might advantageously take the present freshmen and sophomore studies.
They would thus become the exclusive avenues to the university of the
future, leaving it free to do its own proper work with elective studies.
Considering the great expense which this lengthening of the curriculum
of the academy implies, it is plain that the number of schools capable
of fitting boys in this way would always be small. These few academies,
with their monopoly of learned training, would lose their present
character and be erected into little colleges,--colleges of a second
grade. That any such thing is likely to occur, I do not believe; but if
it were, would it aid the higher education and promote its wide
dispersion? Precisely the contrary. Instead of going to the university
from the academies, boys would content themselves with the tolerable
education already received. For the most part they would decline to go
farther. It is useless to say that this does not happen in Germany,
where the numbers resorting to the university are so large as to have
become the subject of complaint; for the German government, controlling
as it does all access to the professions, is able to force through the
gymnasia and through special courses at the university a body of young
men who would otherwise be seeking their fortunes elsewhere. Whether
such control would be desirable in this country, I will not consider.
Some questions are not feasible even for discussion. But it is to
English experience we must look to see what our case would be. The great
public schools of England--Eton, Rugby, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster,
Cheltenham--are of no higher order than under the proposed plan Andover
and Exeter would become. From these two academies nearly ninety-five
per cent of the senior classes now enter some college. But of the young
men graduating from the English schools named, so far as I can
ascertain, less than fifty per cent go to the university. With the
greater pressure toward commercial life in this country, the number
would certainly be less than in England. To build up colleges of a
second grade, and to permit none but those who have passed them to enter
colleges of the first, is to cut off the higher education from nearly
all those who do not belong to the privileged classes; it is to make the
"common consciousness" less common, and to turn it, even more
effectually than at present, into the consciousness of a clique. He who
must make a living for himself or for others cannot afford to reach his
profession late. The age of entering college is already too high. With
improved methods of teaching I hope it maybe somewhat reduced. At any
rate, every study now added to the high schools or academies is a fresh
barrier between education and the people.
II. If, then, by prescribing a large amount of study outside the
university the elective principle is not likely to be successfully
limited, is it not probable that within the college itself the two
counter principles of election and prescription, mutually limiting,
mutually supporting, will always be retained? This is the second
suggestion; to bring studies of choice and studies commanded into
juxtaposition. The backbone of the college is to be kept prescribed,
the fleshy parts to be made elective. By a special modification of the
plan, the later years are turned largely, perhaps wholly, toward
election, and a line is drawn at the junior, or even the sophomore year,
below which elective studies are forbidden to penetrate. Is not this the
plan that will finally be judged safest? It certainly is the safest for
a certain number of years. Before it can securely reach anything else,
every college must pass through this intermediate state. After half a
century of testing election Harvard still retains some prescribed
studies. The Harvard juniors chose for nineteen years before the
sophomores, and the sophomores seventeen years before the freshmen. In
introducing electives a sober pace is commendable. A university is
charged with the greatest of public trusts. The intelligence of the
community is, to a large extent, in its keeping. It is bound to keep
away from risky experiments, to disregard shifting popular fancies, and
to be as conservative as clearness of sight will permit. I do not plead,
therefore, that Harvard and Yale should abolish all prescription the
coming year. They certainly should not. In my opinion most colleges are
moving too fast in the elective direction already. I merely plead that
we must see where we are going. As public guides, we must forecast the
track of the future if we would avoid stumbling into paths which lead
nowhere. That is all I am attempting here. I want to ascertain whether
the dual system of limitation is a stable system, one in which we can
put our trust, or whether it is a temporary convenience, likely to slip
away a little year after year. What does history say? Let us examine the
facts of the past. The following table shows at the left the fifteen New
England colleges. In the next three parallel columns is printed the
percentage of elective studies which existed in these colleges in
1875-76; in the last three, the percentage which exists to-day. To
render the comparison more exact, I print the sophomore, junior, and
senior years separately, reserving the problem of the freshman year for
later discussion.
| 1875-76 | 1885-86
+------+-----+-----+------+-----+-----
| Soph.| Jun.| Sen.| Soph.| Jun.| Sen.
----------+------+-----+-----+------+-----+-----
Amherst | .04 | .20 | .08 | .20 | .75 | .75
Bates | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
Boston | 0 | 0 | 0 | .35 | .66 | .82
Bowdoin | 0 | 0 | 0 | .15 | .25 | .25
Brown | 0 | .04 | .04 | .14 | .37 | .55
Colby | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .08 | .16
Dartmouth | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .41 | .36
Harvard | .50 | .78 |1.00 | 1.00 |1.00 |1.00
Middlebury| 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
Trinity | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .25 | .25
Tufts | 0 | .17 | .17 | 0 | .28 | .43
Vermont | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
Wesleyan | 0 | .47 | .47 | .16 | .47 | .64
Williams | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .37
Yale | 0 | 0 | 0 | .13 | .53 | .80
This table yields four conclusions: (1) A rapid and fateful revolution
is going on in the higher education of New England. We do not exaggerate
the change when we speak of an old education and a new. (2) The spread
of it is in tolerable proportion to the wealth of the college concerned.
The new modes are expensive. It is not disapproval which is holding the
colleges back; it is inability to meet the cost. I am sorry to point out
this fact. To my mind one of the gravest perplexities of the new
education is the query, What are the small colleges to do? They have a
usefulness altogether peculiar; yet from the life-giving modern methods
of training they are of necessity largely cut off. (3) The colleges
which long ago foresaw their coming necessities have been able to
proceed more cautiously than those which acknowledged them late. (4) The
movement is one of steady advance. There is no going back. It must be
remembered, too, that the stablest colleges have been proceeding with
these changes many more years than the period shown in the table. Are
we, then, prepared to dismiss prejudice from our minds and to recognize
what steadiness of advance means? In other matters when a general
tendency in a given direction is discovered, extending over a long
series of years, visible in individuals widely unlike, and presenting no
solitary case of backward turning, we are apt to conclude that there is
a force in the movement which will carry it still further onward. We
are not disposed to seize on some point in its path and to count that an
ultimate holding-ground. This, I say, would be a natural conclusion
unless we could detect in the movement tendencies at work in an opposite
direction. Are there any such tendencies here? I cannot find them.
Prescription invariably loses; election invariably gains.
But in order to make a rational prediction about the future we must know
more than the bare facts of the past; we need to know why these
particular facts have arisen. What are the reasons that whenever
elective and prescribed studies are mixed, an extrusive force regularly
appears in the elective? The reasons are not far to seek. Probably every
professor in New England understands them. The two systems are so
incongruous that each brings out the vices rather than the virtues of
its incompatible brother. Prescribed studies, side by side with
elective, appear a bondage; elective, side by side with prescribed, an
indulgence. So long as all studies are prescribed, one may be set above
another in the mind of the pupil on grounds of intrinsic worth; let
certain studies express the pupil's wishes, and almost certainly the
remainder, valuable as they may be in themselves, will express his
disesteem. It is useless to say this should not be so. It always is. The
zeal of work, the freshness of interest, which now appear in the chosen
studies, are deducted from those which are forced. On the latter as
little labor as possible is expended. They become perfunctory and
mechanical, and soon restive pupils and dissatisfied teachers call for
fresh extension of energizing choice. This is why the younger officers
in all the colleges are eager to give increased scope to the elective
studies. They cannot any longer get first-rate work done in the
prescribed. Alarmed by the dangers of the new principle, as they often
and justly are, they find that the presence of prescription, instead of
diminishing the dangers, adds another and a peculiarly enfeebling one to
those which existed before. So certain are these dangers, and so
inevitable the expanding power of the elective principle, that it is
questionable whether it would not be wise for a college to refuse to
have anything to do with elective studies so soon as it knows itself too
weak to allow them to spread.
For where will the spreading stop? It cannot stop till the causes of it
stop. The table just given shows no likelihood of its stopping at all,
and a little reflection will show that each enlargement increases the
reasons for another enlargement still. If prescribed studies are ever
exceptional, ineffective, and obnoxious, they certainly become more so
as they diminish in number. A college which retains one of them is in a
condition of unstable equilibrium. But is this true of the freshman
year? Will not a special class of considerations keep prescription
enduring and influential there, long after it has lost its usefulness in
the later years? A boy of nineteen comes from home about as untrained in
will as in intelligence. Will it not always be thought best to give him
a year in which to acquaint himself with his surroundings and to learn
what studies he may afterwards profitably select? Possibly it will. I
incline to think not. The case of the freshman year is undoubtedly
peculiar. Taking a large body of colleges, we have direct evidence that
during their last three years the elective principle steadily wins and
never loses. We have but a trifle of such evidence as regards the
freshman year. There the struggle of the two forces has barely begun. It
has begun at Harvard, and the usual result is already foreshadowed. The
prescribed studies are disparaged studies; they are not worked at the
best advantage. Still, I do not like to prophesy on evidence so narrow.
I will merely say I see no reason to suppose that colleges will meet
with permanent success in mingling incompatible kinds of study in their
freshman year. But I can only surmise. Let any college that inclines to
try the experiment do so.
It may be thought, however, a wiser course to keep the freshman year
untouched by choice. A solid year of prescription is thus secured as a
limitation on the election that is to follow. This plan is so often
advised, especially by persons unacquainted with the practical working
of colleges, that it requires a brief examination by itself.
Let us suppose the revolution which we have traced in the sophomore,
junior, and senior years to have reached its natural terminus; let us
suppose that in these years all studies have become elective, while the
freshman year remains completely prescribed; the college will then
fall into two parts, a preparatory department and a university
department. In these two departments the character of the instruction,
the methods of study, the consciousness of the students, will be
altogether dissimilar. The freshmen will not be taken by upper
classmen as companions; they will be looked down upon as children.
Hazing will find abundant excuse. An abrupt line will be drawn, on
whose farther side freedom will lie, on whose hither side, bondage.
The sophomore, a being who at best has his peculiarities, will find his
sense of self-sufficiency doubled. Whatever badly-bred boy parents
incline to send to college will seem to them safe enough for a year,
and they will suppose that during this period he will learn how to
behave. Of course he will learn nothing of the sort. Manly discipline
has not yet begun. At the end of the freshman year a boy will be
only so much less a boy as increase of age may make him. Through
being forced to study mathematics this year there comes no sustaining
influence fitted to fortify the judgment when one is called the next
year to choose between Greek and German. On the contrary, the change
from school methods to maturing methods is rendered as dangerous as
possible by allowing it to take place quite nakedly, by itself,
unsupported by other changes, and at the mere dictation of the
almanac. An emancipation so bare and sudden is not usual elsewhere.
For boys who do not go to college, departure from home is commonly
recognized as a fit occasion for putting on that dangerous garment, the
_toga virilis_. Entrance to the university constitutes a similar epoch,
when change of residence, new companions, altered conditions of
living, a realization that the old supports are gone, and the
presumption with which every one now meets the youth that he is to be
treated as a man among men, become helpful influences cooperating to
ease the hard and inevitable transition from parental control to
personal self-direction. A safer time for beginning individual
responsibility cannot be found. At any rate, whether my diagnosis of
reasons is correct or not, the fact is clear,--self-respecting colleges
do not tolerate preparatory departments. They do not work well. They
are an element of weakness in the institution which harbors them.
Even where at first they are judged necessary, so soon as the college
grows strong they are dropped. When we attempt to plan an education
for times to come, we must bear in mind established facts. Turn the
freshman year into a preparatory department, fill it with studies
antithetic in aim, method, and spirit to those of later years, and
something is established which no sober college ever permitted to remain
long within its borders. This is the teaching of the past without an
exception. To suppose the future will be different is but the blind
hope of a timid transitionalism.
III. The third suggestion for restricting election is the group system.
This deserves a more respectful treatment than the methods hitherto
discussed, for it is something more than a suggestion: it is a system, a
constructive plan of education, thought out in all its parts, and
directed toward an intended end. The definition which I have elsewhere
offered of the elective system, that it demands a fixed quantity and
quality of study with variable topic, would be applicable also to the
group system. Accordingly it belongs to the new education rather than to
the old. No less than the elective system it is opposed to the methods
of restriction thus far described. These latter methods attempt to limit
election by the ballast of an alien principle lodged beneath it or by
its side. They put a weight of prescription into the preparatory
schools, into the early college years, or into parallel lines of study
extending throughout the college course. The source of their practical
trouble lies here: the two principles, election and prescription, are
nowhere united; they remain sundered and at war, unserviceable for each
other's defects. The group system intertwines them. It permits choice in
everything, but at the same time prescribes everything. This it effects
by enlarging the unit of choice and prescribing its constituent factors.
A group or block of studies is offered for choice, not a single study.
All the studies of a group must be taken if any are, the "if" being the
only matter left for the student to settle. The group may include all
the studies open to a student at the university. One decision may
determine his entire course. Or, as in the somewhat analogous
arrangement of the English universities, one group may be selected at
the beginning and another in the middle of the university life. The
group itself is sometimes contrived so as to allow an individual
variation; different students read different books; a special phase of
philosophy, history, or science receives prominence. But the boundaries
of the group cannot be crossed. All the studies selected by the college
authorities to form a single group must be taken; no others can be.
In this method of limiting choice there is much that is attractive. I
feel that attraction strongly. Under the exceptional conditions which
exist at the Johns Hopkins University, a group system has done
excellent work. Like all the rest of the world, I honor that work and
admire its wise directors. But group systems seem to me to possess
features too objectionable to permit them to become the prevalent type
of the future, and I do not see how these features can be removed
without abandoning what is distinctive, and changing the whole plan
into the elective system, pure and simple. The objectionable features
connect themselves with the size of the unit of choice, with
difficulties in the construction of the groups, and with the attempt
to enforce specialization. But these are enigmatic phrases; let me
explain them.
Obviously, for the young, foresight is a hard matter. While disciplining
them in the intricate art of looking ahead, I should think it wise to
furnish frequently a means of repairing errors. Penalties for bad
choices should not be too severe. Now plainly the larger the unit of
choice, the graver the consequences of erroneous judgment. The group
system takes a large unit, a body of studies; the simple elective
system, a small unit, the single study. Errors of choice are
consequently less reparable under the group system than under pure
election. To meet this difficulty the college course at Baltimore has
been reduced from four years to three; but even so, a student who
selects a group for which he finds himself unfit cannot bring himself
into proper adjustment without the loss of a year. If he does not
discover his unfitness until the second year has begun, he loses two
years. Under the elective system, the largest possible penalty for a
single mistake is the loss of a single study, one quarter of a year's
work. This necessary difference in ease of reparability appears to me to
mark an inferiority in group systems, considered as methods of educating
choice. To the public it may seem otherwise. I am often astonished to
find people approving irreparable choices and condemning reparable ones.
That youths between nineteen and twenty-three should select studies for
themselves shocks many people who look kindly enough on marriages
contracted during those years. Boys still unbearded have a large share
in deciding whether they will go to college, to a scientific school, to
a store, to sea, or to a cattle-ranch. Their lives are staked on the
wisdom of the step taken. Yet the American mode of meeting these family
problems seems to our community, on the whole, safer than the English
way of regulating them by tradition and dictation. The choice with heavy
stakes of the boy who does not go to college is frequently set off
favorably against the choices with light stakes of the boy who goes.
Perhaps a similarly lenient judgment will in the long run be passed on
the great stakes involved in group systems. I doubt it. I think it will
ultimately be judged less dangerous and more maturing to grant a young
man, in his passage through a period of moral discipline, frequent
opportunities of repair.
Again, the practical difficulties of deciding what groups shall be
formed are enormous. What studies shall enter into each? How many groups
shall there be? If but one, we have the old-fashioned college with no
election. If two, we have the plan which Yale has just abandoned, a
fixed undergraduate department maintained in parallel vigor with a fixed
scientific school. But in conceding the claims of variety even to this
degree, we have treated the fundamental differences between man and man
as worthy, not reprehensible; and can we say that the proper differences
are only two? Must we not acknowledge a world at least as complex as
that they have in Baltimore, where there appear to be seven reputable
species of mankind: "Those who wish a good classical training; those who
look toward a course in medicine; those who prefer mathematical studies
with reference to engineering, astronomy, and teaching; those who wish
an education in scientific studies, not having chosen a specialty; those
who expect to pursue a course in theology; those who propose to study
law; those who wish a literary training not rigidly classical." Here a
classification of human wishes is attempted, but one suspects that there
are legitimate wishes which lie outside the scheme. It does not, for
example, at once appear why a prospective chemist should be debarred
from all regular study of mathematics. It seems hard that a youth of
literary tastes should be cut off from Greek at entrance unless he will
agree to take five exercises in it each week throughout his college
course. One does not feel quite easy in allowing nobody but a lawyer or
a devotee of modern languages to read a page of English or American
history. The Johns Hopkins programme is the most ingenious and the most
flexible contrivance for working a group system that I have ever seen.
For this reason I mention it as the most favorable type of all.
Considering its purposes, I do not believe it can be much improved. As
applied to its little band of students, 116, it certainly works few
hardships. Yet all the exclusions I have named, and many more besides,
appear in it. I instance these simply to show what barriers to knowledge
the best group system erects. Remove these, and others quite as great
are introduced. Try to avoid them by allowing the student of one group
to take certain studies in another, and the sole line which parts the
group system from the elective is abandoned. In practice, it usually is
abandoned. Confronted with the exigencies of operation, the so-called
group system turns into an elective system, with highly specialized
lines of study strongly recommended. With this more genial working I
have nothing now to do. My point is this: a system of hard and fast
groups presents difficulties of construction and maintenance too great
to recommend it to the average college of the future as the best mode of
limiting the elective principle.
Probably, however, this difficulty will chiefly be felt by persons
engaged in the actual work of educational organization. The outer public
will think it a more serious objection that grouped colleges are in
reality professional schools carried down to the limits of boyhood. So
far as they hold by their groups, they are nurseries of specialization.
That this is necessarily so may not at first be apparent. A little
consideration of the contrast in aim between group systems and
prescribed will make the matter plain. Prescribed systems have gained
their long hold on popular confidence by aiming at harmonious culture.
They argue, justly enough, that each separate sort of knowledge
furnishes something of its own to the making of a man. This particular
"something," they say, can be had from no other source. The sum of these
"somethings" constitutes a rounded whole. The man who has not
experienced each of them in some degree, however small, is imperfectly
planned. One who has been touched by all has laid the foundations of a
liberal education. Degree of acquaintance with this subject or with that
may subsequently enlarge. Scholarly interest may concentrate. But at the
first, the proper aim is balanced knowledge, harmonious development of
all essential powers, avoidance of one-sidedness.