Junior College Mathematics in View of the President's Report

Abstract

Most junior college teachers are conversant with the development of the junior college in this country, as well as the controversy with regard to its relationship to the secondary school on the one hand and to the senior college on the other. The junior college is relatively new and the debates have been frequent and long over its classification and the curriculum it should offer. Being new was not the only reason for the controversies; the fact of variation in type had a great deal to do with it. There was the so-called finishing school for women, the small church school, the state school serving as a feeder for its university, and the schools which were formed simply by adding two years to the existing secondary school program. This variation in type hindered the formulation of general curriculum patterns. Beyond this the junior college, formed by adding two years of work to a secondary school program, had the most difficult problems in its heterogeneous student body—that is, students who were planning to go on to a senior college and those who were ending their formal education with the fourteenth year.