Abstract

Education for Journalists

Writer M. Gaston Boissier closes an elaborate article on the higher education in a journal for August 15, by an argument in favor of the study of science which will probably impress forcibly the great body of thoughtful readers in all countries, and that is, that the increasing influence of journalism on the thought and life of the age needs to be met, or counterbalanced, by some training for youth which will implant in them a love of serious knowledge, a taste for minute exactness, a hatred of sounding generalities, which will make them feel the need of going to the bottom of things, and of holding their tongues about what they do not understand. There are three fields of study, certainly, which are perhaps more likely to be useful to a journalist, as such, than to a man of other callings: history, legislative science, meaning by that the knowledge of the limits and powers of legislation, and political economy, or the knowledge of the working of the laws of human nature which regulate the production and distribution of wealth; but then these are fields which every man pretending to be educated ought to cultivate, no matter to what special pursuit he intends to devote himself.