The Production-Line College
O UR effort to apply productionline methods to a function which must of its nature be individual has been a major cause of our failure in higher education. Under the combined pressures of an expanding enrollment and of a curriculum which became every year more complex as our fund of scientific information increased and as other agencies sloughed off more and more responsibility onto the school, we have attempted to organize our schools and colleges upon a basis analogous to that of the industrial production line. Standardization of institutions and of curriculums, strict departmentalization of subject-matter, teaching periods all of rigidly prescribed identical length regardless of the subject to be taught-these are some of the devices which are adopted by the educational production line. The history instructor teaches his fifty minutes, the bell clangs, and the student closes his notebook upon the last half-written note. The instructor dare not, in many cases, attempt to bespeak his class for so much as fifteen seconds after the bell has rung, since this might result in their being late to someone else's lecture. Nor may his discourse occupy fewer than its prescribed fifty minutes, lest if the instructor fail to fill in every second the students might move on into a classroom not yet emptied to receive them. One day the instructor in mathematics may complete his work in half a period, on another he finds a theorem half-expounded when his time is up. Dare he teach English, or chemistry, or history in the time which remains over and above? Interdepartmental courtesy usually requires that he keep silent, except on mathematics, even if his training may have made him competent in some other field. Such teachers and such tactics are perhaps reasonably efficient for the teaching of the various subjectmatters. But can they be employed in the teaching of people? If you were to ask the average college teacher to what extent he believes he is influencing the intellectual growth of his students, he would probably say many brave things about the knowledges and the skills they are acquiring, and the interest in his subject shown in their discussions; but he will, if honest, tell also of discussions interrupted at the peak of interest and of vain efforts twenty-four hours or even a week later to revive them, of students unable to integrate their work in his field with that in other subjects,