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Changes in higher education
| 23.04.2012, 22:29 | |
| Changes in higher education. The pedagogical experimentalism that marked America's elementary learning during the century's first quarter was less robust in the high school and feebler still in the college. The first venture of any consequence into collegiate progressivism was undertaken in 1921 at Antioch College, in Ohio. Antioch required its students to divide their time between the study of the traditional subjects and the extramural world, for which, every five weeks or so, they forsook the classroom to work at a full- time job. In 1932 Bennington College for women, in Vermont, strode boldly toward progressive ends. Putting a high value on student freedom, self-expression, and creative work, it staffed its faculty largely with successful artists, writers, musicians, and other creative persons, rather than Ph.D.'s. It also granted students a large say in making the rules under which they lived. Such developments in America's higher learning incited gusty blasts from Robert M. Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951. He recommended a mandatory study of grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, and Aristotelian metaphysics. One consummation of the Hutchins prescription is the study of some 100 "great books," wherein reside the unalterable first principles that Hutchins insisted are the same for all men always and everywhere. The vocationalism that Hutchins deplored was taken to task by several others, but with quite different results--notably by Harvard in its report on General Education in a Free Society (1945). Declaring against the high school's heavy vocational leaning, it urged the adoption of a general curriculum in English, science, mathematics, and social science. In the great expansion of higher education between about 1955 and 1975, when expansionist ideas about curriculum and governance prevailed, colleges became at times almost ungovernable. New colleges and new programs made the higher-education landscape so blurred that prospective students and admissions officers in other countries needed large, coded volumes to characterize individual institutions. The college curriculum, like that of the high school, was altered in response to vocal demands made by groups and had expanded in areas representing realities of contemporary social life. Internal reviews, undergraduate curriculum reforms, and the high standards set by some universities demonstrated to some observers that quality education was being maintained in the university. Other critics, however, felt that grade inflation, the multiplication of graduate programs, and increasing economic strains had led to a decline in quality. Financial problems and conservative reactions to the more extreme reforms led some universities to place a strong emphasis on management. Probably the most significant change in higher education has been the establishment and expansion of the junior college, which was conceived early in the century by William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago. He proposed to separate the four-year college into an upper and a lower half, the one designated as the "university college" and the other as the "academic college." The junior college is sometimes private but commonly public. It began as a two-year school, offering early college work or extensions to secondary education. It has since expanded to include upper vocational schools (including a wide range of technical and clerical occupations), community colleges (offering vocational, school completion, and leisure or interest courses), and pre- or early-college institutions. Junior colleges recruit from a wide population range and tend to be vigorous innovators. Many maintain close relationships with their communities. Colleges limited to the undergraduate level, especially in articulated state systems, may not differ much from well-developed junior colleges. | |
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