372 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 740 



abundant and standards low is thoroughly 

 immoral. 



Abraham Plexner 

 Caeneqie Foundation foe the 

 Advancement op Teaching 



A DANGER ARISING FROM THE POPULAR- 

 IZATION OF THE COLLEGE'' 



I WISH to speak of a danger whioh threat- 

 ens the American college as the result of 

 changes in the work of the college and in 

 its environment whose joint effect may be 

 summed up in the phrase, "the populariza- 

 tion of the eoUege." 



The history of the American college be- 

 gins about the close of the first third of 

 the seveateenth century, Harvard Col- 

 lege having been founded in 1637. The 

 traditional college curriculum, which was 

 not radically changed till about the middle 

 of the nineteenth century, was largely due 

 to the intellectual conditions of the seven- 

 teenth century. When Harvard College 

 was founded, there was very little to be 

 studied, beyond the nidiments of a com- 

 mon English education, excepting Latin, 

 Greek and Hebrew and a little mathe- 

 matics. At that very time Descartes was 

 shaping the outlines of the method of co- 

 ordinates in geometry, but the world had 

 still to wait half a century for the inven- 

 tion of the calculus. A half-century was 

 to elapse before Ne^vton's■ great discovery 

 of gravitation gave unity to the conception 

 of the universe. Almost a century and a 

 half was to pass away before the discover- 

 ies of Priestley and Lavoisier created the 

 science of chemistry. The "Systema Na- 

 turae" of Linnffius did not appear until 

 Harvard College was already a century 

 old. A century and a half was to elapse 

 before geology and paleontology took 



'Address given before the Section of Education 

 of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science. 



shape under the hands of Hutton and 

 Cuvier. It was almost a century and a 

 half before Adam Smith's "Wealth of Na- 

 tions" laid the foundations of the modern 

 study of economics. It was more than half 

 a century before Locke's "Essay on the 

 Human Understanding" opened the dis- 

 cussions of the modern period of philoso- 

 phy. More than two centuries were to 

 elapse before the study of language took 

 on a scientific foi'm in Grimm's "Ge- 

 schichte der deutschen Sprache." Two 

 editions had already appeared of the col- 

 lected plays of Shakespeare, but as yet no 

 one dreamed of English literature as 

 standing on a par with the great classic 

 literatures as an object of study; and still 

 less would it have occurred to any English- 

 speaking educator to think of the litera- 

 ture of any other modern language as a 

 worthy object of study. The ancient 

 languages and a little mathematics formed 

 about all the educational material that was 

 accessible in the seventeenth century, and 

 it was nothing strange that the curriculum 

 developed in the environment of that age 

 survived for a considerable time after the 

 environment had changed. But the old 

 curriculum has now become thoroughly 

 extinct. The new branches of learning 

 which have developed in the last three cen- 

 turies have come to take a dominant posi- 

 tion in the education of youth, as in the 

 thought of manhood. The wealth of edu- 

 cational material at present available is 

 vastly larger than any one can deal with 

 in the bi'ief years of the college course. 

 Everywhere the fixed curriculum has given 

 place to the elective system. With the 

 recognition that the field of learning is so 

 large that no one can secure even an intro- 

 duction to all departments of it in the col- 

 lege course, the elective system has be- 

 come a practical necessity. Prom the vast 

 variety of attractive and useful studies 

 each student is rightly left to select, in 



