Two great follies corrupt the present pedagogy, once it gets beyond
the elementals. One is the folly of overestimating the receptivity
of the pupil; the other is the folly of overestimating the possible
efficiency of the teacher. Both rest upon that tendency to put too
high a value upon mere schooling which characterizes democratic and
upstart societies—a tendency born of the theory that a young man
who has been “educated,” who has “gone through college,” is in some
subtle way more capable of making money than one who hasn’t. The
nature of the schooling on tap in colleges is but defectively grasped
by the adherents of the theory. They view it, I believe, as a sort of
extension of the schooling offered in elementary schools—that is, as
an indefinite multiplication of training in such obviously valuable and
necessary arts as reading, writing and arithmetic. It is, of course,
nothing of the sort. If the pupil, as he climbs the educational ladder,
is fortunate enough to come into contact with a few Huxleys or Ludwigs,
he may acquire a great deal of extremely sound knowledge, and even
learn how to think for himself. But in the great majority of cases he
is debarred by two things: the limitations of his congenital capacity
and the limitations of the teachers he actually encounters. The latter
is usually even more brilliantly patent than the former. Very few
professional teachers, it seems to me, really know anything worth
knowing, even about the subjects they essay to teach. If you doubt it,
simply examine their contributions to existing knowledge. Several years
ago, while engaged upon my book, “The American Language,” I had a good
chance to test the matter in one typical department, that of philology.
I found a truly appalling condition of affairs. I found that in the
whole United States there were not two dozen teachers of English
philology—in which class I also include the innumerable teachers of
plain grammar—who had ever written ten lines upon the subject worth
reading. It was not that they were indolent or illiterate: in truth,
they turned out to be enormously diligent. But as I plowed through
pyramid after pyramid of their doctrines and speculations, day after
day and week after week, I discovered little save a vast laboring of
the obvious, with now and then a bold flight into the nonsensical. A
few genuinely original philologians revealed themselves—pedagogues
capable of observing accurately and reasoning clearly. The rest simply
wasted time and paper. Whole sections of the field were unexplored, and
some of them appeared to be even unsuspected. The entire life-work of
many an industrious professor, boiled down, scarcely made a footnote in
my book, itself a very modest work.
This tendency to treat the superior pedagogue too seriously—to view
him as, _ipso facto_, a learned man, and one thus capable of conveying
learning to others—is supported by the circumstance that he so views
himself, and is, in fact, very pretentious and even bombastic. Nearly
all discussions of the educational problem, at least in the United
States, are carried on by schoolmasters or ex-schoolmasters—for
example, college presidents, deans, and other such magnificoes—and so
they assume it to be axiomatic that such fellows are genuine bearers
of the enlightenment, and hence capable of transmitting it to others.
This is true sometimes, as I have said, but certainly not usually.
The average high-school or college pedagogue is not one who has been
selected because of his uncommon knowledge; he is simply one who has
been stuffed with formal ideas and taught to do a few conventional
intellectual tricks. Contact with him, far from being inspiring to
any youth of alert mentality, is really quite depressing; his point
of view is commonplace and timorous; his best thought is no better
than that of any other fourth-rate professional man, say a dentist or
an advertisement writer. Thus it is idle to talk of him as if he were
a Socrates, an Aristotle, or even a Leschetizky. He is actually much
more nearly related to a barber or a lieutenant of marines. A worthy
man, industrious and respectable—but don’t expect too much of him. To
ask him to struggle out of his puddle of safe platitudes and plunge
into the whirlpool of surmise and speculation that carries on the
fragile shallop of human progress—to do this is as absurd as to ask a
neighborhood doctor to undertake major surgery.
In the United States his low intellectual status is kept low, not
only by the meager rewards of his trade in a country where money is
greatly sought and esteemed, but also by the democratic theory of
education—that is, by the theory that mere education can convert a
peasant into an intellectual aristocrat, with all of the peculiar
superiorities of an aristocrat—in brief, that it is possible to make
purses out of sow’s ears. The intellectual collapse of the American
_Gelehrten_ during the late war—a collapse so nearly unanimous
that those who did not share it attained to a sort of immortality
overnight—was perhaps largely due to this error. Who were these
bawling professors, so pathetically poltroonish and idiotic? In an
enormous number of cases they were simply peasants in frock-coats—oafs
from the farms and villages of Iowa, Kansas, Vermont, Alabama,
the Dakotas and other such backward states, horribly stuffed with
standardized learning in some fresh-water university, and then set to
teaching. To look for a civilized attitude of mind in such Strassburg
geese is to look for honor in a valet; to confuse them with scholars
is to confuse the Knights of Pythias with the Knights Hospitaller.
In brief, the trouble with them was that they had no sound tradition
behind them, that they had not learned to think clearly and decently,
that they were not gentlemen. The youth with a better background
behind him, passing through an American university, seldom acquires
any yearning to linger as a teacher. The air is too thick for him;
the rewards are too trivial; the intrigues are too old-maidish and
degrading. Thus the chairs, even in the larger universities, tend
to be filled more and more by yokels who have got themselves what is
called an education only by dint of herculean effort. Exhausted by the
cruel process, they are old men at 26 or 28, and so, hugging their
Ph.D’s, they sink into convenient instructorships, and end at 60 as
_ordentliche Professoren._ The social status of the American pedagogue
helps along the process. Unlike in Europe, where he has a secure and
honorable position, he ranks, in the United States, somewhere between
a Methodist preacher and a prosperous brick-yard owner—certainly
clearly below the latter. Thus the youth of civilized upbringings
feels that it would be stooping a bit to take up the rattan. But the
plow-hand obviously makes a step upward, and is hence eager for the
black gown. Thereby a vicious circle is formed. The plow-hand, by
entering the ancient guild, drags it down still further, and so makes
it increasingly difficult to snare apprentices from superior castes.
A glance at “Who’s Who in America” offers a good deal of support
for all this theorizing. There was a time when the typical American
professor came from a small area in New England—for generations the
seat of a high literacy, and even of a certain austere civilization.
But to-day he comes from the region of silos, revivals, and saleratus.
Behind him there is absolutely no tradition of aristocratic aloofness
and urbanity, or even of mere civilized decency. He is a bind by birth,
and he carries the smell of the dunghill into the academic grove—and
not only the smell, but also some of the dung itself. What one looks
for in such men is dullness, superficiality, a great credulity, an
incapacity for learning anything save a few fly-blown rudiments, a
passionate yielding to all popular crazes, a malignant distrust of
genuine superiority, a huge megalomania. These are precisely the
things that one finds in the typical American pedagogue of the new
dispensation. He is not only a numskull; he is also a boor. In the
university president he reaches his heights. Here we have a so-called
learned man who spends his time making speeches before chautauquas,
chambers of commerce and Rotary Clubs, and flattering trustees who run
both universities and street-railways, and cadging money from such men
as Rockefeller and Carnegie.