CHAPTER XI.

RECENT COLLEGES.-(Continued.)

5. Elective Courses.

SUPPLEMENTING these modifications, and in some degree made necessary by them and marking their culmination, is the large privilege of option accorded students in following a course of study.

The conditions leading to this changed attitude of the educated and general public toward, and the newer ideas of a liberal education, are manifold. Something may doubtless be ascribed to a very general withdrawal of authority in all matters, domestic, civil, and political, as well as educational. That this influence is one whose working and effect are not calculable, and is indefinitely and variously estimated, but universally recognized, only serves to dignify the fact. Besides, the fundamental American trait, protestant and confident, initiates a zeal for change, an impatience of tasks and restraints; and, along with a very natural intolerance of the wisdom of experience, suffers a confidence in untried methods, a wealth of risk, and speculation, and hopefulness, which, to a people of ancestral foundations, forebode only ill.

The growth of a people also, surrounded by and within reach of abundant material resources; stirred by constant exhibitions of material progress; influenced by present considerations; early forced into competitions for place, and personal aggrandizement, and local advantages; in a country where the virtues of party and sect are exalted; and, intoxicated by an almost unbroken record of achievements— easily divorces the public regard from the traditional regenerations of a pronounced humanistic culture, and breeds a warranted but sometimes unwise demand for the merely expedient and useful. Further, the early training in self

control which lies at the basis of our individual sovereignty and the rapid maturing of American youth, suggest a limited prescription and freer appointments throughout society. A citizenship at twenty-one must rest upon a previous training in self-direction, making the assumption of that citizenship rational. That the sentiment may be unwise though soundly inspired, and yet find a general indorsement, is not improbable. The imminence of citizenship to every student sets limits to authority, and fosters the tendency to early independence.

It has been aptly said by a recent writer: * " The American college curriculum, at the time when most of us became acquainted with it, was a very definite thing, time-honored, and commanding a certain respect from its correspondence with the theory on which it is based. Its fundamental idea was discipline of the mind. Its mode of effecting this was, in large part, by shutting the student's eyes to the distracting and inconsequential present, and fixing his gaze on that which was great and good, and hard to understand, in the past. The main work of the course consisted of drill in grammar and mathematics; and the results of this training were bound together, at the hands of the president, by a final exposition of such of the speculations of philosophers as seemed to him safe and substantial. This work lasted-for reasons so old as to be long since forgotten-just four years, and was preceded by a certain very definite amount of drill of much the same kind, which was regarded as a necessary preliminary to the other work.”

This is no caricature, but a statement of recorded fact; not all the merit belongs to the new education; the old-time learning, too, was worth treasuring; but that such education would no longer be called “liberal” has the most scholarly testimony. With the changed human relations have come new estimates, and the growing impression that "the languages of Greece and Rome can never again be

* Dr. David S. Jordan, "Science Sketches," p. 230.

considered as they were once-almost the sole requisites of a liberal education."*

The enlargement of the curriculum, due to the great increase of the field of knowledge-both spiritual and physical science has already been suggested as historically conditioning the lapse of the prescribed course. Science, history, and their comparative studies; philosophy that is not metaphysics and is more than speculation; anthropology -the comparative study of races, language, and customs; the evolution of laws, and ideals of culture-all represent legitimate lines of development and perfection. Neither can all be included nor these omitted.

A. BEGINNINGS OF THE OPEN SYSTEM.

It can not perhaps be said where or when the freedom to select studies was first formally allowed to students in our American schools. Indeed, it is a matter of no great importance; it grew. The privilege has been granted; is now used in every State, perhaps in a majority of all our colleges -in some institutions, too, where it should not be found. But the change is made, or making, and is part of an impulse as old as the century. This change in the curriculum, which in the older institutions has been brought about through years of experiment, and at the expense of much halting and indecision, the newer colleges possess as an inheritance. Sixty years span most that is historic in the question.

It would be interesting to trace to their origin the liberal, but to Americans then unfamiliar, notions of Jefferson, President Nott, Francis Wayland, Joseph Story, Prof. Ticknor, and others, touching this movement. It has a tendency to lead one into a kind of hero-worship to know how large a place the ideas of a few men have filled in the educational history of this country, until it is found that the few men

* Dr. Chase, "Liberal Education," address at the opening of Bryn Mawr College, 1885.

were exponents of a common sentiment, in whose minds the general impulse took shape, and who so became public spokesmen.

The early efforts to establish mechanics' and manual labor institutes are interesting as marking a reaction against the dominance of language and metaphysics, and an ingenuous appeal for a larger recognition of the physical sciences. The University of the City of New York, in 1830, organized with sixteen departments, one half of which were of science and the modern languages. Union college, under Dr. Eliphalet Nott, established and maintained for many years both classical and non-classical courses; the latter substituting German and an increased amount of mathematics in place of the classics, and both admitting a limited choice within the courses.

Harvard also was early led to consider the "fitness of the course of instruction," possibly at the suggestion, certainly with the support, of Judge Story, and in the year 1824 provided, through the corporation and overseers, and against the judgment of the faculty, "for the consideration, to a limited extent, of the desires of students in the arrangement of their studies." Under this provision, French and Spanish were offered as voluntaries" by Prof. Ticknor, and with minor interruptions continued so throughout his own, and Prof. Longfellow's connection with the institution, for twenty years. Further than this, with the exception that juniors might choose a substitute for one term of Hebrew, and seniors between chemistry and fluxions, all the studies of the college were required, as they had been for two centuries.

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B. THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

One of the most interesting of American university foundations is that of the University of Virginia. Its constitution and management are full of instruction to institutions both older and younger. Fortunate in wise direction, its comprehensive organization has been more or less copied by institutions of even greater pretensions.

He who would know the origin and inauguration, and from them learn of the inner spirit, of the University of Virginia, must read the life and study the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson. He was the controlling spirit in the enterprise from its inception till his death. His letters to Cabell and Dr. Priestley and Thomas Cooper and John Adams are full of interrogation and suggestion and plan concerning a “real university."

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As early as 1779, while yet the "Old Dominion" with her sister States was embroiled in a doubtful war; and again in 1814, after numerous defeats and constant opposition from the already established William and Mary College, from the Protestant churches, and from most of the political leaders of the time, Mr. Jefferson and his friends sought to provide for the State, along with a general system of education, a university, in which should be taught in the highest degree, every branch of knowledge, whether calculated to enrich, stimulate, and adorn the understanding, or to be useful in the arts and practical business of life." Five years later (1819) an act of the Assembly was obtained establishing the University of Virginia. When six years later it was opened, after a wide acquaintance and careful study of the most progressive institutions in the United States, it was found that in discipline and instruction, in constitution and means, it very materially differed from them all. In Mr. Jefferson's words publishing his plan it was said: "There is one practice from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is the holding of the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocation to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualifications only, and sufficient age.

* Letters to Prof. George Ticknor. See also Jefferson's "Works," vol.