Of what use is a college training? We who have had it seldom hear the
question raised; we might be a little nonplussed to answer it offhand.
A certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest
reply which I myself can give: The best claim that a college education
can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to
accomplish for you, is this: that it should _help you to know a good
man when you see him_. This is as true of women's as of men's
colleges; but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction I
shall now endeavor to show.
What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college
education and the education which business or technical or professional
schools confer? The college education is called higher because it is
supposed to be so general and so disinterested. At the "schools" you
get a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas the
"colleges" give you the more liberal culture, the broader outlook, the
historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere, or something which
phrases of that sort try to express. You are made into an efficient
instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but,
apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum,
incapable of spreading light. The universities and colleges, on the
other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that
practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more
important than skill. They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make
"good company" of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally
boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical
school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended; this is what we
hear among college-trained people when they compare their education
with every other sort. Now, exactly how much does this signify?
It is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional
training does something more for a man than to make a skilful practical
tool of him--it makes him also a judge of other men's skill. Whether
his trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing,
it develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He
understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in
his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own
line as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line,
he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if
circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work,
clean work, finished work: feeble work, slack work, sham work--these
words express an identical contrast in many different departments of
activity. In so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may
beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work
generally.
Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college
training? Is there any broader line--since our education claims
primarily not to be "narrow"--in which we also are made good judges
between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? What is
especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of
the "humanities," and these are often identified with Greek and Latin.
But it is only as literatures, not as languages, that Greek and Latin
have any general humanity-value; so that in a broad sense the
humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense the
study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor.
Literature keeps the primacy; for it not only _consists_ of
masterpieces, but is largely _about_ masterpieces, being little more
than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it
takes the form of criticism and history. You can give humanistic value
to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics,
mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive
achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being.
Not taught thus literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a
list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and
measures.
The sifting of human creations!--nothing less than this is what we
ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography;
what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history,
that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as
human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part.
Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the
test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All
our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of
perfection on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of
excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations,
we gain a richer sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" may
signify in general. Our critical sensibilities grow both more acute
and less fanatical. We sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act
of penetrating them; we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided
epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.
Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning
is unmistakable. What the colleges--teaching humanities by examples
which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant--should at
least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various
disguises, _superiority_ has always signified and may still signify.
The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really
admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and
impermanent,--this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for
ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some
of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never
become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with
the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or
vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid
its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on
us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and
shipwreck of a higher education.
The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line,
as boring subways is the engineer's line and the surgeon's is
appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish
for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a
disgust for cheap jacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference
of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of
affairs about us. Expertness in this might well atone for some of our
awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. The
best claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase
in which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what
I said: it should enable us to _know a good man when we see him_.
That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact
that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like
ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it is
this line more than any other. "The people in their wisdom"--this is
the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its
trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about
us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but
are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its
critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the
inferior. So it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be
world without end. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing
everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our
irremediable destiny; and the picture-papers of the European continent
are already drawing Uncle Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his
heraldic emblem. The privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with
all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human
quality, and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring
traditions. But when democracy is sovereign, its doubters say,
nobility will form a sort of invisible church, and sincerity and
refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and favor, will have to
vegetate on sufferance in private corners. They will have no general
influence. They will be harmless eccentricities.
Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of
democracy? Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly
rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on
the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not
to admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the noblest exercise of
human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down
fatalistically before the croaker's picture. The best of us are filled
with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error
till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with
beauty. Our better men _shall_ show the way and we _shall_ follow
them; so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher
education in helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see
him.
The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is
now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing
save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and
imitation by the rest of us--these are the sole factors active in human
progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns,
which common people then adopt and follow. _The rivalry of the
patterns is the history of the world_. Our democratic problem thus is
statable in ultra-simple terms: Who are the kind of men from whom our
majorities shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful
leaders? We and our leaders are the _x_ and the _y_ of the equation
here; all other historic circumstances, be they economical, political,
or intellectual, are only the background of occasion on which the
living drama works itself out between us.
In this very simple way does the value of our educated class define
itself: we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and
better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course,
but such a bird's-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. In
our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and
alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that
corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries. We have continuous
traditions, as they have; our motto, too, is _noblesse oblige_; and,
unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have no
corporate selfishness and wield no powers of corruption. We ought to
have our own class-consciousness. "_Les Intellectuels!_" What prouder
club-name could there be than this one, used ironically by the party of
"redblood," the party of every stupid prejudice and passion, during the
anti-Dreyfus craze, to satirize the men in France who still retained
some critical sense and judgment! Critical sense, it has to be
confessed, is not an exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in
processions. Affections for old habit, currents of self-interest, and
gales of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving; and
the pressure of the judicious pilot's hand upon the tiller is a
relatively insignificant energy. But the affections, passions, and
interests are shifting, successive, and distraught; they blow in
alternation while the pilot's hand is steadfast. He knows the compass,
and, with all the leeways he is obliged to tack toward, he always makes
some headway. A small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate
effects more considerable than those of much greater forces if these
work inconsistently. The ceaseless whisper of the more permanent
ideals, the steady tug of truth and justice, give them but time, _must_
warp the world in their direction.
This bird's-eye view of the general steering function of the
college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to help us to a
wider vision of what our colleges themselves should aim at. If we are
to be the yeast-cake for democracy's dough, if we are to make it rise
with culture's preferences, we must see to it that culture spreads
broad sails. We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into
the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject, sure that any
subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.
Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: "You think you are just making
this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of
mankind." Well, your technical school should enable you to make your
bargain splendidly; but your college should show you just the place of
that kind of bargain--a pretty poor place, possibly--in the whole
policy of mankind. That is the kind of liberal outlook, of
perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a
college deals with it.
We of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of
good people have about such ancient seats of learning as Harvard. To
many ignorant outsiders, the name suggests little more than a kind of
sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. In Edith Wyatt's
exquisite book of Chicago sketches called "Every One his Own Way" there
is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness,
Richard Elliot and his feminine counterpart--feeble caricatures of
mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of
enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. Possibly this type
of culture may exist near Cambridge and Boston. There may be specimens
there, for priggishness is just like painter's colic or any other
trade-disease. But every good college makes its students immune
against this malady, of which the microbe haunts the neighborhood of
printed pages. It does so by its general tone being too hearty for the
microbe's life. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not
by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces
unerringly upon the human core. If a college, through the inferior
human influences that have grown regnant there, fails to catch the
robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for its social function stops:
democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear.
"Tone," to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no
other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. By their
tone are all things human either lost or saved. If democracy is to be
saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress
it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which
we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in
the end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each
other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading
power. As a class, we college graduates should look to it that _ours_
has spreading power. It ought to have the highest spreading power.
In our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have
formidable competitors outside. _McClure's Magazine_, the _American
Magazine_, _Collier's Weekly_, and, in its fashion, the _World's Work_,
constitute together a real popular university along this very line. It
would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words
like these: "By the middle of the twentieth century the higher
institutions of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in
the United States. But the mission of raising the tone of democracy,
which they had proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was
assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill
and success by a new educational power; and for the clarification of
their human sympathies and elevation of their human preferences, the
people at large acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the
guidance of certain private literary adventures, commonly designated in
the market by the affectionate name of ten-cent magazines."
Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say
anything like this? Vague as the phrase of knowing a good man when you
see him may be, diffuse and indefinite as one must leave its
application, is there any other formula that describes so well the
result at which our institutions ought to aim? If they do that, they
do the best thing conceivable. If they fail to do it, they fail in
very deed. It surely is a fine synthetic formula. If our faculties
and graduates could once collectively come to realize it as the great
underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less
obscurely groping, a great clearness would be shed over many of their
problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social
system, it would embark upon a new career of strength.
[1] Address delivered at a meeting of the Association of American
Alumnae at Radcliffe College, November 7, 1907, and first published in
_McClure's Magazine_ for February, 1908.