III. The third suggestion for restricting election is the group system. This deserves a more respectful treatment than the methods hitherto discussed, for it is something more than a suggestion: it is a system, a constructive plan of education, thought out in all its parts, and directed toward an intended end. The definition which I have elsewhere offered of the elective system, that it demands a fixed quantity and quality of study with variable topic, would be applicable also to the group system. Accordingly it belongs to the new education rather than to the old. No less than the elective system it is opposed to the methods of restriction thus far described. These latter methods attempt to limit election by the ballast of an alien principle lodged beneath it or by its side. They put a weight of prescription into the preparatory schools, into the early college years, or into parallel lines of study extending throughout the college course. The source of their practical trouble 229 lies here: the two principles, election and prescription, are nowhere united; they remain sundered and at war, unserviceable for each other’s defects. The group system intertwines them. It permits choice in everything, but at the same time prescribes everything. This it effects by enlarging the unit of choice and prescribing its constituent factors. A group or block of studies is offered for choice, not a single study. All the studies of a group must be taken if any are, the “if” being the only matter left for the student to settle. The group may include all the studies open to a student at the university. One decision may determine his entire course. Or, as in the somewhat analogous arrangement of the English universities, one group may be selected at the beginning and another in the middle of the university life. The group itself is sometimes contrived so as to allow an individual variation; different students read different books; a special phase of philosophy, history, or science receives prominence. But the boundaries of the group cannot be crossed. All the studies selected by the college authorities to form a single group must be taken; no others can be.
In this method of limiting choice there is much that is attractive. I feel that attraction strongly. Under the exceptional conditions which exist at the Johns Hopkins University, a group system has done excellent work. Like all the rest of the world, I 230 honor that work and admire its wise directors. But group systems seem to me to possess features too objectionable to permit them to become the prevalent type of the future, and I do not see how these features can be removed without abandoning what is distinctive, and changing the whole plan into the elective system, pure and simple. The objectionable features connect themselves with the size of the unit of choice, with difficulties in the construction of the groups, and with the attempt to enforce specialization. But these are enigmatic phrases; let me explain them.
Obviously, for the young, foresight is a hard matter. While disciplining them in the intricate art of looking ahead, I should think it wise to furnish frequently a means of repairing errors. Penalties for bad choices should not be too severe. Now plainly the larger the unit of choice, the graver the consequences of erroneous judgment. The group system takes a large unit, a body of studies; the simple elective system, a small unit, the single study. Errors of choice are consequently less reparable under the group system than under pure election. To meet this difficulty the college course at Baltimore has been reduced from four years to three; but even so, a student who selects a group for which he finds himself unfit cannot bring himself into proper adjustment without the loss of a year. If he does not discover his unfitness 231 until the second year has begun, he loses two years. Under the elective system, the largest possible penalty for a single mistake is the loss of a single study, one quarter of a year’s work. This necessary difference in ease of reparability appears to me to mark an inferiority in group systems, considered as methods of educating choice. To the public it may seem otherwise. I am often astonished to find people approving irreparable choices and condemning reparable ones. That youths between nineteen and twenty-three should select studies for themselves shocks many people who look kindly enough on marriages contracted during those years. Boys still unbearded have a large share in deciding whether they will go to college, to a scientific school, to a store, to sea, or to a cattle-ranch. Their lives are staked on the wisdom of the step taken. Yet the American mode of meeting these family problems seems to our community, on the whole, safer than the English way of regulating them by tradition and dictation. The choice with heavy stakes of the boy who does not go to college is frequently set off favorably against the choices with light stakes of the boy who goes. Perhaps a similarly lenient judgment will in the long run be passed on the great stakes involved in group systems. I doubt it. I think it will ultimately be judged less dangerous and more maturing to grant a young man, in his passage through a period 232 of moral discipline, frequent opportunities of repair.
Again, the practical difficulties of deciding what groups shall be formed are enormous. What studies shall enter into each? How many groups shall there be? If but one, we have the old-fashioned college with no election. If two, we have the plan which Yale has just abandoned, a fixed undergraduate department maintained in parallel vigor with a fixed scientific school. But in conceding the claims of variety even to this degree, we have treated the fundamental differences between man and man as worthy, not reprehensible; and can we say that the proper differences are only two? Must we not acknowledge a world at least as complex as that they have in Baltimore, where there appear to be seven reputable species of mankind: “Those who wish a good classical training; those who look toward a course in medicine; those who prefer mathematical studies with reference to engineering, astronomy, and teaching; those who wish an education in scientific studies, not having chosen a specialty; those who expect to pursue a course in theology; those who propose to study law; those who wish a literary training not rigidly classical.” Here a classification of human wishes is attempted, but one suspects that there are legitimate wishes which lie outside the scheme. It does not, for example, at once appear why a prospective 233 chemist should be debarred from all regular study of mathematics. It seems hard that a youth of literary tastes should be cut off from Greek at entrance unless he will agree to take five exercises in it each week throughout his college course. One does not feel quite easy in allowing nobody but a lawyer or a devotee of modern languages to read a page of English or American history. The Johns Hopkins programme is the most ingenious and the most flexible contrivance for working a group system that I have ever seen. For this reason I mention it as the most favorable type of all. Considering its purposes, I do not believe it can be much improved. As applied to its little band of students, 116, it certainly works few hardships. Yet all the exclusions I have named, and many more besides, appear in it. I instance these simply to show what barriers to knowledge the best group system erects. Remove these, and others quite as great are introduced. Try to avoid them by allowing the student of one group to take certain studies in another, and the sole line which parts the group system from the elective is abandoned. In practice, it usually is abandoned. Confronted with the exigencies of operation, the so-called group system turns into an elective system, with highly specialized lines of study strongly recommended. With this more genial working I have nothing now to do. My point is this: a system of hard 234 and fast groups presents difficulties of construction and maintenance too great to recommend it to the average college of the future as the best mode of limiting the elective principle.
Probably, however, this difficulty will chiefly be felt by persons engaged in the actual work of educational organization. The outer public will think it a more serious objection that grouped colleges are in reality professional schools carried down to the limits of boyhood. So far as they hold by their groups, they are nurseries of specialization. That this is necessarily so may not at first be apparent. A little consideration of the contrast in aim between group systems and prescribed will make the matter plain. Prescribed systems have gained their long hold on popular confidence by aiming at harmonious culture. They argue, justly enough, that each separate sort of knowledge furnishes something of its own to the making of a man. This particular “something,” they say, can be had from no other source. The sum of these “somethings” constitutes a rounded whole. The man who has not experienced each of them in some degree, however small, is imperfectly planned. One who has been touched by all has laid the foundations of a liberal education. Degree of acquaintance with this subject or with that may subsequently enlarge. Scholarly interest may concentrate. But at the first, the proper aim is balanced knowledge, 235 harmonious development of all essential powers, avoidance of one-sidedness.
On this aim the group system bestows but a secondary attention. Regarding primarily studies, not men, it attempts to organize single connected departments of knowledge. Accordingly it permits only those studies to be pursued together which immediately cohere. It lays out five, ten, any number of paths through the field of knowledge, and to one of these paths the pilgrim is confined. Each group constitutes a specialty,—a specialty intensified in character as, in order to escape the difficulties of maintenance just pointed out, the number of groups is allowed to increase. By insistence on specialization regard for general culture is driven into a subordinate place. The advocates of prescription maintain that there are not half a dozen ground-plans of perfected humanity. They say there is but one. If we introduce variety of design into a curriculum, we neglect that ideal man who resides alike in all. We trust, on the contrary, in our power to hit some line of study which may deservedly appeal to one human being while not so appealing to another. We simply note the studies which are most congruous with the special line selected, and by this congruity we shape our group. In the new aim, congruity of studies, adaptation to a professional purpose, takes precedence of harmonious development of powers.
I have no doubt that specialization is destined to become more marked in the American education of the future. It must become so if we are to produce the strong departmental scholars who illuminate learning in other countries; indeed, it must become so if we are to train competent experts for the affairs of daily life. The popular distrust of specializing is sure to grow less as our people become familiar with its effects and see how often narrow and thorough study, undertaken in early life, leads to ultimate breadth. It is a pretty dream that a man may start broad and then concentrate, but nine out of every ten strong men have taken the opposite course. They have begun in some one-sided way, and have added other sides as occasion required. Almost in his teens Shakespeare makes a specialty of the theatre, Napoleon of military science, Beethoven of music, Hunter of medicine, Faraday of chemistry, Hamilton of political science. The great body of painters, musicians, poets, novelists, theologians, politicians, are early specialists. In fact, self-made men are generally specialists. Something has aroused an interest, and they have followed it out until they have surveyed a wide horizon from a single point of view. In offering wider opportunities for specialization, colleges have merely been assimilating their own modes of training to those which prevail in the world at large.
It does not, therefore, seem to me objectionable that group systems set a high value on specialization. That is what every man does, and every clear-eyed college must do it too. What I object to is that group systems, so far as they adhere to their aim, enforce specialization. Among every half-dozen students, probably one will be injured if he cannot specialize largely; two or three more might wisely specialize in lower degree; but to force the remaining two or three into curricula shaped by professional bias is to do them serious damage. There are sober boys of little intrepidity or positive taste, boys who properly enough wish to know what others know. They will not make scholars. They were not born to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. They have another function: they preserve and distribute such knowledge as already exists. Many of them are persons of wealth. To furnish them glimpses of varied learning is to save them from barbarism. Still another large class is composed of boys who develop late. They are boys who will one day acquire an interest of their own, if they are allowed to roam about somewhat aimlessly in the domain of wisdom until they are twenty-one. Both of these classes have their rights. The prescribed system was built to support them; the elective shelters and improves them; but a group system shuts them all out, if they will not on leaving school adopt professional courses. Whenever 238 I can hear of a group system which like the old college has a place for the indistinct young man, and like the new elective college matures him annually by suggesting that he take part in shaping his own career, I will accept the group system. Then, too, the public will probably accept it. Until then, rigid groups will be thought by many to lay too great a strain on unseasoned powers of choice, to present too many practical difficulties of construction, and to show too doctrinaire a confidence that every youth will fit without pinching into a specialized class.