The Junior College Menace

AS SEEN FROM WITHIN

CRITICISM of collegiate education has never been so sharp as in the last few years, yet amid all this publicity there progresses, unnoticed by laymen and little understood even by educators, a reorganization of our high-school and college systems which may entrench and accentuate a hundredfold the very vices of American schooling which current critics so much deplore. Moreover, the crippling force of this new menace falls with special weight upon the brilliant and precocious student. I refer to the redivision of control between grade school, high school, and university, of which the junior high school and the junior college are the initial symptoms, and which in a predictably short time will give us everywhere in the United States a seven-year elementary course, a threeyear junior high school, a four-year upper school, including the senior highschool and junior-college years, and, finally, universities offering a threeto four-year course leading to a Master of Arts or professional degree. This realignment of jurisdiction is as certain in public education as though the change were already everywhere complete; and protest is idle — even the searching and intelligent protest of Professor Palmer’s recent article.

There does remain, however, the problem of so administering and so controlling the junior college that it can compensate in some degree for the four-year liberal college it seems destined to supplant. This problem Professor Palmer has not touched — partly from preoccupation with other issues, partly from unfamiliarity with actual conditions. Yet this is a matter of the greatest urgency, since the outlook for higher education in America is desperate indeed if a change in junior-college control is not effected before the movement reaches its final stage.

In itself, the junior-college idea has much to recommend it. To many students who could not otherwise go to college it offers, at slight expense and without leaving home, two years of further schooling. As junior colleges are usually situated in large towns where opportunities for employment abound, self-supporting students easily secure these two college years. Moreover, many young men and women who could afford only two years at the university are enabled, by first attending a local junior college, to go away for the more valuable final years and obtain an otherwise impossible degree. Furthermore, parents who consider their children too young to send away can keep them at home for two added years, seemingly without impeding their educational progress.

But only seemingly. For the location, administration, and instructional methods of these junior colleges as at present conducted often nullify their educational effectiveness.

The average junior-college student still lives at home under close parental surveillance, and so misses the maturing experience of fending for himself. Moreover, the nonresident junior college can never impress its students so deeply as a university community that absorbs not only their class time but the whole of its students’ life. The junior-college boy goes back from his classes to the family circle, whose point of view continues to dominate his mind, so that his resistance to new ideas is stiffened and he misses the mental loosening up that comes from transplantation into new surroundings.

But alas! The average junior college has few new ideas to impart even to the receptive learner. Usually these colleges are offshoots of the public high-school system. They begin in a small way through postgraduate courses, and after they have attained some size are still frequently housed under the same roof with the high school and taught by instructors who also handle high-school classes. Even when they are housed separately they continue to be administered by persons whose whole past experience has been in high-school work, and their faculties and executive staffs are manned by promotion from the high-school ranks. This is true in practically every city where the junior college is part of the public-school system — even in so large an institution as Crane Junior College in Chicago. The boards of education which control these junior colleges are likewise experienced mainly in high-school and grade-school problems, and, being often composed of men who themselves lack university training, are ill equipped to build up an institution on collegiate lines. In short, the junior college is to all intents and purposes a mere extension of the high-school course; and the inevitable result is that its students still receive the treatment and instruction adapted perhaps to the high-school age, but little calculated to stimulate the independent thought, the methods of original research, and the rational selfcontrol which college life teaches and demands.

For instance, most junior-college courses are based upon textbooks, and not on library reading and research.

When library reading is assigned, it is not of the kind to stimulate investigation of a wide range of material, but merely the requirement of certain pages or chapters in a specified book; and so it is not in any sense research, but only more expanded textbook study. The instructors in junior colleges, though sometimes better pedagogues than those who handle freshman sections in a great university, are seldom scholars in any real sense, almost never productive scholars. Faculty contacts are thus less stimulating, and study and teaching more superficial. In just those years when intellectual habits and interests should be awakened, when the student will — if ever — learn to think for himself, he is lulled into acceptance of third-hand information and ideas. The young assistants at the university who teach freshmen may be inexperienced pedagogues and unfinished scholars, but they are scholars in the making; their ways and dreams are the ways and dreams of scholarship.

The faculty strength of the average junior college is also hampered by the method of appointing instructors. In four-year colleges and universities the department head selects his own instructors, or, if the department is organized as a committee with a rotating chairman, appointments are canvassed in department meetings. In either case the approval of the president is largely formal. But instructors are chosen in public junior colleges, not by department authority, but by the president, or even by the city superintendent of schools. This opens the way for the entrance of persons without the special expertness which a department would demand, enables an executive to pack the faculty with personal supporters, gives the superintendent and board members an equally vicious patronage, and, by a divided allegiance, prevents the esprit de corps characteristic of a well-organized university department.

Not only do faculties thus tend to be weakened, but the range of ideas and discussion in the junior-college classroom is restricted in ways unknown to the university. The local institution is too near its public, and this public exercises an interfering and sometimes demoralizing control. Too many local pastors scrutinize the reading lists; too many parents are frightened by the theoretical radicalism of exploring youth, and want the mental traveling curtailed. State universities complain of popular pressure, but the long-distance pressure they protest is nothing to that of father-on-the-spot!

Finally, the value of a genuine college experience comes, not alone from books, but from the social and intellectual contacts of student life. In the university, students have developed activities in which the theory of the classroom can be tested independently — in which the student can experiment with life and make instructive mistakes without those tragic practical consequences which the real world inflicts. The junior-college faculty, habituated to the detailed supervision of extracurricular interests proper to the secondary school, employs the same method with these older students, with the result either of killing interest in extracurricular affairs or of depriving them of developmental value.

The average graduate of the junior college, when he enters the university, is thus immature in life, work, and thought; and, unless methods in the junior college change, the universities will one day be swamped by these immature juniors from without. University training is bitterly criticized on the ground that it fails to stimulate intellectual initiative in its students.

What will be the effect as junior colleges multiply and prolong the intellectual childhood of American youth for two more years? The Association of University Women and the Association of University Professors — as the two national bodies most vitally concerned with college education — might well devote themselves to this problem before present errors harden into institutional practice. If American education is extended to offer added years in the university — so that our university degree may approximate that from European institutions — we must see to it that the added years represent added education and not just added time. And this will not be true if junior college consists merely of heavier high-school work.

One hears it said that junior colleges are peculiarly adapted to handling the masses who seek higher education without capacity for absorbing it, and that they form a protective sieve for the universities, which will be thus saved from lowering standards to the mob level. But we have no assurance that, by junior-college aid, such students will not go on to the higher institutions in greater numbers. And what of the brilliant youth caught in the junior-college trap? The student of superior mentality is now passed through the lower schools with greater rapidity. He is ready for college young. His parents fear to send him away. He is placed in a local junior college. There he starves intellectually, and grows warped and bitter under administrative repression. I read recently with some curiosity an account of strife in a Western junior college where the leading students seem to have been driven into unseemly revolt. How, I ask myself, did they ‘get that way’?

The same difficulty presents itself in a minor form in the junior high school, which has been an offshoot of the grade-school system and manned pretty largely by teachers and principals elevated from the grade-school force. Many high-school teachers testify that sophomores entering from the junior high are as irresponsible as the old high-school freshman, and need another year to train them to any sort of self-direction in their work.

The previous line of educational growth in the United States has been a settling downward in the system of subjects and of method. The high school of to-day is the college of yesteryear. But the junior college, reversing this process, bids fair to turn to-morrow’s college into a mere grandiose high school. Time alone can show whether, as the two new educational institutions become established, they can develop suitable personnel and standards of their own, or whether the blight of their origin is ingrained in their very make-up and the already thin substance of American education is to be diluted this much further. There is an heredity in institutions as in individuals, and the junior college was born in the high-school family. Certainly if junior-high-school positions are to be forever the reward of grade-school excellence, and if juniorcollege jobs are filled indefinitely from the high-school ranks, then higher education in America has received a body blow. Whether the city boards of education under which the two-year colleges increasingly operate can resist the inevitable pressure toward this course remains to be seen. And one also wonders whether, in the present state of popular sentiment that makes possible the frequent proposal and occasional passage of the so-called anti-evolution bills, it is safe to expose college training to the short-range public scrutiny which is the lot of any local junior college.