No Friendly Voice
Robert Maynard Hutchins
(University of Chicago, 1936)

In attempting to decide which rule [of utility law] worked better, we had to assume a social order and the aims thereof, and then try to determine which rule did more to achieve the aims we favored. What made this difficult was that we didn't know much about the social order; we didn't have any special competence in the matter of social aims; and we didn't have the slightest idea how to go about finding out whether a given rule helped to accomplish them or not.
       Suddenly we discovered that there were people who knew all these things, people who could tell us how [42/43] the law worked and why. They were the social scientists. We had every reason to resort to them. The courts were social agencies; their conclusions must be conditioned by society. The social scientists could help us to predict what the courts would do. The psychologists would help us understand the behavior of judges. The psychiatrists could help us there, too, and could also assist us in comprehending criminals. Hand in hand with these other scientists we could become scientific.
       . . . Imagine our confusion, however, when we discovered that from their disciplines as such the social scientists added little or nothing. They taught us to reverence our own subject; it was more interesting to them than their own. With the enthusiasm of converts they showed us the masses of social, political, economic, and psychological data which lay hidden in the cases. They then proceeded to teach the cases better than we could teach them, not because they had been nurtured in the social sciences, but because they were good teachers.
       The fact was that though the social scientists seemed to have a great deal of information, we could not see, and they could not tell us, how to use it. It did not seem to show us what the courts would do or whether what they had done was right. 42-43
       . . . We decided, then, that it was nice to have met the social scientists and that we should continue to associate with them in the hope of some day striking some mutual sparks. . . . We thus added greatly to our accumulated data about what the courts had done. It was data of another kind than cases. But, like the cases, it was data absolutely raw. We did not know what facts to look for, or why we wanted them, or what to do with them after we got them. We were simply after facts. These facts did not help us to understand the law, the social order, or the relation between the two. 44

We must, then, train students. This is a vain hope, because the law offices can do it better and because, just when we get them trained, new legislation which we cannot foresee may make the habits we have given them the worst they can possibly have.
       We must, then, devote ourselves to legal research. But, if the law is what the courts will do and we are going to be scientific, we must get the cases, and the facts outside the cases, and the data of the social sciences. But, when we get this material it is useless, because we don't know what to do with it. It is a hopeless job, anyway, because there is so much material that we can't possibly accumulate it all, and we have no basis for selection and discrimination. 47

[community of scholars] In the absence of such rational science or sciences each other science orders its abstractions on a limited set of categories and offers its uncriticized results to the scientific world. The recipient of these results has, with his present training, the almost impossible task of reinterpreting the data in this raw form. He should be able to put them to work in his own science, but he has no rational scheme in which he can locate them. Whitehead has lately shown the fatal consequences that have overtaken theories of inheritance because biologists regarded genes as hard pellets of matter which were not affected by their environment. These fatal consequences ensued because of the inability of one science to keep up with the speculative progress of another. Only the development of rational sciences at the base of medicine can integrate the sciences and make true interchange between scientists possible. [cf. McKeon] 57

... Galen said in the title of one of his treatises, "The Best Physician Is Also a Philosopher." 58

[general education for all] The present democratic notion that higher education is open to a student merely because he is the offspring of a voter would have seemed sheer nonsense to the most democratic of the Founding Fathers. 62 [cf. Harvard pedobaptism debate 17^th c.--Harvard debate important here because of close connection between town and (academic) gown]

New England, too--and here Harvard has been the chief offender--has extended this vicious principle ["the horrid machinery composed of course grades, course credits, course examinations, required attendance, and required residence through which we determine by addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and a logarithm table the intellectual progress of the young," pp. 71-72] into new educational territory by requiring the Bachelor's degree for entrance to professional schools. Such a school acquires mystical prestige by being called "graduate." A law school, for example, is a good school if its students have spent four years in college. It is a poor one if they have lingered only three. It is really not respectable if they have devoted only two to the pursuit of the liberal arts. Of course, there is not the slightest basis in fact or theory for this view. In fact, students who have not spent four years in college are likely to do better in law school than those who have. In theory there is no reason why a student who has completed his general education and wishes to specialize should not do so in professional subject instead of non-professional ones. Yet, New England has given impetus to the adding-machine system by deciding that you can tell whether a student will succeed in a professional school by adding up the years he has devoted to football and fraternities. 72

Outside New England we are coming to the view that we do not know very much about selecting students at entrance. . . . The student will be enrolled if, on the whole, he deserves a trial in college. The university knows that such a trial is the only real test. Its formula has this important consequence--it leaves the secondary schools free to frame the best course of study they can. It imposes neither the methods nor the subject matter of their program. 73

With deference I recommend that the great preparatory schools of New England become colleges. This would mean that they would cease to be preparatory schools. They would take their students through to the end of what we now call the Sophomore year. Their qualified graduates might go on to the university if they cared to do so. If they did not, they could feel that they had had an education. 78

Now the peculiar responsibility of the western universities is the responsibility for the system of public education. With one notable exception the eastern universities have never acknowledged any such responsibility. [some reasons given] 81

Clearly a university . . . ought to provide every facility for the students to participate in the advancement of knowledge. But, sooner or later, it must take the position that the student should not be sent to the university unless he is independent and intelligent enough to go there. The university cannot undertake to give him character or intellectual interest. Parents whose children have neither should keep them at home or send them to another kind of institution. Whatever may be the responsibilities of a college, a university is not a custodial establishment, or a church, or a body-building institute. If it were free to stop behaving as though it were, it would be a better university. 82

Nobody knows today what a general education ought to be. Nobody knows what a sub-professional technical education [84/85] ought to be. The situation in public education requires us to find out. Only the western universities can do it. 84-85

In a period of expansion, Oberlin limited its enrolment. In the football era, Oberlin paid no more attention to athletics than was required by a reasonable program of physical education. In a period of imitation, Oberlin held fast to the secret it had known from the first, that whatever the future of the college may be, it will not be found in copying the aims, methods, curriculum, or organization of any other institution. Oberlin remained a college.
       As I have already suggested, the function of the college is to teach. It is not to conduct scientific investigation or professional training. It aims at transmitting to young people an intelligible scheme of things. This is a full-time job. It requires an excellent staff centering its attention on teaching, on improving its teaching, on making its scheme of things more intelligent and intelligible. The responsibility of adding to the world's knowledge does not rest upon the college. Its object is to communicate it. 92

All attempts to teach character directly will fail. They degenerate into vague exhortations to be good which leave the bored listener with a desire to commit outrages which would otherwise have never occurred to him. Hard intellectual work is doubtless the best foundation of character, for without the intellectual virtues the moral sense rests on habit and precept alone. 93

Only a people that had no conception of the place of education in its national life could contemplate the ruin of the next generation as the best remedy for governmental insolvency. 97

[autonomy] One reason why there is confusion in universities as to the function of the junior college, the senior college, and the graduate school is that no one of these groups has had this freedom to work out its own program. The tendency is always for the organization above to regard the organization below as merely preparatory to its own efforts. The organization above, therefore, will always seek to dominate the organization below in order to secure students who will fit readily into its machinery. But it must be clear that, as long as the junior college is controlled by the senior college and the senior college by the graduate school, no one of them can make its full contribution to the advance of education in America. No educational institution can flourish unless it is free to determine its own ideals and its own methods of achieving them. 98

The purpose of the high school has been even more confused. Is it to prepare pupils for life or for college? Since most high-school graduates do not go to college, the high school is obviously wasting its time if it acts as though they did. Yet, in many places the high-school curriculum is still constructed to meet collegiate requirements whose chief distinction is their rigidity, antiquity, and remoteness from the real world.
       The high school cannot be regarded as preparatory to college. Current economic and social developments mean that it can no longer be regarded as terminal. The community must extend the period of public education which the ordinary youth is expected to enjoy by at least two years. This will be necessary, as we have already seen, because the ordinary youth will not be able to go to work until his eighteenth, or even his twentieth, year. The terminus, therefore, of public education will be advanced from about the end of the Senior year in high school to about the end of the Sophomore year in college.
       You may say that this simply means that we must multiply existing junior colleges, expecting the majority of our adolescents to attend them. Such a suggestion compels us to look at the situation in junior colleges. It is not clear what the junior college is. In many places it seems to be a continuation of high school. In others it looks like an imitation of the first two years at the state university, which is usually the weakest section of the curriculum of that institution. Since 50 per cent of its students leave it every year, the junior college has difficulty in constructing a coherent program. It is, therefore, ambiguous in aim and unsatisfactory in organization.
       If we reconsider the system of public education from the elementary school through the junior college, we see that the normal child should be able to complete elementary work in six years. He should then enter a secondary school, which we may as well call the high school. This unit would [109/110] be definitely preparatory and not terminal. Its work should be completed in four years. Some pupils might require more time some less. The average pupil would come to the end of his secondary, or high-school, education at sixteen. He would then enter one of two programs which should occupy four years, more or less. One of them should be concerned with general education. The other should provide technical or homemaking training of a sub-professional type for those who do not want, or would not profit by, a general cultural education. In many places these programs can be administered most effectively by two institutions In that case the one administering general education might be called a college and the one administering technical education might be called a technical institute. In places where both programs are under the jurisdiction of one institution, I see no objection to calling the whole enterprise a college.
       Such a scheme of public education is adjusted and diversified to meet the conditions of the present day. Of course, it cannot serve its purpose unless the colleges and technical institutes proposed are numerous and local. They must be numerous and they must be local because they will be instruments of popular education, not asylums for the few. Each unit in the system has a definite task. Its accomplishment can be tested in terms of that task. Its administration, its faculty, and the public can understand what it is trying to do and decide to what extent it is succeeding.
       Where does all this leave the colleges of liberal arts and the universities? They exhibit a confusion even greater than that of the rest of the system The college of liberal arts is an extraordinary mixture of specialization and advanced study, of general education and university work. It is inevitable that many of these organizations must abandon their Junior and Senior years, joining their first two years to the last two of high school. They will thus become colleges of the type that I am proposing, devoted to general education, sub-professional technical training, or both. The strongest [110/111] of them may take another direction. They may devote themselves to non-professional specialization in arts, literature, and science. This might take the shape of a three-year curriculum beginning with the Junior year and leading to the Master's degree. I am clear that such work may be better done in a strong college than in a university, which from the Junior year onward should be dominated by scholarly and professional interests.
       The university is today a perfectly amazing institution. It does everything and will do it for anybody. General education, professional education, non-professional specialization, research, and technical work are carried on in a highly indiscriminate and disjointed manner; and the whole is seasoned with the spice of college life. The result is that nobody can tell you what a university is, and any university can claim to be doing a wonderful job because nobody knows what its job is or how to tell whether it is doing it. The only possible answer to these questions is that a university should devote itself to scholarly and professional work; its task is the advancement of knowledge. Since education is a branch of knowledge, a university may conduct an experimental college or institute of the sort I have described in order to provide ideas and information to those laboring in the fields of general and technical education. If a university does not wish to do this, and many of them are not equipped to do it, it should abandon its Freshman and Sophomore years. Thus the university may be relieved of college life, of the burden of thousands who go there because they do not know what else to do, and may limit itself to research and to the education of research workers and professional men. 109-111

. . . a complete collegiate organization is necessary in the university far the study of these problems as they present themselves in real life.
       This is particularly true here, for we are surrounded by other universities not so free to experiment as we are. We have an unusual opportunity to show the way. But we shall not be able to do so unless we are willing to differentiate the individuals on our staff, to provide different kinds of opportunity for different men, to adjust the content and amount of each scholar's work to his individual capacity, and to reward him for contributing to our knowledge of education as we should reward him if he contributed to our knowledge of any other subject.
       In dealing with students the same lack of adjustment of the university to the individual appears, and apparently for the same reason: there are so many of them that to deal with them at all we have to deal with them as though they were identical. Professional work may well be started, presumably, at the end of a good general education. But we have assumed, first, that all of college work was general education and, second, that the longer a man staved in college the better his education was. And consequently, in the effort to get better students in professional schools we have constantly raised the number of years in college required for entrance to them But it must be clear that the great advantage of the graduate professional school is not in the maturity of students, or in the preparation of students, but in the segregation of students. Segregation into a serious professional group has turned many a collegiate loafer into a first-rate professional man. But it has in many professions extended the period of training to quite disproportionate lengths The graduates of some of the so-called "best" law schools cannot start practice before they are twenty-five . . .

We have not had time to think about the quality of our students, our teachers, or our course of study. Nor do I see any relief from the quantitative problem in the future. Adult education means that we shall have millions of new students and shall have to have thousands of new teachers to teach them. The advance of technology will mean, even after the depression is over, that young people will not be able to get jobs and will have to be taken care of by us. This will mean, in turn, a great expansion of the high school, the technical institute, and the junior college, and a great expansion of the staff and plant essential for them.
       Only at two levels is there even temporary relief in sight. A declining birth-rate may for a time, at least, reduce the population of the elementary schools. But the evidence here is quite unclear; and the prediction of sociologists that the number of our people will be stationary by 1960 may not be verified.
       The other point at which the volume of students may be reduced is the university, by which I mean the beginning of the Junior year. The attitude of the public and of the universities themselves should result in limiting university training at public expense to those who seem likely to profit by it. Since we may expect to see a junior college or a technical institute wherever there is a high school today, we may expect the public to revolt against the great expense of sending any boy or girl who wants to go through the highest degrees at the state university. The real costs of education appear at the beginning of the Junior year in college. For work beyond that point specialized courses, small classes, and elaborate equipment are required. All these things are justified for students who have the interest and ability that scholarly and professional work demands. The taxpayer cannot afford them unless the students have this interest and this ability.
       The universities, too, are now abandoning the foolish [116/117] attitude that more students are needed in order to obtain larger appropriations. The added cost of added students is far greater than any added appropriations obtained because of them. And the social and athletic character that large numbers of students have given the universities has done more than most things to prevent them from being universities and to debase the higher learning in America.
       There are some signs, too, that the universities may gradually wipe out those competitive duplications which can best be described as a transfer of the football spirit to education and research. Some universities seem to have bought books merely in order to say that they had more books than the institution next door. Others have started departments simply because the institution next door had them. The present wave of enthusiasm for departments of public administration, forestry, housing, and aeronautics will lead to useless expenditure of the taxpayers' money by spotting competing enterprises all over the map, when, from the educational point of view, two or three centers are all that the country requires. The association of Governing Boards of State Universities has now taken this matter in hand. The result should be a new emphasis on quality and a restriction of the scope of the universities to what each of them can do best.
       Nevertheless, these ameliorations of the quantitative problem at the elementary and university levels, even if and when they are realized, will be but slight assistance to the educational profession or the taxpayer. They will be more than matched by the vast increases in the high school and the junior college, which, though less expensive than the university, are far more costly than the elementary school. The Chicago School Board, as a measure of economy and a matter of principle, abolished the only junior college in the city two years ago. Last fall, one year later, they were compelled to open three junior colleges in place of the one they had abolished. We may confidently await [117/118] the day when every young person may, if he wishes, stay at home and complete the work of the Sophomore year in college, and may do so if he wishes at public expense. Graduation from the local junior college will be as customary as graduation from the local high school is today.
       If, therefore, the educational profession has not had time to think much up to now about the quality of its students, its teachers, or its course of study, there is little reason to expect that it will have more time in future. Only by deliberate recognition of the importance of these problems and persistent attention to them can we hope to solve them. And only by solving them can we hope to secure the consistent support of the American people. 116-118

I used to be opposed to permanent tenure for university professors. I thought it was an invitation to mediocrity and had a debasing effect on salaries. I am now convinced that the greatest danger to education in America is the attempt, under the guise of patriotism, to suppress freedom of teaching, inquiry, and discussion. Consequently, I am now in favor of permanent tenure, with all its drawbacks, as by far the lesser of two evils. We cannot expect to get good teachers without decent salaries and security. 121-22

It is the perpetual task of professional leadership to direct the mind of the public and of boards of trustees to the real function for which such institutions were established. . . . Professional leadership must demonstrate to lay boards that what is "sound" finance in business may not be sound in philanthropic activities. It must insist upon the maintenance of the excellence of the institution and present that ideal as a foil to the constant insistence of the business man on the conservation of assets. 134

The question before any university therefore is, not whether individualized education is desirable, but whether the university, in view of the other demands upon it, can afford to give individualized [186/187] education at all. Still, if we take the large lecture course as a base and select from it only those who are particularly interested and qualified for more individual instruction, without assuming the necessity of small classes and quiz sections in all courses for all students, we can accomplish everything I have in mind without additions to our faculties. And when we are ready to concede that even some Freshmen in some fields are able to learn something by themselves and are likely to develop powers of independent thought and effort only as we permit them to do independent work, we shall again revise our notions of the number of professors that a given number of students require for the best development of their individual talents. 186-187

The other divisions and the professional schools are most of them still at work on their courses of study. In general the Bachelor's degree will be conferred on the basis of general examinations given on the theory that the student will spend one-third of his time in a department, one-third in a division, and have one-third of it free. The courses leading to the higher degrees will be still more specialized. The tendency in the divisions is essentially that manifested in the College--to drop as many departmental courses as possible and to consolidate their subject matter in divisional courses designed to give the student, first of all, a thorough understanding of the divisional field as a whole. The structure of the curriculum is thus pyramidal, proceeding from general courses in the College to divisional courses and then departmental courses in the divisions.
       Almost simultaneously with the divisional organization the faculty began to make provision for interdepartmental and interdivisional co-operation in research and in teaching. Such a university activity is the preparation of teachers. Almost all departments are engaged in it. Many of them are engaged in little else. Yet the formal training of teachers has been accidentally relegated to one department, the School of Education. The effect of this has been to diminish the sense of responsibility felt by all the departments, to prevent the Department of Education from devoting itself to its proper field, the science of education, and to promote a certain degree of disharmony between that department and the rest. In recognition of the fact that the education of teachers is an undertaking of the entire institution we now propose to place that task upon a University committee composed of representatives of all divisions and schools, and to relieve the School of Education of the burden. The result will be clarification of the functions of that department and definite assumption by the whole University of a responsibility which belongs to all of it.
       As we have studied for the past two and a half years the [192/193] problems of general education, we have become convinced that they cannot be readily solved by an organization with divided loyalties. We are certain, too, that an organization which has its students for only two years will always face great difficulties in the construction of a program designed to give a general education. In addition we have observed, like everybody else, the duplication and overlapping that have afflicted the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. Our College became a two-year unit in 1930. Our College faculty has been composed of members of the upper divisions, and has been to a certain extent, a faculty of divided loyalties. The members of it have been concerned with general education in the College and with research and advanced study in the divisions. They could not be appointed in the College without the approval of chairmen of departments whose interests might be exclusively in advanced work. Our high school has been a laboratory school of the Department of Education, under an administration separate from that of the College.
       On January 12 the Board of Trustees on the recommendation of the Senate approved two important proposals, one to incorporate the last two years of the University High School in the program of the College, and the other to permit the appointment of members of the College faculty without the concurrence of departmental chairmen or divisional deans. The first action gives us a four-year unit devoted to general education. The second gives us the chance to build up a faculty chosen because of its special interest and ability in this field. The four years devoted to general education will be under the administration of the College Dean; the Principal of University High School has become Associate Dean of the College.
       The purpose of these actions is to provide an organization and a curriculum for the American system of public education--if not for it to use, at least for it to consider. 192-193

From the point of view of the organization of education--elementary, secondary, collegiate, and university--I am clear that Chicago has taken some suggestive steps. But here, I must admit, I have little but faith to sustain me. I believe--I do not know--that a six-year primary school, a three- or four-year [195/196] college, paralleled by three- or four-year technical institutes, and followed by the university--I believe, I do not know, that this is a sound, efficient, and economical organization of education. At any rate, I think it is worth trying. Certain impressions from our experience may be relevant. Our experience seems to show that the natural association of students is not in a group covering the four years of the typical college of liberal arts, but rather in two groups which separate in the middle of that college. Our divisional students, who are Juniors, Seniors, and graduate students, have developed a divisional consciousness and a community of interest quite distinct from those of the Freshmen and Sophomores, who constitute our College. The natural associates of the Freshmen and Sophomores, on the other hand, seem to be the Juniors and Seniors in high school. Certainly the faculties of the upper divisions have developed a divisional consciousness; and the faculty of the College is coming more and more to see that its problems are distinct from those of the upper divisions and allied with those of the last two years of the high school.
       The development of divisional consciousness has been a striking phenomenon, for it has marked a change in the traditional departmental feeling of the University of Chicago. The construction of divisional courses of study, of divisional examinations, of divisional requirements, and of divisional research projects has brought allied departments together for the good of the students and of one another. In the biological sciences this change has been of peculiar significance, for there the clinical medical departments have become members of the division along with the pre-clinical and non-clinical biologists. The group is therefore a unique association of biologists, who, because of a common administration and a common purpose, are likely to have some influence on the course of education and research in medicine and in biology as a whole.
       In the same way the inclusion of the School of Education [196/197] in the Division of the Social Sciences Seems to me fraught with important consequences for the science of education and for the social studies. The tendency of American universities to regard educational specialists as people who had the queer idea that they could and would train public-school teachers has done the greatest damage to universities and to scholars in education. The social sciences have missed association with one of the most important, if not the most important, of the social studies; departments of education have sometimes had a professional, or even a vocational, cast thrust upon them. At Chicago, the Department of Education is an integral part of the Division of the Social Sciences, to the advantage of both.
       I do not offer this description of what the University of Chicago is doing because these things are the only things that are being done in the university area. It is only necessary to refer to the great contributions that are being made by the great university situated in this city to remind you that even we at Chicago are conscious that other institutions, and notably the University of Minnesota, are engaged in work of fundamental importance to the future of education. It may well be that everything that we are doing is wrong. I do not greatly care if it is, for I trust to the intelligence of educators to point out our errors and thus save both themselves and us from the final fatal consequences of our mistakes. So the Chicago Plan is not the only plan. It may not be the best plan. It is not a plan that we recommend to anybody else. It may have no ultimate significance whatever. The only reason that I think it worth while to present it here is that it may serve to remind us that even in times of great financial distress it is possible for us to direct some attention to what is, after all, our main task, the improvement of education in the United States. 195-197

The trivial results of vocationalism have given rise to the exaggerated view that in a university nothing useful should be taught. And this is not an exaggeration if what it means is that the pursuit of truth for its own sake is the most useful occupation in which we can engage. Attempts to encumber the higher learning with vocational techniques, moral lessons, and political dogma will all end in triviality. [171/172]
       The University of Chicago has been happily free from many of these manifestations. Vocationalism has suffered no more signal defeat than the abolition of our School of Education and the creation of the University Committee on the Preparation of Teachers. The faculty of the Departments of Education wanted to study education, not to get teachers ready for jobs. The Committee on the Preparation of Teachers has decided that the best way to prepare them is to see to it that they have a good education and that they understand something of the educational process. The committee has succeeded in working out a plan in which the vocational elements are limited to those prescribed by state laws. 171-172

The University has been unwilling to indulge in calm contemplation of a suffering world. At Hull-House, at the university Settlement, in public affairs in Chicago, on national commissions, in surveys of school systems the country over, the members of the faculty have partaken of the woes and struggles of our people. . . . The University's interest in ideas has prevented it from becoming a stronghold of reaction like the English universities in the eighteenth century, which, as Lecky shows, opposed every great step demanded by the English intellect. 163

Another phase of Oberlin's independence appeared in its [91/92] resistance to the education trend of the time. 91-92

The standard organization of education is still an eight-year elementary school, a four-year high school, a four-year college, and three years of graduate work. The fact that when we describe the system we do so in terms of time is significant. We do not think of defining it in terms of the subject matter or purpose of its units. And yet it is entirely possible that the subject matter and purpose are more important than the period of incarceration. 107

Our whole system is set up for the average student. The result is that in any well-organized college there probably is not a single regulation governing the curriculum that a really excellent student should not break. Whatever one's view of a university, one may well doubt the value of such restrictions. 183

It does not necessarily follow that as numbers rise standards must fall. In many places as numbers have risen standards have fallen. But this is rather because we have not had time to think than because of any inevitable connection between numbers and standards. If we had time to think about education, instead of being forced to provide something that would look like it for the multitudes who suddenly demanded it, we should direct our attention in the first instance to the achievements of individuals. In order to test those achievements we should work out criteria applicable at the various levels. Instead of asking how many years in high school a student had had, we should determine what kind of training we should require for entrance to a college. We should next have to determine what accomplishments a man leaving the junior college should possess to show that he has finished his general higher education. As a person sought entrance to the university . . . he should be required to submit evidence of his power to deal with it, and should be [184/185] graduated only after he had met tests indicating that he had the knowledge and ability that reflected the criteria previously established for graduation.
       You will say that this is exactly what is done at the present time. At every stage students are required to submit evidence of their previous training, showing either that they are ready to go on with their education or that it is complete. The trouble is that all this is stated in terms of what a student has been through, instead of in terms of what he has learned and what he can do. 184-85

If then an individual remains at any level longer than the average student, it will be because he needs to remain there; if he goes on earlier, it will be because he is qualified to go on. 186

Thus we could break up the lock step of the credit system and succeed at last in adjusting education to the capacities of the individual. 126

Nobody knows today what a general education ought to be. Nobody knows what a sub-professional technical education [84/85] ought to be. The situation in public education requires us to find out. Only the western universities can do it. 84-85

However diversified and expanded the curriculum below the Junior year in college may be, the core of it must be a good general education. There are certain special difficulties we must face, or course. We must find out how to communicate a general education to those who cannot read. We must modify it for those who require technical training of a sub-professional type. But a good general education must be the center or basis of every education program at every level. We know that such a thing does not exist today. We know that what we give instead is a series of short unrelated courses composed of a smattering of miscellaneous facts which leave the student uneducated and, except perhaps in the spasmodic exercise of his memory, untrained. 121

What do we mean, then, by a general education? In the first place, we do not mean scholarly or professional training. What we are talking about is a program for all students, for the whole of American youth. That program may and should serve as the basis for professional or scholarly study. But that is not its object. Its object is to provide the kind of education that every citizen should have. . . . It is paradoxical, but true, that the best practical education is the most theoretical one.
       The University of Minnesota asked thirty-seven industries in the Twin Cities what specific training they wanted high-school boys to have if they were going to work for them. The whole thirty-seven unanimously replied that they wanted them to have no specific training at all. . . . the industries themselves could train the boys on the machines actually in use in about two weeks. 126

Education is not a substitute for experience. It is preparation for it. 127

Assuming that you have sound methods, so that you can actually help the pupil to get an education, what is the education that you are going to help him to get? The ideas that the progressive educators have had about content have been either misconceived or misapplied.
       The progressive educators say that the object of education is to fit the child for the contemporary scene. The sociologists say it is to adjust the student to his environment. Both slogans contain elements of truth. But the first danger into which they lead us is that of preparing students for the status quo. That becomes the scene for which we fit our students; that becomes the environment to which we seek to adjust them. But we have no idea whether the status quo or some other status will confront the student when he is graduated. Efforts to fit him for the status quo may merely succeed in unfitting him for the actual situation in which he will have to live.
       Another difficulty with the slogans of the progressive educators and the sociologists is that they are likely to lead to a course of study composed almost wholly of current facts. 128

Lately a new school of progressive educators and sociologists has arisen. They appreciate the inadequacy of a curriculum composed of lots of information about the contemporary scene. They propose one, instead, composed of lots of information about the scene they think the pupil will face when he emerges from school--a scene not contemporary but future. They have gone so far as to say that they know what kind of scene the pupil is going to face: it is one dominated by what they call "collectivism." This program seems to me even worse than the one that springs from John Dewey and the earlier progressives. It has all its defects and, in addition, is egregiously conceited. . . . But, whatever I think [the future will be], I should not dream of recommending a course of study based upon my opinion, for that opinoin hardly rises above the dignity of a hunch. 129

Nor is the object of general education the development of personality or character. We trust that an integrated personality and a rugged character may result from it. But, if we place personality and character before us as the aim of education, we shall get neither personality, character, nor education. Character is a by-product--a by-product, as Woodrow Wilson used to say, or hard work well done. 129

The moral virtues are habits. The environment of education should be favorable to them. But only a diffused sentimentality will result from the attempt to make instruction in the moral virtues the object of education. And, in addition, resources that might go into intellectual training will he lavished on athletics, social life, and student guidance, a kind of coddling, nursing, and pampering of students that is quite unknown anywhere else in the world.
       If the object of general education is not scholarly, professional, or vocational; if its primary purpose is not the development of character or personality; if it should not be composed of current information about the status quo or imaginary information about the future, what is its object and of what should it be composed? Clearly, the object of general education is the training of the mind. Clearly, too, the mind should be trained for intelligent action. Or, to put it another way, the object of general education is to produce intelligent citizens. Facts, data, and information, present and prospective, cannot be ignored. But the emphasis must be on the training of the mind. Facts, data, and information should be used to exemplify and enforce the principles upon which intelligent action must rest.
       Such a program of general education proceeds on two assumptions: First, it assumes that everybody has a mind and that we must find out how to train it. Second, it assumes that it is a good thing to train it. Certainly I should be put to it to argue that a trained mind will result in a large income. I have no difficulty in holding that it will result in a happy and useful life. It will result in benefit to the individual and to the community.
       It will do more. A program of general education resulting in trained minds will facilitate social change and make it more intelligent. The educational system cannot bring about social change. It cannot work out and impose on the country a blueprint of the social order desired by the teachers colleges. But the educational system can facilitate social change; it can make it more intelligent. A program of general education which is based on ideas, which leads the student to understand the nature and schemes of history, to grasp the principles of science, to comprehend the fine arts and literature, and to which philosophy contributes intelligibility at every stage, is the kind of program that we must now construct. It may seem, at first glance, remote from real life, from the facts, and from the social order. On the contrary, if we can construct it, we shall find that it may give us at last a land fit to be free.
       I realize that the suggestions I have made are both vague and violent. What I have been trying to do is to hold before you the dazzling vision of millions of young Americans receiving an education adapted to their needs at the hands of teachers who are truly educated themselves. This is the goal before us. Only if we can achieve it will the sheep, when they look up, be fed. 130-31