Should a College Educate?

In the “American language” (which is simply the most modern English) a college and a university are two different things. The terms are sometimes confounded, in loose popular speech, but the best usage in this country shows an increasing tendency toward a sharp distinction between them. A failure to apprehend this distinction clearly, and a consequent notion that a college is only a little university, or a university only a large college, has sometimes given rise to odd doctrine as to what a college should teach.

In their original signification the words are not widely different: the universitas signifying merely a “corporate whole,” in law; the collegium, a “society of colleagues.” But the term university, in its development in Europe and this country, and the term college, in its development in this country especially, have become widely differentiated. That which is properly called a university has its own distinct purpose, and consequently its own proper methods and appliances. That which is properly called a college has a different purpose, and its methods and appliances are consequently entirely different.

Ideally, a university is a place where anybody may learn everything. And this, whether it be as knowledge, properly speaking, or as skill. Actually, however, as found existing at present (since few persons after leaving college wish to study beyond the requirements of a bread-occupation), a university consists of a central college, surrounded by a cluster of professional or technical schools, where special branches are pursued, chiefly with reference to some particular calling.

A college, on the other hand, is a place where young people, whatever their future occupation is to be, may first of all receive that more or less complete development which we call a “liberal education.”¹

The character of the college course, then, should be determined purely with reference to the distinct purpose of the college. The human mind being many-sided, the college undertakes to aid its development on all the lines of its natural growth. The tendency of modern life, moreover, with its extreme division of labor, being to force one or two powers of the mind at the expense of the rest, the aim of the college is to forestall this one-sided effect by giving the whole man a fair chance beforehand. While the special or professional schools of the university provide that a person may go as far as possible on some one line of knowledge, which constitutes his specialty,² or of that combination of knowledge and skill which constitutes his profession, the college provides that he shall get such a complete possession of himself—in all his powers: mind, body, and that total of qualities known as “character"—as is essential to the highest success in any specialty or profession whatever. He may get this broad preparation elsewhere than in college. It may come through private study. It may come sometimes—but only to men of extraordinary endowments—from the discipline of life itself. But to the ordinary man, the “average man,” it comes most surely and most easily through a college course. Once having it, from one source or another, a man no doubt fits himself best to serve the world by perfecting his knowledge and skill in some single direction; but without some such broad preliminary development, some such “liberal education,” he will fail not only of his best possible special work, but—what is worst of all—he will assuredly fail of that best service which any man can do for the community, the living in it, whatever his profession, as a complete and roundly moulded man. He will fail (to use Mr. Spencer’s excellent phrase) of “complete living.” He will have entered the world without being equipped for that great common profession, the profession of living—underneath and above his particular calling—the intellectual life.

But (it may be asked) why may not the university, through some one of its special schools, furnish this culture without the need of a college? Because a man is too complex an organism to get complete growth in any single region of study, or by any one line of exercises.

But, at least (it may further be asked), might not the ideal university, with its whole circle of knowledges, professional and otherwise, give this complete culture? In other words, why should not the college add to its course all kinds of knowledges, and so itself become an ideal university, where anybody might learn everything? It is the theory implied in this question that produces the tendency toward unlimited electives in the college course. There should be no difficulty in seeing why this is an irrational tendency, however attractive it may seem at first sight to the public. It is irrational because the time actually given to college study is no more than four years; in this time only a few subjects can be studied; and the very essence of the function of the college is, therefore, that it should select among the numberless possible subjects those which promise the greatest educating force. For we reach, at this point in the discussion, a fact that underlies the whole system of any right education—a fact persistently ignored by many persons having to do with educational affairs, particularly in the lower schools and in remote communities, and on the ignorance of which no end of educational blunders have been built. It is the fact that, while every possible knowledge and skill is useful for one purpose or another, not all are equally useful for the purposes of education. The college, therefore, must select such studies as are most useful for its own purposes. So far as the university undertakes to prescribe any such general or culture-course, it becomes a college. So far as the college forgets to do this, in deference to notions of a “practical” training, or of the magnificence of a great cloud of electives, it does not become a university—for that, in the nature of the case, is impossible; but it fails of its true function as a college, and is no longer either the one thing or the other.

The ideal of a great university where anybody might learn everything has a peculiar charm for the imagination. Bacon sketched the large outlines of such an establishment in his New Atlantis; and ever since his day we have come to see more and more clearly that knowledge does indeed make prosperity, whether for peoples or for individuals. Nothing can be more charming, then, than the thought of a great central institution where the last word on every subject might be heard; where the foremost scientist in every science, the foremost craftsman in every handicraft, should impart the entirety of his acquisitions or his dexterity to all who cared to seek it. Such a university ought, it would seem, to be accessible to every community in this modern world.

But all this would not give us a college. That we have only when we have a company of competent scholars providing a course of general preliminary training; a course selected with reference to its particular end of producing broadly educated men. The university, taking the man as he is, would propose to leave him as he is, except for the acquisition of a certain special knowledge or skill. The college, taking the youth as he is, proposes to make of him something that he is not. It proposes no less a miracle, in fact, than the changing of a crude boy into an educated man. A miracle—yet every day sees it more and more successfully performed.

An educated man—what is it that we understand by the phrase? If it would not be easy to set down all that it connotes in our various minds, we should probably agree that it incudes, among other things, such qualities as these: a certain largeness of view; an acquaintance with the intellectual life of the world; the appreciation of principles; the power and habit of independent thought; the freedom from personal provincialism, and the recognition of the other point of view; an underlying nobleness of intention; the persistence in magnanimous aims. If there has not yet been found the system of culture which will give this result every time and with all sorts of material, it may at least be asserted that a course of study—whether in college or out—somewhat corresponding to the course pursued at our best colleges has a visible tendency to produce this result. Whether it might be produced, also, by some entirely different course is certainly a question not to be rashly answered in the negative. All we can say is, that any course which has as yet been proposed as a substitute has proved, on experiment, to have serious defects in comparison with it. Our wisest plan is to hold fast what we already know to be good studies, making farther experiments with candor and fairness; avoiding, on the one hand, the timid pre-judgments of those who are afraid of all that is not ancient and established, and, on the other hand, the crude enthusiasms of those half-educated persons who think that nothing old can be good, and nothing new can be bad.

Two principal proposals of change in the college course have been made. One is that the modern languages should be substituted for the ancient. So far as the complete substitution has been tried, most observers would probably agree that the experiment has failed. In other words, more persons are found to have studied modern languages without having become educated persons by that means than are found to have studied the classics without that result. College observers, unbiased by any personal interest as teachers on either side, would probably be found nearly unanimous as to this point. Without discussing the question theoretically here, we would only insist upon this: that, so far as any change of this kind is made, it be made only on the ground of greater serviceableness for purely educational purposes, as being better fitted to “educe the man”—the only test of studies with which the college has anything whatever to do. Probably Mill’s answer, or counter-question, will eventually be found the wisest one as between the classical and the modern languages and literatures: “Why not both?”

The other principal proposal of change is the substitution of natural science in place of the “humanities.” To the addition of a certain amount of natural science, enough, certainly, to impart its admirable methods of research, and, what is more, its admirable spirit of uncompromising adhesion to the exact truth, no one is likely to object. But when it is proposed to make any radical substitution of the material studies for the human studies, making courses (as has been done) without Latin, Greek, Literature, Logic, Philosophy, Ancient History, etc., supplying their places with the natural sciences, it is well to consider carefully, first, the results of the experiment so far as it has been tried; and, secondly, certain well-established principles concerning the human mind in its relation to studies. As to ascertained results, it is to be said that for some time now there have been, in several of our institutions of learning, courses having these contrasted characters running side by side. We will not here offer any testimony of our own as to the comparative results of the two in the production of broadly educated men. We would only suggest to those who are in any doubt upon the matter, or who have any radical change of college courses in view, to look into the results of the experiment for themselves, and to take the testimony of those who have had opportunity to observe them. The effect of such an examination will be likely to produce hearty agreement with an editorial writer in a late number of Science, who remarks that the introduction of scientific studies in our educational systems has not brought about the millennium which was expected. Much good, no doubt, they have done, when introduced in proper proportion. Their methods have certainly influenced favorably the methods of the older studies. But, after all, we come back to the truth that, of the two groups of studies, both indispensable, the humanities furnish the greater growth-power for the mind, because they are the product and expression of mind.³

It cannot be too carefully kept in view that, in any such comparison of the natural sciences with the humanities, we take into account only their educational value. The sensitive loyalty of scientific men to their specialties, a very pleasant thing to see, sometimes seems to blind them to this distinction between intrinsic values and educational values. They should remember that no slight upon the intrinsic value of any science is implied in the doubt as to its comparative educational value. There are many things of enormous usefulness to the world in other ways, whose examination could contribute next to nothing toward the development of mind. Iron, for example, constitutes almost the framework of civilization; but this does not at all imply that metallurgy, as a college study, would have any considerable educating force. On the other hand, there are many subjects of study whose application to the ordinary business of life might seem very remote indeed, yet whose power to “educe the man” is found to be very great. The calculus, or the Antigone, might never be of any “use” to the man, in the superficial sense of the word, yet they might have been the very meat and drink of his intellectual growth. The natural sciences may well be satisfied with the crowns of honor the world must always give them for their royal contributions to our mental and material existence, without expecting to be made exclusively, also, our nurses and schoolmasters. The fitness for those humbler but necessary functions must be determined wholly on other grounds than that of value, however priceless it be, to the world for other purposes. Both experiment and reflection seem to point more and more decisively to the view that mind, on the whole, grows chiefly through contact with mind. And accordingly, what are called the liberal courses of study, formed largely of those studies which bring to the student the magnetic touch of the human spirit in its dealings with life, seem to show more vitalizing power, — seem actually to produce, on experiment, more broadly educated men than what may be called the illiberal courses, formed without these human studies. Yet here, again, “Why not both?” is the best solution, so far as we can effect it. For the natural sciences have, undeniably, certain admirable influences in education. They are free from any encouragement of morbid moods. They teach the mind to “hug its fact.” There is little ministry to brooding egotism in them; except that sometimes a very callow pupil may for a while feel that the mastery of a few rudiments somehow covers him prematurely with the glory that properly belongs to the great discoverers; but from this stage he soon recovers. There is always a freshness and out-of-door healthfulness about even the simplest work in natural science that makes it a charming study, for the lower schools, especially. Mr. Spencer has well pointed out its adaptation, on this score, even to the period of childhood. It is, in fact, so far as it includes only the observation of outside nature, an invigorating play of the mind, rather than a laborious work. And the need of this health-giving intellectual play we never outgrow.

But the attractiveness of these natural studies must not be allowed to blind us to the need, when it comes to forming a course for the maturer mind, of more abstract and complex subjects. The sciences in their higher and severer regions, where the mind of man has more and more mingled itself with the mere facts of nature, as in wide comparative views and the induction of great principles; and especially the purely human studies, the languages, histories, philosophies, literatures, — these must be the food and light of the larger growth of the mind. The law of intellectual development in education seems to be analogous to a certain familiar law of physical growth in lower organisms. The very lowest, the vegetable, is able to nourish itself directly on the crude inorganic elements of nature: the higher, the animal, can only be nourished on matter already organized by life. Somewhat so, apparently, with the growth of intellect: while the simpler faculties, such as we share with other animals, are able to get their full development from the sights and sounds of nature alone, the deeper feelings and the higher intellectual processes can be best nourished on the outcome of the human spirit—nature and life as organized, or reorganized, by the mind of man.

In meeting the public on this matter of the course of study, the college finds itself confronted with two or three false notions, so inveterate that they may well be classed as popular delusions. Each of these, like most popular delusions, has crystallized round a convenient phrase.

One such notion is that the choice of studies for any given youth should be governed by his own natural predispositions. In other words, he should follow his bent. This has a plausible sound, yet to apply it to the college course would be to ignore the very purpose of the college. When it comes to selecting a life occupation, a specialty for study or practice, such as the various schools of the university undertake to furnish, a youth should, no doubt, choose according to his taste and talent. But to choose on that ground alone in his preparatory culture-course would simply magnify any lack of balance in his original nature. As well might one advise a boy at the gymnasium to devote himself to those exercises in which he naturally excelled, to the neglect of all that found out his weak points; if the arms were feeble, to use only the muscles of the thighs; if the thighs were undeveloped, to use only the arms. The purpose of the college is to do for mind and character whet the gymnasium does for the physical powers: to build up the man all round. If the student hates mathematics, it is probably because his mind is naturally weak on the side of abstract reasoning, and the hated study is therefore the very study he needs. If he has a lofty disdain of literature, it is very likely only an evidence of some lack of that side of culture somewhere in his ancestry. There is nothing sacred about a bent. So far from being an indication of Providence, it is apt to be a mere indication of hereditary defect. If we look at it from the side of its being a predisposition to weakness in some particular directions, a bent away from certain lines of study (the form in which it chiefly shows itself in college), we can see that the sooner it is repaired by a generous mental diet, the better for the man and for the race to whose ideal perfection he and his posterity are to contribute. Perhaps the greatest danger to which the higher education is at present exposed is that of spreading before the student a vast number of miscellaneous subjects, all recommended as equally valuable, and inviting him to choose according to his bent. The result naturally is that the average boy follows that universal bent of human nature toward the course that offers him the easiest time. If this course happens to include strong studies, easy only because he is specially interested in them, the harm is not so great; but if it consists chiefly of light studies, introduced into the curriculum only because somebody was there to teach them, and somebody else wanted them taught (and perhaps a little, too, because each counts one in a catalogue), then the harm is enormous. This becomes evident enough if we use (as we may for brevity’s sake be permitted to do) the reductio ad absurdum of an extreme illustration; if we suppose that some language having a great history and a great literature, the Greek, for example, is rejected in favor of some barbarous tongue embodying neither history nor literature; say, for example, the Pawnee or the Eskimo; or if we suppose that for exercises in writing and reasoning is substituted the collecting of postage-stamps of all nations, or practice on the guitar. Far short of any such violent extremes, there are perfectly well recognized differences between the efficacy of one study and another in educating a college student. And it would seem wiser to trust the choice to the governing body of the college than to an inexperienced lad, swayed by some momentary whim, or by the class-tradition of the “easiness” of one subject or another; in other words, by his natural bent.

Another popular delusion concerning the college course hinges on a common misuse of the word practical. It properly signifies effectual in attaining one’s end. So, transferring the term to persons, we call him a practical man who habitually employs such means. A “practical study,” then, is in reality a study which is calculated to effect the end we have in view in pursuing it. And since the end in view of a college study is purely and simply the development of the mind and character, any study is a practical study just to the extent that it is effectual for this end. And any study is a completely unpractical study, no matter how useful it may be for other purposes, if it is ineffectual for this. The real virus of people’s misuse of this word lies in their taking it to mean, not effectual for one’s end, whatever it be, but effectual for that particular end which to them happens to seem the chief end of man. If a man’s one aim is to have a successful farm, he is apt to consider all studies unpractical that do not bear directly on agriculture. If the great object of another is to gain public office, to him that study alone seems “practical” which directly subserves this end. Accordingly, there are always found well-meaning persons, not conversant with educational affairs, who consider the best studies, and those which for college purposes are most practical, as being completely unpractical; and who will always be trying to crowd in upon its courses those so-called practical studies, which, for the ends the college has in view, would prove as unpractical as studies could be.

It furnishes a favorite phrase for those who thus misconceive the purpose of a liberal education, to say that it fails to fit a man for the “struggle of life.” If the phrase means the making of a living, this objection certainly seems not well founded. Any one’s daily observation of common life will enable him to answer the question whether or not liberally educated men are, relatively to the rest of the community, making a comfortable living. When, however, we come to notice that some of those who are fondest of this complaint against the college course, on their own account, do not seem to stand in any conspicuous need of a living, we are led to suspect that they may mean something else by the “struggle of life.” Perhaps some mean by this phrase the strife for sudden wealth, or for political office, prizes for which, in fact, a good deal of violent “struggling” is done. So far from inciting men to any such feverish struggle, it may be hoped that the higher education will always raise them above the disposition for it, or the temptation to it. Public reputation and public office should, we are beginning once more to believe, “seek the man;” and they may be depended on to find him as fast as he deserves them. If not in the scramble and struggle of certain ignoble regions of effort, at least in the legitimate pursuit of any dignified career, men succeed in the long run by means of their character and intelligence; and the more completely these have been developed, the surer the success. Such a completeness the present college course is generally admitted to have an observed tendency, at least, to produce.

However much it may lack of perfection, the common criticisms upon it seem wide of the mark: whether it be the charge that there are not enough electives for every possible taste or bent; or that the studies are not practical enough; or that they fail to fit a man for the “struggle of life.” For these complaints are all based on the same fundamental misconception, the supposition, namely, that the purpose of the college is merely to equip the man; when in reality its purpose is, first of all, to evolve the man. They all overlook this central idea of the higher education: that its aim is not merely to add something to the man from without, as convenience, or equipment; but to produce a certain change in him from within as growth and power. The misconception seems all the more short-sighted, in that it fails to perceive that the most valuable equipment for any work whatever that may afterward be undertaken is found in this very breadth and depth of preparatory development.

Two permanent human desires, on the surface antagonistic, but at bottom perfectly reconcilable, have all along been at work in moulding systems of education. One is the desire to be much, or the desire for attainment; the other is the desire to get much, or the desire for acquisition. As we look at young people, we find that we have both these desires for their future. We would have them amount to a great deal, in themselves: we may call this our aspiration for them; and we would have them get on in life: we may call this our ambition for them. As we look at the community we feel these same two desires: we would have it a community of wise and noble persons; and we would have it a prosperous community.

Now our educational work has taken on one character or another, according as aspiration or ambition has been most prominently in mind. Some, perceiving that we are all “people of whom more might have been made,” have been most impressed with the importance of lifting men’s personal lives to higher planes. Others have felt most the need of equipping men for special efficiency in the various callings of life. Not the college only, but the entire field of education, from kindergarten to university, has been a battle-ground where these two ideas, unwisely supposing themselves natural foes, have continually fought. But both these desires are in the right. Seen in the larger view there is no possible casus belli between them. They are reconciled the moment it is seen to be true that the completest development is itself the most valuable equipment.

Fortunately, the colleges have for the most part taken this larger view, and have courageously kept their courses in accord with it, in spite of efforts from outside to warp them from their true purpose of providing an education for men, to that of providing an occupation for them; and corresponding efforts to have the educative studies removed, and occupative studies substituted in their stead.

That the college course will be further improved, as it has been constantly improving in the past, no one can doubt. The important thing is that changes, when they are made, should be made with a clear understanding of the purpose of the college, and in furtherance of this. It would not be best (if, once more, a violently absurd example may be pardoned) that Eskimo should be substituted for Greek on a vicious and sophistical ground; such as, for instance, that a young man might some time go on a diplomatic mission to Greenland, and might find it a convenient language to have. Nor should practice on the guitar be substituted for literary exercises, on any such ground as that it is well received in society, and, for purposes of instruction in the female seminaries, might at any moment be a valuable equipment for the struggle of life.

The greatest advance in college work is probably to be expected from improved methods of treatment, rather than from radical changes of the subjects of the course. Much of the elementary work in the languages, both ancient and modern, will no doubt; eventually be relegated to the lower schools. More and more the classics will be taught as literatures. The same change, it may be hoped, will some time invade even the modern language courses, so that they will have less of the Ollendorff character, the mere conversational drill, conceived as being useful or ornamental for the “struggle,” and more of the character of an intellectual study of the modern European mind in its history and literature. So also in the natural sciences, the lower schools will doubtless one day do a large part of what now the colleges are doing; much of that mere observation and memory, namely, which is not beyond the capacity of the ordinary boy or girl of high-school age.

One college study there is, in particular, which may be expected to make great advances in its scope and methods. It is a study which has for a long time appeared on all the catalogues, but which, so far as any adequate development is concerned, is still in its infancy. This study, the History of English Literature, has too largely consisted in the mere memorizing of disconnected facts and dates as found in some one or two text-books. And so far as the real authors of our literature have been studied at all, it has been with much too exclusive a regard to philology. Even in this comparatively superficial aspect of the subject, its study has been confined, commonly, to a few poets of the early period. The outside shell of literature, the language, has been taught with much acumen and nice scholarship; but the substance, the thing itself, has been neglected. It remains to be seen what educating force there will prove to be in the proper study of this subject when it shall include the history of English thought, of which English literature is only the expression; and when it shall bring the student face to face with the best minds of modern as well as of ancient times.