Education: 8-4-4 v. 6-4-4-2

It is the fond belief of many a pedagog that a major change is imminent in the pattern of U. S. education. Still dominant in the U. S. is the 8-4-4 pattern (eight years of grammar school, four of high school, four of college). In the last generation has arisen a rival 6-3-3-4 pattern (six years of grammar school, three of junior high, three of senior high, four of college). The pressure of the “old grad” has kept the four-year college course sacrosanct. But educators see a natural break between sophomore and junior years. Up to that point in most topflight colleges the work is preponderantly general; beyond that point it is preponderantly specialized. At the University of Chicago, youthful President Robert Maynard Hutchins has led the way by splitting his college in two, calling the upper half “Divisions.”

The educators see also that the present break between high school and college is largely artificial. By narrowing that break they could develop a junior college where hordes of high school graduates, who want more schooling but not four classical years of it, could round out a broad and cultural education. Were President Hutchins dictator of all U. S. education he would combine senior high school and junior college on a 6-4-4-2 pattern (six years of grammar school, four of junior high, four of senior-high-plus-junior-college, with an extra two years or more of university work for serious students only). Many educators differ on the specific pattern but agree on the aims.

Such educators had their eyes, last week on Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tenn., where old Chancellor James Hampton Kirkland seemed about to give the Chicago plan a new twist. Next autumn, he announced, the last two years of the college will be cut adrift from the first two, moored to a graduate school under a single dean. The first two years could scarcely become anything but a junior college.

Such progressivism on the part of a chancellor who is 75 years old and, by virtue of 42 years in the same job, dean of U. S. university presidents, surprised no one who knew him. The “university” which Chancellor Kirkland took over in 1893 was a backward little college bossed by a jealous coterie of Methodist Episcopal bishops. Twenty years earlier “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose cousin-in-law was one of the bishops, had endowed it with $500,000. Chancellor Kirkland, after a bitter fight in Tennessee’s Supreme Court, broke the grip of the Church. Then, with the Vanderbilts behind him, he made himself autocrat. Several millions of dollars from the Vanderbilts and more from the Rockefellers’ General Education Board enabled him to get together a respectable faculty, boost the admission requirements. Throughout the South, church colleges followed Vanderbilt’s lead in declaring their independence, raising their standards.

For the post of dean of the graduate school and senior college Chancellor Kirkland had chosen no Vanderbilt wheel horse but President Oliver Cromwell Carmichael of Alabama College. President Carmichael is a onetime Rhodes scholar in anthropology who elected to teach French in Alabama schools. In 1922 he went to Alabama College as assistant to the president, stepped into his superior’s shoes four years later. At 43 he is a progressive educator with a Hitler mustache and a talent for raising money.

That Dr. Carmichael was swapping a president’s chair for a dean’s without the prospect of something higher seemed unlikely to most observers. No secret is it that old Dr. Kirkland would like to resign and devote more time to raising his prize iris blossoms, famed among Tennessee horticulturists. Last week Oliver Cromwell Carmichael looked like nothing so much as Vanderbilt’s next chancellor, the man who will put a new educational pattern into effect.