Education and living

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

Yet the college has allowed some of these sporting attitudes to be imposed upon it. The undergraduates’ gladiatorial contests proceed under faculty supervision and patronage. Alumni contribute their support to screwing up athletic competition to the highest semi-professional pitch. They lend their hallowing patronage to fraternity life and other college institutions which tend to emphasize social distinction. And the college administration, in contrast to the European scheme, has turned the college course into a sort of race with a prize at the goal. The degree has become a sort of honorific badge for all classes of society, and the colleges have been forced to give it this quasi-athletic setting and fix the elaborate rules of the game by which it may be won—rules which shall be easy enough to get all classes competing for it, and hard enough to make it a sufficient prize to keep them all in the race. An intricate system of points and courses and examinations sets the student working for marks and the completion of schedules rather than for a new orientation in important fields of human interest.

The undergraduate can scarcely be blamed for responding to a system which so strongly resembles his sports, or for bending his energies to playing the game right, rather than assimilating the intellectual background of his teachers. So strongly has this sporting technique been acquired by the college that even when the undergraduate lacks the sporting instinct and does become interested in ideas, he is apt to find that he has only drawn attention to his own precocity and won amused notice rather than respect. In spite of the desire of instructors to get themselves over to their students, in spite of a real effort to break down the “class-consciousness” of teacher and student, the gulf between their attitudes is too fundamental to be easily bridged. Unless it is bridged, however, the undergraduate is left in a sort of Peter Pan condition, looking back to his schoolboy life and carrying along his schoolboy interests with him, instead of anticipating his graduate or professional study or his active life. What should be an introduction to professional or business life in a world of urgent political and social issues, and the acquiring of intellectual tools with which to meet their demands, becomes a sort of sequestered retreat out of which to jump from boyhood into a badly-prepared middle age.

The college will not really get the undergraduate until it becomes more conscious of the contrast of its own philosophy with his sporting philosophy, and tackles his boyish Americanisms less mercifully, or until it makes college life less like that of an undergraduate country club, and more of an intellectual workshop where men and women in the fire of their youth, with conflicts and idealisms, questions and ambitions and desire for expression, come to serve an apprenticeship under the masters of the time.

XXVIII
MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES

If the American college is to have a part in that new educational movement which is beginning to make the school not merely a preparation for life but life itself, interested in what has meaning to the student at his particular age and situation, it will have to recast some of its most cherished practices and ideals. The large university to-day represents all stages in the adjustment of intellectual activity to social demands, from the intensely practical schools of engineering, correlating with the technical progress of industry, back to the departments of literary scholarship—perhaps as pure an anachronism as we have in the intellectual world to-day. The demands for technical knowledge have pulled the university along, as it were, by the nose, and strung it through the ages, so that a “professor” to-day may be an electrical expert fresh from Westinghouse, or an archaic delver into forgotten poetry.

The technical departments of the universities have kept bravely up with the work of “learning by doing.” Laboratory and shopwork, practical coöperation with industry, contact with technical experts, have made the newer departments what they should be—energetic workshops where theory and practice constantly fertilize each other, and where the student comes out a competent technician in his craft. But the place of the college in this scheme becomes more and more anomalous. Devoted to the traditional studies—the literatures, mathematics, philosophy, history—it is still strangely reminiscent of old musty folkways of the schoolman and theologian. Every professor knows the desire of the average student to finish his college course and grapple with his professional studies. Every professor is aware of the sharp quickening of interest which comes on entrance to the professional schools. Though part of this feeling may be due to impatience to get out into the world, much of it certainly arises from a realization that at last one has come into a sphere where thinking means action. The college, with its light and unexacting labor, is cheerfully exchanged for the grind of the professional school, because the latter touches a real world.

Whereas the higher schools give the student active work to do, almost all the methods of the college teaching conspire to force him into an attitude of passivity. The lecture system is the most impressive example of this attitude, and the lecture system seems actually to get a tightening grip upon the modern college. As standard forms have become worked out, it is customary now actually to measure the student’s course by the number of hours he exposes himself to lectures. For the college course to be organized on a basis of lectures suggests that nothing has happened since Abelard spoke in Paris to twelfth-century bookless men. It is as if the magic word had still to be communicated by word of mouth, like the poems of Homer of old. The emphasis is continually upon the oral presentation of material which the professor has often himself written in a text-book, or which could be conveyed with much greater exactness and fullness from books. These books the student knows only as “collateral reading.” Nothing is left undone to impress him with the idea that the books and reviews and atlases are mere subsidiaries to the thin but precious trickle of the professor’s voice.

Now there may be some excuse for the lecture in a Continental university, where the professor is a personality, is not compelled to lecture, and may make of his delivery a kind of intellectual ceremony. But American professors are not only likely to be atrocious lecturers, but to hate such compulsory talking as the sheerest drudgery. Too often their own palpable derision at the artificiality of it makes the lecture an effective barrier between the student’s curiosity and its satisfaction. This is not to deny that the lecture might be made into a broad interpretative survey, which would give the student the clues he needs through the maze of books. This is exactly what the best college courses tend to become. But for this the college will need interpreters, and not the humdrum recorders and collators that it has a weakness for.

The continuance of the lecture system is only symptomatic of the refusal of the college to see clearly the changing ideals of scholarship. If the student has to think chiefly about exposing himself to the required numbers of lectures, and then to examinations which test his powers of receptivity, he will be forced into an attitude which we are discovering is the worst possible for any genuine learning. This passivity may have been all very well when education was looked upon as an amassing of the “symbols of learning,” or the acquiring of invidious social distinction. The old college education was for a limited and homogeneous class. It presupposed social and intellectual backgrounds which the great majority of college students to-day do not possess. The idea of studying things “for their own sake,” without utilitarian bearings, is seductive, but it implies a society where the ground had been prepared in childhood and youth through family and environmental influences. When higher education was confined almost entirely to a professional intellectual class, the youth was accustomed to see intellect in action around him. He did not come to college ignorant even of the very terms and setting of the philosophy and history and sociology studied there. Now, when all classes come to college, the college must give that active, positive background which in former generations was prepared for it outside. It must create the intellectual stomach as well as present the food.

We are learning that this can only be done by putting ideas to work, by treating the matter taught in the college as indispensable for any understanding or improvement of our modern world. In the technical schools, ideas and processes become immediately effective, but nothing in the college is really “used”; ideas are not put to work. Professors anxiously desire to “teach students to think,” but they do not give them opportunities for that hard exercise which alone can produce trained thought. The college organs of expression, the debating clubs, literary magazines, newspapers, speaking contests, dramatic societies, etc., are usually amateurish, spasmodic, unreal. The flimsy background of the undergraduate is not to be wondered at where undergraduate expression in any channel is left by the college authorities unorganized and childish. And his low state must inevitably continue until ideas are not merely collected, with some vague idea of gilding the interior of his soul, but resolutely put to work. One reason for the overmastering devotion to athletics in the modern college is exactly its activity. In that field the student can do something. Here, thank God, he says, is a place where one can act!