Huxley and education / Address at the Opening of the College Year, Columbia University, September 28, 1910

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

I believe the greatest fault of the American student lies in the over-development of one of his greatest virtues, namely, his collectivism. His strong esprit de corps patterns and moulds him too far. The rewards are for the 'lock-step' type of man who conforms to the prevailing ideals of his college. He must parade, he must cheer, to order. Individualism is at a discount; it debars a man from the social rewards of college life. In my last address to Columbia students on the life of Darwin,[1] I asked what would be thought of that peculiar, ungainly, beetle collector if he were to enter one of our colleges to-day? He would be lampooned and laughed out of the exercise of his preferences and predispositions. The mother of a very talented young honor man recently confessed to me that she never spoke of her son's rank because she found it was considered "queer." This is not what young America generates, but what it borrows or reflects from the environment of its elders.

Thus the young American is not lifted up by the example of his seniors, he has to lift it up. If he is a student and has serious ambitions he represents the young salt of his nation, and the college brotherhood in general is a light shining in the darkness. Thus stumbling, groping, often misled by his natural leaders, he does somehow or other, through sheer force, acquire an education, and is just as surely coming to the front in the leadership of the American nation as the Oxford or Cambridge man is leading the British nation.

Our student body is as fine as can be, it represents the best blood and the best impulses of the country; but there may be something wrong, some loss, some delay, some misdirection of educational energy.

Bad as the British university system may be, and it has been vastly improved by the influence of Huxley, it is more effective than ours because more centrifugal. English lads are taught to compose, even to speak in Latin and Greek. The Greek play is an anomaly here, it is an annual affair at Cambridge. There are not one but many active and successful debating clubs in Cambridge.

The faults with our educational design are to be discovered through study of the lives of great men and through one's own hard and stony experience. The best text-books for the nurture of the mind are these very lives, and they are not found in the lists of the pedagogues. Consult your Froebel, if you will, but follow the actual steps to Parnassus of the men whose political, literary, scientific, or professional career you expect to follow. If you would be a missionary, take the lives of Patterson and Livingstone; if an engineer, 'The Lives of Engineers;' if a physician, study that of Pasteur, which I consider by far the noblest scientific life of the nineteenth century; if you would be a man of science, study the recently published lives and letters of Darwin, Spencer, Kelvin, and of our prototype Huxley.

Here you may discover the secret of greatness, which is, first, to be born great, unfortunately a difficult and often impossible task; second, to possess the instinct of self-education. You will find that every one of these masters while more or less influenced by their tutors and governors was led far more by a sort of internal, instinctive feeling that they must do certain things and learn certain things. They may fight the battle royal with parents, teachers, and professors, they may be as rebellious as ducklings amidst broods of chickens and give as much concern to the mother fowls, but without exception from a very early age they do their own thinking and revolt against having it done for them, and they seek their own mode of learning. The boy Kelvin is taken to Germany by his father to study the mathematics of Kelland; he slips down into the cellar to the French of Fourier, and at the age of fifteen publishes his first paper to demonstrate that Fourier is right and Kelland is wrong. Pasteur's first research in crystallography is so brilliant that his professor urges him to devote himself to this branch of science, but Pasteur insists upon continuing for five years longer his general studies in chemistry and physics.

This is the true empirical, or laboratory method of getting at the trouble, if trouble there be in the American modus operandi; but a generation of our great educators have gone into the question as if no experiments had ever been made. In the last thirty years one has seen rise up a series of 'healers,' trying to locate the supposed weakness in the American student: one finds it in the classic tongues and substitutes the modern; one in the required system and substitutes the elective; one in the lack of contact between teacher and student and brings in preceptors, under whom the patient shows a slight improvement. Now the kind of diagnosis which comes from examining such a life as that of Huxley shows that the real trouble lies in the prolongation to mature years of what may be styled the 'centripetal system,' namely, that afferent, or inflowing mediæval and oriental kind of instruction in which the student is rarely if ever forced to do his own thinking.

You will perceive by this that I am altogether on your side, an insurgent in education, altogether against most of my profession, altogether in sympathy with the over-fed student, and altogether against the prevailing system of overfeeding, which stuffs, crams, pours in, spoon-feeds, and as a sort of deathbed repentance institutes creative work after graduation.

How do you yourself stand on this question? Is your idea of a good student that of a good 'receptacle'? Do you regard your instructors as useful grain hoppers whose duty it is to gather kernels of wisdom from all sources and direct them into your receptive minds? Are you content to be a sort of psychic Sacculina, a vegetative animal, your mind a vast sack with two systems, one for the incurrent, the other for the outcurrent of predigested ideas? If so, all your mental organs of combat and locomotion will atrophy. Do you put your faith in reading, or in book knowledge? If so, you should know that not a five foot shelf of books, not even the ardent reading of a fifty foot shelf aided by prodigious memory will give you that enviable thing called culture, because the yardstick of this precious quality is not what you take in but what you give out, and this from the subtle chemistry of your brain must have passed through a mental metabolism of your own so that you have lent something to it. To be a man of culture you need not be a man of creative power, because such men are few, they are born not made; but you must be a man of some degree of centrifugal force, of individuality, of critical opinion, who must make over what is read into conversation and into life. Yes, one little idea of your own well expressed has a greater cultural value than one hundred ideas you absorb; one page that you produce, finely written, new to science or to letters and really worth reading, outweighs for your own purposes the five foot shelf. On graduation, presto, all changes, then of necessity must your life be independent and centrifugal; and just in so far as it has these powers will it be successful; just in so far as it is merely imitative will it be a failure.