Culture in Education

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T HIS article has two purposes. The first is to distinguish between the cultural and the practical aspects of a college curriculum. The second is to suggest a philosophy of education for the small college, especially for the college having both academic and engineering departments. In pursuing our first objective, we desire to define and differentiate, not to evaluate. In our opinion, we evaluate too much. It is the easiest thing in the world to make value judgments. We do this almost as easily as we breathe. In fact, most of the statements we make merely exhale our emotional preferences. When the silent films first relinquished their silence, expressions of disapproval were heard on all sides. No reasons for regretting the change were given, or even entertained; it was just disapproved. But there were at least two individuals, Hugo Mfinsterberg and Charlie Chaplin, who had been engaging in a little analysis. They knew why they regretted the change: the opportunity to develop a new art of pantomime s emed lost forever. For them, there was meaning in debating the issue. Evaluation after analysis is, as a procedure, very rare. The prevailing practice is to base our value judgments, not upon clearly discerned differences, but upon habit, convention, and tradition-that is, upon emotion; and, accordingly, we label certain courses cultural and certain other courses practical, blithely ignorant of what we mean by such division but, nevertheless, quite confident that the former are superior. It would be well for a college community to place a moratorium upon value judgments and to give special attention to judgments of the