speare, 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 gods 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.

TALCOTT WILLIAMS
_School of Journalism, Columbia University_

XXVIII

BUSINESS EDUCATION

=Evolution of business education=

Business education of collegiate grade is a very recent development.
The world's first commercial college was established at Antwerp in
1852, while the forerunner of American institutions of this sort, the
Wharton School, was founded in 1881. Others followed in the nineties,
but the general establishment of schools of commerce as parts of
colleges and universities, as well as the inclusion of business
subjects in the curricula of liberal colleges, took place after 1900.
This sudden flowering at the top was preceded by a long evolution
quite typical of the development of education in all the branches of
learning to which institutions devote time because of their cultural
or professional worth.

Some practical end and not the desire for abstract knowledge prompted
early instruction and stimulated business education as well as
education in general through various stages of progress. Of course all
education is a process whereby technical operations and abstract truth
developed by many generations are systematized, compressed, and
imparted to individuals in a relatively short time.

The first stage in the evolution in a given field may be called the
_apprentice stage_. Just as physicians, lawyers, and in fact
practitioners in all the professions and crafts trained their
assistants in their establishments for the purpose of making them
proficient in their daily work, so did merchants at this stage give
apprentice training in commercial branches to their employees.
Traditional ways of carrying out certain transactions, convenient
rules of thumb, and habits of neatness and reliability were passed on
in a given establishment. As industry grew and guilds were formed, the
training tended to become more s