LIBERAL EDUCATION VS. BOOK LEARNING
Is education something one can “get” in an institution? We are seeking
to discover what an educated person is like,--as Plato would say, to
“find” the educated man. Whether the learning process takes place
in an institution or out of it is from this point of view a matter
of small interest. I should like to picture the liberally educated
individual as a mellow amateur, competent and well-informed, but with
all natural and human, wholly at ease with his knowledge and master
of his technique; one whose thinking is play and whose mind does not
squeak as it runs along. But there frequently appears in educational
circles a professionalism that is rather formidable and terrifying.
I do not mean the specialized knowledge requisite for the so-called
learned professions. One may be highly trained professionally, and like
William James and Mr. Justice Holmes, retain the spirit of the amateur
always. By professionalism I mean a certain artificiality of manner,
bookishness, over-strictness in regard to petty rules, a disposition
to identify education with the display of just that knowledge which
the educated are conventionally supposed to possess. Many people think
of education as something “high-brow,” a fastidiousness which belongs
to the élite. There are those who give the impression that education
is a thing of books and schools and formalities; and that there is a
recognized fraternity of the finished products of the system. As proof
that one belongs to this fraternity there are degrees and credits which
show that the candidate has passed certain examinations and has done a
required amount of reading. We have seen that people may seek education
because they hope it will give them a certain prestige. I once heard
a man say, “I’d give ten thousand dollars if I only knew Greek.” I
wondered why Greek had such value in his eyes. I learned that he had
been in the company of two elderly men, one a clergyman and the other a
physician. He was humiliated because of his ignorance when the two fell
to discussing some Greek text reminiscent of college days. It never
occurred to him that he could secure a few text books and acquire this
coveted knowledge in his spare time whenever he chose to do so.
People persist in thinking that education comes to a man by virtue
of his attendance at some place where it may be “got.” We frequently
hear someone say, “I _had_ so many years of Latin,” or “I _took_
mathematics,” or “I did not _get_ much history.” Formal education,
which is book knowledge acquired in a school,--this possession which
men measure and grade and standardize,--may or may not be an aid to
general culture. The thing I mean by liberal education is too elusive
for the man with the yard stick.
With the modern theories of learning there has come some difference
of opinion regarding the educational value of books. Traditional
education consisted almost wholly of book knowledge. Knowledge of the
books written about a subject was rated as familiarity with the subject
itself.
There is a recent tendency, both within and without institutions of
learning, to skim over as many as possible of the latest books. This
leaves little or no time for the great books, knowledge of which is
essential to a liberal education. In the library of a very up-to-date
writer on sociological and economic subjects, I did not find a single
book, except a few school texts, written before nineteen hundred.
Modern writers all seem to desire to express the movements of the day.
But it is difficult to see how one’s judgment of the present can be
very sound, if one has no background of the cultural traditions of the
race. Ideas of life gained from an exclusive study of the present are
necessarily second-rate. Professor John Erskine says, “To live only
in the moment, to imagine only one’s own place was once thought to be
the fate of the stupid. We have made it the ideal of education.... No
college is liberal which trains its students to identify the excellent
or the important exclusively with the contemporary.” He says that
education should prejudice us in favor of authors who are wise, and
that there have not been many great men nor many great ideas. One may
acquire a liberal education from the reading of relatively few books.
“The Student ... ought to know Hobbes; he ought to know Pascal, and
Plato and Bacon and Homer, and Spinoza and Galileo, and Leonardo da
Vinci.”
And I would add that anyone pursuing his education ought to know
Erasmus and Montaigne, Butler’s “Hudibras,” and something of Hume,
Voltaire, Anatole France, and the best of the classic poets. This is
not a great deal of reading. It can moreover be done in a leisurely
manner, and this is important. Our modern habit of cluttering up the
mind with all sorts of second-rate, up-to-date printed matter accounts
in part for the jumpiness and hectic quality of the modern spirit. No
one seems to take time for quiet reflection any more. Everyone is too
busy keeping up-to-date, gaining a superficial knowledge of the latest
thing, and before we can pause to separate the true from the false in
it, it is already out of date and something still more “modern” is the
fashion.
There is a tendency among very modern educators to reduce book learning
to a minimum. It is said that book knowledge is only hear-say,
second-hand information. The student does not make a fact his own
so long as he must take someone’s word for it. What books tell you
prevents your finding out for yourself. You know an emotion only when
you feel it, a fact when you deal with it, a truth when you discover
it. “We learn by doing.” A leading progressive educator says, “The
school of tomorrow is going to get away from mere reciting what has
been got from books. That is, we are going to give up the notion that
the school is the place where we assign certain set tasks and the child
goes off and prepares those things and then comes back to convince us
that he has done what was required.... In the school of the future,
the child is going to live, really live. This means what he learns he
learns because he needs it then and there.”
This rather extreme form of protest against formal book learning is
really an attempt to correct the opposite extreme. We all know persons,
conventionally educated, who substitute reading for living, and the
book for reality. There are those who never talk about events or ideas,
but always quote what some book says about them, as if they believed
that work, love, joy, pain, became fit subjects of contemplation
only in print. The world of actions and things gives way to a world
of words only. Human existence becomes a sort of grown-up children’s
game of authors. Education becomes an evasion of the challenge of
real situations. Emotion and fancy are exhausted in doing nothing. It
becomes preferable to read about things than to experience them. The
individual thinks he has acquired wisdom; he merely has a taste for
reading and a good memory.
In these days when educators are frantically striving to find some new
method of teaching which will save democracy from mediocrity, it is
the habit to blame the older education for any and all intellectual
futility. I believe, however, that futile persons would be ineffective
no matter what the method of instruction. The statement quoted above
to the effect that in the schools of the future the children are going
to live and are to stop reciting required lessons and learn what they
need “here and now,” is a little like the platitude that one can learn
more out of life than out of books, a saying which always flatters the
illiterate. It seems to be thoroughly modern to believe that the best
way to get an education is to stop studying and just _live_,--whatever
that is.
I am of the opinion, however, that anyone who can learn from life can
also learn from books without spoiling his mind. There is a difference
between learning from books and merely learning to repeat passages
from them, and I had thought that in really learning from books one
was learning from life. Whether one can get more information from
books than from things depends somewhat on the books, also what it is
one wishes to learn, as well as one’s capacity to learn. Manipulation
of objects--doing--has no more educational value than repeating
words. Either may become a mere routine exercise. Education is the
organization of knowledge into human excellence. It is not the mere
possession of knowledge, but the ability to reflect upon it and grow in
wisdom. It would seem that as few people acquire wisdom from practical
experience as from books.
The high-school educated multitude, which prefers the radio to reading,
finds the tales of classic literature tedious except when presented in
the “movies,” reads history only in outline, and natural science only
when popularized in a series of ABC books, is probably correct in its
feeling that books cannot teach it much; and what it is learning from
life is manifest in the sort of life it lives. The habit of reading
good books, ability to know the good ones from the inferior, capacity
to enjoy books for the beauty and wisdom that may be found in them, are
essential parts of a liberal education. A school that implants good
habits of discriminating reading in its students is a good school. One
that fails to do this is a bad school. The modern educational system
has taught the public to read,--and the public reads mostly trash.
That education in a so-called democracy may be official and
professionalized and at the same time superficial and illiberal is
manifest. Thomas Davidson, a pioneer teacher of adults in this country,
expressed great hope in the promise of public education in America.
But there is one fact about such intellectual life as there is in
this country which seems to have escaped Davidson’s attention, I
suppose because his own case was an exception. It is a fact which I
believe may be one of the causes of the small influence which learning
exerts in the daily life and thought and preferences of our people.
Thousands of people say that their education is of no use to them in
later years. It is an interest which they do not keep up but leave
behind at the school-house door. They think that education belongs
properly in the school, and except for some practical advantage most
people seldom think of making any cultural achievement of their own
outside the school. Most advance in scholarship in this country is the
work of professionals, members of university faculties. Outside the
institutions of learning, there is very little independent creative
thought. Exception must be made of our literary men, but these too are
professionals. There are almost no men of leisure who carry on the
progress of civilization as educated amateurs. In this respect we are
much like Germany before the war, where advance in scholarship was
almost confined to the universities and the attempt was made to create
knowledge by the machinery of organized research.
An example of the situation in our country is to be found in the fact
that almost every member of the American Philosophical Association is
a Ph.D. and a teacher of philosophy in a degree-granting institution.
It might almost be said that philosophy, beyond the merest introduction
to the subject, is studied in order that students may become teachers
of still other teachers. I suspect that a similar situation exists
in other learned societies. This confinement of scholarship to the
professional student leaves the public without guidance and at the
mercy of quacks. It causes a break between education and other
interests which the public school strives in vain to bridge over,
because in such a situation the school itself becomes official and
sequestered. Thus education is constantly being done up in little
packages and sent out from the places where it is grown, like the
garden seeds which Congressmen used to send to their constituents and
which nobody planted. Education does not take root because nobody
plants it. People think that culture is the special function of the
professional gardeners, and there are even educators who would be
astonished and jealous if they saw anything but elementary scholarship
growing at large outside their walls.
In this respect, it seems to me, Great Britain has had the advantage.
Many of her greatest contributions to science and philosophy came
from outside the regular university faculties. Such men as Hobbes,
Milton, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Spencer, Mill and Darwin may have received
conventional training, but they went out and did something with it
afterwards. They helped create an ideal of the educated man which we
have yet to gain. Hence Great Britain has had many amateur scholars who
were also men of affairs, men like Mr. Balfour and the Haldanes, whose
influence has helped keep education from being over-professionalized.
Some of the highest educational attainments in history have been
reached without the setting up of any institution at all, in our sense
of the term. Protagoras, Socrates, and Abelard simply gathered groups
of fellow students about them who lived for years in their company,
first as disciples then as assistants. Such education to be sure was
for the selected few, but after a man had spent some time with his
teacher, he acquired a philosophy which changed his way of life. The
modern attempt to educate everyone really educates hardly anyone. The
public school imparts a certain elementary instruction--in eight or ten
years about as much as a normally intelligent youth could master in
two years if he set his mind to it. In matters of taste and standards
of value, public school education makes little difference; or in
developing thirst for knowledge, tolerance, independence of judgment.
The task of giving instruction to the youth of an entire community is
so great that thoroughness is almost impossible. The task falls to the
state, and the state is a vested interest and the protector of other
vested interests, interests which are not always consistent with the
desire for knowledge. There are factions in the community which the
public authorities must conciliate. We have seen what can happen to the
teaching of biology and history when such factions become organized to
control the public education of a state. Public servants are nowhere
eager to have education so free to pursue its proper function that
there is developed an alert and critically minded public to whom they
must justify certain of their practices. What the state desires of
education is soldiers, reliable voters, law-abiding citizens, contented
working men, prosperous traders. Hence a spirit of docility and
credulity, often of timidity, prevails in the school.
Where there are large numbers in attendance, the individual student
receives little personal attention. The education of backward students
is sometimes given more consideration than that of the normally
intelligent. The chief aim is to get the student through and pass him
along to the next grade, and the pace at which the instructor moves is
set by the mediocre. Whether this state of affairs will be remedied by
the use of intelligence tests remains to be seen. At present mental
measurement is a sort of fad. The system requires that all shall learn
the same lesson in the same manner at the same time.
Standardization develops a kind of mass mind, which in mature years
renders men very susceptible to crowd appeal. Learning imposed upon
the student by the system is put on the outside like a mental uniform.
Habits become stereotyped in the elementary, non-reflective aspects of
behavior and knowledge. There is little in this to guide the student
to the spiritual values of a liberal education. Most of those who pass
through the system never know that such values exist.
The public school system is a great bureaucracy with autocracy at the
top and deference to authority all the way down through the hierarchy
of superintendents, principals, and instructors, to the students.
The administrator holds dominion over the teacher. Little is left to
personal initiative. Any system which requires little responsibility of
its employees but much deference to petty authority in time comes to
be filled with persons to whom such servitude is not irksome. Serious
scholarship is rare. The teacher is not encouraged to independence
of judgment concerning the subject which for years it is his work
to teach. Teaching becomes a trade and is practised with as little
intellectual interest as most trades. Other than idealizing the
existing situation together with whatever persons or interests control
the school system, little attention is given to the social setting into
which the school sends its students when they leave.
Dr. Kallen says, “Free public education and private instruction
purchasable at a price are both but the community’s device to meet
present needs by transmitting the past unchanged. They provide a
grammar of assent, not a logic of inquiry. The mental posture they
habituate the youth in is not the posture of reflection. The mental
posture they habituate the youth in is the posture of conformity.
They require belief, not investigation. They impose reverence for
the past and idealization of the present. They envision the future
as a perpetuation of the past, not as a new creation of it. They are
Main Street’s most powerful instrument of self-reproduction without
variation.... They enable government both visible and invisible to
continue by consent, for they forestall and inhibit in the citizens
of the land the technique of doubt and dissent which is the necessary
condition of good government and the true inwardness of that eternal
vigilance so notoriously the price of liberty.”
Here and there, in spite of the system, someone gets his feet on the
path which leads to liberal education. But in general it cannot be
said that the public school has realized the dreams of those who in
the early nineteenth century hoped that free universal education would
place democratic institutions on the solid foundations of enlightened
public opinion and general respect for truth. It was believed that the
curse of ignorance would be removed; that humbug and insolence would
be driven from the control of affairs; that labor would be ennobled by
understanding, and freedom secured by the attainment of self-mastery.
All were now to have access to scholarship; the precious wisdom of the
great minds of all times, no longer the possession of the favored few,
should be made to live in the daily experience of the nations.
We are not so utopian in our hopes for the future of society as were
the Humanitarian idealists of the nineteenth century. Perhaps people
have expected too much of public education and have required too
little. We need not be astonished that the education of the public is
committed to a system which becomes an end in itself; that is human.
Nor need we be astonished that public education is administered and
carried on by persons most of whom do not know what education is; that
is the democratic way of dealing with public affairs. If you are to get
your education, whoever you are you must not be content to let it be a
public affair. You must make it your private affair.
Severe criticism of both the public school and the university is
common. There is much talk about capitalistic influence, and the
denial of academic freedom by prominent business men who contribute
to endowments and constitute boards of trustees. In so far as this
criticism comes from professional radical propagandists it need not be
taken very seriously. Such persons merely want their own propaganda
included in the curriculum. University presidents no doubt often play
politics and do other things common to professional money-raisers.
Faculties are often little more than pedantic trade unions, and if we
are to judge the colleges of the country by the number of first-rate
scholars who graduate from them or by the extent of their influences as
a whole on the cultural standards of the country, we may well question
whether higher education in America succeeds any better than the public
school.
But I wonder why so much criticism is directed at trustees and
faculties and so little at the students. The habit of constantly
denouncing someone because we are not better educated is rather
ludicrous. If our people really desire education they can have it. If
I am dissatisfied with my ignorance, I may seek knowledge at any time,
and no one else, in or out of college, can ever gain wisdom for me.
Anyone who has kept up his interest in his education after graduation
knows that what is learned in school and college is at best a small
part of it--merely the beginning of an education. Anyone who does not
continue his studies through the years of a busy life and thinks that
the brief introduction to the tools of scholarship which he received
in his adolescence is education, should apologize to his college, not
criticize it. Granted that there is much bad teaching, there is more
bad studying,--or I should say, hardly any studying at all. Professor
James Harvey Robinson used to say, “A college is a place where there is
much teaching and no learning.”
Is it not possible that a large portion of the population cannot be
educated? Such persons are not all necessarily dull, they may be
naturally uninterested in education, and it is likely that many enter
institutions of learning with the mistaken notion that it is education
they desire, when what they really want is success, a good time, and a
little training in what they think are the manners and ways of speech
of polite society. The finishing school once supplied this need; now
the colleges have to do it.
The motives which lead people to seek college education divide the
students into three types. First there are the few who love learning.
The spirit which once caused groups of young men to follow Abelard or
Erasmus still brings an occasional youth to college. Such students may
need guidance, advice and the fellowship of mature scholars. It is not
necessary to force them to study, or offer them “snap courses,” or
cram them for examination. Much of the procedure and regulation--the
regimentation common in institutions of learning--is unnecessary and
sometimes harmful to them. Most of them would become educated persons
even if they never saw a college class-room.
A second type of student attends college and university in large
numbers. The motive is preparation for a professional career. Many of
the best students belong to this type. Whether in addition to their
professional training they ever gain a liberal education--we have
seen that the two are not necessarily the same--will depend largely
upon what they do after they get their degrees. If they then have an
interest in educating themselves, their technical training ought to be
an advantage, for most of them have learned how to study. But so much
purely technical knowledge must be drilled into a man’s head that the
student who is preparing for a degree in engineering, law, medicine
or scientific research has very little time for anything else. Many of
the most successful physicians, engineers and scientists need adult
education quite as much as do ordinary working men.
The third type, the majority of undergraduate students, are for the
most part pleasant young men and women of the upper middle class. Their
parents are “putting them through college” because it is the expected
thing to do. A man wishes to give his children every advantage. While
a bachelor’s degree is not exactly a social necessity, there are many
who would have something like an inferiority complex without it. I knew
one family in New York City who almost went into mourning when the only
son failed in his Harvard entrance examinations. Students of this type
enjoy four happy years, largely at public expense, with other young
people of their own age in an environment designed to keep them out of
mischief. I have no doubt this grown-up kindergarten life is good for
them; most of them seem to appreciate it. In later years they remain
enthusiastically loyal to Alma Mater, coming back to football games
and class reunions and contributing to the support of the college.
As alumni their influence is not always on the side of progress in
education, but perhaps they make up for this failure in other ways.
I am prepared, moreover, to say that the existence of hundreds of
centers filled with such care-free young people may be a good thing
for the country. They keep alive a tradition of good cheer and of
man’s right to happiness in a country that is otherwise sordidly
commercial. A leisure class is a social necessity for it serves as an
example to other people showing them how to enjoy their idle hours. The
English aristocracy with its horse races and other out-door sports has
done much to make life interesting to all classes in that otherwise
factory-ridden country, and its example has been followed by people in
other lands. Now about the only leisure class we have in America is the
undergraduate student body. A privileged class is always popular with
the rest of the population in a normally constituted state. And so the
whole country enjoys vicariously the amusements of its undergraduate
boys and girls. The college youth with his automobile, his pipe, and
his big fur coat is a favorite hero in the motion pictures. Moreover,
the fact that the period of loafing is limited to four years is a
blessing, for by taking turns a greater number may enjoy the privilege
than the industry of the country could possibly support in permanent
idleness.
But while all this may be good for the country, it is not very good for
the colleges. It is bad for the morale of any institution to sail under
false colors, and colleges are popularly supposed to be educational
institutions. The college faculties themselves must to some extent
share this popular delusion, or else they would not permit the public
to go on believing it. The attempt to live up to this erroneous idea
puts everybody under a strain, students and faculty alike, and is
the one unpleasant thing about college life. Instructors are forever
annoying the students, trying to get some work out of them. Attendance
on classes is required, and a series of examinations is arranged which
nobody enjoys and which do no good anyway. They only make it necessary
to send an occasional student home, and then there are tears, other
students are frightened and sometimes lose sleep cramming for the next
examination, and the instructor loses popularity, especially if his
course is an elective one.
It is among this type of undergraduates that “campus opinion” has
its origin. Campus opinion is distinctly hostile to learning, and it
holds sway over students with the same tenacity as other crowd ideas
among the uneducated elements of the population. The student who takes
his education seriously loses caste and is regarded as a joke. Few
young people are sufficiently non-gregarious to stand out against the
scornful laughter of their fellows.
What the average student gets from college, then, is an opportunity to
complete his adolescence in an interesting and healthy environment, the
experience of being away from home and on his own, and fraternity and
club life--pleasant in itself--in which friendships are formed that
last through life and are often useful business connections in after
years. There is also athletics, through which the student may develop
his muscles, gain the desirable moral quality of good sportsmanship,
and satisfy any ambition he may have to become a college hero. One
always becomes famous in college outside the class-room, never in it.
Incidentally, if a student is naturally clever at picking up bits of
information with a minimum of reading, he gains a bowing acquaintance
with about as much knowledge as should be the possession of one with a
fair secondary education. Finally, he forms certain habits and acquires
certain manners and tastes which mould him to the type of the average
college graduate, and goes out in the world to take his place in the
social and business circles of his home town, where, if he should ever
mention Aristotle, people would think he was crazy.
The college graduate can play a good game of tennis, wear his clothes
well, talk about the latest novel, walk across a room with grace and
dignity, and share the club opinions of his set, and there is nothing
offensive in his table manners. I do not mean to underrate these
accomplishments. The person who does not have them, however great his
achievement in scholarship, is a boor, too lacking in sensitiveness
to assimilate the knowledge he has stored in his head. But these are
accomplishments that should be learned at home, as a matter of course;
colleges ought not to be necessary for training of this sort.
Wherein the education of the average college graduate fails of its
true ends is seen in what might be called the deeper things of the
spirit. No profound intellectual passion has been awakened, no habit
of independent judgment formed. The college man shares the usual
popular prejudices of his community. He runs with the crowd after the
hero of the hour, and shows the same lack of discrimination as do
the uneducated. He votes the same party ticket, is intolerant along
with his neighbors, and puts the same value on material success as do
the illiterate. His education has made very little difference in his
religious beliefs, his social philosophy, his ethical values, or his
general outlook on the world. Like all opinionated and half-educated
people, he jumps to hasty conclusions, believes what others believe,
does things because others do them, worships the past, idealizes the
present.
In contrast with this, let me quote a passage from John Stuart Mill.
The author meant it to be a description of the scientist. It stands as
a suggestion of what a liberally educated mind should be.
“To question all things;--never to turn away from any difficulty;
to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people
without a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism; letting no fallacy,
or incoherence, or confusion of thought, step by unperceived; above
all, to insist upon having the meaning of a word clearly understood
before using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assenting to
it;--these are the lessons we learn ‘from workers in Science.’ With
all this vigorous management of the negative element, they inspire no
scepticism about the reality of truth or indifference to its pursuit.
The noblest enthusiasm, both for the search after truth and for
applying it to its highest uses, pervades those writers.”
When all is said, the ignorance and folly of men are things that
institutions cannot cure. Each must discover the path of wisdom
for himself. One does not “get” an education anywhere. One becomes
an educated person by virtue of patient study, quiet meditation,
intellectual courage, and a life devoted to the discovery and service
of truth.