On Training Graduate Students for General Education Programs

The proliferation of general education courses in the curricula of American colleges has posed to our graduate schools the difficult problem of training the graduate students who will be called upon to staff these courses as instructors and, eventually, as lecturers and directors.* This, to be sure, is only one of a whole complex of problems and unresolved issues that attend the situation arising from the trend; but it can conveniently be isolated for consideration and discussion in these pages. The term general education is here used loosely to identify a wide range of courses that in common, however much they may differ in plan or detail, are designed to embrace panoramically a broader area than the conventional survey. The term thus includes at one extreme such a scheme as the Hundred Best Books (even though this is a program rather than a course); and at the other it takes in such a relatively restricted course as, for example, a study of Modern European Prose Fiction. It is difficult to generalize upon these courses since no pattern has imposed itself across the nation. Some are relatively venerable, and are considered fixtures; others are new and frankly experimental. They are sometimes offered in secondary schools as preparation for college. It is observable that not a few are conducted

Geography · Graduate education · Graduate students · Mathematics education · Medical education · Pedagogy · Training (meteorology) · Academic Freedom and Politics · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Medicine · Psychology