The battleground of the curriculum : liberal education and American experience / W. B. Carnochan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Prologue -- II. Charles Eliot and James McCosh : the free elective system vs. a "trinity" of studies -- III. Ancients, moderns, and the rise of liberal education -- IV. Two strains of humanism : The idea of a university, and, Culture and anarchy -- V. "Great changes are impending" : the politics of counter-revolution, 1884-1909 -- VI. Between the wars : aspirations to order -- VII. General education "in a free society" : Harvard's Redbook, the "1960s," and the image of democracy -- VIII. Orbs, epicycles, and the wars of "culture" IX. What to do?

This book demonstrates has been going on for two centuries. In contrast to the heated polemics and hyperbole of current debates concerning the role of higher education in the United States, this eloquent, balanced, and witty book seeks to bring sense to a volatile subject by reminding us that controversy has always surrounded the curriculum of the modern university. It points out where and how contemporary critics of the curriculum are wrong, historically speaking, and it shows how American ideals of "liberal education" are extraordinarily obscure, the product of many different attitudes and historical intentions. The author suggests that we cannot begin to understand or even think clearly about the present curricular wars without looking back over the past two centuries. From the tangled web of history, he has selected certain threads in the course of liberal education not only to illustrate the past but to gain a sense of what might lie ahead. The moments in history the author analyzes range from the "battle of the books" between Oxford and representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment at the turn of the nineteenth century, to the struggle over "Western Culture" at Stanford that caught the attention of the politically ambitious and of the nation as well. An exemplary figure within the debates over liberal education is shown to be Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909. Eliot fought a relentless, controversial, and temporarily successful battle to break down the prescribed curriculum and to install the free elective system, in which students were able to set their own program almost at will.