EXCERPTS FROM REPORT

In the meantime I am taking the liberty of appointing a University Committee on "The Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society." This committee, composed of members of several faculties including Arts and Sciences and Education, I hope will consider the problem at both the school and the college level. For surely the most important aspect of each generation--not the comparatively small minority who attend our four-year colleges.

For my own part I am more and more convinced that all we can hope for is to provide a general education which will be the basis of later cultural and intellectual growth. The domains of knowledge are today too widely extended to permit of any adequate survey before the average man wishes to leave his studies and take up a full-time job. As an answer to this dilemma there may well be an enormous expansion of so-called adult education in the post-war world. Such expansion should properly include both general and vocational work.

There is nothing new in such educational goals; what is new in this century in the United States is their application to a system of universal education. Formal education based on "book learning" was once only the possession of a professional class; in recent times it became more widely valued because of social implications. The restricted nature of the circle possessing certain linguistic and historical knowledge greatly enhanced the prestige of this knowledge. "Good taste" could be standardized in each generation by those who knew. But, today, we are concerned with a general education--a liberal education--not for the relatively few, but for a multitude.

The primary concern of American education today is not the development of the appreciation of the "good life" in young gentlemen born to the purple. It is the infusion of the liberal and humane tradition into our entire educational system. Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free.