6. Towards A New Quality-Product

Towards a New Qualitys Product

I

THERE are conventions, as well as tricks, in all trades. Every department of social activity being governed chiefly by convention, it is not surprising that the most powerful and far-reaching conventions are the least talked about. We know them, and obey them, but do not speak of them. In Gascony, probably, people do not talk much about gasconades, nor did the citizens of Gath have much to say about Philistinism. Thus the fundamental conventions that govern our American educational system are never discussed. Criticism and discussion are as a rule confined to matters of method; some of the superficial conventions are sometimes brought under fire; but the fundamental conventions are always left alone.

I propose to bring forward one or two of these conventions and discuss them, by way of preliminary to a practical suggestion. The first convention is that by which we tacitly assume that education and instruction are the same thing, whereas they are really quite different. This is exactly comparable to the convention whereby we assume that republicanism, which is a political system under which everybody has a vote, is the same thing as democracy, which is primarily an economic status, and only secondarily political. Those who speak of the United States as a democracy, for instance, are misusing language most ludicrously, for it is no such thing, never was, and was never intended to be. The Fathers of the Republic were well aware of the difference between a republic and a democracy, and it is no credit to the intelligence of their descendents that the two are now almost invariably confused.

An instructional institution is not at all necessarily educational; whether it be actually so or not depends upon a variety of circumstances which are not usually reckoned with either in the professional or in the popular scale of speech. An instructed pupil is by no means necessarily an educated pupil, not even in limine; he is merely a person who has been exposed to instruction, with nothing implied about the effect of the exposure, which even from an instructional, let alone an educational, view point, may quite well be no more than the effect of exposing a duck’s back to rain. Whatever education accrues to him depends upon collateral circumstances and conditions. Therefore in speaking of instruction as equivalent to education, or vice versa, we misuse language. To avoid pedantry I shall keep on misusing it, for the purposes of this essay, except where the misuse would be ambiguous and perhaps misleading.

In earlier days this distinction was clearer. Ernest Renan long ago drew it with a firm hand, when he spoke of the United States as having set up “a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education”—probably the most complete and competent criticism of our system that has ever been made, for all other general criticisms that I know of, and most of the special criticisms as well, are finally reducible to it. In the bad old times of the three R’s and the deestrick school, the verb to learn had a transitive use, and in that use it was quite regularly pronounced Varn. I am old enough to remember this, and hence old enough to mark the disappearance of the transitive form to Varn, in favour of the active verb to teach. There seems to be a coincidence here, and a rather interesting one, because, as everyone knows who has tried it, you cannot teach a person anything—unless perchance he know it already—but you can l’arn him something. L’arnin’ did not in those days, moreover, mean learning, as understood by us of the enlightened present; it did not mean the rather equivocal windfalls that drop in your path of passage from grade to grade of a course of instruction. Not even in its compound form book-Vaminy did it mean precisely that. It meant something that somebody had l’arned you. I am not praising those old times, nor do I wish them back; I merely remark that a retrospect upon them discerns traces of this particular, and by no means useless or fantastic, discrimination.

A second fundamental convention that is never discussed is the one by which we assume that everybody ought to go to school. Some hardy educators lately have skirted the fringes of this convention by expressing doubt that everybody ought to go to college. The president of Brown University, in a recent interview, was quite outspoken about this. But as far as I know, no one has questioned the convention that regards all children as proper grist for the mill of the secondary schools. Our “compulsory education laws” as they are fancifully styled, embody this convention; so to question it would probably carry the implication of sedition as well as of heresy. Yet the “school age” which these laws specify counts for nothing, except conventionally; what really counts is school-ability; and the assumption that all children of school age have school-ability is flagrantly at variance with fact. If the law can do anything to encourage children of school-ability, irrespective of age, to go to school; if it can do anything to clear, illuminate, and beautify their path to school and through school, well and good. But the purely conventional content of these laws, in their present form, renders their practical application incompetent, fatuous, and vicious, and they ought to be remodeled in accordance with obvious fact and common sense. There was no need of the army tests to inform us that twelve million—or was it twenty?—of our younger people have not enough force of intellect to get them through the high school. Anyone casually considering a random assortment of our youngsters would be sure there are easily that many who are incapable of getting through any kind of secondary school with any profit whatever to themselves, to anyone else, or to the average of American citizenship.

All this seems extremely odd in view of our reputation for being a practical people. Education in the United States comes to a stupendous amount of money. Aside from public funds, the annual fees and disbursements to private secondary schools, colleges, universities, technical schools, are enormous. Having no statistics, I do not know how the gross sum compares with our annual outlay for chewing-gum, cosmetics, cigarettes, motor-cars, or contraband liquor; but one would be safe in saying that it is large enough to justify some sort of assurance about the kind of product that is being got for it. Yet just this is what no one seems able to give. No one seems to have even any very definite idea of the kind of product that is wanted, or any clear specifications for the kind that our system is attempting to produce.

II

It is probably the convergence of these two fundamental conventions upon the practical conduct of education that causes this uncertainty. Such uncertainty would at all events be the natural consequence of this convergence. Mr. Henry Ford is in no uncertainty about the kind of thing he wishes and intends to produce, or about the public demand for it; and he can give you a clear idea of the distinguishing points and qualities that his product will show when it comes out. This parallel cannot, of course, be pressed too far, because Mr. Ford is dealing with inanimate material, and our educational system is not. It may be usefully employed, however, to show the essential differences established by pure convention between production in Mr. Ford’s case and in the case of our educational system.

Suppose there were a convention among the purchasing public which made them assume that aviation and motoring meant the same thing; one can easily imagine some of its reactions upon Mr. Ford in his capacity of manufacturer and salesman. When he met with his associates in the trade, for example, he would have to talk more or less in terms of aviation, and cudgel his brains for ways to keep these conventional trade-terms in some kind of farfetched correspondence with the actualities of motoring. Absurd! some one will say. Quite so; but not an iota more absurd than the reactions set up by the inveterate conventional confusion of republicanism with democracy, or of education with instruction. To prove it, listen to any campaign speech or to any commencement address; or read a copy of the Congressional Record, or the proceedings of some gathering of pedagogues. If Mr. Henry Ford indulged in such inconsequent verbal antics before a group of his colleagues in the automobile industry, they would instantly adjourn as one man and apply for a commission de lunatico inquirendo; and they would be quite right.

One great reason, perhaps the greatest, why Mr. Ford can speak with such certainty about his product, is that he has control of his raw material and can keep it up to standard quality. Now suppose that, in addition to the convention already named, there were a strong social convention whereby everybody assumed that any kind of material, good, bad, or indifferent, would make up into a satisfactory motor-car; suppose, even, that there were a law compelling Mr. Ford, at certain seasons of the year, to accept and use all the culls that the American Tin Plate Company chose to shovel in on him in the course of its regular consignments. What forecast could Mr. Ford make of his product? None, obviously; one car might run ten thousand miles, the next one a hundred, and the next might not live to get out of the shop. For the same reason, largely, our educational system is utterly unable to give any more than a very meagre, vague, and prayerful account of the product that it can turn out.

Moreover, under these circumstances Mr. Ford could not even be much more explicit about the kind of product that he intended to turn out than about the kind he expected to turn out. If the poor man decided that the motor-car business were worth going on with at all, he would bend his harassed mind to the problem of modifying his processes in order to bring his product up as near as possible to the specifications set by these two insane conventions. He would remodel his factory to pro duce out of the average run of his material something which would have all the talking-points of a flying-machine that he could put into it, consistently with making it able to get over the ground in some fashion or other. If the material in one car were above the average, the product would be no worse than hybrid; it would not fly at all, its pretences in this direction being only a decorative folly, and it would not run on land as well as if it had been made in a factory where production was geared to standard material only.

Here we have a pretty fair parallel, again, to the plight of our educational system. Everybody ought to go to school; everybody ought to go to college. The worth and respectability of an educational institution is popularly measured by the size of its “plant” and the number of its students. A big school is a great school. Every institution, therefore, has to have students; it has to have regard to their numbers only, not their quality—anything that will make an additional name on the register will do, for social convention has decreed the assumption that everybody possesses school-ability. By due obeisance to this set of conventions and its corollaries, our institutions grew mightily until they reached their present proportions and then-present scale of expense.

But it was soon found that everybody did not have school-ability of more than a rudimentary type, if even that. As the average of ability was watered down by the increased inflow of students, our educational system did just as we have supposed Mr. Ford might do under analogous conditions; it modified its processes so as to hit the least common denominator of ability in the material it dealt with. This modification was begun, as well as one can set a date to it, when the “elective system” was introduced at Harvard by the late President Eliot; who, in consequence, was enabled to ride the shoulders of American education like the Old Man of the Sea for nearly half a century, while the “elective system,” which in principle is all very well for a university, made its way down into colleges and secondary schools—while, in short, education disappeared from among us, and instruction took its place. Before this period, as M. Renan said, America had indeed set up no serious higher education worth speaking of, but it had set up the beginnings, at least, of some serious primary education, and of a little secondary education; it now may quite fairly be said to have none of any kind. One should say this, too, as I do, without complaint; for what other measures of self-protection could our system take in the face of the dominant conventions? Executives like Mr. Butler and Mr. Eliot (I hope his admirers will forgive me for my plain speaking, for I too admire him as much as they) are great interpreters of the times; great educators, or, indeed, educators of any degree, they are not and never could be, and it is a disservice to them to obscure qualities worthy of all praise by a pretence that they are.

Those who regard my parallel between our educational system and Mr. Ford’s enterprise as extravagant and far-fetched, might give me the benefit of a glance at the number and nature of the subjects taught in one representative secondary school, college, and university—I shall not suggest a choice, he may take his pick—and an estimate of the amount of brain-fag that an average mentality would suffer in “getting through” the minimum requirements laid down to cover a judicious selection from the bewildering list. I think he would cheerfully-exonerate me. Consider one item only, the “courses in English.” Some time ago, in table talk with one of the most highly cultivated men in America, we tried to make a rough estimate of the number of “courses in English” that are offered annually by our colleges and universities. It came to something like twenty thousand, to my great amazement; and from my own observation and experience, which circumstances have made a little larger than the average, perhaps, I should say that these courses are the last refuge of the incompetent and the idle, though this is by no means the same as saying that no others ever take them. Forty years ago, I believe, a course in English was practically unknown among us; in the college I attended, back in the times of ignorance, such a thing was never dreamed of. Yet my fellow students managed somehow to write and speak pretty good English. On the other hand, I never yet had the pleasure of meeting a modern university graduate who had “specialized in English,” who could either write English or speak English even tolerably. If my readers have had better luck, I congratulate them; I hope they have. Last year there fell under my hand a garland of literary windflowers culled from students by instructors, not in a primary school, not in a high school, not in a college, but in an American university, huge, prosperous, and flourishing. I do not know that the writers were “specializing in English”; but there they were, university students, and if one had not got one’s eye-teeth cut, one might say they were therefore presumably literate, presumably intelligent. The following specimens bear testimony on these points:

“Being a tough hunk of meat, I passed up the steak.”

“Lincoln’s mind growed as his country kneaded it.”

“The camel carries a water tank with him; he is also a rough rider and has four gates.”

“As soon as music starts silence rains, but as soon as it stops it gets worse than ever.”

“College students, as a general rule, like such readings that will take the least mental inertia.”

“Modern dress is extreme and ought to be checked.”

“Although the Irish are usually content with small jobs they have won a niche in the backbone of the country.”

The instructor who reports these efforts also shows how Shakespeare fared at the hands of a group of sophomores and upper-classmen:

Edmund in “King Lear” “committed a base act and allowed his illegitimate father to see a forged letter.” Cordelia’s death “was the straw that broke the camel’s back and killed the King.” Lear’s fool “was prostrated on the neck of the King.” “Hotspur,” averred a sophomore, “was a wild, irresolute man. He loved honor above all. He would go out and kill twenty Scotchmen before breakfast.” Kate was a “woman who had something to do with hot spurs.”

Also Milton:

“Diabetes was Milton’s Italian friend,” one student explained. Another said: “Satan had all the emotions of a woman and was a sort of trustee in heaven, so to speak.” The theme of “Comus” was given as “purity protestriate.” Mammon in “Paradise Lost” suggests that the best way “to endure hell is to raise hell and build a pavilion.”

That will be about enough, I think. Let us ask ourselves once more what Mr. Ford would do in like premises, and then reverently take leave of the subject.

III

The third fundamental convention which besets our educational system is that by which we ignore the difference between formative knowledge and instrumental knowledge; the convention whereby we assume that instrumental knowledge is all one need have, that it will perfectly well do duty for formative knowledge; indeed, that it is in itself formative, as much so as any, and that the claims heretofore made for the formative power of another type of knowledge were hierarchical and spurious. When our system remodelled its processes to suit the requirements of educational mass-production (speaking in industrial terms) our educators began to talk a great deal about the need for our being “men of our time,” and taking on only such studies as “adapt us to modern conditions” and “fit us to take our place in the present-day world”—such studies, in short, as directly bear on the business of becoming chemists, engineers, bond-salesmen, lawyers, horse-doctors, and so on. There was no direct relation superficially apparent between the type of study hitherto known as formative, and the actual practice of stock-jobbing, company-promoting, or horse-doctoring; therefore this type of study could and should be laid aside as a sheer waste of time and effort. Time was a great consideration, in fact, alike with students, parents, and a public that, as Bishop Butler says, was everywhere feverishly “impatient, and for precipitating things.” The public ideal of excellence and success, generally speaking, was embodied in men who had themselves never been under the discipline of formative knowledge, and who neither wished nor were able to appraise that discipline intelligently for others. Our educational system at once rose to meet this attitude of the public—what else could it do?—and in the remodelling of its processes, formative studies either were flatly discarded or, when they went on at all, went on only in a vestigial fashion and under the blight of a general disregard and disparagement. At the present time even, as well as I am informed, our system has little or nothing to say about the relation of formative knowledge to the vocational practices of a really educated citizenry. Yet there is something to be said about it, and in view of the state of our society, about which most thoughtful observers have begun to be a little uneasy—a state resultant upon the unquestioned dominance of the conventions I have named—the subject seems worth reopening and reexamining. President Butler of Columbia University was lately quoted by the newspapers as wondering why there are no longer any great men. The obvious rejoinder, of course, if one were ill-natured enough to make it, would be, How can there be any great men as long as Columbia University keeps on being what it is and doing what it does? The just rejoinder, however, is, How can there be any great men among us until the right relation between formative knowledge and instrumental knowledge becomes implicit in the actual practice and technique of education?

IV

While leading the world in mass-production, the United States also puts out a very slender and unconsidered line of quality-products that, as far as I know, are unequalled. The best suit of clothes I ever saw was made of an American homespun wool textile of which the entire annual output would not be enough, I dare say, to keep Hart, Schaffner & Marx busy fifteen minutes. Europe, the home of sausage, has nothing that can hold a candle to the Kingston sausage or the Lebanon County smoked sausage of Pennsylvania. The best shaving-cream, cologne-water, and mouth-wash I ever used are American, made more or less for the fun of the thing, apparently, by a very busy physician with a turn for chemistry, and if one can ever get them, one is lucky ; I do not believe he takes time to make up a hundred dollars’ worth of all three together in a year, so he almost never has any of them on hand. The best hard-water soap I ever saw—and, having an uncommonly thin skin, I have diligently tried many kinds, especially in our Lake regions, and in Europe, where the water is as hard as Pharaoh’s heart—is American, made as a side line by an old-time concern that does not seem to care whether it sells any of it or not; and hence the amount of search and supplication necessary to get it would be enough, probably, to reconcile a sinner to God, in a pinch. It is in the average of such matters, and many others that might be mentioned, that America ranks relatively low; and it is, of course, by the average that a country’s production is to be judged. But the fact remains, as far as my experience goes, that in many lines America’s quality-products, what little there is of them, and put out gingerly, almost surreptitiously, as they are, cannot be matched anywhere.

So it would seem that in a prosperous country of a hundred-odd million, where the mass-instructional system is wholly given over to the three conventions already cited, it might be possible to arouse some interest in a modest but very rigorous social experiment in quality-education, which should implacably defy those conventions. I have long had in mind a plan for such an experiment, in the shape of a strictly undergraduate college which should be limited to two hundred and fifty students. The only requirements for entrance should be (1) knowledge of arithmetic, and of algebra up to quadratics, (2) ability to read Greek and Latin, both prose and poetry, at sight, and to write Greek and Latin prose offhand. Nothing else, absolutely nothing, should be required, and any child worth educating can easily get up those requirements between the ages of eight and fifteen, if that is all he attempts to do. By reading Greek and Latin at sight and writing them offhand, I mean that when a boy entered this college, all language-difficulties, all the mechanical work with vocabulary and structure, should be forever behind him, and he should be able to deal with Greek and Latin purely as literature.

The curriculum of the college should cover (1) the whole range of Greek and Roman literature, (2) mathematics up as far as the differential calculus, (3) late in the course, six or eight weeks work (three hours a week) in formal logic; and still later, the same amount of time on the history of the English language. Nothing but that; the college should pursue its mission as an educational experiment under the most jealously safeguarded aseptic experimental conditions, and it should be understood at the outset that the experiment could not be expected to yield anything approximating conclusive data for at least fifty years. There should be no “student activities” of any kind. The college should disallow and discourage any quasi-official relations with its alumni, and discountenance any representations from its alumni concerning its administration. When I went to college, the authorities regarded the alumni as little better than the scum of the earth, and there would have been joy in the presence of the angels on the day that the alumni barged in with suggestions about how the place should be run, or with attempts to cultivate “college spirit,” and induce undergraduates to do and die for their dear old alma mater. You may believe there would. My recollections of the general atmosphere of that institution are very vivid; it was an atmosphere untainted with sentimentalism of any kind. The students regarded the instructors as their natural enemies, hated them manfully, and respected them immeasureably. Anything like a specious and sentimental Elk-Rotarian good-fellowship between professor and student, in those days, was undreamed of; and the thought of it would have been as much resented by the students, on the score of propriety, as by the faculty. It has never yet been clear to me that this state of things was unwholesome or undesirable.

The college I have in mind should have its experimental status established in such economic security that it need not care twopence whether any students ever came to it or not, or think twice about bouncing its whole undergraduate body, if need be. In fact, if such a college were set up tomorrow, probably not a single student would enter it for the first six or seven years, and if it had a baker’s dozen at the end of ten years, I should be surprised. After that, I should expect it very soon to reach a capacity attendance; and if it stood fifty years without graduating more than fifty men, I believe its character as a social experiment would have been vindicated.

The theory of this college would be that if a young man wanted to go into engineering or horse-doctoring or selling bonds, he might prepare for it after he had got through this inflexible course at the age of twenty-one or so, with the degree of B.A., the only degree that this college should be empowered to confer, and it would be a degree, by the way, that amply meant what it pretended to mean, instead of meaning nothing, as it now mostly does. The test of this theory would be made by some impartial track being kept of these graduates, to see not only how they compared in a vocational way with men of another type of training, but how they stood in all-round ability, enlightenment, character, general culture, general good judgment, and good sense; how their views of life, their demands on life and their discernment of its values, compared with those of their contemporaries otherwise trained.

v

For the purposes of this little essay I am not interested in trying to forecast the results of this test, or to show reasons for stipulating these educational terms for it, because I am not here propounding a thesis, but only making a suggestion. If the suggestion takes root with any one who might wish to endow such an experiment, I should be glad to go into the subject with him to any length and quite disinterestedly, as I have no sort of ax to grind. Almost the last thing I would choose to be at my time of life is a college president, or a professor, or Gott soll hüten, a trustee. My interest is only in a competent diagnosis of the weaknesses and disabilities of American civilization—disabilities which are every day increasingly apparent—and in finding some remedy for them; and I believe that the social experiment I have outlined would throw enough light on both these matters to be worth its cost. With our educational system continually controlled by the conventions which now control it (and there is no prospect that I can see of its release), our civilization is obviously likely to go on as it is. Argument a priori about the kind of civilization that might ensue upon an emancipation from these conventions would be as obviously futile and inert. Some line of practical approach, however, might be indicated a posteriori, by the experimental method, applied through such an institution as I have suggested; and in its essential features, as far as I am informed, there is not an institution in the United States today that remotely resembles the one I propose.

I discussed this idea at larger length lately with a young friend, a graduate of an English university, who wrote me as follows:

But think of the poor devils who will have gone through your mill! It seems a cold-blooded thing, merely by way of experiment, to turn out a lot of people who simply can’t live at home. Vivisection is nothing to it. As I understand your scheme, you are planning to breed a batch of cultivated, sensitive beings who would all die six months after they were exposed to your actual civilization. This is not Oxford superciliousness, I assure you, for things nowadays are precious little better with us. I agree with you that such spirits are the salt of the earth, and England used to make some kind of place for them, not much, maybe, but there were backwaters where they could at least live and cooperate with their kind. But now—well, I hardly know. It seems as if some parts of the earth were jolly well salt-proof. The salt melts and disappears, and nothing comes of it.

This desponding sentiment may be sound or it may be unsound. But whatever one’s opinion may be, I think that in spite of the chance of human sacrifice involved, an experiment tending towards something like actual evidence, one way or the other, would be greatly worth making.