AMERICAN SCHOOLS FLAYED BY HOLMES

"The situation of education is little better than chaotic, and there is a lack of a coherent system of schools in this country," was the statement made by Professor H. W. Holmes '03, Dean of the Graduate School of Education, to a CRIMSON reporter yesterday afternoon.

"Education suffers in America from confusion of purposes. Justified a hundred-fold in our faith in schooling as an instrument of democracy, we have cared more for the spread of education than for its fitness for specific ends. We have been interested in quantity rather than quality.

"The root of the difficulty lies in the relationship between the secondary schools and the colleges. Our students come to college 'prepared', but with hardly the beginnings of an education. Contrasted with the students in English and Continental secondary schools, they must be rated, age for age, markedly inferior. There is no thoroughness or consistency in our school system. Our schools suffer from that disease that keeps them permanently enfeebled--'credititis', the itch for credits points, units, and semester hours. We are in the midst of a generation of students and teachers obsessed with the notion that organization in education means more than anything else. Educationally we are a nation of credit hunters and degree worshippers. Studies are considered mere payments demanded for the fun of being in school and the later privileges of college life. The student knows he can drop the 'stuff' he is studying as soon as he has 'cashed in' at studying as soon as he has 'cashed in' at the entrance gates what he is learning in school. With such a system there is no searching inquiry into educational values, and the true worth of study is obscured.

"The commanding problem of liberal education in America," Dean Holmes stated, "is the problem of unifying secondary education and collegiate education without denying the essential characters and modern development of either, To find a remedy for the existing situation is a difficult problem. The system of concentration and distribution, now used here at Harvard, with general examinations at the final stages of progress in the subjects of concentration might be tried in the preparatory schools, and prove the solution to the problem. There must be, however, cooperation with the colleges, and one college must take the lead in starting a new system.