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THE INVENTION OF FRESHMAN ENGLISH The American collegian is ... simply a school-boy of larger growth.... From the day of his matriculation to the day of his graduation. he is under surveillance more or less intrusive. he pursues a prescribed routine of study. his attendance is noted down. his performances are graded. his conduct is taken into the account. his parents or guardians receive monthly or term reports. In other words. during the entire period of four years the collegian is made to feel that he is looked upon as one incapable of judging and acting for himself. -james Morgan Hart. German Universities In 1861, like many American men before and after him, James Morgan Hart traveled to Germany to study. He did so partly because it was fashionable for young men to go abroad at that time, but he was also a serious student who wanted to pursue advanced study in law. When he returned to America, Hart published an autobiographical account of his experience, an account that praised German university life at the same time as it condemned the course of study commonly pursued in American colleges. Hart's experience in Germany and that of others like him helped to stimulate profound changes in American higher education.' By the end of the nineteenth century the typical American institution of higher learning was no longer a small pastoral college but was well on the way toward becoming a modern elective university. THE CLASSICAL AMERICAN COLLEGE Prior to the Civil War, young men went to college in order to become ministers or teachers. Most early American colleges were affiliated with major Protestant religions: Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth were Congregational; William and Mary and Columbia were Anglican; Princeton and Penn, Presbyterian ; Brown, Baptist; and Rutgers, Dutch Reformed. Enrollments were THE INVENTION OF FRESHMAN ENGLISH +>- 47 small: during the 184os, Yale enrolled about 400 students, and in 1856 Harvard enrolled 366 students. The curriculum of the classical colleges was prescribed for all students for all four years-every student took the same courses, in the same order, from the same professors. The course of study generally included Latin, Greek, and sometimes Hebrew; mathematics; rhetoric and logic; philosophy; and perhaps a little history. By 1850, some colleges offered courses in what we now think of as natural and social sciences-geology, mineralogy , geography, and political economy. But colleges more typically adhered to a strictly classical curriculum. The course of study pursued in the classical colleges was very old even in the nineteenth century. Historian Bruce Kimball traces it to Roman antiquity , where it acquired the name by which it has since been known: liberal arts education (37). Its traditional goal was to train good citizens to lead society. According to Kimball, education in the artes liherales was thought "to produce the active citizen who is thoroughly virtuous and universally competent , that is, the perfect orator capable of addressing any topic and assuming any position of leadership in the state" (37). This education was designed for, and limited to, men-specifically those men who qualified by virtue of family background or training to be called "gentlemen" (107ff).Z In the nineteenth century, the notion of "manliness" was still intimately tied to the ideology of liberal education in general and to the pedagogy of mental discipline in particular. Historian Richard Vesey points out that "educators who believed in mental discipline often linked the word 'manly' to their notion of character. Manliness did not mean softness.... Manliness meant power: the kind of power that one gained by a diligent wrestling with Greek grammar" (28-29)· Greek and Latin certainly dominated the arts curriculum of American colleges before the Civil War. At Dartmouth in the early 18;os, "Greek and Latin letters made up at least one-quarter of the curriculum, rhetoric and belles lettres in English another quarter. About one-quarter was devoted to history, moral philosophy, and divinity, and a final quarter to mathematics, physics, astronomy, and anatomy. The pedagogy consisted primarily of recitations , declamations, and disputations" (Kimball 155). The pedagogy of recitation required that students memorize a few pages assigned from a textbook prior to each day's class. During class the instructor called upon them to "recite ," that is, to repeat aloud the assigned section of the text. Sometimes students were required to conjugate verbs or to parse constructions found in the texts they read and memorized. Declamation and disputation are classical and [3.135.183.187] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 18...

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