NOVEL COLLEGE

Hokitika Guardian, 7 December 1928, Page 2

NOVEL COLLEGE

AMERICAN EXPERIMENT. NO TEACHING OR EXAMINATIONS SAN FRANCISCO, October 31. One of the mifnerous “ experiments” in educiitioniil methods being conducted in American colleges, perhaps the mosC interesting is the one conducted by Professor Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst, and now on the Faculty of the University of Wisconsin. Under the guidance of Dr. Glenn Frank, president of the University, Professor Meiklejohn is attempting to have students take the lead in making their own education rather than depend upon their instructors. “Guinea Pigs” is the title applied by most University of Wisconsin students to the youths enrolled in that institution’s experimental college. If there is any derision prompting that name it probably is due to jealousy, because these human guinea pigs are going through the process of college education without classes, teachers, lecturers, examinations, notebooks, and other conditions which might excite the envy of the “regular” students. For the experimental college which Professor Meilkejohn has founded in .Madison is an institution which seeks better ways of. educating. This college had an attendance of 110 last year, its first session. It offers only two years of work j answerfor freshmen and sophomore years in the University proper. The unusual procedure which it is following seems to justify viewing its students as subjects for experimentation in the labor-, a lories of educators. “ The primary purpose of the experimental college is to demand that students shall take the lead in the making of their own education,” explained Dr Meiklejohn. “Students ordinarily construe their task as one of ‘ learning, ’ ” he said. “So-called ‘bad students’ are quite indifferent to that learning, and even ‘ good students ’ devote their energies •chiefly to acquiring and remembering facts and opinions so long as the system requires them to do so. It weakens and slackens the intellectual fibre of anyone to be treated as an intellectual dependent,” the Professor said. “And the extent to which our students are willing to have someone else do their studying for them is simply appalling. They come to college, and I fear we receive them, as if we had something to give them which they

need only accept and carry away like a load of mental furniture for the adorning and equipping of the empty chambers of their minds.” “ FACULTY ADVISERS.” Methods of the experimental college are a challenge to such conditions. Civilisations, not subjects, arc studied. Members of the faculty are titled “advisers ” instead of “teachers.” They live in dormitories with the students, assuring a sustained and intimate contact between the two groups. Classes give way to individual conferences between the adviser and a single student. “Our experience thus far shows that the individual conference between one teacher and one pupil is, and must be, the corner stone of our. procedure,” said Professor Meiklejohn.

“We are just trying to get the student to do his own work and secondly to give him the experience of keen and sympathetic criticism from one whose business it is to know what the student is doing and how his mind is working.” In a recent message to alumni of the university, Professor Meiklejohn explained that the serious purpose of the university in establishing the experimental -college was “to make sure that the best possible ways of educating freshmen and. sophomores are established and practised.” With the college having finished its first year and started its second, its founder declines to say whether the experiment is succeeding. “The very nature of an ‘experiment’ iforbids that at present,” he said. Results, however, have been gratifying, he admitted. Only two of the first year’s enrolment were advised not to return. Another group of approximately 120 freshmen entered the college this year and the faculty has been doubled in numbers to care lor both freshmen and sophomore groups. It has not yet completely formulated its plan. Until this programme is fully worked out and has ceased to be a matter of experimentation, such as is being carried on in the college now, he is not willing to pronounce the venture a success.