The Theory of Education in the United States

XIII

WE SAID at the outset that this discussion could not be made to lead to any practical, or rather practicable, conclusion, and we are now at the point where we must face that embarrassment. Things being as they are, one’s natural desire is to see what can be done about them. Frankly, I do not see that anything can be done about them. There is no trouble about seeing what might be done, perhaps what should be done, but what can be done is another matter. First let us see what we citizens of the republic of letters, mindful of Plato’s injunction, think might be done. We would say to ourselves first, “The whole theory on which we are working is egregiously wrong, unsound, absurd, and there is no possible compromise with an unsound theory; nature always steps in and exacts her penalty. Ignorance is no excuse with her; good intentions are no extenuation. Our system does many good things, it has much more good in it than bad, but the good things it does are done under the sanction of an unsound theory, and incur the penalties that nature always lays on such enterprises. Therefore the only policy is one of ‘thorough.’ Let us simply discard this unsound theory, and substitute a sound one, one that answers to the facts of experience, just as we discarded Ptolemaic astronomy for Copernican, and as we substituted chemistry for alchemy. Pseudo-equalitarian and pseudo-democratic ideas have no place in educational theory, so let us make a clean sweep of them, and rearrange our practice accordingly.”

This would indeed be no very exorbitant proposal, no more so than a proposal to abandon the geographical theory of Cosmas Indicopleustes or the cosmogony of the book, of Genesis. Yet it could not be carried out; you may perceive at once that it could not be carried out, for very powerful collateral interests have grown up around our theory, tending to hold it firmly in place. Mention of the Mosaic cosmogony suggests a parallel; you are, of course, aware of the very strong institutional interest which we may almost say is built into that theory, and you know how long the strength of that interest has enabled the theory to hold out. You know the story of Galileo’s collision with a similar institutional interest. Some great man of the last generation, I think Professor Huxley, though I am not quite sure, said bitterly that plenty of people would be found to deny the law of gravitation if a collateral interest of this kind were opposed to it. Just here, again for example, comes in the difficulty of discarding or even revising the extraordinary and remarkable official theory on which the United States is attempting to deal with the liquor traffic. Experience has made it clear beyond doubt or peradventure that prohibition in the United States is not a moral issue; it is not essentially, even, a political issue; it is a vested interest.

Our educational system is thus in a plight closely corresponding to that of our economic system. Many people are uneasy about our economic system; as you know, experience is forcibly directing attention to it, with the result that its unsoundness of theory is becoming more and more clearly apparent. Many people think it should be changed, even radically; there is no trouble about seeing just how it should be changed; but nobody is quite prepared to face the enormous deflation that would ensue if it were changed. One is reminded of the story of the boa-constrictor that swallowed a rabbit, then reached through a hole in a fence, and swallowed another. The bulk of the rabbits held the snake’s body immovable in the hole; he could go neither forwards nor backwards. He could have backed out into freedom by disgorging the second rabbit, but he was not prepared to face this deflation; and so he died. Our economic system is in just that situation, and so, in all its essential respects, is our educational system. The general disposition would be to hold tight, like the snake, yielding nothing, and hoping vaguely that some saving intervention might come along to cut in between cause and effect. This disposition is no doubt profoundly unintelligent; the entertainment of this hope is quite unhistorical—no such hope was ever yet rewarded. But we all know that this disposition is what a sound and really effective reform of our system would chiefly have to reckon with.

Here, however, I should like to enter a caveat against possible misunderstanding. My observation of human nature is by no means so superficial as that I should for one moment intimate this disposition to be wholly that of Alexander the coppersmith, arising from individual fear of being put out of business. The revision of our educational theory would of itself put no one out of business; on the contrary, we would all have more business, better business, and be able much more to enjoy our devotion to it. The narrowest trade-unionist view of the situation could discern nothing to be afraid of; better far all round, I should say, if there were everything for it to be afraid of. No, what I have in mind as determining this disposition is chiefly the composite force of inertia, diffidence, preoccupation, a kind of timidity that looks on omne ignotum pro magnifico, infirmity of purpose, the tendency to absorption in one’s immediate interests and surroundings, deference to convention, and so on; all which may be put down as among the weaknesses of our common humanity, and not to be judged on moral grounds too harshly, if at all. Side by side with these goes one very curious and interesting trait, perhaps the most illogical to be found in all human nature’s apparently limitless resources of bad logic; and upon this, on account of its particular interest, I shall dwell for a moment.

I refer to the strange inexplicable loyalty that the average person seems to feel called upon to exercise towards a system out of which he has in one way or another done well, or perhaps only passably well, even though in his heart he disbelieves in it, disapproves of it, and would gladly sacrifice the prospect of any further actual gain for the satisfaction of seeing it abolished. This, too, is not a trait that we need feel called upon to judge. All we need do is to examine it, remark its strangeness, and take account of its bearing on our subject. Let me recount one or two instances where it has fallen under my own observation in what seemed to me a notable way. Four or five years ago I was passing through the lobby of a hotel in New York, in company with an acquaintance who had been one of the world’s foremost financiers, but was then retired. There was a broker’s office in the hotel, and we stopped for a moment to look at the quotations. After we had watched them awhile, my friend said to me in an undertone, “This is a filthy business; we are merely gambling in the sweat of a lot of poor men.” He was very rich; he did not care if he never turned another penny in his life. Moreover, he no longer had any associations or commitments to consider, and no friends who would have thought a whit the less of him for the public expression of his honest opinion on any subject. He also knew the economics of stock-market transactions like a book, knew just what he was talking about, and could give chapter and verse for it to any one who might undertake to discuss their ethics with him. Yet he would never say publicly what he said behind his hand to me; it would be impossible to get him to do it. I urged him to come out with it; business was then running up to the present crisis, and I thought the public expression of his views would do some good, as I still think it might, very probably would, have done. But he never spoke out; and for no conceivable reason except the inhibitions put upon him by this curious, illogical—as far as I can see, indefensible—sense of loyalty to an economic system which he knew was thoroughly bad, for which he felt a corresponding contempt and disgust, but out of which he had done well.

A second instance concerned another friend in the business world, one of the ablest and best men I ever knew, and one of the most successful. You cannot identify him by anything I say, or even identify the part of the world he lives in, so I am risking no breach of promise in speaking of him. I saw him about a month after the great collapse of the stock-market two years ago, and he treated me to a half-hour of the most searching and salty analysis of the situation. In the course of it, to illustrate a point he was making, he told me he had some little holding or other lying around in Wall Street that he had forgotten all about, and could have manipulated a profit of $150,000 on it. “But I didn’t take that profit,” he said, beating his desk with his fist, “and I didn’t take it because —I—didn’t—want it. I didn’t need it; and I knew it would come out of elevator-boys, clerks, manicures, stenographers and all sorts of people who couldn’t afford to lose. I don’t like that kind of money.” Then at once he said, “Now, don’t you ever tell a soul in the world that I have been talking to you in this way.” He was so concerned, you see, lest some one should know he had not played the game by the rules, not taken his profit, not let conventional ethics stand above humanitarian considerations ; he was so fearful of the implied criticism on an economic system which he regarded as despicable but out of which he had done well, that he repeatedly insisted I should never betray him.

So it seems that dissatisfaction with our system, however acute and widespread, is unlikely to take shape in flat abandonment of our educational theory; and short of that, it would appear that nothing can be done which would go any great way towards mending matters, nothing that would bring out the educable person and set him right with the world. The educational system of Continental countries, like Mr. Jefferson’s, tends primarily towards salvaging the educable person, seining him out of the general ruck, and making something of him. It does this easily, naturally, purposefully, because it is not hamstrung by any insane pseudo-equalitarian and pseudo-democratic notions about education; it imports into its practice no such irrelevant nonsense as those notions entail. It is based on the idea that educable persons are relatively few, that their social value is great, that they are accordingly precious and should be enabled to make the most of themselves. It does reasonably well by the ineducable also, but it has no sentimental or romanticist view of his capacities; it gives him such training as he is able to accept, unornamented by finical stuff corresponding to that with which our theory obliges us to decorate our training, such, for example, as our “courses in English,” “reading periods,” and the like. My impression is that the proportion of naturally ineducable persons runs about as high in European populations as in ours. European systems, however, do not go through the specious and immoral pretence of educating them; they do not pretend, that when they are through processing a proverbially refractory raw material, the product is a silk purse or anything in the least like a silk purse. They are realistic, they see things as they are; and they stand in this sharp contrast to our system because their theory is sound, while ours is unsound.

Private enterprise in this country, it is true, might establish a set of institutions for the educable only, consecrated to an unswerving service of the Great Tradition; this would consist of a secondary school, an undergraduate college, and a university comprising the four traditional faculties of Literature, Law, Theology and Medicine. But for obvious reasons this set of institutions would stand a long time with its doors locked, waiting for eligible persons to seek it out. Then when it began to exist as a going concern, it would be existing against all the force of wind and tide, under every temptation to eviscerate itself by concession and compromise. If it kept to its intention, it would of course triumph gloriously in the longrun; but the run would be so long, and the chances of its fidelity so doubtful, that private enterprise, however enlightened and public-spirited, could hardly be expected not to hesitate. Then, too, there is the question of the administration of this wholly alien enterprise. Where the Great Tradition is concerned, “plant” is secondary; throughout the long course of its history, as we have seen, the individual and his groupings have been the primary thing. I am reminded of the profound and delicate words of the Imitation, that superbly profound and delicate work of an author who chose to remain unknown, content that his name should be written only in the Book of Life. “It is a great art” says the author of the Imitation, “to know how to converse with Jesus.” Truly it is; it is an art of which a lifetime’s learning gives but the most beggarly rudiments. Even so may we say that it is a great art to know how to be on living terms with the Great Tradition. We who call ourselves continuators of the Great Tradition are aware with bitterness that in so styling ourselves we are but voicing an aspiration, we are but offering our reverence to a distant, high and unapproachable ideal. We know better than any one can tell us, how slight is our proficiency in the great art of familiar converse with it. Well, then, in a society that not only has lost that art but has lost even the knowledge that such an art exists, a society in which the Great Tradition itself is in complete abeyance—but I think I need say no more, the conclusion is manifest, it is inescapable.