Speech By Commissioner Of Education Earl McGrath, Do We Need a New Type Of Advanced Education?

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The purpases and the progreme of greduate education in the United States need clarification. Our failure to recoghise the taro stremms of development that have contributed to the present forms of graduate instruction in this country accounts for auch of the present confusion about the ways in which we should proceed to astisfy the demends for new types of graduate instruction. It will be recalled that in the early days of higher education in the United States colleges and universities vere primarily concerned with undergraduate teaching. The curriculum contained only a fow courses in the classical languages, history, philesophy, mathomatics, and religion. All students studied the same subjects. Regardless of the fact that of the graduates of early Harvard, and other institutions, becasio ministers of the gospel, the course of study was not peofessional in any modern sense. The purpose of college instruction was primarly to prepare young men for intellectual and moral leadership in the ordinary activities of life, not for the activities peculiar to any of the professions nor for a life of scholarly activity in the library or laboratory. A considerable amount of scholarly work was of course done before the rise of the great modern universities, but much of it was carried on outside of institutions of higher education. During the nineteenth century, however, the orientation of higher education shifted in the United States. The modern complex institution * Speech prepared by Earl J. MoGrath, U. S. Commissioner of Education, to be delivered at the ,meeting of the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools at Houston, Texma, November 30, 1949.