Regarding primarily studies, not men, it attempts to organize single
connected departments of knowledge. Accordingly it permits only those
studies to be pursued together which immediately cohere. It lays out
five, ten, any number of paths through the field of knowledge, and to
one of these paths the pilgrim is confined. Each group constitutes a
specialty,--a specialty intensified in character as, in order to escape
the difficulties of maintenance just pointed out, the number of groups
is allowed to increase. By insistence on specialization regard for
general culture is driven into a subordinate place. The advocates of
prescription maintain that there are not half a dozen ground-plans of
perfected humanity. They say there is but one. If we introduce variety
of design into a curriculum, we neglect that ideal man who resides alike
in all. We trust, on the contrary, in our power to hit some line of
study which may deservedly appeal to one human being while not so
appealing to another. We simply note the studies which are most
congruous with the special line selected, and by this congruity we shape
our group. In the new aim, congruity of studies, adaptation to a
professional purpose, takes precedence of harmonious development of
powers.
I have no doubt that specialization is destined to become more marked in
the American education of the future. It must become so if we are to
produce the strong departmental scholars who illuminate learning in
other countries; indeed, it must become so if we are to train competent
experts for the affairs of daily life. The popular distrust of
specializing is sure to grow less as our people become familiar with its
effects and see how often narrow and thorough study, undertaken in early
life, leads to ultimate breadth. It is a pretty dream that a man may
start broad and then concentrate, but nine out of every ten strong men
have taken the opposite course. They have begun in some one-sided way,
and have added other sides as occasion required. Almost in his teens
Shakespeare makes a specialty of the theatre, Napoleon of military
science, Beethoven of music, Hunter of medicine, Faraday of chemistry,
Hamilton of political science. The great body of painters, musicians,
poets, novelists, theologians, politicians, are early specialists. In
fact, self-made men are generally specialists. Something has aroused an
interest, and they have followed it out until they have surveyed a wide
horizon from a single point of view. In offering wider opportunities for
specialization, colleges have merely been assimilating their own modes
of training to those which prevail in the world at large.
It does not, therefore, seem to me objectionable that group systems set
a high value on specialization. That is what every man does, and every
clear-eyed college must do it too. What I object to is that group
systems, so far as they adhere to their aim, _enforce_ specialization.
Among every half-dozen students, probably one will be injured if he
cannot specialize largely; two or three more might wisely specialize in
lower degree; but to force the remaining two or three into curricula
shaped by professional bias is to do them serious damage. There are
sober boys of little intrepidity or positive taste, boys who properly
enough wish to know what others know. They will not make scholars. They
were not born to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. They have another
function: they preserve and distribute such knowledge as already exists.
Many of them are persons of wealth. To furnish them glimpses of varied
learning is to save them from barbarism. Still another large class is
composed of boys who develop late. They are boys who will one day
acquire an interest of their own, if they are allowed to roam about
somewhat aimlessly in the domain of wisdom until they are twenty-one.
Both of these classes have their rights. The prescribed system was built
to support them; the elective shelters and improves them; but a group
system shuts them all out, if they will not on leaving school adopt
professional courses. Whenever I can hear of a group system which like
the old college has a place for the indistinct young man, and like the
new elective college matures him annually by suggesting that he take
part in shaping his own career, I will accept the group system. Then,
too, the public will probably accept it. Until then, rigid groups will
be thought by many to lay too great a strain on unseasoned powers of
choice, to present too many practical difficulties of construction, and
to show too doctrinaire a confidence that every youth will fit without
pinching into a specialized class.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] These conditions of intellectual nourishment were long ago
recognized in other, less formal, departments of mental training.
In his essays on _Books and Reading_ President Porter wrote in
1871: "The person who asks. What shall I read? or, With what
shall I begin? may have read for years in a mechanical routine,
and with a listless spirit; with scarcely an independent thought,
with no plans of self-improvement, and few aspirations for
self-culture. To all these classes the advice is full of meaning:
'Read what will satisfy your wants and appease your desires, and
you will comply with the first condition to reading with interest
and profit.' Hunger and thirst are better than manifold
appliances and directions, in respect to other than the bodily
wants, towards a good appetite and a healthy digestion. If a man
has any self-knowledge or any power of self-direction, he is
surely competent to ask himself what is the subject or subjects
in respect to which he stands most in need of knowledge or
excitement from books. If he can answer this question, he has
gone very far towards answering the question, 'What book or books
can I read with satisfaction and profit?'" (Chap. iv, p. 39.)
[7] In deference to certain writers I employ their favorite term
"university" in contrast with the term "college," yet I must own
I do not know what it means. An old signification is clear. A
university is an assemblage of schools, as our government is
an assemblage of states. In England, different corporations,
giving substantially similar instruction, are brought together
by a common body which confers the degrees. In this country, a
group of professional schools--law, medicine, theology, and
science--are associated through one governing body with the
college proper, that is, with the candidates for the B.A. degree.
In this useful sense, Tufts and Bowdoin are universities; Amherst
and Brown, colleges. But Germany, which has thrown so many
parts of the world into confusion, has introduced exaltation
and mystery here. A university now appears to mean "a college
as good as it can be," a stimulating conception, but not a
finished or precise one. I would not disparage it. It is a term
of aspiration, good to conjure with. When we want to elevate
men's ideas, or to obtain their dollars, it is well to talk
about creating a true university: just as it is wise to bid the
forward-reaching boy to become "a true gentleman."
X
NECESSARY LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM
The preceding paper has sufficiently discussed the impossible
limitations of the elective system, and has shown with some minuteness
the grounds of their impossibility. The methods there examined are the
only ones suggested by my critics. They all agree in this, that they
seek to narrow the scope of choice. They try to combine with it a
hostile factor, and they differ merely in their mode of combination. The
first puts a restraining check before election; the second puts one by
its side; the third makes the two inseparable by allowing nothing to be
chosen which is not first prescribed. The general purpose of all these
methods is mine also. Election must be limited. Unchartered choice is
licentious and self-destructive. I quarrel with them only because the
modes of effecting their purpose tend to produce results of a transient
and inappropriate sort. The aim of education, as I conceive it, is to
spiritualize the largest possible number of persons, that is, to teach
them how to do their own thinking and willing and to do it well. But
these methods effect something widely different. They either
aristocratize where they should democratize, or they belittle where they
should mature, or else they professionalize where they should humanize.
A common trouble besets them all: the limiting authority is placed in
external and arbitrary juxtaposition to the personal initiative which it
professes to support. It should grow out of this initiative and be its
interpreter and realization. By limitation of choice the proposers of
these schemes appear to mean making choice less. I mean fortifying it,
keeping it true to itself, making it more. Control that diminishes the
quantity of choice is one thing; control that raises the quality, quite
another. How important is this distinction and how frequently it is
forgotten! Words like "limitation," "control," "authority," "obedience,"
are words of majesty, but words also of doubtful import. They carry a
freight of wisdom or of folly, according to the end towards which they
steer. In order to sanction or discard limitations which induce
obedience, we must bear that end in mind. Let us stop a moment, and see
that we have it in mind now.
Old educational systems are often said to have erred by excess of
authority. I could not say so. The elective system, if it is to
possess the future, must become as authoritative as they. More
accurately we say that their authority was of a wrong sort. A father may
exercise an authority over his child no less directive than that of
the master over the slave; but the father is trying to accomplish
something which the master disregards; the father hopes to make the
will of another strong, the master to make it weak; the father
commands what the child himself would wish, had he sufficient
experience. The child's obedience accordingly enlightens, steadies,
invigorates his independent will. Invigoration is the purpose of the
command. The authority is akin--secretly akin--to the child's own
desires. No alien power intervenes, as when a slave obeys. Here a
foreign will thwarts the slave's proper motions. Over against his own
legitimate desires, the desire of a totally different being appears
and claims precedence. Obedience like this brings no ennoblement.
The oftener a child obeys, the less of a child is he; the oftener a
slave, the more completely he is a slave. Roughly to say, then, that
submission to authority is healthy for a college boy, argues a mental
confusion. There are two kinds of authority,--the authority of moral
guidance, and the authority of repressive control: parental authority,
respecting and vivifying the individual life and thus continually
tending to supersede itself; and masterly authority, whose command,
out of relation to the obeyer's wish, tends ever to bring the obedient
into bondage. Which shall college authority be? Authority is necessary,
ever-present authority. If the young man's choice is to become a
thing of worth, it must be encompassed with limitations. But as the
need of these limitations springs from the imperfections of choice,
so should their aim be to perfect choice, not to repress it. To impose
limitations which do not ultimately enlarge the youth they bind is to
make the means of education "oblige against its main end."
This moral authority is what the new education seeks. To a casual eye,
the colleges of to-day seem to be growing disorganized; a closer view
shows construction taking place, but taking place along the lines of the
vital distinction just pointed out. Men are striving to bring about a
germane and ethical authority in the room of the baser mechanical
authorities of the past. In this distinction, then, a clue is to be
found which, if followed up, will lead us away from impossible
limitations of the elective system, and conduct us at length to the
possible, nay, to the inevitable ones. As the elective principle is
essentially ethical, its limitations, if helpfully congruous, must be
ethical too. They must be simply the means of bringing home to the young
chooser the sacred conditions of choice; which conditions, if I rightly
understand them, may compactly be entitled those of intentionality,
information, and persistence. To secure these conditions, limitations
exist. In the very nature of choice such conditions are implied. Choice
is sound as they prevail, whimsical as they diminish. An education
which lays stress on the elective principle is bound to lay stress on
these conditions also. It cannot slip over into lazy ways of letting its
students drift, and still look for credit as an elective system. People
will distrust it. That is why they distrust Harvard to-day. The
objections brought against the elective system of Harvard are in reality
not levelled against the elective system at all. They are directed
against its bastard brother, _laissez-faire_. Objectors suspect that the
conditions of choice which I have named are not fulfilled. They are not
fulfilled, I confess, or rather I stoutly maintain. To come anywhere
near fulfilling them requires long time and study, and action unimpeded
by a misconceiving community. Both time and study Harvard has given, has
given largely. The records of scholarship and deportment which I
exhibited in my first paper show in how high a degree Harvard has
already been able to remove from choice the capricious, ignorant, and
unsteadfast characteristics which rightly bring it into disrepute. But
much remains to do, and in that doing we are hampered by the fact that a
portion of the public is still looking in wrong directions. It cannot
get over its hankering after the delusive modes of limitation which I
have discussed. It does not persistently see that at present the proper
work of education is the study of means by which self-direction may be
rendered safe. Leaders of education themselves see this but dimly, as
the papers of my critics naively show. Until choice was frankly accepted
as the fit basis for the direction of a person by a person, its
fortifying limitations could not be studied. Now they must be studied,
now that the old methods of autocratic control are breaking down. As a
moral will comes to be recognized as the best sort of steam power, the
modes of generating that power acquire new claims to attention.
Henceforth the training of the will must be undertaken by the elective
system as an integral part of its discipline.
I am not so presumptuous as to attempt to prophesy the precise forms
which methods of moral guidance will take. Moral guidance is a delicate
affair. Its spirit is more important than its procedure. Flexibility is
its strength. Methods final, rigid, and minute do not belong to it. Nor
can it afford to forget the one great truth of _laissez-faire_, that
wills which are to be kept fresh and vigorous will not bear much looking
after. Time, too, is an important factor in the shaping of moral
influences. Experiments now in progress at Harvard and elsewhere must
discriminate safe from unsafe limitations. Leaving then to the future
the task of showing how wide the scope of maturing discipline may
become, I will merely try to sketch the main lines along which
experiments are now proceeding, I will give a few illustrative examples
of what is being done and why, and I will state somewhat at large how,
in my judgment, more is yet to be accomplished. To make the matter
clear, a free exposition shall be given of the puzzling headings already
named; that is, I will first ramblingly discuss the limitations on
choice which may deepen the student's intentionality of aim; secondly,
those which increase his information in regard to means; and thirdly,
those which may strengthen his persistence in a course once chosen.
I. That intentionality should be cultivated, I need not spend many words
in explaining. Everybody acknowledges that without a certain degree of
it choice is impossible. Many persons assert also that boys come to
college with no clear intentions, not knowing what they want, waiting to
be told; for such, it is said, an elective system is manifestly absurd.
I admit the fact. It is true. The majority of the freshmen whom I have
known in the last seventeen years have been, at entrance, deficient in
serious aims. But from this fact I draw a conclusion quite opposite to
the one suggested. It is election, systematized election, which these
boys need; for when we say a young student has no definite aims, we
imply that he has never become sufficiently interested in any given
intellectual line to have acquired the wish to follow that line farther.
Such a state of things is lamentable, and certainly shows that
prescribed methods--the proper methods, in my judgment, for the school
years--have in his case proved inadequate. It is useless to continue
them into years confessedly less suited to their exercise. Perhaps it is
about equally useless to abandon the ill-formed boy to unguided choice.
Prescription says, "This person is unfit to choose, keep him so";
_laissez-faire_ says, "If he is unfit to choose, let him perish"; but a
watchful elective system must say, "Granting him to be unfit, if he is
not spoiled, I will fit him." And can we fit him? I know well enough
that indifferent teachers incline to shirk the task. They like to divide
pupils into the deceptive classes of good and bad, meaning by the former
those who intend to work, and by the latter those who intend not to. But
we must get rid of indifferent teachers. Teachers with enthusiasm in
them soon discover that the two classes of pupils I have named may as
well be dismissed from consideration. Where aims have become definite, a
teacher has little more to do. The boy who means to work will get
learning under the poorest teacher and the worst system; while the boy
who means not to work may be forced up to the Pierian spring, but will
hardly be made to drink. A vigorous teacher does not assume intention to
be ready-made. He counts it his continual office to help in making it.
On the middle two quarters of a class he spends his hardest efforts, on
students who are friendly to learning but not impassioned for it, on
those who like the results of study but like tennis also, and
popularity, and cigars, and slackness. The culture of these weak wills
is the problem of every college. Here are unintentional boys waiting to
be turned into intentional men. What limitations on intellectual and
moral vagrancy will help them forward?
The chief limitation, the one underlying all others, the one which no
clever contrivance can ever supersede, is vitalized teaching. Suitable
subjects, attractively taught, awake lethargic intention as nothing else
can. An elective system, as even its enemies confess, enormously
stimulates the zeal of teachers. It consequently brings to bear on
unawakened boys influences of a strangely quickening character. When I
hear a man trained under the old methods of prescription say, "At the
time I was in college I could not have chosen studies for myself, and I
do not believe my son can," I see, and am not surprised to see, that he
does not understand what forces the elective system sets astir. So
powerful an influence have these forces over both teachers and pupils,
that questions of hard and easy studies do not, as outsiders are apt to
suppose, seriously disturb the formation of sound intentions. The many
leaders in education whose opinions on election I quoted in my previous
paper agree that the new modes tend to sobriety and intentionality of
aim. When Professor Ladd speaks of "the unexpected wisdom and manliness
of the choices already made" in the first year of election at New Haven,
he well expresses the gratified surprise which every one experiences on
perceiving in the very constitution of the elective system a sort of
limitation on wayward choice. This limitation seems to me, as Professor
Ladd says he found it,[8] a tolerable preventive of choices directly
aimed at ease. In a community devoted to athletics, baseball is not
played because it is "soft," and football avoided on account of its
difficulty. A similar state of things must be brought about in studies.
In a certain low degree it has come about already. As election breeds
new life in teaching, the old slovenly habit of liking best what costs
least begins to disappear. Easy courses will exist and ought to exist.
Prescribed colleges, it is often forgotten, have more of them than
elective colleges. The important matter is, to see that they fall to the
right persons. Where everything is prescribed, students who do not wish
easy studies are still obliged to take them. Under election, soft
courses may often be pursued with advantage. A student whose other
courses largely depend for their profit on the amount of private
reading or of laboratory practice accomplished in connection with them
is wise in choosing one or more in which the bulk of the work is taken
by the teacher. I do not say that soft courses are always selected with
these wise aims in view. Many I know are not. We have our proper share
of hardened loafers--"tares in our sustaining corn"--who have an
unerring instinct as to where they can most safely settle. But large
numbers of the men in soft courses are there to good purpose; and I
maintain that the superficial study of a subject, acquainting one with
broad outlines, is not necessarily a worthless study. At Harvard to-day
I believe we have too few such superficial courses. As I look over the
Elective Pamphlet, and note the necessarily varying degrees of
difficulty in the studies announced there, I count but six which can,
with any justice, be entitled soft courses; and several of these must be
reckoned by anybody an inspiration to the students who pursue them.
There is a tendency in the elective system, as I have shown elsewhere,
to reduce the number of soft courses somewhat below the desirable
number.