The History of University Education in Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University (1876-1891). With supplementary notes on university extension and the university of the futureSteiner, Bernard C. (Bernard Christian)
History
The History of University Education in Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University (1876-1891). With supplementary notes on university extension and the university of the future
Steiner, Bernard C. (Bernard Christian)
Johns Hopkins University -- History; Universities and colleges -- Maryland -- History
Our results are much less satisfactory when we turn to the other side of
our system, and enquire as to curriculum. It must be admitted that the
larger part of our local centres can only take unit courses; there may
be often a considerable interval between one course and another; or
where courses are taken regularly the necessity of meeting popular
interest involves a distracting variety of subjects; while an
appreciable portion of our energies have to be taken up with preliminary
half-courses, rather intended to illustrate the working of the movement
than as possessing any high educational value. The most important
advance from the unit course is the Affiliation system of Cambridge
university. By this a town that becomes regularly affiliated, has
arranged for it a series of unit courses, put together upon proper
sequence of educational topics, and covering some three or four years:
students satisfying the lecturers and examiners in this extended course
are recognized as 'Students affiliated' (S.A.), and can at any time
enter the university with the status of second year's men,--the local
work being accepted in place of one year's residence and study. Apart
from this, the steps in our educational ladder other than the first are
still in the stage of prophecy. But it is universally recognized that
this drawback is a matter solely of funds: once let the movement command
endowment and the localities will certainly demand the wider curriculum
that the universities are only too anxious to supply.
The third point in our definition was that the movement was to be
organized on a basis of itinerant teachers. This differentiates
University Extension from local colleges, from correspondence teaching,
and from the systems of which Chautauqua is the type. The chief function
of a university is to teach, and University Extension must stand or fall
with its teachers. It may or may not be desirable on other grounds to
multiply universities; but there is no necessity for it on grounds of
popular education, the itinerancy being a sufficient means of bringing
any university into touch with the people as a whole. And the adoption
of such a system seems to be a natural step in the evolution of
universities. In the middle ages the whole body of those who sought a
liberal education were to be found crowded into the limits of university
towns, where alone were teachers to listen to and manuscripts to copy:
the population of such university centres then numbered hundreds where
to-day it numbers tens. The first university extension was the
invention of printing, which sent the books itinerating through the
country, and reduced to a fraction the actual attendance at the
university, while it vastly increased the circle of the educated. The
time has now come to send teachers to follow the books: the ideas of the
university being circulated through the country as a whole, while
residence at a university is reserved as the apex only of the university
system.
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