Slike strani
PDF
ePub

IT

INTRODUCTION

T is characteristic of the American people to have profound faith in the power of education. Since Colonial days the American college has played a large part in .American life and has trained an overwhelming proportion of the leaders of American opinion. There was a time when the American college was a relatively simple instituし tion of a uniform type, but that time has passed. The term "college" is now used in a variety of significations, a number of which are very new and very modern indeed. Some of these uses of the term are quite indefensible, as when one speaks of a college of engineering, or of law, or of medicine, or of journalism, or of architecture. Such use of the word merely confuses and makes impossible clear thinking as to educational institutions and educational aims.

The term "college" can be properly used only of an institution which offers training in the liberal arts and sciences to youth who have completed a standard secondary school course of study. The purpose of college teaching is to lay the foundation for intelligent and effective specialization later on, to open the mind to new interpretations and new understandings both of man and of nature, and to give instruction in those standards of judgment and appreciation, the possession and application of which are the marks of the truly educated and cultivated man. The size of a college is a matter of small importance, except that under modern conditions a large college and one in immediate contact with the life of a university is almost certain to command larger intellectual resources than is an institution of a different type. The important thing about a college is its spirit, its clearness of aim, its steadiness of purpose, and the opportunity which it affords for direct personal contact between teacher and student. Given these, the question of size is unimportant.

There was a time when it was felt, probably correctly, that a satisfactory college training could be had by requir

ing all students to follow a single prescribed course of study. At that time, college students were drawn almost exclusively from families and homes of a single type or kind. Their purposes in after-life were similar, and their range of intellectual sympathy, while intense, was rather narrow. The last fifty years have changed all this. College students are now drawn from families and homes of every conceivable type and kind. Their purposes in afterlife are very different, while new subjects of study have been multiplied many fold. The old and useful tradition of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, together with a little history and literature, as the chief elements in a college course of study, had to give way when first the natural sciences, and then the social sciences, claimed attention and when even these older subjects of study were themselves subdivided into many parts.

These changes forced a change in the old-fashioned program of college study, and led to the various substitutes. for it that now exist. Whether a college prefers the elective system of study, or the group'system, or some other method of combining instruction that is regarded as fundamental with other instruction that is regarded as less so, the fact is that all these are simply different kinds of attempt to meet a new condition which is the natural result of intellectual and economic changes. Just now the college is in a state of transition. It is not at all clear precisely what its status will be a generation hence, or how far present tendencies may continue to increase, or how far they may be counteracted by a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. Therefore this is a time to describe rather than to dogmatize, and it is description which is the characteristic mark of the important series of papers which constitute the several chapters in the present volume.

A careful reading of these papers is commended not only to the great army of college teachers and college students, but to that still greater army of those who, whether as alumni or as parents or as citizens, are deeply concerned with the preservation of the influence and character of the

American college for its effect upon our national standards of thought and action.

American colleges are of two distinct types, and it may be that the future has in store a different position for each type. The true distinction between colleges is according as they are separate or are incorporated in a university system, and not at all as to whether they are large or small. A separate college, such as Amherst or Beloit or Grinnell or Pomona, has its own peculiar problems of support and administration. The university college, on the other hand, such as Columbia or Harvard or Chicago or the college of any state university, has quite different problems of support and of administration. It is not unlikely that the distinction between these two types of college will become more sharply marked as years go by, and that eventually they will appear to be two distinct institutions rather than two types of one and the same institution.

Meanwhile, we have to deal with the college as it is, in all its varied forms, but characteristically American whatever its form. The American college has little or no resemblance to the English Public School or to the French Lycée or to the German Gymnasium. It is something more than any one of these, and at the same time something less. It differs from them all very much as the conditions of American life differ from those of English or of French or of German life. The college may or may not involve residence, but when it does involve residence, it is at its best. It is then that the largest amount of carefully ordered and stimulating influence can be brought to bear upon the daily life of growing and expanding youth, and it is then and only then, that youth can get the inestimable benefits which follow from daily and hourly contact with others of like age, like tastes, like habits, and like purposes. Indeed, it has often been said that the college gives more through its opportunities which attach to residence, than through its opportunities which attach to instruction.

Almost every conceivable problem that can arise in college life and college work, is discussed in the following

« PrejšnjaNaprej »