WHAT UNIVERSAL CULTURE MEANS.
It was one of those Indian summer afternoons when it seems sinful waste
of opportunity to spend a needless hour within. Being in no sort of
hurry, the doctor and I chartered a motor-carriage for two at the next
station, and set forth in the general direction of home, indulging
ourselves in as many deviations from the route as pleased our fancy.
Presently, as we rolled noiselessly over the smooth streets, leaf-strewn
from the bordering colonnades of trees, I began to exclaim about the
precocity of school children who at the age of thirteen or fourteen were
able to handle themes usually reserved in my day for the college and
university. This, however, the doctor made light of.
"Political economy," he said, "from the time the world adopted the plan
of equal sharing of labor and its results, became a science so simple
that any child who knows the proper way to divide an apple with his
little brothers has mastered the secret of it. Of course, to point out
the fallacies of a false political economy is a very simple matter also,
when one has only to compare it with the true one.
"As to intellectual precocity in general," pursued the doctor, "I do not
think it is particularly noticeable in our children as compared with
those of your day. We certainly make no effort to develop it. A bright
school child of twelve in the nineteenth century would probably not
compare badly as to acquirements with the average twelve-year-old in our
schools. It would be as you compared them ten years later that the
difference in the educational systems would show its effect. At
twenty-one or twenty-two the average youth would probably in your day
have been little more advanced in education than at fourteen, having
probably left school for the factory or farm at about that age or a
couple of years later unless perhaps he happened to be one of the
children of the rich minority. The corresponding child under our system
would have continued his or her education without break, and at
twenty-one have acquired what you used to call a college education."
"The extension of the educational machinery necessary to provide the
higher education for all must have been enormous," I said. "Our
primary-school system provided the rudiments for nearly all children, but
not one in twenty went as far as the grammar school, not one in a hundred
as far as the high school, and not one in a thousand ever saw a college.
The great universities of my day--Harvard, Yale, and the rest--must have
become small cities in order to receive the students flocking to them."
"They would need to be very large cities certainly," replied the doctor,
"if it were a question of their undertaking the higher education of our
youth, for every year we graduate not the thousands or tens of thousands
that made up your annual grist of college graduates, but millions. For
that very reason--that is, the numbers to be dealt with--we can have no
centers of the higher education any more than you had of the primary
education. Every community has its university just as formerly its common
schools, and has in it more students from the vicinage than one of your
great universities could collect with its drag net from the ends of the
earth."
"But does not the reputation of particular teachers attract students to
special universities?"
"That is a matter easily provided for," replied the doctor. "The
perfection of our telephone and electroscope systems makes it possible to
enjoy at any distance the instruction of any teacher. One of much
popularity lectures to a million pupils in a whisper, if he happens to be
hoarse, much easier than one of your professors could talk to a class of
fifty when in good voice."
"Really, doctor," said I, "there is no fact about your civilization that
seems to open so many vistas of possibility and solve beforehand so many
possible difficulties in the arrangement and operation of your social
system as this universality of culture. I am bound to say that nothing
that is rational seems impossible in the way of social adjustments when
once you assume the existence of that condition. My own contemporaries
fully recognized in theory, as you know, the importance of popular
education to secure good government in a democracy; but our system, which
barely at best taught the masses to spell, was a farce indeed compared
with the popular education of to-day."
"Necessarily so," replied the doctor. "The basis of education is
economic, requiring as it does the maintenance of the pupil without
economic return during the educational period. If the education is to
amount to anything, that period must cover the years of childhood and
adolescence to the age of at least twenty. That involves a very large
expenditure, which not one parent in a thousand was able to support in
your day. The state might have assumed it, of course, but that would have
amounted to the rich supporting the children of the poor, and naturally
they would not hear to that, at least beyond the primary grades of
education. And even if there had been no money question, the rich, if
they hoped to retain their power, would have been crazy to provide for
the masses destined to do their dirty work--a culture which would have
made them social rebels. For these two reasons your economic system was
incompatible with any popular education worthy of the name. On the other
hand, the first effect of economic equality was to provide equal
educational advantages for all and the best the community could afford.
One of the most interesting chapters in the history of the Revolution is
that which tells how at once after the new order was established the
young men and women under twenty-one years of age who had been working in
fields or factories, perhaps since childhood, left their work and poured
back into the schools and colleges as fast as room could be made for
them, so that they might as far as possible repair their early loss. All
alike recognized, now that education had been made economically possible
for all, that it was the greatest boon the new order had brought. It
recorded also in the books that not only the youth, but the men and
women, and even the elderly who had been without educational advantages,
devoted all the leisure left from their industrial duties to making up,
so far as possible, for their lack of earlier advantages, that they might
not be too much ashamed in the presence of a rising generation to be
composed altogether of college graduates.
"In speaking of our educational system as it is at present," the doctor
went on, "I should guard you against the possible mistake of supposing
that the course which ends at twenty-one completes the educational
curriculum of the average individual. On the contrary, it is only the
required minimum of culture which society insists that all youth shall
receive during their minority to make them barely fit for citizenship. We
should consider it a very meager education indeed that ended there. As we
look at it, the graduation from the schools at the attainment of majority
means merely that the graduate has reached an age at which he can be
presumed to be competent and has the right as an adult to carry on his
further education without the guidance or compulsion of the state. To
provide means for this end the nation maintains a vast system of what you
would call elective post-graduate courses of study in every branch of
science, and these are open freely to every one to the end of life to be
pursued as long or as briefly, as constantly or as intermittently, as
profoundly or superficially, as desired.
"The mind is really not fit for many most important branches of
knowledge, the taste for them does not awake, and the intellect is not
able to grasp them, until mature life, when a month of application will
give a comprehension of a subject which years would have been wasted in
trying to impart to a youth. It is our idea, so far as possible, to
postpone the serious study of such branches to the post-graduate schools.
Young people must get a smattering of things in general, but really
theirs is not the time of life for ardent and effective study. If you
would see enthusiastic students to whom the pursuit of knowledge is the
greatest joy of life you must seek them among the middle-aged fathers and
mothers in the post-graduate schools.
"For the proper use of these opportunities for the lifelong pursuit of
knowledge we find the leisure of our lives, which seems to you so ample,
all too small. And yet that leisure, vast as it is, with half of every
day and half of every year and the whole latter half of life sacred to
personal uses--even the aggregate of these great spaces, growing greater
with every labor-saving invention, which are reserved for the higher uses
of life, would seem to us of little value for intellectual culture, but
for a condition commanded by almost none in your day but secured to all
by our institutions. I mean the moral atmosphere of serenity resulting
from an absolute freedom of mind from disturbing anxieties and carking
cares concerning our material welfare or that of those dear to us. Our
economic system puts us in a position where we can follow Christ's maxim,
so impossible for you, to 'take no thought for the morrow.' You must not
understand, of course, that all our people are students or philosophers,
but you may understand that we are more or less assiduous and systematic
students and school-goers all our lives."
"Really, doctor," I said, "I do not remember that you have ever told me
anything that has suggested a more complete and striking contrast between
your age and mine than this about the persistent and growing development
of the purely intellectual interests through life. In my day there was,
after all, only six or eight years' difference in the duration of the
intellectual life of the poor man's son drafted into the factory at
fourteen and the more fortunate youth's who went to college. If that of
the one stopped at fourteen, that of the other ceased about as completely
at twenty-one or twenty-two. Instead of being in a position to begin his
real education on graduating from college, that event meant the close of
it for the average student, and was the high-water mark of his life, so
far as concerned the culture and knowledge of the sciences and
humanities. In these respects the average college man never afterward
knew so much as on his graduation day. For immediately thereafter, unless
of the richest class, he must needs plunge into the turmoil and strife of
business life and engage in the struggle for the material means of
existence. Whether he failed or succeeded, made little difference as to
the effect to stunt and wither his intellectual life. He had no time and
could command no thought for anything else. If he failed, or barely
avoided failure, perpetual anxiety ate out his heart; and if he
succeeded, his success usually made him a grosser and more hopelessly
self-satisfied materialist than if he had failed. There was no hope for
his mind or soul either way. If at the end of life his efforts had won
him a little breathing space, it could be of no high use to him, for the
spiritual and intellectual parts had become atrophied from disuse, and
were no longer capable of responding to opportunity.
"And this apology for an existence," said the doctor, "was the life of
those whom you counted most fortunate and most successful--of those who
were reckoned to have won the prizes of life. Can you be surprised that
we look back to the great Revolution as a sort of second creation of man,
inasmuch as it added the conditions of an adequate mind and soul life to
the bare physical existence under more or less agreeable conditions,
which was about all the life the most of human being's, rich or poor, had
up to that time known? The effect of the struggle for existence in
arresting, with its engrossments, the intellectual development at the
very threshold of adult life would have been disastrous enough had the
character of the struggle been morally unobjectionable. It is when we
come to consider that the struggle was one which not only prevented
mental culture, but was utterly withering to the moral life, that we
fully realize the unfortunate condition of the race before the
Revolution. Youth is visited with noble aspirations and high dreams of
duty and perfection. It sees the world as it should be, not as it is; and
it is well for the race if the institutions of society are such as do not
offend these moral enthusiasms, but rather tend to conserve and develop
them through life. This, I think, we may fully claim the modern social
order does. Thanks to an economic system which illustrates the highest
ethical idea in all its workings, the youth going forth into the world
finds it a practice school for all the moralities. He finds full room and
scope in its duties and occupations for every generous enthusiasm, every
unselfish aspiration he ever cherished. He can not possibly have formed a
moral idea higher or completer than that which dominates our industrial
and commercial order.
"Youth was as noble in your day as now, and dreamed the same great dreams
of life's possibilities. But when the young man went forth into the world
of practical life it was to find his dreams mocked and his ideals derided
at every turn. He found himself compelled, whether he would or not, to
take part in a fight for life, in which the first condition of success
was to put his ethics on the shelf and cut the acquaintance of his
conscience. You had various terms with which to describe the process
whereby the young man, reluctantly laying aside his ideals, accepted the
conditions of the sordid struggle. You described it as a 'learning to
take the world as it is,' 'getting over romantic notions,' 'becoming
practical,' and all that. In fact, it was nothing more nor less than the
debauching of a soul. Is that too much to say?
"It is no more than the truth, and we all knew it," I answered.
"Thank God, that day is over forever! The father need now no longer
instruct the son in cynicism lest he should fail in life, nor the mother
her daughter in worldly wisdom as a protection from generous instinct.
The parents are worthy of their children and fit to associate with them,
as it seems to us they were not and could not be in your day. Life is all
the way through as spacious and noble as it seems to the ardent child
standing on the threshold. The ideals of perfection, the enthusiasms of
self-devotion, honor, love, and duty, which thrill the boy and girl, no
longer yield with advancing years to baser motives, but continue to
animate life to the end. You remember what Wordsworth said:
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
I think if he were a partaker of our life he would not have been moved to
extol childhood at the expense of maturity, for life grows ever wider and
higher to the last."