Functions of a school of journalism: To select as well as to train
President Eliot, when the organization of a school of journalism came before him, cast his august and misleading influence for the view that a college education was enough training for newspaper work. Many still believe this. In more than one city-room today college men are challenging the right of the graduates of a school of journalism to look on themselves as better fitted for the newspaper office than those who are graduates of a good college. If the training of the school has done no more than graft some copy-writing and some copy-editing on the usual curriculum, they are right. If the coming journalist has got his training in classes, half of whose number had no professional interest in the course offered, the claim for the college course may be found to be well based. Men teach each other in the classroom. A common professional purpose creates common professional ideals and common professional aims as no training can, given without this, though it deal with identically the same subjects.
The training of the journalist will at this point go through the same course as the training of other callings. The palpable thing about law, the objective fact it presents first to the layman, is procedure and form. This began legal education. A man entered a law office. He ran errands and served papers which taught him how suits were opened. A bright New York office boy in a law firm will know how many days can pass before some steps must be taken or be too late, better than the graduate of a law school. The law students in an office once endlessly copied forms and learned that phase of law. For generations men "eat their dinners" at the Inns of Court and learned no more. The law itself they learned through practice, at the expense of their clients. Anatomy was the obvious thing about medicine when Vesalius, of the strong head and weak heart, cleaned away the superstitions of part of the medical art and discovered a new world at twenty-eight. The medical training of even seventy years ago, twenty years after cellular pathology had dawned, held wearisome hours of dissection now known to be a waste. It is the functions of the body and its organs which we now know to be the more important, and not the bones, muscles, nerves, and organs considered as mere mechanism.
The classroom is the patent thing about instruction. The normal schools lavished time on the tricks of teaching until flocks of instructors in the high schools and colleges could not inaccurately be divided into those who could teach and knew nothing and those who knew something and could not teach. Our colleges early thought they could weave in Hebrew and theology, and send out clergymen, and later tried to give the doctor a foundation on which eighteen subsequent months could graft all he needed of medicine.
Reporting is the obvious aspect of journalism which the ignorant layman sees. Many hold the erroneous view that the end of a school of journalism is to train reporters. Reporting is not journalism. It is the open door to the newspaper office, partly because there are very few reporters of many years' service. Some of them are, but able men before long usually work out of a city-room, or gain charge of some field of city news, doing thus what is in fact reporting, but combined with editorial, critical, and correspondent work. Such is the Wall Street man, the local politics man, the City Hall man, or the Police Headquarters man, who gathers facts and counts acquaintance as one of his professional assets. But these men are doing, in their work, far more than reporting as it presents itself to those who see in the task only an assignment. Such men know the actual working of the financial mechanism, not as economists see it, but as Bagehot knew it. They understand the actual working of municipal machinery besides having a minute knowledge of character, decision, practice, and precedent in administration. In our real politics, big and little, they and the Washington and Albany correspondents are the only men who know both sides, are trusted with the secrets of both parties, and read closed pages of the book of the chronicles of the Republic. As for the Police Headquarters man, he too alone knows both police and crime, and no investigation surprises him by its revelations. If a man, for a season, has had the work of one of these posts, he comes to feel that he writes for an ignorant world, and if he have the precious gift of youth, looks on himself as favored of mortals early, seeing the events of which others hear, daily close to the center of affairs, knowing men as they are and storing confidence against the day of revelation.
Men like these are the very heart's core of a newspaper. Their posts train them. So do the key posts of a newspaper, its guiding and directing editors and those who do the thinking for thinking men by the hundred thousand in editorial, criticism, and article. It is for this order of work on a newspaper that a school of journalism trains. It is to these posts that, if its men are properly trained, its graduates rapidly ascend, after a brief apprenticeship in the city-room and a round in the routine work of a paper. Dull men, however educated, will never pass these grades, and not passing they will drop out. A school should sift such out; but so far, in all our professional training, it is only the best medical schools which are inflexible in dealing with mediocrity. Most teachers know better, but let the shifty and dull pass by. The newspaper itself has to be inexorable, and no well-organized office helps twice the man who is dull once; but he and his kind come often enough to mar the record.
Journalism, like other professions, has its body of special tasks and training, but, as in other callings, clear comprehension of this body of needs will develop in instruction slowly. The case system in law and the laboratory method in medicine came after some generations or centuries of professional work and are only a generation old. Any one who has sought to know the development of these two methods sees that much in our schools of journalism is where law and medical schools were sixty years ago. We are still floundering and have not yet solved the problem of giving background, concision, accuracy, and interest to the report, of really editing copy and not merely condensing and heading it, of recognizing and developing the editorial and critical mind, and most of all, of shutting out early the shallow, the wrong-headed, the self-seeking, and the unballasted student.
The average college student lacks expressional power: Reasons
The very best law and medical schools get the better of this, and only the best. They are greatly aided by a state examination which tests and tries all their work, braces their teaching, stimulates their men, and directs their studies. This will inevitably come in journalism, though most practicing newspaper men do not believe this. Neither did doctors before 1870 expect this. As the newspaper comes closer and closer into daily life, inflicts wounds without healing and does damage for which no remedy exists, the public will require of the writer on a daily at least as much proof of competency as it does of a plumber. This competency sharply divides between training in the technical work of the newspaper and in those studies that knowledge which newspaper work requires. Capacity to write with accuracy, with effect, with interest, and with style is the first and most difficult task among the technical requirements of the public journal. As has already been said, a gift for expression is needed, but even this cannot be exercised or developed unless a man has acquired diction and come in contact with style, for all the arts rest on the imitation of accepted models. Many students in all schools of journalism come from immigrant families and are both inconceivably ignorant of English and inconceivably satisfied with their acquirement of English, as we all are with a strange tongue we have learned to speak. Even in families with two or more generations of American life, the vocabulary is limited, construction careless, and the daily contact with any literature, now that family prayers and Bible reading are gone; almost nil. Of the spoken English of teachers in our public schools, considered as the basis of training for the writer, it is not seemly to speak. Everybody knows college teachers who have never shaken off the slovenly phrases and careless syntax of their homes. The thesis on which advanced degrees are conferred is a fair and just measure of the capacity to write conferred by eleven years of education above the "grammar grades." The old drill in accurate and exact rendering of Greek and Latin was once the best training for the writer; but slovenly sight reading has reduced its value, and a large part of its true effect was because the youth who studied the classics fifty years ago came in a far larger share than today from families whose elders had themselves had their expression and vocabulary trained and developed by liberal studies. The capacity for good writing apparent at Oxford and Cambridge rests in no small measure on the classical family horizon in teacher and taught.
Kind of training in composition to be given students of journalism