refusal of the college to see clearly the changing ideals of
scholarship. If the student has to think chiefly about exposing himself
to the required numbers of lectures, and then to examinations which
test his powers of receptivity, he will be forced into an attitude
which we are discovering is the worst possible for any genuine
learning. This passivity may have been all very well when education
was looked upon as an amassing of the “symbols of learning,” or the
acquiring of invidious social distinction. The old college education
was for a limited and homogeneous class. It presupposed social and
intellectual backgrounds which the great majority of college students
to-day do not possess. The idea of studying things “for their own
sake,” without utilitarian bearings, is seductive, but it implies a
society where the ground had been prepared in childhood and youth
through family and environmental influences. When higher education was
confined almost entirely to a professional intellectual class, the
youth was accustomed to see intellect in action around him. He did
not come to college ignorant even of the very terms and setting of
the philosophy and history and sociology studied there. Now, when all
classes come to college, the college must give that active, positive
background which in former generations was prepared for it outside. It
must create the intellectual stomach as well as present the food.
We are learning that this can only be done by putting ideas to work,
by treating the matter taught in the college as indispensable for any
understanding or improvement of our modern world. In the technical
schools, ideas and processes become immediately effective, but nothing
in the college is really “used”; ideas are not put to work. Professors
anxiously desire to “teach students to think,” but they do not give
them opportunities for that hard exercise which alone can produce
trained thought. The college organs of expression, the debating clubs,
literary magazines, newspapers, speaking contests, dramatic societies,
etc., are usually amateurish, spasmodic, unreal. The flimsy background
of the undergraduate is not to be wondered at where undergraduate
expression in any channel is left by the college authorities
unorganized and childish. And his low state must inevitably continue
until ideas are not merely collected, with some vague idea of gilding
the interior of his soul, but resolutely put to work. One reason for
the overmastering devotion to athletics in the modern college is
exactly its activity. In that field the student can do something. Here,
thank God, he says, is a place where one can act!
To make intellectual expression and not receptivity the keynote
of the college does not mean to turn it into an intellectual
engineering school or to make it severely utilitarian. It should
remain unspecialized, the field for working out a background for the
contemporary social world. The paradox is that only by this practical
exercise can any real cultural or scholarly power be attained. As long
as the student can speak of “taking courses” the receptive and slightly
medicinal character of college learning will be emphasized. Moreover,
as the schools both above and below the college adjust themselves to
the new conceptions of learning, the archaic forms of college will
cause it to lag in the race. The reason for their persistence is, of
course, that whereas the technical demands of industry and the keen
emulation in the professions have sharpened the higher schools and
forced a revision of ideals and methods, the practical application
of the cultural studies of the college has not seemed so urgent.
The turning of these cultural studies into power is to be the exact
measure of our growing conviction that ideas and knowledge about social
relations and human institutions are to count as urgently in our
struggle with the future as any mathematical or mechanical formulas did
in the development of our present.
Transcriber’s Notes
Page 48: “cottom looms” changed to “cotton looms”
Page 92: “Profesor Judd’s” changed to “Professor Judd’s”
Page 99: “imperfect acomplishment” changed to “imperfect accomplishment”
Page 164: “classics and mathemathics” changed to “classics and
mathematics”
Page 190: “particualarly to those” changed to “particularly to those”
Page 230: “The large university to-day represent” changed to “The large
university to-day represents”