Key ideas: "This volume is made up of the Lectures delivered last year [1931] on the Page-Barbour Foundation, at the University of Virginia" (A. Nock)
The subject that I am appointed to discuss is the theory of education in the United States. This discussion has its difficulties. It brings us face to face with a good many serious disappointments. It calls for the re-examination and criticism of a good many matters which seemed comfortably settled, and which we would rather leave undisturbed.
The most discouraging difficulty about this discussion, however, is that apparently it cannot lead to any so-called practical conclusion; certainly not to any conclusion, as far as I can see, which will at all answer to the general faith in machinery as an effective substitute for thought, and the general reliance upon machinery alone to bring about any and all forms of social improvement.
If Socrates had come before the Athenians with some fine new piece of machinery like a protective tariff, workmen’s compensation, old-age pensions, collective ownership of the means of production, or what not; if he had told them that what they must do to be saved was simply to install his piece of machinery forthwith, and set it going; no doubt he would have interested a number of people, perhaps enough to put him in office as the standard-bearer of an enlightened and progressive liberalism.
When he came before them, however, with nothing to say but Know thyself, they found his discourse unsatisfactory, and became impatient with him.
Perhaps we are not fully aware of the extent to which instruction and education are accepted as being essentially the same thing.
I think you would find, if you looked into it, for instance, that all the formal qualifications for a teacher’s position rest on this understanding. A candidate is certificated—is he not?—merely as having been exposed satisfactorily to a certain kind of instruction for a certain length of time, and therefore he is assumed eligible to a position which we all agree that only an educated person should fill. Yet he may not be at all an educated person, but only an instructed person.
We have seen many such, and five minutes’ talk with one of them is quite enough to show that the understanding of instruction as synonymous with education is erroneous. They are by no means the same thing...
An educated man must be in some sort instructed; but it is a mere non distributio medii to say that an instructed person must be an educated person.
The word sends us back to a phrase of Plato. The person of intelligence is the one who always tends to “see things as they are,” the one who never permits his view of them to be directed by convention, by the hope of advantage, or by an irrational and arbitrary authoritarianism.
He allows the current of his consciousness to flow in perfect freedom over any object that may be presented to it, uncontrolled by prejudice, prepossession or formula; and thus we may say that there are certain integrities at the root of intelligence which give it somewhat the aspect of a moral as well as an intellectual attribute.
Mr. Jefferson’s reasoning was that citizens who could read had the means of being correctly informed about public affairs, and that if they were correctly informed they might be trusted to do the right thing about them.
There are certain defects in this reasoning upon which we need not dwell. We may observe, however, without at all disparaging literacy, that in general the mere ability to read raises no very extravagant presumptions upon the person who has it. Surely everything depends upon what he reads, and upon the purpose that guides him in reading it.
It is interesting to note that one who might be called Mr. Jefferson’s contemporary (he died when Mr. Jefferson was nine years old) furnishes us with precisely the right criticism upon this point. This was Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham, the revered author of the Analogy, and one of the four greatest in all the Church of England’s long roster of great men. Bishop Butler made the acute observation that the majority of men are much more apt at passing things through their minds than they are at thinking about them.
Hence, he said, considering the kind of thing we read and the kind of attention we bestow on it, very little of our time is more idly spent than the time spent in reading.
For evidence of this one has but to look at our large literate population, to remark its intellectual interests, the general furniture of its mind, as these are revealed by what it reads; by the colossal, the unconscionable, volume of garbage annually shot upon the public from the presses of the country, largely in the form of newspapers and periodicals,
On the other hand, too, we may regard the negative testimony furnished by the extremely exiguous existence among us of anything like a serious literature, especially a serious periodical literature. It must be clear, I think, that any expectations put upon the saving grace of literacy are illusory.
We have found, then, three most serious errors in the theory upon which the mechanics of our educational system were designed. This theory contemplates a fantastic and impracticable idea of equality, a fantastic and impracticable idea of democracy, and a fantastically exaggerated idea of the importance of literacy in assuring the support of a sound and enlightened public order...
First, there was this strong sentiment for one’s children, and for their progress in a civilised life. The conception of a civilised life, of its nature, and of the way to enter into it, was and is often most imperfect, but no matter; the sentiment was in itself noble and disinterested. One’s children should have, at any cost or sacrifice, all the education they could get.
Then, playing directly into the hand of this sentiment, there was the idea of equality prompting the belief that they were all capable of taking in and assimilating what there was to be had; and then the idea of democracy, prompting the belief that the whole subject-matter of education should be common property, not common in a true and proper sense, but, roughly, in the sense that so much of it as was not manageable by everybody should be disallowed and disregarded.
Then finally, all this had the general sanction of a pseudo-patriotic idea that in thus doing one’s best for one’s children, one was also doing something significant in the way of service to one’s country.
The progress through school and college did, in fact, remain quite strictly disciplinary up to the revolutionary period which set in, as well as one can put a date to it, about thirty-five years ago.
Now, it was of the very essence of this disciplinary character—the very fifth essence, as a medievalist might say—that all the knowledge canvassed in these fixed curricula should be of the order known as formative.
Instrumental knowledge, knowledge of the sort which bears directly on doing something or getting something, should have no place there; it should have as strict an institutional quarantine raised against it as cities raise against a plague. This discrimination was quite carefully regarded in our institutions until the revolution of thirty-five years ago broke it down. I suggest that we look for a moment at the disciplinary fixed curricula made up of purely formative studies, to see what it actually came to in practice.
Let us look at it in this way: let us suppose that an educable person found good schools and a good college, where all circumstances were favourable—there were such—what would he do, and what might be expected of him?
After the three Rs, or rather for a time in company with them, his staples were Latin, Greek and mathematics.
He took up the elements of these two languages very early, and continued at them, with arithmetic and algebra, nearly all the way through the primary, and all the way through the secondary schools. Whatever else he did, if anything, was inconsiderable except as related to these major subjects; usually some readings in classical history, geography and mythology.
When he reached the undergraduate college at the age of sixteen or so, all his language-difficulties with Greek and Latin were forever behind him; he could read anything in either tongue, and write in either , and he was thus prepared to deal with both literatures purely as literature, to bestow on them a purely literary interest. He had also in hand arithmetic, and algebra as far as quadratics
Then in four years at college he covered practically the whole range of Greek and Latin literature; mathematics as far as the differential calculus, and including the mathematics of elementary physics and astronomy; a brief course, covering about six weeks, in formal logic; and one as brief in the bare history of the formation and growth of the English language.
What was the purpose of this? We may admit, I presume, the disciplinary value of these studies, since that has never been seriously disputed, so far as I know, but we may say a word, perhaps, about their formative character.
The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity; every department, I think, except one—music.
This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything.
Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind; a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage-point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations.
I think, how different would be the view of contemporary men and things, how different the appraisal of them, the scale of values employed in their measurement, on the part of one who has undergone this discipline and on the part of one who has not.
These studies, then, in a word, were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity.
A general preparation it did give an educable person, first by inculcating habits of orderly, profound and disinterested thought; and second, by giving him an immense amount of experienced acquaintance with the way the human mind had worked in all departments of its activity.
The point is that the whole burden of education lay on the student, not on the institution or on the individual scholar.
Traditionally, also, the undergraduate college put the whole burden of education on the student. The curriculum was fixed, he might take it or leave it; but if he wished to proceed bachelor of arts, he had to complete it satisfactorily.
Moreover, he had to complete it pretty well on his own; there was no pressure of any kind upon an instructor to get him through it, or to assume any responsibility whatever for his progress, or to supply any adventitious interest in his pursuits.
In structure, the four “learned” Faculties (literature, Law, thology and medicine) have been superseded by all manner of “departments” and “schools.”
In intention, the newest type of university organisation and influence is not primarily that of an association of scholars, but that of an association, more or less loose and sprawling, of pedagogues, of persons on whom, as we shall shortly see, the whole burden of education has been shifted.
In function, this type does not contemplate education, in the traditional sense of the word; it contemplates training.
The object of education, as we understand the word, the purpose of enforcing the Great Tradition’s discipline, is to inculcate certain views of life and certain demands on life.
Hence this object is not to produce, say, great practitioners of medicine, but (if you will permit me to bring forward some examples by name) to produce great practitioners like ancoast and William Osler. Not to produce great physicists, but great physicists like Mr. Millikan. Not great philologists and grammarians, but those like Gildersleeve and Humphreys, who had all the science there was, but who employed it in all their works and ways for the furtherance of the Great Tradition, and for that alone.
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.