Are (U.S.) Colleges Still Doing "Their Job?" (What is it?)

Were college academics better in the past? Were there real intellectual ivory towers?

From 1750 to 1800 the college curriculum was pretty much unchanged. For example, in 1802 - as Samuel Miller[1] tells it -- Harvard, for example, offered:

First Year: Arithmetic, English Grammar, French, Geography. Greek and Latin writers, Hebrew, Logic, Rhetoric, Universal History.

Second Year: Greek and Latin writers, Algebra, Arithmetic, French, Geography, Hebrew, History, Logic, Mensuration, Philosophy (Locke and Blair).

Third Year: Conic Sections, English Composition, Euclid, Forensic Disputations, Greek and Latin writers, History, Mensuration, Trigonometry.

Fourth Year: Astronomy, Elements of Natural and Political law, English Composition.Greek and Latin writers, Paley's Philosophy, Spheric Geometry and Trigonometry, Theology.

Don't some of these items seem rather elementary? Before we try to compare this curriculum with today’s college curricula, we should attempt to get answers to the following questions:

1. Who were the students this curriculum was prepared for? Ages? Background? Prospects?
2. How many attended college in 1802? How regularly?
3. Who taught this curriculum? How were they likely prepared to teach it?
4. How strict were the testing conditions? How frequent the tests?
5. What was at stake? Was the test retakable? How was it prepared for? (e.g. cram sessions?)[2]

College and University then were not what they are now. A lot came in between. And what they are now is not, unfortunately, what all too many people imagine them to be.[3]

For examples and to examine important related issues further, see Conflict in Higher Education Faculty Evaluation: an organizational perspective.
Cordially
--- EGR

FOOTNOTED REFERENCES

[1] Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century in Two Volumes: Containing a Sketch of the Revolutions and Improvements in Science Arts, and Literature, during that Period (New York: T and J. Swords, 1803)

[2] A Classic on American Colleges is Frederick Rudolph. The American College & University. A History. 1960. U of Georgia Press.Throughout.

[3] For multiple essays on college and university organization, see Aspects of organizational functioning and culture.

What Can Public Schools Teach?

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie.
I learned that soldiers never die.
I learned that everybody's free,
And that's what the teacher said to me.
-- Tom Paxson (1964)

The last lynching in the U.S., involving victim Michael Donald, happened on March 20, 1981 in Mobile, Alabama. I was 38 at the time and never heard of it. In fact, until I looked it up in order to write this blog, I never knew of it. I was a school teacher at that time in the Philadelphia School District, working in an inner city junior high school. I never heard a peep about any lynching.

While I was growing up, attending public schools, I never heard in school of Japanese American internment during WWII, or of Pogroms in Europe, or of Harriet Tubman, or of the Trail of Tears, or of the Homestead Strike or of attacks on Catholics in Philadelphia by “Nativist” Americans. Why?

American public schools developed in a culture in which the following values were considered superior by most of those who supported the schools:

Whiteness, Maleness, Christian, Protestant, European, (particularly English-speaking), and Being of wealthy or professional parentage.

These values defined a group of people who were taught – as many still are -- to consider themselves innately superior to those outside the group, even to the point of using civil and military power to subjugate and even annihilate resistant outsiders. Superiority justified even brutal domination. (Of course, lacking power and being White, male, Christian, etc. in other parts of the globe would have likely made one receive, rather than give abuse – since brutal domination has never been unique to the U.S.)

Times have changed. The voices of former “inferior people” cannot be so easily suppressed. We, those of us historically privileged who have the guts to look and see, have recognized that our esteemed forefathers, our beloved parents and relatives, were mere humans, also. No more or less greedy, hateful, brutal, grasping and hypocritical than many of us are today.

And yet there is a vast disagreement on particulars: both about facts and about values. Who provoked the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Who massacred whom? Who was rightfully defending themselves?

Where there is profound lack of consensus, the public schools have no place teaching as though that consensus existed. To insist otherwise is also to practice domination.

To examine these issues further, see Trading-Off "Sacred" Values: 
Why Public Schools Should Not Try to "Educate"


Cordially
--- EGR