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
between the wants of a locality and the educational supply offered by
universities or similar central institutions. No doubt such a scheme is
widely different from the ideal education of European countries, so
highly organized from above that the minister of education can look at
his watch and know at any moment all that is being done throughout the
country. On the contrary the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race leans
towards self-help; it has been the mission of the race in the past to
develop self-government in religion and politics, it remains to crown
this work with the application of the voluntary system to liberal
education.
In indulging this piece of speculation I have had a practical purpose
before me. If what I have described be a reasonable forecast for the
University of the Future, does it not follow that University Extension,
as the germ of it, presents a field for the very highest academic
ambition? To my mind it appears that existing types of university have
reached a point where further development in the same direction would
mean decline. In English universities the ideal is 'scholarship.'
Scholarship is a good thing, and we produce it. But the system which
turns out a few good scholars every year passes over the heads of the
great mass of university students without having awakened them to any
intellectual life; the universities are scholarship-factories producing
good articles but with a terrible waste of raw material. The other main
type of university enthrones 'research' as its summum bonum. Possibly
research is as good a purpose as a man can set before him, but it is not
the sole aim in life. And when one contemplates the band of recruits
added each year to the army of investigators, and the choice of ever
minuter fields--not to say lanes and alleys--of research, one is led to
doubt whether research is not one of the disintegrating forces of
society, and whether ever increasing specialisation must not mean a
perpetual narrowing of human sympathies in the intellectual leaders of
mankind. Both types of university appear to me to present the phenomena
of a country suffering from the effects of overproduction, where the
energies of workers had been concentrated upon adding to the sum of
wealth, and all too little attention had been given to the distribution
of that wealth through the different ranks of the community. Just at
this point the University Extension movement appears to recall academic
energy from production to distribution; suggesting that devotion to
physics, economics, art, can be just as truly shown by raising new
classes of the people to an interest in physical and economic and
aesthetic pursuits, as by adding to the discoveries of science, or
increasing the mass of art products. To the young graduate, conscious
that he has fairly mastered the teaching of the past, and that he has
within him powers to make advances, I would suggest the question
whether, even for the highest powers, there is any worthier field than
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