General Education In A Free Society

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Presented
With the Compliments of

THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE

OF

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

General Education in a Free Society

THE COMMITTEE ON THE OBJECTIVES OF A GENERAL
EDUCATION IN A FREE SOCIETY

PAUL H. BUCK, Chairman, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and
Professor of Hibtory.

JOHN II. FINLEY, JR., Vice-Cbairnian, Eliot Professor of Greek and /Master
of Eliot House.

RAPHAEL DEMOS, Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of the Board of
Tutors in the Department of Philosophy.

LEIGH HOADLFY, Professor of Zoology, Master of Lcvcrett House, and
Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

BYRON S. HOLLINSHFAD, Research Fellow in Education, President of
Scranton Keystone Junior College, and Past President of the American As-
sociation of Junior Colleges.

WILBUR K. JORDAN, President of Radcliffe College and member of the
Department of History.

IVOR A. RICHARDS, University Professor and Director of the Commission
on English Language Studies.

PHILLIP J. RULON, Professor of Education and Acting Dean of the Gradu-
ate School of Education.

ARTHUR M. SCHLFSINGFR, Fiancis Lee Higginson Professor of History
and former President of the American Historical Association.

ROBERT ULICH, Professor of Education and former Minister of Education
in Saxony, Germany.

GEORGE WALD, Associate Professor of Biology and recipient of the Eli
Lilly Award of the American Chemical Society in 1939.

BENJAMIN F. WRIGHT, Professor of Government and Chairman of the
Department of Government.

GENERAL EDUCATION
IN A FREE SOCIETY

Report of the
Harvard Committee

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

JAMES BRYANT CONANT

iff it

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

1950

Copyright, 7^5, by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College

Thirteenth Printing

Printed at the Harvard University Printing Office
at Cambridge, Massachusetts, U. S. A.

Introduction

The war has precipitated a veritable downpour of books and
articles dealing with education. In particular the future of the
liberal arts colleges has been a subject of widespread discussion
both within and without the academic walls. There is hardly a
university or college in the country which has not had a com-
mittee at work in these war years considering basic educational
questions and making plans for drastic revamping of one or more
curricula. Nor have larger group activities been missing. The
Association of American Colleges has not only sponsored the
publication of a book on the liberal arts but tyas also arranged
important conferences dealing with various ghases of college
education. With this background in mind, the Dreader may won-
der why the report of one more university committee should be
presented to the public in book form. He may well ask, what
merit, if any, resides in this particular treatment of a familiar
subject collegiate education?

The answer lies in the fact that, in spite of its origins, the book
is not primarily concerned with collegiate education. Rather, it
is an inquiry into the problems of general education in both
school and college by a Committee largely composed of mem-
bers of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in short, men of dis-
tinction in special fields of learning. In other words, the report
of the Harvard Committee on "The Objectives of a General
Education in a Free Society," which is printed here in full, pre-
sents a view of the total American educational scene. The recom-
mendations as to changes in the Harvard College curriculum
(which in due course will be debated by the Faculty) were
arrived at only after the Committee had spent months examining
the entire problem of providing adequate education for all
American youth. Therefore, in one sense this is a report of
experts, in another sense a report of an impartial jury of laymen
determined to find the facts.

That a group of men whose lives had hitherto been devoted

(v)

Introduction

to university affairs should take great pains and spend much time
investigating the current educational situation in the United
States is, I believe, without precedent. That they were joined in
the enterprise by colleagues from the Faculty of Education who
knew the schools from long experience makes the case no less
exceptional. The first four chapters of this book are, therefore,
the product of a study unique in the history of American edu-
cation.

A further unusual if not unique feature of the report is evi-
dent if one considers that the document represents a unanimity
of opinion not based on compromise between divergent views.
And when one adds the comment that the Committee was ap-
pointed from both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the
Faculty of Education, such unanimity is recognized as not only
exceptional but of high significance. To one who has listened
for years with considerable dismay to the "educators and school
men" belaboring the "professors" and vice versa, this unanimity
seems like the dawn of a welcome day. The writer of the fore-
word is obviously a biased witness, but to him the first four
chapters are a heartening sign that college professors and school
teachers and administrators can come to understand each other's
difficulties if they will put their minds upon the task. For I think
the members of the Committee would be the first to say that if,
as is often the case with academic committees, they had been
forced to write a report after a few months of deliberation, both
unanimity and understanding of the nature of the problem would
have been conspicuous by their absence. The title of this book
might well be "A Study of American Education."

The letter of transmittal mentions briefly the methods by
which the study was conducted. But a casual reader may easily
miss an important point if he fails to realize that the Committee
was not only considering the problem for nearly three years, but
spent the equivalent of many weeks of eight-hour working days
in its investigations and deliberations. The assistance of numerous
collaborators of wide experience and high standing, and the con-
sultations with many school and college men who came to Cam-
bridge required, of course, a budget for expenses considerably

(vi)

Introduction

beyond that which one normally expects a faculty committee to
spend. It has turned out that the $60,000 appropriated by the
Harvard Corporation for the expenses of the Committee was a
fairly accurate measure of the monetary cost of the undertaking.
The cost in terms of the time and energy of the members, while
strictly speaking incalculable, is obviously of a different order of
magnitude. Indeed, it is such cost that usually makes academic
enterprises of this sort prohibitively expensive. But in the case
at hand, the importance and the urgency of the problem appeared
to warrant what was planned.

Readers of the document who share the writer's enthusiasm
for the outcome will recognize the debt which Harvard owes to
the twelve men whose names appear on the letter of transmittal,
and above all to the Chairman, Professor Paul H. Buck, Dean of
the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Those who are familiar with
committees will recognize the hand of genius in this work, for
without a presiding officer who is both effective and understand-
ing no such labor can ever be brought to a successful conclusion.

Potential readers of this book may be divided into three
classes: educators concerned with school problems, educators
concerned with university and college problems (and I include
in this category all professors of arts, letters and professional
subjects whether or not they bridle at the designation), and lay-
men. The third group hardly needs to be reminded that a book
even a book which is an educational report is designed to be
read as a whole. With the school and college teachers and ad-
ministrators, the case is somewhat different. Each group will be
concerned primarily with the relevance of the report to their par-
ticular problems. Therefore, I may be permitted perhaps to issue
a solemn warning: any judgment based on an incomplete or frag-
mentary reading is not only unfair to the authors, but almost
certain to be false. The book must be taken as a unit. The fifth
chapter dealing with the problems of one particular college, for
example, may have significance for other colleges, but it is almost
certain to be misunderstood if taken apart from the first four
chapters; similarly with chapter four which deals with some
aspects of secondary education.

(vii)

Introduction

There will be some who open the book with an initial preju-
dice against the contents derived from the title. "General edu-
cation/' they may exclaim, "what's that? I'm interested only in
liberal education that's what the country needs." For the use
of the current phrase "general education" instead of "liberal
education," the writer is ready to take his share of blame. Shortly
after the Committee had been appointed (in January, 1943, to be
exact) I reported to the Board of Overseers of Harvard Uni-
versity as follows:

"... I am taking the liberty of appointing a University Com-
mittee on 'The Objectives of a General Education in a Free
Society.' This committee, composed of members of several facul-
ties including Arts and Sciences and Education, I hope will con-
sider the problem at both the school and the college level. For
surely the most important aspect of this whole matter is the gen-
eral education of the great majority of each generation not the
comparatively small minority who attend our four-year col-
leges. . . .

"The heart of the problem of a general education is the con-
tinuance of the liberal and humane tradition. Neither the mere
acquisition of information nor the development of special skills
and talents can give the broad basis of understanding which is
essential if our civilization is to be preserved. No one wishes to
disparage the importance of being 'well informed.' But even a
good grounding in mathematics and the physical and biological
sciences, combined with an ability to read and write several for-
eign languages, does not provide a sufficient educational back-
ground for citizens of a free nation. For such a program lacks
contact with both man's emotional experience as an individual
and his practical experience as a gregarious animal. It includes
little of what was once known as 'the wisdom of the ages/ and
might nowadays be described as 'our cultural pattern.' It in-
cludes no history, no art, no literature, no philosophy. Unless
the educational process includes at each level of maturity some
continuing contact with those fields in which value judgments
are of prime importance, it must fall far short of the ideal. The
student in high school, in college and in graduate school must be

(viii)

Introduction

concerned, in part at least, with the words 'right' and 'wrong' in
both the ethical and the mathematical sense. Unless he feels the
import of those general ideas and aspirations which have been a
deep moving force in the lives of men, he runs the risk of partial
blindness.

"There is nothing new in such educational goals; what is new
in this century in the United States is their application to a sys-
tem of universal education. Formal education based on 'book
learning' was once only the possession of a professional class; in
recent times it became more widely valued because of social im-
plications. The restricted nature of the circle possessing certain
linguistic and historical knowledge greatly enhanced the prestige
of this knowledge. 'Good taste' could be standardized in each
generation by those who knew. But, today, we are concerned
with a general education a liberal education not for the rela-
tively few, but for a multitude."

Whether or not one wishes to equate the terms "liberal educa-
tion" and "general education" at the college stage, the latter
phrase has advantages when one examines in a comprehensive
way the manifold activities of American schools and colleges.
If the Committee had been concerned only with Harvard Col-
lege, the title might have read "The Objectives of a Liberal Edu-
cation." A minor annoyance, to be sure, would have arisen
quickly, for many specialists in various faculties would- have been
ready to testify eloquently to the fact that their specialty if prop-
erly taught was in and by itself a liberal education. No such
claim has as yet been made in terms of a general education. But
quite apart from this quarrel over the meaning of a much used
and much abused adjective, any serious consideration of the
problems of American schools would have been difficult for a
university group designated as a committee on liberal education.
The reasons lie deep in the history of American education in this
century and are evidence of the cleavage between "educators"
and "professors" to which I have referred already. Phrases be-
come slogans and slogans fighting words in education no less
than in theology.

Therefore, I may express the hope that the reader of this book

Introduction

will drop, as far as possible, his educational prejudices for the
moment and forget the overtones of many hackneyed phrases as
he explores through the eyes of a group of university professors
scientists, classicists, historians, philosophers the present
status of the American educational system. I hope he will pro-
ceed with them sympathetically as they consider ways and means
by which a great instrument of American democracy can both
shape the future and secure the foundations of our free society.

JAMES BRYANT CONANT

Cambridge
June u, 1945

Contents

PAGE

INTRODUCTION BY JAMES BRYANT CONANT v

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii

I. EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

1. The Problem 3

2. Growth of the Schools 6

3. The Impact of Social Change 15

4. Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism 31

5. The Search for Unity 36

II. THEORY OF GENERAL EDUCATION

1. Heritage and Change 42

2. General and Special Education 51

3. Areas of Knowledge 58

4. Traits of Mind 64

5. The Good Man and the Citizen 73

III. PROBLEMS OF DIVERSITY

1. Kinds of Difference 79

2. Unity Conditioned by Difference 92

3. Basic Plan for the Schools 98

IV. AREAS OF GENERAL EDUCATION; THE SECONDARY SCHOOLS

1. Mark Hopkins and the Log 103

2. The Humanities 107

3. The Social Studies 132

4. Science and Mathematics 150

5. Education and the Human Being 167

V. GENERAL EDUCATION IN HARVARD COLLEGE . . . -177

1. Types of Collegiate Institutions 178

2. General Education in Liberal Colleges . . . .180

3. The Present College 183

(xi)

Contents

4. Proposed Requirements in General Education . 195

5. Administration 201

6. Proposed Courses in General Education . . . 204

(a) The Humanities 205

(b) The Social Sciences 213

(c) Science and Mathematics 220

7. Tutorial and Advising 230

8. Harvard as a University College 242

VI. GENERAL EDUCATION IN THE COMMUNITY

1. Distractions and Obstacles 248

2. Adults as Learners 252

3. New Media of Education 262

f xii )

Letter of Transmittal

PRESIDENT JAMES BRYANT CONANT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Sir:

In the spring of 1943 you appointed a University Committee
on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society, with
members drawn from the faculties of Arts and Sciences and of
Education. Your instructions to the committee were as expansive
as its name was long. We were urged to consider the problem of
general education in both the school and the college. We were
cautioned that the general education of the great majority of
each generation in the high schools was vastly more important
than that of the comparatively small minority who attend our
four-year colleges. You advised us that the educational process
falls short of its ideal unless it includes at each stage of maturity
some continuing contact with liberal and humane studies. The
goals of these studies, you said, had been the topic of prolonged
discussion; so much so that the peculiar character of the problem
was in danger of being missed. "There is nothing new," you
asserted, "in such educational goals; what is new in this century
in the United States is their application to a system of universal
education."

In short, we were directed not so much to make recommenda-
tions for general education in Harvard College as to venture into
the vast field of American educational experience in quest of a
concept of general education that would have validity for the
free society which we cherish. This concept if found would be
a true basis upon which to build such special contribution as edu-
cation in Harvard College could make to American democracy.

The report we herewith submit to you should be read in the
light of this, its main purpose. We hope it will provoke discus-
sion and that it \vill lead to action. We would suggest that the
recommendations for Harvard College have little meaning in
themselves if divorced from the earlier chapters which deal with

( xiii )

Letter of Transmittal

background, theory, and philosophy. The report stands or falls
as a unit.

We hope that our colleagues in reading through the report
from beginning to end will share in the experience of mutual
self-education which the committee itself underwent. Whatever
else the report may be, it certainly is the result of joint effort. It
is the product of twelve men living in close association for two
years, grappling cooperatively with a complex and stubborn
problem of major importance. The committee regularly met as
a whole once a week, frequently more often, and periodically
secluded itself for sessions of several days' duration. We main-
tained a central office into which memoranda poured and where
daily groups smaller than the whole committee met informally
to discuss our problems. We sought advice both from our col-
leagues in the university and from persons of various walks of
life and sections of the country. We brought consultants to
Cambridge as individuals and in groups. We operated through
subcommittees and by conferences. All in all, we tapped so far
as was in our power the rich and varied thinking and experience
of American education. This procedure was made possible by
a very generous grant from the President and Fellows of Harvard
College for the expenses of the committee.

In emphasizing the joint nature of the report, we must also
call attention to the unanimity of opinion reached by the com-
mittee. It should not go unmentioned that twelve men, whose
teaching and scholarly interests lie in some phase of special edu-
cation, could by this process of intimate collective study achieve
so common an understanding of the basic philosophy and content
of general education. The committee agreed on all matters of
primary importance. In the application of general principle to
practice the committee was able to resolve minor disagreement
by compromise. On a few matters of minor detail there re-
mained some unresolved difference of opinion.

Finally, we should like to remind you of the words you used
to the Board of Overseers in your Annual Report of January i r,
1943, in describing your purpose in appointing the committee.
You then wrote: "The primary concern of American education

(xiv;

Letter of Transmitted

today is not the development of the appreciation of the 'good life'
in young gentlemen born to the purple. It is the infusion of the
liberal and humane tradition into our entire educational system.
Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our
future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and
the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and
are free."

You will find this theme dominant in the report now submitted
to you. Such a concept of general education is the imperative
need of the American educational system. It alone can give
cohesion to our efforts and guide the contribution of our youth
to the nation's future.

Respectfully submitted,

PAUL II. BUCK, Chairman

JOHN II. FINLEY, JR., Vice-Chairman

RAPHAEL DEMOS

LEIGH I IOADLEY

BYRON S. HOLLINSHEAD

WILBUR K. JORDAN

IVOR A. RICHARDS

PHILLIP J. RULON

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER

ROBERT ULICH

GEORGE WALD

BENJAMIN F. WRIGHT

(XV)

Acknowledgments

In preparing this report the committee consulted many col-
leagues. Some generously served on one of the following sub-
committees: English and Literature, Mathematics and Science,
Social Studies, and the Special Problems in the Higher Education
of Women. Others met with the committee at its regular
meetings.

Persons from outside the university who also gave generous
help included: Harriett M. Allyn, Academic Dean, Mount Hoi-
yoke College; Earl A. Barrett, Phillips Exeter Academy; James P.
Baxter, 3rd, President, Williams College; Ronald S. Beasley,
Groton School; Wilbur J. Bender, Phillips Academy; Corning
Benton, Phillips Exeter Academy; John Bergstresser, Dean, Col-
lege of the City of New York; Sarah G. Blanding, Dean, New
York State College of Home Economics, Cornell University;
A. A. K. Booth, Personnel Director, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft
Company; Selma Borchardt, Attorney for the American Fed-
eration of Labor; Nelle E. Bowman, Director of Social Studies
in the Public Schools, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Francis I. Brady, Ports-
mouth Priory School; Henry W. Bragdon, The Brooks School;
Scott Buchanan, Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis; ^nna P.
Butler, Cambridge High and Latin School; Morton H. Cassidy,
Hyde Park High School; Paul D. Collier, Director of the Bureau
of Youth Services, Connecticut State Department of Education;
William IL Cowley, President, Hamilton College; Bernice B.
Cronkhite, Dean, Radcliffe College; Charles K. Cummings, Wes-
ton High School; Burton L. Gushing, East Boston High School;
Herbert J. Davis, President, Smith College; Edmund E. Day,
President, Cornell University; Myrtle C. Dickson, Headmaster,
Roxbury Memorial High School; Imrie Dixon, Melrose High
School; Frances D. Dugan, Director, Winsor School; Ruth E.
Eckert, University of Minnesota; Ruth Edgett, Shady Hill
School; Irwin Edman, Columbia University; Harold Fields,
Board of Examiners, New York City; Burton P. Fowler, Prin-

(xvii)

A cknoivledgments

cipal, Germantown Friends School; Alonzo G. Grace, Commis-
sioner of Public Education, State of Connecticut; Harry V.
Gilson, Commissioner of Education, State of Maine; Ernest
Green, General Secretary of the Workers' Educational Associa-
tion of Great Britain; Raymond A. Green, Principal, Newton
High School; Harriet L. I lardy, Radcliffe College; Margaret
Hastings, Winsor School; Charles W. Mendel, Yale University;
Merritt A. Hewitt, Milton Academy; John C. Huden, State Su-
pervisor, High Schools, Vermont; Galen Jones, Principal, East
Orange High School; Lewis W. Jones, President, Bennington
College; Frederick McC. Kelly, United Electrical Radio and Ma-
chine Workers of America; Gail Kennedy, Amherst College;
Tyler Kcpner, Brookline High School; Edwin S. W. Kerr, Dean,
Phillips Exeter Academy, who also kindly furnished the com-
mittee a meeting room at Phillips Exeter Academy; Allen Y.
King, Supervisor of Social Studies, Cleveland; Frederick O.
Koenig, Stanford University; Homer W. LeSourd, Milton Acad-
emy; Katharine E. McBride, President, Bryn Mawr College;
James P. McCarthy, Shady Hill School; Thomas R. McConnell,
Dean, University of Minnesota; Richard H. McFeely, Director
of Studies, George School; Morris Meister, Science High School,
New York City; Francis X. Moloney, English High School,
Boston; William E. Mosher, Dean, Maxwell Graduate School of
Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University; Winifred
Nash, Dorchester High School for Girls; Reinhold Niebuhr,
Union Theological Seminary; II. Dayton Niehaus, Groton
School; Morris Paladino, International Ladies' Garment Workers
Union; Robert W. Perry, Maiden High School; William IT.
Pillsbury, Superintendent of Schools, Schenectady, New York;
Victor E. Pitkin, Reading High School; Lillian Putnam, Shady
Hill School; Mary Sawyer, Dean, Brookline High School;
Charles 1 1. Scholl, International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers of America; George E. Shattuck, Principal, Norwich
Free Academy; Mildred P. Sherman, Dean, Radcliffe College;
Sara E. Southall, Supervisor of Employment and Service, Inter-
national Harvester Company; George D. Stoddard, Commis-
sioner of Education, State of New York; Carl P. Swinnerton,

( xviii )

A cknonjoledgmcnts

Pomfret School; Katharine Taylor, Director, Shady Hill School;
William J. R. Taylor, Middlesex School; C. Mildred Thompson,
Dean, Vassar College; Mark Van Dorcn, Columbia University;
Julius E. Warren, Commissioner of Education, Commonwealth
of Massachusetts; Olive II. Wetmore, Radcliffe College (secre-
tary to the subcommittee on the Special Problems in the Higher
Education of Women for about three months) ; William C. Wol-
gast, Principal, East High School, Rochester, New York.

Members of the Harvard faculty who served on subcommit-
tees or otherwise gave their aid included: President James B.
Conant, James F. Barclay, Paul D. Bartlett, Ralph Beatley, Gar-
rett Birkhoflf, Edward S. Castle, Henry Chauncey, I. Bernard
Cohen, Archibald T. Davison, Frederick B. Deknatel, Howard
W. Emmons, Walter Gropius, Richard M. Gummere, A. Chester
Hanford, Lieutenant Edward Hodnett, Henry W. Holmes, Jo-
seph F. Hudnut, Truman L. Kelley, Edwin C. Kemble, Delmar
Leighton, Harry T. Levin, Kirtley F. Mather, Francis O.
Matthiessen, Theodore Morrison, Frederick G. Nichols, Otto
Oldenberg, Arthur Pope, George W. Sherburn, Theodore Spen-
cer, Overton IT. Taylor, David V. Widder.

The committee wishes to express its special gratitude to Rob-
ert J. Havighurst, of the University of Chicago, who spent two
periods of several weeks each with the committee.

One member, Byron S. Hollinshead, devoted his entire time
to the work of the committee, having come to Harvard for that
purpose.

The following members of the Harvard faculty served as
members of the committee at one period or another: John T.
Dunlop, John M. Gaus, Howard M. Jones, Alfred D. Simpson,
Howard E. Wilson. Sherwood R. Mercer was secretary to the
committee during its first year.

The committee owes much to two successive secretaries:
Shirley D. Hobson and Madelyn S. Brown, and to Elizabeth F.
Hoxie, who helped prepare the manuscript for publication.

(xix)

General Education in a Free Society

CHAPTER I

Education in the United States

I
The Problem

We need no Homer to praise us. Rather, we have opened
the whole earth and sea to our enterprise and raised every-
where living memorials to our fortune.

Pericles, as reported by Thucydides

Youth is the time when the character is being molded and
easily takes any impress one ?nay wish to stamp on it. Shall
we then simply allow our children to listen to any stories
that anyone happens to make up and so receive into their
minds ideas often the very opposite to those we shall think
they ought to have when they are grown up?

Plato, Republic

THESE two statements from another democracy pose broadly
the problem of this report. They are in essence contradictory.
The first breathes the pride of a free society which, through the
released energy of its citizens, had achieved a power, wealth,
and height of material progress unknown until that time. The
second concerns the effects of this creative freedom. It reflects
a time when many shades of opinion, many forms of special
knowledge, many standards of life and conduct, beat confusedly
upon the young, and it asks how under those circumstances they
might be expected to reach a settled outlook. The achievements
proclaimed in the first statement thus set the question of the
second. Taken together they reflect two characteristic facets of
democracy: the one, its creativity, sprung from the self-trust of

(3)

General Education in a Free Society

its members; the other, its exposure to discord and even to funda-
mental divergence of standards precisely because of this creativ-
ity, the source of its strength.

General education, as education for an informed responsible
life in our society, has chiefly to do with the second of these
questions, the question of common standards and common pur-
poses. Taken as a whole, education seeks to do two things: help
young persons fulfill the unique, particular functions in life
which it is in them to fulfill, and fit them so far as it can for those
common spheres which, as citizens and heirs of a joint culture,
they will share with others. Obviously these two ends are not
wholly separable even in idea much less can preparation for
them be wholly separate. Who docs not recall from school or
college some small, seemingly quite minor subject which through
a teacher or on reflection took on inclusive meaning? Yet to
analyze is inevitably to separate what in fact clings together, and
this report on general education will perforce deal mainly with
preparation for life in the broad sense of completeness as a human
being, rather than in the narrower sense of competence in a
particular lot.

Illogically enough, such being its purpose, it fails to deal with
the primary school and, still more illogically, with infancy
surely the times in life when education is nothing if not general.
But as for infancy, it is doubtful whether a group of professors
would show at their best on that subject, and as for the primary
school, its relatively clear, definite function does not at least
present the confusing choices which come up later. Apart from
the size of primary classes and the indefensible practice of paying
teachers less and less the younger the class that they teach, a
practice related neither to the difficulty nor to the importance of
their work, we have, moreover, the strong impression that pri-
mary education in the United States is more satisfactory than
either secondary or higher education. In any case, what we
have to say will, rightly or wrongly, be confined to the high
school and college, though we shall turn briefly at the end to
adult education and the more imponderable, if not less formative,
realm of radio and movie. We can claim neither completeness

(4)

Education in the United States

nor originality. The size of the subject precludes the former,
and its character, at once ageless and contemporary, the latter.
Much has lately been written on general education, and several
colleges and universities have taken new steps toward carrying it
out. What usefulness this report may have will therefore not be
of a pioneering kind but because it shares a widespread and (as
one thinks back over the history of education) surely an ancient
concern.

Why has this concern become so strong in late years? Among
many reasons three stand out: the staggering expansion of knowl-
edge produced largely by specialism and certainly conducing to
it; the concurrent and hardly less staggering growth of our edu-
cational system with its maze of stages, functions, and kinds of
institutions; and not least, the ever-growing complexity of society
itself. It is hard to say whether the effect of these changes has
been chiefly to estrange future citizens from one another because
of the very different backgrounds and forms of training from
which they take up their different parts in life, or, because such
masses of students have been involved, whether it has not been
rather toward a stiff uniformity cramping the individual's best de-
velopment. Certainly both forces have been at work. The ques-
tion has therefore become more and more insistent: what then is
the right relationship between specialistic training on the one
hand, aiming at any one of a thousand different destinies, and
education in a common heritage and toward a common citizenship
on the other? It is not too much to say that the very character of
our society will be affected by the answer to that question.

It is impossible to talk about general education except against
this background of growth and change. We shall begin with
what seem on the whole the clearer of these shaping forces, dis-
cussing here the growth of our educational system and the
effects of society on it, and leaving to the next chapter the partic-
ularly vexed and murky question of the nature and organization
of modern knowledge.

The unparalleled growth one could almost say eruption
of our educational system, taking place as it has while our way
of life was itself undergoing still vaster changes, is like a mathe-

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General Education in a Free Society

matical problem in which new unknowns are being constantly
introduced or like a house under construction for which the
specifications are forever changing. To have embarked toward
the ideal of free secondary education was surely to cut out work
enough. But to have done so when life was always raising new
demands, when the prospects facing young people were never
stable, and when the very goals of education had therefore to be
constantly revised, was to undertake more even than was bar-
gained for. The wonder is not that our schools and colleges have
in some ways failed; on the contrary, it is that they have suc-
ceeded as they have. Restated, then, the background of general
education involves two far-reaching questions: first, what in
practice has been implied in the attempt to achieve anything like
universal free secondary education, and second, what have been
the complicating cross-currents sweeping across schools and
colleges from outer society? We shall say a few words, necessar-
ily inadequate, of each.

Growth of the Schools

THE movement toward universal education, inaugurated in a
few states before the middle of the last century by such prophetic
figures as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, had borne fruit by
the end of the century when free public education had been
established in every state and free secondary education in most.
The momentum thereafter steadily mounted, particularly in the
years following the last war. The period of schooling was ad-
vanced to sixteen, new buildings went up everywhere, the cur-
riculum was enormously enlarged, and armies of teachers were
recruited for the swelling ranks of pupils. As the slender-spired
white wooden church symbolized an earlier period, so in count-
less towns across the continent the less aspiring but more tolerant
and more embracing high-school building symbolized this era.
The year 1870, just before the movement got strongly under

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Education in the United States

way, offers a good point of contrast. In the seventy years be-
tween then and 1940 the population slightly more than tripled.
But in 1870 some 80,000 students were enrolled in secondary
schools and 60,000 in colleges, whereas by 1940, 7,000,000 were
enrolled in the former and 1,500,000 in the latter (while, in addi-
tion, more than 1,000,000 * were engaged in part-time, vocational,
and adult education). Thus, while the general population was
increasing three times over, the enrollment of high schools was
being multiplied about ninety times and that of colleges about
thirty times. And the end is not yet. Even now one young
person in six fails to reach high school, and half of those who
enter drop out before the end. 2

But these figures, striking as they are, in some ways tell least
of the change. It will have been noted that in 1870 three fourths
of those who attended high school went on to college. The high
school's function was therefore clear; it was quite simply to pre-
pare for college. Its curriculum, membership, and general at-
mosphere were all dominated by that purpose. Those who went
to high school were therefore a fairly homogeneous group, on the
whole children of well-to-do families looking forward to the
learned professions or to leadership in politics or trade. If in-
cluded among them were doubtless a certain proportion of chil-
dren of poorer families, still these cherished the same ambitions,
probably all the more intensely. They were the proverbially
ambitious poor boys, eager to rise in the world and no doubt
destined in most cases to do so. No one was compelled to stay in
high school, and if you could not stand the pace, you fell out.
The result was that the curriculum, if narrow and rigid by mod-
ern standards, was compact, testing, and absolutely clear in its
intention. The teachers, hardly more numerous as a class than
college teachers, were themselves commonly college men, shar-

1 About one third were in university-extension courses.

*The approximate figures are as follows:

in sixth grade, 90-95 per cent of the age group

in tenth grade, 60 per cent of the age group

in twelfth grade, 45 per cent of the age group

in second year of college, 15 per cent of the age group

in fourth year of college, 7 per cent of the age group

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General Education in a Free Society

ing the outlooks and standards of their brethren in higher institu-
tions and enjoying the same almost ministerial respect and
naturally so, since the earlier mysteries of composition and mathe-
matics, Virgil and Xenophon, which were the staple of high
school, differed only in degree from the higher mysteries of
advanced mathematics, the more philosophic ancient authors,
history, rhetoric, and Christian ethics, which were the fare of
college.

But by another seventy years how great was the change from
this decorous, self-contained system. The ninetyfold increase in
numbers observed above, a convulsion as powerful as an earth-
quake, was of course the controlling fact. But had this increase,
vast as it has been, meant simply a ninetyfold multiplication of
the old plan and kind of schooling, it would have been compara-
tively minor. Far outshadowing in importance this mere numeri-
cal increase is the gradual change which it has brought about in
the whole character of the high school and in its function toward
American society.

This more significant, more inward change has followed quite
simply from the fact that, instead of looking forward to college,
three fourths of the students now look forward directly to work.
Except for a small minority, the high school has therefore ceased
to be a preparatory school in the old sense of the word. In so far
as it is preparatory, it prepares not for college but for life. The
consequences of this transformation for every phase of the high
school are incalculable and by no means yet fully worked out.
This mighty and far-reaching fact in itself gives rise to one of
the main themes of this report a theme to be set forth more
fully at the end of the chapter and discussed at length thereafter:
how, given this new character and role of the high school, can
the interests of the three fourths who go on to active life be
reconciled with the equally just interests of the one fourth who
go on to further education? And, more important still, how can
these two groups, despite their different interests, achieve from
their education some common and binding understanding of the
society which they will possess in common?

But instead of pursuing this question now, it is worth observing

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Education in the United States

somewhat more exactly what this new part is which the high
school has been called on to play. It is, in essence, the incom-
parably difficult task of meeting, in ways which they severally
respect and will respond to, masses of students of every conceiv-
able shade of intelligence, background, means, interest, and ex-
pectation. Unlike the old high school in which no one was com-
pelled to stay if he could not or did not wish to do the work, the
modern high school must find place for every kind of student
whatever his hopes and taknts. It cannot justly fail to adapt
itself, within reason, to any. No argument is being attempted
here for what has been called, usually scornfully, at an earlier
stage "the child-centered school." We are stating the simple fact
that, in an industrial age, no alternative exists to the widespread
employment of minors (or, much more likely, their widespread
unemployment) except some concept of schooling which recog-
nizes and meets the vast actual differences among students. Fu-
ture generations will probably think that, much as has already
been done, it is only a beginning. The tendency is always to
strike a somewhat colorless mean, too fast for the slow, too slow
for the fast. The ideal is a system which shall be as fair to the
fast as to the slow, to the hand-minded as to the book-minded,
but which, while meeting the separate needs of each, shall yet
foster that fellow feeling between human being and human being
which is the deepest root of democracy.

But already, it hardly need be said, these inescapable differ-
ences among students have brought about a huge increase in the
number and kind of subjects taught in high school. That change,
to be sure, has not taken place to anything like the same extent in
small country high schools with few teachers and fewer facilities,
which are still the majority, though they no longer have the
majority of pupils. But even here the widespread movement
toward consolidating small country schools in a central school to
which pupils come from round about has made possible a very
great enlargement of courses. It is therefore of some importance
to see why such an enlargement is a great gain, but also what
difficulties it raises.

The heart of the question is what is meant by difference of

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General Education in a Free Society

intelligence. For it is obviously for this reason that some students
are at home in the traditional subjects, while others flounder and
fail. It has been estimated that algebra, for instance, is success-
fully taught to fourteen-year-olds of slightly superior gifts but
that, as now taught at least, it is more or less meaningless to fully
half of the age group. What does such a fact mean? The answer
if it could be fully known would certainly be most complex, and
no claim is made here to knowing it. But this much seems clear:
that, however finally rooted in native endowment (the mere
physical and nervous make-up of the brain), intelligence depends
also on habit and outlook which in turn go back to earliest op-
portunity. A child brought up where books are read, interests
are in the air, and promptings everywhere solicit his own small
explorations will evidently stand a better chance of exhibiting
intelligence, as our society judges it, than one who has felt no
such promptings. But who can say that at birth the one child was
more promising than the other? One approaches here a realm of
causation doubly shaped by physical accident and the visible
hand of the social order. The result is that what passes for intelli-
gence is certainly in part the same thing as opportunity, by which
is meant the whole complex of surroundings which help to shape
a child's view of the world and of his place in it.

It was said that the high school is morally obliged to adapt
itself to every kind of student. The view of intelligence just set
forth is the ground of this duty. For assuming that a young
person's abilities to some extent reflect his surroundings and
both together color his hopes of life and expectations of himself,
then a truly democratic education must perforce try to equalize
opportunity by counteracting impediments. But it cannot do so
simply by offering the conventional academic subjects to all
students indiscriminately. These, again as now taught at least,
are too alien to the backgrounds of most students to be anything
like generally effective in breaking down the barriers of circum-
stance. Something closer to their experience is needed which,
by meeting them halfway, will lead them out and beyond them-
selves. That is not the case, to be sure, with the very gifted.
Their vivid minds, like powerful currents, overleap all breaks

do)

Education in the United States

between life and study, supplying by imagination what they have
missed in experience. Much has been written, and rightly so, about
the need of seeing to it that such students, whatever their means,
find their path clear to the topmost reaches of education. We
shall return to the subject later. Certainly few subjects touch
more closely the spirit of democratic education. But democracy
is not only opportunity for the able. It is equally betterment for
the average, both the immediate betterment which can be gained
in a single generation and the slower groundswell of betterment
which works through generations. Hence the task of the high
school is not merely to speed the bright boy to the top. It is at
least as much (so far as numbers are concerned, far more) so to
widen the horizons of ordinary students that they and, still more,
their children will encounter fewer of the obstacles that cramp
achievement.

To return then to the profusion of courses in the modern high
school, its justification is by no means wholly practical: simply
to fit young people for various kinds of jobs. The justification is
quite as much one of method: to meet students on their own
ground, to draw on their experience, to appeal to their hopes,
and, by recognizing the influence of circumstance, to mitigate it.
Manual training, business training, work in mechanics and agri-
culture, courses in health and home economics these and a
thousand more functional adaptations of the older disciplines,
such as general mathematics instead of algebra and geometry,
discussion courses instead of composition and literature, study of
work and government in the United States instead of formal his-
tory all reflect in part at least the search for the right means of
influencing the great mass of students who, through bent or
background or both, learn little from the conventional studies.
This search will continue and will almost certainly produce a yet
greater diversity. As was said, there is no solution simply in
striking a dull average, satisfactory to neither the quick nor the
slow. Too little has been done for the slow especially those
who in simpler times would have left school early and gained
through work the kind of self-respect and upstandingness which
they find hard to gain from books. The movement toward some

do

General Education in a Free Society

form of national or community service clearly owes some of its
support to the feeling that the schools have failed with these
young people. But be that as it may, the present diversity of in-
struction in the high school reflects dimly like a clouded mirror
the diversity of our society itself, and it will not be adequate
until it catches the image more exactly.

Put thus as the reflection of modern life, this growth of the
curriculum raises again, but more clearly now, the main problem
of this report, which has to do, not with the thousand influences
dividing man from man, but with the necessary bonds and com-
mon ground between them. Democracy, however much by en-
suring the right to differ it may foster difference particularly
in a technological age which further encourages division of
function and hence difference of outlook yet depends equally
on the binding ties of common standards. It probably depends
more heavily on these ties than does any other kind of society
precisely because the divisive forces within it are so strong. But,
from what has been said, it is clear that this task of implanting
common ties is far from simple. The very disparity between
students which has forced the high school to its expanded cur-
riculum means that there is no single form of instruction that can
reach all equally. Hence, even if it could be agreed what stand-
ards Americans have in common, the task of interpreting these to
students of different ages, gifts, and interests must still be im-
mense. Again, the fact that some students prolong their educa-
tion far beyond high school, while the great majority do not,
could become to some extent has already become a strongly
dividing force. For to the degree that high schools try to prepare
the majority for early entrance into active life by giving them
all sorts of practical, immediately effective training, to that de-
gree something like a chasm opens between them and the others
whose education is longer. And in this chasm are the possibilities
of misunderstanding and class distinction. But to see these
difficulties is to grasp more firmly what must be the char-
acter of general education. It must be at once, as it were,
horizontal, in the sense of uniting students of similar ages, and
also perpendicular, in the sense of providing a strand that

Education in the United States

will run through both high school and college, uniting different
ages.

Finally, before leaving the growth of the high school, it is
worth adding a few words on a subject closely related to the ex-
pansion of the curriculum, the course-unit system. It has this re-
lation to the curriculum because it is the mechanism whereby
courses of every kind are legitimatized, put on equal footing, and
made available for tabulation. A unit represents a year's work in
one subject, and for graduation a student offers sixteen such
units (or fifteen when four years of English are mysteriously
counted as three). But it is important to note that he may not
haphazardly combine any courses to make up this total. On the
contrary, his choice is strictly limited by the kind of diploma for
which he is aiming. Large high schools commonly offer several
different over-all courses: vocational, business, general, college-
preparatory, and scientific. Of these the general course alone
leaves the student comparatively free; the others all specify fairly
exactly the range of subjects from which he shall choose. A few
conclusions therefore follow about the course-unit system. It is
in practice the instrument by which the great diversity of gifts
and interests among students is matched by an equal diversity of
instruction. Hence the profusion of courses, all equally counting
as one unit, to which it has led. Then, it resembles the system of
"concentrating" or "majoring" in a given subject which is in
force in most colleges, in that it tends to increase rather than to
mitigate these differences in students. For, being combined with
a series of restrictions on choice of subjects, it in effect divides
the high school into a number of lesser schools which, at least so
far as the curriculum is concerned, are virtually sealed off from
one another.

The course-unit system is thus in practice a divisive force in the
high school. And because it encourages students to think of their
studies as a series of blocks, each a unit complete in itself and
separable from all others, it has a somewhat similar effect on the
individual student also. That is, it divides his work into compart-
ments, some of which may be related to others before or after,
but many of which are simply islands of experience, connecting

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General Education in a Free Society

with nothing, leading to nothing. It is noteworthy that European
schools follow a quite different scheme. Students there take the
same six or seven subjects concurrently through successive years,
though with different emphasis and expense of time in any given
year. The intention evidently is to keep all subjects steadily be-
fore the student as he matures, in the hope of giving his work
both sequence and roundedness. In our system the heaping up of
requirements for any one of the diplomas gives some such thread
of sequence but without adequate roundedness and at the expense,
as has been said, of dividing the high school into virtually autono-
mous groups.

Within limits, this dispersion and dividing of work both in the
high school as a whole and in the case of any single student is no
doubt desirable. The differences between students make it even
to some extent inevitable. Seen in perspective, the course-unit
system reflects more clearly than anything else simply the titanic
growth of the high school. It has been a method of setting
standards and defining functions, almost of setting up inter-
changeable parts. Tasks have had to be known in advance if
teachers were to be trained for them; students have had to be
provided with universally recognizable records. The whole vast
machinery of the high school has necessarily veered toward
standardization as the alternative to chaos.

Yet the system has its serious dangers. From what has been said
these will appear chiefly two: the alienation of students from
each other in mind and outlook because their courses of study for
the various diplomas are so distinct, and the disjointedness of any
given student's work because instead of being conceived as a
whole it falls into scattered parts. The first of these two points
has been made already. The root idea of general education is as
a balance and counterpoise to the forces which divide group from
group within the high school and the high school from the col-
lege. But in so far as general education is also conceived as an
organic strand running through the successive years of high
school and college, then it should play the same binding, unifying
part for the individual as well. Certainly it will fail of its full
function unless it does so.

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Education in the United States

The Impact of Social Change

SO much for the growth of the high school. But, as was said
at the start, this growth, though revolutionary, has not alone
guided its development or prescribed its characteristic form. The
unceasing, ever-faster process of change that has gone on simul-
taneously in outer society, by creating new conditions the effects
of which have flowed back over the high school like a flood, has
been at least equally shaping. Though it is possible to do even
less justice here to this huge subject, still an attempt must be made
to suggest something of its importance.

The great underlying fact to which every phase of the ques-
tion in some way goes back is the change of the United States,
during the period which we have been considering, from a mainly
agricultural to a mainly urban and industrial nation. The familiar
statistics hardly need repeating in detail. From the turn of the
century to 1940, the number of people living in communities of
twenty-five hundred or more rose from about 40 to 56 per cent.
Fostered by quick means of transportation, great metropolitan
districts came into being, each embracing one or more central
cities with satellite towns and farming lands, and these, some one
hundred and forty in number, contain nearly half the population.
Meanwhile, the wealth invested in industries increased many
times over and their output at an even faster rate. Industrializa-
tion became increasingly a national phenomenon, with the South
and Far West affected in only less degree than the older sections
of the East and Middle West, and with the war tending to erase
even these disparities. To an amazing degree people's environ-
ment has come to consist of machines and man-made things, much
as the environment of animals is made up of natural objects and
growing things. Even the farmer and his wife have mechanized
their work, go to town in a car, and hear the voice of the city
from the radio.

('5)

General Education in a Free Society

The educational effect of this mighty change has been equally
great, though different, on city and on country. Of the two, the
country has fared far the less well, and because education is a
state and local responsibility, those states which are largely rural,
less industrialized, and less wealthy have been at a very great dis-
advantage in comparison with their richer and more urban neigh-
bors. Mississippi, for instance, is able to spend only a fifth as much
per pupil as New York and to pay its teachers and principals an
average annual salary of $559 against New York's $2604. Ten
states annually spend less than $50 a pupil, whereas eight spend
more than $100. The birth rate being higher in the country than
in the city, the poorer states face the further disadvantage of
having a relatively higher proportion of children to educate.
South Carolina, for instance, has twice the proportion of children
to adults as Los Angeles county; yet Los Angeles has five times
the wealth available for education. Indeed, if South Carolina
spent its entire state budget for education, it would still be spend-
ing less per pupil than do several states.

Such disparities have roused the current movement to obtain
federal support for education. The question is troublesome. On
the one side is the evident fact that in no sphere is local and state
concern more natural or rightly stronger than in education. It is
the sphere next removed from the family itself, touching parents
and communities in their closest interests. Hence in no sphere is
remote control less desirable. On the other side is the equally
evident fact that the nation at large has no less concern for the
condition of its young people. Americans move about more than
any people on earth. Country children go to the city, young
people brought up in one section move to another. The quality
of education in one state therefore affects all other states. It fol-
lows that the federal government has an inescapable duty toward
education, the more so because the income tax is increasingly
draining from the states the funds by which education can be
supported.

It has in fact recognized this duty, though spasmodically and
for the most part in conjunction with other aims, as in the Civilian
Conservation Corps, which was partly educational in function,

(16)

Education in the United States

in the National Youth Administration, which was more fully so,
and even as early as the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 furthering
vocational training. The war has brought other steps of the same
ambiguous kind, in the use of schools and colleges for training
and in educational provisions for veterans. Nothing is more to be
wished than that the whole tangled subject be clarified and a
solution found which shall do justice at once to the clear need
for local and state control and yet to the equally clear obligation
of the federal government toward those states which cannot now
support anything like an adequate system of schooling. There is
a further question whether the best interests of the nation, in both
peace and war, would not be served by federal subvention of very
able students.

The difference of educational opportunity as between country
and city thus appears in part as a difference between state and
state. But it appears also as a difference within any given state,
and this whole question of the relative advantages of the country
and the city child leads in turn to a basic and intensely interesting
question concerning the larger role of the modern school. In
simpler times, still partly perpetuated in small towns and in the
country, schooling, far from being the whole of education, was
only one among several influences at least as strong, probably
stronger. First and strongest was the family, usually large, living
together in a household where each member had tasks and all
watched and learned the others' tasks. Then, there was the world
of crops, animals, and wild nature, the green or snowy margin
ever at the door, a standing lure to learning and doing. In addi-
tion were the relatively clear, settled standards of less changing
times, those of the family first of all, but hardly less those of the
community of small-town or country neighbors. And finally
there was the more or less tight bond of the church. By tempera-
ment most city-bred moderns probably tend either to idealize or
to disparage these conditions. Certainly it is hard to judge them
accurately. Moreover, they differed enormously from place to
place. It is a far cry indeed from the secure small towns de-
scribed by Sarah Orne Jewett to the more cheerless of the Mis-
sissippi settlements visited by Huckleberry Finn. We are not

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General Education in a Free Society

concerned here to judge these conditions but simply to point out
that, for better or worse, the older school was as the country
school to some extent still is strictly limited in function because
other influences were so strong.

To conclude with the country school, its disadvantage as com-
pared with the city school is therefore less great than might ap-
pear at first sight. For the latter's ever- widening scope which
now extends to health, athletics, extracurricular activities of all
kinds, counseling, placement, and even in some cases to staying
open all day and all year as a meeting ground and place of or-
ganized doings is in part simply a compensation for the re-
strictions of city life. The country school, on the other hand,
having to supply no such compensations, has less call to be so
elaborate. Yet it is true that the country school has serious needs.
As was noted, many country children eventually find their way
to the city, where more complex conditions await them and they
must compete for all kinds of jobs. Moreover, farming itself has
become increasingly technical, both as a science and in the use of
machines. When one reflects that the majority of American high
schools are still small rural schools of five or six teachers and less
than one hundred and thirty pupils, it is evident that enormous
tasks are to be done. These are mostly tasks of consolidation and
redistricting and to some extent of specializing. Consolidation of
outlying schools in a central school makes possible a range of
courses much more nearly equal to the actual differences among
pupils than anything that a small school can offer. Specializing
means the setting up in one district of a school strong in certain
subjects and, in another district, of one strong in others. There
are evident dangers and difficulties in such a scheme: dangers of
overspecialization, difficulties of transportation or living away
from home. But if the country child is to crown his many native
advantages by a formal education in any way equal to that of his
city cousin which is to say, if his advantages are to be of the
use to him and to the nation that they might be then some such
steps must be carried forward in all parts of the country as fully
as they have been carried forward already in some. That possi-
bility in turn leads back to the question of federal support.

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Education in the United States

The wave of change which has lifted and shaken every phase
of American life has thus not failed to touch the country high
school, in part simply negatively by leaving it stranded in old,
now outmoded ways, in part positively by carrying it forward to
new ways. But the city, with all its familiar complexities and
contradictions, its unity yet discord, its efficiency yet waste, its
opportunity yet frustration, is after all the characteristic feature
of the times, and it is the city high school which puts most neatly
the current problems of education. These spring in part from the
weakening or loss of precisely those things which the country
school can assume: the previously noted influences of family,
household, chores, animals, countryside, community, church,
which had always been taken for granted as the framework of
education until they began to disappear. They reflect in part also
the growth of entirely new influences, comparative freedom from
work, readier access to books, ideas, and music, the indiscriminate
presence of the movies, radio, and pulp magazines. Not least im-
portant, they reflect the economic and cultural schisms within the
seeming unity of the city, schisms which are all the greater if one
reckons as part of the city the industrial and residential areas
around it. And with everything else they reflect the weight of
sheer numbers.

There is of course no such thing as the typical city high school.
But certain broad types can be distinguished. First there is the
very large school of two thousand students or more, 3 situated in
the crowded part of the city and drawing mostly from working-
class families. The classes are big, averaging at least forty, and an
air of regimentation and discipline prevails. Students march from
class to class, and it is no accident that men teachers are in the
halls between periods and that a patrolman loiters by the entrance.
Equipment and objects of art are under lock and key. Teachers,
all specialists in their subject, have five classes daily in addition to
keeping the "home room." Their material is largely planned for
them by the state and local authorities. In the press of faces they
have difficulty in knowing or following any one student, a task
left to a rarely adequate staff of professional counselors. There

Over fifty high schools have five thousand or more students each.

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General Education in a Free Society

are athletic teams, which, however, affect only comparatively
few. The building is closed at a certain hour in the afternoon,
after which, unless a student has a job, he has little to do except
to idle at the street corner or play the juke box or finger magazines
in a drugstore. Such a school offers many different kinds of voca-
tional training, and the great majority are enrolled in one of these,
having made their choice more or less at random at the age of
fourteen or fifteen. Only a few, perhaps a tenth, go on to college.
Like this school, though smaller, poorer, less ably taught, harsher
in atmosphere, thinner in offering, and usually still more domi-
nated by politics, are high schools in the very heart of industrial
areas. Many of these are made up almost wholly of first- or
second-generation Americans. Very few of their graduates go
to college.

In sharp contrast to either of the foregoing is the high school
in some comfortable suburb. Classes are smaller; teachers are
better paid; the Parent-Teachers Association is eager and inter-
ested; there are many activities such as plays, athletics, and student
publications; an atmosphere of concern for education pervades
the school and the staff. A cleavage, to be sure, runs between the
college-preparatory group and those who are taking vocational
and business courses, and this cleavage reflects a difference of
means and background. But lines are not sharply drawn; many
able but less well-to-do pupils, responding to the favorable at-
mosphere and encouraged by interested teachers, take the col-
lege-preparatory course. The activities of the school are also a
common bond. About half the graduates of this school go on
either to college or to further education of some sort.

Two other schools somewhat resemble it: the private school
and the central high school in prosperous small towns, particularly
in the Middle West. These are the extremes, so to speak, of
which the suburban high school is the mean. All three have in
common a sense of solidarity and pride in the school, a more or
less personal relationship between teachers and pupils, a fairly
thoroughgoing internal democracy, however unrepresentative the
private school may be of the whole community, and a vigorous
set of activities surrounding the schoolwork as such. The two

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Education in the United States

extremes differ in that the private school draws from a much more
restricted class and sends virtually all its graduates to college.
The students are both more sheltered and more forced. The good
small-town high school, on the other hand, is a cross-section of
the town itself, and its strength is that of a community where
everyone goes by his first name. In an academic sense it is per-
haps less good than either the suburban high school or the private
school, but it always sends a fair proportion of its graduates to
college and contributes at least its full share, probably more than
its share, of distinguished people.

These examples are doubtless neither typical nor complete.
Most actual schools are probably a cross between two or more of
the types just described, and we have omitted other types, for
instance, parochial schools and various technical and trade schools.
But even these examples will suffice to reinforce the point already
made: namely, that as the roundedness and self-sufficiency of an
earlier, partly rural way of life have disappeared, the school has
necessarily taken on new functions. Or rather, the schools of
well-to-do communities have taken on these functions. The com-
parative lack of them among precisely those parts of the popula-
tion which have borne the brunt of industrialization is the point
most worth noticing.

What are these functions? They are first of all those which
follow from the inherent nature of the city as a place where
people congregate for the convenience of work. That means
that living quarters are small, there is little family life, fewer odd
jobs (everything being manufactured), fewer chances for recrea-
tion (all the land being taken up). The school alone under these
conditions is the place formally set aside for young people, and
their life in consequence inevitably centers about it. Hence the
rise of boarding schools and the multiplication of activities in all
high schools where the means are sufficient. No other course is
possible. Health, play, social life, avocations, help in the choice
of a career: all devolve increasingly on the school and have in fact
thus devolved in the case of the comparatively well-to-do, who
least need such help. In the case of the others, the Y.M.C.A.,
settlement houses, the Boy Scouts, churches, public libraries, and

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General Education in a Free Society

other independent agencies have done and continue to do im-
portant work. Such privately supported organizations are char-
acteristic of democratic and especially of American life. Churches
in particular do a kind of work which, by its nature, no publicly
supported agency can attempt. Yet it is probable that even these
influences have not been able to keep pace with the times. Over
and above, then, the enlargement of the curriculum discussed
earlier, the modern city high school faces in part has already
faced a further and equally great extracurricular enlargement.
It is not too much to expect that by another few decades most
city schools, like a few at present, will be staffed and equipped to
stay open all day the year round as places where the young can
achieve that fullness of opportunity which the city otherwise
denies.

But, as with the enlargement of the curriculum, there are prob-
lems and dangers in this extracurricular enlargement. These are
in part simply another phase of the familiar modern problem of a
planned society. How far can such paternalism go without sap-
ping the final responsibility of the individual? But this question
inevitably raises another: what responsibility can the individual
be expected to assume unless he has known good influences?
Whether you interpret democracy primarily as political democ-
racy protecting the rights of the individual or as economic de-
mocracy protecting opportunity for the mass, there is a point
where the two views meet: namely, that opportunity means noth-
ing unless it is opportunity for good, which in turn depends on
some experience of the good. Even Jefferson's competitive, selec-
tive ideal of democratic education rests on the assumption that at
each stage the teacher and the school shall be the best possible, so
that those who might otherwise be handicapped will have equal
chance to get ahead. Thus when the modern city deprives many
young people of the most basic concomitants to education, is it
not the school's place to supply these so far as it can, even over
and above the curriculum? There seems no doubt of the answer,
and this wider view of the school's function will underlie much
that is said about general education in later chapters.

This expansion raises other questions still, notably as to the

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Education in the United States

nature and function of teaching. We have said little hitherto
about teaching, and what follows bears equally on what was said
earlier about the growth of the curriculum. It has been fashion-
able for some time among college people to criticize public-school
teaching and, still more bitterly, the teachers' colleges, schools of
education, and normal schools which prepare for it. School peo-
ple for their part have come to believe that colleges have no grasp
of public education except as it concerns themselves and no in-
terest in it except to criticize. This state of mutual acrimony is
understandable, if not excusable, as another and particularly con-
fusing result of the expansion of the public school. It seems clear
in retrospect that when, about 1900, the need for literally armies
of teachers became evident, liberal colleges and universities faced
a decisive choice. Either they might train these teachers as they
had those of earlier generations, in which case, however, very
serious changes would have to be made in the conventional col-
lege curriculum; or else they might keep their traditional dedica-
tion to higher studies, in which case they would surrender the
training of teachers to new and, in terms of knowledge and tradi-
tion, far less well-equipped institutions and themselves increas-
ingly lose touch with the schools. The element of expense also
entered in. The pay that most schoolteachers could expect and
the means with which a great many started hardly justified four
years even at a state university, much less at an endowed college.
Many also could not have met the usual collegiate requirements.
For these and other reasons, the second of the two choices just
mentioned was in fact made by the colleges, no doubt in part un-
consciously and out of inertia. Any other choice would have
been hard, and there is something to be said in our complex age
for a specialization whereby colleges and teachers' colleges each
perform their unique function. But the consequences have been
grave, not only the misunderstanding already noted but loss of
any continuing interchange whereby each group might inform
and influence the other. This report is, in some sense, only an
attempt to bridge, so far as is possible at this date and by such
means, this dividing canyon.

The reproach commonly expressed by college people is that,

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General Education in a Free Society

as a result of their training, teachers are badly educated even in
the subjects which they teach, much more so in other subjects.
The reason given is that their training, brief in any case, is largely
taken up with methods, psychology, and administration with
anything, in short, except the subject to be taught. And schools
of education, it is said, sink deeper and deeper into these bad
habits, making of teaching an elaborate and largely incom-
prehensible pseudo science instead of the essentially clear and
straightforward task which it should be. Still worse, the criticism
goes on, they have falsely persuaded the legislatures of most
states to make these technical subjects a prerequisite to the teach-
ing license a clinching deterrent to entering upon teaching with
a sound general background. The reply of experts on education
and some teachers has, in effect, been already described. It is that
the growth of our educational system has brought into the schools
crowds of students so immensely varied in abilities and outlooks
that the chief problem today is less to know the subject which
you teach than to know what to teach and how to teach it. Edu-
cation, in this view, is essentially a matter of social planning.
Hence the emphasis on methods. In addition, there is the com-
monly suppressed assumption that, in view of the numbers of
teachers necessary, they could not all be of the highest talent and
accordingly the best that could be done would be to make up by
knowledge of method what might be lacking in native endow-
ment and general cultivation.

As usual, both sides have much to be said for them. It is of
course true that in the end only the spark of knowledge and
devotion to knowledge will kindle an answering flame in students.
Hence everything finally depends on the teacher's quality of
mind and spirit. But it is also true that criticism, though well
founded, means little when it comes from those who have neither
seriously considered nor themselves experienced the killing
weight of numbers, the low pay, the political interference, the
struggle against bad backgrounds and influences, the imperson-
ality implicit in any big system, the demands on nervous energy
and sheer physical strength, that characterize the life of the
public-school teacher.

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Education in the United States

We return, therefore, to the earlier question: what are the con-
ditions necessary for good teaching within the wider curriculum
and wider concept of the school? The answer seems to fall into
three parts: higher pay for teaching, a more widespread dedica-
tion to it, and a clearer recognition that, like the kingdom of
heaven, it is a house of many mansions, each different, each hon-
orable. The first two points are inseparable from each other. The
people who should will not go into teaching unless it is more
respected and more highly paid merely as teaching, not as super-
intending or administering, the jobs better paid at present. At the
same time, it will be neither more respected nor better paid until
more dedicated people go into it. Like the ministry and the armed
services, teaching will presumably never be so lucrative as other
callings. At least it never has been, except in the writings of
philosophers. But there seems hope that the peculiar violence of
expansion in commerce and industry which took able people from
it during the last half-century will be less strong in the next. If
so, its quieter rewards and more inward satisfactions will come to
be more justly valued for what they are. Assuming that the
growth of higher education will henceforth also be less violent,
there is further hope that colleges and universities will take up
once more their ancient function of influencing students toward
schoolteaching, a function which they have largely abrogated in
past decades when every influence has been toward college
teaching.

Meanwhile, an unceasing struggle must be fought to free edu-
cation from a type of direct political control which seeks to im-
pose appointments, restrain the legitimate freedom of teachers,
and even dictate what they should teach. No doubt the ultimate
control of education must be political. But there is a serious ques-
tion whether appointive school boards, membership on which is
given after scrutiny and for a term of years to demonstrably
qualified persons, are not more informed, more independent, and
more responsible than most of the present elective boards. With
this struggle against direct political control must come a similar
struggle against excessive technical requirements for the teaching
license. No doubt some such requirements are beneficial say,

General Education in a Free Society

six or eight hours in practice-teaching and educational psychol-
ogy, instead of the sixteen or eighteen hours in these and other
subjects now commonly asked. Surely the hope of a sound gen-
eral education is in teachers who are themselves generally edu-
cated.

But, as was said, these hopes will not be fulfilled automatically,
and the conditions of teaching will not improve until more and
better-qualified people embark on it in a spirit of devotion. One
of the tragedies of our time has been the change of teaching from
a calling to something like an industry. The fault, as has been
argued, is at once with the colleges, which have turned their
backs; with the schools of education, which have taught every-
thing except the indispensable thing, the love of knowledge; and
with American society itself, which has tolerated the conditions
under which many students and their teachers still labor. The
remedy is a joint concern both of the public and of people who
so believe in the importance of high-school teaching as the floor
and foundation of democracy that they will go into it as a calling.

There is one further precondition to improvement: a clearer
realization of the variety yet interdependence of tasks in the new
high school. The variety of these tasks has been suggested al-
ready; it follows from the expansion of all extracurricular activi-
ties and of the curriculum itself. Their interdependence is hard
to grasp clearly, harder still to make real in practice. Yet pre-
cisely in this interdependence lies the heart of education in a com-
mon tradition and for a common citizenship. The big modern
high school resembles the modern university in being minutely
subdivided. Up to a point it must be. Each subject requires its
special training and fosters its particular outlook; the atmosphere
of academic subjects differs from that of vocational subjects; the
function of the teacher from the function of the counselor. Yet,
from what has been said of the degree to which the high school
is and must increasingly become the center of young people's lives
in cities and even in towns, it follows that all its phases, being thus
educational in the broader sense, must be bound together by com-
mon purposes if they are to exert a rounded, unifying influence.

The implications of this very important point for the cur-

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Education in the United States

riculum have been already broached, and we shall revert to them
in later chapters. More will also be said on the place of extracur-
ricular activities in fostering the aims of general education. Here
we would return to the basic postulates of democracy for this
large yet ideally interdependent school. Democracy was earlier
taken to imply two in part contradictory commands: first, that of
discovering and giving opportunity to the gifted student and,
second, that of raising the level of the average student. One can
call these two forces, in education no less than in politics, the
Jeffersonian and the Jacksonian. 4 Our point here is that there is
need for a more complete democracy in both these senses not only
between student and student but between subject and subject
and teacher and teacher. In saying this, we have in mind the
powerful, widespread, and very unhappy distinction of atmos-
phere and general standing between academic and vocational
courses. The latter tend to be simply the dumping ground for
those who do not succeed in the former. There are obviously
strong forces in American society making for this state of things.
The wish to get ahead, parents' desires that their children shall
have what they have lacked, the vague optimistic belief of many
young people that they may go to college and hence might need
the preparatory subjects, teachers' better preparation in these
subjects, and their naturally greater interest in brighter pupils:
all this and simple snobbishness tend to give luster to the academic
course and a higher status to its teachers. For the same reason,
the academic course tends to be crowded with students who do
not belong in it, and hence is often diluted. But this is not our
main point here; rather that it is a strange state of affairs in an
industrial democracy when those very subjects are held in dis-
repute which are at the heart of the national economy and those
students by implication condemned who will become its oper-
ators.
The question, to which no adequate answer has as yet been

*This terminology is certainly unfair to Jefferson's express interest in the
citizen-farmer and artisan. But it does reflect the importance which, in Notes
on the State of Virginia, he attached to selection of the ablest through educa-
tion.

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General Education in a Free Society

found, is, then, how to endue all subjects in the modern high
school, and the teachers of these, with a respect commensurate to
their equally necessary part in American life. Here Jeffersonian
and Jacksonian principles collide head on, and subjects making
for success create an atmosphere harmful to those making for
simple usefulness. In this connection it is important to distinguish
clearly between so-called technical courses and those in manual
training. It is sometimes falsely assumed that students not gifted
in mind are gifted in hand. That is not the case. Virtually as
high an intelligence is demanded for success in a good technical
high school as in a good college-preparatory course. These two,
the academic and the technical courses, are the aristocracy of the
high school, and in them the Jeffersonian principle of selection
operates. However imperfect they may be, cause for major con-
cern is not in them, but in the vocational and trade courses, re-
garded as inferior, made up of inferior students, and taught by
inferior teachers. And this concern must be the greater because
this distinction bears a relationship to American life as a whole.
It has been estimated that about 10 per cent of the jobs in the
United States are professional or managerial, that another 25 or
30 per cent demand some technical training (for instance, scien-
tific farming, any one of the skilled trades, office work), but that
for the great remaining mass of more than half the jobs no previ-
ous training is necessary. It is of future holders of these that we
are thinking now. Colleges and professional schools on the whole
prepare for the first kind of jobs; junior colleges, technical high
schools, and trade schools prepare for the second kind; responsi-
bility for the third kind is on the grammar schools and high
schools alone. Moreover, this is a responsibility for a strictly
general, not a technical, education since, as said, education of the
latter kind is not necessary for these jobs. This important point
was touched on earlier when we said that the huge expansion of
the curriculum was not chiefly intended to fit students for spe-
cific jobs but rather to reach all students in ways which they
severally might respect and profit from. For these students their
whole high-school education is in the truest sense general edu-
cation.

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Education in the United States

Thus we return to the imperative need that all the courses, in-
deed all the wider activities, of the high school be thought of as
interdependent and equally honorable. For it is in all these courses
and activities alike that the civilizing work of preparing for
American life takes place. There is always a strong tendency,
which this report will not have escaped, to think of general edu-
cation merely as a series of specific courses, highly literate in
character and thereby perforce appealing to the bookish. Such
courses have their important place, but, considering the popula-
tion as a whole, they again illustrate the selective Jeffersonian
principle. They are for those students who can and will go ahead.
But had the high school consisted only of such students, there
would have been no need in the first place greatly to expand the
curriculum. The unsolved problem, the Jacksonian task, of the
high school is to reach students who do not read well yet are not
skilled in hand, whose backgrounds are bad, who in cities espe-
cially are a prey to a thousand mercenary interests the kind of
young people who, as said, in other times would have left school
early and found self-respect in work but who now, if they leave
school, are simply unemployed. For them particularly, though
for all to some extent, the whole range of the school must be
general education sports, activities, provisions for health, op-
portunities for avocation and part-time work, quite as much as
courses. And a great untried realm of community and national
work, foreshadowed in the C.C.C. and in the instructional pro-
grams of this war, is yet to be formulated. These are the young
people for whom experience of this kind has meant higher stand-
ards, improved health, greater self-respect, and a wider experi-
ence of life. Other nations have met the same problem by regi-
menting the young even in peace. But such regimenting cannot
safely be our solution. That solution is rather in a vision of the
scope of the high school and of the equal dignity and importance
of teaching in the Jacksonian and the Jeffersonian senses that is
to say, of teaching not by books and information alone, which are
necessarily for the brighter, but by work, guidance, and atmos-
phere.

Finally, there is outside the school, in the movies and radio, in

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General Education in a Free Society

adult education and the life of the community, a realm still more
powerful for good or ill. We shall return to this subject also, in
the last chapter. Here we merely add that the same conflicting
forces that operate in the school system operate in this realm
likewise. The conflict is in part between the forces making for
unity and those making for division. Like the high-school cur-
riculum, the movies and radio, not to speak of magazines and
newspapers, have adapted themselves to the enormous range of
taste and intelligence which exists in the general public, catering
quite consciously, often quite cynically, to one or another level.
This variety is necessary and within limits good. But, as in the
case of the high school, it carries with it the possibility of division
between class and class because tastes will have been so differently
formed. It also carries the possibility of personal frustration,
when people struggle against influences which they scarcely
know how to escape. Doubtless wisdom has always been the fruit
of the tree of good and evil. But one need be no soft paternalist
to believe that never in the history of the world have vulgarity
and debilitation beat so insistently on the mind as they now do
from screen, radio, and newsstand. Against these the book or
movie which speaks with authentic largeness to the whole people
has no easy victory.

Again, the conflict is in part between the same Jeffersonianism
and Jacksonianism of which we have spoken. Or perhaps these
are not the right terms in this context. We mean the conflict
between the right of any person to create and do for his own
profit and the right of the public to what will be to its profit. It
is said that the public is often ahead of legislators. Certainly it is
often ahead of what is given it for entertainment. It is no reply
to say that entertainment is not education. The greatest periods
of the world's art and literature have been those of expanding
horizons when ordinary men found in the arts the model and
revelation of their humanity. Precisely because they wear the
warmth and color of the senses, the arts are probably the strongest
and deepest of all educative forces. The spread of music in our
times carries untold good, but the movies have rarely equaled
this side of the radio's accomplishment. And however many op-

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Education in the United States

portunities museums and libraries offer, these, like the advanced
course or special teacher in school, are on the whole Jeffersonian,
appealing to the naturally elect. Yet it seems clear that general
education, as making for an enfranchisement of spirit among all
Americans, will fail in the schools unless it extends to the com-
munity.

Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism

WE pause now to draw together and generalize the points so
far made, because, together with what will be said in the next
chapter on the organization of knowledge, they will be recurrent
themes in all that follows. This and the next chapter largely state
questions; the four later chapters look to solutions. Or perhaps
solution is too strong a word. Education, like all society's prime
needs, changes as society changes. Yet, since the general character
of a culture changes more slowly and human nature more slowly
still, if at all, there exist also relatively constant elements in edu-
cation. The most that one can do is therefore, like Long John
Silver looking for treasure, to triangulate the major features of
the more and the less changing. But to do so is not to find guar-
anteed solutions: it is only to look in the direction inwhich
they lie.

It was said at the start that the high school's chief problem
followed at once from its own explosive growth and from the not
less explosive changes taking place outside it. These two cate-
gories are not exact; certainly they are not mutually exclusive,
and facets of the same historical and social movements appear
under both. Yet the consequences for the school system when
the attempt was made to realize the ideal of universal free educa-
tion were in fact immeasurably heightened by the setting of ever-
increased urbanization and industrialization in which the attempt
was carried out. If related, then, these, as it were, inner and outer
movements are distinct in themselves and have raised distinct
problems.

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General Education in a Free Society

The first and inner movement the sheer numerical growth
of the high school at something like thirty times the rate of the
country at large meant that there came into it a number and
variety of students far greater than any system had ever before
tried to cope with. There were few or no guideposts, and when
the traditional academic subjects proved unsuitable for vast num-
bers of students, the curriculum was widened to include a thou-
sand watered-down versions of these as well as a thousand new
vocational and practical subjects. The result was, and is, a parcel-
ing, an atomization of the curriculum which, if it reflects the
actual variations among students, tends if anything to enhance
them by dividing man from man in their basic preparations for
life. This tendency has been the stronger because the mechanism
whereby the stretching of the curriculum was carried out the
course -unit system likewise emphasized separateness: both a
separateness of subject from subject within the high school as a
whole, with the resulting presumption that any combination of
subjects makes an equally good education; and a separateness of
course from course in any student's program, with the resulting
danger that it lack roundedness and cohesion. The two sides of
the problem thus stand forth clearly: on the one, a need for di-
versity, even a greater diversity than exists at present in the still
largely bookish curriculum, since nothing else will match the
actual range of intelligence and background among students; and
on the other, a need for some principle of unity, since without
it the curriculum flies into pieces and even the studies of any one
student are atomic or unbalanced or both.

Jointly these opposite needs evidently point to one solution:
a scheme of relationship between subjects which shall be similar
for all students yet capable of being differently carried out for
different students. Within it there must be place for both special
and general education: for those subjects which divide man from
man according to their particular functions and for those which
unite man and man in their common humanity and citizenship.
This scheme, further, should provide a continuing bond of train-
ing and outlook not only between all members of the high school
but also between the great majority who stop at high school and

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Education in the United States

the minority who go on to college, such that their education
should not differ in kind but only in degree. It is this scheme,
like our society itself, simple in larger outline yet infinitely varied
and complex in detail, which it is the main burden of the follow-
ing chapters to expound.

The second and outer movement the vast social transforma-
tion which attended the lesser, though still great, transformation
of the school system brought sharply forward the question,
what is the school's peculiar function in the entirety of a young
person's education? It is often despairingly said that the modern
school, being expected, like Atlas, to carry the world, is thereby
prevented from carrying on its own true work. The question
arises out of the inherent specialism of modern and particularly of
city life, which leaves few leisurely reaches where young people
learn unconsciously from nature and by watching older people.
Nature has retreated, and work is for the most part done away
from their gaze (with exceptions, notably the mechanic in a small
garage, admirable teacher). Hence this extension of the school's
activity has come about less in the country than in the city
which is not to say that country schools, for the most part poor
and small, do not have their own serious needs, in turn involving
the question of federal support. But in the city, well-to-do com-
munities have in fact shown their belief that the school must find
and furnish substitutes for what modern life takes away. ath-
letics to replace work and the mere physical struggle for survival,
avocations and handicrafts to replace chores and the skill of
doing, even a small community in the school to replace the se-
curity of church and village. There is no good in complaining
that the school is Atlas. People will not let it cease to be such
until more generally benign influences surround the young
influences which, in Plato's charming words, "like a wind breath-
ing health from sound regions, insensibly from earliest childhood
lead them to likeness and sympathy with the life of reason." The
question, rather, is how the school can furnish such influences to
the poor as well as to the well-to-do.

There are unquestionable risks in such an extension of scope,
the elephantine growth of athletics, for instance, or, in colleges,

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General Education in a Free Society

the strange flourishing of fraternities. You cannot, it is clear,
gather together masses of young people and expect them all to
behave like young Aristotles. Young people have always brought
with them to school the unsettlements and vapors of adolescence,
and now when nearly all go to high school the scope of these
unsettlements is multiplied geometrically. It is one thing to have
a relatively few students of superior gifts and stable backgrounds;
it is another to have the present Babel of gifts and backgrounds.
Granting, then, that it is at best not easy for the young to see
their way through the mists of feeling, it follows that the school
cannot hope to accomplish its proper tasks without allowing for
and somehow harnessing these feelings. Hence the only way of
escaping the excesses of athletics, cliques, and general anti-intel-
lectualism these gropings, pathetic or harmful, for outlets which
neither the community nor the school otherwise provides is to
recognize what the school legitimately should provide. This
recognition in turn brings one face to face with teaching in all
its varied phases.

It was argued earlier that the low pay of teaching could not be
considered as something apart from the caliber and devotion of
those who go into it, and that the one would rise only with the
other. If the sufferings of our time have shown anything, they
have shown that human beings are not led by economic motives
alone but equally by visions, however distorted, of causes to be
served. The failures of teaching are not therefore ascribable only
to the pay, however cryingly it demands improvement, but to the
failure of colleges, teachers' colleges, and the country as a whole
to make of teaching the high calling that it must be. But, it was
further argued, improvement will also depend on a sound and
thoroughgoing democracy in the schools. We understand by
democracy the interworking of two complementary forces, the
Jeffersonian and the Jacksonian, the one valuing opportunity as
the nurse of excellence, the other as the guard of equity. If,
therefore, equal opportunity no longer lies in the curriculum
alone but also in the wider functions which have been cast on the
school by the conditions of modern life, the commands of de-
mocracy extend to these as well. All are teachers, and all equally

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Education in the United States

necessary, who give to young people through the curriculum or
beyond it the opportunity which makes for completeness of life,
and improvement in teaching will depend on this wider vision
of who the teacher is.

Are Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism in fact complementary
or do they struggle against each other? Much of our future will
be written in the answer to this question. The terms are of course
vague and relative. Thus we have criticized the school system as
too Jeffersonian, because it gives quite different honor to aca-
demic and technical subjects from which students go on to rela-
tively assured futures, from any that it gives to subjects pursued
by humbler students. The standard of our education is a strongly
middle-class standard, which must disappoint and may embitter
those (perhaps half of all the students in the high school) who
find themselves cast for another role. Their good is still almost
wholly to be discovered. On the other hand, it can equally be said
that the high school is Jacksonian, in that it largely fails to find and
force the able young person. And the same, as has been noted,
applies to outer influences, radio and moving picture, which aim,
often calculatingly, at the mass. It has been gloomily said that
no man and no society can do two things well at the same time.
Certainly the human tendency is so to see one goal as to forget
the other, and writers on education have not uncommonly erred
with this fault, setting either a standard of culture which coolly
neglects the great mass or indulging in a flat and colorless egali-
tarianism. But the belief that one good is purchasable always and
only at the expense of another ultimately goes back to a belief in
the natural right of the stronger; it runs counter both to religious
faith and to the best experience of civilization. The hope of the
American school system, indeed of our society, is precisely that
it can pursue two goals simultaneously: give scope to ability and
raise the average. Nor are these two goals so far apart, if human
beings are capable of common sympathies.

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General Education in a Free Society

The Search for Unity

WE have said nothing hitherto and shall say little now about the
college, intentionally. However much higher and secondary
education may have in common, they differ in one decisive re-
spect: their relationship to what can be called the body of mod-
ern knowledge. Secondary education of course reflects this body
of knowledge. What students learn in high school now is some-
thing very different from what their parents learned. But the
school's task is, after all, largely timeless. You have to acquire
the outlooks and methods necessary for any knowledge before
you go on to fine distinctions between today and yesterday. The
school is a civilizing place in the fundamental sense of giving
young people the tools on which any civilization depends. The
college, on the other hand, stands in direct, almost mirrorlike
relationship to the state of knowledge, responding to its move-
ments, changing as it changes. That is not to say that the college
does not have its own civilizing tasks to perform; it has. Yet
these, if one can estimate such a thing, are secondary rather than
primary. Or at least they are so intertwined with the tasks of
learning and understanding as to be inseparable from them.
Hence, before saying anything profitable about colleges, it is
necessary to take the dizzy plunge into a consideration of reality
as seen by the modern mind; which is to say, into the view of
man and the world which emerges from modern knowledge and
which it is the business of colleges to convey. This plunge we
shall attempt in the next chapter. As was said at the start, the
whole question of general education has arisen not only out of
the expansion of the educational system and the changes of so-
ciety but out of the accompanying headlong growth of knowl-
edge also.

Yet, needless to say, the college has been far from unaffected
by the former two movements which we have traced in the

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Education in the United States

schools. A thirty-fold growth from 1870 to 1940, though less
than a ninetyf old, is still great, and it has brought much the same
impulse toward variation. So much so that the word, college,
though still probably meaning to most people the four-year lib-
eral college, means many other types of institutions too. It means
the agricultural college, the business college, the engineering col-
lege, the teachers' college. At the University of Chicago it means
the usual last two years of high school and the first two of college,
and at junior colleges it means the latter two years only. Even
within the six hundred and ninety or so liberal colleges through-
out the country the span of standards and offering is very wide,
and a further difference has tended to grow up between univer-
sity colleges (that is, those associated with universities and more
or less influenced by the resulting atmosphere of specialism) and
colleges existing by themselves. Add the growth of city colleges,
usually publicly supported, not to speak of the hive of institutions
comprising a state university, and in spite of all the selective
forces which come into play at the end of high school, there
results a variety hardly less than that of the school system. Thus
all that was said about the need, in the latter, for the binding,
integrative working of general education to check and counter-
balance its inevitable divisiveness applies to colleges as well. Not
less applicable to colleges is what was said about the impossibility
of finding one single method and substance of general education,
even though its higher aims be agreed on. Surely there is no
simple prescription, no one panacea equally effective for all col-
leges, but within broad limits each must work out its way for
itself. These limits are set by the spirit and intention of general
education as training in what unites, rather than in what divides,
modern man which in turn leads to the next chapter.

Again, this growth has divided any given college against itself,
the more so the bigger and more characteristically modern it is.
Two distinct and far-reaching steps have given the present col-
lege its form. The first, the so-called free elective system intro-
duced by the authoritative figure of President Eliot in the seven-
ties and eighties, opened finally to American students the floods
of specialized knowledge then streaming from European univer-

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General Education in a Free Society

sities but offered before then only to Americans who studied
abroad. This, the first long step away from the restricted cur-
riculum of earlier times, was entirely necessary, even inevitable.
But the exuberance of freedom to which it led raised difficulties.
If students could study anything that they chose within the now
very greatly expanded curriculum, what assurance was there of
coherence and intellectual discipline in their work? This disci-
pline might exist, but there might be simply a careless, indiscrimi-
nate tasting. Moved by such considerations, faculties as time
went on increasingly hedged the student's freedom by requiring
him to take a proportion of his work, varying in different col-
leges, in more or less closely related subjects. He was, to be sure,
likewise required to take work outside these subjects, but as the
scope and importance of the main field grew, these other require-
ments became more and more incidental. This, the so-called sys-
tem of "concentrating" or "majoring," represents the second step.
It is the system now in force in the great majority of American
colleges.

As was said, the main argument leading to its adoption was that
of intellectual discipline. If liberal education, so the argument
ran, could no longer mean knowledge of a common subject mat-
ter, it could at least mean experience of a common method. But
this argument has in recent times been subjected to increasing
criticism. Not only is it very doubtful whether the intellectual
discipline involved in all subjects, in chemistry, for instance, and
in literature, is identical or even very similar, but students' motives
in choosing and following any given subject have very commonly
proved to have little or nothing to do with intellectual discipline.
Rather, as modern life has come increasingly to rest on specialized
knowledge, the various fields of college study have in conse-
quence appeared simply as preparation for one or another posi-
tion in life. They have become, in short, for many, though by no
means for all, a kind of higher vocational training. We do not
here intend to defend or attack this vocationalism. It has, as said,
an obvious connection with modern life; it has perhaps an equal
connection with a state of democracy in which the hereditary
moneyed class is less strong and almost all young people have to

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Education in the United States

prepare themselves to make a living. But of this more later. Our
sole point here is that the rise of this partly, though not wholly,
vocational specialism has tended to take from the college what
theoretical unity it had. It is for this reason that the college was
said above to be divided against itself. Certainly, if the various
fields of study do not represent a common discipline or give
anything like a common view of life, then such unity as the col-
lege has must come chiefly from imponderable tradition or simple
gregariousness.

This, then, or something like this, is the present state: an enor-
mous variety of aim and method among colleges as a whole and
much the same variety on a smaller scale within any one college.
This condition, which seemingly robs liberal education of any
clear, coherent meaning, has for some time disturbed people and
prompted a variety of solutions. Sectarian, particularly Roman
Catholic, colleges have of course their solution, which was gen-
erally shared by American colleges until less than a century ago:
namely, the conviction that Christianity gives meaning and ulti-
mate unity to all parts of the curriculum, indeed to the whole life
of the college. Yet this solution is out of the question in publicly
supported colleges and is practically, if not legally, impossible in
most others. Some think it the Achilles' heel of democracy that,
by its very nature, it cannot foster general agreement on ulti-
mates, and perhaps must foster the contrary. But whatever one's
views, religion is not now for most colleges a practicable source
of intellectual unity.

A second solution has been sought in the tradition of Western
culture as embodied in the great writings of the European and
American past. There seems much that is fertile in this view and
we shall revert to it. But at first glance it appears to collide with
two difficulties: first, the great disparity of taste and ability
which exists even among college students (not to speak of high-
school students, to whom, as repeatedly said, any truly valid
scheme of unity must also extend) and, perhaps more important,
a doubt whether the spirit of innovation and change expressing
itself in a thousand modern forms is not itself as fundamental a
part of Western culture as the spirit of tradition.

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General Education in a Free Society

A third solution recognizes precisely this spirit of change. It
centers on contemporary life, and, casting off the formal divi-
sions of knowledge, tries to organize knowledge around actual
problems and questions which young people may be expected to
meet in mature life health, vocation, family, social issues, pri-
vate standards, and the like. The difficulty here is a somewhat
naive dismissal of the fact that a great many people have con-
tributed over a very long time to human knowledge, which in
consequence has a dignity, almost an austerity, calling for some
respect. Moreover, since conditions change, what assurance is
there that the problems which students study will resemble those
that they will meet? In general, relevance to the present seems
more valid as a point of view expressing a teacher's outlook and
emphasizing the inevitable bearing of knowledge on life than it
is as a unifying principle.

Finally, the pragmatist solution sees in science and the scientific
outlook this saving unity, urging that what is common to modern
knowledge is not so much any over-all scheme as a habit of
meeting problems in a detached, experimental, observing spirit.
Yet, if not the philosophers of pragmatism, at least their disciples
seem in practice, if one may put it so, not pragmatic enough.
That is, there is always a tendency in this type of thought to
omit as irrelevant the whole realm of belief and commitment by
which, to all appearances, much of human activity seems in fact
swayed. And if pragmatism be extended to include this realm of
value, then it runs the danger of losing its scientific character.
The question at bottom is whether the scientific attitude is in
truth applicable to the full horizon of life, and on this question
there is, to say the least, uncertainty.

Thus the search continues and must continue for some over-all
logic, some strong, not easily broken frame within which both
college and school may fulfill their at once diversifying and
uniting tasks. This logic must be wide enough to embrace the
actual richness and variegation of modern life a richness partly,
if not wholly, reflected in the complexity of our present educa-
tional system. It must also be strong enough to give goal and
direction to this system something much less clear at present.

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Education in the United States

It is evidently to be looked for in the character of American
society, a society not wholly of the new world since it came
from the old, not wholly given to innovation since it acknowl-
edges certain fixed beliefs, not even wholly a law unto itself since
there are principles above the state. This logic must further em-
body certain intangibles of the American spirit, in particular,
perhaps, the ideal of cooperation on the level of action irrespec-
tive of agreement on ultimates which is to say, belief in the
worth and meaning of the human spirit, however one may under-
stand it. Such a belief rests on that hard but very great thing,
tolerance not from absence of standards but through possession
of them.

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CHAPTER II

Theory of General Education

I
Heritage and Change

WE have tried so far to sketch in broad outline the growth of
American education and to indicate the factors which have de-
termined this growth. The very momentum of its development,
like that which has marked American life generally, left a legacy
of disturbance and maladjustment undreamed of in simpler times.
A passage from Machiavelli's Discourses comes to mind in which,
after asking why the Roman Republic showed signs of confusion
in the period of its fastest growth, he observes that such confusion
was inevitable in so vigorous a state. "Had the Roman Common-
wealth/' he concludes, "grown to be more tranquil, this incon-
venience would have resulted that it must at the same time have
grown weaker, since the road would have been closed to that
greatness to which it came. For in removing the causes of her
tumults, Rome must have interfered with the causes of her
growth." Just so in the United States, the most ideally planned
educational system would have found itself in conflict with the
unforeseen forces set loose by the growth and development of
the country. But this very growth, the source of the gravest
problems to education, is at the same time the index of its strength
and promise.

In order to pass judgment on the actualities of education and
to make reasonable proposals for revising the present system, it is
necessary to have an insight, however tentative, into the ideal
aims of education in our society. The present chapter will ac-
cordingly consider what can, perhaps overformally, be called a

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Theory of General Education

philosophy of American education, and especially that part of it
which is general education.

It was remarked at the end of the previous chapter that a su-
preme need of American education is for a unifying purpose and
idea. As recently as a century ago, no doubt existed about such
a purpose: it was to train the Christian citizen. Nor was there
doubt how this training was to be accomplished. The student's
logical powers were to be formed by mathematics, his taste by
the Greek and Latin classics, his speech by rhetoric, and his ideals
by Christian ethics. College catalogues commonly began with a
specific statement about the influence of such a training on the
mind and character. The reasons why this enviable certainty
both of goal and of means has largely disappeared have already
been set forth. For some decades the mere excitement of enlarg-
ing the curriculum and making place for new subjects, new
methods, and masses of new students seems quite pardonably to
have absorbed the energies of schools and colleges. It is fashion-
able now to criticize the leading figures of that expansive time
for failing to replace, or even to see the need of replacing, the
unity which they destroyed. But such criticisms, if just in them-
selves, are hardly just historically. A great and necessary task of
modernizing and broadening education waited to be done, and
there is credit enough in its accomplishment. In recent times,
however, the question of unity has become insistent. \Ve are
faced with a diversity of education which, if it has many virtues,
nevertheless works against the good of society by helping to de-
stroy the common ground of training and outlook on which any
society depends.

It seems that a common ground between some, though not all,
of the ideas underlying our educational practice is the sense of
heritage. The word heritage is not here taken to mean mere
retrospection. The purpose of all education is to help students
live their own lives. The appeal to heritage is partly to the au-
thority, partly to the clarification of the past about what is im-
portant in the present. All Catholic and many Protestant institu-
tions thus appeal to the Christian view of man and history as
providing both final meaning and immediate standards for life.

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General Education in a Free Society

As observed at the outset, it is less than a century since such was
the common practice of American education generally, and cer-
tainly this impulse to mold students to a pattern sanctioned by the
past can, in one form or another, never be absent from education.
If it were, society would become discontinuous.

In this concern for heritage lies a close similarity between re-
ligious education and education in the great classic books. Ex-
ponents of the latter have, to be sure, described it as primarily a
process of intellectual discipline in the joint arts of word and
number, the so-called trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and
quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music). But, since
the very idea of this discipline goes back to antiquity and since
the actual books by which it is carried out are in fact the great
books of the Western tradition, it seems fairer, without denying
the disciplinary value of such a curriculum, to think of it as
primarily a process of opening before students the intellectual
forces that have shaped the Western mind. There is a sense in
which education in the great books can be looked at as a secular
continuation of the spirit of Protestantism. As early Protestant-
ism, rejecting the authority and philosophy of the medieval
church, placed reliance on each man's personal reading of the
Scriptures, so this present movement, rejecting the unique au-
thority of the Scriptures, places reliance on the reading of those
books which are taken to represent the fullest revelation of the
Western mind. But be this as it may, it is certain that, like reli-
gious education, education in the great books is essentially an
introduction of students to their heritage.

Nor is the sense of heritage less important, though it may be
less obvious, a part of education for modern democratic life. To
the degree that the implications of democracy are drawn forth
and expounded, to that degree the long-standing impulse of
education toward shaping students to a received ideal is still
pursued. Consider the teaching of American history and of
modern democratic life. However ostensibly factual such teach-
ing may be, it commonly carries with it a presupposition which
is not subject to scientific proof: namely, the presupposition that
democracy is meaningful and right. Moreover, since contem-

Theory of General Education

porary life is itself a product of history, to study it is to tread
unconsciously, in the words of the hymn, where the saints have
trod. To know modern democracy is to know something at least
of Jefferson, though you have not read him; to learn to respect
freedom of speech or the rights of the private conscience is not
to be wholly ignorant of the Areopagitica or the Antigone^
though you know nothing about them. Whether, as philosophers
of history argue, being conditioned by the present we inevitably
judge the past by what we know in the present (since otherwise
the past would be unintelligible) or whether human motives and
choices do not in reality greatly change with time, the fact re-
mains that the past and the present are parts of the same unrolling
scene and, whether you enter early or late, you see for the most
part the still-unfinished progress of the same issues.

Here, then, in so far as our culture is adequately reflected in
current ideas on education, one point about it is clear: it depends
in part on an inherited view of man and society which it is the
function, though not the only function, of education to pass on.
It is not and cannot be true that all possible choices are open to us
individually or collectively. We are part of an organic process,
which is the American and, more broadly, the Western evolution.
Our standards of judgment, ways of life, and form of govern-
ment all bear the marks of this evolution, which would accord-
ingly influence us, though confusedly, even if it were not under-
stood. Ideally it should be understood at several degrees of depth
which complement rather than exclude each other. To study the
American present is to discern at best the aims and purposes of a
free society animating its imperfections. To study the past is
immensely to enrich the meaning of the present and at the same
time to clarify it by the simplification of the writings and the
issues which have been winnowed from history. To study either
past or present is to confront, in some form or another, the
philosophic and religious fact of man in history and to recognize
the huge continuing influence alike on past and present of the
stream of Jewish and Greek thought in Christianity. There is
doubtless a sense in which religious education, education in the
great books, and education in modern democracy may be mutu-

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General Education in a Free Society

ally exclusive. But there is a far more important sense in which
they work together to the same end, which is belief in the idea
of man and society that we inherit, adapt, and pass on.

This idea is described in many ways, perhaps most commonly
in recent times, as that of the dignity of man. To the belief in
man's dignity must be added the recognition of his duty to his
fellow men. Dignity does not rest on any man as a being separate
from all other beings, which he in any case cannot be, but springs
from his common humanity and exists positively as he makes the
common good his own. This concept is essentially that of the
Western tradition: the view of man as free and not as slave, an
end in himself and not a means. It may have what many believe
to be the limitations of humanism, which are those of pride and
arise from making man the measure of all things. But it need not
have these limitations, since it is equally compatible with a re-
ligious view of life. Thus it is similar to the position described
at the end of the last chapter as cooperation without uniformity,
agreement on the good of man at the level of performance with-
out the necessity of agreement on ultimates. But two points have
now been added. First, thus stated, the goal of education is not
in conflict with but largely includes the goals of religious educa-
tion, education in the Western tradition, and education in modern
democracy. For these in turn have been seen to involve neces-
sary elements in our common tradition, each to a great extent
implied in the others as levels at which it can be understood.
Certainly no fruitful way of stating the belief in the dignity and
mutual obligation of man can present it as other than, at one and
the same time, effective in the present, emerging from the past,
and partaking of the nature not of fact but of faith. Second, it
has become clear that the common ground between these various
views namely, the impulse to rear students to a received idea
of the good is in fact necessary to education. It is impossible
to escape the realization that our society, like any society, rests
on common beliefs and that a major task of education is to per-
petuate them.

This conclusion raises one of the most fundamental problems
of education, indeed of society itself: how to reconcile this neces-

(4O

Theory of General Education

sity for common belief with the equally obvious necessity for
new and independent insights leading to change. We approach
here the one previously mentioned concept of education which
was not included under the idea of heritage: namely, the views
associated with the names of James and Dewey and having to do
with science, the scientific attitude, and pragmatism. This is
hardly the place to try to summarize this body of thought or even
to set forth in detail its application by Mr. Dewey to education.
To do so would be virtually to retrace the educational con-
troversies of the last forty years. But, at the risk of some injustice
to Mr. Dewey's thought as a whole, a few points can be made
about it. It puts trust in the scientific method of thought, the
method which demands that you reach conclusions from tested
data only, but that, since the data may be enlarged or the con-
clusions themselves combined with still other conclusions, you
must hold them only tentatively. It emphasizes that full truth is
not known and that we must be forever led by facts to revise our
approximations of it. As a feeling of commitment and of alle-
giance marks the sense of heritage, so a tone of tough-mindedness
and curiosity and a readiness for change mark this pragmatic
attitude.

Here, then, is a concept of education, founded on obedience
to fact and well disposed, even hospitable, to change, which ap-
pears at first sight the antithesis of any view based on the im-
portance of heritage. Such hostility to tradition well reflects one
side of the modern mind. It is impossible to contemplate the
changes even of the last decades, much less the major groundswell
of change since the Renaissance, without feeling that we face
largely new conditions which call for new qualities of mind and
outlook. Moreover, it is obviously no accident that this prag-
matic philosophy has been worked out most fully in the United
States. Yet, in spite of its seeming conflict with views of educa-
tion based on heritage, strong doubt exists whether the question-
ing, innovating, experimental attitude of pragmatism is in fact
something alien to the Western heritage or whether it is not, in
the broadest sense of the word, a part of it.

The rest of the present volume would hardly suffice for this

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General Education in a Free Society

sweeping subject. But it can be observed even here that we look
back on antiquity not simply out of curiosity but because ancient
thought is sympathetic to us. The Greek idea of an orderly
universe, of political freedom under rationally constructed laws,
and of the inner life itself as subject to the sway of reason, was
certainly not achieved without skepticism, observation, or the
test of experience. The ancient atomists and medical writers and,
to a large extent, Socrates himself relied precisely on induction
from observed facts. Socrates, the teacher and the gadfly of the
Athenian city, impressed on his pupils and the public at large the
duty of man to reflect on his beliefs and to criticize his presup-
positions. Socrates was an individualist proclaiming that man
should form his opinions by his own reasoning and not receive
them by social indoctrination. And yet, it was this same Socrates
who died in obedience to the judgment of the state, even though
he believed this judgment to be wrong. Again, historical Chris-
tianity has been expressly and consistently concerned with the
importance of this life on earth. The doctrine of the Incarnation,
that God took the form of man and inhabited the earth, declares
this concern. While perhaps for Greek thought, only the time-
less realm had importance, in Christian thought the process of
history is vested with absolute significance. If the ideal of de-
mocracy was rightly described above in the interwoven ideas of
the dignity of man (that is, his existence as an independent moral
agent) and his duty to his fellow men (that is, his testing by out-
ward performance), the debt of these two ideas to the similarly
interwoven commandments of the love of God and the love of
neighbor is obvious.

These evidences of a consistent and characteristic appeal
throughout Western history to the test of reason and experience
are not adduced for the purpose of minimizing the huge cre-
ativeness of the modern scientific age or of glozing over its actual
break from the past. In the well-known opening chapters of his
Science and the Modern World in which he inquires into the
origin of modern science, Mr. Whitehead pictures it as inspired
by a revolt against abstract reasoning and a respect for unique
fact. So considered, the first impulse of modern science was

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Theory of General Education

antirational or, better, antitheoretical, in the sense that it was a
reaction against the most towering intellectual system which the
West has known, namely, scholasticism. But be this question of
origin as it may, there is no doubt that the modern mind received
one of its characteristic bents in the empiricism, the passion for
observation, and the distrust of abstract reasoning which have
attended the origin and growth of science.

But there also seems no doubt that what happened was a shift,
perhaps to some degree a restoration, of emphasis within the
Western tradition itself rather than a complete change in its
nature. It is a mistake to identify the older Western culture with
traditionalism. Classical antiquity handed on a working system
of truth which relied on both reason and experience and was
designed to provide a norm for civilized life. Its import was
heightened and vastly intensified by its confluence with Chris-
tianity. But when, in its rigid systematization in the late Middle
Ages, it lost touch with experience and individual inquiry, it
violated its own nature and provoked the modernist revolt. The
seeming opposition that resulted between traditionalism and
modernism has been a tragedy for Western thought. Modernism
rightly affirms the importance of inquiry and of relevance to
experience. But as scholasticism ran the danger of becoming a
system without vitality, so modernism runs the danger of achiev-
ing vitality without pattern.

While, then, there are discontinuities between the classical and
the modern components of our Western culture, there are also
continuities. For instance, it would be wrong to construe the
scientific outlook as inimical to human values. Even if it were
true that science is concerned with means only, it would not
follow that science ignores the intrinsic worth of man. For the
values of human life cannot be achieved within a physical
vacuum; they require for their fulfillment the existence of ma-
terial conditions. To the extent that classical civilization failed
to mitigate the evils of poverty, disease, squalor, and a generally
low level of living among the masses, to that extent it failed to
liberate man. Conversely, to the extent that science, especially
in its medical and technological applications, has succeeded in

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General Education in a Free Society

dealing with these evils, it has contributed to the realization of
human values. Thus science has implemented the humanism
which classicism and Christianity have proclaimed.

Science has done more than provide the material basis of the
good life; it has directly fostered the spiritual values of human-
ism. To explain, science is both the outcome and the source of
the habit of forming objective, disinterested judgments based
upon exact evidence. Such a habit is of particular value in the
formation of citizens for a free society. It opposes to the arbi-
trariness of authority and "first principles" the direct and con-
tinuing appeal to things as they are. Thus it develops the qualities
of the free man. It is no accident that John Locke, who set forth
the political doctrine of the natural rights of man against estab-
lished authority, should have been also the man who rejected the
authority of innate ideas.

Students of antiquity and of the Middle Ages can therefore
rightly affirm that decisive truths about the human mind and its
relation to the world were laid hold of then, and yet agree that,
when new application of these truths was made through a more
scrupulous attention to fact, their whole implication and meaning
were immensely enlarged. Modern civilization has seen this en-
largement of meaning and possibility; yet it is not a new civiliza-
tion but the organic development of an earlier civilization. The
true task of education is therefore so to reconcile the sense of
pattern and direction deriving from heritage with the sense of
experiment and innovation deriving from science that they may
exist fruitfully together, as in varying degrees they have never
ceased to do throughout Western history.

Belief in the dignity and mutual obligation of man is the com-
mon ground between these contrasting but mutually necessary
forces in our culture. As was pointed out earlier, this belief is
the fruit at once of religion, of the Western tradition, and of the
American tradition. It equally inspires the faith in human reason
which is the basis for trust in the future of democracy. And if it
is not, strictly speaking, implied in all statements of the scientific
method, there is no doubt that science has become its powerful
instrument. In this tension between the opposite forces of herit-

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Theory of General Education

age and change poised only in the faith in man, lies something
like the old philosophic problem of the knowledge of the good.
If you know the good, why do you seek it? If you are ignorant
of the good, how do you recognize it when you find it? You
must evidently at one and the same time both know it and be
ignorant of it. Just so, the tradition which has come down to us
regarding the nature of man and the good society must inevitably
provide our standard of good. Yet an axiom of that tradition
itself is the belief that no current form of the received ideal is
final but that every generation, indeed every individual, must
discover it in a fresh form. Education can therefore be wholly
devoted neither to tradition nor to experiment, neither to the be-
lief that the ideal in itself is enough nor to the view that means are
valuable apart from the ideal. It must uphold at the same time
tradition and experiment, the ideal and the means, subserving,
like our culture itself, change within commitment.

General and Special Education

IN the previous section we have attempted to outline the unify-
ing elements of our culture and therefore of American education
as well. In the present section we shall take the next step of in-
dicating in what ways these cultural strands may be woven into
the fabric of education. Education is broadly divided into gen-
eral and special education; our topic now is the difference and
the relationship between the two. The term, general education,
is somewhat vague and colorless; it does not mean some airy
education in knowledge in general (if there be such knowledge),
nor does it mean education for all in the sense of universal educa-
tion. It is used to indicate that part of a student's whole educa-
tion which looks first of all to his life as a responsible human being
and citizen; while the term, special education, indicates that part
which looks to the student's competence in some occupation.
These two sides of life are not entirely separable, and it would

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General Education in a Free Society

be false to imagine education for the one as quite distinct from
education for the other more will be said on this point pres-
ently. Clearly, general education has somewhat the meaning of
liberal education, except that, by applying to high school as well
as to college, it envisages immensely greater numbers of students
and thus escapes the invidium which, rightly or wrongly, attaches
to liberal education in the minds of some people. But if one
cling to the root meaning of liberal as that which befits or helps
to make free men, then general and liberal education have iden-
tical goals. The one may be thought of as an earlier stage of the
other, similar in nature but less advanced in degree.

The opposition to liberal education both to the phrase and
to the fact stems largely from historical causes. The concept
of liberal education first appeared in a slave-owning society, like
that of Athens, in which the community was divided into free-
men and slaves, rulers and subjects. While the slaves carried on
the specialized occupations of menial work, the freemen were
primarily concerned with the rights and duties of citizenship.
The training of the former was purely vocational; but as the free-
men were not only a ruling but also a leisure class, their education
was exclusively in the liberal arts, without any utilitarian tinge.
The freemen were trained in the reflective pursuit of the good
life; their education was unspecialized as well as unvocational; its
aim was to produce a rounded person with a full understanding
of himself and of his place in society and in the cosmos.

Modern democratic society clearly does not regard labor as
odious or disgraceful; on the contrary, in this country at least, it
regards leisure with suspicion and expects its "gentlemen" to en-
gage in work. Thus we attach no odium to vocational instruc-
tion. Moreover, in so far as we surely reject the idea of freemen
who are free in so far as they have slaves or subjects, we are apt
strongly to deprecate the liberal education which went with the
structure of the aristocratic ideal. Herein our society runs the
risk of committing a serious fallacy. Democracy is the view that
not only the few but that all are free, in that everyone governs
his own life and shares in the responsibility for the management
of the community. This being the case, it follows that all human

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Theory of General Education

beings stand in need of an ampler and rounded education. The
task of modern democracy is to preserve the ancient ideal of
liberal education and to extend it as far as possible to all the mem-
bers of the community. In short, we have been apt to confuse
accidental with fundamental factors, in our suspicion of the
classical ideal. To believe in the equality of human beings is to
believe that the good life, and the education which trains the
citizen for the good life, are equally the privilege of all. And
these are the touchstones of the liberated man: first, is he free;
that is to say, is he able to judge and plan for himself, so that he
can truly govern himself? In order to do this, his must be a mind
capable of self-criticism; he must lead that self-examined life
which according to Socrates is alone worthy of a free man. Thus
he will possess inner freedom, as well as social freedom. Second,
is he universal in his motives and sympathies? For the civilized
man is a citizen of the entire universe; he has overcome provin-
cialism, he is objective, and is a Spectator of all time and all
existence." Surely these two are the very aims of democracy
itself.

But the opposition to general education does not stem from
causes located in the past alone. We are living in an age of spe-
cialism, in which the avenue to success for the student often lies
in his choice of a specialized career, whether as a chemist, or an
engineer, or a doctor, or a specialist in some form of business or
of manual or technical work. Each of these specialties makes an
increasing demand on the time and on the interest of the student.
Specialism is the means for advancement in our mobile social
structure; yet we must envisage the fact that a society controlled
wholly by specialists is not a wisely ordered society. We cannot,
however, turn away from specialism. The problem is how to
save general education and its values within a system where spe-
cialism is necessary.

The very prevalence and power of the demand for special
training makes doubly clear the need for a concurrent, balancing
force in general education. Specialism enhances the centrifugal
forces in society. The business of providing for the needs of
society breeds a great diversity of special occupations; and a

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General Education in a Free Society

given specialist does not speak the language of the other spe-
cialists. In order to discharge his duties as a citizen adequately, a
person must somehow be able to grasp the complexities of life as
a whole. Even from the point of view of economic success,
specialism has its peculiar limitations. Specializing in a vocation
makes for inflexibility in a world of fluid possibilities. Business
demands minds capable of adjusting themselves to varying situa-
tions and of managing complex human institutions. Given the
pace of economic progress, techniques alter speedily; and even
the work in which the student has been trained may no longer be
useful when he is ready to earn a living or soon after. Our con-
clusion, then, is that the aim of education should be to prepare
an individual to become an expert both in some particular voca-
tion or art and in the general art of the free man and the citizen.
Thus the two kinds of education once given separately to differ-
ent social classes must be given together to all alike.

In this epoch in which almost all of us must be experts in some
field in order to make a living, general education therefore as-
sumes a peculiar importance. Since no one can become an expert
in all fields, everyone is compelled to trust the judgment of other
people pretty thoroughly in most areas of activity. I must trust
the advice of my doctor, my plumber, my lawyer, my radio re-
pairman, and so on. Therefore I am in peculiar need of a kind of
sagacity by which to distinguish the expert from the quack, and
the better from the worse expert. From this point of view, the
aim of general education may be defined as that of providing the
broad critical sense by which to recognize competence in any
field. William James said that an educated person knows a good
man when he sees one. There are standards and a style for every
type of activity manual, athletic, intellectual, or artistic; and
the educated man should be one who can tell sound from shoddy
work in a field outside his own. General education is especially
required in a democracy where the public elects its leaders and
officials; the ordinary citizen must be discerning enough so that
he will not be deceived by appearances and will elect the candi-
date who is wise in his field.

Both kinds of education special as well as general con-

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Theory of General Education

tribute to the task of implementing the pervasive forces of our
culture. Here we revert to what was said at the start of this
chapter on the aims of education in our society. It was argued
there that two complementary forces are at the root of our cul-
ture: on the one hand, an ideal of man and society distilled from
the past but at the same time transcending the past as a standard
of judgment valid in itself, and, on the other hand, the belief that
no existent expressions of this ideal are final but that all alike call
for perpetual scrutiny and change in the light of new knowledge.
Specialism is usually the vehicle of this second force. It fosters
the open-mindedness and love of investigation which are the
wellspring of change, and it devotes itself to the means by which
change is brought about. The fact may not always be obvious.
There is a sterile specialism which hugs accepted knowledge and
ends in the bleakest conservatism. Modern life also calls for
many skills which, though specialized, are repetitive and certainly
do not conduce to inquiry. These minister to change but uncon-
sciously. Nevertheless, the previous statement is true in the sense
that specialism is concerned primarily with knowledge in action,
as it advances into new fields and into further applications.

Special education comprises a wider field than vocationalism;
and correspondingly, general education extends beyond the limits
of merely literary preoccupation. An example will make our
point clearer. A scholar let us say a scientist (whether student
or teacher) will, in the laudable aim of saving himself from
narrowness, take a course in English literature, or perhaps read
poetry and novels, or perhaps listen to good music and generally
occupy himself with the fine arts. All this, while eminently fine
and good, reveals a misapprehension. In his altogether unjustified
humility, the scientist wrongly interprets the distinction between
liberal and illiberal in terms of the distinction between the hu-
manities and the sciences. Plato and Cicero would have been
very much surprised to hear that geometry, astronomy, and the
sciences of nature in general, are excluded from the humanities.
There is also implied a more serious contempt for the liberal arts,
harking back to the fallacy which identifies liberal education with
the aristocratic ideal. The implication is that liberal education is

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General Education in a Free Society

something only genteel. A similar error is evident in the student's
attitude toward his required courses outside his major field as
something to "get over with/' so that he may engage in the busi-
ness of serious education, identified in his mind with the field of
concentration.

Now, a general education is distinguished from special educa-
tion, not by subject matter, but in terms of method and outlook,
no matter what the field. Literature, when studied in a technical
fashion, gives rise to the special science of philology; there is also
the highly specialized historical approach to painting. Specialism
is interchangeable, not with natural science, but with the method
of science, the method which abstracts material from its context
and handles it in complete isolation. The reward of scientific
method is the utmost degree of precision and exactness. But, as
we have seen, specialism as an educational force has its own
limitations; it does not usually provide an insight into general
relationships.

A further point is worth noting. The impact of specialism has
been felt not only in those phases of education which are neces-
sarily and rightly specialistic; it has affected also the whole
structure of higher and even of secondary education. Teachers,
themselves products of highly technical disciplines, tend to re-
produce their knowledge in class. The result is that each subject,
being taught by an expert, tends to be so presented as to attract
potential experts. This complaint is perhaps more keenly felt in
colleges and universities, which naturally look to scholarship. The
undergraduate in a college receives his teaching from professors
who, in their turn, have been trained in graduate schools. And
the latter are dominated by the ideal of specialization. Learning
now is diversified and parceled into a myriad of specialties. Cor-
respondingly, colleges and universities are divided into large
numbers of departments, with further specialization within the
departments. As a result, a student in search of a general course
is commonly frustrated. Even an elementary course is devised
as an introduction to a specialism within a department; it is sig-
nificant only as the beginning of a series of courses of advancing
complexity. In short, such introductory courses are planned for

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Theory of General Education

the specialist, not for the student seeking a general education.
The young chemist in the course in literature and the young
writer in the course in chemistry find themselves in thoroughly
uncomfortable positions so long as the purpose of these courses
is primarily to train experts who will go on to higher courses
rather than to give some basic understanding of science as it is
revealed in chemistry or of the arts as they are revealed in
literature.

It is most unfortunate if we envisage general education as
something formless that is to say, the taking of one course after
another; and as something negative, namely, the study of what is
not in a field of concentration. Just as we regard the courses in
concentration as having definite relations to one another, so
should we envisage general education as an organic whole whose
parts join in expounding a ruling idea and in serving a common
aim. And to do so means to abandon the view that all fields and
all departments are equally valuable vehicles of general educa-
tion. It also implies some prescription. At the least it means
abandoning the usual attitude of regarding "distribution" as a
sphere in which the student exercises a virtually untrammeled
freedom of choice. It may be objected that we are proposing to
limit the liberty of the student in the very name of liberal educa-
tion. Such an objection would only indicate an ambiguity in the
conception of liberal education. We must distinguish between
liberalism in education and education in liberalism. The former,
based as it is on the doctrine of individualism, expresses the view
that the student should be free in his choice of courses. But edu-
cation in liberalism is an altogether different matter; it is educa-
tion which has a pattern of its own, namely, the pattern associated
with the liberal outlook. In this view, there are truths which
none can be free to ignore, if one is to have that wisdom through
which life can become useful. These are the truths concerning
the structure of the good life and concerning the factual condi-
tions by which it may be achieved, truths comprising the goals
of the free society.

Finally, the problem of general education is one of combining
fixity of aim with diversity in application. It is not a question of

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General Education in a Free Society

providing a general education which will be uniform through the
same classes of all schools and colleges all over the country, even
were such a thing possible in our decentralized system. It is
rather to adapt general education to the needs and intentions of
different groups and, so far as possible, to carry its spirit into
special education. The effectiveness of teaching has always
largely depended on this willingness to adapt a central unvarying
purpose to varying outlooks. Such adaptation is as much in the
interest of the quick as of the slow, of the bookish as of the un-
bookish, and is the necessary protection of each. What is wanted,
then, is a general education capable at once of taking on many
different forms and yet of representing in all its forms the com-
mon knowledge and the common values on which a free society
depends.

Areas of Knowledge

WE have gradually moved from the less to the more specific,
until now we have reached the topic of actual outcomes of edu-
cation. In this section we shall deal with general education only;
and our question will take two forms: what characteristics (traits
of mind and character) are necessary for anything like a full and
responsible life in our society; and, by what elements of knowl-
edge are such traits nourished? These two questions, these two
aspects, are images of each other. We have repeatedly found
ourselves until now describing general education, at one time, as
looking to the good of man in society and, at another time, as
dictated by the nature of knowledge itself. There is no escape
from thus shifting from one face of the same truth to the other.
But temporarily and for the sake of clarity it may be useful to
separate the two questions and consider first the elements of
knowledge, and later the characteristics.

Tradition points to a separation of learning into the three
areas of natural science, social studies, and the humanities. The

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Theory of General Education

study of the natural sciences looks to an understanding of our
physical environment, so that we may have a suitable relation to
it. The study of the social sciences is intended to produce an
understanding of our social environment and of human institu-
tions in general, so that the student may achieve a proper rela-
tion to society not only the local but also the great society,
and, by the aid of history, the society of the past and even of the
future. Finally, the purpose of the humanities is to enable man
to understand man in relation to himself, that is to say, in his
inner aspirations and ideals.

While all this is obvious and even trite, it is hardly adequate.
Subject matters do not lend themselves to such neat distinctions.
To consider only one example, psychology, which has been clas-
sified as a natural science in the above list, surely has, or ought to
have, something to say about human nature. A more serious
flaw of this classification is that it conceives of education as the
act of getting acquainted with something, and so as the acquiring
of information. But information is inert knowledge. Yet, given
this limitation, such an approach has its merits because it directs
the student's attention to the useful truth that man must familiar-
ize himself with the environment in which nature has placed
him if he is to proceed realistically with the task of achieving the
good life.

A much better justification of the way in which the areas of
learning are divided is in terms of methods of knowledge. Let us
start with the difference between the natural sciences and the
humanities. The former describe, analyze, and explain; the latter
appraise, judge, and criticize. In the first, a statement is judged
as true or false; in the second, a result is judged as good or bad.
The natural sciences do not take it on themselves to evaluate the
worth of what they describe. The chemist is content to state the
actual structure of his compound without either praising or de-
ploring the fact. Natural science measures what can be measured,
and it operates upon its materials with the instruments of formal
logic and mathematics. Yet these latter are not themselves science
or even the final arbiters of science. Science serves a harsher
master the brute facts of physical reality. Logic and mathe-

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General Education in a Free Society

matics are triumphs of abstraction. These are the media by which
a scientific argument is pursued. But when the argument has
by these means yielded a solution, this in turn must meet the
question, u is it real?" "is it true?" By this final appeal to
things as they are, or as they appear to be, the argument stands
or falls.

In contrast to mathematics and the natural sciences, the human-
ities explore and exhibit the realm of value. For example, in
literature the student is presented with various ways of life, with
the tragic and the heroic outlook, or with the merely pathetic
and ridiculous. His imagination is stirred with vivid evocations
of ideals of action, passion, and thought, among which he may
learn to discriminate. The intelligent teacher will explore the
great arts and literatures in order to bring out the ideals toward
which man has been groping, confusedly yet stubbornly. And
of course the arts have done as much through form as through
content; they disclose varying standards of taste.

Although techniques have been developed for the study of
natural phenomena, no comparable progress has been made in our
insight into values. We can measure a physical body, but we
cannot measure an ideal, nor can we put critical standards under
a microscope so as to note all their elements with precision.
Science aims at precision and gets it. This is true, partly because
science will not bother itself with facts when these do not lend
themselves to the methods of exact observation. It limits itself
to events that recur and to things which permit measurement.
To the extent that an object is truly unique and occurs only
once it is not the stuff of science. For example, every society is
to a degree unique; hence the student of social phenomena is still
baffled in his search for strict uniformities.

To admit that a difference exists between the methods of
science and our insight into values is one thing; to go on from
there and assert that values are wholly arbitrary is a different and
wholly unjustified conclusion. It has been thought that, since
the words right and wrong as applied to ethical situations do not
have the same meaning as right and wrong when applied to
mathematical propositions, no rational criteria are involved; and

Theory of General Education

that one is at liberty to choose any set of standards more or less
from the air and apply them to the problems which come to
hand. Or by way of reaction some persons have gone to the
opposite extreme of setting up fixed dogmas and imposing them
by sheer authority. But standards are the reflection neither of
personal whims nor of dogmatic attitudes. In the realm of values,
critical analysis of complex situations is possible by rational
methods and in the light of what other men have thought upon
such matters. Here we return to what was said earlier in this
chapter about the twin contribution of heritage and innovation
to human beliefs. Starting with a few premises, for instance with
those involved in our commitment to a free society, the mind
can proceed to analyze the implications of these premises and
also to modify their initial meaning by the aid of experience.
While there can be no experimenting with ideals, there is ex-
perience of values in application, and there is heaping up of such
experience. While there can be no precise measurement, there is
intelligent analysis of codes and standards. While there are no
simple uniformities, there are moral principles which command
the assent of civilized men. Of all this more presently; our con-
clusion is that value-judgments are, or at least can be, rational in
so far as they are informed and disciplined; they are communi-
cable and can become matters of intelligent discussion and
persuasion.

Finally, on this basis the social studies may be said to combine
the methods of the natural sciences and of the humanities, and to
use both explanation and evaluation. For instance, the historian
is obviously concerned with facts and events and with the causal
relations between happenings; yet he is no less concerned with
values. A historical fact is not merely a fact: it is a victory or a
defeat, an indication of progress or of retrogression, it is a mis-
fortune or good fortune. We do not mean by this that a his-
torian passes moral judgments on events and nations. We do
mean that a historian is selective; that out of the infinity of
events he chooses those that have a bearing on man's destiny. A
similar situation is disclosed in economics, which is a judicious
mixture, not always acknowledged or even realized, of factual

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General Education in a Free Society

objective study and normative judgment. The classical, if not
the contemporary, economist is engaged on the one hand in a
description and analysis of this or that economic institution, and
on the other hand with a criticism of what he describes and
analyzes in the light of the norm of a sound economy. From this
point of view the object of philosophy would appear to be the
bringing together of both facts and values. Philosophy asks the
question: what is the place of human aspirations and ideals in the
total scheme of things?

The method of science can be set off against the method of
social studies and humanities taken together in the following way.
In science, new findings are constantly being made in such a
way that the sum of these findings constitutes the current view
of truth. Science is knowledge for which an exact standard of.
truth exists; as a result, within any particular present there is
common agreement about what is scientific truth; or if the agree-
ment is lacking there are determinate criteria commonly agreed
upon, by the application of which the issue can be settled. But
in the other two fields there is often no common agreement as to
what is valid within any given present; there is diversity of
schools and doctrines, the reason being that a standard of exact
truth or exact Tightness is lacking. In the sciences, thought is
progressive; the later stage corrects the earlier and includes the
truth of the earlier. Were Galileo able to return to the land of
the living, who doubts that he would regard later changes in
physical theory as an improvement on his own? In consequence,
the history of its thought is strictly irrelevant to science. But it
is impossible to say with the same assurance that our philosophy
or art, though presumably better than the cave man's, is better
than that of the Greeks or of the men of the Renaissance. The
work of any genius in art or philosophy or literature represents
in some sense a complete and absolute vision. Goethe does not
render Sophocles obsolete, nor does Descartes supersede Plato.
The geniuses that follow do not so much correct preceding in-
sights as they supply alternative but similarly simple and total
insights from new perspectives. For this reason historical knowl-
edge has a special importance in philosophy, and the achieve-

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Theory of General Education

ments of the past have a significance for the arts and literature
which is certainly not true of science.

At this point the impatient reader will interject that the dis-
tinctions which we have made do not really distinguish. We
have said that literature exhibits life as it might be; yet is it not a
fact that literature also depicts life as it is? We have said that
economics is concerned with norms as well as actualities; yet
surely mathematical economics is an analytical study and nothing
else. And conversely, the reader may add, it is false that science
is wholly restricted to the techniques of measurement. The very
method of science, the way in which it defines a fact and its
essential presuppositions, is not subject to scientific proof. All
this we admit without reservation. The distinctions we have
made are rough and inexact; the total area of learning is more
like a spectrum along which the diverse modes of thought are
combined in varying degrees, approximating to purity only at
the extreme ends.

Nevertheless, these distinctions retain their importance at
least for pragmatic, that is, educational reasons. If it is true that
in questions of government the words right and wrong, true and
false, lack the exactitude which they have in questions of mathe-
matics, the fact must be of the essence of teaching government
and history. Clearly, education will not look solely to the giving
of information. Information is of course the basis of any knowl-
edge, but if both the nature of truth and the methods of asserting
it differ as between the areas, the fact must be made fully ap-
parent. As Mr. Whitehead has said, a student should not be
taught more than he can think about. Selection is the essence of
teaching. Even the most compendious survey is only the rudest
culling from reality. Since the problem of choice can under no
circumstances be avoided, the problem becomes what, rather than
how much, to teach; or better, what principles and methods to
illustrate by the use of information. The same conflict between
the factual aspects of a subject and the need of insight into the
kind of truth with which it deals arises in an acute form in that
most factual of disciplines, natural science itself. While a heaping
up of information is peculiarly necessary in the teaching of

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General Education in a Free Society

icience, information is not enough. Facts must be so chosen as to
:onvey not only something of the substance of science but, also
md above all, of its methods, its characteristic achievements, and
ts limitations. To the extent that a student becomes aware of
:he methods he is using, and critically conscious of his presuppo-
;itions, he learns to transcend his specialty and generates a liberal
outlook in himself.

Traits of Mind

the time of his examination the average student hardly
remembers more than 75 per cent of what he was taught. If he
were a sophomore when he took the course, how much does he
recall by the time of his graduation, how much five years later,
how much, or how little, when he returns on his twenty-fifth
reunion? Pondering on all this, the pessimist might well conclude
that education is a wholly wasteful process. He would of course
be wrong, for the simple reason that education is not a process of
stuffing the mind with facts. Yet he would be partly right be-
cause the student soon forgets not only many facts but even
some general ideas and principles. No doubt we are exaggerating.
Those students particularly who have been able to unite what
they learned in school or college with later studies or with their
jobs do retain a surprising amount of information. Nevertheless,
the real answer to the pessimist is that education is not merely the
imparting of knowledge but the cultivation of certain aptitudes
and attitudes in the mind of the young. As we have said earlier,
education looks both to the nature of knowledge and to the good
of man in society. It is to the latter aspect that we shall now
turn our attention more particularly to the traits and charac-
teristics of mind fostered by education.

By characteristics we mean aims so important as to prescribe
how general education should be carried out and which abilities
should be sought above all others in every part of it. These

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Theory of General Education

abilities, in our opinion, are: to think effectively, to communicate
thought, to make relevant judgments, to discriminate among
values. They are not in practice separable and are not to be
developed in isolation. Nor can they be even analyzed in separa-
tion. Each is an indispensable coexistent function of a sanely
growing mind. Nonetheless, since exposition requires that one
thing be discussed at one time, our description of these abilities
must take them up in turn.

By effective thinking we mean, in the first place, logical think-
ing: the ability to draw sound conclusions from premises. Yet
by logical thinking we do not mean the equipment of the special-
ist or what a student would learn by taking a course in formal
logic. We are concerned with the student who is going to be a
worker, or a businessman, or a professional man, and who does
not necessarily look forward to a career in scholarship or in pure
science. As a plain citizen he will practice his logical skills in
practical situations in choosing a career, in deciding whom to
vote for, or what house to buy, or even in choosing a wife. But
perhaps the last case is just the point where logical skills fail,
although European parents might disagree.

Logical thinking is the capacity to extract universal truths
from particular cases and, in turn, to infer particulars from gen-
eral laws. More strictly, it is the ability to discern a pattern of
relationships on the one hand to analyze a problem into its
component elements, and on the other to recombine these, often
by the use of imaginative insight, so as to reach a solution. Its
prototype is mathematics which, starting with a few selected
postulates, makes exact deductions with certainty. Logical think-
ing is involved to a degree in the analysis of the structure of a
painting as well as in that of a geometrical system. In moving
toward a solution, the trained mind will have a sharp eye for the
relevant factors while zealously excluding all that is irrelevant;
and it will arrange the relevant factors according to weight. For
instance, in voting during a presidential election our citizen
should consider whether the candidate has sound policies,
whether he has the ability to get on with Congress, whether he
has a good grasp of international relations, and, in these troubled

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General Education in a Free Society

times, whether he has an understanding of military strategy.
These are some of the factors which are relevant to the problem
in hand. But the looks of the candidate most probably, and his
religious denomination surely, are irrelevant. Prejudice brings in
irrelevancies and logic should keep them out.

Effective thinking, while starting with logic, goes further so
as to include certain broad mental skills. Thus an effective
thinker is a man who can handle terms and concepts with skill
and yet does not confuse words with things; he is empirical in
the widest sense of the word, looking outward to nature. He is
not satisfied merely with noting the facts, but his mind ever soars
to implications. He knows when he knows and when he does
not; he does not mistake opinion for knowledge. Furthermore,
effective thinking includes the understanding of complex and
fluid situations, in dealing with which logical methods are inade-
quate as mental tools. Of course thinking must never violate the
laws of logic, but it may use techniques beyond those of exact
mathematical reasoning. In the fields of the social studies and
history, and in the problems of daily life, there are large areas
where evidence is incomplete and may never be completed.
Sometimes the evidence may be also untrustworthy; but, if the
situation is practical, a decision must be made. The scientist has
been habituated to deal with properties which can be abstracted
from their total background and with variables which are few
and well defined. Consequently, where the facts are unique and
unpredictable, where the variables are numerous and their inter-
actions too complicated for precise calculation, the scientist is
apt to throw up his hands in despair and perhaps turn the situa-
tion over to the sentimentalist or the mystic. But surely he would
be wrong in so doing; for the methods of logical thinking do not
exhaust the resources of reason. In coping with complex and
fluid situations we need thinking which is relational and which
searches for cross bearings between areas; this is thinking in a
context. By its use it is possible to reach an understanding of
historical and social materials and of human relations, although
not with the same degree of precision as in the case of simpler
materials and of recurring events. As Aristotle says, "It is the

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mark of an educated man to expect no more exactness than the
subject permits."

A further element in effective thinking is the imagination, by
which we mean whatever is distinctive in the thinking of the
poet. Logical thinking is straight, as opposed to crooked, think-
ing; and that of the poet may be described as curved thinking.
Where the scientist operates with abstract conceptions the poet
employs sensuous images; imagination is the faculty of thinking
in terms of concrete ideas and symbols. Instead of reading a
prosaic analysis of exuberant vitality, we may get a direct vision
of it in Manet's portrait of the boy with the flute. We may
study human nature in the psychologist's abstract accounts of it,
or we may see it in the vivid presentations of imagined individu-
als like Othello, Becky Sharp, Ulysses, and Anna Karenina. The
reader might demur that imagination has little to do with effec-
tive thinking. Yet the imagination is most valuable in the field
of human relations. Statistics are useful, but statistics alone will
not carry us very far in the understanding of human beings. We
need an imagination delicately sensitive to the hopes and the
fears, the qualities and the flaws of our fellow man, and which
can evoke a total personality in its concrete fullness. In practical
matters, imagination supplies the ability to break with habit and
routine, to see beyond the obvious and to envisage new alter-
natives; it is the spur of the inventor and the revolutionary, no
less than of the artist.

It may be noted that the three phases of effective thinking,
logical, relational, and imaginative, correspond roughly to the
three divisions of learning, the natural sciences, the social stud-
ies, and the humanities, respectively.

Communication the ability to express oneself so as to be
understood by others is obviously inseparable from effective
thinking. In most thinking, one is talking to oneself; and
good speech and writing are the visible test and sign of good
thinking. Conversely, to speak clearly one must have clear ideas.
You cannot say something unless you have something to say;
but in order to express your ideas properly you also need some
skill in communication. There is something else too: the honest

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intent to make your ideas known, as against the desire to deceive
or merely to conceal. Communication is not speaking only but
listening as well; you cannot succeed in communicating your
ideas unless the other person wishes to hear and knows how to
listen. As there are two kinds of language, oral and written,
communication breaks up into the four related skills of speaking
and listening, writing and reading.

Communication is that unrestricted exchange of ideas within
the body politic by which a prosperous intellectual economy is
secured. In its character as the sharing of meanings it is the in-
strument by which human beings are welded into a society, both
the living with the living and the living with the dead. In a free
and democratic society the art of communication has a special
importance. A totalitarian state can obtain consent by force;
but a democracy must persuade, and persuasion is through
speech, oral or other. In a democracy issues are aired, talked out
of existence or talked into solution. Failure of communication
between the citizens, or between the government and the public,
means a breakdown in the democratic process. Nevertheless,
whereas people have been brought together nearer than ever
before, in a physical sense, by the improvement of mechanisms of
transportation, it cannot be said that mutual understanding
among individuals and among peoples has made a corresponding
advance. Skills, crafts, professions, and scholarly disciplines are
apt to surround themselves by high walls of esoteric jargon.
Other barriers are erected through the tendency to convert
communication into propaganda, whether it be political propa-
ganda, or economic propaganda, as for instance in some types of
advertising. Thus, effective communication depends on the
possession not only of skills such as clear thinking and cogent
expression but of moral qualities as well, such as candor.

In older days, a course on rhetoric was a normal part of the
curriculum. Rhetoric to us suggests oratory, and today we are
suspicious of or at least indifferent to oratory. Yet the art of
rhetoric meant the simple skill of making one's ideas clear and
cogent; it did not necessarily mean high-flown speeches. The
simplest example of communication is conversation. It is a truism

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to say that conversation is a lost art. The question is, where was
it lost? If we carry on less, or less good, conversation than
our ancestors did, is it because we have lost the art, or because,
having become technicians, we have little to say that is suitable
for general conversation, or because we are much more interested
in doing things driving, for example, or playing bridge?
Learned persons are apt to disparage conversation as trivial or
frivolous, but unjustly so. If you are looking for the uncovering
of important truths during a dinner party, of course you may be
disappointed; but that is because you will be looking for the
wrong thing. The contribution of general conversation is the
revelation and impact of personality. While nothings are being
bandied about and trivial words, like the lightest balloons, are
launched into the air, contact with personalities is being achieved
through characteristic inflections and emphases, through readi-
ness or shyness of response. In conversation the idea is insepar-
able from the man; conversation is useful because it is the most
unforced and natural means of bringing persons together into a
society. Beyond its social function, conversation is a delight in
itself. It is an art, yet it loses its value if it becomes artificial. Its
essence is spontaneity, impetus, movement; the words of a con-
versation are evanescent, things of the moment, while written
words are formalized, rigid, and fixed. Starting with simple things
like the weather and minor personal happenings, it proceeds to
weave a pattern of sentiments and ideas, and through these of
persons, which is fugitive just because it is alive.

Perhaps we have wandered too far from the serious or should
we say the ponderous aspects of our problem. Yet we had a
point to make: that language needs to be neither high learning
nor high literature in order to be communication. What we have
in mind is the language of a businessman writing a plain and
crisp letter, of a scientist making a report, of a citizen asking
straight questions, of human beings arguing together on some
matter of common interest.

The making of relevant judgments involves the ability of the
student to bring to bear the whole range of ideas upon the area of
experience. It is not now a question of apprehending more rela-

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tionships within ideas but of applying these to actual facts. The
most competent instructor of military science is not necessarily
the best officer in the field. An adequate theory of ball playing
is conceivable, but an abstract knowledge of it would not make a
good ballplayer any more than a course on poetics, however
good, would make a good poet. It is not the power to distinguish
or state the universal formula, for separated contemplation, which
heightens our skill. It is the power to use the formula in the new
concrete situations as they fleet past us which education aims to
advance. In Plato's myth the philosopher who has obtained the
vision of the good must return to the cave and use his vision in
order to guide himself among the shadows. Initially and in-
evitably he is confused; only after long habituation is he able to
find his way around and properly to apply his concepts to his
concrete experience. There is no rule to be learned which could
tell the student how to apply rules to cases; the translation from
theory to practice involves an art all its own and requires the
skill which we call sagacity or judgment.

To some degree every school or college is separated from life
by high walls, visible or invisible; it holds reality at arm's length.
And up to a point this is necessary and proper. While it is true
that the present is our only fact, nevertheless we cannot see the
present so long as we are immersed in it; we need the perspective
afforded by distance in time and in space. One of the aims of
education is to break the stranglehold of the present upon the
mind. On the other side is the fact that youth is instinctive and
ardent; to subject youth to a steady diet of abstractions alone
would be cruel and unnatural. Moreover, abstractions in them-
selves are meaningless unless connected with experience; and for
this reason all education is in some sense premature. The adult
who rereads his great authors realizes how much he had missed of
their meaning when he read them in school or college. Now his
reading is more rewarding because his range of experience is
greater. One might conceive fancifully of another scheme of
life in which work comes first and education begins later, say at
forty-five. The advantages of this scheme are obvious. Not only
would the mature student be amply equipped with the depth of

Theory of General Education

experience necessary for the understanding of the great authors,
but the financial problem would be solved. The student would
have saved enough money from his work, or perhaps his children
would support him.

But such Utopias are not for us; we have to deal with harsh
realities. Education must be so contrived that the young, during
the very process of their schooling, will realize the difference
between abstractions and facts and will learn to make the transi-
tion from thought to action. A young man who has been nour-
ished with ideas exclusively will be tempted by the sin of intel-
lectual pride, thinking himself capable of dealing with any
problem, independently of experience. When he later comes into
contact with things, he will stumble or perhaps in self-defense
withdraw into sterile cleverness. As we have seen, the aptitude
of making relevant judgments cannot be developed by theoretical
teaching; being an art, it comes from example, practice, and
habituation. The teacher can do a great deal nonetheless; he can
relate theoretical content to the student's life at every feasible
point, and he can deliberately simulate in the classroom situations
from life. Finally, he can bring concrete reports of actual cases
for discussion with the students. The essential thing is that the
teacher should be constantly aware of the ultimate objectives,
never letting means obscure ends, and be persistent in directing
the attention of the student from the symbols to the things they
symbolize.

Discrimination among values involves choice. The ability to
discriminate in choosing covers not only awareness of different
kinds of value but of their relations, including a sense of relative
importance and of the mutual dependence of means and ends. It
covers also much that is analogous to method in thinking; for
example, the power to distinguish values truly known from values
received only from opinion and therefore not in the same way
part of the fabric of experience. Values are of many kinds. There
are the obvious values of character, like fair play, courage, self-
control, the impulse of beneficence and humanity; there are the
intellectual values, like the love of truth and the respect for the
intellectual enterprise in all its forms; there are the aesthetic

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values, like good taste and the appreciation of beauty. As for the
last, people are apt to locate beauty in picture galleries and in
museums and to leave it there; it is equally, if not more, important
to seek beauty in ordinary things, so that it may surround one's
life like an atmosphere.

Add to all this that the objective of education is not just
knowledge of values but commitment to them, the embodiment
of the ideal in one's actions, feelings, and thoughts, no less than an
intellectual grasp of the ideal. The reader may objec. that we are
proposing a confusion, that we are suggesting the turning of
school or college into a moral reformatory or a church. For is
not the purpose of educational institutions to train the mind and
the mind only? Yet it is not easy, indeed it is impossible, to
separate effective thinking from character. An essential factor in
the advancement of knowledge is intellectual integrity, the sup-
pression of all wishful thinking and the strictest regard for the
claims of evidence. The universal community of educated men
is a fellowship of ideals as well as of beliefs. To isolate the activ-
ity of thinking from the morals of thinking is to make sophists
of the young and to encourage them to argue for the sake of per-
sonal victory rather than of the truth. We are not so naive as to
suggest that theoretical instruction in the virtues will automati-
cally make a student virtuous. Rather, we assert that the best
way to infect the student with the zest for intellectual integrity is
to put him near a teacher who is himself selflessly devoted to the
truth; so that a spark from the teacher will, so to speak, leap
across the desk into the classroom, kindling within the student
the flame of intellectual integrity, which will thereafter sustain
itself.

The problem of moral values and character is more complex.
Here the college does not play quite the same role as the school.
Clearly we have a right to expect the school to be engaged di-
rectly in moral education. But although the college shares in this
responsibility, it cannot be expected to use the same direct ap-
proach. The college will have to confine itself to providing a
proper discrimination of values and will trust to the Socratic
dictum that the knowledge of the good will lead to a commit-

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ment to the good. Nevertheless, we must recognize a difference
between the responsibility of both school and college to train the
intellect and their responsibility to form character. In some sense,
the former responsibility is a unique one for the educational in-
stitution. But in the sphere of moral instruction the school shares
its responsibilities with numerous other institutions, of which the
family is the most important. Moreover, the school's responsi-
bility is less than that of the family in this field. To use an
earlier figure there is danger in regarding the school as a mod-
ern Atlas to whom is entrusted the bearing of the whole task of
the formation of man. To change the metaphor, a wise society
does not put all its eggs in one basket. By the same token, the
school cannot remain uninterested in the task of moral education.
Just as liberal education, while strictly liberal, must somehow be
oriented toward vocationalism, so in this general way will school
and college be oriented toward moral character.

Discrimination in values is developed by the study of all the
three areas of learning. We have seen that the humanities point
both to moral and to aesthetic values. It may be true, as we have
said earlier, that ethical neutrality is a guiding rule for the his-
torian as scholar. Nevertheless, the historian or social scientist,
as teacher, should probably go further and present to the student
the human past and human institutions not merely as facts but as
attempted embodiments of the good life in its various phases. In
the natural sciences facts are studied in abstraction from values.
But this separation, while pragmatically valid, leads to disaster
if treated as final. Values are rooted in facts; and human ideals
are somehow a part of nature.

5

The Good Man and the Citizen

GENERAL education, we repeat, must consciously aim at these
abilities: at effective thinking, communication, the making of
relevant judgments, and the discrimination of values. As was

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noted earlier, one of the subtlest and most prevalent effects of
specialism has been that, through its influence, subjects have
tended to be conceived and taught with an eye, so to speak, to
their own internal logic rather than to their larger usefulness to
students. In a course in history, for example, little concern will
be felt for a student's ability to express himself, which will be
left to English, or for his ability to think logically, which will
fall to mathematics. Good teachers will, to be sure, always say
of their subject that it subserves these higher aims, and to their
great credit many do seek these aims. But the organization of
knowledge into rigid, almost autonomous units, w r orks against
them. One of the few clear facts about the unclear and much dis-
puted question of the transfer of powers from one subject to
another is that it will tend not to take place unless it is deliber-
ately planned for and worked for. Again, every course, whether
general or special, may be expected to contribute something to
all these abilities. Doubtless some courses will contribute more
to some traits and others to others, but these abilities are after all
of quite universal importance. Communication is basic to science
as well as to literature; the power to think effectively is as essen-
tial to all forms of speech as it is to mathematics. Indeed, it will
not be fostered as it should even by mathematics, unless the logi-
cal movements which find their purest form in theorems and
equations are expressly given wider use. The power to discrimi-
nate between values is involved in this very act of wider applica-
tion. Finally, the mastery of any one of the three large areas of
learning will be of little use to the student unless he can relate
his learning to the realities of experience and practice.

Human personality cannot, however, be broken up into dis-
tinct parts or traits. Education must look to the whole man. It
has been wisely said that education aims at the good man, the
good citizen, and the useful man. By a good man is meant one
who possesses an inner integration, poise, and firmness, which in
the long run come from an adequate philosophy of life. Personal
integration is not a fifth characteristic in addition to the other
four and coordinate with them; it is their proper fruition. The
aim of liberal education is the development of the whole man;

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and human nature involves instincts and sentiments as well as the
intellect. Two dangers must be mentioned. First, there is the
danger of identifying intelligence with the qualities of the so-
called intellectual type with bookishness and skill in the manip-
ulation of concepts. We have tried to guard against this mistake
by stressing the traits of relevant judgment and discrimination of
values in effective thinking. Second, we must remember that
intelligence, even when taken in its widest sense, does not exhaust
the total potentialities of human nature. Man is not a contem-
plative being alone. Why is it, then, that education is conceived
as primarily an intellectual enterprise when, in fact, human nature
is so complex? For instance, man has his emotions and his drives
and his will; why should education center on the training of the
intellect? The answer is found in the truth that intelligence is
not a special function (or not that only) but a way in which all
human powers may function. Intelligence is that leaven of aware-
ness and reflection which, operating upon the native powers of
men, raises them from the animal level and makes them truly
human. By reason we mean, not an activity apart, but rational
guidance of all human activity. Thus the fruit of education is
intelligence in action. The aim is mastery of life; and since living
is an art, wisdom is the indispensable means to this end.

We are here disputing the doctrine, sometimes described as the
classical view, that in education, reason is a self-sufficient end.
Yet it was Plato himself who urged that the guardians of the state
should be courageous as well as wise, in other words, that they
should be full-blooded human beings as well as trained minds.
We equally oppose the view at the other extreme that vitality
and initiative, unregulated by the intellect, are adequate criteria
of the good man. Whenever the two parts of the single aim are
separated, when either thought or action is stressed as an exclusive
end, when the teachers look only to scholarly ability and the
students (and perhaps the public too) only to proficiency in
activities and to "personality" (whatever that may mean), then
indeed wholeness is lost. And what is worse, these qualities
themselves, in proportion as they are divorced from each other,
tend to wither or at least to fall short of fulfilling their promise.

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We are not at all unmindful of the importance of religious
belief in the completely good life. But, given the American
scene with its varieties of faith and even of unfaith, we did not
feel justified in proposing religious instruction as a part of the
curriculum. The love of God is tested by the love of neighbor;
nevertheless the love of God transcends merely human obliga-
tions. We must perforce speak in purely humanistic terms, con-
fining ourselves to the obligations of man to himself and to soci-
ety. But we have been careful so to delimit humanism as not to
exclude the religious ideal. Yet we are not arguing for an educa-
tion which is student-centered. As man is the measure of the
abstract values, so in their turn do these values measure man.
Like an ellipse, an educational institution has two centers, not one.
And although the geometrical metaphor forbids it, truth compels
us to add a third, namely, society.

Just as it is wrong to split the human person into separate
parts, so would it be wrong to split the individual from society.
We must resist the prevalent tendency, or at any rate tempta-
tion, to interpret the good life purely in terms of atomic individu-
als engaged in fulfilling their potentialities. Individualism is often
confused with the life of private and selfish interest. The man-
date of this committee is to concern itself with "the objectives of
education in a free society." It is important to realize that the
ideal of a free society involves a twofold value, the value of
freedom and that of society. Democracy is a community of free
men. We are apt sometimes to stress freedom the power of
individual choice and the right to think for oneself without
taking sufficient account of the obligation to cooperate with our
fellow men; democracy must represent an adjustment between
the values of freedom and social living.

Eighteenth-century liberalism tended to conceive the good
life in terms of freedom alone and thought of humanity in
pluralistic terms (like matter in Newtonian physics) as an ag-
gregate of independent particles. But a life in which everyone
owns his home as his castle and refrains from interfering with
others is a community in a negative sense only. Rugged individu-
alism is not sufficient to constitute a democracy; democracy also

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is fraternity and cooperation for the common good. Josiah Royce
defined the good life in terms of loyalty to a shared value. Of
course when union is stressed to the exclusion of freedom we fall
into totalitarianism; but when freedom is stressed exclusively we
fall into chaos. Democracy is the attempt to combine liberty
with loyalty, each limiting the other, and also each reinforcing
the other.

It is important, however, to limit the idea of the good citizen
expressly by the ideal of the good man. By citizenship we do not
mean the kind of loyalty which never questions the accepted
purposes of society. A society which leaves no place for criticism
of its own aims and methods by its component members has no
chance to correct its errors and ailments, no chance to advance
to new and better forms, and will eventually stagnate, if not die.
The quality of alert and aggressive individualism is essential to
good citzenship; and the good society consists of individuals
who are independent in outlook and think for themselves while
also willing to subordinate their individual good to the common
good.

But the problem of combining these two aims is one of the
hardest tasks facing our society. The ideal of free inquiry is a
precious heritage of Western culture; yet a measure of firm be-
lief is surely part of the good life. A free society means tolera-
tion, which in turn comes from openness of mind. But freedom
also presupposes conviction; a free choice unless it be wholly
arbitrary (and then it would not be free) comes from belief
and ultimately from principle. A free society, then, cherishes
both toleration and conviction. Yet the two seem incompatible,
If I am convinced of the truth of my views, on what grounds
should I tolerate your views, which I believe to be false? The
answer lies partly in my understanding of my limitations as a
man. Such understanding is not only the expression of an intel-
lectual humility but is a valid inference from the fact that wise
men have made endless mistakes in the past. Furthermore, a
belief which does not meet the challenge of criticism and dissent
soon becomes inert, habitual, dead. Had there been no hetero-
doxies, the orthodox should have invented them. A belief which

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is not envisaged as an answer to a problem is not a belief but a
barren formula.

How far should we go in the direction of the open mind?
Especially after the first World War, liberals were sometimes
too distrustful of enthusiasm and were inclined to abstain from
committing themselves as though there were something foolish,
even shameful, in belief. Yet especially with youth, which is ar-
dent and enthusiastic, open-mindedness without belief is apt to
lead to the opposite extreme of fanaticism. We can all perhaps re-
call young people of our acquaintance who from a position of ex-
treme skepticism, and indeed because of that position, fell an
easy prey to fanatical gospels. It seems that nature abhors an
intellectual vacuum. A measure of belief is necessary in order to
preserve the quality of the open mind. If toleration is not to
become nihilism, if conviction is not to become dogmatism, if
criticism is not to become cynicism, each must have something of
the other.

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CHAPTER III

Problems of Diversity

I
Kinds of Difference

FROM this high vantage point where knowledge, like an out-
spread landscape, looks harmonious and untroubled, we return
in this chapter to a more usual and dimmer plane. The main
upshot of all that has been said until now is so simple that any
statement of it sounds almost absurdly flat. It is that, as Ameri-
cans, we are necessarily both one and many, both a people fol-
lowing the same road to a joint future and a set of individuals
following scattered roads as gifts and circumstances dictate. But
though flat and truistic this double fact is the foundation of this
report. Simple in itself, it is far from simple in its consequences.
It means that, though common aims must bind together the whole
educational system, there exists no one body of knowledge, no
single system of instruction equally valid for every part of it.
That is obviously true as regards special education, the thousand
avenues of specific competence. But it is true even, though to a
lesser extent, of general education. We have sketched what
seem to us the traits of mind necessary for anything like a com-
plete life in our society. We have described the facets of reality
reflected in the different spheres of learning and together com-
prising what the human spirit can call truth (though we have
left out, for reasons already given, what many consider the
highest, most embracing sphere, that of religion, and our exposi-
tion may seem to fall short on that account) . But and here is
the great difficulty when it comes to fostering these traits of
mind and presenting this view of truth, the immense variation

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among students enters in, precluding any universal method.
General education must accordingly be conceived less as a
specific set of books to be read or courses to be given, than as a
concern for certain goals of knowledge and outlook and an in-
sistence that these goals be sought after by many means as in-
tently as are those of specialism. That is not to say that some
books and some subjects will not be commoner than others in all
attempts to achieve general education; they will. Shakespeare's
plays are more important than Jonson's; the speeches of Lincoln
than those of Douglas. But it is to say that this search for a sound
general education is as various and unending as the search for the
good society itself and that there are many roads to Rome.

These points have been repeated at the risk of tiresomeness
because, instead of going on as we shall in the next two chapters
to discuss ways and means of carrying out general education, we
wish to return here to the stubborn and crucial question of the
difference between students. As was said earlier, there is always
a tendency, which this report will not have escaped, to think of
general education as a series of highly literate courses of the sort
which necessarily appeal to the gifted and intellectual. So far as
colleges and college-preparatory schools are concerned, that is
right and proper. But the interests of such students can be over-
emphasized, as if the task of schools and colleges were (in the
terms used earlier) wholly Jeffersonian and not Jacksonian also.
The next two chapters will by their nature look largely to the
first, the Jeffersonian side of education, but they would be badly
out of focus if more were not first said of the second, Jacksonian
side.

In days when only the favored went beyond grammar school
this question of the differences between students hardly arose.
The ordinary boy left school and went to work with his father
or went West or went to sea or found a job in the community
where people knew him, and the ordinary girl worked at home
or near by. When industrialization began many of them drifted
into the factories, with well-known results which provoked legis-
lation against child labor and led to raising the school age. More
lately, unemployment has tended to raise the age still further. In

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Problems of Diversity

1933, five million young people between sixteen and twenty-four
roughly a third of the whole group, including all those still
being educated were out of school but unemployed, and of
these the younger were progressively the worse affected. The
war has of course changed all this, but unless the fifty-five or
sixty million jobs which have been estimated as necessary for full
employment after the war in fact materialize, much the same
conditions will recur, with the young feeling their impact first
and most heavily. The cause is not wholly, or perhaps mainly,
in a failure of our economic system. Thousands of lighter jobs
which used to call for a brisk young pair of hands have simply
ceased to exist, and the ordinary job calls for competence or
stamina or both. The combined effect of these humanitarian and
economic forces has been the staggering increase in enrollments
discussed earlier. In many states nearly the whole population of
high-school age is now in high school, and the same may pres-
ently be true of most states. Thus within a generation the prob-
lem of how best to meet this immense range of talent and need
has grown up, like the fabled beanstalk, to overshadow virtually
every other educational problem. It is in truth at the heart of any
attempt to achieve education for democracy.

The professional word for the problem is "differentiation," a
term applied to two main spheres: an inner sphere of ability and
outlook and an outer sphere of opportunity. These two spheres
are obviously to some unknown extent related. One cannot dis-
tinguish rigidly the conditions surrounding a child and creating
the atmosphere in which he is brought up from the view of the
world and of his destiny in it which he will unconsciously form.
The fact is fundamental to the history of this country, even of
the modern era. The welling up of talent and energy which has
historically accompanied the decline of privilege and the rise of
submerged classes has evidently been in large degree simply a re-
lease of powers suppressed or dormant until then. Long familiar
here, this seems the basic process which has been taking place for
a generation in Russia and which is said to be under way in the
Middle East and East. It is the unfolding of potentiality to the
sunlight of stimulus and self-respect. But on any short view, at

General Education in a Free Society

least, the process seems to have limits, likewise unknown, as re-
gards both peoples and individuals. As to peoples, it has been
argued that a release of the kind familiar here or during the
Renaissance or in modern Russia works through only a minority
of the people, a previously submerged fifth or fourth perhaps,
leaving the rest relatively untouched, except, of course, as they
are affected by the new conditions brought about by the former.
Certainly every yeoman's son in Elizabethan England did not be-
come a Shakespeare or even one who enjoyed Shakespeare; nor
in this country was every frontier boy a Lincoln or one who
understood Lincoln. Many must have remained almost untouched
by the expansive atmosphere of those times, which yet produced
such men. As regards individuals, the same limits show them-
selves. The best schools and most modern housing do not
suddenly endue all the young people in them with high standards
and good ability. Something like the old theological question of
the perfectibility of man is involved here, and one can only say
that, though people do in fact respond to outer conditions, which
are therefore incalculably important, and though conditions have
never been perfect (indeed, it is unknown what are perfect con-
ditions for human growth) and consequently it is uncertain what
their results would be, still the brute fact of human difference
remains. All men are equal before God and the law and, if sane,
are equally responsible for their acts, but they differ biologically
and, even under the best conditions, would presumably strive for
different ends.

Hence, though powerfully and subtly related, difference by
ability and outlook on the one hand and by opportunity on the
other are not the same. The former shows itself first in the
actual range of performance by students in school. A group of
representative thirteen-year-olds will show a span of some seven
years in ability. About 5 per cent of them will be as bright as
the average sixteen-year-old, another 5 per cent no brighter than
a ten-year-old. At twenty a few will be capable of almost any
intellectual task, others will not have progressed and may never
progress beyond the mental age of eleven or twelve. The main
criteria are vocabulary and the ability to deal with abstractions.

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Problems of Diversity

By fifteen an ordinary high-school student recognizes some ten
to fifteen thousand words. Some know many more, others only
a few thousand. More variable is their ability to attach meaning
to words. Ideas like hardness, sweetness, cleanliness, fair play,
have meaning for almost everyone. But more abstract concepts
like demonstrative proof in geometry, generalized number in
algebra, or hypothesis in science, and the more general ranges of
such social ideas as justice and even democracy, ask an effort of
mind of which many adolescents seem incapable and an equip-
ment for thought which they appear to lack. A still higher stage
of conceptualization such as transfinite numbers and the four-
dimensional geometry of mathematicians exceeds the powers of
most human beings.

These differences come into play in high school, making of it
a kind of vast sorting machine separating students by ability. It
must inevitably be such to some extent, but the purpose in trying
to distinguish accidental from inborn qualities in young people is
to make this sorting fairer and less harsh. Similarly, the purpose
of general education is to assure that it shall not be guided by
economic values only but of this more presently. As it is, even
by the ninth grade some 10 to 30 per cent of the school popula-
tion has dropped back, and the average intelligence of the grade
is therefore three or four points above the norm. The proportion
which drops back depends upon the policy of the school. Even
where students are promoted regularly in order that they may
stay with others of their age, some of the duller ones are sure to
be placed in "ungraded rooms" or to be otherwise kept from
high school, though the number may be as low as 10 per cent.
Other schools, by not promoting poor students, may keep back
as many as 30 per cent. Thus the mental range of the high school
as a whole covers from three fourths to nine tenths of the total
range. The graduating class is more select, preponderantly above
the lowest quarter. College in turn brings a new stage of selec-
tion, roughly the top quarter, though with exceptions. Those
colleges which draw largely from a local population may admit
from the upper half, though in that case many students will tend
to drop out after a year or two. A few colleges draw chiefly

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General Education in a Free Society

from the upper tenth. The mechanism by which this sifting takes
place is of course the curriculum. Slower students can sometimes
learn as much as the abler by taking more time; in other cases
they simply fail to learn, at least under present methods and in a
practicable time. Algebra was cited earlier as a subject in which,
under the limitations just mentioned, perhaps a half of the ninth
grade fails. Subjects which have a like effect in other grades are
physics and chemistry, geometry, foreign language, economics
if treated analytically, and those ranges of English and the social
studies which also involve analysis. Colleges which reach below
the top quarter in I.Q. either have somewhat lower standards
or have consciously or unconsciously created new types of
courses for the less gifted.

Intelligence is thus one ground of differentiation. Within
what we have called the inner sphere of mind and outlook (as
opposed to the outer sphere of opportunity), expectation is an-
other. Here the distinction between the two spheres grows
thinner. If vocabulary and the power to grasp abstractions to
some extent reflect a person's background and early influences,
his expectations do so far more. Many young people who are
quite capable of doing college work do not go to college because
they are too poor. That is an obvious lack of opportunity to
which we shall come in a moment. But others equally able do
not go on because they lack the desire. They tend to come from
working-class families where no college tradition exists and even
graduation from high school was rare until lately. Expectations
must be learned; they are not inborn. If parents and relatives do
not teach these young people to value education and the things to
which it leads, who will? A teacher, perhaps, or pastor or, more
rarely, an employer or older acquaintance still more rarely,
probably, reading or a movie. But usually they adopt their par-
ents' expectations and the general color of their surroundings. If
it is certain that many able but poor and otherwise handicapped
young people look to education as a chance to better themselves,
it is equally certain that many, perhaps more, do not. 1 Their

1 See W. Lloyd Warner, Robert J. Havighurst, and Martin B. Loeb, Who
Shall Be Educated? Harper and Brothers, 1944.

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Problems of Diversity

ambition is bounded by the world that they know, and to
advance a step or two within it is enough.

Again, within this same inner sphere are differences of interest.
There are the mechanical who like to work with their hands,
and the meditative, often clumsy with their hands but quick at
words and ideas. There are the literal, at home in everything
exact, and the artistic, who see things intuitively and by symbols.
These and similar differences apparently have little or nothing
to do with background but run through all social classes. Yet
they are of course fostered or repressed by background and even
by the general character of an age. There seems no reason to
believe that altogether exceptional artistic talent existed in
ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy, or that scientific and ex-
ecutive gifts, to a degree far beyond all others, are inborn in
Americans. Opportunity, rather, gives play to some gifts, re-
pressing others, and a chief role of general education is precisely
to check the too iron working of current forces, to the end of
eliciting the varied powers innate in people, thereby enriching
both them and the community.

Finally, there is a vastly important but equally obscure differ-
ence in will power and fidelity to purpose. Even the best intel-
lectual gifts come to little without this virtue, and less than the
best gifts may go far with it. How will power is related to back-
ground is most uncertain. Neither extreme privilege nojr ex-
treme lack of privilege seems conducive to it, though an oc-
casional person has conspicuously shown it in spite of or
perhaps, in some subtle way, because of these handicaps. On
the other hand, it is certainly not a random gift of the gods;
otherwise, it would not have marked so high a proportion of
people in certain groups and nations throughout history. It
seems to have something to do with a combination of clear
standards and hard but not impossible demands. As Herodotus
makes a king of Sparta say, "Poverty has always been native to
Greece, but virtue has been acquired, the creation of thought
and firm custom." But whatever its origin, this quality of will
power is something different from intelligence, though in the
long run it may help it. Hence any test of intelligence gives very

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General Education in a Free Society

incomplete grounds for judging a person, particularly a young
person in his changing years, and knowledge thus gained must
be augmented by some test of actual accomplishment and by the
judgment of teachers. Nowhere is the insight of a good teacher
so indispensable as in holding students to their best and in setting
for each work matched to both his gifts and his will. If to deal
successfully with any of the differences so far noted calls for
much experience and small enough classes so that teachers can
know their pupils, that is supremely the case in this all-important
and entirely personal, unmechanical task of nurturing and judg-
ing character.

So much for the inner sphere of mind and outlook. To turn
now to the outer sphere of opportunity, it is clear from what has
been said that equal opportunity does not mean identical pro-
visions for all. Rather, it means access for all to those avenues of
education which match their gifts and interests. That obviously
includes access to good schooling through college and graduate
school for all young people of the requisite will and ability, re-
gardless of their means. Here we are back at what was called
earlier the main task of our educational system: to nurture
ability while raising the average. But before returning to that
question it is worth trying to judge in some rough way the size
and complexity of the task. The sources of unequal opportunity
are of two kinds, socio-economic and geographical, and we shall
say a few words of each.

The extent to which means determine opportunity appears
from several studies which have been made in small cities of
New England, the South, and the Middle West. The popu-
lation of each city was sorted into several groups, and the
education of the children of each group was then compared.
There were relatively slight differences from one section
of the country to the other. The following broad categories
emerged:

(a) The upper group as regards income sends nearly all its children
through high school, public or private, and about 90 per cent to
college. These are professional people, owners, managers, and per-
sons living on inherited money. Practically all of them can afford

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Problems of Diversity

to send their children to college, but they produce only some 8 per
cent of the children of the community.

(b) The middle group as regards income sends about 60 per cent of
its children through high school and about 15 per cent to college
or some other higher institution. They are small businessmen,
clerical and other office workers, minor professional people, fore-
men and a few skilled workers. They produce about a third of the
children in the community. Many of these young people aspire to
positions above those of their parents, and for them high school and,
more rarely, college are roads to this goal. While a good number
of them have excellent native ability, their parents cannot afford
to send them to college, and they must look to scholarships and
part-time employment if they go. The presence of a tuition-free
college near by makes their going more likely.

(c) The lower group sends about 30 per cent of its children through
high school and about 5 per cent through college. It comprises
the great majority of workers, skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled.
They are the poor. They produce about 60 per cent of the children
of the community. It is usually a sacrifice for them to keep their
children in high school, and they cannot possibly pay money
toward college. The minority of young people from this group
who finish high school are often ambitious for better things. They
take commercial and other vocational courses, hoping for more
security and a higher income than their fathers knew. But there is
usually a limit to their hopes. Most of them will be satisfied with a
step up to a slightly higher income, and the very few who aspire
to college must work their way without help from home.

Thus it appears that from the middle and lower groups,* con-
taining more than 90 per cent of the children, very many boys
and girls roughly a half of the whole number drop out of
high school and very few go on to college. One may then ask
how much ability is lost. How many young people able to do
good college work do not reach college? A rough answer is
possible on the assumption, generally accepted by college ad-
missions officers, that the top 20 to 25 per cent of the total group
can succeed in an average liberal college. This represents an
I.Q. of 1 10 and above. From a study 2 of young people of this
intelligence made in Pennsylvania in 1936, it was found that 57
per cent of those whose means were above average went to col-

'Harlan UpdegrafF, Inventory of Youth In Pennsylvania. American Council
on Education, 1936. (Mimeographed.)

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General Education in a Free Society

lege, but only 13 per cent of those whose means were below
average. Now the whole latter group (that is, those with I.Q.
no or above but below-average means, whether or not they
went to college) is about 1 1 per cent of the total age group.
The 13 per cent of them who went to college thus represent
about one and one-half per cent of the total, leaving more than
9 per cent of the boys and girls in Pennsylvania who were of
college caliber but of below-average means and who did not go
to college. These findings arc confirmed by a study of a still
abler group 3 all of the highest 10 per cent in intelligence, of
I.Q. 116 and over who graduated from Milwaukee high
schools in 1937 and 1938. Sixty-three per cent of them came
from families whose income was under three thousand dollars
and did not go to college. That is, over 6 per cent of the total
age group had excellent ability but did not go to college for
reasons which were at least partly financial.

These estimates give reason for saying that out of every one
hundred young people between six and nine are good college
material but do not reach college. This group is as large, or
nearly so, as the entire body of students now in college. They
are prevented by either or both of two causes: lack of means or
lack of desire. Something has been said of those who are able
enough but do not want further education. In a sense they are
denied it by hostile surroundings. But not a great deal can be
done for them by the time that they reach high school, though
something may yet be done by inspiring teachers. I low many
of them are there? What is the division, among able young
people who do not go to college, between those who would go
if they could, and those who would not? On the basis of very
slender evidence noted earlier, 4 it appears about equal. If so, 3
to 5 per cent of our young people annually some seventy-five
to one hundred and twenty-five thousand are of college cali-
ber and would go to college if they could but are prevented by
poverty.

"Helen B. Goetsch, Parental Income and College Opportunities, Teachers
College, Columbia University, Contributions to Education, no. 795, 1940.
* See note on page 84.

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Problems of Diversity

Here, then, is a wide lack of opportunity, and similar lacks
must be noted among the progressively less gifted. We have
spoken so far only of the upper quarter in ability. But young
people of average intelligence, though not suited for the tradi-
tional college, can yet profit from training in agriculture or
nursing and from many kinds of courses, largely vocational, of-
fered by junior colleges and technical institutes. It is evidently
as important for their welfare and that of society that they make
the best of themselves as that the more gifted do so. Hence the
estimate just made of the numbers who deserve and wish but
cannot afford education beyond high school must be enlarged,
probably more than doubled, to include this group. And there
are financial limitations even on high school. It was noted earlier
that only a third of the children from the lower income group,
itself three fifths of the population, now graduate. To put it
otherwise, in 1940 about 60 per cent of all our young people
were in high school at sixteen and about 45 per cent at eighteen.
Assuming as a rough guess that the lowest fifth in intelligence
would not profit beyond sixteen from the present-day high
school, that still leaves 20 per cent at sixteen and 35 per cent at
eighteen who could have profited but did not stay. Some of
them live in isolated places far from a high school; others are
farmers' children who expect to live on the farm. Still others
frankly prefer the immediate advantages of work and wagfes to
the more distant returns from education. Nevertheless, very
many would certainly continue in high school if they could
afford the cash cost and if their parents did not need their earn-
ings. The cost of high school is higher than is commonly real-
ized about ninety dollars a year by a recent estimate, with
variations according to the size of communities and the age of
students. The money goes for clothing, athletic equipment, class
dues, lunch, and various other purposes which loom large in the
life of adolescents. How many of the 35 per cent just estimated
as not finishing high school though intelligent enough to do so
were thus prevented by lack of money or by their parents' need?
It is impossible to say surely a sizable proportion.

Such, in very broad terms, are the limits now imposed on edu-

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General Education in a Free Society

cation by means and social status. These estimates have been
based on prewar incomes, and if real incomes should rise after
the war for the poor, opportunity would likewise rise. If,
further, the social environment of these young people should
improve materially, more of them would almost certainly show
higher promise. There is experimental evidence that ability can
be improved as a child's early surroundings are improved evi-
dence which, as was said, the growth and spread of talent which
have accompanied the decline of privilege in the modern era tends
to confirm. After all, even the most embracing modern school
touches only part of a young person's life; there remain the
shaping years of infancy and the steady pressure of surround-
ings.

Is this slow process of social change the only hope of improve-
ment? Certainly it is the main hope. One can of course make
the trite, though always tragic, reply that to subsidize all those
just estimated as not reaching college or junior college or finish-
ing high school, though able and eager to do so, would cost only
what is being spent on the war every few days. But it is also
true that schools and colleges have still other needs: higher
salaries, smaller classes, means of helping those who do not profit
beyond a certain point from books, adult education above all,
perhaps, a more rounded, longer, more continuing education of
teachers. Short of the millennium, these claims will conflict,
und the only hope of keeping one's bearings is to hold firmly in
mind the final purpose of all education: to improve the average
and speed the able while holding common goals before each.
Subsidies tend to favor the able, while a general improvement
of the school system favors all. Certainly funds can be quite as
justly claimed for the latter purpose as for the former. Although
subsidies are one, they are only one way of improving oppor-
tunity. It is even dangerous to think of them as apart from other
ways. The current movement to find and support promising
young scientists, however worthy, could be ruinous if it created
the impression that science, or any other one specialty, is enough
even for these young people, much less for our potential leaders.
Leadership is inseparable from its following, and both from com-

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Problems of Diversity

mon standards. Subsidy must therefore be carried only so far as
neither to breed overspecialism nor to turn men's eyes from that
broader education (broader, that is, as respects both content and
those whom it reaches) through which alone is specialism
healthy and leadership possible.

Finally, opportunity is also conditioned by geography, by the
region in which a child happens to be born. Statistics on the
very unequal sums spent per pupil and per teacher in the various
states, a disparity which in turn reflects the very unequal re-
sources of these states, were given in the first chapter and need
not be restated here. Suffice it to say that as much as a fivefold
difference (not in total but, to repeat, in expenditure per pupil)
exists between a number of states, a difference by no means
wholly canceled by the lower cost of living in the South as con-
trasted to the Northeast. The ironic fact was also noted that,
the birth rate being higher in the country than in the city, the
poorer states, which are largely rural, have with their smaller
means a higher proportion of children to educate. This double
burden of less money and more children has shown itself in
generally poorer facilities and lower attendance. In 1939, of the
ages fourteen through eighteen, 392 in 1000 went to high school
in Mississippi, 952 in Washington. Seven states, of the rural
South and rural Great Plains, had fewer than 500 in 1000 en-
rolled, while ten states, of the urban North and West, had rfiore
than 800. Add the crowning irony that these states of least
wealth and largest families, after educating their children at their
own expense, lose about half of them to the urban and industrial
states which do not reproduce themselves, and it is clear that a
good deal less than justice is to be found in our present system.
As said earlier, the solution clearly lies in some form of federal
support of education which will at once help the poorer states
maintain standards more nearly equal those of their richer neigh-
bors, yet leave to all states their present responsibility. The
founding fathers hardly foresaw that, in reserving education as
a responsibility of the states, they were bequeathing this heritage
of inequality. Yet as the states became unequal in their ability
to support education such in fact has been the result.

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General Education in a Free Society

Unity Conditioned by Difference

THESE differences then of mind and outlook on the one
hand, and of opportunity on the other make the tasks, present
and future, of our schools and colleges almost unimaginably
varied. The deductions to be drawn from any such overview
are fairly clear as regards special education. At least the over-
whelming response to this variety of gifts and interests has been
to recognize the need for a nearly equal variety of means for
turning them to account. There has ensued the vast diversifi-
cation, already dwelt on, of schools and colleges and of courses
within them surely a desirable, an inevitable step. That is not
to say that much does not remain to be done in this quarter. Far
better guidance and testing are clearly a first necessity since, if
students have different aptitudes, everything obviously depends
on discovering what these are and on placing them where they
can be developed. Again, the relationship of special to general
education needs far more thought. There is patent shortsighted-
ness in turning out students equipped with this or that skill yet
defective, say, in English, the basic means by which most skills
come into play. But good speech and good writing are not
learned in a few years and from a few courses. They develop as
the whole mind develops, hence must be cultivated within and
through special education. And the same is true not only of the
power to communicate but of the other abilities discussed in the
previous chapter. To recognize difference and to try to capital-
ize on it by special training is not to escape more general and
fundamental duties, even within this special training. And there
remains the never-ending task of opening new avenues to the
underprivileged and of awakening them to gifts repressed by
circumstance which they hardly know they have. (In Mark
Twain's amusing Captain StonnfielcTs Visit to Heaven, the
greatest potential poet in history duly recognized as such m

<9O

Problems of Diversity

paradise, though only in paradise proves to have been a poor
tailor from Tennessee who was laughed at in his village and
never published a line.) This is as much a social as an educational
task, to be solved, if at all, by the richness and variety of stimulus
in American life as a whole.

But these are not the main questions of this report. What de-
ductions, rather, about general education are to be drawn from
these facts? In view of these wide and deep differences, is a truly
general education possible? We shall conclude by stating two
broad propositions and then by sketching what seems to us the
role of general education as conditioned by difference.

The first proposition is at once a confession and a question
a confession of ignorance and a question calling for answer. The
line of reasoning in this report so far has been briefly this. First,
our national life and, more broadly, our culture do in fact predi-
cate certain traits of mind and ways of looking at man and the
world. Second, these traits and outlooks embrace both heritage
and change, which in turn correspond, though not exactly and
certainly in no wooden, perfunctory way, to general and special
education, the one concerned with the more slowly changing re-
lationships \vithin knowledge as a whole, the other with its more
quickly changing parts. Third, a successful democracy (success-
ful, that is, not merely as a system of government but, as democ-
racy must be, in part as a spiritual ideal) demands that these traits
and outlooks be shared so far as possible among all the people, not
merely among a privileged few. But, fourth, there exist in fact
great differences among people, not only of opportunity, which
have been and can be improved, but of gifts and interests, which
either cannot be improved so quickly or, in the case of interests,
are and should ideally be varied. Our ignorance, which seems to us
a widespread ignorance, and our question, which is the question
of the nation and age, follow these four steps as a fifth. It is, how
can general education be so adapted to different ages and, above
all, differing abilities and outlooks, that it can appeal deeply to
each, yet remain in goal and essential teaching the same for all?
The answer to this question, it seems not too much to say, is the
key to anything like complete democracy.

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General Education in a Free Society

As repeatedly said, in so far as our culture embraces a spirit of
change and novelty, and in so far as special training, by equip-
ping students with a thousand new skills, looks to this spirit of
change, then our present diversified system fulfills in part the
commands of democracy. But in so far as our culture is not
wholly dedicated to novelty, as it certainly is not, but on the
contrary rests on a view of the world and of man slowly built
up, though never completed, over centuries, then our system by
its very variety also slights the commands of democracy. The
problem, then, to repeat, is not merely to foster the skills and
outlooks which divide man from man according to their special
gifts and different destinies but to develop also the traits and
understandings which they must have in common despite their
differences.

Though we do not know the answer to this question, we
would venture a few remarks about it. First, as said earlier, it
cannot be one over-all solution, since the whole problem is pre-
cisely to reach differently gifted students of different ages and
hopes. Further, it will be comparatively easy to reach the gifted
and favored. The next chapter will be largely about them, the
following wholly. They are the Jeffersonians, those who learn
well in high school and many of whom go on to college. It is
of course debatable what is the best general education for them.
Our views on the subject may not find favor; certainly there are
other current views. But, with time, some agreement, doubtless
embracing many minor variations, would seem possible. After
all, these are very gifted students, and it is hard to see how, given
an experimental spirit and a serious will toward general educa-
tion, one can go far wrong. What we have said and shall say
about the facets of modern knowledge and the traits of effective
thought is nothing new and, probably, on main points at least,
nothing controversial. Thus the chief problem is not to discover
the right general education for these able young people but for
the less gifted not for those who go to college and to academic
and technical high schools (however great an effort toward gen-
eral education is needed in all three) but for the great majority
in other courses, those who are in those courses precisely because

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Problems of Diversity

of their lower facility with ideas. As was said in the first chapter,
they are the people whom the totalitarian states have regimented.
Yet democracy imposes on them, as on all, the task of responsible
private judgment, and it is for the schools to fit them for this
task by every possible means.

The efficacy of mere courses for these students seems doubt-
ful, but needless to say courses are important. They must not be
simply watered-down versions of more complex courses but
authentic and fresh vehicles of the spheres of general education
the world, man's social life, the realm of imagination and
ideal designed to implant the power of thought and expres-
sion, the sense of relevance and value. They must avoid the ex-
tremes either of talking down to students or of dazing them with
abstractions. They must make increasing use of what appeals
directly to the senses and clothes ideas with warmth movies,
singing, plays yet never to the neglect of reading and discus-
sion. They must grasp the nettle of simplifying the great writ-
ings of our culture in such a way that they shall become a com-
mon possession, a subject to which we shall return in the next
chapter. Again, since the whole rise of vocational and manual
courses has come about not primarily to train young people for
jobs but as a means of reaching them through what they respect
and think real, the carrying over of general education into these
subjects has special importance. Students whom ideas will
hardly touch will yet feel them in more specific forms mathe-
matics when it turns up in some mechanical task, history when it
touches some trade, design when it is a part of making, and speech
and clearness of mind running through all. Hence follows the
need already expressed for devoted and broadly educated teach-
ers of these subjects, who will teach them with these higher ends
in view.

Further still, the whole life of the school must be such as to
embody these higher ends. If some students will learn of democ-
racy, for instance, partly through reading, all and the less
gifted especially must learn of it also through action and by
example. It has been said that one of the challenges of our age is
so to rouse in students the sense of connection between ideas and

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General Education in a Free Society

day-to-day action that their wills will be enlisted for what their
minds accept, and for none has this point more importance than
for those who see life primarily as action. Finally, when one
reflects that great numbers of these young people have been un-
employed if they left school, yet, if they stayed in school, have
been exposed to a bookishness on which they did not thrive
and when one thinks further of the number of local and national
projects which need doing it seems that there must be some
sound way of connecting these two needs. The C.C.C. of course
attempted some such thing, but without tie with the schools, at
great expense, and without great educational success. In many
cities schemes of part-time work in local industries have been
worked out but always with the danger that the good of the stu-
dents shall come second and that the school shall sink into a kind
of serf of industry. There seems place, then, for a system of
projects, largely local, on which students might work under
guidance and for pay until they can be employed full time. No
doubt such a system would be resisted either as socialistic or as
infringing on organized labor. We realize its possible dangers
dangers like those which face our society at every turn: of frus-
tration and human waste if nothing is done, of regimentation and
state control if too much is done. Yet now that nearly everyone
goes to high school the problem of these less gifted young people
must be faced. It must not be faced condescendingly. The rec-
ord of such people over history the simple-hearted, those who
have done the unobserved work of the world is certainly at
least as good as that of their more gifted and more tempted
brethren. They are as worthy and as valuable democratic citizens
as anyone else. The problem is to educate them by exactly the
same ideals of schooling as everyone else, yet by means which
shall be as meaningful to them as are more abstract means to the
more abstract-minded.

Our second general proposition can be stated more briefly. It
has to do with the whole spirit and purpose of general, as opposed
to special, education. Special education, by equipping people for
certain specific tasks, is the more competitive in spirit and looks
the more directly to worldly success. Or at least, to most students

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Problems of Diversity

and probably to most adults, it seems to do so. To know how to
do something is to put your foot in the door, to have a possible
start in life. Once you are inside the door, to be sure, more im-
ponderable qualities, of judgment and understanding, of perspec-
tive and character qualities more akin to those of general edu-
cationcome into play, and the more important the job the
more importantly they come into play. Nevertheless, at first
glance technical competence seems by far the first requisite for
advancing yourself, and on any view it is at least a chief requisite.
It therefore follows that an education not wholly given to tech-
nical competence is an education not wholly looking to worldly
success. There is no escaping that conclusion, nor on a moment's
thought should there be desire to escape it. No society can be
organized simply for the advancement of the fittest or, in the
more polite modern term, for mobility. If it were, it would cease
to be a society in the sense of Aristotle's famous definition: "The
state originates in the need for subsistence; it continues through
the wish for the good life." In so far as society looks to the good
life, then it has common aims, the inculcation of which is at least
as important a task of education as the furtherance of this or that
individual. Ideally, indeed, the success of an individual is mean-
ingless or harmful except as it is the mark of his superior service
to the common good. In any case, competition and the common
good both have place in education, and though here again there
is no exact equivalence of the one to special and the other to
general education, still it is clear that general education does
represent a force in the curriculum, and ultimately in society,
which is not in the main competitive.

This point, finally, has bearing on the diverse interests of stu-
dents noted earlier: bents for mechanics, for the arts, for ideas,
for literal fact, or in a thousand other directions. It was said that
these bents appear to be inborn in people independently of back-
ground and walk in life, but that they are nevertheless drawn
forth or repressed by background and even by the spirit of an
age. If, then, general education does not reflect the competitive-
ness of current life, neither should it reflect the narrowing of po-
tential gifts which competitiveness enforces. On the contrary, it

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General Education in a Free Society

should strive to enrich society by freeing the full scope of people's
native gifts. No doubt there are limits to this giving of scope.
The very idea of a common body of training and knowledge
means that everyone, irrespective of his bent, owes a duty to his
general sharing in the culture and to his membership in society.
But some students will inevitably feel more drawn to some sides
of their studies and others to others, and over and above the core
of commonness, there should be chances for all to perfect what is
in them. This need will prescribe the scheme of general educa-
tion now to be set forth. An ideal but not impossible vision of
American society might see it as made up of myriad smaller soci-
eties representing between them all the arts and insights, all the
duties and self-dedications, of civilized man. It would be in order
that they might participate in some of these, quite as much as for
making a living, that education would prepare young people,
and this participation would in turn be the door to the good life.

Basic Plan for the Schools

IT therefore remains only to draw the scheme of general educa-
tion that follows from these premises. At the center of it, at
school and again at college, would be the three inevitable areas
of man's life and knowledge which were sketched in the previous
chapter and will be discussed in detail in the next: the physical
world, man's corporate life, his inner visions and standards. That
these should be taken up at school and again at college seems to
us to follow both from their importance and from the quick
growth of students in these years. But if so, the duty will rest on
colleges to find ways of treating these great themes which will
build on rather than duplicate what the schools have done. Ex-
actly that, in effect, was argued in the previous chapter when it
was said that, if these three areas differ not only in subject matter
but in the values to which they look and in the methods which
they follow, then mere encyclopedism is not enough, and the

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Problems of Diversity

only adequate treatment of them will be one which concerns
itself with values and methods quite as much as with facts. In
other words, college courses on these subjects must be partly
philosophic if they are to deal not only with information but with
kinds of truth (e.g. the values and norms of literature as con-
trasted to the demonstrable truth of science). The same holds of
course to some extent for schools, and no teacher can shake the
responsibility of making very clear what is involved in judgment
and value on the one hand, and in fact and measurement on the
other. But schools have, after all, a huge task of plain exposition
to perform if students are to have in their hands the main tools
and elements of knowledge, and, instead of repeating this work,
colleges should move on to new relationships and new stages of
understanding.

In school, in our opinion, general education in these three
areas should form a continuing core for all, taking up at least
half a student's time. That does not mean that all should have
exactly the same courses. In the present high school there is a
great difference between general mathematics and algebra, be-
tween English as studied by commercial students and English in
a college-preparatory course, and what has been said of the
range of ability among students justifies this distinction. But
just here applies what was also said about the crucial need for
new and authentic treatments of these great subjects, not simply
waterings-down of harder courses, for the less able. Here, to
repeat, is the basic question facing our school system, and on its
success in answering this question the wider success of general
education, as a bond between all future citizens and all sharers of
the common culture, will largely depend. It can be objected that
an education which is not shared by all exactly in the same way
is not a truly common education. This objection has some force,
since sharing of experience is certainly, within limits, an ideal of
all education, notably in a democracy. Yet, if thoroughly carried
out, this ideal would be disastrous. It would mean that in general
education, and only in general education, would the quick and
the slow be thrown helter-skelter together, the ones held back,
the others forced beyond their speed, and neither satisfied. The

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General Education in a Free Society

ideal of commonness must therefore show itself chiefly in a com-
mon requirement rather than in a common way of carrying it
out. There must be courses of different difficulty and different
method in each of the three spheres of general education, and the
criterion for membership in these should be neither a student's
intentions in life nor his background nor the kind of diploma for
which he is aiming, but simply whether or not a given course is
the best for him which is to say, a criterion of ability. Extra-
curricular activities and the general atmosphere of the school,
both important for general education, are perhaps the only truly
identical experiences, but even these will be stronger when they
rest on common aims of study.

It was said that this core of general education should, in our
view, take up about half a student's time in school. Accepting the
course-unit system as established, at least for the present, despite
its grave weaknesses dwelt on earlier, that would amount to some
eight units, preferably spaced by means of half-courses over the
four years of school rather than compressed into two or three.
The common and desirable division within these eight units
would probably be three in English, three in science and mathe-
matics, and two in the social studies. But and this is the im-
portant point this half of the schoolwork to be spent on gen-
eral education would seem the barest minimum, either for those
not going on to college or for those who are. For the former,
who will be ending their formal education, another course in
each of the three areas seems nothing short of essential, and for
the latter, who are going on, a deeper knowledge of one or more
of the areas is not less so. Since this view is somewhat at variance
with current practice, it calls for a word of explanation.

If colleges increasingly take up the duty of general education,
as it seems that they must, then those who go on to college will
encounter it again there and at a higher and more complex stage.
They will also commonly choose and follow at college some spe-
cial field, and both for that reason and because even general edu-
cation at college should draw from deeper roots, they must begin
to lay down these roots in school. For example, general quite
apart from special education in literature will mean more at

Problems of Diversity

college to those who have studied a foreign literature. A few
perhaps, gifted themselves and sped by their families, may go
equally far at school beyond the common minimum in all the
three areas of general education. But most will presumably carry
further one or preferably two of them, the scientifically-minded,
for instance, going ahead to advanced courses in science and
mathematics, the humanistic and literary laying a foundation in
languages. More will be said in the next chapter on this parting
of the ways beyond the common and shared core of general
education. Were it not for the course-unit system, it might be
possible for more of those going to college to carry forward, as
students do in Continental schools, all their subjects on a com-
mon front, though natural interest no doubt inevitably enters in
and, under any system, some would prefer and carry further
some subjects and others others. As it is not only through the
system and from natural interest but through the growth of
knowledge itself some pointing seems inevitable, and the wise
scheme of schooling for those who go to college would seem
one which, in some ways, resembles the scheme which we pro-
pose for college itself: a core of common studies strengthened by
more advanced work on one or more sides. But in school, need-
less to say, these further studies should be less specialized than at
college. We have argued from the start against a narrow special-
ism and feel its dangers in schools particularly. Ideally, to be sure,
college and even graduate specialism is only an extension along
one avenue of the general aims of all education. But at school
that should be transparently the case, and whether in the com-
mon core or beyond it no course should lack that relevance to
knowledge beyond its own limits which is the hallmark of all
right education.

Those, on the other hand, who will enter active life from high
school will doubtless not often press on to this advanced work
beyond the common core, and we have urged for them another
course in each of the areas of general education. Foreign lan-
guage, for instance, though necessary for much of college work,
is surely of far less use to these young people than music or the
arts or more English or more study of American life, and ad-

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General Education in a Free Society

vanced mathematics is probably likewise of less use than more
general science. If they do this added work in general education,
something like a third of their high-school courses will still re-
main. General education can be compared to the trunk of a tree
from which branches, representing specialism, go off at different
heights, at high school or junior college or college or graduate
school the points, that is, at which various groups end their
formal schooling. It seems an axiom of education in this age that,
as they are about to enter active life, each group should be pre-
pared for it in some special ways. The third of their high-school
courses remaining beyond general education would then repre-
sent that special training for these young people. Here would be
the chance for vocational and business courses, for work in the
arts, for agriculture and home economics and a thousand other
practical fields. As said many times, even these courses are not
wholly vocational in intent, nor is the break complete between
them and general education. On the contrary, they should carry
forward the spirit of it into these realms and for these young
people, exactly as does further mathematics or language for those
who are going to college.

To change the earlier figure, general education at high school
is like the palm of a hand, the five fingers of which are as many
kinds of special interest mathematics and science, literature and
language, society and social studies, the arts, the vocations. These
fingers would stretch for all beyond the common core, and all
would follow one or more than one. If, as urged earlier, actual
work comes to take its place, for some, as a part of high school,
that would be, illogically, yet a sixth finger. All, then, whatever
their future intentions, would have the binding experience of the
common core; and all would follow some field of special interest.
Here, then, too broadly sketched to convey the warmth and
color of actuality, is a scheme which accepts the claims of a com-
mon culture, citizenship, and standard of human good, yet also
the competing claims of diverse interests, gifts, and hopes. Cer-
tainly some such scheme cannot be absent from American educa-
tion if it is to produce at one and the same time sound people and
a sound society.

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CHAPTER IV

Areas of General Education; the Secondary

Schools

Mark Hopkins and the Log

WE come at last to the heart of the subject, the curriculum. It
has been a long road, though, even as it is, we have pushed like
hardened tourists through much that mutely asked for delay, and
we have left out much. When every question is inexhaustible, it
is hard to keep a sense of proportion. But whether too long or
too short, these preliminary chapters have served, or were meant
to serve, a strictly necessary purpose. It is fruitless to think about
any such practical step as a curriculum without having in mind
specifications or points of reference, in this case the ends toward
which the curriculum should look and the students for whom it
is intended. It is these two points of reference that we have tried
to establish so far. The first is a view of society as depending on
both heritage and change. The second is a view of students as
both united and divided: united, as heirs of a common past and
agents in a joint future; divided, as varying in gifts, interests, and
hopes. From these premises comes an idea of education as, for
all and at all stages beyond the earliest, both general and special.
These two sides of education should be thought of as connected,
the special forever flowing out of the general and forever return-
ing to and enriching it. Certainly their separation maims and
impoverishes each, since higher and more universal relationships
are empty except as they bear on particulars, and particulars in
turn run to chaos and conflict unless they find place in a larger
whole.

General Education in a Free Society

Because we have felt this need of connection between what is
or should be common among human beings and what is particu-
lar to each, we have been unwilling to lay down rigid rules for
general education. We take, so to speak, a middle position in the
Mark Hopkins-student-log debate. To talk only of Mark Hop-
kins is to assume that all you need for a sound education is the
inspiration and guidance of a gifted teacher, whatever he may
teach. Few persons in our society play so indispensable a part as
the instructor who is able to kindle in students a zeal for those
qualities which education at its best represents and reflects. There
is no educational reform so important as the improvement of
teaching. But indispensable as the good teacher may be, it by no
means follows that what he teaches is irrelevant. He is only the
mouthpiece of the truth that speaks through him, and his value
ultimately depends on how complete this truth is as judged by
the only standards by which it can be judged: namely, the tradi-
tions of our nation and culture.

The other extreme is to think only of the log (here used, some-
what freely, to mean the subject) and to say that, on the contrary,
it is Mark Hopkins who is irrelevant since only the truth counts.
This position we equally reject. That is, even as we believe that
some subjects are more important and more universal than others,
so we believe that they may legitimately be taught in different
ways not only by different teachers but also by different in-
stitutions. This belief follows from the apparently certain fact
that the human mind is fallible and that no person or institution
accordingly has a patent on the truth. It follows also from the
differences amon^ students and from the consequent necessity
that teaching, like the art that it is, cope with these differences.
There thus devolves on teaching the double duty of setting forth
a truth that is usable, in the sense of being adapted to students,
and honest, in the sense of springing from inner integrity. And
in this duty lies the work of all Mark Hopkinses, as responsible
yet forever unique and individual interpreters of the common
truth.

At bottom education is society perpetuating its spirit and
inner form in a new generation. The Mark Hopkins-student-log

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

debate is therefore only the debate of society as to its own na-
ture. The position which we have taken is our answer to what
seems to us the crucial point in the debate: the question, namely,
how far a free society must accept and inculcate common
standards.

The question comes down finally to a definition of freedom.
We believe that men are not in any genuine sense free to choose
unless the fullest possible truth is presented to them. That is to
say, freedom is not permission to flout the truth but to regulate
your life in knowledge of it. One who has not learned and does
not follow the laws of health is not free to be well, nor if he
knows nothing of society is he free to be useful and happy in it.
This view of freedom as willing acceptance of truth has its par-
allel in religion, finding expression in such time-honored phrases
as "in Whose service is perfect freedom." Yet if pressed to a
conclusion, this very view leads to the paradox of a completely
prescribed education to the denial of freedom in the name and
for the purpose of freedom. Authoritarians do not find this
paradox illogical, but the great majority of persons, we think,
suspect with us that it is illogical. What are the grounds of this
suspicion? They seem to be two: that the truth is not wholly
known and that, even if it were, human nature is too fallible to
justify any group of persons having power enough to prescribe
rigorously the form of education. Democracy, however much
it may imply trust in human nature, implies also suspicion of it.
The system of checks and balances in the Constitution is designed
to prevent control by any one group, and the Bill of Rights pro-
tects the freedom to dissent. Both reflect the belief that the
knowledge of any one group, however wise, is limited, and that
room must therefore remain for correction and compromise. Yet
since this view in turn, if pressed to a conclusion, would make of
truth a purely relative matter and thereby take from society the
possibility of any common standards, it too leads finally to para-
dox and illogic. We therefore recognize the impossibility of
either extreme. Freedom is submission to the best and fullest
truth that can be known; yet it is also recognition that truth is
not fully known. This is the position described in Chapter II

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General Education in a Free Society

under the terms heritage and change. It makes place for both the
log and Mark Hopkins, resting basically on the belief that our
society and culture have indeed laid hold on common truths,
knowledge of which is necessary for anything like a good and
useful life, yet that, since our hold on truth is incomplete, we
must forever look to new insights leading to change.

Our argument, then, is that knowledge is dangerous and il-
liberal if it does not embrace as fully as possible the mainsprings
of our culture. We do not believe, for example, that education
can safely be left with those who see our culture solely through
the eyes of formal religion. Neither do we think this culture
wholly reflected in any one list of great books, which, important
as they may be in setting forth standards, necessarily neglect the
relevance of these standards to the present. But we are equally
suspicious of those empiricists who believe the truth is to be
found only in experiment, a position that finally implies the
denial of any stable truth. Without denying the partial value of
any of these views, we believe rather that the main task of educa-
tion is to interpret at all stages both the general and the particular
both the common sphere of truth and the specific avenues of
growth and change. And though the very existence of a free
society depends, we believe, on some balance being kept between
these two opposite sides of education, differences in carrying
each out are not only legitimate but desirable.

These views prescribe the nature of this chapter. Believing in
this need for variation, we should have refused, even if we had
been able, to prescribe in detail what high schools should teach
as general education. On the other hand, simply to state general
principles would be to leave our meaning unclear and to fail of
whatever useful suggestions we are capable of giving. We shall
therefore now go through the areas of general education already
sketched, restating why they seem to us imperative and describ-
ing what, in our opinion, is of first importance in each. Such an
arrangement produces roughly the structure of a railroad train,
car hitched after car, for which apology is offered. It runs the
more serious risk of creating false impressions. Laziness always
seeks some simplifying image, seeing the areas of knowledge

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

merely as aspects, three sides of a box, or as ingredients so
much cream, so much sugar, so much coffee to be mixed in a
cup. But there is no safe image for the full growth of the human
mind. Neither the sciences, nor the social studies, nor the human-
ities have to do exclusively with one side of its growth. All
overlap and are interfused, however great may be the aptitudes
and opportunities which each singly possesses. We have de-
scribed their interrelation; now we shall describe them separately.

2

The Humanities

ENGLISH. One need not make the altogether excessive claim
that the humanities are the whole of either liberal or general edu-
cation in order to recognize their central importance. If we
recommend that the study of literature continue through the
four years of secondary school (though possibly not as a major
or full-time subject in each year), we do not mean that literature
is the only one of the humanistic studies which is legitimately
part of the secondary curriculum. We do suggest that it is, for
those years, the central humanistic study that it offers peculiar
opportunities for achieving the goals previously set forth. The
first of these opportunities is direct access to the potentialities and
norms of living as they are presented to the mental eye by the best
authors. All the other aims in the teaching of literature are sub-
ordinate to this. All work in literature should be concerned
chiefly with making these visions accessible. When they are
seen, when the words open to the reader, the teacher's task is
performed. Unless this direct view is to some considerable degree
achieved, we have failed. Above all we must beware of getting in
the light, between the work and the reader. Summaries or re-
statements of what the masters were trying to say are often worse
than useless. They can be mere dust in the learner's eye.

A natural doubt thus rises at the start. If by "the best authors"
we mean the best, rather than good contemporary writing, or

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General Education in a Free Society

writing aimed expressly at different mental stages, or otherwise
tempered to assumed limitations of experience in the readers, are
not those "best authors" too hard too hard, that is, for school
study under present conditions, large classes, lack of relevant
background, teaching power, and the rest? The doubt is reason-
able as well as natural. The greatest work stretches any mind.
For young minds the stretching may never begin or it may be of
the wrong sort. Questions of differentiation obviously enter.
We should not sacrifice the interests of the many to those of the
few. Nonetheless, it is legitimate to consider first what would
be best for those most able to profit, making then what modifica-
tions are required to suit the needs of others.

The root argument for using, wherever possible, great works
in literature courses is briefly this: ours is at present a centrifugal
culture in extreme need of unifying forces. We are in real dan-
ger, as the discussion in Chapter II has shown, of losing touch
with the human past and therefore with one another. The rem-
edy is not in more knowledge about the past. That has been
piled up as such knowledge never was for any former generation.
Its sudden, all but overwhelming, increase is one of our chief
difficulties. The humanities as recently as the sixteenth century
were a compact and compassable literature. They cover now not
only all literature, philosophy, music, but also "anything that has
anything to do with anything in the Metropolitan Museum,"
and have thereby ceased to be the bond and covenant between
men that they once were. Not even the great scholar can any
longer see the human story steadily or whole, and the epitome
confronts the rest of us. As Shelley said, "Epitomes are the
moths of just history; they eat the poetry out of it," and the poetry
is our need. It is through the poetry, the imaginative understand-
ing of things in common, that minds most deeply and essentially
meet. Therefore the books whether in verse or prose, whether
epic, drama, narrative, or philosophy which have been the
great meeting points and have most influenced the men who in
turn have influenced others are those we can least afford to
neglect, if ways can be found of opening better access to them.
It is a safe assumption that a work which has delighted and in-

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

structed many generations of ordinary readers and been to them
a common possession, enriching and enriched, is to be preferred
to a product which is on its way to limbo and will not link to-
gether even two school generations. On the question of diffi-
culty, it is relevant to refer to Mr. Whitehead's dictum in Aims
of Education, "If it were easy the book ought to be burned, for
it cannot be educational."

Difficulty, of course, is mainly a matter of the preliminary
steps, and we must always ask whether these steps are of the right
kind as well as degree. The choice of early reading matter and
its grading is, to be sure, a vast and downtrodden topic. We may
note only three points for comment:

Under-grading. With a view to "establishing the reading habit"
great numbers of lower-level texts are now written in words and
constructions which exact no reading effort from the learner, be-
yond his endurance of verbal boredom, and offer him in content
nothing whatever to strengthen his mental bite. Is it any wonder
that he is at a loss later when he meets sentences which are trying
to say something worth saying?

Sub-English. Great numbers of texts in literature, history, social
studies, and science, pored over through interminable classroom
hours, are written in forms of English which would be intolerable
out of a schoolbook. One gets tired of the refrain that the schools
are trying to "teach the clear and simple expression of ideas" when t
the prose so often used is a string of dead phrases without spring or
balance, point or punch, fetid with the author's fatigue and the fog
of terminology prematurely introduced. "Art affects us in our un-
awares," said Bergson. So does lack of art. These pages are not ex-
plicitly put before students as models of composition. Their excuse
is the subject matter. But they have their effects nonetheless. It is
a sound principle that all sentences to be closely studied in the
schoolroom should be as well made for their purpose as the best
writers can contrive. There will be enough bad models to contend
with outside.

Premature formulation. In another respect these texts often fail.
They sum up too soon. It is right to let a student know roughly
where he is going, but wrong to save him the journey. Too many
courses tell him throughout what he is seeing, so that he memorizes
the account of a trip which he never took. His head was buried in
the guidebook.

General Education in a Free Society

To set out any detailed plan of successive reading here would
lead to misapprehension. It is not part of the function of a uni-
versity committee to suggest to schools what specifically they
should do. We may put forward a policy, but there we should
stop. The final ground of the policy for the study of literature
here outlined is perhaps this: long-continued close contact with
excellent work, the best of its kind, has a formative and ordering
power especially upon minds still plastic, growing, and active in
imitation. And for the teacher, whose position here is ancillary
and whose contact with the work studied is much closer and
longer-termed, the ordering influences are helpful too. The
greater the work, the more support can he draw from the dignity
of his charge, until the time comes when a society which would
be free recognizes this too and gives him solid support.

If we suppose this principle to be granted that nothing less
than the best practicable literature is good enough for school
study what recommendations as to arrangement and teaching
and what warnings as to misdirections of energy can be offered?
These questions have of late been much under discussion. Little
that is new can be suggested and excellent reports on the same
themes are readily available. It may therefore be best to cast this
part of our report in summary form as minutes of the great
contemporary debate.

A representative report on the teaching of English as a lan-
guage and literature would set forth these chief points. Among
prevailing trends to be discouraged in the study of literature, it
would list:

Stress on factual content as divorced from design.
Emphasis on literary history, on generalizations as to periods,
tendencies and ready-made valuations in place of deeper fa-
miliarity with the texts.

Strained correlation with civics, social studies.
Overambitious technical analysis of structure, plot, figurative
language, prosody, genre.

Use of critical terms (Romanticism, Realism, Classical, Senti-
mental) as tags, coming between the reader and the work.
Didacticism: lessons in behavior too closely sought.

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

These dangers are familiar to reflective teachers, as are their op-
posite extremes:

Superficial reading of too much, with no close knowledge of

either the content or its import.

Lack of any aids to the understanding of what is being read.

Indifference to or ignorance of techniques of literature.

Avoidance of critical terms and appraisals when the student is

ready for them.

Irresponsible attitude to the implications of what is being read.

Among implications to be kept in mind would be:

That division into intellectual, aesthetic and ethical components

is for analysis only. The whole mind, in which these are not

separable, is at work in literature always.

That ethical results of literature are not to be seen as obedience

to a body of precepts, but come in quickened imagination,

heightened delight, and clearer perspective.

That a common body of tradition to accept, to revolt against,

either way to work from is our primary protection against

ethical ignorance.

On the choice and ordering of texts the main points would be:

The limits of available time to be kept in mind. Less to be
studied rather than more. Omissions to be planned, not settled
by the accident of shortage of time.

Old and new writing to be proportioned with regard to a two-
way traffic between:

(a) The new as more immediate and leading to the more re-
mote.

(b) The old as explaining the tradition on which more difficult
modern writing depends.

The values of American and English literature and of other

literature in translation to be balanced.

Texts for classroom study to be supplemented by less difficult

bpoks for outside reading. Guidance to be provided since a chief

end sought is extensive discriminating private reading.

Emphasis on mere number of books read or book reports made

to be questioned.

Proper liberty to be secured for teachers in choosing the texts

they can handle best with enough organization to prevent

undesirable duplication.

Historical sequence to be followed only if illuminating to the

literature read.

General Education in a Free Society
As means to developing better reading, stress to be laid:

On intensive, close study of well-written paragraphs and poems
which are saying important things compactly.
On what a word is doing in a place on a page in addition to
its dictionary sense and the dependence of this upon the con-
text.

On the normal ingredients of full meaning: the literal sense, the
metaphoric implications, the writer's (or speaker's) mood, his
tone, his intent, his attitudes toward his point, his reader, himself,
his work, and other people and things.

On the utility, almost the necessity, of metaphor; and-the fruit-
fulness of intensive imaginative study of how the mind relies on
parallels in all its doings.

On paraphrasing of the thought of an original passage analyt-
ically for purposes of elucidation, but not as an exercise of syn-
onym-trading or as an attempt to compete with the literary
quality of the original.

On the value of reading aloud for interpretation, and of choos-
ing poems and passages of lasting significance to be memorized.
On the economy of reading at different speed and with different
emphasis for different purposes.

For improvement in writing and this goes largely for oral ex-
pression as well stress on the following:

Constant practice, with recognizable problems of expression
graded to the shaping mind.

Enough short exercises to permit of careful criticism and revi-
sion without undue strain.

Exercises close enough to students' interests to develop their
capacities.

Coherence, closeness of observation, integrity of purpose, fresh-
ness of attack.

Observance of minimum essentials in mechanics, the manners of
discourse. Instruction where necessary in use of dictionaries and
other references. (Handbooks of composition to be viewed as
etiquette guides, rarely needed if literary upbringing is whole-
some.)

Study of grammar only when it can be made to throw light on
the workings of language and provide a convenient vocabulary
for analysis of structural weaknesses in speech and writing.

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

Such is the consensus on the art and science of teaching English,
a middle-of-the-road policy, far from being as inconsiderate as
this current phrase for the golden mean might suggest. As a
whole it aims to secure the maximum freedom for the teacher
compatible with a coherent and reasonable order. In view of the
peculiar relation described above between teacher, subject, and
pupil in the study of English, there is no doubt that this freedom
should be carefully guarded.

But reasonable order is no less important. If the books read do
not seem to the student to have any bearings one on another, we
are losing endless educational chances. Granted that false or
forced correlations can be a great evil, there is still room to plan
sequences and groupings which will "make sense 1 ' (including a
sense of proportion and direction) for the student. It is impos-
sible to lay out any sound universal scheme for such arrange-
ments, as impossible as it would be to write a specification for
intelligent behavior. Conditions do and should vary and should
be met with modified plans. Nonetheless, certain general prin-
ciples suggest themselves to experienced teachers.

For example, relatively simple narrative (The Jungle Books,
Treasure Island, The Odyssey) and poetry of fairly open and
uncompacted meaning will naturally come early. Bible narrative,
myths, travel and adventure, as well as simple character studies,
offer endless variety but should be kept on the highest possible
literary level. Selections such as were made in the five books of
Cambridge Readings in Literature show what samples of great
writing can be assembled for provocative study from twelve
years up. Drama and fiction asking for more analytic reflection
would follow with more complex poetry. And prose discussions
of fundamental theses (man and the state, the moral order, the
problem of pain, the sources of delight, the essential family and
social relationships) should not all be postponed to so late a
period that the majority will have left school before they are
taken up. No great bulk of reading on these themes should be
attempted. They lend themselves preeminently to class discus-
sion of short pregnant passages. Even though such work may
seem to be over the head of many in the class, these slower minds

General Education in a Free Society

should not be allowed to leave without at least knowing that
these topics are the prime preoccupation of maturer minds or
without some idea, however vague, of what has been thought
about them. A time will come for most when these matters will
not seem so recondite. And here is a place to observe again that
memorization of verse and prose at all stages is a device which is
none the worse for being as old as teaching itself.

There is a need for versions of the great works cleared of un-
necessary and unrewarding obstacles and made by abridgment
and reflective editing more accessible to general readers. We be-
lieve that in the interests of teaching and public reading alike it is
time for scholarship to turn some part of its best energies to the
service of the present. Great books are being read increasingly
in abridgments. If these are not made by scholars they will be
made by relatively incompetent hands. Only the scholar knows
enough to distinguish the parts of Homer, Plato, the Old Testa-
ment, Bacon, Dante, Shakespeare, or Tolstoy which are essential
to their value for contemporary general readers from the parts
which concern only the special student. But the scholar, by his
training, his competitive position, above all his professional ideal,
is as a rule unconcerned with this problem. The sieving out of
inessentials needed if these authors are to be read with profit by
nonspecialists, or read widely at all, is a highly delicate process.
A separation within the sentence is often needed, an extremely
careful weighing of profit and loss, a balancing of one sort of
clarity, scope, or fidelity against another. Only the mature
scholar saturated with his author can judge of these things; only
he can bring together the phrases which supplement and explain
one another or cut out with a minimum of disturbance the ob-
structive detail, the unimportant qualification, or the irrelevant
reference. How far this process of clarification or simplification
should be carried is, of course, in every instance the prime ques-
tion. Nothing but a fine awareness both of the material and of
the reader's resources will answer it.

Administrative ordering of all this reading should not have
coverage as its aim. It should not have even the avoidance of
duplication merely as such in view. Most things worth study at

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

all are worth repeated study. Few things are more educative than
a return to a text (which is not to be confused with a textbook)
after some interval, to watch how another good teacher handles
it. Fear of duplication is a sign of the fear that most teaching is
likely to be bad. Two mistreatments of a book are of course many
times worse than one. The real aim of administration here should
be to see that as little inferior matter as possible is perused, and
above all that what is read is timed to yield the most to the stu-
dents. An external authority can never replace the instinct of a
good teacher in close touch with the class. "Best for the class"
is, however, a phrase which can hide all the problems. This
policy puts immense responsibilities on the teacher who gets as a
rule too little aid from the wise in carrying them. It is when
reading programs are examined in detail that the principle
stressed above that only the best is good enough for class
study ceases to seem a truism and becomes a constructive
command.

In practice the choice of texts is embarrassed by many consid-
erations, some administrative: admission to approved lists, library
limitations, lack of suitable editions are among them, of which
little in general can be said. Even more apt to interfere with ideal
educational policy are certain consequences of the teacher-class
relationship. Numbers of books are strong favorites because the
teacher feels that with them he and the class have a good time.
This is too often accepted as a decisive argument. The further
question, "What sort of a good time?" is not gone into, or even
raised. Yet this is clearly the important point. Valuable class-
work is often, even usually, enjoyable. It does not follow that
enjoyable times in class must be valuable. Doubtless in choosing
texts nothing can replace, nothing has the authority of, teaching
experience. But it must be examined experience, experience
which has been put through a Socratic questioning to see whether
it knows what it is. As things are, however, so sad a proportion
of time spent on literature is plain boredom that attachment to
anything which amuses is very understandable. A safe test per-
haps might be this: let the teacher ask himself, "Am I needed for
this enjoyment?" If the answer is "No, they would read it as

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happily and as fully without me," then some other text which
will not be enjoyed without the teacher's help should replace it.
The choice unfortunately cannot be left to the pupil. He does
not know the alternatives to be considered.

The study of literature is throughout the study of language.
Most of the English teacher's time and effort, whether he is aid-
ing readers or not, should be concerned with language. But we
must go further and say that all teachers of whatever subject
have more than an incidental responsibility here. They will feel
it in the degree to which they realize how many of their difficul-
ties, and their students' difficulties, come from their own neglect
of this duty. A misunderstanding is likely at this point. This is
not a question of tackling spelling or grammar considered as a
routine quasi-mechanical skill, or of "good English" in any
vaguely general sense. It is a question of giving practice and
help in understanding and using the English which is the indis-
pensable medium of their own teaching. A science teacher, for
example, is not u taking over what the English class should have
done" when he gives time and labor to this. Parroting apart, the
language as used in a subject is in practice indistinguishable from
the subject itself. In working on it he is doing his own work,
not the English teacher's work. Teachers of these subjects some-
times are admirably equipped to help students listen and speak,
read and write well. And they have relatively defined, simplified,
and organized subject matters, which is no slight advantage.

The great bane of science and social studies is mechanical
repetition of uncomprehended words and phrases. Literature
suffers less from this until critical, aesthetic, grammatical, or
technical terminology is used. Then perhaps it suffers more.
Teachers of the more exact studies in knowing their subject
know its terminology and have at least better means of uncover-
ing the meanings, or voids, which words and phrases contain for
their pupils. Satisfactory exploration of literary terminology is
so difficult that it should properly be postponed to the college.
The science teacher can give a training in the understanding of
precise technical language beyond the power of the English
teacher, who has essentially to deal with fluid language, with

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

words and sentences which rightly and inevitably change their
charges of meaning from context to context. It is their business
to be variable and resourceful. In contrast the terms of science
are fixed. Science aspires to use language rigidly, to keep the rela-
tions of its terms to one another constant through definition. Its
key words are terms in the logical sense, or have a one-one rela-
tion to terms. Words in literature and nontechnical conversation
are not terms in this sense, and we fall into endless confusion when
we forget this.

For these reasons the sciences are the preeminent field for log-
ical studies, for practice in strict definition and the analysis of
implication, for the dissection of misconceptions, for the remorse-
less exposure of false or irrelevant ideas encysted in parroted
phrases, and for the discharge of the morbid matter. Nowhere
else can the student be so firmly forced to consider how he under-
stands and how much, for nowhere else are such inescapable tests
of understanding available. Therefore the science teacher's re-
sponsibility for clarity of expression, for the examination of ob-
scure phrases, is unique. It is his duty, moreover, to help the
student (in collaboration with the English teacher) to see and
remember clearly the difference between the rigid terms of sci-
ence and the fluid language of literature and conversation, and to
protect him from the misplaced technical jargon which is a dry
rot in so much current talk and writing. The social-studies
teacher, being from the position of his subject peculiarly exposed
to this blight, has his part in this to play too. Instruction in lan-
guage is thus inevitably a joint duty of all teachers.

Nonetheless, the main weight of the task of induction into lan-
guage falls on the English teacher. What can happen in the pupil
depends very largely upon what is happening in the teacher. If
he is uncharged with crisp meanings, little is likely to be induced
in his hearers; whence, of course, most of our educational woe.

More narrowly, if the teacher's works and ways of speech are
limp or confused, he will fail in his main function, which is to
excite attention to and care for the living word. Speech comes
before reading and writing and should keep this priority. Read-
ing and writing can indeed get in the way, and some current

General Education in a Free Society

trends encourage this displacement, eye-reading, for example,
It is rapid. It is the right way of perusing the newspaper or most
textbooks. The economies of time and effort which are possible
by cutting down vocal and subvocal accompaniments have been
rightly urged, and the work which goes to this end in schools
is well spent. But literature is built with living words, not with
graphic marks. It is represented speech of one order or another.
Strictly silent reading, where no body of sound and vocal move-
ment arises at least in verbal imagery, deprives the words of most
of their powers. Their footprints will not do instead. This is
most evidently true of poetry. It is remarkable how often a para-
graph of argument or exposition which baffles a class will become
pellucid to them when read as an organic whole by an intelligent
voice which respects and reflects the sequences of the thought.
What should be read how is a prime question for a teacher and
the class to consider together.

It seems likely that the opening up of print to the learner's
eye very largely depends on the teacher's ability to read aloud in
a suitable fashion. This is a neglected area in most teacher train-
ing. There are dangers evidently. What is required is not elocu-
tion but honest regard for the components and structure of the
meaning. The teacher must understand as he reads and show
what he understands in his reading. We may note here, more-
over, that the power to attend to and criticize the spoken word,
and all the implications and nuances of its utterance, has regained
through the radio a public importance it has not enjoyed since
the invention of printing. A modern society has become an audi-
ence again. The relevance of this to the concept of freedom
hardly needs stressing.

Reading, vocal or silent, is an art. Our risk is to regard it as a
mechanism. At the rudimentary stage, in the primary grades, we
are content if the right sounds pop out smoothly in response to
the graphic stimuli. This tends to make us assume, unwittingly
and often incorrectly, that the right ideas too are invisibly pop-
ping up in the reader's mind. There is a moral and many a
parallel to be drawn here. At numberless points this false assimi-
lation of lower and higher levels of activity misleads teaching.

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

For example, handbooks of composition frequently discuss the
choice of the "right" word as though that were ruled by exactly
the same principles as the use of the "right" (i.e. correct) spelling.
Here is another instance of that instructive ambiguity of the
word, right, which was noted in Chapter II. The first, the right
word, is a matter of fitness to ends, but right spelling concerns a
formal convention which for English, incidentally, is almost
criminally defective. The result of such confusion is often deep
frustration and lasting bewilderment in the pupil. Malapropism,
the mistaking of one word for another, does have its analogies
with misspelling, mispronouncing, and bad grammar. Conform-
ing with a code governs all these. But which word best says
what it is best to say is another matter altogether. It concerns
choice of ends and judgment as to the fittest means, the highest
human capacities. A bare rule as such has to be observed, that
is all.

Throughout the teaching of composition the separation of
mechanical rules from animating principles is all-important.
Composition, by pen or tongue, is largely a matter of imitation.
But the word, imitate, straddles all levels. In spelling, in pro-
nunciation, in punctuation, and in grammatical conformities we
follow the letter, the surface routine. In everything which has to
do with the shaping and expression of thought and feeling, "the
letter killeth; the spirit giveth life." And if the models we put
before them have no spirit our students' progress must be slight.
If the reading matter we force them to attend to is not clear,
forceful, well organized, and interesting as language, in addition
to the interest of its content, we arc depriving them of the first
instrument of their instruction. We are doing worse than this if
we make them suppose we want them to imitate modes of speech
or writing whose aim and virtue they have not even felt. Com-
position, then, is a matter of good models, in speech and writing,
and intelligently graded discussion of what makes them good.
Hence the importance we have stressed above of the choice of
the best for classroom study.

Foreign Language. There is probably no educational problem
about which there is more confusion and disagreement than the

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General Education in a Free Society

role of foreign language in secondary education. Experienced
teachers vary between the extreme poles, between, that is, the
view that foreign language has no appropriate place in general
education, and, on the contrary, that it includes the truly essen-
tial subjects.

One of the claims most often made by those who urge a con-
siderable experience with foreign language is its value for the
understanding of English and its help in developing a mastery of
English composition. It is certainly possible, without great ex-
pense of time, to make comparisons between English and other
languages which yield fruit of the utmost value. To learn that
other languages have words with meanings which no English
word carries, that they sort meanings in other ways and link
them up in other patterns, can be a Copernican step, one of the
most liberating, the most exciting, and the most sobering oppor-
tunities for reflection that the humanities can offer. And with it
can come, through etymology, a widespread vivification of the
learner's interest in English, a sense of the omnipresence of tradi-
tion, of the connections of thought with thought kept alive,
sometimes against our wishes, by tradition, a sense of the de-
pendence of any one mind upon the vast anonymous work of art
his language is, of its limitless past, its vagarious history, the
mysteries of its growth and his responsibility to it. All this and
much more a first exploration of the connections between Eng-
lish and other languages can give. Sometimes an English word in
its varying senses ("idea" or "right," for example) can compact
within itself as it were and give a foretaste of a whole philosophy
which masterpieces little more than spell out; or a word like "in-
comprehensible" or "believe" will lend itself modestly to record
the most daring efforts of homemade thought, as though all that
the mind could do were to catch up with the dictionary.

It might seem, then, that the learning of other languages were
an essential part of work in the humanities. For at the other end
of the course the values of work in translation are recognized.
There is no better practice in reading or in writing English than
translation, provided the translator knows the other language
sufficiently well. Our italics point to the fact that with most

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translation work in school this condition is unfulfilled. Between
the first Copernican step and the profitable translation work
comes the long labor under the taskmaster rule, and few of the
many who begin this labor finish it. Few, that is, bring their
grasp of another language to a point where it has both an ex-
plosive and a disciplinary effect on their English (as Shake-
speare's Latin, for instance, put into his hands the huge mass of
English words deriving from Latin which he then manipulated
and remade freely yet with a certain limiting tact for root mean-
ings). Few, moreover, lay hold through another language of
cultural traditions surrounding and augmenting their own.
Those who thus fail to bring language to the kindling point are
certainly wasting their time perhaps not absolutely, in the sense
that they have learned nothing, but at least relatively, in the sense
that they might have learned more from something else. Yet
for those for whom language is the opening of doors, either as
respects words in the time-honored way of poets and writers or
as respects cultures in the way of historians, it is essential. In-
deed, they are essential since any society, for want of a certain
number of persons so educated, slips into insularity.

The main problem, then, in teaching foreign languages seems
to be this: how may many, perhaps most, students be brought to
take what we have called the Copernican step the step, that is,
of realization that structure is the skeleton of all speech, not 'just
their own, and that words carry history with them? And how,
in addition, may the comparatively few who can and should go
further press on to a firm and fruitful grasp of language?

We pause here to interject a distinction which, because it is
often not clearly grasped, greatly vexes discussion of language
teaching, the question, so to speak, of context and intention.
Language is sometimes studied as a tool for instance, German
by prospective scientists who will need access to technical writ-
ings in German, 1 or Spanish by persons looking forward to a
job in South America. For obvious reasons such study has made

1 For serious work in the natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, and
medicine, German has hitherto occupied a unique position among the foreign
languages. It must be remembered that not only the German but much of the

General Education in a Free Society

enormous strides during the war. Its relatively clear and simple
goal has come to be matched to relatively exact procedures:
notably, intensiveness (namely, headlong, though briefer, im-
mersion in a language, so that students shall live for a time in the
very atmosphere of it) and the direct method (speaking the
language from the start so that it shall become, so far as possible,
a living habit rather than a bare conceptual scheme). But pre-
cisely because such strides have been made in teaching language
as a tool, it is sometimes assumed that that is the only purpose for
teaching language. That is not the case. Greek and Latin, as
dead languages, and many living languages also, are studied not
as tools but for the cultural ends mentioned in the last para-
graphs. One could of course say that Latin was a tool to
Shakespeare or Milton or that French is such to those who read
Montaigne or Molicrc. But to say that is to cavil, for the reason
that even in the act of studying these languages students are con-
cerned with more than language itself. They are concerned with
the very stuff of the humanities, with timeless writings, with
other cultures, and with the ever-changing meaning of words.
Evidently, then, these two reasons for studying a foreign lan-
guage as a tool and as a part of humanistic education are dis-
tinct, implying distinct methods and looking to distinct ends.

Language as a tool hardly falls under the humanities, and it
might be said that it is more closely allied to special than to gen-
eral education. It is of course true that a person who has learned
German for scientific reasons may go on to read Schiller. It is
also true that any study of language, however narrowly pursued,
must have an effect on a person's native speech. At least it is
hard to imagine anyone of so obdurately practical a bent that, in
learning a new language, he fails to draw comparisons, note
etymologies, and in general improve his speech by fresh experi-
ence in putting words together. Language has this in common
with travel that it inevitably raises contrasts. But there is no
nook or corner of knowledge which will not bear in the same

Scandinavian, Dutch, Swiss, Polish, and Balkan work, as well as that of Russian
and Oriental investigators, is, or was until recently, published in full or abstracted
in German.

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way on general education, given the intention to make it do so.
We shall therefore say nothing further of language as a tool,
except that it will in fact prove to many a necessary tool which
they will have to gain when the need for it arises. Colleges will
doubtless increasingly offer intensive courses, especially in sum-
mer sessions, when, conscious of their need, students may repair
it as quickly and effectively as possible. Such courses will be
harder to institute in schools, where the curriculum is less flex-
ible. But as the experience of the armed forces in teaching
language has shown, the first and indispensable prerequisite is
motive, the sense that a language is necessary, and when this
sense is present (as with the hopeful young scientist taking up
German), the learner will make good progress even without the
best intensive methods. What is to be avoided at all costs is study
of language which neither makes it a tool nor adds to humanistic
education, dim, perfunctory plodding, without clear goal or
tangible results.

To return then to the earlier point, there are, so far as general
education is concerned, two distinct stages in teaching language:
what was called the Copcrnican step, for many, and a deeper
grasp of language in connection with literature and history, for a
comparatively few. It remains to speak briefly of each of these
stages.

Enough has been said of what is meant by the Copernican step,
and of how liberating its expansive influence can be on a student's
understanding of his native speech. The question now is how
such a step can be brought about. Much has been done in recent
years with so-called "general language," which is study of the
structure of other languages, both related and unrelated to Eng-
lish, and also of the origin of words. Its virtue is that it aims
frankly and openly at what any study of language in general
education should accomplish at this stage: namely, at illuminating
English. Its weakness may be that it is too academic, too con-
sciously the fruit of research, for the ninth grade that it, so to
speak, talks down to students by merely offering them informa-
tion without rousing in turn their own powers of performance,
as the study of a single language can do. Trial will make clear

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how useful the method is. If it survives, it may well become the
core of English teaching in the first year of high school.

Meanwhile, the teaching of a single language will remain far
the commoner way of giving perspective to English. There are
few subtler tasks than this early stage of language teaching.
Moreover, it is hard to estimate, since its results should appear
primarily in a student's English, not in his grasp of the new lan-
guage. The reason why this should be so lies in the whole history
of the English speech. The tribes which early mingled on the
British Isles evolved a progressively more simplified speech lack-
ing the genders and most of the case endings. Hence followed
the extreme dimness of English grammar and syntax. But the
close ties between England and the Continent, particularly after
the Norman conquest and throughout the Renaissance, enor-
mously enriched the language, supplying a synonym of Latin
origin for virtually every Germanic word in the tongue. Hence
arose the staggering size of the English vocabulary, hence also
the subtlety and allusiveness of English as characteristically used
by those who have fully felt its potentialities. The result is that,
whereas an ordinary Frenchman can read Racine and an ordinary
German, Schiller, an ordinary Englishman or American has
much greater trouble with Shakespeare. To return, then, to the
early stages of language teaching, its prime function is not to
give a practical command of the new language; on the contrary,
it is to illuminate English in these two respects in which English
supremely needs illumination, namely, syntax and vocabulary.

This need explains and largely justifies the traditional use of
Latin or French in the late primary or early secondary years.
The somewhat mystical superiority of intellectual discipline
which has been claimed for these languages, especially Latin,
may be largely false. Nevertheless, as regards syntax, they are
far clearer than English, and it is precisely this clarity which is
wanted from them, to be reflected back, so to speak, on English.
For this reason they should come early rather than late in the
curriculum, preferably in the seventh or eighth grade, where it is
arguable that they should even be substituted for English. At
least, the advantages to school English if more students came to

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it with some experience of syntax and some sense of the root
meanings of words would be enormous.

But the precondition of any such gain is that teachers fully
understand and never forget the reasons why a foreign language
should be taught at all at this early stage which reasons, to
repeat, have chiefly to do with a student's growth in his own
speech, not in the foreign speech. Yet young people have definite
minds, and to be told that they are studying a language and yet
somehow not studying it could be confusing, to say the least.
Hence their progress must inevitably be measured to some extent
by the new language rather than by the English. Here is at once
the danger and the advantage of studying a single foreign speech
as opposed to general language. The danger is that it shall be
studied only for itself without relevance to English, as general
language clearly is relevant. The advantage is that a single speech
is something definite for students to grasp, an intellectually
coherent system fixed in history and appealing both to their logi-
cal powers and to their imagination of mankind and of the past.
The teacher who would escape this danger and reap these advan-
tages has the complex task of interpreting a foreign culture
through its language and, at the same time, of rousing the sense
of structure and vocabulary as common to all language. This
task calls for tact, knowledge, and sense of proportion of a very
high order. Yet given the history and nature of English per-
haps even the nature of the human mind which learns the familiar
only by experience with the unfamiliar few tasks are more
important.

Finally, a relatively small number of the many who have thus
begun a foreign language for the sake of their English should go
further. We are not here thinking of those already mentioned
who will pursue language as a tool, but rather of those for whom
it should be the path and guide to deeper understanding of the
humanities. The relation of language to the humanities is in
many ways like that of mathematics to the sciences. Both mathe-
matics and language exist, so to speak, in their own right (mathe-
matics no doubt to a greater degree than language), yet both arc
at the same time doors to neighboring studies. As many students,

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at something like the second or third year of high school, will
turn in the direction of mathematics and science, so others will
turn to language and literature. That is not to say that general
education in both fields should not be continued for each of
these groups, but simply that one group will find its natural
home in the one field and the other in the other. Those, then,
whose serious interest is in the humanities have, as it were, a
double task to perform, even beyond their work in English.
They should attack language as intensely as those for whom it is
merely a tool (for why should they go on at all if they are not
to achieve some such firmness of grasp? ) . Yet they must at the
same time find in language more than a tool an insight into an-
other culture, a vision of the history of ideas, something which in
depth and vitality far surpasses translations.

What should be the languages to be pursued in this spirit?
German and Spanish will presumably be studied largely as tools.
The French or Latin begun earlier will be for many the natural
avenue of this further humanistic study, and they should be
taught with this intention and this alone. But a word should be
said of two other languages, Russian and ancient Greek. One
need hardly dwell on the greatness of Russian literature or on the
import of Russian thought and history for any future that we can
foresee. Begun in the last years of school, Russian should give
something like a new dimension to the work of some students
chiefly interested in literature or in history and the social studies.
The same is true in a slightly different, though not less important,
sense of Greek. General education will only make more clear
the fundamental place in our culture of the great Greek writings.
Philosophy, political theory, many branches of literature, even
as they largely began for us in these writings, so inevitably return
to them for comparison and refreshment. Though the great
majority of students will come to know these writings in transla-
tion, still general education will fail of part of its function unless
it leads some to that vividness of understanding which only the
original can inspire. This, in short, is the purpose of all further
study of language in general education to give to some that
vitality in humanistic training which others will gain in scientific

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training and which, so far as schooling can assure insight, is the
root of insight.

The Arts. For the purposes of general education art should be
experienced in as many forms as possible from earliest infancy.
By the arts we mean chiefly music, painting, drawing, and
modeling. We do not of course deny the value of the dance,
architecture, and the rest of the arts; but we are now concerned
with general education in the schools and with what has been and
can be usually taught there. It may be doubted whether formal
courses in these subjects should be required of students in the
secondary schools, although some circumstances may justify
such a prescription. But the absence of required courses, or of
any courses at all, should not mean an absence of musical or
artistic experience. The happiness of many, perhaps of nearly
all, people will be enhanced or diminished by the presence or ab-
sence of aesthetic sensitivity to music and the fine arts, as well as
to literature.

The arts bring delight; they train the emotions; they develop
understanding. For instance, skill in drawing and painting sharp-
ens our visual perceptions so that we can see better and see more
in the realm of color, form, and space. More generally, in all the
arts including music (with its cultivation of auditory perceptive-
ness) the mind is enabled to rise above the literal and the obvious
and to grasp the resonances and the overtones of experience. It
is usually said that art is the discernment and communication of
beauty. Such a statement is sound in the double sense that it
makes clear that art is not a preoccupation with one's private
state, and that art is more than a manipulation of colors, sounds,
and other materials. Yet the term, beauty, limits the scope of art
unduly; beyond the beautiful the artist is concerned to discover
and express any variety of value in things.

Thus, instruction in the arts should be viewed as a part of gen-
eral education. The arts appeal to the mind through the senses,
enabling the young to understand their heritage in the most direct
fashion before reason has matured. The progress of the mind as
it unfolds in time is from nonverbal thinking to conceptual think-
ing and finally to the grasp of the variable mathematical symbol.

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The arts give a meaning to our heritage for those who might
never gain an understanding of it through abstract concepts.
And when reason has become mature, the arts reinforce what is
already grasped conceptually, by giving it sensuous embodiment.
The word, appreciation, is much in vogue in any reference to the
aim of courses in art. This term has been designed presumably to
mean something between understanding and feeling and mostly
succeeds in conveying neither. To study the world's artistic
heritage is to educate one's mind by partaking of the insights of
the masters, as well as to experience sheer delight. But introduc-
tion to heritage is only one aspect of learning. Here we come to
the contribution of the individual mind. The masters are not
models to be imitated in a mechanical fashion; their value for the
pupil is to deposit a seed in his mind which may grow into a plant,
small or large. What is learned must be so mixed with one's own
substance that it will issue into new and personal forms.

We must be on our guard so as not to confuse individuality
with subjectivity. In a natural reaction against the concept of
verisimilitude in the arts, the teacher today urges the pupil to
pour out his soul on the canvas as spontaneously as possible. Yet
aesthetic work is not self-expression but self-transcendence, as
when an actor projects himself into a role. The cult of self-
expression in the arts is partly the result of a reaction against
Puritanism which has overreached itself. Doubtless all learning
must be absorbed into the tissue of individual experience, since
man is a living being growing from within out. Yet work in the
arts is significant in the measure that it has submitted to discipline.
It is not a case of an alien force imposing arbitrary restrictions.
The discipline comes from the very nature of the materials used
by the artist, such as color, space, clay, and sound; and it comes
from the structure of the object which is revealed. The word,
imagination, tends to mislead our mind, suggesting as it does mere
inventiveness. In fact, the imagination discloses to the mind a
realm of ideal possibility and of value. The artist does not create
this realm; he discovers it and, upon entering it, obeys the rules
of the realm.

To recapitulate, instruction in the arts consists of three phases

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

first the reception of heritage from the past, second the reac-
tion of the individual mind upon this heritage with a view to the
enhancement of present experience, third the opening of the eyes
of the mind outward to the universal realm of value. We are not
suggesting that the three phases need follow one another in this
order. In many cases, the heritage of art is better understood
after the pupil has already familiarized himself with the natural
beauty around him.

Art is the merging of idea and feeling with concrete material;
no wonder, then, that Platonists and Puritans have so often
feared art. An aesthetic conception is inseparable from its ma-
terial embodiment. In painting, the artist is thinking and feeling
with the tips of his fingers; and, generally, in the arts learning is
bound up with doing. Thus, art by its very nature makes the
transition which we have described by the term, relevance. A
pupil who sings or plays an instrument is thereby helped better
to understand and appreciate fine points in the literature of
music. Beyond all the other arts, architecture is committed to the
task of making relevant judgments in complex situations. A
painter may claim to inhabit Bohemia, but an architect, normally,
must live in the everyday world. In planning the construction of
a house, he must consult not only his taste but his client's domes-
tic needs and the limitations imposed, for instance, by economic
factors and those of geographical location.

Finally, instruction in the arts has a bearing on other traits of
the person beyond those of his intelligence. In this world we
have to live with others and with ourselves; we need the virtues
both of society and of solitude. Such an art as music cultivates
the social skills. To sing in a choir or to play in an orchestra is to
merge oneself with a larger and disciplined whole without, how-
ever, losing one's own individuality. For it is by virtue of
playing a definite and individual role that one contributes to the
effectiveness of the organization. And inasmuch as in music
there are no explicit ideas at all, there is no scope for controversy
or dispute either. Thus the arts contribute to a welding of
human beings whom other influences would pull apart. Individ-
uals who differ in their intellectual abilities can all respond to the

General Education in a Free Society

sensuous appeal of the arts. Communal festivals or religious
rituals are cases in point. Now the arts have been defined as an
expression of the play impulse, and indeed the same rhythm of
society and solitude is illustrated in the world of sports. In foot-
ball, for instance, the individual must adjust himself to an organ-
ized group. But fishing is a lonely sport. The individual is apart
from his fellow men: all alone in the presence of the glassy or the
rushing waters, he has the chance to ponder deeply, since even
the fish may be away. Fishing fosters not only philosophy but
the arts as well, notably the art of fiction.

In turning to some of the methods suitable for teaching the
arts in the schools, we shall begin with the pupil who expects to
make a career in art. We deplore the frequent practice of putting
the gifted pupil in an art school almost from the outset. Here we
revert to some of our earlier remarks. An artist cannot become a
great or even a good artist unless along with technical skill he
has a certain range of human experience and understanding. To
deprive him of a general education is to diminish his chances of
artistic growth. And should it turn out later on, after he has had
an exclusively artistic education, that he is not suited to a career
in art, he will lack the general equipment and flexibility to change
to another career. But the schools must make special adjustments
for the gifted pupil. Since, particularly in music, professional
training must begin at an early age, he should not be required to
take so many academic courses as are usually prescribed.

However, our primary concern is with the pupil who is receiv-
ing a general education and does not propose to become a special-
ist in the arts. The important question is what he will be like
when he has grown to be a mature person, and whether instruc-
tion in the arts has given him something which will be available
to him all his life. Is the usefulness of school instruction in the
arts to be measured by considering what skills he has acquired
which he can use in his leisure, or in terms of a more indirect and
more general enrichment of experience? Probably it should be
measured in both ways. For instance, the student who is not to
become a professional musician may nevertheless learn to sing or
play an instrument as an amateur. The case of drawing and

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

painting is different. It is said that Mr. Churchill is an accom-
plished painter, and that when, owing to the vicissitudes of po-
litical life, he is out of power, he spends a good deal of time in
painting. But very few of us will have a chance even to resign
from great office; and few nonprofessional pupils can be expected
to acquire enough skill in school to be able to go on painting
with pleasure to themselves, much less to others.

For the purposes of general education in music the advantages
of choral singing are obvious. Children sing naturally and almost
all children can sing. Of course, for many playing an instrument
affords an admirable musical outlet. But singing is the utterance
of oneself through tools provided by nature. There has been an
unfortunate tendency in the schools to concentrate on the im-
parting of musical techniques and on the reading of musical nota-
tion. This is too theoretical. Practice should precede theory, and
theory when it comes should be pertinent to the practice
achieved. The pupil must first be given musical experience:
listening to music and, even more, participating in it. Correla-
tively it is important to develop the taste of the pupil, and for
this reason it is essential that he should be provided with music
of the highest standards. When the music is of poor quality, he
is soon bored. Nor is it necessary that the music be spectacular,
impressionistic, or even romantic in order that it be intelligible
and interesting to him; the young have a natural liking for
rhythm and melody, easily found in the works of the great
masters.

When we come to the question of the other arts, the situation
is different. Oftentimes a youngster who has a knack at repro-
ducing the outer look of physical objects or persons is hailed as
a potential genius and urged to make a specialty of painting. Yet
it is possible that lacking, as he well may, imagination and depth,
such a youth will be a failure. Nonetheless, the current practice of
letting and even urging the pupil to be as "creative" as possible
must be deprecated. It is surely a paradox that, whereas a stu-
dent of the piano is obliged to spend long hours laboriously ac-
quiring craftsmanship, it is assumed that one may use colors or
draw by relying solely on natural gifts. Instruction in drawing

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and painting should include courses designed to give an under-
standing of the principles of color and form. One who has ac-
quired the relevant knowledge and taste will then have no need
of the specialized vocational courses as, for instance, those in
household decoration. An aesthetic education will give a young
person standards which he can apply to particular situations.
The purpose of general instruction in the arts is to help the stu-
dent to bring to bear his aesthetic taste upon his daily living.
Our houses and our factories, our cars and our bridges, can be
made to combine an adaptation of means to ends with a con-
formity to aesthetic norms. Only the existence of an artistically
educated lay public can guarantee this. Now that the patrons of
art are no longer princes, peers, or even the great rich, but come
from the larger public, it is of the highest importance for the
interests of the professional artist himself that the lay public have
discriminating taste.

3

The Social Studies

WHEN Aristotle said that "man is by nature a political animal"
he did not mean that man invariably seeks public office or habitu-
ally engages in what we may think of as the activities of the
politician. He meant, rather, that civilized man lives in a politi-
cally organized society, that only in such a society can he live a
satisfactory life. Fie was reflecting the doctrine of his teacher,
Plato, and of his teacher's teacher, Socrates, as also when he said
that "virtue and goodness in the state are not a matter of chance
but the result of knowledge and purpose." Not all people were,
in his estimation, adapted to the highest form of civic life. But
even among those whose capacities fitted them for life in society,
their natural endowments were but the beginning. "All else is the
work of education, we learn some things by habit and some by
instruction." Like Plato and Socrates before him, he believed
with unquestioning faith that education for life in organized

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society is essential to the well-being of the state. It is, in other
words, a condition of the good life for all citizens.

The education which seeks to promote active, responsible, and
intelligent citizenship is ordinarily general rather than special
education. It is not, to be sure, reserved for formal education
since the shaping of the future citizen takes place mainly at
home, at church, on the street or playground, before and outside
of school and college. But neither the school nor the college can
defensibly fail to attempt the promotion of the kind of citizen-
ship upon which the well-being of our entire way of life depends.

Nor do the social studies include all those which have a very
real bearing upon life in society. In some measure every subject
in the curriculum helps achieve this great goal of general educa-
tion. But the social studies have a more immediate relationship to
civic education than do the other studies of the secondary-school
years, and even though they are concerned with other aspects of
general education than training for a life of civic responsibility,
this is their distinctive justification.

As was remarked, the schools are far from being the only
agencies concerned with the development of citizenship. In this
area, as perhaps in no other with which the schools deal, their
work is intimately related to that of a number of nonacademic
organizations. The Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the 4-H clubs,
the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., as well as many other religious and
civic groups, often do more toward instilling an attitude and habit
of responsibility than the schools can ordinarily accomplish. In
some school systems, both rural and urban, certain of these
activities have been closely tied to more formal schoolwork,
usually to the advantage of both. Certain localities have experi-
mented with a kind of civic apprenticeship which seeks to intro-
duce the boy or girl directly into the field of adult civic activities.
But whether youth organizations are entirely separate from the
school or are closely affiliated with it, many of them unquestion-
ably succeed in bringing students at an impressionable age into
some direct touch with civic life, and in giving them a vivid
sense of its opportunities and its obligations.

In addition to formal studies most schools have various more

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or less extracurricular activities which contribute to the aims
here being discussed. Many offer programs of lectures and dis-
cussions which help stimulate an interest in public affairs. Stu-
dent government may be an introduction to the methods and
responsibilities of politics. School forums and debating societies
are ordinarily concerned with public issues and play an important
role in the development of a great many boys and girls who
become leaders in their generation. Interested and energetic
teachers are often able to establish and encourage current-affairs
clubs, discussion groups, and mock political conventions.

The value of such activities, whether inside or outside the
schools, can be, and indeed frequently is, enormous. Nothing
that we shall say about the value of formal training should be
taken to reflect any doubt in our minds as to the debt which our
society owes to such organizations and such methods of acquaint-
ing boys and girls at an impressionable age with some of the vital
relationships and obligations of social life. We believe, indeed,
that their importance will be greater in the future.

But if we recognize the value of these activities, we must also
recognize their limitations. It is rare that such organizations or
activities can help develop materially that sense of perspective
which ordinarily follows only upon the study of instances and
ideas removed in space, and usually in time as well as in space,
from immediate experience. What was earlier said about famili-
arity with the traditions of our civilization is as pertinent to the
teaching of citizenship as to the study of literature. Political
wisdom has always been founded in some part upon knowledge
of the past, and upon comprehension of those values which are
either implicit in institutions or which have been nobly expressed
by statesmen and philosophers. To say this is not to question the
value of an understanding of immediate political and economic
affairs. It is only to say that a study of immediate problems is
ordinarily inadequate since the immediate problem is itself, in
some measure, the product of tradition and of inherited ideas.
We urge not the necessity of antiquarianism, but rather that kind
of education which, specifically directed at wise and responsible
citizenship, includes the formal study of history and the social

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

sciences. Interest in, and good will toward, civic affairs are in-
valuable but inadequate.

The need for differentiation, discussed in the previous chapter,
will probably result in certain variations of subject matter in the
social studies with different groups of students. It is of course
clear that the goals remain the same. But differences in back-
ground and in intellectual competence will call for variety in
materials and teaching methods. As between those students who
are preparing for college and those who do not expect to con-
tinue their formal education beyond high school, we see but
slight grounds for differentiation in subject matter. Those whose
formal education ends with high school, as well as those who in-
tend to go on to technical institutions or to liberal colleges, need
that cultural literacy which springs only from the study of his-
tory. All of them should be given some sense of the nature and
value of the inheritance which they did not achieve but which
they must help maintain, as well as some understanding of that
principle of continuity with the past which is possible only
through the study of the past. Whether the student expects to
spend six or eight years in college and in professional school, or
to begin to earn a living at once, he cannot avoid the fact of
citizenship, and the schools will not fulfill their duty to society
unless they help their students understand the nature of the
problems and responsibilities of the society in which they must
live and which they should help govern. The only sound prin-
ciple upon which to base a distinction in the allotment of time
and of courses as between those who are preparing for college
and those who are not is that certain aspects of work in the social
studies, such as the course dealing with government and eco-
nomics, might be postponed until the college years on the as-
sumption that they could there be studied in a more mature way
and, therefore, be of greater value in the development of citizen-
ship. For those students who plan to take advanced work in
government, economics, or sociology in college a sound second-
ary-school preparation in history is of particular importance.

An over-all plan dealing with the teaching of the social studies
is essential in every school. The first reason for such planning is

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General Education in a Free Society

to ensure that no subject or materials of basic concern are left
out. The second is to provide for the orderly development of a
curriculum adapted to the age and accomplishment of pupils in
the various grades. The third is to avoid duplication and repe-
tition.

The Elementary Grades. Since this committee has to do
chiefly with secondary schools and colleges, it would be inappro-
priate to discuss in detail the content of social studies in the ele-
mentary grades. But we suggest that the work of the high school
can be much more substantial if it is built on a foundation which
has been carefully designed and carried out in the lower grades.
It should avoid repeating what the student has previously cov-
ered, unless these materials are such that a second reading is likely
to be of greater value than something new. It should also be able
to assume some understanding of certain specific methods of
learning, a competence in certain skills, as well as a grasp of
certain bodies of information.

We do not mean to advocate a long series of systematic or
chronological surveys through the first seven or eight grades of
school. Such surveys are of extremely doubtful value, at least
before the senior high school. It is, for one thing, unwise to
attempt in lower grades what can be done much better later on.
We have, moreover, in schools and colleges alike, often made the
mistake of believing that comprehensive coverage is the inevitable
method. Surveys have their place, and it is an important one, but
the systematic or comprehensive survey is often better calculated
to stifle the student's interest than to arouse his curiosity and to
lead him to go on for himself. As Montesquieu put it, "We must
not always exhaust a subject, so as to leave no work at all for the
reader."

In the lower grades children can begin to gain some compre-
hension of the customs, the methods of making a living, and the
traditions of peoples remote from their own experience, as well as
some sense of the historical development of their own commu-
nity. The relation of environment to civilization is not something
which can be acquired solely through a study of the immediate
scene. To say this is not to deprecate the study of the community

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

or state or section, since such study is essential to an appreciation
of many aspects of society and politics, but to urge that localism
by itself is a weak basis for citizenship. In these grades the em-
phasis should be less on survey or on chronology or on time se-
quence, than on gaining perspective through an introduction to
a fairly wide variety of the ways in which people in differing
civilizations have lived. This can often be carried on most fruit-
fully in connection with the study of geography. But just as the
merely picturesque is to be avoided, so is the sentimental approach
to other peoples and times unlikely to yield any realistic under-
standing of their way of life.

It is hardly for us to describe the appropriate subject matter
for the grammar grades. There are many possibilities, and they
can be combined in many patterns. The study of relatively
simple peoples, such as the Vikings or the American Indians, of
value in early grades, is doubtless inappropriate for children old
enough to find in Huckleberry Finn the basis for understanding
one of the most fascinating segments of American life. The great
explorations of early modern times provide rich materials which
help give an understanding both of the economic problems of
that age and of the folkways of various peoples. Such study can
also be a vivid and a valuable introduction to modern geog-
raphy, one which keeps it from appearing as nothing more than
an interminable series of lists of capitals, rivers, and principal
products.

There is a commonly accepted principle that work in social
studies in the seventh and eighth grades should be carefully re-
lated to that of both the elementary grades and of high school.
It may be doubted whether there is any single program which
would suit the needs of all schools. But experiments which have
been and are being carried out by many school systems calling
for the beginning in the seventh grade of a group of two-year
sequences in the social studies suggest valuable educational possi-
bilities. This plan relates the first to the second year in these
groupings and also provides secure foundations for the work to
come. In those schools where a large proportion of the students
leave before the eleventh grade it will be desirable to have in the

General Education in a Free Society

seventh and eighth grades a course on community life and civics,
as well as a primarily narrative course on American history.
Whether such a program is equally desirable in those schools
where all, or nearly all, students complete the twelfth grade is, in
view of our recommendations for these years, less clear. We
repeat how important it is to avoid the repetition and duplication
now to be found in some curricula. There are many valuable
subjects which might properly be offered in the seventh and
eighth grades, leaving the formal study of American history and
of civics until the last years of high school.

The High School. We do not propose that every student in
every secondary school should have work in the social studies
during each of his four years, although in most schools that might
be an eminently desirable plan. In an earlier section we suggested
that English continue through all four years, even though it
might not be a major or full-time subject in each. There are also
great advantages to continuity in the social studies, and if the
schedule has sufficient flexibility it may be found both desirable
and possible to have the social studies likewise present in each of
the four years, although in one or two of those years, probably
in the ninth or tenth grade, they might count as minors or as
half-courses.

A number of schools are now considering the adoption of two
two-year sequences in the social studies for the high schools. This
plan has advantages, although it may not be applicable under all
conditions. Such a program would include the study of European
history, or of general history and geography, in the ninth and
tenth grades, to be followed in the eleventh and twelfth by a final
two-year sequence dealing with American history and with the
problems of American life. This scheme can be adapted to the
needs both of independent schools and of public-school systems,
whether those systems include junior high schools or retain the
older four-year high school.

In any case no one should graduate from secondary school who
has not had a considerable amount of work in the history of
modern civilization. We see no way of attaining that perspective,
that sense of proportion, which is an essential component of good

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

citizenship, without some understanding of the forces which have
gone into the making of the age in which we live. All citizens
need to realize that the causes of present happenings ordinarily
go back before December 7, 1941, or March 4, 1933, and nearly
all of them have roots which penetrate far deeper than the
twentieth century. The heritage from the past includes wars and
racial prejudices as well as modern science and medicine. It in-
cludes that group of institutions, traditions, ideas, and values
which we call "the American way of life." Certainly the studies
of every student should include a thorough course in American
history given toward the end of high school. But, important as
we conceive such a course to be, it cannot provide all of the
historical materials or training needed by American citizens. A
very large proportion of our institutions and ideas, even of our
standards of value, have origins which antedate the coining of the
white man to this continent. Our science, our art, and our litera-
ture are not purely American creations. We live, moreover, in
a world of smaller dimensions, and it is no longer possible for us
to ignore the wars or other conflicts which originate thousands
of miles from our boundaries and whose causes often involve
events or tensions extending centuries into the past.

The focus of work in general history should be Europe, al-
though a course which failed to include the relation of certain
events and tendencies in European history to those of other areas,
particularly Asia, would be too narrow to serve the needs of
modern citizenship. Such a course should probably not be a
survey of the entire range of European history, or even of Eu-
rope since the fall of Rome, but it should not be confined to
Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether the
course be one which deals with events spread over a very long
period of time or be confined within somewhat narrower limits,
its central goal must be kept clearly in mind: to set forth the
main tendencies in the development of modern civilization.

Along with the study of general history should go the further
study of geography. That subject seems to be studied most fruit-
fully, at least in high school, when it is linked with history. It
does not follow that students should be expected to learn every

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General Education in a Free Society

change that has taken place in the map of Europe since Charle-
magne, or even since the Treaty of Westphalia. Such rote learn-
ing turns into a travesty both of history and of geography. But
the importance of geographical factors in the growth of the mod-
ern world needs emphasis. This would be particularly true in
connection with the study of the history and problems of the
twentieth century, which should include economic as well as
political geography.

While we think that general history, and especially European
history, has been unhappily neglected in many schools, both
public and private, during the past few decades, we do not, to
repeat, propose that every school should provide precisely the
same course. Certainly colleges should not attempt to require for
entrance this or any other single pattern of courses even though
they may, and we think should, expect of students some substan-
tial work in European or in general history as well as in American
history. But there are obvious dangers in prescribing the par-
ticular methods by which these aims should be attained. There
may, for example, be in a given school a teacher who is devoted
to ancient history, and a course in Greek or Roman history can
be made a vital part of the education of future citizens, even
though, no matter how well taught, it would not afford that
familiarity with the background of the modern world which is
necessary to an understanding of the great society in which we
live. Such a course might, that is to say, be an extremely valuable
basis upon which to build later work in modern European and
in American history, even though it would not be a substitute
for either. The need for experimentation in teaching the social
sciences will continue. It would be most unwise to cast them in
a rigid mold. The enthusiasm of a teacher for his subject is al-
ways of first importance. But even when all of these factors are
taken into account, it may be doubted whether any of them can
justify the exclusion of European and American history from
the list of courses which best subserves the purposes of general
education.

It is probably unnecessary to speak at length of the importance,
or even of the nature, of a course in American history to be taken

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

later in the school years, preferably in the eleventh grade. The
value of such work at this time is now generally accepted, and
such a course is almost universally to be found in the secondary
schools.

In some school systems pupils are exposed to American history
three, four, even five or six times. Testimony, both from edu-
cators and from students who have experienced, and suffered
from, such multiple exposure leads us to the view that there is no
sound reason for this repetition. It leads neither to mastery of
nor to interest in American history. The subject is many times
surveyed, usually with diminishing returns and increasing dis-
taste. It seems wiser to fix the responsibility for American history
in one year of high school and then to insist that the standards of
that course be as high as those of any in the school. No course
will carry a heavier responsibility; none will afford greater oppor-
tunities for inspiring teaching. We reiterate our opinion that
this subject can be most valuably studied when it constitutes not
a separate item in a miscellaneous array, but is introduced as part
of a sequence of courses in history and the other social studies.
The aim of such a course is to provide a basis for all later study or
discussion of American life and society and for participation in
the work of citizenship. It should, we think, be strongly factual
in nature. That is not to say that it should consist of lists of dates
and presidents. Rather, its emphasis should be on the careful knd
even detailed study of many of the principal events, movements,
personalities, and institutional developments in American history.
Easy generalization should not be encouraged at the expense of
genuine learning. The course should certainly deal at some length
with the happenings and the trends of the last half-century, but
it should not be confined to the recent period.

The residue which holds over from the study of history in
school will be much greater if the method of uniform coverage
is avoided. What we have said earlier about the importance of
selection applies here. Some breadth of coverage is always nec-
essary in dealing with a broad sweep of history in order that
connections and relations may be indicated. It does not follow
that coverage need be uniform, that all aspects of the story be

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dealt with, much less dealt with in equal detail or equal lack of
detail. Those periods, those great writings and documents which
constitute landmarks in the history of our institutions, certain of
the momentous experiments and discoveries which have been
responsible for the transformation from magic to modern science,
the impact of technology upon economic and social life, some of
the conflicts which have led to, or immediately preceded, great
wars certain of these can profitably be dealt with in consider-
able detail, while only the simplest narrative is employed to tie
together parts of the whole pattern. The systematic survey of
chronological completeness succeeds only in finishing the course
as marked out in a syllabus, while dulling the student's interest
in history and limiting his understanding to the narrow confines
of a textbook. A course that attempts to present the contributions
of certain peoples or inventions or movements or events to the
formation of our civilization may fail to attain a neat compre-
hensiveness, but it may also leave a much more enduring imprint
on the student's mind.

In addition to some appreciation of the legacy from past gen-
erations, and some understanding of the variety and complexity
of inherited problems, the student should gain from the study of
history a considerable training in what may be called the his-
torical skills: the ability to analyze maps and documents, to apply
tests of credibility, and even of scholarly validity, to current
materials as well as to those of the past. We have suggested that
it is educationally dangerous to require students to form judg-
ments without evidence. It follows that they must be given
experience in gathering and weighing historical evidence. What
was said about the evils of premature formulation in the teaching
of English is equally relevant to the teaching of history. It is
crucial that students acquire a mastery of the relevant factual
detail. Yet the pursuit of facts for their own sake which results
in the irrelevant learning of the quiz programs is equally un-
desirable. We realize that it is far easier to make such statements
than to apply them in the classroom. Few traits more clearly
distinguish good teaching from bad than intelligent use of the
principle that interpretation and generalization, though impor-

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tant, are valuable only when based on an understanding of the
facts to which they relate. The tremendous accumulations of
historical scholarship during the past generation have made the
problem infinitely harder for the teacher than it was in the nine-
teenth century. But the problem remains. So far as schools are
concerned, history is studied not for its own sake but because of
its relation to the whole of general education, and that education
cannot be successful if it is confined to the memorizing of half-
understood details or if facile interpretation be substituted for
careful study. William James' remark that we can see into a
generalization only so far as our knowledge of detail goes, ap-
plies to the social studies as well as to every branch of learning.

The course dealing with the nature of contemporary society
constitutes a fitting culmination for all the work in the social
studies that has preceded it, and it should be an invaluable intro-
duction to the task of citizenship which lies just ahead. By a
study of contemporary society we do not mean the study of
current events, although the best teaching will ordinarily have
some relation to contemporaneous problems and happenings.
Rather do we suggest as thorough a study as is feasible in the
eleventh or twelfth grade of those topics which are dealt with in
colleges in departments of government, economics, and sociology.
The subject of such a course would be, in other words, the goals
and the values, the organization and the processes, the problems
and conflicts in the political structure, the economic life, and the
social relationships which go to make up the United States. Ob-
viously no single course can even attempt a comprehensive survey
of this broad domain. No one has yet found the perfect selection
or arrangement of materials and topics, nor is it probable that
any one plan will please all teachers. The very richness of the
opportunities will inevitably result in variations of approach and
emphasis. Such a course can be most profitably given when it
follows immediately after the study of American history. It will
be even more profitable if it has also been preceded by work in
general or European history and in political and economic geog-
raphy.

Many of the courses dealing with this subject matter carry

General Education in a Free Society

some such title as "Problems of American Life," or some variation
thereon in which the word "Problems" appears. Emphasis upon
problems, at least when the word is at all indicative of content
and approach, has both advantages and disadvantages. It is of the
first importance to introduce students at the end of high school
to some of the unsolved, and perhaps insoluble, problems of
modern political and economic life. It is equally important that
the emphasis be not upon problems alone, particularly since many
of the issues which loom large today will seem trivial, if they are
not quite forgotten, a few years hence. A course of this kind
should never neglect the basic structure and processes which go
to make up the political, economic, and social system. It is of
equal importance that it deal with the values expressed in our
institutions. A course which emphasizes racial discrimination and
scarcely mentions the humanitarian movements of the last hun-
dred years, with their common premise of the dignity and worth
of all human aspirations and their magnificent, if unfinished, list
of achievements, is likely to foster either cynicism or romantic
zeal for a quick remedy, which may turn into disillusion at the
first contact with the difficulties and complexities inherent in the
attainment of true reforms. A course which pictures vividly the
grim story of political corruption and, with scant formality,
passes over the vast significance of a party system of government
in which freedom of speech means the right to disagree, where
the opposition seeks power only through constitutional means
where words and ballots are substituted for violence, concentra-
tion camps, and enforced conformity such a course will have
failed to give the student a true idea of the nature and the values
of the society in which he will be called upon to exercise the
functions of a citizen.

Such treatment of American political, social, and economic
life should not be concerned only with the contemporaneous or
with our society as a going concern. The old and much criticized
maxim, "Politics without history has no roots," expresses a sound
view if only it be wisely interpreted and applied. It does not
necessarily mean that politics (which, as once understood, em-
braced economics and sociology) should be taught only in his-

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torical terms. But the political, economic, and social problems of
today do have historical roots, just as they will supply the roots
of other problems in the future. Connections with the past and
some knowledge of these problems are essential to an understand-
ing of the complexity of the political organism.

The movement toward a "realistic" study of government and
economics has unquestionably produced a clearer picture of con-
temporary problems and processes. But the understanding that
has resulted has often been shallow, partly because of neglect of
historical forces, partly through lack of attention to the role
played by relatively abstract principles of politics and economics.
Nearly fifty years ago Justice Holmes said, "Theory is the most
important part of the dogma of the law, as the architect is the
most important man who takes part in the building of a house."
The generalization is as valid for the social sciences as for law
and architecture, yet the teaching of these subjects is rarely based
upon the principle which Holmes expressed. One result is that
the slogans and catchwords of the moment are accepted as state-
ments of profound truth; another is a skeptical relativism which
recognizes no standard of value except success. There is no bet-
ter safeguard against these unhappy conditions than the study of
some of the speculative doctrines, as well as some of the state-
ments of political and social faith, which served the men of the
past the men from whom we inherit the institutions for whose
perpetuation and improvement we are responsible. A wise stu-
dent of American history and government recently remarked
that we today have no substitute for the old books of maxims
and precepts of free government which formerly constituted a
basic part of instruction in the schools. The lack to which he re-
ferred is a serious one, even though the old collections of maxims
seem dogmatic and not entirely relevant today. But some of the
classic statements of political and social theory can profitably be
used either in courses in European or American history or in
those dealing with civics or American life. Obviously there will
be a need for careful selection of such materials in relation to the
capacities of students, and we do not suggest The Politics or
The Wealth of Nations in high-school courses. But there exist

General Education in a Free Society

statements of the essential principles of democracy which should
be made available to all students; other statements, as with algebra
or advanced work in foreign languages, would be suitable only
for a somewhat limited group. Thus Mill's On Liberty or his
Representative Government probably could be studied profitably
by only a minority of high-school students. Some parts of Jef-
ferson's Notes on Virginia and some numbers of The Federalist
might be read by a somewhat larger proportion, provided the
teacher has the training and the capacity to explain their place
in the growth of American polity and is able to discuss their
relevance to contemporary affairs. Nearly all students should
have an opportunity to read some of the major constitutional
documents and certain of the great speeches of Pitt, Burke, Lin-
coln, Wilson, and Roosevelt. Passages from many of them have
become the common possession of literate men. Primarily they
are eloquent testimonies of faith in a free society. They are also
illustrations in the history of constitutional democracy and state-
ments of the principles which have shaped and continue to shape
the social order in which we live. As such they warrant analysis
as well as repetition.

During late years there have been many criticisms of the teach-
ing of social studies in schools. These criticisms, at least those
coming from persons outside the schools, seem to be variations
on a single theme, but for purposes of analysis and discussion
they may be considered under three heads: first, that teachers of
the social studies have often substituted moralizing and senti-
mentality for sound analysis; second, that there has been much
thinness and superficiality; and third, that the subject matter of
these courses has not afforded the intellectual discipline of such
subjects as the languages and mathematics which have been
crowded out in order to make room for these inadequate re-
placements.

It is easy to agree that a course which consists largely of
moralizing about proper attitudes is a poor training ground for
citizenship. Fortunately the flag-waving chauvinism of the sort
lampooned by Dickens in Jefferson Brick is rarely found among
teachers, although members of school boards sometimes indulge

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in it. Students ordinarily view such oratory with fitting detach-
ment. But the common sense of students can hardly supply the
solid base of information which should underlie every such
course. We need more interpretation rather than less in our
teaching of all of the social studies. But theorizing which has no
secure roots in factual knowledge is unlikely to bear sound fruit.

Closely related to the charge that a sentimentally ethical tone
has sometimes been substituted for more serious study of both
principles and causal factors is the charge that these courses have
been superficial. It is apparently true that a good many teachers,
sometimes because they have lacked an adequate preparation in
the subject, have emphasized almost wholly the merely contem-
poraneous, discussing current events with very little relation to
the complexities which they invariably reflect. Even the best-
trained teachers, in colleges as well as in schools, have occasionally
been so ambitious to cover a vast number of topics that they have
dealt thoroughly with none of them. In historical courses as well
as in those devoted to civics or to problems of government and
economics there is always the danger of spreading so thin that no
opportunity is afforded for careful analysis. From undue spread-
ing has followed the result, above alluded to, that true learning
has been sacrificed to quick generalization. Too many children
have learned too little about too much. The fault has probably
been as much with school authorities and with those responsible
for college-entrance requirements as it has been with teachers.
All alike must recognize more clearly the limitations inherent in
a succession of broad surveys; all must encourage intensive as
well as extensive study.

The view that the social studies do not offer the discipline
provided by some of the more traditional subjects is largely mis-
placed. It is true enough that these subjects do not even aim at
the exactness or the rigor appropriate to mathematics or to the
study of Latin grammar. But an education wholly devoted to
the study of those disciplines would be incomplete indeed. It is
no criticism of the values of mathematics or grammar to suggest
that the methods of reasoning applicable to them are only par-
tially applicable when one must deal with the complexity of

General Education in a Free Society

social and political life, with the emotions, the variables, the un-
knowns, to be found in almost every situation which the student
will later meet. Rigorous exactitude does not allow for con-
tinuity and change. In education, as in life, we cannot flee from
distressing complexity and uncertainty to the cozy neatness and
comprehensiveness of dialectic. Scholasticism gave to modern
civilization the vital principle of orderliness. But intellectual
orderliness can, when misplaced, be fatal to either order or justice
in the changing society that is our heritage and our responsibility.
What we can hope for in the teaching of the social studies is not
a mathematical or logical precision, but rather an understanding
based upon careful, even rigorous, study of some of the stubborn
facts which have gone into the making of our social order, as
well as a consideration of the theories and principles implicit in it.
This is clearly no easy assignment, and to accomplish the aims
we have discussed, teachers of the social sciences must be persons
of capacity as well as of superior training. Many are now chosen
not because of their competence but because they have time left
over from their activities as athletic coaches, or for other reasons
as irrelevant. Even among those teachers who devote their en-
tire time and attention to the subject, there are a good many who
have been poorly trained. Teachers of history and of the other
social studies need at least as much college training in history,
government, and economics as do teachers of languages or mathe-
matics in their fields. Training in methods of teaching the social
studies can be useful, but training in methods is not a substitute
for training in content. Colleges must share in the blame for this
condition. Many of them have failed to oiler the kind of courses
needed by teachers. Rather, courses have commonly been
planned only for the needs of prospective college teachers or
research scholars. They have been particularly lacking in their
failure to define the objectives to be sought in the study of these
subjects. It is easy for any college or university teacher to be-
come so fascinated with the internal consistency and the scholarly
problems of his specialty that he loses all sight of its relationship
to general education. In order that secondary-school teachers of
history and the social studies may have a sounder training, col-

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leges and universities must reconsider their methods and their
offerings.

No discussion of the problems of teaching the social studies
would be complete without a recognition of the restraints some-
times imposed on teachers by outside persons or groups in the
community. These limitations or compulsions come ordinarily
from those who believe, or profess to believe, that they are ex-
pressing the true principles of Americanism. They too often
forget that the basic doctrine of that faith is freedom of thought
and speech, as they fail to recall the disastrous effects in many
countries of abandoning that freedom. It may readily be agreed
that teachers must be aware of their grave responsibility in dis-
cussing debated and debatable political and social ideas and move-
ments. Their role is analysis, discussion, teaching not stump
oratory. But recognition of the nature of that role must not be
allowed to become an excuse for strangling the freedom to in-
vestigate and to discuss controversial issues. That freedom is
essential to the continuation of the American way of life. Teach-
ers are citizens and their students will soon be expected to take
up the obligations of citizenship. Unless teachers are free to enjoy
the privileges of citizenship outside the classroom, and to carry
on in the classroom the spirit and practice of inquiry and discus-
sion, the rights of teachers and of students will have been sacri-
ficed to a principle of enforced conformity which has been far
more productive of the spirit of revolt than of intelligent par-
ticipation in the democratic process. Change is inevitable in
politics, as in science and in the art of war. Our constitutional
system is based on that assumption, and orderly change, as the
founders knew, can proceed only out of free discussion. To those
who are entirely content with the existing condition of affairs,
any consideration of proposals for amendment may appear to be
both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. To them we would recall
the statement of Jefferson, made at the age of seventy-three, after
he had spent nearly a decade in reflecting on his forty years of
public life:

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of
the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlight-

General Education in a Free Society

cned, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and man-
ners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institu-
tions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might
as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a
boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their
ancestors. (Writings, Paul L. Ford, ed., X, pp. 42-43.)

4

Science and Mathematics

SCIENCE IN GENERAL EDUCATION. Science means
many things to many different persons. To some it is typified
primarily by the miracles of technology which have changed the
face of civilization and which exert a continuing impact on all
aspects of modern society. To others science signifies predomi-
nantly an intellectual enterprise marked principally by precision,
so that it tends to fuse with mathematics; or by the ordering of
evidence, so that it tends to fuse in this regard with certain social
sciences. To still others it represents primarily a body of knowl-
edge and hypothesis concerning the material world.

Science partakes of all these things. But if it is to be considered
fruitfully, and its contribution to general education evaluated, it
must be defined more adequately. From our point of view science
is primarily a distinct type of intellectual enterprise, involving
highly restricted aspects of reality and prepared as such to make
particular types of contribution to general education.

Science is not to be divorced from technology. Science and
technology develop in parallel, each fructifying the other. Yet
science is not technology. Its prime end is knowing rather than
doing\ or better still, it is doing in order that one may know,
rather than doing with primarily other ends in view greater
convenience, technical efficiency, military power, or economic
advantage, for example.

As was said in Chapter II, science is certainly distinguished by
a persistent effort toward precision. It measures whatever can be

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measured. Yet it is only as logical as its interpretation of reality
permits. When logic and apparent fact fall out with one another,
the scientist takes the fact and leaves the logic for future repair.
Science is concerned with understanding and operating with
nature. Its object is, as Bacon expressed it, u to command nature
in action." It is not primarily concerned with the construction of
a logical system. Science, like the proverbial man from Missouri,
insists upon being shown. It is in this regard an expert and highly
organized common sense.

When we say that science is concerned with things and events
which permit exact definition and measurement, we imply a cer-
tain stability in these things and in their behavior. To a degree
science limits its interest to the stable or repetitive. The material
world abounds in such phenomena; yet it cannot be relied upon
to produce them for inspection at times and under conditions
which best satisfy scientific examination. The scientist therefore
ensures himself, when he can, the proper circumstances for pur-
suing his inquiry by ordering the conditions of the natural event
himself. This is the point of scientific experiment. By this means
matters may be so arranged as to yield an unequivocal answer to
a highly specific question concerning the real world. Such regu-
lation of the system under regard is beyond the powers of students
in other areas of reality.

It is this constant appeal to things as they are which makes the
direct experience of the field and laboratory essential in scientific
education. Needless to say, this is so only to the degree that work
in the field or laboratory is designed not merely to keep students
busy or to develop technical proficiency, but to provide directly
the materials of scientific argument and the tests of scientific
hypothesis. For this purpose no elaborateness is needed. The
simple observation that weights tied to the end of a certain length
of string oscillate with the same period no matter what the weight
or what the amplitude of swing demonstrates better than any
quantity of verbal explanation the genuine meaning of order in
nature. The direct observation that part for part the structure
of man parallels that of a frog conveys as can no amount of state-
ment a sense of the genetic relationships of living organisms.

General Education in a Free Society

Science is concerned with the marshaling and critical appraisal
of evidence; so also are many other fields of learning. But science
is concerned with evidence of a peculiar sort concerning a par-
ticular class of phenomena, specifically with those material things
and processes which permit exact description and measurement.
The world contains many things which do not lend themselves
to this type of examination. These things, whatever their intrinsic
value to us as human beings, fall outside the province of the nat-
ural sciences. Science is prepared to deal only with those aspects
of reality which lend themselves to its methods of appraisal.
Great confusion in the public mind has resulted from the failure
to appreciate this fundamental and self-imposed limitation. This
consideration is fundamental also in defining what we mean by
the natural sciences. Certain aspects of human social organization,
for example, represent potential natural sciences, since man and
society are part of matter and nature. This potentiality, however,
cannot now be realized, precisely because man's social behavior
and social processes cannot yet be analyzed and defined with
sufficient precision.

The element of precision in the natural sciences is fulfilled by
measurement when possible. It then yields a description which
is numerical and which therefore can be manipulated mathe-
matically. The end of this process is the enunciation of a scien-
tific law or hypothesis. In the best case a scientific law takes the
form of a mathematical equation. Not all branches of science
attain at all points this ultimate state, but all aspire to it, and all
measure their success by the degree to which they approximate
this condition.

Quantitative measurements and their mathematical manipula-
tion are therefore woven inextricably into the structure of sci-
ence. Within large areas of physics, chemistry, and biology one
can no more excise mathematics than logic without destroying
the essential structure. Modern physics originated in the careful
measurements and mathematical arguments of Galileo, modern
astronomy in Kepler's mathematical treatment of the extensive
measurements of Tycho Brahe, modern chemistry in the quanti-
tative analyses of Lavoisier, modern physiology in the measure-

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

merits and calculations of blood flow and heart volume by Wil-
liam Harvey. Newton was forced to invent the calculus to deal
with his dynamical observations. Instruction in science should
certainly inculcate in the general student an appreciation of these
relations and some exercise in their application.

Mathematics and work in the laboratory represent genuine
intellectual barriers for some students. It might be supposed for
this reason that the values of science instruction which are our
primary concern in general education might be conveyed more
successfully without these elements. What this notion fails to
appreciate, however, is that direct observation and precision are
among the most important values and basic ideas that science
should contribute to general education.

What might be conveyed without them is not only not science,
but is in a very real sense antiscientific. It comes perilously close
in spirit to the scholasticism with which modern science broke at
its inception. It possesses the typically scholastic reliance upon
verbal authority in this case the authority of the writer of
scientific texts it has the same predominantly deductive logical
structure, and the same preoccupation with words rather than
with the objects and processes which they only imperfectly sym-
bolize. The thought that an understanding of science might be
conveyed as well or better without direct observation, experi-
ment, and mathematical reasoning involves a fundamental mis-
apprehension of the nature of science.

We have stressed certain very general points of view and
modes of approach which animate all the sciences. It is clear that
important lines of thought and content interconnect the sciences
with one another. Yet it must be added that despite their many
interconnections and similarities, the individual sciences differ
widely. These differences emanate from the nature of physical
reality; they are not simply foisted upon us by the predilections
of scientists.

In going from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology,
one crosses genuine hierarchical boundaries. The basis of consid-
eration of the natural world changes; different frames of reference
are invoked. One either considers different things, or one con-

General Education in a Free Society

siders the same things from wholly different standpoints. When
we deal with a lever in physics we are not concerned with
whether it is made of wood or steel. When we deal with wood
or steel in chemistry, we are not concerned with the possibility
that these substances are to be used to make levers. When levers
enter biology, it is in the form of anatomical adaptations of the
principle of the lever for animal locomotion; and here we are
concerned primarily neither with the principle of the lever as
such nor with the substance of the lever as such, but with the role
of anatomical levers in promoting the maintenance and survival
of the organism.

So it is with almost any aspect of the material world which we
care to examine. It is presented to us physically, chemically, or
biologically, not merely in different aspects, but on wholly dif-
ferent levels of approach and reference. Associated with these
basic intellectual differences are wide differences in technical
approach. One has only to enter a physical, a chemical, or a bio-
logical laboratory to see that each of them works with different
tools; one is confronted with different sights, sounds, and smells.
This fact again is not based upon the inclination or education of
the scientist, but upon the nature of the material being examined
and the nature of the inquiry being pursued. What we deal with,
therefore, in the division of the natural sciences is inherent in the
modes in which the natural world appears to our senses. It is no
mere traditional educational tactic. Since this is so, it cannot be
exorcised by any mere educational reconstruction.

It should be an important aim of general instruction in science
to make this truth clear to students, to give them a clear appre-
ciation of the hierarchy of nature and its reflection in the hier-
archy of the sciences. There is abundant opportunity provided
here to convey a most important generalization: that all modes
of inquiry must be adapted to the material under consideration
and to available methods of approach. If this educational task is
properly accomplished we shall have less in future of attempts
to use the "scientific method" upon material wholly unsuited to
whatever methods may be employed under that guise; and more
realization that statements in the literary or social sphere neces-

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

sarily are different in nature, and in precision, from statements in
mechanics.

We have defined above what we mean by science, what it is
and what it is not, and have attempted to give some idea of its
unique characteristics and the unique contributions which it can
make to general education. Our task is now to define more
closely the conditions under which these potentialities can be
realized. It is not enough that courses in science purvey precise
information, use mathematical methods, maintain laboratories,
and avoid doing violence to the hierarchical structure of nature
and of the sciences. Many such courses as now constituted
have all these characteristics and still fail to make the full con-
tribution to general education which is potentially theirs.

The reasons for this failure are to be sought in many directions.
Particularly at the middle levels, the teacher is not always clear
whether he is engaged in general or in special education, what
proportion of his effort is to be spent on coverage and on being
factually up-to-date, to what degree he is training for manipu-
lative skill, and so on. From the point of view of general educa-
tion, we are interested in these things not primarily for their own
sake, but as they fit into an integrated intellectual structure. Sci-
ence instruction in general education should be characterized
mainly by broad integrative elements the comparison of sci-
entific with other modes of thought, the comparison and contrast
of the individual sciences with one another, the relations of sci-
ence with its own past and with general human history, and of
science with problems of human society. These are areas in which
science can make a lasting contribution to the general education
of all students. Unfortunately, these areas are slighted most often
in modern teaching.

Many science teachers may at once object that they are already
badly pressed for time. There is so much ground to cover, and
so much more is added day by day, that the teacher is engaged in
a continuous struggle to encompass the subject matter. How is
he, then, to deal with extra things the critical examination,
history, literature, and general cultural context of his subject? It
is of course true that as extra things these aspects of science in-

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struction should be impossible. But they are not extra things
they are the very stuff of science in general education. Once it is
clear that one is engaged in general rather than special education,
these are things which must be emphasized, and to an increasing
degree as the student matures. Obviously in the very young,
science instruction primarily takes the form of conveying some
familiarity with the world of immediate experience, and this nec-
essarily proceeds mainly by direct contact and emphasis on fact
and classifications. The integrative element here is the student's
own mode of life and his personal relation to the immediate
environment.

But as one leaves direct experience, and the immediate and
familiar, an increasing need arises for an intellectual structure, an
articulated skeleton to be clothed with the flesh of scientific fact
and demonstration. The facts of science and the experiences of
the laboratory no longer can stand by themselves, since they no
longer represent simple, spontaneous, and practical elements di-
rectly related to the daily life of the student. As they become
further removed from his experience, more subtle, more abstract,
the facts of science must be learned in another context, cultural,
historical, and philosophical. Only such broader perspectives can
give point and lasting value to scientific information and experi-
ence for the general student.

When are we, in fact, engaged in general rather than special
education in science? We believe the answer to this question is
reasonably clear. Below the college level, virtually all science
teaching should be devoted to general education. Certain types
of technological instruction in the secondary schools, which have
a primarily vocational intent, we do not include in our considera-
tion of the sciences. It may be hoped that whenever possible
even such vocational instruction might retain elements of a gen-
eral scientific attitude. What we have to say about relations
between general and special education in science at college must
be reserved for the next chapter.

Science in the Schools. Education in science should begin early
in the primary grades, surely not later than the seventh grade. It
can approach familiarly immediate aspects of the environment.

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

They may be dealt with in large comprehensive units, the study
of which transcends the conventional boundaries between the
various branches of science. At this stage, in fact, no important
end is served by concentrating on the method or structure of the
sciences. On the contrary, the student and his environment are
the central themes; and their interrelations, if pursued rationally,
necessarily disregard all such limitations.

So, for example, if one approaches the study of the atmosphere,
one should ascertain by simple means that air has substance and
weight, that it exerts pressure and has other such properties which
conventionally belong to the realm of physics. This might well
be followed by a consideration of the composition of the air: so,
for example, combustion removes a fraction of the air, oxygen,
occupying about one fifth of its total volume, producing in this
process carbon dioxide. Here one is in the conventional sphere
of chemistry. One might well proceed immediately to demon-
strate that a living animal also consumes oxygen and produces
carbon dioxide while a green plant reverses this process, and here
we have entered biology.

Even at this most elementary stage the student should become
familiar with the direct appeal to nature which is the heart of
science. To a large degree this can be done by demonstration,
but students should be led to explore matters for themselves and
to find answers to simple problems by direct experimentation.
There is also of course a great area of science which involves
careful observation rather than experiment. Every effort should
be made to induce a genuine and rich familiarity with the world
of nature outside the classroom. This is the period of life in which
collecting, classifying, and simple description are particularly
attractive; and all these things, which form so large and indis-
pensable a background for the more sophisticated experiences of
later life, should now be fostered and developed.

Important as it is that the student learn to experiment as a
means of solving natural problems, it is not at all requisite that he
concern himself with an intellectual analysis of this process. In
reality the scientific method, of which so much is spoken for
both good and ill, is whatever means may be appropriate for

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solving problems in the natural environment. The working
scientist brings to bear upon these problems everything at his
command previous knowledge, intuition, trial and error, im-
agination, formal logic, and mathematics and these may ap-
pear in almost any order in the course of working through a
problem.

The nub of the matter is that the problem be solved. One may
go back afterward to analyze what has occurred, and then may
generalize it and put it in the form of a logical sequence. But that
is not how the thing actually happens; and in any case the analysis
of this very complicated procedure is a highly sophisticated ven-
ture not necessary to the successful operation of the method, and
certainly no concern of a child engaged in his first approach to
nature. Nothing could be more stultifying, and, perhaps more
important, nothing is further from the procedure of the scientist
than a rigorous tabular progression through the supposed "steps"
of the scientific method, with perhaps the further requirement
that the student not only memorize but follow this sequence in
his attempt to understand natural phenomena.

In high school science instruction should certainly continue.
At this stage those who are properly qualified to do so should
have the opportunity to pursue sciences and to begin to develop
the skills appropriate to them. But for those especially for whom
secondary education is terminal, and possibly for all students, a
course in a particular science does not really fulfill the aims of
general education. There is place for a rigorous and highly in-
tegrated introduction to science as a whole. Such a course should
differ greatly from the type of general science taught in grammar
school. It can expand its content beyond the student's immediate
environment and experience. It should begin to segregate for him
the differences in point of view and approach which are the basis
of the division of the sciences into separate disciplines. It should
include something of the history of scientific discoveries and some
discussion of major scientific concepts and hypotheses. Such a
course, properly designed, might not only be the ideal offering
for the terminal student but the best possible introduction for
those who will go on to the individual sciences.

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

As a second course in science, or as a first course for those
whose training in general science is already adequate, a course in
general biology is probably most advisable. In the ninth or tenth
grade biology takes precedence over courses in other sciences,
both because the student's stage of intellectual maturity is better
suited to the subject matter of biology, which can be dealt with
largely in a descriptive way, and because the content of this
course is more intimately related to his daily experience and
educational needs. Such a course should, for example, provide
informative and emotionally neutral approaches to such subjects
as personal and community hygiene, nutrition, and sexual re-
production.

General biology, coming usually at the tenth grade, is probably
the last formal science instruction that many students not going
on to college will obtain. Whatever they are to learn of the scien-
tific spirit and methods of accumulating knowledge must be epito-
mized in this course. This aim might be attained in part through
study of the work of great biologists Pasteur, Mendel, Darwin,
and Harvey, for example and in part through individual proj-
ects involving laboratory or field work which run parallel with
the work of the classroom.

Those students preparing to enter college but who have no
direct interest in the sciences might also stop at this point; or for
those who have had biology in the ninth grade a further course
in physics or chemistry might be advised. Better still for such
students would be a systematic presentation of basic concepts and
principles of the physical sciences, such as is now being experi-
mented with in a number of schools. This type of course draws
illustrative materials, as they are appropriate to its principal
themes, from the fields of physics, chemistry, geology, and astron-
omy. Its aim should be to supply a broad view of the nature and
organization of the physical world and a more mature approach to
scientific concepts than is possible in the general science teaching
of grades seven through nine. Needless to say, its primary aims
should be those of general education, not the development of
the skills and technical knowledge of the potential physicist and
chemist.

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Those who plan advanced work in science and mathematics in
college should go beyond secondary-school biology to a year of
chemistry or physics or both. An integrated course in physical
sciences might be of particular value to such students. A course
like this can profitably extend into a second year. When properly
designed such a two-year sequence should make a greater contri-
bution to the student's general education and his preparation for
future study than separate one-year courses in physics and chem-
istry.

In the final section of this chapter we shall say something about
the importance of shop training in general education. For those
who intend to go into scientific or technological work, it has
special relevance. The manipulation of objects, the use of tools,
and the construction of simple apparatus all are required for entry
into the world of experimentation. Even the pure mathematician
is greatly aided by shop experience; the forms, contours, and
interrelations of three-dimensional objects provide a stimulus and
satisfaction not to be achieved altogether within the limits of
plane diagrams. The lack of shop training is at present a most
serious deterrent to entry into all types of technological work
and to college and postgraduate training in science, medicine, and
engineering. What students should learn in secondary school
specifically is the use of simple hand tools and the execution of
simple basic operations such as soldering and elementary glass
blowing and joining. If the student can be taught to operate a
drill press, a wood lathe and a machine lathe, so much the better.
Obviously, the equipment for work with power-driven tools is
not ordinarily available except in larger schools.

Mathematics in General Education. We have already empha-
sized the indispensable part which mathematics plays in the study
of the natural sciences. This by no means exhausts its position as
a tool and as an effective mode of thought in general education.
In subjects other than the sciences notably in economics, psy-
chology, sociology, and anthropology frequent and increasing
use is made of the graphic presentation of data, of statistics, and
of simple algebraic formulas. Almost all students meet one or
more of these fields either in the course of their formal education

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

or later, and hence should be prepared early with the simple
mathematical techniques required for their pursuit.

This argument has particular and immediate force for the pro-
spective college student. But the need of elementary mathematics
in fact involves a much larger and constantly growing section of
the general population. The complexities of organization and
technology in modern industry, in government, and in the na-
tional defense make increasing demands upon the mathematical
equipment and skills of the ordinary participant and worker.
The wartime situation in which many young men otherwise
qualified for officer training were rejected because of deficiency
in mathematics can be duplicated in many varieties of employ-
ment. The fact is that there is a steadily increasing number of
jobs in industry, as well as in both civil and military governmental
agencies, for which a sound training in algebra and geometry is
a prerequisite. For a fairly considerable number of positions solid
geometry and trigonometry are essential.

Beyond this, however, mathematics has an important intrinsic
role in general education. It helps build some of the skills and
comprehensions that make the effective individual. Within the
past fifty years mathematics and logic have been fused into a
single structure. In so far as logical thinking is rigorous, abstract,
and relational, its connection with mathematics is obvious. The
ability to analyze a concrete situation into its elements, to Syn-
thesize components into a related whole, to isolate and select
relevant factors, defining them rigorously, meanwhile discarding
the irrelevant; and the ability to combine these factors, often in
novel ways, so as to reach a solution, all are important features of
mathematical procedure.

Mathematics may be defined as the science of abstract form. It
is concerned with the universal pattern within the concrete situa-
tion. The discernment of structure is essential no less to the
appreciation of a painting or a symphony than to understanding
the behavior of a physical system; no less in economics than in
astronomy. Mathematics studies order abstracted from the par-
ticular objects and phenomena which exhibit it, and in a general-
ized form. When Bertrand Russell defined mathematics as the

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General Education in a Free Society

subject in which we do not know what we are talking about, and
do not know whether what we are talking about is true, he stated
wittily what we have been saying solemnly.

Mathematics is by no means the only road to an appreciation
of abstraction and logical structure. But tactically these ends may
be approached most readily through mathematics, particularly
with the young. No better example of an abstract logical system
for use with adolescents than demonstrative geometry has yet
been discovered. One has only to experience its impact upon a
bright youngster the satisfaction with which he borrows the
logical sequence of propositions, the reiterated "therefore" and
the "Q.E.D." to realize the force of such instruction in general
education.

General education throughout its history has included mathe-
matics as one of its major components. It has lost none of its
relevance in modern general education, though to it now must be
added the enormous utility of mathematics in modern life.

Mathematics in the Schools. By the end of the seventh or the
middle of the eighth grade every pupil should have acquired a
reasonable facility in the language of arithmetic, the beginning of
an appreciation of the number system, some competence in the
solution of arithmetical problems, and some appreciation of the
power of mathematics in formulating and solving problems in
the real world.

By this time also every pupil should have learned the commoner
facts of geometry, either by induction from measurements, draw-
ings, and gross observation, or by intuitive reasoning. The next
stage in mathematical instruction, and the last for those students
who are least apt in the subject, should convey an appreciation of
the use of formulas, graphs, and simple equations, and should
develop some skill in solving right triangles trigonometrically.
Even in the case of pupils who are not quick in mathematics, these
last steps should require not more than half a year. Probably little
more than half the pupils enrolled in the ninth grade can derive
genuine profit from substantial instruction in algebra or can be
expected to master demonstrative geometry. Those who have
the requisite abilities should certainly receive such instruction.

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

The teaching of these subjects is complicated by the fact that
many students of low mathematical aptitude feel compelled to
study algebra and demonstrative geometry simply to maintain
their intellectual status, or because these subjects are integral
parts of college-preparatory instruction. In most schools the
attempt to deal with such students in the same class with their
more able fellows has resulted in substantial concessions in the
way these subjects are taught. It is probably true that any con-
siderable softening of instruction in algebra and demonstrative
geometry, to bring them within the compass of the mathemati-
cally inept, serves no useful purpose. It makes a contribution of
very doubtful value to the slow students at the very real expense
of the more acute.

It is unfortunately true that those aspects of algebra and geom-
etry that are of greatest interest in general education are also more
difficult to teach, and are much harder for the student to grasp,
than are the technical skills of mathematical manipulation. The
pressure to make mathematics easier for students, therefore, is
inclined to take the form of making it less meaningful and more
technical, of developing it as a ritual of memorized formulas and
procedures. This consideration runs just counter to the popular
notion that the principles and basic ideas of mathematics are
relatively easily conveyed, and that it is the drill and solution of
specific problems that present the most formidable obstacles.

We must recognize, then, that for the mathematically less
gifted pupils in the ninth grade there is little straightforward
mathematics available beyond elementary instruction in arith-
metic and informal geometry, which, as was said, should include
guidance in the use of formulas, equations, graphs, and right-
triangle trigonometry. If it be thought that these students might
more profitably be taught such a subject as "commercial algebra,"
only a cursory glance at this subject shows it to be harder than
ordinary algebra. On the other hand, it is of course desirable to
stimulate the interest of mathematically inept students in the
number relations of arithmetic and in the elementary principles
of geometry by presenting mathematics in various disguises ~
such as shop mathematics, business arithmetic, mathematics of the

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General Education in a Free Society

farm, and so on. In such novel forms these students can be
brought to reexamine and improve their grasp of simple arith-
metic and its application to practical problems.

If further mathematics is to be given these pupils, informal
geometry and mechanical drawing offer the greatest chance of
success because of their concreteness. In such an approach, how-
ever, one has been forced to concede one of the primary values of
mathematics instruction in general education. Mathematics com-
prises both abstraction and the application of the results obtained
by abstraction to specific real problems. Of these aspects, the
basic one is abstraction. Only because it is abstract is mathematics
applicable generally to problems which arise in widely different
areas. When a student has reached his limit of tolerance in han-
dling abstractions, his general education in mathematics must also
come to an end.

We may now consider the students of relatively good mathe-
matical endowment. These pupils can acquire in the ninth and
higher grades a genuine appreciation of algebra as an extension
and generalization of arithmetic. Through algebra they gain a
better understanding of the number system of arithmetic and of
arithmetical procedures. Through algebra, also, they can appre-
ciate how the abstraction and generalization of specific proce-
dures yield solutions that are applicable to a wide range of real
problems; and that by solving their problems symbolically by
means of algebra they enormously simplify and shorten their
numerical computations.

These students have the capacity also to understand demon-
strative geometry, which they should be taught in the tenth and
higher grades. Instruction in this subject should give them prac-
tice in devising and appraising logical arguments and in pursuing
a limited argument to its conclusion. It should also bring them to
appreciate the structure of an abstract logical system.

Though it is of course possible to learn to reason deductively
without the aid of instruction in demonstrative geometry, no
better example of an abstract logical system within the reach of
secondary-school pupils has yet been discovered. Properly taught,
it shows the need of undefined terms, defined terms, and assump-

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

tions in every sustained logical argument. It proclaims its the-
orems as valid conclusions from basic assumptions but makes no
assertion that the assumptions themselves have absolute validity.
It suggests that starting with other assumptions one might arrive
at quite different theorems, equally valid logically, yet possibly
contradicting the former set. Demonstrative geometry, so taught,
becomes the study of geometric systems and goes on from these
to yield conclusions concerning logical systems in general. The
projection of the structure of geometry into areas of more im-
mediate and often of more practical interest to the student should
be taught explicitly. It is only in this way that there can be ac-
complished the "transfer" of mathematical values to other spheres
of human interest, which is a primary concern of general edu-
cation.

In describing the instruction in algebra and demonstrative ge-
ometry in grades nine, ten, and eleven, we have had in mind the
needs of all those students who have mathematical aptitudes
above the median. As has already been emphasized in a preced-
ing discussion, the circumstances of life, work, and national well-
being in our highly technological culture make it essential that
virtually all students who have the capacity for mastering these
subjects be taught them. The student preparing to go to college
certainly needs this instruction.

For students who by the tenth or eleventh grade have decided
that their interest in science and mathematics will not extend
beyond a general education in these areas, no further work in
mathematics can probably be prescribed. Nevertheless, to ensure
even such students full freedom of choice in later pursuing some
scientific or technological training, and to assure them a more
complete and rigorous training in an area of constantly widening
importance in all fields of learning, further mathematics might
be very strongly advised.

Rather than have such students pursue further mathematics in
the customary large units solid geometry, trigonometry,
or advanced algebra it might be more valuable to give them
in the senior year, just preparatory to entering college, an intro-
ductory survey of elementary trigonometry, statistics, precision

General Education in a Free Society

of measurement, and the use of graphs. Such a course would give
them a very general, if elementary, equipment for understanding
better a number of situations with which they can scarcely fail
to make contact later. It would also serve as a freshener, just be-
fore entering college, of their previous training in algebra and
geometry, often all but lost by this time.

In any case the common practice of leaving a gap of two years
between the last instruction in mathematics in secondary school
and entrance into college represents an enormous waste in the
educational process. During this interval much of the mathe-
matics taught in the ninth and tenth grades is forgotten, and much
of the mathematics instruction of the freshman year at college is
devoted to its recall. On purely educational grounds it would be
very much better if even the minimum program of mathematics
instruction which we have suggested for the precollege student
were taught at a slower pace, so as to be distributed over the
entire secondary-school course.

For students who by their third year in secondary school have
decided upon a college training involving science and mathe-
matics, pure or applied, further training in mathematics is needed.
Beyond demonstrative geometry, such students ordinarily should
have instruction in advanced algebra, solid geometry, and trigo-
nometry. Particularly for these students a senior mathematics
course which abandons the traditional method of teaching these
subjects separately might be desirable. This would resemble to
a degree the senior mathematics which we have just discussed
with reference to nonscience students. For students with a direct
interest and general aptitude in science and mathematics, such a
course might include besides elementary trigonometry and
some solid geometry analytic geometry and an elementary ap-
proach to the principles of the calculus. It should in any case
bring such students to the threshold of the calculus, so that the
first mathematics course in college can attack this subject directly.

Teachers and administrators who are charged with the task of
guiding secondary-school pupils in the choice of their studies
may be interested in the judgment of college teachers of science.
The latter, of course, wish to have every pupil in secondary

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

school acquire those scientific ideas that should be the common
property of everyone. But from the point of view of college
instruction in science, if they must choose between students who
have studied considerable science and only a little mathematics,
and students who have had little science but who are well
grounded in mathematics, they almost universally prefer the
latter. Statistics of the College Entrance Examination Board
show success in college physics to be correlated more closely with
a high score in the Board's examination in advanced mathematics
than with a high score in its examination in physics.

To summarize, those aspects of mathematics that should be
prescribed for all students can be mastered by the end of the
eighth grade or by the middle of the ninth. Above this point a
division must be recognized between students who can derive
little profit from further instruction in pure mathematics and
those with relatively good mathematical aptitude. We have taken
the position that of the latter group in the senior high school,
every student should be strongly advised to study both algebra
and demonstrative geometry and should not reject either subject
lightly. The prospective candidate for admission to college cer-
tainly needs instruction in both these subjects. Those college-
preparatory students who have no special interest in science,
medicine, or technological fields should not be required to pursue
the study of mathematics further. All competent students -with
special interests in these fields should take all the secondary
mathematics that is available.

5
Education and the Human Being

THE fact that an educational institution grants a diploma on the
basis of the completion of courses and the passing of examinations
does not imply that its aim is wholly to impart learning. As we
suggested in the second chapter, learning is also for the sake of
cultivating basic mental abilities; in short, to foster the powers of

General Education in a Free Society

reason in man. The ability to think in accordance with the facts
and with the laws of inference, to choose wisely, to feel with
discrimination is what distinguishes man from the animals and
endows him with intrinsic worth. Yet reason, while an end, is a
means as well a means to the mastery of life. The union of
knowledge and reason in the integrated personality this is the
final test of education. We are not now denying the central posi-
tion of reason or of knowledge as ministering to reason; we are
only urging that reason is or must strive to become a master of a
highly complex inner kingdom consisting of many and diverse
members, all of which go into the making of a complete man. To
put the matter bluntly, the educational process has somewhat
failed of its purpose if it has produced the merely bookish youth
who lacks spirit and is all light without warmth. But to leave the
matter in these terms is to make for dangerous confusion; we must
safeguard our statement from the misunderstandings to which it is
exposed. What are some of the important qualities, over and
above intellectual ability, which are necessary for an integrated
and sound human being?

The school will be concerned with the health of its pupils, both
physical and mental. The human body must be healthy, fit for
work, able to carry out the purposes of the mind. Mental health
has two forms. The first is social adjustment, an understanding
of other people and a responsiveness to their needs with its coun-
terpart of good manners. The second is personal adjustment, the
individual's understanding of himself, his poise and adequacy in
coping with real situations. Obviously the two are inseparable.

While traditionally man has been viewed as primarily a rational
animal, recent thinking has called attention to his unconscious
desires and sentiments which becloud and sometimes sway his
reason. To be sure, classical philosophers recognized the exist-
ence of the passions, but they tended to regard the latter as alien
intrusions and an unwanted complication. Yet passions, although
dangerous because primitive and even savage, are a source of
strength if properly guided; they supply the driving forces for
achievement. Lord Bryce once said that if government were in
the hands of the young many mistakes would be made, but if

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

government were run by old men nothing would be done. Ac-
cording to the ancient myth, reason is the charioteer that directs
but is not the horse that pulls the chariot. In the complete man
we look for initiative, zest and interest, strength of resolution,
driving power. In a free society much of improvement, in or
outside government, comes from the initiative and the dogged
perseverance of private citizens; and the clash of ambitions in the
struggle for the rewards of life, when regulated by the rules of
fair play and a concern for the common good, is a source of social
progress.

The danger in the preceding account is that the various com-
ponents of the human person might be wrongly viewed as isolated
elements or faculties, each leading an autonomous existence. For
instance, reason is not a faculty operating separately from interest
and zest. Without a zeal for knowledge, without the impulse of
curiosity, the thinker will remain lazy and unproductive. And
yet, while ordinarily the perfection of one human power depends
on the parallel development of the other powers, there are im-
portant and unpredictable exceptions. It is not true, for example,
that a healthy body is always necessary for the existence of a
vigorous mind. There are cases of great men in the arts and the
sciences who, all their lives, fought against sickness; there have
been persons eminent in a special field who were not rounded
individuals. Human personality is enough of a mystery to pre-
clude our making sweeping and rigid prescriptions.

Furthermore, the concept of the whole man is not adequate as
an aim of education. The innate drives, the sentiments and force
of will, are neutral, capable of developing in either direction, and
may become antisocial unless they are "moralized," unless they
are made to serve as tools in the hand of duty. The complete man
must be a good man. Moral character arises from the molding of
the native powers to ideal aims. The final secular good is the
dedication of the self to an ideal higher than the self the devo-
tion to truth and to one's neighbor.

So far we have been dealing with general objectives. But teach-
ers naturally ask what should be done in the school to implement
these aims. We wish to make it clear that to adopt the above list

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of the human powers is not at all to be committed to a comparable
list of courses, as a part of formal instruction. There may or may
not be courses in subjects such as health or manners, depending
on the circumstances. Our point is that in a proper scheme of
general education the mind will acquire the capacity to meet
various particular and concrete problems in matters of health,
human relationships, and the like. In this view the education of
the mind leads to a maturing of the whole person. On any other
view, the obvious danger is that schools will set for themselves
so inclusive an objective, or perhaps one should say so many
objectives, that their central and essential contribution will be
neglected. The schools cannot do everything. When they at-
tempt too many tasks, they sometimes fail to do any of them well.
Other social institutions are concerned with helping the indi-
vidual develop personal competence, while the schools have the
special and major responsibility of furthering the growth of in-
tellectual abilities. Our discussion of the qualities which go to
make up the complete man is based upon the assumption that
though these qualities are of the utmost importance, though they
are, indeed, vital to the future well-being of our society, they are
not the sole responsibility of the schools, and their cultivation
must not stand in the way of developing those qualities for which
the school bears the primary burden of responsibility.

However, the emotions and the will cannot be trained by theo-
retical instruction alone. Doubtless the three areas of knowledge,
each in its own fashion, raise and discuss problems of human
value. Yet values cannot be learned solely from books. Consider
the case of social adjustment. Thinking is a solitary process, and
in so far as education cultivates intellectual skills it is producing
individualists. To be sure, thinking is stimulated by discussion
with other people, but in the last resort one has to make up one's
mind by oneself. Yet living is a cooperative process. Social ad-
justment is not something that just happens in the individual with
the passing of years. One must learn to get along with other
people just as one learns to use complex sentences. But the task
of learning to get along with people is infinitely more difficult.
Little children do not know how to get along with each other; a

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

teacher or some other adult must constantly control the situation.
If adults lived with each other after the fashion of children and
regulated their disputes as children do, we should never have had
a free society. The child has much to learn before he can behave
as an equal among equals or cooperate with strangers for a com-
mon purpose. While the family and the neighborhood teach
many of the preliminary lessons, the main task is really tackled in
the training ground of actual situations, especially those of ado-
lescence and adult living.

But while we admit that general instruction is not enough for
our purpose, we also call attention to the fact that the school as
it stands is equipped to exercise an influence over its pupils
through media other than formal teaching. The school is an
organization in which a certain way of life is practiced. The pupil
acquires a habit by the process of unconscious absorption; no
sermon need be preached. A word of ridicule uttered by another
pupil may produce the desired effect. Furthermore, the teacher
can and does exert an influence on the student by his example as
well as by what he says on the platform. In our specialized society
the teacher may think it enough to teach a subject. But impres-
sionable young people get from a teacher much more than subject
matter. They judge every action. In some respects the young are
exceedingly intolerant; they expect in their teachers perfection
to which they themselves do not aspire but which they want to
see exemplified in all those in authority over them. Teachers
should be more aware of their influence in matters unrelated to
their subject.

Finally, in the school the pupil takes part in the various activi-
ties. No one who has examined the early histories of schools and
colleges with the tales of "cows in the chapel" and "rioting on the
common" can have much regret that students now have more
legitimate outlets for their exuberance. Nonetheless, it is true
that we may pursue a good thing too far and encourage a tone of
anti-intellectualism. Or we may, particularly in urban schools,
provide insufficient activities, inducing mere bookishness.

Ideally, as the name implies, activities should mean putting into
practice the theory of the classroom. In the previous chapter we

General Education in a Free Society

stressed the importance of the ability to make relevant judgments.
Activities provide a means by which the abstract skills imparted
in the classroom are made relevant to concrete choices and ac-
tions. The educational value of activities, such as it is, comes
from the fact that habituation and experience are necessary for
the development of any skill, including intellectual skills. Student
government, within limits, is valuable in shaping the quality of
later citizenship. It is only when the student faces the actual
difficulties of governing by democracy that he begins to appre-
ciate the complexity of a free society. To learn to resist pressure,
to discover the power of a minority, to have free speech used
against one, to prescribe rules and then to abide by them, is train-
ing of the first order for democratic living. The connection of
the activities with the curriculum is easy to show in the case of
the French Club, the Debating Society, the Glee Club, and the
Forum. It is harder to illustrate when \ve come to managerial
offices and to athletics. Yet there is no doubt that decisiveness,
initiative, and cooperativeness can be stimulated in the student
who has to cope with problems encountered in the running of an
organization or in team play.

So far as the students are concerned, emphasizing the impor-
tance of activities is bringing coals to Newcastle. What is needed
is a proper balance between the values of intelligence and the
other human values. Extracurricular activities must be thought
of, not as something apart from the classroom, but as an extension
of it. Yet to administer these activities formally is to deprive
them of a good deal of their value, w r hich after all lies in the fact
that they arc the spontaneous expression of students. Conversely,
something of the spirit of the activities should be communicated
to the student's classroom work. The difference between courses
and activities is apt to correspond in the student's mind to the
difference between duty and pleasure. Of course it would be
foolish to expect young people always to love learning to the
same degree that they love sports. Yet with the proper school
atmosphere it should be possible to inject some of the zestfulness
of activities into studies. It has been said that our businessmen,
prospecting among school or college graduates for future em-

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Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

ployees, are chiefly interested in the student's proficiency in ac-
tivities and not in courses. Whether this be true or not, we submit
that the educational authorities should not abdicate their standards
because of any pressures from the public. The school serves the
community primarily as a leader in cultural standards. The great
danger is that there should be two sets of values in the school
intellectual and practical moving as it were on parallel tracks
and never meeting.

The atmosphere of the school, the informal role of the teacher
and the activities these are all media by which practice and
habituation supplement the work of formal instruction in the
school. We must emphasize that rational explanation should ac-
company or follow habituation; that, in short, mere habituation is
not enough, as the case of language may show. On the one hand,
it is true that one does not know a language adequately if one
knows its grammar and vocabulary only; one must be able to use
the language and speak it with something of its peculiar idiom.
On the other hand, it is also true that a street Arab who can speak
his native tongue fluently is not because of that fact to be regarded
as educated in language; and linguistic proficiency will become
firmer when accompanied by an understanding of the formal
structure of the language. Nor is social adjustment only the
habitual facility of getting along with other people; it is also and
essentially the understanding of other persons of their desires,
capacities, and valuations. Poise comes from an inner reserve,
from a clarity and conviction as to purpose. Without these, per-
sonal force is apt to degenerate into that flashy and indeterminate
quality miscalled "personality."

Have we exhausted all the potentialities of the school in the
preceding account? No, not wholly. When the curriculum, the
pervasive atmosphere of the school, and the activities, having
done their best, still fall short of expected results, then the school
must have recourse to types of instruction in specific subject
matters. There is a difference between implicit and explicit in-
struction. By the former we mean indirect instruction, as when
a student acquires skills of thought and communication from
courses in general education, or acquires initiative and resource-

General Education in a Free Society

fulness from his participation in sports. The normally intelligent
youth will be able to draw his own conclusions, carrying over
into particular cases the spirit of his whole training. But there are
those who must be told specifically and explicitly. For instance,
while many pupils will be able to absorb relevant knowledge
about health from the general course in biology and other allied
courses, others will need explicit instruction in personal hygiene.
Again, while some will learn manners by contagion from the
established practices of the school, there will be others who will
have to be told the rules of polite behavior in so many words.
A school serving a community of first-generation immigrants
may have to introduce courses on the American way and on
American standards of living. However, such explicit instruction
should be regarded as remedial and as peripheral to the cur-
riculum. Because the circumstances vary, no uniform list of such
special courses can be given, but some suggestions may be made.

Education is not complete without moral guidance; and moral
wisdom may be obtained from our religious heritage. By law and
by custom little sectarianism is now to be found in the great body
of American schools and colleges. However, much of the best
tradition of the West is to be found in the distillations of the
prophets, in the homilies and allegories of an earlier age, and in
Biblical injunctions. These are not the property of a sect or even
of Christians; they constitute the embodiment of experience on
the ethical plane which is, or should be, the heritage of all.

It is clear that physical health is a gift bestowed by heredity
and confirmed for the individual by the care given to him in his
early years. But the role of the school in the development of
health may be decisive. Although the first responsibility in this
matter rests with the family and the community, in some places
the schools must assume the task of giving direct instruction in
health, personal or civic. For many young people the elementary
facts about diet, rest, exercise, drugs, and disease will have to be
learned away from home if they are to be learned at all. Such
instruction may make the difference between a debilitated and a
healthy community. The subject may take time from other
pursuits of more central intellectual importance. But no educa-

Areas of General Education; the Secondary Schools

tional or social system is sound unless it rests on solid physical
foundations.

In an earlier section we spoke of the importance of shop train-
ing for students who intend to go into scientific or technological
work. Such experience is important for the general education of
all. Most students who expect to go to college are now offered
an almost wholly verbal type of preparatory training, while hand
training and the direct manipulation of objects are mainly reserved
for the vocational fields. This is a serious mistake. The bookish
student needs to know how to do things and make things as much
as do those students who do not plan to take further intellectual
training. The direct contact with materials, the manipulation of
simple tools, the capacity to create by hand from a concept in
the mind all these are indispensable aspects of the general edu-
cation of everyone. In some schools pupils receive such training
in the elementary grades. Other students gain such experience
outside of school; but for those who have had no experience in
the use of tools, a high-school course may offer the only pos-
sibility.

In modern society, where few children automatically follow
their fathers' vocations, the school must inevitably give some help
in choosing a career. Any treatment of American society should
acquaint students with many sides of the conditions which they
will have to face. Yet some students will need more detailed in-
formation about the requirements and possibilities of various
kinds of work. Formal course instruction is of doubtful value
for this purpose, which can be better served by individual guid-
ance and by the provision of suitable reading in the school library.

Beyond the knowledge of future work, the student needs an
experience in actual work. Clearly the school itself cannot be
expected to provide this experience in any formal way. Yet it is
beneficial for all, even more so for those who expect to enter
business or one of the professions than for those who will engage
in some form of manual or craft work. It is important that this
experience be of such a kind as to contribute to the total produc-
tivity of society, although it need not be manual labor. In other
words, it is desirable that it be genuine, rather than made, work.

General Education in a Free Society

We repeat that we are thinking here not of any formal school
requirement but of what is necessary for the maturing of a young
person.

It is obvious that our account of education in its bearing on the
entire human being presupposes a general theory of human nature
and of human values. It is equally obvious that in the nature of
the case such a theory had to be assumed rather than explicitly
formulated in this report. A contrast with current tendencies
may help clarify our views. In a natural reaction against the in-
herited type of formal and bookish learning, educational practice
has tended to swing to the opposite extreme and to replace the
traditional courses of the curriculum with highly specific and
practical courses. The danger here is that training is being sub-
stituted for education. More recently a reaction to the reaction
has appeared, which would place great books in a central, even
monopolistic, position and which tends to identify education
exclusively with cultivating the ability to think. We have taken
a position somewhere between these two. We have stated that
education looks to the whole man and not to his reason alone;
yet we have maintained that the whole man is integrated only in
so far as his life is presided over by his reason. While we thus
regard the cultivation of the mind as the chief function of the
school, we view reason as a means to the mastery of life; and we
define wisdom as the art of living. We have stressed the impor-
tance of the trait of relevance; and we have urged that, while in
school, the pupil should be helped to see beyond conceptual
frameworks and make concrete applications. Yet since the school
by its nature cannot reproduce the complexity of actual life, a
merely functional approach to teaching is inadequate also.

An extreme and one-sided view easily calls attention to itself
and gains fervent adherents; but a balanced view is apt to be less
immediately striking. Reasonableness does not lead to exciting
conclusions because it aims to do justice to the whole truth in all
its shadings. By the same token, reasonableness may legitimately
hope to attain at least to part of the truth.

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CHAPTER V

General Education in Harvard College

IN previous chapters we have discussed the aims and the basic
problems of general education. We have also suggested possible
applications of our views to the secondary schools, although in
so doing we were keenly aware of the impossibility of presenting
a single neat pattern according to which they should all be or-
ganized. Our task in this chapter is to cross the divide that
separates the general from the specific, and to discuss with some
particularity the application of our views to Harvard College. In
the pursuit of this task we shall necessarily be concerned with
many aspects of the complex structure and organization of a
single university.

While we believe that a discussion of a single college is far
from irrelevant to our main theme, we wish to leave no doubt
that the recommendations made for Harvard in this chapter are
not specifically intended for other American institutions of
higher learning. If it is necessary to recognize wide variations
among schools, it is equally necessary to recognize the even
greater variations among colleges. The simple structure of ele-
mentary education in America becomes more complex at the
secondary level and divides into an enormous diversity at the
college level. This variety is the product of circumstances which
are still at work, which may lead to an even greater diversity
during the next generation, and which would make any attempt
to impose a single program of general education upon all colleges
futile.

It is probable that many persons, including a sizable proportion
of the teachers in the colleges, continue to approach all prob-
lems of higher education as though the term, college, had a single
specific meaning throughout the United States. Such a view, to

General Education in a Free Society

the extent that it still exists, is an anachronism which stands in
the way of any realistic analysis of the problems of higher edu-
cation. A brief survey of the principal varieties of the genus
college in America may help to make clear why we are confining
our discussion of the higher learning to a single institution.

Types of Collegiate Institutions

CHRONOLOGICALLY, the first of the institutions of higher
learning in America are the liberal colleges. These may be inde-
pendent institutions or parts of a university. Some of them are
coeducational, some are for one sex only. Their distinguishing
characteristics are that they ordinarily require four years or the
equivalent for the bachelor's degree and that they are not pri-
marily vocational in character.

During the last three generations there has been a rapid growth
of undergraduate vocational colleges. These, like liberal col-
leges, ordinarily require four years for a degree, but they provide
a primarily vocational training rather than one devoted largely,
if not entirely, to the humanities, the social sciences, mathematics
and the sciences. The vocational colleges include those preparing
for the professions of engineering, agriculture, and teaching, as
well as the many undergraduate colleges of business. They may
be independent or parts of universities. Many of them are com-
bined with a liberal arts college, both ordinarily being parts of a
large university. This has been particularly true of schools of
business and of education, and in such cases the first two years
are ordinarily spent in the liberal arts college of the university,
after which time the student transfers into the vocational college

for his last two years of work.

*

The present century has likewise seen an enormous growth of
junior colleges. These are two-year colleges which may be either
vocational or liberal in emphasis; they usually offer terminal vo-
cational courses as well as courses in the humanities, social sci-

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General Education in Harvard College

ences, and sciences. The present movement for the establishment
of technical institutes is but the most recent variation in what is
apparently a major development in American education, these
technical institutes being junior colleges with a predominantly
vocational emphasis.

The fourth variety of institution is the vocational school which
follows high school but lacks a clearly recognized standing
either as a junior college or as a four-year college. This category
includes most of the proprietary business colleges, nurses' training
schools, and the trade schools and other similar institutions which
require high-school graduation for entrance but do not aim to do
work of the breadth that is expected of college students.

In all these institutions except liberal colleges general education
is usually confined to the first year or two or is omitted altogether.
Their major commitment to special or vocational education re-
quires them to make competent engineers, nurses, farm man-
agers, accountants, dental assistants, draftsmen, or secretaries in
a period of time which seems always too short. There are so
many skills to be learned, so much technical knowledge to be
acquired, and the penalty for the lack of them is so direct and
sure for the young graduate in his first job, that the claims of
general education are either denied altogether or are grudgingly
recognized and pursued in a half-hearted fashion in a few sur-
vey courses.

During the last few years the leaders in vocational education
at the college level have themselves begun to state with emphasis
the case for more attention to general education. Thus a recent
report of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Educa-
tion recognizes the inadequacies of an exclusively technical edu-
cation and suggests that much greater attention be given in the
education of future engineers to many of the subjects which have
no immediate relation to engineering. It is interesting that the
report seems particularly concerned about the small amount of
aesthetic training given to engineers and with their lack of in-
formation about, and participation in, public affairs, both civic
and philanthropic. Just what effect this point of view will have
upon the vocational colleges remains to be seen, but we heartily

General Education in a Free Society

agree that it would be a very great loss to society if those persons
who are leaders in scientific research and in technology are at the
same time most laggard in cultural interests and in civic re-
sponsibility.

Junior colleges and the technical institutes ordinarily make at
least a gesture toward general education. Most of them set aside
a third or a half of a two-year vocational curriculum for liberal
courses. Somewhat more comprehensive requirements in general
education are to be found in the two college years which precede
the vocational years of undergraduate teachers' colleges and
schools of business administration. Only in the fourth category,
the vocational or trade school not of collegiate standing, is
general education sometimes, though not always, altogether
neglected.

But it is obvious that liberal colleges should not be the only
higher institutions concerned with what may properly be called
the ends of human action. The capacity to think objectively, to
communicate, to discriminate among values, and to make rele-
vant judgments, is as desirable for young people who attend
junior colleges and trade or professional institutions as for those
who devote four years to a less definitely vocational training.
But it is also obvious that the variety of colleges makes a single
prescription impossible, and there necessarily will be differences
both in the amount of time devoted explicitly to general educa-
tion and in the nature of the offering designed to achieve it.

General Education in Liberal Colleges

EVEN among the liberal colleges there has developed an increas-
ing amount of diversification, so much so that it is often difficult
for a student to transfer from one of these colleges to another and
to carry on work of the kind earlier begun. Without attempting
a comprehensive description of these various experiments, a brief
characterization of some of them may help to throw light upon

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General Education in Harvard College

certain of the problems involved, as well as to give perspective to
our discussion of Harvard College. It may be said that there are
now five major approaches to the problem of general education
in these colleges: (i) distribution requirements, (2) comprehen-
sive survey courses, (3) functional courses, (4) the great-books
curriculum, and (5) individual guidance.

The first of these is the most widely used. It came in as an
attempt to ameliorate some of the shortcomings of the elective
system, and it consists of requirements concerning how, in the
interests of breadth, a student should distribute a portion of his
courses among the various areas or departments. Sometimes it
includes the prescription of one or two or three courses or sub-
jects. Sometimes it merely requires courses in particular fields
or areas.

Those colleges which have become dissatisfied with distribu-
tion requirements have most often substituted a set of survey
courses in humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological
sciences. These courses usually demand about half of the stu-
dent's time during the first two college years, although they
occasionally demand all or nearly all of it in those years. They
have proved administratively feasible and are now widespread.
There are enormous differences among such courses in choice of
material and manner of treatment. We shall have more to say
about them later.

The term, functional, has been given to courses which deal
explicitly with some important phase of active life, such as main-
taining health, choosing a vocation, managing and raising a fam-
ily, or buying goods and services wisely. The analysis of the
human being given at the close of the last chapter might be taken
as a basis for a set of functional courses. The required "core"
program at the General College of the University of Minnesota
is of the functional type. The recent report of the American
Council on Education, entitled Design for General Education,
describes four such courses: personal and community health,
problems of social adjustment, marriage and family adjustment,
and vocational orientation.

The great-books program has received wide publicity, espe-

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General Education in a Free Society

cially following its adoption by St. John's College. It means
spending four years in the study of approximately one hundred
great books of the Western tradition, supplemented by ancient
and modern languages, mathematics, and laboratory science. The
four years are entirely prescribed; there are no electives and no
specialization. A number of other colleges give courses in hu-
manities or literature in which a few of the more literary and
philosophical of the great books are read, but they otherwise
depart fundamentally from the principles exemplified in the
St. John's curriculum.

The phrase, individual guidance, is used here to describe the
programs of such colleges as Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and
Black Mountain, where the first year or two of the student's
program is given to a number of elective courses chosen by the
student for exploratory purposes. The theory is that the student
will try out a number of interests to discover which are deep
enough to serve as foundations for later work. Once the student
has found a really genuine intellectual interest, his college pro-
gram is planned around this central interest. The resultant pro-
gram may be very broad or it may be similar to concentration in
a more conventional college. There is an important difference
between this approach and that of the old elective system. The
exploratory courses are purposely left small so as to give the
student intimate contact with the teacher. A tutorial or advisory
system brings the youn^ student into regular conferences with a
member of the faculty who is given a considerable amount of
information about the student. Thus the student's program, as
it takes shape, may be almost as much under the supervision of
the faculty as if it were prescribed.

All of these approaches to the problem of general education
are evidences of some degree of dissatisfaction with the elective
system, but beyond that they have little in common. There is a
very great spread between the entirely prescribed curriculum at
St. John's and the more conventional system which gives rela-
tively great freedom of choice. Rather than attempt to pass
judgment upon these various proposals we prefer to recognize
the value of the era of experimentation, to express the hope that

General Education in Harvard College

experiments will continue, and to confine our further discussions
of general education in the colleges to one particular institution,
Harvard College.

The Present College

HARVARD'S present structure and condition is the ground on
which we must build, the context within which we must plan.
We may begin with a most important consideration, Harvard's
present size. It is a large institution, and it is one part of a much
larger university. A number of years ago the size of the entering
class was set at 1000; it has not always been held to this limit.
The total number of undergraduates in the years immediately
preceding the present war ranged between 3500 and 3600. 1 The
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is responsible for both grad-
uate and undergraduate instruction, numbers more than 300
above the ranks of teaching fellow (prcdoctorate) and annual
instructor. The number of distinct courses offered to under-
graduates is normally more than 400. Even during the war, de-
spite large defections in staff and students, the undergraduate
offering did not fall below 300.

Harvard draws its students from all sections of the country,
all types of schools, and virtually all economic levels. Year by year
the student body samples more and more thoroughly all strata of
American life. This tendency is fostered by a carefully consid-
ered and active policy which allows promising students to enter,
or through scholarships brings them to Harvard, from virtually
all walks of life. The percentage of freshmen admitted to Har-
vard from New England has dropped steadily through the years
to a present 48 per cent. An additional 24 per cent come from
the Middle Atlantic states, 14 per cent from the northern Mid-
dle states (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin,

1 Harvard University numbered, in the same period, some 8000 students in all
its divisions.

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General Education in a Free Society

and Ohio), and about 3 per cent from the Central states (Iowa,
Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) .
Four per cent are from the South, 4 per cent from the Far West,
and 3 per cent from the Territories and from foreign countries.
In the entering class of 1944, 490 schools were represented, 244
of them public schools. About half the students in Harvard Col-
lege now come from public schools. Their entrance from virtu-
ally all types and sizes of public schools throughout the country
is fostered by a flexible and liberal admissions policy, to be re-
viewed below.

Harvard's policies have also succeeded in greatly broadening
in recent years the economic base from which students are drawn.
During 1940-1941 the financial assistance awarded to under-
graduates exceeded a third of a million dollars. This sum is
equivalent to almost one fourth of the total college receipts from
tuition. Particularly the National Scholarship Plan, though it
involves relatively small numbers of students of high promise,
has been administered to further these trends. About three
fourths of the national scholars come from public schools, pre-
dominantly in the Middle West. Roughly three fourths of them
come from families with annual incomes of less than three thou-
sand dollars, about a third from families with incomes less than
two thousand dollars.

In recent years capable students have been able to enter Har-
vard with almost any type of educational background provided
in this country. Prior to 1942 candidates for admission were
offered a choice between two plans of examination; those coming
from distant places might under certain conditions enter without
any examination. In addition to Plan A (Old Plan), under which
the candidate took a series of separate College Entrance Board
examinations in prescribed and elective subjects until the whole
quota of admission requirements had been completed, the pro-
spective student might apply under Plan B (New Plan). This
latter plan placed great stress upon the school record and the
principal's recommendation but did not specifically prescribe the
content of school studies other than English. Under Plan B the
candidate was required to take at the end of his last year in

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General Education in Harvard College

school four College Board examinations of the comprehensive
type in addition to the scholastic aptitude test. One of the exam-
inations had to be in English; the other three were chosen from
a list of about a dozen subjects. Applicants from areas outside
the northeastern seaboard also might enter Harvard without
examination, provided that they ranked in the highest seventh of
a class numbering at least seven during their last two years at
school.

Since 1942 the former type of College Entrance Board exam-
inations has been given up because of the complications involved
in the examination and admission of new freshmen three times a
year. At present the special objective aptitude and achievement
tests of the College Entrance Examination Board, taken in a
single day, formerly required of scholarship candidates alone, are
used for all candidates for admission. The scholastic aptitude test
contains both a verbal and a mathematical section. The general
achievement test consists of nine sections (English, French, Latin,
German, Spanish, physics, chemistry, biology, and social studies),
from which the candidate for admission may choose any three.
Consequently, every boy is tested on a basis which nearly all
types of schools meet and to which the programs of practically
all students can be fitted. Special emphasis is placed upon the
school record and upon the principal's recommendation. It may
be fairly stated, therefore, that Harvard puts virtually no* pre-
scriptions in the way of able students seeking admission, except,
of course, those relating to aptitude and to high-school achieve-
ment.

We have already mentioned the undergraduate curriculum of
more than four hundred courses. We may now inquire into its
existing elements of design. A concern with liberal and general
education is not in any sense new at Harvard. It has been the
object of continuous scrutiny and revision these many years.
The entire undergraduate curriculum was reviewed comprehen-
sively by a faculty committee, and new regulations were insti-
tuted by the faculty as recently as 1940-1941. What we possess
in this regard, therefore, exists by intention and design, not by
accident or default. We shall appraise it in this light.

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General Education in a Free Society

Over a considerable period the tendency of the Harvard fac-
ulty, for what have been considered adequate reasons, has been
to prescribe only the most general outlines of the educational
structure, leaving the widest latitude as to its content. Probably
the most striking characteristic of the present curriculum is pre-
cisely this: there is virtually no prescription except of form, and
even this is extremely flexible. The student at all points is pre-
sented with an extraordinarily broad choice of content. There
is at present no course required of all undergraduates at Harvard.
The only course prescribed at all by name is one in English com-
position, English A. It must be taken by all students who have
not demonstrated proficiency in the use of English by direct
examination.

Beyond this, the only direct prescription of content at Har-
vard is a reading knowledge of a single foreign language, de-
termined by passing either an examination or an intermediate
language course. This requirement may be satisfied before en-
tering college by passing the appropriate achievement test of the
College Entrance Examination Board with a certain grade. Until
lately this requirement specified French or German. In a recent
accession of global sentiment the faculty expanded it to include
Latin, ancient Greek, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japa-
nese, and Arabic.

Of the total curriculum, sixteen courses are required for the
bachelor's degree. Two degrees are at present offered, the A.B.
and S.B., the requirements for them differing only in the school,
or occasionally college, preparation in ancient languages.

The entering freshman, with the aid of his faculty adviser,
makes a first choice of studies among a list of courses "regularly
open to freshmen." At the present time about forty-eight distinct
courses are so listed, actually eighty-four half-courses, most of
which form paired sequences, distributed among twenty-one
departments. This can scarcely be considered a restrictive pre-
scription. But even this is by no means binding. Students who
enter Harvard with good school preparation are permitted to
engage directly in more advanced courses. About a third of the
freshman class take advantage of this opportunity.

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General Education in Harvard College

Toward the end of the freshman year, in consultation with his
adviser and a representative of the field of his choice, the student
selects a field of concentration, to which at least six of the sixteen
courses offered for the degree are to be devoted. At present
thirty distinct fields of concentration are listed, a number which
may be increased by special combinations. No more than two
courses in the field of concentration may be of definitely ele-
mentary grade. This prescription is intended to ensure that every
student acquires at Harvard a reasonably penetrating experience
in one area of learning.

A further prescription is designed to assure some breadth of
general education. Until recently all students were required to
take at least four courses of distribution: courses falling outside
the area of concentration. Certain elementary language courses,
including English composition, could not be offered for dis-
tribution.

In 1941, new requirements were adopted by the faculty as a
result of the study alluded to above. These further liberalized
the existing rules. All courses offered by the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences were divided into three areas, further subdivided into
eight sections. Two sections form the area of natural sciences;
two that of social studies; and four the area of arts, letters, and
philosophy. Certain courses in elementary language (including
English A) and composition, public speaking, and military and
naval sciences are excluded from all sections and areas. The rule
is that each student's program must include at least one course
from each of four sections, and that all three areas must be repre-
sented. In order to discourage excessive specialization it is further
required that the total program of each student contain at least
six courses outside any one section. One course in military or
naval science may be substituted for a course in one of the four
sections, provided that the remaining three sections represent all
three areas.

The extreme flexibility of this provision must be emphasized.
A single section in the area of social studies includes the entire
curricular offerings of the departments of economics, govern-
ment, psychology, and sociology, together with most of anthro-

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General Education in a Free Society

pology. A single course in mathematics can dispose of an entire
section which includes all of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry,
engineering sciences, and physics. A single course in the history
of science or of religion satisfies the prescription in a section
which includes all types of history taught at Harvard.

This is, then, the present state of educational prescription at
Harvard: one prescribed course in English composition for fresh-
men who cannot demonstrate their proficiency; a reading knowl-
edge in one of ten languages, ancient or modern; a freshman
curriculum which limits, though not finally, the choice to about
forty-six courses; a choice of concentration among thirty-two
fields, many of them further subdivided; a prescription of general
distribution so wide as to include in most of its sections the entire
curricula of several departments.

This remarkable catholicity of choice is reserved for general
education and for the election of a field of concentration. Once
the latter has been chosen, a program of genuine, even detailed,
prescriptions may come into play. The several departments ordi-
narily have definite ideas of what is to be included within the
immediate scope of their interest. They make rigorous demands
upon the student's activities and time; and in the absence of
virtually all definition of content in general education, concen-
tration inevitably dominates the curriculum.

One result is that many undergraduates go to considerable
lengths of specialization at Harvard. A feature of the present cur-
riculum which lends itself to this tendency is the very sketchy
separation between graduate and undergraduate courses. In each
department courses are divided into a group primarily for under-
graduates, a middle group for both undergraduates and gradu-
ates, and a group primarily for graduates. In most departments
the middle-group courses form much the largest section. Properly
qualified undergraduates find little difficulty in entering even
those courses primarily designed for graduate students. The
wholesome result is that undergraduates regularly find themselves
in direct competition with graduate students in advanced courses
in all fields.

Concentration culminates in the General Examination. This is

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normally required, ordinarily in the last year in college, of all
students concentrating in any field except chemistry and engi-
neering sciences. The General Examination is designed to test a
student's understanding of the entire field in which he concen-
trates. Unless a student can demonstrate in this examination that
he has mastered the subject of concentration as a whole, he is
ineligible for the degree, whatever his record in courses.

As stated above, at least six courses are regularly required for
concentration. Superior students, however, ordinarily take an
honors program. This may demand further courses in the field
of concentration, as well as the submission of an honors essay or
thesis based upon special reading or original research.

This brings us finally to what is often regarded as the most
distinctive element of present Harvard education, the tutorial
system. Students in fields in which General Examinations are
given ordinarily are tutored from the beginning of their sopho-
more year. The tutoring is done by a member of the field of con-
centration and is usually restricted to the area of this field.
The departments vary greatly in the stress laid upon tutoring
and its integration with more formal types of instruction. Some
of them employ primarily predoctorate teaching fellows for
tutoring; others use the full facilities of their senior staff. Some
departments stress the importance of tutorial instruction; others
give it no definite place in the curriculum. The role of the
tutorial system in the general pattern of Harvard education will
be discussed later. It will be enough here to note that at present
it forms part of the system of special rather than of general edu-
cation and in certain instances makes a notable contribution to
the success of the concentration program.

Whatever vagueness may at present attach to general educa-
tion at Harvard, therefore, the system of concentration is clear,
definite, and full of content. An impressive battery of educa-
tional machinery is arrayed in its support: the teaching depart-
ments, prescribed courses, the system of honors, the tutorial
system, and the General Examination. It offers the able and
enterprising student an opportunity for a remarkably penetrating
experience in the field of his choice. On the whole, concentra-

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tion has been a distinct success at Harvard. In striking contrast,
general education at Harvard is at present dismissed with a vague
exhortation on its desirability and the essentially negative pre-
scription that beyond his area of concentration the student take
two or three courses of something almost anything.

It may seem that we have been discussing general education
solely in terms of subject matter, forgetting the values and quali-
ties which it seeks. We do not mean to suggest that the distribu-
tion rule has been the only influence tending to promote the
general education of Harvard students. To repeat what was said
in Chapter II, general education is distinguished from special
education not so much in terms of subject matter as in terms of
method and outlook. It is erroneous to conclude that because
Harvard College requires no subjects to be studied by all students
that it, therefore, offers no training in the essentials of general
education. It is clearly of much more importance that honest
thinking, clearness of expression, and the habit of gathering and
weighing evidence before forming a conclusion be encouraged
than it is that students be required to take any particular group
of introductory courses. We believe that there are altogether
valid reasons for requiring students to have some things in com-
mon, but the reasons for a common body of learning and of ideas
should not be confused with the quite different reasons for an
approach to learning more conducive to the objectives of a gen-
eral education than are courses designed primarily for specialists
or would-be specialists.

Under the system which requires a certain amount of distribu-
tion of courses, the student usually takes, in addition to those
courses in his major or concentration field, a number of introduc-
tory courses in other fields. Such courses have ordinarily been
planned, organized, and taught primarily for those students who
intend to take additional courses in the same field. Rarely have
they been organized or taught for those students whose study of
the subject ends with an introductory course. Frequently they
have given excellent training in thoroughness and in detailed
analysis within the range of a somewhat professionalized intro-
ductory course, but they have not often overcome the narrow-

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ness which is an inevitable aspect of academic departmentaliza-
tion and they have not often provided an insight into the rela-
tionships of ideas and of bodies of learning. They have, in other
words, not been designed primarily for the purposes of general
education. Their contributions to general education have ordi-
narily been incidental or even accidental rather than primary and
intentional. Those who have taught them have been more con-
cerned with the learning and the internal logic of their special
field than with the relation of their materials to any general pat-
tern of ideas or of information. Even so, their contribution to
general education has often been considerable, and we are en-
couraged to believe that if courses which are only incidentally
designed for the purpose of general education prove valuable for
it, courses specifically designed and taught for that purpose will
be even more valuable to students in giving them training in
methodical thinking and discrimination, in the arts of communi-
cation and in the ability to make relevant judgments, as well as
in helping them develop a frame of reference within which the
relationship of general ideas takes on a more significant meaning.
They will also furnish them with some common body of infor-
mation and ideas.

In the preceding sections of this report we have said relatively
little about general education as common education, if only be-
cause that aspect of it has too often been regarded as its principal,
if not indeed its sole, justification. We have also been conscious of
the disparities in the needs of students and schools, and have hesi-
tated to advocate a common education which might prove to be
unprofitable for a large proportion of those who would be sub-
jected to it. But when we come to deal with a single college, it
seems desirable to talk about general education not only in terms
of the qualities which it seeks to elicit, but also in terms of the
unifying influence which it can become.

The present system of concentration and distribution in Har-
vard College affords rich opportunities for specialization and,
therefore, for differentiation. But it is weak indeed in the oppor-
tunities it provides for the development of a common body of
information and ideas which would be in some measure the

General Education in a Free Society

possession of all students. There has been, in other words, no
very substantial intellectual experience common to all Harvard
students. It would seem clear that communication on an ad-
vanced level is impossible unless those who are seeking to com-
municate with each other have some common body of knowledge
and ideas, as well as some common training in the analysis of
values and of relationships. The undergraduate, whether he be a
concentrator in the sciences, the humanities, or the social sciences,
should be able to talk with his fellows in other fields above the
level of casual conversation. He should share in a common aware-
ness of the importance of ideals and objectives, in a common
understanding of the heritage which is the possession of his gen-
eration. Nor will general education at the college level have
been entirely successful unless the student has acquired some
understanding of what is common to all fields of learning, as well
as some understanding of the principal respects in which their
aims and their methods differ.

It does not follow from this argument that the system of con-
centration should be abandoned. The committee has given con-
sideration to certain programs which call for an entirely required
curriculum, but it has no disposition to recommend the adoption
of any of them. We believe that there are unquestionable educa-
tional values to be gained from pursuing a subject well beyond its
elementary stages. The much criticized departmentalization of
the colleges is but a product of the enormous growth and speciali-
zation of learning during the past two or three generations, and it
would be entirely unrealistic and out of keeping with the growth
of higher learning in modern times to propose that this differen-
tiation should be supplanted by an organizational scheme unre-
lated to the existing specialization and diversification.

We conclude, then, that general education has been neglected
in Harvard College, but we do not conclude that specialization
should be abolished. It is of great educational importance that
students be allowed to acquire something approximating a mas-
tery of a particular segment of learning. There is no other device
which provides quite the same educational values, no other which
gives, at least to the more serious student, a comparable feeling

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General Education in Harvard College

of satisfaction in exchange for good and honest work. The
system of concentration, moreover, allows for the great varia-
tions which exist even within a single college in background, in
intellectual aptitudes and interests, and in professional intentions.
But it is unnecessary for us to discuss the system of concentration
at length; the whole tendency of academic organization favors it.
We do, however, recognize that there are many teachers who
believe that concentration has been carried to excess in certain
fields. We suggest that this criticism should be faced more
squarely in the future than in the past.

If the committee favors the continuation of concentration, it
also believes, to repeat, that the importance of training which is
common to all students and of training which seeks explicitly
and exclusively to achieve the aims of general education has been
neglected. The claims of general education should be presented
as clearly as the various departments press the claims of each of
the fields of special learning, and to this end we shall recommend
not only the adoption of certain requirements which the student
must satisfy, but also that an agency be established within the
faculty which will guard the interests of general education as the
individual departments at present guard those of special edu-
cation.

Before discussing the nature of our proposals for general edu-
cation in Harvard College and the structure of such an agency,
it may be well to say that we see no need for a radical change in
the over-all course requirements for the bachelor's degree. Cer-
tain specific proposals will be made later in this chapter, but they
do not contemplate altering the number of years ordinarily re-
quired for the degree, or the number of required courses. The
experience of the past three years has indicated the limitations of
an accelerated degree. The speed-up is perhaps adapted to the
acquisition of certain skills or bodies of information intended to
be put to immediate use. When the aims of education cannot be
stated in terms of such skills or such immediacy, the value of in-
tensive instruction pursued twelve months in the year becomes
extremely doubtful. We have seen many students pass through
such a system under the necessities of war, but most of them, and

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General Education in a Free Society

particularly those whose course and examination records indi-
cated high competence, have felt that they were losing many of
the values of college training as a result of the brevity and the
hurried character of their residence in college. This experience
with a speeded-up program has served to strengthen the convic-
tion that growth in intellectual and emotional maturity is of the
highest educational importance, and that the development of
such maturity cannot ordinarily be hastened by an accelerated
curriculum. It is probably true that many of our students could
be brought to a more mature level of intellectual and emotional
understanding at a somewhat earlier age, but this can be accom-
plished by the provision of more adult materials for study, by
more rigorous standards, by a richer experience in extracurricular
activities, and, even more, by work or travel or other pursuits
undertaken entirely away from college, rather than by any such
specious device as is involved in a slight increase in the length of
the college year or in the number of courses taken. Experience
of the war years reinforces the argument for the taking of four
substantial, rather than five or six thinner and more compressed,
courses.

This is not to say that there should be no exceptions to the
four-year degree. There arc students and there are circumstances
for whom and under which a three-year degree should be made
possible. It is scarcely for us to discuss this problem at any
length, but we believe that it is one which may well be considered
at greater length in the future. We suggest that there be careful
consideration of the relation of summer school to the work dur-
ing the regular college year, with particular emphasis on the
types of subject matter and on the methods of instruction which
can be most profitably employed in such relatively short terms.
While the wartime experience with the accelerated degree has
indicated that acceleration has many limitations, wartime experi-
ence with intensive language courses has supported the belief
previously held by many teachers that languages can be most
satisfactorily learned, at least for tool purposes, by intensive
study over a short period of time rather than by the traditional
three hours a week spread over one or more years. It seems safe

General Education in Harvard College

to assume that much the same conclusion will be found to be cor-
rect for other subjects, while there will be some in which essential
values will be lost by intensive cultivation rather than by a
method which allows more time for reflection.

Proposed Requirements in General Education

GENERAL and special education are not, and must not be
placed, in competition with each other. General education
should provide not only an adequate groundwork for the choice
of a specialty, but a milieu in which the specialty can develop its
fullest potentialities. Specialization can only realize its major
purposes within a larger general context, with which it can never
afford to sever organic connection. General education is an
organism, whole and integrated; special education is an organ, a
member designed to fulfill a particular function within the whole.
Special education instructs in what things can be done and how
to do them; general education, in what needs to be done and to
what ends. General education is the appreciation of the organic
complex of relationships which gives meaning and point to the
specialty. To some degree it should suffuse all special education.
Every course given in Harvard College, however specialistic,
should make some recognizable contribution to general educa-
tion. To the degree that it fails to do this, it has failed to make
its best contribution to the specialty as well.

We wish to avoid a system in which general education is care-
fully segregated from special education as though the two had
nothing in common. But if there be no separation at all, if gen-
eral education be left entirely to courses taught from a special or
technical point of view, or with a special, sometimes vocational,
end in mind, then general education must suffer even though
almost any first-rate specialization promotes in some measure the
ends of general education.

We should have some courses in the college which seek to

General Education in a Free Society

fulfill the aims of general education exclusively and not inciden-
tally, courses which are concerned with general relationships and
values, not with the learning and the technicalities of the special-
ist. We do not propose that these courses should all be taken at
one time, or even in one period of the college career. It would
be a mistake to set off a certain period for general education,
leaving the remainder for nongeneral education, as though gen-
eral education ceased at a certain point and had no relevance to
subsequent study. General education should not be limited to a
block of courses which the student is to take and get over with in
order to go on with the more interesting and significant special
study. It should be a pervasive and a lasting influence as well as
a set of course requirements. It is with that aim in mind that we
propose the following program.

This committee proposes that of the sixteen courses required
for the bachelor's degree students should be required to take six
courses in general education. In any individual program no such
course may be counted for both concentration and general edu-
cation. Of the six courses, at least one shall be in the humanities,
one in the social sciences, and one in the sciences. In the first two
of these areas a particular course will be designated and required
of all students. These courses will be described in a following
section of this report. The prescribed courses in the humanities
and the social sciences would be expected to furnish the common
core, the body of learning and of ideas which would be a com-
mon experience of all Harvard students, as well as introductions
to the study of the traditions of Western culture and to the con-
sideration of general relationships. In the area of the sciences it
is proposed that there be established alternative courses to meet
the needs of those students who come to college with marked
divergences in their preparation and plans for special study, as
well as with disparities in their competence in dealing with
mathematical and scientific material.

In addition to these introductory and required courses in gen-
eral education, we propose that a student be required to take
three further courses in general education. (It is understood that
both of the introductory courses in science described later in this

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General Education In Harvard College

chapter may be counted toward the general education require-
ments.) No one of these additional or second-group courses shall
be in the student's particular department of concentration, al-
though one of them, and only one, may fall within the broad
area in which he is concentrating. There will thus be a consider-
able range of choice among the second group of general educa-
tion courses. This choice will, however, be confined to the
courses approved by the proposed Committee on General Educa-
tion as fulfilling the aims of general education. Courses narrowly
specialistic in character thus would be excluded from those satis-
fying these requirements.

It is proposed, moreover, that the introductory courses will
not be the only new courses established for the purpose of gen-
eral education, but that there will be a number of other new
courses designed not to fill the needs of specialized training or
concentration, but rather to achieve the aims of general educa-
tion. Several possible courses are discussed later in this chapter.
No one of these would be required of all students, although it
would clearly fall within the jurisdiction and responsibility of
the Committee on General Education to recommend any course
or courses which seem to it particularly valuable for the objec-
tives of general education. It is believed that there are now to be
found in the offering of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences a num-
ber of courses suitable for the purposes of general education, or
which could with some modification be adapted to those pur-
poses. The Committee on General Education would have au-
thority to include in its list of courses which would fulfill the
general education requirements courses now offered by depart-
ments or divisions, or courses which might in the future be
offered by existing agencies of the faculty, as well as courses
sponsored by the committee itself. It is believed, further, that
there are members of the faculty who would be glad to have the
opportunity of offering courses fulfilling these requirements, and
that the committee should consider and perhaps sponsor the giv-
ing of such courses.

It should not be assumed that all of the courses designed for
the general education requirements or sponsored by the Com-

General Education in a Free Society

mittee on General Education would be mammoth introductory,
and certainly not survey, courses. The first group of required or,
as in the case of the two science courses, alternatively required
courses would, it is true, be very large, although they would not
be what is understood ordinarily by survey courses. But, in the
second group of general education courses, it is believed that
many of them would be relatively small, in some instances con-
fined to students with special qualifications. It is hoped that some
would be Mouse conference courses of the type being experi-
mented with when the exigencies of the war calendar and the de-
parture for war service of many instructors prevented the con-
tinuation of what held promise of becoming a very interesting
development.

It is suggested that the required courses in the humanities, the
social sciences, and the sciences shall be taken during the first two
years of college. Under most circumstances it will be desirable
for the student to take two of these courses during his freshman
year and the third during his second year. The broad scope of
these courses would be particularly helpful to the student who
is preparing to choose a field of concentration. It is believed
that the remaining, or second-group, courses in general educa-
tion would not have to be taken at any particular time. It is, in-
deed, proposed that most of them will be taken in the junior and
senior years when the student is more mature, in command of a
larger vocabulary and a greater body of learning, and is able to
appreciate on a more advanced level some of the principles,
values, and relationships which arc of special importance in the
promotion of the aims with which we are concerned. General
education should not be confused with elementary education.

The problem of English composition is one which has per-
plexed most faculties. Virtually all college teachers will agree
that students should have a sound training in the essential tech-
niques of English composition in high school, and that they
should there have developed some facility of expression; that, in
other words, they should come to college prepared to go ahead
without the necessity of learning, or even of reviewing, the essen-
tials of spelling, grammar, and syntax. We realize that composi-

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General Education In Harvard College

tion is a never-ending discipline which can be only begun in
schools and must be continued in college. But most college
teachers, and this seems to be true in virtually every country,
complain that the high schools do not equip their students with
the capacity to write their own language clearly and grammati-
cally, and that, therefore, the colleges must do a kind of work in
composition which the schools should have done and which the
schools should be able to do better than the colleges. The result
has been that in most colleges there is some remedial requirement
in English composition. At Harvard English A has been required
of nearly all freshmen. It has already been observed that this
course, the one which is taken by the largest number of Harvard
students, does not count toward fulfilling the distribution re-
quirements. This is evidently an indication of the faculty belief
that English A has to do largely with the technique of writing
and is not primarily a course in subject matter, that it is calcu-
lated to develop a skill rather than to explore a field of learning.

The present requirement in English composition has the merit
of placing responsibility for improvement in the writing of
English in a single agency. It has the corresponding weakness of
segregating training in writing from the fields of learning. Since
the responsibility for training in written communication is vested
in the staff of English A, the other members of the faculty too
often feel that they have little if any responsibility for the devel-
opment of skill and facility in writing. This seems to us a serious
weakness. What is desired is not primarily skill in writing lit-
erary English or about English literature. Training in composi-
tion should not be associated with the English Department only.
It should be functional to the curriculum, a significant part of the
student's college experience. It should, so far as is feasible, be
associated with training in general education rather than with a
single course or department. We realize that if training in com-
position is everyone's responsibility, it may become no one's, but
we believe that the ends sought by the present English A require-
ment can be better achieved by the modification of the existing
system.

We propose that in place of English A as now given there be

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General Education in a Free Society

substituted a procedure which will be more directly connected
with the introductory courses in general education. It is assumed
that all students will take at least one of the introductory courses
in general education in their first year and that most freshmen
will take two of these courses. We propose that during the first
half of the freshman year the work in composition be limited to
two class hours a week or one class and one conference hour, the
emphasis to be placed upon the essential techniques and skills in
writing. This would be required of all students who could not
pass a test comparable in difficulty to that existing during the
past few years. The bulk of the freshman class would, in other
words, be required to do what might be called remedial work in
English composition during the first semester of their freshman
year. Even among those students who are required to take this
training there will probably be such great disparities in previous
education, as well as in capacity, that it will be essential to sep-
arate them into sections by accomplishment and ability.

During the second term of the freshman year the work in
English composition would be required of all students. It would
be given, not separately, but in connection with the courses in
general education then being taken by the student. The classes
in composition would, as classes, cease to meet. In their place
the students would be expected to write frequent themes in con-
nection with their general education course or courses. During
the first experimental years the writing would probably be di-
rected and corrected by the instructors in composition, but it is
hoped that later all instructors in these courses might share in
the task. Instructors in composition thus would come to have an
intimate relation to the courses in general education. So far as
proves feasible they should become members of their staffs.
They would be expected to hold conferences with each student
on each theme. Such individual conferences should more than
compensate in educational value for the absence of formal classes
in English composition during the second term.

It seems to us that there should be no additional course credit
for this work in English composition, but that it should be
thought of as an integral part of the general education require-

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General Education in Harvard College

ment, one of the stages in the process of improving the capacity
to communicate thought, as well as further training in systematic
analysis, in evaluation, and in the discernment of relevance.

5

Administration

WE recommend the establishment of a standing Committee on
General Education. This standing committee would have very
much the same responsibility for general education that the de-
partments, which are also committees of the faculty, have for
special education. It would, in other words, have a general
supervisory authority in this area, an authority which would
include the administration, although not the making, of the
rules applying to general education. It is for the faculty, with
the approval of the Governing Boards, to vote the rules; the
committee would supervise their enforcement. The committee
would also be charged with responsibility for proposing to the
faculty changes in these rules as experience indicates.

As the various departments and divisions are responsible for
certifying that the student has fulfilled the requirements for con-
centration, so the Committee on General Education would be
responsible for accrediting students' programs as fulfilling the
requirements of general education. This function would ordi-
narily present few major administrative problems, but because
we believe it desirable to maintain elements of flexibility in the
program for general education we think that there is need for
some discretionary authority, and that, therefore, the general
education requirements should not be administered in a purely
mechanical manner, or by any agency with less standing and
responsibility than a committee of the faculty. The standing
committee, again following the example of the departments,
would have the function of administering the budget allotted to
general education and of fostering the establishment of courses
serving the aims of general education.

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General Education in a Free Society

We do not conceive of appointments in general education as
being either exclusively or permanently tied to such courses. We
think that it will be far wiser in any long-run view to avoid
having two faculties, one for general and one for special educa-
tion. Those teaching the general courses should continue to have
departmental affiliations and, where possible, should offer both
general and special instruction. Such a system should work to the
advantage both of the courses which seek to deal with the broad
aims of human activity with general ideas and with the inter-
connections of fields of learning and of those which aim to
promote the detailed study of particular segments of learning.
The connections between teaching in the general and the special
courses should be real and continuing. Members of the faculty
who take part in one of the large introductory courses designed
for general education should ordinarily serve in that capacity for
a term of years and should retain some departmental instruction,
either on the undergraduate or the graduate level, while doing so.

The committee would be responsible for preparing a list of
courses fulfilling the requirements of general education, even as
the department or division lists those courses which satisfy its
requirements. It would probably be desirable for the Committee
on General Education to issue a pamphlet stating the rules gov-
erning general education, the principles upon which they are
based, and also the content, the scope, the methods, and the aims
of the various courses which fulfill those requirements.

It is possible that the program which we have proposed, if
adopted, should not be put into effect instantaneously. Some of
the courses in general education might well be given for one or
two years to small groups of students, so that experience may be
gained in suitable methods and materials, before they are offered
as required courses, or even as courses open to all who might
elect them. This period of experimentation would also give time
in which to assemble a teaching staff for each of the large courses
and to hold preliminary discussions among that staff.

During such a transitional period the present rules for distribu-
tion presumably would remain in effect. It will be a simple mat-
ter for the Committee on General Education to assign each new

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General Education in Harvard College

course to one of the areas and, if necessary, to one of the sections,
into which the course offering is now divided. The new courses
would thus count as fulfilling the distribution requirements so
long as these remain. The committee should have responsibility
for recommending to the faculty the time at which the change-
over from the present distribution rules to the new rules applying
to general education should take place.

The members of the Committee on General Education should
be appointed by the President, perhaps for terms so arranged
that there would be continuity of membership. This might be
accomplished by having three-year terms with one third of the
committee retiring each year. There is no particular size which
seems inevitably correct, but it is probable that a committee of
approximately nine members would be suitable. One of this size
could include a variety of areas within the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences, and yet it would not be too large to make difficult the
arrangement of meetings or the efficient conduct of business.
Because of the central position of this committee in the entire
scheme of Harvard education, it seems probable that the Dean of
the Faculty should serve ex officio as chairman of the committee.
It is assumed that the committee would include in its member-
ship several members of the faculty who are responsible for the
conduct of the courses in general education, but it also seems
desirable that its membership should not be confined to them. It
should, in other words, include members of the faculty not per-
sonally involved in such courses, although there is probably no
necessity for specifying in advance the proportion to be followed
in the distribution of membership. This is one of the numerous
questions which may be determined subsequently on the basis of
experience.

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General Education in a Free Society

Proposed Courses in General Education

BEFORE entering upon a discussion of specific course recom-
mendations, we should like to refer to the principles which
we already have expressed. Our proposals for courses in general
education in Harvard College are based upon the philosophy of
general education set forth in Chapter II. It is unnecessary to
repeat here the argument there developed, but we think it appro-
priate to insert this reference in order that readers who are con-
cerned primarily with the problems of college education may be
reminded that the college is an inseparable part of the entire edu-
cational process.

In Chapter II we discussed the separation of learning into three
areas: the humanities, the social sciences, mathematics and sci-
ence. The justification for that classification we shall not repeat.
Nor shall we repeat here the principles which were stated in con-
nection with our discussion of the secondary schools. We see
general education in the colleges as a continuation of general
education in the schools. The differences which appear in the
later stages are those required by growth in maturity, in learning,
and in the mastery of certain skills. Most of what we had to say
in Chapter IV concerning the reasons for studying literature, the
arts, the social sciences, mathematics and science, as well as the
objectives of such study, applies as well to the study of those
subjects in Harvard College. As we said in Chapter IV, we do
not imply that the same subject matter should be studied again
in college, still less that the same books should be used or the same
standards maintained. We mean, rather, that general education
in the college should be viewed as the continuation of a process
which started in the schools. We assume that it will be carried
forward on a much more advanced level, but we also assume that
the educational values and the aims in the several stages of the
process remain the same.

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(a) The Humanities

It is proposed that the course in the area of the humanities
which will be required of all students be one which might be
called "Great Texts of Literature." The aim of such a course
would be the fullest understanding of the work read rather than
of men or periods represented, craftsmanship evinced, historic or
literary development shown, or anything else. These other mat-
ters would be admitted only in so far as they are necessary to
allow the work to speak for itself. Otherwise they should be left
for special, not general, education.

Literature is surrounded by a numerous company of attendant
studies which profess to guide the student in the right approach,
the proper understanding, the full enjoyment. These attendant
studies occasionally assume the main place. Thus at various times
philology, history of language, history of literature, biography
of authors, discussion of literary form, criticism, prosody, and
grammar may be found occupying the student's time and energy
even to the utter neglect of that for which alone these worthy
subjects were born.

As scholarship, which once had only a shelf of Greek and
Latin authors to tend, becomes ever more extensive, more co-
ordinated, and more official, this danger of forgetting its prime
purpose inevitably increases. The ancillary studies can and do
at innumerable points assist the specialist in his professional effort
to throw light upon literature. They belong unquestionably to
his own full professional equipment. It is his business to further
them and to train successors in their use. Moreover, progress in
these studies is tangible, almost measurable. Progress in ability
to take from literature what man most needs is, in comparison,
intangible. Relatively it is unexaminable. What can be examined
is largely knowledge about literature. But the knowledge it has
to give as a part of general, as opposed to special, education is of
another sort. It is knowledge through. It comes only through
immersion in the literature. Knowledge about, though its origin
and aim may be simply to aid the immersion, can in fact prevent
and hinder its own purpose.

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The scholar is of course aware of this. He has learned this les-
son in his own progress through many a hard struggle to recover
perspective. But if his chief occupation has been research and
the training of others in research, a special effort of imagination
is needed to distinguish what is, or might be, helpful to himself
in reading a master from what will help a beginner who neither
possesses nor will ever possess anything resembling his own back-
ground or equipment. Here is the difficulty in designing a course
in great literature for all students: that the modes of treatment
proper to the specialist are a distraction to those who are not to
become experts. A mere listing of books to be read would convey
little without some specification of the mode of treatment. But a
specification would amount to the course itself. And here we
meet another difficulty. There is not one best way of introducing
people to Homer or Plato or Dante. Or, if there is, which it is
is not known. Freedom for the instructor is essential. He only
teaches, in this field, by letting his students watch the play of a
mind with a mind, that their minds may play in turn. The play
he shows them must be representative of "the all in each of all
minds," to use Coleridge's phrase, but it cannot be tied down to
another man's notions of what is educative. And yet if a course
in literature is to deserve to be compulsory there must be wide
agreement both as to what it is attempting and how it will at-
tempt that.

A third difficulty is that there are no known ways of describ-
ing ends or means in these matters which will not be construed
by different readers to very different effects. Nonetheless, with
the prime aims as defined above in mind, it may be said that the
more specific aim is familiarity with as much of the greatest writ-
ing as can be read and pondered in the limited time available. The
proportion of reading to pondering is of course the turning point.
There must be time for reflection or the familiarity will remain
too verbal. This cuts down the amount that can be read. But
since the best commentary on an author is frequently some more
of his writing, and since great books are great in part through the
power of their design, the amount for single authors cannot be
cut beyond a point. The outcome is that fewer books can be

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chosen. Each must be read completely enough for its parts to
help one another to the full. Probably, therefore, a course which
chose eight great books would be trying to do too much. A list
from which a selection would be made might include Homer,
one or two of the Greek tragedies, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy.

Both lectures and group discussions are desirable as aids to this
reading. The main purpose of the lectures would be to launch
certain themes for the discussions. Each of these books can be
thought about and talked over through course after course. Care-
ful husbandry of time will be needed. It will not be possible to
consider more than some selection of those things in each book
for which it has been most regarded; and this selection will need
all the instructor's wisdom. It will include the greatest, most uni-
versal, most essential human preoccupations first. Whatever is
left unnoticed is sacrificed in the interests of these. The treat-
ment which is attempted of these great themes can only do its best
to be worthy of them. They themselves are its inspiration. Be-
yond all techniques of pedagogy and scholarship these books
have been masters of method. The instructor can only seek to
be a means by which the authors teach the course.

Some doubt may be felt whether the heights of these books
may not be beyond the reach of large masses of the students.
But they have always been admittedly beyond the reach of the
vast majority of even their best readers. That has not made them
less educative. And indeed the chief reason for the course, and
the best argument for experimenting with it, is that too many
students today have too little contact with thoughts which arc
beyond them (apart from the specialties) and that many are in
fact passionately if inarticulately hungry for greatness in the
common cares of man.

Other General Courses in the Humanities. Under the rules
that we have proposed for the distribution of choice among gen-
eral education courses all students might take one additional
course in the humanities area, and those students not concentrat-
ing in a department falling within that area might be allowed to
take two or even three such courses. We do not propose to draw

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up an inclusive list of courses suitable for fulfilling the general
education requirements, but we think it desirable to say some-
thing about the principles which should be observed in planning
courses designed for that purpose.

It seems to us entirely undesirable to have a course of the
block-survey type which would include portions of all, or nearly
all, of the humanities. What principle of synthesis would bring
together in one, or even in two courses, the subject matter of
philosophy, the fine arts, music, and literature (for the course on
great texts would not exhaust the possible contributions of litera-
ture to general education)? Such a broad survey of the super-
ficial aspects of fields which have relatively little in common may
be productive of a smattering of information, but it is not
conducive to the growth of understanding or to the develop-
ment of those intellectual qualities which we believe to be the
chief goal of a general education.

Nor is it sufficient to require that the student take some course,
any course, in the humanities. Such a requirement apparently
rests upon the assumption that any course in English or in a
foreign literature, in philosophy, or in the fine arts, or music,
simply because it is offered in one of those departments, will con-
tribute to a liberal education. A course is not necessarily liberal
or humanistic, and certainly not general, simply because it is
offered by a department of literature, or philosophy, or art, or
music. Such courses may be as specialistic as courses in the other
two areas.

Literature. The place of literature in general education was
discussed at some length in the preceding chapter and again in the
section dealing with the projected course on great texts. As we
have just said, we assume that that course would not be the only
one available for students who wish to satisfy their general edu-
cation requirement by taking an additional course or courses in
literature. It is evident that there are now offered at Harvard
several different kinds of courses on literature, some designed for
the specialist, some for general education. Just how many in the
latter category should be made available, with some reshaping,
for the satisfaction of the general education requirements is a

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problem that should be determined by the Committee on General
Education, and that decision should be subject to modification
after further time for study and after the accumulation of addi-
tional experience. Changes in personnel in the various depart-
ments of literature will, of course, bring changes in the offerings
of those departments, and such changes will occasionally affect
the nature and number of the general education courses.

In addition to literature courses offered by single departments,
we believe it highly desirable to have courses on literature which
fall within no single department, courses which in some fashion
cross over the national boundaries which departments of litera-
ture ordinarily reflect and offer opportunities for the study of
types and styles of literature on a broadly comparative and philo-
sophic basis.

Philosophy. The place of philosophy in general education has
been the subject of prolonged debate during the last few years,
with no clear agreement emerging. One of the obstacles in the
way of an agreement is uncertainty about the role of philosophy.
It is sometimes said that philosophy offers a universal synthesis
of all knowledge. That was approximately true two centuries
ago, but since that time the natural sciences and large portions of
what have become the social sciences have separated from the
parent stem and have become enormously complex and special-
ized disciplines of their own. Another difficulty usually encoun-
tered in any discussion about the position of philosophy is the
extreme claim sometimes made that only in and through philoso-
phy can one attain a truly rational approach to the major prob-
lems of life. The fact would seem to be that this is true for some
persons but is wide of the mark for those to whom the methods
of philosophy appear abstract and unreal.

Yet when these caveats have been entered, it remains true that
a very considerable proportion of college students can find in
philosophy, if it be taught in a manner suited to their background
and their needs, one of the most vital of intellectual experiences.
We think that it would be serving no good purpose to require
every student to take a course in philosophy. Such a rule would
result in a watered-down course suitable neither for the philo-

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sophically dull nor for the philosophically curious and adept.
But if we believe that philosophy is a subject which cannot be
required of all students, we also believe that there should be
available at least two philosophy courses among the list of those
suitable for fulfilling the requirements in general education. We
do not mean to imply that two is a maximum number. We sug-
gest only that it would be desirable to have one course which
would be planned for those students who wish to take a general
education course in philosophy during their freshman or sopho-
more year, and another for students who prefer to take this
subject in their senior, or possibly junior, year. We have ob-
served many students who postponed taking a course in philos-
ophy until they had attained a relative maturity of learning and
of outlook, and then discovered that philosophy was superbly
rewarding. But there are students for whom the same experience
can come during the freshman or sophomore year, and we see
no way of laying down a universal rule concerning the time at
which students should take such a course. We do believe it im-
portant to recognize that there are many students who will profit
from work in philosophy provided their study of that subject
comes relatively late, and that a course designed for students who
have attained some mastery of another field of learning but who
are beginners in philosophy should be made available, and that
its membership be limited to them.

It would be unwise for us to prescribe the organization or the
content of either of these courses in philosophy. We can be
more definite about their aims. They should aim to impart to the
student the habit of self-criticism on the one hand the scrutiny
of fundamental presuppositions and on the other they should
impart perspective, the capacity to envisage truth synoptically,
from the standpoint of "all time and all existence." Essentially
they would be concerned with the questions raised by the great
philosophers, questions which haunt any reflective mind, young
or old. There are various ways of organizing the materials in a
course in philosophy so that they will be suitable for the purposes
of general education, and it is probable that courses offered by
different instructors would follow varying methods of approach.

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The analysis of the principal writings of six or seven of the great
philosophers, the method long used with success in Philosophy A,
would offer interesting parallels to the course on great texts, and
the introductory course in the social sciences, which will be dis-
cussed in the following section of this chapter. This approach is
not, we believe, the only way of studying the philosophical ideas
discussed by the greatest philosophers. Another approach is by
the study of problems such as causality, change, free will, and
truth. The third approach is the study of types of philosophy,
such as idealism, pragmatism, naturalism, and realism. In effect,
these three approaches the study of great masters in philos-
ophy, of problems, and of systems are inseparable, since the use
of any one method would involve the other two. We would
propose still another way, altogether different from these just
mentioned, for future consideration in connection with the de-
velopment of philosophical courses in general education. This
method has already been tried at Harvard with an increasing
measure of success among beginning students. Such a course
would have as its objective the study of the heritage of philos-
ophy in our civilization. Western culture may be compared to a
lake fed by the streams of Hellenism, Christianity, science, and
democracy. A philosophical course based upon the study of
these contributions might offer an extremely valuable way of
considering the conceptions of a life of reason, the principle of
an ordered and intelligible world, the ideas of faith, of a personal
God, of the absolute value of the human individual, the method
of observation and experiment, and the conception of empirical
laws, as well as the doctrines of equality and of the brotherhood
of man.

The Fine Arts. The claim for the fine arts in general education
rests on several assumptions: first, that the function of education
is to develop our faculties of perception and understanding; sec-
ond, that works experienced visually (architecture, sculpture,
and painting) are a significant part of human culture and that the
study of them is an academic discipline analogous in its methods
and values to the study of literature or of philosophy.

Fundamental to all learning in the field is the perception and

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understanding of the means of expression in the visual arts. The
forms of the arts are so varied, the body of material so vast, that
no one can hope to comprehend all expressive means. Yet once a
beginning has been made and a real grasp of the meaning of the
forms of even a very small part of the total of art is achieved, the
way to further understanding lies open. A student can go on by
himself, once he has learned how to "see." Since early schooling
is ordinarily so strongly literary, the majority of students come
to college with at least some grasp of literature and, through
popular music, the radio and records, some notion of music.
Few, however, have ever been exposed to the visual arts. It
seems to us, therefore, that it should be the obligation of the col-
lege to correct this lack, by acquainting as many students as pos-
sible with the visual arts through a systematic introduction in the
classroom. Otherwise, a whole field of experience that is a sig-
nificant part of human culture may remain closed.

This committee does not feel competent to determine either
the character or the content of general education courses in the
fine arts. It is probable that both historical and analytical ap-
proaches to the subject should be made available. The two
methods might possibly be combined in a single course, but such
a combination can be successful only if the instructor in charge
believes in that approach. It is interesting that perhaps the best
remembered general course in the fine arts ever given at Harvard
was that of Charles Eliot Norton, who followed none of the
present methods of bringing the student into direct contact with
works of art.

It has been proposed to us that an approach to the fine arts
which would be nearer to the methods of architecture should also
be made available, and a course on the elements of design might
well prove to be a valuable experience for a large number of
students. Such a course would deal with the fundamentals of
surface, volume, and space, and would probably involve some
elementary shopwork aimed to coordinate the elements of hand-
work and design.

Although we do not believe that training in the technique of
the arts should be a part of general education, the development

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of creative ability for the pleasure and satisfaction that creative
work, even on a nonprof essional basis, can bring must be recog-
nized. Opportunity should be given to the student to explore
the possibilities for himself in drawing, painting, and modeling.
Facilities and professional supervision should be provided on an
extracurricular basis. Just as the student with musical talent can
play in the orchestra or sing in the glee club with the best pro-
fessional direction, so a student should be able to do water colors
or model with the aid of really competent guidance. A studio
open to all students with a professional painter or sculptor in
charge is a desirable aim.

Music. A training in the musical skills is hardly within the
province of general education, but participation in choral singing
or in orchestral performance can be of the greatest value for large
numbers of students. The Harvard Glee Club has given a mag-
nificent opportunity to hundreds of students to engage in one of
the most rewarding of aesthetic experiences, one which, as we
observed in the preceding chapter, contributes also to the devel-
opment of social unity. The Harvard Orchestra has offered a
similar experience for a somewhat more limited number who had
already attained a sufficient degree of skill in the handling of
musical instruments.

A recognition of the importance of experience in musical ex-
pression does not mean that we consider courses in the histdry or
in the analysis of music to be irrelevant to general education.
Such courses have in the past contributed largely to the durable
satisfaction of many students, some of whom secure but meager
profit from those subjects which must depend on verbal symbols.
We believe that one or more courses in music should be designed
and given for the purposes of general education, but we are not
qualified to suggest which types of courses would be most suit-
able for these purposes.

(b) The Social Sciences

It is proposed that all students take a course which might
be called "Western Thought and Institutions." We considered
the possibility of suggesting as a title for such a course "The

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Evolution of Free Society," but that title carries with it implica-
tions of indoctrination which would be unacceptable to many,
and which might, indeed, convey an entirely false idea of its
intentions. For while we agree that Harvard College should
assume "a full and a conscientious responsibility for training men
in the nature of the heritage which they possess, and in the re-
sponsibilities which they must assume as free men for its enlarge-
ment and perpetuation," we do not believe that the course
should be one which would attempt to convince students of the
eternal perfection of existing ideas and institutions. The central
objective of the course would be an examination of the institu-
tional and theoretical aspects of the Western heritage.

It would be inappropriate for us to outline in detail a scheme
of this course, or even to indicate all the topics with which it
would be concerned. Its content and procedure should be
worked out by the staff charged with its execution and later
modified on the basis of experience in actually giving the course.
In order to indicate somewhat more clearly the character of the
course we have in mind we shall, however, suggest a number of
topics and writings with which it could deal appropriately.

Any course which attempts to consider the nature of the
Western heritage must raise more questions than it professes to
answer. It should open up questions of ends as well as of means,
of values and objectives as well as of institutional organization.
But it should also include an analysis of some of the great attempts
which have been made to find answers to these questions. The
course would, in other words, include an historical analysis of
certain significant movements and changes in Western society
together with the reading of substantial portions of certain of the
classics of political, economic, and social thought which those
changes have helped to produce.

In a single course it would be folly to attempt a comprehensive
survey of the entire range of European institutional development
and social thinking from the time of the Greeks to the present
day, and no such project is proposed. We believe that the course
should be selective, not inclusive. It will, for example, probably
be thought desirable to spend some time at the beginning in read-

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ing portions of two or three of the great foundation treatises of
political and social thought which came out of the civilization of
classic antiquity. It may be doubted whether any other books
succeed so well in raising certain of the persistent problems of
organized life in society as do those of Plato and Aristotle. The
study could not at this point be a thorough one in the sense in
which advanced work in a field of concentration would be
thorough, but it might prove to be intensely valuable in indicat-
ing the nature of some of the more enduring problems. Along
with the reading of portions of such books might well go lectures
on the character of the Greek city-state, and possibly some con-
sideration of the impact of the Roman Empire upon the culture,
law, and political life of the ancient world.

The proportion of time to be allotted to this primary material
should be left for later decision. But it seems apparent that the
principal emphasis in the course should be placed upon the evo-
lution of such institutions as representative government and the
reign of law, the impact of the Reformation upon society and
government, as well as upon religion and philosophy, the growth
of religious toleration, the nature and legacy of the natural-rights
philosophy, the growing confidence in the power of reason to
deal with human problems, the expansion of humanitarianism,
the rise of the laissez-faire philosophy and its relation to the
economy of the preindustrial age, and the impact of the techno-
logical revolution upon industrial organization, the growth of
populations, and the vast expansion of social and economic
legislation.

Let us repeat that we do not anticipate the comprehensive
coverage of all of these topics or of others which might be sub-
stituted for some of them, or even added to them. A general
survey is apt to be a dreary and a sterile affair, leaving little
residue in the minds of the students. But we also wish to reiterate
the principle that narrowly specialized courses which may be
far more thorough do not provide the answer to the evident need
for some approach in the field of the social sciences to the prob-
lems of a general education. The course on Western thought
and institutions would not cover or even, we should assume,

General Education in a Free Society

attempt to deal with all of the major topics. There would be a
constant need for selection and hence for emphasis. The attempt
is not to survey all history and all political and social thought but
to open up some of the great questions, to indicate the character
of some attempted solutions of the past, to study a few of those
topics and of the great statements of analysis or of ideals with
some intensity. Not the least among the possible achievements of
such a course might be the desire of students who had taken it to
push deeper into some aspects of the field which had been opened
to them.

It is evident that there is an immense body of philosophical
literature available for use in a course of this kind. The problem
of selection will not be an easy one, and we do not wish to make
that choice. We may suggest, however, that in the writings of
Aquinas, Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, Locke, Montesquieu,
Rousseau, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill, to mention no others,
one can find materials admirably suited to serve the purpose of
such a course. These writings will be best understood and most
valuable to the student when read in the economic, social, and
political context of their times. They should, that is to say, be
studied not simply as great books, but as great expressions of
ideas which emanated from certain historical backgrounds. Only
when their reading and interpretation are based upon a study of
the times in which they were produced can the student come to
have a genuine understanding both of their significance when
first published and of their relevance to the problems of the
twentieth century.

It may be said that the course which we have suggested is
beyond the capacity of the freshman or sophomore student. We
agree that few of the materials proposed for the course are of
the simplified textbook character. But we also believe that the
course offers the best possible introduction to the general range
of subject matter dealt with in the various fields of the social
sciences, and that it will offer the student, even though he may
fail to grasp the significance of much of the material at the time,
a set of intellectual tools which will be of the greatest value to
him. Although a course of the kind which we envisage has not

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previously been offered at Harvard, it would draw heavily upon
materials and methods used in two of the largest introductory
courses, History i and Government i . The course is not unlike
the very successful introductory course, "Contemporary Civili-
zation," which has been given at Columbia during the past
twenty-six years, although we suggest that it would be preferable
to deal with fewer topics and to read longer portions of fewer
books than has been customary in that admirable course. In a
formal sense "Western Thought and Institutions" would be a
new course, but it would thus be building upon the experience
derived from courses which have been successfully taken by
freshmen at both Harvard and Columbia.

The course would have the additional merit of avoiding repe-
tition of high-school work in the social studies. Students coming
to it with a good high-school training in European history would
find their earlier work of great value to them, but they would
not be asked to rewalk the same paths. This discouraging re-
survey of European history or of problems of American life has
been a not infrequent aspect both of the older variety of fresh-
man survey courses in history and of some of the more recent
interdepartmental survey courses in the social sciences.

It is evident that although this proposed course would not
parallel with any exactitude the proposed course on great texts
which we suggest for the area of the humanities, there would be
rewarding opportunities for cross reference and for comparison
in the two courses. These two courses, as well as the projected
introductory course in the physical sciences, would form a com-
paratively coherent and unified background for an understand-
ing of some of the principal elements in the heritage of Western
civilization.

Other Courses in the Social Sciences. There will in time be a
number of courses in the area of the social sciences, in addition to
the required course on Western thought and institutions, which
can be used for satisfying the requirement in general education.
It may be assumed that several existing courses, doubtless altered
somewhat to meet the needs of nonconcentrators, will be found
acceptable for this purpose.

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What was said earlier in this chapter about general education
courses in the humanities is pertinent to the consideration of
courses in the social sciences. We believe that a course will not
necessarily be suitable for the purposes of general education
simply because it is offered by the Department of History, or
Economics, or Government, or Sociology, or Anthropology, or
Psychology. Nor will the fact that it is an introductory course
make it useful for students who intend to take no further work
in that subject. Yet there are courses in all of these subjects which
achieve many of the aims of general education. How many of
them can be made available for students who have had no pre-
liminary work in the field must be determined in each instance.

Block-survey courses including largely unrelated segments of
three or four of the social sciences seem to us as undesirable as
synthetic groupings in the humanities. We think that there are
many possibilities for courses in the social sciences which are
genuinely interdepartmental, but there must be some carefully
thought-out principle of coherence involved or the course will
likely fail to attain any unity. There is, after all, no very real
educational advantage in having a course taught by several per-
sons, simply because they have their professional homes in
different departments, and there are obvious weaknesses involved
in such cooperation unless the central aim is both clear and
attainable. Otherwise, the course is apt to combine superficial-
ity with an almost complete lack of integration except in the
title.

American Democracy. We may suggest a single example of a
course which would draw on materials in all, or nearly all, of the
social sciences, and yet would not consist of a series of unrelated
segments. It seems to us that both as a sequel to the course on
Western thought and institutions, and as a preparation for the
responsibilities of citizenship, one of the most suitable courses
which could be devised for the purposes of general education
would be one to which the title "American Democracy" might
be given. Such a course would have as its immediate aim a ma-
ture consideration of certain of the problems which confront an
American citizen. It would be in no sense a study of current

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events or even of current situations, even though it is to be
hoped that it would be intimately related to the problems of the
present day. Nor would it consist of a series of blocks of lec-
tures, each block given by a man from a different department.
The proposed course would be interdepartmental in the sense
that it would draw upon materials and techniques employed in
various social sciences, but it should not be given by a panel of
lecturers each having a vested right to a certain number of weeks.
The staff of this course, like that of the proposed course on
Western thought and institutions, would almost certainly be
drawn from men in all, or nearly all, of the social-science fields,
but it is assumed that a single member of the faculty would be
placed in charge.

A course on American democracy would involve the study
of a carefully selected group of topics which could be considered
in terms of their historical development, of their relation to the
institutional and philosophic pattern of which they form a part,
and which would be viewed in terms of the values they reflect, as
well as analyzed from the aspect of the detached critic.

The best examples of the approach that we have in mind are
to be found in three volumes written by foreign students of
American society. Tocqueville's Democracy in America and
Bryce's American Commonwealth have long been among the
most valuable books for anyone concerned either with the past
or with the present nature of American democracy. Gunnar
Myrdal's An American Dilemma deals with a much more limited
subject matter, but he approaches it with such breadth that his
method indicates the possibilities for a study of current problems
which draws upon relevant materials in all of the social sciences
and which also transcends the contemporaneous.

A course of this kind cannot be created overnight. The as-
signment will be an extremely difficult one. What was said earlier
about the need for time and for experimentation with small
groups will be particularly true here. But we also feel that an
investment in such a course might pay remarkable dividends.
The course would probably be intended primarily for those who
are not concentrators in one of the social sciences. It might,

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however, prove invaluable for those concentrators, as well as
for students who take no subsequent college work in the social
sciences.

Just as the course on Western thought and institutions would
be more valuable to those students who have had some sound
work in European history in high school, so those students who
attained a reasonable mastery of American history before enter-
ing college would find their knowledge of that subject of par-
ticular importance for a course on American democracy.

Human Relations. We think it unnecessary to suggest many
new courses in the social sciences at this time, since we believe
that there will be many proposals made by social-science depart-
ments or by individual members of the faculty for courses which
the Committee on General Education will need to consider. We
do, however, wish to recommend that a course in the field of
"human relations" be carefully considered by the standing com-
mittee and, if it appear feasible, be offered as one of those in
general education. The need for such a course has been expressed
by students and alumni. In many of the answers to the question-
naire sent out to a large body of Radcliffe alumnae last summer
the view is expressed that the greatest lack in the general training
offered in college is precisely at this point. The difficulty of the
task is almost as great as the importance of the problem. There
is relatively little material suitable for undergraduate instruction
now available. It is certain that a course of this kind, if it is given
at all, should be given on an experimental basis over a number of
years and to a class of limited numbers. But the potential value
of such an experiment seems so great that it would be short-
sighted to rest content with a recognition of the difficulties in-
volved and to make them the basis for a policy of inaction.

(c) Science and Mathematics

General Considerations. From the viewpoint of general edu-
cation the principal criticism to be leveled at much of present
college instruction in science is that it consists of courses in spe-
cial fields, directed toward training the future specialist and mak-
ing few concessions to the general student. Most of the time in

General Education in Harvard College

such courses is devoted to developing a technical vocabulary and
technical skills and to a systematic presentation of the accumu-
lated fact and theory which the science has inherited from the
past. Comparatively little serious attention is given to the ex-
amination of basic concepts, the nature of the scientific enterprise,
the historical development of the subject, its great literature, or
its interrelationships with other areas of interest and activity.
What such courses frequently supply are only the bricks of the
scientific structure. The student who goes on into more ad-
vanced work can build something from them. The general stu-
dent is more likely to be left simply with bricks. Eventually he
constructs his educational edifice elsewhere with other materials.

It frequently happens that even the student who concentrates
in a science is preoccupied with his specialty to such a degree
that he fails to achieve a view of science as a whole and of the
interrelationships of the special fields within it. A general edu-
cation in science needs to be provided for the future scientist or
technologist as well as for the general student. One could
scarcely insist that all students of history or literature should learn
some biology, for example, but that the prospective physicist or
chemist need not do so.

It is necessary, therefore, to provide science courses at the
introductory level which have general rather than specialistic
education as their primary aim. Such courses should represent
reasonably broad syntheses within the areas of science and mathe-
matics the physical sciences, for example; or a fusion of
physics with mathematics or chemistry; or biology, animal and
plant. They should be taught so as to convey some integrative
viewpoint, scientific method, or the development of scientific
concepts, or the scientific world-view. They should convey
verbally and through the laboratory some understanding of the
various means by which science progresses: increase in the pre-
cision of observation and measurement, the evolution of funda-
mental concepts, the introduction of new instruments and
procedures, the fructification of one science by another, the pro-
gression from description to analysis and synthesis and from the
qualitative to the quantitative.

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The creation of introductory courses in science, however,
does not exhaust the contribution which science should make to
general education or our concern with the general education of
the scientist. The body of science includes not only special
knowledge and skills but conceptual interrelations, a world-view,
and a view of the nature of man and knowledge, which together
constitute the philosophy of science; a history which forms a
continuous and important segment of all human history; and
writings which include some of the most significant and impres-
sive contributions to all literature.

These aspects of the sciences are frequently almost entirely
neglected in the college teaching of science. It sometimes hap-
pens that members of philosophy departments devote some at-
tention to the philosophy of science. Unfortunately, the profes-
sional philosopher may possess only a remote appreciation of the
nature of science. In any case his contribution usually does not
reach either science students or members of the science staff. It
is philosophy of science for students of philosophy. Similarly,
the history of science may be dealt with in separate courses or
even as at I larvard in a separate department of the college. Such
devices, valuable as they may be intrinsically, merely emphasize
the avoidance of instruction in the history and philosophy of
science by scientists themselves.

The claim of general education is that the history of science
is part of science. So arc its philosophy, its great literature, and
its social and intellectual context. The contribution of science
instruction to the life of the university and to society should in-
clude these elements, since science includes them. A science
course so constructed as to encompass these elements makes an
important contribution to general education. It need not by that
token make a poorer contribution to an education in science.
One can defend the view that it is all the better science for being
good general education.

Beyond the introductory courses which are described below,
general education in science and mathematics needs to be pro-
vided for the advanced student. Ideally this should be an integral
part of the education in his specialty, pervading all his courses.

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In part it might also take the form of special courses in the science
departments, probably seminars, which examine on a mature
level, and with reasonably well-prepared students, important as-
pects of the philosophy, history, and interrelations of the sciences.
The great books of science can make an important contribution
in this process. They offer the well-trained student extraordi-
narily rich material for consideration and discussion and can
help him to attain a breadth of view and intellectual grasp of his
field scarcely to be equaled by other means.

An Introductory Program. What we propose to do concern-
ing general education in science and mathematics at Harvard
must be designed to meet the needs of students who vary widely
in aptitude and training. All that we can depend upon in the
entering student in these fields is some instruction in elementary
algebra and geometry. At the other extreme we admit students
who have had as much as four years each of mathematics and
science. Though this entire gamut of possibilities is represented
in the entering classes, the great bulk of students come to Har-
vard with an appreciable foundation in school mathematics and
science. All but a handful (twenty-three out of nine hundred in
a recent count) have had at least three years of school mathemat-
ics, including algebra, demonstrative geometry, and usually a
second year of algebra. Almost 40 per cent have gone at least
two courses beyond second-year algebra. About 95 per cent of
the students have studied biology, chemistry, or physics for at
least one year at school; and about 50 per cent have taken more
than one year of work in these sciences.

Mathematics. A specific level of proficiency in mathematics
is not at present required for admission to Harvard College, nor
do we propose that it should be. The minimal program of
secondary-school mathematics alluded to in the foregoing chap-
ter, however, which includes elementary algebra and demon-
strative geometry, is essential for pursuing the program in natural
sciences which we envisage for the general student, and for
understanding many matters which arise in concentration pro-
grams outside the sciences.

As indicated above, almost all students who now come to

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Harvard have had at least one year of school mathematics beyond
this minimal program. The very small number who offer only
two years of school mathematics are likely to have been selected
for admission because of particular gifts which outweigh their
paucity of mathematical training. From the point of view of
general education, therefore, one might be permitted the opti-
mistic view that our students have already completed a minimal
program in mathematics before entering college.

It must be conceded that with some students this instruction
has not "taken"; at the time of entering college they are not pro-
ficient in the mathematics studied at school. This is a problem
which must be faced by those departments of the college which
give instruction in fields which require mathematical under-
standing and competence. We take the position, however, that
for the general student the student whose work in college
makes no specific mathematical demands there is little point,
whatever his level of performance, in prescribing remedial math-
ematics. It would necessarily involve much simple repetition of
work already done in secondary school and would offer little
hope that such a second exposure would result in substantial
educational gain.

Science. To provide for introductory general education in the
sciences it is proposed that two new courses be instituted: one in
the principles of physical science and one in the principles of
biological science. Both courses are to be planned primarily to
give students an insight into the fundamental principles of the
subject and the nature of the scientific enterprise. In neither of
them is a systematic factual survey contemplated. Both courses
should communicate by discussion and example the methods by
which scientific knowledge has advanced within the past four
hundred years and should illustrate the combination of logical
analysis, careful observation and experiment, and imaginative
insight which has characterized the great scientific advances of
the past.

In the physical sciences, scientific modes of inquiry are applied
to relatively simple systems. These lend themselves to precise
definition and measurement, their elements can be analyzed and

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General Education in Harvard College

often separately controlled, and their properties can be described
and to a degree predicted. The physical sciences therefore pro-
vide the clearest, simplest, and most rigorous examples of scien-
tific analysis and approach.

The biological sciences are concerned with a much more com-
plex level of material organization, one which therefore is less
open to precise definition, specification, and control. A course
in biological sciences should convey to students some insight
into the way in which science approaches such complicated and
multivariant systems, and some understanding, therefore, of the
nature of problems which are encountered in even more extreme
form in the social studies.

Both courses should include lectures, laboratory work by in-
dividual students, and conferences. Though each of the courses
could profit intellectually from the advice of scientists and other
interested scholars, and each might be enlivened with occasional
guest lectures, each of them should represent primarily a syn-
thesis in the mind of a single person who is entrusted with the
design and direction of the course as a whole.

The way in which topics are presented is itself of great impor-
tance. Too often, even in introductory courses, problems appear
simply in the form of educational bric-a-brac, hurdles in per-
formance for the student. In such courses as we have in mind
every effort should be made to have the student understand and
assent to the problems which confront him as genuine scientific
problems. To a degree this result can be achieved by thorough
presentation and discussion, clarified by demonstrations and
work in the laboratory. One prime difficulty, however, is that
much of the material to be considered does not in fact present
problems to the contemporary scientist; even the well-informed
student already knows the solutions. Such situations can fre-
quently borrow a very stimulating interest and heightened value
by being presented in their proper historical context. Many
topics which might now represent only scientific detritus, dull
and dry facts and formulas to be memorized by the student, were
matters of absorbing concern and controversy in the past. Their
educational value and intellectual quality are bound up inti-

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matcly with this past status. The historical development of the
subjects considered in our courses, therefore, should occupy an
important place in their design.

The kind of presentation which is contemplated will neces-
sarily force the omission of much of the conventional subject
matter of biology and the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the
student who grasps the content of this type of course should
emerge with a rich understanding of the nature of science and
of many basic phenomena. Such a course might be expected to
fill a much more substantial place in the total residue of his formal
education than would more detailed and systematic courses in
the individual fields of physical or biological science. It is pro-
posed that all students at 1 larvard College take either the course
in physical sciences or that in biological sciences.

A Course in the Principles of Physical Science. This course
must be planned for freshmen and sophomores who vary widely
in scientific and mathematical preparation and who can be relied
upon to possess only a general interest in science. Rather than
provide the student with a systematic presentation of the ma-
terials of one science, this course should develop particular
aspects of the scientific enterprise within the whole range of the
physical sciences. To give the course greater unity, it should be
built about a core of physics. Materials from other sciences
chemistry, astronomy, and geology should be introduced only
to the degree that they are pertinent to the problems under dis-
cussion. The course would probably omit, for example, descrip-
tive chemistry and descriptive astronomy. It should, however,
explore basic chemical concepts: atomic theory, the periodic
system, laws of chemical combination, valence, and so on. Simi-
larly, celestial mechanics might provide the material for much of
its discussion of dynamical principles.

Such a course must discard at the outset any attempt to survey
the material of the sciences which compose it. Rather, it must
look to some dominant intellectual pattern to guide its selection
of material. In the present case the pattern is to be found in the
development of basic physical principles and concepts, and the
methods and approaches by which they have been developed.

General Education in Harvard College

This is not intended to be merely a course about science. Ii
will contain much solid scientific content. The student will
learn fundamental facts and laws and will solve problems the-
oretically and in the laboratory. He will do so, however, with a
highly selected subject matter, which in every case is chosen to
subserve the major aims of the course.

The emphasis on historical development in this course is in no
sense to constitute merely a humanistic garnishing of its factual
material. On the contrary, it is introduced to illuminate and
vitalize the content with which it is integrated. The attempt
should be made in this course to teach science as part of the total
intellectual and historical process, of which, in fact, it has always
been an important part. The student should gain thereby an in-
sight into the principles of science, an appreciation of the values
of the scientific enterprise; and he should also learn much of the
subject matter of the physical sciences.

It is expected that this course will be given in two versions
adapted to the wide differences in mathematical achievement
of entering students. Both editions of the course should
have precisely the same educational objectives and fundamen-
tal structure. They would differ only in rate and rigor of
presentation.

The heart of the course in physical sciences should be its lec-
tures. They should include much illustrative material slides,
motion pictures when available, and demonstrations. The course
ideally should be directed by a single lecturer, though it might
well be enlivened from time to time by other lecturers on special
topics. The lectures should be supplemented by conference sec-
tions meeting once each week. These should be differentiated
according to the interests, preparation, and aptitude of the stu-
dents. They should afford opportunity for discussion with the
instructor and for exercise in dealing with theoretical problems.
The number of students in each section should be small enough
to permit general participation in discussion. Beyond formal
classwork, students should be expected to solve problems and
write occasional themes. Outside reading should include contact
with original scientific sources. In part, these will have to be

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General Education in a Free Society

prepared specifically for this course, since no adequate collections
of such material are at present available.

The laboratory associated with this course is of special im-
portance. It should be planned to illustrate the methods by
which physical problems are approached and solved. Every
effort should be made to convey these as genuine experiences,
either by presenting the student with problems of which he does
not know the answer or, when this is impracticable, by casting
back the situation into the historical framework in which it con-
stituted a genuine issue. The student should thus have a series of
real experiences in the scientific solution of material problems.
He should also have considerable exercise in the employment of
scientific data to yield general solutions, basic principles, and
predictions of the behavior of systems with which he has had as
yet no contact.

A Course in the Principles of Biological Science. The aim of
the course in biological sciences is to present an integrated view
of the science of living organisms, animal and plant. It should lay
constant emphasis upon general concepts and upon modes of
scientific approach to biological problems. It should convey not
only knowledge concerning organisms, but how this knowledge
was acquired and how it impinges upon other areas of human
interest and learning.

The course is expected to develop its main themes in a pro-
gram of lectures. These should draw appropriate material from
the fields of zoology, botany, physiology, paleontology, and
geology. About this nucleus should be built a program of
demonstrations, individual work in the laboratory, and confer-
ences. The laboratory should provide abundant opportunity for
examining living organisms. The student should have access to a
microscope and should see living protozoa, protoplasmic stream-
ing in plant cells, the beating of cilia, and the capillary circulation
of the blood. Only in this way can he come to appreciate the
constant flux and motion that characterize all life.

For induction into scientific modes of investigation, the lab-
oratory, in close association with the lectures, might well review
a number of classic experiments in the history of biology. Those,

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General Education in Harvard College

for example, by which Redi, Spallanzani, and Pasteur demolished
the belief in spontaneous generation are well within the compass
of this course. Pasteur's experiments also introduce the students
to such practical matters as antisepsis and techniques of pasteuri-
zation. Simple modifications of the original procedures of
Priestley and Ingenhousz demonstrate with great clarity the inter-
relations of photosynthesis and respiration in plants and animals,
and the interplay of both processes in maintaining animals and
plants in organic balance.

Group demonstrations prepared and performed by the in-
structing staff can exhibit to the students many phenomena which
they have neither the skill nor resources to demonstrate for
themselves: the electrical activities of the beating heart and of
the brain, the action of hormones and drugs, the effects of vita-
min deficiency, and so on. Museum exhibits and selected mo-
tion pictures can also aid greatly in clarifying and integrating the
work of the course.

A large responsibility in achieving the educational aims of
this course should rest upon work in conferences. Organisms are
so complex in structure, and so varied in their activities and in-
terrelations, that the mere passive reception of information about
them by the student, either in lecture or by reading, is inade-
quate. He must be given the opportunity to talk about biology
with others, to view its concepts from many different aspects,
and to correct and refine his notions of them in the dialectic
of question and answer, discussion and argument. The con-
ferences also must be the principal means of directing and
organizing the student's outside activities in connection with
the course: his visits to museums, field trips, and his outside
reading.

Apart from elementary textbooks, many lucid and stimulating
presentations of special aspects of biology exist, written by au-
thorities for the use of nonspecialists. Examples are T. H. Hux-
ley's Marts Place in Nature, T. H. Morgan's Evolution and
Genetics, A. V. Hill's Living Machinery, and W. B. Cannon's
Wisdom of the Body. Such contacts with original authority
represent a particularly satisfying experience for the student

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General Education in a Free Society

and lead his interest more deeply into specific phases of biologi-
cal thought.

A serious attempt should be made in the course also to bring
students into contact with examples of the classic literature of
biology. Such writings as Harvey's Circulation of Blood, por-
tions of Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man, parts of
Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine, Wil-
liam Beaumont's Observations on the Physiology of Digestion,
and Grcgor Mendel's first paper on plant hybridization, all make
fine reading for the beginning student. Fortunately some of
these works Darwin, Harvey, and Beaumont, for example
arc available in cheap editions. Others are not so readily acces-
sible. It may prove desirable in this course to prepare an anthol-
ogy of source materials in biology.

7
Tutorial and Advising

THE system of individual instruction and guidance to which the
term, tutorial, was applied has been in effect for a varying length
of time in different departments, having been adopted in some
thirty years ago, in others during the twenties. One department,
Chemistry, has never adopted the system, while several of the
other sciences experimented with it for a few years and then
abandoned it.

It is to be remembered that the tutorial system at Harvard has
never been the only method of instruction employed in any field
of study. It was added to a fully developed course system that
has remained intact even in those departments in which tutorial
instruction has been most strongly emphasized. To be sure, a
limited number of students were allowed to substitute additional
work with their tutors for one or two or even three courses, but
even in these cases tutorial work, on any quantitative basis, occu-
pied a minor position. It is a significant fact that during this entire
period the organization, procedure, and value of the course sys-

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General Education in Harvard College

tern were generally taken for granted, at least to the extent that
it was assumed that courses would continue to be the principal
method of instruction in Harvard College.

During the past two decades there have been many investi-
gations of the tutorial system by a variety of agencies. The
system has been discussed in three reports of the Student Coun-
cil (1926, 1931, 1939). It was the subject of a careful report
made by the Overseers Committee to Visit Harvard College in
1934. It was also the subject of discussion in 1936 by a committee
of the faculty which prepared a report recommending certain
changes in the system, and it was the subject of a report published
and circulated by the Teachers' Union in 1940. In 1943 the
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences addressed a number of
questions to the members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on
the subject of the tutorial system, and in answer to these ques-
tions one hundred and sixty-seven letters were written by indi-
vidual members of the faculty to the Dean, many of the letters
dealing at considerable length with the problems of tutorial in-
struction, some of them containing suggestions for its modi-
fication.

We have not attempted to make another survey of this particu-
lar method of instruction, but we felt that a discussion of general
education in Harvard College involved a consideration of the
tutorial system, if only because of the possibility that tutorial
instruction might be more closely related to general education.
We have given attention to all of the discussions and proposals
to which we have just referred. We have also had the advantage
of reading nearly two hundred replies to a questionnaire on the
tutorial system sent out during the summer of 1944 to alumnae
of Radcliffe College who had received such instruction during
the last twenty years. We should have liked to make such an
inquiry of the alumni of Harvard College, but because so large a
proportion of them were scattered over the world in the various
armed services, it did not seem possible to secure a well-distributed
group of replies.

It has occasionally been proposed that tutorial instruction
should be related to general education rather than to concentra-

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General Education in a Free Society

tion in a special field. We believe that such a change would not
be desirable, even though we are strongly of the opinion that
tutoring does in many cases make a very substantial contribution
to general education. This contribution is not made through
tutorial in nebulous subjects, but rather through the discussion
of books and of ideas in a given field of concentration. It is true
that tutorial has sometimes been little more than a process of
preparing students for divisional examinations, but this has been
tutorial in its least admirable form. If tutorial consisted of noth-
ing more than what is ordinarily called "filling in the gaps," or
of coaching for divisional examinations, it would deserve to be
abandoned altogether. Fortunately the best tutors have done far
more than help their students cover certain ranges of a subject
matter in which they felt inadequately prepared. We have al-
ready referred several times to the educational deficiencies of a
purely survey course. What has been said about the cruder
forms of coverage practiced in some courses is even more strongly
applicable to survey work through the tutorial method. A cer-
tain amount of ground coverage is necessary and inevitable, but
it can nearly always be accomplished far more efficiently and
economically in courses than in tutorial. To say this is not to
say that tutorial is of little educational worth; it is only to
say that it should be confined to its proper province. There, with
skillful tutors and with students who are adapted to this method
of instruction, it can be of immense value. Tutorial discussion,
particularly when combined with the writing and critical analy-
sis of essays, docs more than give coherence to a particular field
of study; it can also help to give a greatly increased breadth of
view and maturity of judgment. Thus, although we suggest that
tutorial should continue to be connected with concentration, we
believe that it can make very great contributions to general
education, inasmuch as the results of successful tutorial are to be
found in increased skill in analysis and expression, in the capacity
to deal with general ideas and to make and defend value-judg-
ments, in those intangibles which are surely of the very essence
of a successful general education. It seems reasonable to antici-
pate that as the number of instructors who have had experience

General Education in Harvard College

in the courses designed for purposes of general education in-
creases, so will the contributions of tutorial instruction to general
education be enlarged.

We assume that the tutorial system will not be used by any
department which believes that this method of instruction is not
well adapted to its needs. It is apparent that tutorial has not
worked nearly so satisfactorily in most of the physical sciences
as in the humanities and the social sciences. There are inevitable
differences in the methods of teaching chemistry and philosophy.
No sound reason exists for requiring all departments to use the
same educational techniques.

It would be unrealistic to discuss tutorial entirely in terms of
the contributions that it can make, and often has made, to educa-
tion at Harvard College without considering also the burden that
it imposes both upon the budget of the college and upon the
teaching time of the faculty. Tutorial is a very expensive system
indeed, whether judged in terms of expense or in terms of man
power. It is to be remembered that tutorial has been added to an
elaborate course system in which the undergraduate is offered
an enormous range of choice in almost every department of in-
struction. Even those who are most enthusiastic about the tu-
torial system do not ordinarily advocate a drastic reduction of
course offerings in order to provide additional time for tutorial
instruction. Tutoring is, moreover, a very demanding form of
instruction, at least if it be well done. No member of the faculty
who offers courses for undergraduates and for graduate students,
who is also probably involved in a certain amount of the adminis-
trative work which seems an inevitable concomitant of university
life in America, can lightly assume the burden of any considerable
number of tutorial students; and the fact is that very few of the
members of the faculty who have attained professorial rank have
been willing to give more than a small fraction of their time to
tutorial instruction. Only a minority, indeed, have been willing
to make even a gesture in that direction.

The situation with regard to tutorial varies greatly from de-
partment to department, but it seems safe to say that those de-
partments having the larger concentrations (and in the years im-

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mediately preceding the war, most of the students who received
tutorial instruction were concentrators in five of the thirty-odd
fields available in Harvard College) have delegated the tutorial
task primarily to teaching fellows, annual instructors, faculty in-
structors to members of the staff who were not on permanent
appointment. This means that a very heavy proportion of tutor-
ing has been carried on by young and relatively inexperienced
tutors. Many of these have done really first-rate educational jobs.
But unhappily a good many of them have not stayed at Harvard
long enough to acquire skill in this very difficult form of teach-
ing. Some of them have left before they were familiar even with
the requirements for concentration and distribution, while others
would never have been successful tutors, no matter how long
their stay. No one will dispute the proposition that we have poor
lecturers and poor section men at I larvard, but classroom teach-
ing is much more open to inspection than is the work of tutorial.
The traditions of the course system sometimes impose undue
limitations upon the work of the very ablest instructors, but they
also serve as guides and controls for the inexperienced or the
capricious. The very closeness of the tutorial relationship, more-
over, adds to the unhappy plight of the student who is assigned
a tutor whose immaturity of judgment, emotional instability,
limited learning, or devotion to his own graduate work makes
him unsatisfactory as either a guide, a counselor, or an instructor.
It has occasionally been suggested that substantial economies
could be made by substituting group tutorial for individual tu-
torial. If we may judge by the testimony both of tutors and of
students who have received group instruction, the group method
of tutorial is not one which can be generally substituted for in-
dividual instruction. Many members of the faculty who have
had experience in tutorial seem to feel that group tutorial is
ordinarily an unsatisfactory substitute either for individual tu-
torial or for the classroom, that it lacks most of the merits of both
of those methods and has relatively few of its own. Although it
has been and can be used successfully by certain tutors and under
particular circumstances, it cannot be used by all tutors or with
all groups of students. We conclude that no substantial econo-

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mies can be expected from group tutorial, and that it should be
used only by experienced tutors and only under favorable con-
ditions.

There is another aspect of the personnel problem which de-
serves more attention than it has ordinarily received. This is the
difficulty of keeping a sufficient staff of able and experienced
young tutors long enough for them to be valuable to I larvard,
and yet not too long for Harvard to be responsible for interfer-
ing seriously with their teaching careers elsewhere. We must
continue to assume that, at least in the larger departments, most
of the tutoring will be done by men who will stay at Harvard a
relatively short time. This will, that is to say, be true if tutorial
instruction be given to all students. In some departments un-
fortunate situations have arisen out of the necessity of keeping
an exceptionally large number of able young men at Harvard
beyond the time at which they would normally leave for teach-
ing positions in other institutions.

We seem, then, to have before us the dilemma that a poor or
inexperienced (the terms are not necessarily synonymous) tutor
may be worse than none at all and the very real difficulty of
keeping young men long enough so that they shall be valuable
to their students and to I larvard, and yet not so long that their
academic careers shall be impaired.

In a considerable number of the letters addressed by members
of the faculty to the Dean of the Faculty the opinion is expressed
that tutorial should be changed from a right to which every stu-
dent, no matter what his qualifications or his performance, is
automatically entitled to a privilege reserved for the competent
and the industrious. Such a view is by no means new in the dis-
cussions of the tutorial system. In the very carefully considered
Student Council report of 1931 appears the following significant
statement:

The introduction of the tutorial system has unquestionably had
a beneficial effect upon the education of nearly every student in
the College. At the same time, the true purpose of the system has
been attained in a surprisingly small number of cases. While statis-
tics cannot be formed for matters so intangible, the committee does

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not believe that it is excessive to say that from 50 to 75 per cent
of the students in Harvard College, far from regarding their tutorial
work as being the central focus of the College career, look at it as
hardly more than a fifth course added to the schedule for three
years. It is generally estimated that about half of the students are
not capable of getting the highest benefits from tutorial work, al-
though they gain some value from it. Of the remainder, even those
who are reaping considerable benefits from tutorial instruction at
present rarely get anything which approaches the highest practical
ideal attainable.

Three years later the Overseers Committee published a report
in which a similar point of view is expressed:

At present it costs just as much by the hour to tutor the unre-
sponsive students as the responsive, and the drain on the tutor's
energy is greater in the one case than in the other. Since these are
times when every item of expense must justify itself, common sense
would suggest that tutoring be reserved in large measure for those
students who can really profit by it. The tutorial system would be
more efficient and would become all the more strongly established
if its work were concentrated in the field of its major usefulness,
and the resultant economies in operating costs would be consider-
able. Thus the practical and the theoretical arguments reinforce
each other.

It was in response to the attitude expressed in these reports,
and in accordance with a very considerable body of faculty
sentiment, that in 1936 a committee of the faculty proposed a
rather half-hearted application of the principle that tutorial was
not for all students. This recommendation provided for the
establishment by those departments which wished to do so of
Plan A and Plan B tutorial. Plan A tutorial has meant ordinarily
full-time tutorial, while Plan B has varied from a substantial
amount of tutorial instruction to nothing more than the signing
of plans of study at certain fixed periods in the year.

It seems to this committee that the time has come for Harvard
College to recognize the impossibility of carrying both an ex-
traordinarily rich system of course instruction and a tutorial
system under which every student is given the benefit of indi-
vidual instruction. We realize that it will not be easy to distin-

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guish on any objective basis between those students who are best
qualified for, and most deserving of, tutorial instruction and those
for whom it has little value. Any basis of distinction will be
imperfect. Everything considered, we believe that we should
accept the principle that the tutorial method of instruction is one
which is entirely defensible only when it is related to the work
of those students who are candidates, or potential candidates, for
honors. If we could expect to have really competent tutors for
all students, the answer might be a different one. But all of the
evidence, including the answers to the Radcliffe alumnae ques-
tionnaires, seems to show that poor tutoring is worthless, and
there seems to be no possibility of securing tutorial instruction
for all students which will measure up to the standards of Harvard
classroom instruction. We agree with the Overseers Committee
of 1934 that the tutorial system would be strengthened rather
than weakened if we recognized more clearly the range within
which it functions best, and concentrated our resources there.

During the last few decades the proportion of students who
have been candidates for honors at Harvard has been very large
indeed, ranging between 40 and 50 per cent, and more than one
third of all candidates for degrees graduate with honors. We
believe this to be an extremely desirable situation, and we think
that every effort should be made to maintain, and indeed to in-
crease, this proportion. Honors candidacy and tutorial instruc-
tion must be considered privileges worth working for. We believe
this is feasible if the quality of tutorial instruction is main-
tained at a sufficiently high level. The allowance of course re-
duction in the junior and senior years for students who wish to
do additional tutorial work makes honors candidacy attractive to
some students, particularly to those who weary of course rou-
tine. Course reduction should not, however, be allowed to be-
come an instrument of acceleration.

We have suggested that tutorial instruction is probably of
limited value for those students who do not intend to be can-
didates for honors. We suggest further that it is of doubtful
value for many sophomores, including some of those who are
potential candidates for honors. Most students in their second

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college year have not gained a sufficient mastery of any subject,
nor have they attained a degree of intellectual maturity which
will make tutorial instruction a sufficiently valuable experience
to warrant the expense to the college or the time of an experi-
enced instructor. We recognize that this is not true in all cases,
and that for some students sophomore tutorial should be made
available on the basis of criteria set by the several departments.
Departments or perhaps more truly areas vary in their need
of tutorial, and those which regard it as necessary to their proper
ends should be free to make relatively greater use of it, if they
adjust its expense to that of their course offerings. Other depart-
ments or areas may prefer to experiment in seeking comparable
ends by smaller sections and discussion groups.

It seems desirable that the administration of the tutorial system
be kept flexible. To that end we suggest that a final choice of
students who are to be candidates for honors and who are to
receive tutorial instruction in their senior year be not made until
the beginning of that year. Only in exceptional cases should a
man who has not attained Group IV in the rank list be allowed
to work with a tutor in his junior year, and his continuance under
the system of tutorial instruction should depend upon creditable
performance in tutorial, as well as upon an improvement of his
course standing. But tutorial should not be something to which
even those students who attain the Dean's List (a B average or
better) are entitled as of right, and any student who fails to take
full advantage of his tutorial opportunity should be deprived of
that privilege. Similarly, any student excluded from tutorial at
the beginning of his junior year because of a poor course record,
whose work improves materially during that year, should be al-
lowed to become a candidate for honors and receive tutorial
instruction during his senior year.

Our proposals envisage a tutorial system of instruction in those
departments retaining this method for perhaps half of the student
body during the junior and senior years, and for a somewhat
smaller number of students during the sophomore year. We as-
sume that every student should have an adviser during his sopho-
more, junior, and senior years, as well as during his freshman year.

General Education in Harvard College

The problem of advising is one of the most difficult of those
with which a college administration is faced. Not the least of
these difficulties is that several kinds of advice are required by
students, some of which can be best given by members of the
faculty, others by technicians. Thus the faculty member is not
often qualified to give advice on questions relating to job place-
ment, which are commonly dealt with by a placement office, and
teachers generally prefer to leave psychiatric problems to a
trained medical officer. Many questions involving the applica-
tion of college rules and regulations are handled by the Dean of
Harvard College and his staff. But the general advisory function
is most effectively performed when it follows naturally and di-
rectly out of those relations which are a part of the educational
procedure. The tutorial system has had the advantage of provid-
ing upperclassmen with advisers with whom they have had this
direct and natural contact. If we limit tutorial instruction to
about half of the men in the upper classes, it is essential that we
replace the advisory function of the tutor for those not tutored
by an advisory system which will retain the same qualities.

In making plans for such a system, we should proceed upon
the premise that all students need the opportunity for direct inti-
mate contact with a member of the department, or, when this
is not possible, the area, in which the student is concentrating.
It is also important that the advisory function be closely tied in
with the Houses. Of recent years a number of men have been
added to the House staffs to represent fields, such as chemistry,
in which there was no tutoring. The expectation was that such
instructors would act as advisers of the students in their fields
affiliated with their House. This practice has, on the whole,
worked admirably, and it should be taken as a model upon which
to develop a system of advising for the upperclassmen in the
Houses who do not receive tutorial instruction. Students not
connected with a House should, of course, be assigned an adviser
on the staff of the department in which they concentrate. It will
be particularly important that the advisers who deal with sopho-
mores have contacts with them which go well beyond the func-
tion of signing study cards and giving perfunctory advice about

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General Education in a Free Society

the selection of courses. It should be possible for these advisers,
at least for those who are in fields of concentration which offer
tutorial instruction, to recommend reading to their advisees and
to hold conferences with them (perhaps three or four times in
the course of a year), both for the purpose of encouraging the
students in their academic work, and also for the purpose of
finding out which of those students warrant tutorial instruction
during their junior and senior years. A good many students
who, for one reason or another, have failed to do honors work
in their freshman year have the capacity and the latent interest to
do work of a higher standard if only they are encouraged and
given sound advice at the time when they most need it. There
will be other students who will not begin to take a serious interest
in academic work until their junior year, and here, as in the
sophomore year, the adviser can play an important part in helping
to encourage the student and to recommend him for inclusion in
the list of those who are to be tutored during the senior year.

For the successful accomplishment of this goal it will be de-
sirable not only that such advisers be on the staffs of the several
Mouses, but also that they be men who are familiar with under-
graduate work, including tutorial instruction and the system of
divisional examinations, in their fields. In many instances these
men will be tutors, who will thus serve as advisers for those stu-
dents who do not receive tutorial instruction as well as act as
advisers for their own tutees. In other instances they will be
members of the faculty who are not tutors but who are interested
in maintaining the close, human contacts with students which are
not always possible in a college where so many of the courses are
large and relatively impersonal unless some special device is
employed.

The adoption of such a system should make possible the assign-
ment of a considerably larger proportion of students in the
Houses to advisers connected with their own Houses than has
been true in the past. This would be the case since under the
present tutorial system it has often been impossible to assign stu-
dents to tutors in their own Houses because the special fields of
the students and of the tutors did not coincide. Under the pro-

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General Education in Harvard College

posals here advanced it would not be essential that the special
fields of the adviser and the student coincide, although it would
be desirable that the adviser be familiar with the requirements and
the methods of the student's field. He might, however, be in a
neighboring department, where circumstances did not permit the
assignment of all students to faculty advisers in the field of their
choice. It may be further remarked that the establishment of
House conference courses of the kind referred to earlier in this
chapter would also be helpful in giving to the Houses the in-
tellectual vitality eminently desirable but not always successfully
attained in the past.

We suggest that in those departments which have a divisional
examination at the end of the senior year all men, whether tu-
tored or only advised, be required to take such examinations.
Ground covering can, and should, be left primarily to the courses.
A final and general review of the field of concentration under-
taken at the end of a college career has important educational
values for all students, and no one should be deprived of them.
It is possible that those students who do not have tutorial instruc-
tion will profit somewhat less than has been the case with students
in Groups V and VI who, in the past, were tutored. But the
evidence seems again to support the conclusion that a very large
proportion of such students have done perfunctory tutorial work.
The function of the adviser should include advice regarding
divisional examinations, both as to the selection of courses and as
to the reading of additional books or other materials. Depart-
ments and divisions may wish to make some distinction between
divisional examinations taken by honors and those taken by pass
candidates. It is to be hoped that the differences will be largely
in terms of the kind and difficulty of questions rather than in
terms of breadth of coverage. We can and should expect every
student to master a considerable body of learning in his field. We
cannot expect all of them to attain the same degree of excellence.
Tutorial instruction, and that of an improved standard, should
be provided for those whom Jefferson called "the best geniuses,"
for those students who are concerned with quality as well as
amount of learning, with ideas and with values, those who have

General Education in a Free Society

questions to which they seek answers, and who have the capacity
and the willingness to work toward the solution of those ques-
tions. It is for such students that the tutorial system is splen-
didly adapted, and it is for them that it should be retained and
strengthened.

8
Harvard as a University College

WE have used the term, university college, once or twice so far
to denote the particular character of a college which, strong in
its collegiate tradition, is also influenced by a strong surrounding
university. In the United States the college is far the older in-
stitution. Built on British models by the early colonists and ever
more widely transplanted and acclimatized as the country was
opened, it remained the almost universal institution of higher
learning until the latter half of the last century, when the univer-
sity was in its turn created, this time from Continental models.
The resulting fusion of undergraduate and graduate departments
in one greater institution has since become a characteristic, in
many ways a unique, trait of American education. No two such
institutions are of course identical. Apart from purely local
coloring, differences of emphasis as between the college and the
graduate schools give each its particular tone and individuality.
Columbia differs from Yale, Yale from Chicago, Chicago from
Michigan. At Harvard, the age, tradition, strength, and size of
the college have enabled it to keep a kind of equilibrium with the
graduate schools, which since President Eliot's day have likewise
created their own very strong traditions. It is clear that most of
the questions so far treated in this chapter in some way go back
to this central question of the place of the college within the
university, and it may therefore be well to end with a few words
on the particular form of university college which exists at
Harvard.

The modern college dates from the Renaissance, when it was

General Education in Harvard College

created, more or less in opposition to the then long-established
European universities, as a place where students might live to-
gether and with their teachers for the purpose of receiving a
rounded preparation spiritual, intellectual, physical for active
life. It took its inspiration from the classical ideal of the complete
man and was originally aristocratic in tone, a training place for
the kind of universal gentleman described in Castiglione's Cour-
tier or sketched in Shakespeare's picture of Hamlet as "the
courtier's, scholar's, soldier's eye, tongue, sword." But in Eng-
land, where this concept of the college alone took firm root, it
was also shaped by the Puritan, antiaristocratic forces of the
Reformation, which stressed not so much the rounded gentleman
as the pastor and the religiously formed man of affairs. A passage
from S. E. Morison's The Founding of Harvard College (pp. 56-
57) catches amusingly the fusion of ideas which was carried from
the old to the new Cambridge.

One can hardly exaggerate the importance of this intrusion of
'young gentlemen' into the English universities, for there they re-
mained, and to Harvard they have come. Owing to the fact that
England simultaneously received the reformation, the renaissance,
and this notion of a gentleman's education, there was brought about
an unwilling compromise between gentility and learning, a rubbing
of shoulders between the poor scholar and the squire's son, that has
made the English and American college what it is today: the
despair of educational reformers and logical pedagogues, the aston-
ishment of Continental scholars, a place which is neither a house
of learning nor a house of play, but a little of both; and withal a
microcosm of the world in which we live. To this sixteenth-cen-
tury compromise, become a tradition, we owe that common figure
of the English-speaking world, 'a gentleman and a scholar.'

Such were several among the leading founders of New England,
and of Harvard: both Winthrops and both Saltonstalls, Downing
and Bradstreet, Bellingham, and Peter Bulkeley, of whom Cotton
Mather wrote, 'His Education . . . was Learned, it was Genteel,
and . . . Pious.' To Harvard they brought a new zeal for scrip-
tural religion and the humanist tradition. From her opening day,
Harvard has included a large proportion of young men who had
no professional intentions. They have been complained of by their
more serious preceptors, these three hundred years. They havf
committed every sort of folly and extravagance. New colleges

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General Education in a Free Society

such as Williams and Amherst have been founded in order to pro-
vide a place where poor but pious youths could be educated for the
ministry, uncontaminated by the 'rakehells,' 'bloods,' and 'sports'
of Harvard and the same class of students have flocked to the
new colleges. Even after countless examples of gentlemen who
have become scholars and scholars who have become gentlemen by
this illogical commingling, there are some people who would admit
none to our colleges but serious students, and others who would set
a standard of luxury and expense impossible for poor students. As
long as Harvard remains true to her early tradition, rich men's sons
and poor, serious scholars and frivolous wasters, saints and sinners,
puritans and papists, Jews and Gentiles will meet in her Houses,
her Yard, and her athletic fields, rubbing off each other's angulari-
ties, and learning from friendly contact what cannot be learned
from books.

But one further point should be noticed. It was remarked that
democracy, by broadening the basis of government to include
all the people, ideally demands of all the education formerly
reserved for a privileged class. The distinction has ceased between
inferiors trained only for practical tasks and superiors broadly
trained for government. The Renaissance collegiate education
was, in effect, precisely an education of governors men rounded
and supple enough to make decisions and sufficiently well edu-
cated to do so with perspective and a sense of standards. It is the
mantle of this tradition which has descended on the modern
college even to some degree on the modern high school. Since
the governor is now the citizen and no longer merely the gentle-
man and the aristocrat, then this "gentleman's education" has
become the citizen's education. The Puritan influence mentioned
above was a step in this direction. It is an education which looks
first of all to general responsibility and competence among an
increasingly large group.

By contrast the tradition of the university is a specialistic tradi-
tion. As the college goes back to the rounded ideal of the Renais-
sance, so the university goes back to the medieval specialism of
the cleric and lawyer. This tradition has likewise been very
greatly broadened in the course of time, but in the form in which
it reached this country less than a century ago, it remained

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General Education in Harvard College

strongly, perhaps increasingly, specialistic. Hence President
Eliot's characteristic achievement was immensely to strengthen
and, in some cases, to found the various graduate schools and to
bring their enriching influence into the college, even, as was
argued earlier, at some risk to the latter's traditional role. This
was the origin of the university college, a place that remained
henceforward still partly a training ground for citizens and culti-
vated human beings but now made room also for the first steps in
professional competence.

The peculiar fact about Harvard is that this balance between
the forces of the college and of the university, though sometimes
unsteady and always subject to great opposing strains, has been
kept. The same faculty teaches both undergraduates and gradu-
ates, and the most eminent men have often taken part in the ele-
mentary courses. Many juniors and seniors mingle in courses
with graduate students. The recent creation of a seven-year pro-
gram leading jointly to the degrees of A.B. and LL.B. has been
an attempt to establish with the Law School the same close ties
that have long existed with the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences. All this testifies to the force of the one partner, the
university, in the union of university and college. What of the
other partner? Its opposite force has been shown in the tutorial
system, the Houses, and the system of divisional examinations
and honors, so far at least as the latter have represented careful
and individual oversight of students. It has shown itself also, and
perhaps chiefly, in the teaching of undergraduates by scholars
who, if undergraduate and graduate faculties had been distinct,
would have given themselves wholly to graduates and to their
own research and writing. An Agassiz, a James, a Ilaskins, a
Kittredge, a Whitehead have embodied the ideal of the university
college. The overworked dichotomy which would lead us to
believe that the scholar and the teacher are necessarily different
persons has been proved false by them and by others less distin-
guished. It is true that not all scholars have been able to relate
their scholarship to the needs of undergraduates, but many have
done just that superbly. Such men have had the power to open
new worlds of learning, to set standards of rigor and honesty, to

General Education in a Free Society

suggest approaches to the great questions of humanistic learning,
of society, and of science for which neither textbooks nor dis-
cussions could be more than pale substitutes.

Yet, as we have argued from the beginning, this element of
roundedness which is of the essence of the college has lacked a
vehicle peculiar to itself, in the sense that specialism, the university
element, has had its peculiar vehicle in the system of concentra-
tion. We do not wish to indulge in black-and-white dichotomies
of the kind just complained of. It is true that concentration has
illustrated for many, particularly as regards method of thought,
the very qualities which we have described as aimed at by general
education. It is also true, as just said, that the greatest teachers
have made of their courses something far transcending lessons in
a special and limited subject. Yet the fact remains that the present
system favors a specialism which only the strong teacher breaks
through. Moreover, by the very definition of the university
college, specialism is within limits right and desirable. What
therefore is wanted and, we believe, offered in general educa-
tion is a vehicle as proper to the element of the college as is
concentration to the element of the university. We repeat that
rigid distinctions here are misleading and even harmful. Special-
ism is not meaningless for general education, nor general educa-
tion for specialism. Neither is the one uniquely the vehicle of the
college, nor the other of the university. Yet their double presence
would in fact express and embody the double nature of the
university college.

Finally, a similarly loose but perhaps useful contrast can be
applied to teaching. It has been said that teaching has naturally
two phases: the Olympian and the earthly. In the Olympian
phase, the teacher, actually or figuratively at some distance from
the student, expounds the objective majesty of the subject a
majesty which exists, so to speak, whether the student heeds or
not, which is greater than he and greater than the teacher, some-
thing austere and almost impersonal, a facet of the world. In the
human phase, the teacher sits on the same level as the student,
discussing the truth as it appears to each. The individual adjust-
ment which each makes to the truth is then uppermost, and as the

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General Education in Harvard College

teacher examines, he can also be examined. We would not say
that the Olympian phase of teaching is proper to the university
and the human phase to the college. Graduate instruction obvi-
ously involves discussion and personal oversight. Yet it is true
that, in so far as the college aims to develop the total person, then
it must attach special importance to this human phase of teaching.
The justification of all teaching to some extent, and of this kind
especially, is in the premises of the democratic way of life: teach-
ing is important because the human being has value in himself
not as a potential scholar but as he actually is with his actual
capacities and limitations. From this premise follows what was
said earlier about the place of tutoring, advising, and small dis-
cussion groups in the college as a whole and in connection with
the Houses. The university college must use both methods, the
human as well as the Olympian, to fulfill its proper purpose.

What is this purpose? It is to give to the nation and the world
so far as it can both trained skill and responsible judgment. If one
tried to estimate, for example, Harvard's contribution to the war,
what would come first? Would it be this or that instrument or
discovery which has saved lives or helped win engagements?
Would it be technically skilled persons in necessary posts? Would
it be the man of broad human wisdom whose ideals stirred and
led the nation? Would it be thousands of humbler men, each
responsible in his separate duty? Obviously one could not choose.
All are necessary; none could be foregone. Just so, the concern
with the individual which is at the heart of the college and the
advancement of learning which is at the heart of the university
are likewise each inseparable and indispensable.

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CHAPTER VI

General Education in the Community

i

Distractions and Obstacles

IF the principles set forth in Chapter II are accepted, certain out-
comes as to postschool and out-of-school education follow. The
purpose of this chapter is to discuss these, to note some of the
opportunities which are open to us and the forces which could
bar us from them, to review our resources and make what tenta-
tive estimate we may of the state of the battle. The original title
of this committee contained the word "objectives." That is a
term current in educational jargon but it almost belongs today to
military science, and, though some of the implications of the
comparison may be regrettable, it is clearly useful. We have been
concerned with the strategy in the first place, to a less degree
with the tactics, and in some measure with the logistics of an
enterprise which is rightly to be regarded as a struggle. The
struggle is as old as man himself. It may be looked upon as man's
effort to become in actuality more nearly what he is in idea. It
will continue while man remains and any assurance anyone may
feel as to ultimate victory is questionable. But our business is
with the contemporary phase. There is little doubt that as much
now turns on what happens out of school and after school as on
what happens in classrooms. It is clear at least that in the measure
in which in-school work fails in achieving its aims, the need for
means and agencies to pursue them out of school is increased.
It is equally clear that wide success in continuing out-of-school
education depends upon what has been done in the years of
compulsory study.

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General Education in the Community

How successful the schools are is a moot point; but few, prob-
ably, will deny that school achievement commonly falls far short
of what is required by a just conception of the dignity of man.
The rejections by the armed services on educational grounds are
one index. The estimate that the loss will amount to nearly a
million able-bodied men will probably prove too low. By the
1940 census there were over ten million illiterates in the United
States and approximately two million children between the ages
of six and fifteen not attending school. The National Education
Association finds that nearly twenty million of our voting popu-
lation had less than sixth-grade education. These are uncom-
fortable figures. No one will be content to allow so large a pro-
portion of the community to remain so ill equipped either as
human beings or as citizens of a democracy. Less precise and
ponderable are the judgments of publishers, journalists, adver-
tisers, radio-program directors, and motion-picture producers
as to the capacities and interest of their publics. And the experi-
ence of the opinion-poll experts does not run counter to the
general trend of these findings. In view of recent advances in
physical standards of living and the resultant opportunities, the
lag in education seems the more shocking. These very oppor-
tunities indeed to "go places" or turn on the juke box rather
than to talk things over or think things out may tend to keep
wisdom back. A schooling better aware of its aims may come to
see in contemporary distractions some of its major opponents.

These are evidently matters of valuation and can hardly be
proved. It is less debatable that the schools leave much undone
and that means for supplementing and continuing their work out
of school are still extremely deficient. But that is the negative
way of putting a point which needs positive statement more. The
positive statement takes us back to the nature of man and to the
four characteristics described in Chapter II as aims so important
as to prescribe how general education should be carried out and
which abilities should be sought above all others in every part of
it. These abilities, it will be recalled, were to think effectively, to
communicate thought, to discern relevance, and to discriminate
among values. To call them characteristics or abilities does not

General Education in a Free Society

perhaps suggest clearly enough that these are not powers adven-
titious to man but u his glassy essence.'* They are what makes him
man, and his prime business, to which all else is means only, is
with their growth in himself and in others. As stated, they may
look like means themselves to some further end. But looked at
more closely, in their integration, they are his being and his end.
He is his endeavor to grow in them. As this endeavor flags or is
frustrated the less human he becomes. His education accordingly,
in the deepest sense, is the development of these powers toward
their and his perfection.

Any attempted description of these constitutive human powers
will, perhaps necessarily, be incomplete and misleading. Descrip-
tions here are a means of recollecting, of reminding ourselves of
what we know. There are many such. It is interesting to com-
pare three descriptions given in very different epochs and in the
terms of very different traditions. In Mencius' famous parable:

The trees of Niu hill were once beautiful. Being in the suburbs of
a great city, however, they were hewn down with axes and bills.
Could they retain their beauty? Still, through the growth from the
vegetative life day and night, and the nourishing influence of the
rain and the dew, they were not without buds and sprouts spring-
ing out. But then came the cattle and the goats, and browsed upon
them. Thence came the bare and stripped appearance of the hill.
People seeing this think it was never finely wooded. But is this the
nature of the hill?

Even so of what properly belongs to man. Is what is left of any
man's mind ever without love and justice, without courtesy and
knowledge of right and wrong? The way in which man loses his
proper goodness of mind is like the way in which the trees were
denuded by hatchets. Hewn down day after day, can it retain its
excellence? But there is some growth of its life night and day, and
in the calm air of the morning, just between night and day, the
mind feels in a degree these desires and aversions which are proper
to humanity; but then it is fettered and destroyed by what a man
does during the day. This happens again and again, the night breath
is not enough to preserve the proper goodness, and he becomes not
far different from the birds and beasts. When people see this, they
think his mind never had these endowments. But is this man's pro-
pensity?

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If it gets its nourishment, there is nothing which will not grow. If it
loses its nourishment, there is nothing which will not perish.

A. few years before this Plato was writing:

As it is, we have given a true account of the soul in its present ap-
pearance. But we have looked at it in a state like that of the sea-
god Glaucus: whose original nature can no longer be readily
discerned by the eye, because the members of his body have been
broken off or crushed and in every way marred by the waves, and
incrustations have grown over him of seaweed and shells and
stones, so that he is more like any wild beast than his natural self.
The soul which we behold has been brought to a similar state by a
thousand evils.

Modern philosophy puts the same point this way:

Now, let us go quite a way from physics and consider an oak tree.
There is evidence, we saw, for the norm of an oak tree. A botanist
or horticulturist could tell us in great detail what is the normal
growth and appearance of any particular variety of oak. Give the
oak suitable soil, water, sun, fertilization, and freedom from other
vegetation, from insects, and the like, and the normal oak will be
exemplified. The law of the oak will exhibit itself in concrete exist-
ence just as the law of gravitating mass exhibited itself in the
dropped ball. But plant the oak in poor soil or on a windswept hill,
or in a thick forest, and it will be distorted from its normal growth
just as the planet was from the normal gravitational path. This dis-
tortion will be a resultant of the forces of other laws in which the
characters of the oak participate in conjunction with the normal
law of growth of the oak.

The same distortions occur for the same reasons in the norms of
animals, of men, and of human societies. (Stephen C Pepper,
World Hypotheses, p. 179.)

Man, these agree, has his norm, and the account of education
we are giving here agrees too, without, however, professing to
give an adequate statement of the norm. The apprehension of
the norm by approximation to it is education itself, which
is thus its own aim. Books about education are not competitors.

But we can discuss the means to be used and the dangers to be
met, and in so doing we must ignore neither the influences of the
schools upon the community nor its influences upon their prod-

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ucts. Mencius' hatchetman and his goats hew and browse alike
within and without the schools. It is what happens after the
schooling period and what should and should not happen which
concern us now. If we are tempted to blame the schools for the
bare and stripped appearance of too many ex-students in later
life, we should not forget what the world is endlessly doing to
them. And here what happens in the immediate postschool years
has especial importance.

Adults as Learners

POSTSCHOOL education has both perennial and emergency
aspects. Within the long-term program place has to be found for
measures to meet postwar conditions as these affect the youth
who has just left school. Even though employment be high fol-
lowing the war, it seems likely that there will be an unemployed
group of younger people of considerable size. In the depression
years, as was said earlier, the out-of-school and unemployed
group amounted to about a third of the age range from sixteen
to twenty-four. The proportion of those unemployed was larg-
est, of course, in the lower age ranges from sixteen to nineteen
the forming years in which those who have got least from their
schooling can often make a new start and in which even those
who got most are in the greatest danger of losing it. As we also
saw, young people, even in prosperous times, may be both un-
employed and out of school. In many cases the economic re-
sources of the family are not sufficient to permit attendance even
at a public high school. In perhaps as many cases the paucity of
offerings at the available high school does not allow the student
to take the particular course he needs or desires. On the employ-
ment side there is a lack of opportunity in many parts of the
country. This lack of opportunity is most marked in those very
sections where the proportion of the young to adults is highest,
the very sections where opportunity is most needed. Labor laws

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vary with the states, but in many instances they have the effect of
prohibiting young people from engaging in a regular job around
the time when they withdraw from school. Further, some in-
dustries and some unions have set up their own stringent regula-
tions to keep youthful competition out of the labor market.

However this may be, it is unwholesome at this stage for boys
and girls both to be away from educational influences and with-
out the discipline of some kind of job. It is wasteful. It exposes
the human sapling to countless evils just when it is at its most
vulnerable stage, the stage too at which help for its sprouts can
most readily be given. To deal with this situation the federal
government set up two major agencies in the past decade, the
Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administra-
tion. While both agencies are now out of existence, their experi-
ence may be useful for future planning.

During its existence the C.C.C. employed over 2,500,000 young
men and unemployed war veterans. The administration of this
agency was the responsibility of the War Department. Its work
consisted chiefly of camp operation, reforestation, and soil con-
servation. Most of those enrolled were seventeen, eighteen, and
nineteen years of age. The cost was approximately $1200 per
year per person. The values gained by the individuals and the
community do not lend themselves to computation. In terms of
contribution to the war effort alone we might well put our esti-
mate high. On an over-all view they will be far higher. An edu-
cational program was provided, but this was both less imagina-
tively conceived and less successful than the other aspects of the
Corps. The N.Y.A. program may be divided into two chief
components. In one phase it provided part-time employment near
home for 1,750,000 out-of-school young people, and in the other
it administered a work program for approximately 1,800,000 stu-
dents in schools and colleges. There was little criticism of the
N.Y.A. student aid but considerable criticism of the effectiveness
of the out-of-school program, in some cases because it set up
educational facilities similar to those in the existing school systems
but less well operated. In other cases the criticism was based on
"boondoggling" of the W.P.A. variety on a junior level.

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Since C.C.C. and N.Y.A. drew from the same group of young
people, any reconstruction of their program should be integrated.
The Educational Policies Commission has recommended that to
avoid duplication the future administration of the out-of-school
program be coordinated with the public-school system and be
under its direction. Further, it is desirable that in any reconstruc-
tion of these agencies more provision be made for what is fre-
quently called citizenship education. How this may best be done
with the out-of-school group still calls for much experimentation,
in which self-government within constructive projects may have
an important place. As was said in Chapter III, the great task of
general education is to adapt itself to different abilities and out-
looks, yet remain in goal the same for all.

In addition to the N.Y.A. and C.C.C. , there was a tendency in
some cities in the thirties to establish public-school centers for
older youth which performed counseling and placement service
in addition to providing education in civic affairs and training
for vocational skills. Some of the techniques of these schools,
such as the Opportunity School at Denver, might well be emu-
lated in other sections of the country. European and English
experience also provides useful guidance. For example, the Folk
Schools in Denmark and the village colleges in England proposed
in the R. A. Butler report show further ways of continuing gen-
eral education for those who leave regular school early. But
we do not need to look abroad to see what community colleges
may do. The junior colleges in California, for example, are now
serving both the out-of-school and adult population to a degree
unexpected even by their proponents. Of 166,000 students en-
rolled in these institutions in 1943, three fourths were part-time
and adult. Where the junior college has actually become the
"local academy of learning," it may serve admirably the purposes
we have described.

Promising, also, are the various types of cooperative work-
school programs which have developed in various parts of the
United States. Where these work-school plans include a gener-
ous time allowance for materials dealing with social understand-
ing and cultural heritage, they are particularly valuable. It is of

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considerable interest that in these school-industry arrangements,
industry, quite as much as the schools, has evinced a desire for an
admixture of general education in the training for vocational
skills. The same is true of the recommendations which labor is
making.

A special problem within a special problem concerns postwar
provision for illiterates. Between June i, 1942, and May 31, 1944,
some two hundred thousand "functional illiterates" were inducted
into the armed forces. Considerable numbers of these then went
to school, often with results which put previous efforts to teach
them to shame. The Navy Special Recruit Training Program has
reported most encouraging experience. The older men, while
unable to learn as rapidly perhaps as their younger mates, showed
a stronger drive to learn the fundamental skills. They had not
shown anything of this sort before. What had been holding
them back?

The answer is, low educational standards within their com-
munities. A community which regards illiterates as normal, or
tacitly exempts them from higher standards as incapable of any-
thing better, takes from them the one thing which might help. In
the Training Centers all this is changed. The trainee has been
well shaken up in a wide variety of broadening situations; he joins
a group as undereducated as himself; scornful young persons are
no longer in sight; and, above all, learning to read and write be-
come first steps to needs clearly seen. Add to all this intelligent
instruction, which grades his task for him, and the outcome can
be surprising. Illiteracy is largely a consequence of bad tradition.
These programs offer a remarkable opportunity to crush illit-
eracy at its source in such men's families if demobilization does
not discontinue them without providing means to carry on the
work. It is the responsibility of the schools to see that what has
been learned about illiteracy in the war-training effort is not
overlooked in peacetime.

When we turn from the education of out-of-school youth to
the great multiplicity of influences which go to make up what
we call adult education, concrete suggestions are harder to make.
Certain it is, however, that as the proportion of adults to youth

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steadily increases, adult education becomes a more important key
to the health of the body politic. Adults, not young people, set
the tone of a community. Almost inevitably, school people, and
also the general public, overestimate the importance of the in-
fluence of schools and colleges in forming the individual's char-
acter, beliefs, and habits of thought. The community outside the
schools has a weight and influence the schools cannot possibly
have. If life in the community fails to illustrate the teaching of
the schools, the individual is more apt to conform to the com-
munity mores than he is to hold fast to the teaching of his school
or college. And yet the salvation of the community depends upon
those individuals whose education gives them the moral and in-
tellectual strength to stand out when necessary against the ma-
jority. It may be added that such are precisely the men and
women for whom an adequate system of adult education should
find work to do as teachers.

The types of adult education may be loosely divided into two
chief forms: school and college sponsored and community spon-
sored. The former consists of the myriad of courses given under
school auspices, sometimes for credit, sometimes not. In these
programs every attempt should be made to keep the break in
learning between school and adult life as brief as possible. Obvi-
ously, there is an advantage for the individual and the school if
adult work is begun as soon as possible after regular education
has been discontinued. On the other hand, adult and in-school
work are in many respects very different. The transition calls
for drastic changes of pattern to accord with the change of
initiative.

In many instances, nonetheless, the school itself should be the
civic center for adult education (although the public library may
serve the same purpose if the school is poorly located). New
school buildings should be designed with more comfortable
lounge rooms where adults may smoke, relax, and hold discus-
sions. Old buildings should be altered as much as possible to meet
the same need. The economic waste which is represented by the
closing of an expensive plant like a school building in the middle
of the afternoon, in the evenings, and during most of the summer,

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should not be permitted whenever and wherever there are adults
who wish to use the building for educational purposes.

As a civic center, moreover, the school can and should serve as
meeting ground and channel for all the other community agencies
of public welfare. The museums, the parks, the town libraries,
the cultural and instructional programs of radio, movie, and, in
due course, television, the many existing social agencies, the men's
and women's clubs, all lose many of their opportunities for serv-
ice through lack of effective means of bringing to general notice
what they have to offer. Announcements, programs, and syl-
labuses, however widely displayed, do not do what is needed.
They may catch the eye, but they rarely catch or hold, much less
create, enough interest to bring in any but the hardened and
habitual lecture-goer. The great mass of those more in need of
the awakening and diversification and development of their
curiosities are untouched. Humble people, especially, are often
barred off, by their very virtue, from chances which should be
especially theirs. They need skillful encouragement of a sort
which experienced teachers of adults know best how to give.
And though we should not underrate the tact and power of
persuasion which advertising at its highest can exert, nor neglect
its great possible services for fear of the obvious dangers, it is
probably true that only personal contacts can penetrate the in-
sulations of distrust, shyness, and self-depreciation which with
so many keep educational velleities from passing into action. It
needs no intense effort of imagination to realize the reluctance,
the hesitation, the fear of "giving oneself away," of finding one-
self out of one's depth, with which most self-critical adults con-
sider the taking up of a new enterprise in learning. These are
feelings shared by modest minds at all levels. They are greatly
reinforced wherever there is any record of ill success or of the
discovery that what was sought turned out to be very unlike
anything hoped for or expected. And it is these minds, rather
than the brash dreadnoughts of the classroom, which can in the
end learn most with profit to others as well as themselves.

These reminders seemed desirable if the fundamental diffi-
culties of adult education were to be faced. Apart from a happy

General Education in a Free Society

few, who are not in our picture, most adults have considerable
experience to justify them in shrinking from the strain of attack-
ing any subject which is not immediately intelligible to them.
Recognizing this, much adult education has chosen, as the path
of wisdom, to scale down the demands made upon the students
to points at which it may be doubted what, if any, the remaining
educational value may be. "The main thing, at first, is to get them
to come," might represent the justification of not a few courses.
It is a sound justification if the students continue to come and if
what follows later does give them some solid gain from coming.
When it does not, the disappointment adds to the handicaps of
future efforts.

Such reflections will be familiar to all who have had to do with
adult education programs. They lead not to pessimism but to the
conviction that adult education, more even than school educa-
tion, needs the most considerate planning human beings are
capable of. Its delicacy reflects the sound instinct, as well as the
acquired inertia, of the adult student. In the school, moreover,
we have better chances of retrieving our mistakes. But planning
must assume counseling. The best programs will miss their effect
if the right students are not somehow guided to the right courses
or study groups, and prepared by discerning advice for what they
may rightly expect. And here great difficulties appear. Counsel-
ing, even in the best school systems, is still something of a hit-or-
miss affair in spite of all the tests and other school aids available.
In adult education, counseling is vastly more difficult, calls for
greater tact and discernment and is, as yet, little more than an
educator's dream as indeed an adequate provision for adult
education itself is.

Nonetheless, once the need for an adequate provision, its pos-
sibilities and the general gains it would bring are clearly seen
also the trends which are making it every year more necessary
it is hard to doubt that immense developments will be forth-
coming. Among these trends two may be mentioned. Medicine
has altered the normal expectation of life. As the proportion of
older to younger persons changes, continuing adult education
becomes more and more necessary to keep a society from spiritual

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senescence. Secondly, the machine age is but beginning. Leisure,
the name the future will have to give to unemployment, is open-
ing out before mankind as widely as the Pacific Ocean spread
before Cortez. It is no wild surmise that a chief adjustment we
will have to make soon is the replacement of needful toil by other
occupations. We are making it already or failing to make it with
every reduction in hours of labor. And the dangers of idleness,
we know today, are very far from being merely proverbial.
We have seen how a Hitler can turn a people from unem-
ployment to war. We have not yet seen as clearly how edu-
cation can be made not merely a preventive but, in William
James' phrase, the moral equivalent of war. To use a previous
figure of speech this means a Jacksonian raising of the many by
education.

The unparalleled growth we almost said eruption in our
school system was the point with which this report began. A
parallel growth or eruption to be expected in postschool invita-
tions and aids to further learning seems to be what its conclusions
indicate. In the measure in which the schools succeed this devel-
opment becomes the more likely. General education perpetuates
itself, if only by seeking endlessly to discover what it itself is.
In Chapter I we compared the present diversity of offerings in
the high school to a clouded mirror reflecting dimly the diversity
of our society itself. One great function of adult education is to
provide a still more comprehensive reflection, but cleared and
ref ocused by our utmost endeavor to the vision of those who have
passed out of tutelage, to become in the measure of their aware-
ness guardians of the republic.

We have considered some of the psychological barriers to the
growth of such a program. They pointed to the need for in-
formation, discriminating advice, and helpful introduction to the
available offerings such as only an extensive guidance system
could provide. The cost, the shortage of experienced and skilled
advisers, and the administrative problems may look formidable,
but so were, and still are, the parallel difficulties of the high school.
The educational luxuries of one age have a way of becoming
evident necessities to the next, and the federal government, states,

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and localities can afford to sponsor programs so much in the
common interest.

It will not be found that adults are solely or mainly interested
in educational services which benefit them vocationally. For
example, "less than 8% of the activities of the well-known
Shorewood Opportunity School, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are
vocational," * though as small a percentage as this is unusual.
Vocational instruction stands on a special footing. Success in it
dispenses in a large measure with the need for continuation. It
can come to an end, its purpose can be fulfilled. But general
education, as we have conceived it, is endless, since it serves those
of man's needs which are inexhaustible. It is true that if the
schools could do for their students all that we could wish, their
graduates would have been readied to conduct their own educa-
tion throughout the rest of their lives for themselves. This report
thus far may have seemed to conceive of education as solely a
relation of student to teacher. Yet education is primarily self-
teaching. The classroom is to show the student how to instruct
himself and to save him time in this attempt. Its aim is to aid him
toward enterprising independence, toward free curiosity, and
toward persistence in self-learning. But no realist will question
that, as things are, relatively few adults left to their own devices
will go far. The day's work, its relaxations, its most commonly
proffered amusements prevent progress. Without tempting and
repeated invitations to start new or refresh old interests, and
well-ordered food and care for them, not much growth is to be
expected.

The day's work, of course, may itself be highly educative.
Some sorts of work are. A more widely spread concern for
education would demand that as many sorts of work as possible
be made so, if need be at some cost in productivity. Some cor-
porations have been wise enough to see this. But within the terms
of our reference we have to consider, rather, those forms of
organized opportunities for enhancement and inquiry which go
by the names of cultivation and study.

Both names may give us pause. "Cultivation" may suggest

1 According to the Educational Yearbook for 1940, p. 358.

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artificialities and acquisitions rather than the maturing of the
whole man. "Study'' carries connotations which are somewhat
narrowly scholastic. The adult and the out-of-school youth
needs and this touches the heart of the problem to escape
from the classroom atmosphere. And he needs guides who have
escaped from it too. Coleridge rightly said that teachers have
"a mental odour." It is the mark their high profession puts on
them. In place of the formal teacher the adult needs the person
who combines wisdom and practical experience. But he must be
able to teach nonetheless. He must know what should come be-
fore what and for whom, and be able to control a discussion with
this in view. He must be able to explain, to encourage, to pro-
voke, and to disturb. He must, in fact, have all the gifts of the
teacher and exert them without the advantages of the teacher's
position and powers of compulsion. Above all he must be able
to meet others on that most obvious, elusive, intangible plane,
their common nature as human beings. And here is the hindrance.
The bottleneck of adult education programs is a shortage of such
skillful human experts.

It is no small part of the argument for general education, as we
have conceived it, that those in whom it has been well furthered
in school and college are more likely than specialists to be good
guides for adults. They are more likely to have kept the common
touch and to remember what is being attempted. They are more
likely, also, to find in adult education, which has no glittering
prizes to offer and calls for all the proverbial patience of the saint,
a satisfying life and even something of the reward of a ministry.

As to the give-and-take of discussion, it may well be that help
here is to be found in the techniques of the progressive schools.
Ways of conducting study there developed may prove to have
their best application with adult groups. Be that as it may, it is
certain that the successful instructor of adults needs both excep-
tional resourcefulness and all the help he can get. The proportion
of adults who drop out of the classes they have been enterprising
enough to enroll for is eloquent testimony on this.

Here comes up the question of texts and textbooks. There are
very few expositions of any subject which are at all well suited

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to the adult beginner. They either assume too much, leave him
page by page at a loss, and invite him to acquiesce dishonestly in
what is not understood; or they attempt to drag him through a
systematic treatment which his incentives are far too weak to
sustain. In a heightened degree this is a situation all too familiar
in the schools. As we had occasion to remark in that connection,
one of the great challenges to scholarship and technique in edu-
cation is the provision of more suitable texts and textbooks. It
arises conspicuously with adult students for whom the original
texts of the great works of our tradition have special value. These
are the people who have learned through life. More information
is not their goal. They want human understanding and insight
at its highest.

The systematic study of design in exposition is one of the most
strangely neglected fields of educational inquiry. Many subjects
mathematics and languages exemplify them preeminently
have an order of presentation which, when it is worked out, is
easier, less confusing, less subject to mutual interference between
its steps, than any other. Yet, except in arithmetic, the search for
these optimum orders has received singularly little systematic
attention. Tradition, fashion, and hunches still take the place of
radical research into the principles of comprehension. Until texts
which have full regard and respect for the learner's mind are
forthcoming, much educational effort of adults and children alike
will continue to be needlessly frustrated. And this frustration is
the more serious because whatever the developments, they will
never replace the deeper meanings of the texts.

3
New Media of Education

MORE important still, the needed boost to conventional texts
may come through an extension and supplementing of them by
films and television. In both there is much experimenting and pos-
tulate searching in progress. For their more sustained enterprises

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language teaching and continuous courses of study films and
television alike require printed matter designed to have a live
relation to the sound-motion presentation. The challenge to the
text is given when the screen ceases to be a mere illustration or
adornment to the language and becomes the equal or superior
medium of communication.

Something of a revolution is indeed taking place through these
new means of bringing the world itself, and clarified versions of
it, to us. Traditionally language deputizes for what has to be
absent. It tells us what we might see or hear. But too often it
gets in the way of, or replaces, all that could give it a meaning.
"Through the words I have mastered, I have come to appreciate
the beauty of the great outdoors," said a favorite "Pupils' Creed"
written for eighth graders. Today there is a better chance of
turning the poor pupil right side out again. Now that the things
and events themselves can be brought to us, the role of language
is reversed. Instead of words having to explain or represent
things, it is rather things, and actual processes taking place before
us, which explain words or call them in question. In the making
of a good instructional or documentary film the duties of lan-
guage are searchingly looked into and the needless obscurities of
traditional texts are exposed. A healthy criticism is started and
language, gaining a rival in its new partner, has now new stand-
ards of lucidity to live up to.

The chief success of sound-motion teaching hitherto has prob-
ably been in vocational rather than in general subjects. It is easier
to judge success in a riveter's training than in morale building, for
example. "Estimates of time saved in training technicians for war
industry and in the training of military personnel vary from 25 to
75 per cent," said the Commission on Motion Pictures in Educa-
tion of the American Council on Education. Enough has been
done in all fields, however, to show that the high hopes early
expressed for those aids were not, after all, excessive. There is
good evidence that they can greatly increase both clarity and
interest of presentation in many subjects. Furthermore, long
retention of content and of meaning is improved, sometimes in a
measure great enough to be decisive. Students cease to feel that

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General Education in a Free Society

they are being "slidden back by a perpetual back-sliding' 1 on their
steep path to understanding. There is reason to expect especial
advantage from these aids in the attack on illiteracy.

Films to teach and support early steps in reading are near the
bottom of the ladder. It would be rash to say how far up the
movie can go. Certainly the parts it can play with good effect
are many. Films serve particularly well as awakeners of interest.
They can present a theme, biographic, historic, or moral, with a
massiveness of impact which for a while would make the impulse
to continue by nonconventional methods all but irresistible, were
these methods appropriately related. That is almost never the
case. The exceptions are movies which profess to be well-known
books "in film form," and too often in these so much violence
has been done to the original that reading "the book of the film"
is commonly disconcerting. As a rule the values which gave the
book its permanent interest are replaced by more instant and
transitory lures. There is nothing in the nature of the medium,
however, to cause this. The fault is with the director's defective
ideas of his function.

On the documentary rather than the theatrical side things are
different, and numbers of excellent pictures have been made,
many of them on "human geography" in the widest sense occu-
pations, regions, social problems, cooperative cultures. Strangely
little in comparison has been done in a documentary fashion with
history. Theatrical pictures exploiting famous personages are of
course frequent, but the use of the tremendous resources of the
medium to put, say, Renaissance Europe on the screen with the
aid of Erasmus' Colloquies, for example, could be an immense
educational eye opener. Charles Reade's The Cloister and the
Hearth could supply a framework upon which a thousand details
of custom and craftsmanship, living conditions and social struc-
ture could be mounted. A thread of adventure would not be
lacking. A rich contemporary background of reading, music,
and art would not be hard to provide. Numberless opportunities
in fact await producers aware of educational aims and with
enough imagination to pursue them. The movie has proved itself
to possess the power, if there is the wisdom to use it.

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Somewhat less encouragement can be drawn from the probable
future of radio in education. It has the defects of blindness,
though great skill is constantly displayed in overcoming or di-
minishing them. From the nature of the medium little is known,
or can be expected to be known, as to its effects. We are in a
realm of surmises here where extremely powerful interests wit-
tingly and unwittingly influence us. The obvious utilities of
radio in distributing news and speeches, in arousing interest in
current questions, and as a channel for music, its powers in light
entertainment and as distraction and occasionally in drama all
these familiar things do not show how deep radio impressions
commonly go. The common listener's habit of "leaving it on"
while ordinary conversation continues (and sometimes even seri-
ous study needing much concentration) must raise doubts on the
point. The long-term effect of this background upon the quality
of the living it accompanies is a matter on which objective evi-
dence is unfortunately lacking.

As a medium for discussion, radio suffers from the superior
attractiveness of a dogfight to an ordered exchange of views. In
general, the program director is incessantly in the position of
Horace's poet wishing "either to instruct or to amuse or to
combine the two." The combination is the point of difficulty.
Without great care his offering does neither. Instruction pure
wins him credit, but amusement gets him listeners. In the setting
in which most listen, with rival programs of all sorts waiting on
the turn of the dial, there is a heavy drag against any wide raising
of the educational level. Against this, however, successes with
music must be set. But music is the art of the ear. There are no
comparable successes with arts of joint senses drama for ex-
ample. Without the actor's visual presence, Sophocles and Shake-
speare do not go down. Any tear jerker concocted for the ear
alone beats the "holy poets' pages" every time.

Be this as it may, much uncertainty inevitably exists as to what
is listened to, and how, by whom. Methodical inquiry into such
things is as yet but beginning. The work of the rapidly develop-
ing agencies for listener research shows the opportunity, the
promise, and the difficulty. Meanwhile a shower of technical

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General Education in a Free Society

innovations in communication descends upon us, each enough by
itself to originate an epoch. And the psychologic assumptions,
the philosophic coordinates upon and by which to test and place
them remain "with one foot in the unconscious and the other in
the Middle Ages." We are at a turning point indeed in human
affairs though we can do no more than guess what vectors may
be needed to describe our spin.

General education is the sole means by which communities can
protect themselves from the ill effects of overrapid change. For
its concern is with what is the same throughout all changes and
with the very process of change itself and the techniques of tak-
ing account of it. Political trends and upheavals naturally engage
our attention to the neglect perhaps of wider and deeper changes.
The coming of steam was a larger event in human history than
all but the greatest changes in government, larger not as a ma-
terial event only but in the spiritual transformations it is still in-
ducing. With it man began to inhabit his planet as a planet.
Increased physical mobility has naturally increased the scale of
wars, which is a reminder that danger is inseparable from power.
The press, radio, photography, television our progressive dis-
embodiment - and indeed all increased means of mass communi-
cation have their dangers too. Propaganda, which is their political
aspect, has attracted perhaps more than its share of critical atten-
tion. Advertisement has received some share, but chiefly in its
quality of a potential threat to the consumer's judgment. More
dangerous, because more general and because it threatens the
spirit rather than the pocket, is the degradation which language
undergoes when the greatest words are most often met in
servitude to mean or trivial purposes. "In a world of strife,
there is peace in beer." That slogan was no invention of a
satirist. It adorned many a newspaper in the days before Pearl
Harbor and is but one example, less harmful through its very
fatuousness, of the modes of attack to which mass communi-
cations expose standards in all fields. Against them we can
only oppose general education at all levels. With such possibili-
ties in mind we do well to remember Hector's words in Troilus
and Cresslda:

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General Education in the Community

The wound of peace is surety,
Surety secure.

Or, as Poor Richard had it, "He that is secure is not safe."

Such dangers, however, are a spur to a widened and livelier
sense of responsibility, individual and collective. Enlargement of
the common concern is indeed the distinctive character of our
age. Not very long ago the mass of mankind could and did leave
peacemaking, for example, to statesmen. Today most people feel
some of its weight on their shoulders. Even one generation back,
how other people lived was not their business; but all men are
neighbors now. Among and beyond all the local and personal
motives which drive men to pursue education, this budding col-
lective responsibility year by year grows in power. And as it
grows it profoundly influences some immediate motives. The
desire to get on in the world or to advance the status of the work-
ers, the two chief drives which have animated out-of-school edu-
cation hitherto, are being transformed by it into wider interests
far more favorable both to growth in democracy and to the final
causes for which society itself is only a means. "War is the great
educator," as enemy propagandists have said, though hardly with
this in mind. It has shown us that in technical instruction we have
been sadly unambitious and unenterprising. It has shown us
equally that in general education the strongest incentive comes
from the whole man's awareness of his share in the common fate,
of his part in the joint undertaking,

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