The Theory of Education in the United States

XII

NEVERTHELESS we must be careful to observe that this slighting of the educable person has not been deliberate, wilful or heedless; nor has it ever failed to give rise to great searchings of heart, even among those who are obliged to fall in with it. My impression is, as I have already said—and I give it wholly under correction and for what it is worth—my impression is that a great deal of the general dissatisfaction with our system may be run directly back to this root. I suspect, though I say it with all delicacy and diffidence, that this is largely the ground of Mr. Butler’s discontent, and that the ground of his anxiety is the apparent assurance that, as things stand, nothing in the world can be done about it. Of course, working under the prescription of an impossible theory is attended by a continual sense of frustration, impotence and failure—this is always bound to be the case, it must be so—but I believe that this sense is most acutely felt at this point. I have heard say that professional teachers tend to become petty and ingrowing. I do not know that this is so, but if it be so, there is surely some extenuation to be found in the theoretical conditions under which they exercise their calling.

Mr. Flexner says that “a student of Columbia College may study serious subjects in a serious fashion.” I do not know just what he means by this. On the face of it, the statement is commonplace; anybody anywhere may study serious subjects in a serious fashion. The things to be considered, assuming that he be educable as well as serious, are what he gets out of it, and whether his circumstances permit him to get enough out of it to make his exertions worth while. If Mr. Flexner means that an educable person can in any proper sense of the term get an education in Columbia College, I must disagree with him. I firmly believe that no such thing is possible; and now, with your permission, I will skirt the margin of good taste by saying that I firmly believe no such thing is possible in any American institution with which I am acquainted.

Why should this be so? Let me put it this way: Why is it impossible for Columbia to be a training-school for the ineducable with one side of its being, and an educational institution for the educable with the other? I cannot answer that question. There seems no reason for it a priori. Would not a mere slight mechanical rearrangement easily bring the thing about—so-much institutional energy and attention sluiced off to turn the one set of wheels, so-much sluiced off to turn the other? It would seem so. There is certainly no indisposition on the part of the authorities towards anything of the kind; quite the contrary. There is no prejudice or prepossession against the educable person; all hands are ready to do their best by him, they are more than willing, they would gladly make every effort compatible with the general theory that governs their procedure. So much is true also, probably, of the average run of our institutions; we may at any rate well believe it is true of them. But there seems to be somewhere in the order of nature some obscure and powerful factor making steadily against any sort of success worth speaking of.

When we talk about the order of nature, or a law of nature, we mean no more than a registration of experience. The final “causes of things,” so wistfully apostrophised by Lucretius, seem forever beyond us, even the causes of the most commonplace phenomena. We are fond of thinking we have solved a problem of cause and effect, when all we have done, really, is to move it a step or two backward. We say that when bodies, free to fall, fall always down and never up, they do so in obedience to the law of gravitation; but we really know of no such law. What we mean is that in all human experience free bodies have invariably behaved in that way, and this gives rise to a correspondingly strong expectation that they will continue to behave in that way; but of any “law” compelling them to do so, we know nothing. Some years ago I was in Turin, where bakers were trying to make a certain breadstuff as it was made in Genoa, only a few miles away. They could not do it. They brought down flour from Genoa, they brought down workmen, they even brought down water in casks, they reproduced every condition of Genoese manufacture as far as human intelligence could discern them, but with no success. No one could account for this; probably no one ever will; so we say there was something in the order of nature against the project. One of our physicists, the other day, speaking of a magnet’s pull on steel, said he could clear the problem, perhaps move it one or two steps backward, but as for solving it, the best he could do was to say that the magnet pulled on the steel because God willed it should do so. Consider the simplest and most obvious commonplaces of observation, the periodicity of hay fever, the phenomena of measles or seasickness, or even the distribution of hair on the human body—no one on earth knows or can surmise any more plausible final reason for them than that God wants them to be that way.

Thus I cannot answer our question why our institutions may not deal satisfactorily with the ineducable and the educable at the same time. We only know that with every exercise of good will in the premises, they do not, apparently cannot, and for all we can see, never will; so we say that there seems to be something in the order of nature against their so doing, some principle to which the attempt at this procedure is repugnant. They fought from heaven, cried Deborah; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. In the realm of the spirit, as of the flesh, certain salutary ways, certain lines of wholesome and rewarding procedure, seem to be marked out for us, and we cannot profitably transgress them. Such knowledge of them as we have is empirical and tentative. All we really know of them, indeed, is that they are there; and we remember the noble passage, grand with all the grandeur of a chorus of Æschylus, in which Bishop Butler insists that the imperfection of man’s knowledge is all the greater reason for his strict obedience, as far as his knowledge goes, in order that “he may never make the dreadful experiment of leaving the course of life marked out for him by nature, whatever that nature be, and entering upon paths of his own, of which he can foresee neither the dangers nor the end.”

But a recapitulation of some of the matters that we have already observed will go some way, perhaps, towards making this incompatibility of function seem reasonable. How is it possible, really, as a matter of what old-school psychologists called “the common sense of mankind,” for an institution to affirm a pseudo-equalitarian, pseudo-democratic theory at one end of its campus, and deny it at the other? How can it effectively honour the Great Tradition on one side of the street, and disparage it on the opposite side? How can it effectively maintain a Holmes, Lowell, Adams, Pancoast, Humphreys, Osier, Gildersleeve, in one set of buildings while devoting another set to their practical extermination? One is reminded, though the parallel is possibly not quite exact, of the French painter’s acute observation that art cannot be incorruptible part of the time. One is also reminded of the formula known in economics as Gresham’s law, that “bad money drives out good”; the two cannot exist in circulation side by side, and it is always the good money that is forced out. I do not mean to imply that the work of the training-school is bad money; on the contrary, I have taken pains to express my great respect for it, my appreciation of the need of it, and my wish that it could be extended. I mean only that it is in all respects so different from the work of an educational institution that the attempt to compass both under the same general direction is bound to be ineffectual, and that the mere force of volume would always tend to drive the latter out.