THE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION MOVEMENT.

Of the liberal movements dominating the thought of the world to-day, the greatest of all is the sweep of education. No phrase or dissertation can compass the entire scope or catch all the essential elements of the newer education that is shaping itself. But everywhere one direction is apparent: The trend of education is toward the people in mass and group without regard to condition, class, or circumstance; toward men, women, and children as human beings having without distinction full claim on equal opportunity to enjoy the benefits of art and science. Literature, history, philosophy, all of the subjects that were once studied by a privileged few, are now being sought by a rapidly increasing number who have but recently acquired some leisure. The people are calling for knowledge, for that education which opens the door to complete living.

Educational extension is one of the terms that has been applied to the movement. It has come into use in the United States to describe the numerous ventures designed to meet the demand for knowledge and training. This demand is not uniform nor simple. It does not come from a single-minded public, from the people of one class. In one sense it is not a demand at all, but rather a multitude of impulses suggesting or rather seeking a way. Mr. Parke R. Kolbe says:

The educational system of the United States represents not a uniform plan, developing in accordance with predetermined laws, but rather the result of innumerable separate initiatives whose aims and methods have been dependent upon their attendant conditions of inception and growth.

He says that our educational system "looks like a coat of many colors when reviewed geographically."1

Educational extension includes many devices and instruments of instruction. There are innumerable agencies, apart from schools, designed to "educate the public," to "put something over," to tell the "truth in advertising," to sell the community a "welfare" idea, to instruct the workman in rules of safety, scientific system, and better methods of increasing production. In the crafts and trades men devise ways of inculcating in their fellows commonly accepted principles of association and mutual action; they teach each other new methods, new techniques, and new ways to secure for their group accrued benefits of the industry or business. They have their chapels, classes, lecturers, teachers, their schoolmasters, and younger schoolmates.

1 From School and Society, May 31, 1919, "The Colleges in the War," by P. R. Kolbe.

The employers, managers of great industries, have also appropriated every essential device of school and university not only to teach their workmen but also to educate themselves. They have their educational directors, schools, conferences, their laboratories, their service of specialists, their expert studies, their clubs and fraternities. They have tremendously developed the art of advertising, which, in the long run and in the best sense, may prove to be the basis of the finest technique of educational extension.

"Education is a curiously pervasive commodity. Analysis always proves it to be a part of nearly every large undertaking. It bobs up in everybody's bailiwick," says S. P. Capen.' He describes how the Federal Government had developed educational extension, including the work of the Bureau of Education: "As time has gone on other Government departments have found that certain portions of their work were educational. By the spring of 1917 the Government's educational activities involved the annual expenditure of more than 30 million dollars. They were carried on in no less than 20 different bureaus, commissions, and departments." Both the magnitude and the dispersion of these activities will doubtless cause surprise to anyone who has not studied the question.

Definition of educational extension.-Educational extension is not readily susceptible of definition, although the thing itself is very real. It is closely connected with the growing complexity of intercommunication in civilized countries. With every increased facility of intercourse through speech, press, and picture, through travel, cable, telegraph, telephone, through personal contact, through the innumerable mechanical, physical, and spiritual inventions of civilization, comes the means of increasing the scope and thoroughness of educational extension.

Of course, that form of education which is associated with schools and colleges and the children and youth who attend them has not been superseded by this comprehensive though vague new kind of education, which transcends all schools and barriers of age. But the traditional idea is expanding and changing with the impetus of new movements. The importance of considering the nature of educational extension is that its complexity, diversity, and ubiquity point to inevitable changes in the theory and practice of educational institutions as such, not so much perhaps in the primary elements of the public school system, but certainly in secondary schools and in the institutions of higher learning.

Not so very many years ago the private university, the State university, and the college were largely teaching institutions in a definitely limited sense, and the function of research was only grad

1 School and Society, May 24, 1919, "The Colleges in a Nationalized Educational Scheme," by 8. P. Capen,

ually added. Even now the actual distinction between university and college is not thoroughly understood or recognized-the distinction that makes a university preeminently a discoverer of scientific fact, a laboratory and training center for advanced students, and a distributor of knowledge rather than a teacher of the youth or a school for elementary students of the professions. This latter field of endeavor belongs increasingly to the school and college, while the true university becomes more and more the graduate center, the scientific laboratory, the curator of the arts, and the administrator of educational extension.

Accordingly, the growth of university extension is a logical development of the new demand for universal education. Freedom, selfdetermination, the new democracy, equal suffrage, open diplomacy, and all the fresh catch words of the war and after the war, and the liberal movements linked with them-all have educational implications presupposing the diffusion of knowledge among the people. Undoubtedly the university, especially the State-owned institution, will play a progressively important part in educational extension.

In the United States and England, university extension is a welldefined movement with elaborate institutional organization and fairly definite methods and objectives which have broadened and deepened during the past 10 years. Inevitably it has reflected the spirit of the decade and has consciously taken up the task of developing new methods of adult education.

In spite of the fact that the movement is identified with universities and colleges, academic institutions which formerly were remote from the people and high above any suggestion of commonness and popularity, it is nevertheless quite ordinary, humble, and matter of fact in its intention. The man in the street can understand that university extension is "an organized effort to give to the people not in college some of the advantages enjoyed by the one-half of 1 per cent who are able to attend campus classes. It reaches out to the clerk, the workingman, the teacher, and the public official, and says to each 'If you can not go to your university, your university will come to you.' Agricultural extension makes better farmers, and general extension makes better workers, better teachers, and better citizens." In addition, the average man readily understands that the State university belongs to the Commonwealth and owes service to every citizen. He grasps, quickly, too, the nature and value of its services in research, instruction, and information. If there are some who naively rate these services too low, and who place the university instructor on a par with the characters of a cartoon or the "professor of dancing," there are many more who have a deep appreciation of the value of all university services; there are many who quickly realize the significance of university extension and who are eagerly receptive of its benefits.

A broader view of extension.-So, too, for the scientist, the scholar, and the man of affairs, university extension has gradually come to mean something definite and fine. He sees in the colorless phrase a rich implication of truth seeking and truth dissemination, the application of universal science and art to universal living. He sees in the newer university a central plant with great resources of investigation and research, a central group of scientists and specialists in technology, put at the service of the State, working for the whole citizenship and for each citizen who desires.

Academic views. Some there are, academicians within the universities themselves, who, taking too literally the popular interpretations of university extension, rate the movement at ignorant par and decry the opening of the college gates to the people anywhere. They fear the effect of extension activities, not of course on the people, for even the most exclusive professor of the humanities or abstract mathematics is usually a thorough democrat, but on the seclusion and dignity and strength of the university itself. They wonder how a research professor can at the same time read, study, search, attend committees, and give "popular" lectures. They believe in detachment, undisturbed seclusion, freedom from practical pressure, as a sine qua non to the cultivation of science and art. Their misgivings have justification, but only in so far as the conception of "university" is too limited and narrow.

66

University."-The true university should have both open gates and cloistered libraries, both practical, itinerant messengers and theoretical, isolated servants. Ivied walls and dusty laboratories may be legitimately, and picturesquely, part of the same university building that houses the office of the correspondence study department. A short course for Boy Scout masters may be held on the same campus where a learned conference of sociologists is discussing the theory of mob psychology. At the same institution there may be, and in many cases there are, groups of administrators concerned with a dozen different problems of resident instruction or extension work, while hundreds of teachers meet routine classes or correct correspondence study papers and prepare for community meetings. One faculty member may be testifying before a public utility commission, another conducting a social survey of a distant city, another preparing simple written lessons on prenatal care for mothers, another giving vocational guidance to students, and still others may be buried in historical files or seeking for a Greek hiatus or for missing data on a geological epoch.

The university is coming more and more to live up to its name. The ideal university and the practical institution growing toward the ideał take a high ground and look over a wide field of human endeavor. "The phenomenal growth of university extension in the United

States in the past 10 years may be looked upon as indicative of a new interpretation of the legitimate scope of university service," wrote Dean Louis E. Reber, of the University of Wisconsin, in 1916.

Nevertheless, it is still maintained in many of our learned institutions that higher education should be removed from any possible intimacy with the common things of life. These institutions repudiate the idea that organized extension of their services may become a worthy function among their acknowledged activities-worthy not only in enabling them to reach greater numbers than the few who may assemble within their gates, but essentially so in its influence upon their own life and growth. Though with these, as with the more liberal, pursuit of the truth is the fundamental and all-embracing object of existence, they apparently fail to realize that truth does not belong to the cloister more than to the shops and homes or to the streets and fields, but is inseparably of them all.

The return of power to the institution is not, however, the main justification of university extension. Such justification exists primarily in the fact that the university is the one great source and repository of the knowledge which the people— all, not merely a few, of the people-need in order to reach their highest level of achievement and well-being.

Is it not a very uncharacteristic view of the field of the university which seems to limit its functions to those of a sealed storehouse, with facilities for giving out its invaluable contents only to the few who may be able to learn the cabalistic passes that unlock its doors? More in keeping with the modern spirit is the new slogan of unlimited service, which lays upon the university a command to retrieve to the world its losses from undiscovered talent and undeveloped utilities and to give freely to humanity the pleasures and profits of which so many are deprived by ignorance of the work of the masters of art and learning, and of the laws of sane living. For such purposes as these the university, in the fullness of its possessions and powers, must inevitably be acknowledged to be, in the words of President Van Hise, "the best instrument." 1

The principle of extension accepted. In the four years since 1915, the adverse criticism on the part of members of university faculties has materially diminished, partly because of the new impulse toward adult education received from the war, and partly through the momentum of growth; even in the period before the war it was confined to comparatively few men, usually in departments which had little occasion for actual participation in extension work. With only two or three exceptions the administrative heads of State universities now accept without question the central idea of university extension, the principle that the State-owned institution has definite duties to perform for the people of the State, duties which are in addition to the task of educating the resident students. All State universities do perform such duties even when they have not secured substantial funds to organize a distinct extension machinery. Most private universities and colleges recognize a similar obligation to put their resources at the service of the community. The men who determine the policies of the institutions are in the great majority committed to recognition of extension and are in most States actively promoting it.

1 Reber, L. E., "University Extension," Annals, American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, Sept., 1916, Publication reprint No. 1061.