The Fresh Start that Wasn't
Discourses on the First Decade of Wallace Brett Donham (V)
This post belongs to a series of ‘discourses’ that build upon points made by Wallace Brett Donham in his Education for Responsible Living. As you might expect, both the title of this project and the approach that I take with the component essays owe much to the Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius of Niccolò Machiavelli.
Regardless of results, and it is too early to appraise these, the Army and Navy programs have done a great service by arousing interest in self-examination by the colleges. The war has focused our attention on the plain question whether existing liberal-arts training fails in comparison with the concrete effectiveness of scientific and engineering training as preparation for life in an age which science seems to dominate. This question should be settled on a long look ahead, not on a war basis. Does scientific and engineering training meet the needs of contemporary civilization? And if not, what are its limitations? What is the place of liberal-arts general education, and does it occupy this place? Are men graduating from liberal-arts colleges and entering active life well equipped to deal with the problems they will meet in life? In the present situation vested interests are weaker than in normal times. Many are in a mood to explore new avenues toward educating youth. As military training courses disappear, which they are rapidly doing, teachers will have time to work on building new teaching material and new courses. This is in fact a unique opportunity to make a fresh start. But where shall we go?
In the year Dean Donham wrote these words, Congress passed Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. Often called the ‘GI Bill of Rights’, this law paid the college costs, to include both tuition and living expenses, of veterans who enrolled in institutions of higher education.
In theory, this program made it easier for former students who had interrupted their formal schooling for the sake of military service to complete their courses of study. In practice, it convinced many who would otherwise have done something else to go to college. As a result, it provided the ‘vested interests’ of the academe with a bumper crop of fully-subsidized, highly-compliant, students, to the point where neither the suppliers nor the consumers of educational services sought the ‘fresh start’ that Donham had in mind.
Soon thereafter, the weaving of educational deferments into the warp and weft of the selective service system gave young men a powerful incentive, not merely to pursue undergraduate qualifications, but to crown the receipt of their bachelor’s degrees with several years of post-graduate studies. This effect, in turn, reinforced the trend, already in progress before the Second World War, to turn teacher training (‘normal’) schools into four-year colleges and four-year colleges into research universities.
To be continued …
Sources
Wallace Brett Donham Education for Responsible Living (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944) (Internet Archive) pages 13 and 14 (Internet Archive)
V.R. Cardozier Colleges and Universities in World War II (Westport: Praeger, 1993) pages 29-38 and 51-61 (Internet Archive)
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