America. From the first the American college has been organized by the
people and for the people. It has been about as much resorted to by the
poor as by the rich. Through a widely developed system of free public
schools it has kept itself closely in touch with popular ideals. Its
graduates go into commercial life as often as into medicine, the
ministry, or the law. It has shown itself capable of expansion too in
adjusting itself to the modern enlargement of knowledge. The rigid
curriculum, which suited well enough the needs of our fathers, has been
discarded, and every college, in proportion to the resources at its
command, now offers elective studies and seeks to meet the needs of
differing men. To all who can afford four years (soon it may be three),
and who are masters of about half as much capital as would support them
during the same time elsewhere, the four hundred colleges of our country
offer an education far too good to be superseded, duplicated, or
weakened. In these colleges excellent provision has been made, and has
been made once for all, for everybody who has a little time and a little
money to devote to systematic education of the higher sort.
But our educational scheme has one serious limitation, and during the
last fifty years there have been many earnest efforts to surmount it.
Not every man is free to seek a systematic training. Multitudes are tied
to daily toil and only in the evening can they consider their own
enlargement. Many grow old before the craving for knowledge arises. Many
also, with more or less profit, have attended a college, but are glad
subsequently to supply those defects of education which the experiences
of life relentlessly bring to view. To all these classes, caught in the
whirl of affairs, the college does not minister. It is true that much
that such people want they get from the public library, especially as
our librarians of the modern type energetically accept their duties as
facilitators of the public reading. Much is also obtainable from the
cheap issues of the press and from such endowed courses of higher
instruction as those of the Lowell, Cooper, Brooklyn, Peabody, and
Drexel institutes. But, after all, these supplementary aids, though
valuable, are deficient in guiding power. Most persons, especially if
novices, work best under inspection. To learners teachers are generally
important. There seems to be still a place in our well-supplied country
for an organization which shall arouse a more general desire for
knowledge; which shall stand ready to satisfy this desire more cheaply,
with less interruption to daily occupation, and consequently in ways
more fragmentary than the colleges can; and yet one which shall not
leave its pupils alone with books, but shall supply them with the
impulse of the living word and through writing, discussion and directed
reading, shall economize and render effective the costly hours of
learning. Unquestionably there is a field here which the colleges cannot
till, a field whose harvest would enrich us all. Can any other agency
till it? To every experiment thus far it has yielded only meagre, brief
and expensive returns. A capital thing it would be to give to the busy
that which normally requires time and attention; but how to do it is the
question,--how to do it in reality, and not in mere outward seeming.
Chautauqua has not done it, impassioned though that rough and
generous institution has been for wide and fragmentary culture. Its
work, indeed, has had a different aim; and, amusing as that work
often appears, it ought to be understood and acknowledged as of
fundamental consequence in our hastily settled and heterogeneous land.
Chautauqua sends its little books and papers into stagnant homes from
Maine to California and gives the silent occupants something to think
about. Conversation springs up; and with it fresh interests, fresh
hopes. A new tie is formed between young and old, as together they
persue the same studies and in the same graduating class walk through
the Golden Gate. Any man who loves knowledge and his native land must
be glad at heart when he visits a summer assembly of Chautauqua: there
listens to the Orator's Recognition Address; attends the swiftly
successive Round Tables upon Milton, Temperance, Geology, the
American Constitution, the Relations of Science and Religion, and the
Doctrine of Rent; perhaps assists at the Cooking School, the Prayer
Meeting, the Concert and the Gymnastic Drill; or wanders under the
trees among the piazzaed cottages and sees the Hall of Philosophy and
the wooden Doric Temple shining on their little eminences; and, best of
all, perceives in what throngs have gathered here the butcher, the
baker, and the candlestick-maker,--a throng themselves, their wives and
daughters a throng--all heated in body, but none the less aglow for
learning and a good time. The comic aspects of this mixture of science,
fresh air, flirtation, Greek reminiscence, and devoutness are patent
enough; but the way in which the multitude is being won to discard
distrust of knowledge, and to think of it rather as the desirable goal
for all, is not so generally remarked by scholarly observers. Yet that
is the weighty fact. The actual product in education may not be
large; enthusiasm and the memory may be more stimulated than the
rational intelligence. But minds are set in motion; an intellectual
world, beyond the domestic and personal, begins to appear; studious
thought forms its fit friendship with piety, gladness and the sense
of a common humanity; a groundwork of civilization is prepared. To
find a popular movement so composite and aspiring, we must go back to
the mediaeval Crusades or the Greek Mysteries. In these alone do we
observe anything so ideal, so bizarre, so expressive of the combined
intellectual and religious hopes of a people. In many Chautauqua
homes pathetic sacrifices will be made in the next generation to send
the boys and girls to a real college.
Now, in proposing to transport to this country English extension methods
the managers have had in mind nothing so elementarily important as
Chautauqua. They have felt the pity we all feel for persons of good
parts who, through poverty or occupation, are debarred from a college
training. They seek to reach minds already somewhat prepared, and to
such they undertake to supply solid instruction of the higher grades. It
is this more ambitious design which calls for criticism. Professor R. G.
Moulton speaks of extension education as "distinguished from school
education, being moulded to meet the wants of adults." And again, "So
far as method is concerned, we have considered that we are bound to be
not less thorough, but more thorough, if possible, than the universities
themselves." If, in the general educational campaign, we liken
Chautauqua to a guerrilla high school, university extension will be a
guerrilla college. Both move with light armor, have roving commissions,
attack individuals, and themselves appear in the garb of ordinary life;
but they are equipped for a service in which the more cumbrous
organizations of school and college have thus far proved ineffective. It
is a fortunate circumstance that, with fields of operation so distinct,
no jealousy can exist between the two bands of volunteers, or between
them both and the regular army. The success of either would increase the
success of the other two. To Chautauqua we are all indebted for
lessening the popular suspicion of expert knowledge; and if the plans of
the extension committee could be carried out, college methods would have
a vogue, and a consequent respect, which they have never yet enjoyed.
Every one, accordingly, civilian or professional, wishes the movement
well, and recognizes that the work it proposes to do in our country is
not at present performed. Its aims are excellent. Are they also
practicable? We cannot with certainty say that they are not, but it is
here that doubts arise,--doubts of three sorts: those which suspect a
fundamental difference in the two countries which try the experiment;
those which are incredulous about the permanent response which our
people will make to the education offered; and those which question the
possibility of securing a stable body of extension teachers. The first
set of these doubts has been briefly but sufficiently indicated at the
beginning of this paper; the second may with still greater brevity be
summed up here in the following connected series of inquiries:--
With the multitude of other opportunities for education which American
life affords, will any large body of men and women attend extension
lectures? Will they attend after the novelty is worn off, say during the
third year? Will they do anything more than attend? Will they follow
courses of study, write essays, and pass examinations? Will the
extension system, any better than its decayed predecessor, the old
lyceum system, resist the demands of popular audiences and keep itself
from slipping out of serious instruction into lively and eloquent
entertainment? If the lectures are kept true to their aim of furnishing
solid instruction, can they in the long run be paid for? Will it be
possible to find in our country clusters of half a dozen towns so
grouped and so ready to subscribe to a course of lectures on each day of
the week that out of the entire six a living salary can be obtained?
Will the new teachers be obliged to confine themselves to the suburbs of
large cities, abandoning the scattered dwellers in the country, that
portion of our population which is almost the only one at present cut
off from tolerable means of culture? If in order to pursue these
destitute ones, correspondence methods are employed, in addition to the
already approved methods of lecture instruction, will lowering of the
standard follow? In England three or four years of extension lectures
are counted equivalent to one year of regular study, and a person who
has attended extension courses for this time may be admitted without
further examination to the second year of university residence. Will
anything of the sort be generally attempted here?
These grave questions are as yet insusceptible of answer. Affirmative,
desirable answers do not seem probable; but experience alone can make
the matter plain. Of course the managers are watchfully bearing such
questions in mind, and critical watchfulness may greatly aid the better
answer and hinder the less desirable. Accordingly anything like a
discussion of this class of practical doubts would be inappropriate
here. Data for the formation of a confident opinion do not exist. All
that can be done by way of warning is to indicate certain large
improbabilities, leaving them to be confirmed or thwarted by time and
human ingenuity.
But with the third class of doubts the case is different. These relate
to the constitution of the staff of teachers, and here sufficient facts
are at hand to permit a few points to be demonstrated with considerable
certainty. When, for example, we ask from what source teachers are to be
drawn, we are usually told that they must come from college faculties.
If the method of the extension lecturer is to be as thorough as that of
the universities themselves, the lecturers must be experts, not
amateurs; and where except at the colleges does a body of experts exist?
No doubt many well-trained men are scattered throughout the community as
merchants, doctors, school-teachers, and lawyers. But these men, when of
proved power, have more than they properly can attend to in their own
affairs. It seems to be the colleges, therefore, to which the movement
must look for its teachers; and in the experiments thus far made in
this country the extension lecturing has been done for the most part by
college officers. A professor of history, political economy, or
literature has, in addition to his college teaching, also given a course
of instruction elsewhere. This feature of the American system, one may
say with confidence, must prove a constant damage to the work of the
colleges and, if persisted in, must ultimately destroy the extension
scheme itself.
In England the extension teachers are not university teachers. To have
no independent staff for extension work is a novelty of the American
undertaking. The very name, university extension, besides being
barbaric, is in its English employment largely misleading; since neither
the agencies for extending nor indeed, for the most part, the studies
extended, are found at the universities at all. A small syndicate or
committee, appointed from among the university officers, is the only
share the university has in the business. The impression, so general in
this country, that English university teachers are roaming about the
island, lecturing to mixed audiences, is an entire error. The university
teachers stay at home and send other people, their own graduates
chiefly, to instruct the multitude. A committee of them decides on the
qualifications for the work of such persons as care to devote themselves
to itinerant teaching as a profession. For those so selected they
arrange times, places, and subjects; but they themselves do not move
from their own lecture rooms. Nor is there occasion for their doing so.
In the slender development of popular education in England, many more
persons of the upper classes become trained as specialists than can find
places as university teachers. There thus arises a learned and leisured
accumulation which capitally serves the country in case of a new
educational need. On this accumulated stock of cultured men--men who
otherwise could not easily bring their culture to market--the extension
movement draws. These men are its teachers, its permanent teachers,
since there are not competing places striving to draw them away. In the
two countries the educational situation is exactly reversed: in England
there are more trained men than positions; in America, more positions
than trained men. It seems probable too that this condition of things
will continue long, so far as we are concerned; at least there is no
present prospect of our reaching a limit in the demand for competent
men. Whenever a college has a chair to fill, it is necessary to hunt far
and wide for a suitable person to fill it. The demand is not from the
old places alone. Almost every year a new college is founded. Every year
the old ones grow. In twenty-five years Harvard has quadrupled its
staff. Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan,
the University of Pennsylvania,--indeed almost every strong college in
the country,--shows an immense advance. A Western state is no sooner
settled than it establishes a state university, and each of the sects
starts from one to three colleges besides. No such perpetual expansion
goes on in England. The number of learned positions there is measurably
fixed. If more experts than can fill them, or than care to enter
political life, the liberal professions, and the civil service, are
manufactured in the course of a year, the surplus stock is at the
disposal of the extension syndicate. Many of these men too are persons
of means, to whom a position of dignity is of more consequence than a
large salary. The problem, accordingly, of organizing popular
instruction out of such a body of waiting experts is a comparatively
simple one; but it is not so simple here. In our country any man who has
a fair acquaintance with a special subject and moderate skill in
imparting it, especially if he will be contented with a small salary,
can be pretty sure of college appointment.
Naturally enough, therefore, the organizers of the extension movement,
despairing of finding among us competent unattached teachers, have
turned at once to the colleges; but the colleges are a very unsafe
support to lean upon. A professor in a university where the studies are
elective has no more superfluous time than a busy lawyer, or doctor, or
business man. Merely to keep up with the literature of a subject, to
say nothing of that research and writing which should enlarge its
limits, is an enormous task. Teaching too is no longer an affair of
text-books and recitations. Leisurely days of routine ease belong to the
past. A professor nowadays must prepare lectures incessantly; must
perpetually revise them; must arrange examinations; direct the reading
of his students; receive their theses; himself read a large part of
their voluminous written work; personally oversee his advanced men;
gather them about him in laboratory, seminary and conference; attend
innumerable committee and faculty meetings; devise legislation for the
further development of his college and department; correspond with
schools and colleges where his students, after taking their higher
degree, may suitably be placed; and if at the end of a hard-worked day
he can find an hour's leisure, he must still keep his door open for
students or fellow-officers to enter. So laborious have become the
duties of a university teacher that few large staffs now go through a
year without one or two of their members breaking down. With the growing
complexity of work it often seems as if the proper business of college
officers, study and teaching, must some day cease altogether, crowded
out by the multifarious tasks with which they are only indirectly
connected. It is useless to say that these things are not necessary.
Whoever neglects them will cease to make his college, his subject and
his influence grow. It is because professors now see that they cannot
safely neglect them that the modern college differs fundamentally from
its humdrum predecessor of a quarter of a century ago. Any movement
which seeks to withdraw a professor's attention from these things, and
induces him to put his soul elsewhere, inflicts on the community a
serious damage. No amount of intellectual stimulus furnished to little
companies here and there can atone for the loss that must fall on
education when college teachers pledge themselves to do serious work in
other places than in their own libraries and lecture rooms. To be an
explorer and a guide in a department of human knowledge is an arduous
profession. It admits no half-hearted service.
Of course if the work demanded elsewhere is not serious, the case is
different. Rather with benefit than with damage a college teacher may on
occasion recast the instruction that was intended for professionals and
offer it to a popular audience. In this way a professor makes himself
known and makes his college known. Many of the small colleges are now
engaging in university extension as an inexpensive means of advertising
themselves. But such lecturing is incidental, voluntary and perpetually
liable to interruption. Beyond the immediate series of lectures it
cannot be depended on. There is nothing institutional about it. The men
who undertake it are owned elsewhere, and a second mortgage is not
usually a very valuable piece of property. A movement which places its
reliance on the casual teaching of overworked men is condemned from the
start. University extension can never pass beyond the stage of
amateurism and temporary expedient until, like its English namesake, it
has a permanent staff of instructors exclusively devoted to its
service.
Where, then, is such a staff to be obtained? In view of the conditions
of education in this country already described, it is improbable that it
can be obtained at all. But something may still be done,--something,
however, of a more modest sort than enthusiasts at present have in mind.
There issue from our great universities every year a number of men who
have had two or three years' training beyond their bachelor's degree.
Some of them have had a year or two of foreign study. They frequently
wish to teach. Places do not immediately open to them. If the extension
movement would set them to work, it might have all their time at a
moderate salary for two or three years. Such men, it is true, would be
inexperienced, and their connection with itinerant teaching could not be
rendered lasting. As soon as one of them proved his power as a teacher,
some college would call him; and he would seldom prefer the nomadic and
fragmentary life to an established one. Plainly too under the charge of
such men the grade of instruction could not be the highest; but it
might be sound, inspiriting even, and it is in any case all that present
circumstances render possible. We may mourn that those who are masters
in their several provinces are already fully employed. We may wish there
were a multitude of masters sitting about, ready for enlistment in a
missionary undertaking. But there are no such masters. The facts are
evident enough; and if the extension movement aims at a durable
existence, it will respect these facts. The men it wants it cannot have
without damaging them; and damaging them, it damages the higher
education of which they are the guardians. Teachers of a lower grade are
at hand, ready to be experimented with. The few experiments already
tried have been fairly successful. Let the extension leaders give up all
thought of doing here what has been done in England. The principal part
of that work is performed for us by other means. The wisest guidance,
accordingly, may not lead the movement to any long success. If, however,
university extension will keep itself clearly detached from other
educational agencies and make a quiet offer of humble yet serviceable
instruction, there is a fair prospect that by somewhat slow degrees a
permanent new power may be added to the appliances for rendering busy
Americans intelligent.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Printed in 1892.
VI
SPECIALIZATION[2]
Ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class, this afternoon belongs to
you. This morning we dedicated a chime of bells to the memory of Mrs.
Palmer, and in those moving exercises you had but a slender share.
Probably not half a dozen of you ever saw her who, once seen, was loved
with romantic ardor. Undoubtedly many of you are different from what you
would have been had she not lived, and lived here; for her influence so
passed into the structure of this University that she will shape
successive generations of you for a long time to come. But enough of
her. Let us dismiss her from our thoughts. Too much praise we have
already lavished on one who was ever simple and self-forgetting. She
would chide our profusion. If we would think as she would wish us to
think, let us turn rather to the common matters of the day, reflecting
on those joys and perplexities which have attended you throughout these
formative years. One especially among these perplexities, perhaps the
greatest of all, I would invite you to consider now. Let me set it
clearly before you.
This morning I sat down to breakfast with about a hundred of you who had
entered on the attainment of the highest degree which this University
offers. You were advanced specialists. You had each chosen some single
line of endeavor. But even then I remembered that you were not the only
specialists here. Before me this afternoon I see candidates in medicine,
men and women who have taken for their specialty the warfare with pain
and disease. They have said, "All that I can ever know, I will bring to
bear on this urgent problem." Here also are the lawyers, impassioned for
justice, for the quelling of human strife. That is their specialty. They
too restrict themselves to a single point of view. Beside them sit the
scientific men, who looking over the vast expanse of nature have
accepted the task of tracing the physical aspects of this marvellous
machine. Nor can I stop here. Throughout the undergraduate department,
as we all know, run dominant interests. I should be ashamed of a young
man who in his four years had not found some compulsive interest; for it
is only when an interest compels that we can say that education has
begun. So long as we are simply learning what is set before us, taking
the routine mass of academic subjects, we may be faithful students, but
we are not scholars. No, it is when with a free heart we give ourselves
to a subject, bidding it take of us all it demands and feeling that we
had rather attend to it than to anything else, because it expresses our
personal desires--then it is that its quickening influence takes hold.
But this is specialization. We might think of the University of Chicago
then as a great specializing machine.