Address by United States Commissioner of Education Earl James McGrath, Educating American Adults

EDUCATING AMERICAN ADULTS * It is my conviction that the general education movement is the most significant development in higher education since President Eliot launched the elective system at Harvard in the 1870'S The general education movement consti- tutes an attempt to bring order out of the chaos that was launched by the elective system by providing a common basis of information, understanding and intellectual skills among our people. General education has as its goal the development of an informed citizenry capable of dealing with the many perplexing social problems that we all face. The process by which general education has been developing in the colleges and universities of the nation has in my judgment slowed down. The Korean situation and the recurrent impact of science and technological development is causing a lessening of interest in general education. That is unfortunate, because the conflict we are engaged in is essentially a conflict of values. Another reason for the lessened interest in general education is that institutions like Chicago, Columbia and Colgate have achieved a certain amount of satisfaction with their own programs and are no longer pioneering. Because they no longer have the same missionary spirit, smaller institutions are no longer stimulated as they were some years ago. It is time for us to take another look at the national picture and see whether these things are true, this is an accurate appraisal of the situation and if it is, what should be done. We might take some thought as to how we can accelerate the development of general education programs * By Earl J. McGrath, U. S. Commissioner of Education, Federal Security Agency, Washington, D. C., published in Trade Union Courier, Vol. XVII, No. 20, December 3, 1952, pp 7 and 8.