General Survey Courses
T HE sampling formula for safeguarding acquaintance with the great fields of knowledge is a natural but unsatisfactory outcome of current trends in scholarly production. The general idea that college graduates should be informed about the culture of the race is sound. And at one time it was possible for a student to secure a distillate of what man had achieved. But for the last seventy years scholarly production has been so specialized that complete coverage is impossible. Scholarly knowledge is so enormous in area that a student can neither master all of it nor even keep up with its daily accretions. To meet this situation the accepted plan has been to divide knowledge into a few large fields and require the student to familiarize himself with a sample of each. Ordinarily the conventional large fields are physical science, biological science, social studies, the humanities, and foreign languages. Within each of these fields the student is required to have competency in a beginning course. In the physical-science field, for instance, he must study either in high school or in college some physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, or mathematics to a depth sufficient to meet the standards of his college. Because the knowledge so gained and the objectives of these beginning courses are more specialized and less general than some colleges desire, a trend has risen since the first World War toward a survey of the contributions of these great fields. Courses have been built which cut across departmental lines as the great contributions of the fields are teased out and woven into a broad structure. Integration is substituted for sampling. To discover the extent to which this new type of course is being experimented upon and used we ran