Spoon-Feeding?

It was obvious to Historian Max Beloff, who teaches modern history at Oxford, that U.S. education was ahead on one count: more people, were getting to college than ever before. Could postwar Britain, which talked of doing the same, learn anything from U.S. experience?

Last year, Max Beloff, who has written a book on American history (Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy), made a six-month tour of U.S. campuses* to find out. There were, he admitted, a few things that pleased him, such as the exhaustive approach to Russian studies (not matched in Britain) of Columbia University's Russian Institute. Yet on the whole, he reported in the current issue of Britain's Universities Quarterly, U.S. higher education offers more to be pitied than copied.

Accent on Interest. Beloff complained that, except for a few "radicals such as Chancellor Hutchins of the University of Chicago," there is "a certain lack of boldness" on the part of educators. They seem sold on the idea "that every young person has a right to a higher education, irrespective of ability or previous training." And what is the result? A notion, said Beloff, "that the total number of students is more important than the quality of the work done."

A good deal of the trouble, he decided, can be traced to the school, where there is too much concern with making education "easy" and with teaching only "interesting" subjects. Thus "the years of life when memory is at its most active . . . are largely wasted, and a great deal of what could profitably be done at school is left to be done in college . . . One obvious example of this is in languages ... Modern languages in America are in danger of following the dead languages into total neglect . . ."

Accent on Quizzes. Wrote Beloff: "The habits of spoon-feeding that the school child acquires are not easily abandoned at the college level. Instruction by lecture and random discussion with the reading of prescribed passages from prescribed textbooks, the whole tested by examinations largely factual in character ... are hardly the way to encourage either independence of mind or maturity of judgment."

This "delayed intellectual adolescence," he found, continues even at the postgraduate level, where a Ph.D. student is so encumbered with courses and quizzes that he has no time for original work at all. "This method," blurted Beloff, "produces more Ph.D.s ... it does not produce more scholars."

Beloff, who had said no more than many U.S. educators had been saying since U.S. collegiate enrollments began to boom a generation ago, did not explain what, if anything, could be done about it.

* Including Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, Wisconsin, Virginia, Yale, Northwestern, Illinois and Minnesota.

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