1 The Industrial Age Roots of General Education
The general education curriculum as we know it today is a product of the Industrial Revolution. The assumptions that underpin it are now being challenged as the Information Revolution matures. In The Meaning of General Education (Miller, 1988), I tracked the history of the idea of the general education curriculum from its 19th century origins in the Industrial Revolution through twentieth century innovations in response to the World Wars and the Cold War. The innovations that define the Information Revolution are continuing to spark changes to society that are perhaps even more profound than those of the industrial era. This piece will explore how the Information Revolution is placing new demands on education and how we might best articulate the role of general education in the 21st century’s global information society.
Looking Back: General Education in the Industrial Era
Before the Industrial Revolution, the American college served mainly to produce ministers and civic leaders. Its curriculum was based in the classical liberal arts, what the Yale faculty in their famous 1828 report called “the discipline and furniture of the mind” (Yale University Faculty, 1828/1961, p. 285). However, as the Industrial Revolution matured in the nineteenth century, other needs arose, and American higher education responded in several ways:
- American academics began to go to German research-oriented universities to earn their doctorates and returned with new interests in research, which stimulated interest in new disciplines and, by extension, changed how both faculty and curricula were organized within the institution.
- New interests in specialized areas of knowledge led to the growth of academic libraries.
- Industrialization created a demand for professionals in new field—engineering and business management, for instance—and universities responded by creating undergraduate and graduate programs in these new areas.
- New industries also stimulated a dramatic increase in immigration to the U.S.; the state governments responded by funding new higher education institutions—normal schools—to train teachers to serve the children of these new citizens.
- Rapid urbanization also created a concern that the nation’s farmers would not be able to feed the growing urban population. In response, the federal government funded land grant colleges and new agricultural research and education programs, further diversifying the curriculum and fostering the development of Agricultural Extension Services in the new land grant colleges.
- The experience of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization stimulated the development of new research arenas—sociology and social psychology, for example—which also stimulated the diversification of the university’s research mission, new public institutions, and, in the process, new curricula.
As higher education developed around new research and professional disciplines, general education evolved as well. While general education maintained some of the elements of the old liberal education, it increasingly became the “breadth” component of an undergraduate degree that was focused increasingly on narrowly focused professional and research majors. The goal of general education in this new era became to introduce key knowledge in a broad array of subjects, helping students to make a final choice of major and, in the process, providing some “furniture of the mind” for their role as members of the broader society. The result was the “distribution” approach to the undergraduate curriculum, with the traditional liberal education topics –literature, history, math, science, social science, philosophy, etc.—organized largely through a series of introductory courses taught from within in the discipline-based academic departments.
The distribution model made it harder for institutions to mount a comprehensive, unified general education curriculum, if for no other reason than that the responsibility for general education courses was distributed across the disciplines, each course conceived and taught within the standards of the discipline. Often, these are introductory courses in the discipline. The result, often, is a collection of general courses, rather than a coherent curriculum.
One of the early advocates for innovation in general education was John Dewey. In his 1915 book, Democracy and Education, Dewey emphasized the idea that education, while it may use materials from the past, is about the present. Noting that “an individual can live only in the present,” Dewey argued:
The study of past products will not help us understand the present, because the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they were the products. A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past (Dewey, 1915, p.75).
“The present, in short,” Dewey added, “generates the problems which lead us to search the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when we search” (p. 76). This led Dewey to a “technical definition” of education: “It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (ibid.).
John Dewey’s instrumentalist philosophy influenced the general education curriculum at Vermont’s Bennington College, which opened in 1932 with the first two years focused on helping students find their real interests and talents through a curriculum that used problem solving projects and experiments appropriate to the various subject areas.
Another innovation in the 1930s was the Experimental College, created by Alexander Meiklejohn at the University of Wisconsin with the goal, as Meiklejohn described it, of “the building up of self-direction . . . trying to create or cultivate intelligence, capable of being applied in any field of scholarly work” (Meiklejohn, 1932, p.10). The primary task, he wrote, was “the education of common men . . . in terms of the kind of thinking which all men are called upon to do in the enduring relations of life” (Miller, p. 45).
A third example, the Great Books Program at the University of Chicago, evolved out of what the university’s President Robert Maynard Hutchins described as a “permanent studies” curriculum based on the premise that “it is impossible to understand any subject or to comprehend the contemporary world” without understanding the ideas contained in the great books of western civilization (Miller, p. 53). “If we can know nothing about society,” he wrote in 1941, “if we can have only opinion about it, and if one man’s opinion is as good as another’s, then we may decide to get what we irrationally want by the use of irrational means, namely force” (Hutchins, 1941, p.31).
The move toward materialism had very direct implications for higher education, in Hutchins’ view. “. . .The aim of education is wisdom and goodness,” he wrote, adding, “Studies that do not bring us closer to this goal have no place in a university . . . If you deny this proposition, you take the responsibility of asserting that a rational view of the universe and one’s role in it is no better than an irrational one or none at all” (Hutchins, 1941, p. 26-27). The implications for the curriculum were clear: “If, then, we are to have standards of social criticism and social action, and if they are to be anything but emotional standards, they must result from philosophical and historical study and from the habit of straight thinking therein” (p. 29).
Ultimately, the goal of education was to find meaning for the individual’s role in society and for the ideals that hold society together. As Hutchins put it, “The alternatives before us are clear. Either we must abandon the ideal of freedom or we must educate our people for freedom” (Hutchins, 1941, p. 17).
