Furthermore--

I

I HAVE just read in the February number of the Atlantic Monthly the article ‘Am I Too Old to Teach?’ I read it with a sad acquiescence which should have gratified the writer of the plaint, as a proof of the convincing quality of his statement of thesis. The title itself is well devised to catch the sensitized eye of any professor who is middle-aged and a bittock, — of his class I am one, — and sensitively he reads. Reading, he is, I think, inevitably acceptant. At least one is acceptant. My own observations march so evenly with those of the writer that my conclusions differ but slightly from his. If his readers should answer yes to his title question I should have instantly to send in my resignation to my own Board of Trustees.

For as I analyze a form of discontent which of late tags the footsteps of my own daily performance I must acknowledge that ‘Old P—’ has for-

mulated an explanation of my state of mind as well as his own. And if his statement is called to question — as doubtless it will be — I can support it with corroborative evidence. But having lent my assistance to confirm his arraignment of the present state and purposes of youth, I should wish also to go back a stage and show an antecedent reason for the state he defines.

If Twenty-two — or Twenty, or Eighteen — is less idealistic, less sensitive, less humble, than he was twentyfive years ago, there must be some cause for his precocious decadence. We have done our utmost with the war as excuse—for everything from the price of huckleberries to the present detestable frame of literary realism. We have explained every stage or evincement of iniquity or obliquity with the fact that men were ‘shaken.’ But we can’t be cashing that check forever. The trouble is that most men were not shaken enough. And since Twenty was only ten when the war opened and fourteen when it closed, and probably had only a very misshapen and half-romantic notion of it anyway, — a large proportion of fourteen-year-olds were grieved when the Armistice whistles blew, — we can’t explain his mental or moral state, good or bad, directly with that. It would be better for many older persons if they had never conceived of the war as an excuse for themselves. In fact it would be better for many men if they had never heard the word ‘morale,’ the great word which relieves individual responsibility at the expense of communal responsibility. It has unlocked a whole closetful of self-excuses.

But that is a digression, put in merely because I wished to say it. One sometimes gives ideas a ride when he is driving in their direction. My real theme follows. In general terms it is this: an important section of the positive explanation — perhaps only a section — for the state we complain of in the students under our instruction is undoubtedly to be found in education itself. I should like to lift a little of the burden from the shoulders of youth and transfer it to the rounded shoulders of educators; not, I think, to the shoulders of ‘Old P—— and his kind, but of those who have had authority in directing the earlier training of his students and of those who are even now busily — so busily! broadening and making practical and ‘democratizing’ the college course.

I sympathize fully with ‘Old P— in his lament over democracy, which he says is mediocrity, in education — mediocrity from instruction to result, usually. So easily are we persuaded by theorists on education that we allow them to lay hands on every stage of schools — primary, secondary, college — to work their fantastic wills. The result is seen in the young materialist before us. In nothing have these fantasies been more effective than in the introduction of‘practical’ subjects into curricula, to the crowding-out of learning which deals with thought or beauty or the long growth of mankind. Theories of education are as changeable as the surface of the wind-swept desert — and sometimes almost as arid. Nothing is dearer to the heart of the pedagogic speculator than novelty and what he calls progress, — meaning merely change, — and his pedagogical Rosinante bounds along from fad to fancy and from fancy to project, its rider well pleased with its cavortings merely because they are cavortings. He loves to exhibit a prance or curvet never tried before. And with no part of his achievement has he been better satisfied, apparently, than with his success in reducing the use of the abstract or ideal in education and the substitution of the concrete in every place possible.

‘Old P——’ is chiefly suffering, as many other professors are, from the results of instruction in the earlier schools. On the secondary school every wind of pedagogical doctrine has blown. It is regarded as the gateway into life and each man brings his own notion of the province of life and would make the gate open in the direction of that province. Only a revolving door would meet all the demands made upon this entrance. Private schools, with a degree of independence, have been able to maintain their own standards, commonly; but the high school has become a catchall for every fad or whim which has come down from some feverish school of education. One of the chiefest of these is the steady pressure upon — or enticement to— the high-school student to take as many as possible of the so-called practical subjects. They fit for ‘life,'— which is apparently to be but a manual or industrial life, — while history and language and literature fit, supposedly, for super-life only. ‘Vocational’ is a word to conjure with. ‘Old P——s’ students have probably been prepared for his work largely by instruction in carpentry, or cooking, or elementary bookkeeping, or sewing. They have been prepared for life, not for learning! What can he expect?

II

How far the schools of the country are contributing to the apparently growing materialism and to the certainly growing crudity of life it must be difficult to say. Perhaps they are only exponential of it, a result more than a cause. In that case we are only going in a circle, undoubtedly vicious. Certainly the schools are catering to this instead of opposing it. The great accusation against them is that they are so largely substituting a lower motive in education for a higher one. One hears ‘practical’ spoken much oftener — certainly much louder — than one ever hears ‘scholarship’ or ‘truth’ or ‘wisdom.’ As to ‘culture,’one grows shy and hesitant over saying it at all. Steadily and firmly other motives are taken away from the student until often nothing higher is left to him than the necessity of making a living. Apparently he is to live only to come out even with himself at the end. ‘The teacher and mother should confer together (sic),’ I heard a lecturer on vocational guidance say, speaking of the child in the fifth grade or thereabout, ‘after all the tests have been made, and decide on what is necessary to prepare the child for his vocation.’ It sounds unbelievable. What has become of the ‘complete and generous education’? And what about fitting a man to perform ‘justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war’ ?

There is no reason why the learning or partial learning of a trade or profession should not be combined with stages of education. The harm is done when learning a trade is called education and when the whole motive of education is reduced to the utilitarian one. This is so evident that it seems trite to say it; and yet the condition goes on. The whole scale of acquisition is lowered. The result of the application of the practical motive is that the proportion of values in subjects and in training is lost. Students and instructors alike seem to lose it. Applied science is placed on the same level with pure science — if not higher. Pupils are taught little difference in final value between cooking and chemistry, between collecting items of school news and the study of great literature, between bookkeeping and higher algebra, between carpentering up a bookrack and learning the principles of physics. If there is any superiority it is on the side of the deduced thing, not on that of the fundamental principle. In fact it is generally true, I think, that while instruction in science may be very modest and matter-of-fact, instruction in applied science or anything industrial is almost blatant in its assertion of importance, when once it gets its toe into a curriculum. The essential value of the general over the particular, of truth over fact, of principle over skill, is not thus learned. No scale of values — or none that recognizes the greatness of ideas and the domination of law — is established. The first great chance of the pupil is lost. He does n’t learn the difference between the little and the great. If ‘Old P——’s’ students have been thus prepared his weariness is understandable.

This loss of opportunity to teach relations is found not only in the type of subjects offered but often in the handling of them. In the desire to cater to the student’s unformed taste, to his own youthful preferences and youthful judgment, really valuable subjects are sometimes turned into superficialities — mere time-fillers, one would think, supplied because teacher or superintendent wishes to be thought up-todate. There is the ever-present English, for example. I have never been able to understand why so much time must be given to that subject, but from the results I see I am convinced that at the most it is usually too little. But when the time allotted to it is filled with examination of the format and classification of magazines, — not even of their content, — a study in which any magazine has as important place as any other; with vocational English, whatever that may be; with collecting of notes about the school grounds, notes thrown into negligible form; with the study of new poetry, on the part of students who have not yet learned that there is old poetry; with reading-lists which apparently make no distinction between Zane Grey and Thackeraybecause they like Zane Grey, forsooth, and they must always be given an alternative when something they don’t like is offered to them—with all this, is it surprising that ‘Old P—’ finds his students lacking in taste? If they had had any initially it would ere this have been deeply overlaid.

It is no wonder that college teachers of language find their beginning students innocent of any notion of relations or system in the English language; they have not been allowed to study grammar, poor things, because they might not like it. I have a responsible eye on four young persons gradually passing through the preparatory school and I have chapter and verse at hand.

I even read the ‘educational’ journals in ironic moments. (Would that pedagogy had kept to its rightful name and left education to its own meaning! But a peculiarity of the science is that it is always growing ashamed of its phrasing and seeking new.) Very recently I read that the ‘ new school ‘ is ‘a laboratory of experimental pedagogy’; and even later that ‘the shop should be the king-pin of the whole school’! The exclamation point is involuntary.

Related to this theory of the material of education is the passion for the concrete which is a part of the modern educational impulse. Children are not allowed to think in terms of reason because of the conviction that they cannot or do not wish to do so. Even if a pupil would find it natural to say that two and two make four, he is not permitted to say it, but only that two goldfish and two goldfish make four goldfish. He is allowed to make acquaintance with geography only in terms of his own back yard or the school ground. Can’t you recall days when you pored over the pinks and blues and wavy shore-lines of a map and imagined the unseen countries there and the days when you should see them? What a thing an island was, in its field of blue! But that delight is denied the present child. The pedagogist’s whole conception of the child is so very low. But glory be, the Four would rather have their seven times six straight than encumbered with goldfish. I can’t help thinking that they would be quite different persons from what I wish them to be if their minds had always to proceed in terms of goldfish. And how would they ever demand coral islands if they were allowed to see only a pool in a sandpile? It is not thus that explorers and dreamers are made.

For — I don’t think I speak unfairly when I say it — they learn perfection in none of their material projects. There is nothing from their little juvenile news-writing to their blacksmithing that they would not learn better in a brief apprenticeship under a working professional or a responsible artisan with the standards of his guild. We teach our Latin and science and history badly enough,Heaven save us,with results which we are often ashamed to own; but at least there is a clear mark to which we are trying to bring our students. If we do not keep them in acute awareness of their distance from the mark and instill a degree of humility over that distance, we are doing sadly indeed. But I seem to see smugness instead of humility as a result of the handling of material things, a smugness all out of proportion to achievement or purpose. The shop the king-pin of the school!

III

The faults of the preparatory school we weakly repeat in the college. We too yield to the pressure of the immediate interest and clutter our curricula with what should be applications of learning, letting them take the place of learning itself. The school which has the newest subjects is held to be richest and fullest. Schools for all kinds of training there should be, doubtless, but not every school is a college. Unfortunately our curricula are too often, when it comes to the last authority, in the hands of pure theorists — themselves often but illcultivated men — who, as in the elementary schools, place novelty above either ideas or perfection. There is a peculiar complexity in the attitude of many proponents and partisans of socalled practical subjects, that in spite of their conviction of the tremendous importance of their case they so often want to creep under a college degree with it. One would suppose that with their certainty of the absolute value of this training — whatever it is — they would be willing to have it stand alone. But no — it must borrow from the college whatever credit or authority the latter has achieved in its long development. There is a jaunty inconsistency in it.

But thus the college also contributes to the materialism of which ‘Old P——’ complains. Here too we have the student making every sort of endeavor to get credit — in his type of avarice the credit takes the place of the dollar — for applied science with the scantiest possible knowledge of pure science, for applied art without the history or principles of art, for social or political theory without basis of history, for news-writing or the making of scenarios without study of language or the drama. He does n’t always succeed in his endeavor, fortunately. But he is strongly assisted by much that passes for educational theory. And we who associate with students can see the results. We can see them in the lack of understanding of real scholarship, in the readiness to accept a half-done thing, in the lack of distinctions in values, in disregard of the abstract and the fundamental, in high regard for the current and the superficial. Manual training comes, but wisdom lingers. One of the dreariest things to meet in college teaching is the hardness and smugness which comes from the un-idealist on the other side of the desk.

In Pride and Prejudice, anyone may recall, Miss Bingley, eagerly trying to reach the heights of superiority of the superior Mr. Darcy, whom she persistently admires, says sententiously, apropos of her brother’s ball, ‘I should like balls infinitely better if they were carried on in a different manner. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order of the day.’ ‘Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say,’ answers her genial brother, ‘but it would not be near so much like a ball.’ Well, our colleges grow more and more ‘practical’ and ‘vocational,’ we dare say, but very much less like colleges. We are doing what the slack colloquial speaker does with his words. He takes ‘unique’ to mean unusual or rare, and he has nothing left to indicate unique; he takes ‘appreciate’ to mean approve or enjoy, and in time he has no word with which to say appreciate. He is the poorer for his expansion, instead of richer. When we have combined every kind of vocational school with the college and have no college left, shall we wish that we had one?

The precocious modernism complained of in students is partly an exponent of their period — our period. You may look for it in current literature. But it is also partly resultant from the type of study I have been defining and partly from the subjects which are offered to the student. Here again we come across the trail of educational theory. It is seriously held that students may be educated in the modern alone — modern literature, modern history, modern thought. The student is easily acquiescent. It makes a demand on the elasticity of the mind, to try to move it backward. And there are educators who think that enough is done for youth if it is instructed in the affairs of this immediate world. ‘The world you live in’ is a catchy slogan. High-school children are fed on the newest books, the modernest of modern history. Last summer a group of teachers seriously considered, in discussion, whether it is necessary or wise to teach any but American history to American children. In the end they decided that it is well to learn something of foreign history in order to know what is to be met with in Americanizing the immigrant. That is a true tale, preposterous as it sounds. In colleges students are sometimes allowed to ‘major’ in sociology without taking any course in history, the sociology department being indifferent in the matter. As if anything in the present, literature or government or society, were separable from the past!

One of the finest thrills you can give youth comes when you stir its imagination with a view of the past. There is nothing comparable to it. Nothing so enriches the present as to see the long lines reaching to it from far up in the years. And nothing else so stabilizes one’s thinking and generalization. You may be almost certain, of any person of slovenly thinking and fantastic conclusions, that he does not know the life and thought of the past. There is no real education, no full culture, without it. Do you often find — I ask it merely as a question, for I am not furnished with the answer myself — the materialist, the easy cynic, the un-idealist, among scholars in history or students of the past as related to the present?

IV

There is one thing more to say. I approach this point with caution and with a realization of the discourtesy which may seem to be involved in mentioning it. But there is a thing which I think has never been said and which bears saying — more than that, demands to be said if one is to take a complete view of practical or professional subjects in college. When I think of these four young persons in college presently, I think of them as under the instruction of men — perhaps women — who can in themselves convince the Four of the beauty and ability of a trained and instructed mind.

I intend to do something of the choosing myself, if I am permitted, and I think it will be possible to find for them teachers who are citizens of the learned world, who are — I venture to say it—cultured. They will not only teach their own subject well, but they will relate it to the beauty or greatness of other subjects; and they will ever and anon open a door to an enticing glimpse of another world, and the Four will come home all agog over the hope of a prompt entrance to it. I know that there are such teachers, for I have sat before them myself. While they taught me language they set my young mind racing eagerly after art or history. While they taught me history they pricked my imagination with borrowings from archæology or literature. I remember them well. And their kind has not vanished from the earth. I want the Four to stand on the thresholds of their minds and guess curiously at the worlds they live in.

But if the Four take practical courses they must be instructed by teachers of practical courses. And what will they have then? Probably very efficient masters of some craft or profession. But am I willing that these students should spend a precious fourth of their college time—I estimate that with judicious selection of topics it might sum up to even more than that — listening to persons who know only their own very limited subjects and know those not at all for speculation but only for application, who cannot relate their small topics to history or art or language or literature, perhaps not even to science?

With the intrusion of professional and practical subjects into the college curriculum the average of culture in college faculties is distinctly lowered. Certainly the level of speech, always an exponent of the user’s culture, is lowered. It is a pity—is it not ? — that a student should spend so many hours listening to speech which not only is without distinction but may even be slovenly. His car is stuffed with special terminologies, often formed in ignorance of or disregard of the real relations of the language. Terminologies are baneful in teaching. At first a mere convenience, they seem to become in time the chief substance of a course. I rarely find that either taste or definition in language goes with them.

I think that if I could hear one lecture on pedagogy delivered in impeccable English I should be less bitter on this point.

I use pedagogy, so-called education, only as an illustration. How much of such language some students must listen to!

Two great things belong of right to the student—reverence for perfection and respect for ideas. These are ideally and ethically the basis and incentive for scholarship. With the first goes love of accuracy and completeness; with the second goes love of truth and of steps leading to truth. The two demand sincerity and integrity and intellectual result. In these two lies the hope for scholarship and for progress of thought in the world. With them should go a great curiosity, a curiosity which only knowledge will satisfy and which finds in gratification but a further stimulus. Without this reverence and this respect and this curiosity in the world, colleges would never have been built at all.

But is the growing motive in education either stimulating or gratifying these? The present purpose is largely to substitute the immediate for the distant view. This unwillingness to look far into the past is paralleled by the desire to offer a present material profit for all acquisition. Respect for ideas means respect for marketable ideas; love of knowledge means the hope that knowledge may be a valuable tool. It is true that there are fewer dreamers in our classes now. And there should be dreamers. It is a sad day when dreamers begin to cease from among us. As I look from behind my desk at the brown uniformity of youth before me, I too wonder who will furnish the dreams, social or poetic or political, which will add beauty to the coming decades. If there are none, whose fault will it be?