Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/52

34 who cannot piece together scraps enough to gain conditional admission. "The more subjects, the more points," one dean is quoted as saying. Partial certificates—a year's work taken here, a subject or part of a subject taken there—may be added up until the sum equals arithmetically the "units" of a high school course. Moreover, the same subject can be counted twice: English grammar and rhetoric are two subjects, not one; so are English literature and English classics; so biology and zoölogy. Now, aside from these duplications, it is absurd to sum up fragmentary or isolated "credits" of this kind as "equivalent" to a high school course, even if the details were each adequately tested, as they are not. For a school curriculum is an organic thing in whose continuity and interrelations its educational virtue resides. One subject bears upon another; one year reinforces another. A curriculum has, as such, unity, purpose, method. It is not merely a question of time, still less of detached specified amounts without reference to time.

Things are not essentially different in Baltimore, where the entire matter is regulated by voluntary action on the part of the three schools belonging to the division under consideration. The "examination" is of the usual kind: "on a strict accounting they would all fail." In Louisville, students are admitted into the total school, the medical department of the University of Louisville, by either examination or certificate. The examination covers less than a four-year high school course; certificates are accepted from two-year high schools as full satisfaction of the requirements. Worse still, the school also admits students without either, in flat disregard of its professed standard and of the state board. St. Louis, Denver, Nashville, Pittsburgh, furnish further illustration. In none of these does the examiner exact, whether through examination or in evaluation of certificates, the preliminary standard which he is ostensibly appointed to enforce. In most cases the very word "preliminary" is a misnomer, just as we have found it to be in Illinois. For example, the Ohio requirement is not really preliminary to medical education. The schools on the so-called high school or equivalent basis admit students who have not completely satisfied the examiner. Strictly speaking, the students should not be allowed to proceed to the sophomore class; for their medical school credits beyond the first year cannot count until after the admission requirements have been satisfied. Meanwhile they may have reached the senior class. And the moment they satisfy the examiner in respect to "preliminaries," now "subsequents" to the extent of two or three years, that moment their previous work in the medical school automatically becomes "good." At Vanderbilt the first-year class had been studying two months,—yet not a single "preliminary" credential had been even submitted to the examiner; at Louisville