elective system, namely, the student whose artistic instinct makes him
ambitious of gaining the maximum effect, an A.B., with the minimum
expenditure of means. History D is a good course: the lectures do not
come until eleven o'clock, and no thought of them blunts the edge of
the evening before. Semitic C is another good course--only two
lectures a week, and you can pass it with a few evenings of cramming.
If such a man is fortunate enough to have learned foreign languages in
the nursery or in traveling abroad, he elects all the general courses
in French and German. This sort of man is regarded by Dean Briggs with
unwonted impatience; but he has one great claim to our admiration. Of
all possible kinds of students, he alone has found the pea. For him
the elective system is elective.
The men who developed the elective system, it is quite unnecessary to
say, had no sinister intention. They were pioneers of educational
progress who revolted against the narrowness of the old curriculum.
The nearest means of reform was suggested to them by the German plan,
and they sought to naturalize this _in toto_ without regard to native
needs and conditions. But the pioneer work of the elective system has
been done, and the men who now uphold it in its entirety are clogging
the wheels of progress no less than those who fought it at the outset.
The logic of circumstances early forced them to the theory that all
knowledge is of equal importance, provided only that it is
scientifically pursued, and this position in effect they still
maintain. You may elect to study Shakespeare and end by studying
American finance legislation; but so long as you are compelled to
study scientifically, bless you, you are free.
The serenity of these men must of late have been somewhat clouded.
Professor Hugo Muensterberg, as an editorial writer in "Scribner's
Magazine" lately remarked, "has been explaining, gently but firmly,
ostensibly to the teachers in secondary schools, but really to his
colleagues in the Harvard faculty, that they are not imitating the
German method successfully." In no way is the American college man in
the same case as the German undergraduate. His preparatory schooling
is likely to be three years in arrears, and, in any case, what he
seeks is usually culture, not science. "The new notion of
scholarship," this writer continues, "by which the degree means so
much Latin and Greek, or the equivalent of them in botany or
blacksmithing, finds no favor at all in what is supposed to be the
native soil of the 'elective system.'" Dr. Muensterberg's own words,
guarded as they are, are not without point: "Even in the college two
thirds of the elections are haphazard, controlled by accidental
motives; election, of course, demands a wide view and broad knowledge
of the whole field.... A helter-skelter chase of the unknown is no
election." The writer in "Scribner's" concludes: "It is not desirable
that a man should sell his birthright for a mess of pottage, even if
he gets the pottage. If he does not get it, as Dr. Muensterberg
intimates, of course his state is even worse."
Rough as the elective system is upon the student who aspires to be
merely a scholar, it is rougher on the undergraduate who only wants to
train his mind and to equip it for business and professional life. To
him a purely scientific training is usually a positive detriment.
Scrupulous exactitude and a sense of the elusiveness of all knowledge
are an excellent and indispensable part of the bringing up of a
scholar; but few things are more fitted, if pursued exclusively, to
check the self-confidence of a normal man and to blight his will. Poor
Richard had a formula for the case: "A handsaw is a very good thing,
but not to shave with." Before taking a vigorous hold on the affairs
of Wall Street or of Washington, our recent graduate has first to get
away from most of the standards that obtain in the university, or at
least to supplement them by a host of others which he should have
learned there. In another passage in the article already quoted, Dean
Briggs has touched the vital spot. He is speaking of the value, to
teachers especially, of the peculiar fetich of Teutonized university
instruction, the thesis, and of its liability to be of fictitious
value. "Such theses, I suspect, have more than once been accepted for
higher degrees; yet higher degrees won through them leave the winner
farther from the best qualities of a teacher, remote from men and
still more remote from boys. It was a relief the other day to hear a
head-master say, 'I am looking for an under-teacher. I want first a
man, and next a man to teach.'" What is true of teaching is even more
obviously true of the great world of business and of politics. What it
wants is men.
The cause of the break-down of the elective system, as at present
constituted, is to be found in the machinery of instruction. The
office of the teacher has become inextricably mixed up with a totally
alien office--university discipline. Attendance at lectures is the
only means of recording a student's presence in the university, and
success in the examination in lecture courses is the only basis for
judging of his diligence. At the tolling of a bell the student leaves
all other affairs to report at a certain place. In the Middle Ages, as
we have seen, lectures were of necessity the main means of
instruction. Books were rare and their prices prohibitive. The master
read and the student copied. To-day, there are tens of thousands of
books in every college library. Only in the higher courses are
lectures necessary or profitable. But still instruction is carried on,
even in the most general courses, by means of professorial lectures.
Where great periods are covered by leaps and bounds, freshness or
individuality of treatment is quite impossible. The tolling of the
college bell dooms hundreds of students to hear a necessarily hurried
and inarticulate statement of knowledge which has been carefully
handled in printed form by the most brilliant writers, and to which a
tutor might refer the student in a few minutes' conference. Modify the
lecture system? It is the foundation of the police regulation. The
boasted freedom in elective studies simmers down to this, that it
enables the student to choose in what courses he shall be made the
unwilling ally of the administrative officer. The lectures waste the
time of the student and exhaust the energy of the teacher; but unless
the lecturers give them and the studious attend, how can the
university know that the shiftless stay away?
It is necessary, moreover, for the administrator to judge of the
student's success as well as of his diligence. Twice every year the
professors hold an examination lasting for three hours in each of
their several courses. Of late years an ingenious means has been
devised for making the examination system an even more perfect ally of
the police. In the middle of each term an examination of one hour is
held to insure that the student has not only attended lectures but
studied outside; and, in order to expose the procrastinator, it has
become the custom for the examination to be given without warning.
Like the lecture system, the examination system throws the onus of
discipline on the studious and the teachers. Two thousand students
write yearly 32,000 examination books. Quite obviously the most
advanced of the professors cannot spare time for the herculean task of
reading and duly grading their share of these books. They give over
most of them to underpaid assistants. The logical result of such a
system is that the examinations tend to be regarded merely as
statements of fact, and the reading of the books merely as clerical
labor. If academic distinctions are disprized in America, both in
college and out of it, this is amply explained by the fact that they
attest a student's diligence rather than his ability. They are
awarded, like a Sunday-school prize, in return for a certain number of
good-conduct checks.
It is not enough that the machinery of instruction wastes the time of
the student and debases the office of the examiner; it is, as I have
said, the cause of the break-down of the elective system. As long as
each student is required to pursue every study under the eye of the
disciplinarian, the decision as to what he shall study rests not with
his desires or his needs, but with an elaborate schedule of lectures
and examinations. So excessive are the evils of the present system
that no less a man than Professor William James has advocated the
abolition of the examinations.
This remedy is perhaps extreme; but the only alternative is almost as
radical. It is to enable the student, at least the more serious
student, to slip the trammels of the elective system, and to study
rationally, and to be rationally examined in, the subject or group of
subjects which he prefers. In a word, the remedy is to divide and
organize our courses of instruction for the more serious students into
groups corresponding in some measure to what the English call honor
schools.
It may be objected that already it is possible to read for honors. The
objection will scarcely convince any one who has taken the
examination. It is oral, and occupies an hour or two. The men who
conduct it are leading men in the department, and are often of
world-wide reputation. They are so great that they understand the
nature of the farce they are playing. No candidate is expected to
have covered the field of his honor subject even in the broadest
outlines. When the astute student is not sure of an answer, he
candidly admits the fact and receives credit for knowing that he does
not know--a cardinal virtue to the scientific mind. If I may be
allowed a personal instance, I went up for the examination in English
literature in complete ignorance as to all but a single brief
movement. When my ignorances were laid bare, the examiners most
considerately confined their questions to my period. We had much
pleasant conversation. Each of the examiners had imparted in his
courses his latest rays of new light, and each in turn gave me the
privilege of reflecting these rays to the others. For a brief but
happy hour my importance was no less than that of the most eminent
publication of the learned world. It need scarcely be said that such
examinations are not supposed to have much weight in judging of the
candidate's fitness. A more important test is a thesis studied from
original sources, and the most important is good-conduct marks in a
certain arbitrary number of set lecture courses. The policeman's
examination is supreme.
IV
THE AMERICAN HALL
The college has shown a tendency, as I have indicated, to divide in
its social life into separate organizations for the purposes of
residence, dining, and athletics. In the administrative life, at least
the proctors and the freshman advisers are each in charge of separate
bodies of undergraduates. In the educational life, a similar tendency
is noticeable. Year by year there has been an increasing disposition
to supplement lectures or to substitute them by what is in effect
tutorial instruction. In the history courses, for example, the
lectures and examinations have for some time been supplemented by
private personal conferences. If the student is proceeding properly,
he is encouraged; if not, he is given the necessary guidance and
assistance. I do not know what the result has been in the teaching of
history; but in the teaching of English composition, where the
conferences have largely supplanted lectures, it has been an almost
unmixed benefit. The instructor's comments are given a directness and
a personal interest impossible either in the lecture-room or by means
of written correction and criticism; and the students are usually
eager to discuss their work and the means for bettering it. As the
lecture system proves more and more inadequate, the tutorial
instruction must necessarily continue to increase, and is not unlikely
to afford the basis for a more sensibly devised scheme of honor
schools.
If the American college were organized into separate halls, it would
be necessary and proper, as Mr. Bolles suggested, to place in each a
Dean and administrative board; and the most economical plan of
administration, as he pointed out, would be to give each administrator
as many duties as possible toward a single set of pupils. Thus the
proctor on each staircase of the hall would be the adviser of the men
who roomed on it. It would be only a logical extension of the
principle to give the proctor-adviser a tutorial office. All this
indicates a reversion toward the golden age of the mediaeval hall.
Here is where the gain would lie: The administration of the hall would
make it no longer necessary to rely on the lecture courses for police
duty, and the wise guidance of a tutor would in some measure remove
the necessity of the recurrent police examinations. Thus the student
would be able to elect such courses only as the competent adviser
might judge best for him; and if the faculty were relieved of the
labor of unnecessary instruction and examination it would be possible,
with less expense than the present system involves, to offer a
well-considered honor examination, and to provide that the examination
books should be graded not with mere clerical intelligence, but with
the highest available critical appreciation. Thus and only thus can
the American honor degree be given that value as an asset which the
English honor degree has possessed for almost a century.
It would by no means be necessary as at Oxford to make the honor
examination the only basis for granting the degree. The fewer lecture
courses which the student found available would be those in which the
instruction is more advanced--the "university" courses properly
speaking; and his examinations in these would be a criterion, such as
Oxford is very much in need of, for correcting the evidence of the
honor examination. Furthermore, in connection with one or more of
these courses it would be easy for the student to prepare an honor
thesis studied from the original sources under the constant advice of
a university professor. Such an arrangement might be made to combine
in any desired proportion the merits of the English honor schools
with the merits of advanced instruction in America. With the
introduction of the tutor, the American hall would be the complete
counterpart of the mediaeval hall of the golden age, and would solve
the educational as well as the social and administrative problem.
As to the details of the new system, experience would be the final
teacher; but for a first experiment, the English arrangement is in its
main outline suggestive. An American pass degree might be taken by
electing, as all students now elect, a certain number of courses at
random. For the increasing number of those who can afford only three
years' study, a pass degree would probably prove of the greatest
advantage. It was by making this sharp distinction between the pass
degree and the honor degree that the English universities long ago
solved the question, much agitated still in America, of the three
years' course. For the honor men[6] two general examinations would
probably suffice. For his second year honor examination (the English
"Moderations") a student might select from three or four general
groups. This examination would necessarily offer precisely that
opportunity for mental culture the lack of which Dean Briggs laments
as the worst feature of the elective system as at present conducted.
Furthermore, it would be easy to arrange the second year honor groups
so as to include only such subjects as are serviceable both for the
purposes of a general education and to lead up to the subjects the
student is likely to elect for final honors. For the final honor
examination the student might choose from a dozen or more honor
groups, in any one of which he would receive scientific culture of the
most advanced type, while at the same time, by means of private
reading under his tutor, he might fill in very pleasantly the outlines
of his subject. It is probable that such a system would even
facilitate the efforts of those who are endeavoring to transplant
German standards. According to Professor Muensterberg, the student who
specializes in the German university is a good two years or more in
advance of the American freshman. The spirit of German instruction
would thus require that the period of general culture be extended at
least to the middle of the undergraduate course.
Some such reorganization of our methods of teaching and examining, and
I fear only this, would enable an undergraduate to choose what he
wants and to pursue it with a fair chance of success. It would make
the elective system elective.
A concrete plan for an American hall will perhaps make the project
clearer. The poorer students at Harvard have for some years had a
separate dining-hall, Foxcroft, where the fare and the system of
paying for it are adapted to the slenderest of purses. They have also
lived mainly in certain primitive dormitories in which the rooms are
cheapest. More than any other set of men except the clubmen they are a
united body, or are capable of being made so. When next a bequest is
received, might not the University erect a building in which a hundred
or two of these men could live in common? The quadrangle would insure
privacy, the first requisite of community life; the kitchen and
dining-hall would insure the maximum comfort and convenience with the
minimum expense. Nothing could contribute more to the self-respect and
the general standing of the poorer students than a comfortable and
well-ordered place and way of living, if only because nothing could
more surely correct the idiosyncrasies in manners and appearance which
are fostered by their present discomfort and isolation.
The life of the hall would not of course be as strictly regulated as
the life in an English college--perhaps no more strictly than in any
other American college building. If in the hope of creating a closer
community feeling stricter rules were adopted, they should be adopted,
as in a mediaeval hall, only by consent of the undergraduates.
Such a hall would develop athletic teams of its own, and would produce
university athletes. Under the present arrangement, when the poorer
students are members of university teams, they may, and often do,
become honorary members of the university clubs; but their lack of
means and sometimes of the manner of the world make it difficult for
them to be at home in the clubs; their social life is usually limited
to a small circle of friends. If they had first been trained in the
life of a hall, they would more easily fall in with the broader life
outside; and instead of being isolated as at present, they would exert
no small influence both in their hall and in the university. Few
things could be better for the general life of the undergraduate than
the cooperation of such men, and few things could be better for the
members of a hall than to be brought by means of its leading members
into close connection with the life of the university.
If such a hall were successful, it could not fail to attract serious
students of all sorts and conditions. At Oxford, Balliol has for
generations been known as in the main unfashionable and scholarly;
but it is seldom without a blue or two, and its eight has often been
at the head of the river. As a result of all this, it never ceases to
attract the more serious men from the aristocracy and even the
nobility. In America, the success of one residential hall would
probably lead to the establishment of others, so that in the end the
life of the university might be given all the advantages of a dual
organization.
No change could be more far reaching and beneficial. The American
institutions of the present are usually divided into two classes, the
university, or "large college," and the "small college." The merit of
the large colleges is that those fortunately placed in them gain
greater familiarity with the ways of the world and of men, while for
those who wish it, they offer more advanced instruction--the
instruction characteristic of German universities. But to the
increasing number of undergraduates who are not fortunately placed,
their very size is the source of unhappiness; and for those
undergraduates who wish anything else than scientific instruction,
their virtues become merely a detriment. It is for this reason that
many wise parents still prefer to intrust the education of their sons
to the small colleges. These small colleges possess many of the
virtues of the English universities; they train the mind and cultivate
it, and at the same time develop the social man. If now the American
university were to divide its undergraduate department into organized
residential halls, it would combine the advantages of the two types of
American institution, which are the two types of instruction the world
over. Already our college life at its best is as happy as the college
life in England; and the educational advantages of the four or five of
our leading universities are rapidly becoming equal to those of the
four or five leading universities in Germany. A combination of the
residential hall and the teaching university would reproduce the
highest type of the university of the Middle Ages; and in proportion
as life and knowledge have been bettered in six hundred years, it
would better that type. England has lost the educational virtues of
the mediaeval university, while Germany, in losing the residential
halls, has lost its peculiar social virtues. When the American
university combines the old social life with the new instruction, it
will be the most perfect educational instruction in the history of
civilization.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] For a detailed statement as to the course such a student would be
able to pursue under the English system of honor schools, see Appendix
III.
[5] _The Atlantic Monthly_, October, 1900.
[6] For full details as to the scheme of an English honor school, see
Appendix III.
APPENDIX
I. ATHLETIC TRAINING IN ENGLAND
In one or two particulars it seemed to me that we might learn from the
English methods of training. On the Oxford team we took long walks
every other day instead of track work. Our instructions were to climb
all the hills in our way. This was in order to bring into play new
muscles as far as possible, so as to rest those used in running.
Though similar walks are sometimes given in America as a preliminary
"seasoning," our training, for months before a meeting, is confined to
the track. This is not unwise as long as a runner's stride needs
developing; and in the heat of our summers such walks as the English
take might sometimes prove exhausting. Yet my personal observations
convinced me that for distance runners--and for sprinters, too,
perhaps--the English method is far better. Under our training the
muscles often seem overpowered by nervous lassitude; at the start of a
race I have often felt it an effort to stand. In England there was
little or none of this; we felt, as the bottle-holders are fond of
putting it, "like a magnum of champagne."