COLLEGE TEACHING

STUDIES IN

METHODS OF TEACHING IN

THE COLLEGE

Edited by

PAUL KLAPPER, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Education

The College of the City of New York

with an

Introduction by

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, LL.D.

President of Columbia University

Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York

WORLD BOOK COMPANY

1920

WORLD BOOK COMPANY

THE HOUSE OF APPLIED KNOWLEDGE

Established, 1905, by Caspar W. Hodgson

Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York

2126, Prairie Avenue, Chicago

Copyright, 1920, by World Book Company

Copyright in Great Britain

All rights reserved

PREFACE

The student of general problems of education or of elementary education finds an extensive literature of varying worth. In the last decade our secondary schools have undergone radical reorganization and have assumed new functions. A rich literature on every phase of the high school is rapidly developing to keep pace with the needs and the progress of secondary education. The literature on college education in general and college pedagogy in particular is surprisingly undeveloped. This dearth is not caused by the absence of problem, for indeed there is room for much improvement in the organization, the administration, and the pedagogy of the college. Investigators of these problems have been considerably discouraged by the facts they have gathered. This volume is conceived in the hope of stimulating an interest in the quality of college teaching and initiating a scientific study of college pedagogy. The field is almost virgin, and the need for constructive programs is acute. We therefore ask for our effort the indulgence that is usually accorded a pioneer.

In this age of specialization of study it is evident that no college teacher, however wide his experience and extensive his education, can speak with authority on the teaching of all the subjects in the college curriculum, or even of all the major ones. For this reason this volume is the product of a coöperating authorship. The editor devotes himself to the study of general methods of teaching that apply to almost all subjects and to most teaching situations. In addition, he coördinates the work of the other contributors. He realizes that there exists among college professors an active hostility to the study of pedagogy. The professors feel that one who knows his subject can teach it. The contributors have been purposely selected in order to dispel this hostility. They are, one and all, men of undisputed scholarship who have realized the need of a mode of presentation that will make their knowledge alive.

Books of multiple authorship often possess too wide a diversity of viewpoints. The reader comes away with no underlying thought and no controlling principles. To overcome this defect, so common in books of this type, a tentative outline was formulated, setting forth a desirable mode of treating, in the confines of one chapter, the teaching of any subject in the college curriculum. This outline was submitted to all contributors for critical analysis and constructive criticism. The original plan was later modified in accordance with the suggestions of the contributors. This final outline, which follows, was then sent to the contributors with the full understanding that each writer was free to make such modifications as his specialty demanded and his judgment dictated. This outline is followed in most of the chapters and gives the book that unifying element necessary in any book and vital in a work of so large a coöperating authorship.

The editor begs to acknowledge his indebtedness to the many contributors who have given generously of their time and their labor with no hope of compensation beyond the ultimate appreciation of those college teachers who are eager to learn from the experience of others so that they may the better serve their students.

TENTATIVE OUTLINE FOR THE TEACHING OF —— IN THE COLLEGE

Paul Klapper
The College of the City of New York

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

There was a time when it was felt, probably correctly, that a satisfactory college training could be had by requiring all students to follow a single prescribed course of study. At that time, college students were drawn almost exclusively from families and homes of a single type or kind. Their purposes in after-life were similar, and their range of intellectual sympathy, while intense, was rather narrow. The last fifty years have changed all this. College students are now drawn from families and homes of every conceivable type and kind. Their purposes in after-life are very different, while new subjects of study have been multiplied many fold. The old and useful tradition of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, together with a little history and literature, as the chief elements in a college course of study, had to give way when first the natural sciences, and then the social sciences, claimed attention and when even these older subjects of study were themselves subdivided into many parts.

These changes forced a change in the old-fashioned program of college study, and led to the various substitutes for it that now exist. Whether a college prefers the elective system of study, or the group system, or some other method of combining instruction that is regarded as fundamental with other instruction that is regarded as less so, the fact is that all these are simply different kinds of attempt to meet a new condition which is the natural result of intellectual and economic changes. Just now the college is in a state of transition. It is not at all clear precisely what its status will be a generation hence, or how far present tendencies may continue to increase, or how far they may be counteracted by a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. Therefore this is a time to describe rather than to dogmatize, and it is description which is the characteristic mark of the important series of papers which constitute the several chapters in the present volume.

A careful reading of these papers is commended not only to the great army of college teachers and college students, but to that still greater army of those who, whether as alumni or as parents or as citizens, are deeply concerned with the preservation of the influence and character of the American college for its effect upon our national standards of thought and action.

American colleges are of two distinct types, and it may be that the future has in store a different position for each type. The true distinction between colleges is according as they are separate or are incorporated in a university system, and not at all as to whether they are large or small. A separate college, such as Amherst or Beloit or Grinnell or Pomona, has its own peculiar problems of support and administration. The university college, on the other hand, such as Columbia or Harvard or Chicago or the college of any state university, has quite different problems of support and of administration. It is not unlikely that the distinction between these two types of college will become more sharply marked as years go by, and that eventually they will appear to be two distinct institutions rather than two types of one and the same institution.

Meanwhile, we have to deal with the college as it is, in all its varied forms, but characteristically American whatever its form. The American college has little or no resemblance to the English Public School or to the French Lycée or to the German Gymnasium. It is something more than any one of these, and at the same time something less. It differs from them all very much as the conditions of American life differ from those of English or of French or of German life. The college may or may not involve residence, but when it does involve residence, it is at its best. It is then that the largest amount of carefully ordered and stimulating influence can be brought to bear upon the daily life of growing and expanding youth, and it is then and only then, that youth can get the inestimable benefits which follow from daily and hourly contact with others of like age, like tastes, like habits, and like purposes. Indeed, it has often been said that the college gives more through its opportunities which attach to residence, than through its opportunities which attach to instruction.

Almost every conceivable problem that can arise in college life and college work, is discussed in the following pages. It is now coming to be understood that the health of the college student is as much a matter of concern as his instruction, and that a college is not doing its full duty by those who seek its doors, when it merely provides libraries, laboratories, and skillful teachers. It must also provide for such conditions of residence, of food, of exercise, and of frequent medical examination and inspection, as shall protect and preserve the health of those who come to take advantage of its instruction.

There is one other point which should not be overlooked, and that is the literally immense influence exerted in America by that solidarity of college sentiment and college opinion which is kept alive by organizations of former college students scattered throughout the land. This, again, is a peculiarly American development, and it serves to unite the college and public sentiment much more closely than any formal tie could possibly do. Indeed, it illustrates how completely the American people claim the college as their own. The man or woman who has once been a college student never ceases to be a member of that particular college or to labor to extend its influence and to increase its usefulness.

Every reader of this volume should approach it in a spirit of sympathetic understanding of American higher education, and of the college as the oldest instrument of that higher education and still one of the chief elements in it.

Nicholas Murray Butler
Columbia University

PART ONE

I

A large proportion of university graduates were included among the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were chiefly graduates of Cambridge, which had always been religiously more tolerant than Oxford, and especially of Emmanuel College, which was the stronghold of Puritanism at Cambridge. It was natural that these men, leaders in the affairs of the colony, should want to establish a New Cambridge University, but it is astonishing that they were able to do so as early as 1636, only six years after the founding of this colony. Two years later the college was named after John Harvard, a clergyman and a graduate of Emmanuel, who upon his death bequeathed half his estate and all his fine library of three hundred volumes to the college. The religious motive predominated in the founding of Harvard, for though the colonists longed "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity," they were actuated chiefly by dread "to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust."

Harvard remained the sole instrument in the colonies for that purpose for more than half a century. In 1693 the College of William and Mary was founded in Virginia, with the most generous endowment of any pre-Revolutionary college, generous because of the help received from the mother country. It was the child of the Church of England, and its president and its professors had to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles. Subscription to a religious creed was also demanded of the president and tutors of the third American college, founded in 1701. This Collegiate Institute, as it was called, moved from place to place for more than a decade, but finally it settled permanently in New Haven in 1717. It afterward received the name of Yale College in honor of Elihu Yale, who had given it generous assistance.

As a result of the founding of these three institutions, the New England and the Southern colonies had their need for ministers fairly well supplied, but this was not yet true of the Middle colonies. However, the Presbyterians had become particularly strong in the Middle colonies, and their religious zeal resulted in the establishment of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, in 1746.

A few years later Benjamin Franklin advanced for the college a new raison d'être. In 1749 he published a pamphlet entitled "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania," in which he advocated the establishment of an academy whose purpose was not the training of ministers but the secular one of developing the practical virtue necessary in the opening up of a new country. The Academy was opened in 1751, and the charter, granted in 1755, designated the institution as "The College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia." Though the extremely modern organization and curriculum suggested by Franklin were not realized, the institution, which was afterward called "The University of Pennsylvania," offered the most liberal curriculum of any college in the colonies up to the Revolution.

The human motive was uppermost also in the establishment of King's College in 1754. The colonial assembly desired its establishment to enhance the welfare and reputation of the colony, and the only connection between the college and the Church of England lay in the requirement that the president should be a communicant of that church and that the morning and evening service of the college should be performed out of the liturgy of that church. But the religious motive again comes to the fore in the establishment of Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, in 1764, primarily to train ministers for the Baptist churches; of Queens, afterwards named Rutgers, in 1766, to provide ministers for the Dutch Reformed churches; and of Dartmouth, in 1769, from which it was hoped at first that the evangelization of the Indians would proceed.