An American at Oxford

by John Corbin

As regards the American teaching system, the fact that the college so long remained identical with the university has caused little else than good. At Oxford and Cambridge, when a demand arose for instruction in new fields, the university could not meet it because it had little or no wealth and had surrendered its teaching function; and the score of richly endowed colleges, by force of their inertia, collectively resisted the demand. The enlargement in the scope of instruction has been of the slowest. In America, each new demand instantly created its supply. The moment the students in theology required more than a single professor, their tuition fees as well as other funds could be applied to the creation of a divinity school; and the professorships in law, medicine, and the technical professions were likewise organized into schools, each fully equipped under a separate faculty for the pursuit of its special aim. Thus the ancient college was developed by segregation into a fully organized modern university. American institutions are composed of a reduplication, not of similar colleges, but of distinct schools, each with its special subject to teach. This fact makes possible a far higher standard of instruction. The virtue of the administrative and social organization in the English university, as has been pointed out, results from division of the university into separate communities,—distinct organs, each with its separate activity. The virtue of the American university in its teaching functions results from a precisely similar cause.

In the case of the college, one or two details have lately been the occasion of criticism. In the educational as in the social and administrative functions, the machinery is apparently overgrown. Until well into the nineteenth century, the body of instruction offered was much the same as in the English colleges of the seventeenth century, or in the pass schools of to-day,—a modified version of the mediæval trivium and quadrivium. When a new world of intellectual life was opened, most academic leaders regarded it with abhorrence. The old studies were the only studies to develop the manners and the mind; the new studies were barbarous, and dwarfed the understanding. All learning had been contained in a pint-pot, and must continue to be so. If the old curriculum had prevailed, the old system might have continued to serve, in spite of the enormous increase of students; but it did not. Discussions of the educational value of the new learning are still allowed to consume paper and ink; but the cause of the old pint-pot was lost decades ago. All branches are taught, and are open to all students.

The live question to-day both in England and America is not whether we shall recognize the new subjects, but how and in what proportion we shall teach them. In England, where the colleges and the university are separate, the teaching and the examining are separate. The student prepares in college for an examination by the university. It is as a result of this that the subjects of instruction have been divided and organized into honor schools; and here again the division and organization have resulted in sounder and more efficient functioning. In America, such a division has never been made: the teaching and the degree-granting offices have remained identical. The professor in each "course" is also the examiner, and the freedom of choice of necessity goes not by groups of related studies but by small disconnected courses. As the field of recognized knowledge developed, new courses were added, and the student was granted a greater range of choice. Whereas of old all the instruction of the college might and had to be taken in four years, the modern courses could scarcely be exhausted in a full century. This American system, earliest advocated at Harvard, is called the elective system, and has made its way, in a more or less developed form, into all American universities worthy of the name. Its primary work was that of the Oxford honor schools—the shattering of the old pint-pot. It has done this work; but it is now in train to become no less a superstition than the older system, and is thus no less a menace to the cause of education.

It is perhaps only natural, though it was scarcely to be expected, that the university which in late years has most severely criticised the elective system is that which a quarter of a century ago deliberately advocated it, and in the face of almost universal opposition justified it in the eyes of American educators. There has evidently been a miscalculation. Yet though Harvard has cautiously acknowledged its failure in the persons of no less authorities than Professor Münsterberg and Dean Briggs, the element of error has not yet been clearly stated, nor has the remedy been proposed. Many things have been said against the elective system, but they may all be summed up in one phrase: it is not elective. This is no specious paradox. It is the offer of free election that is specious.

No offer could seem fairer. The student is at liberty to choose as he will. He may specialize microscopically or scatter his attention over the universe; he may elect the most ancient subjects or the most modern, the hardest or the easiest. No offer, I repeat, could seem fairer. But experience disillusions. Some day or other a serious student wakes up to the fact that he is the victim of—shall we say a thimble-rigging game? For example, let us take the case of a serious specialist. Of all the world's knowledge the serious specialist values only one little plot. A multitude of courses is listed in the catalogue, fairly exhausting his field. Delightful! Clearly he can see which walnut-shell covers the pea. He chooses for his first year's study four courses—the very best possible selection, the only selection, to open up his field. One moment: on closer scrutiny he finds that two of the four courses are given at the same hour, and that, therefore, he cannot take them in the same year. Still, there are at his command other courses, not so well adapted to his purposes, but sooner or later necessary. He chooses one. Hold again! On closer inspection he finds that appended to the course is a Roman numeral, and that the same numeral is against one of his other courses. After half an hour's search in the catalogue he finds that, though the two courses are given at different hours, and indeed on different days of the week, the mid-year and final examinations in both take place on the same days. Obviously these two cannot be taken in the same year. With dampened spirits his eye lights on a second substitute. He could easily deny himself this course; but it is vastly interesting, if not important, and he must arrange a year's work. Behold, this most interesting course was given last year, and will be given next year, but neither love nor money nor the void of a soul hungering for knowledge could induce the professor who gives it to deliver one sentence of one lecture; he is busy and more than busy with another course which will not be given next year. The specialist is at last forced to elect a course he does not really want. One entanglement as to hours of which the present deponent had knowledge forced a specialist in Elizabethan literature to elect—and, being a candidate for a degree with distinction, to get a high grade in—a course in the history of finance legislation in the United States. This was a tragic waste, for so many and so minute are the courses offered that the years at the student's disposal are all too few to cover even a comparatively narrow field. The specialist may well ruminate on the philosophy of Alice and her Wonderland jam. Yesterday he could elect anything, and to-morrow anything; but how empty is to-day!

Highly as the modern university regards the serious specialist, a more general sympathy will probably be given to the man who is seeking a liberal education. Such a man knows that in four years at his disposal he cannot gain any real scientific knowledge even of the studies of the old-fashioned college curriculum. As taught now, at Harvard, they would occupy, according to President Eliot's report for 1894-95, twice four years. But by choosing a single group of closely related subjects, and taking honors in it, he hopes to master a considerable plot of the field of knowledge. I will not say that he chooses the ancient classics, for—though they are admirably taught in a general way in the great Oxford Honor School of Literæ Humaniores—the American student may be held to require, even in studying the classics, a larger element of scientific culture, which would take more time than is to be had. For the same reason I will not say that he chooses the modern languages and literatures, though such a choice might be defended. Let us say that he chooses a single modern language and literature—his own.[4] Surely this is not too large a field for four years' study. Of classics, mathematics, science, and history he has supposedly been given a working knowledge in the preparatory school. For the rest he relies on the elective system.

Even in the beginning, like the specialist, he is unable to choose the courses he most wants, because of the conflict of the hours of instruction and examination; and this difficulty pursues him year by year, increasing as the subjects to be taken grow fewer and fewer. But let us dismiss this as an incidental annoyance. His fate is foreshadowed when he finds that the multitude of courses by which alone he could cover the entire field of English literature would fill twice the time at his disposal. Already he has discovered that the elective system is not so very elective. He sadly omits Icelandic and Gothic, and all but one half course is Anglo-Saxon. Some day he means to cover the ground by means of a history of literature and translations; but in point of fact, as the subjects are not at all necessary for his degree, and as he is overburdened with other work, he never does. He sticks to his last, and is the more willing to do so because, being wise beyond the wont of undergraduates, he knows that it will be well to fortify his knowledge of the English language and literature with a complementary knowledge of the history of the English people, and of the history and literature of the neighboring Germans and French.

Having barely time for a rapid survey of these complementary subjects, he elects only the introductory courses. In the aggregate they require many precious hours, and to take them he is obliged to omit outright English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but he knows that it is better to neglect a finial or two than the buttresses of the edifice he is building. Again he has miscalculated. After his complementary courses are begun, and it is too late to withdraw from them, he discovers even more clearly than the specialist how very unelective the elective system can be. It is the same old question of the thimble and the pea. These introductory courses are intended to introduce him to the study of history and of literature, not to complement his studies of English. What he wanted to know in English history was the social and the political movements, the vital and picturesque aspect; what he is taught is the sources and constitutions—the dry bones. In German and French he wanted to know the epochs of literature; he is taught the language, considered scientifically, or, at most, certain haphazard authors in whom he has only a casual interest. If he is studying for honors, he is obliged to waste enough time on these disappointing courses to reach a high grade in each. The system of free election is mighty, for he is a slave to it.

This difficulty is typical. Thus a student of history or of German who wants to study Elizabethan literature for its bearing on his subject is obliged to spend one full course—a quarter of a year's work—on the language of four or five plays of Shakespeare before he is permitted to take a half course on Shakespeare as a dramatist; and even then all the rest of the Elizabethan period is untouched.

Let us suppose that our student of English is wary as well as wise, preternaturally wary, and leaves all complementary subjects to private reading—for which he has no time. He is then able to devote himself to the three or four most important epochs in English literature. He has to leave out much that is of importance, so that he cannot hope to gain a synoptic view of the field as a whole; but of his few subjects he will at least be master. Here at last is the thimble that covers the pea. Not yet! In four courses out of five of those devoted to the greatest writers, the teacher's attention is directed primarily to a very special and scientific study of the language; the examination consists in explaining linguistic cruxes. Literary criticism, even of the most sober kind, is quite neglected. If the student learns only what is taught, he may attain the highest grades and the highest honors without being able in the end to distinguish accurately the spirit of Chaucer from that of Elizabethan literature.