College prolongs infancy

by Horace Meyer Kallen

Almost equally so are the military establishments of states. Military duty comes at a much earlier age than civil responsibility. Modern industrial nations continue to conscript their young at from sixteen to eighteen. Also, the taxing power defines the young as self-supporting members of the economic order at eighteen; at that age exemption on their account ceases. For tax gatherers and armies, as for religious sects, adulthood and sexual readiness lie close together.

And this readiness is recognized in women by custom and law, which set the “age of consent” at puberty and raise it nowhere beyond sixteen. Moreover the readiness finds its purpose more largely than we imagine in marriage. The United States census of 1920 shows that nearly a quarter of all young people from fifteen to twenty-four were married, and the proportion has not grown less since then. Nor are these marriages confined to the poor. The rich signalize their daughters’ readiness by “presenting them to society” at from sixteen to eighteen; and there is much rivalry among “debs” about getting married or at least engaged during their first year “out.” The men of this class, on the other hand, tend to marry much later, while the average age of marriage for the “college bred” of both sexes is unnaturally higher. The whole contrasts sharply with the early marriage age of a hundred years ago.

V

Personal distinction also seems to go with the assumption of adulthood soon after puberty. Whether this is attained through some special attitude or general ability enchannelled by custom, opportunity, or accident in a particular vocation, makes little difference. Poets, painters, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, traders of distinction, assume the professional attitude and the responsibility of adulthood at an early age. Shelley, Keats, Bryant, Peter Cooper, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Eliot, Thomas Edison, Maxwell, Galileo, and countless others of the great, all began young. Nelson went to sea at twelve and commanded a ship at fifteen. His contemporary captains in the American merchant marine were boys of eighteen and nineteen. Much of the work of the world continues to be done by men and women under twenty-five. Prizefighters are old at thirty. It is a favorite doctrine of representative American employers, such as Henry Ford, that workingmen over forty are antiquated, and to be scrapped. Did not the great Osler advise euthanasia for all men over sixty? Nevertheless, the ruling personages in the ruling classes—the captains of industry, the masters of finance, the public officials, the judges, the generals—are progressively older and older now. They are men whose minds had matured and set while their bodies were young, and whose policies derive from the unconscious premise that what was modern and advanced in their youth is necessarily so in their old age. They are the elder statesmen who in their prolonged infancy rule the world....

VI

If many of these elder statesmen rule by virtue of distinguished ability and early adulthood, most do by virtue of a privileged position that delays adulthood and prolongs infancy more literally. The locus of this position is the high school and the college, especially the college. Owing to democracy, there has been a diffusion of some of the privileges of this status to the children of the masses. One of its marks is the war against child labor which we have noted, and the progressively later age at which work certificates are granted; another is the advancement, already referred to, of the age of consent and the measures for the protection of girls. Still another, and the most signal, is the increase of the high school population from the 300,000 of 1890 to the 5,000,000 of 1930, and the corresponding growth of the body of college students. Nevertheless the difference between the working young and the young at school remains still the difference between the responsibility of adulthood and the irresponsibility of infancy. The difference increases with the income level. The richer the class, the more likely are the young to be kept in a state of social infancy, the longer is the time delayed when they are permitted to assume the responsibilities of adulthood.

The secondary school and the college are by tradition and practice instruments pat to the social postponement of adulthood and the prolongation of social infancy.

By and large, only those children enter high school who do not need to work for a living. They enter about the time that children of the residual world enter life, at puberty. Their attending high school signalizes an invidious distinction between them and their contemporaries, for the high school has been from its beginning a mark of “aristocracy.” Even the “commercial” high school, which is yet of low esteem beside the high school preparing for college, celebrates this invidious distinction. But the real McCoy is the “college preparatory.” College sits in excelsis. The topmost turn of the educational system, it sets the standards and defines the ideal both of knowledge and conduct. Secondary-school students consequently prepare for college in a far completer way than is recognized. They emulate and reproduce the whole pattern and structure of “college life,” with its fraternities and other societies, its athletics, its hidden sex interests, and all the rest. Indeed, since the “educative process” worked by the schools is defined from above downward, the colleges, which are for the most part resorts where the well-to-do keep their physiologically mature young in a state of personal irresponsibility and social-economic dependence, set the standard of education for the whole nation.

Practice under this standard maintains a gulf between the curriculum and student interests. The school work, as the teacher sees it, makes up the “serious purpose” for which schools and colleges exist. Yet here is what a boy who believes in this serious purpose writes to the New York Times about his education:

“In a few weeks I will be handed a diploma, have my hand shaken by sundry individuals, and then told that I have been graduated from high school. I am supposed to be educated. The city has provided me for some four years with skilled teachers and expensive apparatus and told me, ‘Be conscientious in your studies and you shall know.’ I know that I have been sincere, but I will tell a few things I do not know.