Wisconsin's Experimental College
It THIS article I am quoting largely from my annual report to the Faculty of the College of Letters and Science of the University of Wisconsin, the sponsors of our work, who in approving the establishment of the Experimental College said, "An Experimental College shall be set up within the College of Letters and Science. The purpose of the new College will be to formulate and to test under experimental conditions, suggestions for the improvement of methods of teaching, the content of study, and the determining conditions of undergraduate liberal education." The discussion I am presenting falls under four headings: the course of study, the method of teaching, the community life of the college, and the continuance of the experiment. Without further introduction I begin with the first of these four topics. A course of study has been made and shaped when two things have been done: first, a range of interest must have been defined; and second, a body of literature must have been selected and presented which will stimulate that interest. In the plan for the Experimental College the "range of interest" is the attempt to begin acquaintance with and understanding of the work of the human mind, as it creates and fashions the civilizations in the midst of which men live. To this end our literature has been, in the two years, chosen in the freshman year from two different fields. Our students have read books which reveal and interpret the Athens of Pericles and Plato in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. We have tried in the sophomore year to select and arrange material bearing upon the nineteenth century in America. In both cases, we have interpreted the literature as expressing the attempt of a civilization to deal with its own situation. We have wanted our students to see how human appreciation and intelligence attempt to express and to direct human action, and how both succeed and fail in their characteristic activities. The organization and selection of the Greek material has quite naturally