Chapter V: Part 5

At a recent labor conference in New York City, May, 1916, called to present a program for the local public schools, Mr. Gompers expressed himself as open-minded towards the Gary plan which is about to be extended to thirty-five more New York schools. This open-mindedness of Mr. Gompers is in welcome and significant contrast to the attitude taken by some of the smaller leaders in the city, who have apparently tried to line up organized labor with a personal political machine and with reactionary schoolmen in obstructing the reorganization of the elementary schools. But organized labor has better business than opposing educational reform, and Mr. Gompers’s remarks, made with full responsibility and in direct opposition to the thinly-veiled partisan spirit of the conference, suggest that the responsible leaders of labor are willing to take a more enlightened stand in this important movement.

Organized labor has repeatedly gone on record in favor of a public school system which will train a labor citizenry so versatile and intelligent as to be able to protect itself from exploitation and the hazards of our social shiftlessness. It has demanded that vocational teaching be kept intimately related to life, so that children come out from the school neither helpless unskilled workers nor narrow machine-tenders, but potential citizens acquainted with the backgrounds of their crafts, with the significance of the labor movement and the institutions and movements of the world about them. Labor above all classes has a vital interest in an education for all children which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meanings of industrial processes and occupations. The education that labor desires is one which will give, particularly to those who engage in industrial callings, the desire and ability to share in social control, and to become masters of their industrial fate.

Now organized labor must be rapidly coming to see that this demand will never be satisfied by the conventional type of city public school. A traditional school founded on the bookish education of a leisure class can never be made into a pre-vocational school that will give power and dignity to labor, without a fundamental transformation of the present spirit, subject matter and teaching methods. An elementary school which gives its children no more than narrow drill in the three R’s plus a little remote and unreal text-book information in history and geography, with what little half-hearted music and drawing and nature-study can be squeezed in, will never provide the foundation that the trained worker will need. No system of trade-training or vocational education superimposed upon such an elementary school will remedy the evils. Children who have been listlessly and ineffectively drilled in book-work will have acquired attitudes that are likely to be carried over into vocational work. Except for the few, industrial training will seem sheer drudgery, for it will have its roots in no interests and powers developed in earlier years. Pre-vocational education must mean something more than a mere sop to the motor-minded boys and girls who are restless with their books and are on the verge of leaving school for work. Such training, if it is to mean anything, must be woven in as an organic part of the school course. The entire elementary school could be a general, free, spontaneous, amateur pre-vocational school, where in direct contact with machines and industrial processes as well as books, with gardens and gymnasiums as well as laboratories and kitchens, with tools and print and pottery shops and drawing and music studios, children might have their imaginations stirred, try out their busy hands on things, and gradually sift out of the variety the interests that they can lay hold on with some promise of creative use. The school might be a place where play passed insensibly into work, and aimless experiment into purposeful construction.

Most of the current criticism of the public schools arises from the rapidly growing conviction that only in such a school will the modern city child have a chance to be educated in any way which will meet the demands in industrial or commercial life that will be made upon him. There is danger in current educational experiments that we become too easily satisfied with the mere addition of desirable courses, without at the same time transforming the school so that the new work is organically assimilated. Labor cannot be content with the school reform which many cities are adopting in the introduction of vocational courses merely in the upper grades. Such a postponement means an invidious class-distinction in those grades between the children who are going on to academic work and those who are going on to industrial work. It broadens the gulf between labor and leisure rather than diminishes it. Labor should be the first to protest against these “pre-vocational courses,” “junior high school plans,” as they are variously called. A school which consists merely of six years of bookish schooling with trade-learning and athletics tacked on at the top would merely intensify the evils under which labor now suffers. It would produce mechanical drudges. It would almost guarantee that industrially exploitable horde of young workers the creation of which organized labor so much fears.

In advocating such a system the lesser labor chiefs in New York have been very badly advised. The program of “immediate demands,” put forth under Mr. Gompers’s nose with a great flourish of the rights of labor, is not only unprogressive but actually reactionary. It is exactly the kind of specious program that the narrow-minded employer might demand who wished a docile but intelligent labor force trained at the public expense. In whose interest does labor demand the “immediate elimination from the course of study of any activity which takes away from the essentials and fundamentals of education in the elementary schools?” To eliminate organized play, auditorium dramatics, shopwork, gardening, dancing, etc., is surely the best way to drive children out of school, or to train them into mere appendages to machines. What labor needs is the most varied kind of work-study-and-play school, where imagination and interest are awakened. Yet here we find a conference on organized labor and education demanding simply more of the old kind of traditional schools! What good will it do to have more school buildings, more teachers, more pay for teachers, even more night-schools and playgrounds, if the schools merely pursue the old limited grind? Labor needs a school enriched in opportunity and vitalized with the modern spirit of “learning by doing,” yet all it can think of to demand is “a seat for every child”! And to ram home to the public a sense of its straitened vision, this conference records its “emphatic protest against any further extension of the Gary plan.”

Now opposition to the Gary plan may be a useful attitude for the lesser labor leaders who are playing for political stakes, but we cannot believe that this is the attitude of the intelligent elements in the labor movement. For what the Gary plan does is exactly to make possible for the first time on a large public scale this greatly enriched elementary school which labor needs for the realization of its own expressed educational ideals. The broad curriculum, the flexibility which adapts the school to the needs of every child, the interweaving work, study and play, transform the traditional school into a kind of child-community, where children throughout the course are laying the rudiments of their vocations. They have a chance from the early years, by trial and error, by experiment and realization, to find out what they can do and what they cannot do. To quote Superintendent Wirt, the Gary school is educating them just as the home, shop and school teacher educated the children of earlier American days. No formal pre-vocational course begun in the seventh or eighth year can do what this simple intimate contact with things and processes does. In a sense, industrial education may begin in the Gary school as soon as the small child is interested in going into the school-shops or laboratories as helper or observer. All the activities may be tested in the same way. The school is thoroughly democratic because the opportunities, bookish, manual, artistic, are open on equal terms to all the children. For labor to oppose the Gary plan means that labor is suicidally opposing the very kind of school that holds out the most opportunity for an enriched education for its children.

Mr. Gompers and the other responsible leaders of organized labor could do nothing more important than make an immediate and thorough study of the educational promise of the Gary school. If organized labor were to put itself enthusiastically behind the Gary plan, it would have at once an enlightened policy on elementary education which would effectively prevent any insidious exploitation of the movement. It would be well if the responsible leaders would repudiate these lesser labor chiefs who manipulate education for political purposes. The time has come for a bold and progressive stand.

XXIV

EDUCATION FOR WORK

The urgency of vocational education in this country has been immensely reinforced during the past few years by the rapidly growing social solicitude for child welfare. Child-labor laws, compulsory education, minimum wage, children’s courts, welfare bureaus, devised primarily as mere protective agencies for the weaker and less self-defensible members of the community, are now suddenly seen to involve a host of positive social responsibilities. We are recognizing that the state has a duty not only to save the younger generation from exploitation, premature labor and demoralizing environments, but also to give it every possible opportunity to be trained for an effective vocation. In particular, the recent raising of the age limit for child labor in many of the states, by keeping in school thousands of children who would otherwise have passed out to work, has put a great strain upon the public school. The challenge so far has done little else than make evident an alarming inadequacy of the present type of school to train children for the work which they will shortly be called upon to do. The school systems of the large northern cities are having thrust upon them great numbers of children for whose education, in this new sense of the word, they are unprepared. And the burden and urgency is one that will increase rather than diminish.

This is one of the lessons of a document like the recent admirable report of the Minneapolis Survey for Vocational Education, made last year under the auspices of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. It would be difficult to advise reading more important for educator, employer and employee than this cross-section of the skilled-labor life of a great American city, looked at with a view to vocational guidance. In Minneapolis all the conditions were at their best for such a social laboratory experiment. The rapid growth of manufacturing and the unusually high proportion of skilled industries make the demand for the training of workers paramount. The stringent state laws require attendance at the school until the age of sixteen or the completion of the entire elementary course. The city has a school system of high traditional excellence. Clearly all the factors that would stimulate a campaign for vocational education are here in their most exacting form.

The analysis here given of the training which the manufacturing and mechanical industries require for their various skilled positions, the training which public schools and special schools are purporting to give, the increase in resources which school and shop will have to make to meet the social demands made upon them--all this will be found typical in greater or less degree throughout the country. The most general impression one gets from the Survey is of industrial unpreparedness. The public school is seen not with its usual fault as an institution of general education which has ignored pre-vocational needs, but as a pre-vocational school of narrow and exclusive type, for the vocational training of the classes in the community whose actual need was least. For above the earlier years of rudimentary schooling there has been superimposed a bookish school which is really a pre-vocational school for the professions or for domestic leisure. The boys and girls whose futures were to be professional and domestic had the benefit of the public school. The vast majority, the motor-minded and those whose aptitudes were not intellectual, very properly and automatically left this bookish school as soon as they had obtained their rudimentary general education. When the state suddenly refuses to allow these children to leave the school until they have finished the elementary course, the school system is faced with the necessity of broadening itself from a narrow pre-vocational school for the professions into a pre-vocational school for all the industries and arts of the modern community. The smatterings of wood-working and domestic science which the city schools have introduced are shown not to have broadened the school in the least. Even the technical courses in the high schools have quite failed to meet the problem. Of the recent graduates from these courses in the Minneapolis schools it is shown that one-half went directly to college, only one-tenth passing into occupations for which the course could in any way be regarded as preparatory. Most of these students, moreover, went into drafting rooms. It may be said therefore that to the training of the great artisan class of such a modern and progressive city the public schools have contributed practically nothing. A typically American progressive school system with all its technical and manual accessories is shown functioning at its very highest limit as a pre-vocational school, not for skilled labor, but for the professions and what the Survey suggestively calls the “commissioned officers of industry.”

The industries themselves, however, are found to be no more adequately engaged than the school in training their own workers. Apprenticeship has all but died out, and among neither employers nor employees is there any enthusiasm for its return. Yet, although all the trades require a constant supply of trained workers, no substitute has yet been found for apprenticeship. The movement for industrial education has at times seemed like an attempt of employers to get their skilled workers trained at public expense. The effort to establish separate boards in the cities for industrial education threatened to limit such training to the narrow skill which each industry would demand and to supply employers with apprentices at no cost to the industry itself. Fortunately the Minneapolis Survey warns against this narrow and sinister conception of vocational education. Industrial interests cannot shirk the responsibility for the special training of their workers. The rapid growth of “corporation schools” shows that at least the most prosperous and highly skilled shops and factories are accepting this responsibility. All the employer has a right to demand is that the school give the young worker a general pre-vocational training which will introduce him to the special trade work. The graduate of the elementary school should have been through a well rounded course which not only cultivated a general intelligence, but discovered, by submitting him to many different kinds of activity, his particular flair or knack, and thus enlisted his interest in further training for a particular vocation.

The elementary school should, in other words, be a general pre-vocational school, where the boy or girl could get a bearing towards every type of vocation. The Survey strikingly confirms the far-sighted vision of William Wirt and his unspecialized and varied Gary school in which the children from their earliest years are testing out their powers in shop and foundry and laboratory and studio and classroom. “What is needed,” it says, “is not a course in special woodworking--the extent of manual work in most elementary schools of the present time--but rather organized training in practical arts which will include a variety of experiences fundamental to the life of the community. Woodwork, metal work, printing and bookbinding, clay modeling, concrete and electrical work, are some of the industries which give an opportunity for experience in certain fundamental processes which are most valuable to boys without respect to the occupation in which they may later engage.”

In the last year of the elementary school, or in the years of the junior high school, more specialized technical courses could be introduced. For the advanced work, more and more responsibility should be thrown on the shop, the school providing the background of theory, the shop the practical application, and the student alternating between shop and school as in the so-called coöperative course. For the workers already engaged, part-time continuation classes are advised, with “dull-season classes,” and evening trade-extension courses. For these the various special schools in the city, commercial and technical, could coöperate. In this correlation of shop and school a new form of apprenticeship would grow up. The Survey reports trade agreements already worked out in several trades which provide that after two years of high-school instruction in practical, technical and academic subjects, the worker will be placed in the occupation at wages equal to those of a third-year apprentice. The agreements require the approval of the union, and the employers agree to use the school as the first source of supply in engaging new workers.

On some such constructive lines as are suggested in this Minneapolis Survey will the problems of vocational education be worked out. In its discussion of such topics as home gardening, office work, art education, domestic service, the Survey suggests the breadth of the field to be covered. An ideal system of vocational training would not only give every boy and girl in the school an opportunity to find an aptitude and cultivate some skill but it would make possible the training of “non-commissioned officers” in the industrial army. The education of such leaders will really be the goal of organized vocational education. As the industries, trades and occupations become more technical and more scientifically managed, the demand for administrative, supervisory, directive and planning officers taken from the ranks is constantly widening. Efficient management is becoming recognized as almost the most important factor in production, and management will be the reward for intelligence and skill. Until we have an educational system which in coöperation with shop and factory gives fullest opportunities for each child in the schools to work towards qualifying as such a “non-commissioned officer” in some occupation of the social army, we shall not have our democratic school or our framework for the future democratization of industry. Nor shall we be able to attack those mountainous problems of unskilled labor which no system of vocational training can touch.

XXV

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS

The movement for vocational education has done nothing more valuable than to show us how far we are still from realizing the public school as a child-community, first of all as a quickening life and only secondarily as an educational institution. The rapidly extending “continuation school” is perhaps the most obvious symptom of this failure. The term itself is unfortunate, for it drags along with it the old separation of education from living. It suggests something in the way of a surplus, of extension schooling beyond an allotted time, as if its pupils were getting an educational largess out of some great social bounty. Actually the “continuation school” represents educational deficit; the necessity for it registers our failure to provide an earlier school-community life for children which would have kept them out of industry. Also it registers our failure to provide child-labor laws which would have protected them.

The continuation school is officially a “school for employed minors fourteen to sixteen years of age,” and is intended to hold, by the tenuous thread of four to six hours a week school attendance, those boys and girls who have gotten their employment certificates at the earliest legal age and are floundering about in low-paid occupations, mostly unskilled. New York City alone has 58,000 such children, fourteen and fifteen years of age, two-thirds of whom have never completed the elementary school. Stores, offices, shops, domestic service, messenger service absorb these boys and girls, untrained and unfocused, and the truly formidable burden is placed upon them of making their skilful way in the world. Popular tradition tries to make us glow with the belief that this world is a ladder up which virtue and industry will automatically ascend. But unfortunately the ladder of opportunity rarely reaches down so far. The lowest rung is beyond their reach. The gap between it and the ground is often too great even for initiative and character to bridge. The “employed minors fourteen to sixteen years of age” become the nucleus for that partly employed, sodden and anemic mass of drifters which drags down labor everywhere and clogs social progress.

The education which these children have had has in most cases barely fitted them to remain upright on the ground, not to speak of reaching for the ladder. The acquirement of literacy, a more or less uncertain skill in figuring, the exposure to some miscellaneous historical and geographical information--this has been the real substance of their five or six years’ schooling. To most of these children it is probable that the world of printed symbols will never mean very much. A real school would have striven to awaken their concrete and constructive intelligence, given play to all the non-intellectual impulses. It is just the tedium and artificiality of the old school which has sentenced them now to stand at the bottom of the occupational scale. Without class-prestige, economic advantages, manners, extraordinary initiative or intelligence, most of these children are handicapped from the start. Literate, they are perhaps fitted to compete on equal terms with each other for work. But for the passing into better-paid, more interesting, more responsible and skilful activity, their schooling, though it came at the most plastic and active time of childhood, has done nothing whatever.

We try, therefore, through the “continuation school” to make up bravely to these children what they have lost. We try to lift them so that they can clutch at the lowest rung of the ladder. We find it easier to make stabs at repairing the damage than to reorganize the elementary school so as to prevent it. In Wisconsin cities a boy or girl leaving school at fourteen to go to work is required to attend day continuation school four or five hours a week for three years. In Boston the children must attend for four hours a week for two years. In Pennsylvania cities they must attend eight hours a week for two years. Continuation schools for 20,000 children are in process of formation by the New York City Board of Education. Wisconsin’s forty-five industrial and continuation schools are compulsory, while in the other states which have permissive laws the schools may be made locally compulsory. Employers are required to dismiss their child employees on working days and within working hours, the school time being reckoned as part of the time that minors are permitted by law to work.

Such laws obviously follow the line of least resistance. They add to the school system without revitalizing it. At the same time, a scheme like the Massachusetts plan suggests that the continuation school may be developed into a real stimulus of incentive. This plan provides for three kinds of classes. For those “employed minors” who are already in semi-skilled work, it provides some training and background for the trade or occupation chosen. There are also trade preparatory classes for pupils who have definitely chosen the trade for which they wish training, but have not yet found placement in the trade. Then there are “pre-vocational” classes for those who are ambitious to make some intelligent choice of an occupation. These pupils are given varied shopwork, visits to shops and factories, and personal consultation with teachers and employers. Classes are small, and intensive work can be done. The other pupils, employed in unskilled labor and without definite vocational leanings, go into “general improvement courses,” where half the time is spent in regular school subjects continuing the elementary school work; a quarter of the time is devoted to “the discovery and development of dominant interests and powers,” and the rest of the time to what is quaintly called “civics, hygiene, recreation and culture.” In this latter activity one-quarter of the time of the “pre-vocational” and trade courses is similarly spent. Pupils may transfer from one class to another when they are ready. If the purpose of the continuation school is to bridge that gap between the ground and the level where opportunity can at all begin to mean anything, this Massachusetts plan would seem to do it in an easily graduated and flexible way. The untrained and unfocused worker has at least a chance to have his imagination stimulated and to learn the rudiments of some better work.

The sanguine advocates of the continuation school, however, are apt to assume that this chance is equivalent to an effective vocational training. They forget that of the 10,000 or more children whom Wisconsin provides with compulsory continuation schooling a majority must necessarily remain in the general improvement classes or else get only a rudimentary training. And five hours a week for education against fifty for routine labor is not likely to make over the boys and girls who are pulled into the school for a brief respite from the department stores, messenger and domestic service, mills and factories, millinery and dressmaking shops. Even in the stimulating Massachusetts atmosphere one hour a week for “civics, hygiene, recreation and culture” seems hardly availing. In the light of the kind of school-community life which every progressive state now knows enough to provide and could afford to provide, the continuation school seems a pathetic if necessary palliative for our educational sins. Already loud complaints are heard against “allowing the public school to pass on its failures for some one else to bury.” The first lesson of the continuation school is that it should not be needed. Even employers repeatedly declare that to industry children under sixteen are of no real value as workers. The states are one after another jacking up their child-labor limit to sixteen years. We are rapidly coming to the public conviction that the school should care for all children’s activity up to that age. What the continuation school does now for four hours a week, we are insisting that the regular school shall do for thirty or even forty hours a week.

But this means that we shall have to have a reinvigorated school. It must not be a prison where children are kept when they long for the freedom of outside work. It must be a place where full opportunity for expression is provided for each child in a varied life of study and work and play. It must be an organic life and not an institution. No system of industrial and continuation schools piled on at the top will effect this. The evening school has largely failed because it demanded an impossible concentration and perseverance from the over-fatigued and excitement-craving worker. The continuation school, dealing with restless and unintegrated children, will be ineffective for the same reason. The vocational movement goes blundering on in amazing disregard of the psychology of the worker. Even the docile German child, it is said, must be coerced into his admirable continuation school where he gets a thorough orientation in his relations to his work, the community and his comrades. What are admirable trades and studies going to mean to boys and girls who are doing the most rudimentary work, their impulses undirected, their minds filled with sex-fantasy, personal mirages, and all the cheap and feeble excitements of the city streets? The groping and desiring spirit of youth is going indomitably to resist your most thoughtful schemes until you have a school which from the earliest years, by its freedom, its expressive life, its broad communal and personal excitements, its contact with real things, provides a child-life which meets these inner needs. Our best American public schools already begin to show that such a child-community life is not at all impossible. Until we achieve it generally, our continuation school will be one of the stop-gaps, and a lusty warning of what we have failed to achieve.

XXVI

WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES

The marked and immediate reaction of the thinking public to the Scott Nearing case shows a growing conviction that all is not well within the conventional forms of university control. It implies a sense that universities, whether supported by the state or privately, are becoming too vitally institutions of public service to be much longer directed on the plan of a private corporation. University trustees are generally men of affairs, and as men of affairs they naturally tend to hold the same attitude towards the university that they do to the other institutions--the churches and railroads and corporations--they may direct. The university officers whom they appoint seem to have exactly the same duties of upholding the credit of the institution, of securing funds to meet its pressing needs, of organizing the administrative machinery, which their corporation officers would have. Professors are engaged by contract as any highly-skilled superintendent would be engaged in a factory. If a well-paid subordinate of a mining corporation could not get along with his colleagues and his men, or if he consorted with the I. W. W. or made revolutionary speeches in the streets, his services would be dispensed with as readily as the Pennsylvania trustees rid themselves of the unpleasantness of Professor Nearing. Trustees may respect a professor more than they do intrinsically a fourth vice-president. They may tend to err, as Chancellor Day has suggested, on the side of “merciful consideration.” But they cannot see that the amenities of the case materially alter the professor’s status.

This would be the case of university trustees stated in its rawest terms. That they tend so often to act as if they were a mere board of directors of a private corporation gives rise to endless suspicion that they consult their own interests and the interests of the donors of the vested wealth they represent as trustees of the university, just as they would protect, as faithful corporation directors, the interests of the shareholders of the company. It is just this attitude which the thinking public is no longer inclined to tolerate. We are acquiring a new view of the place of the university in the community. When the American college was no more than an advanced boys’ academy, there may have been some excuse for this form of control by self-perpetuating and irresponsible boards of trustees. But many things have changed since Harvard and Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Columbia, were founded.

Now this determined autocracy may not have worked so badly when most of the trustees and practically all of the instructors were ministers of the Gospel, although even in those days faculties sometimes complained that their careful plans were overridden by men ignorant of collegiate business and little interested in educational policy. The demand that trustees’ functions should be limited to the management of funds, leaving the faculties to regulate administration and control appointments is a hoary one. But with the passing of control from the ghostly to the moneyed element, the gulf between trustee and professor has become extreme. Professors have fallen into a more and more subordinate place, and the president, who used to be their representative, has now become almost entirely the executive agent of the trustees, far removed in power and purse and public distinction from the professor. The university president in this country has become a convenient symbol for autocratic power, but even when he has become a “mayor of the palace” and professors may not approach their governors except through him, the real autocracy still lies in the external board behind him.

This absentee and amateur form of university control is being constantly ratified by our American notions of democracy, and that folkway, which runs so omnipresently through our institutional life, of giving the plain ultimate citizen control, in order that we may be protected from the tyranny of the bureaucrat. The newer state universities are controlled in exactly the same spirit. Regents, elected by legislatures, have shown themselves quite as capable as the most private trustees of representing vested political interests. Nor has democracy been achieved by the cautious admission, in recent years, of alumni trustees, as in the case of Columbia, or, as in the case of Harvard and Yale, by the substitution of alumni for the former state officials. Self-perpetuating boards will always propagate their own kind, and even if alumni trustees were ever inclined to be anything but docile, their minority representation would always be ineffective for democracy.

The issues of the modern university are not those of private property but of public welfare. Irresponsible control by a board of amateur notables is no longer adequate for the effective scientific and sociological laboratories for the community that the universities are becoming. The protests in the most recent case imply a growing realization that a professor who has a dynamic and not a purely academic interest in social movements is an asset for the whole community. The latest controversy between trustee and professors seems to have been very definitely an issue between interested policy and accurate, technical fact. It seems to have been clearly a case of old tradition against new science, the prejudiced guesses of corporation officials against the data of a scientific student of economics. Any form of university control which gives the prejudiced guess the power over the scientific research is thus a direct blow at our own social knowledge and effectiveness. The public simply cannot afford to run this risk of having the steady forging ahead of social and economic research curtailed and hampered. We cannot afford to depend wholly on the tempering of trustees by the fear of the clamor of public opinion. It is wholly undesirable that trustees should be detained only by “merciful consideration” from discharging professors whom they find uncongenial or who they feel are spreading unsound doctrine. Make university trustees directors of a private corporation and you give them the traditional right of terminating contracts with their employees without giving reasons or any form of trial. But if the university is not to be a mere degree-manufactory, or a pre-vocational school representing the narrow interests of a specialized economic class, but is to be that public intellectual and scientific service that we all want it to be, the governance must be different from that of a mining company, and the status of the professor different from that of a railroad employee. Professors should have some security of office.

An interested public which feels this way will demand that the faculties be represented strongly in the determination of all university policy and in the selection and dismissal of the instructors. It may even demand that the community itself be represented. Trustees who really envisage the modern university as a public service, as a body of scientific and sociological experts, will gladly share their power. If they do not, they will demonstrate how radically their own conception of a university differs from the general one, and it will be the duty of professors to assert their rights by all those forms of collective organization whereby controlled classes from the beginning of time have made their desires effective.

XXVII

THE UNDERGRADUATE

In these days of academic self-analysis, the intellectual caliber of the American undergraduate finds few admirers or defenders. Professors speak resignedly of the poverty of his background and imagination. Even the undergraduate himself in college editorials confesses that the student soul vibrates reluctantly to the larger intellectual and social issues of the day. The absorption in petty gossip, sports, class politics, fraternity life, suggests that too many undergraduates regard their college in the light of a glorified preparatory school where the activities of their boyhood may be worked out on a grandiose scale. They do not act as if they thought of the college as a new intellectual society in which one acquired certain rather definite scientific and professional attitudes, and learned new interpretations which threw experience and information into new terms and new lights. The average undergraduate tends to meet studies like philosophy, psychology, economics, general history, with a frankly puzzled wonder. A whole new world seems to dawn upon him, in its setting and vocabulary alien to anything in his previous life. Every teacher knows this baffling resistance of the undergraduate mind.

It is not so much that the student resists facts and details. He will absorb trusts and labor unions, municipal government and direct primaries, the poems of Matthew Arnold, and James’s theory of the emotions. There is no unkindliness of his mind towards fairly concrete material. What he is more or less impervious to is points-of-view, interpretations. He seems to lack philosophy. The college has to let too many undergraduates pass out into professional and business life, not only without the germ of a philosophy, but without any desire for an interpretative clue through the maze. In this respect the American undergraduate presents a distinct contrast to the European. For the latter does seem to get a certain intellectual setting for his ideas which makes him intelligible, and gives journalism and the ordinary expression of life a certain tang which we lack here. Few of our undergraduates get from the college any such intellectual impress.

The explanation is probably not that the student has no philosophy, but that he comes to college with an unconscious philosophy so tenacious that the four years of the college in its present technique can do little to disintegrate it. The cultural background of the well-to-do American home with its “nice” people, its sentimental fiction and popular music, its amiable religiosity and vague moral optimism, is far more alien to the stern secular realism of modern university teaching than most people are willing to admit. The college world would find itself less frustrated by the undergraduate’s secret hostility if it would more frankly recognize what a challenge its own attitudes are to our homely American ways of thinking and feeling. Since the college has not felt this dramatic contrast, or at least has not felt a holy mission to assail our American mushiness of thought through the undergraduate, it has rather let the latter run away with the college.

It is a trite complaint that the undergraduate takes his extra-curricular activities more seriously than his studies. But he does this because his homely latent philosophy is essentially a sporting philosophy, the good old Anglo-Saxon conviction that life is essentially a game whose significance lies in terms of winning or losing. The passion of the American undergraduate for intercollegiate athletics is merely a symbol of a general interpretation for all the activities that come to his attention. If he is interested in politics, it is in election campaigns, in the contests of parties and personalities. His parades and cheerings are the encouragement of a racer for the goal. After election, his enthusiasm collapses. His spiritual energy goes into class politics, fraternity and club emulation, athletics, every activity which is translatable into terms of winning and losing. In Continental universities this energy would go rather into a turbulence for causes and ideas, a militant radicalism or even a more militant conservatism that would send Paris students out into the streets with a “Cail-laux as-sas-sin!” or tie up an Italian town for the sake of Italia Irredenta. Even the war, though it has called out a fund of anti-militarist sentiment in the American colleges, still tends to be spoken of in terms of an international sporting event. “Who will win?” is the question here.

Now this sporting philosophy by which the American undergraduate lives, and which he seems to bring with him from his home, may be a very good philosophy for an American. It is of the same stuff with our good-humored contempt for introspection, our dread of the “morbid,” our dislike of conflicting issues and insoluble problems. The sporting attitude is a grateful and easy one. Issues are decided cleanly. No irritating fringes are left over. The game is won or lost. Analysis and speculation seem superfluous. The point is that such a philosophy is as different as possible from that which motivates the intellectual world of the modern college, with its searchings, its hypotheses and interpretations and revisions, its flexibility and openness of mind. In the scientific world of the instructor, things are not won or lost. His attitude is not a sporting one.

Yet the college has allowed some of these sporting attitudes to be imposed upon it. The undergraduates’ gladiatorial contests proceed under faculty supervision and patronage. Alumni contribute their support to screwing up athletic competition to the highest semi-professional pitch. They lend their hallowing patronage to fraternity life and other college institutions which tend to emphasize social distinction. And the college administration, in contrast to the European scheme, has turned the college course into a sort of race with a prize at the goal. The degree has become a sort of honorific badge for all classes of society, and the colleges have been forced to give it this quasi-athletic setting and fix the elaborate rules of the game by which it may be won--rules which shall be easy enough to get all classes competing for it, and hard enough to make it a sufficient prize to keep them all in the race. An intricate system of points and courses and examinations sets the student working for marks and the completion of schedules rather than for a new orientation in important fields of human interest.

The undergraduate can scarcely be blamed for responding to a system which so strongly resembles his sports, or for bending his energies to playing the game right, rather than assimilating the intellectual background of his teachers. So strongly has this sporting technique been acquired by the college that even when the undergraduate lacks the sporting instinct and does become interested in ideas, he is apt to find that he has only drawn attention to his own precocity and won amused notice rather than respect. In spite of the desire of instructors to get themselves over to their students, in spite of a real effort to break down the “class-consciousness” of teacher and student, the gulf between their attitudes is too fundamental to be easily bridged. Unless it is bridged, however, the undergraduate is left in a sort of Peter Pan condition, looking back to his schoolboy life and carrying along his schoolboy interests with him, instead of anticipating his graduate or professional study or his active life. What should be an introduction to professional or business life in a world of urgent political and social issues, and the acquiring of intellectual tools with which to meet their demands, becomes a sort of sequestered retreat out of which to jump from boyhood into a badly-prepared middle age.

The college will not really get the undergraduate until it becomes more conscious of the contrast of its own philosophy with his sporting philosophy, and tackles his boyish Americanisms less mercifully, or until it makes college life less like that of an undergraduate country club, and more of an intellectual workshop where men and women in the fire of their youth, with conflicts and idealisms, questions and ambitions and desire for expression, come to serve an apprenticeship under the masters of the time.

XXVIII

MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES

If the American college is to have a part in that new educational movement which is beginning to make the school not merely a preparation for life but life itself, interested in what has meaning to the student at his particular age and situation, it will have to recast some of its most cherished practices and ideals. The large university to-day represents all stages in the adjustment of intellectual activity to social demands, from the intensely practical schools of engineering, correlating with the technical progress of industry, back to the departments of literary scholarship--perhaps as pure an anachronism as we have in the intellectual world to-day. The demands for technical knowledge have pulled the university along, as it were, by the nose, and strung it through the ages, so that a “professor” to-day may be an electrical expert fresh from Westinghouse, or an archaic delver into forgotten poetry.

The technical departments of the universities have kept bravely up with the work of “learning by doing.” Laboratory and shopwork, practical coöperation with industry, contact with technical experts, have made the newer departments what they should be--energetic workshops where theory and practice constantly fertilize each other, and where the student comes out a competent technician in his craft. But the place of the college in this scheme becomes more and more anomalous. Devoted to the traditional studies--the literatures, mathematics, philosophy, history--it is still strangely reminiscent of old musty folkways of the schoolman and theologian. Every professor knows the desire of the average student to finish his college course and grapple with his professional studies. Every professor is aware of the sharp quickening of interest which comes on entrance to the professional schools. Though part of this feeling may be due to impatience to get out into the world, much of it certainly arises from a realization that at last one has come into a sphere where thinking means action. The college, with its light and unexacting labor, is cheerfully exchanged for the grind of the professional school, because the latter touches a real world.

Whereas the higher schools give the student active work to do, almost all the methods of the college teaching conspire to force him into an attitude of passivity. The lecture system is the most impressive example of this attitude, and the lecture system seems actually to get a tightening grip upon the modern college. As standard forms have become worked out, it is customary now actually to measure the student’s course by the number of hours he exposes himself to lectures. For the college course to be organized on a basis of lectures suggests that nothing has happened since Abelard spoke in Paris to twelfth-century bookless men. It is as if the magic word had still to be communicated by word of mouth, like the poems of Homer of old. The emphasis is continually upon the oral presentation of material which the professor has often himself written in a text-book, or which could be conveyed with much greater exactness and fullness from books. These books the student knows only as “collateral reading.” Nothing is left undone to impress him with the idea that the books and reviews and atlases are mere subsidiaries to the thin but precious trickle of the professor’s voice.

Now there may be some excuse for the lecture in a Continental university, where the professor is a personality, is not compelled to lecture, and may make of his delivery a kind of intellectual ceremony. But American professors are not only likely to be atrocious lecturers, but to hate such compulsory talking as the sheerest drudgery. Too often their own palpable derision at the artificiality of it makes the lecture an effective barrier between the student’s curiosity and its satisfaction. This is not to deny that the lecture might be made into a broad interpretative survey, which would give the student the clues he needs through the maze of books. This is exactly what the best college courses tend to become. But for this the college will need interpreters, and not the humdrum recorders and collators that it has a weakness for.

The continuance of the lecture system is only symptomatic of the refusal of the college to see clearly the changing ideals of scholarship. If the student has to think chiefly about exposing himself to the required numbers of lectures, and then to examinations which test his powers of receptivity, he will be forced into an attitude which we are discovering is the worst possible for any genuine learning. This passivity may have been all very well when education was looked upon as an amassing of the “symbols of learning,” or the acquiring of invidious social distinction. The old college education was for a limited and homogeneous class. It presupposed social and intellectual backgrounds which the great majority of college students to-day do not possess. The idea of studying things “for their own sake,” without utilitarian bearings, is seductive, but it implies a society where the ground had been prepared in childhood and youth through family and environmental influences. When higher education was confined almost entirely to a professional intellectual class, the youth was accustomed to see intellect in action around him. He did not come to college ignorant even of the very terms and setting of the philosophy and history and sociology studied there. Now, when all classes come to college, the college must give that active, positive background which in former generations was prepared for it outside. It must create the intellectual stomach as well as present the food.

We are learning that this can only be done by putting ideas to work, by treating the matter taught in the college as indispensable for any understanding or improvement of our modern world. In the technical schools, ideas and processes become immediately effective, but nothing in the college is really “used”; ideas are not put to work. Professors anxiously desire to “teach students to think,” but they do not give them opportunities for that hard exercise which alone can produce trained thought. The college organs of expression, the debating clubs, literary magazines, newspapers, speaking contests, dramatic societies, etc., are usually amateurish, spasmodic, unreal. The flimsy background of the undergraduate is not to be wondered at where undergraduate expression in any channel is left by the college authorities unorganized and childish. And his low state must inevitably continue until ideas are not merely collected, with some vague idea of gilding the interior of his soul, but resolutely put to work. One reason for the overmastering devotion to athletics in the modern college is exactly its activity. In that field the student can do something. Here, thank God, he says, is a place where one can act!

To make intellectual expression and not receptivity the keynote of the college does not mean to turn it into an intellectual engineering school or to make it severely utilitarian. It should remain unspecialized, the field for working out a background for the contemporary social world. The paradox is that only by this practical exercise can any real cultural or scholarly power be attained. As long as the student can speak of “taking courses” the receptive and slightly medicinal character of college learning will be emphasized. Moreover, as the schools both above and below the college adjust themselves to the new conceptions of learning, the archaic forms of college will cause it to lag in the race. The reason for their persistence is, of course, that whereas the technical demands of industry and the keen emulation in the professions have sharpened the higher schools and forced a revision of ideals and methods, the practical application of the cultural studies of the college has not seemed so urgent. The turning of these cultural studies into power is to be the exact measure of our growing conviction that ideas and knowledge about social relations and human institutions are to count as urgently in our struggle with the future as any mathematical or mechanical formulas did in the development of our present.

Transcriber’s Notes

Page 48: “cottom looms” changed to “cotton looms”

Page 92: “Profesor Judd’s” changed to “Professor Judd’s”

Page 99: “imperfect acomplishment” changed to “imperfect accomplishment”

Page 164: “classics and mathemathics” changed to “classics and mathematics”

Page 190: “particualarly to those” changed to “particularly to those”

Page 230: “The large university to-day represent” changed to “The large university to-day represents”