Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1997
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 103-17.
Abstract
In 1929 the University of Chicago plan for liberal or general education was first proposed by its young president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Sociologist Daniel Bell, in his history of general education in America says, "The Chicago plan sought to draw together the disciplines in three fields-the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences-and Jo consider problems which, by their nature, could only be understood by applying concepts from different disciplines. "1 Hutchins' proposal became the most discussed plan for balancing university curriculum's that had become specialized and disjointed in the first thirty years of the century, although it was far from being the only general education experiment of its day. The Experimental School at the University of Wisconsin and the General College at the University of Minnesota are usually identified, along with Chicago, as the three most significant general education experiments of the early 1930s.2 These experimental programs served as models, in whole or in part, for reforms throughout the Great Plains region of Canada and the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.
In this essay I will identify two trends that emerge out of these initial experiments-a trend combining liberal education traditions and a trend combining liberal and professional education-and show to what extent those trends were taken up by the land-grant colleges, state universities, and provincial universities of the Great Plains. David R. Russell identifies three communities within the general education movement: those who saw utility and efficiency as the primary goal of education; those who saw culture as the primary goal; and those who saw social reform as the goal. This paper will focus primarily on the goals and actions of the first and second communities.3 I use "liberal education" here to speak mainly of traditions in education. Twentieth-century experiments like those at Chicago, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are best described as "general education experiments" because they attempt to offer a broad or general education. They are informed, however, by the liberal education traditions extending from Greek and Roman education to nineteenth century versions of liberal education. To clarify this distinction, I am arguing that this comparison of American and Canadian schools will show that western Canadian universities were more influenced by general education experiments on the Great Plains than by the nineteenth- century liberal education tradition in eastern Canada. The term "general education" was seldom used by Canadian educational reformers, but was more common than "liberal education" in the US I will frequently refer to American general education experiments and Canadian liberal education flirtations, but the two are synonymous.
I have limited my study of American schools, besides Chicago and Minnespta, to those in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska because I am primarily interested in establishing educational patterns, not advancing research into the history of education or the curriculum at the American institutions. The archival research I have done in western Canada, however, will shed some new light on the nature of American educational and cultural influences on western Canada. This comparison will also show that much of the appeal of these Great Plains experiments is their similarity to a British, Arnoldian conception of higher education, an issue that may complicate our understanding of national and regional identity formation.
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln