Higher Education In Twentieth-Century America

Fülszöveg

This book is the distillation of a lifetime of involvement, observation, and thinking by a distinguished scholar and educator. Mr. De-Vane analyzes the major trends shaping American collegiate and university education today; in doing so, he uses history, not as an end in itself, but as a means of demonstrating the importance of these movements by tracing their development. His method is to single out particular institutions for the parts they have played and still play. Yale College is chosen to illustrate the survival of the American college into the twentieth century and its delayed transformation into a university; Johns Hopkins and Chicago exemplify early phases of the university movement, and Harvard its mature development; Michigan and Wisconsin represent different courses taken by the state universities; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exhibits an aspect, in its extreme form, of the institution of higher education under contemporary pressures.
The classical... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This book is the distillation of a lifetime of involvement, observation, and thinking by a distinguished scholar and educator. Mr. De-Vane analyzes the major trends shaping American collegiate and university education today; in doing so, he uses history, not as an end in itself, but as a means of demonstrating the importance of these movements by tracing their development. His method is to single out particular institutions for the parts they have played and still play. Yale College is chosen to illustrate the survival of the American college into the twentieth century and its delayed transformation into a university; Johns Hopkins and Chicago exemplify early phases of the university movement, and Harvard its mature development; Michigan and Wisconsin represent different courses taken by the state universities; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exhibits an aspect, in its extreme form, of the institution of higher education under contemporary pressures.
The classical curriculum of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which had prepared students well for leadership in an agrarian nation, gave way to the scientific and technological necessities of a growing industrial nation and world power, and to the example of the new German university. Like Clark Kerr, author of The Uses of the University (HUP, 1963), Mr. DeVane is vitally concerned with the education of future generations. He sees the necessity of change, but also the value of the classical tradition "that has built a deep idealism into the American character over the generations."
William Clyde DeVane is Dean Emeritus of Yale College, and Sanford Professor of English at Yale. He is the author of several books on nineteenth-century English literature.
Library of Congress Series in American Civilization
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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