The Theory of Education in the United States

X

WE ARE now in a position, probably, to deal with the little problem which we set ourselves awhile ago, and which for convenience we may now restate. Why is it that our post-revolutionary conditions seem no more satisfactory than our pre-revolutionary conditions? We have done everything to our system that ingenuity can devise and that money can pay for; why, then, does it work no better in point of produce than it ever did? What is the meaning of the general chorus of complaint about it, and what are the specific bearings, the “indications,” as the physicians say, of surveys like those of Mr. Learned, Mr. Flexner, and others? Is it not clear that the whole difficulty lies with the theory upon which we are trying to erect a workable system? Is it not clear also that so long as we persist with an unsound theory, we never can, by any exercise of ingenuity, set up a system that will work any better than ours is now working?

I think there can be no doubt about it. Earlier in these Lectures, you may remember, I suggested a comparison between the product of the Continental university and ours. Compare the material resources, the “plant” and equipment, of, say, a French provincial university and one of ours; and then compare the general run of produce. In this year of depression, sixty-five of our institutions report themselves as proposing to spend $62,500,000 on building alone. Looking at a Continental university and at what comes out of it, one may very seriously ask, What for? By comparison with the “plant” which I see around me here at the University of Virginia, the great University of Bonn, which is in the very aristocracy of German universities, looks like a barrack. What would be the emotions of a really up-to-date, live-wire, go-getting American university-president (I venture to use these terms because in this particular connexion they seem to have passed out of the glossary of slang and into conventional good usage) if he were invited to Poitiers or Montpellier and went to take a look around his new domain? Yet see the produce that comes out of Bonn, Poitiers, Montpellier, and then see what comes out of ours!

The root of the matter is, I repeat, that the Continental institution has no false and fantastic conceptions of equality and democracy to which it must conform, and no inflated notion of the social value of a literate citizenry. We in the United States hear a great deal about the “average student,” and his capacities, needs and desires. The Continental institution feels under no obligation to regard the average student as a privileged person. He is there on his own, if he be there at all, and he finds nothing cut to his measure, no organised effort to make things easy and pleasant for him, no special consideration for his deficiencies, his infirmity of purpose, or the amount or quality of intellectual effort that he is capable of making. Equality and democracy enjoin no such responsibility on these institutions. In the Prussian schools, modelled on the Crown Patronage Schools, you will indeed see the shoemaker’s son sitting between the banker’s son and the statesman’s son, over the same lessons; but equality and democracy, as we popularly understand them, have nothing to do with this. The three boys sit there because they are able to do the work, and it matters not which one of the three, if any, finds it too hard going, and drops out. The upshot of the Continental system’s freedom from unsound notions about equality and democracy is that its processes are selective; “the best geniuses,” as Mr. Jefferson said, are diligently “raked from the rubbish,” and the rubbish is not suffered to clog the workings of the system’s machinery. Our system, on the contrary, is engaged with the rubbish, because the theory of its operation requires it to be so engaged.

Now, since hardly any one is satisfied with the way our system is working, let us see for a moment what the precise grounds are for complaint against it. Suppose we had the reorganization and re-direction of it wholly in our hands, just what changes would we make? It may possibly surprise you a little to hear me say that I would make hardly any actual changes, and those I would make are only such as should enable our system to go on doing no practically what it is doing now, but to do it better. Our dissatisfaction, really, is due only to some vague notion that we ought to be gathering grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. The case therefore, in my judgment, is one that calls for clarification of thought, in the first instance, and when that has taken place, it will be seen that the actual changes in our system which are indicated by clear thought are few and simple. Clear thought, to begin with, reestablishes the distinction between education and instruction or training. Then, since experience shows that the great majority, though quite ineducable, are capable of being trained, it seems to me that our system’s line of development is essentially the right one. There is, obviously, a great social advantage in having a trained citizenry, as there is in having a literate citizenry; but in both cases the advantage is not what we thought it was, but something quite different. There is no political advantage, such as Mr. Jefferson imagined, in having a literate citizenry; experience, I should say, has established this beyond doubt; but an artisan, for example, who can read a slip of printed directions is more of a social asset than one who cannot, for he makes less trouble for other people in getting the hang of his work. Similarly, though the actual civilisation of a society does not especially profit if the ineducable majority are given all the instruction they can take in, its material well-being is in a way to be considerably advanced thereby, and the sum of its happiness is no doubt in a way to be somewhat increased. I speak thus cautiously because this outcome, as you know, depends wholly on the kind of economic system that the society has in force. Under one kind of system, indeed, a trained citizenry may be only the more profitably exploitable in virtue of this superior training, and the advantage in material well-being may thus accrue only the more largely to a small owning and exploiting class. But with due allowance made for these circumstances, one may say broadly that a society is better off for having its ineducables as well trained as they are capable of becoming.

Well, then, here surely is the argument for vocationalism; it is a perfectly sound one, so why not accept it instead of wasting time over others which are not sound, but are on the contrary, quite specious? Here is the ground of justification for the “new million-dollar high school,” for Mr. Butler’s new type of institutional organisation, and for an extension of the elective plan clear to the logical limit of the bargain-counter, grab-bag or drug-store policy. Let us be quite serious about this. There are two distinct points of view. Hitherto we have been considering our system and its institutional life from the point of view of education. Now we are considering them from the point of view of instruction or training. If in the first instance we are perfectly clear in our minds about what it is we wish to do—that is, to train to the best advantage a vast number of ineducable persons—really, is not our system, in all essential respects, pretty well organised to do it, and are not our institutions giving a fairly good account of themselves in point of results? I think so. Then if this be admitted, can any one suggest anything more to the purpose than that our system should remain virtually as it is, and that our institutions should go on doing what they are doing now? I think it very doubtful.

For my own part, if my attention were officially invited to the matter, I should have but two suggestions to offer. At present, our institutions, all the way through the system, feel a certain responsibility, over and above their function as training-schools, for doing as much with education as under their very untoward circumstances they are able to do. This is a great disability, and it should be removed. It is imposed on them only by unclear thinking, as we may see by a moment’s glance at their actual situation. We set up an institution, load it to the gunwales with ineducable persons, proceed to train them in brick-laying, dish-washing, retail shoe-merchandising, or what not, and then insist that there should be somewhere a poor pennyworth of bread thrown in with this intolerable deal of sack. Mr. Butler says that the results accruing to our processes are “admitted to be anything but satisfactory.” But from what point of view? Certainly not from that of the actual intention of the system, of the institution. The only question, really, is whether the persons trained in the institution turn out good bricklayers, shoe-salesmen, dish-washers. If they do—and I am not in a position to say whether they do or not—then I submit that the new type of institutional organisation has done all that can be expected of it, and is entitled to a clean bill. From the point of view of education—the point of view that we have hitherto taken—Mr. Butler’s observation is sound beyond peradventure. But under the circumstances is it competent for him to take that point of view? I cannot see that it is.

It was this thought that prompted my playful reply to my Italian friend, whose comment I mentioned at the outset of these Lectures. He, like Mr. Butler, was vaguely expecting our system to produce something that it is not organised to produce and cannot possibly produce, and was vaguely disappointed at finding no such product. Judged by its intention, I should say, as I said to my Italian friend, that it is doing extremely well; and I suggest that it should be relieved of any responsibility beyond its intention. If the press reports are true, Mr. Henry Ford, in his school for boys at Sudbury, has worked out a plan that seems to correspond exactly with the suggestion that I am making. He takes boys in—presumably all ineducable, as none other would see any reason for going there—and trains them in purely instrumental knowledge with never a grain of formative knowledge from first to last. In this I think he is precisely right; and I venture to think that just this is what all our institutions should be doing, and that a great many more institutions should be set up to do the same thing, for the ineducable are among us as the sands of the sea for multitude.

The other suggestion that I would make is that having thus dropped all pretence to an educational character, our system and its institutions should drop all titles, like that of college and university, which by age-long usage intimate this character. Our system is not educational; we have seen that its fundamental theory makes it impossible to attribute any such character to it. Its institutions are not educational institutions. Why, then, should there be any pretence to the contrary? Nobody, I think, could say more in praise of Mr. Butler’s newer type of institutional organisation than I have just now said. Nobody could be more cordially in favour of it than I am. Yet I repeat that there is great violence and great impropriety in describing it as a university organisation; great violence, in wresting a very old title quite away from anything remotely resembling its traditional significance; and great impropriety, by consequence, in exposing the public, always careless in such matters, to the risk of most serious misapprehension. I noticed the other day in a French newspaper a quotation from the dean of Harvard University’s School of Business Administration. The writer was puzzled, as well he might be, about this novel and anomalous designation, and finally compromised with his conscience by putting the title in quotation-marks, and calling this dignitary the dean of the Faculty of “Affaires.” It seems to me that this trifling incident puts the matter in a clear light. There is nothing in the world wrong with a school of business administration. We ought to have a great many of them, and make them all as good as we can; they are invaluable. But a school of business administration existing as a university Faculty is an inadmissible anomaly, quite as this French editorial writer perceived it to be. Let me take every pains to avoid misunderstanding. The institution with which I am connected is doing a good and great work, a necessary work, and doing it extremely well. Mr. Butler’s ideas of this work, as set forth in his last presidential address are, I think, beyond the reach of cavil or question. If I had my way, I would set up institutions on the same model all over the land. But I think it is most unjustifiable to call this institution a university, because by age-long use-and-wont the title conveys a wholly erroneous notion of the institution’s character and activities. Surely there is nothing discreditable, say, about the name institute; it is in good usage everywhere, and carries just the right notion of what now goes on under the name of university work. As far as I know, there does not exist a university or an undergraduate college, in the traditional and proper sense, anywhere in the country. I cannot see that there would be any conceivable sacrifice of prestige if our institutions honourably and scrupulously gave up a title to which they have but a most questionable right, and called themselves institutes. There is plenty of good precedent for this. The Royal Institute, the Istituto Fisico, the Institute of Science, in our own country the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, your Virginia Polytechnic Institute at Blacksburg, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Stevens Institute, the Rice Institute—the title is an honourable one, and deceives no one by the implication of an improper pretence.

My suggestion would include the suppression of meaningless and misleading individual academic titles as well as institutional titles. As Mr. Flexner has pointed out, there is something monstrous and shocking about the conferring of an academic degree in the liberal arts, on the strength of such qualifications as he cites—wrestling, poultry-raising, advertising research, clothing decoration, and so on. Mr. Flexner has spoken so well and forcefully of this unnatural proceeding that I can add nothing to what he has said. If I should come here and try to impress you by saying that my institution turned out so-many hundred Masters of Arts last year, and would turn out so-many hundred more this year, I should expect you to reply somewhat thus: “Yes, that is all very fine, very good, but what are they like? To bear the degree of Master of Arts is an immense pretension, and noblesse oblige—how are they justifying it? Are they showing disciplined and experienced minds, are they capable of maintaining a mature and informed disinterestedness, a humane and elevated serenity, in all their views of human life? Do they display invariably the imperial distinction of spirit, the patrician fineness of taste, which we have been taught to associate with that degree of proficiency in the liberal arts? We cannot see that the kind of discipline to which you say they have been subjected, has any such bearing. Gymnastics, copy-editing, stenography, food-etiquette, home laundering, and such like, are commendable pursuits, and we are all for having them well and freely taught, but we cannot see that they tend in the least towards what we have always understood an advanced degree in the liberal arts to mean. Therefore if you ask us to congratulate you on the number of your graduates, we must first have a look at their quality.”

But if our system is doing as well as all this, you may say, if it turns out to be so much on the right track, after all, why trouble oneself about it, especially if the only changes one can suggest are a trifling matter of nomenclature and the suppression of a little forced play with formative knowledge? Well, I do not press either suggestion, even though I think that the matter of nomenclature is important because words have power. “The range of words is wide,” says Homer; “words may tend this way or that way.” A just care for words, a reasonable precision in nomenclature, is of great help in maintaining one’s intellectual integrity. One can easily cheat oneself with words; one can as easily intoxicate oneself with them. But we may let this go; I should not be over-critical of our system on these grounds; I should not be disposed, in fact, to bear very heavily on its defects when reckoned against its excellences, were it not for just one matter to which we have not yet directed our attention.