The recent controversies have revived the ancient dispute between a general education which makes the “all-round man” and specialized education which serves some particular purpose. This controversy can be illustrated by two kinds of examples. First, let us listen to those who are interested in higher education for the classes of students who are going to high school and college. Later we shall find that there is another level at which the same kind of controversy is going forward.
The following statements and counter-statements illustrate the extent to which the dispute is carried:
I suggest, that, in the first place, a man educated in the modern sense, has mastered the fundamental tools of knowledge: he can read and write; he can spell the words he is in the habit of using; he can express himself clearly orally or in writing; he can figure correctly and with moderate facility within the limits of practical need; he knows something about the globe on which he lives. So far there is no difference between a man educated in the modern sense and a man educated in any other sense.
There is, however, a marked divergence at the next step. The education which we are criticizing is overwhelmingly formal and traditional. If objection is made to this or that study on the ground that it is useless or unsuitable, the answer comes that it “trains the mind” or has been valued for centuries. “Training the mind” in the sense in which the claim is thus made for algebra or ancient languages is an assumption none too well founded; traditional esteem is an insufficient offset to present and future uselessness. A man educated in the modern sense will forego the somewhat doubtful mental discipline received from formal studies; he will be contentedly ignorant of things for learning which no better reason than tradition can be assigned. Instead, his education will be obtained from studies that serve real purposes. Its content, spirit and aim will be realistic and genuine, not formal or traditional. Thus, the man educated in the modern sense will be trained to know, to care about and to understand the world he lives in, both the physical world and the social world. A firm grasp of the physical world means the capacity to note and to interpret phenomena; a firm grasp of the social world means a comprehension of and sympathy with current industry, current science and current politics. The extent to which the history and literature of the past are utilized depends, not on what we call the historic value of this or that performance or classic, but on its actual pertinency to genuine need, interest or capacity. In any case, the object in view would be to give children the knowledge they need, and to develop in them the power to handle themselves in our own world. Neither historic nor what are called purely cultural claims would alone be regarded as compelling.
Even the progressive curricula of the present time are far from accepting the principle above formulated. For, though they include things that serve purposes, their eliminations are altogether too timid. They have occasionally dropped, occasionally curtailed, what experience shows to be either unnecessary or hopelessly unsuitable. But they retain the bulk of the traditional course of study, and present it in traditional fashion, because an overwhelming case has not—so it is judged—yet been made against it. If, however, the standpoint which I have urged were adopted, the curriculum would contain only what can be shown to serve a purpose. The burden of proof would be on the subject, not on those who stand ready to eliminate it. If the subject serves a purpose, it is eligible to the curriculum; otherwise not. I need not stop at this juncture to show that “serving a purpose,” “useful,” “genuine,” “realistic,” and other descriptive terms are not synonymous with “utilitarian,” “materialistic,” “commercial,” etc., for intellectual and spiritual purposes are genuine and valid, precisely as are physical, physiological, and industrial purposes.[42]
The answer in florid and perfervid terms offered by a champion of the classics is as follows:
I have left myself only a few words to sum up and define the main issue raised by the so-called modernist reform of education. It is not the place of physical science in our civilization and in our universities: that is secure. It is not the opportunity of industrial or vocational training for the masses: we all welcome that. It is not the conversion of the American high school into the old Latin-verse-writing English public school: nobody ever proposed that. It is not the prescription of a universal requirement of Greek or the maintenance of a disproportionate predominance of Latin in our high schools and colleges: there is not the slightest danger of that. It is the survival or the total suppression, in the comparatively small class of educated leaders who graduate from high schools and colleges, of the very conception of linguistic, literary, and critical discipline; of culture, taste, and standards; of the historic sense itself; of some trained faculty of appreciation and enjoyment of our rich heritage from the civilized past; of some counterbalancing familiarity with the actual evolution of the human man, to soften the rigidities of physical science, and to check and control by the touchstones of humor and common sense the a priori deductions of pseudo-science from conjectural reconstructions of the evolution of the physical and animal man.
It is in vain that they rejoin that they too care for these things, and merely repudiate our exclusive definitions of them. That is, in the main, only oratorical precaution and the tactics of debate, as, if space permitted, I could show by hundreds of citations from their books. The things which, for lack of better names, we try to suggest by culture, discipline, taste, standards, criticism, and the historic sense, they hate. Or, if you prefer, they are completely insensitive to them and wish to impose their own insensibility upon the coming generation. They are genuinely skeptical of intellectual discriminations which they do not perceive, and æsthetic values which they do not feel. They are fiercely resentful of what they deem the supercilious arrogance of those who possess or strive for some far-off touch or faint tincture of the culture and discipline which they denounce as shibboleths, taboos, and the arbitrary conventions of pedants.
From their own point of view it is natural that they should deprecate with sullen jealousy the inoculation of the adolescent mind with standards and tastes that would render it immune to what one of them has commended in print as the “science” of Elsie Clews Parsons. The purpose, or, at any rate, the tendency of their policies is to stamp out and eradicate these things and inculcate exclusively their own tastes and ideals by controlling American education with the political efficiency of Prussian autocracy and in the fanatical intolerance of the French anticlericalists. Greek and Latin have become mere symbols and pretexts. They are as contemptuous of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, Burke, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson, Alexander Hamilton, or Lowell, as of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Horace. They will wipe the slate clean of everything that antedates Darwin’s Descent of Man, Mr. Wells’s Research Magnificent, and the familiar pathos of James Whitcomb Riley’s vernacular verse.
These are the policies that mask as compassion for the child bored by literature which, they say, it cannot be expected to appreciate and understand, or behind the postulate that we should develop æsthetic and literary sensibilities only by means of the literature that expresses the spirit of modern science, not that which preserves in amber the husks of the dead past.[43]
The Theory of Separate Schools for Different Classes of People
Both writers above quoted are speaking of those learners who are to have large opportunities of higher education. What is to happen to the common masses, to whom the last writer grants the “opportunity of industrial or vocational training,” is still in doubt. There are, however, disputants who are trying to settle this question also. To illustrate we may borrow from a pamphlet issued by a great commercial organization in its campaign for legislation which should transform the school system of the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois.
STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES
Definition: Vocational education includes all forms of specialized education, the controlling purposes of which are to fit for useful occupations, whether in agriculture, commerce, industry or the household arts.
1. State aid is necessary to stimulate and encourage communities to carry on work in vocational education, but local communities should be permitted to initiate and should partly maintain such courses or schools.
2. The vocational schools should not compete or interfere with the present public school system, but should supplement it by providing practical instruction in vocational lines for youth between fourteen and eighteen who have left the present schools. To guard against any competition with the public schools as now organized, a special tax should be levied for the support of vocational schools, which, with the State grant for their support, should not be taken from the funds now provided by law for the support of the public school system.
3. The proper expenditure of State moneys for vocational schools should be fully safeguarded, while at the same time the initiative in adapting measures to local conditions should be left with the local authorities. To secure these ends the general management and approval of these courses and schools should be left to a State commission, while the local initiative and direct control should be exercised by a local board composed of employers, skilled employees and local superintendents of schools.
4. An efficient system of vocational education requires different methods of administration, different courses of study, different qualifications of teachers, different equipment, different ways of meeting the needs of pupils and much greater flexibility in adapting means to ends than is possible under the ordinary system of public school administration. For these reasons these schools should be under a separate board of control, whether carried on in a separate building or under the same roof with a general school, so that they may be free to realize their dominant purpose of fitting for useful employment.[44]