Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
‘The curriculum’, write Richard Hofstadter and C. de Witt Hardy, ‘is a barometer by which we may measure the cultural pressures that operate upon the school.’ These pressures are of many kinds, economic and intellectual, and they make schools and universities social, and even political institutions sensitive to external needs and demands. In the United States, where education has become one of the main secular goals of society, the history of schools and universities deserves to be an integral part of the social history of the country. Lawrence A. Cremin has shown how such an integration can be achieved. And now that ‘B schools’ in the vanguard of Le Défi American are spreading outwards from Manila to Manchester the time is ripe to study a phenomenon which most historians and sociologists, if they have not despised, have preferred to ignore.
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page 44 note 4 Howe, p. 46. Compare McCarthy, Charles R., The Wisconsin Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 31Google Scholar. ‘If Wisconsin is a prosperous state to-day, there is no doubt that it is largely because of German ideas and ideals, early instituted in the state.’ German achievements were attributed to the ‘close identification of science with politics’ which made the expert ‘the alter ego of the statesman and the administrator’. See also Howe, p. 38.
page 44 note 5 The Nation, 101 (9 09 1915), 322–4.Google ScholarThe Nation, liberal in economics, conservative in politics, and Anglophile in sentiment, was particularly critical of the ‘Wisconsin Idea’ despite the support which E. L. Godkin, its first editor and a Liberal Republican, had given to the movement for civil service reform in the 1870s. The outbreak of the First World War provided it with a useful stick. ‘Just at the moment’, it declared, ‘we have a rare opportunity of studying the fruits of social efficiency in Germany, the land where the State-university idea has achieved its finest realization.’ The Socialists of the Chair, of whom the two most famous were Adolf Wagner and Gustav Schmoller, had a great influence on visiting American students such as Richard T. Ely, E. J. James, and Simon N. Patten and the ‘Union for Social Polities’, founded in 1872, may be regarded in some respects as the precursor of the American Economic Association.
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page 47 note 2 ‘Pioneer Ideas and the State University’, a commencement address delivered at the University of Indiana in 1910. Reprinted in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), pp. 285–6.Google Scholar See also Universities and Public Service, p. 53.
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