The great thinker, John Stuart Mill, insists that “the great business of
every rational being is the strengthening and enlarging of his own
intellect and character. The empirical knowledge which the world
demands, which is the stock in trade of money-getting, we would leave
the world to provide for itself.” We must make our system of education
such “that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be a manhood
in your little men of which you do not dream. We must have a system of
education capable of forming great minds.” Education must aim at the
bringing out of the genius in man. Do we achieve such aim by the
formation of philistine-specialists and young petty-minded artisans?
“The very cornerstone of an education,” Mill tells us, “intended to form
great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object
is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual _power_,
and to inspire the intensest _love of truth; and this without a particle
of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead_.”
With us the only love of truth is the one that leads to the shop, the
bank and the counting-house.
The home controls the school and the college. As long as the home is
dominated by commercial ideals, the school will turn out mediocre
tradesmen.
This, however, is one of the characteristic types of the American home:
the mother thinks of dresses, fashions and parties. The daughter twangs
and thrums on the piano, makes violent attempts at singing that sound as
“the crackling of thorns under a pot,” is passionately fond of shopping,
dressing and visiting. Both, mother and daughter, love society, show and
gossip. The father works in some business or at some trade and loves
sports and games. Not a spark of refinement and culture, not a redeeming
ray of love of knowledge and of art, lighting up the commonplace and
frivolous life of the family. What wonder that the children of ten and
eleven can hardly read and write, are little brutes and waste away their
precious life of childhood in the close, dusty, overheated rooms of the
early grades of some elementary school? Commercial mediocrity is raised
at home and cultivated in the school.
“As a means of educating the many, the universities are absolutely
null,” exclaims Mill. The attainments of any kind required for taking
all the degrees conferred by these bodies are, at Cambridge, utterly
contemptible.” Our American schools, with their ideals of money-earning
capacities, our colleges glorying in their athletics, football teams and
courses for professional and business specializations would have been
regarded by Mill as below contempt.
What indeed is the worth of an education that does not create even as
much as an ordinary respect for learning and love of truth, and that
prizes knowledge in terms of hard cash? What is the educational worth of
a college or of a university which suppresses its most gifted students
by putting them under the ban of disorderly behavior, because of not
conforming to commonplace mannerisms? What is the educational value of a
university which is but a modern edition of a gladiatorial school with a
smattering of the humanities? What is the educational value of an
institution of learning that expels its best students because they
“attract more attention than their professors”? What is the intellectual
level of a college that expels from its courses the ablest of its
students for some slight infringement, and that an involuntary one,
under the pretext that it is done for the sake of class-discipline, “for
the general good of the class”? What travesty on education is a system
that suppresses genius in the interest of mediocrity? What is the
cultural, the humanistic value of an education that puts a prize on
mediocrity?