impose itself upon the masses?--for even superstition must have a sign
which the blind can read, and a source of appeal to human nature.
The answer bears out still further Professor Wendell’s parallel.
The mediæval church drew its authority from God, and to impose that
authority upon the masses it invented the method of propaganda. It
claimed to be able to release men from the burden which oppressed them
most heavily, their sins, and in conjunction with the secular power
it enforced its claims against all gainsayers, treating the obstinate
among them with a series of penalties, penance, excommunication, the
stake. Education finds its authority in the human reason, and likewise
imposes that authority by propaganda. It too claims the power of
salvation from the evils which oppress men most sorely to-day--the
social maladjustments, “lynchings, strikes, trusts, immigration,
racial controversies”--and it is in alliance with the secular power
to preserve its monopoly of social remedies from the competition of
anything like direct action. Now it is clear that in the religion
of Christ in its pure form the church had a basis for its claims to
possess a power against sin, and a means of salvation. Similarly
it may be maintained that human reason, allowed to act freely and
disinterestedly, would be sufficient to cope with the evils of our
time and bring about a social salvation. Indeed, it is curious to
remark how nearly the intellectual conclusions of reason have come to
coincide with the intuitive wisdom of Jesus. The church was faithless
to its mission by alliance with temporal power, by substituting its
own advancement for the will of God, by becoming an end in itself.
Education likewise is by way of being faithless to itself, by alliance
with secular power, political and financial, by the substitution of its
own institutional advancement for disinterested service of truth, by
becoming likewise an end in itself.
In one of the most remarkable pronouncements of the present
commencement season, President Hopkins of Dartmouth College summarized
the influences which make against what he calls Verihood. They are
first, Insufficiency of mentality, or over-professionalization of
point of view; second, Inertia of mentality or closed mindedness; and
third, False emphasis of mentality or propaganda. The late war and
its evil aftermath have put in high relief the extent of this third
influence. President Hopkins speaks as one of the Cardinal Archbishops
of Education, and I quote his words with the authority which his
personality and position give them:
“Now that the war is passed, the spirit of propaganda still
remains in the reluctance with which is returned to an
impatient people the ancient right of access to knowledge
of the truth, the right of free assembly, and the right of
freedom of speech. Meanwhile the hesitancy with which these
are returned breeds in large groups vague suspicion and
acrimonious distrust of that which is published as truth, and
which actually is true, so that on all sides we hear the query
whether we are being indulged with what is considered good for
us, or with that which constitutes the facts. Thus we impair
the validity of truth and open the door and give opportunity
for authority which is not justly theirs to be ascribed to
falsehood and deceit.”
The war was a test which showed how feeble was the hold of American
education upon the principle which alone can give it validity. Nowhere
was the suppression of freedom of mind, of truth, so energetic, so
vindictive as in the schools. Instances crowd upon the mind. I remember
attending the trial of a teacher before a committee of the New York
School Board, the point being whether his reasons for not entering
with his class upon a discussion of the Soviet government concealed
a latent sympathy with that form of social organization. The pupils
were ranged in two groups, Jews and Gentiles, and were summoned in
turn to give their testimony--they had previously been educated in
the important functions of modern American society, espionage, and
mass action. Another occasion is commemorated by the New York _Evening
Post_, the teacher being on trial for disloyalty and the chief count in
his indictment that he desired an early peace; and his accuser, one Dr.
John Tildsley, an Archdeacon or superintendent of the diocese of New
York under Bishop Ettinger:
“Are you interested in having this man discharged?”
“I am,” said Dr. Tildsley.
“Do you know of any act that would condemn him as a teacher?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Tildsley, “he favoured an early peace.”
“Don’t you want an early, victorious peace?”
“Why ask me a question like that?”
“Because I want to show you how unfair you have been to this
teacher.”
“But Mr. Mufson wanted an early peace without victory,” said
Dr. Tildsley.
“He didn’t say that, did he? He did not say an early peace
without victory?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t want an early peace, do you?”
“No.”
“You want a prolongation of all this world misery?”
“To a certain extent, yes,” said Dr. Tildsley.
Nor did the sabotage of truth stop with school boards and
superintendents. A colleague of mine writing a chapter of a text-book
in modern history made the statement that the British government
entered the war because of an understanding with France, the invasion
of Belgium being the pretext which appealed to popular enthusiasm--to
which a great publishing house responded that this statement would
arouse much indignation among the American people, and must therefore
be suppressed.
We need not be surprised that since the war education has not shown
a disinterested and impartial attitude toward the phenomena of human
affairs, a reliance on the method of trial and error, of experiment
and testimony, which it has evolved. Teachers who are openly, or even
latently, in sympathy with a form of social organization other than
the régime of private control of capital are banned from schools and
colleges with candle, with book, and with bell. Text-books which do not
agree with the convenient view of international relations are barred.
Superintendents like Ettinger and Tildsley in New York are the devoted
apologists for the system to which they owe their greatness. To its
position among the vested interests of the world, to the prosperity of
its higher clergy, education has sacrificed its loyalty to that which
alone can give it authority.
The prevention of freedom of thought and enquiry is of course necessary
so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than
to stimulate thought. The belief which it is the function of education
to propagate is that in the existing order. Hence we find the vast
effort known as “Americanization,” which is for the most part a
perfect example of American education at the present day. The spirit
of “Americanization” is to consider the individual not with reference
to his inward growth of mind and spirit, but solely with a view to his
worldly success, and his relation to the existing order of society,
to which it is considered that the individual will find his highest
happiness and usefulness in contributing. This programme naturally
enough finds a sponsor in the American Legion, but it is truly
disconcerting to find the National Education Association entering into
alliance with this super-legal body, appointing a standing committee
to act in co-operation with the Legion throughout the year, accepting
the offer of the Legion to give lectures in the schools, and endorsing
the principle of the Lusk Law in New York, which imposes the test of an
oath of allegiance to the Government as a requirement for a teacher’s
certificate.
We have now the chief reason why education remains the dominant
superstition of our time; but one may still wonder how an institution
which is apparently so uncertain of its purpose and methods can
continue to exercise such influence on the minds and hearts of men.
The answer is, of course, that education is not in the least doubtful
of its purpose and methods. Though the humble and obscure teacher,
like the Lollard parson, may puzzle his brains about the why and how
and purpose of his being here, his superiors, the bishops, the papal
curia, know the reason. Education is the propaganda department of the
State, and the existing social system. Its resolute insistence upon
the essential rightness of things as they are, coupled with its modest
promise to reform them if necessary, is the basis of the touching
confidence with which it is received. It further imposes itself upon
the credulity of the people by the magnificence of its establishment.
The academic splendour of the commencement season when the hierarchs
bestow their favours, and honour each other and their patrons by higher
degrees, is of enormous value in impressing the public. Especially
to the uneducated does this majesty appeal. That an institution
which holds so fair an outlook on society, which is on such easy and
sympathetic terms with all that is important in the nation, which
commands the avenues by which men go forward in the world, should be
able to guarantee success in life to its worshippers is nothing at
which to be surprised. Hence we find the poor of different grades
making every sacrifice to send sons and daughters through high school,
through college, in the same pathetic faith with which they once burned
candles to win respite for the souls of their dead.
There are reasons, however, for thinking that the superstition is
passing. In the first place, nowhere do we find more scepticism in
regard to the pretensions of education than among those who have been
educated, and this number is rapidly increasing. In the second place,
the alliance between education and a social system depending on private
capital is too obvious, and the abrogation of the true functions of the
former is too complete. The so-called Americanization campaign is so
crude an attempt to put something over that even the unsophisticated
foreigner whom it is intended to impress watches the pictures or reads
the pamphlets which set forth the happy estate of the American workman,
with his tongue in his cheek. The social groups which feel aggrieved
under the present order are marking their defection by seceding from
the educational system and setting up labour universities of their own.
So serious is this secession that New York has passed the Lusk Law,
designed to bring the independent movement under State control. In the
third place, the claim of education to be an open sesame to success in
life is contradicted by the position of its most constant votaries, the
teachers. The prestige which used to attach to the priests of learning
and which placed them above the lure of riches has vanished; their
economic station has declined until even college professors have fallen
into the servantless class, which means the proletariat. Truly for such
as they to declare that education means success in life is a dismal
paradox.
Another sign of approaching reformation in the educational system is
to be found in the frankly corrupt practices which infest it. Here the
parallel to the mediæval church is not exact, for in the latter it was
the monasteries and religious houses that were the chief sources of
offence, while the colleges and private institutions of higher learning
which correspond to them are singularly free from anything worse
than wasteful internal politics. It is the public educational system
which by reason of its contact with political government partakes
most palpably of the corruption that attends the democratic State.
It is unnecessary to mention the forms which this corruption takes
where a school board of trustees by political appointment is given
the exploitation of the schools--the favouritism in appointments and
promotions, the graft in text-books and equipment, the speculation in
real estate and building contracts, the alienation of school property.
There is scarcely a large city in the country in which pupils and
teachers alike are not shamefully and scandalously defrauded by action
of school trustees which can be characterized in the mildest terms as
wilful mismanagement conducing to private profit.
There are two things necessary to the reform of education. One is
democratic control, that is, management of institutions of teaching by
the teachers. It is to be noted that this is the demand everywhere of
labour which respects itself--control of the means of production and
responsibility for the result. Surely the teachers should be one of the
first groups of toilers to be so trusted. Under democratic control the
spoliation of the schools by politicians, the sacrifice of education
to propaganda, the tyranny of the hierarchy can be successfully
resisted. Once the teachers are released from servile bondage to the
public through the political masters who control appointments and
promotions, they will deal with their problems with more authority,
and be independent of the suffrage of the pupils. Through joint
responsibility of the workers for the product they will arrive at that
_esprit de corps_ which consists in thinking in terms of the enterprise
rather than of the job, and from which we may expect a true method of
education. Already the movement toward democratic control of teaching
is taking form in school systems and colleges. There are a hundred and
fifty unions of teachers affiliated with the American Federation of
Labour. But the true analogy is not between teachers and labour, but
between education and other professions. To quote Dr. H. M. Kallen:
“To the discoverers and creators of Knowledge, and to its
transmitters and distributors, to these and to no one else
beside belongs the control of education. It is as absurd
that any but teachers and investigators should govern the
art of education as that any but medical practitioners and
investigators should govern the art of medicine.”
The other thing needful to restore education to health and usefulness
is that it should surrender its hold upon the superstitious adoration
of the public, by giving up its pretensions to individual or social
salvation, by ceasing its flattery of nationalistic and capitalistic
ambitions, and by laying aside its pomps and ceremonies which conduce
mainly to sycophancy and cant. Education has shown in special lines
that it can be thoroughly scientific, disinterested, devoted. It is
its task to translate these virtues of the specialist into the general
field. It is not the business of education to humbug the people in
the interest of what any person may think to be for their or for his
advantage. It is its business to deal frankly and honestly with them,
accepting in the most literal sense the responsibility and the promise
contained in the text: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall
make you free.”
ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM
It is natural for the musician to think any land barbarous if it
has produced no great composers, the painter if it has produced no
great painters, the critic or the scholar if it has produced no great
scholars and critics, and so on for all the other arts and sciences.
But it is idle to insist that every race should express itself in the
same way, or to assume that the genius of a nation can be tested by
its deficiencies in any single field of the higher life. Great critics
are rare in every age and country; and even if they were not, what
consolation is there for the clash and diversity of races and nations
except the special and diverse gifts which each may furnish to the
spiritual whole? England has achieved greatness without great music,
Germany without great sculpture, ancient Rome without great science or
philosophy, Judæa with little but poetry and religion; and it is not
necessary to lay too much stress on our own lack of great scholars and
great critics--yes, even on our lack of great poets and great painters.
They may come to-day or to-morrow, or we may be destined never to have
them. The idea that great national energy must inevitably flower in a
great literature, and that our wide-flung power must certainly find
expression in an immortal poem or in the “great American novel,” is
merely another example of our mechanical optimism. The vision of great
empires that have been both strong and silent, Assyria, Babylonia,
Egypt, haunts all history; Virgil or Camoens only fitfully expresses
the power that is summed up in Cæsar or Magellan.
But without insisting on impossible aims or illusory standards of
greatness, it is fair to ask some flow of spiritual activity, some
general spirit of diffused culture,--in a word, the presence of a soul.
For though we must eat (and common sense will cook better dinners than
philosophy), though we must work (and the captain of industry can
organize trade better than the poet), though we must play (and the
athlete can win more games than the scholar), the civilization that
has no higher outlets for its intellect and imagination will show at
least some marks of spiritual starvation. You may see the signs of its
restless gnawing on the face of almost any American woman beyond the
first flush of youth; you may see some shadow of its hopeless craving
on the face of almost any mature American man.
The same signs are to be seen in American scholarship and American
criticism. If scholarship were what most people think it, the dull
learning of pedants, and criticism merely the carping and bickering
of fault-finders, the fact would hardly be worth recording. But since
they are instruments which the mind of man uses for some of its keenest
questionings, their absence or their weakness must indicate something
at least in the national life and character which it is not unimportant
to understand.
I
The tradition of scholarship, like so many other things, comes to us
from what used to be called the Renaissance, the period (it may not
be ironical to be reminded) in which the Americas were discovered
and explored; and whatever savour of distinction inheres in the idea
of “the gentleman and the scholar” was created then. Scholarship at
first meant merely a knowledge of the classics, and though it has
since widened its scope, even then the diversity of its problems was
apparent, for the classical writers had tilled many fields of human
knowledge, and the student of Homer and Virgil was really faced with a
different problem from the student of Plato or Thucydides. Scholarship
has never been a reality, a field that could be bounded and defined
in the sense in which poetry, philosophy, and history can be. It is
a point of view, an attitude, a method of approach, and, so far as
its meaning and purpose can be captured, it may be said to be the
discipline and illumination that come from the intellectual mastery of
a definite problem involved in the growth of the human spirit.
Scholarship, conceived in this sense, has no history (though dull and
learned hodge-podges have served as such), for it is a spirit diffused
over various fields of study; and in America this spirit has scarcely
even come into existence. American Universities seem to have been
created for the special purpose of ignoring or destroying it. The
chief monuments of American scholarship have seldom if ever come from
men who have been willing to live their whole lives in an academic
atmosphere. The men whom we think of as our foremost literary scholars,
Gildersleeve, Norton, and the rest, acquired their fame rather through
their personalities than their scholarly achievements. The historians,
Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, Parkman, Rhodes, Lea, Fiske, Mahan, were
not professors; books like Taylor’s “Mediæval Mind,” Henry Adams’s
“Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,” Thayer’s “Cavour,” Villard’s “John
Brown,” and Beveridge’s “John Marshall,” even Ticknor’s “History of
Spanish Literature,” were not written within University walls, though
Ticknor’s sixteen years of teaching tamed the work of a brilliant
man of the world until there is little left save the characteristic
juiceless virtue of an intelligent ordering of laborious research. It
would seem as if in the atmosphere of our Universities personality
could not find fruitage in scholarly achievement worthy of it, and
learning can only thrive when it gives no hostages to the enemy,
personality.
Of the typical products of this academic system, the lowest is
perhaps the literary dissertation and the highest the historical
manual or text-book. It may be because history is not my own special
field of study that I seem to find its practitioners more vigorous
intellectually than the literary scholars. Certainly our historians
seem to have a special aptitude for compiling careful summaries of
historical periods, and some of these have an ordered reasonableness
and impersonal efficiency not unlike that of the financial accounting
system of our large trusts or the budgets of our large universities.
To me most of them seem feats of historical engineering rather than of
historical scholarship; and if they represent a scholarly “advance” on
older and less accurate work, written before Clio became a peon of the
professors, it can only be said that history has not yet recovered from
the advance. Nor am I as much impressed as the historians themselves
by the more recent clash between the “old” school and the “new,” for
both seem to me equally lacking in a truly philosophic conception
of the meaning of history. Yet there is among the younger breed a
certain freshness of mind and an openness to new ideas, though less to
the problems of human personality or to the emotional and spiritual
values of man’s life. This deficiency is especially irritating in the
field of biography. Not even an American opera (_corruptio optimi_)
is as wooden as the biographies of our statesmen and national heroes;
and if American lives written by Englishmen have been received with
enthusiasm, it was less because of any inherent excellence than because
they at least conceived of Hamilton or Lincoln as a man and not as an
historical document or a political platitude.
But literary scholarship is in far worse plight in our Universities.
No great work of classical learning has ever been achieved by an
American scholar. It may be unfair to suggest comparison with men like
Gilbert Murray, Croiset, or Wilamowitz; but how can we be persuaded
by the professors or even by a dean that all culture will die if we
forget Greek and Latin, until they satisfy us by their own work that
they themselves are alive? Asia beckons to us with the hand of Fate,
but Oriental scholarship is a desert through which a few nomadic
professors wander aimlessly. As to the literatures in the modern
European tongues, Dante scholarship has perhaps the oldest and most
respectable tradition, but on examination dwindles into its proper
proportions: an essay by Lowell and translations by Longfellow and
Norton pointed the way; a Dante Society has nursed it; and its modern
fruits, with one or two honourable exceptions, are a few unilluminating
articles and text-books. Ticknor’s pioneer work in the Spanish field
has had no successors, though Spanish America is at our doors; the
generous subsidies of rich men have resulted as usual in buildings
but not in scholarship. Of the general level of our French and German
studies I prefer to say nothing; and silence is also wisest in the
case of English. This field fairly teems with professors; Harvard has
twice as many as Oxford and Cambridge combined, and the University of
Chicago almost as many as the whole of England. Whether this plethora
of professors has justified itself, either by distinguished works of
scholarship or by helping young America to love literature and to write
good English, I shall not decide, but leave entirely to their own
conscience. This at least may be said, that the mole is not allowed
to burrow in his hole without disturbance; for in this atmosphere, as
a protest and counterfoil, or as a token of submission to the idols
of the market-place, there has arisen a very characteristic academic
product,--the professor who writes popular articles, sometimes clever,
sometimes precious, sometimes genteel and refined, sometimes merely
commonplace, but almost always devoid of real knowledge or stimulating
thought. Even the sober pedant is a more humane creature than the
professorial smart-Aleck.