As we go into this historical review, we will keep in mind that much of what our educational renewal movement has been about stands against the erosion of values that came with industrialized education. I think there are great opportunities once this history is understood to guide students to colleges and universities that will be excellent destinations for students to build on their educational foundation at our schools and homeschools.

Universities Prior to Industrialization

Let us begin by considering how higher education became what it is today. We can go all the way back to the medieval universities. With the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088, numerous intellectual centers were established throughout Europe including Paris (1150), Oxford (1167), Cambridge (1209) and St Andrews (1413), among many others. These universities were representative of the Aristotelian scholasticism of high middle ages. Our understanding of the trivium and quadrivium within the modern classical education movement is significantly shaped by the medieval universities. Renaissance humanism, far from being a break from the universities, was an outgrowth of these universities which became centers of scientific and humanistic thought.

The word “university” is a composite of “unity” and “diversity.” The goal of the liberal arts curriculum was to find unifying principles across the diverse arts and sciences learned at these institutions. This unity of diversity was also seen at places like Oxford where multiple colleges were federated as a university, something that modeled the federation of states, such as the United States. Taking Oxford as an example, the career of a student began with oral examinations. All students entering Oxford were required to know both ancient Greek and Latin (this was true even into the early 1900s). The first year ended with an examination on the classics. Most students then went on to study degrees that would place them in law, politics or the church. In essence, they received the education of a gentleman as they were the sons of gentlemen who were to be placed in the positions of civil leadership.

The university model struggled to keep up with changing times, as advances in technology and medicine occurred largely outside these centers of learning. Thus Spencer Walpole took a dire view of the education on offer at Oxford, writing:

“‘The education imparted at Oxford,’ wrote the Oxford University Commissioners in 1852, was ‘not such as to conduce to the advancement in life of many persons except those intended for the ministry of the Established Church.’ Few medical men, few solicitors, few persons intended for commerce or trade, ever dreamed of passing through a university career.”

Spencer Walpole, History of Twenty-Five Years, Vol. 4: 1870-1875 (Longmans 1903), 136-137.

From Walpole’s perspective, the old medieval model was not suitable to meet the demands of a more technical age. In many ways he was correct that advances in scientific research were neglected in favor of the liberal arts, which had eroded into a status-confirming exercise for the aristocracy. Walpole was expressing the prevailing opinion in British society as educational reforms substantially overhauled the system from the 1870s to the 1940s.

As an aside, the widespread educational reforms in Britain set the backdrop for authors such as Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and others who lamented the loss of the liberal arts. Chesterton, for instance, lamented how modern reforms gutted education of any philosophical insight when he wrote, “But there is something to be said for teaching everything to somebody, as compared with the modern notion of teaching nothing, and the same sort of nothing, to everybody” (Chesterton, All I Survey, 50).

The same story as laid out here for the British educational system can be repeated as it regards American education. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and any number of schools underwent similar kinds of reforms, leading colleges to shift their emphasis from liberal arts education to technical job training and scientific research. To be fair, there is certainly a place for science and job training. However, as Chesterton astutely recognizes, the loss of the liberal arts was not simply about a change in the curriculum, but about sweeping social changes that emphasized secular atheism, gutting education of its life-giving ideas that empowered learners to consider what it means to live with meaning and purpose.

The Emergence of the Educational-industrial Complex

Already in the mid-1800s higher education saw significant reforms shifting colleges and universities towards research in medicine and technology. As mentioned above, this came at the expense of the liberal arts. Then in the first half of the 20^th century, higher education exploded. According the census data, the number of college degrees awarded in 1950 (432,000) were over ten times the number in 1910 (37,200). There were several factors leading to this massive expansion.

During the great depression, colleges and universities struggled with finances as did the rest of the economy. Roosevelt ignored the pleas of leaders in higher education to offer federal aid to colleges and universities, but he did create a New Deal program offering federal word-study grants to students. This opened the door for a new segment of society to enter higher education, bring greater economic diversity into American schools.

After World War 2, the G.I. Bill enabled millions of returning veterans to gain access to higher education. Just this influx of new students alone accounts for the massive expansion of colleges and universities in the mid-1900s. In addition, college campuses began to expand from small institutions to massive campuses with some state universities hosting tens of thousands of undergraduates.

Finally, the Great Society under Lyndon B. Johnson set the expectation that a college education was part of the American dream. Federal grants and loans subsidized this expectation in the Higher Education Act of 1965. From this point forward, higher education saw in influx of hundreds of thousands of new enrollment each decade.

The sheer size of higher education meant that it represented a significant sector of the economy with a huge federal budget allocated to support it. Combined with the reforms of the late 1800s, higher education was no longer about the lengthy process of forming students for leadership positions in society in the liberal arts tradition, but was now centered on technical job training. The industrial economy needed workers. It also needed consumers. Thus, going to college became a hallmark of American life where teenagers would expect to live in dorms, eat cafeteria food and tick the boxes of graduation credits. The combination of technical training and consumerist mentality. In his manifesto to change our conception of education, Seth Godin critiques what higher education had become by the latter part of the 1900s, “The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers” (Godin Stop Stealing Dreams).

It was Dwight D. Eisenhower who warned Americans of the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell address” (January 17, 1961).

The threat of an education-industrial complex mirrors Eisenhower’s warning. True, it doesn’t wield the same kind of destructive power, but an educational-industrial complex places its citizenry under the “unwarranted influence” of “misplaced power.” It raises the question as to whether it is worth placing our children in the institutions of higher education. What is the value of a college education? Have the rising costs of undergraduate education matched our perception of its value?

A New Post-industrial Economy

I have probably painted higher education in a rather poor light thus far. It is true that I have benefitted from my college education and regularly guide our high school graduates in the college selection process. I do not want to leave you without hope in what is becoming a rather bleak landscape when it comes to higher education broadly. There are two reasons that I am hopeful as it regards higher education for our students.

One, there remain numerous colleges and universities that offer excellent liberal arts programs. Students graduating from high school are not without great options whether they want to pursue specialized degrees or desire certain kinds of campus environments. It is actually an exciting time to be searching for colleges as classical school kids and their homeschooled compatriots are highly attractive to these colleges and universities. They know that generally speaking these are students who write well, think deeply and care about their learning.

Two, the demographic cliff colleges and universities are facing means that there is a simultaneous winnowing of small colleges and improvement of quite a number of collegiate programs. The recession in the early 2000s has meant that there are fewer students graduating in the 2020s. With lower enrollment, many colleges are needing to tighten their belts and make themselves more attractive to the smaller pool of applicants. While this might not mean savings for families paying for college, it can mean that tuition dollars are being invested in programs offering better value.

Conclusion

Having looked at the history of universities and capturing a sense of the current state of affairs, we are now better positioned to understand many of the mechanisms that exist in higher education today. In the next article we will delve into the way the game has been played for the past eighty years or so. Ultimately, we will promote a program of guidance that plays a different kind of game. Yet, understanding these rules will enable us as guides to understand the processes and procedures of higher education as it currently stands. We cannot go into college guidance naïve to the inner workings of topics such as federal funding, standardized tests and grade point averages.

For now, hopefully I have left you with a strong sense of how important the liberal arts tradition has been within the history of higher education since the middle ages. Figures at the start of the 20^th century cried out against the erosion of the liberal arts, figures such as Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis. Yet, situating the liberal arts within the broader framework of scientific research and technical training remains a significant question today. For instance, the debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois addressed this very question. While this question may remain prominent in our minds today, new questions are emerging with the rising costs of a college education. Is it worth spending so much in tuition only to have significant loan debt for decades afterward? Is the value of a college education worth the cost? I think these are actually significant questions parents and students today are asking when they begin asking for college guidance. Hopefully with the perspectives gained in this historical overview, some answers have emerged that address all of these questions.

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As President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson’s progressive agenda saw an expansion of federal regulation of business through anti-trust legislation and of federal programs to assist farmers and labor. When his oversight of America’s involvement in WW1 is taken into account, his presidency seems a microcosm of FDR’s. It is Wilson as educational reformer, though, that we want to cast a spotlight.

Ten years before Wilson ran for President of the United States, he was appointed as President of Princeton College. Under his guidance Princeton was transformed from a liberal arts college aimed at training Presbyterian ministers to a progressive university with a new science department and graduate school. As an alumnus of Princeton, Wilson was very much aware of the culture of Princeton, its strengths and weaknesses. Even during his student days, Wilson articulated a desire for Princeton to become more like European universities, opining that the level of scholarship achieved in Germany and England outstripped that of America. He saw that the American system of education promoted something less than true scholarship. And while students are partially at fault, he places the blame on the collegiate system for its failings.

In 1877, Wilson’s sophomore year at Princeton, he first addressed the concept of educational reform, writing:

When true scholarship offers so grand an opportunity for the exercise of our noblest faculties, we marvel that it should be so neglected. On the part of the student, misguided energy and insufficiency of enthusiasm are at fault; but we must believe that to our collegiate system a large part of the blame can be attached. Nothing is so utterly destructive of true scholarship as what is technically called “cramming.” To abolish the practicability of this operation should be the basic principle in the College regime. (The Princetonian, May 1877)

Wilson’s critique rings true even today, as students remain faithful to the hallowed tradition of “cramming;” learning everything for the final, but learning nothing of lasting significance.

At his inauguration as President of Princeton in 1902, Wilson articulated his understanding of two modes of learning:

There are two ways of preparing a young man for his life work. One is to give him the skill and special knowledge which shall make a good tool, and excellent bread-winning tool of him; and for thousands of young men that way must be followed. It is a good way. It is honorable; it is indispensable. But it is not for the college, and it never can be. The college should seek to make the men whom it receives something more than excellent servants of a trade or skilled practitioners of a profession. It should give them elasticity of faculty and breadth of vision, not upon their own profession only, for its liberalization and enlargement, but also upon the broader interests which lie about them, in the spheres in which they are to be, not breadwinners merely, but citizens as well, and in their own hearts, where they are to grow to the stature of real nobility. (Princeton University Bulletin, Dec 1902)

Wilson’s vision for not just Princeton, but for the entire educational system in America, was to provide an education that built upon the older subjects – Greek, Latin, mathematics, English, which he saw vitally connected with religious and moral values – the new areas of the natural sciences. This entailed laboratories, telescopes, museums, the stuff of empirical investigation. Wilson realized many of his goals. The museum of natural history opened in 1909. The graduate college was dedicated in 1913. He also diversified the school, moving it away from its conservative Presbyterian moorings to hire Jewish and Roman Catholic professors. By the end of his tenure, Princeton was well on its way towards becoming the dominant educational institution it is today. However, Wilson was not entirely satisfied. His address to alumni in Pittsburgh during April 1910, full of fire and fury, decried elitism and called for the democratization of private and public education. The voices of common men must “echo in the corridors of the universities.” Despite the censure he received for his fiery speech, the ideal won out; and rightfully so. A quality education ought not be the sole domain of an elite class.

By 1909, Wilson already had a sense of the pitfalls of the new university, incorporating the older subjects with the emerging fields of technical science. He wrote, “The spirit of technical schools has not always been the spirit of learning. They have often been intensely and very frankly utilitarian, and pure science has looked at them askance.” To counteract this, he called for America to commit to the ideal of the liberal arts tradition:

There is an ideal at the heart of everything American, and the ideal at the heart of the American university is intellectual training, the awakening of the whole man, the thorough introduction of the student to the life of America and of the modern world, the completion of the task undertaken by the grammar and high schools of equipping him for the full duties of citizenship. It is with the idea that I have said that the college stands at the heart of the American university. The college stands for liberal training. Its object is discipline and enlightenment. The average thoughtful American does not want his son narrowed in all his gifts and thinking to a particular occupation. He wishes him to be made free of the world in which men think about and understand many things, and to know how to handle himself in it. He desires a training for him which will give him a considerable degree of elasticity and adaptability, and fit him to turn in any direction he chooses. (The Delineator, 1909)

Democratized access to this ideal of education would indeed equip America with thoughtful, engaged, accomplished, disciplined and enlightened citizens. Is the ideal achievable? Can it overcome the pitfalls of the technical school which squelches the spirit of learning? Wilson wants it all – the university training the hearts and hands by converging the ideals of the liberal arts college with the practicality of the technical school.

Wilson’s most mature expression of his educational philosophy came on the eve of his short term as governor of New Jersey, only two years before becoming President of the United States. He continues to articulate the dangers of the new university model. The specialization of subjects leads to special interests in the political sphere and in public discourse. The inability of doctors, lawyers, electricians, psychologists and the like to speak meaningfully to one another because educational specialization has meant that general knowledge has been sacrificed for professional ends. His solution continued to be a combination of liberal arts with technical schooling. Yet, the stark differences he identifies make it an impossible concoction. In his address to the New York City High School Teacher Association on January 9, 1909, he delineates the options available to the populace:

Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. You cannot train them for both in the time that you have at your disposal. They must make a selection, and you must make a selection. I do not mean to say that in the manual training there must not be an element of liberal training; neither am I hostile to the idea that in the liberal education there should be an element of the manual training. But what I am intent upon is that we should not confuse ourselves with regard to what we are trying to make of the pupils under our instruction. We are either trying to make liberally-educated persons out of them, or we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines, or else we do not know what we are trying to do. (High School Teachers Association of New York, Volume 3, 1908-1909)

Democratization occurs through people’s choices to pursue one or the other option. But will institutions maintain a meaningful choice for people? Will all universities provide both a liberal arts education alongside technical training? Manual tasks, Wilson recognizes, are a necessary burden that must be born by the majority of students educated in America. Only the few can benefit from a liberal arts education. In the end, pragmatism must win out. The course of the twentieth century sees technical training win out over the liberal arts. Indeed, many of the liberal arts subjects were recast along technical lines. This occurred in part due to the use of scientific modes of investigation in the humanities. But it also occurred through the specialization of each subject, making each subject its own domain ignored by and ignoring other domains.

Idealism breaks easily on the shoals of pragmatism. It only takes one total war to inoculate a nation against idealism. To have undergone two total wars with an intervening decade of decadence followed by a decade of depression left a nation bereft of the liberal arts tradition that had upheld its founders. Fortunately a remnant have held tightly to the ideals of the liberal arts, and we are now seeing a renaissance underway. To what extent will it correct years of industrialism’s ascendancy in education?

Resources

Berg, A. Scott. Wilson. Berkley, 2014.

DiNunzio, Mario R. ed. Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President. NYU Press, 2006.

Heckscher, August. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. Scribner, 1991.

Walworth, Arthur. Woodrow Wilson. 2nd Ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

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