Six Precocious Freshmen

President Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern University began combing the nation last week for precocious, prodigious lads, aged 13 to 15. If high school principals can find as many as six, properly qualified, Northwestern will admit them, next September. "Our experience with precocious students," said President Scott, "has been satisfactory." But they have been few, have had no chance for the stimulus of competition and cooperation with equals. "It is planned to have these six precocious freshmen live together and enjoy an environment favorable to them," said he.

As prodigies to be duplicated under modern educational conditions, President Scott cited: Jeremy Bentham, who wrote Latin and Greek at five, prepared for Oxford at ten; George Gordon Lord Byron, writer at ten, famed poet at 15; Benjamin Franklin, newspaper publisher at 17; Alexander Hamilton, businessman at 15; Albrecht von Haller, German anatomist who prepared a Chaldean grammar and 2,000 biographies of famous persons at nine; John Stuart Mill, high mathematician at eight; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer at five;* Napoleon Bonaparte, "Little Mathematician" at eight; James Watt, mathematician at six, experimenter with steam at 15; George Washington, professional surveyor at 15.

Goethe's 100th

Everyone knows Faust, chiefly from storybooks, operatic and cinematic versions. Cultured people know Der Erlkonig and a few other poems of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which have been set to music. But Wilhelm Meister, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Egmont, Werther are not to be found in drugstores.

Because Goethe died 100 years ago come March 22, because something ought to be done about it, people have lately been reading up on him, making plans. Any German schoolboy could recall the following facts: He was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749, of well-to-do parents. At 15 he fell in love with one Gretchen whom he immortalized in Faust. He went to Leipzig where he had a mistress named Anna Katharina Schonkopf. As a student in Strasbourg he fell in love with Friderike Brion, an episode around which Franz Lehar wrote an operetta in which Tenor Richard Tauber sang several seasons ago. Goethe had many other loves during his life, including one, at the age of 74, with a very young girl. He was imaginative, sentimental, not always amiable.

Greatest of Goethe collections outside Germany is that which the late William Alfred Speck assembled and presented to Yale University. Donor Speck, son of German-born New Yorkers, read Gotz von Berlichingen at the age of 15, bought a complete set of Goethe. Never rich, he studied pharmacy, worked in his father's drugstore, which he called "my pillory," spent all his money collecting Goetheana.

In 1915 he gave his 6,000 items to Yale, became curator of Modern German Literature and an assistant professor. He died in 1928, but not before completing a notable transaction. Professor Speck learned that a Chicago collector possessed two pages of the manuscript of Faust, only ones in the U. S. He would not sell them, but it was known he collected holograph letters of U. S. presidents. Collector Speck found it an easy matter to get William Howard Taft, Yale alumnus, to write a letter in his own hand, give him letters from Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Then a swap was arranged.

Yale opened last week the Goethe celebrations. Professor Carl Schreiber adduced a fact: Faust was the most-read work in the German trenches during the War.

The Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation has invited Professor Eugen Kuhnemann, Goethe scholar of the University of Breslau, to lecture at 50 U. S. universities. The Foundation is putting on a Goethe essay contest, distributing a Goethe cinema. In Germany, President Paul von Hindenburg will place a wreath on Goethe's tomb at Weimar.

Next meeting of the Modern Language Association of America is to be at Yale, in honor of the Goethe Year. A situation of which modern language teachers are well aware is that German, ousted from U. S. institutions during the War, has been restored in almost all the colleges, in many a big city high school. But in the Middle West, where it was once spoken and taught in classrooms, German is now replaced by French and Spanish.

Thinker

Officials of Centre College, Danville, Ky. ousted Charles J. Thurmond as editor of the college Cento. Last fortnight he editorially attacked marriage as the "stupidest of all institutions in existence to-day," said that "mutual attraction between persons is a purely physical thing and purely for the purpose of procreation and perpetuation." Ousted last week, Editor Thurmond said: "I do not practice what I expressed as a possible solution to unsatisfactory marriage. I do not advocate that it should be practiced. I am doing some thinking on the subject. The constitutional bill of rights of the United States gives me the right to think on any subject I please. Furthermore, I announced in the Cento before Christmas that I was thinking on this subject. . . ."

"Goldfish"

Richard Myers, 12. was doltish, clodpated. They classified him as backward, put him in an ungraded class in Morse Public School. Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Last week Richard Myers came home with big bruises and welts on his back. His parents got a lawyer to try to have him transferred, to try to take action against the school's Principal Max Reutershan.

Blandly Max Reutershan admitted that he used a length of garden hose which he called a "goldfish" on stupid children. He used it also on his own five children. "It does them good," said he. "How else can I maintain discipline? I beat them to save them--and not in anger." Then Max Reutershan laughed. "The law gives me the right to use rubber hose on pupils and I do it."

The Poughkeepsie Superintendent of Schools refused to take action. And doltish Richard Myers said: "I didn't do the writing I was told to. Oh, yes, I'll do it now. I'll be good, all right."

Ethonomy

Getting children to save their pennies has been the chief work of the National Thrift Committee, which promotes an annual Thrift Week. "To overhaul U. S. education." the Committee was last week reorganized. On its advisory board are now many U. S. educator-bigwigs. A new rallying-word, "Ethonomics" was coined for the Committee by Dr. John Bates Clark, 85, retired Columbia economics professor. Said he last week: "The important fundamentals of ethics, economics, and civics should be taught not as unrelated subjects, as in the past, but as the composite cornerstone upon which our social_ structure rests. . . . The present situation is so universal that the only way we can hope to accomplish anything is through the 'ethonomic' education of the children. The Capitalist System must be J fortified with righteousness. Without it [ the future appears dark."

* President Scott forgot that it is almost essential for a great musician to be prodigious, that musicians are judged dispassionately as artists, regardless of their numerical age (see p. 40).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.