TO “BE” OR TO “DO”
TO “BE” OR TO “DO”
I
A recent writer in a privately printed volume on education begins
with the sentence: “What is the matter with our schools?—Everything.”
I would not go quite as far as that in a blanket indictment of
our educational system, but I must confess that to an outside but
interested observer the system appears to be more and more hopelessly
uncertain of where it is trying to go or what it is trying to do—a
welter of “isms” in a sea of expense, without the slightest agreement
as to basic aims.
In looking back, it is of course very easy to underrate the real
influence of one’s teachers. In the past couple of days I have happened
to note both Gibbon’s characterization of his Oxford days as the most
unprofitable of his whole career, and Henry Adams’s of his four years
at Harvard as wasted. I have often, however, tried to estimate just
what my education did for my own incomparably less powerful mind. I
must have had in all, I think, about twelve or thirteen years, and as I
look back on them I am impressed with the appalling waste of time and
effort. I was naturally a bookish and studious boy. I began collecting
my library when I could not have been more than ten or twelve, and was
an eager student, yet I was taught Latin, German, and French, with
the result that I never could read either of the first two without a
dictionary. In conversation I never could speak more than a sentence
of any of the three, and I have never known an American student who
could—that is, merely as a result of his studying a language in school
and college. Yet, at thirty-five, I taught myself in a few months more
Persian than I had ever learned of Latin in several years’ drudgery
in boyhood. I remember, during the war, meeting on the street in
Paris a young French lad of about twelve, of the better class, who
stopped me and asked where he could get for his collection one of the
insignia which I was wearing as an American officer. He spoke English
fluently and, on my asking where he had learned it, he replied,
somewhat surprised, “Why, at school.” In America, with all the colossal
expenditure on buildings, that is a feat which, so far as I know, no
American school has ever accomplished for one of its pupils.
Of history as I may have been taught it, I can remember nothing. So
far as I can now discern, all my historical knowledge, moderate as it
is, has been acquired by reading, long years subsequent to the ending
of my formal “education.” That I do not remember facts from my years
spent on “American,” “Ancient,” and “European” history may be due to a
poor memory, but apparently history was taught merely _as_ facts. The
rudiments of spelling and mathematics have undoubtedly been useful. As
far as my institutional education was concerned, the arts of painting,
sculpture, architecture and music were simply nonexistent. I never
heard a word about the world of delight to be found in them or of
their possible influence on the life of the spirit. Of my struggles
with grammar there remains nothing, not a single rule, so laboriously
studied. I came of a cultured family and learned at home to use my
mother tongue with a moderate degree of correctness. On the other
hand, from my experience with country people in a village where I was
on the Board of Education, I could not see that if they did not speak
correctly by home training, they ever learned to do so in school. Of my
physics and chemistry I have only hazy recollections. From mineralogy,
geology, physiology, psychology, and zoology much less remained to me
than from botany which I taught myself, learning, without forgetting,
to name the trees and wildflowers and something of the general science.
I have always been greatly interested in philosophy, and I well recall
with what anticipations I went from my small college to Yale to get
what I thought would be a genuine initiation into the subject under the
late Professor Ladd. Never were a student’s hopes doomed to more swift
and complete annihilation. As I recall it, in his course he lectured
to over three hundred students. During the lectures some of his
audience read novels, some newspapers, while a few “grinds” like myself
ruined their handwriting trying to keep up with the lecturer in their
note-taking. After another hour’s work in my study rewriting the notes,
I had a lecture written in longhand that was far inferior in exactness
and proper expression to any chapter in a textbook that Ladd might have
written, and after two hours’ waste of time I had merely reached the
point of having an imperfect text to study.
With the exception of one Japanese, none of the students whom I
happened to know took the slightest interest in the subject. I had
hoped that there might be opportunity, so essential in philosophy
above all other studies, for some direct play of mind between my own
uninstructed one and that of the instructor. There never was. The
professor was a mere unapproachable oral textbook. Nevertheless, he
had the illusion that studying “under him” _had_ induced some play
of mind among his novel-readers, and for that reason he used to give
out the examination questions at the year’s end so that the student
might give original thought to them. Five of my friends were among the
novel-readers. Having paid no attention to the course the entire year,
they got me to sit under the apple trees at Ik Marvel’s place, and
for a couple of afternoons before the examination I talked over the
questions with them. They all passed, with higher marks, I believe,
than I did myself, and received Yale’s _imprimatur_ that they were
proficient in philosophy.
Since I had completely lost the desire to teach which had taken me to
the University, I took my Master’s degree and let a Ph.D. go hang. I
have never regretted the step, though I have no illusions as to the
self-educated man’s being as well trained as one who has had a genuine
education. Thus ended mine, which had cost me a dozen years and my
father certainly a minimum of six thousand dollars, pre-war. If it
be objected that things are different to-day, I may add that I see
no evidence of it; instead, I see an even greater confusion of aim
and method. Not long ago I asked a well-known professor at one of the
largest and best-known universities in the East what, in his candid
opinion, his university did for the many thousands of students who
annually attended it. After a moment’s thought he said that as far
as he could see, the university turned out a standardized, low-grade
mental product, much like an intellectual Ford factory.
II
It is my experience that the professors themselves are getting
thoroughly tired of the overorganization and intellectual aimlessness
of our modern educational institutions. To a great extent they
themselves are caught in the mill. I think that America is the only
civilized country in the world where what a man _does_ counts for so
much more than what he _is_, and where the general public, having no
cultural standard by which to judge what a man is, takes as the basis
of appraisal solely the visible signs of what presumably he has “done.”
A college degree has come to have a perfectly absurd value in the eyes
of the public, not only in regard to the graduates of an institution,
but in connection with the teaching staff. It is practically impossible
for a man who has not obtained his Ph.D. label to progress far in
teaching as a profession. I cannot imagine any leading European
university, such as Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, caring in the
slightest whether a man who was otherwise qualified to teach within
its halls had any degree at all, but every little picayune college or
“university” of the fifteen hundred or more scattered over the United
States has been seized with the Ph.D. mania. A member of the faculty
of one of the oldest institutions in the country, who receives many
requests from southern and western colleges for suitable men to teach
on their staffs, told me that the one _sine qua non_ on which they
all insisted in their applications was that the candidate must have
received his Doctor’s degree. Otherwise, no matter how well educated,
how brilliant intellectually, how good a teacher, the door was closed
to him.
A year or two ago I was talking with a very successful teacher of
English literature in a prominent school for girls. She had only an
A.B. but was soon, after many years’ work, to have her sabbatical
year. With sound instinct she wished to spend that year in England,
becoming more familiar with the background of her subject, browsing as
she wished among the masterpieces of the literature, and, at the end,
bringing back to her pupils a wider knowledge, a deeper insight, and a
freshened enthusiasm. But, no. She had reached the limit of salary to
which she could ever attain with only an A.B., and therefore she felt
it necessary to spend the year in the soul-killing routine of taking
“English courses” at an American university to obtain an A.M. According
to the American educational system, there was never a question of what
she _was_, of what she could give to her pupils, of how, for their
sake and her own, she could best spend that precious year outside the
schoolroom, but of what tangible label she could wear, indicating to
parents what she had “done.” The pages of school and college catalogues
listing the faculty must be scattered over with degrees, or the
institution is suspect.
To a certain extent this might seem to be placing the responsibility on
the public, but as is so often true in speaking of American education,
we find ourselves arguing in a vicious circle. As Everett Dean Martin
has well said, “The school cannot evade the responsibility for the
present low level of mental life in this republic.” Considering the
enormous outlay for public education and the colossal sums represented
by the endowments of our private institutions, we have a right to
ask why, when educators have had resources undreamed of in any other
land, they have created merely a muddled system and a general level of
cultural attainment among our people below that of any one of eight or
more European countries.
In so far as there appears to be any definite trend in American
educational aims, it would seem to be toward President Eliot’s ideal
of “power and service”—one of the most baneful phrases, I fear, ever
let loose by an educator upon an uneducated people. The stress is laid
wholly upon the “doing.” We have, more particularly in innumerable
smaller colleges, courses in cost accounting, in real estate selling,
in “business English,” household decoration, basketball coaching as
a profession, poultry raising, personnel management—all counting for
“points” with philosophy or literature or science.
I cannot see that, as a general rule, American universities or colleges
leave the slightest cultural impress upon those who attend them.
Once out in the world, the ideals and the interests of most of the
university men are identical with those of any “go-getter” who, since
leaving high school, has been learning his trade of stockbroking or
real estate selling or manufacturing in the world of experience. A man
who has attended the Harvard Business School may indeed get ahead a
bit faster than his less-tutored competitor, but that is because of
his specific technical training, similar to that of a cabinetmaker or
lawyer. Some corporations, after exhaustive research, have come to
the conclusion that a “college man” is likely to prove more valuable
in the competition of business than one who is not; but that may be
explained on many grounds quite divorced from education. College men
come from a class that is at least moderately well up in the economic
scale, with all that this implies in producing a superior animal—good
air, food, and the rest. Moreover, a college man has four years more
of such things than has the non-college class. Then there are the
social knowledge, the friendship, and the “mixing” experience gained in
college. But none of these advantages is in any way related to the main
business of a university in its undergraduate department, which is, to
provide a cultural background and an education. The mere fact that the
graduate is a better money-maker has nothing to do with that.
“For power and service.” This phrase not only expresses a utilitarian
view of education, but, in the true American spirit of haste, it
has tended to emphasize the desire not only for “results”—that is,
“practical” results—but immediate ones. It has emphasized our belief
that “culture” either is something to help one in his economic career
or else is a mere fandangle ornament for those who wish to “put on
side”—not something vital in one’s own spiritual growth. American
education cannot be considered as disconnected from all the shortcuts
advertised in almost every American journal—the fifteen-minute-a-day
French courses that will enable you to entertain the representative of
a foreign firm and in a week astonish your employer into raising your
salary fifty per cent; or the scrapbook of the world’s wisdom that will
enable you to impress your hostess and to become popular in cultured
society by a few moments a day; or the five-foot shelf that will make
you the intellectual equal of the lifelong student. The American has
no use for the old Greek saying that “good things are hard.” He wants
knowledge and wisdom without striving. His education has taught him
no other path or ideal. If knowledge and culture are only for “power
and service,” why not buy them “canned,” if it is possible, much as he
stops at the service station to fill up with gas?
As compared with the “plants” of all our educational institutions
in America, those of Europe make but a shabby showing for the most
part—but they appear to get results that ours do not. There are idle
students everywhere in all lands, but one cannot help comparing the
mental outlook of the graduate of the high schools or “gymnasiums” or
the universities abroad with those here at home and finding there a
something which our students do not have—a maturity and a character.
The matter may be subjected to certain rough ways of measuring results
as well. Leaving out such intellectual world centers as Paris, I may
mention such a smaller town as Amsterdam, generally considered a mere
minor trading and industrial center. In wandering about the streets
of this northern Venice, one not only finds bookshops everywhere, but
displayed in them the latest books, in four languages, on science,
philosophy, and the arts. This fact speaks eloquently for the results
attained by Dutch education of whatever sort it may be. There are
plenty of cities in the United States of the same population—under
seven hundred thousand—in which it would be difficult to get in even
one language a tenth of the books offered at Amsterdam in four. Again,
in the twenty-eight years that the Nobel Prize in literature has been
offered, it has never yet been won by an American, though winners have
come from practically every country in Europe and even from the Orient.
Again, if we leave genius out of account and consider only the cultured
public, we find that the number of books published in various countries
in proportion to units of ten thousand inhabitants gives the following
table:
Denmark 11.4
Latvia 9.5
Holland 9.0
Germany 5.2
Norway 4.7
France 3.8
Great Britain 3.0
United States .85
Even such “backward” nations, according to our ideas, as Spain, Russia,
and Poland produce more books in the above ratio than do we—the most
abundantly supplied with money for education of all the nations in the
world!
III
Our errors are fairly evident. For one thing, our democracy has
harmed our education in two directions. On the one hand we have to a
great extent turned over our public educational system to the people,
although the weakest point in American life is perhaps its lack of
public responsibility. Our city, and not seldom our state, politics
are a byword and a hissing, a sink of corruption and ignorance; yet
it is usually to them that we leave the selection of the membership
in our Boards of Education. The cry is also raised that public money
should be spent only in giving the public what it wants—and, in its
uneducated and uncultured soul, what it wants is anything but a
“liberal education.” It all too often wants but two things: the ability
to earn a better living; and the label of having been educated—a
diploma or degree certifying that the recipient is as good as any of
the genuinely educated classes. As Lessing wrote a century and a half
ago:
The iron pot longs to be lifted up
By tongs of silver from the kitchen fire
That it may think itself a silver urn.
This situation would be bad enough were it limited to the public school
and state university systems; but, as a competent critic has recently
pointed out, too many of the private colleges and universities have
“gathered up their academic gowns” and run after the mob “offering
academic standing to anything for which there is a popular demand.”
Democracy, universal education, and high wages in the laboring class
have had another unfortunate influence upon education by swamping our
institutions with students who, although some are admirable, have in
all too many instances no background at all, no desire to be really
educated, and no power of becoming so. For this reason there has
been a general movement during the past five years to simplify the
wording of textbooks in all the higher grades of school, and even
in our universities a professor has to choose his words with great
care. I am told that even at Harvard a professor dare not speak of a
king as having been “crowned,” for fear that the students will think
he has been knocked on the head! Thus a student coming from a home
with cultural background, with an intelligent mind, and a desire to
learn, has to be held back to a pace no faster than can be kept by the
son of an ironpuddler or a carpenter. This is no negligible point.
As the Greeks said, “One comes to limp who walks with the lame.”
The attempt to bring about mass production in education has thrown
enormous responsibility upon, and created almost insoluble problems
for, our educational leaders. A few generations ago the larger number
of students in our higher educational institutions either came from
well-to-do homes or else were boys of unusual gifts or ambitions. If
a boy is really to receive the foundation of a liberal education by
the time of his graduation from college, it is evident that what the
college has to teach the boy who comes from one class of society is
quite different from what it has to teach one from another. Education
is far from being a mere matter of “book learning”, though many are apt
so to consider it. A person is far from being “educated” when his mind
has merely been crammed with facts for four or even seven years.
Man is more than an intellectual machine, and a genuine education
should develop and enable him to realize and utilize all sides of
his nature. He is, for example, as much an æsthetic and an emotional
creature as he is a reasoning one. Indeed, fundamentally he is more so.
He reacted to emotion long before he began to reason, and developed
art long before he did science, history, and all the rest of what now
goes under the old term “book larnin’.” In America, the emotional
and æsthetic sides of man’s nature, so deeply imbedded in it, are
starved to an extent that they are almost nowhere in Europe. The great
mass of our population, for example, rarely sees a really beautiful
building. Compare the churches scattered all over the land with those
which are the inheritance of the poorest in almost every community,
however small, in England, France, Italy, Spain and other European
countries. The great mass of our people, again, rarely see any genuine
and beautiful sculpture. It is the same with painting. Not only are
our greater museums poor in comparison with those of Europe but the
distances are so great that the bulk of our people are hardly brought
into contact at all with examples of really great art. In practically
every country in Europe not only can some of the finest art be reached
by almost anyone in a few hours’ travel at most, but a man living
almost anywhere can, in no more time than it takes to go from New York
to Chicago, see all the greatest galleries, London, Paris, the Hague,
Amsterdam, Vienna, Dresden, Florence, Rome, and the rest. In music it
is much the same, although not to quite the same extent. America is
practically a musical desert as compared with the life of ordinary
people in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, or Denmark.
When the “privileged classes” are mentioned it is usually in an
invidious sense, but there is a very real and inescapable way in which
a boy brought up in a family which is cultured and which at least has
money for travel is privileged as compared with the boy brought up
in a home and a general environment that is not cultured and who has
never seen anything beyond fifty miles from his village or small town
until he goes to college. In the first case, a very large part of the
boy’s education has been carried on outside of college altogether.
Social intercourse and foreign travel have given him certain elements
of education utterly beyond the reach of the other. There is all
the difference in the world, for example, between reading about the
cathedral of Chartres and standing in it. In our emotional and æsthetic
lives it is even more true than in other respects that we learn by
experience. How are we really to educate the vast mob of boys and girls
now crowding into our colleges, whose experience has been limited to
the architecture of our Main Streets, learning the names of Beethoven
and the other composers (or getting garbled versions of their works
on radio or Victrola), and whose experience of great painting and
sculpture is at most limited to black and white pictures in some book
on art?
For the “privileged classes” college education in a way is
supplementary education, but for a large part of those now crowding
into the fifteen hundred colleges of America it is the whole of their
education, and if it is limited to books, and, even worse, largely
limited to what may be learned from books for the purely practical art
of making a living, is it any wonder that the ideal and conception of
“education” and “culture” are steadily narrowing? It must be remembered
also that the college graduates of today will consider themselves the
“educated” class of the future, and with the public largely in control
of education, what will they consider education to be if they have
been told they themselves were educated enough to get their degrees by
studying chicken-raising with a little history and other things thrown
in for the looks of it?
The self-educated person has all the handicaps of a first explorer
in a new land. He may not always take the right roads. He does not
see the country as a whole. He has to waste much time finding out
things that everyone will know when the country has been well mapped.
A genuine education should be of immense help in orienting us in the
uncharted lands of the spirit. But that is just where so much current
education fails us. It is merely a hodge-podge of miscellaneous and
uncoördinated information that leaves the mind almost as bewildered at
the end as at the beginning. Occasionally, indeed, given a strong mind,
a self-educated person seems to have a better understanding of what
education is than our educators. I have before me a remarkable letter
from a workman, whose schooling stopped at the age of twelve. Being
the eldest of a family of eight he then had to go into a factory, and
though his position has much improved he is still in a factory, nor
is he there in an executive job. From twelve to sixteen he put in ten
hours a day of the most exhausting physical toil, but continued his
studies in history by himself. From history he proceeded to philosophy,
and the sciences of psychology, biology, physiology and physics. In
translations he has read such French authors as Rabelais, Villon,
France, Barbusse, Rolland, Proust, etc. Later he developed a taste for
poetry, apparently becoming interested first through Keats and Tagore.
Of music, he writes me: “I am fairly well acquainted with the best
music, having attended symphonies, concerts and organ recitals since I
was eighteen or nineteen years old. I used to take what little money I
had left after paying my board and go off to Pittsburgh alone to hear
the New York, Philadelphia or Chicago orchestras perform. My taste for
music was not created by the modern radio concerts. I acquired it from
seeing and hearing Paur, Herbert, Stock, Damrosch, Muck and others.”
Much of his recent reading has been in Bosanquet, Alexander, Eddington,
Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. He does not own a car but spends his
holiday time hiking and studying nature as far from cars as he can get.
He is bringing up his children and trying to instil into them the idea
that education is much more than learning how to get a living; and
incidentally he says he has found some of the secrets of a contented
life.
I admit that here we have a very unusual case, but is it too much to
ask of an educational system which, at vast expense, takes a child at
four or five and now carries him on to twenty or so, that it should
succeed in doing for the student a little something of what this man
has done for himself? What, among other things, has he taught himself?
The joys of exact knowledge in science, of speculation in philosophy,
the joys of nature, of music, of rational recreation and sane
expenditure, and “some of the secrets of a contented life.” How many
American colleges of today would have given him as rounded an education
as that?
Let us read another letter that is on my table. It is from a woman
in one of the largest, wealthiest and most populated states in the
Union, the public school system in which should be of the best. She
began as a school teacher herself. “No doubt I did the work badly
enough,” she modestly writes, “but I did like to work with children
and I began to study them. Then and there I became a rebel against the
methods and system advocated and I departed from them just as much
as I dared. After five years of teaching I married. Ten years ago my
little daughter was born. Here was my opportunity to do as I pleased,
for a while at least. I began by interesting her, talking to her as
if she had a mind when she was a tiny baby. Before she was six months
old, she had spoken several words plainly enough to be understood by
disinterested persons. At thirteen months she was making sentences.
Before she was three years old she was reading script and print. The
most delightful books I could find were procured for her. Of her own
volition she was learning much each day. She had no lessons. In her
little _Readers_ she began anywhere her fancy dictated. An eighth
grade geography was worn out and another was procured. She browsed
among the books we owned; at four reading from Holmes and Longfellow.
At five she had read Poe and Hawthorne. At six years old I found her
reading Emerson’s essay on the Intellect. She had nature books and
travel books, and we thought she was doing splendidly at home but to
conform to custom at “half past six” we sent her to school (rural). She
didn’t fit anywhere. She was more interested in the work the eighth
grade pupils were doing than that of the lower grades. Fortunately
she had a tactful teacher. He did the best he could with her, finally
placing her in fourth grade.” The next year, under a teacher unfitted
for her work, the child lost all interest. The following year she was
kept home, “doing most excellent work”. The next year she returned to
school and for seventh grade work was given reading, spelling, grammar,
arithmetic, penmanship, geography, local state history, United States
history, physiology and health education. “At the end of the term
the County Superintendent gives a final examination. Beginning at 8
o’clock the children write on all these subjects and also on Reading
Circle books. They have till five o’clock to finish.... The County
Superintendent gives the teachers the hint that final questions will be
based on questions sent out through the term, so the teachers attempt
to get the children to memorize the answers to these questions. There
is a good cram before the examination. Of course most of them pass.”
The mother now faces the dilemma of continuing the ten year old child
in school where she loses her interest and desire to learn, or teaching
her at home which means that she will not have that shibboleth, a
diploma, essential economically for almost any sort of job.
Here again, we may say, is an exceptional case, but it illustrates one
of the most serious defects in our general education. That is that the
educational system from bottom to top is coming to be operated more and
more for the benefit of the unintelligent and not the intelligent. An
educational system that is operated with public money should be run,
so the easy logic runs, for the benefit of the public, all the public.
Of course, the more of the public that enters the schools, the lower
the work of the schools must be. Here and there there may be in a poor
home an exceptionally keen and alert childish mind. Here and there is
a poor home in which the parents are intelligent and do all possible
to develop the child’s mind and provide it with a stimulating mental
environment. But we know these are exceptional cases and not the rule.
With the lowered quality of teachers themselves, due to over-demand
owing to mass classes, and with the teaching geared lower and lower to
meet the requirements of a lower standard of pupil, from kindergarten
to college, is not the chance for the really intelligent child
getting less and less? How can an intelligent child from a home where
intelligent and ambitious and mentally alive parents help to kindle all
the child’s interests and tastes be expected to take any interest in
class work which is keyed to the rate of progress and general capacity
of dull-witted children from homes that are cultural vacuums?
In many lines of private business and, I believe, in all government
positions, a high school diploma is now essential. It has thus come to
have an economic value, which has operated on education in two ways. It
sends an enormous number of educationally unfit through the mill, not
because they want an education but because they want the certificate
that admits them to a job. If they could buy one for ten dollars they
would much prefer to do so. This degrades the ideal of education in
the minds of pupils and teachers alike, by making it serve primarily
an economic and not a humane end; and it hampers the education of the
intelligent pupil by dragging him down to the level of the vastly more
numerous unintelligent. Democracy considers it undemocratic to spend
public money on the few. It must be spent on the many, but the many
are not the equals of the few, and there is no escaping the conclusion
that our public educational system as we have it now, throughout
every grade, must sacrifice the intelligent, fit few to the supposed
advantage of the heavy-minded, unfit many. I do not speak of the few
and the many in any snobbish sense. It is reasonable to admit that
a child brought up in a stimulating home environment, with all the
advantages that a background of culture and experience in its parents,
and perhaps grandparents, implies, meeting interesting people, hearing
interesting things discussed, and with other “privileges,” is more apt
to be fit than one brought up in a dull, commonplace home with none of
these advantages. It is also reasonable to admit that the number of
homes of the first type are few and of the latter, many. It is in that
sense that I use the words few and many.
Our great democracy claims to base its future upon education. On that,
its spokesmen tell us, it must stand or fall; but, we ask, what sort of
education? Is it to be one aimed chiefly at getting ahead in the world,
at getting a white-collar job instead of a manual one, an executive
instead of a clerical one, and so on? Or is it to be an education that
shall teach us, whatever our economic rank and position, to get the
best out of life, to live fully and joyfully, to think sanely, to act
wisely?
In a recent article, the President of Yale asks educators: “Is your
philosophy of higher education aristocratic, or is it democratic? Do
you conceive the colleges as properly the homes of the children of the
upper classes (whatever that may mean in America) where an agreeable
social experience may be indulged in for four years, or do you regard
them as centers of a robust intellectual life to be enjoyed by all
who possess the qualifications of mind and character enabling them to
profit by the opportunities offered? Are you uncompromisingly committed
to a stereotyped conception of ‘liberal’ education, or do you recognize
the unquestioned dynamic of vocational and professional interests?”
With all respect to President Angell this seems to me the most
amazingly misleading series of questions I have ever read from a man
of such academic standing. Why try to befuddle the issue by speaking
of an “aristocratic” and a “democratic” education? Does he mean by
the first a cultural education and by the latter a vocational one?
Or does he mean by the first one which can be pursued by intelligent
minds and by the second one suited to minds less so? I can readily
see the difference between cultural and vocational, and can see that
different grades of minds are capable of proceeding to different
lengths in the pursuit of either of these two sorts of education, but
I fail to see what he means by aristocratic and democratic so applied.
The whole series of questions appears to me perilously like an appeal
to popular prejudice rather than an honest attempt to set the problem
clearly before us. It is clear what he intends by the high-sounding
phrase “unquestioned dynamic of vocational and professional interest.”
In plain English it means money-making as an incentive to study and
regarded as the end of education. Yet the only alternative Dr. Angell
places before the public is what he calls, evidently intending to
discredit any alternative, “a stereotyped conception of ‘liberal’
education.” I deny most obstreperously that these are the only
alternatives and I do not hesitate to assert that by putting the list
of questions as he has, Dr. Angell, so far from doing anything to
clarify the public mind on the problem, has done much to befuddle it.
Appealing to prejudice by calling vocational training or an inferior
quality of cultural education “democratic education” can only mislead
the people at large as to what a genuine education is. He might as
well speak of democratic truth or democratic fine art or democratic
scholarship or democratic beauty. Nor need he confuse the issue by
talking of “the upper classes (whatever that may mean in America)” as
contrasted with “a robust intellectual life.” Dr. Angell knows as well
as anyone that there is a great difference between homes in America
as everywhere, and the children in them, though homes and children
of the best sort may be found on all economic and social planes and
are not limited to any one “class.” He must also realize that under
modern conditions, which have given a great economic value to the
possession of a college degree, the masses of students that go to
college for the sake of acquiring such a degree for business reasons
do anything but make their college a “center of robust intellectual
life.” I suggest to Dr. Angell that he read that stinging indictment of
American collegiate and intellectual life, _Lone Voyagers_. “Chippewa
College” was assuredly not patronized by the children of the upper
classes, but the picture of the student body is all too true to life
in such places. “The ambition of the ‘co-eds’ was to teach in a small
town high school, not unlike the one where they had been educated. The
town often hadn’t even a library. Such girls couldn’t waste their time
developing a critical spirit. It would be suicidal for them if they
did. Their happiest fate was to marry the town dentist or doctor, the
clerk in the bank, the owner of the garage. Their highest ambition
in life would be to send their children to Chippewa. The men in the
College of Arts were generally serving time, taking the prerequisites
to get them into the professional schools, or lazy boys content to
loaf for four years before they settled down into business.” As to the
college life, the cheap toggery shops with the “cheap sport” clothes,
the yet cheaper movies with student cat-calls at risqué incidents, the
college “activities,” do we not know them all too well as Miss Neff
portrays them? Does this sort of thing, which is common enough all
over the United States, go to make that “center of robust intellectual
life” that Dr. Angell offers as the only alternative to “the life of
the upper classes, whatever that may mean in America”? No, the choice
is not between the “children of the upper classes” on the one hand,
and “all those who possess qualifications of mind and character” on
the other, but between those of all classes who have the desire and
capacity for genuine education and those, again, of all classes who
desire merely the social or economic benefit to be derived from the
possession of a college diploma. If, as he says, the effort to answer
his questions “will doubtless keep the educational pendulum swinging
vigorously for many a day to come,” all I can say is that the heads of
our educational leaders are more bemused than even I have ever claimed
them to be.
There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make
a living, and the other how to live. Surely these should never be
confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of
what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make
a living. In the old days we learned how to do it mainly in the shop
or on the farm or by practice in the office of merchant, lawyer, or
doctor. In the complications of modern life and with our increased
accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some
years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular
trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind
us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a
profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings. It
is merely learning how to make a living. Culture is essential in order
to enable us to know how to live and how to get the best out of living,
and a liberal education should help us on our way to acquire it, albeit
the acquisition is a lifelong process. “Culture” is a much misused
word and has come to have a very feminine and anæmic connotation in
America. There have been innumerable definitions, but we may quote one
of Matthew Arnold’s as being as suggestive as any for our purpose. He
speaks of culture as “a harmonious expansion of all the powers which
make the beauty and worth of human nature.” This is far removed from
giving the degree of Bachelor of Arts to a student who has learned how
to truss and dress poultry or has compassed the mysteries of how to
sell real estate and run an apartment house.
Of course, life is short and getting rich is long—or may be. Many
people who go to college to-day, aside from their lack of _desire_ for
education, have no _time_ for it, because it does not lead immediately
to “power and service.” This, to be sure, is nothing new. What _is_
new is that a large proportion of the colleges have opened their arms
to all such and have deceived them into believing that when they have
gotten an olla-podrida of ill-digested information of a scientific and
cultural sort, with the practical courses to teach them how to earn a
better living more quickly, they have acquired a liberal education and
are entitled to consider themselves Bachelors or Masters of Arts. The
words, indeed, have come to signify as little as “gentleman” or “lady.”
It all comes back, like most things, to the question of values—of what
is worth while, of what is the good life. Should we learn French in
order to impress the boss? Should we pick up scraps from collections
of the classics in order to make a hit at Mrs. Jones’s party and
impress her guests? One of the most sympathetic of foreign critics and
observers of American life, a man who has spent much time among us,
recently said that one feeling he always had here was that all our
goods were in our shop windows and there was nothing behind. I believe
this criticism is all too true. We are so busy _doing_ that we have no
time to _be_. We all have almost forgotten what it is to _be_. We all
have motor cars but no place to go. At present what we need above all
else in America is education—not the infinitely variegated supply of
courses that make a college catalogue look like Sears, Roebuck’s, but a
liberal education that will enable us to create a scale of values for
our experiences and to take a philosophical attitude toward the complex
reality about us.
If it be complained that most people have no time for an education
that does not give immediate results, I again reply that that is their
misfortune and has nothing to do with the matter. It is extremely
unfortunate, if they are really capable of being educated, that they
have no time for it; but, that being so, why tell them they _are_
educated? Why not face the problem frankly and divide education (and
degrees) into the two sections that I have suggested, the one to teach
people how to make a living and the other to give them a _liberal_
education, to teach them how to live, how to develop all those powers
within themselves that make for the beauty and worth of life? If
everyone in a democracy cannot have such an education (and a degree),
neither can everyone have some of the other good things—a million
dollars, or the talent that makes him a poet or painter or president of
an advertising company.
IV
Is it not time that we stopped marking down all our spiritual goods
to the price that the lowest in the cultural scale can pay? In the
seventeenth century the lower middle class in Holland became very
prosperous and there was a great demand for small paintings to adorn
their new houses. As one of the historians of their art writes, instead
of improving the quality of the art, this situation brought about a
deterioration, because of the simple rule that “a large uneducated
demand in any field can never produce anything but a glut of inferior
commodity.”
Whether a democracy can last is problematic, but it is certain it
cannot last if there are no leaders above the general level. How
are we to train them? Is it by training men solely for a particular
calling—medicine, engineering, running a locomotive, or laundering
collars? Or are we to give, to some at least, an education in
which doing is subordinated to being, in which the development of
intelligence and character shall be held superior to passing an
examination in philosophy after reading novels for nine months, or
learning how to truss and dress poultry? Sir Arthur Keith recently
said, speaking of English education, that “it is self-discipline; the
formation of character in making man’s higher centers masters of his
cerebral establishments.” However it may be brought about—and that is
something for the educators to decide (though they seem woefully at sea
about it)—what the leaders of our civilization need in education is to
be taught to _be_ something, rather than merely how to _do_ something.
In America, if I may repeat, far more than in Europe, the soul of the
people depends upon the culture to be obtained by a genuinely liberal
education. In Europe, in a sense, culture lies about one, for, in
another definition of Arnold’s, it is “contact with the best that has
been thought and said.” I happen to be writing this before my fire
in London. Any errand that takes me into the streets—a visit to my
agent in Fleet Street, a trip down into the City, a stroll through
Whitehall—stirs more historical questions than a month in college could
answer. Three minutes in one direction will take me to the marvelous
collection of the Dutch masters gathered here for the time being from
all the world. Ten minutes in a bus and I have the wonders of the
Elgin marbles and the choicest sculpture of Greece for the asking. I
am planning an ordinary week-end trip which in a few hours will take
me to France or Holland, where entirely new sets of impressions and
questions of every sort—æsthetic, historic, racial—will be aroused in
spite of myself.
It is far easier here, as I well know from years spent on both sides
of the world, to stress _being_ instead of _doing_ than it is in any
corner of my native land. In America not only is it almost impossible
to get into contact with “the best that has been said and thought,”
save through books alone, but _doing_ has been exalted into a national
cult and _being_ is despised by public opinion as something enervating
and almost disgraceful for a man to consider, something tainted with
the idea of “idleness-and-leisure,” which are usually hyphenated in
America.
“Power and service.” But of what earthly use is power unless it is to
produce or secure something worth while, and of what use is service
unless it is to serve some desirable end? In so far as any ideal is
considered an end in America, it is the ideal of “a better life for
everyone of every class”; but that merely puts off the question one
stage further. What is a better life? Are not power and service merely
_means_, just as are dynamos or locomotives? And what can the end be
except a state of _being_ desirable to man? And should it not be the
aim of education to help us learn what that end, that desirable state
of being, is, and how to attain to it as far as the imperfect nature of
man will allow?
We have been “doing” for three hundred years. We have cleared and
settled a continent. We have accumulated the most colossal store of
material power and resources the world has ever seen. Is it not time
that we began to think what to do with all our means, what the end
is that we wish to attain? If we are not to do it _now_, when, in
Heaven’s name, are we _ever_ going to be rich and prosperous enough to
do it? We have always given as an excuse for our cultural barrenness
that we have had to lay the material foundations first. But how can
that excuse be given any more, when we are the richest nation in the
world, and we are told, until we are almost sick of hearing it, that
all classes enjoy the highest standard of material comfort in the
history of the race? Are we forever to continue getting more things in
order to get more things with which to get more things, and so on _ad
infinitum_? Are we forever to seek the means without ever considering
the end for which we seek them? Is there any sense in _doing_ if we are
never to _become_ something, to _be_ something, as a result? The entire
practical life in America urges us to do unceasingly and unthinkingly.
Should it not be one of the chief functions of education to find the
strands of meaning in our ceaseless web of doing and to teach us some
purpose in our lives? Can anything give us that purpose better than
culture, in the sense first defined above? Can that culture be attained
by a “liberal education” that permits “business organization,” “fire
insurance,” “business psychology,” or “personnel administration” to be
substituted at the whim of the student for literature, art, science,
history or philosophy?
Does not our whole educational muddle spring in part from mob
snobbery—from exactly the same mental attitude that makes the laboring
class talk of “colored wash-ladies” and “garbage gentlemen,” that
makes them want to be dubbed Bachelors of Art after studying business
English and typewriting, ever gaining heaven by serving earth? Does it
not also spring in part from the lack of character and of a coherent
philosophy of life among those who should be our educational leaders?
To the latter, in taxes and endowments, we are giving money reckoned in
hundreds of millions. We are giving them also a hundred million years
or so of the lives of our young in every generation. In exchange, what
are they returning to us in national ideals and culture? Is it not a
fair question?