A doctor cannot afford to depend too freely on experience, valuable though it may be, because the high prices it asks are paid by his patients. But so far as professional training goes, Dr. Goodnow stood on firm ground. All it undertakes to do is to enable students to work along chosen lines—to turn them into doctors, lawyers, priests, mining engineers, analytical chemists, expert accountants. They may or may not be educated men in the liberal sense of the word. They may or may not understand allusions which are current in the conversation of educated people. Such conversation is far from encyclopædic; but it is interwoven with knowledge, and rich in agreeable disclosures. An adroit participant can avoid obvious pitfalls; but it is not in dodging issues and concealing deficits that the pleasures of companionship lie. I once heard a sparkling and animated lady ask Mr. Henry James (who abhorred being questioned) if he did not think American women talked better than English women. “Yes,” said the great novelist gently, “they are more ready and much more brilliant. They rise to every suggestion. But”—as if moved by some strain of recollection—“English women so often know what they are talking about.”
Vocational training and vocational guidance are a little like intensive farming. They are obvious measures for obvious results; they economize effort; they keep their goal in view. If they “pander to cabbages,” they produce as many and as fine cabbages as the soil they till can yield. Their exponents are most convincing when they are least imaginative. The Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration says bluntly that it is hard for a young man to see any good in a college education, when he finds he has nothing to offer which business men want.
This is an intelligible point of view. It shows, as I have said, that the country does not feel itself rich enough for intellectual luxuries. But when I see it asserted that vocational training is necessary for the safety of Democracy (the lusty nursling which we persist in feeding from the bottle), I feel that I am asked to credit an absurdity. When the reason given for this dependence is the altruism of labour,—“In a democracy the activity of the people is directed towards the good of the whole number,”—I know that common sense has been violated by an assertion which no one is expected to take seriously. A life-career course may be established in every college in the land, and students carefully guarded from the inroads of distracting and unremunerative knowledge; but this praiseworthy thrift will not be practised in the interests of the public. The mechanical education, against which Mr. Lowell has protested sharply, is preëminently selfish. Its impelling motive is not “going over,” but getting on.
“It takes a much better quality of mind for self-education than for education in the ordinary sense,” says Mrs. Gerould; and no one will dispute this truth. Franklin had two years of schooling, and they were over and done with before he was twelve. His “cultural opportunities” were richer than those enjoyed by Mr. Gompers, and he had a consuming passion for knowledge. Vocational training was a simple thing in his day; but he glimpsed its possibilities, and fitted it into place. He would have made an admirable “vocational counsellor” in the college he founded, had his counsels not been needed on weightier matters, and in wider spheres. As for industrial education, those vast efficiency courses given by leading manufacturers to their employees, which embrace an astonishing variety of marketable attainments, they would have seemed to him like the realization of a dream—a dream of diffused light and general intelligence.
We stand to-day on an educational no man’s land, exposed to double fires, and uncertain which way to turn for safety. The elimination of Greek from the college curriculum blurred the high light, the supreme distinction, of scholarship. The elimination of Latin as an essential study leaves us without any educational standard save a correct knowledge of English, a partial knowledge of modern languages, and some acquaintance, never clearly defined, with precise academic studies. The scientist discards many of these studies as not being germane to his subject. The professional student deals with them as charily as possible. The future financier fears to embarrass his mind with things he does not need to know.
Yet back of every field of labour lies the story of the labourer, and back of every chapter in the history of civilization lie the chapters that elucidate it. “Wisdom,” says Santayana, “is the funded experience which mankind has gathered by living.” Education gives to a student that fraction of knowledge which sometimes leads to understanding and a clean-cut basis of opinions. The process is engrossing, and, to certain minds, agreeable and consolatory. Man contemplates his fellow man with varied emotions, but never with unconcern. “The world,” observed Bagehot tersely, “has a vested interest in itself.”
The American Laughs
It was the opinion of Thomas Love Peacock—who knew whereof he spoke—that “no man should ask another why he laughs, or at what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a responsible agent.... Reason is in no way essential to mirth.”
This being so, why should human beings, individually and collectively, be so contemptuous of one another’s humour? To be puzzled by it is natural enough. There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see. But to be scornful or angry, to say with Steele that we can judge a man’s temper by the things he laughs at, is, in a measure, unreasonable. A man laughs as he loves, moved by secret springs that do not affect his neighbour. Yet no sooner did America begin to breed humorists of her own than the first thing these gentlemen did was to cast doubts upon British humour. Even a cultivated laugher like Mr. Charles Dudley Warner suffered himself to become acrimonious on this subject; whereupon an English critic retaliated by saying that if Mr. Warner considered Knickerbocker’s “New York” to be the equal of “Gulliver’s Travels,” and that if Mr. Lowell really thought Mr. N. P. Willis “witty,” then there was no international standard of satire or of wit. The chances are that Mr. Lowell did not think Mr. Willis witty at all. He used the word in a friendly and unreflecting moment, not expecting a derisive echo from the other side of the sea.
And now Mr. Chesterton has protested in the “Illustrated London News” against the vogue of the American joke in England. He says it does not convey its point because the conditions which give it birth are not understood, and the side-light it throws fails to illuminate a continent. One must be familiar with the intimacies of American life to enjoy their humorous aspect.