When the leading interest is found it should next be made the means of creating interest in subjects to which the pupil is naturally indifferent or even averse. I have illustrated the process here implied in a paper on the prevocational art school which is connected with the Ethical Culture School. Young persons devoted to art are often unwilling to take up subjects which seem to them unrelated to what they really care for, like science and history. They are obsessed by a single passionate ambition. They are all eagerness to become artists—to draw, paint, model, etc. Time spent on any other subject seems to them misspent. If indulged in this one-sided activity, the chances are that they will not even become competent artists. In any case they will lack breadth and vision. They will lack a cultural background. They will be inferior as human beings. They will not be personalized. For personality, on its mental as well as on its social side, depends on relatedness,—depends not so much on what one does, as on the interrelation between what one does and what other people do.
In order to expand the interest of the young art student, the method employed in the school just mentioned is to present those subjects which appear to be alien in such a way as to bring out the art aspects of them, the contact points between them and art. Thus in history special prominence is given to the age of Pericles, the age of Rembrandt. In science special attention is paid to the theory of color, the chemistry of etching. And all other branches of knowledge are treated similarly. The aim is not indeed to exploit the other subjects in the interest of art, but so to utilize the artistic interest as to lead the mind out to a larger comprehensive interest in other related branches on their own account. Or rather, to put my thought precisely, and thus to connect it with the underlying ethical theory, the aim is to prepare the future artist for the give and take relation between his own pursuit and the activities of men in other vocations. He should be helped to enrich his own life as an artist by drawing upon all that the sciences and the humanities can give him, with a view to eventually returning with interest the profit he has derived. What the artist can do for the scientist, the religious teacher, etc., I have indicated in the previous chapter.
Precisely the same cultural idea should be worked out in prevocational schools of commerce, of technology, of science, etc. In each case the paramount interest should be the starting-point, the center from which lines of interest are to be made to radiate out into the correlated branches.
If this ethical idea is carried out the whole educational system will be remodeled. The cæsura in education will then fall about the sixteenth year. Before that the task will be to lay the general foundations and to reconnoiter the individuality of the pupil. After that there will be a system of prevocational schools. The college, a legacy which has come to us from a type of society unlike our own, will disappear, and the university will become an organism of vocational schools succeeding the prevocational.[83]
I mentioned at the end of Book I the problem of specialization, the increased necessity of restricting oneself to a limited field in order to achieve anything like the consciousness of mastery, and the inevitable fractionalizing of men which is the consequence of this very tendency toward specialization. In the idea of outreaching radiations of interest and of the give and take relation there is the promise of liberation from the narrowness of specialism without the calamity of dilettantism. That this idea cannot be fully realized, that no one can actually extend his web of interest so far, that his reactions at best will be feeble, is perhaps a palmary instance of that law of frustration which fatally besets all human effort. But the effort will be in the right direction, and the effort counts.
The University
In sketching the ethical or spiritual side of the University, initial stress is to be laid on the meaning of the word universitas. The term as at present used hardly
suggests more than all-inclusiveness. A modern university is an institution in which all the different schools, the school of engineering, the school of science, the school of philosophy, etc., exist side by side, under a single governing body, and in which the various branches of knowledge are pursued without any visible systematic connection between them! The spiritual ideal of a university is that of system, of organic connection, for this is what spiritual means.
In looking back on the history of the higher institutions of learning one cannot but be struck by the close correspondence of those institutions to the general ideals of life of the people among whom they flourished. I call to mind the Hindu education with its Brahmanic background; the Mandarin education, with Confucianism as its inspiring principle; the musical education of the Greeks; the theological education of Jews and Mohammedans; then among the Western nations, the English university a seminary for training rulers of the Empire; the German university, a training institution for the higher bureaucracy; the French university, visibly reflecting the logical tendency of the French mind.
We in America, instructed by the survey of the past, are bound to face the question: In what way shall the American university differ from universities elsewhere? What characteristic shape shall the American university take on? How can the American university correspond to the American ideal of life? At present our notions in this respect are in a formative, not to say in a chaotic, condition. The college still survives—an institution designed for the education of gentlemen. Practical tendencies, looking toward materialistic success, prevail in many of our Western universities. The German research idea has come in as a third factor, penetrating deeply in some of our institutions, less deeply in others, but inharmonious everywhere with the rival conceptions that still persist.