Education: Harvard Asks a Question

The postwar car, kitchen and medicine chest will be new, wonderful, better-than-ever. Will U.S. schools and colleges keep step?

Scores of recent studies have probed the past and suggested paths to a brighter future. From Maine’s little Bates College to the huge University of Southern California, curriculum changes have already become the order of the day. Last week, Harvard added its findings—and they went straight to fundamental issues.

Two Principles. “Teach youth a trade, increase his earning power,” say the vocationalists. “Help youth adjust to the complexities of modern society,” proclaim the pragmatic Deweyites. “Instill in youth the wisdom of past ages,” cry the Hutchinsites, flourishing their Great Books. Underlying all such panaceas are the basic principles of the world-envied U.S. educational system—”Jeffersonian” and “Jacksonian.”

Thomas Jefferson felt that education’s prime responsibility was to discover the gifted student and train him for leadership in his special field (the versatile sage of Monticello never dreamed that specialization in stenography would one day seem more desirable than Sanskrit). Andrew Jackson’s philosophy, on the contrary, clearly calls for education to concentrate on raising the level of the mass.

The Core Idea. While agreeing that both principles are essential to a free people, more & more educators today are apprehensive that Jeffersonian specialism has run away with the show. But well aware that flight from the technological facts of modern life is impossible, few have urged drastic changes. Nor has Harvard, which comes close to the consensus in urging emphasis on a compulsory “core” of general subjects.

The core idea has its roots deep in the problems of U.S. democracy. In the most complex technical-industrial society of all time, American learning has spread out to encompass everything from electronics to eel husbandry—and the common body of tradition and culture that once bound men together is by & large getting a cursory dismissal as “useless” and “impractical.”

The inevitable and dangerous result, as noted in the Harvard report, is a society of separate groups—isolated, divided, thinking and acting in terms of their special interests—just when the basic unity of free men is the world’s crying need. Few of the recent educational studies, of which Harvard’s is perhaps the weightiest and most comprehensive, have had a more provocative thesis.

Dangerous Delinquency. Titled General Education in a Free Society, Harvard’s report is the result of two years’ and $60,000 worth of study, research and consultation by a committee of twelve.

The words “Free Society” are not included in the title for mere euphony. Throughout its 267 pages the document returns again & again to the theme that democracy is nothing but an unworkable, confusing dream unless its citizens share a set of fundamental traditions and premises. Their perpetuation, argues Harvard’s committee, is education’s prime responsibility. And in meeting this responsibility, the committee finds that U.S. education has been dangerously delinquent.

Roaming far beyond the banks of the tranquil Charles, Harvard’s investigators have examined the whole educational system, and have ended by pointing the finger squarely at the nation’s secondary schools.

Three-quarters of America’s 7,000,000 high-school students do not go on to college. Therefore, says the committee, it is the high schools’ prime job to equip them for citizenship in a free society. At present, most of this Jacksonian three-quarters learn critically little of democracy’s common roots, hence are condemned to flounder in a maze of “practical” Jeffersonian specialization.

Recommended Requirements. The Harvard survey makes specific recommendations. Of the 16 year-courses regularly required for a high-school diploma, it urges that at least eight be in the general (core) subjects: three in English, three in science and mathematics, two in history, government and related social studies. That would leave no student more than half his school time for learning a skill or trade. But for the three-quarters who are not going to college, the committee recommends further core concentration: an additional three courses.

One surprise package in the report is culture-conscious Harvard’s casual shoulder shrug to foreign languages. The committee seems to say, in the course of much backing & filling, that the majority of high-school students could more profitably spend their time on English, art or history than on French, Spanish, German (let alone Latin and Greek).

For Harvard College itself, the report prescribes the same medicine. Of the 16 courses requisite for a B.A., six should be compulsory in the humanities, sciences and social sciences. And to implement this core requirement, the committee calls for a number of brand-new survey courses.* Only after satisfying these requirements in general education, could the Harvard student of the future go in for specialization.

The Basic Concern. The Harvard report is no lightning shaft from Olympus. Its arguments, though sound, suffer by restatement; the document as a whole loses point by diffuse organization. But most educators will find merit in its eclectic conservatism. No other survey has scrutinized the educational field more comprehensively or related it so closely to the nation’s welfare.

For those who would dismiss Harvard’s cultural prescription as effete and impractical, the committee underlines its basic concern: “The question has become more & more insistent: what is the right relationship between specialistic training on the one hand, aiming at any one of a thousand different destinies, and education in a common heritage and toward a common citizenship on the other? It is not too much to say that the very character of our society will be affected by the answer to that question.”

* One of these, titled “Great Texts of Literature,” is sure to bring satisfied smiles to Hutchins and St. John’s fans.