HISTORY'S ROLE IN GENERAL EDUCATION

The teaching of history did not play a major role in American colleges and universities until early in the twentieth century when it became an integral part of the movement for general education. Since then, the experience of students and instructors in general education history courses has substantially affected the way history has been taught, the size of enrollments in history courses, and the role of history in the university. Currently the re-examination of general education under way in higher education suggests the need to take a fresh look at history's place in the curriculum.1 The introduction of general education requirements into the college and university curriculum began on the eve of World War I in reaction to the excesses of the elective system. As early as 1885, David Starr Jordan, then president of Indiana University, had developed the idea of the major subject as an alternative to both the classical and elective curriculum. By 1901, Yale had moved to a system of course concen tration and distribution. Even Cornell, the initiator of the plural curriculum, established a distribution requirement in four specified areas of knowledge in 1905. At Harvard, one of the centers of the elective system, President A. Lawrence Lowell succeeded Charles Eliot in 1908 and reversed the elective trend there. By the outbreak of World War I, the concept of the major (and sometimes the minor) subject with a distribution of courses in the natural sciences, social sciences (including history), and humanities was widespread in American higher education.2 A further step was the attempt to recreate a common core curriculum where undergraduates would share like experiences in a limited number of courses. Educators saw the difficulties in attempt ing to identify specific important courses, but they also felt the need for some unity or coherence among the proliferation of student choices. Increasing numbers of academics believed that all students should have some similar background for understanding their hu manistic tradition, contemporary social issues, and the recent explo sion of scientific knowledge. Also, educators believed that, alongside