teachers must be where everything is taught to anybody than where
a few subjects are offered to all, may be seen by comparing the
number of teachers at Harvard--146, instructing 1586 men--with
those of Glasgow University in 1878--42, instructing 2018 men.
[5] Or sixteen per cent of his recitations. Readers may like to
compare this result with the number of absences elsewhere. At
a prominent New England college, one of the best of those which
require attendance, a student is excused from ten per cent of
his exercises. But this amount does not cover absences of
necessity,--absences caused by sickness, by needs of family,
and by the many other perfectly legitimate hindrances to
attendance. The percentage given for the Harvard seniors
includes all absences whatsoever.
IX
ERRONEOUS LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM
In a paper published in the Andover Review a year ago, I called
attention to the fact that a new principle is at work in American
education. That principle, briefly stated, is this: the student now
consciously shares in his own upbuilding. His studies are knitted
closely to his personal life. Under this influence a new species of
power is developed. Scholarship broadens and deepens, boyishness
diminishes, teacher and pupil meet less artificially. The college, as an
institution, wins fresh life. Public confidence awakens; pupils,
benefactions, flow in. Over what I wrote an eager controversy has
arisen, a controversy which must have proved instructive to those who
need instruction most. In the last resort questions of education are
decided by educators, as those of sanitation by sanitary engineers; but
in both cases the decision has reference to public needs, and people
require to be instructed in the working of appliances which are designed
for their comfort. There is danger that such instruction may not be
given. Professional men become absorbed in their art and content
themselves with reticence, leaving the public ignorant of the devices by
which its health is to be preserved. A great opportunity, therefore,
comes to the common householder when these professional men fall foul of
one another. In pressing arguments home they frequently take to ordinary
speech, and anybody who then lends an ear learns of the mysteries. The
present discussion, I am sure, has brought this informatory gain to
every parent who reads the Andover Review and has a studious boy. The
gain will have been greater because of the candor and courtesy with
which the attacking party has delivered its assault. The contest has
been earnest. Its issues have been rightly judged momentous. For good or
for ill, the choice youth of the land are to be shaped by whatever
educational policy finally wins. Yet, so far as I recall, no unkind word
has slipped from the pen of one of my stout opponents; no disparagement
of man or college has mixed with the energetic advocacy of principle;
the discussion has set in well toward things. I cannot call this
remarkable. Of course it is not easy to be fair and strong at once.
Sweetness and light are often parted. Yet we rightly expect the
scholar's life to civilize him who pursues it, and we anticipate from
books a refinement of the spirit and the manners as well as the
understanding. My opponents have been scholars, and have spoken as
scholars speak. It is a pleasure to linger in their kindly contentious
company. So I gladly accept the invitation of the editors of the Review
to sum up our discussion and to add some explanatory last words.
The papers which have appeared fall into two easily distinguishable
classes, the descriptive and the critical. To the former I devote but a
brief space, so much more direct is the bearing of the latter on the
main topic of debate--the question, namely, what course the higher
education can and what it cannot now take. Yet the descriptive papers
perform a service and deserve a welcome word. Suspecting that I was
showing off Harvard rather favorably, professors planted elsewhere have
attempted to make an equally favorable exhibit of their own colleges. In
my manifesto they have seen "a coveted opportunity to bring forward
corresponding statistics which have not been formed under the Harvard
method." Perhaps this was to mistake my aim a little. I did intend to
advance my college in public esteem; she deserves that of me in
everything I write. But primarily I thought of myself as the expounder
of an important policy, which happens to have been longer perceived and
more elaborately studied at Harvard than elsewhere. I hope I did not
imply that Harvard, having this excellence, has all others. She has many
weaknesses, which should not be shielded from discerning discussion. Nor
did I intend to commit the injustice to Harvard--an injustice as gross
as it is frequent--of treating her as a mere embodiment of the elective
system. Harvard is a complex and august institution, possessed of all
the attractions which can be lent by age, tradition, learning,
continually renewed resources, fortunate situation, widespread
clientage, enthusiastic loyalty, and forceful guidance. She is the
intellectual mother of us all, honored certainly by me, and I believe by
thousands of others, for a multiplicity of subtle influences which
stretch far outside her special modes of instruction. But for the last
half-century Harvard has been developing a new and important policy of
education. Coincident with this development she has attained enormous
popular esteem and internal power. The value and limits of this policy,
the sources of this esteem and power, I wish everybody, colleges and
populace, to scrutinize. To make these things understood is to help the
higher education everywhere.
In undertaking this _quasi_ philosophical task, I count it a piece of
good fortune to have provoked so many lucid accounts of what other
colleges are doing. The more of these the better. The public cannot be
too persistently reminded of the distinctive merits of this college and
of that. Let each be as zealous as possible; gains made by one are gains
for all. Depreciatory rivalry between colleges is as silly as it is
when religious sects quarrel in the midst of a perishing world. Probably
such rivalries have their rise in the dull supposition that a fixed
constituency of pupils exists somewhere, which if not turned toward one
college may be drawn to another. As the old political economists tell of
a "wages fund," fixed and constant in each community, so college
governors are apt to imagine a public pupil-hoard, not susceptible of
much increase or diminution, which may by inadvertence fall into other
hands than their own. In reality each college creates its constituency.
Its students come, in the main, from the inert mass of the uncollegiate
public. Only one in eight among Harvard students is a son of a Harvard
graduate; and probably the small colleges beget afresh an even larger
percentage of their students. On this account the small colleges have
been a power in the land. To disparage them shall never be my office. In
a larger degree than the great universities they spread the college idea
among people who would not otherwise possess it. The boy who lives
within fifty miles of one of them reflects whether he will or will not
have a college training. Were there no college in the neighborhood, he
might never consider the matter at all. It is natural enough for
undergraduates to decry every college except their own; but those who
love education generously, and who seek to spread it far and wide,
cannot afford the luxury of envy. One common danger besetting us all
should bind us together. In the allurements of commerce boys may forget
that college is calling. They do forget it. According to my computations
the number of persons in the New England colleges to-day is about the
same as the number in the insane asylums; but little more than the
number of idiots. Probably this number is not increasing in proportion
to population. Professor Newton, of Oberlin, finds that the increase of
students during the ten years between 1870 and 1880, in twenty of our
oldest leading colleges, was less than three and a half per cent, the
population of the United States increasing during the same period
twenty-three per cent. In view of facts like these, careful study of the
line along which college growth is still possible becomes a necessity.
It will benefit all colleges alike. No one engaged in it has a side to
maintain. We are all alike seekers. Whatever instructive experience any
college can contribute to the common study, and whatever pupils she may
thereby gain, will be matter for general rejoicing.
To such a study the second, or critical, class of papers furnishes
important stimulus; for these have not confined themselves to describing
institutions: they have gone on to discuss the value and limits of the
principle which actuates the new education everywhere. In many respects
their writers and I are in full accord. In moral aim we always are, and
generally too in our estimate of the present status. We all confess that
the conditions of college education have changed, that the field of
knowledge has enlarged, that a liberal training nowadays must fit men
for more than the four professions of preaching, teaching, medicine, and
law. We agree that the prescribed systems of the past are outgrown. We
do not want them. We doubt whether they were well suited to their own
time; we are sure they will never fit ours. Readjustments of curricula,
we all declare, must be undertaken if the higher education is to retain
its hold on our people. Further still, we agree in the direction of this
readjustment. My critics, no less than I, believe that a widely extended
scope must be given to individual choice. With the possible exception of
Professor Denison, about whose opinion I am uncertain, everybody who has
taken part in the controversy recognizes the elective principle as a
beneficial one and maintains that in some form or other it has come to
stay, People generally are not aware what a consensus of opinion on this
point late years have brought about. To rid ourselves once for all of
further controversy let us weigh well the words of my opponents.
Mr. Brearley begins his criticism addressed to the New York Harvard Club
thus: "We premise that every one accepts the elective principle. Some
system based on that principle must be established. No one wants the
old required systems back, or any new required system." Professor
Howison says: "An elective system, in its proper place, and under its
due conditions, is demonstrably sound." Professor Ladd does not express
himself very fully on this point in the Andover Review, but his opinions
may be learned from the New Englander for January, 1885. When, in 1884,
Yale College reformed its curriculum and introduced elective studies, it
became desirable to instruct the graduates about the reasons for a step
which had been long resisted. After a brief trial of the new system,
Professor Ladd published his impressions of it. I strongly commend his
candid paper to the attention of those who still believe the old methods
the safer. He asserts that "a perfect and final course of college study
is, if not an unattainable ideal, at present an impossible achievement."
The considerations which were "the definite and almost compulsory
reasons for instituting a comprehensive change" he groups under the
following heads: (1) the need of modern languages; (2) the crowding of
studies in the senior year; (3) the heterogeneous and planless character
of the total course; (4) the need of making allowance for the tastes,
the contemplated pursuits, and the aptitudes of the individual student.
Substantially, these are the evils of prescription which I pointed out;
only, in my view, they are evils not confined to a single year. Stating
his observation of the results of election, Professor Ladd says:
"Increased willingness in study, and even a new and marked enthusiasm on
the part of a considerable number of students, is another effect of the
new course already realized. The entire body of students in the upper
classes is more attentive, regular, interested, and even eager, than
ever before." "More intimate and effective relations are secured in many
cases between teachers and pupils."
These convictions in regard to the efficiency which the elective
principle lends to education are not confined to my critics and myself.
Let me cite testimony from representatives of other colleges. The last
Amherst Catalogue records (page 24) that "excellent results have
appeared from this [the elective] method. The special wants of the
student are thus met, his zest and progress in his work are increased,
and his association with his teachers becomes thus more close and
intimate." President Robinson says, in his annual report for 1885 to the
Corporation of Brown University: "There are advantages in a carefully
guarded system of optional studies not otherwise obtainable. The saving
of time in preparing for a special calling in life is something, and the
cumulative zeal in given lines of study, where a gratified and growing
taste is ever beckoning onward, is still more. But above all, some
provision for choice among ever-multiplying courses of study has become
a necessity." In addressing the American Institute of Instruction at Bar
Harbor, July 7, 1886, Professor A. S. Hardy, of Dartmouth, is reported
as saying: "Every educator now recognizes the fact that individual
characteristics are always sufficiently marked to demand his earliest
attention; and, furthermore, that there is a stage in the process of
education where the choice, the responsibility, and the freedom of the
individual should have a wide scope." President Adams, in his inaugural
address at Cornell in 1885, asserted that "there are varieties of gifts,
call them, if you will, fundamental differences, that make it impossible
to train successfully all of a group of boys to the same standard. These
differences are partly matters of sheer ability, and partly matters of
taste; for if a boy has so great an aversion to a given study that he
can never be brought to apply himself to it with some measure of
fondness, he is as sure not to succeed in it as he would be if he were
lacking the requisite mental capacity."
In determining, then, what the new education may wisely be, let this be
considered settled: it must contain a large element of election. That is
the opinion of these unbiased judges. They find personal choice
necessary for promoting a wider range of topics in the college, a
greater zeal on the part of the student, and more suitable relations
between teacher and pupil. With this judgment I, of course, heartily
agree, though I should make more prominent the moral reason of the
facts. I should insist that a right character and temper in the
receiving mind is always a prerequisite of worthy study.[6] But I
misrepresent these gentlemen if I allow their testimony to stop here.
They maintain that the elective principle as thus far carried out,
though valuable, is still meagre and one-sided. They do not think it
will be found self-sufficing and capable of guarding its own working.
They see that it has dangers peculiar to itself, and believe that to
escape them it will require to be restricted and furnished with
supplemental influences. I believe so too. Choice is important, but it
is also important that one should choose well. The individual is sacred,
but only so far as he is capable of recognizing the sacredness of laws
which he has had no part in making. Unrestricted arbitrary choice is
indistinguishable from chaos; and undoubtedly every method of training
which avoids mechanism and includes choice as a factor leaves a door
open in the direction of chaos. Infinite Wisdom left that door open when
man was created. To dangers from this source I am fully alive. I totally
dissent from those advocates of the elective system who would identify
it with a _laissez-faire_ policy. The cry that we must let nature take
care of itself is a familiar one in trade, in art, in medicine, in
social relations, in the religious life, in education; but in the long
run it always proves inadequate. Man is a personal spirit, a director, a
being fitted to compare and to organize forces, not to take them as they
rise, like a creature of nature. The future will certainly not tolerate
an education less organic than that of the past; but just as certainly
will it demand that the organic tie shall be a living one,--one whose
bond may assist those whom it restricts to become spontaneous, forcible,
and diverse. If I am offered only the alternative of absolutism or
_laissez-faire_, I choose _laissez-faire_. Out of chaotic nature
beautiful forms do continually come forth. But absolutism kills in the
cradle. It cannot tolerate a life that is imperfect, and so it stifles
what it should nourish.
Up to this point my critics and I have walked hand in hand. Henceforth
we part company. I shall not follow out all our little divergencies. My
object from the first has been to trace the line along which education
may now proceed. It must, it seems, be a line including election; but
election limited how? To disentangle an answer to this vexed question, I
pass by the many points in which my critics have shown that I am
foolish, and the few others in which I might show them so, and turn to
the fundamental issue between us, our judgment of what the supplemental
influences are which will render personal initiative safe. Personal
initiative is assured. The authoritative utterances I have just quoted
show that it can never again be expelled from American colleges. But
what checks are compatible with it? Accepting choice, what treatment
will render it continually wiser? Here differences of judgment begin to
appear, and here I had hoped to receive light from my critics. The
question is one where cooperative experience is essential. But those who
have written against me seem hardly to have realized its importance.
They generally confine themselves to showing how bad my plans are, and
merely hint at better ones which they themselves might offer. But what
are these plans? Wise ways of training boys are of more consequence than
Harvard misdeeds. We want to hear of a constructive policy which can
take a young man of nineteen and so train him in self-direction that
four years later he may venture out alone into a perplexing, and for the
most part hostile, world. The thing to be done is to teach boys how to
manage themselves. Admit that the Harvard discipline does not do this
perfectly at present; what will do it better? Here we are at an
educational crisis. We stand with this aim of self-guidance in our
hands. What are we going to do with it? It is as dangerous as a bomb.
But we cannot drop it. It is too late to objurgate. It is better to
think calmly what possible modes of treatment are still open. When
railroads were found dangerous, men did not take to stage-coaches again;
they only studied railroading the more.
Now in the mass of negative criticism which the last year has produced I
detect three positive suggestions, three ways in which it is thought
limitation may be usefully applied to supplement the inevitable personal
initiative. These modes of limitation, it is true, are not worked out
with any fulness of practical detail, as if their advocates were
convinced that the future was with them. Rather they are thrown out as
hints of what might be desirable if facts and the public would not
interfere. But as they seem to be the only conceivable modes of
restricting the elective principle by any species of outside checkage, I
propose to devote the remainder of this paper to an examination of their
feasibility. In a subsequent paper I shall indicate what sort of
corrective appears to me more likely to prove congruous and lasting.
I. The first suggestion is that the elective principle should be
limited from beneath. Universities and schools are to advance their
grade, so that finally the universities will secure three or four years
of purely elective study, while the schools, in addition to their
present labors, will take charge of the studies formerly prescribed by
the college. The schools, in short, are to become German gymnasia, and
the colleges to delay becoming universities until this regeneration
of the schools is accomplished.[7] A certain "sum of topics" is said
to be essential to the culture of the man and the citizen. In the
interest of church and state, young minds must be provided with
certain "fact forms," with a "common consciousness," a "common basis
of humanism." Important as personal election is, to allow it to take
place before this common basis is laid is "to strike a blow at the
historic substance of civilization." How extensive this common
consciousness is to be may be learned from Professor Howison's remark
that "languages, classical and modern; mathematics, in all its
general conceptions, thoroughly apprehended; physics, acquired in a
similar manner, and the other natural sciences, though with much less of
detail; history and politics; literature, especially of the mother
tongue, but, indispensably, the masterpieces in other languages,
particularly the classic; philosophy, in the thorough elements of
psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, each historically
treated, and economics, in the history of elementary principles, must
all enter into any education that can claim to be liberal."
The practical objections to this monarchical scheme are many. I call
attention to three only.
In the first place, the argument on which it is based proves too much.
If we suppose a common consciousness to be a matter of such importance,
and that it cannot be secured except by sameness of studies, then that
state is criminally careless which allows ninety-nine hundredths of its
members to get an individual consciousness by the simple expedient of
never entering college. The theory seems to demand that every male--and
why not female?--between sixteen and twenty be indoctrinated in "the
essential subject-matters," without regard to what he or she may
personally need to know or do. This is the plan of religious teaching
adopted by the Roman Church, which enforces its "fact forms" of doctrine
on all alike; without securing, however, by this means, according to the
judgment of the outside world, any special freshness of religious life.
I do not believe the results would be better in the higher secular
culture, and I should be sorry to see Roman methods applied there; but
if they are to be applied, let them fall impartially on all members of
the community. To put into swaddling clothes the man who is wise enough
to seek an education, and to leave his duller brother to kick about as
he pleases, seems a little arbitrary.
But secondly, there is no more prospect of persuading our high schools
to accept the prescribed subjects of the colleges than there is of
persuading our government to transform itself into the German. Already
the high schools and the colleges are unhappily drawing apart. The only
hope of their nearer approach is in the remission by the colleges of
some of the more burdensome subjects at present exacted. Paid for by
common taxation, these schools are called on to equip the common man for
his daily struggle. That they will one day devote themselves to laying
the foundations of an ideally best education for men of leisure is
grotesquely improbable. Although Harvard draws rather more than
one-third of her students from states outside New England, the whole
number of students who have come to her from the high schools of these
states, during a period of the last ten years, is but sixty-six. Fitting
for college is becoming an alarmingly technical matter, and is falling
largely into the hands of private tutors and academies.