At War with Academic Traditions in America

Into this volume A. Lawrence Lowell has gathered the most important of his writings and addresses on education, including his Inaugural Address and extracts from many of his Annual Reports as President of Harvard. Valuable though they are as a running commentary on recent educational history, they are even more important as the revelation of the basic principles underlying his long and brilliant administration. Here will be found, with the added emphasis of collective presentation, those progressive ideas that must always be associated with his name: his scorn of pedantry, his impatience with the building-block conception of education, his insistence that the student, not the course, is the only real unit and that a higher type of scholarship than has hitherto prevailed in America should be provoked in the college and in the graduate and professional schools. In all this there is food for thought and discussion for many years to come.