President of Swarthmore College
By 1921 Aydelotte was president of Swarthmore College where he successfully blended the educational processes he learned at Oxford with the traditional Hicksite Quaker values the college was founded on. He expanded the college to an economically viable size and developed a broad-based liberal arts educational curriculum that stressed academic excellence.
He is known for introducing the Honors program at Swarthmore, a program based on his experiences at Oxford. The system is based on the premise that the only true education is self-education, and the idea was to create a set of seminar courses for selected students that were more challenging than the regular curriculum. These students would not receive grades or examinations, but would receive oral examinations at the end of the senior year given by external examiners. This replaced the lecture method of teaching for the advanced students, and introduced the notion of the students reaching the faculty. This method of teaching has become the signature of a Swarthmore College education.
Read more about this topic: Frank Aydelotte
Famous quotes containing the words president and/or college:
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)