ABSTRACT
In the country’s large urban centers, the people’s college became the successor to the academy, which was most usually found in rural areas.1 In both institutions students opted, with few exceptions, for the modern curricula rather than for the classical course. What established the people’s college as an institution parallel to the liberal arts college was its adoption of the educational philosophy of the Yale Report. The report’s emphasis on mental discipline and on the academic study of the liberal arts and sciences defined “the college course” as the proper curriculum for all of the country’s post-common-school institutions of general education. The only curricular difference between the liberal arts college and the people’s college was that the former concentrated on the classical languages, the arts, and the sciences, the latter emphasized primarily mathematics, the natural sciences, and the modern languages. Both stressed a predominantly academic approach and had no room for the applied sciences and practical studies.
