AMERICAN SYSTEM DENOUNCED

Hokitika Guardian, 27 December 1930, Page 6

AMERICAN SYSTEM DENOUNCED

COLLEGES TEACHING “EASY RUBBISH.” SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 26. A striking rebuke lias been administered to the American system of university education by Dr. Abraham Flexner, director of the Institute of Advanced Study in Newmarket, New Jersey, in a new book which criticises American universities for teaching “rubbish.” In his book be declares that “the sort of easy rubbish which may be counted toward a Bachelor of Arts degree passes the limit of credibility.” “Institutions,” be adds, “have needlessly cheapened, vulgarised and mechanised themselves.” Mentioning clog dancing for men and wrestling among courses that count towards a degree, he says great universities descend to “humbug in bestowing degrees that represent neither a substantial vocational training.” Criticising the Harvard School Business Administration, he asserted it is an irrelevant and unworthy thing for a modern university to undertake to “short-circuit” experience. English universities, he holds, are seats of higher learning, incomparably superior to anything in America. He is of the opinion that there is not a college in. America “that has the courage to place athletics where everyone knows they properly belong.” College Football Craze. During the present season athletics seem to dominate all the leading colleges of the United States, football of American style filling the newspapers with comment and probabilities of prospective matches from the pens of sporting writers, many of whom are supposed to be studying educational subjects in the respective universities and colleges. Each team has usually about 55 players, who are continually being changed on the. field of play, principally through injuries in the fierce contests, which resolve themselves into exhibitions of brawn. Many believe that America has gone mad on college football, and although tliere is much talk of unemployment and poverty, there is never any lack of a big gate for any “big” football match. Compared with the intelligence of a British university graduate the American is sadly in the rear, especially in subjects like mental arithmetic, the Yankee, .student having to resort to pencil and paper to figure out what the average English schoolboy does “in his head.” Obviously, too much outside influence of sport militates against the perfecting of education in the United States’ colleges. Questioning the Questioners.

Dr. Hamilton Holt, president of Rollins. College at Winter Park; Florida, annoyed by the continuous influx of questionnaires that flow across his desk, has devised a retaliatory method Avhich has attracted considerable national attention. With the receipt the other day of a questionnaire asking for information in a “survey” of another “educational probe,” Dr. Holt dictated a “stock form” reply. The reply is as follows: “If. we comply Avith these it will take a great 'deal of our valuable time. Therefore, before Ave reply, Avill you kindly fill out the following questionnaire yourself: '(1) What are your qualifications for asking these questions? (2) What are your qualifications for analysing the ansAvers received ? (3) What guarantee Avill you give that the information furnishAvill he put to any use?’ ” “The questionnaire craze is merely an aspect of the tendency to glorify research at the expense of teaching,” said Dr. Holt. “I have seen so many examples of the evil of research that I have become prejudiced on the subject. To-day avc find hosts of men engaged in the laborious, time-consum-ing and unprofitable task of writing uninspired theses on unimportant subjects and trying to learn more and more about less and less.”