DIVORCE EDUCATION FROM CLASS PRIVILEGE -- CONANT

The following are excerpts from President Conant's address at the ceremonies inaugurating Howard L. Bevis as President of Ohio University on October 26, 1940.

"When the history of American education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comes to be written, the development of the state-supported universities will be the dominant theme. The tremendous growth of these institutions during the first half of the twentieth century is a unique phenomenon. This growth will be recorded by historians as clear evidence that the optimistic intellectual courage born of the fifteenth century Renaissance was, five centuries later, still driving westward with undiminished vigor.

"Such a statement may seem to many blindly optimistic. To those who urge that our Universities revert to the outlook of the Middle Ages it will appear not so much optimistic as outmoded and heretical.

"This yearning for pre-Renaissance culture which exists in certain of our educational circles is a new phenomenon in the history of this nation. It may be argued that it is the harbinger of the sunset of the Renaissance spirit. But I belong with those who hold the contrary view.

You Can't Have Both

"This is an inherent antithesis between the unity of medieval life and the chaos of the individualistic spirit of the Renaissance. There is an antithesis between a closed system of coherent culture and a system of rampant individualism, between dogma and free inquiry; you may have the one or the other. But you are chasing rainbows if you think you can have them both.

"I am firmly convinced that the common denominator among all universities past and present is professional education.

"The Renaissance type of university has today expanded to include the professional training of ministers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, historians, philosophers, research workers in the sciences. Such professional training is a lengthy process. Furthermore it must be preceded by the development of certain types of mental ability.

"So far in this discussion, I have carefully avoided the words, "higher education." I heartily wish this phrase could be abolished. It connotes false values, raises implications of snobbery and hampers our best efforts in persuading young people to pursue that course of study best suited to their talents. By speaking of the "privileges of a higher education" we make the situation still worse.

"The good majority of citizens of this country accept as axiomatic the statement that this nation should be classless. They freely admit that hereditary rights are strictly limited to private property, and that even the inheritance of private property does not carry with it undue privileges. Certainly it is a principle of this republic that the inheritance of private property shall not determine the opportunity for education nor its scope.

Variety, Net Hierarchy

"If we are to continue to have an essentially free and classless society in this country, we must proceed from the premise that there are no educational privileges. We must endeavor to sort out at each stage in the educational process those boys and girls who can profit from one type of education, and those who can profit by another. There must be a variety of educational channels leading towards different walks in life. And as far as possible there should be no hierarchy of education disciplines; no one channel should have a social standing above the other.

"The social implications hidden in those words "higher education" are an obstacle to those who seek to minimize the number who follow the wrong educational road.

Viewpoint Changes Slowly

"But the viewpoint on matters such as these changes slowly. There are those who frankly, though silently, look upon colleges and universities as preeminently special preserves.

"There are others who apparently envisage a society of a socialistic type. In their utopian state everyone, they believe, should receive an education at least the equivalent of the liberal arts colleges of four years. This seems to high a value on academic life.

Education Must Be Democratic

"How shall we give our future citizens a point of view which makes all of them effective contributors to the welfare of the nation? In short, what kind of general education should we supply? There must be no question of privilege. Let me both an undesirable and an impossible situation. It places altogether too no one say that some who have been through four years of college have had an opportunity denied to others who have the same aptitude and ambitions.

"We must rather have the types of general education fitted to the capacities of the individual, and distributed among all the future citizens of the land. This general education starts in high school and must be so arranged that it can be assimilated by an extremely heterogeneous group of students.