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322Conversation What Is the Future of Higher Education?Literacy, as the basis of education, has a special history in the United States. It reached extraordinary levels in New England in the eighteenth century, substantially higher than in England or France, and higher than in contemporary America, if standards, definitions, and circumstances do not differ to the point that comparisons are meaningless. The Puritans are said to have attached the utmost religious significance to the ability to read Scripture for oneself, male or female. Much basic teaching was done in the home, no doubt an earnest business, with real emotional rewards for success. From the seventeenth century their communities also accepted the responsibility of maintaining schools. Their thought on the matter is a variant of Aristotle%u2019s1. Literacy gives access to the knowledge for which the soul yearns.There was a region in America where literacy was enthusiastically propagated. And there was another region where it was jealously, by law, restricted to one race. This fear of the possible impact of literacy on the enslaved is another instance of the association of learning with freedom, with the awakening of the autonomous self. The Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787, just before the ratification of the Constitution, excluded slavery from the upper Midwest and established fundamental rights%u2014habeas corpus and religious tolerance, for example. Of education, it said, %u201cReligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.%u201d The Morrill Act, signed by Lincoln in 1862, established the practice of the donation of land by the federal government to create and support colleges and universities. . . .The Morrill Act specifies that this emphasis should not exclude %u201cother scientific and classical studies.%u201d It would be consistent with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century learning if Hesiod2 or Virgil3 inspired this georgic vision of enlightened rural life. The act passed because states that opposed it had seceded, and for the same reason it called for the teaching of %u201cmilitary tactic.%u201d After the Civil War the land grant system was extended to the South on condition that the colleges should be integrated, or equivalent schools should be created for Black students. These colleges became the basis of historically Black higher education. There are now about four thousand degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. These schools have been a distinctive influence and resource for the country through many generations.Comparison with other countries is oddly difficult, a consequence of varying definitions of the word university and of differences in the ways education is organized. It is possible to say that there are more than 160 universities in the United Kingdom, 380 in Germany, about one hundred in Canada. The figure for France is somewhere between one hundred at the low end and 3,500 at the top, an illustration of the problem. In any case, the European norm is very different from the scale of institutional higher education in the US, even when these figures are multiplied to correct for the larger American population.These comparisons, inexact as they are, are sufficient to make the point that American culture, with all the changes the country has passed through over the years, has maintained a consensus about the importance of higher education. Through what has been, by world standards, a very distinctive tendency to broaden openness to nontraditional students%u2014women, epochally%u2014and to vastly and continuously enlarge curriculum, the strong presence of colleges and universities has had a profound influence on the life of the country. 102An ancient Greek poet.%u2014Eds.3An ancient Roman poet.%u2014Eds.1An ancient Greek philosopher who supported public education.%u2014Eds.2023Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.