But numbers are not the only gauge of the influence of professional study on the calling itself. The mere presence, the work, the activities, and the influence of professional schools raise the standards of a calling. Those in its work begin to see their daily task from the standpoint which training implies. Since the overwhelming majority of newspaper men believe in their calling, love it, rejoice in it, regret its defects, and honor its achievements, they begin consciously to try to show how good a newspaper can be made with nothing but the tuition of the office. Inaccuracy, carelessness, bad taste, and dubious ethics present themselves at a different angle when judged in the light of a calling for which colleges and universities furnish training. A corporate spirit and a corporate standard are felt more strongly, and men who have learned all they know in a newspaper office have a just, n.o.ble, and often successful determination to advance these standards and endeavor to equal in advance anything the school can accomplish. This affects both those who have had college training and those who come to their work as newspaper men with only the education of the public schools, high or elementary. More than 1000 letters have been received by the School of Journalism in Columbia University, since it was opened, asking advice as to the reading and study which could aid a man or woman unable to leave the newspaper office to study to improve their work. College graduates, in particular on newspapers, begin systematic study on their own account, aware of an approaching compet.i.tion. Definite standards in newspaper writing and in diction begin to be recognized and practiced in the office, and slips in either meet a more severe criticism.
Newspaper a.s.sociations of all orders play their part in this spontaneous training. Advertising clubs and their great annual gatherings have censored the periodic publicity of the advertising column as no other agency whatever could possibly have done. How far this educating influence has transformed this share of the American periodical in all its fields only those can realize who have studied past advertis.e.m.e.nts. Every state has its editorial a.s.sociation. These draw together more men from the weeklies and the dailies in cities under 50,000 of population than from cities of more than 500,000.
These a.s.sociations thirty years ago were little more than social. They have come to be educational agencies of the first importance. They create and a.s.sert new norms of conduct and composition. The papers read are normally didactic. All men try to be what they a.s.sert they are. From the American Newspaper Publishers" a.s.sociation, bringing together nearly 1000 of our leading newspapers to meetings of the weeklies of a county, a region in a state, a whole state, sections like New England or the Southern States of particular cla.s.ses of periodicals, these various organizations are rapidly inst.i.tuting a machinery, and breathing a spirit whose work is a valid factor in the education of the newspaper man. Not the least influence which the schools of journalism exert on the active work of the calling is through these a.s.sociations, particularly in the states west of the Mississippi where, at the present stage of journalism in this region, state universities can through schools of journalism bring newspapers together at a "newspaper week."
=Journalism raised to dignity of a profession by schools of journalism=
The rapid growth in students registered in "journalism" courses did not gauge the demand for professional teaching in the craft of the newspaper or the magazine. A large share of the "journalism" taught consisted simply in teaching newspaper English. The college course has been nowhere so vehemently and vigorously attacked as in the training it gave in writing English. Few were satisfied with it, least of all those who taught it. At least one college professor, whose method and textbooks were launched thirty years ago, has recanted all his early work in teaching composition and p.r.o.nounced it valueless or worse. The college graduate, after courses in English composition (at least one in the freshman year and often two or three more), in many instances found himself unable to write a business letter, describe a plan projected in business affairs, compose advertis.e.m.e.nts, or narrate a current event. This was not invariably the case, but it occurred often enough to be noted. Books, pamphlets, and papers multiplied on this lack of training for practical writing in college composition courses.
The world of education discovered, what the newspapers had found by experience, that the style of expression successful in literature did not bring results in man"s daily task of reaching his fellow man on the homely and direct issues of daily life. In literature, genius is seeking to express itself. In the newspaper and in business, the writer is trying--and only trying--to express and interpret his subject so as to reach the other and contemporary man. If he does this, he wins. If not, he fails. Genius can, should be, careless of the immediate audience, and wait for the final and ultimate response.
No newspaper article and no advertis.e.m.e.nt can. For them, style is only a means. In letters, form is final. The verdict of posterity and not of the yearly subscriber or daily purchaser is decisive.
=Journalistic writing demands a distinctive style and calls for immediate response=
In the high school and college, from 1910 on, there came courses in English which turned to the newspaper for methods and means of expression, and were called "courses in journalism." They were really courses in the English of the newspaper, besprinkled with lectures on the diction of the newspaper and the use of words--futile efforts, through lists of words that must not be used, to give a sound rule of the selection of language by the writer, and, above all, attempts to secure simple, direct, incisive narrative and discussion. These are all useful in their place and work. They prepare a man for some of the first steps of the newspaper office, particularly in the swift, mechanical routine and technique of "copy," indispensable where what is copy now is on the street for sale within an hour.
Where an instructor has himself the gift of style and the capacity to impart it, where he is himself a man who sells his stuff and knows what stuff will sell, where he has taste and inspiring, effective teaching power, a course in newspaper English may carry a man far in acquiring command of his powers of expression to their profitable use.
These "courses in journalism" sometimes run for only a single semester. Many run for the normal span of three hours a week through a year. Sometimes there are two in succession, the second a.s.suming the task of teaching work which a newspaper beginner usually reaches in from three to five years: the special article, the supplement, study of a subject, the "feature" story, criticism, and the editorial. When these courses are based on a.s.signments which lead a man to go out and get the facts on which he writes, they furnish a certain share of training in the art of reporting. Where this is done in a college town and a college community, however, the work is a far remove from that where the reporter must dive and wrestle in the seething tide of a great city, to return with news wrested from its native bed.
=Courses in "newspaper English"=
Newspaper English has its great and widest value to the man who wishes to learn how he can affect the other man. A course in it is certain, if the instruction is effective, to leave a student better able to express himself in the normal needs of life. This work is taken by many students as part of the effective training of college life, with no expectation of entering active newspaper work. The demand for publicity work in all business fields, and its value to the social worker, the teacher, and the clergyman, lead others to this specialized training. In at least one of our state universities, half those who take the courses in journalism do not look to the newspaper in the future. The curriculum is often so arranged that in a four-year college course it will be practicable to combine these courses in newspaper English with the parts of work offered, required for, or preparatory to the three learned professions, social service, business, and the applied sciences. Such an arrangement of studies frankly recognizes the value in general education and after life of training in the direct expression the newspaper uses. In no long time every college will have at least one such course in its English department.
But this course in direct writing stands alone, without any systematic training in journalism; it should not be called a course in journalism any more than a course in political science dealing with law, or a course in physiology or hygiene, can be called courses in law or medicine, because they cover material used in schools of law or schools of medicine. It is an advantage for any educated man to learn to write clearly, simply, to the point; to put the purpose, object, and force of an article at the beginning, and to be as much like Daniel Defoe and Franklin, and as little like Walter Pater or Samuel Johnson, as possible; it is well for him to have a general view of the newspaper and its needs; it is a mistake to leave him with the impression that he has the training journalism demands. He is no better off at this point than any college graduate who has picked up for himself, by nature or through practice and imitation, the direct newspaper method.
=Functions of a school of journalism: To select as well as to train=
President Eliot, when the organization of a school of journalism came before him, cast his august and misleading influence for the view that a college education was enough training for newspaper work. Many still believe this. In more than one city-room today college men are challenging the right of the graduates of a school of journalism to look on themselves as better fitted for the newspaper office than those who are graduates of a good college. If the training of the school has done no more than graft some copy-writing and some copy-editing on the usual curriculum, they are right. If the coming journalist has got his training in cla.s.ses, half of whose number had no professional interest in the course offered, the claim for the college course may be found to be well based. Men teach each other in the cla.s.sroom. A common professional purpose creates common professional ideals and common professional aims as no training can, given without this, though it deal with identically the same subjects.
The training of the journalist will at this point go through the same course as the training of other callings. The palpable thing about law, the objective fact it presents first to the layman, is procedure and form. This began legal education. A man entered a law office. He ran errands and served papers which taught him how suits were opened.
A bright New York office boy in a law firm will know how many days can pa.s.s before some steps must be taken or be too late, better than the graduate of a law school. The law students in an office once endlessly copied forms and learned that phase of law. For generations men "eat their dinners" at the Inns of Court and learned no more. The law itself they learned through practice, at the expense of their clients.
Anatomy was the obvious thing about medicine when Vesalius, of the strong head and weak heart, cleaned away the superst.i.tions of part of the medical art and discovered a new world at twenty-eight. The medical training of even seventy years ago, twenty years after cellular pathology had dawned, held wearisome hours of dissection now known to be a waste. It is the functions of the body and its organs which we now know to be the more important, and not the bones, muscles, nerves, and organs considered as mere mechanism.
The cla.s.sroom is the patent thing about instruction. The normal schools lavished time on the tricks of teaching until flocks of instructors in the high schools and colleges could not inaccurately be divided into those who could teach and knew nothing and those who knew something and could not teach. Our colleges early thought they could weave in Hebrew and theology, and send out clergymen, and later tried to give the doctor a foundation on which eighteen subsequent months could graft all he needed of medicine.
Reporting is the obvious aspect of journalism which the ignorant layman sees. Many hold the erroneous view that the end of a school of journalism is to train reporters. Reporting is not journalism. It is the open door to the newspaper office, partly because there are very few reporters of many years" service. Some of them are, but able men before long usually work out of a city-room, or gain charge of some field of city news, doing thus what is in fact reporting, but combined with editorial, critical, and correspondent work. Such is the Wall Street man, the local politics man, the City Hall man, or the Police Headquarters man, who gathers facts and counts acquaintance as one of his professional a.s.sets. But these men are doing, in their work, far more than reporting as it presents itself to those who see in the task only an a.s.signment. Such men know the actual working of the financial mechanism, not as economists see it, but as Bagehot knew it. They understand the actual working of munic.i.p.al machinery besides having a minute knowledge of character, decision, practice, and precedent in administration. In our real politics, big and little, they and the Washington and Albany correspondents are the only men who know both sides, are trusted with the secrets of both parties, and read closed pages of the book of the chronicles of the Republic. As for the Police Headquarters man, he too alone knows both police and crime, and no investigation surprises him by its revelations. If a man, for a season, has had the work of one of these posts, he comes to feel that he writes for an ignorant world, and if he have the precious gift of youth, looks on himself as favored of mortals early, seeing the events of which others hear, daily close to the center of affairs, knowing men as they are and storing confidence against the day of revelation.
Men like these are the very heart"s core of a newspaper. Their posts train them. So do the key posts of a newspaper, its guiding and directing editors and those who do the thinking for thinking men by the hundred thousand in editorial, criticism, and article. It is for this order of work on a newspaper that a school of journalism trains.
It is to these posts that, if its men are properly trained, its graduates rapidly ascend, after a brief apprenticeship in the city-room and a round in the routine work of a paper. Dull men, however educated, will never pa.s.s these grades, and not pa.s.sing they will drop out. A school should sift such out; but so far, in all our professional training, it is only the best medical schools which are inflexible in dealing with mediocrity. Most teachers know better, but let the shifty and dull pa.s.s by. The newspaper itself has to be inexorable, and no well-organized office helps twice the man who is dull once; but he and his kind come often enough to mar the record.
Journalism, like other professions, has its body of special tasks and training, but, as in other callings, clear comprehension of this body of needs will develop in instruction slowly. The case system in law and the laboratory method in medicine came after some generations or centuries of professional work and are only a generation old. Any one who has sought to know the development of these two methods sees that much in our schools of journalism is where law and medical schools were sixty years ago. We are still floundering and have not yet solved the problem of giving background, concision, accuracy, and interest to the report, of really editing copy and not merely condensing and heading it, of recognizing and developing the editorial and critical mind, and most of all, of shutting out early the shallow, the wrong-headed, the self-seeking, and the unballasted student.
=The average college student lacks expressional power: Reasons=
The very best law and medical schools get the better of this, and only the best. They are greatly aided by a state examination which tests and tries all their work, braces their teaching, stimulates their men, and directs their studies. This will inevitably come in journalism, though most practicing newspaper men do not believe this. Neither did doctors before 1870 expect this. As the newspaper comes closer and closer into daily life, inflicts wounds without healing and does damage for which no remedy exists, the public will require of the writer on a daily at least as much proof of competency as it does of a plumber. This competency sharply divides between training in the technical work of the newspaper and in those studies that knowledge which newspaper work requires. Capacity to write with accuracy, with effect, with interest, and with style is the first and most difficult task among the technical requirements of the public journal. As has already been said, a gift for expression is needed, but even this cannot be exercised or developed unless a man has acquired diction and come in contact with style, for all the arts rest on the imitation of accepted models. Many students in all schools of journalism come from immigrant families and are both inconceivably ignorant of English and inconceivably satisfied with their acquirement of English, as we all are with a strange tongue we have learned to speak. Even in families with two or more generations of American life, the vocabulary is limited, construction careless, and the daily contact with any literature, now that family prayers and Bible reading are gone; almost nil. Of the spoken English of teachers in our public schools, considered as the basis of training for the writer, it is not seemly to speak. Everybody knows college teachers who have never shaken off the slovenly phrases and careless syntax of their homes. The thesis on which advanced degrees are conferred is a fair and just measure of the capacity to write conferred by eleven years of education above the "grammar grades." The old drill in accurate and exact rendering of Greek and Latin was once the best training for the writer; but slovenly sight reading has reduced its value, and a large part of its true effect was because the youth who studied the cla.s.sics fifty years ago came in a far larger share than today from families whose elders had themselves had their expression and vocabulary trained and developed by liberal studies. The capacity for good writing apparent at Oxford and Cambridge rests in no small measure on the cla.s.sical family horizon in teacher and taught.
=Kind of training in composition to be given students of journalism=
Those who turn to journalism naturally care for writing, but in an art to "care" is little and most have never had the personal environment, the training, or the personal command of English to enable them to do more than write a stiff prose with a narrow vocabulary and no sense of style. Even those who have some such capacity are hampered by the family heritage already outlined. College writing is in the same condition; but the average college man is not expecting to earn his living by his typewriter. In order to receive a minimum capacity in writing enough to pa.s.s, every year of study for journalism must have a writing course and the technical work must run to constant writing.
From start to finish there must be patient, individual correction. The use of the typewriter must be made obligatory. Rigid discipline must deal with errors in spelling, grammar, the choice of words and phrases. Previous college training in composition must in general be revised and made over to secure directness and simplicity. At the end, the utmost that can be gained for nineteen out of twenty is some facility, a little sense of style and diction, and copy that will be above the average of the newspaper and not much above that. Examine the writing in the newspapers issued by some schools and the work in schools that do not, and a distressingly large portion is either dull or "smart," the last, worst fault of the two.
=Effective training in reporting must be given in large urban centers=
Reporting is the first use to which writing is put and through which the writer is trained. For this, abundant material is indispensable, as much as clinical material for a medical school. As the medical schools gravitate to cities, and the rural inst.i.tutions flicker out one by one, so in the end the effectively trained reporter will gravitate to a large city. Towns of under 20,000 population furnish a very tame sort of reporting, and those who get this training in them find reporting is under new conditions in a great metropolis. In such a place the peril is that routine news will take too much of the precious time for training the reporter and the demands of academic hours will interfere with sharing in the best of big stories.
=Aims in teaching the art of reporting=
Routine is the curse of the newspaper, and it is at its worst in reporting. In its face the four hard things to get are the combination of the vivid, the accurate, and the informed and the condensed story.
Equipped newspapers of high standards like the New York _World_ require recourse to reference books, the "morgue," and the files in every story where details can be added to the day"s digging in that particular news vein. Condensation comes next. The young cub reporter generally shuns both. He hates to look up his subject. He spreads himself like a sitting hen over one egg. Both must be required for efficient training. Compression it is difficult to enforce in a school where paper bills are small or do not exist and the s.p.a.ce pressure of the large daily is absent. A number of dailies of large circulation are cultivating very close handling of news and s.p.a.ce for feature and woman stuff with very great profit, and the schools give too little attention to this new phase of the newspaper. In all papers, the old tendency to print anything that came by wire is gone and mere "news"
has not the place it once had. In particular, local news was cut down one half in a majority of dailies in cities of 250,000 and over from August, 1914, to the close of the war. The small daily in places of less than 50,000 and weeklies did not do this, which is one reason why great tracts of the United States were not ready for war when it came.
Woe to the land whose watchmen sleep!
=The teaching of copy-editing=
Copy-editing is the next task in the training of the coming newspaper man. On the small daily and weekly, there is little of this, but it is practiced on the metropolitan daily. There ten to twelve men are needed, doing nothing else but editing copy. In the office, two or three years are needed to bring a man to this work. No school can teach this unless its men give at least a full day to editing a flood of copy that will fill a 12 to 16 page newspaper. Where the work of the students runs day by day on the copy of one of the lesser dailies, editing for that purpose is secured, but not the intensive training needed to handle the copy-desk requirements of newspapers in a city of 1,000,000 population or more in its urban ring. Success in this field is proved when men go direct from the cla.s.sroom to such a desk. This carries with it tuition in heads for all needs, make-up, and the close editing of special articles, features, and night a.s.sociated Press copy.
=A liberal curriculum must be part of training for journalism=
Newspaper training will always deal also with subjects and needs a course containing a larger proportion of the studies usually taught in college or offered in its curriculum. Medicine requires the same chemistry, organic and inorganic, the same physics, and the same elementary biology as our college courses cover; these sciences are more or less like a Mother Hubbard, no very close fit and concealing more than is revealed. Johns Hopkins has been able at this point to apply tests, personal and particular, gauging both teacher and taught, more searching than are elsewhere required. The fruits abundantly justify this course, and in time some school of journalism will apply like tests to history,--ancient, medieval, and modern,--political economy, political science, and the modern languages, which are the basis of its work. The practical difficulty is that it is far easier to test the three sciences just mentioned than history, politics, and economics. No one will seriously a.s.sert that these are as rigorously taught as chemistry, physics, and biology. The personal equation of the teacher counts for more, it is both easier and more tempting to inject social theories, not yet tested by current facts, than in science. Sciolism is less easily detected in courses which deal with the humanitarian held than in science, but it is not less perilous and it is not less possible to apply the same experimental tests as in the scientific laboratory. He is blind, however, who does not see that much advance in the current teaching at any time of history, politics, and economics has had its experimental tests as complete and as convincing as in any laboratory, which certain teachers wholly refuse to accept--sometimes because they are behind the times, sometimes because they are before the times; sometimes they are in no time whatever but the fool time of vain imaginings that somewhere, somewhen, and somehow there is a place where human desires are stronger than the inevitable laws which guide and guard the physics, the chemistry, and the biology of social bodies.
=Social sciences must be related to life=
A notable difference exists between the views of law taught and discussed in a law school and in a school of political science. The medical lectures preserve a sobriety in discussing sundry biological problems not always present in advanced courses of biology. Both lecturers, in both instances, are scientific men, both are faithful to the truths of science, but as a distinguished economist, who in his early years had been accused of being an advanced socialist, said, after he had won a comfortable fortune by judicious investments in business, banking, and realty, to a friend of earlier and far-distant years: "My principles remain exactly the same, but, I admit, my point of view has changed." There is not one biology of the medical school, another of the biological laboratory. Neither does the body of law differ in a law school or in a school of political science. The principles remain exactly the same. Of necessity, however, the point of view has changed and treatment has changed with it. So has responsibility.
The subject offers some difficulties. The a.n.a.logy is not at all points exact. Medicine and law have a definite body of doctrine. Schools of biology and political science have not, but granting all this, it still remains true that exactly as the law student and the medical student must have what is defined, established, and unmistakable in the world of law and of life, so the student looking to journalism needs and must have what is defined, established, and unmistakable in economics and political science. Here, again, no one will pretend that the usual college course in either of these branches is taught with the same determination to keep within the same metes and bounds of recorded, tested, and ascertained facts as is true of courses in physics, chemistry, and biology. The boundary marked is less distinct.
The periodic law by which the atomic values of elements are established is more definite than the periodic law under which wealth is distributed through society, though in the end some Mendelleeff will record the periodic law of social elements in their composition and action. Research is needed and must be free. Theory and speculation are as necessary to secure an experiment and observation.
The principle is clear, however, that the student who is to make professional use of a topic needs to have a definite and established instruction, not required in one to whom topic is incidental. The medical student or law student who has a new view of economic results or a new theory of the cause and purpose of our judicial and const.i.tutional system as organized to protect the few against the many will work this off in the school of life, and is unaffected in his professional work. The journalist within his first year"s work must apply his college economics and political science, and a wrong starting point may have serious consequences to his own career in the end, perhaps to society. Fortunately the work of the journalist so brings him in contact with things as they are, that the body of newspaper writers, taken as a whole, represents the stability of society. The convictions and principles created by their daily work tend this way. The labor union has few illusions to the reporter, and it was the editorial writers of the land who carried the gold standard in 1896, when many a publisher was hazy and scary. The causes of crime grow pretty clear to a police reporter, and a few a.s.signments in which a newspaper man sees a riot convinces him of the value of public order, rigidly enforced. None the less, the reporter should start right on these sciences, basic in his calling; in the end, as the medical school has steadied the college teaching of chemistry and biology, so the school of journalism, the school of business, and the school of railroad practice _et al_ will steady economics and political science. But the duty of the college and university remains clear, to be as watchful that the sciences of social action and reaction shall be taught with the same adherence to the established and the same responsibility to their professional use as the sciences of physical, chemical, and biological action and reaction.
=Especially adapted content in social sciences to meet professional needs=
The college studies needed as preparation for journalism call for a special proficiency and content as much as for a professional viewpoint. The journalist makes precisely the same use of his fundamental studies as does the medical student of his. If a future lawyer neglects his chemistry and biology, it is of little moment. He can get up what he needs of a case. A medical student who neglects these studies will find that the best schools bar him. In time the school of journalism will refuse the college pa.s.sing mark for admission. The newspaper man almost from the start has to use his economics, his political science, and his history. Elementary economics is in great measure given to theory, though a change has begun. For the journalist, this course needs to be brought in close contact with the actual economic working of society. The theory may be useful to the man who expects in the end to teach economics. It is of next to no value to the writer on public affairs. Of what possible use is it to him to learn the various theoretic explanations of Boehm-Bawerk"s cost and value? The newspaper man needs to see these things and be taught them as Bagehot wrote on them and Walker and Sumner taught them.
=General science course of inestimable worth to the journalist=
In Columbia, this change is already recognized as necessary. So in political science, the actual working of the body politic needs to be taught, and this is too often neglected for explanatory theories and a special interpretation. A single elementary course in chemistry, physics, or biology presupposes two or three more courses which fill out the special opening sketch. Newspaper works requires a general account of science, derided by the scientist who is himself satisfied in his own education with a similar sketch in history. These general science courses are being smuggled in as "history of science," or "scientific nomenclature." Much can be done in a year with such a three-hour course, if the teaching be in exceptional hands; but adequate treatment requires two years of three hours, one on organic and one on inorganic science. The latter should give a view of anthropology and the former dwell on the application of science in modern industry.
=In history attention must be focalized on modern movements=
College history courses end thirty to fifty years ago. The journalist needs to know closely the last thirty years, at home and abroad. Weeks given to colonial charters in American history are as much waste as to set a law student to a special study of the Year Books of Edward I and II. College students have to put up with a good deal of this kind of waste. If twelve hours can be a.s.signed to history, three should be on the cla.s.sical period, three introductory to the modern world, three to European history since 1870, and three hours for American history; at least two of these three hours should go to American history since Garfield.
=Recent progress in all subjects must be summed up for the student of journalism=
The writing course should be used to supplement this by articles on both these fields so that a student will learn the sources of history for the last thirty years, its treaties, its elections, its movements, its statutes, its reference works. He will need all this knowledge as soon as he has to write as a correspondent, a feature writer, or an editor, on the important topics of the day. Statistics need to supplement economics and advanced courses, two, if possible, should give knowledge and method in the approach to new problems in currency, banking, trusts, and unions. At least one general course in philosophy is needed, and Freud is as important for him here as Aristotle. The contact of the newspaper man with book reviewing, book advertising, and the selection of fiction and news in supplements and magazines calls for the "survey course in English literature" and a knowledge of the current movement in letters for thirty years back. In science, in politics, in history, in economics, in philosophy, and in letters, it is indispensable that the young newspaper man should be introduced by lecture, and still more by reading, to the speaking figures of his own day on affairs, political life, letters, the theatre, and art.
=The journalist must ever be a student of human affairs=
These things are indispensable. The man who knows them can learn to write and edit, but the man who can only write and edit and does not know them will speedily run dry in the newspaper, weekly and monthly.
News is today standardized. Each President, each decade, each great war, the a.s.sociated Press and City Press a.s.sociations cover more completely the current news. Presentation, comment, handling special articles, grow each year more important and more in demand. The price of supplement and magazine articles has trebled in the last twenty years. The newspaper grows more and more to be a platform, particularly the Sunday newspaper and popular magazine. If a man is to be a figure in the day"s conflict and on its wider issues, he needs the special training just outlined, and when this outline is begun, he will find the toil of the years in these fields has but begun. About the safe harbors of journalism where men come and go, dealing with the affairs of and ending the ready market of the day, are the reefs strewn with the wrecks of ready and often "brilliant" writers whose few brief years left them empty and adrift, telling all they meet that no man can long earn a fair income and hold his own through the years in journalism.
A school can ameliorate all this by one course which requires much reading of the Bible and Shakespeare, by furnishing in the school library abundant access to the best current prose and verse of the day which will directly appeal to the young reader, since each decade has its new G.o.ds in letters, and by selecting teachers for the professional courses who have shown that they can write at least well enough to be paid by newspapers and magazines for their work. The teacher in writing whose work is not salable is not as likely to teach students how to write so that their work can sell as one who has earned his living by selling his stuff.