THE MEANING OF
A LIBERAL EDUCATION
_The People’s Institute
“Lectures-in-Print” Series_
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_W·W·NORTON & COMPANY, INC._
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THE MEANING OF
A LIBERAL EDUCATION
BY
EVERETT DEAN MARTIN
_Director, The People’s Institute, New York
Lecturer, The New School for
Social Research_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
W·W·NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
_Publishers_
Copyright, 1926
W·W·NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOR THE PUBLISHERS BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
To her who lovingly gave me the first and most
important instruction, and inspired the
desire for scholarship,
MY MOTHER
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
PREFACE
Most books that deal with the subject of education, and there are
many, are concerned with the training of the young. Much is said about
educational methods but very little about content. There is discussion,
also, of the effectiveness of institutions, schools and colleges, and
the interest of the State in education. This book does not deal with
such matters.
It is concerned with other problems. What is an educated person like?
How does he differ from the uneducated? Does he think differently and,
if so, why? We shall be empirical in our study. We shall study persons
who are generally recognized as outstanding educated minds and ask what
it is that characterizes them. Is an educated person one who is like
Socrates, Erasmus, Montaigne, Goethe, Arnold, Santayana?
The theme of this book is that education is more than information, or
skill, or propaganda. In each age education must take into account
the conditions of that age. But the educated mind is not a mere
creature of its own time. Education is emancipation from herd opinion,
self-mastery, capacity for self-criticism, suspended judgment, and
urbanity.
It is often believed that education, adult education in particular, is
an avocation or an interest to occupy the individual in his leisure
time, like music or stamp collecting. The work of The People’s
Institute at Cooper Union, New York, where these lectures were given,
is essentially that of adult education. I have tried to think through
with those who attended the lectures what it is that for ten years
we have been trying to achieve. Adult education is now becoming an
important interest in American life, and the inquiry seems timely.
This book, then, contends that education is a spiritual revaluation
of human life. Its task is to _reorient_ the individual, to enable
him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to
place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals.
If education is not liberalizing, it is not education in the sense of
the title of the book. I use the term “liberal” not in the political
sense, as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense meaning
by a liberal education the kind of education which sets the mind free
from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests. In this
sense, education is simply philosophy at work. It is the search for the
“good life.” Education is itself a way of living.
I have written the book not from the standpoint of the professional
educator for whom education is frequently--if it be adult education--an
enterprise designed for the uplift of other people, but from the
standpoint of one who is concerned that his own education shall not
stop in middle-life. No one is fit to be a teacher in whose own mental
process education has ceased to go on. One is a student first and only
incidentally a teacher. The best teacher is the seeker after truth
amongst his students. Probably the most successful educator cannot tell
what is the secret of his success in teaching. That which is important
about the philosophy of education is not method but that background of
knowledge which enables its possessor to judge what is worth knowing
and doing.
EVERETT DEAN MARTIN.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE vii
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. LIBERAL EDUCATION VERSUS ANIMAL TRAINING 23
III. LIBERAL EDUCATION VERSUS PROPAGANDA 45
IV. LIBERAL EDUCATION VERSUS BOOK LEARNING 66
V. THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF DOUBT 84
VI. A MAN IS KNOWN BY THE DILEMMAS HE KEEPS 107
VII. THE FREE SPIRIT 127
VIII. THE APPRECIATION OF HUMAN WORTH 146
IX. EDUCATION AND WORK 160
X. EDUCATION AND MORALS 180
XI. THE CLASSICAL TRADITION: PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 197
XII. HUMANISM: ERASMUS AND MONTAIGNE 220
XIII. SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION: HUXLEY 252
XIV. THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 286
XV. POSTSCRIPT--ADULT EDUCATION IN AMERICA 308
THE MEANING OF
A LIBERAL EDUCATION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The evidence is unmistakable that there is an important change in the
attitude of the public toward education. There is an increasingly
general demand for it in some form or other. Everywhere and in all
classes of society the interest in acquiring better knowledge is
apparent.
In England and on the continent of Europe there are thousands of
classes and groups patiently pursuing long and serious courses of
study. American colleges and universities are crowded and many students
are each year turned away. Vast and increasing numbers register
annually for correspondence and university extension courses. The
demand for more education is shown also in the increasing number
of lecture courses, people’s colleges, and other centers of public
discussion.
While people do not always know just what it is they demand and
frequently the thing which they receive is not education, nevertheless
there is a new and very wide-spread interest. This new interest shows
itself not only in the increasing number of persons engaged in some
kind of educational activity but also in the fact that people are
beginning to see that education properly may be extended into adult
life.
Until recently, people have thought of education as something for
children, something which a man either got or missed in his early
years, something which he generally forgot in his mature years. To
the average person, education was a matter of fond memories or of
unpleasant associations with teachers, school houses and experiences
of childhood. The “highly” educated person was the exceptional person
in the community, discussions of the philosophy of education did not
appeal to a wide public interest. Now higher branches of learning
are being pursued by numbers of people outside regular educational
institutions. Something very significant is happening. Perhaps at no
time since the thirteenth century has the desire for knowledge so
nearly approached a mass movement.
Certain qualifications must however be made. While much of the demand
for education is genuine and spontaneous, much of it is spurious,
irrelevant, inconsequential. The increased attendance at school or
university does not necessarily mean that more education is going on.
It is frequently said that our colleges are crowded with inferior
students. Athletics, fraternities, schools of business and the
automobile tend to displace science and the classics. American youth
has acquired its ideal of college life from the motion pictures. We
should not infer from the large numbers engaged in adult education
that democracy has suddenly decided to rid itself of intellectual
shoddiness. If the advertisements of correspondence courses in
self-improvement which regularly appear in the popular magazines are
an indication of the instruction offered for sale, people might better
spend their money for patent medicine or in having their fortunes
told. At best adult education consists largely of brief courses of
a vocational nature. Even worker’s education, a movement which has
inspired hope in many liberals, may easily be over estimated. Much
of it is little more than a recrudescence of antiquated radical
propaganda, designed to enable the proletariat to “emancipate itself
from the slavery of capitalism,” and to get it “ready for a millennial
industrial democracy.” The initiative often comes not from studious
minded workers, but from enthusiastic intellectuals and idealistic
uplifters. The cultural gesture is often pathetic or comic. It is
not uncommon for those who have completed the courses of study in a
“workers” college to find themselves more unadjusted than they were
before.
It is sought to make of adult education something which will broaden
the interests and sympathies of people regardless of their daily
occupation--or along with it--to lift men’s thought out of the monotony
and drudgery which are the common lot, to free the mind from servitude
and herd opinion, to train habits of judgment and of appreciation of
value, to carry on the struggle for human excellence in our day and
generation, to temper passion with wisdom, to dispel prejudice by
better knowledge of self, to enlist all men, in the measure that they
have capacity for it, in the achievement of civilization.
Adult education is a way of living which should be open to all who care
for it for its own sake. It is not surprising that it frequently fails
of its true aims. Education has always been regarded as a mere means to
ends that have nothing to do with it. It is to be expected, therefore,
that education in our day should be regarded primarily as a means of
entrance to the already overcrowded professions, or to material gain or
better social position. Doubtless it must remain so until the community
becomes sufficiently civilized so that some degree of liberal education
is the expected thing in all classes, an interest and a goal, a
spiritual bond of union somewhat like the idea of catholic religion in
the middle ages. This is an ideal which will not be realized by magic.
There is no cheap popular substitute for education. Nor are we nearing
the goal while as now almost anything passes for education.
Almost any method of salesmanship or trick of influencing people for
any ends whatever is now “education.” Every one educates the public. It
is marvelous how large a portion of the population of these states is
qualified to instruct. Education has become the game men perpetually
work to convert their neighbors. It is the cure for every social ill.
How shall we put an end to the crime wave, abolish war, how to prevent
social revolution,--or bring revolution about, how induce unwilling
people to accept cheerfully the coercion of national prohibition or
give lip service to some one’s favorite brand of patriotism? The answer
is in all cases--education. If you are engaged in increasing the sale
of a certain soap, in putting everyone on guard against that social
disability of which one’s best friend will not tell him, if you can
frighten a multitude with the danger of pyorrhea and thus increase your
profit in tooth paste--all this is now called education.
Many see in the general movement for more education a great hope for
humanity. It was the belief in its political benefits that led to the
compulsory education of children in the nineteenth century. Men were
sure that all that held the world back was ignorance. People would
surely wish to have their ignorance removed. Remove it, teach men the
laws of a reasonable and beneficent nature, and mankind in general
would be wise and happy and good. Ingersoll used to rejoice whenever he
visited a town where the schoolhouse was larger than the church.
As the humanitarians of the nineteenth century held that public school
education must inevitably put an end to tyranny and superstition, so
many of our contemporaries look upon adult education as the guarantor
of a new and better civilization. There is to be an end of bigotry and
partisan strife and of crowd hysteria and of the vulgarities which
beset democracy. They see genius appreciated, a selection by the masses
of a sincere and competent leadership. Men everywhere are to learn “not
only how to make a living, but how to live.”
Finally, it is hoped that adult education will give us new methods
and aims which will be carried back into our schools and colleges and
transform them. A better informed adult population will naturally take
a more active and intelligent interest in the education of youth. And
when teachers try to instruct adults it will become necessary for them
to make their teaching interesting and significant. The teachers will
also learn something about life, gleaning sheaves of ripe wisdom out
of the mature experience of their students; they will become better
teachers. All this may or may not come to pass. The point of interest
is that there is this tendency to make a gospel of education.
We Americans have a weakness for new gospels. They are a pleasant form
of verbal exercise. Liberty, Democracy, Social Reform, the Cause of
Labor, Psychoanalysis--all have been put to such evangelistic use. Now
we are to become an educated nation by the simple process of everyone
educating everyone else. Education is like reform, it is something
which is always good for other people. There is much talk about adult
education and there are many conferences. But I have not attended a
conference for the discussion of this subject in which anyone spoke
of adult education as his own pursuit of knowledge. And as with most
gospels, we are in such a hurry to save souls that we would begin
proclaiming the new salvation to the nation before pausing to find out
what education is.
Education has one thing in common with religion. One must come to it
with clean hands and a pure heart or one can never know the secret
power of it. This is as true of a nation as of an individual. As a
people we have certain traits which may be praiseworthy in themselves,
but are distinctly hostile to the work of education. I will enumerate
them and then briefly indicate their element of hostility. They
are, first, our genius for organization; second, our well-known
utilitarianism; third, our cleverness in finding shortcuts to the ends
we seek; and fourth, our tendency to make propaganda.
The American way of doing things is to proceed to organize them. Our
genius for organization is probably our most generally recognized
national characteristic. It has given us such prestige as we enjoy
among the nations of the earth. Ours is the land of the Woolworth
Building, the Ford factories, the Anti-saloon League, Rotary, the Ku
Klux Klan, and the college cheer leader. In organization there is power
and there is efficiency, as seen in the success of our industries.
Labor, politics, morals, religion, charity have all followed the
same course. In fact a man gains recognition in this country only by
virtue of his membership in some power-seeking group. He who remains
unorganized is lost. And without a chairman, a committee, an executive
secretary and a press agent no human interest can survive. We simply do
not know what to do with it or how to think about it.
Organization, which is instrument or means, tends to become an end in
itself. This is the fate of most organized causes; a movement arises
with its standardized labels and values, its stereotyped mannerisms,
its rigamarole. Success is estimated in terms of material effects,
tangible results, numbers and power. The organizer takes precedence
over those who possess the interest which it is his task to serve.
When a man becomes a labor organizer, he stops work. Many university
presidents are not themselves teachers or even scholars. They are
good organizers, and with very much the same methods and standards
of value one could as well organize a labor union or an insurance
company. This is no criticism of the college president. His practical
ability is requisite of modern conditions. But ways of thinking and of
feeling are elusive and essentially personal, and when the attempt is
made to institutionalize them they vanish and a lifeless imitation is
substituted. You may as well try to organize the weather as to organize
faith, hope and love. “Organized charity” is almost a contradiction
in terms. Organized religion is a garden of artificial flowers, badly
faded too. The spiritual life of the race was carefully weeded out long
ago.
To know the effect of organization upon education, one need only attend
a convention of the National Educational Association, or familiarize
oneself with the public school system anywhere. The system supplants
education. The present interest in adult education is in part a protest
against the system. The thirst for knowledge is nowhere more genuine
and healthy than in such groups as those which attend The People’s
Institute of New York and other educational centers where learning
is pursued with a minimum of organization. In such places people who
desire further knowledge of some subject in which they are interested
come together, voluntarily, and their only basis of association is
their common intellectual interest. There is no cult or “movement”;
there are no promoters for there is nothing to promote. There are
no ulterior ends to serve and there are no outside influences or
regulations save those necessary to insure honest scholarship and
competent instruction. Many adult students would resent any attempt at
further organization.
There is in existence at the present time a World Association for adult
education, and there was recently formed an American Association.
But these associations have no ambition to guide or control or to
standardize. Nor are they equipped to do so. One of the greatest
services that such an association, made up of teachers and students,
could perform would be to work to prevent the diversion of the present
interest in popular education to ends that are not educational.
“Adult Education” is becoming a slogan, a phrase to capitalize, a
label to attach to various activities which have hitherto borne other
brands,--Americanization for instance, or social work, or community
organization, or reforms and propagandas of one sort or another. Much
that is now labeled Adult Education has a curiously familiar look.
There are faces one has seen before somewhere in other climes that then
enjoyed the sunshine of popular interest. Praiseworthy enterprises
no doubt, and not less praiseworthy is the somewhat tardy discovery
that the organizers have all along been speaking the prose of adult
education without knowing it.
The danger is that persons with long experience in promoting and
administering many things may also conceive of each educational task
as primarily one of organization. In a recent conference on adult
education in a New England state, an enthusiastic public school
administrator in a burst of oratory proposed that adult education be
made compulsory. Another called attention to the appalling extent of
illiteracy, particularly as regards the use of the English language,
and urged that adult education be promoted as a preventive of crime.
A third, a dean in an eastern college, insisted that adult education
at once be departmentalized; graded, I suppose, into its primary,
secondary, collegiate and post-graduate branches. Nothing has yet
been said about an adult kindergarten, though doubtless many people
could profit by attending such an institution. Perhaps the associated
kindergartens have not yet discovered the fact that they also have been
engaged in adult education.
We shall be disappointed if it is our hope to send the grown-up
population of the country back to Public School to receive still more
of the thing that caused many of them to leave. One of the leading
educators in America recently asked a group of teachers whether any
among them were so well satisfied with what they had accomplished in
their own sphere that they could wish to extend their work through the
adult years.
It is very difficult for the man of the system to think of education
itself, he is too much preoccupied with gradations, requirements,
discipline, reports, with seeing that a given minimum of identical work
is done by all in a given time. He thinks in terms of buildings and
equipment, submission to authority, conformity to herd opinion, service
to the state. All or at least some of these things are necessary, but
it is obvious that they do not constitute an education. This lesson
America has got to learn. There can be no quantity production of the
things of the spirit.
Another national trait which influences our education is our
utilitarianism. I do not use this term in the sense that it was used by
those philosophers who held the principle of the Greatest Happiness.
I refer to that in us which is spoken of as “Yankee shrewdness.”
Except in politics and religion, we are a sensible people. And by
sensible I mean--and most Americans would agree--practical. We can be
very efficient when we wish to,--that is, when there is anything to
gain by it. We are straightforward, and except in matters concerning
which we prefer to deceive ourselves, not easily taken in. Whatever we
profess, we are born pragmatists. Our first question about anything is
‘what good is it’, that is, what use is it? We demand results and we
get them. We get things done because our philosophy of life is one of
action, and our prevailing ethical standard is one of service. In the
solution of a practical problem, and most problems to which we give our
attention are practical, we pride ourselves on our directness. We come
to the point. We dispense with the unnecessary, the ornamental, the
traditional. It is a valuable trait.
But things sometimes have meanings other than that of usefulness. There
are values which can not be measured in terms of money or personal
advantage, or of time lost or gained, or of industrial efficiency.
Health for instance is good not merely because the healthy man can
do more work; it is good for its own sake. Yet people are frequently
advised to guard their health for strictly economic reasons, and
practical people have the habit of showing us the cost of disease,
presenting statistics of labor-time lost, estimating the loss to the
community as so many thousands of dollars annually.
I have known people to take a like utilitarian view of human
relationships, making friends for the sake of commercial and social
advancement, furnishing their houses, selecting their motor cars and
even their clothes with the view to keeping up their credit at the
bank. Many a man openly says that he belongs to certain clubs, and
sometimes one even joins a church, for business reasons. How much the
practical man misses is evident from the fact that it never occurs to
him that there are other reasons for doing these things.
Practical men love to philosophize about the value of education. When
I was a student I once rode up to the college with a farmer who was
passing the campus on his way home from town. He informed me in no
uncertain terms that he had no use for that institution. It irritated
him to see all those “young loafers” wasting their time learning Latin
and Greek and lawn tennis. Not one of them, not even the faculty, knew
how to do anything; he had recently tested them out. He had asked the
professor of Greek how many feet of lumber could be sawed from a log
twenty-three inches in diameter and twenty feet long, and the professor
did not know.
The farmer’s point of view is now that of many modern institutions of
learning. Educators are determined to give people the knowledge they
need for success in life and work. Courses are offered in scenario
writing, millinery, salesmanship. Whether courses are anywhere offered
in paper hanging--with credit toward the bachelor’s degree, I do not
know. But it is held that as thinking is really part of acting, only
that knowledge is real which can be put in operation. There is a truth
in this statement if one takes a sufficiently broad view of activity.
But the tendency is to make an easy and crude distinction between
knowledge which is useful, and that which is merely “ornamental.” This
distinction does not always hold. Knowledge may be like art, it may
have values which are more than use or ornamentation. Dr. Horace Kallen
divides values into economic values and æsthetic values. Economic goods
are those which are valuable because they are the means of getting some
good other than themselves. Aesthetic goods are those which have value
in themselves. Art is excellence. Education is the art of making living
itself an art. It is the achievement of human excellence; it transcends
both the useful and the ornamental. It is a way of life, just as truly
as the religious life is a way of life, or the moral life, or the
single life.
People motivated by a narrow utilitarianism do not really desire
education. They are quite content with a vulgar substitute--if it
pays. Education does not transform them; they tend to transform it
after their own likeness. That many are seeking “education” from
such motives is evident. One has only to study the advertising pages
of the popular magazines to note the kind of appeal that is made to
induce the ambitious to enroll in certain correspondence schools. The
prospective student is given the promise that if he will subscribe for
certain courses he may some day sit in the boss’s chair, and associate
with the big men at the top who do real things. Usually there is an
alluring picture of these big men at their desks, thinking great
ideas; a picture which gives about the same notion of the lives of the
successful as one sees in the motion pictures. Sometimes the picture
is of two men one on either side of the manager’s desk. One stands
meekly, hat in hand, dressed as a laborer. On his face are the marks of
sorrow, humility, hunger. The other man has the look of the typical
“go-getter.” The latter is seated; he is evidently giving an order.
Such a picture is not intended to be a comment upon the inequalities
of our industrial system. The reader is informed that both men started
at the bottom, that one improved his mind and his opportunities, the
other’s is a wasted life.
Such advertisements are typical, and are worthy of note because they
indicate something of the nature of the prevailing American interest in
education. Here is an illustration of a domestic scene: The man stands
at the door dejected. He has just been discharged from his position,
and has come home to tell his wife. She sympathetically replies that he
ought long ago to have bought that course of lessons. Or she consoles
him with the question, “Why is it that all the others have gone ahead
and you have not?”
By contrast there is a series of invitations to enter the temple of
knowledge in which a wife is portrayed leaning affectionately over
her husband’s shoulder. He holds a pay envelope in his hand and says,
“I am making real money now.” It is well, when telling people of the
advantages of education, to give them an idea of the conversation which
takes place in the homes of the cultured.
But that anyone should seriously enter upon a course of study of
the world’s classics in order that he may impress people with his
knowledge, appear genteel, make himself attractive to women or gain
entrance to an exclusive social set, is, I believe, a distinctly
modern contribution to educational theory. There recently came into
my possession half a shelf of little old books bound in leather.
They contain a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, some novels
of Fielding and Smollet, and a book or two of seventeenth century
religious meditations. The volumes are discolored with age and are worn
with much reading, broken bindings are carefully repaired with hand
stitching and torn pages pasted together by someone who prized and
reverenced their content. They are part of the small library of a New
England farmer of the early years of the Republic, who read his books
by his kitchen fireside when the day’s work was done, who lived with
them for years, and found in them a perpetual source of interest and
wisdom and a refuge in an existence of loneliness and toil. Imagine
anyone trying to sell that man a work of art with the promise that a
casual reading of it would enable him to appear more cultivated than he
really was.
Today a much advertised and in fact admirable selection of classic
literature is offered with precisely this appeal. A full page display
appears in the Sunday papers depicting a gaudy dining-room with three
people conventionally dressed for dinner seated at the table. There are
two men and a beautiful woman. She is talking to the man on her right,
and is evidently fascinated with his brilliant conversation. The man
on the left sits dumb and miserable and unnoticed; he can not join in
such sophisticated and scintillating discussion. We are informed that
the poor man has neglected to read his fifteen minutes a day. It is to
this sort of thing that popular utilitarianism, aided and appealed to
by commercialism, would divert a hesitating interest in education.
Even in the best of educational institutions the utilitarian point of
view with its emphasis upon a narrow efficiency has its dangers. It is
the source of that specialization which crams the student’s head full
of information concerning one subject, leaving him in ignorance of all
else and hence unable to gain a proper perspective of the knowledge
that he does possess.
In “Science and the Modern World,” Whitehead says
“The modern chemist is likely to be weak in zoölogy, weaker still
in his general knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, and completely
ignorant of the principles of rhythm in English versification. It
is probably safe to ignore his knowledge of ancient history. Of
course I am speaking of general tendencies; for chemists are no worse
than engineers, or mathematicians, or classical scholars. Effective
knowledge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a restricted
acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it.
This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each
profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now
to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of
abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the
abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is
paid. But there is no groove of abstraction which is adequate for the
comprehension of human life....
The dangers arising from this aspect of professionalism are great,
particularly in our democratic societies. The directive force of
reason is weakened. The leading intellects lack balance. They see
this set of circumstances, or that set; but not both sets together.
The task of coordination is left to those who lack either the force
or the character to succeed in some definite career.... The point is
that the discoveries of the nineteenth century were in the direction
of professionalism, so that we are left with no expansion of wisdom
and with greater need of it. Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced
development. It is this balanced growth of individuality which it
should be the aim of education to secure.”
A philosophy which reduces learning to mere efficiency, makes of
education only a means to something other than personal development.
It sees each good as an economic good, a means only, making everything
exist only for the sake of something else to be obtained. But there
are goods which exist for their own sakes and one such good is human
excellence.
In the words of Dr. L. P. Jacks, “The civilization of power aims at
the _exploitation of the world_, which is thought of as a dead or
mechanical thing, existing that men may exploit it. That of culture
aims at the _development of man_, thought of as a citizen of a universe
which can be loved, enjoyed and reverenced: education being the name of
the process which leads him to love, enjoy and reverence it.”
Another and even more serious danger is our passion for shortcuts.
Business prospers by rapid turnover. Practical men demand quick
results. We are an impatient people, always in a hurry. We have not
time for the tedious labor processes necessary to produce well-made
articles of handicraft. Consequently we have learned to be satisfied
with hastily and cheaply made commodities which somewhat resemble the
real articles and will do just as well--for the time being. Why should
we not buy cheap furniture, when we expect to move every first day of
October? Why not wear garments made of shoddy, when everyone knows
the fashions will change even before shoddy can be worn threadbare?
Why erect buildings that will stand for centuries in cities where
everything is torn-down and rebuilt in a decade, and even churches
move about following the shifting elements of the population which
constitute their membership? Just why we are all moving about in such
a hurry no one knows. Some people think that this restless haste is
progress. Whether it is or not, it is certainly modern.
But something of the shoddiness enters into the minds and hearts of
men, when shortcuts are sought in matters of mental growth which are
essentially processes of slow maturing. Education requires time. The
only time wasted is that spent trying to save time. There should be no
haste or crowding or cramming. Mastery of any subject requires years of
familiarity with it. The formal training one receives in an institution
is but the introduction. Most people never get beyond a mere bowing
acquaintance with knowledge.
A prominent American manufacturer, so we are told, once made the
statement that if he wished to know anything he would employ an expert
to tell him about it in five minutes. Among workers in adult education
there is a demand for easy text books, primers which will give to
people in a few pages and in words of one syllable the essentials of
philosophy, psychology, literature and natural science. Simple and
clear statement is always desirable. No author really knows his subject
matter until he can “talk United States” in presenting it. But that
is another story. People who can read nothing more profound than the
tabloid papers are a menace to education. They only retard the progress
of any class they enter.
Yet there is a wide demand for tabloid information. We like outlines
of history, psychology, philosophy; primers of relativity; ABC’s of
atoms. Such books have value only for the student who after reading
them consults the original sources. But what people want is education
without effort, ready-made education. I recently saw an advertisement
in which there was offered for sale “a whole library in one volume.”
Another advertisement offers “The Essentials of a Liberal Education;
Twenty Centuries of thought on your Library Shelf,”--one shelf is all
that is required! And in addition the publishers will provide you with
“easy reading courses.”
The following example is typical of what happens to education when
wisdom lifteth up her voice in the street. A full page advertisement
appears in a Sunday newspaper. There is a picture of two successful
business men looking at a newspaper. The article which has caught their
attention reads, “R. P. Clark Made President of Big Mercantile Corp.
Began as Office Boy 21 years ago.” Here are a few lines quoted from
their comments,
“That fellow amazes me! Do you remember when he first came to us as
an office boy?... and all the other fellows had a head start on him
with their college degrees. He must have found an unusual way to
make up for his lack of schooling--he must have found a secret means
of improving his chances both in business and society. Clark knew
how tremendously he was handicapped by his lack of schooling and he
determined to find _a shortcut to education_. And this he found in
Elbert Hubbard’s Famous Scrapbook.”
There you have it. I have never seen a more complete statement of the
average man’s idea of education. Mastery of the tricks which bring
early success; belief that there is somewhere a secret magic, knowledge
of which will immediately transform one’s personality;--the shortcut.
No appreciation of the fact that it is never information which
transforms a person, but the persistent effort put forth to acquire
it. Education is on the air, in these enlightened times one can get
it anywhere--like bootleg whiskey. It is proposed now to give adult
education by radio. All you need do to achieve scholarship is to turn
it on, close your eyes, and go to sleep. You can get it without effort,
without knowing that you are getting it, or just who is educating you.
I mentioned earlier that one of the dangers to education in America
is our weakness for propaganda. Few people know the difference
between education and advertising. The latter is commonly spoken
of as education by those engaged in it. I once knew an advertising
manager for a fruit grower’s organization. He conceived a brilliant
idea. Just as we have Health Week, Clean-Up Week, Fire Prevention
Week, he arranged in various localities an Orange Eating Week. He
told me that he could educate the public to eat as many oranges as he
chose. Press agents are everywhere busy “educating the public” for all
sorts of objects; to respect the rights of vested capital, to give
money to build cathedrals, to vote a straight party ticket. I once
attended a banquet given by an organization of manufacturers. There
I met a splendid-looking elderly gentleman and was told that he was
the attorney for the organization. As I had never before seen him, I
inquired if he had offices in New York. My informant said, “Oh, no, he
lives in Washington. His job is to educate Congress.”
In spite of all this popular interest, or perhaps because of it, the
cause of education is in a bad way. It is dangerous to encourage
people to think they are educated when they are not, or to believe
they are acquiring it when they are in fact getting something else.
Much that passes for adult education serves only to make people more
superficial and opinionated than they were before. It is very doubtful
if the general level of our intellectual life has been raised by such
knowledge as the public has gained. The public can read and we have
with us the Hearst papers and the tabloids. Literacy has placed the
bulk of the population daily at the mercy of the propagandist and the
press agent. With libraries and colleges and high schools everywhere,
and after a century of science, vast sections of the population can be
swept by such movements as the Ku Klux Klan and Fundamentalism. State
after state prohibits the teaching in its schools of such scientific
knowledge as will lead to a belief in evolution. Crazy reform,
fantastic religious innovation, political foolishness and unbalanced
partisanship may at any time sweep over the country. Intelligence in
this country makes a poor showing in competition with quackery and
complacent ignorance for popular leadership.
It is common to lay the blame for the present state of affairs at the
door of the schools and colleges. Without doubt they must accept some
measure of responsibility in the matter. In many instances the only
alternative to a general slump in standards of scholarship has been a
narrow academic pedantry. There has been much yielding to the pressure
of popular prejudice, much display of conventional morality as a
cover for second-rate educational activity. Faculties are well aware
how little a student may know and get through college. The colleges
themselves seem to have participated in the general cheapening of
education by their generosity in granting honorary degrees. Almost any
one who is successful in business or prominent in politics becomes a
“Doctor.” Erasmus in the fifteenth century, even though he had already
become probably the leading classical scholar of his times, studied
and taught at Paris for nine years before he was granted his doctor’s
degree. When the late Mr. Bryan threatened to print all his college
degrees on his card, in answer to the repeated statement that he was an
ignoramus, the joke was really on the colleges.
But too much is demanded of institutions of learning. Large numbers
of students come to them with no background of cultural tradition,
and they return to an environment which is distinctly hostile to
intellectual pursuits. The public clamor that some one educate us in
spite of ourselves is only another way of shouting, “We have piped
unto you and ye have not danced.” The ultimate responsibility for the
condition of education rests upon the average members of society,
and it is reducible to a moral factor. Carlyle once said that people
could only be taken in by quacks when they had a certain element of
quackery in their own souls. When multitudes regard education merely
as a shortcut to financial success, or as a device for appearing to be
something they are not, or as an instrument for converting others to
their own partisan beliefs, they will of course get the “education”
they desire.
Once I thought that ignorance was an innocent thing, a sort of
spiritual vacuum passively waiting to be filled with precious truths.
Except in children ignorance is by no means an innocent thing. It is a
very active element in human life. We must overcome strong resistances
before we may begin to learn some things. We keep ourselves in
ignorance because there are facts and truths whose existence we prefer
not to admit. The man who strives to educate himself--and no one else
can educate him--must win a certain victory over his own nature. He
must learn to smile at his dear idols, analyze his every prejudice,
scrap if necessary his fondest and most consoling belief, question his
presuppositions, and take his chances with the truth. The greater the
need of education, the stronger the resistance to it.
Whether the present increase of interest in education is to be an empty
gesture depends upon whether the thing demanded is really education.
There is no one right way, and certainly each age with its special
needs and peculiar industrial and cultural environment should make its
own contribution to educational achievement. But there is something
which belongs to no special time and to all times, a way of approaching
our tasks or valuing experiences. No one who is merely a creature of
his own times is really educated. There is conceivable a world in
which,--great as are the historical accidents that separate them--a
Socrates, or a Plato, or a Cicero, or an Erasmus, a Voltaire, a Goethe,
a Huxley would be at home. Much as they differ, there is yet something,
which the educated have in common, a quality of spirit, something that
may not be defined, but that right-minded people recognize. We shall
strive from various avenues of approach to envisage it, for to miss it
is to miss all. It is the meaning of a liberal education.