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Perhaps the most controversial chapter in the book explores the career of Robert Maynard Hutchins, who next to Harper was Chicago’s most important President in the Twentieth Century. Hutchins is a larger than life figure who is still invoked as a guardian of a certain kind of intense, highly rationalistic university culture and as a proponent of classically based general education, against ‘vocationalist’ tendencies within the modern university. The chapter explains Hutchins most salient interventions and contributions, including his reorganization of the University in 1930, his sponsorship of the first Core curriculum, his later fights with the faculty over the shape and nature of that curriculum, the creation of the all-general-education “Hutchins College” in 1942, his attempts to restructure graduate education, his courageous defence of academic freedom in the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter argues that Hutchins had a major impact on the intellectual culture and value norms of the University, an impact that still resonates in the self-understanding of today’s University, but he left the University in a severely weakened financial state, a condition, which then framed and over-determined the challenges and problems that his successors in the Presidency had to deal with over the next 50 years.

Raising funds was one of the difficulties faced by hospital reformers in their aim to support black hospitals. Given the lack of financial capabilities of the patients and the increasing expense of operating these hospitals, black reformers recognized that no movement for the improvement of black hospitals could succeed without the white's cooperation and financial assistance. This chapter studies the activities of three white philanthropic foundations—the Duke Endowment, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the General Education Board—with regard to black hospital reform. In particular, this chapter illustrates how the Rosenwald Fund maintained a broad-based black health program that supported programs in professional education, public health, outpatient services, and hospital care; the Duke Endowment's substantial financing for the operation and construction of black hospitals in North and South Carolina; and the General Education Board's (GEB) donation of funds for educational programs at selected hospitals.

What is the current cultural context for American higher education? This essay defines the concepts of secularization, secularism, and the secular, and provides a brief history of their role in American higher education as well as more recent postsecular developments. The notion of postsecularity is described empirically (not ideologically) in terms of religion's new visibility in American culture and, by extension, on the nation's college and university campuses. Implications for contemporary higher education are briefly explored, especially as they relate to programs of general education.

This chapter delves into the gendered effects of different training and educational systems. It poses the following three questions. Are some specific types of vocational training and educational systems more biased against women than others? If so, what are the gendered implications of educational reforms in many of the advanced industrial societies? Do women’s greater educational investments—a universal trend observed in all countries—promote gender equality in the labor market? Briefly summarized, this chapter shows that, first, vocational education is more gender-segregating than general education systems; second, apprenticeship-based vocational education is more gender-segregating than school-based vocational education; and third, school-based training for professional jobs is a woman-friendly pathway into high-status occupations.

The historical development of Switzerland’s collective skill formation system is strongly interrelated with the structure and overall trajectory of the country’s political economic system. From early industrialization until the present, cleavages have existed not only between the federal state and the cantons, between the representatives of employers and the labor force but also between different factions of the key stakeholders in the political economy (i.e., employers’ associations, labor movement, and political parties). As a consequence, educational stakeholders and the federal administration have played a key role in the development of the skill system. In this context, apprenticeship training has continued to be a widely accepted model of skills provision and thus to form the core of the Swiss vocational education and training (VET) system. Nevertheless, this system has been adapted in recent years to ensure that more general and academic skills are being provided.

This chapter examines the debate over pedagogy that roiled education and policymaking circles in the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. Discussions were imbued with politics and with midcentury anxiety about the fracturing of the modern world. Questions of pedagogy frequently became philosophical discussions about the meaning of proper citizenship, the definition of a good society, and the true meaning of democracy. In the end, neither liberal education nor general education succeeded in achieving dominance. Solution came in the form of a synthesis developed at Harvard in 1943-1945. The work of a committee of professors and outside consultants was to provide a vision of the right kind of mind for America that came to have lasting influence. That vision emphasized the cultivation of expert mental skills over factual knowledge as the basis of citizenship.

Chapter One explores the emergence of three 20th Century foundations that promoted southern education reform, the General Education Board, the Rosenwald Fund, and the Negro Rural School Fund (Jeanes Fund). The annual Conference for Education in the South began at Capon Springs, West Virginia in 1898 and brought together an assembly of leaders in farming, business, church, and school, but quickly became an important venue for far-reaching collaboration between reformers, university scholars, northern businessmen, and southerners who represented state interests. The foundations involved in southern education developed from the extensive collaboration that these meetings produced. This chapter argues that education reform was instrumental to the broader goal of state building, and foundation programs specifically targeted state and local governance capacity. An effective public system of education required governance structures that could provide sufficient oversight, integrate a range of state and local agencies, and promote the organization and participation of local communities. Schooling promoted those administrative structures and helped to organize rural black communities. Foundation programs extended black educational opportunity and strengthened local governance capacity, but restricted the quality of education that would be available. Yet, their programs also had the potential to affect black agency over the longer term.

This chapter provides a history of the GED test from its inception in 1943 as a college placement exam for wounded World War II veterans and later as a requirement for GIs to meet before receiving wartime high school diplomas. Ralph Tyler of the University of Chicago, E. F. Lindquist of the University of Iowa, and others associated with the American Council on Education promoted the test as part of their largely unsuccessful efforts to introduce “general education” curricula into the high schools and to end the dominance of the Carnegie unit system. Since the 1960s decisions were made to lower the test's reading levels, market the GED for school age youth, and distance the GED's emphasis away from the academic regimen and character skills required of traditional graduates. Government funding supports GED test-prep instruction as a substitute to high school attendance and coursework for credit-deficient teens and adults.

The American system of education, while vast, various, and decentralized, reflects commitments and principles long thought to be central to American national identity. The system that emerged with great clarity after the Second World War was deliberately designed to be an instrument of democratic aspirations announced at the founding of the nation. The focus on a universal, general, and liberal education at both the secondary and postsecondary levels distinguishes the American system from all others.

Religion has become more visible on many college and university campuses, as illustrated by examples including Penn State, MIT, Harvard, and Boston College. The religion that has “returned” to higher education is not, however, the old religion of the past. Religion today is characterized by pluriformity, meaning not only that more religious traditions are now present in American society, but also that the contours of religion are less clear. We currently inhabit a religio-secular world where many different life stances interact. In this context, religion has to be defined broadly to include not just traditional religion, but also what Thomas Luckmann called “invisible religion,” or what Paul Tillich called “ultimate concerns.” Understood this way, religion is not something that has to be imported into higher education, because religion is already present there (albeit sometimes invisibly). Paying attention to the varied religious dimensions of learning will enhance, not undermine, higher education as a whole.

In response to the callfor a reconsideration of the purposes of higher education, this chapter argues that responsiveness to societal needs is one source of guidance for formulating an institution’s purposes. It is also argued that the major societal needs of the 21^st century are for individuals who have the intellectual and personal capabilities to constructively engage political, ethnic, and religious differences. Meeting these societal needs requires a transformation in both the purposes and practices of higher education. The current need for transformation is situated in the context of previous transformations in higher education, including secularization, post-secularization, the move to general education, and recent efforts to reform undergraduate education, particularly at research universities

This chapter focuses on Joseph Jackson Schwab and his contributions to the reconstruction of general education. Schwab became a prime mover behind Chicago's three-year sequence in the natural sciences—a curriculum which has captured the attention of science educators ever since. He helped create the famed course in Observation, Interpretation, and Integration, which he taught for nearly two decades. As pedagogue, he was legendary; students invariably recall him as one who made learning in the second Hutchins College electrifying. A key player in the University Examiner's office, he broke new ground in creating evaluation instruments geared to specific goals of liberal learning. One of the rare natural scientists accomplished in humanistic learning as well, he was eagerly embraced by Hutchins and Adler in their extension programs for teaching and publishing the Great Books of the Western World. Following these germinal achievements during the Hutchins years at Chicago, Schwab went on to address a national audience with provocative essays on the liberal curriculum and pedagogical practice.

This chapter examines the notion that teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning may constitute the most powerful tools that they bring to the classroom. The concept of effective pedagogy, defined as rooted in particular belief structures and actions, is introduced and developed through an examination of the specific beliefs, values and experiences that teacher-educators, pre-service and in-service teachers must all negotiate. Issues of creator identity, historical and evolving conceptions of what music is, and ideas on how and why music should be taught are presented with the acknowledgement that each is shaped and framed within an interwoven complex of social, cultural, political, and educational contexts. Models of compositional contexts and tasks are provided to highlight composition's powerful potential within the general education curriculum.

Discrete study of the various individual arts can enhance human perception and understanding uniquely and significantly. These dimensions qualify the arts to be an important part of general education for all students, but they are not the whole story. There is another application that can provide impressive educational dividends: the arts used as vehicles to enhance learning in other subjects. The arts can function in tandem with the entire curriculum, enlivening it and ensuring the student's engagement in the learning process. Music, the visual arts, the media, and theater were used as the means of learning history. They were fused with the subject matter, relating them to the subject being studied and, in the process, enlarging and invigorating learning. This “integration” of the arts can be taken to a more profound dimension in which the classroom creates an environment in which the arts are treated as a primary context for learning to take place.

In the decades around 1900, calls to reform collegiate education led to distinctive efforts to reshape liberal elite culture. Hoping to restore a program of common learning, these reformers turned their backs on the classical curriculum of the previous century, seeking fresh ways to recover an essential and irreducible humanity made possible solely by breadth of learning. The initiatives to reinvent liberal learning which they pursued converged under what came to be called the general education movement, which is the focus of this chapter. This phenomenon was unique to the United States and may well constitute one of the country's major contributions to the history of higher education.

Steps to reform liberal education over the past century were driven by imaginative responses to big social changes. Some of those reforms simply expanded available inventories of adaptive resources. These new curricula were devised to service vocational specialties, promote civic patriotism, and inculcate more demanding forms of self-discipline. Other reform efforts harked back to old ideals rooted in the classical notion of paideia. Their sponsors intended to deal with the troubling consequences of modern conditions for the development of free human beings and citizens, conditions such as hyperspecialization, privatization, mediocrity, and intellectual anarchy. These reforms aimed to promote well-rounded personal growth; critical, reflexive thinking; adherence to high intellectual standards; ability to grasp the relatedness of different fields; and heightened levels of individuality. Together, they constituted the general education movement. This chapter discusses contested principles for the liberal curriculum and the University of Chicago's contribution to the general education movement.