There is another tendency which is working toward an inevitable result. The average American student who desires higher or professional education will not spend four years in high school, four years in college, and three or four years in a graduate or professional school. There is a movement to shorten in some manner the whole course of education. Already many colleges and collegiate departments of universities offer electives that will count for one or two years of law, medicine, or theology. Already the university system in the form of group electives is introduced into the last two years of college.
The outcome will probably be a gradual reorganization of the high-school studies and those of the first two or three years of college. The new curriculum should lay for the student a broad and firm foundation in knowledge and power for all subsequent aptitudes. Upon this should be built the graduate school, the professional school, and perhaps the school of technology. In this plan the American college need not be lost, for the bachelor’s degree could be granted for a given amount of work beyond the college in the graduate school. The claim that the student should begin university work almost anywhere along the line of education, before laying a complete foundation for a specialty, appears absurd. It may be added that only by partial reorganization of our educational system can the admission standard to the American professional school ever be made respectable.
The scientific spirit—the term is used in the broadest sense—in all investigation and instruction is a most encouraging feature of present tendencies. If the American professor cannot always be an original investigator, he may keep abreast of investigation and impart its inspiration to the student. To this end the Lehrfreiheit, freedom in teaching, is necessary. It is a sad comment that the spirit of the inquisition has recently appeared in a New England university. The professor’s thought must not be prescribed for him by any creed, religious, political, or scientific. Of course, he must stand on the safe foundation of the past—he is not expected to soar in a balloon or leap over a precipice. A recent work on “The Ideal of Universities” says: “We can distinguish four chief currents in the theology of the present era: (1) The Roman Catholic; (2) the Protestant; (3) that objective-historic theology which simply states the origin and development of the Christian doctrine; and (4) the inception of a theology based upon recognized facts of science, of human nature, and of history.” All philosophy of nature and of human nature must become truth-seeking—this is a mere truism. No philosophy or belief can afford to maintain any other attitude. Leaders in the orthodox churches are teaching us this fact by their bearing toward new conceptions. And we need have no fear of the outcome. The highest ideals and hopes of humanity will be confirmed by the most thorough investigation in which metaphysics shall use the contribution of every department of objective and subjective science. A course in theology, scientific theology, should be found in every university, including the state university—and some dare to think the latter is the place for it. The facts of man’s higher intellectual and emotional life are the most important data for investigation.
The doctrine of Lernfreiheit, the freedom of the student, unhappily has been ignorantly applied in this country. It may properly be employed for the German university student at the age of twenty to twenty-five, after his training in the gymnasium, but not to the American college student at the age of eighteen to twenty-two. In America it may apply to the students in the graduate school. Some American colleges have tried the extreme theory of mental and moral freedom for the college student, and have learned from an unsatisfactory experience the lesson of a wise conservatism.
The old struggle between science and the humanities still goes on. We must adopt a view of education which regards the nature of man and its adaptation to the whole environment, including its historical element. In a keen analysis of the nature of things we shall not find Greek and Latin, but we shall find them historically in our language and literature, and in the generic concepts of our civilization. Hence they are a necessary part of any extended study of language, literature, or art.
We do not believe that the practical tendency of American education will destroy our reverence for what the Germans call the philosophical faculty in the university. The liberal arts, including pure science, are the gems of human culture, and are given a high value even in the imagination of the ignorant. The editor of “The Cosmopolitan” draws a bold and somewhat original outline for modern education, and it is in many ways suggestive. But the author overlooks what every true scholar knows, that thorough scientific knowledge of principles must remain the fundamental work of education and the substantial ground of progress in civilization. A university course may not consist chiefly of lectures upon prudential maxims, such as all must learn partly from experience. Such a theory would award the palm, not to Socrates, but to the Sophists. The truth in all the clamor for practical work in the college is that the culture studies must be vivified by closer relation to the real world and to modern life.
Little has been said of what is called the graduate school. Germany credits us with eleven institutions that have either reached the standard of a genuine university or are rapidly approaching it. Of these eleven, five are state universities. This estimate, of course, is made in accord with the plan and standard of the German university. It appears certain that in time the name university in America will be applied only to those institutions which maintain the graduate school and raise the dignity of the professional schools. The university system will develop freely in this country only after a somewhat important reorganization of our higher education. The line must be drawn more sharply between foundation education and university work, the whole period of education must be somewhat shortened, and, in most of our universities, the graduate faculty must be strengthened. That these changes will be wrought, and that we shall have a rapid development of the genuine university is certain. Much is to be expected from our higher scholarship in many lines of investigation. In America, men are solving problems the existence of which has only been dimly conceived by the masses of people in the Old World. Inspired by our advanced conceptions of government and society, and by the free, inventive, truth-seeking spirit characteristic of our people, the American scholar will make leading contributions to the world’s literature of sociology, politics, and science. And when the spirit of reality, now superficial, gains a deeper insight into the nature of things, America may yet lead the world in those investigations which belong to the sphere of philosophy.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Read at the National Council of Education, Milwaukee, July 6, 1897. This is one of three papers on “University Ideals” there presented, the other two representing respectively Princeton and Leland Stanford, Jr. The author was requested to write on “State University Ideals.”