The New Trend

In days not so very long ago the whole educational system from bottom to top was based on the assumption of individual similarity. . . The assumption was that the classical languages, mathematics, and a few other studies varying more or less from college to college would tune up the mind, so to speak, to concert pitch.

Recently many so-called educators have gone to the opposite extreme of placing emphasis on individual differences, an extreme that is no more tenable when employed without check than that of exclusive attention to individual similarities. . . This tendency has reached the college and serves to augment the impulse in the same direction given by the system of free electives initiated by President Eliot of Harvard. Under the influence of this movement the colleges have multiplied the number of courses offered so that any taste, however specialized or even erratic, may be satisfied.

Without going into any profound analysis of personality, either individual or social, it seems evident that there are many aspects of young men and women in which they are similar and many in which they are different. Any system of education that does not keep its eyes open to both facts is certain to be lopsided. The existence of individual similarities among students lies back of the almost uniform practice in college, or school either for that matter, of devoting a certain part of the course to subject matter that constitutes a sort of highest common facor of what any young man ought to know. . . This highest common factor may be looked upon as a body of knowledge, broad in character and stimulating in intellectual effect, through the medium of which a student may obtain an insight into the various directions in which a more detailed study of the field would carry him.

Herbert E. Hawkes in the Nation.