A New Helmet of Salvation

ONE of the most stimulating adjectives of contemporary thought is ‘modern.’ Modern art, modern philosophy, modern minds, captivate us to the point that we even take seriously a movement known as ‘modernism.’ In spite of the fact that practically every modern idea was anticipated by the ancients and that many were directly inspired by the ancients, we still feel an uncritical joy in the label ‘modern’ and a delight in urging people to be modern.

The latest helmet of salvation is the teaching of something called ‘social science’ in the lower schools. The theory is that children should be kept abreast of their times. It seems absurd to some educationalists that children should spend their days learning ancient history and be ignorant of modern. They must be oriented toward an understanding of what is going on around them, so that they can meet the problems of modern life as we, their parents, have not been able to do.

This is a very appealing programme indeed. I have a child of eleven who surprises me by knowing a great deal about Pisistratus but knows nothing about the NRA. In fact her ignorance of American history as a whole is appalling. She asked me the other day whether the Civil War was fought before the Revolution. If she went to an upto-date school, she would be studying current history and could hold her own in any teatime conversation.

I heard of one mother who gathers her children round her under the evening electric light while my children are listening to David Copperfield, and discusses the events of the day with them. They talk of Hitler and Stalin and Huey Long, of the TVA and the AAA, of the coming war and the possibility of an overthrowing of capitalism. The children of another of my friends go to a school where each morning they must announce their discovery of some current event; recently the youngest — aged about ten — proudly gave as hers that she had found a bird’s nest in Central Park. The teacher was disgusted. ‘What I wanted,’ she said, ‘was real news.’ A third group of children are so busy reading the newspapers for current history that they have no time for reading anything else.

It may be jealousy or an inferiority complex or something equally hideous that moves me, but I confess to an ineradicable skepticism about the value of all this. The discovery of a bird’s nest seems to me much more important in the life of a child — and possibly in a man’s — than the discovery that 1500 people watched a hanging in Kentucky. When one looks back ten years at the names which flared out in our newspapers, one has difficulty in recalling whom they belonged to. When one picks up a magazine of only a few years ago, one finds that the articles on current events are beginning to seem quaint. The books that were puffed, the social programmes that were to save the world, the religious creeds that were to free the human spirit, are now about as ‘contemporary’ as Chartism or Physiocracy or Agnosticism. Who bothers about Technocracy or Humanism these days? Yet only three or four years ago everyone was sure that they were either the cure or the scourge of civilization. If the fad of teaching current events to children was in vogue at that time, children followed their parents and teachers in discussing these things. The result was knowledge of something which was of interest in 1931 or thereabouts and which lost its interest in 1933. Why is that of more importance than knowledge of something which happened in 500 B.C. and has never lost its interest?

It might be held to be axiomatic that the importance of knowledge is not to be judged by the date of its subject matter, but by its datelessness. Every age finds certain things important which fill certain needs in its life, and these are seldom the same from epoch to epoch. Hiram Powers, who seems to us like a feeble imitator of Canova, in his day seemed like a second Phidias. We are likely to feel that a knowledge of African Negro sculpture is more important than a knowledge of contemporary American sculpture. We shall turn out to be as wrong as our fathers in the eyes of our children. But, changing as standards are and must be, they are nevertheless determined by some deeply rooted hunger in the souls of the people who make them. What satisfies that hunger is independent of date. Count Keyserling is of our time chronologically; but Plato still seems more important to most of us. Hence what is important about current events is not the fact that they are current, unless we are statesmen, newspaper men, or business men, whose existence is justified by fashions, styles, and the changing scene in general. If this were not so, anything which happened to-day would be as important as anything else. Yet not even the enthusiastic modernist believes that.

As far as children are concerned, the importance of an event may be measured by its melodramatic interest. One mother told me that the effect of the new studies on her children was to make them talk about nothing but gangsters, murderers, and kidnappers. Those were things which they could appreciate, involving primitive and childish motives and reactions. Childish people have always understood and liked clear-cut and brutal behavior. Revenge, lust, greed, bravery, involve no delicate moral casuistry. And children, in spite of sentimental pedophiles, are little savages, potential men but not actual men, if one may use Aristotelian language. To reason with a child is like throwing corn before an egg. Every case of reasoning with children which I have ever encountered turns out to be a subtly disguised form of threatening or promising. They get from the newspapers what childish adults get and no more.

Sooner or later the leaders of American education will have to wake up to the fact that children arc not finished products, but are like saplings or puppies. This does not mean a return to the three R’s or to an authoritarian system of inflexible standards. One can still recognize individual differences in the immature and individual potentialities which can be developed each in its own direction. They will have to wake up also to the fact that some things are more important than others, and know why. That importance may be — and I believe is — instrumental to some other end and not terminal. And that end may be itself complex: pleasure, social cooperation, and self-respect. Anyone can observe that people are able to respect themselves without being selfish, and to be coöperative without being nullities. Anyone can also observe that people who respect themselves and the selves of others are not therefor unhappy. (The probability is that they are happier than the egoists who have no egos.) But such a point of view seems hopelessly reactionary to the fashionable educationalists, who must, of course, year by year announce a new final philosophy with the inventiveness — if not the candor — of dressmakers.