Citizenship Education and the Colleges

One of the happier educational products of the war was the widespread self-examination it encouraged among American colleges. With the wartime slump in enrollments, those members of the faculty who remained on the campus were commonly given the task of planning the postwar educational programs of their respective institutions. We are now in that postwar period, and much of this admirable effort has been dropped to grapple with the heavy enrollments the schools were presumably planning to meet. But in many schools, whether the curricula underwent any major operations or not, there remains a ferment of doubt and argument over the adequacy of what they are doing.This ferment is not likely to die out soon. Colleges which brushed aside the polemics of Mr. Hutchins at Chicago a decade ago are still agitated by the Harvard Report on General Education. Harvard, like the College of the University of Chicago, is proceeding to make major departures from the prevailing practices of American colleges. Columbia College has paced the adoption of integrated courses in Western Civilization. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, guiding light of American technical schools, has discovered that engineers should also be liberally educated men and has made curricular changes designed to do something about it. The University of Florida and Michigan State College have moved sharply in the same direction, more or less independently, by creating basic colleges through which all would-be technicians and specialists must percolate before burying themselves in their chosen profession. Other schools are instituting comprehensive courses, tightening up the elective system, and otherwise taking steps to insure that general education is not lost in the scramble to prepare for a job.