220 



NA TURE 



[August ii, 1923 



International Education. 



" ^PHKRE is hardly any important national 

 *■ problem left in the world which has not an 

 international relation and aspect." " The search for 

 truth and its application to human need is a vast, 

 world-wide co-operative task. . . . Every country 

 should seek entangling alliances in a league for 

 scientific progress." Of these quotations the first is 

 from aspeech made recently in London by Dr. Nicholas 

 Murray Butler, the second from a report, published 

 last year, by the president of the Rockefeller Founda- 

 tion. Both indicate a point of view which has been 

 adopted with enthusiasm since the War by a consider- 

 able number of people, especially in academic circles, 

 in the United States. Both in America and on this 

 side of the Atlantic, where it is more familiar, system- 

 atic efforts have been made to orientate higher 

 education to some extent to this supra-national point 

 of view. 



In America two important organisations have been 

 established expressly for the furtherance of Inter- 

 national Education — the Institute of International 

 Education by the Carnegie Endowment for Inter- 

 national Peace, and the International Education 

 Board by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The Board, which 

 only came into being this year and aims at promoting 

 " education throughout the world," has made a grant 

 of 100,000 dollars a year for ten years to Teachers 

 College, Columbia University, to aid in establishing, 

 as an integral part of the College, an International 

 Institute for the instruction of foreign students (of 

 whom there are already some 250 in the College) and 

 of Americans engaged in teaching in foreign countries, 

 and for research and investigation into foreign educa- 

 tional conditions and the adaptation to those condi- 

 tions of American systems and methods of education. 

 The Board aims at establishing mutually helpful 

 relations with other countries in regard to selected 

 specific educational problems, and has already 

 arranged for a study of co-operative farming methods 

 in Denmark. Many of the activities of the Rocke- 

 feller Foundation, with which the Board is closely 

 associated, have an international educational char- 

 acter : of the 157 individuals who held the Founda- 

 tion's fellowships in 1921 only 71 were Americans, 

 the others belonging to 1 7 other nationalities. 



The Institute of International Education began 

 work in 1919, and its director, Dr. S. P. Duggan, has 

 recently presented its fourth annual report. Among 

 its varied achievements during 1922 was an agree- 

 ment with the Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis 

 Island, designed to mitigate in its application to 

 students the new American immigration law limiting 

 to specified quota the number of immigrants from 

 foreign countries, the director undertaking to act 

 as sponsor for properly certificated students and 

 the commissioner agreeing to admit such students 

 provisionally on parole. Among its other enterprises 

 may be mentioned : arranging for the selection and 

 distribution of 45 fellowship-holders from France for 

 study in the United States and 35 from the United 

 States for study in France ; acting as agent for the 

 Spanish Junta para Ampliaci6n de Estudios, which 

 sent 6 fellowship holders to the United States, and 

 for the Czechoslovakian Government, which sent 5 ; 

 assisting the French authorities to select French girls 

 for training, partly in France and partly in America, 

 in library work and public health nursing ; secur- 

 ing fellowships in American institutions for foreign 

 students ; promoting resort by Americans to summer 

 sessions in foreign universities ; organising student 

 tours in Italy, France, England, and Scandinavia ; 

 arranging exchanges of professors ; and promoting 



NO. 2806, VOL. 112] 



the formation of International Relations Clubs for 

 the discussion of international questions. The Insti- 

 tute has now an established place as one of the most 

 influential of existing organs for the development of 

 intellectual intercourse among the nations of the world. 



In Great Britain the most important single endow- 

 ment of international education is that provided 

 by the Rhodes Scholarship Trust. Provision is now 

 made under the trust for the continuous residence at 

 Oxford of 190 scholars selected from English-speaking 

 countries outside the United Kingdom. A peculiarity 

 of the method of selection for these scholarships is 

 an insistence on moral force of character, capacity 

 for leadership ; in short, all-round ability, as well 

 as literary and scholastic attainments. A similar 

 principle is prescribed for selecting candidates for the 

 6 Henry P. Davison scholarships founded this year 

 to provide for Oxford and Cambridge men spending 

 a year at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. A few 

 scholarships similarly designed to draw students from 

 abroad are offered by certain Cambridge Colleges, 

 the Imperial College, and the universities of Liverpool, 

 Manchester, McGill, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, 

 most of them being open only to students of countries 

 within the British Empire. 



Conversely, many universities have endowments, 

 such as the Craven Fund and Radcliffe travelling 

 fellowships fund, which encourage students to go 

 abroad for study or research, generally in some 

 specified field, such as modern languages and institu- 

 tions, classical studies, or the fine arts, in which 

 sufficient facilities are not available at home. 

 Similarly various governments and voluntary associa- 

 tions, such as the federations of university women, 

 the Anglo-Swedish Society, and the Canadian 

 Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, have 

 instituted scholarships enabling students to travel 

 to distant countries for educational purposes. The 

 Government of Panama, for example, periodically 

 sends two carefully selected students to universities 

 in Great Britain for complete degree courses of study. 

 The Albert Kahn travelling fellowships, open to 

 British graduates of universities of the I'nited 

 Kingdom, are remarkable for their breadth of aim — 

 " to enable men ... to enter into personal contact 

 with men and countries they might otherwise never 

 have known ; to issue from the world of books . . . 

 into the broader world of . . . all such human 

 interests, struggles, and endeavours as go to the 

 making up of general civilisation." 



Apart from endowments for encouraging inter- 

 national education by scholarships and fellowships 

 there are many influences, some of quite recent 

 origin, having a similar tendency. The universities 

 of the United Kingdom have instituted a new doctor- 

 ate, the Ph.D., open to graduates of foreign uni- 

 versities as well as to their own, and have organ- 

 ised in connexion therewith instruction in research 

 methods ; their laboratories and other equipment for 

 advanced study and research have been greatly 

 developed ; their representatives have taken part in 

 missions to American, French, Belgian, and Swiss 

 universities ; they have established a standing 

 committee of their executive heads with the Uni- 

 versities Bureau as its secretariat, and a separate 

 committee for promoting interchange of students and 

 teachers with universities in other lands — a purpose 

 which has been greatly furthered by the constitution 

 of the British divisions of the American University 

 Union and the Office National des Universites et 

 £coles Fran9aises, both of which have offices in the 

 I house belonging to the Universities Bureau. There 



