What America did : $b A record of achievement in the prosecution of the warKelly, Florence Finch
History
What America did : $b A record of achievement in the prosecution of the war
Kelly, Florence Finch
World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
Located at Beaune, in the Cote d’Or region, where the huge base
hospital had been built, in the great series of buildings no longer
needed for trainloads of wounded men was the “Khaki University,” at
which were given academic, agricultural, professional, commercial and
technical courses of three months each. Of its many buildings four
hundred were used for class room purposes and others were converted
into laboratories, dormitories, libraries and recreation halls.
Fourteen colleges comprised this Khaki University which, including the
agricultural college associated with it but located elsewhere, became
for the time of its existence the largest educational institution in
the world. Its colleges gave instruction in language, literature,
philosophy, science, fine and applied arts, journalism, education,
engineering, music, business, medicine, and all other subjects
usually provided for at educational institutions of every sort,
whether technical, academic, commercial or professional. Especial
attention was paid to agriculture. The engineering school offered a
full variety of courses in civil, electrical, mining, mechanical and
sanitary engineering. The college of arts, with an art training center
near Paris, had 1,000 students and gave instruction in architecture,
sculpture, painting, interior decoration, town planning, industrial
art, landscape gardening, and furnished guidance for the study of art
museums and structures of esthetic value. In the libraries of the Khaki
University were 500,000 volumes. Its faculty numbered 500 members and
15,000 men, all of them privates and officers of the A. E. F., enrolled
when the institution opened. The Y. M. C. A., whose Army Educational
Commission had devised and organized the entire huge educational
scheme, turned it all over to the War Department in the spring of 1919.
Many of the faculty members of important universities and colleges
in the United States aided in the working out of this comprehensive
educational plan and, under the direction of the Army Educational
Commission of the Y. M. C. A. and army officers, coöperated with them
in the immediate supervision of the schools. Nearly 50,000 officers
and men whose record cards showed them to have been school teachers
or university or college professors before they were soldiers were
detailed from the army for the work of teaching this huge body of
pupils in the post schools and at Beaune.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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