Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, is, in a sense, three small books under one cover. David Potts, an academic residing in the Pacific Northwest, was originally introduced to the documents more than 40 ...]]> Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, David B. Potts, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, is, in a sense, three small books under one cover. David Potts, an academic residing in the Pacific Northwest, was originally introduced to the documents more than 40 years ago as part of a graduate-level study of the history of American education. Ever since, in his role as a professor of American history and an academic dean, he has carried the torch for what he describes as one of the great, underappreciated documents of American higher education history—a precursor to the influential writings of Harvard’s Charles Eliot and other reformers decades later.

The Yale Reports, reprinted here in scanned form from the original, make up one part of the book. The other major part of the book is Potts’s own analysis and appreciation of the Reports—an attempt to provide context for the document and its relevance to understanding the development of colleges in the U.S. As a third major element, Potts has included documents from Amherst College and Harvard that are similar to and contemporary with the Yale Reports and to which, in some measure, the three authors of the Yale Reports—Jeremiah Day (Yale’s longest-serving president), James Kingsley (professor of Latin, Greek and Hebrew), and Gideon Tomlinson (governor of Connecticut)—wrote in response.

The Yale Reports provide a comprehensive snapshot of the issues stirring higher education and an interested public in the 1820s. The Reports were authored at a time of rapid change in the U.S. and similar change in the academic world. The nation was about to embark on an expansion in the number of colleges it sustained, just as settlement began to rapidly spread westward across the land. According to sources cited by Potts, there were 56 colleges within the country in 1830. This number grew to 203 in 1860 and 370 in 1890. This growth trajectory was accompanied by a tectonic shift in other areas of the academic enterprise as well. A familiar demand was heard for vocational education that would produce men of business, ministers and engineers. Most obviously, “reformers” sought to relegate the ubiquitous study of Latin and Greek from central elements in the curriculum to mere electives.

To illustrate the point, Potts includes a summary of Yale’s rather hidebound freshman curriculum at the time, which included:

I.

• Livy, three books
• Adam’s Roman Antiquities
• Arithmetic reviews
• Day’s Algebra begun [a text authored by one of the Yale Reports authors]
• Graeca Majora begun

II.

• Livy continued through five books
• Graeca Majora, continued through the historical part
• Day’s Algebra finished

III.

• Horace begun
• Homer’s Iliad; Robinson’s
• Playfair’s Euclid, five books

Much of the change that Yale considered at this point was modeled by Amherst College. Amherst had seen remarkable growth in enrollment during its first six years, thanks in part to its new curriculum. It seemed it “might soon have more undergraduates than the venerable Harvard and rank second among the nation’s colleges,” noted Potts; much to the discomfiture of its New England neighbors who often saw proportional declines in their own student numbers. This may have been a direct result of Amherst’s appeal or it might have related to another Potts observation, namely that many well-to-do fathers had begun to question the utility of any kind of college education for their sons.

However, in the face of these competitive challenges, and to answer the critics of higher education in general, the three authors of the Yale Reports (often mistakenly reported as only two, Potts notes), took a careful look at the curriculum and educational approaches used at Yale and found them already evolving, albeit with traditional courses still very much ascendant. In fact, the authors took pains to connect the traditional curriculum to the purposes of college education itself. “The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind,” the authors declare.) But these worthy aims also had to be tempered by attention to practical realities. “A most important feature in the colleges of this country is, that the students are generally of an age which requires, that a substitute be provided for parental superintendence” (Italics in original). Potts, in his explanation of this particular statement, points out that contemporary college administrators had had to contend with a variety of student disorders, including an “uprising over the quality of food” at Yale itself.

Above all, Potts points out that the Yale Reports helped sharpen “the emerging distinction between undergraduate and graduate studies and between liberal as compared to vocational or professional education.”

For readers not steeped in the early history of higher ed, there are implicit lessons for today about the challenges institutions must always master if they are to remain relevant in changing times, in particular the need to balance tradition and innovation. Furthermore, notes Potts, “Yale’s Reports of 1828 is an excellent starting point for exploring the core ends and means of a liberal education in a democratic society.”

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

The College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) exams, often preceded by AP courses, have a reputation for spitting out an overwhelming amount of information, but that is about to change. The nonprofit, which also administers the SATs, says it will revamp the biology and U.S. history tests to give students the opportunity to learn the materials, ...]]>

The College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) exams, often preceded by AP courses, have a reputation for spitting out an overwhelming amount of information, but that is about to change. The nonprofit, which also administers the SATs, says it will revamp the biology and U.S. history tests to give students the opportunity to learn the materials, rather than cram for the exam.

The College Board has AP exams in 30 subjects, with 1.8 million students taking 3.2 million tests. While the program is recognized for giving students the opportunity to get an early start on more challenging, university-level work, some exams require too much study—material that, in turn, deters students from learning "big concepts." The biology and U.S. history exams are two of AP's biggest culprits with their ever-expanding laundry list of "ought-to-knows."

The new focus of the AP exams in these two subject areas will allow more time for the "big picture," the College Board says, and eliminate the need to squeeze in extraneous information that generally isn't absorbed.

High scores on an AP exam can get students college credit. Compared to college courses, whose prices range from the hundreds or even thousands of dollars, the $87 AP exam is a worthwhile investment for any high school student looking save some money and/or get the most out of their college years. For some, entering college with AP credit can leave room for extracurricular courses, an earlier graduation date or a double major.

But as students are burdened by the challenges of advanced coursework earlier and earlier, and colleges come to expect AP scores on transcripts, some educators have had enough. Indeed, AP courses and exams emerge among the key villains in the film "Race to Nowhere."  The documentary argues the "push to achieve has created a generation of high-strung students constrained in a one-size-fits-all’ system."

The new focus of AP tests will change lesson plans and study techniques for hundreds of thousands of educators and students in New England over the next couple of years. In fact, in 2008, nearly 80,000 New England students took more than 135,000 AP exams, with the both biology and U.S. history being among the five most popular exams. And since 2004, the number of exam-takers in New England has increased by 31%. Click here for a PDF of facts and figures about AP exams in New England.