U.S. GENERAL EDUCATION

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27169, 13 October 1953, Page 3

U.S. GENERAL EDUCATION

DR. R. J. HAVIGHURST’S LECTURE VOLUNTARY CO-OPERATION PREFERRED Voluntary effort by members of. several faculties to present a broad series of lectures fitting in with the programme of the university is probably the best strategy in introducing "general education” in the opinion of Dr. Robert J. Havighurst, professor of education at the University of Chicago. He gave this judgment last evening after an exhaustive survey of innovations and present practice at typical American universities. General education (“training to be a better person rather than just a better worker”) had always been a stated purpose of higher learning, but its implementation had varying fortunes, he said. About 1850, it could be said to exist because most students had natural philosophy, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, history, zoology, and botany. After that the tendency was for courses to proliferate, and students elected their choice besides a specialist core. There was • not much criticism up to about 1910, when it began to appear that the part on which there was concentration was efficient, but the elective subjects “just did not add up to anything.” Professor Havighurst said his own undergraduate days (about the end of World War 1) were unalloyed pleasure, and that was probably why he could remember their substance. He majored in chemistry and so his “area of concentration” was chemistry, physics, mathematics, bacteriology, with Latin, German and French as tool subjects. The “area of distribution” included English composition and literature (“freshman English”), journalism, European history, American Government, astronomy, the book of Luke (“it was a Methodist college”), and physical education (“when I presented a paper on football, the coach asked

what he was to do with it”). All this was interesting, but it did not proviae the intellectual stimulation of high or graduate school. So from 1920 there began the period of search for principles of unity in the arrangement of liberal education, Professor Havighurst said. Colombia introduced a course on contemporary civilisation integrating material from the social sciences. Chicago began one on the nature cf the world and man, in which scientists who were past their busist years of research and formal teaching tried Mo give some general appreciation. Dartmouth chose the theme of evolution to combine the biological, physical, and social sciences. The alternative to these “survey courses” was an experimental college such as was established at Wisconsin. This two-year college of liberal education gave no qualification except a certificate that the man had completed the course and an assessment of. a paper about his own region. “ Summary of Themes

By 1930 the survey courses were beginning to cut across orthodox university departments, more than 100 colleges having them in 1940. Besides the survey course there had emerged “functional” courses on the problerfis of daily living. These were started by a women’s college ascertaining the preoccupations of former students. Rearing families, buying household commodities, and so on led to college subjects of child health, consumer science, and others.

A Spaniard about 1943 deftly sum-: marised the themes at which general education was aiming:—(l) the physical scheme of the world; (2) the fundamental themes of organic life; (3) the historical process of the human species; <4> the structure and functions of social life; (5) the plan of the universe. The last 10 years was the period of establishment of general education. Nobody would question that it was established in the American university, Professor Havighurst said. He then described in detail the programmes in the seven types of college he listed last week. Several of them allowed at the outset an emphasis on specialist and tool subjects with general education in the social sciences, the humanities, physical sciences, biological science, and also provided extra options. Sarah Lawrence College for Women (which ’ had unusal staff arrangements) aimed at an individual course based on each student’s interests. St. John’s College for Men at Annapolis based its work solely on the great books of the Western tradition. Professor Havighurst said that having worked with graduates from all of these he could see merit m many of the ideas. The strategy of general education offered three main options. Effective courses provided by co-operatmg faculties could be developed to a stage where they counted as credits in later examination. This idea he preferred. Another idea was to reorganise a whole college curriculum oyer a period. Third, there could be pioneering elective courses followed by arbitrary changeover. The important feature was that general education was now recognised to be a desirable feature at some stage of the American university, Professor Havighurst said.