The Congress
THE DILEMMAS OF A DEAN E modern college educator who, somewhat like Macbeth's porter, hears a mighty thundering at his gates, is likely to be a little disturbed, even in his dream. What is the...
...Meanwhile the knockers at the gate are insistent...
...Dean Hawkins believes, first of all, that the spectre of umass education" has been banished—uWe are headed directly away from the policy of wholesale exposure of education to youth on the 'take it or leave it' principle...
...After all, these "minutiae," similar in one respect to the "fundamentals of English composition," would often "involve marking time and consequent boredom to the student...
...The report is illuminating because it is honest...
...Dean Hawkins frankly takes a stand that, after all, the individual student is at stake in the college, which ought not to exist merely for the sake of encouraging professorial oratory...
...The alleged scholastic debates about how large an angelic population could be quartered upon the point of a needle, are as nothing compared with finely-spun discussions about this engrossing process of differentiation...
...The typical is especially fascinating when it is squarely up against dilemmas piquantly various, like a nosegay of thistles...
...Perhaps it would not really make a great deal of difference if the professors did "read to a docile class the same notes year after year, with the occasional polishing of a phrase...
...How are you going to take care of the individual if he is submerged in a constantly expanding mass ? How will you stress quality if quantity is always your supreme obsession...
...Or can there be a general principle at all...
...And the modern knocker at the educational gates insists above all upon not being bored...
...The typical is always interesting...
...They take what they get quite as they wish to take it, and nobody seems able to do much about the matter, one way or another...
...Like its brethren among courses, it is a sample of the "type of survey or orientation" class now so much cherished, and "has to do with broad outlines rather than the minutiae of scholarship...
...And yet it is as nothing compared with modern methods for making courses "vital" and interesting to "the kind of youth that now registers in Columbia College...
...What is the general principle which alma mater shall adopt toward her too, too numerous children...
...It is conscientiously noted by the Dean that even such matters as "falling in love" are often responsible for poor academic work...
...We should then be sure, at least, that they had not invented them on the spur of the moment...
...But there is the first of the inevitable dilemmas...
...Yet, even though the matter of excellent teachers could be settled to some extent by the expenditure of sums now far beyond the dream of even very sanguine educators, the problem has become so intricate that only infinite genius and patience could solve it...
...It tends to the organization of fraternities "without adequate opportunity for determining whether the group is congenial and without sufficient time for looking over the ground...
...That, we shall all gladly admit, is progress...
...The answer might possibly be, by strengthening the faculty proportionately...
...Sometimes, as Dean Hawkins observes, this fondness for motion misleads youth...
...Sociology 3-4, to select an instance, uhas to do with the development of the social world from a state of primitive superstition and myth to modern self-control...
...and he proudly avers that his policy is not automatically to get rid of misfits, but "to burn our own smoke just as far as we can...
...The day is past when the college teacher can read to a docile class the same notes year after year, with the occasional polishing of a phrase...
...It makes it necessary for the faculty to ponder carefully that interesting question—"Who is gifted and who is not...
...THE DILEMMAS OF A DEAN E modern college educator who, somewhat like Macbeth's porter, hears a mighty thundering at his gates, is likely to be a little disturbed, even in his dream...
...The meditations of Dean Hawkins, of Columbia College, on these subjects—as contained in his recent annual report to the president—may be considered quite typical of what the run of deans are thinking...
...and how gifted one must be in order to be called a genuinely gifted student...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 8
