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XXVIII

BUSINESS EDUCATION

USINESS education of collegiate grade is a very recent development. The world's first commercial college was established at Antwerp in 1852, while the forerunner of American institutions of this sort, the Wharton School, was founded in 1881. Others followed in the nineties, but the general establishment of schools of commerce as parts of colleges and universities, as well as the inclusion of business subjects in the curricula of liberal colleges, took place after 1900. This sudden flowering at the top was preceded by a long evolution quite typical of the development of education in all the branches of learning to which institutions devote time because of their cultural or professional worth.

Some practical end and not the desire for abstract knowledge prompted early instruction and stimulated business education as well as education in general through various stages of progress. Of course all education is a process whereby technical operations and abstract truth developed by many generations are systematized, compressed, and imparted to individuals in a relatively short time.

The first stage in the evolution in a given field may be called the apprentice stage. Just as physicians, lawyers, and in fact practitioners in all the professions and crafts trained their assistants in their establishments for the purpose of making them proficient in their daily work, so did merchants at this stage give apprentice training in commercial branches to their employees. Traditional ways of carrying out certain transactions, convenient rules of thumb, and habits of neatness and reliability were passed on in a given establishment. As industry grew and guilds were formed, the training tended to become more standardized and merchants joined in establishing guild schools for their

Evolution of education

business

employees. Many such schools were conducted in the various crafts, and their modern counterparts are the wellknown vocational or trade schools. This vocational training stage was developed by business men for persons not employed as productive craftsmen but rather as workers in business offices which administered production and directly attended to selling and exchange, and for others looking forward to such employment. At this stage there grew up also private schools, usually conducted by teachers especially proficient in particular lines of service. Thus inventors of shorthand systems, devisers of systems of penmanship, and authors of methods of bookkeeping and accounting set up schools in these specialties. Here we have training outside the business house itself to prepare for participation in business, and the enterprises flourish because there is a demand for the people they train. At this stage rules of thumb are supplanted by systems based on principles, and the way is paved for the technical school stage. The training here is practical, but it is broad and based on scientific knowledge. This stage is not reached in all fields of endeavor, for some stop at the first or the second, while on the other hand the existence of a higher stage of education does not preclude the continuation at the same time of agencies carrying on instruction after the mode of the lower stages. With the rise of the factory system and the extension of capitalistic production and industrial integration in the form of "big business," there came a demand in the business world for men widely informed and thoroughly trained. Not only did men to meet this demand have to have good foundations of general education, but they needed technical preparation in the specialized field of business itself.

Business science is not only applied science, but it is secondary or derived from a number of the fundamental sciences. It draws its principles from the physical sciences of physics, chemistry, geology, and biology; it utilizes the engineering applications of these sciences; it derives valu

able information from physiology and psychology, and it makes use of the modern languages. Borrowing from all the pure sciences and their applied counterparts, it formulates its own regulations so that it may manage the work of the world economically, so that it may bring about the production of goods necessary to meet humanity's many, varied, and recurrent wants, and make these commodities available in advantageous times and places with individual title to them established according to existing standards of personal justice and social expediency.

The final stage, the cultural stage, is reached when the educator determines that the field in question is so much a part of the general civilization or intellectual wealth of the world that it ought to receive some consideration, not only by specialists in the field but also by the student pursuing a well-planned course of a general or nontechnical character designed to enable him to appreciate and play some rôle in the world in which he lives. It is because new branches of human endeavor constantly blossom forth into this stage, while more ancient branches wither and no longer bear fruit of contemporary significance, that the very humanities themselves change as well as realities.

Business as a field of human thought and activity has reached this stage, and educators reckon with it in laying out courses of general elementary, secondary, and collegiate study.

No one would contend that educators should in any way cease to offer general or cultural courses, but they should insist that these general courses embrace all of humanity's wealth, including that which modern society contributed, and that they should with each addition reshape their general offerings so that appropriate proportions will be preserved.

Before the development of modern highly organized production, business training would have been synonymous with commercial training; that is, training to prepare men

Definition

of business education

to play their parts in the exchange of goods. This would embrace correspondence with customers, the keeping of records of stock, the cost of stock, making out bills, and attending to all financial operations which were associated with marketing and exchange. Successful training would imply, of course, the broad foundational grasp of arithmetic, reading, and writing of the mother tongue and of such foreign languages as the nature of the market might require, a grasp of various money values, banking procedure, and other information concerning financial affairs, the means of transportation, freight charges, etc. Manual skill had to be developed in penmanship, in the technique of bookkeeping, general office organization, and filing. With the invention of mechanical and labor-saving office devices, facility in operating them was required to supplement skill in penmanship.

Of course, with the development of the market the complexity of office management increased. In modern times the business man concerns himself not only with the duties of the merchant and exchanger, but also with the organization of industry and economical procedure. The modern business man, entrepreneur or manager, and all those assisting him in the discharge of his duties, perform functions in two directions: first, in the direction of the market in the establishment of price, in the selling of his goods, and in attending to all matters which flow therefrom, and secondly toward the production plant itself; while he employs technicians who know how to perform operations skillfully according to the laws of science, nevertheless he must know how to buy labor and how to organize labor and materials and put them in coördinate working relationship most economically.

We can therefore define business education as education which directly prepares people to discharge the business function; namely, the economical organization of men and materials in production and the most advantageous distribution and exchange of the commodities or service for consumption.

In the modern world it is hard sometimes to draw the line between the field of technology in production and the field of business management in production, but in general the two functions are fairly distinct. The technician is interested in operations of production, while the business manager is interested in their economical organization and in their government with relation to market conditions. The very engineers themselves must be selected, engineered, and paid by the business man. The business manager is interested in keeping the total price of his commodities above his total entrepreneur's cost. The technician is interested in inventing and operating the machinery of production, if and when the business man determines what operations will be profitable.

curricula of business

education

The aims of business education are, first and foremost, Aims and professional; second, civic; and third, cultural. At no time can the three be separated, but it is possible to devise a curriculum which stresses one or two of the aims. It is also possible to treat a subject so as to emphasize technical and practical skill or to promote philosophical reflection.

The professional aim prompted the establishment of the first schools or colleges of commerce, and it is kept to the fore not only in institutions giving courses of study which lead to distinctive degrees in commerce, but also in places which give specialized instruction in particular fields. We shall consider curricula of the following types:

Type I. Curriculum designed to give the student training to meet a definite professional requirement established by law.

Type II. Curriculum designed to make a student profi-
cient in a particular narrow field.

Type III. Curriculum leading to a baccalaureate degree
in commerce or business, vertical type.
Type IV. Curriculum leading to a baccalaureate degree
in commerce or business, horizontal type.

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