Abstract of talk by A.H. Turner on "College and the Future"There are a few times in one's life when the lasting results of a choice are perhaps its main characteristic. Such is the entrance to college.
College may be thought of as an experiment station in human relations. Life is made up of getting on with people, soem few in intimate relations, very many in slighter contacts, but all the time, year in and year out, getting on with people. College gives an extensive variety with whom to practise the fine art of happy personal relations.
David Starr Jordan, great president of Stanford University, quotes this, "My son, we should lay up a stock of enthusiasms in our youth or else we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we lose a great many of them by the way." It is open to question whether real enthusiasms are so easily lost, but there is no question about the happiness given and enjoyed by the person of sincere and varied enthusiasms. College offers an introduction to many and the beginning of real acquaintance with a number of the things we like to hear cultured people talk about, mountain-climbing, the out-of-door world, music, art, poetry, a long list of fine enthusiasms which will last.
The best gift the college has to give to the future of each of its students is her major work, a way of getting a vision of the world which for her is the best way of looking at it - for the major work is long enough to make it color one's thinking all through one's life. One gets an intimacy with that particular mode of thinking, whether it be the light of past centuries cast on the problems of today, the civilization of another people seen through their language, the wonder of some fundamental field of science or of the laws of the mind. For each the choice must be her own, and that choice of a major can not be made too seriously. Others can tell one about what a particular major may mean and advise as to its value, but each student finally makes this important choice herself. And it is in her major that she finds her delight in work.