DEPARTMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION SECRETARY'S MINUTES FIRST SESSION.-WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 1902 The first session of the department was called to order in Room 11 of the University library building by President Cyrus Northrop of the University of Minnesota, at 2:30 P. M. on Wednesday, July 9. About 165 persons were present. In the absence of the president, vice-president, and secretary of the department (President W. H. P. Faunce, of Brown University, Providence, R. I.; President C. W. Dabney, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn.; Professor John W. Perrin, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, O., respectively), President Northrop nominated Dr. William W. Folwell, of the University of Minnesota, as acting president. Professor Folwell was duly elected and took the chair. Mr. F. P. Keppel, of Columbia University, was elected acting secretary. Mendelssohn's "Lift Thine Eyes" and "Cradle Song" by Brahms were sung by the Lorelei Ladies' Trio. Professor R. H. Thurston, of Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y., was absent from the meeting, and his paper entitled "Education for Professional Life and Work" was therefore omitted. Professor Edwin G. Dexter, University of Illinois, Champaign, Ill., read a paper entitled "Should Entrance to College Be thru Examination of the School or of the Pupil ?" George N. Carman, director of Lewis Institute, Chicago, presented the report of the Commission of Accredited Schools, of which he is secretary. Upon the resumption of order, after the short recess which followed the reading of these papers, the chair, upon motion, appointed a committee of three to report at the next session for the nomination of officers for the ensuing year, as follows: President William L. Prather of the University of Texas, Austin, Tex. President William H. Black of Missouri Valley College, Marshall, Mo. The chair then introduced Dr. H. M. Lane, of San Paulo, Brazil, who gave an extemporaneous account of his many years' experience in the organization of Brazilian education. A general discussion of Professor Dexter's and Director Carman's papers, and upon the general question of the articulation between the secondary schools and the colleges, followed, in which the following gentlemen took part: Director Carman (in reference to Professor Dexter's paper); Professor John C. Hutchinson of the University of Minnesota; Principal E. V. Robinson of St. Paul, Minn.; Mr. F. P. Keppel, of Columbia University, New York city; Professor G. W. Knight of the Ohio State University, Columbus, O.; President Cyrus Northrop of the University of Minnesota; Professor Snyder of the University of Michigan; Professor Dexter (in reference to Director Carman's paper); Principal L. H. Ford, of Webster City, Ia.; Professor Folwell, the acting president of the department; Charles Alden Smith, principal of the high school, Duluth, Minn.; Professor Hale, of Michigan; Inspector John F. Brown of the State University of Iowa; and Professor Thomas Nicholson of Cornell College, Iowa. Upon motion, the session adjourned at 5 P. M., to meet at the same place on Friday, July 11, at 2:30 P. M. SECOND SESSION.-FRIDAY, JULY II After the session had been given an opportunity, in another room, to hear the piece of music on the program, The Holy City," Adams, sung by Master Henry Pauly, the meeting was called to order at 3 P. M. by Acting-President Folwell. About 110 per sons were present. Professor J. Irving Manatt, of Brown University, Providence, R. I., presented the first paper of the session, "The Future of Greek in American Schools." This was followed by the second paper, "Education in the Appreciation of Art," by Chancellor William Bayard Craig of Drake University, Des Moines, Ia. Under the head of "Miscellaneous Business," President Prather presented the following report for the Committee on Nominations, which was accepted and adopted by the Department, and the nominees declared duly elected: MINNEAPOLIS, JULY 11. Your Committee on Nominations of Officers for the Department of Higher Education nominate the following named gentlemen: For President - Benjamin Ide Wheeler, of California. Respectfully submitted, With reference to the communication from the secretary of the National Educational Association regarding the appointment of a committee to confer with a committee of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, President William L. Prather offered the following resolution, which was adopted by the department: Resolved, That a committee be appointed by the Department of Higher Education with authority from the Board of Directors to participate in the conference with the committee from the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education in the formulation of entrance requirements in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and drawing, and that the committee be as follows: President Henry S. Pritchett, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chairman. Professor William Hallock, of Columbia University. President Winfield S. Stone of Purdue University. Professor H. E. Eddy, of the University of Minnesota. Principal E. V. Robinson of the Central High School, St. Paul, Minn. There was no discussion upon the papers presented. Professor Folwell, the acting president, expressed, on behalf of the University of Minnesota, the pleasure which the university had felt in having the department as its guests in 1902. The meeting then adjourned at 4:45 P. M. F. P. KEPPEL, Acting Secretary. PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS SHOULD ENTRANCE TO COLLEge be thru the EXAMINAITON OF THE SCHOOL OR OF THE PUPIL? EDWIN GRANT DEXTER, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS Biologists tell us that specialization in the animal kingdom is brought about only thru variation; that an organism is what its great great grandfather was -no better and no more until it begins to show divergencies from the ancestral type. What is true of the organic evolution of the animal world is equally so in the institutional development of the world educational. The American school system is as much the result of the survival of the fittest among a multiplicity of variations as is anything which nature presents, and its advancement to a more perfect stage is as fully dependent upon the tendency to vary. That we are living in an era of tremendous educational mutability is a fact, and a fact, moreover, upon which future generations will have reason to congratulate themselves, even if we have not. Today's uncertainty makes tomorrow's certainty, and no small bequest to our children's children will be the solution of some of the crying educational problems of today. Sports in the educational organism have made their appearance from the kindergarten to the university. Wherever increasing complexity has demanded more exact adjustment of parts, we find them. The problems of individual instruction; of semi-annual promotions; of electives; of the six-year high-school course; of the whole swarm of so-called "fads ;" of entrance to college by other means than that of the examination of the pupil--these and many other somewhat radical departures from the ancestral type must be included within the category. In discussing any one of these variations we must at the outset free our minds of any a priori conclusions as to the universal goodness or badness of educational sportsas such. It is true that not all revolution is evolution, and that newness and goodness are not synonymous terms. It is, however, equally true that oldness and goodness are fully as far from being equivalent, and that if what has been is best simply because it is what has been, we have stagnation. The only valid criterion which we can have for judging the fitness either of the type or its variation for survival is the exactness with which it fulfils the demands made upon it by present conditions. In the problem before us at this time for discussion, the type form is the entrance to college by means of the personal examination of the applicant for admission by officers delegated by the college, this examination to be the sole means of determining the fitness of the applicant for college work. The variation is the entrance to college by candidates without subjection to such an examination, and solely because they have successfully completed a course of study in some secondary school, which school has been examined by an officer delegated by the college, and its course of study approved. I would here call attention to the fact that our subject is not that of the relative merits of the entrance examination and the certificate plan, which has been so fully discussed before the Eastern Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools, since with them the examination of the school does not figure. I quote from President Eliot's remarks before the conference held in Boston in October, 1900: In the first place, in New England we have no system of really examining the condition of the secondary schools; therefore the experiment of certificate is tried under the most disadvantageous possible circumstances. When it was first introduced into this country an argument was made in favor of it from the German practice, secondary schools in Germany giving an outgoing certificate valid at the university. A fatal defect in the argument was that the German secondary schools are supervised by competent government educational authorities ours by none. In New England we have nothing more than an occasional friendly visit to some schools by some college officer. That is an extremely weak and imperfect method, though perhaps better than nothing. Do not, then, confuse our problem with that of examination versus certificate as its solution has been attempted in New England, since we include another factor of no small pedagogical and administrative importance, namely, this very examination of the school the absence of which, there, President Eliot so much deplores. The question of the superiority of either one of the two plans for the best co-ordination of secondary with college work must be settled by the criterion of pedagogical fitness. Institutions of learning are for the youth, and not the youth for the institution of learning, in spite of what may seem to be evidences to the contrary in the minds of some. We may, however, for purposes of analysis perhaps be justified in assuming that two criteria are subsumed by that given above, viz., the pedagogical criterion and the administrative criterion. Theoretically, the former should always be supreme, yet not infrequently the exigencies of our educational conditions are such that, temporarily at least, in the process of feeling one's way it must be made subservient to the latter. Let us then apply to the two methods of entrance to college covered by our subject each of these criteria in turn, and see what the effect of each is upon the pupil, the secondary school, and the college. This comparison can perhaps best be brought out by means of the direct question. 1. What is the pedagogical effect of the college entrance examination, as at present administered, upon the pupil? Let me at this point ask you to distinguish carefully between this-i. e., the entrance examination- and the examination as an occasional test of power and proficiency in regular school work. Whatever may be my own opinion with regard to the former, I am in hearty accord with much that President Hadley has recently written on the question of the latter. The two are, however, radically different in these two respects: First, the college examination is set by those who know nothing of the personal peculiarities of the applicant and can make no legitimate allowance for such peculiarities, while the other is not; and, second, in it the student knows that previous school successes, except as they are indicated by the present test, count for nothing. Both of these peculiarities make the college entrance examination open to criticism from the standpoint of our present criterion. My objection on the ground of the first is that the ordinary college entrance examination presents conditions to the youth the like of which he will seldom or never meet in after life, and to which we have no right to subject him. The aim of our education is the adaptation of the individual to an environment in which he is likely to find himself, and I would confidently assert that not one person in one hundred will in his whole after life find himself in a situation the outcome of which he can predict with so little certainty as the one in which he faces his examiner. Pedagogically this is wrong. The youth is not stronger than the man, and no part of our educational machinery has a right to subject him to greater stress than he is likely to meet in subsequent years. I disagree as fully with those who hold that the entrance examination to college is valuable because it enables him to rise to similar emergencies which he is likely to meet in after life as I should with those who might urge the introduction into the public schools of a fire drill which included a jump from the fifth-story window into a net held on the sidewalk below. Proficiency in this feat might come in handy to one in a million; but what of the nervous strain on the others? On the second ground, that too much depends upon the entrance examination, I would base the argument that it is conducive to cramming. At whatever stage in the educational career it is understood by the pupil that promotion depends solely and entirely upon success in passing a given test, at that stage you will find that pernicious form of so-called study. As long as the student is practically told: no matter whether your previous work has been good or bad, no matter how you have prepared yourself for this examination, if you answer these questions you succeed, if you don't you fail,- the cram system with all its evils is destined to remain. (Edgar H. Nichols, Educational Review, May, 1900.) President Butler, in an address before this Association not many years ago, said: It is bad psychology and bad education to suppose there is an obstacle at the pupil's sixteenth year which can be surmounted only by an examination. I am sure this should be done away with. 2. But to the next question: What is the effect of the entrance examination upon the secondary school? Here we shall find a more marked difference of opinion than upon that just discussed, or perhaps, if we may judge from the data presented by Principal Ramsay of Fall River, a much greater difficulty in having any opinion at all. Time prevents my making any considerable reference to his extensive report, which contains a tabulation of answers to twelve questions bearing upon the relative merits of the examination and certificate plans of college entrance, from twentynine head masters of secondary schools and the corps of college preparatory teachers in one public high school. Mr. Ramsay's conclusions are adverse to the certificate plan, altho it seems to me those conclusions are not supported by the data presented. The answer to what may be considered his crucial question, "Do you on the whole think it wise to vest with the head master and his assistants the responsibility of determining the fitness of pupils to enter college?" was thirteen "yes" to thirteen "no," on the part of the masters, and four "yes" to three "no", by the instructors. That somebody's judgment, too, was bad is shown by the fact that a given question, viz., "How do your examination candidates compare with your certificate candidates in mental |