The same educational fallacy which fills the groves of learning
with such dunces causes a huge waste of energy and money on lower
levels—those, to wit, of the secondary schools. The theory behind the
lavish multiplication of such schools is that they outfit the children
of the mob with the materials of reasoning, and inculcate in them a
habit of indulging in it. I have never been able to discover any
evidence in support of that theory. The common people of America—at
least the white portion of them—are rather above the world’s average
in literacy, but there is no sign that they have acquired thereby any
capacity for weighing facts or comparing ideas. The school statistics
show that the average member of the American Legion can read and
write after a fashion, and is able to multiply eight by seven after
four trials, but they tell us nothing about his actual intelligence.
The returns of the Army itself, indeed, indicate that he is stupid
almost beyond belief—that there is at least an even chance that he
is a moron. Is such a fellow appreciably superior to the villein of
the Middle Ages? Sometimes I am tempted to doubt it. I suspect, for
example, that the belief in witchcraft is still almost as widespread
among the plain people of the United States, at least outside the
large cities, as it was in Europe in the year 1500. In my own state
of Mary-land all of the negroes and mulattoes believe absolutely in
witches, and so do most of the whites. The belief in ghosts penetrates
to quite high levels. I know very few native-born Americans, indeed,
who reject it without reservation. One constantly comes upon grave
defenses of spiritism in some form or other by men theoretically of
learning; in the two houses of Congress it would be difficult to
muster fifty men willing to denounce the thing publicly. It would
not only be politically dangerous for them to do so; it would also go
against their consciences.
What is always forgotten is that the capacity for knowledge of the
great masses of human blanks is very low—that, no matter how adroitly
pedagogy tackles them with its technical sorceries, it remains a
practical impossibility to teach them anything beyond reading and
writing, and the most elementary arithmetic. Worse, it is impossible
to make any appreciable improvement in their congenitally ignoble
tastes, and so they devote even the paltry learning that they acquire
to degrading uses. If the average American read only the newspapers,
as is frequently alleged, it would be bad enough, but the truth is
that he reads only the most imbecile _parts_ of the newspapers.
Nine-tenths of the matter in a daily paper of the better sort is almost
as unintelligible to him as the theory of least squares. The words
lie outside his vocabulary; the ideas are beyond the farthest leap of
his intellect. It is, indeed, a sober fact that even an editorial in
the New York _Times_ is probably incomprehensible to all Americans
save a small minority—and not, remember, on the ground that it is too
nonsensical but on the ground that it is too subtle. The same sort of
mind that regards Rubinstein’s Melody in F as too “classical” to be
agreeable is also stumped by the most transparent English.
Like most other professional writers I get a good many letters from my
customers. Complaints, naturally, are more numerous than compliments;
it is only indignation that can induce the average man to brave the
ardors of pen and ink. Well, the complaint that I hear most often is
that my English is unintelligible—that it is too full of “hard” words.
I can imagine nothing more astounding. My English is actually almost
as bald and simple as the English of a college yell. My sentences are
short and plainly constructed: I resolutely cultivate the most direct
manner of statement; my vocabulary is deliberately composed of the
words of everyday. Nevertheless, a great many of my readers in my own
country find reading me an uncomfortably severe burden upon their
linguistic and intellectual resources. These readers are certainly
not below the American average in intelligence; on the contrary, they
must be a good deal above the average, for they have at least got to
the point where they are willing to put out of the safe harbor of the
obvious and respectable, and to brave the seas where more or less
novel ideas rage and roar. Think of what the ordinary newspaper reader
would make of my compositions! There is, in fact, no need to think; I
have tried them on him. His customary response, when, by mountebankish
devices, I forced him to read—or, at all events, to try to read—, was
to demand resolutely that the guilty newspaper cease printing me, and
to threaten to bring the matter to the attention of the _Polizei._ I do
not exaggerate in the slightest; I tell the literal truth.
It is such idiots that the little red school-house operates upon, in
the hope of unearthing an occasional first-rate man. Is that hope
ever fulfilled? Despite much testimony to the effect that it is, I am
convinced that it really isn’t. First-rate men are never begotten by
Knights of Pythias; the notion that they sometimes are is due to an
optical delusion. When they appear in obscure and ignoble circles it
is no more than a proof that only an extremely wise sire knows his own
son. Adultery, in brief, is one of nature’s devices for keeping the
lowest orders of men from sinking to the level of downright simians:
sometimes for a few brief years in youth, their wives and daughters are
comely—and now and then the baron drinks more than he ought to. But it
is foolish to argue that the gigantic machine of popular education is
needed to rescue such hybrids from their environment. The truth is that
all the education rammed into the average pupil in the average American
public school could be acquired by the v larva of any reasonably
intelligent man in no more than six weeks of ordinary application, and
that where schools are unknown it actually _is_ so acquired. A bright
child, in fact, can learn to read and write without any save the most
casual aid a great deal faster than it can learn to read and write in a
class-room, where the difficulties of the stupid retard it enormously
and it is further burdened by the crazy formulæ invented by pedagogues.
And once it can read and write, it is just as well equipped to acquire
further knowledge as ninetenths of the teachers it will subsequently
encounter in school or college.