ABSTRACT
High schools have generally gotten better, even though some formerly adequate or even distinguished city schools have been swamped with poor students and have seen their abler teachers grow frustrated and depart. Advising systems have done little to counter this, for student advising is much less valued than undergraduate instruction. The American graduate school has become the envy of the world, a mecca for foreign students and a model for foreign institutions. It has also become one of the central institutions of American culture. If this is the case, the critical problem of graduate instruction in the social sciences and the humanities is to narrow the gap between individual students' personal lives and their work. American graduate training has, however, been conspicuously slow to follow this lead and let students look at problems rather than disciplines. Teaching is often adjusted to the exigencies of research, but research is almost never shaped by the experience of teaching.
