PROPAGANDA FOR EDUCATION
Education is not securing its proper share of public interest. The
public school system, materially and financially, is being adequately
supported. There is marked eagerness for a college education, and a
vague aspiration for culture, expressed in innumerable courses and
lectures. The public is not cognizant of the real value of education,
and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving
the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.
It is felt, for example, that education is entitled to more space in
the newspapers; that well informed discussion of education hardly
exists; that unless such an issue as the Gary School system is created,
or outside of an occasional discussion, such as that aroused over
Harvard’s decision to establish a school of business, education does
not attract the active interest of the public.
There are a number of reasons for this condition. First of all, there
is the fact that the educator has been trained to stimulate to thought
the individual students in his classroom, but has not been trained as
an educator at large of the public.
In a democracy an educator should, in addition to his academic duties,
bear a definite and wholesome relation to the general public. This
public does not come within the immediate scope of his academic
duties. But in a sense he depends upon it for his living, for the
moral support, and the general cultural tone upon which his work must
be based. In the field of education, we find what we have found in
politics and other fields—that the evolution of the practitioner of
the profession has not kept pace with the social evolution around
him, and is out of gear with the instruments for the dissemination of
ideas which modern society has developed. If this be true, then the
training of the educators in this respect should begin in the normal
schools, with the addition to their curricula of whatever is necessary
to broaden their viewpoint. The public cannot understand unless the
teacher understands the relationship between the general public and the
academic idea.
The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to
make him realize that his is a two-fold job: education as a teacher and
education as a propagandist.
A second reason for the present remoteness of education from the
thoughts and interests of the public is to be found in the mental
attitude of the pedagogue—whether primary school teacher or college
professor—toward the world outside the school. This is a difficult
psychological problem. The teacher finds himself in a world in which
the emphasis is put on those objective goals and those objective
attainments which are prized by our American society. He himself is
but moderately or poorly paid. Judging himself by the standards in
common acceptance, he cannot but feel a sense of inferiority because
he finds himself continually being compared, in the minds of his own
pupils, with the successful business man and the successful leader in
the outside world. Thus the educator becomes repressed and suppressed
in our civilization. As things stand, this condition cannot be changed
from the outside unless the general public alters its standards of
achievement, which it is not likely to do soon.
Yet it can be changed by the teaching profession itself, if it becomes
conscious not only of its individualistic relation to the pupil,
but also of its social relation to the general public. The teaching
profession, as such, has the right to carry on a very definite
propaganda with a view to enlightening the public and asserting its
intimate relation to the society which it serves. In addition to
conducting a propaganda on behalf of its individual members, education
must also raise the general appreciation of the teaching profession.
Unless the profession can raise itself by its own bootstraps, it will
fast lose the power of recruiting outstanding talent for itself.
Propaganda cannot change all that is at present unsatisfactory in the
educational situation. There are factors, such as low pay and the lack
of adequate provision for superannuated teachers, which definitely
affect the status of the profession. It is possible, by means of an
intelligent appeal predicated upon the actual present composition of
the public mind, to modify the general attitude toward the teaching
profession. Such a changed attitude will begin by expressing itself in
an insistence on the idea of more adequate salaries for the profession.
There are various ways in which academic organizations in America
handle their financial problems. One type of college or university
depends, for its monetary support, upon grants from the state
legislatures. Another depends upon private endowment. There are other
types of educational institutions, such as the sectarian, but the two
chief types include by far the greater number of our institutions of
higher learning.
The state university is supported by grants from the people of the
state, voted by the state legislature. In theory, the degree of
support which the university receives is dependent upon the degree of
acceptance accorded it by the voters. The state university prospers
according to the extent to which it can sell itself to the people of
the state.
The state university is therefore in an unfortunate position unless its
president happens to be a man of outstanding merit as a propagandist
and a dramatizer of educational issues. Yet if this is the case—if
the university shapes its whole policy toward gaining the support of
the state legislature—its educational function may suffer. It may be
tempted to base its whole appeal to the public on its public service,
real or supposed, and permit the education of its individual students
to take care of itself. It may attempt to educate the people of the
state at the expense of its own pupils. This may generate a number of
evils, to the extent of making the university a political instrument, a
mere tool of the political group in power. If the president dominates
both the public and the professional politician, this may lead to a
situation in which the personality of the president outweighs the true
function of the institution.
The endowed college or university has a problem quite as perplexing.
The endowed college is dependent upon the support, usually, of key
men in industry whose social and economic objectives are concrete
and limited, and therefore often at variance with the pursuit of
abstract knowledge. The successful business man criticizes the
great universities for being too academic, but seldom for being
too practical. One might imagine that the key men who support our
universities would like them to specialize in schools of applied
science, of practical salesmanship or of industrial efficiency. And it
may well be, in many instances, that the demands which the potential
endowers of our universities make upon these institutions are flatly
in contradiction to the interests of scholarship and general culture.
We have, therefore, the anomalous situation of the college seeking
to carry on a propaganda in favor of scholarship among people who
are quite out of sympathy with the aims to which they are asked to
subscribe their money. Men who, by the commonly accepted standards,
are failures or very moderate successes in our American world (the
pedagogues) seek to convince the outstanding successes (the business
men) that they should give their money to ideals which they do not
pursue. Men who, through a sense of inferiority, despise money, seek to
win the good will of men who love money.
It seems possible that the future status of the endowed college will
depend upon a balancing of these forces, both the academic and the
endowed elements obtaining in effect due consideration.
The college must win public support. If the potential donor is
apathetic, enthusiastic public approval must be obtained to convince
him. If he seeks unduly to influence the educational policy of the
institution, public opinion must support the college in the continuance
of its proper functions. If either factor dominates unduly, we are
likely to find a demagoguery or a snobbishness aiming to please one
group or the other.
There is still another potential solution of the problem. It is
possible that through an educational propaganda aiming to develop
greater social consciousness on the part of the people of the country,
there may be awakened in the minds of men of affairs, as a class,
social consciousness which will produce more minds of the type of
Julius Rosenwald, V. Everitt Macy, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the late
Willard Straight.
Many colleges have already developed intelligent propaganda in order
to bring them into active and continuous relation with the general
public. A definite technique has been developed in their relation to
the community in the form of college news bureaus. These bureaus have
formed an intercollegiate association whose members meet once a year
to discuss their problems. These problems include the education of
the alumnus and his effect upon the general public and upon specific
groups, the education of the future student to the choice of the
particular college, the maintenance of an _esprit de corps_ so that
the athletic prowess of the college will not be placed first, the
development of some familiarity with the research work done in the
college in order to attract the attention of those who may be able to
lend aid, the development of an understanding of the aims and the work
of the institution in order to attract special endowments for specified
purposes.
Some seventy-five of these bureaus are now affiliated with the
American Association of College News Bureaus, including those of Yale,
Wellesley, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Western Reserve, Tufts and
California. A bi-monthly news letter is published, bringing to members
the news of their profession. The Association endeavors to uphold the
ethical standards of the profession and aims to work in harmony with
the press.
The National Education Association and other societies are carrying on
a definite propaganda to promote the larger purposes of educational
endeavor. One of the aims of such propaganda is of course improvement
in the prestige and material position of the teachers themselves. An
occasional McAndrew case calls the attention of the public to the fact
that in some schools the teacher is far from enjoying full academic
freedom, while in certain communities the choice of teachers is based
upon political or sectarian considerations rather than upon real
ability. If such issues were made, by means of propaganda, to become
a matter of public concern on a truly national scale, there would
doubtless be a general tendency to improvement.
The concrete problems of colleges are more varied and puzzling than one
might suppose. The pharmaceutical college of a university is concerned
because the drug store is no longer merely a drug store, but primarily
a soda fountain, a lunch counter, a book-shop, a retailer of all
sorts of general merchandise from society stationery to spare radio
parts. The college realizes the economic utility of the lunch counter
feature to the practicing druggist, yet it feels that the ancient and
honorable art of compounding specifics is being degraded.
Cornell University discovers that endowments are rare. Why? Because the
people think that the University is a state institution and therefore
publicly supported.
Many of our leading universities rightly feel that the results of their
scholarly researches should not only be presented to libraries and
learned publications, but should also, where practicable and useful,
be given to the public in the dramatic form which the public can
understand. Harvard is but one example.
“Not long ago,” says Charles A. Merrill in _Personality_, “a certain
Harvard professor vaulted into the newspaper headlines. There were
several days when one could hardly pick up a paper in any of the larger
cities without finding his name bracketed with his achievement.
“The professor, who was back from a trip to Yucatan in the interests of
science, had solved the mystery of the Venus calendar of the ancient
Mayas. He had discovered the key to the puzzle of how the Mayas kept
tab on the flight of time. Checking the Mayan record of celestial
events against the known astronomical facts, he had found a perfect
correlation between the time count of these Central American Indians
and the true positions of the planet Venus in the sixth century B.C. A
civilization which flourished in the Western Hemisphere twenty-five
centuries ago was demonstrated to have attained heights hitherto
unappreciated by the modern world.
“How the professor’s discovery happened to be chronicled in the popular
press is, also, in retrospect, a matter of interest.... If left to his
own devices, he might never have appeared in print, except perhaps in
some technical publication, and his remarks there would have been no
more intelligible to the average man or woman than if they had been
inscribed in Mayan hieroglyphics.
“Popularization of this message from antiquity was due to the
initiative of a young man named James W. D. Seymour....
“It may surprise and shock some people,” Mr. Merrill adds, “to be told
that the oldest and most dignified seats of learning in America now
hire press agents, just as railroad companies, fraternal organizations,
moving picture producers and political parties retain them. It is
nevertheless a fact....
“... there is hardly a college or university in the country which does
not, with the approval of the governing body and the faculty, maintain
a publicity office, with a director and a staff of assistants, for the
purpose of establishing friendly relations with the newspapers, and
through the newspapers, with the public....
“This enterprise breaks sharply with tradition. In the older seats
of learning it is a recent innovation. It violates the fundamental
article in the creed of the old academic societies. Cloistered
seclusion used to be considered the first essential of scholarship. The
college was anxious to preserve its aloofness from the world....
“The colleges used to resent outside interest in their affairs. They
might, somewhat reluctantly and contemptuously, admit reporters to
their Commencement Day exercises, but no further would they go....
“To-day, if a newspaper reporter wants to interview a Harvard
professor, he has merely to telephone the Secretary for Information to
the University. Officially, Harvard still shies away from the title
‘Director of Publicity.’ Informally, however, the secretary with the
long title is the publicity man. He is an important official to-day at
Harvard.”
It may be a new idea that the president of a university will concern
himself with the kind of mental picture his institution produces on
the public mind. Yet it is part of the president’s work to see that
his university takes its proper place in the community and therefore
also in the community mind, and produces the results desired, both in a
cultural and in a financial sense.
If his institution does not produce the mental picture which it should,
one of two things may be wrong: Either the media of communication with
the public may be wrong or unbalanced; or his institution may be at
fault. The public is getting an oblique impression of the university,
in which case the impression should be modified; or it may be that the
public is getting a _correct_ impression, in which case, very possibly,
the work of the university itself should be modified. For both
possibilities lie within the province of the public relations counsel.
Columbia University recently instituted a _Casa Italiana_, which was
solemnly inaugurated in the presence of representatives of the Italian
government, to emphasize its high standing in Latin studies and the
Romance languages. Years ago Harvard founded the Germanic Museum, which
was ceremoniously opened by Prince Henry of Prussia.
Many colleges maintain extension courses which bring their work to the
knowledge of a broad public. It is of course proper that such courses
should be made known to the general public. But, to take another
example, if they have been badly planned, from the point of view of
public relations, if they are unduly scholastic and detached, their
effect may be the opposite of favorable. In such a case, it is not the
work of the public relations counsel to urge that the courses be made
better known, but to urge that they first be modified to conform to the
impression which the college wishes to create, where that is compatible
with the university’s scholastic ideals.
Again, it may be the general opinion that the work of a certain
institution is 80 per cent postgraduate research, an opinion which
may tend to alienate public interest. This opinion may be true or it
may be false. If it is false, it should be corrected by high-spotting
undergraduate activities.
If, on the other hand, it is true that 80 per cent of the work is
postgraduate research, the most should be made of that fact. It should
be the concern of the president to make known the discoveries which
are of possible public interest. A university expedition into Biblical
lands may be uninteresting as a purely scholastic undertaking, but if
it contributes light on some Biblical assertion it will immediately
arouse the interest of large masses of the population. The zoölogical
department may be hunting for some strange bacillus which has no known
relation to any human disease, but the fact that it is chasing bacilli
is in itself capable of dramatic presentation to the public.
Many universities now gladly lend members of their faculties to assist
in investigations of public interest. Thus Cornell lent Professor
Wilcox to aid the government in the preparation of the national census.
Professor Irving Fisher of Yale has been called in to advise on
currency matters.
In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education
as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to
overadvertise an institution and to create in the public mind
artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its
misuse.