Education in Uniform: The Dilemma

VOLUME 171

NUMBER 2

FEBRUARY, 1943

86th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

I SUPPOSE there is no public role more completely fatuous than that of Job’s comforter. You may evoke from Job passages of the most moving verse, but only at the cost of making a fool of yourself. The worst you can say he already knows, and the best he would rather not hear.

The role of the man who attempts to talk to teachers about education in this second winter of the war is precisely the role of Job’s comforter. Your colleges are being turned into military academies and technical institutions. Your schools are being stripped of masters and sixth-form boys. Your endowments are draining off into bonds and taxes. And there is no hope anywhere. To some of you it must seem that your life’s work is being destroyed before your eves. To others, the whole fabric of liberal education comes clattering down and you wonder whether, when the war ends, its structure will be restored. To speak words of superficial comfort to men and women afflicted with these anxieties would be a fool’s errand indeed.

It is no use asking you to accept with gratitude the cold comfort of the common lot. Your bones are no easier because other men’s bones are racked as well. You know perfectly well that what you face others face with you. It is the fundamental nature of the fascist wars to present the free societies with a hard, a brutal choice. Indeed, it was precisely because the free societies would be presented with a brutal choice that the fascists felt safe to wage these wars, for it was the fascist conviction that the choice would be too hard for the free and selfgoverning committees to make — or at least to make in time. The choice was the choice between the surrender of the rich attributes of freedom for good, but by soft and easy stages, and their surrender with harshness for the months and years necessary to their defense.

The surrender for good was to be a surrender as seductive as the descent into Avernus — as seductive and as shameful. The surrender for the months and years necessary to a defense by fighting was a surrender, in the fascist view, so difficult and so painful that no self-governing people would be able to agree to make it until the making of it was too late.

Copyright 1943, by The Atlantic Monthly, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

History has proved that the fascist view was sound but not, thanks to the courage of two living men, quite sound enough. Hitler’s strategy rested upon a contempt for his enemies and a confidence in their incapacity to act which seemed — but only seemed — reckless and maniacal. The reoccupation of the Rhineland, the rearming of Germany, the seizure of Austria, the seizure of Czechoslovakia were foolhardy ventures. Hitler could have been destroyed at a trifling cost at any step in his presumptuous and insolent rise to power. But he was not destroyed. And Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France were to add, to the proof which went before, their heartbreaking proof that freemen could apparently not make in time the decisions necessary to defend their freedom. Not until that lesson had been spelled out, and not until Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill had interpreted that lesson to their people, and had reinforced their people’s understanding with their own personal and moral courage, their own will to action, was the creeping of the democratic paralysis overcome and halted.

When Britain fought back against the Nazi bombers and regained, as Mr. Churchill superbly put it, the mastery of the daylight air; when the United States placed its resources of men and iron at the disposition of the freedom-loving world, and rearmed Britain with its ships and rifles, the free peoples found the leadership and the courageous voice they had earlier lacked, and the strategy of contempt and bluff met its first and therefore fatal defeat.

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The free people of England and of the United States made, in the following months, the tremendous decision the misled fascists had believed they could never make. In England first and in America later, the great divisions into which a free economy naturally falls — labor, industry, agriculture, the learned professions, the people as consumers, the people as members of households, as owners of businesses, the people as young men, as young women — handed over to the common labor of defense, handed over to themselves as citizens and therefore as trustees for all the people, increasing measures of their personal and professional and economic freedom. Organized labor handed over its basic right to strike. Industry handed over a great part of its freedom to manage its factories and its plants. Farmers handed over a measure of determination as to the crops they would plant and harvest. The people as consumers handed over to an increasing extent their freedom to buy and use as they pleased. Young men and young women handed over their freedom to dispose of themselves, even of their lives.

There were some, of course, who refused to contribute. There were unauthorized strikes not countenanced by the responsible leaders of labor. There was business as usual in occasional factories, occasional enterprises. There were consumers who revolted against any interference with their peacetime habits — hoarders of coffee and sugar, wasters of the nation’s rubber and the nation’s oil. But these were the minority, and even this minority gradually fell away as the young men, who had not complained, who had not asked questions, who had accepted for themselves and for their future, who had given far more than the greatest corporation or the most powerful union or the richest and most delicate woman, began on far-off and dangerous islands to make the meaning of their contributions real.

It heartens you, of course, to feel yourselves surrounded by others who have made the same sacrifices you have made — the same in substance however they may differ in degree. It heartens you to feel that you, as members of a free society, have joined with other members of that society in the most difficult choice free men were ever called upon to make. Indeed this sense of decision, of ability to decide, is more heartening to you than it is, perhaps, to any others, for you, whose whole lifework depends upon the maintenance of free institutions, welcome, more than most men, visible and tangible proof that the free institutions of wartime democracy are vigorous and strong. But you will hardly feel, nevertheless, that these assurances of common effort supply the answer to your deepest question. For the question which moves your minds, if I may undertake to speak thus far on your behalf, is a quest ion touching not your privileges but your duties.

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What troubles you most is not the conversion of the liberal arts colleges of New England to military and technical institutions, or the drafting and enlistment of your boys, or the loss of trained and skillful teachers, painful as all these things may be. Above all, what troubles you is not the shrinkage of endowments or the loss of tuitions. What deeply and searchingly troubles your minds is the question how you are to perform, under the conditions of this time, the necessary duties which this time imposes upon your profession — the most solemn perhaps, the most urgent certainly, of all the duties your profession has been called upon to bear.

Specifically and precisely, what you ask yourselves is this: How and by what means are you, whose profession is the teaching of the young men and the young women of a free society, to reach these young men and these young women with the instruction they, more than any generation of their predecessors in this country, will shortly and desperately require? How are you to give them the understanding of the common past, the sense of the common future, the mastery of the tools and implements of the common life, which they must necessarily have, which they more than any who preceded them must surely have, if they are to turn the military winning of this war into a human victory for the things for which this war is fought?

You agree — as all men and women who love their country, who love freedom and who hate fascism, must agree — that the military winning of the war comes first. But you ask yourselves as teachers, as servants of the truth and of the spirit, what it means truly to win the war. Does it mean something that young men trained to handle guns and tanks and planes and ships and signal apparatus and the machinery of factories can do? Or does it mean something else, something requiring a different kind of training? Does the winning of this war mean the defeat of our enemies only, or does it mean the gaining of something beyond the defeat of our enemies — the gaining of a positive and created thing which shall justify all this anguish, all this death? What is the image of our victory and what soldiers are required to gain it for us; how trained, how taught?

This, I take it, is the central question of your deep concern. For you believe, as many who have not the privilege to share your holy calling also believe, that the gaining of a positive victory in this war is only second in profound necessity to the avoidance of defeat; and that, once the terrible danger of defeat has been removed, the gaining of a positive victory becomes the dedicated, the essential purpose of our lives.

You believe — as most, I think, of your contemporaries believe — that we must not fail again, we must not fall back again into the slothful self-indulgence, the intellectual cowardice, and the moral degeneration of the years which followed the other war. There must be no public Hardings, no private post-war generations, no resignation to the so-called course of history, no “return” (what word was ever sadder or more shameful than the word “return”?) to “normalcy,” to the world as it was, to the evils which begat this evil, to the old surrender, the old indifference, the old cynicism, the irresponsibility of men as citizens and men, which prepared, as surely as the past prepares the future, the slaughter of our sons.

And believing all this, you believe also, in your capacity as teachers whose duty it is to prepare new generations for new lives, that you have an obligation in this matter —an obligation which, however willingly you may surrender anything else, you cannot possibly surrender. The labor of creating victory is a labor, you believe, — and many believe with you, — which only the generation of the young can possibly accomplish, for only the young men and the young women can have the inward hope and courage to conceive the image of our victory and make it real. Only the young men and the young women can feel in their bodies and their lives what the world, made whole at last and single by the mastery of the daylight air, can be.

But believing this you believe also and necessarily that the generation which is to accomplish this tremendous labor—this labor no other generation has ever yet succeeded in accomplishing — must be prepared for its immeasurable work even more carefully, even more meticulously, even more laboriously than this same generation must be prepared for the task of bearing arms. For you see clearly that those who are to attempt to construct, in the brief moment of opportunity at the war’s end, the world for which the war is fought, will require for this labor a range of knowledge, a degree of understanding of their past and ot themselves, a clarity of perception, which only the greatest, the most devoted, and the most passionate teaching can supply.

The heart of your anxiety, in other words, is this: that the time imposes upon you obligations which the time prevents you from performing; that the war imposes duties toward the generation of young men which cannot be fulfilled because the war will not allow you to fulfill them — because the generation of young men, by a necessity you cannot question and do not question, has been devoted to a more urgently, a more immediately required education in arts far different from the arts you teach.

It would be frivolous and worse to suggest to you that you comfort yourselves in that anxiety by looking around you at the sacrifices of the manufacturers and the labor unions and the housewives. You cannot comfort yourselves and, indeed, you should not. For the unanswerable question which you ask yourselves and us is a question which must have an answer. In this one matter we cannot accept impossibility. Too much depends on it. The whole future depends on it. The survival of this democracy depends on it. The realization of the millions of sacrifices already made — the slaughtered armies, the murdered hostages, the children and women starved, the cold, the fire, the hunger — depends on it. For unless the military winning of this war is followed by the accomplishment in victory of the cause for which the war is fought, even the military winning will not be secure. And unless the generation of the young, the generation which will fight this war and win it, is prepared to carry on beyond the winning to the victory, no victory will be gained.

No layman can or should attempt to tell you how this irresolvable issue may be resolved. The problem belongs to all of us, but the instructed answer can be only yours. Laymen remember from their own experience of schools that education is not a question of hours of instruction but of moments of learning. They remember that a boy who is ready to be taught can receive much in a small time while a boy who is not prepared to learn can be obdurate and impenetrable for years. They remember too that teaching is not altogether a question of number of hours lectured but of rare and unforgettable moments of communication — that a teacher who, like the lovers in Donne’s poem, can gather all he is and all he knows up into a momentary ball of expression can cast it far and deep.

They believe, therefore, that a generation of young men and young women who are profoundly prepared by the sudden fracture of their lives to accept and to know will perceive in a brief time what might otherwise have required years of teaching; and that teachers who feel, as American teachers must now feel, the terrible need to speak and to be understood — who speak, as American teachers must now speak, with the tongues of a profound and sober passion and an earnest knowledge — will be heard as they were never heard before. How these two, speakers and hearers, can be brought together — whether in camps or technical schools or ships; whether by word of mouth, or print, or radio, or record — no layman, certainly not I, can tell you. But this we do know: that unless the means are found, the ultimate victory may elude our hands.