Word: hutchinses
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Higher education in the U.S. is chaotic and is bogged down in makeshift adjustments to environment, too much vocational specialization and lack of a basic philosophy. This is the theme of Robert Maynard Hutchins' new book, The Conflict in Education (Harper; $2), published this week. Educator Hutchins, longtime (1929...
What worries Dr. Hutchins most is the pressure on higher education to adjust itself to the prevailing social and political mores of the majority. Says Hutchins: "Everybody is supposed to be like everybody else. The doctrine of adaptation has won the day." All wrong, he says: "The history and tradition...
Specialization, or what Hutchins calls "the doctrine of the ad hoc," is another plague afflicting higher education. Courses are offered in everything from how to be a beautician to how to drive an automobile, while the bases of the oldtime classical education receive less and less attention. "The process of...
The third great evil, says Hutchins, is the concept of education as a means of furthering this or that social doctrine. Hutchins uses the same paddle to wallop both John Dewey and T. S. Eliot, who espoused opposed educational philosophies. Dewey held that education should be used to further social...
The conformists, the specialists, the pragmatists and the reconstructionalists are all wrong, says Hutchins. Education should be neither a means toward earning a living nor of promoting social reform. Education should be liberal, its object "to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives." With such an education, a...