David Bromwich has recently shown how the current educational nostrum of ‘massive open online courses’, or moocs, implies a very specific idea of intellectual community: ‘At the heart of the mooc model is the idea that education is a mediated but unsocial activity. This is as strange as the idea—shared by ecstatic communities of faith—that the discovery of truth is a social but unmediated activity.’footnote1 Bromwich’s apt analysis does not tell us if there is an alternative model of higher education as a mediated and social activity. In fact there is, and it has been available at least since the late Enlightenment. At the heart of humanities teaching in most Western universities is the academic seminar. It is to this interactive, discursive form of teaching that moocs wish to become heir apparent. But where does the teaching model of the seminar come from? And how can the history of its development inform our modern understanding of higher education, and the potential for online courses within it?
In the early modern period, the lecture was the characteristic teaching form of university study. From the end of the eighteenth century, this began to change. The reforming educational writings of Fichte, Schelling, Humboldt and Schleiermacher proposed a form of study at whose didactic core lay not diligent note-taking in the lecture hall but rather independent research. Thus, they wanted, first, to allocate a new function to lectures: material was no longer simply to be conveyed—this could much better be learnt in solitude, in the quiet contemplation of relevant books. Lectures were now intended to make the process of cognition itself tangible, visible, and thus to stimulate students to undertake intellectual ‘self-guided learning’. However, merely altering the form of the lecture was not enough to bring about inquisitive learning in the context of the old system. The new tendency in education theory found purchase only with the implementation of another measure. The emphasis of these idealistic conceptions was to be carried by a new institution better suited than lectures to be the research environment of universal learning: the seminar.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term ‘seminar’ denoted a complex institution, a space that made the union of teaching and research possible. The seminar was a new organizational unit in the academy, with its own budget for purchasing books or funding bursaries. It was a specific location, a meeting room, which later frequently also housed a library with study materials and accommodation, and the seminar members had privileged access to it. This was the site on which the new form of learning took place. Here, at specified hours, the members would meet to undertake research-led learning under the guidance of the seminar director. They schooled themselves in philological and historical methods, composed written seminar papers and, ultimately, came to model their own behaviour on the example of their director. At first, the seminar functioned as a new way to recruit and train high-school teachers, because teachers who had been trained as researchers were expected to give better and more challenging school lessons. However, within the university, the seminar also offered a new way to differentiate the student body. Only the highest performing individuals could become proper members of the seminar; they would often receive scholarships; and since the seminar meetings were generally public—and well attended—their privileged status was clear for outsiders to see. Seminar activity forced members to form themselves as individuals: they were to develop their own interests, work independently, be self-motivated—that is to say, to engage in ‘research’.