What Constitutes an Educated Person to-Day?

WHEN is a riddle not a riddle?

When there is no answer.

So, when the question that forms the the title of this paper was put to me, I felt at once that it was one of the most interesting of questions, and that the answer, if there were any, would be one of the most interesting of solutions. But I was convinced that it was like the riddle of the Sphinx before she encountered Œdipus — guaranteed to be insoluble. Nor am I the Œdipus who shall surprise the Sphinx.

The fact is, I suppose, that outside of China the question cannot be answered so as to satisfy more than a very small number of people. Each man must make his own definition of the educated person, as each man, in the end, must make his own anthology. There is not a single theory of education, however wild or foolish, that has not adherents among people who have every reason to know better.

Two things are certain: first, that determining the requirements is not so much a sum in addition as an exercise in finding the highest common factor; second, that education is not so much a matter of results as of the process applied. In other words, two educated people may have very different mental stores, and only the unavoidable minimum in common; also, a man may be educated without being ‘cultured,’ just as he may be educated without being particularly intelligent. Education is something that is done to you. A man may have true wit, shrewd sense, wide experience of men and things, excellent judgment, may even have read extensively, and st ill not be educated. On the other hand, a man may have no wit, small experience or judgment, and may have read far less, and still be an educated man. You cannot often say — however much you might like to maintain it — that a man who has acquired a degree at a good university is not educated. Think of all the men you know who have contrived to graduate from good universities, and see how many of them contrive also to lack culture, or intellectual interests, or mental background. But you cannot say they are uneducated, for they are not. True, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; but you must realize that there is nothing in the word ‘educated’ that excludes either article. Nor can you demand any single branch of learning as part of the educated man’s equipment. Once, you could demand Latin, at least, if not Greek. I doubt if you can demand Latin now, any more than you can demand biology or German. A man must have learned something, if he is to be called ‘educated’; but it is a very ticklish business to say what. Personally, I should not dare name even Latin as a necessary element, though to part with a smattering, at least, of Latin goes hard.

This is, I can see, going to be largely definition by elimination, so let me state at once what seems to me to be one thing without which no man can fairly be called educated; that is a power to use his native language correctly. An educated man cannot be illiterate. I am aware that this test will occasionally exclude a full professor in a reputable university. That makes no difference. I maintain that no man is educated whose grammar is shaky. He may have a Ph.D. from any place you like; but if he confuses adverbs and adjectives, he is not an educated man. This minimum I think we can — we must — still demand.

I am not sure that this is not the only point on which we can be absolutely firm. Before determining what, besides the grammar of his native tongue, a man must know, let us proceed with one or two more eliminations.

It would be very pleasant, for example, to say that an educated man must have a trained mind. The purpose of all good education is, indeed, to develop a trained mind; but is it safe to say that, if you have it not, you are uneducated? Hardly. A trained mind presupposes power to deal with material set before one in a logical and sensible way — whether the facts be of history, of physics, or of language. The trained mind is the mind that has learned to handle facts, in whatever field one has served one’s apprenticeship. It has learned a certain method. I say ‘a certain method’ advisedly; for, fundamentally, there is only one method to be pursued in dealing with a subject — the method that perceives the relations and proportions of given elements, and proceeds to its conclusions by the laws of logic. Your game may be constructive or destructive, research or criticism; but if you do not know how to arrange your material in proper proportion, to distinguish between proved fact and mere conjecture, and to argue logically, you have not a trained mind. No one, I should think, could cavil at that. But what you may demand of the trained mind is far too much to demand of the mere ‘educated person.’ I should like, indeed, to insist that logical thinking is a requisite. But here the frequent case in point confutes you. Too many obviously educated people fail to think logically. Education does not necessarily prevent your begging the question or juggling with facts.

To take a single example: no one who has read, soberly and carefully, the Theory of the Leisure Class will deny that the author begs the question, contradicts himself, juggles his facts, and indulges in supreme contempt for the laws of evidence. Yet is there anyone who feels empowered to state that the author of that book is not an educated man? You may say, if you feel like it, that he has not a trained mind; but you cannot call him uneducated, for he is not. Let us leave to one side the ‘trained mind’ temptation. It may be the fruit of the best education, but it is not the test of whether or not a man has been educated. The woods are full of the educated who cannot reason.

The new training in scientific method must be omitted from our requirements, as much as the old stiff training in logic. A man may be educated, though he has skipped the laboratory entirely, as he may be educated if he does not know what a syllogism is. There is no official list, as once there was, of things a student must know, or even know about. All that education must do for you is to teach you somet hing, in a given amount. Could you say, for example, that the best technical schools fail to educate because they pay little or no attention to the humanities? Could you say that Oxford, yesterday, failed to educate because it dealt only in the humanities? We must not be misled by the modern eclecticism of our college curricula. Education does not necessarily mean a smattering of language, literature, philosophy, history, economics, natural science, and mathematics, though the entrance and A.B. requirements of our colleges would seem to indicate that it does. Very likely the smattering is a good thing for the average boy or girl; yet you cannot say that the extreme specialist is necessarily uneducated. I should say that it is impossible to specify the subjects that must have been studied. You can do without Greek, you can do without biology, you can do without mathematics or philosophy, you can certainly do without banking, accounting, and corporation finance — and yet be educated, I mean. But you cannot do without them all.

By and large, I should say, education presupposes some real study in one or two fields of knowledge, and a shrewd suspicion that other fields exist. You do not absolutely have to know any chemistry, or any philosophy, or any Greek, to be educated. Your education may have concerned itself chiefly with history and certain literatures. But unless you have some notion of the proportional importance of these other subjects, and what their place in the sun is, you are not really educated, I fancy. You do not need to know any chemistry, but you need to know why chemistry is, and what it stands for. If you really know history, you will know as much about sociology as you need to know, to fulfil the definition. If you really know something about literature, you will have enough philosophy to rub along with. Arithmetic is, I should think, the minimum mathematical requirement. And so it goes. All these subjects inevitably overlap.

To put it broadly, an educated man must, it seems to me, have a general notion of the problems of the race. He must have an idea of how the race has tried to solve some of them — either mental, spiritual, political, or physical. He must have oriented himself, well or ill, in time. He must know something about the past — enough, in some field or other, to give him a perspective. You can fulfil these requirements and omit almost any one or two fields of knowledge. Therefore it is idle to speculate as to the exact contents of the educated mind. No doubt the smattering demanded by most colleges will facilitate this proper perspective. It will teach the student what a subject ‘stands for.’ I suppose that is the reason for the weary hours spent by the humanist in the laboratory, the weary hours spent by the scientist in the literature classes. But a mere smattering does not of itself give perspective; whereas genuine immersion in any vital subject does. If you really know your English literature au fond, you are bound to have a notion of political and economic history, of schools of art, of philosophy, of scientific theory, of the rôle and influence of other European languages. That is, if you really know your English literature well enough, Shakespeare and Milton and Clarendon and Carlyle will have introduced you to history and politics; Bacon and Berkeley and Huxley to philosophy and science; Chaucer and Spencer and Dryden to Continental literature; Ruskin to art, and so forth, and so forth. 4Collateral reading’ would do the rest. Unfortunately, we seldom deal with so complete a knowledge, even of a single field. Greek alone would give you a sense of history, polit ics, art, philosophy, and the possibilities of language. How a biologist can escape sociology, I do not see. The astronomer must have encountered the men of antiquity and of the Middle Ages. The scientist has less chance of getting his education made up to him than any of these others, I suppose. So, no doubt, eclecticism is a good thing.

I seem to have been dealing, for the most part, with the young men and young women who go to college. I do not believe that a college course is necessary to education, but it is certainly the easiest way. The self-educated man is apt not to be educated — because, as I said earlier, education is something that is done to you. The only thing that can do it to you, besides human teachers, is books. The danger of selfeducation is that a man is likely never to have learned how to read; and that he will have read incoherently and not have assimilated his reading. He has not oriented himself in time; he has not a working idea of the problems of the race, and of how they have been wholly, or in part, solved. His reading is too apt to have been all ‘collateral.’ There are likely to be deplorable lacunœ in his vision of the constituent elements of human existence on the planet. To say nothing of the fact that he may easily not fulfil the requirement of proper use of his native tongue. It takes a much better quality of mind for self-education than for education in the ordinary sense.

I have been desperately trying to avoid the aforementioned temptation of making my own ant hology. I should like to say that you are not educated if you cannot spell — but that is manifestly untrue. I should like to say that you are not educated if you have never read Byron, if you really want to ‘see America first,’ or if you subscribe, for choice, to the New York Nation. I should like, in other words, to play about among my own perceptions, or define the educated person by the mere people I happen to know who are best educated. It is a constant temptation, too, to confuse the cultivated person with the educated person, which would be a bad mistake. So many of the latter are not the former; and I have even known the former not to be the latter, strange though it may seem.

I wonder if there is not, in the background of all our minds, more insistence on the school and college requirement than we even like to admit. Do you not always hesitate, when a man has not graduated from an institution of learning, to call him educated? There are people who have had only highschool training, who have gone on for themselves, who can certainly be called educated — whom you would never think of calling anything else. On the other hand, it must be admitted, they are fewer than the high-school graduates — those, that is, who have stopped their formal education there — to whom you would spontaneously refuse the appellation. People who have stopped short with the lower grades very seldom come into the ‘educated’ category. All of which goes to show that education is, as I said before, something that is done to you; something that it is exceedingly difficult to do to yourself.

A surgeon in Pennsylvania, the other day, operated on himself for appendicitis. Not that the analogy is perfect; but the person who has since childhood administered his books to himself, and done it with the result of ‘education,’ is almost as rare a case. He is possible; when he exists, he is remarkable; but there are very few of him. It is certainly true, as I said before, that it takes a much better quality of mind to educate one’s self than to submit to the educative process at other hands. That is, doubtless, why, when you find the man who has done it successfully, you find an unusually interesting and valuable person. To offset the lack of educational privilege, he has a native gift that sets him above the ruck. But you do not find him singing in every forest. How often do you hear the comment: ‘If - had had advantages, if - had had an education, he would have been a remarkable person’? Which in itself shows how difficult is the single-handed fight for a thing that is essentially a cooperative business.

The minimum, then (according to one rash interlocutor of the Sphinx), is: ability to use one’s native language correctly; a general notion of the problems of the race, and an idea of how the race has tried to solve some of them — either mental, spiritual, political, or physical; some degree of orientation in time. Proper cultivation of any field of knowledge will give this to any average mind. Some will get it by a nicely arranged smattering. But beyond this, in the direction of the specific, I doubt if you can go.

One word, in closing, as to the merits of education. Merits do not come into the question as propounded; but we have glanced in passing at the uneducated man who possesses wit, judgment, experience, and a measure of reading. Only a pedant will deny that he is a more interesting person than the educated man who lacks wit, judgment, and experience. Judgment is certainly one of the most important things that educators hope the educated will acquire. They do not always acquire it, as we have said. But, on the other hand, the uneducated man is more likely to be prejudiced, bigoted, narrow. He is more likely to be selfor class-conscious, because he has not been liberated by the consciousness of other points of view. Even if he has gazed at men and things in many places, he is more likely to have done it with an initial parti pris that deprives him of some of the finest fruits of his opportunities. If he has judgment — ah, that is a different matter. For even the trained mind counts judgment as its chief asset.

The fact is that this hypothetical person we have referred to — this uneducated man with all these merits — is a rare bird. To be sure, mere experience of men and things, without wit or judgment or reading, suffices to make a man interesting beyond the average university product; for we are all Desdemonas at heart. Education does not serve half so well as varied adventure to make a man’s talk rewarding. Even grammar can be dispensed with.

But all that is beside the point. The Sphinx did not ask what constituted an interesting person; she inquired, much more diabolically, what constituted an educated person. One Theban has now given an answer, and is prepared to be devoured.