And lastly, I am sure that it is an enthusiastic spirit. The college wants to give a man a keen desire for social progress, a love for the arts, a delight in sheer thinking, and a confidence in his own powers. It will do little good to teach a man about what men have thought and done and built unless some spark is kindled, some reaction produced that will have consequences for the future; it will do little good to teach him about literature and the arts unless some kind of an emotional push is imparted to him that will drive him on to teach himself further and grow into a larger appreciation of the best; it will do little good to enforce scientific discipline unless by it the mind is forged into a keener weapon for attacking problems and solving them scientifically and not superficially. And it is just this enthusiasm that the college, and only the college, can impart. We come there to learn from men, not from books. We could learn from books as well at home, but years of individual study will not equal the inspirational value of one short term of listening to the words of a wise and good man. Only enthusiasm can knit the scattered ideals and timorous aspirations into a constructive whole.
Some such spirit as I have endeavored to outline, the college is beginning to be infused with to-day; some such spirit the undergraduate must get if he is to be in the best sense educated and adequately equipped for the complex work of the world. If such a spirit is instilled, it almost matters little what the details of his courses are, or the mere material of his knowledge. Such an attitude will be a sufficient preparation for life, and adequate training for citizenship. We want citizens who are enthusiastic thinkers, not docile and uncritical followers of tradition; we want leaders of public opinion with the scientific point of view: unclassed men, not men like the leaders of the passing generation, saturated with class prejudices and class ideals.
The college is rapidly revising its curriculum in line with the new standards. The movement is so new, to be sure, that things have hardly got their bearings yet. Men who graduated only ten years ago tell me that there was nothing like this new spirit when they were in college. The student finds a glut of courses, and flounders around for two or three years before he gets any poise at all. A judicious mixture of compulsory and elective courses seems to be furnishing a helpful guide, and a system of honor courses like that recently introduced at Columbia provides an admirable means, not only to a more intensive culture, but also to the synthesis of intellectual interests that creates a definite attitude toward life, and yet for the absence of which so many young men of ability and power stand helpless and undecided on the threshold of active life. To replace the classics, now irretrievably gone as the backbone of the curriculum, the study of history seems an admirable discipline, besides furnishing the indispensable background for the literary and philosophical studies. Scientific ethics and social psychology should occupy an important place in the revised curriculum. The college cannot afford to leave the undergraduate to the mercies of conventional religion and a shifting moral tradition.
The pedantic, Germanistic type of scholarship is rapidly passing. The divisions, between the departments are beginning to break down. Already the younger instructors are finding their ideal professor in the man who, while he knows one branch thoroughly, is interested in a wide range of subjects. The departments are reacting upon one another; both undergraduates and instructors are coming to see intellectual life as a whole, and not as a miscellaneous collection of specialized chunks of knowledge. The type of man is becoming common who could go to almost any other department of the college and give a suggestive and interesting, if not erudite, lecture on some subject in connection with its work. It is becoming more and more common now that when you touch a professor you touch a man and not an intellectual specialty.
The undergraduate himself is beginning to react strongly to this sort of scholarship. He catches an inspiration from the men in the faculty who exhibit it, and he is becoming expert in separating the sheep from the goats. He does not want experiments in educational psychology tried upon him: all he demands in his teacher is personality. He wants to feel that the instructor is not simply passing on dead knowledge in the form it was passed on to him, but that he has assimilated it and has read his own experience into it, so that it has come to mean more to him than almost anything in the world.
Professors are fond of saying that they like to have their students react to what they bring them; the student in turn likes to feel that the professor himself has reacted to what he is teaching. Otherwise his teaching is very apt to be in vain. American youth are very much less docile than they used to be, and they are little content any longer to have second-hand knowledge, a little damaged in transit, thrust upon them. The undergraduate wants to feel that the instructor is giving him his best all the time, a piece out of the very warp and woof of his own thinking.
The problem of the college in the immediate future is thus to make these ideals good, to permeate undergraduate society with the new spirit, and to raise the level of scholarship by making learning not an end in itself but a means to life. The curriculum and administrative routine will be seen simply as means to the cultivation of an attitude towards life. As the ideals crystallize out and the college becomes surer and surer of its purpose, it will find itself leading the thought of the age in new channels of conviction and constructive statesmanship through its inspirational influence on the young men of the time. Admitting that these ideals are still unorganized and unestablished, that in many of the colleges they have hardly begun to appear, while even in the larger ones they are little more than tendencies as yet,—is it too much to hope that a few years will see the college conscious of its purpose, and already beginning to impose on the rank and file of its members, instructors and undergraduates alike, the ideals which have been felt this last decade by the more sensitive?
XIV
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
It would not perhaps be thought, ordinarily, that the man whom physical disabilities have made so helpless that he is unable to move around among his fellows, can bear his lot more happily, even though he suffer pain, and face life with a more cheerful and contented spirit, than can the man whose handicaps are merely enough to mark him out from the rest of his fellows without preventing him from entering with them into most of their common affairs and experiences. But the fact is that the former’s very helplessness makes him content to rest and not to strive. I know a young man so helplessly disabled that he has to be carried about, who is happy in reading a little, playing chess, taking a course or two in college, and all with the sunniest good-will in the world, and a happiness that seems strange and unaccountable to my restlessness. He does not cry for the moon.
When the handicapped youth, however, is in full possession of his faculties, and can move about freely, he is perforce drawn into all the currents of life. Particularly if he has his own way in the world to make, his road is apt to be hard and rugged, and he will penetrate to an unusual depth in his interpretation both of the world’s attitude toward such misfortunes, and of the attitude toward the world which such misfortunes tend to cultivate in men like him. For he has all the battles of a stronger man to fight, and he is at a double disadvantage in fighting them. He has constantly with him the sense of being obliged to make extra efforts to overcome the bad impression of his physical defects, and he is haunted with a constant feeling of weakness and low vitality which makes effort more difficult and renders him easily faint-hearted and discouraged by failure. He is never confident of himself, because he has grown up in an atmosphere where nobody has been very confident of him; and yet his environment and circumstances call out all sorts of ambitions and energies in him which, from the nature of his case, are bound to be immediately thwarted. This attitude is likely to keep him at a generally low level of accomplishment unless he have an unusually strong will, and a strong will is perhaps the last thing to develop under such circumstances.