August 24, 2019 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Progressive Era Aided Harvard
Besides football Eliot also discouraged
other favorite American sports baseball, basketball and hockey.
It was equivalent to discouraging cricket
in England or worse football in Brazil.
When once in his tenure as president his
baseball team performed well in the league games he has said to have made the
following remark:
“This year I’m told the team did well
because one pitcher had a fine curve ball.
I understand that a curve ball is thrown
with a deliberate attempt to deceive.
Surely this is not an ability we want to
foster at Harvard.”
It must be quite apparent to the readers by
now that Eliot’s “New Education” has a strong semblance to the kind of
education that we went through and which your children must be going through.
It was under Eliot that the system of
standard entrance examinations was set up which any scholar from anywhere in
the world would be allowed to take and if successful would be eligible to be
recruited in the university.
Thus the process that would attract the
best brains from all over the world in future was established at Harvard by
Eliot and thereby would allow Harvard to maintain its hard-earned superiority
that was established in the Eliot regime.
In his forty-long years of presidency of
Harvard Eliot lifted up the university from its primitive colonial set up and
established multiple new facilities in the form of schools, departments,
libraries, laboratories, class-rooms and even athletic facilities.
As he was carrying out these dramatic transformations
at Harvard United States as a nation during its Progressive Era of development
(1890s to 1920s) was seeing rise of some phenomenally affluent families that
are called plutocrats.
American plutocrats of the Progressive Era
are a little bit different from the Russian oligarchs in the sense that
oligarchy is more to do with the power structure of the system while the
plutocracy is rooted in wealth distribution.
Yet there is no doubt that the Russian oligarchs
are not only powerful but one of the wealthiest men in the world largely
acquiring their wealth because of their close association either with the
government officials (sometimes they being the officials themselves) or with
the criminal bosses connected with the Russian government or with both.
In the forty years of Progressive Era of
the United States the number of such plutocratic families grew exponentially
from about 100 millionaires in 1870s to 4000 in 1892.
By the time the First World War began its
devastation of the European, the Ottoman and the Japanese Empires the number of
millionaires in the United States had reached 16,000.
The Japanese Empire actually profited from
the World War I and got a chance to sit along the “Big Four” at the Versailles
Peace Conference and acquire a permanent seat on the Council of the League of
Nations.
This prosperity would not last long though.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Advertisements
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment