Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

We plain Americans in our little red school-houses and our big brick high schools and our spreading universities have learned republicanism and the rights of man and the not-to-be-questioned opportunity of every person to go to the top of the ladder if he wished and were able. This we were taught explicitly and implicitly. And we believed these things because we were made to think that all right-thinking men everywhere believed them: and therefore we recited Gladstone and Lincoln and Toussaint L’Ouverture and passages from Carlyle’s “French Revolution” and Mrs. Browning on the freeing of Italy with confident hearts. Furthermore, we felt that these principles were sincere, because, no matter how poor or how stupid, we found educational opportunities opened on every side. There was no discrimination in the quantity of American education, and but little in its quality. Until we left the school or the campus, our liberal tradition fitted us like a garment. It never occurred to us that it might not always fit.

Yet as soon as we moved out into America, crossing that bridge from theory to practice, from ideas to application, which in all countries is long and in new countries longest of all, strange contradiction began to be apparent. Republicanism, it appeared, worked out in practice, at least in our town, into boss control and domination by party leaders, acting usually for vested interests. The rights of man, we discovered, had a curious sound when discussed by labor-unions or the unemployed. Opportunities, it became clear, could not be freely offered to the man without capital unless we were prepared to change radically an industrial system which our common sense taught us was better—at least for us—than the visionary industrial democracies that radicals without business experience wished to set up. Were these precious ideals of ours merely buncombe, then, held only in theory, in practice to be disregarded? Or was democracy good as a half-way measure, but false as a general principle? Was our education a tradition to be reverenced—and disregarded?

Not a few reached the indicated conclusion, though they kept, as a rule, their opinions to themselves. Perhaps as many swung to the other extreme, believed that only more democracy would cure us, and also kept out of print, for fear of being associated with radical aliens who held much the same opinions in politics and social affairs, but very different conceptions of cleanliness, morals, and polite conversation. These were our right and left wings merely. The great mass of us, the everyday Americans, took things as they were with a kind of shrewd childish good sense, and pushed ahead, being as democratic as was convenient in this unequal world, but taking no nonsense from people who would interfere with business in order to make us more so. And that is where we are now—at the end of the war, in the midst of a world revolution so great that no one knows whether it has just begun or is just ending.

But a revolution drives men back upon their principles, makes them scan willingly or unwillingly the things they live by—the prejudices, enlightenments, interpretations, convictions that in the largest sense are their education. And this is true not only of rapid revolutions, like the French and the Russian, but of slow ones, such as that revolution which has been slowly gathering headway in English-speaking countries for three decades or more, that revolution of social and industrial conditions now rapidly accelerating. And what have Americans thought of their education?

I think they have found it a brake, a stabilizer, a deterrent alike from violent reaction and dangerous experiment. I think also that they have found it what it is—traditional. They have felt it as a taboo, good on Sundays, but on week-days not to be too closely regarded. Where it has preached restraint to the more radical, they have listened, but grown restless. Was it not John Bright who said that England would be ruined if the hours for labor should be shortened? Did not Cooper, who wrote the epic of frontier freedom, sharpen his pen to defend the unearned increment of the landlord? Where it speaks of liberty and equality to the more conservative, they have listened, but not taken it too seriously. After all, the world must be governed and dividends paid. While the rights of the citizen should be safeguarded, business is business nevertheless, and politics politics. The Declaration of Independence, they felt, should be kept in its place, which was the Fourth of July. Theory—by which they meant education—has little place in practical affairs. They were liberals of course, but plain and prosperous Americans first of all, and the latter, at least, they intended to remain.

And thus, in its noble attempt to shape the minds of Americans to a similitude of their full-blooded ancestors who dared to be radical, American education itself has acquired the sanctity, the reverence, the ghostliness of the dead. Like the dead, it is most influential upon spirits sensitive to the past, and operates through love and veneration and mere habit rather than through immediate compulsion. Like them, it visits the minds of the living only in glimpses of the moon, and its influence, though wide-spread, is partial and easily forgotten in the noonday glare of active, practical life. Americans respect their education, but too seldom do they live by it.

It is a good tradition, this American ideal of noble and sturdy liberalism. The only detraction to be made is precisely that the education which embodies it is felt to be merely traditional. But this is much the same as to say that last year’s hat is a good hat, the only trouble being that when we wear it we invariably remember that it is last year’s hat. And at least one unhappy consequence follows.

American minds have been coddled in school and college for at least a generation. There are two kinds of mental coddling. The first belongs to the public schools, and is one of the defects of our educational system that we abuse privately and largely keep out of print. It is democratic coddling. I mean, of course, the failure to hold up standards, the willingness to let youth wobble upward, knowing little and that inaccurately, passing nothing well, graduating with an education that hits and misses like an old type-writer with a torn ribbon. America is full of “sloppy thinking,” of inaccuracy, of half-baked misinformation, of sentimentalism, especially sentimentalism, as a result of coddling by schools that cater to an easy-going democracy. Only fifty-six per cent of a group of girls, graduates of the public schools, whose records I once examined, could do simple addition, only twenty-nine per cent simple multiplication correctly; a deplorable percentage had a very inaccurate knowledge of elementary American geography.

A dozen causes are responsible for this condition, and among them, I suspect, one, which if not major, at least deserves careful pondering. The teacher and the taught have somehow drifted apart. His function in the large has been to teach an ideal, a tradition. He is content, he has to be content, with partial results. It is not for life as it is, it is for what life ought to be, that he is preparing even in arithmetic; he has allowed the faint unreality of a priestcraft to numb him. In the mind of the student a dim conception has entered, that this education—all education—is a garment merely, to be doffed for the struggle with realities. The will is dulled. Interest slackens.

But it is in aristocratic coddling that the effects of our educational attitude gleam out to the least observant understanding. This is the coddling of the preparatory schools and the colleges, and it is more serious for it is a defect that cannot be explained away by the hundred difficulties that beset good teaching in a public-school system, nation-wide, and conducted for the young of every race in the American menagerie. The teaching in the best American preparatory schools and colleges is as careful and as conscientious as any in the world. That one gladly asserts. Indeed, an American boy in a good boarding-school is handled like a rare microbe in a research laboratory. He is ticketed; every instant of his time is planned and scrutinized; he is dieted with brain food, predigested, and weighed before application. I sometimes wonder if a moron could not be made into an Abraham Lincoln by such a system—if the system were sound.