The Graduate Approach in an Undergraduate College
ONE day soon after the opening of college, a new member of the faculty came into my office and sank into a chair.
’Well,’he said, ‘I’ve just had an experience I never expected to encounter. My telephone rang and a girl’s voice asked me if I could come around to 201 at three o’clock and meet some students. I went. There were six of them. They said they wanted a course in literary criticism and proceeded to map it out. Since that was my field, they asked me to take them on. I have a full schedule, but I can’t let a thing like that go by.’
The instructor, who had been teaching in a large university, was excited and puzzled. It was an unheard-of experience for him — but an old story to us. He was being introduced to the practical results of placing the responsibility for learning in college on the shoulders of the students.
The young mind in college years is generally seeking a focus. Given thoughtful guidance, the student will establish his own educational objectives and reach out toward them without the imposed discipline of the undergraduate college. Let him discover significant objectives in his studies; self-discipline and the ability to do independent research — abilities commonly associated with the graduate student — will then develop in the undergraduate.
If each freshman, like each graduate student, is considered as a person with individual abilities and needs; if he is trusted, after twelve years of preparatory work, to be ready both in maturity and in preparation to proceed with his own education; if he is given the time of sympathetic, intelligent faculty who will help him plan; if faculty will be less insistent on the logic of the approach and more observant of the logical or illogical way in which learning takes place in their own as well as other people’s minds, a college situation may be developed in which freshmen may be trusted, in general, to want and pursue their own education.
Students come to college eager to learn, ready for new methods, seeking a test of their maturity. Any headmaster will tell you how often they revisit him, disillusioned.
‘College is just like more prep school. “To-morrow’s lesson will be from page 40 to 55 with a test on Thursday."'
Too often the college discounts completely rigid preparatory courses in high school, although insisting on them as prerequisites to admission. ‘We would rather start freshmen all over again,’ says the professor. And so the drudgery in literature or languages or science begins anew; and what is worse, drudgery in repetition. Marks are the whip.
Education must be taken on faith.
’You must take a science whether you want it or not. Every educated person should have that experience. Some day you will see why. Indeed, we hope you will want to major in this field.'
Some students do become interested enough to develop into scholars in the field; but I am inclined to think it is in spite of rather than because of the method.
Let me describe, on the other hand, an instance of what I call the graduate approach to the freshman.
An able student came to college definitely conditioned against mathematics but with a great interest in philosophy and excellent training in art and music. She was encouraged to work intensively in the fields of her choice. She wanted to know what philosophers had to say about the origins of life. We challenged her to a concern with what science had to say about that problem. She decided in her second year to study chemistry. Her instructor, aware of what her objective was, planned her work so that from the beginning her study was related to this subject. She became more enthusiastic, but soon found herself balked by the lack of proper mathematical tools. She then went to the director of education and asked that her schedule be changed to include some mathematics. The mathematics instructor, who also had been told of her objective, was able to point out to her the close connection between mathematics and philosophy. This interested her so much that she was loath to stop when she had acquired enough for her special needs. Meanwhile her instructors in art, music, philosophy, and literature each noted a distinct development in scope and comprehension in her work.
One Sunday in her senior year I was invited to dinner by her family, who lived near by. She did not come home for dinner. She was closeted in a dark room in the laboratory working over an apparatus which she had constructed with the help of her physics instructor, trying to measure the time it takes the eye to perceive different colors. She had worked for months on that unsolved problem — she and a student in Europe who was approaching it by a different route. She had traveled far from her early interests, but each step had followed logically from the last. It was the logic of learning, not of teaching — the logic which leads the scholar to the final choice of a subject for intensive study. It had made the continuity of education convincing.
In general — and this is again merely a matter of following the paths psychology has pointed out to us — the student learns most easily and discovers the joy of learning when the point of departure is within his own experience.
Thus students who shuddered at the names of Euripides and Sophocles read the works of these men with zest after they had seen Mourning Becomes Electra. After reading It Can’t Happen Here one student made a study of the dictator as an historical and literary figure, going back through the Napoleonic period, the French Revolution, the seventeenthcentury political philosophers, to Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Machiavelli. Another, reading Sheean’s Personal History and being challenged by his eyewitness accounts of revolution, made an extensive study of the French Revolution and completed her work by writing a paper on Mirabeau.
Nor is this approach useful only in opening up the past. As frequently the student discovers a world about him of whose meaning or even existence he was almost wholly unaware. Thus a group of students in social psychology who wished to ‘understand people’ approached their problem with the candid camera. Working with a psychologist in conferences, seminars, and field trips, and with a photography instructor, they made a two-months study of various juvenile and adult groups. Then each student undertook a project of her own planning, the results of which have been compiled into a class book on metropolitan culture with chapters on young children at different social levels, school children on play days, two young children in a nursery school, contemporary civilization in 125th Street, New York City, the margin of life, and peddlers in New York City.
Another student of child psychology is at present making a study of all the children’s theatres in the country and compiling a bibliography of plays presented in these theatres. With her observations in child psychology, she has joined a group of drama students studying play techniques, and is planning ultimately to write the kind of plays which will be psychologically valuable to children.
While explorations such as these are generally carried on in previously explored fields and mean only that the individual has discovered for himself new vitality and significance in his own world, the undergraduate occasionally penetrates into uncharted fields and makes an original contribution to man’s store of knowledge.
A student in biology, becoming interested in the development of bone structure in the embryo chick and finding little written information, made an extended study, with the result that her findings were published by the American Anatomical Association.
In order to challenge the student to independent work, a curriculum must be provided which is both flexible and rich. It must be sufficiently flexible so that a student beginning work in one field may pursue a lead into another. A group of drama students is now working with an economics class, planning ultimately to write a play on a contemporary economic problem. Frequently problems in art lead to the biology or chemistry laboratory. Psychology students call on the instructors in natural science to discover the physical bases of psychological phenomena. Often, as in a course called ‘Preparation for Marriage,’ instructors from various departments contribute their specific data to a many-faceted subject. Knowledge is not divided, for purposes of convenient absorption, into compartments. It is perceived as a scholar perceives it to be, without bounds or limits, having implications of which a lifetime is not long enough to do more than scratch the surface.
As to the richness of the curriculum, a few course descriptions, chosen at random, may illustrate.
Here is a course in ‘Patterns of Living’: ‘A course to help students clarify and organize their experiences. . . . Reading lists will be drawn from the available literature in psychology, anthropology and social science, and from fiction, biography and poetry. Some of the simpler philosophic materials illustrative of the varieties of human experience will also be read. There will be frequent field trips designed to help the students become more closely acquainted with the different ways of living. The primary emphasis will be on the student’s own life scheme.’
Here is another course: ’Field course, New York City. The st udent will investigate the economic activities by which the city maintains itself (shipping, banking, manufacturing, advertising, etc.); the population groups that it attracts (various immigrant groups and t heir cultures); the segregating and classifying process to which it subjects its populations (various districts such as Hell’s Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, the Upper West Side, Harlem, etc.); the emotional experiences to which it subjects its people and the maladjustments which it causes (destitution, crime, family troubles, mental maladjustments); and some attempts at. adjustments such as housing developments, Father Divine’s Mission, trade-unions and trade associations, charities, various political groups and movements.’
Many courses are, naturally, specific where these are general. They are broad but not vague — broad enough to challenge the student’s interest at a number of points, but specific enough so that he can develop a definite objective within the outlines of the course.
Do the students study just what they want and avoid discipline where there is so much latitude? Sometimes, but not often.
They are not working for marks, for there are no marks in this kind of college. They do not take notes on lectures and learn lessons out of textbooks for recitations and examinations. From their freshman year they are being trained to find their own material in the library; read, select, evaluate and digest it; and present and defend their own theses in long seminars. In weekly conferences with each of their instructors they plan, discuss, check their work, narrowing it when the scope is too broad, or vice versa, pursuing its ramifications into other fields when that is indicated. Thus is developed a kind of discipline which cannot be superimposed œ the kind of self-discipline which the students most need in the world they are entering.
The instructors are no longer final authorities, but advisers, counselors, and companions in learning. The responsibility for learning is shifted entirely to the student, who is constrained to shape his own educational objectives and, with as much guidance as he needs, reach out toward them.
The complaint is frequently made that this kind of education is spotty; that it leaves great hiatuses in a student’s basic knowledge. That is unquestionably true. But what kind of education for the young person can be complete? We can put a student through varied courses of study and he may pass examinations in all of them; but he will retain only part of what he has learned — only that part which has acquired significance for one reason or another, through his emotional set and through the cultural pressures which have surrounded him. So, in the end, he also has a spotty education, and he has missed the rich zest of intellectual exploration and discovery. I once heard a prominent educator say that he had gone to school for twenty years and received his education in four days — the days when his teachers, through wisdom or happenstance, found the magic key which unlocked doors to great intellectual vistas. But we have not time in to-day’s complexities to muddle so long. We need more illumination as we go.
Nor is there any greater fallacy than the assumption that an education can and must be crammed into four years. You cannot get an education in four or forty years. To be worthy of the name, education must be a lifelong pursuit. Better far a year of opening horizons and the joy of shaping one’s own objectives than four — or twenty — years of resistance to other people’s directions.
What are we in the liberal arts colleges trying to do? This is the nub of the question. Are we trying to teach subject matter only? Shall we be content with obedient performance of tasks, or at best with developing scholars? Or are we trying to develop in young people the ability to understand and live effectively in this complex world? If that is our object, we must have faith in their desire for such training. We must give them in college the kind of emotional and intellectual satisfaction which makes for their best adjustment as persons. We must see education as a way of living.
And above all we must trust them to be grown-up. A prolonged adolescence may be a sign of a maturing race, but if carried too far it may be a sign of decadence. The baby of three in the nursery school is expected to carry his dinner plate to the luncheon table without spilling the food. He quickly acquires a degree of independence and self-reliance in a predominantly adult world. May the liberal arts colleges not take a page from the books of the two extremes of education, the nursery school and the graduate school? May we not challenge our students to that maturity which they are so eager to test?
Several colleges established in the last ten years are doing this. They feel their faith is having its reward.