EDUCATION TO MEET POPULAR DEMANDS
The rapid extension of natural-physical science in the last fifty years has had much to do with the change of accent in American education. This change of emphasis has effected a distinct transformation in the curriculum, in the college teacher and in the student ideal.
Should one care to get one’s fingers dusty with ancient documents, one might turn to an old leaflet in the files of the library at Columbia, dated November 2, 1853. It is the report of the trustees of Columbia College upon the establishment of a university system. Among other things this report outlines, in accordance with the ideas of the trustees, “the mission of the college.”
The Library, Columbia University
This mission is, “to direct and superintend the mental and moral culture. The design of a college is to make perfect the human intellect in all its parts and functions; by means of a thorough training of all the intellectual faculties, to obtain their full development; and by the proper guidance of the moral functions, to direct them to a proper exertion. To form the mind, in short, is the high design of education as sought in a College Course.” The report hereupon proceeds to note that unfortunately this sentiment, “manifest and just” though it be, “does not meet with universal sympathy or acquiescence.” On the contrary, the demand for what is termed progressive knowledge ... and for fuller instruction in what are called the useful and practical sciences, is at variance with this fundamental idea. The public generally, unaccustomed to look upon the mind except in connection with the body, and to regard it as a machine for promoting the pleasures, the conveniences, or the comforts of the latter, will not be satisfied with a system of education in which they are unable to perceive the direct connection between the knowledge imparted and the bodily advantages to be gained. The committee therefore “think that while they would retain the system having in view the most perfect intellectual training, they might devise parallel courses, having this design at the foundation, but still adapted to meet the popular demand.”
We have here one of the early indications of “parallel courses” in one of our institutions of higher learning as a concession to popular demands. But this concession at Columbia was made before the immense extension and development of modern natural, physical, and industrial science. Education or culture in the early fifties was something easy to define. It included logic, literature, oratory, conic sections, and religion. Since that date, however, the American undergraduate has discovered modern research work at the German university. Cecil Rhodes has opened Oxford for American students with his “golden key.” The American student has been called upon to match with his technical ability the enormous and rapid development of a new material civilization, and educational institutions take color from the social and political media in which they exist. In fact, it cannot be easily estimated how real or how comprehensive a factor the college graduate has been in guiding and shaping this practical and progressive awakening.
The American undergraduate is more than ever before contemporaneous with all that is real and important in modern existence. He is filled with enthusiasm for civic and social and religious investigation and improvement. With self-reliant courage he works his way through college, tutoring, waiting on table, and performing other real services. He debates with zeal economics, immigration, and labor questions. Indeed, the modern American university is taking increasingly firmer hold upon the life of the nation. The college graduate of fifty years ago was more or less a thing apart. If he was strong in his literary studies, he was also weak in his attachment to life itself, where education really has its working arena. In comparison with him, the student to-day spends a greater proportion of his time in the study of political science. One feels the limitation of the modern undergraduate especially in the sweep of his literary knowledge, and in his acquaintance with abstract thought, art, and poetry. But when we see student and professor working together on our American farms, bringing about a new and higher type of rural life; when we find our mechanical engineers not only in the mountains and on the Western prairies, but in the heart of India or inland China or South Africa, building there their bridges and railroad tunnels according to the ideas seen in the vision of their new practical educational training, we are bound to ask whether the modern undergraduate is not truly interested in the deep aim of all true scholarship, namely, the spiritual and concrete construction of life by means of ideas made real. Ambassador Bryce’s opinion of the American universities carries weight, and of them he has said:
If I may venture to state the impression which the American universities have made upon me, I will say that while of all the institutions of the country they are those of which the American speaks most modestly, and indeed deprecatingly, they are those which seem to be at this moment making the swiftest progress, and to have the brightest promise for the future. They are supplying exactly those things which European cities have hitherto found lacking to America; and they are contributing to her political as well as to her contemplative life elements of inestimable worth.
But since undergraduate training must deal not simply with the theory of education, but also with the imperative demands and conditions of a new time, there must be discovered practical ways by which our undergraduates may save their literary ideals at the same time that they enlarge their practical and progressive knowledge; means by which they may discover literary, historical, linguistic, and philosophical values without losing their mathematics and their physical and material sciences.
To the end, therefore, of making cultural studies as strong, attractive, and profitable to our undergraduates as practical and scientific training, our institutions should train men of large caliber to teach English and belles-lettres. They should discover great teachers and inspiring personalities.