The Unintellectual Boy

I

THERE are signs that the colleges of the United States are beginning to insist on their right, as educational institutions, to demand intellectual activity from their students, a demand which certainly does not seem illogical or unreasonable. Colleges exist for the purpose of promoting intellectual training and for the advancement of knowledge. The millions of dollars that have been showered upon the colleges of this country by endowment or legislative appropriation have without question been entrusted to them in the belief that the acquirement of further intellectual training will benefit young people after their high school or secondary school training is over, and the obligation rests on the colleges to use those millions for that purpose. The colleges are waking up to the realization of that obligation. The change is coming; it is taking place under our very eyes; and, whether the alumni like it or not, it will soon be an accomplished fact. I desire to discuss here certain probable effects of the change, first on the American faith in the efficacy of a college course for everyone, and then on the secondary schools of the country, especially considering those which have been known as ' college preparatory schools.'

It is worth while to point out that the belief in a college education is something of very recent growth. Fifty years ago there was in America a very decided prejudice against the college man. He was variously accused of being ladylike, visionary, snobbish, and unpractical. Business houses and banks, as well as farmers and factory superintendents, looked askance at the applicant for work who carried in his hand a college diploma. To-day they all welcome him. What has happened since 1880 to cause this nation completely to change its estimate of the value of a college education? The answer is simple. America has observed the behavior and accomplishments of its college graduates, and approved what it has seen. Before 1915 this change in appraisal was coming fast, and the experience of the war settled the matter. The myth that college training was only a veneer, and that college men were effeminate snobs, exploded with finality when it was discovered that in the army, where every adventitious advantage is stripped from a man with his civilian clothes and all are started at scratch in an even competition, the college-bred men left their competitors far behind. There was no getting away from that evidence; it compelled a verdict in favor of the college man.

The new faith, however, is just as unreasoning as the old prejudice, and therefore just as blind. To people in general, what is an advantage to one man must be an advantage to every man, and so, to-day, it is almost an article of educational faith to say that every man should go to college, and therefore that the colleges should provide types of education suited to every man. So positive is this faith that it has brought an irresistible pressure on the great universities, which have been forced by it, first, to accept human material utterly unfitted to be intellectually trained, and then to provide training for this material such as it could accept.

In His recent ‘provocative’¹ book on the universities, Abraham Flexner has described in detail the situation resulting from this pressure, in respect both to pre-college training and to college undergraduate instruction. He points out that applicants for admission may offer as satisfactory evidence of fitness to do college work the fact of completion in high school of ‘courses’ in typewriting, bookkeeping, cooking, mechanical drawing, blacksmithing, and kindred subjects, — courses which cannot fairly be called studies at all, but are at best merely opportunities to acquire skill, — and that these will be accepted by all but a handful of American colleges on an equal basis with courses in science, mathematics, and languages, which require the use of the mind to master them. He points out, too, that the colleges which have admitted students so trained, finding it impossible for them to do intellectual college work, have been forced to provide for them college courses similar to these nonintellectual subjects of school ‘study.’ The list of such courses reads like the advertisement of a correspondence school: ‘ the writing of advertising copy,”‘elementary stenography,’ ‘newspaper practice,’ ‘principles of home laundry,’ ‘food etiquette and hospitality,’ ‘gymnastics and dancing for men, including practice in clog dancing.’

It is true that in the case of state universities the argument can be maintained that, since these institutions are

supported by the taxpayers, they should provide such education as can be assimilated by all who desire to continue to go to school after having finished a high school course. None should be excluded who are willing to work, whether or not they are in the slightest degree intellectual. It is not an institution exclusively for the brainy which the taxpayers desire to establish, but a safe, pleasant, companionable resort for young men and women who do not have to go to work at the age of seventeen or eighteen and wish to postpone that disagreeable necessity for four years. The fact that this argument is seldom brought forward in so bald a form does not make if less true that it is the only possible reason why these universities fritter away the time of instructors and students on such nonsense as ‘drug store practice’ and ‘elementary costume design. ’

One might suppose that, while the individuals who spend their college years on such trivialities are getting nothing of educational value, their presence would nevertheless do no great harm to serious-minded seekers after learning who compose the rest of the college, but it must be remembered that the college is a community, a more or less compact social body, and that the presence of any considerable number of idlers, dullards, and butterflies makes it impossible to establish the undercurrent of intellectual enthusiasm which ought to be present in any community devoted to learning. If a college is to do its intellectual task well, it cannot tolerate the presence of those who interfere with it. Already, as was stated at the beginning of this paper, the signs of revolt are clear. Sooner or later the colleges are going to insist on their right to be truly temples of learning, and they will eject the money changers. They have already begun the process by scrutinizing more closely the fitness of their candidates for admission. The time has passed when Harvard would give credit, for admission to its Scientific School, for courses in ‘blacksmithing’ and ‘chipping and filing,’ and even the state universities of the West and South will sooner or later perceive that no acquirement of any skill should be accepted as proof that an applicant can think. Just as soon as the colleges have excluded the mentally unfit, they will abandon courses that belong only in trade schools. They give them now merely because they think they must.

When this change has come over the colleges, — and it has already been accomplished or is in process at a good many of them, — the attitude of the public toward a college education is going to be quite different from what it is to-day, and decidedly more intelligent. Blind faith will be replaced by a reasoned appraisal. People are going to perceive that only those young men who are fitted intellectually for serious thinking can really benefit from four years of college, and that it is a waste of time for the dull, the slow, and the unintellectual to go to college at all.

II

I have discussed my subject so far only from the point of view of the college, but my real interest is secondary education. Not only is that the field in which my own experience lies, but from the point of view of numbers it is vastly more important than is university education. It is also more immediately important than university education, because it has a more direct effect on the life and civilization of the country. If our secondary schools could be brought to anything like a satisfactory standard of aim and achievement, an immediate improvement of the whole national life, social, political, economic, and æsthetic, would result. My contention is that the new attitude on the part of the public toward college education, and the abandonment of the idea that preparation for college should be the educational end and aim of all secondary school training, will free the schools from the most serious handicap from which they have suffered, and will increase enormously their chances of performing their real function of education. Up to the present moment every secondary school has been the slave of college entrance requirements. Its first and necessary business is to see to it that the school course of each boy meets the specific requirements for admission to the college of his choice, and any consideration of real educational values can have no weight whatever as against that necessity. The school which should to-day try to declare its own independence, and adopt the curriculum best designed in its opinion to fit its students both for life and for further study, would find that at graduation its students would be barred by this or that technicality from almost every worth-while college. If it tried, during even the single final year of its course, to provide the necessary options to meet these technicalities, it would find its ideal course gradually disintegrating under its very eyes.

Even when the public has become convinced that its dull, or slow, or unintellectual sons had better not waste their time by going to college, the situation will not have been greatly improved, for it will still seem a kind of disgrace to the boy to have to give up the idea of college, and every effort will continue to be made to avoid that disgrace. It is due to that ridiculous misconception that tutoring and cramming schools exist, and that every secondary school is hampered by the necessity of abandoning sound education in favor of ‘preparing for examinations.’ The first step toward improving our secondary educational system is therefore clear: the public must be made to understand that individuals differ as widely in their educational needs as they do in physical appearance, and that there is no more disgrace involved in these differences than there is in differences of stature or coloring. Parents are incredibly childish and incredibly sheeplike. Just as a child is mortified beyond words if he is ‘different,’ even merely to the extent of being red-headed, and just as each sheep must go by the exact route taken by the sheep in front, so parents are mortified if their sons have not the exact talents of their neighbors’ sons and cannot travel exactly the same road.

This habit of blind conformity has effects sufficiently disastrous in the ordinary affairs of life, especially in the choosing of a vocation, but in education, except for those who are so exactly the average size mentally that they are fitted perfectly by the stock on the educational shelves, it is fatal. The fact that our secondary schools are so universally called throughout the country ‘prep’ schools sufficiently indicates our attitude toward them. Instead of insisting that boys of from fourteen to eighteen be mentally developed by the schools in such a way as to encourage their talents and quicken their interests as each may require, the American public insists that they be clothed, each one of them, in the same mental garment. Actually, a boy’s secondary education should be the very opposite of what we demand. It should be specially designed to fit his individual needs and his individual talents. It should not be a ready-towear garment, but should be carefully tailored, and the boy himself should take an active part in the fittings.

Let us consider, for a moment, the purpose of secondary education. First of all, as its name implies, it is a preparation for higher education. Now higher education demands of its votaries independent initiative, insatiable curiosity, a passion for truth reënforced by the straight thinking required to recognize truth, and sound methods and habits of work. Curiously enough, it does not require any very large stock of information as a foundation, but it does require a liberal point of view, a broad outlook, and a real love of the use of the intellect. The best college entrance test which I can think of would be an honest answer to a single question: Do you enjoy using your mind? So far, then, as secondary education is for the purpose of preparation for college work, its aim should be not so much the imparting of any particular set of facts as a training in methods, the establishment of a point of view, and constant, insistent, exacting practice in straight thinking.

But secondary education is not merely or chiefly preparation for college work; its most important function is training for life and living. Now the activities of a man’s life, for which a school should prepare him, fall into four main classifications: his vocation, his civic relations, his family responsibilities, and the recreative occupations of his free time. If the secondary school course were planned solely with a view to preparing boys for these various classes of activities, and if its methods were such as to secure the constant practice in straight thinking which I have pointed out to be the vital requirement for college preparation, then its pupils should and would be fitted at the end of their course to go on to college, if they happened to have the kind of intellect which would benefit by college training, or to take up straightway the business of living, or to spend a few years of special work in some one of the many fields which, as I shall suggest later, might well be substituted for a college course for boys who are not book-minded but are possessed of talents or interests worth cultivating.

III

If we examine the probable curriculum which would result, we shall find that in suggesting the possibility of organizing the secondary school course on such a basis I am not asking for any violent upheaval. I said that the school work should specifically prepare a boy for the four main kinds of activities which will fill his life, but the very first kind, his vocational work, can best be prepared for in school by the same sort of general training of the mind already suggested as being the vital need for college preparation. The boy wants a thorough understanding of mathematical relations, and a habit of accuracy in mathematical manipulations, not a training in business arithmetic or bookkeeping. In other words, vocational training has absolutely no place in the secondary school, and should be rigorously excluded from it. For every conceivable occupation in life there are already existing agencies for special training at which a boy can take, after he leaves school, courses which provide a far better preparation for the vocation of his choice than the schools can give. The secondary school needs every moment it can find for its own legitimate fields of instruction, and each vocational course thrust into its curriculum robs its students of some valuable part of its training and gives them in return something of no real value.

In revising the curriculum for our ideal secondary school, therefore, we must consider not four but three fields of activity for which the pupils need preparation, — their civic relations, their family responsibilities, and the use of their free time, — not forgetting that the consideration underlying all is that the pupils must be mentally well trained. The vehicle for this mental training lies convenient to our hand. The old established subjects of study will do the trick. Language, science, mathematics, and history have stood the test, and must always be the backbone of the curriculum. They provide training in the various kinds of thinking that men are called on to do, and if the instruction is aimed not to prepare for examinations but to promote thinking, if the underlying philosophy of each subject is more and more stressed as the pupils become more and more able to grasp it, they will provide a liberal foundation of intellectual experience which will prepare pupils to meet emergencies, to solve problems, and, later, to acquire further knowledge for themselves to meet all the ordinary needs of life.

For the mental training of the pupils, therefore, we can depend on the accepted subjects of study, but what of this specific training for civic relations and family responsibilities, and what about the development of resources for leisure moments? It is in these respects that the secondary schools of to-day are scandalously deficient, and it is just to correct these deficiencies that I offer certain suggestions.

It ought to be possible to prepare our future citizens to discharge their civic duties far better than we prepare them to-day. We give, to be sure, certain barren courses in ‘civics,’ of which the textbooks are not much more than catalogues of officialdom, containing explanations of just how officials are selected, just how laws are passed, and just what are the various branches of national, state, and local government, with clear statements about the distinction between the executive, legislalive, and judicial branches of government, and brief explanations of methods of taxation and the enforcement of the laws. In a good many schools student self-government is said to exist, usually modeled on the government of an American city, and often, unfortunately, functioning at about the same level of inefficiency. From all this the pupils obtain a certain familiarity with the nomenclature and procedure of politics, but about the history of experiments in government as they have been tried down the centuries, about the philosophy of government, about established principles of liberty, or about the age-long conflict between the interests of society and the interests of the individual, they learn nothing, partly because these are inherently controversial subjects and so are avoided by the writers of textbooks who desire to offend no one lest the sale of their books be affected, and partly because few teachers are competent to teach such subjects. Nevertheless, without some knowledge of these principles no one can intelligently discharge his duties as a citizen or criticize the conduct of the government under which he lives. We cannot expect in the future to avoid the disastrous mistakes in legislation and organization which have littered the story of our nation’s politics down to the present day unless we educate future generations in the principles of government. Our ideal secondary school, then, will find time somewhere for at least one course designed properly to prepare boys for their activities as citizens.

I approach the subject of the preparation of boys for family obligations with some misgivings, because such preparation calls for education in morals, a difficult and dangerous field. It is hideous to think of the horrors that would be perpetrated by the unfit teacher in such a subject, and of the banalities of the typical textbook which the typical school board would put into the hands of the pupil. Fortunately, however, our ideal school will be staffed by teachers of tact and taste and understanding, who can talk about sacred subjects, such as love and service and altruism, without making them common or ridiculous. In the coming secondary school curriculum, therefore, a place will be found for a course in ethics.

I have reserved till the last the question of how to prepare boys for the use of their future leisure, both because the suggestion is novel and because it is one of the most important functions of secondary education, rating second only to training in sound, straight thinking. The old labor-union slogan of eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for play comes not far from summing up the day’s apportionment for grown men. The secondary schools of to-day pay practically no attention to preparation for any kind of recreation except athletic sports. The instruction given in the arts, in music, and in literature is all aimed at fitting the pupils to pass examinations, not at providing them with a life interest. Indeed, of these three great fields of human interest, the first two rarely find a place at all in a secondary school curriculum. As a result the vast majority of American business men know of only two possible ways in which to use their spare time: either to be amused by someone else, at the theatre or over the air, or to ’play games.’ Within themselves they have no resources. If, for one reason or another, their spare time is suddenly increased, they are nearly always bored to death, and from day to day they are hard put to it to use the leisure which is part of the daily régime with anything like real enjoyment. If they had had the opportunity as boys to experiment with their own talents, most of them would have discovered that they had some gift worth cultivating.

My contention is that every secondary school, therefore, should have its music rooms, its studios, its workshops, and its reading rooms, and that its instruction in literature should have the definite purpose, in the earlier years, not of instruction in the facts of literary history, but of arousing any dormant interest in reading and in writing of which any pupil may be possessed. The use of all these facilities should not be for the main purpose of acquiring skill, though there would have to be some instruction in technique, since there can be no good teaching of adolescents without a chance for putting theory into practice or for some other form of self-expression. Every boy should make the acquaintance of a wide variety of forms of artistic expression, and should have a chance himself to experiment with some of them, and during the last years of his course he should be encouraged to carry on in a chosen field. From such a training the boy ought to be able to discover some real, abiding interest which would serve him as a delightful resource throughout his life, and would make him independent of outside assistance in the use of his leisure. Moreover, the development of his taste in art, which would be the certain result of such a training, would make it possible for him to hold in some kind of check the architects, interior decorators, and other specialists who, later in his life, may otherwise fatten on his ignorance. If such training could become universal, the artistic crudities of American civilization would very quickly disappear.

IV

If it should be contended that there is no room in the curriculum of the secondary school for the addition of such instruction as I am advocating, my answer is, first, that these subjects are of supreme importance, and room can therefore be made for them by displacing less important subjects. The course in the history of government could and should take the place of the present almost universal course in civics, without the sacrifice of any time at all. The course in ethics need not occupy more than two periods a week, but to my mind it could be made the most vitally important subject in the whole curriculum. Everyone knows how extensively the old sanctions have been weakened and the old validities are being questioned by the young people of this generation. They do not accept any ‘ought,’ whether it has behind it the authority of church, state, school, or family, without doubt and questioning. Among themselves they discuss all sorts of moral questions, and more often than not their inexperience and narrow vision lead them to mistaken conclusions. They need the guidance of sympathetic wisdom, and in such matters they have more confidence in the disinterested opinion of their teachers than in the insistence of their parents or in the teaching of their church. Our civilization depends for its successful continuance on the altruism of the men and women who compose it, and the continuance of a dominant altruistic morality should not be left to chance. Its cultivation belongs in the secondary school.

Whether or not boys preparing for college can find the time for the discovery and training of special talents I am not at all sure, but it may be observed that these boys have already discovered the possession of one special talent, the talent for learning, without which they ought not to be intending to go to college at all. Moreover, their college training should provide them with all the resources needed for their future leisure. It is for the boys not going to the universities that such opportunities are needed, and as a practical school executive I maintain that time can easily be found for them.

I should like to point out here that out of such changes in the course of study as I have been advocating there develops naturally a new and happy alternative to ‘going to college.’ If a boy has, at school, discovered that he possesses talents or interest in some special branch of the fine arts, what could be more natural for him, instead of going to a school of advanced academic learning, than to pursue for one, two, or three years the study of that special branch, and what could be of more lasting benefit? He would pursue it with the intention, not of making it a profession, but of making himself proficient in it; his point of view would not be that of the professional, but that of the amateur. If the fear arises that he will become neither professional nor amateur, but dilettante, I should reply that that would depend almost entirely on the training that he had received at school. We cannot disregard entirely the boy’s own character, but in the main his attitude toward such further studies will depend on the atmosphere of study as it existed in his school, and as he breathed it daily during his training there.

This brings me to my final word about our ideal secondary school, a brief discussion of the atmosphere which should prevail there. I have suggested that the non-academicminded boy should not prepare for college, but for life, and inferentially that he should therefore not study all the ‘college preparatory’ subjects. Although his mental training should be derived from much the same subjects of study, they should be attacked by him from a different point of view, and with a slightly different purpose. I advocate the introduction, for him, of courses in the fine arts. But I want to emphasize the fact that I should insist, for him, on standards of work and achievement not less rigorous than those we set for his academic-minded brother. Education is a hard taskmaster, and grants its best rewards only to those who earn them by the sweat of their brow. I believe in discipline. Without discipline education becomes a flabby, effeminate, anæmic caricature of itself. The notion that boys of secondary school age should be allowed to decide for themselves what they should study, or what should constitute a day’s work for them, sickens me. They are without wisdom, and without experience, and they need not only guidance but driving. Like a recruit for the army, the first thing that a new boy entering a secondary school needs is discipline. It should be friendly and sympathetic, of course, but it should be firm. For the first few years it must be imposed from without, but gradually the source of discipline should change, until finally, in the last year of school, it is imposed from within, and becomes self-discipline. If such an atmosphere of discipline can be created and maintained in a school, there is little danger of dilettantes appearing among its graduates.

V

My desire to provide in the secondary schools a sound training for the boy who has no special intellectual talent does not arise solely out of sympathy with the boy’s personal needs. The political, social, and business leaders of the next generation are rather more likely to be drawn from the class of men who are not academicminded than from the class which has special talents for learning. Leadership depends on traits of character, not on intellect. It arises from an inborn urge to lead, and it is successful in operation in proportion to the strength of purpose, the tact, the determination, and the will power of the individual. It has nothing whatever to do with scholastic aptitude. Indeed, the very traits on which successful leadership depends are promoted by the overcoming of obstacles, and the school experience of the less intellectual among the school population, the very struggles they have to make in their competition with their better-endowed schoolmates, is likely to result in the growth of the very qualities required for leadership.

It must not be assumed for a moment, moreover, that the non-intellectual boy is necessarily unintelligent. Far from it. He is merely a person whose intelligence runs along practical instead of theoretical lines. It is high time that this distinction was emphasized. Throughout America, to-day, the teaching profession is becoming more and more converted to the belief that ‘intelligence tests’ are tests of intelligence. I wish to point out that they are no such thing. They are pretty reliable tests of academic talent, but that is all. The result of their application to the pupils of private schools is to indicate fairly conclusively that about one third of the whole number are not good college material. Most of the best private secondary schools are avowedly college preparatory schools, and they do not want this unfit material cluttering up their classes and burdening their instructors. Naturally, therefore, they get rid of it. As a result, hundreds of such boys are dropped from these schools yearly, not because they are idle or vicious, but merely because their intelligence is not of the intellectual order. Many of them are bright, wide-awake human beings, interested in life and in their fellow men. They would never succeed in learning, but they will succeed in life. Many of them will become leaders of men, and therefore it is of the utmost importance to the next generation that their training should be of the best. Yet what does secondary education provide to-day for these boys? Excellent training in athletics, but no training worth talking about for their minds. The public schools offer them futile courses in vocational training specially designed to obviate all necessity of thought. The best private schools drop them out or exclude them from the start. They drift, perforce, to cramming and tutoring schools, so that they may be shoehorned into college, and so avoid the disgrace which they and their parents believe attaches to failure to enter college. In college, the only possible way for them to survive is by continual tutoring, hiring other people to do for them the thinking that they themselves cannot do. If they receive the college degree they receive something to which they are really not entitled, and which they have not earned. Six years, if we include the last two years in school, have been spent on a kind of intellectual effort for which they are not fitted, and from which they gain practically nothing.

If these boys were subnormal, and not susceptible of any serious education, I should not consider them proper material for the secondary schools. Such is not the case. They are, I repeat, just as intelligent as their contemporaries, but intelligent along different lines. Along those lines they can be taught to think, to study, to investigate. They are capable, along those lines, of receiving the same sort of exacting, stimulating training which the best schools now give along academic lines. They need a preparation for life which is denied them to-day.

I have sketched the outlines of a secondary course of study which seems to me suited to the needs of such boys. The studios, the music rooms, the reading rooms, which would be needed would entail the expenditure of money, but in the public schools that money would be saved by scrapping the whole battery of laundry equipment, machine shop equipment, kitchen ranges, and what not that cost vastly more than the simple sort of apparatus I have in mind. To produce with one’s hands has a certain truly educational value; to tend a machine is in itself mechanical, not educational. The private schools, however, if they are to do two tasks instead of one and educate simul taneously the intellectual-minded and the practical-minded boys, would have to provide both additional space and additional teaching staff. Nevertheless, when people come to realize that only by some such means can fair educational treatment be given a large proportion of the private school pupils, the necessary funds will surely be forthcoming.

A natural suggestion would be, not to incorporate in the existing college preparatory schools new courses and a new point of view which is sure to complicate their task, but to establish a totally new set of secondary schools designed especially for the education of boys not headed for the universities. That is the way the Germans have handled the problem, but I do not think it would be the best way for us. It presupposes the possibility of differentiating at twelve or fourteen years of age between the intellectually gifted and the practical-minded, and no such distinction is possible at that age. If such a division were made, it would mean the placing of a final label on the boys of each class, whereas experience shows that intellectual powers are not inborn, but may be developed or inspired by contact or by training in individuals who appeared to be hopelessly unintellectual. Moreover, to segregate the two classes of boys would deprive them of the educational value of contact with each other, and would tend to make them narrow and intolerant. Especially in a boarding school is it true that both classes of minds have their contributions to make to the common life, just as they will have in the community life for which they are preparing, and, living together, each will learn to respect and value the other’s abilities. If what we may call, for want of a better term, the practical course of study in such a school were to be carried on in any slack or easygoing fashion, then it would, of course, weaken the whole institution, but we contemplate no such state of things. My proposal is an institution where every boy has to put into his lessons all he has in him, but where no boy is asked to perform tasks for w hich nature never fitted him.

When we have secondary schools so organized, when we have come to realize that it is perfect nonsense to suppose that all boys² should go to college, and when we realize that there is no more disgrace necessarily involved in a boy’s not going to college than in his not having blue eyes, we shall have made a great stride toward sanity in American secondary education. The colleges will profit by it, the schools will profit by it, and most of all the community will profit by it, because at last real education, real mental training, will be given not only to the learned, but to the practical men who do the work of the world.