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 LETTER 
 
 ititstcc of (ColumWii College 
 
 ON THE REQUISITES FOR 
 
 ADMISSION TO THE FRESHMAN CLASS, 
 
 GEOHG-B O A AMTHION. 
 
 1864. 
 
.•' 
 

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 Tjrustee op Columbia College. 
 
 Sir : I respectfully submit to you, for your consid¬ 
 eration, the following suggestions as to the present 
 conditions of admission to Columbia College. They 
 are the results of my experience as a teacher during 
 the last seventeen years, and I am induced to lay them 
 before you by my interest in the cause of public edu¬ 
 cation, and, more especially, in the system of the Col¬ 
 lege of which I am an alumnus. 
 
 I have long been satisfied that the statutes of the 
 College regulating admission to the Freshman class 
 need revision. They provide that “ no student will be 
 admitted into the Freshman class unless he be accu¬ 
 rately acquainted with the grammar of both the Greek 
 and Latin tongues, including such rules of Prosody as 
 may be applicable to such of the poets as he is to be ex¬ 
 amined upon ; be master of Caesar’s Commentaries ; of 
 the Orations of Cicero against Catiline and for the 
 poet Archias; of the first six books of Yirgil’s JEneid ; 
 of Sallust; of the Gospels according to St. Luke and 
 St. John and the Acts of the Apostles; of Jacob’s 
 Greek Header; of the first three books of Xenophon’s 
 Anabasis, and the first three books of Homer’s Iliad. 
 
 388771 
 
2 
 
 He must also be able to translate English into gram¬ 
 matical Latin.” 
 
 I omit any reference to the qualifications prescribed 
 in departments other than that of the Ancient Lan¬ 
 guages, as the suggestions I have the honor of making 
 to you are mainly applicable to that department alone. 
 
 I entered Columbia College as a Freshman in Octo¬ 
 ber, 1835, at which time this statute was in force. 
 During the four years that preceded my matriculation 
 my studies had been wholly confined to this prescribed 
 course. Fairly to master it within that period was 
 then possible for any boy of average ability and in¬ 
 dustry, though it was, even then, no light undertaking 
 fully to comply with the letter of the statute. To do 
 so at the present day is, as I shall endeavor to show, 
 generally impracticable. 
 
 The school year then extended from the first day of 
 September to the last day of July, and the hours of 
 attendance at school were universally from nine A.M. 
 to three P.M. But, within the last thirty years, the 
 social usages of the city have materially changed. 
 Families now remove to the country early in the sum¬ 
 mer and return to town late in the fall. Classes are 
 seldom, if ever, fairly organized in our private schools 
 before the first day of October; they are not full till a 
 month later. Three fourths of their pupils leave them 
 before the middle of June. The hours of attendance 
 are now from nine A.M. to two P.M. In addition to 
 Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, the French language 
 is now insisted on as a part of the school course, and 
 parents are apt to demand (most injudiciously, as I 
 
3 
 
 think) that it receive as much attention from their 
 children as either of the ancient languages. Hours 
 formerly given to exercise and recreation are now 
 very generally devoted to music and other accomplish¬ 
 ments. The school-boy sits down at last, jaded and 
 unrefreshed, to a late dinner, and seldom has it in his 
 power to take up his books before seven o’clock in the 
 evening. 
 
 Let us take the case of a boy of fair abilities, who, 
 under all these drawbacks, works faithfully at home 
 for four hours daily on some part of the course he has 
 to master before he is entitled to apply for admission 
 to the College, and see what this statute requires of 
 him. 
 
 The school year consisting at the utmost of but ten 
 months, and in the majority of cases of but eight or 
 nine, our student cannot be expected, during his first 
 year, to do more than master the Latin grammar and 
 to make, at the utmost, some little progress in the 
 rudiments of Greek. Let us suppose, however, that 
 during this first year he has acquired such familiarity 
 with the grammar of both languages that, at the be¬ 
 ginning of his second year of preparation, he is able 
 to commence reading the books enumerated in your 
 statute. How, if he (as is the general usage) take up 
 the study of the ancient languages at twelve, expect¬ 
 ing to enter college at sixteen, or, in other words, to 
 devote four years to qualifying himself for admission, 
 this leaves him, as the period within which he must 
 make himself master of this formidable list of books, 
 three school years, or, at most, thirty months, or one 
 
4 
 
 hundred and twenty weeks of five days each, or six 
 hundred days, to prepare himself for examination 
 upon 
 
 Caesar’s Commentaries,. 
 
 .... 85 pages, 12 mo. 
 
 Sallust,.. 
 
 ....117 “ 
 
 Cicero,. 
 
 ....59 “ 
 
 Virgil,.. 
 
 ....137 “ 
 
 Jacob’s Greek Reader,. 
 
 ..... 179 “ 
 
 Xenophon’s Anabasis,. 
 
 ....86 u 
 
 Homer’s Iliad,. 
 
 .... 60 “ 
 
 723 pages, 12mo. 
 
 In all seven hundred and twenty-three pages, or 
 nearly a page and a quarter a day, making no allow¬ 
 ance whatever for revisions, to which one fourth, at ^ 
 least, of the whole period must be devoted. He must 
 get up also the Gospels according to St. Luke and St. 
 
 John and the Acts of the Apostles. 
 
 Now, during the first year of a boy’s work in trans¬ 
 lating Caesar and the Greek Reader, a page of the for¬ 
 mer-and a half a page of the latter would be consider¬ 
 ed by every judicious and thorough instructor too 
 much for one day; and no teacher who values his own 
 reputation (to say nothing of the welfare of his pupils) 
 would consent to send up a boy for examination with¬ 
 out, at least, six months’ hard work in final revision. 
 
 It is, therefore, practically, as a general rule, impossi¬ 
 ble for teacher or pupil to comply with the letter of the 
 statute now in force. It is, I believe, well known that 
 your President and the members of your faculty who 
 take part in your entering examination have long recog- 
 
5 
 
 nized and acted on the fact that candidates for admis¬ 
 sion are seldom if ever prepared on the whole of the 
 prescribed course. The examination of each is, in 
 practice, confined to such parts of it as he has been 
 able to go over. The College authorities determine, 
 according to their discretion, whether the fraction of 
 the course on which each is prepared does or does not 
 come up to the standard of qualification now practical¬ 
 ly adopted as sufficient, though below that laid down 
 by the law of the College. My own practice has been 
 to inform the President by letter of the portions of the 
 course upon which I wish my pupils to be examined, 
 and he has always received my statement with kind¬ 
 ness and courtesy, without objecting to their inability 
 to comply with all the conditions required by your 
 rule. I expect to send up for examination in July 
 six candidates for the Freshman class, severally pre¬ 
 pared for examination on the first and second books of 
 the Anabasis, the first and second books of the Iliad, 
 the second, fourth, and sixth books of the iEneid, 
 and the Orations of Cicero against Catiline. I shall 
 do this at the peril of their being rejected if the pro¬ 
 visions of this statute be strictly enforced, and I am, 
 therefore, naturally anxious that the whole subject 
 be brought before the Trustees for their consideration. 
 
 I beg leave farther to call your attention to the fact 
 that the College now professes to require of every stu¬ 
 dent who enters her Freshman class that he shall 
 have mastered, during a period generally not exceed¬ 
 ing three years, an amount of Latin and Greek vastly 
 exceeding all he will have to read during the four years 
 
6 
 
 
 of bis undergraduate course. For no undergraduate 
 now reads five hundred pages (if so many) of Greek 
 and Latin from the day of his matriculation to that in 
 which he receives his degree.* And the hardship of 
 the rule becomes still more apparent when we com¬ 
 pare the mental capacity of the undergraduate with 
 that of the school-boy. 
 
 The practical working of this statute is injurious to 
 the College. Most wealthy men wish to give their 
 sons a liberal education. This desire is generally 
 strongest with those whose opportunities of early cul¬ 
 ture have been smallest. While the boy is work¬ 
 ing on mere grammar, and is called on to exercise no 
 faculty but that of memory, he can get on without help at 
 home. But when a classical author is put into his 
 hands, and he is required to bring other faculties into 
 action, he meets with difficulties and perplexities, and 
 is in danger of becoming discouraged, despondent, and 
 apathetic. If his father has himself received a classi- 
 
 * I make this statement on information received from undergradu¬ 
 ates and recent graduates as to the ground actually gone over by them 
 during each year of their college life. The preponderance which 
 mathematics and physical science have acquired in the College course 
 has doubtless been conceded for good and sufficient reasons, and after 
 due deliberation on the part of those to whom the interests of the Col¬ 
 lege are intrusted. But there are among its Alumni those who, without 
 presuming to question the wisdom of this policy, feel some natural 
 sorrow when they see the department of Ancient Language and Litera¬ 
 ture, once the special pride of the College, in seeming danger of being 
 crowded out of its high place. Those who remember the position of 
 classical studies in our curriculum thirty years ago, cannot but regret 
 that they should be overshadowed and enfeebled by the growths that 
 have more recently shot up, however vigorously and usefully. 
 
 i 
 
7 
 
 cal education, lie can supply, the necessary aid, and 
 does so the more cheerfully, because it reminds him 
 of his own school days, and brings him again in con¬ 
 tact with the dimly remembered text-books over which 
 he toiled when himself a boy. But the school-boy 
 whose father cannot thus assist him, and has not the 
 means or the good sense to put him in charge of a 
 private tutor, is very apt to become hopelessly dis¬ 
 couraged before he has construed a page of Xenophon 
 or a line of the Iliad. He is generally tempted to 
 give up the drudgery of Greek and Latin, to surrender 
 the privilege of a liberal education, the value of which 
 he is not yet sufficiently matured to appreciate, and to 
 devote his youth to a desk in a counting-house, glorified 
 by some dim and distant vision of millions to be made 
 in trade and speculation. The result is that, of the 
 sixty boys now pursuing classical studies in my own 
 school, not more than six or eight will enter any col¬ 
 lege in any one year. Hoes not this tend to account 
 for the remarkable fact, that the increase of college 
 undergraduates is far below the increase of the city 
 and its dependencies in population and wealth ? 
 
 It may be said that the school-boy should receive 
 help in school from his own school-teachers. But, to 
 attempt even to comply with the requirements of your 
 statute, a certain number of pages of Latin and Greek 
 must be read inexorably and without fail every day. 
 These recitations and the work in mathematics, and in 
 French and English studies, are at least sufficient to 
 occupy all the hours assigned to attendance at school. 
 Not a moment is left that can be devoted to counsel 
 and guidance as to the lesson of to-morrow. 
 
8 
 
 The work in school, then is at best little more than 
 a mere translation of the lesson. Faithful, thorough 
 drilling in 'parsing, an exercise which more than any 
 other part of the classical course develops the mental 
 faculties, and gives the student a mastery of the laws of 
 human thought and language, is impossible. There is 
 no time for it. One six hundredth part at least of the 
 Greek and Latin required by the statute must be read 
 daily, or the student must present himself for examin¬ 
 ation, at the risk of being rejected for not having mas¬ 
 tered the entire course. Even if the teacher govern 
 himself by the rule your faculty has practically sub¬ 
 stituted for that of your statute, he is still obliged to 
 carry his students over a far larger surface than they can 
 conquer and permanently occupy. I assert, without the * 
 
 least hesitation, that your Freshmen would make more 
 progress in the ancient languages during their four 
 years of college life, if they had been prepared for ad¬ 
 mission by a thorough and exhaustive study of, for 
 example, one book of the Iliad, and one oration of 
 Cicero, than by a hurried superficial reading of all 
 your present statute prescribes. You can satisfy your¬ 
 self on this point by attending the next college en¬ 
 trance examination. You will find the candidates for 
 admission able to translate such books as they have 
 read, with more or less facility, but generally unable 
 to parse, or, in other words, to prove the accuracy of 
 their translation by reference to the laws of the two 
 languages, out of which and into which the meaning 
 of their author is to be conveyed. 
 
 I respectfully submit that the entering examination 
 
9 
 
 in the classics should be confined to one point. Not 
 how much has the candidate read? but, is he so far a 
 master of the Greek and Latin languages that he can, 
 in the presence of the examining professor, with pen, 
 ink, and paper, and the aid of a dictionarj^, write out, 
 within a reasonable time, a correct translation of a page 
 of a suitable classic author, and answer viva voce such 
 questions on its grammatical construction as may be 
 put to him. This is substantially what he has to do 
 when he prepares his first lesson as a Freshman. If 
 he can stand an examination before the Faculty on the 
 first thirty lines of the seventh or the twelfth book of 
 the -ZEneid, he'should not be rejected because he has not 
 read the fourth, fifth, and sixth books. If his know¬ 
 ledge of Greek be such that, with a lexicon at hand, he 
 can readily make out a given passage in the last book 
 of the Iliad or the Odyssey, he should be admitted, 
 even if he have not read the first three books of either. 
 
 The point I wish to make is this. Your entering 
 examination should test the candidate’s knowledge of 
 and ability to deal with the ancient languages, instead 
 of requiring (according to the letter of your existing 
 statute) an acquaintance, necessarily most superficial and 
 worthless, with a vast mass of Greek and Latin prose 
 and poetry. 
 
 Should you modify your statute in accordance with 
 this view, the course of training in every one of our 
 respectable private schools would undergo a change, 
 and every boy, who aims at entering Columbia Col¬ 
 lege, would find himself breathing more freely and 
 seeing more clearly the work before him. Teachers 
 
10 
 
 will no longer attempt to carry their pupils over seven 
 hundred pages of Greek and Latin, within half the 
 time such an undertaking requires. Short lessons, 
 thoroughly learned, and learned in their presence and 
 with their help, will enable them to send up for exam¬ 
 ination better scholars and more scholars; for on this 
 system the son of the college graduate will have no 
 advantage over his less fortunate schoolmate. Tor 
 myself, as one of the private teachers of the city, I do 
 not promise these results in one year or in two, but I 
 believe that, in three years, I could effect all that I 
 desire to do in aid of the College if this change in its 
 system be now made. 
 
 I submit, moreover, that the statute now in force 
 weakens and injures the teacher, and thus does indirect 
 mischief to his pupils and to the undergraduate corps 
 of the College. No system could be devised more 
 likely to dwarf a teacher’s intellect. For seventeen 
 years have I, in each and every year, read, re-read, and 
 read for the third time, with my pupils, the first three 
 books of the Iliad, the first three books of the Ana¬ 
 basis, the Jugurtha or Catiline of Sallust, the orations 
 of Cicero against Catiline, and three or more of the 
 first six books of the JEneid, literally cramming my 
 scholars for their entrance examination. I am not 
 allowed by the statute to read with them the fourth, 
 fifth, and sixth books of Homer, or the fourth and 
 subsequent books of the Anabasis, or any part of Vir¬ 
 gil except the first six books of the JEneid. And yet, 
 had the liberty been accorded to me, the monotony of 
 a teacher’s life would have been varied, and my in- 
 
11 
 
 structiohs have been made far more useful to my 
 pupils. Could I read the Cyropaedia next year crit¬ 
 ically with a class in the place of the Anabasis, or 
 Cicero’s Orations against Antony in the place of those 
 against Catiline, I think my scholars would find in my 
 instructions a freshness and a spirit, that I cannot flat¬ 
 ter myself is to be discovered when they listen to me 
 translating for the forty-first time: “How far, 0 Cati¬ 
 line, wilt thou abuse our patience ?” 
 
 To avoid possible misconstruction, I beg leave to say 
 most distinctly and emphatically, that these suggestions 
 are prompted by no desire to see the qualification for 
 admission to the College lowered. Its standard of 
 admission and of scholarship has been sufficiently low¬ 
 ered during the last thirty years by the progress of the 
 city in material wealth and luxury, and by the baneful 
 influence and example of the diploma-factories that 
 abound among us. I desire to see your statute modi¬ 
 fied, because I think its modification will make your 
 candidates for admission to the Freshman class better 
 and more thorough Grecians and Latinists. By dimin¬ 
 ishing the ground they are now required to go over, the 
 thoroughness of their training would be increased, and 
 I respectfully submit that the effect of such diminution 
 would be to raise, instead of lowering, the standard of 
 scholarship not only in the College itself, but also in 
 the private schools from which its undergraduate corps 
 is annually recruited.. 
 
 I have advanced these views in the course of con¬ 
 versation with several of the Trustees of Columbia 
 College, and have by them been requested to present 
 
12 
 
 them in their present shape. I have done so hurriedly, 
 that I might bring them to your notice before the next 
 meeting of the Board of Trustees in April. With 
 more time and more leisure, I think that I could have 
 presented the subject in greater detail, but, as a teacher 
 of the classics and an alumnus of a college whose rep¬ 
 utation for thorough instruction in the classics stands 
 second to none in the country, it appeared to me to be 
 a positive duty to suggest such an alteration in its 
 statutes as might maintain the classics in their due 
 place as the chief instrument of mental culture and men¬ 
 tal discipline to the great majority of students. As a 
 teacher of the classics and an alumnus, I am the more 
 desirous that my Alma Mater shall continue to give 
 prominence to the literature of Greece and Borne, when 
 I remember that the Professors of the Greek and 
 Latin languages are among the small minority by 
 which the Alumni of the College are represented in its 
 Faculty. 
 
 I have the honor to be with great respect 
 
 Your obedient servant, 
 George C. Anthon, 
 
 204 Fifth Avenue. 
 
 March 28, 1864. 
 
J