The new American college

Abstract

About twenty-five or thirty years ago, it began to be apparent to some of the shrewder observers in this country that all was not well with higher education in America. Too often the graduates of our colleges and universities seemed to have but little understanding of the world in which they lived; too often they seemed ill equipped to meet the demands of a competitive society with those resources which a college should afford its graduates. Often they did not seem to know enough about the various aspects of the world to be aware of and to understand the implications of their own acts. It was the consciousness that the colleges were in a sense failing to accomplish their appointed tasks that caused men to question the procedures by which our graduates were trained. The work of Montessori and Froebel in the kindergarten was having far reaching effects on our educational thinking, and the philosophy of experimentalism was beginning to invade a field which previously had withstood the shocks of changing modes of thought. The result was that educators began to seek a better way in the scientific approach. Psychological testing was developed, statistical methods and analyses were employed wholesale throughout the system with many interesting and valuable results. But despite, or perhaps because of, increasing standardization and the infusion of what men thought to be scientific procedure, our colleges continued to turn out graduates who were, as far as one could see, as badly educated as ever. This does not mean that American college education has always been bad, or that there have not always been some good results from it. Even before the great development of the experimental sciences in the last century, some of our institutions and the men in them could have been compared favorably with almost any in the world; and at all times, some men amongst us have managed to learn and to know a great deal despite the system. Nevertheless, college education in general was going through definite doldrums and those in responsible positions were forced to give their attention to the needs of the system. The application of scientific approaches and procedures was not without its value. It did much to improve the ills of the system, but it failed to accomplish more than a partial cure because educators had not arrived at a clear understanding of the basic trouble. More recently, men like Abraham Flexner have done much to clarify our understanding. Gradually it has been made plain that we have been busily applying quantitative standards and methods to a process in which qualitative values are the only ones of real importance. It was unavoidable of course in building up our system that