Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899Various
Religion
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
No professor can plead ignorance of the way to enter this new career
of usefulness. One can scarcely pick up a college catalogue or a
magazine or a newspaper without learning how to make the university
universal. One of the simplest plans, with which all are familiar, is
to send to men with a reputation for learning a ruled form and a
request that each will write, in the proper columns, the price,
publisher, and title of the best book on his own subject--mathematics,
astronomy, moral science, or whatever it may be--or, if he knows of no
such book, that he will write one. An accompanying circular tells how
these lists are to be scattered through the innumerable homes of our
land, and how diplomas are to be distributed as prizes to those who,
after purchasing the books, prepare and submit the most exhaustive
permutations of their tables of contents.
Learned men who do not approve this plan are offered a choice from
many others: six-week courses in law, medicine, and theology; summer
schools for the promotion of science and the liberal arts; questions
and answers in the educational column of some journal for the home; or
a national university so universal that it shall supply lunches and
learning for all out of the public chest, with no doorkeeper to
examine passports.
The way to extend the university in this direction is so well
understood that I will turn now to another part of our subject, for
some may be less familiar with our opportunity to construct a royal
road to learning for those who are entitled to use it.
A recent writer on education, who says American universities impose
"upon young men in the nineteenth century a curriculum devised by
dead-and-gone priests for the young men of the twelfth," calls upon
the teachers of America to reconstruct their curriculum on
psychological principles. I myself am no psychologist, and while I
fail to see how this fact concerns the public, it has recently been
pointed out in print, although no one has ever charged me with lack of
reverence for the psychologist. In truth, he is to me what the good
old family doctor is to many, for I am convinced that it would be hard
to name one among all the educational ills that flesh is heir
to that he would not be able to throw on the spot, with a good
collar-and-elbow hold. I have a prodigious respect for those fine big
words _curriculum_ and _psychological principles_, and I welcome the
plan for reconstructing the curriculum on psychological principles the
more eagerly because it is extremely simple and not hard to
understand, like some psychological utterances. In fact, it is so very
simple and easy that it is sure of enthusiastic indorsement by
innumerable children, for this reformer's plan is neither more nor
less than the abolition of the pedagogue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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