Educating Education
PROFESSOR Alexander Meiklejohn has outlined, ••• and the University of Wisconsin has agreed to accept, an experimental program in higher education. A small "community" of first- and...
...No student, he declared, would bare his real spiritual convictions, questions or doubts in the presence of his fellows...
...Indeed things have come to such a pass that embryologists and similar savants scorn the outsider who would humbly take an interest in their subjects, while proudly confessing their own absolute ignorance of everything not embryological...
...In the first place, is not this plan calculated to stir up a little revolution in teaching...
...Despite all the value derived from private counsel and personal "taking of stature," the sermon remains, when it is effective, an instrument that cannot be replaced...
...A small "community" of first- and second-year students is to be segregated, with their teachers, from the academic activities of the university as a whole...
...Meiklejohn informs us, with a variety of socialized teaching...
...We may rightly share their curiosity, because Dr...
...Indeed, their presence seems to congeal him into an attitude of indifference and often even of flippancy...
...How futile it is to approach authors like Dickens or Balzac without some knowledge of social history and theory ought to be apparent...
...Meiklejohn's experiment should ever be widely incorporated in the university' system, a change in preliminary education would almost automatically be imposed...
...Meiklejohn's proposal is interesting and significant from at least two points of view...
...We heard an experienced university professor of apologetics say recently, quite without any stimulus from Dr...
...To a large extent the product of secondary education has been the victim of mass training, which jumbles a crowd of youngsters through inadequate part-time sessions, and of the prevailing idealism regarding the aim of the high school to prepare for "civic living...
...During recent years instructors, all bent to one frame...
...There is no doubt that if Dr...
...To this proposal, not having any practical acquaintance with the problem, we can only say "Perhaps...
...Meiklejohn, that the study of religion in higher schools ought not to be made dependent upon the classroom...
...Unfortunately people who were never intended by their Maker as "givers of addresses" are frequently impressed into the posse...
...There is some excuse for this point of view in the case of scientific research...
...of mind by dissertorial labors, have frankly perched themselves upon one rail from which both timidity and a longing for "authoritativeness" have prevented any descent or even random exploration...
...A beginning is to be made, Dr...
...Everybody who has ever sat under a good lecturer knows this...
...Naturally good teaching of this kind is not the same as good scholarship...
...Wise men may experiment with it and the cognate educational lecture, but their eagerness to search ought not to cause them to throw away what has already been found...
...Within the confines of this domain experimentation will try to work out a more satisfactory system of training...
...No matter how valuable reading and private research may be, there is gained from a good harangue to an interested group a certain stimulus, a rather vague but none the less real stirringup of energy, which come from no other source...
...If the study of such a thing as Athenian civilization is not to be the merest trifling, the student must bring to his work some knowledge of Greek and Latin, some ability to wrestle with abstract ideas and to appreciate what in the concrete is known as form, some definite number of definite details which he can contribute to his own educational synthesis...
...It is interesting, too, to observe how the projected arrangement of "individual instruction," relying upon precepts to be followed later' on by the student himself, virtually follows the practice of the "father confessor" in spiritual life and progress...
...Nevertheless, to come back to Wisconsin University, it does not seem very likely that lectures will ever lose their value in education...
...Here is a point where the idea may possibly be of some service to Catholic education...
...But it should be rather obvious that history, philosophy, literature and the social sciences are so closely afllliated that one cannot competently discuss one without knowing something of the others...
...Everybody will be busy dealing with one topic—^Athenian civilization, for instance...
...In fact, we make bold to define a good teacher of one of these studies as a man who could, if called upon to do so, master any of the others with only a reasonable amount of additional preparation...
...Paul Claudel, in declaring that he earnestly wished some religious order might undertake the study of Oriental philosophical literature, maintained that the existing misunderstanding of that literature was due to the ignorance of Oriental social institutions on the part of European commentators...
...Secondly, the plan presupposes a reform of secondary education...
...The students who congregate for this purpose from the separate hamlets of the Middle-West will, at least, have the comfort of knowing that they are serving a pioneer purpose, however gawky they may appear in the role...
...but this does not argue against the man who can...
...He is painfully made to learn by rote those matters which an honestly educated person would learn as a matter of course...
...How much better it would be, he thought, if the instruction could be individual, the student then being required to follow an indicated course of reading...
...That is, there will be no classes, no subjects, no specialists in anything...
...Here again the religious analogy seems pertinent...
...And yet even investigation is often seriously hampered by the specialist's limitations...
...These things the average student simply does not bring...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 6
