Two Problems in General Education

Abstract

O F THE many problems growing out of the experiment in general education at Temple University, there are two that I wish to consider, both related to the basic courses in the humanities. The first is the problem of freedom for the teacher-a problem of academic freedom, though not the kind with which Committee A of the American Association of University Professors occupies itself. The second is a problem of scholarship. Is it possible to teach general-education courses and remain a scholar? During a year of study and visitations supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, we found that our main problem in setting up the program was to determine what general education ought to mean at Temple. We decided not to organize a highly integrated music-literatureart course like the ones we found at Boston University and Chicago. To exhibit the relationships between the arts is of great value, but to us it was important that the individual teacher be encouraged to show such relationships as his own breadth of culture suggested and not be required to give instruction in arts where he might lack special competence. For the music and art portion of the program, therefore, we chose to set up courses separate from those in literature. (As it turned out, a combination musicand-art course did develop, and we got some integration in spite of ourselves!) The essence of the generaleducation idea seemed to us to lie in a reaffirmation of not necessarily the practice, but certainly the aim and ideal, of liberal studies, that is, to examine ways in which certain texts, long valued for wisdom and imaginative power, throw light on significant areas of human experience. This, you say, is the aim of all sound teaching in the humanities. It is. We came to think of our new courses not as a departure from what we had had before, but rather as an enrichment of sound teaching that had been going on for a long time, an enrichment and a clarification of purposes. The kind of teaching general education excludes, we agreed, is that in which examinable information about literature-traits of schools and movements, influences, dates-encroaches so far upon the human meaning of the text as to become in effect the subject of the course. General education excludes the kind of teaching that has been mechanized by the habitual failing of man, his tendency to substitute the letter for the spirit.