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Page 45
Something like this, perhaps, is the feeling of many men--men by no means
given to morbid gusts of panic--amid a society that laughs overmuch in its
amusement and exults in the very lust of change. Nor is their anxiety
quite the same as that which has always disturbed the reflecting
spectator. At other times the apprehension has been lest the combined
forces of order might not be strong enough to withstand the
ever-threatening inroads of those who envy barbarously and desire
recklessly; whereas today the doubt is whether the natural champions of
order themselves shall be found loyal to their trust, for they seem no
longer to remember clearly the word of command that should unite them in
leadership. Until they can rediscover some common ground of strength and
purpose in the first principles of education and law and property and
religion, we are in danger of falling a prey to the disorganizing and
vulgarizing domination of ambitions which should be the servants and not
the masters of society.
Certainly, in the sphere of education there is a growing belief that some
radical reform is needed; and this dissatisfaction is in itself wholesome.
Boys come into college with no reading and with minds unused to the very
practice of study; and they leave college, too often, in the same state of
nature. There are even those, inside and outside of academic halls, who
protest that our higher institutions of learning simply fail to educate at
all. That is slander; but in sober earnest, you will find few experienced
college professors, apart from those engaged in teaching purely
utilitarian or practical subjects, who are not convinced that the general
relaxation is greater now than it was twenty years ago. It is of
considerable significance that the two student essays which took the
prizes offered by the Harvard _Advocate_ in 1913 were both on this theme.
The first of them posed the question: "How can the leadership of the
intellectual rather than the athletic student be fostered?" and was
virtually a sermon on a text of President Lowell's: "No one in close touch
with American education has failed to notice the lack among the mass of
undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, and the small regard for
scholarly attainment."
Now, the _Advocate_ prizeman has his specific remedy, and President Lowell
has his, and other men propose other systems and restrictions; but the
evil is too deep-seated to be reached by any superficial scheme of honors
or to be charmed away by insinuating appeals. The other day Mr. William F.
McCombs, chairman of the National Committee which engineered a college
president into the White House, gave this advice to our academic youth:
"The college man must forget--or never let it creep into his head--that
he's a highbrow. If it does creep in, he's out of politics." To which one
might reply in Mr. McCombs's own dialect, that unless a man can make
himself a force in politics (or at least in the larger life of the State)
precisely by virtue of being a "highbrow," he had better spend his four
golden years otherwhere than in college. There it is: the destiny of
education is intimately bound up with the question of social leadership,
and unless the college, as it used to be in the days when the religious
hierarchy it created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding
place for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a
school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the
_jeunesse dor�e_ (_sc._ the "gold coasters"). We must get back to a common
understanding of the office of education in the construction of society,
and must discriminate among the subjects that may enter into the
curriculum, by their relative value towards this end.
A manifest condition is that education should embrace the means of
discipline, for without discipline the mind will remain inefficient, just
as surely as the muscles of the body, without exercise, will be left
flaccid. That should seem to be a self-evident truth. Now it may be
possible to derive a certain amount of discipline out of any study, but it
is a fact, nevertheless, which cannot be gainsaid, that some studies lend
themselves to this use more readily and effectively than others. You may,
for instance, if by extraordinary luck you get the perfect teacher, make
English literature disciplinary by the hard manipulation of ideas; but in
practice it almost inevitably happens that a course in English literature
either degenerates into the dull memorizing of dates and names or, rising
into the O Altitudo, evaporates in romantic gush over beautiful passages.
This does not mean, of course, that no benefit may be obtained from such a
study, but it does preclude English literature generally from being made
the backbone, so to speak, of a sound curriculum. The same may be said of
French and German. The difficulties of these tongues in themselves, and
the effort required of us to enter into their spirit, imply some degree of
intellectual gymnastics, but scarcely enough for our purpose. Of the
sciences it behooves one to speak circumspectly, and undoubtedly
mathematics and physics, at least, demand such close attention and such
firm reasoning as to render them an essential part of any disciplinary
education. But there are good grounds for being sceptical of the effect of
the non-mathematical sciences on the immature mind. Any one who has spent
a considerable portion of his undergraduate time in a chemical laboratory,
for example, as the present writer has done, and has the means of
comparing the results of such elementary and pottering experimentation
with the mental grip required in the humanistic courses, must feel that
the real training obtained therein was almost negligible. If I may draw
further from my own observation I must say frankly that, after dealing for
a number of years with manuscripts prepared for publication by college
professors of the various faculties, I have been forced to the conclusion
that science, in itself, is likely to leave the mind in a state of
relative imbecility. It is not that the writing of men who got their early
drill too exclusively, or even predominantly, in the sciences lacks the
graces of rhetoric--that would be comparatively a small matter--but such
men in the majority of cases, even when treating subjects within their own
field, show a singular inability to think clearly and consecutively, so
soon as they are freed from the restraint of merely describing the process
of an experiment. On the contrary, the manuscript of a classical scholar,
despite the present dry-rot of philology, almost invariably gives signs of
a habit of orderly and well-governed cerebration.
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