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I didn't get a chance to read this passage in class today, but am eager to share it with you all, both as inspiration and as a reminder of how historically located curricular revision always is. In preparation for a new course I'm teaching this spring on the James family, I've been reading Robert Richardson's biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. The book mentions a pair of essays on "The New Education," which Charles W. Eliot (who had just been elected president of Harvard) published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869. I thought that what Eliot had to say 140 years ago was remarkably prescient for the conversations we've been having in our ESem these past few weeks. Eliot was trying to bring Harvard into the industrial age, by replacing a "classic" curriculum with the more "practical" and "scientific" one (which we are now, in turn, talking about replacing). In that process, Eliot was sure that established faculty members, who had been running too long on a single track, were NOT going to be helpful!

'He sympathized with modern parents who wanted a practical education to enable their sons to follow "business or any other active calling." He wanted to educate students for careers in the "the workshops, factories, mines, forges, public works and counting rooms." Eliot expected little help from the older faculty. "To have been a schoolmaster or college professor thirty years only too often makes a man an unsafe witness in matters of education....There are flanges on his mental wheels which will only fit one gauge." The existing gauge, the classical schools and colleges, did not offer what was wanted. The new scientific schools that had sprung up since the late 1840s...were at least moving in the right direction, towards "a system of education based chiefly upon the pure and applied sciences, the living European languages and mathematics, instead of upon Greek, Latin, and mathematics, as in the established college system."