Home » Robert Frost on progressive education 100 years ago

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Robert Frost on progressive education 100 years ago — 12 Comments

  1. From Frost’s remarks on Meiklejohns’ “students” one might nearly conclude Frost has in mind one such as Scott Buchanan who graduated Amherst 1916, one year prior to Frost”s start there. Buchanan was to go on to found St. Johns College New Program with Stringfellow Barr in 1937. That “program” of great books education (including study of ancient Greek, Latin, French and German, btw) was rigorously imposed from the “top” downward, so to speak, with nary an elective in sight. The program was, and still is so far as I know, heavily dependent on the Platonic/Socratic notion of dialogue as our sole human means of exploration of truth, whatever that may be. We simply have no other entities to whom to appeal. So, along with one another we try to work it out for ourselves, with help from the books as teachers (our “authorities”), with which we argue in concert with our fellow students and tutors, who are understood to be students themselves, though advanced in experience somewhat.

  2. Meiklejohn was at the helm quite long enough (1913-1923) to chart and maintain a new course, from which Amherst College has never since deviated. It is of course the ‘highest ranked’ liberal arts college in the US.
    He was quite the radical, and today would encourage BLM and Antifa.
    By leading the Left and downward turn of liberal arts academia, he must be deemed a rather huge success.

  3. Incidentally,Dwight Morrow, the Amherst trustee mentioned above, was Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law.

    The hubris of their young teachers deluded egotistical students to imagine that through their rational discussions they could find easy and valid solutions to the complex problems of society.

    That describes the university, a hundred years later, with the change that today many students consider rational discussions unnecessary, as they assume that venting their feelings will suffice for finding solutions.

    OMG, I am sounding like an old fogy.

  4. Calvin Coolidge graduated from Amherst in 1895. I recall from Amity Shlaes’ book, that he and other alums didn’t view Meiklejohn favorably.

  5. Matthew’s question demonstrates the power of the Socratic Method. It’s also very funny. Profoundly so.

  6. om:
    Schlaes’ book, “Coolidge”, makes most worthwhile reading. His presidency is symbolic of our condition. He stanched the early erosive liberalism of the Wilson era, but only, as we know, briefly. Imagine a 25% reduction of the national debt by one president!

    Now, even as we watch the Left eat and abort its own, I fear Trump’s term(s) will have results as evanescent as Calvin’s.

  7. The book “Freedom Not License” by A.S. Neill was floating around my household as a teen and I read it. It is very much a Rousseau style concept of education with the added detail that the kiddies do need some supervision so that they don’t go berserk.

    A friend of mine sent one or both of their children to St. Johns college. The curriculum struck me as odd at the time; now less so.

  8. Mr TommyJay, a couple of things possibly to your interest: Peter Stanlis was betimes a contributor to The Imaginative Conservative website.
    [http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/author/peter-stanlis].
    So also is Eva Brann.

    [http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/category/senior-contributors/eva-brann].

    If you have some residual curiosity regarding St. John’s College, may I commend to you Miss Brann’s article “A College Unique and Universal”?

    [http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/03/college-unique-universal-st-johns-college-eva-brann.html]

  9. Matthew Says:
    November 4th, 2017 at 11:28 pm
    Is it comforting or frightening that this has been going on for a long time?
    * *
    “There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation” or university, as the case may be.
    However, the problem with liberalism of this kind is that eventually you run out of other people’s brains.

    http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2008/08/is-this-correct-use-of-quotation.html

    https://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/thatcher.asp

  10. My grandfather had Frost as an English teacher at Pinkerton Academy in 1910. He didn’t think much of him. Gramps would have been a 9th-grader, and I am betting that this age group did not fit Frost’s skills as well as college students did.

    However, having dealt with 9th-graders might have been a good course of instruction for the poet. It tends to destroy illusions.

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