A Redditor in Europe is complaining that universities are becoming more like secondary schools. Previously the Euro tradition put all the weight on the test. If you aced the final test it didn’t matter whether you attended the lectures. Now they’re requiring attendance at every class.
I don’t know if his complaint is valid, but the confusion of two purposes is definitely a problem on this side of the Atlantic.
Schools have always been divided into two types serving two purposes and two parts of the brain. Cortical schools work toward memorizing words and theories. Cerebellar schools work toward mastering skills.
Cortical learning is not needed for any real job. Cortical learning is purely for show, demonstrating a certain type of mental discipline, which is a skill. The material is irrelevant and never used for any real-life purpose. History and literature and law are the cortical equivalent of lab materials, meant to be wasted and consumed by imperfect practice. Students dissect embalmed frogs or embalmed literature, then discard the result.
Jobs and life require cerebellar learning. Most jobs also need some textual details, which can be mastered along the way in a good apprenticeship process.
And this brings me back to my old buddy Anderson, who was appointed to head K-State after a rebellion by the Grange farm organization tossed out the theory-crazed Woke terrorists who had founded the college.
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Growing up in Manhattan, and living across the street from the Goodnow House at a time when it was still occupied by a Goodnow descendant, I thought I understood the story, but I’d never read these details before. Highly illuminating.
Briefly: The anti-southern-slavery wackos who settled Manhattan came from Mass and Conn. The Mass contingent were Methodists and Grahamites who had been recruited at Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham. Isaac Goodnow and Joseph Denison were major players in that group. Goodnow is generally credited with founding KSU, but it was actually a team IPO. Goodnow, acting as a venture capitalist, organized Bluemont College as a Methodist school with Denison as headmaster, hoping to sell the facility to the newly formed state government. When the gov’t hesitated, Goodnow moved into political positions where he was able to maneuver the sale. After that, Goodnow played politics for a while then settled into real estate like modern VCs.
Though nominally a land-grant college and nominally devoted to agriculture and mechanics, K-State remained a Methodist liberal-arts school from its formation in 1859 until about 1873. At that point farmers, feeling their political hard red Wheaties through the Grange movement, wanted the college to fulfill its assigned mission of training farmers and performing ag research. The Grangers placed new members on the board and overthrew the old leadership. Their newly appointed president, John Anderson, laid out his project in the 1874 college handbook:
1. It is impossible for most people to find time to study everything that is important for some men to master.
2. The subjects discarded, in whole or in part, by each separate class of students, should be those that will be of least importance to them.
3. Of those retained, prominence should be given to each in proportion to the actual benefit expected to be derived from it in the state of Kansas.
4. The farmer and mechanic should be as completely educated as the lawyer and minister; but the information that is essential to the one class is often comparatively useless to the other; and it is therefore unjust to compel all classes to pursue the same course of study.
5. Ninety-seven percent of the people of Kansas are in the various industrial vocations, and only three per cent in the learned professions; yet prominence is given to the studies that are most useful to the professions instead of those that are most useful to the industrial pursuits. This state of things should be reversed, and the greatest prominence given to the subjects that are the most certain to fit the great majority for the work they should and will pursue.
6. Most young men and young women are unable to go through a full college degree. Therefore, each year’s course of study should, as far as practicable, be complete in itself.
7. The natural effect of exclusive headwork, as contradistinguished from handwork, is to beget a dislike for the latter.
8. The only way to counteract this tendency is to educate the head and the hand at the same time, so that when a young man leaves college he will be prepared to earn his living in a vocation in which he has fitted himself to excel.
9. Putting off the choice of an occupation until after the student leaves college as a graduate, instead of making it when he enters college, or as soon thereafter as possible, is a mistake.
10. Some agricultural colleges take as an objective point the graduation of agricultural experts, experimenters, professors of sciences, editors, etc; the Kansas State Agricultural College should take as an objective point the graduation of capable farmers and housewives, and it should make an effort to graduate thousands of such.
12. Whatever else may yet need to be tried, there is no use in repeating the experiment of flying a literary kite with an agricultural tail, so often made in various quarters. It is a pleasant regential and professorial amusement, and quite attractive to an immediate locality; but there is nothing in it for the industrial student, whose estate pays for the kite. The fact that, out of some 600 students attending Cornell University last year, only two were studying agriculture, is enough for us.
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A model for the Foy Rebellion.
Theory made war. Theory burned up part of the country and impoverished the rest, except for the NYC robber barons and Mass sweatshoppers who sponsored Goodnow and Denison and Lincoln, and who sold guns to Lincoln’s soldiers.
Practical farming makes food, not war.
Anderson’s spirit was reanimated in the New Deal by Henry Wallace.
Polistra's Mill 