The postwar car, kitchen and medicine chest will be new, wonderful, better-than-ever. Will U.S. schools and colleges keep step?
Scores of recent studies have probed the past and suggested paths to a brighter future. From Maine's little Bates College to the huge University of Southern California, curriculum changes have already become the order of the day. Last week, Harvard added its findings—and they went straight to fundamental issues.
Two Principles. "Teach youth a trade, increase his earning power," say the vocationalists. "Help youth adjust to the complexities of modern society," proclaim the pragmatic Deweyites. "Instill in youth the wisdom of past ages," cry the Hutchinsites, flourishing their Great Books. Underlying all such panaceas are the basic principles of the world-envied U.S. educational system—"Jeffersonian" and "Jacksonian."
Thomas Jefferson felt that education's prime responsibility was to discover the gifted student and train him for leadership in his special field (the versatile sage of Monticello never dreamed that specialization in stenography would one day seem more desirable than Sanskrit). Andrew Jackson's philosophy, on the contrary, clearly calls for education to concentrate on raising the level of the mass.
The Core Idea. While agreeing that both principles are essential to a free people, more & more educators today are apprehensive that Jeffersonian specialism has run away with the show. But well aware that flight from the technological facts of modern life is impossible, few have urged drastic changes. Nor has Harvard, which comes close to the consensus in urging emphasis on a compulsory "core" of general subjects.
The core idea has its roots deep in the problems of U.S. democracy. In the most complex technical-industrial society of all time, American learning has spread out to encompass everything from electronics to eel husbandry—and the common body of tradition and culture that once bound men together is by & large getting a cursory dismissal as "useless" and "impractical."
The inevitable and dangerous result, as noted in the Harvard report, is a society of separate groups—isolated, divided, thinking and acting in terms of their special interests—just when the basic unity of free men is the world's crying need. Few of the recent educational studies, of which Harvard's is perhaps the weightiest and most comprehensive, have had a more provocative thesis.
Dangerous Delinquency. Titled General Education in a Free Society, Harvard's report is the result of two years' and $60,000 worth of study, research and consultation by a committee of twelve.
The words "Free Society" are not included in the title for mere euphony. Throughout its 267 pages the document returns again & again to the theme that democracy is nothing but an unworkable, confusing dream unless its citizens share a set of fundamental traditions and premises. Their perpetuation, argues Harvard's committee, is education's prime responsibility. And in meeting this responsibility, the committee finds that U.S. education has been dangerously delinquent.