Culture and the American Student

Abstract

During the All-University Educational Conference at Rutgers University in the spring of 1949 President A. N. Torgensen of the University of Connecticut stated: students are here because they hope to be trained for something useful. This emphasis on the seems to have become an obsession in the minds of many so-called educators, especially so since the end of the war. Countless books, pamphlets and articles on have since appeared on the market. Titles such as and the War, in the Post-war Era, Progressive Education are found again and again on books and in college curricula. But even a casual perusal of these works clearly shows that nothing basic or authentic concerning is presented. Our great educational leaders and proven educational principles are usually completely disregarded, and unproved theories concerning a' so-called realistic education are proposed and defended. In almost every case the author would have us believe that the practical-minded twentieth-century students desire practical, useful training to the exclusion of everything else. In the following pages the students themselves thoroughly repudiate this unjust and unfounded theory. The American students of today are as anxious as their forefathers to study truly cultural subjects even though they cannot be measured in dollars and cents.