General Courses Not Enough

It may be said that the orientation courses at the beginning and the summary courses at the end of the college years, with which colleges have been experimenting, meet the situation into which specialization has plunged education. I doubt it. They are manifestly things tacked on to the regular college procedure porous plasters applied to the curriculum to reduce its incoherence. Any genuine orientation of the student to his world must be reached in the regular college procedure, not outside it.

Of course, no one who has even partly earned the right to participate in a discussion of education will expect too much of such a synthesized section of the curriculum. The historian with, say, the last hundred and the next hundred years of our-educational history before him would doubtless look upon the use of any such section of the curriculum as an emergency measure adopted by a people that found itself the victim of a great confusion resulting from an unprecedentedly rapid accumulation of knowledge. It alone will not educate men or equip them for the mastery of modern life. I suggest, therefore, a second field of inquiry.

If we find ourselves driven to admit that knowledge is growing more rapidly than educators an fetter it, may it not be necessary for us to strive to develop educational methods in the undergraduate's years that will deal more directly with the mental processes of the student than do many of our present methods of teaching, and examination that lay so much emphasis on subject matter? May it not be that the only way in which the modern man can hope to keep pace with the modern world is to increase the tempo of his, mind as the tempo of the advance of knowledge increases?

Progress Lies in Teaching Methods

We are dealing here with an elusive and maybe absurd hypothesis. I know the battle that has been waged around the problem of the training of the mind. But one thing is clear, and that is that we shall find no really conclusive answer to the educational dilemma growing out of the enormity and complexity of modern knowledge if we attempt to determine the future evolution of higher education mainly in terms of curriculum construction. Any such approach will inevitably drive us to a choice between superficial general knowledge and accurate specialized knowledge. We must look for the really creative development of education in the methods of teaching rather than in the materials of teaching.

What will a greater emphasis upon the possible development of the mind to see and understand more quickly and accurately mean in terms of the work of the classes. May it mean that our class-rooms will more and more become places in which the students rather than the teachers perform? May it mean that usually the best teacher will be the man who says the least to his students? May it mean the virtual scrapping of the lecture system?

It is, I admit, difficult to see how any synthesis of even the major findings of modern knowledge could be caught in a two-year curriculum if we continue to teach entirely in terms of the subjects and departments that are today the basis of instruction, unless each subject were to be taught by a polymath like Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Adam Smith, or Thomas Henry Buckle. It may be there-fore, that we shall find that the only way we can manage to induct students into a general understanding of their civilization will be to teach during these two "general" years in terms of situations rather than subjects.

Many Difficulties 'Arise

The suggestion that we might achieve a broader culture and a better sense of the relatedness of things by studying in terms of situations rather than subjects is convincing in the abstract. But the moment we attempt to step from the abstract into the concrete and undertake to visualize such a teaching policy in operation in a university, a thousand difficulties arise. Few have ventured to condescend to details respecting this suggestion as far as college instruction goes. It has usually been left in that twilight zone of the abstract where we keep ideas that would be good if they could be made to work. In an article published in the Century Magazine, Alexander Mciklejohn tentatively suggested that we might find our way out of the confused wilderness of unrelated specialisms, not by any formal synthesis of modern knowledge in a curriculum but by devoting the freshman year to the comprehensive study of a single historic episode such as the Greek civilization, setting the freshmen to reading the literature of that period and, under the friendly guidance and stimulation of a faculty of men who were masters of special fields, taking that civilization to pieces, seeing how it worked, what forces animated it, and what germs of the future were thrown up by it. His assumption was that in a year of roaming within the catholic boundaries of that singularly fruitful experiment in civilization the freshmen would see and handle most of the beginnings or early forms of modern knowledge and life.

He suggested that the sophomore year might be devoted to a similar study of some other and later historic episode, say English civilization in the nineteenth century, or maybe our own American civilization, the assumption here being that the students would doubtless be led during the sophomore year to draw comparisons between the ways different people go at the job of building and administering a civilization, and to discover what kinds of civilizations occur when different sets of factors are present. This is, of course, an adaption to higher education of the project method that has been worked out in primary and secondary education. And there at least is this advantage in taking a situation out of the past rather than out of the present, it will stand while you study it.

Here at any rate is a definite suggestion of teaching by situation rather than by subject in the college. Is such a project feasible