CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Demography and curriculum: The humanities in American higher education from the 1950s through the 1980s
Tác giả
Geiger R.L.
Năm xuất bản
2006
Source title
The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II
Số trích dẫn
14
DOI
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
The modern American university is a cognitive omnivore, feasting on all legitimate fields of knowledge. Different forms of knowledge, in fact, are more readily distinguished by their locus and organization outside universities than within. The humanities, however, find their principal home in university departments. This is not to say that the production and enjoyment of literature, history, and the arts are confined to academic precincts, but rather that the organized study of such subjects, compared with other fields, is concentrated in institutions of higher learning. For most of the twentieth century this has been advantageous. In particular, the great postwar expansion of American higher education provided employment for the world's largest collection of professional humanists. And their teaching brought a fairly high level of exposure to humanistic subjects to the world's largest population of postsecondary students. This chapter will examine the dynamics of the humanities during the great postwar demographic expansion of higher education and try to explain the shifting relationships among student enrollments, institutions of higher education, and the content of the humanities subjects that were taught there. On the surface the outline of these developments is fairly clear. After the postwar G.I. enrollment bulge dissipated, the educational system began a prolonged natural expansion that was based on population growth and rising participation. The number of seventeen-year-olds doubled from 1950 to the early 1970s, and high school graduation rates rose from 60 to 75 percent. At the same time the propensity to go to college rose from 42 to 53 percent. When these multiples are multiplied, the result is a more than threefold increase in the number of students entering college. Total undergraduate enrollments increased far more-by a factor of five-from under 2 million to over 9 million. States and localities could not build colleges, nor graduate schools train college teachers, fast enough to accommodate these burgeoning numbers. But then the expansion ground to a halt. In the mid-1970s American higher education ceased to grow for the first time in its history-a condition dubbed the "steady state." The steady state caused painful adjustments throughout higher education, but nowhere was the pain more acute than in the humanities. (See Figures 2.1 and 2.2.) When the last of the G.I.s graduated in 1950, bachelor's degrees in the core humanities disciplines of languages and history constituted just over 8 percent. Their share rose another 2 percentage points during the 1950s, but then shot up to 16 percent in the mid-1960s. For that entire decade the annual number of humanities graduates tripled. In the mid-1970s, however, this category commenced a precipitous drop. A decade later humanities majors represented barely 6 percent of college graduates. This same roller-coaster pattern was repeated for humanities doctorates. These aspiring professionals saw demand for their services evaporate almost overnight. Not only was there an impossible surplus of credentialed humanists, but intellectual shifts also left many of them trained to teach in now-unfashionable fields. This striking record of unsuccess was accompanied by turmoil within humanities fields. In strategic discussions of the postwar shape of higher education, the humanities were accorded pride of place as fundamental components of a liberal education. They clearly built upon this stature in the years of rapid expansion. At the height of their popularity, however, the humanities were wracked by controversy over relevance and political bias. In some ways the crisis of the curriculum in the humanities paralleled the crisis in its enrollments, but a relationship between the two, if one exists, is far from clear. Nor are the causes clear behind the boom and bust pattern traced by the humanities from the 1950s to the 1980s. Several factors seemed to play a role, and they will be explored below. Clearly the trend toward vocationalism had an impact, whether as cause or effect. 1 The changing composition of college students and the types of institutions in which they studied both seem relevant. Gender has also been identified as a factor, since male and female students had different study preferences, and the gender balance shifted markedly during these years. 2 Perhaps most challenging is the question of how the changing content of the humanities curriculum influenced this pattern of development. © 2006 By The The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
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Nơi xuất bản
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus