JOHN HARVARD.

Evening Star, Issue 22447, 18 September 1936, Page 8

JOHN HARVARD.

An exhibition that has been opened in the Bodleian Library at Oxford naturally draws attention to the progress made in education in the United States, which to-day contains 1,117 universities, colleges, and professional schools. Harvard and Yale in some degree correspond to Oxford and Cambridge in England. It is the tercentenary of the foundation of Harvard that is being celebrated by the Bodleian exhibition. This institution is the oldest, richest, and best equipped of the homes of learning in the United States. It was named in honour of a Cambridge graduate, the Rev. John Harvard, who went to New England in 1637, and dying in 1638 bequeathed to the college that it was proposed to establish in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over three hundred volumes and a considerable sura of money. In the struggling pioneering days of the colony there was little time to devote to tho arts and sciences, and the avowed object of Harvard was the preparation of young men for the Puritan ministry. In its infancy the college wah supported by voluntary contributions from tho churches and from the Massachusetts colony. There was little money available in those days, and for a long time Harvard was handicapped by many difficulties. In the nineteenth century, however, a change for the better came. Harvard expanded into a university, and it was delivered from, sectarian control and made independent of the State. Harvard, conservative in its methods as a university should he within reason, is now regarded as one of the great universities of the world,' rich in financial resources and strong in academic influence.

In his book, ‘ Universities: American, English, and German,’ Dr Abraham Flexner, a well-known American authority on education, makes critical comments on phases of university work in the United States, in which various colleges have gone outside the scope of what in the opinion of sober and wellbalanced educationists is the true function of the university. He points out that American, universities are open to innovation, which is excellent, but he comments that they have been invaded indiscriminately by things both good and bad. Discussing the less admirable trend and developments, he says: “A wild, uncontrolled, and uncritical expansion has taken place; the serious withdraw into their owh shells; the quacks emit publications ’ that travesty research and make a noise that drowns out the small, still voice to which America should be listening. Thus a nation which ‘ believes ’ in education permits its elementary and secondary schools to be demoralised by politicians and its universities to break under the incongruous load placed upon them.” Dr Flexner says it is gratifying to he able to record the fact that there are American colleges which have not succumbed to certain extravagant modern ideas, and he names Harvard among those which offer a varied and solid cultural curriculum to undergraduate students who may care to be educated. In weighing the present-day tendencies in higher education in America, England, and Germany the author presents his idea of a university as one which reaffirms the value of a liberal education as opposed to the vocational, functional, and utilitarian viewpoint which he sees usurping first place in the universities to-day.