The Fight for Education
I
THE early American college attempted to train men to be good men and able citizens. It sought to imbue the student with a knowledge of and a passion for the ideals this country served. It sought to provide him with those intellectual tools necessary for effective choice and administration of the means to serve those ends. It sought to provide him with knowledge enabling him to communicate meaningfully with the array of experts whose services government and citizenry required. It provided the student with experiences designed to yield habits and attitudes which would serve him in his search for personal happiness and in his efforts to contribute to the common good.
J. S. Mill described such objectives in his Inaugural Address at St. Andrews: —
The proper function of a University in national education is tolerably well understood. At least there is a tolerably general agreement about what a University is not. It is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings. Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.
Whatever errors of method and means the early American college may have made, these were its ends and they are good ends.
They are the ends of the American college no longer. The American college has been engulfed by the backwash of an American version of the German ideal of exhaustive, factual, and specialized research. As Mr. Cowley of Hamilton says, ‘Changing rapidly . . . to an industrial society, the nation needed institutions to train chemists, economists, engineers, geologists, physicists, and dozens of other varieties of specialists and professional men.’ The nation got such institutions — the American universities. And the colleges later got for faculties the men such universities trained as specialists and researchers, but whom the universities could not place as specialists and researchers; and the colleges are still getting these men.
Four out of six of their faculty members are specialist trained and specialty devoted. They have gone through a training whose rigor rivals that of mediæval monks. They have lived, eaten, and slept zoölogy, economics, chemistry, for from two to five of their intellectually most impressionable years. Most of them have been filled with the notion that research in their field is the highest form of human action; that training even of potential new specialists is a nuisance; and that undergraduate teaching is irrelevant to their interests and talents. With this equipment of specialized knowledge and narrowed horizons, they go out to staff the colleges of this nation. Prospective teachers who are interested in training the young to become effective men and citizens rather than specialists must be reëducated at the institutions to which they go as teachers, and this occurs, if at all, as erratically and imperfectly as any other accident. That accident does not happen to most of them. These specialist teachers have taken over the college. They are dictating its curriculum, sustaining the free elective system and fostering the ‘major sequence.’
The specialist insists that the major function of a college is to let him reproduce his kind. The scientist would have the college mostly science; the historian wants mostly history. There is little or no chance for a rational resolution of such a conflict among twenty-odd different specialists. Relativistic in the first place, and steeped in jealous professionalism, the specialists have no way of settling their differences except by logrolling and an academic version of laissez-faire economy. By logrolling, they establish the list of ‘required’ courses: says the chemist to the English instructor, ‘If you’ll back Inorganic, I’ll vote for Shakespeare I, II, and III.’ By laissez-faire, they establish the free elective system, a free competition for the students’ time unhampered by restrictions based on the worth of their subjects to a general education.
Nor have the colleges been able to withstand the demand from their faculties for some miniature imitation of the specialized regimen of graduate training. The sign of that defeat is the ‘major sequence.’
Domination of the American college by these two curricular devices spells time-serving for the student and disaster for the nation unless stopped or counteracted. In a college run on these twin principles, the judgment of an adolescent — inexperienced, ignorant, and swayed by winds of momentary publicity and prestige — determines what education he shall get.
Consider what the student may get from his ‘major.’ The ‘major’ usually requires that he devote one-fourth to one-third of his college years to courses in a single field or with some additions from closely allied fields. If such a program were successfully pursued, it would constitute specialization at a close approach to its worst, for, to quote J. S. Mill again: —
Every department of knowledge becomes so loaded with details, that one who endeavors to know it with minute accuracy, must confine himself to a smaller and smaller portion of the whole extent. . . . Now, if, in order to know that little completely, it is necessary to remain wholly ignorant of all the rest, what will soon be the worth of a man, for any human purpose except his own infinitesimal fraction of human wants and requirements? His state will be even worse than that of simple ignorance.
The vices of the elective system are obvious. The student bounces from one elementary course to another, selecting the ‘snap’ courses if he is smart or has the right upper-classman advice, promptly forgetting what he learns in one while getting a ‘pass’ in another. This is no mere private opinion. As part of the monumental examination of Pennsylvania colleges conducted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Learned and Wood conclude: —
Beyond the course concerned the student knows that he bears no obligations for possessing even the material with which to think. Instead of secure confidence in a mastery of what has been learned as a basis for further learning to come, the attitude of the undergraduate, unless corrected by personal efforts that are quite optional, is one of vagueness and apologetic uncertainty regarding all ideas contained in courses that have been ‘passed.’ While still a freshman he begins to qualify for that definition of the college-educated man which as an alumnus he will lustily invoke: one who willingly forgets all he has learned in order the better to appreciate what remains. The institution, can scarcely be charged with the avowed aim of producing this devastating attitude toward knowledge, but its procedure is as effective as though this were its sole purpose. Except as chance correctives operate within himself, the student receives from the institution all the logic of an invitation for closing each course with the familiar campus requiescat, ‘Nevermore.’
This then is the proud Baccalaureate which the University of Chicago is abandoning. This is the American college which the University of Chicago is ‘attacking.’
II
The Chicago Plan is a four-year plan; it begins at the end of the sophomore year of high school. It does, however, admit, for the time being, graduates of conventional high schools without prejudice and without penalty. Furthermore, it is a plan with two slightly differing curricula, leading respectively to the Bachelor of Arts and the Bachelor of Philosophy degrees. The controversy over this plan, however, revolves about its last two years and its program for the Arts degree. It is with these years and this program I deal.
The Chicago Plan is a plan to prevent the descent of university specialism into general education. It is an attempt to hew out of the jungle and confusion of the four-year college two years devoted and dedicated to the ideals of a general education.
A general education is one devoted to development in men of the virtues required of able men and able citizens in a democratic nation. These virtues are both moral and intellectual. ‘Society,’ says Frank Knight, ‘must educate and restrain, must make men intelligent and moral in such a way and to such a degree . . . that they can be trusted with the freedom, which means the power, required for the good life.’ It is not enough for an able citizen of a democracy to ‘ know ‘ a body of principles if he is unable to apply them. It is not enough to be able to apply them if he has not the stamina and discipline to obey his reasoned conclusions once they are made. It is not even enough to obey one’s reasoned conclusions if the conclusions proceed from premises which ignore or reject the common good. In the words of Robert Ulich: ‘Education is the organized attempt of mankind to develop skills and criteria, knowledge and values, that will help us not only to discriminate between good and evil, freedom and bondage, but to decide actively for the positive and reject the negative.’ The emphasis then is not upon ‘knowing’ alone, but upon knowledge plus skills plus attitudes, for the sake of action.
In short, the ends and objectives of the college are distinct from those of the university. If the university’s function is the ‘advancement of knowledge,’ the function of the college is to provide a common faith, a common body of principle, a common moral and intellectual discipline. Any man who fails to distinguish between the ends of these two institutions, the college and the university, cannot comprehend the nature of the Chicago Plan.
The skeleton of the Bachelor of Arts program, as it pertains to the conventional college years, can be described in four sentences. The average student will explore for two years the three main lines of human knowledge: the Natural Sciences, the Humanities, and the Social Studies. In addition, for the first of those two years he will receive intensive training in the use of his native tongue; in the second year, he will examine the concepts, methods, and dilemmas which have given rise to these fields of knowledge and which knit them into a single tool for solution of human problems. He will receive his degree, not after completion of these particular courses, nor for serving a given time, but after demonstrating his mastery of the knowledge and skills which comprise these three fields. He may demonstrate such mastery whenever he considers himself prepared to do so.
The content, the form, and the method of this plan have each its separate significance. With each, I shall deal briefly and incompletely.
The success of a man and a nation depends upon wise choice of goals and methods. One field which contributes to such wisdom is the history of man’s ideas concerning himself and his politics. This is not the conventional history of names and dates and rulers and wars, but the history of man’s developing insights into the meanings of his constantly multiplying data. It is a history whose landmarks are not Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, and Bismarck, but Plato and Aristotle, Paul and Anselm, Calvin and Knox, Hobbes, Locke and Mill, Adam Smith and Marx, Paine, Jefferson, and Hamilton. It is the history of political and humanistic ideas, man’s best available knowledge of himself as individual and member of society. This matter, Walter Lippmann’s ‘common faith and common body of principle,’ is one of the joint responsibilities as part of the content of the Humanities and the Social Studies.
The need for such bodies of knowledge in turn requires certain skills in reading, expression, and logic. Reading is necessary in a sense which lies far beyond what is usually meant. It means comprehension not only of words and sentences, but also of a larger unit of discourse, the argument. It means ability to distinguish the propositions of an argument, to identify them as statements of fact, faith, theory, hypothesis, or opinion. It means the further ability to identify and judge the relationships between such propositions, to determine whether the arguments are valid or fallacious. It means also the ability to compare and contrast one argument with another in order to choose the better. Such skill in reading is necessary not merely because the vehicle of man’s social heritage is a syntactical language, but because there are bad arguments as well as good ones. A generation benefits from the knowledge of previous ones only if it can distinguish the fallacious from the proper, the complete from the incomplete, the probable from the less probable.
Complementary to skill in reading is skill in expression: the ability to state one’s ideas with clarity, to choose one’s arguments well, and to participate in coöperative debate. Without clarity and wise choice of argument, the citizens who have been best endowed by heredity and circumstance with intelligence and information are not heard by other citizens. Without ability at coöperative debate, committees and legislative bodies cease to function as instruments for the common good.
These skills are part of the joint responsibility of The College as a whole, and comprise one of the specific tasks of the Humanities and the course in English.
The Natural Sciences also have a share in this aspect of general education. Men must be able to ascertain the truth of the propositions with which argument begins. This is done through the scientific processes of observation, experimentation, and reasoning — the gathering and evaluation of evidence. Truths once gained must be applied. Such skills as these comprise one proper function of the Natural Sciences in the Chicago curriculum, though it is not exclusively theirs.
One further peculiarity of science instruction in The College is that the particular materials are chosen for the contribution they can make to a liberal education. There is no anguish in Biology when an obscure animal phylum goes undescribed. We do no weeping because our list of digestive enzymes is incomplete. When our students leave us, they may not be embryo chemists or able to repair their electric fans. They do know the basis of the physical universe in which they live; they do know the essentials of the organic world of which they are a part.
The significance of the form of this curriculum is evident. It consists in essence of only five lines of effort. Three of these (the Humanities, the Natural Sciences, and the Social Studies) run through both years. The fourth is English. The fifth is ‘Integration.’ Departmentalization is gone. Even divisional lines are hazy. The Humanities overlap English. The Natural Sciences collaborate with English and the Social Studies. Darwin is set in a humanistic as well as a biological context. The same books and the same ideas may be parts of both Social Studies and Humanities.
The specific content and objectives of these courses are chosen and formulated for their value to the student, not for their value as prerequisites to a specialized education. They include no electives to be chosen by adolescents. They are chosen and formulated by mature men, and men who have been self-educated and mutually reëducated over a period of ten years or more to a broader perspective than one is ever likely to find in young Ph.D.’s or older practitioners of specialized, graduate departments.
This form of The College is neither accident nor hurried choice. It had its birth, not in 1942, but in 1931. Most of the present plan was inaugurated then. Since then, it has been watched and altered, shifted and reëxamined, refined and modified. The action of 1942 was not to produce a novelty for the wartime tourist trade. The action of 1942 was to amplify the product of ten years of effort and give it a symbol which means what the program achieves — competence in the liberal arts.
The essential features of method may be summed up in two phrases: educational opportunities, and comprehensive examinations. The educational opportunities are made available to the student, not thrust upon him. Each ‘course’ offers lectures, discussions, and demonstrations. These the student may attend or not as he sees fit. There are reviews for those who need them, advanced seminars for those who can use them. A syllabus describes each ‘course’ and guides the student to the books and other readings which will help him attain to mastery. When the student has attained such mastery, by whatever means he chooses, he may demonstrate the fact through the comprehensive examination.
The intent of this method is to develop initiative and a capacity for responsibility. It is an effort to develop initiative and responsibility by one of the few means that will do the job — by requiring them. The student is placed in a situation where initiative and responsibility pay and the lack of them does not; where paternalism by the teacher or dictatorship by the dean does not replace adulthood in the student.
This is the skeleton of the Chicago Plan. It is a plan evolved and administered by the teaching faculty. And that is significant. Presidents, assistants to presidents, and public relations counsels may dream of colleges. They may write glowing descriptions of ends and objectives which appear in catalogues. But the professors teach the students. The professors’ ends — or a lack of them — determine what education the student shall receive. The Chicago Plan is no fiat from above; it is a realization of more than one man’s hopes, the product of its teachers’ labors.