Its Two Little Horns
IF a dilemma would be content to wear only one horn, innocent adventurers into t the field of debate and argument would be less dangerously beset by the beast of embarrassing alternatives. Then, for instance, when a college professor catches sight of a fellow traveler, wantonly strayed from the royal road of reason and distressingly impaled on the right horn of a logical dilemma, — labeled ‘What Do Students Know?’ — he will not feel called upon to precipitate himself, as a gratuitous exercise in agility, on the left horn, inscribed ‘What Do Teachers Know?’ There is, to be sure, a safe agnostic front between these two perilous projections, called ‘What Does Anybody Know?' But that is a place of unprofitable repose and affords no scope for mental gymnastics.
Such opportunity was offered, however, by the gyrations of Professor Boas, for the play of the intellectual muscles of a certain group of spectators, that I am recording this latter reaction for the entertainment of yet other beholders who may be interested.
This morning I carried the May Atlantic into my classroom and read to my aspiring essay-writers this accepted article, as a sample of how to do it. Quite on their own initiative, the young neophytes discovered that in many respects it was rather an object-lesson on how not to do it. So promptly was the bone of contention pounced upon, so thick and fast came the responses, from Sophomore and Senior, from lads and lassies, that my position demanded all the tact of the Speaker of the House. Perhaps the total effect can best be conveyed in the form of a colloquy by the members of the class, with the author of ‘What Do Teachers Know?’ as the object of the inquiries. The general impression was somewhat as follows: —
Question. ‘The writer says, “The ancients were interested in interpreting facts, not in accumulating them.” How could they interpret what they had not accumulated and therefore did not have?’
Answer. Silence.
Question. ‘If “intelligence is insensitive to mere facts, and reacts only to ideas,” where does it get the ideas to react from? What is an idea but a deduction from two or more facts?’
Answer. Silence.
Question. ‘If “artichokes and chameleons and Yale and the date of the battle of Lexington have very little place in the production of understanding and intelligence and critical power,” what has?’
Answer. ‘A benevolent and humanistic skepticism, and a willingness to weigh and balance, to expound and elucidate, are all that is needed.’
Question. ‘But what is there to be skeptical about but facts? What is there to put in the balance and weigh? What to expound and elucidate about?
Answer. Silence.
Question (from a demure maid in the back row). ‘Does n’t Professor Boas seem to have a good many facts at his command, and use them pretty freely in this very anathema against them?’
Answer. ‘They speak for themselves.’
Question. ‘Socrates is eulogized for his “sublime ignorance.” Was it honest-to-goodness ignorance or a sublime assumption of it?’
Answer. Silence from the Oracle, broken by a modest voice from over by the window. ‘Seems to me I read somewhere that the Socratic method was simply the wise man’s pretense of an ignorance that longed for enlightenment, and that “on this baited hook were caught the unwary whose pretense was to a wisdom when they had it not.” ’
Question. ‘ In what “ mysterious way” does information come when it is needed?’
Answer (from a sad Sophomore). ‘ Sometimes, in my caseany how, through chagrin and bitterness, by first having my ignorance exposed.’
Question. ‘The Ph.D. is rebuked for writing a treatise on something that nobody had ever thought of before. What would be its value if somebody had thought of it before and done it?’
Answer. Silence.
Question. ‘In that connection, if nobody ever did an unthought-of thing, what would become of pioneering and progress? Who would be in the van and blaze the trail?’
Answer. Silence.
Question. ‘When did the Ph.D. candidate begin being ignorant of everything else in order to write his dissertation?’
Answer (from an irreverent youth next the radiator). ‘Since no credit is given him for the eighteen or twenty years of education from the kindergarten through the Master’s degree, he must have risen right up from his cradle to “bore, face downward, into his problem, while the world floated by in clouds, and he as unaware as a lamprey of logarithmic functions.” He could have had no more information or culture to start in with than a Hottentot.’
Question. ‘Even if a field can be “melancholy,” by permission of the pathetic fallacy and in spite of Ruskin, how can it be “evasive”?’
Answer (from the end-man). ‘By disregarding mere facts.’
Question. ‘All these English courses that are listed as a waste of time and money — does any one student have to swallow them all? And if anyone did have a honing to know about, say, the Bible, or Johnson and his circle, or Celtic poetry, or the American Novel, why should it be forbidden him? Are they not all honorable subjects? If one consumes his beef and bread, can’t he add a salad, an entrée, or a dessert?’
Answer (from the teacher). ‘If he has a good digestion and a sharp appetite, he may go right through the whole menu, with impunity and profit, from cocktail to cheese and coffee. Nay, for the elect there are still cakes and ale, and ginger shall be hot in the mouth.’
Question. ‘If to one who has been in the army “the university seems as a kingdom of shadows where ghosts teach living men,” do the professors who were in the army seem like ghosts, and the students who never left home, like living men?’
Answer. Silence.
Question (from a Sophomore). ' If the cynical Seniors have found out there is “nothing in it,” why don’t they pass the word down and stave off some of this stampede toward halls of learning? Most failures don’t keep on being more and more popular, as the colleges seem to be doing.’
Answer (from a strangely cheerful Senior). ‘Pure maliciousness. They like to see more silly flies walk into the same spider’s web.
Question (from the teacher). ‘The grand climax of the wholesale indictment before us is one on which you should be able to testify. So far as your own experience goes, is it true that “the Freshmen are keen, eager, and hungry,” and “the Seniors disillusioned, cynical, and fed up”?’
Answer. (Concourse of expressive grins from the class; remark from an incorrigibly joyous Junior.) ‘ When I was a Freshman and herded with the big first-year classes, my hunger was mainly for my dinner or a fight , and I was as keen and eager as the rest of the bunch to jump at the sound of the closing bell. We never allowed any professor to run over the hour.’
The courteous innuendo of his conclusion reminded me that our own gong had sounded forty seconds before, and I speedily turned the rascals out, commending them to the next dose of frothy and venomous facts with which they were being fed up ad nauseam. And as I prepared to measure out another sickening spoonful for my own helpless victims, I thought of Strunsky’s fallacy-puncturing observation in his ‘The Everlasting Feminine,’ that any statement whatever made about Woman is true. So is any generalization about students and professors. Some Freshmen are indeed wonderfully keen and eager; others are an incredible miracle of sodden stupidity and indifference. Some Seniors are flaccid and unstrung; others are just being keyed up to concert pitch. Some teachers are — anything you like; others are everything you do not like. Accordingly, when it comes to students versus teachers, or facts versus ideas, or information versus intelligence, or summer versus winter, or food versus fresh air, the dialectician may well take a cue from the canny Ruggles girl, confronted with a choice between hard versus soft sauce, and take ‘a little of both, please.’
For in the logical realm there remaineth classification, interpretation, and discrimination, of parent facts and progeny ideas; and the greatest of these is discrimination.