The Theory of Education in the United States

XI

THIS matter is the status of the educable person. Hitherto our observations have been only upon the status of the ineducable in our régime; we have said nothing about the educable. Such persons exist among us, and in about as considerable numbers, I should say, as exist elsewhere. With reference to them we may observe, first, that they are socially valuable, they are a potential asset; and second, that our system does not, and by the conditions of its theory cannot, do anything whereby we may realise on their value. They simply go to waste, and as matters stand, they must do so. This consideration is the only thing that has seemed to myself to justify me in occupying your attention with this subject; the only thing, in fact, that makes the subject interesting to me. Our system, our new type of institutional organisation and influence, does everything, probably, that can be done for the ineducable, for the motor-minded, for all types among those we have been considering. All honour to it for that! Clearly, then, if everybody were motor-minded, ineducable, without hope of development beyond adolescence, it would be an excellent system indeed. If, again, the educable individual were socially valueless, one would be sorry for his misfortunes, of course, but one would hardly feel it worth one’s while to parade them before this assemblage, nor could one hope to arouse more than an eleemosynary interest in them. But if the educable person be admitted to exist among us and to be worth developing; and if it be shown that our system not only does not, but under its theory cannot, direct and promote his due development, then, I think, the time that we have devoted to the examination of this theory has not been spent in vain.

We need not waste words over the assumption that the educable person exists here. We have always had him with us, so it would be fair to suppose a priori that his breed has not completely died out. Besides, we occasionally see him; not often, but often enough to suggest that he does not exist as a mere survival, a dodo solitarius, but that he is produced about as regularly as ever. We need not, I repeat, occupy ourselves with his vital statistics. We may, however, briefly examine one or two of our main reasons for thinking that the educable person is, from a social point of view, worth consideration, and that in behalf of the common welfare, something should be made of him.

The educable person, in contrast to the ineducable, is one who gives promise of some day being able to think; and the object of educating him, of subjecting him to the Great Tradition’s discipline, is to put him in the way of right thinking, clear thinking, mature and profound thinking. Now, the experienced mind is aware that all the progress in actual civilisation that society has ever made has been brought about, not by machinery, not by political programmes, platforms, parties, not even by revolutions, but by right thinking. One feature appears with unfailing regularity upon the long panorama of human activity which our discipline exhibits to us. We see there that every social enterprise, every movement, every policy, which was not conceived in right thinking and carried out under the direction of right thinking, has in the long-run cost more than it came to. Nature, if you like that term, has levied a fine on it, proportioned with interesting precision to the degree of its departure from the counsels of right thinking. Our discipline enforces no more weighty and memorable lesson than this. Nature takes her own time, sometimes a long time, about exacting her penalty, and often gets at it by strange, unexpected and roundabout ways; but exact it in the end she always does, and to the last penny. It would appear, then, that a society which takes no account of the educable person, makes no place for him, does nothing with him, is taking a considerable risk; so considerable that in the whole course of human experience, as far as our records go, no society ever yet has taken it without coming to great disaster. It has been tried before; as I said, the testimony of our discipline is most impressively explicit on this point. It has been tried before by societies relatively as rich, powerful, self-assertive and self-congratulatory as ours—the glib complacency of Mr. Hoover in his public utterances is, one may say, word for word the glib complacency of Cleon or of Trajan in theirs—but none has ever yet succeeded in safely putting that risk at defiance.

At present our society is in most serious economic difficulties. The truly mature person, bred in the Great Tradition, could at any time have reached into his accumulation of experience and found a match for each one of these difficulties, and for every circumstance of each, every sequence of cause and effect. The happenings of the last eight or ten years have simply added another set of stereotyped registrations to his stock of experience. There is nothing new about them, nothing strange or unpredictable. Yet I am sure you have remarked, as I have, the extraordinary, the unconscionable incompetence with which these happenings have been met by those whom our society regards as its “leaders of thought.” Indeed, the universality of this incompetence and its incredible degradation are perhaps all that puts a distinguishing mark on the circumstances of the period. I may give one example. One of the men most in the public eye holds a high place in industry and finance. All his sayings and doings are made much of in the press, which represents him as a person of almost unearthly wisdom. His prominence in some international transactions a short time ago made his name a household word. I think, though I am not quite sure, that he holds an honorary degree from Columbia University. After the depression had been running for about a year, a friend of mine who knows him very well met him, and said, “I suppose you have learned a good deal in these twelve months; tell me what you have learned.” “Yes, indeed,” he replied. “We have learned that it won’t do to reduce wages.” Think of it! To have gone through a year of economic convulsions of catastrophic importance, and to have learned that! One might suppose that the survivor of a deluge, say some Hasisadra or Noah, or one who had lived through the subsidence of Atlantis, as Plato describes it, would see point to digging into the natural laws that govern such happenings and finding out all he could about them, in the hope of turning up something that might be useful in the event of their threatened recurrence. Suppose you met one of these survivors and asked what he had learned from his experience, and he told you with a great air of finality that he had learned that it is a good thing to go in when it rains! A most incompetent answer, you would say, a childish answer, the effort of an immature, ineducable mind. Yet not one whit more so than the answer given by this person, to whom the nation, in a sense, looks up.

You may easily see the bearing that all this has upon our subject. If you are not by this time tired of having me use my university as a corpus vile for anatomical purposes, I will venture to bring it forward once more. Last summer, in a speech at Paris, Mr. Butler spoke of Russian economic competition and the Five-Year Plan. He made the excellent and salutary observation that the Five-Year Plan, whether a good, bad or indifferent plan, was a plan, and that the rest of the world was planless. “I have great concern for the man with a competing social and economic system, if we do not demonstrate the supremacy of ours. I have great concern for the man with a plan, competing with a planless world.” This is admirable; it touches the marrow of our good sense. “What I ask for,” Mr. Butler continued, “is a plan; a plan to solve problems that have become international. Not to sit and wait, not to stand and wait, not to abuse the people with a plan, but to present a better plan.…”

Just so. It seems competent then, in the first instance, to say to Mr. Butler, “You ask for a plan—very well, produce one. Produce one that shall take strict and logical account of every economic factor in the situation. It can be done. But the plan must be one that shows the same integrity of purpose in its construction that is apparent in the Five-Year Plan; otherwise it will get nowhere. Do not speak of the League of Nations; we have seen leagues of nations before, all the way back to the Amphyctionic League; we know all about them, what their real purpose and function are, and we can recognise at a glance every specious pretext under which these have ever been disguised. Do not, moreover, give your plan a political character or attempt a political approach to the problems with which it proposes to deal. We know what political government is, its history, and the limitations under which it must work, the limitations put upon it by its primary intention and character, and there is no use trying to make anything in the realm of politics and statecraft stand up to the Five-Year Plan; the first collision will break it into kindling-wood.”

So we might say; and Mr. Butler could produce such a plan with no great effort and no very heavy investment of originality. But producing a plan is not everything; one must also get it accepted, and the first thing needful towards getting it generally accepted is its acceptance by a body, large or small, of informed and intelligent opinion. Now, suppose Mr. Butler produced his plan, could he find in this country, or could there be found for him, such a body of opinion to understand, accept and support it? Quite clearly no such body of opinion could be found. Those who most naturally would first take the plan under review are such as the gentleman I just now mentioned as having learned so much from the country’s recent economic experiences—one could run off their names from memory, hardly missing a single one—and you can imagine what that order of intelligence would make of it. Your imagination will at once supply, without any aid from me, a sense of what the upshot of the plan would be, and this will be enough, and more than enough, to convince you that Mr. Butler’s demand for a plan amounts to a counsel of perfection.

Well, then, that being so, it seems to me quite competent for us to turn on Mr. Butler, and ask what Columbia University has been about all these years. If it had retained the character of an educational institution, devoting itself to educating educable persons, making this its primary interest, it would now, probably, by itself alone, be contributing a pretty fair quota towards a body of opinion intelligent enough, at least, to know a sound plan when it saw one. Formerly, Columbia turned out a respectable number of such individuals. The educable person is still here in the raw, and a few of his kind, as a finished product, would come in uncommonly handy at the moment. What has Columbia to say in the premises? What has our whole educational system to say?

The question is pertinent. The sum of the matter is that when circumstances tighten up, and profound, disinterested thought is called for, it becomes manifest that the newer type of institutional organisation and influence does not fill the bill. One may say generally that in its utter helplessness with the educable person it does not fill the bill in any circumstances. We citizens of the republic of letters have no wish to escape the responsibility of saying just this, and we do say it. But in particular we remark also that at times like the present the anti-social character of this type of organisation is most clearly apparent. Our society can get along for considerable periods by the process known as “muddling through,” in more or less cheerful disregard of the absence of thought and intelligence. We take up the tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, our images—Mr. Coolidge’s two-gallon hat and Mr. Henry Ford’s conveyor-system—and follow the star of our god Buncombe along ways which seem not too insecure. But occasionally circumstances arise which make it imperative that some one should do some thinking, even as Mr. Butler suggests; and in its utter incompetence with the only person among us who gives promise of ever being able to think, our newer type of institutional organisation has failed us so notably that the term anti-social, applied to its character, seems neither unjust nor inurbane.