CONSERVATIVE AMERICA
There is one experience that conservative-liberal America--bourgeois
America, the pushing America that gets what it wants on this side of
the ocean--possesses in common, and that is its education. We of the
vast American middle class have all been to high school, or we have
lived with high school graduates; we have all been to college, or we
have worked with college graduates. Our education, when viewed with any
detachment, is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given generation most of
us have studied the same textbooks in mathematics and geography and
history, read the same selections in literature, been inoculated with
the same ethical principles from the Bible and the moralists. Ask us a
question as to what makes right or wrong, as the President did in his
war messages, and we will respond with a universal roar, like factory
whistles when a button is punched on some celebration day.
This general American experience is largely responsible for the
tenacity with which we of this generation blindly conserve the liberal
principles of our ancestors, even while we keep them, like the tables
of the ten commandments, safe from the rude touch of practical
experience. Education such as ours seldom fails to influence men’s
ways of thinking even when their actions pass beyond its control. The
influence, however, is too often ineffectual, bloodless. That is a
lesson we need to ponder in America.
Education in these colonies in the eighteenth century was bent toward
theology. All but the lower schools, if, indeed, they could be
excepted, were contrived to find and to train the pastor, the minister
to the people. For him those studies that influence opinion--history,
ethics--were chiefly taught. For his purposes, the languages of the
classics were chiefly studied. It was the pastor that emerged as
prime product of academies and colleges. And therefore theology, that
arduous intellectual exercise for which he prepared, set its mark upon
all intellects down to the humblest. We wonder at the obsession with
religious thinking that the letters and diaries of farmers, merchants,
and lawyers of our eighteenth century display to the amazement of
their very untheological descendants. We should rather wonder at the
intellectual energy expended in wrestling with a difficult and abstract
subject. They entered, as we of the twentieth-century bourgeois do not,
into the field of scholarship; they partook of disputes that were as
international as Christendom; and shared with the chosen ones for whom
all this education was made, Jonathan Edwards and his co-professionals,
an interest in problems far broader than their strip of Atlantic
clearings. That the experience, whatever we may think of the value of
the theology, was good for them does not, I think, permit of argument.
There have never been abler Americans than at the end of the eighteenth
century.
But nineteenth-century America was a different world. Interest in
theology abated for reasons that need not here be discussed. More and
more the United States diverged intellectually from our colonial unity
with Europe; our own problems engrossed us; and these were problems
of material development, of local statecraft, of that elementary
education which a democracy must necessarily take as its chief concern.
What had been a professional training by which God’s ministers were
to be selected became relatively unprofessional, a so-called “liberal
education,” the object of which was to illumine and make pliable and
broad the minds of laymen. The high purpose of the teacher was not
now to choose the leaders of the spirit. It was rather to preserve
in a new world of crude physical endeavor the arts and sciences that
civilize the mind.
American life in the nineteenth century had many of the characteristics
that we are accustomed to associate with heroic barbarism. It had
the same insecurity--insecurity of life on the border, insecurity of
fortune where life was safe. It had the same frequency of hazardous
toil against wild nature; the same accompaniments of cold and
privation; the same vast and shadowy enterprises, usually collapsing;
the same intensity of physical sensation; the same ardor of emotional
experience in the spiritual realm. And always education mitigated
extravagance, restrained excess, directed effort. Through education our
ancestral Europe restrained and guided us. Education kept us white.
But never, perhaps, has the divergence between life as it had to be
lived and the civilities taught us in school been greater. Never
has the ideal world, which, after all, it is the chief business of
education to mirror, been more different from the facts of experience
than in America. The ridiculous scientist of Cooper’s “Prairie” who
mistakes his donkey for a new monster and thinks it more important
to call the buffalo the bison than to eat when hungry of its hump,
is a symbol of the contrast between what we learned and what we did
in America. In the eighteenth century, education for most Americans
was practical preparation for a knowledge of God’s ways with man. In
the nineteenth it had become not a preparation for life so much as an
antiseptic against the demoralizations of a purely material struggle
to open up a continent. The results have been of grave political
importance.
For the divergence between theory and practice explains the curiously
traditional character of our schooling as we knew it in youth, as our
grandfathers knew it in youth. I am not now speaking of the wearisome
controversies over Latin and Greek and classic English literature,
the so-called traditional subjects which make up a large part of
education. It is not the letter, but the spirit, that makes the thing
taught traditional. And ever since democracy began, the teacher has
had to be the priest and guardian of tradition in America. He has been
an anxious parent stretching the coverlet of racial culture over the
restless limbs of little immigrants. He has taught reading, writing,
and arithmetic as a means of holding fast to our tradition. He has
taught literature and history and “moral ethics” and “natural science”
as the containers of that tradition. We have almost forgotten that for
a time in the early nineteenth century it seemed quite possible that
the frontier would become Indian rather than European in its culture.
We see clearly now how possible it would have been for whole regions
of the South to relapse into negro semi-barbarism. We may guess that
save for the teacher and his grinding in of tradition the white races
of North America might have slipped backward, as too clearly have the
white races in many parts of Latin America.
One element in this education by tradition was specially important.
Liberalism, the principle upon which this republic was founded,
education took up as soon as it dropped theology, if not earlier.
American education became impregnated with liberalism, made liberalism
its chief tradition. What we study in school and college stays by
us, overlaid perhaps, scarcely vital any more, yet packed close to
the roots of our conscious being. And the compost they gave us in
America was liberalism. History enshrined the republican ideals of
our founders and the democratic ideals of our nineteenth-century
development. Sometimes it was taught in college classes with “sources”
duly ticketed. Sometimes it trickled through commencement speeches
or primers thumbed on back-row benches. The results were the same.
In literature, whether English or American, the same ideas were
predominant, or at least were made to seem so by careful selection.
Democracy and the rights of man blow through the reading of the
American school-boy, somewhat aridly it must be admitted; but still
they blow. Civics and government and the social sciences in these
latter days, as they are taught in America, advance the same standard.
Not less definite and persuasive was the influence of the men who
taught us. Many of them have been aristocratic in taste and in their
misprision of the stupidities of the common man, but their text also
was of liberalism and democracy whenever the subject or the occasion
permitted. Even geography and spelling were presented as the means
whereby the child of the laboring man had been given his chance to
rise in the world and perhaps become President. Properly considered,
the things we have been taught, the men who taught us, the very
organization of our school and college system, have been one vast
engine for shaping the minds of young America in the turn and mold of
liberalism.
But this liberalism, like most of our education, was highly
traditional. Our subjects and the men who taught them looked
prevailingly backward for inspiration, recalled us to the past, warned
us of the future. The urge was always the old Roman one--preserve the
piety of your ancestors. Preparation for new conditions, for a possible
new liberty in industry or politics, for a possible new democracy in
wealth, there was, we must confess, very little. We were linked to
tradition; we were made profoundly and sincerely liberal, at least in
our theories of life; we were implored to stand pat.
And though education, as the art was practised here in America,
has perhaps kept us liberal, it has certainly given to liberalism
that faint shadow of unreality, that sacrosanctity which belongs to
all traditional beliefs. It is the traditional quality of American
education that more than any other single agency has petrified
American liberalism.
We plain Americans in our little red school-houses and our big brick
high schools and our spreading universities have learned republicanism
and the rights of man and the not-to-be-questioned opportunity of every
person to go to the top of the ladder if he wished and were able. This
we were taught explicitly and implicitly. And we believed these things
because we were made to think that all right-thinking men everywhere
believed them: and therefore we recited Gladstone and Lincoln and
Toussaint L’Ouverture and passages from Carlyle’s “French Revolution”
and Mrs. Browning on the freeing of Italy with confident hearts.
Furthermore, we felt that these principles were sincere, because, no
matter how poor or how stupid, we found educational opportunities
opened on every side. There was no discrimination in the quantity of
American education, and but little in its quality. Until we left the
school or the campus, our liberal tradition fitted us like a garment.
It never occurred to us that it might not always fit.
Yet as soon as we moved out into America, crossing that bridge from
theory to practice, from ideas to application, which in all countries
is long and in new countries longest of all, strange contradiction
began to be apparent. Republicanism, it appeared, worked out in
practice, at least in our town, into boss control and domination by
party leaders, acting usually for vested interests. The rights of man,
we discovered, had a curious sound when discussed by labor-unions or
the unemployed. Opportunities, it became clear, could not be freely
offered to the man without capital unless we were prepared to change
radically an industrial system which our common sense taught us was
better--at least for us--than the visionary industrial democracies
that radicals without business experience wished to set up. Were
these precious ideals of ours merely buncombe, then, held only in
theory, in practice to be disregarded? Or was democracy good as a
half-way measure, but false as a general principle? Was our education a
tradition to be reverenced--and disregarded?
Not a few reached the indicated conclusion, though they kept, as a
rule, their opinions to themselves. Perhaps as many swung to the other
extreme, believed that only more democracy would cure us, and also kept
out of print, for fear of being associated with radical aliens who
held much the same opinions in politics and social affairs, but very
different conceptions of cleanliness, morals, and polite conversation.
These were our right and left wings merely. The great mass of us, the
everyday Americans, took things as they were with a kind of shrewd
childish good sense, and pushed ahead, being as democratic as was
convenient in this unequal world, but taking no nonsense from people
who would interfere with business in order to make us more so. And that
is where we are now--at the end of the war, in the midst of a world
revolution so great that no one knows whether it has just begun or is
just ending.
But a revolution drives men back upon their principles, makes them
scan willingly or unwillingly the things they live by--the prejudices,
enlightenments, interpretations, convictions that in the largest sense
_are_ their education. And this is true not only of rapid revolutions,
like the French and the Russian, but of slow ones, such as that
revolution which has been slowly gathering headway in English-speaking
countries for three decades or more, that revolution of social and
industrial conditions now rapidly accelerating. And what have Americans
thought of their education?
I think they have found it a brake, a stabilizer, a deterrent alike
from violent reaction and dangerous experiment. I think also that
they have found it what it is--traditional. They have felt it as
a taboo, good on Sundays, but on week-days not to be too closely
regarded. Where it has preached restraint to the more radical,
they have listened, but grown restless. Was it not John Bright who
said that England would be ruined if the hours for labor should be
shortened? Did not Cooper, who wrote the epic of frontier freedom,
sharpen his pen to defend the unearned increment of the landlord?
Where it speaks of liberty and equality to the more conservative, they
have listened, but not taken it too seriously. After all, the world
must be governed and dividends paid. While the rights of the citizen
should be safeguarded, business is business nevertheless, and politics
politics. The Declaration of Independence, they felt, should be kept in
its place, which was the Fourth of July. Theory--by which they meant
education--has little place in practical affairs. They were liberals
of course, but plain and prosperous Americans first of all, and the
latter, at least, they intended to remain.
And thus, in its noble attempt to shape the minds of Americans to a
similitude of their full-blooded ancestors who dared to be radical,
American education itself has acquired the sanctity, the reverence, the
ghostliness of the dead. Like the dead, it is most influential upon
spirits sensitive to the past, and operates through love and veneration
and mere habit rather than through immediate compulsion. Like them,
it visits the minds of the living only in glimpses of the moon, and
its influence, though wide-spread, is partial and easily forgotten in
the noonday glare of active, practical life. Americans respect their
education, but too seldom do they live by it.
It is a good tradition, this American ideal of noble and sturdy
liberalism. The only detraction to be made is precisely that the
education which embodies it is felt to be merely traditional. But this
is much the same as to say that last year’s hat is a good hat, the only
trouble being that when we wear it we invariably remember that it is
last year’s hat. And at least one unhappy consequence follows.
American minds have been coddled in school and college for at least
a generation. There are two kinds of mental coddling. The first
belongs to the public schools, and is one of the defects of our
educational system that we abuse privately and largely keep out of
print. It is democratic coddling. I mean, of course, the failure to
hold up standards, the willingness to let youth wobble upward, knowing
little and that inaccurately, passing nothing well, graduating with
an education that hits and misses like an old type-writer with a
torn ribbon. America is full of “sloppy thinking,” of inaccuracy,
of half-baked misinformation, of sentimentalism, especially
sentimentalism, as a result of coddling by schools that cater to an
easy-going democracy. Only fifty-six per cent of a group of girls,
graduates of the public schools, whose records I once examined, could
do simple addition, only twenty-nine per cent simple multiplication
correctly; a deplorable percentage had a very inaccurate knowledge of
elementary American geography.
A dozen causes are responsible for this condition, and among them, I
suspect, one, which if not major, at least deserves careful pondering.
The teacher and the taught have somehow drifted apart. His function
in the large has been to teach an ideal, a tradition. He is content,
he has to be content, with partial results. It is not for life as it
is, it is for what life ought to be, that he is preparing even in
arithmetic; he has allowed the faint unreality of a priestcraft to numb
him. In the mind of the student a dim conception has entered, that this
education--all education--is a garment merely, to be doffed for the
struggle with realities. The will is dulled. Interest slackens.
But it is in aristocratic coddling that the effects of our educational
attitude gleam out to the least observant understanding. This is
the coddling of the preparatory schools and the colleges, and it is
more serious for it is a defect that cannot be explained away by
the hundred difficulties that beset good teaching in a public-school
system, nation-wide, and conducted for the young of every race in the
American menagerie. The teaching in the best American preparatory
schools and colleges is as careful and as conscientious as any in
the world. That one gladly asserts. Indeed, an American boy in a
good boarding-school is handled like a rare microbe in a research
laboratory. He is ticketed; every instant of his time is planned and
scrutinized; he is dieted with brain food, predigested, and weighed
before application. I sometimes wonder if a moron could not be made
into an Abraham Lincoln by such a system--if the system were sound.
It is not sound. The boys and girls, especially the boys, are coddled
for entrance examinations, coddled through freshman year, coddled
oftentimes for graduation. And they too frequently go out into the
world fireproof against anything but intellectual coddling. Such
men and women can read only writing especially prepared for brains
that will take only selected ideas, simply put. They can think only
on simple lines, not too far extended. They can live happily only
in a life where ideas never exceed the college sixty per cent of
complexity, and where no intellectual or esthetic experience lies too
far outside the range of their curriculum. A world where one reads the
news and skips the editorials; goes to musical comedies, but omits
the plays; looks at illustrated magazines, but seldom at books; talks
business, sports, and politics, but never economics, social welfare,
and statesmanship--that is the world for which we coddle the best of
our youth. Many indeed escape the evil effects by their own innate
originality; more bear the marks to the grave.
The process is simple, and one can see it in the English public
schools (where it is being attacked vivaciously) quite as commonly as
here. You take your boy out of his family and his world. You isolate
him except for companionship with other nursery transplantings and
teachers themselves isolated. And then you feed him, nay, you cram
him, with good traditional education, filling up the odd hours with
the excellent, but negative, passion of sport. Then you subject him to
a special cramming and send him to college, where sometimes he breaks
through the net of convention woven about him, and sees the real world
as it should appear to the student before he becomes part of it; but
more frequently wraps himself deep and more deeply in conventional
opinion, conventional practice, until, the limbs of his intellect bound
tightly, he stumbles into the outer world.
And there, in the swirl and the vivid practicalities of American life,
is the net loosened? I think not. I think rather that the youth learns
to swim clumsily despite his encumbrances of lethargic thinking and
tangled idealism. But if they are cut? If he goes on the sharp rocks
of experience, finds that hardness, shrewdness, selfish individualism
pay best in American life, what has he in his spirit to meet this
disillusion? Of what use has been his education in the liberal,
idealistic traditions of America? Of some use, undoubtedly, for habit,
even a dull habit, is strong; but whether useful enough, whether
powerful enough, to save America, to keep us “white” in the newer and
more colloquial sense, the future will test and test quickly.
Why do we coddle our aristocracy, who can pay for the best and most
effective education? I think that the explanation again is to be
sought in the traditionalism of American education. If our chief, our
ultimate, duty to the boy that we teach is to make him an “American
gentleman,” and if by this is meant that we are to instil the essence
of the Americanism which made Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt, and
let it go at that, and if all our education hovers about this central
purpose--why, the stage is set for a problem play that may become
tragedy or farce. It is not thinking we teach then so much as what has
been taught. It is not life, but what has been lived; not American
liberalism, but a conservatism that never has been characteristically
American. The tradition is not at fault, nor the thought of the past,
nor the lives of our ancestors; it is when all these things are taught
as dead idealism unrelated to the facts of the present that they become
merely traditional.
And the boy and girl are not deceived. They take all that is given
them--no youth in the world are so pliable, so receptive as ours--and
retain and respect and cherish what they remember of it. But it is
clear that for them it is tradition, it is unreal in comparison with
their sports, their social aspirations. It will be unreal in comparison
with their business and their politics and their household affairs. It
will be a venerated tradition of liberal thinking for them of which
they will be highly conservative. But it will not function in their
lives--not more at least than the sixty per cent that they sought for
in order to get that degree of bachelor of arts which certified that
they were versed in the thought of their forefathers. And so they merge
in the common American mind that I have called conservative-liberal.
I know of no better proof of the truth of what I have just written than
the history of our college undergraduates in war-time.
Here is such a demonstration as comes only once in a generation. Of
all unpreparedness, the unpreparedness of the undergraduate for war
was apparently chief. He knew little about the war, its causes, its
manifestations, for he is not an ardent reader of current events
outside his college world, nor does he hear much of the talk of the
market-place. He knew little about war. The R. O. T. C. had spread
some ideas of drill and discipline and the technic of fighting; but he
was neither drilled nor disciplined in 1917. And as for the training
in accurate obedience and in exact thinking which war is supposed
to demand, he simply did not have it, or so we thought. Nor had his
particularistic fashion of following his own little contests to the
exclusion of loyalties to the world outside, and his indifference to
politics beyond fraternity elections, or economics beyond the cost of
theater-tickets and beer, led us to assume a ready response to a great
moral emergency in national affairs.
We were utterly deceived. The response of the American undergraduate
was immediate and magnificent. He crowded into the most dangerous
military professions, and was eminent in the most difficult branches of
organization and experiment. He did not, it is true, think very broadly
about the war, but he thought intensely. He did not learn accuracy,
steadiness, independence overnight, but he learned them. He was wholly
admirable. And the women, who in ways not yet sufficiently celebrated
made it possible for the country to stiffen to the crisis, were as
eager to serve as the men.
And the reason, I believe, was that for the time the education of the
undergraduate ceased being traditional and became a moving force in his
experience. The dim liberal idealism in which his mind had been moving
for many years suddenly took on color and became fire. Every impulse
of his mental training urged him to do just what was asked of him, to
struggle for democracy, for justice, for a square deal; to believe in
the rights of man and the permanence of right and the supremacy of a
righteous idealism. And his habits of hard, earnest play, where rules
were obeyed and victory went to the best player, also were the very
stuff the world wanted, also transformed miraculously into the very
apparatus of war. His traditional education, with its extra-curriculum
of games that also were traditional in their neglect of the new and
special qualities required for success in modern life, precisely
fitted the clamorous need of the hour. And the undergraduate for a
little while silenced his critics, amazed his friends, and was in many
respects happier than in those years of peace when he was trying to
bridge the gap between his education and life as it was being lived in
America.
And with peace he relapses--the American in general relapses into the
old discontinuity. The crisis of self-defense over, our ideals once
more begin to seem impractical, traditionary. As long as the patriotism
lit by the war and danger crackled under the pot, our liberalism
bubbled ardently; but peace chills the brew. For peace means that we
drop our ardors and face again the insistent reachings of the democracy
for a greater share in wealth, for a greater control over productivity,
for representation in industry as well as in politics. Peace means
that we must face not war, with its romantic thrills and its common
enemy, but the prosaic causes of war that hide among friends as well
as enemies, that for cure demand self-criticism, self-denial, and
humbleness of spirit, a struggle in which the Croix de Guerre is likely
to be reproach and contumely.
The break between our education and the life we are living again
widens, and it is this break which emasculates our liberalism. Viewed
alone, the fine ideals of our education are easily defensible; the
hustling vigor of our life is also defensible. The trouble is that
in ordinary times they fail somehow or another to connect. Education
grows bloodless. Life becomes aimless or merely self-regarding. What we
believe grows pallid and fades before it transmutes into what we do.
Indeed, I would go further and say that Americans, and especially the
graduates of universities, are somewhat weakened by their education.
They go out into life with an enormous appetite for living and a set
of ideals like a row of preserved vegetables canned and hermetically
sealed for future contingencies. In 1917 and 1918 we opened some of
those jars and found the contents good for a special emergency. But
ordinarily the lids are tight, while we go about our business proud of
our stores of education, but inwardly uncertain, like the housewife,
as to whether or not those ideas that seemed so good when our teachers
packed them away in the season of youth will not be sour to the taste
of practical modernity.
The clamor for vocational education is a protest against this
ineffectiveness of the merely traditional. But the cure does not lie
in such a medicining. Vocational education is well enough, and we
need more of it, but training of the hands and of the brain to purely
material accomplishments will never save liberalism in America. The
strength of vocational education is that it looks forward and prepares
for things as they are. Its weakness, when administered alone, is that
it neglects the directing mind. In any large sense it is aimless, or,
rather, it aims at successful slavery quite as much as at successful
freedom. Liberal education also must look forward, must put its
traditions to work, must germinate, and become alive in the mind of the
American, and then teach him by old principles to attack new problems.
We must either live by our education or live without it. The
alternatives are desiccation and anarchy. If we live by it, education
itself stays alive, grows, sloughs off dead matter, adapts itself
like an organism to environment. If we live without and beyond and in
neglect of education, as many “practical” Americans have always done
once they left school or college, education decays, and sooner or later
the man decivilizes, drifts toward that mere acceleration of busyness,
which is the modern equivalent of barbarism.
Once before, and far more seriously, a civilization was threatened
because its education became merely traditional and ceased to function
in practical life. The society of Appolinaris Sidonius in the fifth
century, as Dill describes it, was faced with economic disruption, with
hordes of aliens, with a rampant individualism that put the acquisition
of a secure fortune above everything else. The leaders failed to lead.
“Their academic training only deepened and intensified the deadening
conservatism of unassailable wealth.” “Faith in Rome had killed all
faith in a wider future for humanity....” There was an “apparent
inability to imagine, even in the presence of tremendous forces of
disruption, that society should ever cease to move along the ancient
lines.” Roman imperialism divorced itself from Roman thought and became
a deadening tyranny. Roman thought divorced itself from Roman life and
became an empty philosophy. And the sixth century and disaster followed.
The historical analogy is imperfect. Our civilization is still vigorous
where the Roman was tired and weak. No outer barbarians threaten us.
Science safeguards us from economic breakdown.
And yet, like the skeptic who does not believe in God, but refuses to
take chances on his death-bed, I should not scoff at the parallel.
Stale imperialism, shaken religions, a liberalism become an article of
faith not an instrument of practice--all these are potential of decay,
of explosion. We must look to our education. If it does not grip our
life, we must change education. If life is not gripped, our life needs
reforming. And the thing is so extraordinarily difficult that it is
high time we ceased praising for a while the virtues of our forefathers
or the wealth of our compatriots, and began the task. After all, it
means no more than to teach the next generation not merely to preserve,
but also to carry on, the traditions of America.