Excerpt from Suggestions for Courses in History in Junior Colleges

The Department of History in the University of California is greatly interested in the courses which are being ofiered in the fifth and sixth years in high schools in California, and makes the following suggestions in reply to the numerous inquiries which have been received from different parts of the State with regard to courses in History. The term Junior Colleges, which has been applied to the establishment of such courses in the fifth and sixth years, indicates that the work is expected to be of college rather than of high school standard. In no subject is there a wider difference of treatment between school and college than in History. In the high school, History must be taught, or at any rate has hitherto been generally taught, by the text-book method. In ambitious high schools with progressive teachers, the text-book method is largely supple mented, and in the fourth-year classes it is sometimes entirely abandoned. But in the great majority of high schools the text-book method still con tinnes to be used. In colleges and-universities the text-book method, even when supplemented from other sources, is now abandoned. The college student is freed from the idea that all the History he need know is shut between the covers of one text-book, and he is led to consult many books and to realize that training in History does not mean the acquisition of a certain amount of historical information, but that it is also a discipline in learning how much or how little is known about the past and in a study of the controversies as to the interpretation of the past. The college student breaks away from the idea of reciting upon a set lesson and is led to read, study, and compare. This change in the method of teaching, which at present generally takes place at the end of the four years in high school, when the student enters a college or a university, must begin-in the fifth year of the high school, or the first year of the junior college, if students from the junior colleges are to be admitted into the upper classes of the university. Otherwise such students will be hampered in their upper-class work by ignorance of the methods of instruction and research therein pursued, if they come at once from six years of recitation work in History into the upper-class work of a modern university.

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