The Theory of Education in the United States

II

TAKEN in hand it accordingly was, about thirty-five years ago, and very energetically. Dissatisfaction focussed about the thesis that our system was out of relation to life. Something must be done with it to make our children grow up as men of their time, and prepare them to face actuality. Too much attention had been paid to the languages, literature and history of classical antiquity, which were all of far less than doubtful value to the youth of twentieth-century America. The thing now was to introduce the sciences, living languages and the useful arts, to make instruction vocational, to open all manner of opportunities for vocational study, and to induce youth into our institutions for pretty strictly vocational purposes. All this was done; the process amounted to a revolution, carried out with extraordinary thoroughness and in an astonishingly short time. Hardly any debris of the old order remains except, curiously, the insignia of certain proficiencies; these now survive as mere vestiges. You are as well aware as I, for example, of what a bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts now represents. Some new insignia have been devised, and one or two borrowed from the systems of other countries, like the degree of doctor of philosophy, which fulfils the humble but possibly necessary function of a factory-inspection label, some say a trade-union label; perhaps it is both. Aside from these insignia, however, nothing is left; our system underwent a revolutionary renovation. Exponents of the new order have had their way unhindered, and have been able to command an almost inconceivable amount of money and enthusiasm in support of their plans and policies.

Yet after three decades of this, our system gives no better satisfaction, apparently, than it did before. At no time during this period has it given satisfaction; hence the period has been one of incessant tinkering, the like of which probably has never been seen anywhere in the world. Method after method, device after device, readjustment after readjustment, have been tried, scrapped, revived and modified, and then tried again. One might say that the field of our pedagogy during these three decades has been the drillground of empiricism; large areas of it, indeed, seem to have been, and still seem to be, the hunting-ground of quackery. One cannot too much wonder at the high hopefulness attending this unconscionable revel of experimentation. Yes, yes, we kept saying, let us but just install this one new method in the secondary schools, or this one new set of curricular changes in the undergraduate college, or this one grand new scheme for broadening the scope of university instruction, and in a year or so it will prove itself to be the very thing we have all along been needing; and this, that or the other batch of pedagogical problems will be laid to eternal rest. Such, I think, is a fair summary of our thirty years’ experience; the details of it are no doubt well known to you, and many of them will probably recur to your memory at once, perhaps in some cases with a rather strong appeal to your sense of humour.

Ingenuity, however, when applied in limine, must some time reach the end of its exercise, and that time seems now to have come. We seem now to be at the moment when every conceivable mode of tinkering has been applied at every available point in our educational system, and when nobody can think of anything more to do. Professional educators are carrying on as best they can, occasionally pausing to consider the gains which accrued from the revolution of thirty years ago, and which the efforts of three decades have been devoted to consolidating. From what some of them say, it might appear that these gains are relatively inconsiderable, hardly worth the crushing price set by the turmoil of a revolution and the distracting toil of consolidation. Many professional educators, even some veterans of the revolution who fought behind the barricades and manfully worked the guillotine in the hour of triumph—even some of these seem now to be in the mood of self-examination, wondering, like Mr. Weller’s charity-boy at the end of the alphabet, whether it was worth going through so much to get so little. Dissatisfaction is, of course, a noble and invaluable attribute of man; one should never, strictly speaking, be satisfied with anything, least of all with the social institutions and mechanisms which we create. The lively and peremptory exercise of dissatisfaction is the first condition of progress; one wishes that Americans at large had a better understanding of its uses. But dissatisfaction with something which may and should be made to work better, differs in quality from dissatisfaction with something which gives no hope of ever being made to work at all. Dissatisfaction in the realm of the aëroplane is a very different thing in quality from dissatisfaction in the realm of the perpetual-motion device. In the one case, the application of ingenuity may, and often does, improve the machine and makes it work better. In the other case, when all the resources of ingenuity are exhausted, the machine gives only a semblance of working, without the reality.

In criticism of the present state of our educational system, non-professional opinion appears to be in pretty close agreement with the opinion lately expressed by many of our professional educators. A few months ago, an Italian nobleman, one of the most accomplished men in Europe, told me that he had had a curious experience in our country; he wondered whether I had made anything like the same observation, and if so, how I accounted for it. He said he had been in America several times, and had met some very well-educated men, as an Italian would understand the term; but they were all in the neighbourhood of sixty years old. Under that age, he said, he had happened upon no one who impressed him as at all well-educated. I told him that he had been observing the remnant of a pre-revolutionary product, and coming from a country that had had the Sicilian Vespers and Rienzi and Massaniello and now Mussolini, he should easily understand what that meant; that our educational system had been thoroughly reorganised, both in spirit and structure, about thirty-five years ago, and that his well-educated men of sixty or so were merely holdovers from what we now put down, by general consent, as the times of ignorance—holdovers from pre-Fascist days, if I might borrow the comparison. “But,” I went on, “our younger men are really very keen; they are men of parts, and our schools and universities do an immense deal for them. Just try to come round one of them about the merits of a bond-issue or a motor-car, the fine points of commercial cake-icing or retail shoe-merchandising, or the problems of waste motion involved in bricklaying or in washing dishes for a hotel, and you are sure to find that he will give a first-rate account of himself, and that he reflects credit on the educational system that turned him out.” My friend looked at me a moment in a vacant kind of way, and presently said that proficiency in these pursuits was not precisely what he had in mind when he spoke of education. “Just so,” I replied, “but it is very much what we have in mind. We are all for being practical in education. Do you know, it would not surprise me in the least to find that our Russian friends had taken a leaf out of our book in designing their Five-Year Plan?” He looked at me again for a moment, and changed the subject. I thought of explaining myself, but saw it would be of no use; my little pleasantry had been dashed to pieces against the solid adamant of his patrician seriousness.

It is unquestionably an interesting problem that is set for us by the fact that with everything its own way, with no lack of means or moral support, our system should bring forth secondary schools which lie helpless under the formidable indictment of Mr. Learned, and universities which lie helpless under the equally formidable indictment of Mr. Flexner. As for our undergraduate colleges, the president of Columbia University, Mr. Butler, was quoted in the press only the other day as saying that they had been trying all through the post-revolutionary period to find an effective substitute for their discarded curriculum, and had not yet succeeded.1 I may remind you of similarly depressing utterances made recently by the late president of Brown, the president of Haverford, Mr. Gauss of Princeton, the late Mr. Giddings of Columbia, and many others. An inquiry made last winter into New York City’s elementary schooling reached the conclusion that many more than one-third of the pupils cannot be dragged through the work assigned them; and this in spite of considerable official pressure upon teachers to promote pupils without too close regard to the quality of their work. At the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Lang said that the type of education offered in our new million-dollar high schools is about one-twentieth as valuable as the kind given in the traditional little red schoolhouse of a generation ago. Last spring, at a conference of educators in Florida, there was practical unanimity, according to the press reports, in the opinion that our educational system is a failure. Mr. Butler again, in a public utterance, permits himself the desponding observation that the results of our educational endeavours “are admitted to be anything but satisfactory.” Only the other day, the head master of Harrow, speaking of the corruption that has set in upon our English speech, observed that England is “exposed to the whole backwash of the United States, where there are a hundred million people who have very little literary tradition.”

I need not continue these depressing citations; you may carry them to any length you like by following the newspapers from week to week. There seems no room for doubt that the quality of our educational system’s product is as unfavourably regarded now as it was thirty-five years ago, and that the force of criticism, professional and lay, against our system has not abated, but rather the contrary. While the systems of Holland, Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany, France, with little money and relatively poor equipment, keep turning out at least a moderately acceptable product, our rich and well-equipped foundations elaborate a product that is on all sides regarded as quite unacceptable. This is a strange state of things, and as I have said, it presents an interesting problem for our examination; a problem which we may presently consider.

2 The last annual report of the Carnegie Foundation, published while this volume was in the press, contains most astonishing testimony on this point.

• 1* The last annual report of the Carnegie Foundation, published while this volume was in the press, contains most astonishing testimony on this point.
• 2It is unquestionably an interesting problem that is set for us by the fact that with everything its own way, with no lack of means or moral support, our system should bring forth secondary schools which lie helpless under the formidable indictment of Mr. Learned, and universities which lie helpless under the equally formidable indictment of Mr. Flexner. As for our undergraduate colleges, the president of Columbia University, Mr. Butler, was quoted in the press only the other day as saying that they had been trying all through the post-revolutionary period to find an effective substitute for their discarded curriculum, and had not yet succeeded.* I may remind you of similarly depressing utterances made recently by the late president of Brown, the president of Haverford, Mr. Gauss of Princeton, the late Mr. Giddings of Columbia, and many others. An inquiry made last winter into New York City’s elementary schooling reached the conclusion that many more than one-third of the pupils cannot be dragged through the work assigned them; and this in spite of considerable official pressure upon teachers to promote pupils without too close regard to the quality of their work. At the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Lang said that the type of education offered in our new million-dollar high schools is about one-twentieth as valuable as the kind given in the traditional little red schoolhouse of a generation ago. Last spring, at a conference of educators in Florida, there was practical unanimity, according to the press reports, in the opinion that our educational system is a failure. Mr. Butler again, in a public utterance, permits himself the desponding observation that the results of our educational endeavours “are admitted to be anything but satisfactory.” Only the other day, the head master of Harrow, speaking of the corruption that has set in upon our English speech, observed that England is “exposed to the whole backwash of the United States, where there are a hundred million people who have very little literary tradition.”