What Do Teachers Know?

PROFESSOR WEST’S article on what students do not know, which appeared in the March Atlantic, analyzes the results of certain information tests that were given a group of college students and urges that teachers study the matter and meet the issue of undergraduate ignorance ‘sanely and efficiently.’ The information tests given range from ordinary biological questions, such as the identification of certain vegetables and animals, to literary questions, such as the identification of certain authors. The result he reaches is that students do not know the world which lies about them, and that they are ‘taught to answer quite glibly academic questions of a decidedly erudite character.’

Both of these conclusions seem just enough, but it is to be regretted that he did not push the matter further. He should have asked whether students are any more ignorant than they ever were, and if so, why. Or, if he did not care for that line of inquiry, he might have asked whether the facts that the modern student does not know are worth knowing? Or he might have asked the really fundamental question, what the teachers of these benighted ones themselves know.

The tests that should be given college students ought not to sound a man’s knowledge of facts, but to determine his adjustment to his environment and the facility he displays of moving without friction in the milieu where his life is to be spent. The students Professor West examined might think Leghorn was a breed of cows; it is questionable whether boys bred on farms would make the same mistake. So far as I am concerned, it may refer to hats or hens, and I know that, not because I learned it in school, but (a) because I have a sister, and (b) because I once read Country Life assiduously as a child, thinking, foolishly, to keep poultry in an urban back-yard. Even if I did not know it, I am afraid I should not bewail my ignorance. If the word ever swam into my ken, and I found a use for it, I would soon discover its meaning. If I am to go on being a bond salesman, or a street-car conductor, or a man who reads gas-meters, or even a professor, it is an open question in my mind whether being totally ignorant of the meaning of Leghorn would sadden my life.

Again, four men out of a hundred may not know where Yale is; but a hundred men out of a hundred Harvard men will know. As soon as information becomes necessary or interesting, the human mind picks it up in some mysterious way. The students Professor West examined think an artichoke is a fish; my California students would laugh in their faces. But my students are no wiser than his: they simply are used to seeing artichokes grow in their back-yards. Just as they told me, recently, that Dante was a Greek poet, so they would probably announce that breadfruit was a species of wheat.

It is easy to find ignorance of facts in all people. Stevenson, if I am not mistaken, thought stern sheets were sails. Frederick Locker thought the opening word in Corneille’s ‘Marquis, si mon visage’ was a title, whereas it happens, says Austin Dobson, to be the given name of the lady Corneille is addressing. Lord Bolingbroke implies that Virgil preferred the histories of Livy and Tacitus to that of Herodotus, but, as Disraeli, père, points out, Virgil died before Livy’s history was written and before Tacitus was born. Any handbook of literary curiosities will give a writer who wishes to make the gesture of learning dozens of other examples.

Not only do well-known writers make these errors, but the more obscure, and, unfortunately, not less influential, professor sometimes slips. Nineteen per cent of Professor West’s students may not have known whose ally Bulgaria was, but a Harvard Ph.D., a chemist and philosopher, a writer on logic and the history of thought, and an officer in the R.O.T.C., once naïvely asked me whose ally Serbia was. A professor of history did not know the family name of Spain’s ruling house, and apologized for his ignorance on the ground that he was a professor of Swiss, not Spanish, history. A professor of philosophy, specializing in æsthetics, admitted that he had no idea who Vico was, and that he had never read Benedetto Croce. A young American teacher recently asked me who Thomas Jefferson was.

There is a certain excuse for all these people. They have been crammed into the specializing machine and forbidden access to any subjects outside their specialty. Their ignorance is more deplorable, perhaps, than their students’, but equally explicable. They are ignorant because they cannot be widely read and be scholars.

You cannot have intelligent students unless you have intelligent teachers. Intelligence does not come from the acquisition of facts, and no information test can reveal its presence or its absence. To test intelligence by information is like testing gold by water. Intelligence is insensitive to a mere fact; it reacts only to ideas.

If knowledge of facts were important, then Lord Acton would have been wiser than Socrates. Indeed, how could anyone living before the twentieth century dream of claiming knowledge as his? All those people who believed in Ptolemaic astronomy, in Aristotelian physics, in pre-Columbian geography, in Galenic medicine, in Euclidean geometry, in Augustinian history, must have been fools. They certainly could not have passed an information test. I doubt whether Plato could have told what an artichoke was, or when the battle of Lexington took place. I can well imagine Lucian, when asked whether Rodin was a painter or a musician, putting his thumb to his nose and insolently replying the Greek equivalent of ‘Je m’en fiche.’ The ancients were interested in interpreting facts, not in accumulating them. To be sure, there are always the men who collect menageries, whether of animals, or sea-shells, or postage-stamps, or facts; but it is not to those men that civilization turns for help in her hours of need.

Of course, neither Socrates nor Plato, neither Zeno nor Epicurus, was a modern professor. They were not Ph.D’s. If Professor West really washes to know why his students are ignorant, he should note that their professors also are ignorant. A Ph.D. must perforce be ignorant. In the first place, he can scarcely get his degree unless he writes a treatise on something that nobody else has ever thought of before. That excludes him at once from the ranks of general scholars. Then he must soak himself for three years in that one subject until he knows it thoroughly. As the old adage says, ‘All selection is rejection’; and while the candidate for a Ph.D. is boring, face down, into his problem, the world floats by in the clouds, and he is about as aware of its floating as a lamprey is aware of logarithmic functions.

Now the Ph.D. is invested, and he is given a chair. Does he begin to teach the general subjects the ordinary man must know? Not at all: he continues to develop his specialty. Thus you find in my own university, in a subject close to mine, courses in Elizabethan poetry, Spenser, Elizabethan prose, English prose from Malory to Bacon, the Bible in English literature, the age of Milton, Restoration literature, eighteenth-century prose, eighteenth-century poetry, Johnson and his circle, English satire from Bishop Hall to Thackeray, nineteenth-century poetry, later Victorian and Georgian prose, Browning, liberal thought in English literature, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, the development of narrative art, the criticism of the novel, the Anglo-Celtic poets, twentiethcentury poetry, Celtic influences in English, history of American literature, American authors, the American novel, Scottish literature, Sir Walter Scott. These take in only lecture courses and courses in modern literature. Courses in philology are omitted. To analyze them would bo to invite rebuke from my colleagues and friends; but anyone at all accustomed to American university life knows that half of these lectures are a waste of time and money, and are given merely to afford a professor a chance to lecture on his specialty.

What do teachers know who permit such things? Do they honestly think that the literature of one man is as good as that of another? Do they honestly think that it makes no difference whom a student studies or reads? The chemists do not offer courses in the chemistry of Roger Bacon, Paracelsus and his time, Raymond Lullius and the philosopher’s stone. The mathematicians do not lecture on magic squares, Pythagorean hypostases of cardinal numbers, the influence of mathematics on psychology in the Academy. For the sciences have a definite subject-matter in which truth and falsity seem to be somehow distinct. The arts and the humane letters consist in antiquarian interests, apparently. Yet the literary instinct is still potent, and history has not stopped; men are continuing to ponder and reflect, and the good and the bad are still with us.

What do teachers know? Do they know the human soul, or do they know facts, or do they know that there is such a thing as a problem of knowledge? In those evasive and melancholy fields where a man’s character is formed and his outlook upon life is sharpened, do they realize that what is needed is understanding and intelligence and critical power? In such fields, if Professor West will pardon me, artichokes and chameleons and Yale and the date of the battle of Lexington have very little place. A benevolent and humanistic skepticism, and a willingness to weigh and balance, to expound and elucidate, are all that is needed. For teachers in such fields the Greek sages are the best models. Who could better typify the teacher of philosophy, the sculptor of character, than Socrates ? There are no facts to be accumulated here: there is only a sublime ignorance. Socrates spent his life in questioning and in analyzing and in observing, with quaint good humor, the experiences of beliefs. Though he never stamped his foot and thumped his fist on a desk and thundered out the truth, men have turned to him for ages when they wanted to know the truth. They have seen in his sweet reasonableness a genuine understanding and intelligence, a satisfaction in not being dogmatic, and enough sportsmanship to take a chance with error.

It is just the absence of that Socratic quality which marks us teachers of today, who think our subject-matter more important than our students. Just as the American business man is often said to make his life subservient to his business, as if his business did not exist for his life’s sake, so we young teutonists, with our ardent Ph.D-ocracy, are willing to sacrifice ourselves and our students for what we think is scholarship. At this moment I know of a university which is asking for the resignations of certain instructors because they are not Ph.D’s. The work of these men is said to be perfectly satisfactory; no fault is found with their methods of teaching. But they will be discharged and Ph.D.’s employed at twice their wages, to give exactly the same work, with no guaranty whatsoever that they will teach as well. The pathos of such a sight never strikes a man within the university; because he lacks the perspective; but when one returns after a year or two in other pursuits, such as the army, the university seems to one as a kingdom of shadows where ghosts teach living men.

Professor West wishes to meet the issue sanely and efficiently. The issue is the education, not of the student, but of the teacher. The Freshmen are wonderful — keen, eager, and hungry. The Seniors are disillusioned, cynical, and fed up. They have been through it all, and their young hearts know that there is nothing in it.