and thus did expose a magnificent national morale, many are inclined to
believe that war is necessary to call forth such consecration and
self-forgetful service. Analysis of the war training, however, reveals a
point of view and a method of procedure that is definitely designed to
develop team-play and to enhance morale whether there be war or not. If
these methods are applied to education in times of peace, they certainly
will produce some effect even though the result is not as profoundly
striking as it was during the war. Among the many significant features
of war training, the following are mentioned as worthy of particular
consideration for transfer to school practice:
"As a primary policy, a nation at war is obliged to recognize that every
individual is an asset capable of useful service in some particular line
of work of direct benefit to the country. In order to make the most
efficient use of all its resources, it is necessary to make strenuous
exertions to discover what each individual is best qualified to do and
to train each to use his abilities in the most effective manner. Applied
to education this fundamental attitude produces two results that are of
importance in the development of morale. The teacher's point of view
shifts from a critical one, with attention focused on discovering
whether the individual measures up to the academic standards fixed by
school authorities, to one of friendly, not to say eager interest to
discover what each individual really can do well. The student's spirit
also changes from one of discouragement and doubt of his ability ever to
make good, to one of interest and desire for achievement. Both of these
results are of large importance in releasing energy for both the teacher
and the student. They also have an immediate bearing on the enhancement
of morale."
In any place of campaign to this end within a college or university, the
first thing to do is to build around that vague but very real emotion
called college spirit, to supplement this by guiding our young people to
enlist in worth-while, nation-wide or world-wide causes (we are
singularly provincial about this in America), and by ensuring better
teaching and supervision and better coordination of work.
There is no question that we have underestimated both the American
undergraduate's capacity for intellectual work and his real pleasure in
it when he feels it worth while. One of my friends was telling me of
his experiences as commanding officer of one of the ground schools for
aviators, where a large proportion of the candidates were college
undergraduates, and I asked him if he had had any troubles as to
discipline. "Yes indeed," he replied, "night after night we'd catch some
fellows studying with a peep-light under their blankets, after taps had
sounded."
Any doubts as to the instinctive reaction of the normal, healthy young
American toward educational opportunities were dispelled by the
experiences of the army in France after the armistice. The let-down,
after the terrific physical and emotional strain, the impatience
regarding any delay as to return home, combined to make a pretty serious
situation as to the morale of our troops. After some misguided and
nearly disastrous experiments as to the curative properties of heavy
drill and strict discipline, the A.E.F. recognized the necessity for a
prompt and thorough stimulation of all the welfare activities, and a
real educational program; and it was straight, old-fashioned book-work
more than it was the movies, or athletics, more even than Miss Elsie
Janis, which turned the corner for us. In all, more than 200,000 men
volunteered for the privilege of studying. The military order was often
reversed and majors sat at the feet of the corporals or privates who had
been selected as teachers. The reports as to the intensity of the work
of teachers and students alike should put any of us professionals to
shame.
* * * * *
Just now we are hearing a great deal about the benefits of discipline. I
think what the speakers are really talking about, though they don't
recognize it themselves, is the benefit of the state of mind which
accepts and welcomes discipline. We are not, even as the result of the
war, a disciplined people in the sense that Germany is, or was, and we
can thank God for it. We shall never want in this country a general
subordination of the individual will and initiative to external control.
Discipline is a means and not an end. If discipline, as such, externally
imposed, were so important a factor in success as many people seem to
think to-day, we could look through a list of ex-enlisted men in the
army and navy--I mean the men enlisted and discharged during peace
time--and find a relatively large number who made conspicuously good
records after returning to civil life. As a matter of fact, we find
nothing of the kind.
What we do find is that not a few enlisted men who chose the army or the
navy as their permanent career have won commissions and made fine
records. There were no better general officers in the war than men like
Harbord of our army and Robertson of the British, both of whom rose from
the ranks. But isn't it fair to say that the discipline imposed on these
men was accepted gladly and accepted in the terms of their fundamental
interest, and that these men are not really exceptions to what I have
said?
I venture to predict that there will be a very different record to tell
as to the success in civil life of those men now leaving the Army, who,
because they believed in the cause and wished to participate to the full
in the great enterprise, gladly submitted themselves to the discipline
for the purpose of increasing their efficiency.
In a month or so you can teach an enthusiastic man, who is fired by a
big idea, all the discipline he needs for carrying out his duties and
profiting by his opportunities, but you can't reverse the process and
incite enthusiasms as a result of the application of discipline.
Don't think that I want to minimize the merits of military discipline
for military purposes. Of course, coordination and subordination are
absolutely necessary in the handling of large bodies of men. Even the
men in France who deserted to the front, as many of them did, no matter
how much we may sympathize with their desire to get into the game, had
to be disciplined. Someone had to stay behind and see to the supplies.
The point we are discussing is the carrying over of this principle of
military discipline intact into civilian life. So far as discipline
brings about regularity of life, of exercise, so long as it ministers to
alertness, we can use it, but as between discipline on the one hand, and
initiative and team play on the other, to meet our academic or our
national needs, I am for initiative and team play.
Please don't misunderstand me. By reducing the present emphasis on
external discipline, after childhood has been passed, I don't mean a
lowering of standards. External discipline, it seems to me, is often
really imposed as a substitute for high standards; something supposed to
be just as good and more easy to keep in stock. The standards of the
worth-while organization, and these are the outward expression of its
aims, its ideals, ought to be high enough and intelligently enough
administered to make sure that the men and women who are unable to
provide their own discipline, should in the general interest be
painlessly but promptly removed from the group.
Here is a _credo_ for the American people, from the pen of a regular
army officer. It's a pretty good one for an American University: "To
foster individual talent, imagination and initiative, to couple with
this a high degree of cooperation, and to subject these to a not too
minute direction; the whole vitalized by a supreme purpose, which serves
as the magic key to unlock the upper strata of the energies of men."
* * * * *
Finally, let me try to apply these lessons to you young men and women of
the graduating class.
Keep in good physical shape. Overwork is usually a combination of bad
air, bad feeding, and lack of exercise and sleep. See that you don't go
stale. If you lack the zest of life, find out what the trouble is;
whether it is your teeth or your liver or your soul. Picture to yourself
what Theodore Roosevelt got out of life.
Be honest with yourself. Do your own thinking and do it straight. This,
strangely enough, is perhaps the thing which you will find hardest to do
after the undergraduate atmosphere. A student body is, or at any rate
was before the war, the most convention ridden group of which I have any
knowledge. I am all for conventions, because they save a great deal of
time and worry, but only so far as we recognize them as conventions and
do not exalt them into principles or philosophical truths. Remember that
the public opinion of America is an infinitely more important thing to
the world than ever before, and that you are each to be a part of it.
Keep your intellectual interests and your interest in your _alma mater_,
not in her athletics and her fraternities alone. Remember that as alumni
of this University you are citizens of no mean city. Recruit men and
women whom she ought to have and who ought to have her, remembering that
the danger to this country from the inside, and it is no inconsiderable
danger, is mainly due to the misdirected zeal of sincere people who lack
knowledge and background. Take for example the employer who can't see
beyond the point of telling his men to "take it or leave it," and the
workman whose sense of real or fancied injustice has brought him to what
with our children we know as the kicking and biting stage. It is too
late to do much with the present adult generation except by main
strength and awkwardness, but a recruit for higher education from either
of these groups is a good national investment.
Keep your human contacts. Don't be a "glad-hander" but do at least your
share. It takes two to make and keep alive a friendship, just as it does
a quarrel. There is something worth while in everyone. Give yourself a
chance to find what it is. Practice following and, as the chance comes
to you, practice leading, but above all, practice team play. Keep
yourself ready to take the next step, whatever it may be. There is a
story of Marshal Joffre, of which I can at least say that it is good
enough to be true. After the first battle of the Marne some enthusiast
was proclaiming him as a second Napoleon and laying it on pretty thick.
The old gentleman stood it as long as he could and then said: "No,
Napoleon would have known what to do next, and I don't."
Keep your enthusiasms and your ideals. In other words, keep your youth.
In choosing your life work, get into something in which the policy and
practice are such that you can throw your whole soul into the job. Don't
take yourself seriously, but take your opportunities for usefulness
seriously. Find out the callings in which America is short. There are
plenty of them, as the war has shown. Think over whether it isn't
possible for you to be one of the men or one of the women who, from your
training and momentum and vision, will be selected ten or fifteen or
twenty years hence, to take on some important job, with the nation as
your client, as the one person best qualified to fill it.
We no longer have to prove that it pays to know, to really know almost
anything that is worth while. It pays in money, if that is what one
wants; it pays in the more enduring satisfactions of life, in the
pleasure that comes from exact knowledge and intellectual pioneering, in
the almost unique joy of creation without the responsibilities of
possession, and in the feeling of individual readiness to be of use in
meeting the problems which the years allotted to your generation will
surely bring forth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Commencement address delivered at the University of
Michigan, June 26, 1919.]
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