Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

Most of these young men come thus from homes of conventional religion, cheap literature, and lack of intellectual atmosphere, bring few intellectual acquisitions with them, and, since they are most of them going into business, and will therefore make little practical use of these acquisitions in after life, contrive to carry a minimum away with them. In the college courses and talks with their instructors they come into an intellectual atmosphere that is so utterly different from what they have been accustomed to that, instead of an intellectual sympathy between instructor and student, there ensues an intellectual struggle that is demoralizing to both. The instructor has sometimes to carry on a veritable guerilla warfare of new ideas against the pupils in his courses, with a disintegrating effect that is often far from happy. If he does not disintegrate, he too often stiffens the youth, if of the usually tough traditional cast of mind, into an impregnable resolution that defies all new ideas forever after. This divergence of ideals and attitudes toward life is one of the most interesting complications of scholarship, for it is dramatic and flashes out in the class-room, in aspects at times almost startling.

There is still another thing that complicates scholarship, at least in the larger colleges that have professional schools. Two or three years of regular college work are now required to enter the schools of law, medicine, divinity, and education. An undergraduate who looks forward to entering these professional schools, too often sees this period of college work as a necessary but troublesome evil which must be gone through with as speedily as possible. In his headlong rush he is apt to slight his work, or take a badly synthesized course of studies, or, in an effort to get all he can while he is in the college, to gorge himself with a mass of material that cannot possibly be digested. Now, the college work is of course only prescribed in order that the professional man may have a broad background of general culture before he begins to specialize. Any hurrying through defeats this purpose, and renders this preliminary work worse than useless. A college course must have a chance to digest if it is to be at all profitable to a man; and digestion takes time. Between the listlessness of the business youths who have no particular interest in scholarship, and the impetuosity of the prospective professional man who wants to get at his tools, the ordinary scholar who wants to learn to think, to get a robust sort of culture in an orderly and leisurely way, and feel his mental muscles growing month by month, gets the worst of it, or at least has little attention paid to him. The instructor is so busy, drumming on the laggards or restraining the reckless, that the scholar has to work out much of his own salvation alone.

Whether or not all this is good for the scholar in cultivating his self-reliance, the general level of scholarship certainly suffers. Neither the college administration nor the faculties have been entirely guiltless, in the past, of yielding before the rising tide of extra-curricular activities. Athletics, through the protection, supervision, and even financial assistance, of the college, have become a thoroughly unwholesome excrescence on college life. They have become the nucleus for a perverted college sentiment. College spirit has come to mean enthusiasm for the winning of a game, and a college that has no football team is supposed to have necessarily no college spirit. Pride and loyalty to Alma Mater, the prestige of one’s college, one’s own collegiate self-respect, get bound up and dependent upon a winning season at athletics. It seems amazing sometimes to the undergraduate how the college has surrendered to the student point of view. Instructors too often, in meeting students informally, assume that they must talk about what is supposed to interest the student rather than their own intellectual interests. They do not deceive the student, and they do miss a real opportunity to impress their personality upon him and to awaken him to a recognition of a broader world of vital interests than athletic scores and records.

If the college would take away its patronage of athletics, which puts a direct premium on semi-professionalism, would circumscribe the club-house features of the fraternities, and force some more democratic method of selection on the undergraduate societies, would it have the effect of raising the general level of scholarship? It surely seems that such a movement on the part of the college administration would result in keeping athletics proportioned directly to the interest that the student body took in it, to the extent of their participation in it, and the voluntary support that they gave to it, instead of to the amount of money that an army of graduate managers and alumni associations can raise for it and to the exertions of paid professional coaches and volunteer rah-rah boys. This would permit college sentiment to flow back into its natural channels, so that the undergraduate might begin to feel some pride in the cultural prestige of his college, and acquire a new respect for the scholarly achievements of its big men. This would mean an awakened interest in scholarship. The limitation of extra-curricular activities would mean that that field would become less adequate as a place for acquiring distinction; opportunity would be diminished, and it would become more and more difficult to maintain social eminence as the sine qua non of campus distinction. Who knows but what these activities might be finally abandoned entirely to the unpresentable class, and the ruling class seize upon the field of scholarship as a surer way of acquiring distinction, since the old gods had fled?

If the college is not yet ready to adopt so drastic an attitude, it has at least already begun to preach democracy. It is willing to preach inspirationally what it cannot yet do actively. In the last few years there has been creeping into the colleges in the person of the younger teachers a new spirit of positive conviction, a new enthusiasm, that makes a college education to-day a real inspiration to the man who can catch the message. And at the risk of being considered a traitor to his class, the sincere undergraduate of to-day must realize the changed attitude, and ally himself with his radical teachers in spirit and activity. He then gets an altered view of college life. He begins to see the college course as an attempt, as yet not fully organized but becoming surer of its purpose as time goes on, to convert the heterogeneous mass of American youth—scions of a property-getting class with an antiquated tradition and ideals that are out of harmony with the ideals of the leaders of thought to-day; slightly dispirited aliens, whose racial ideals have been torn and confused by the disintegrating influences of American life; men of hereditary culture; penniless adventurers hewing upward to a profession—to a democratic, realistic, scientific attitude toward life that will harmonize and explain the world as a man looks at it, enable him to interpret human nature in terms of history and the potentialities of the future, and furnish as solid and sure an intellectual and spiritual support as the old religious background of our fathers that has been fading these many years.

This is the work of the college of to-day, as it was the work of the college of fifty years ago to justify the works of God to man. The college thus becomes for the first time in American history a reorganizing force. It has become thoroughly secularized these last twenty years, and now finds arrayed against it, in spirit at least if not in open antagonism, the churches and the conservative moulders of opinion. The college has a great opportunity before it to become, not only the teacher, but the inspirational centre of the thought and ideals of the time.

If to the rising generation our elders rarely seem quite contemporaneous in their criticisms of things, we in turn are apt to take the ordinary for the unique. We may be simply reading into the college our own enthusiasms, and may attribute to the college a new attitude when it is ourselves that are different. But I am sure that some such ideal is vaguely beginning to crystallize in the minds of the younger professors and the older undergraduates, or those who have been out in the world long enough to get a slightly objective point of view. The passing of the classics has meant much more than a mere change in the curriculum of the college; it has meant a complete shifting of attitude. The classics as a cultural core about which the other disciplines were built up have given place to the social sciences, especially history, which is hailed now by some of its enthusiastic devotees as the sum of all knowledge. The union of humanistic spirit with scientific point of view, which has been longed for these many years, seems on the point of being actually achieved, and it is the new spirit that the colleges seem to be propagating.

I am sure that it is a democratic spirit. History, economics, and the other social sciences are presented as the record of the development of human freedom, and the science of man’s social life. We are told to look on institutions not as rigid and eternally fixed, but as fluid and in the course of evolution to an ever higher cultivation of individuality and general happiness, and to cast our thinking on public questions into this new mould. A college man is certainly not educated to-day unless he gets this democratic attitude. That is what makes the aristocratic organization of undergraduate life doubly unfortunate. For one of the most valuable opportunities of college life is the chance to get acquainted, not politely and distantly, but intimately, with all types of men and minds from all parts of the country and all classes of society, so that one may learn what the young men of the generation are really thinking and hoping. Knowledge of men is an indispensable feature of a real education: not a knowledge of their weaknesses, as too many seem to mean by the phrase, but knowledge of their strength and capabilities, so that one may get the broadest possible sympathy with human life as it is actually lived to-day, and not as it is seen through the idealistic glasses of former generations. The association only with men of one’s own class, such as the organization of college life to-day fosters, is simply fatal to any broad understanding of life. The refusal to make the acquaintance while in college of as many as possible original, self-dependent personalities, regardless of race and social status, is morally suicidal. There are indications, however, that the preaching of the democratic gospel is beginning to have its influence, in the springing-up of college forums and societies which do without the rigid coöptation that has cultivated the cutting one’s self off from one’s fellows.

I am sure that it is a scientific spirit. The scientific attitude toward life is no longer kept as the exclusive property of the technical schools. It has found its way into those studies that have been known as humanistic, but, in penetrating, it has become colored itself, so that the student is shown the world, not as a relentless machine, running according to mechanical laws, but as an organism, profoundly modifiable and directive by human will and purpose. He learns that the world in which he lives is truly a mechanism, but a mechanism that exists for the purpose of turning out products as man shall direct for the enrichment of his own life. He learns to appreciate more the application to social life of machinery in organization and coöperation; he gets some idea of the forces that build up human nature and sway men’s actions. He acquires an impartial way of looking at things; effort is made to get him to separate his personal prejudices from the larger view, and get an objective vision of men and events. The college endeavors with might and main to cultivate in him an open-mindedness, so that at twenty-five he will not close up to the entrance of new ideas, but will find his college course merely introductory to life, a learning of one’s bearings in a great world of thought and activity, and an inspiration to a constant working for better things.

I am sure that it is a critical spirit. A critical attitude toward life is as bad a thing for a boy as it is an indispensable thing for an educated man. The college tries to cultivate it gradually in its students, so that by the end of his four years a man will have come simply not to take everything for granted, but to test and weigh and prove ideas and institutions with which he comes in contact. Of course the results are unfortunate when this critical attitude comes with a sudden shock so as to be a mere disillusionment, the turning yellow of a beautiful world; but it must come if a man is to see wisely and understand. The college must teach him to criticize without rancor, and see that his cynicism, if that must come too, is purging and cleansing and not bitter.