CHAPTER VII

TO “BE” OR TO “DO”

TO “BE” OR TO “DO”

I

A recent writer in a privately printed volume on education begins with the sentence: “What is the matter with our schools?—Everything.” I would not go quite as far as that in a blanket indictment of our educational system, but I must confess that to an outside but interested observer the system appears to be more and more hopelessly uncertain of where it is trying to go or what it is trying to do—a welter of “isms” in a sea of expense, without the slightest agreement as to basic aims.

In looking back, it is of course very easy to underrate the real influence of one’s teachers. In the past couple of days I have happened to note both Gibbon’s characterization of his Oxford days as the most unprofitable of his whole career, and Henry Adams’s of his four years at Harvard as wasted. I have often, however, tried to estimate just what my education did for my own incomparably less powerful mind. I must have had in all, I think, about twelve or thirteen years, and as I look back on them I am impressed with the appalling waste of time and effort. I was naturally a bookish and studious boy. I began collecting my library when I could not have been more than ten or twelve, and was an eager student, yet I was taught Latin, German, and French, with the result that I never could read either of the first two without a dictionary. In conversation I never could speak more than a sentence of any of the three, and I have never known an American student who could—that is, merely as a result of his studying a language in school and college. Yet, at thirty-five, I taught myself in a few months more Persian than I had ever learned of Latin in several years’ drudgery in boyhood. I remember, during the war, meeting on the street in Paris a young French lad of about twelve, of the better class, who stopped me and asked where he could get for his collection one of the insignia which I was wearing as an American officer. He spoke English fluently and, on my asking where he had learned it, he replied, somewhat surprised, “Why, at school.” In America, with all the colossal expenditure on buildings, that is a feat which, so far as I know, no American school has ever accomplished for one of its pupils.

Of history as I may have been taught it, I can remember nothing. So far as I can now discern, all my historical knowledge, moderate as it is, has been acquired by reading, long years subsequent to the ending of my formal “education.” That I do not remember facts from my years spent on “American,” “Ancient,” and “European” history may be due to a poor memory, but apparently history was taught merely _as_ facts. The rudiments of spelling and mathematics have undoubtedly been useful. As far as my institutional education was concerned, the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and music were simply nonexistent. I never heard a word about the world of delight to be found in them or of their possible influence on the life of the spirit. Of my struggles with grammar there remains nothing, not a single rule, so laboriously studied. I came of a cultured family and learned at home to use my mother tongue with a moderate degree of correctness. On the other hand, from my experience with country people in a village where I was on the Board of Education, I could not see that if they did not speak correctly by home training, they ever learned to do so in school. Of my physics and chemistry I have only hazy recollections. From mineralogy, geology, physiology, psychology, and zoology much less remained to me than from botany which I taught myself, learning, without forgetting, to name the trees and wildflowers and something of the general science.

I have always been greatly interested in philosophy, and I well recall with what anticipations I went from my small college to Yale to get what I thought would be a genuine initiation into the subject under the late Professor Ladd. Never were a student’s hopes doomed to more swift and complete annihilation. As I recall it, in his course he lectured to over three hundred students. During the lectures some of his audience read novels, some newspapers, while a few “grinds” like myself ruined their handwriting trying to keep up with the lecturer in their note-taking. After another hour’s work in my study rewriting the notes, I had a lecture written in longhand that was far inferior in exactness and proper expression to any chapter in a textbook that Ladd might have written, and after two hours’ waste of time I had merely reached the point of having an imperfect text to study.

With the exception of one Japanese, none of the students whom I happened to know took the slightest interest in the subject. I had hoped that there might be opportunity, so essential in philosophy above all other studies, for some direct play of mind between my own uninstructed one and that of the instructor. There never was. The professor was a mere unapproachable oral textbook. Nevertheless, he had the illusion that studying “under him” _had_ induced some play of mind among his novel-readers, and for that reason he used to give out the examination questions at the year’s end so that the student might give original thought to them. Five of my friends were among the novel-readers. Having paid no attention to the course the entire year, they got me to sit under the apple trees at Ik Marvel’s place, and for a couple of afternoons before the examination I talked over the questions with them. They all passed, with higher marks, I believe, than I did myself, and received Yale’s _imprimatur_ that they were proficient in philosophy.

Since I had completely lost the desire to teach which had taken me to the University, I took my Master’s degree and let a Ph.D. go hang. I have never regretted the step, though I have no illusions as to the self-educated man’s being as well trained as one who has had a genuine education. Thus ended mine, which had cost me a dozen years and my father certainly a minimum of six thousand dollars, pre-war. If it be objected that things are different to-day, I may add that I see no evidence of it; instead, I see an even greater confusion of aim and method. Not long ago I asked a well-known professor at one of the largest and best-known universities in the East what, in his candid opinion, his university did for the many thousands of students who annually attended it. After a moment’s thought he said that as far as he could see, the university turned out a standardized, low-grade mental product, much like an intellectual Ford factory.

II

It is my experience that the professors themselves are getting thoroughly tired of the overorganization and intellectual aimlessness of our modern educational institutions. To a great extent they themselves are caught in the mill. I think that America is the only civilized country in the world where what a man _does_ counts for so much more than what he _is_, and where the general public, having no cultural standard by which to judge what a man is, takes as the basis of appraisal solely the visible signs of what presumably he has “done.” A college degree has come to have a perfectly absurd value in the eyes of the public, not only in regard to the graduates of an institution, but in connection with the teaching staff. It is practically impossible for a man who has not obtained his Ph.D. label to progress far in teaching as a profession. I cannot imagine any leading European university, such as Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, caring in the slightest whether a man who was otherwise qualified to teach within its halls had any degree at all, but every little picayune college or “university” of the fifteen hundred or more scattered over the United States has been seized with the Ph.D. mania. A member of the faculty of one of the oldest institutions in the country, who receives many requests from southern and western colleges for suitable men to teach on their staffs, told me that the one _sine qua non_ on which they all insisted in their applications was that the candidate must have received his Doctor’s degree. Otherwise, no matter how well educated, how brilliant intellectually, how good a teacher, the door was closed to him.

A year or two ago I was talking with a very successful teacher of English literature in a prominent school for girls. She had only an A.B. but was soon, after many years’ work, to have her sabbatical year. With sound instinct she wished to spend that year in England, becoming more familiar with the background of her subject, browsing as she wished among the masterpieces of the literature, and, at the end, bringing back to her pupils a wider knowledge, a deeper insight, and a freshened enthusiasm. But, no. She had reached the limit of salary to which she could ever attain with only an A.B., and therefore she felt it necessary to spend the year in the soul-killing routine of taking “English courses” at an American university to obtain an A.M. According to the American educational system, there was never a question of what she _was_, of what she could give to her pupils, of how, for their sake and her own, she could best spend that precious year outside the schoolroom, but of what tangible label she could wear, indicating to parents what she had “done.” The pages of school and college catalogues listing the faculty must be scattered over with degrees, or the institution is suspect.

To a certain extent this might seem to be placing the responsibility on the public, but as is so often true in speaking of American education, we find ourselves arguing in a vicious circle. As Everett Dean Martin has well said, “The school cannot evade the responsibility for the present low level of mental life in this republic.” Considering the enormous outlay for public education and the colossal sums represented by the endowments of our private institutions, we have a right to ask why, when educators have had resources undreamed of in any other land, they have created merely a muddled system and a general level of cultural attainment among our people below that of any one of eight or more European countries.

In so far as there appears to be any definite trend in American educational aims, it would seem to be toward President Eliot’s ideal of “power and service”—one of the most baneful phrases, I fear, ever let loose by an educator upon an uneducated people. The stress is laid wholly upon the “doing.” We have, more particularly in innumerable smaller colleges, courses in cost accounting, in real estate selling, in “business English,” household decoration, basketball coaching as a profession, poultry raising, personnel management—all counting for “points” with philosophy or literature or science.

I cannot see that, as a general rule, American universities or colleges leave the slightest cultural impress upon those who attend them. Once out in the world, the ideals and the interests of most of the university men are identical with those of any “go-getter” who, since leaving high school, has been learning his trade of stockbroking or real estate selling or manufacturing in the world of experience. A man who has attended the Harvard Business School may indeed get ahead a bit faster than his less-tutored competitor, but that is because of his specific technical training, similar to that of a cabinetmaker or lawyer. Some corporations, after exhaustive research, have come to the conclusion that a “college man” is likely to prove more valuable in the competition of business than one who is not; but that may be explained on many grounds quite divorced from education. College men come from a class that is at least moderately well up in the economic scale, with all that this implies in producing a superior animal—good air, food, and the rest. Moreover, a college man has four years more of such things than has the non-college class. Then there are the social knowledge, the friendship, and the “mixing” experience gained in college. But none of these advantages is in any way related to the main business of a university in its undergraduate department, which is, to provide a cultural background and an education. The mere fact that the graduate is a better money-maker has nothing to do with that.

“For power and service.” This phrase not only expresses a utilitarian view of education, but, in the true American spirit of haste, it has tended to emphasize the desire not only for “results”—that is, “practical” results—but immediate ones. It has emphasized our belief that “culture” either is something to help one in his economic career or else is a mere fandangle ornament for those who wish to “put on side”—not something vital in one’s own spiritual growth. American education cannot be considered as disconnected from all the shortcuts advertised in almost every American journal—the fifteen-minute-a-day French courses that will enable you to entertain the representative of a foreign firm and in a week astonish your employer into raising your salary fifty per cent; or the scrapbook of the world’s wisdom that will enable you to impress your hostess and to become popular in cultured society by a few moments a day; or the five-foot shelf that will make you the intellectual equal of the lifelong student. The American has no use for the old Greek saying that “good things are hard.” He wants knowledge and wisdom without striving. His education has taught him no other path or ideal. If knowledge and culture are only for “power and service,” why not buy them “canned,” if it is possible, much as he stops at the service station to fill up with gas?

As compared with the “plants” of all our educational institutions in America, those of Europe make but a shabby showing for the most part—but they appear to get results that ours do not. There are idle students everywhere in all lands, but one cannot help comparing the mental outlook of the graduate of the high schools or “gymnasiums” or the universities abroad with those here at home and finding there a something which our students do not have—a maturity and a character.

The matter may be subjected to certain rough ways of measuring results as well. Leaving out such intellectual world centers as Paris, I may mention such a smaller town as Amsterdam, generally considered a mere minor trading and industrial center. In wandering about the streets of this northern Venice, one not only finds bookshops everywhere, but displayed in them the latest books, in four languages, on science, philosophy, and the arts. This fact speaks eloquently for the results attained by Dutch education of whatever sort it may be. There are plenty of cities in the United States of the same population—under seven hundred thousand—in which it would be difficult to get in even one language a tenth of the books offered at Amsterdam in four. Again, in the twenty-eight years that the Nobel Prize in literature has been offered, it has never yet been won by an American, though winners have come from practically every country in Europe and even from the Orient. Again, if we leave genius out of account and consider only the cultured public, we find that the number of books published in various countries in proportion to units of ten thousand inhabitants gives the following table:

Denmark 11.4 Latvia 9.5 Holland 9.0 Germany 5.2 Norway 4.7 France 3.8 Great Britain 3.0 United States .85

Even such “backward” nations, according to our ideas, as Spain, Russia, and Poland produce more books in the above ratio than do we—the most abundantly supplied with money for education of all the nations in the world!

III

Our errors are fairly evident. For one thing, our democracy has harmed our education in two directions. On the one hand we have to a great extent turned over our public educational system to the people, although the weakest point in American life is perhaps its lack of public responsibility. Our city, and not seldom our state, politics are a byword and a hissing, a sink of corruption and ignorance; yet it is usually to them that we leave the selection of the membership in our Boards of Education. The cry is also raised that public money should be spent only in giving the public what it wants—and, in its uneducated and uncultured soul, what it wants is anything but a “liberal education.” It all too often wants but two things: the ability to earn a better living; and the label of having been educated—a diploma or degree certifying that the recipient is as good as any of the genuinely educated classes. As Lessing wrote a century and a half ago:

The iron pot longs to be lifted up By tongs of silver from the kitchen fire That it may think itself a silver urn.

This situation would be bad enough were it limited to the public school and state university systems; but, as a competent critic has recently pointed out, too many of the private colleges and universities have “gathered up their academic gowns” and run after the mob “offering academic standing to anything for which there is a popular demand.”

Democracy, universal education, and high wages in the laboring class have had another unfortunate influence upon education by swamping our institutions with students who, although some are admirable, have in all too many instances no background at all, no desire to be really educated, and no power of becoming so. For this reason there has been a general movement during the past five years to simplify the wording of textbooks in all the higher grades of school, and even in our universities a professor has to choose his words with great care. I am told that even at Harvard a professor dare not speak of a king as having been “crowned,” for fear that the students will think he has been knocked on the head! Thus a student coming from a home with cultural background, with an intelligent mind, and a desire to learn, has to be held back to a pace no faster than can be kept by the son of an ironpuddler or a carpenter. This is no negligible point. As the Greeks said, “One comes to limp who walks with the lame.” The attempt to bring about mass production in education has thrown enormous responsibility upon, and created almost insoluble problems for, our educational leaders. A few generations ago the larger number of students in our higher educational institutions either came from well-to-do homes or else were boys of unusual gifts or ambitions. If a boy is really to receive the foundation of a liberal education by the time of his graduation from college, it is evident that what the college has to teach the boy who comes from one class of society is quite different from what it has to teach one from another. Education is far from being a mere matter of “book learning”, though many are apt so to consider it. A person is far from being “educated” when his mind has merely been crammed with facts for four or even seven years.

Man is more than an intellectual machine, and a genuine education should develop and enable him to realize and utilize all sides of his nature. He is, for example, as much an æsthetic and an emotional creature as he is a reasoning one. Indeed, fundamentally he is more so. He reacted to emotion long before he began to reason, and developed art long before he did science, history, and all the rest of what now goes under the old term “book larnin’.” In America, the emotional and æsthetic sides of man’s nature, so deeply imbedded in it, are starved to an extent that they are almost nowhere in Europe. The great mass of our population, for example, rarely sees a really beautiful building. Compare the churches scattered all over the land with those which are the inheritance of the poorest in almost every community, however small, in England, France, Italy, Spain and other European countries. The great mass of our people, again, rarely see any genuine and beautiful sculpture. It is the same with painting. Not only are our greater museums poor in comparison with those of Europe but the distances are so great that the bulk of our people are hardly brought into contact at all with examples of really great art. In practically every country in Europe not only can some of the finest art be reached by almost anyone in a few hours’ travel at most, but a man living almost anywhere can, in no more time than it takes to go from New York to Chicago, see all the greatest galleries, London, Paris, the Hague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Dresden, Florence, Rome, and the rest. In music it is much the same, although not to quite the same extent. America is practically a musical desert as compared with the life of ordinary people in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, or Denmark.

When the “privileged classes” are mentioned it is usually in an invidious sense, but there is a very real and inescapable way in which a boy brought up in a family which is cultured and which at least has money for travel is privileged as compared with the boy brought up in a home and a general environment that is not cultured and who has never seen anything beyond fifty miles from his village or small town until he goes to college. In the first case, a very large part of the boy’s education has been carried on outside of college altogether. Social intercourse and foreign travel have given him certain elements of education utterly beyond the reach of the other. There is all the difference in the world, for example, between reading about the cathedral of Chartres and standing in it. In our emotional and æsthetic lives it is even more true than in other respects that we learn by experience. How are we really to educate the vast mob of boys and girls now crowding into our colleges, whose experience has been limited to the architecture of our Main Streets, learning the names of Beethoven and the other composers (or getting garbled versions of their works on radio or Victrola), and whose experience of great painting and sculpture is at most limited to black and white pictures in some book on art?

For the “privileged classes” college education in a way is supplementary education, but for a large part of those now crowding into the fifteen hundred colleges of America it is the whole of their education, and if it is limited to books, and, even worse, largely limited to what may be learned from books for the purely practical art of making a living, is it any wonder that the ideal and conception of “education” and “culture” are steadily narrowing? It must be remembered also that the college graduates of today will consider themselves the “educated” class of the future, and with the public largely in control of education, what will they consider education to be if they have been told they themselves were educated enough to get their degrees by studying chicken-raising with a little history and other things thrown in for the looks of it?

The self-educated person has all the handicaps of a first explorer in a new land. He may not always take the right roads. He does not see the country as a whole. He has to waste much time finding out things that everyone will know when the country has been well mapped. A genuine education should be of immense help in orienting us in the uncharted lands of the spirit. But that is just where so much current education fails us. It is merely a hodge-podge of miscellaneous and uncoördinated information that leaves the mind almost as bewildered at the end as at the beginning. Occasionally, indeed, given a strong mind, a self-educated person seems to have a better understanding of what education is than our educators. I have before me a remarkable letter from a workman, whose schooling stopped at the age of twelve. Being the eldest of a family of eight he then had to go into a factory, and though his position has much improved he is still in a factory, nor is he there in an executive job. From twelve to sixteen he put in ten hours a day of the most exhausting physical toil, but continued his studies in history by himself. From history he proceeded to philosophy, and the sciences of psychology, biology, physiology and physics. In translations he has read such French authors as Rabelais, Villon, France, Barbusse, Rolland, Proust, etc. Later he developed a taste for poetry, apparently becoming interested first through Keats and Tagore. Of music, he writes me: “I am fairly well acquainted with the best music, having attended symphonies, concerts and organ recitals since I was eighteen or nineteen years old. I used to take what little money I had left after paying my board and go off to Pittsburgh alone to hear the New York, Philadelphia or Chicago orchestras perform. My taste for music was not created by the modern radio concerts. I acquired it from seeing and hearing Paur, Herbert, Stock, Damrosch, Muck and others.” Much of his recent reading has been in Bosanquet, Alexander, Eddington, Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. He does not own a car but spends his holiday time hiking and studying nature as far from cars as he can get. He is bringing up his children and trying to instil into them the idea that education is much more than learning how to get a living; and incidentally he says he has found some of the secrets of a contented life.

I admit that here we have a very unusual case, but is it too much to ask of an educational system which, at vast expense, takes a child at four or five and now carries him on to twenty or so, that it should succeed in doing for the student a little something of what this man has done for himself? What, among other things, has he taught himself? The joys of exact knowledge in science, of speculation in philosophy, the joys of nature, of music, of rational recreation and sane expenditure, and “some of the secrets of a contented life.” How many American colleges of today would have given him as rounded an education as that?

Let us read another letter that is on my table. It is from a woman in one of the largest, wealthiest and most populated states in the Union, the public school system in which should be of the best. She began as a school teacher herself. “No doubt I did the work badly enough,” she modestly writes, “but I did like to work with children and I began to study them. Then and there I became a rebel against the methods and system advocated and I departed from them just as much as I dared. After five years of teaching I married. Ten years ago my little daughter was born. Here was my opportunity to do as I pleased, for a while at least. I began by interesting her, talking to her as if she had a mind when she was a tiny baby. Before she was six months old, she had spoken several words plainly enough to be understood by disinterested persons. At thirteen months she was making sentences. Before she was three years old she was reading script and print. The most delightful books I could find were procured for her. Of her own volition she was learning much each day. She had no lessons. In her little _Readers_ she began anywhere her fancy dictated. An eighth grade geography was worn out and another was procured. She browsed among the books we owned; at four reading from Holmes and Longfellow. At five she had read Poe and Hawthorne. At six years old I found her reading Emerson’s essay on the Intellect. She had nature books and travel books, and we thought she was doing splendidly at home but to conform to custom at “half past six” we sent her to school (rural). She didn’t fit anywhere. She was more interested in the work the eighth grade pupils were doing than that of the lower grades. Fortunately she had a tactful teacher. He did the best he could with her, finally placing her in fourth grade.” The next year, under a teacher unfitted for her work, the child lost all interest. The following year she was kept home, “doing most excellent work”. The next year she returned to school and for seventh grade work was given reading, spelling, grammar, arithmetic, penmanship, geography, local state history, United States history, physiology and health education. “At the end of the term the County Superintendent gives a final examination. Beginning at 8 o’clock the children write on all these subjects and also on Reading Circle books. They have till five o’clock to finish.... The County Superintendent gives the teachers the hint that final questions will be based on questions sent out through the term, so the teachers attempt to get the children to memorize the answers to these questions. There is a good cram before the examination. Of course most of them pass.” The mother now faces the dilemma of continuing the ten year old child in school where she loses her interest and desire to learn, or teaching her at home which means that she will not have that shibboleth, a diploma, essential economically for almost any sort of job.

Here again, we may say, is an exceptional case, but it illustrates one of the most serious defects in our general education. That is that the educational system from bottom to top is coming to be operated more and more for the benefit of the unintelligent and not the intelligent. An educational system that is operated with public money should be run, so the easy logic runs, for the benefit of the public, all the public. Of course, the more of the public that enters the schools, the lower the work of the schools must be. Here and there there may be in a poor home an exceptionally keen and alert childish mind. Here and there is a poor home in which the parents are intelligent and do all possible to develop the child’s mind and provide it with a stimulating mental environment. But we know these are exceptional cases and not the rule. With the lowered quality of teachers themselves, due to over-demand owing to mass classes, and with the teaching geared lower and lower to meet the requirements of a lower standard of pupil, from kindergarten to college, is not the chance for the really intelligent child getting less and less? How can an intelligent child from a home where intelligent and ambitious and mentally alive parents help to kindle all the child’s interests and tastes be expected to take any interest in class work which is keyed to the rate of progress and general capacity of dull-witted children from homes that are cultural vacuums?

In many lines of private business and, I believe, in all government positions, a high school diploma is now essential. It has thus come to have an economic value, which has operated on education in two ways. It sends an enormous number of educationally unfit through the mill, not because they want an education but because they want the certificate that admits them to a job. If they could buy one for ten dollars they would much prefer to do so. This degrades the ideal of education in the minds of pupils and teachers alike, by making it serve primarily an economic and not a humane end; and it hampers the education of the intelligent pupil by dragging him down to the level of the vastly more numerous unintelligent. Democracy considers it undemocratic to spend public money on the few. It must be spent on the many, but the many are not the equals of the few, and there is no escaping the conclusion that our public educational system as we have it now, throughout every grade, must sacrifice the intelligent, fit few to the supposed advantage of the heavy-minded, unfit many. I do not speak of the few and the many in any snobbish sense. It is reasonable to admit that a child brought up in a stimulating home environment, with all the advantages that a background of culture and experience in its parents, and perhaps grandparents, implies, meeting interesting people, hearing interesting things discussed, and with other “privileges,” is more apt to be fit than one brought up in a dull, commonplace home with none of these advantages. It is also reasonable to admit that the number of homes of the first type are few and of the latter, many. It is in that sense that I use the words few and many.

Our great democracy claims to base its future upon education. On that, its spokesmen tell us, it must stand or fall; but, we ask, what sort of education? Is it to be one aimed chiefly at getting ahead in the world, at getting a white-collar job instead of a manual one, an executive instead of a clerical one, and so on? Or is it to be an education that shall teach us, whatever our economic rank and position, to get the best out of life, to live fully and joyfully, to think sanely, to act wisely?

In a recent article, the President of Yale asks educators: “Is your philosophy of higher education aristocratic, or is it democratic? Do you conceive the colleges as properly the homes of the children of the upper classes (whatever that may mean in America) where an agreeable social experience may be indulged in for four years, or do you regard them as centers of a robust intellectual life to be enjoyed by all who possess the qualifications of mind and character enabling them to profit by the opportunities offered? Are you uncompromisingly committed to a stereotyped conception of ‘liberal’ education, or do you recognize the unquestioned dynamic of vocational and professional interests?”

With all respect to President Angell this seems to me the most amazingly misleading series of questions I have ever read from a man of such academic standing. Why try to befuddle the issue by speaking of an “aristocratic” and a “democratic” education? Does he mean by the first a cultural education and by the latter a vocational one? Or does he mean by the first one which can be pursued by intelligent minds and by the second one suited to minds less so? I can readily see the difference between cultural and vocational, and can see that different grades of minds are capable of proceeding to different lengths in the pursuit of either of these two sorts of education, but I fail to see what he means by aristocratic and democratic so applied. The whole series of questions appears to me perilously like an appeal to popular prejudice rather than an honest attempt to set the problem clearly before us. It is clear what he intends by the high-sounding phrase “unquestioned dynamic of vocational and professional interest.” In plain English it means money-making as an incentive to study and regarded as the end of education. Yet the only alternative Dr. Angell places before the public is what he calls, evidently intending to discredit any alternative, “a stereotyped conception of ‘liberal’ education.” I deny most obstreperously that these are the only alternatives and I do not hesitate to assert that by putting the list of questions as he has, Dr. Angell, so far from doing anything to clarify the public mind on the problem, has done much to befuddle it. Appealing to prejudice by calling vocational training or an inferior quality of cultural education “democratic education” can only mislead the people at large as to what a genuine education is. He might as well speak of democratic truth or democratic fine art or democratic scholarship or democratic beauty. Nor need he confuse the issue by talking of “the upper classes (whatever that may mean in America)” as contrasted with “a robust intellectual life.” Dr. Angell knows as well as anyone that there is a great difference between homes in America as everywhere, and the children in them, though homes and children of the best sort may be found on all economic and social planes and are not limited to any one “class.” He must also realize that under modern conditions, which have given a great economic value to the possession of a college degree, the masses of students that go to college for the sake of acquiring such a degree for business reasons do anything but make their college a “center of robust intellectual life.” I suggest to Dr. Angell that he read that stinging indictment of American collegiate and intellectual life, _Lone Voyagers_. “Chippewa College” was assuredly not patronized by the children of the upper classes, but the picture of the student body is all too true to life in such places. “The ambition of the ‘co-eds’ was to teach in a small town high school, not unlike the one where they had been educated. The town often hadn’t even a library. Such girls couldn’t waste their time developing a critical spirit. It would be suicidal for them if they did. Their happiest fate was to marry the town dentist or doctor, the clerk in the bank, the owner of the garage. Their highest ambition in life would be to send their children to Chippewa. The men in the College of Arts were generally serving time, taking the prerequisites to get them into the professional schools, or lazy boys content to loaf for four years before they settled down into business.” As to the college life, the cheap toggery shops with the “cheap sport” clothes, the yet cheaper movies with student cat-calls at risqué incidents, the college “activities,” do we not know them all too well as Miss Neff portrays them? Does this sort of thing, which is common enough all over the United States, go to make that “center of robust intellectual life” that Dr. Angell offers as the only alternative to “the life of the upper classes, whatever that may mean in America”? No, the choice is not between the “children of the upper classes” on the one hand, and “all those who possess qualifications of mind and character” on the other, but between those of all classes who have the desire and capacity for genuine education and those, again, of all classes who desire merely the social or economic benefit to be derived from the possession of a college diploma. If, as he says, the effort to answer his questions “will doubtless keep the educational pendulum swinging vigorously for many a day to come,” all I can say is that the heads of our educational leaders are more bemused than even I have ever claimed them to be.

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living. In the old days we learned how to do it mainly in the shop or on the farm or by practice in the office of merchant, lawyer, or doctor. In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings. It is merely learning how to make a living. Culture is essential in order to enable us to know how to live and how to get the best out of living, and a liberal education should help us on our way to acquire it, albeit the acquisition is a lifelong process. “Culture” is a much misused word and has come to have a very feminine and anæmic connotation in America. There have been innumerable definitions, but we may quote one of Matthew Arnold’s as being as suggestive as any for our purpose. He speaks of culture as “a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature.” This is far removed from giving the degree of Bachelor of Arts to a student who has learned how to truss and dress poultry or has compassed the mysteries of how to sell real estate and run an apartment house.

Of course, life is short and getting rich is long—or may be. Many people who go to college to-day, aside from their lack of _desire_ for education, have no _time_ for it, because it does not lead immediately to “power and service.” This, to be sure, is nothing new. What _is_ new is that a large proportion of the colleges have opened their arms to all such and have deceived them into believing that when they have gotten an olla-podrida of ill-digested information of a scientific and cultural sort, with the practical courses to teach them how to earn a better living more quickly, they have acquired a liberal education and are entitled to consider themselves Bachelors or Masters of Arts. The words, indeed, have come to signify as little as “gentleman” or “lady.”

It all comes back, like most things, to the question of values—of what is worth while, of what is the good life. Should we learn French in order to impress the boss? Should we pick up scraps from collections of the classics in order to make a hit at Mrs. Jones’s party and impress her guests? One of the most sympathetic of foreign critics and observers of American life, a man who has spent much time among us, recently said that one feeling he always had here was that all our goods were in our shop windows and there was nothing behind. I believe this criticism is all too true. We are so busy _doing_ that we have no time to _be_. We all have almost forgotten what it is to _be_. We all have motor cars but no place to go. At present what we need above all else in America is education—not the infinitely variegated supply of courses that make a college catalogue look like Sears, Roebuck’s, but a liberal education that will enable us to create a scale of values for our experiences and to take a philosophical attitude toward the complex reality about us.

If it be complained that most people have no time for an education that does not give immediate results, I again reply that that is their misfortune and has nothing to do with the matter. It is extremely unfortunate, if they are really capable of being educated, that they have no time for it; but, that being so, why tell them they _are_ educated? Why not face the problem frankly and divide education (and degrees) into the two sections that I have suggested, the one to teach people how to make a living and the other to give them a _liberal_ education, to teach them how to live, how to develop all those powers within themselves that make for the beauty and worth of life? If everyone in a democracy cannot have such an education (and a degree), neither can everyone have some of the other good things—a million dollars, or the talent that makes him a poet or painter or president of an advertising company.

IV

Is it not time that we stopped marking down all our spiritual goods to the price that the lowest in the cultural scale can pay? In the seventeenth century the lower middle class in Holland became very prosperous and there was a great demand for small paintings to adorn their new houses. As one of the historians of their art writes, instead of improving the quality of the art, this situation brought about a deterioration, because of the simple rule that “a large uneducated demand in any field can never produce anything but a glut of inferior commodity.”

Whether a democracy can last is problematic, but it is certain it cannot last if there are no leaders above the general level. How are we to train them? Is it by training men solely for a particular calling—medicine, engineering, running a locomotive, or laundering collars? Or are we to give, to some at least, an education in which doing is subordinated to being, in which the development of intelligence and character shall be held superior to passing an examination in philosophy after reading novels for nine months, or learning how to truss and dress poultry? Sir Arthur Keith recently said, speaking of English education, that “it is self-discipline; the formation of character in making man’s higher centers masters of his cerebral establishments.” However it may be brought about—and that is something for the educators to decide (though they seem woefully at sea about it)—what the leaders of our civilization need in education is to be taught to _be_ something, rather than merely how to _do_ something.

In America, if I may repeat, far more than in Europe, the soul of the people depends upon the culture to be obtained by a genuinely liberal education. In Europe, in a sense, culture lies about one, for, in another definition of Arnold’s, it is “contact with the best that has been thought and said.” I happen to be writing this before my fire in London. Any errand that takes me into the streets—a visit to my agent in Fleet Street, a trip down into the City, a stroll through Whitehall—stirs more historical questions than a month in college could answer. Three minutes in one direction will take me to the marvelous collection of the Dutch masters gathered here for the time being from all the world. Ten minutes in a bus and I have the wonders of the Elgin marbles and the choicest sculpture of Greece for the asking. I am planning an ordinary week-end trip which in a few hours will take me to France or Holland, where entirely new sets of impressions and questions of every sort—æsthetic, historic, racial—will be aroused in spite of myself.

It is far easier here, as I well know from years spent on both sides of the world, to stress _being_ instead of _doing_ than it is in any corner of my native land. In America not only is it almost impossible to get into contact with “the best that has been said and thought,” save through books alone, but _doing_ has been exalted into a national cult and _being_ is despised by public opinion as something enervating and almost disgraceful for a man to consider, something tainted with the idea of “idleness-and-leisure,” which are usually hyphenated in America.

“Power and service.” But of what earthly use is power unless it is to produce or secure something worth while, and of what use is service unless it is to serve some desirable end? In so far as any ideal is considered an end in America, it is the ideal of “a better life for everyone of every class”; but that merely puts off the question one stage further. What is a better life? Are not power and service merely _means_, just as are dynamos or locomotives? And what can the end be except a state of _being_ desirable to man? And should it not be the aim of education to help us learn what that end, that desirable state of being, is, and how to attain to it as far as the imperfect nature of man will allow?

We have been “doing” for three hundred years. We have cleared and settled a continent. We have accumulated the most colossal store of material power and resources the world has ever seen. Is it not time that we began to think what to do with all our means, what the end is that we wish to attain? If we are not to do it _now_, when, in Heaven’s name, are we _ever_ going to be rich and prosperous enough to do it? We have always given as an excuse for our cultural barrenness that we have had to lay the material foundations first. But how can that excuse be given any more, when we are the richest nation in the world, and we are told, until we are almost sick of hearing it, that all classes enjoy the highest standard of material comfort in the history of the race? Are we forever to continue getting more things in order to get more things with which to get more things, and so on _ad infinitum_? Are we forever to seek the means without ever considering the end for which we seek them? Is there any sense in _doing_ if we are never to _become_ something, to _be_ something, as a result? The entire practical life in America urges us to do unceasingly and unthinkingly. Should it not be one of the chief functions of education to find the strands of meaning in our ceaseless web of doing and to teach us some purpose in our lives? Can anything give us that purpose better than culture, in the sense first defined above? Can that culture be attained by a “liberal education” that permits “business organization,” “fire insurance,” “business psychology,” or “personnel administration” to be substituted at the whim of the student for literature, art, science, history or philosophy?

Does not our whole educational muddle spring in part from mob snobbery—from exactly the same mental attitude that makes the laboring class talk of “colored wash-ladies” and “garbage gentlemen,” that makes them want to be dubbed Bachelors of Art after studying business English and typewriting, ever gaining heaven by serving earth? Does it not also spring in part from the lack of character and of a coherent philosophy of life among those who should be our educational leaders? To the latter, in taxes and endowments, we are giving money reckoned in hundreds of millions. We are giving them also a hundred million years or so of the lives of our young in every generation. In exchange, what are they returning to us in national ideals and culture? Is it not a fair question?