2.2 - How Did We Get Here? A Brief History of Higher Education

Hi, welcome back. Look what I found. I'm excited. I found-- thanks to Jason Doty at the John Franklin Center, who is a designer; he runs the Franklin Center--- I found these posters from some of the first podcasting conferences we held at Duke. In the folder that went with this-- the planning folders-- the word "podcasting" is even in quotation marks; we weren't quite sure what to call this new phenomenon. But here's one called On Air that takes place in September of 2005. And ? is speaking, Danah Boyd is speaking; some of my very favorite scholars on new technology and youth. How nostalgic to look back. Here's Podcast Five Academy; this one's from 2007, our fifth annual conference. Pretty exciting to go back and look in the vault, and see what was happening in that distant, distant era of 2003, 4, 5 and 7.

Today, we're going to be talking a little bit more distantly about the Humboltian University in the 19th century, and the origins of the research university, and the educational system we've all inherited today. As with everything else, it's an activist purpose of history. We're not going to be spending a lot of time on the details, but more looking at the big picture, the motivations and what informed the creation of the modern university, and how relevant those ideas are to the present; what's good; what we can take into the future; and frankly we have to change.

The modern university of the 19th century is often referred to as the Humboldtian University. It's named after Wilhelm Von Humboldt, a German educator who based his work on the ideas of Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German philosopher who emphasized the importance not of memorization; recitation; and repeating authorized knowledge, but of producing new knowledge. He and the University of Berlin-- the first Humboldtian University-- struck a recitation from its most important credentialing, and, instead, relied on labs; on seminars; and on the idea that the student in higher education should be a researcher under the tutelage of a professor, but also be looking not again to prove the lessons of the past or memorize a lesson to the past, but to produce new knowledge. Again, not to preserve accepted ancient knowledge, but to discover an advanced new knowledge. Those are metaphors, of course, and they're appropriate metaphors for the industrial age. This was a great age of energy and innovation in addition to being an age of mechanization and automation. And the Humboldtian University was designed to create the most productive, innovative thinkers and to encourage experimentation and exploration.

Probably the biggest contrast in 19th century education was between the French system and the German system. The German system was looking at being modern, being new, taking some of those ideas from Kant about what the filter is that allows us to see the world, and developing that filter in a more research-oriented, innovative and productive way. Versus the French, who were much more disciplinary, much more hierarchical, who are very very interested in what is required in order to fulfill the degrees from the most prestigious university. Ecole Normale Superieure was, by far, the most prestigious university and everything was ranked below it. British education's a little bit of a combination of those two, and interestingly when education comes to the colonies-- to the United States-- it's a bit of an amalgam of the British system with some influences from the French and German as well.

The first, people often say Harvard College was the first university established in America. Actually, that's not quite true. The University of Mexico was established in 1551 by the Spaniards, who were coming to colonial Mexico. Harvard College was established in 1636, so about 75 years later. The primary, primary focus of Harvard College in 1636 was to train young men for the ministry-- young men, specifically; it was not open to women. It's a very select group of people who were typically the children of ministers, typically the upper middle class-- if not the richest Americans-- and again, being trained for the ministry. The second university of the time was College of William and Mary in 1693, and like Harvard, it focused on what was then called liberal arts. And what was called the liberal arts in the late 17th century is interesting and instructive, because it's quite different from today. The typical subjects in the liberal arts in the late 17th century were Greek and Latin-- you had to learn Greek and Latin-- geometry, logic, rhetoric, ethics, and ancient history. And what's interesting about that is we don't often think of mathematics and logic in the same breath as language learning, ethics, and rhetoric. But all of those were thought to be liberal arts in the sense that they trained the mind-- they helped to create that filter-- but also provide a certain rigor. The typical method at Harvard and at the College of William and Mary in late 17th century was repetition. You repeated things over and over until you learned them. There was a lot of emphasis on memorization and recitation. It was only later in the 18th and 19th century that the emphasis started to change from recitation and repetition-- in the United States-- to a somewhat more Humboltian model of individual research and writing.

In the next segment, we'll be talking more about that, and we'll be looking pretty specifically at the U.S. education in the industrial age. And in that segment, we're going to expand from higher education to all education, including primary and secondary education. But there are certain key words I'd like you to keep in mind as we move to the next segment and our focus on, again, primarily U.S. industrial education.
1) Timeliness: much, much of 19th century American education focused on being on time and doing things on time.
2) Hierarchy: this is a carryover very much from the older system-- and from the French system, too-- where what was important was who the headmaster was, who the professor was-- even the German system-- who the heir, doctor, professor was that you were studying with.
3)--and now this is from the Humboldtian University-- Productivity: not just making new knowledge, but how much were you making; how could you make it faster, better, and more.
4) Standardization: it's interesting that the 19th century becomes more and more interested in the standardized form of education, which you might say comes from the French system.
5) Scientific Method and Scientific Metrics: this is using methods from industry and from science to assess productivity, even when accessing the intellectual knowledge, the new knowledge that is produced in higher education.
6)-- and this is something that will be a recurring theme when we get to the contemporary future of higher education-- the idea of the two cultures, the separation of the scientific and mathematical and technological knowledge from the interpretive, creative, artistic, historical knowledge. And, for the first time, math is no longer part of the liberal arts, but it's part of science, and it's somehow separated from rhetoric-- which is a very curious historical accident: that logic and mathematics would move to the science side of the equation and away from such things as rhetoric and writing and reading.
Finally, 7) teaching: not learning, but teaching. And again, top down, having knowledge to communicate to others.

Those are some of the keywords of 19th century industrialized education, and that's what we'll be focusing on next time. Thank you.