Citizenship Education and the Colleges

Robert A. Walker

American Political Science Review, 1948, vol. 42, issue 1, 74-84

Abstract: One of the happier educational products of the war was the widespread self-examination it encouraged among American colleges. With the wartime slump in enrollments, those members of the faculty who remained on the campus were commonly given the task of planning the postwar educational programs of their respective institutions. We are now in that postwar period, and much of this admirable effort has been dropped to grapple with the heavy enrollments the schools were presumably planning to meet. But in many schools, whether the curricula underwent any major operations or not, there remains a ferment of doubt and argument over the adequacy of what they are doing.This ferment is not likely to die out soon. Colleges which brushed aside the polemics of Mr. Hutchins at Chicago a decade ago are still agitated by the Harvard Report on General Education. Harvard, like the College of the University of Chicago, is proceeding to make major departures from the prevailing practices of American colleges. Columbia College has paced the adoption of integrated courses in Western Civilization. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, guiding light of American technical schools, has discovered that engineers should also be liberally educated men and has made curricular changes designed to do something about it. The University of Florida and Michigan State College have moved sharply in the same direction, more or less independently, by creating basic colleges through which all would-be technicians and specialists must percolate before burying themselves in their chosen profession. Other schools are instituting comprehensive courses, tightening up the elective system, and otherwise taking steps to insure that general education is not lost in the scramble to prepare for a job.

Date: 1948
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:42:y:1948:i:01:p:74-84_05

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().