Abstract
SHOULD training for citizenship be an integral part of every undergraduate's curriculum? One of the smaller New England colleges, Hobart, announces a reorganization implying an affirmative answer to this question. Furthermore, the College hopes to make the bachelor's degree “represent less an aggregation of academic achievements and more an integration of intellect and of personality in the primary responsibilities of the citizen towards his community”. The announcement is significant, according, as it does, with a growing tendency in the United States to emphasize the universities' obligation to the social order. In his inaugural address, published in School and Society of October 24, the president of the College explains that studies in economics, history, political science and social psychology will in future be so organized as to constitute a progressive four-year course culminating in its final year with a study of contemporary problems in American government and the means of social control. He points out that the ‘orientation’ courses commonly provided in colleges for the freshman year are well enough for opening the adolescent mind to a glimpse of the problems of the modern world, but are necessarily superficial and elementary compared with what is possible in the fourth year when the student has been equipped with a fairly comprehensive background of knowledge and is ready to envisage political and economic problems with interest as prospective factors in his own life. The dire need of the country for such stiffening as these reforms are calculated to provide is indicated by the statement that “Ballyhoo, the present and audible substitute for rational leadership, is well on the road to becoming the chief creator of American policy and politicians”.
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Citizenship and the Universities. Nature 139, 106 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139106a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139106a0