Narrator Listen to part of a lecture in an education class. Now get

Just now we talked about an ideal high school. Well...er...What is then an ideal college. Well...uh...An ideal college should be a community, a place of close, natural, intimate association, not only of the young men who are its pupils and novices in various lines of study, but also of young men with older men, with mature men, with veterans and professionals in the great undertaking of learning, of teachers with pupils, outside the classroom as well as inside it. No one is successfully educated within the walls of any particular classroom or laboratory or museum; and no amount of association, however close and familiar and delightful, between mere beginners can ever produce the sort of enlightenment which the young lad gets when he first begins to catch the infection of learning. The trouble with most of our colleges nowadays is that the faculty of the college live one life and the undergraduates is not touched with personal influence of the teachers: life among the teachers is not touched by the personal impressions which should come from frequent and intimate contact with undergraduates. This separation need not exist, and, in the college of the ideal university, would not exist.
    It is perfectly possible to organize the life of our colleges in such a way that students and teachers alike will take part in it; in such a way that a perfectly natural daily intercourse will be established between them; and it is only by such an organization that they can be given real vitality as places of serious training, be made communities in which youngsters will come fully to realize how interesting intellectual work is, how vital, how important, how closely associated with all modern achievements—only by such an organization that study can be made to seem part of life itself. Lectures often seem very formal and empty things; recitations generally prove very dull and unrewarding. It is conversation and natural intercourse with scholars chiefly that you find how lively knowledge is, how it ties into everything that is interesting and important, how intimate a part it is of everything that is "practical" and connected with the world. Men are not always made thoughtful by books; but they are generally made thoughtful by association with men who think.
    The present and most pressing problem of our university authorities is to bring about this vital association for the benefit of the novices of the university world, the undergraduates. Classroom methods are thorough enough; competent scholars already lecture and set tasks and superintend their performance; but the life of the average undergraduate outside the classroom and other stated appointments with his instructors is not very much affected by his studies; is almost entirely dissociated from intellectual interests.