If Henry Adams had lived in the 13th century he would have found the centre of a world of unity in the most powerful doctrine of the church, the cult of the Virgin Mary. Living in the 19th century he sums up his experience in a world of multiplicity as the attempt to realize for himself the saving faith of that world in what is called education. Adams was not the first to be struck with the similarity of the faiths of the mediæval and the modern world. This comparison is the subject of an article by Professor Barrett Wendell published in the North American Review for 1904 and entitled “The Great American Superstition”:
“Undefined and indefinite as it is, the word education is just now a magic one; from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it is the most potent with which you can conjure money out of public chests or private pockets. Let social troubles declare themselves anywhere, lynchings, strikes, trusts, immigration, racial controversies, whatever you chance to hold most threatening, and we are gravely assured on every side that education is the only thing which can preserve our coming generations from destruction. What is more, as a people we listen credulously to these assurances. We are told, and we believe and evince magnificent faith in our belief, that our national salvation must depend on education.”
Professor Wendell goes on trenchantly to compare this reigning modern faith with that in the mediæval church. He calls attention to the fact that whereas the dominant architectural monuments of the Old World are great cathedrals and religious houses, implying the faith that salvation could be assured by unstinted gifts to the church, in our modern times the most stately and impressive structures are our schools, colleges, and public libraries, many of them, like the cathedrals, erected by sinners of wealth in the pursuit of individual atonement and social salvation. “Ask any American what we shall do to be saved, and if he speak his mind he will probably bid us educate our fellow-men.” He might have extended his comparison to the personal hierarchy of the two institutions, for at the time of his article the President of Harvard spoke to the people of the United States with the voice of Innocent III, surrounded by his advisers among university presidents and superintendents gathered like Cardinal Archbishops, in the conclave of the National Education Association, of which the Committee of Ten was a sort of papal curia. Although the educational papacy has fallen into schism, the cities are still ruled by superintendents like bishops, the colleges by president and deans, like abbots and priors, and the whole structure rests on a vast population of teachers holding their precarious livings like the parish priests at the will of their superiors, tempered by public opinion. Indeed, Professor Wendell is struck by the probability that as European society was encumbered by the itinerant friars, so America will have “its mendicant orders of scholars—the male and female doctors of philosophy.” But it is his main theme which concerns us here, that “the present mood of our country concerning education is neither more nor less than a mood of blind, mediæval superstition.”
The difference between faith as religion and as superstition may be hard to define, the terms having become somewhat interchangeable through controversy, but in general we should doubtless use the pragmatic test. A vital and saving faith which actually justifies itself by results is religion; a faith which is without constructive effect on character and society, and is merely fanciful, fantastic, or degrading we call superstition. The old education which America brought from England and inherited from the Renaissance was a reasonable faith. It consisted of mathematics, classics, and theology, and while it produced, except in rare instances, no mathematicians, classical scholars, or theologians, it trained minds for the learned professions of those days and it gave the possessors of it intellectual distinction, and admitted them to the society of cultivated men everywhere. Its authority was largely traditional, but it worked in the world of that day much as the thirty-three Masonic degrees do in the world of Masonry. It may properly be called a religion, and in its rigid, prescribed, dogmatic creed it may be compared to the mediæval theology. At any rate, it suffered the same fate and from the same cause. Its system was too narrow for the expanding knowledge and the multiplying phenomena of the advancing hour. It failed to take account of too many things. The authority of tradition, by which it maintained its position, was challenged and overthrown, and private judgment was set in its place.
Private judgment in education is represented by the elective system; President Eliot was the Luther of this movement and Harvard College his Wittenberg. Exactly as after the Reformation, however, the attitudes of assertion and subservience in spiritual matters continued to manifest themselves where the pope had been deposed, in Geneva and Dort and Westminster, so in spite of the anarchy of the elective system the educational function continues to impose itself in its traditional robes of authority, and to be received with the reverence due to long custom. And in this way education in America from being a saving faith has become an illusion. The old education, its authority challenged, its sway limited, and nobody caring whether its followers can quote Latin or not, is in the position of the Church of Rome; the so-called new education, uncertain in regard to material and method, direction and destination, is like the anarchic Protestant sects. Neither possesses authority; the old system has lost it, and the new ones have never had it. They are alike in depending upon the blindness of the masses which is superstition.
Although the generalization remains true that the mood of America toward education is a mood of superstition, there are certain forms of education operative in America to-day which approve themselves by performance and justify the reasonable faith in which they are held. The argument in favour of the elective system, by force of which it displaced the prescribed classical course, was that it was necessary to give opportunity for specialization. This opportunity it has given, and in certain directions the results produced by American institutions are of high value. Our scientific education is the most advanced, and in the professions which depend upon it, engineering and medicine, our product doubtless “compares favourably” with that of Europe. These facts cannot be cited, however, as a valid reason for the American faith in education as a whole. It is recognized to-day that progress in natural science has far outrun that in politics, social life, culture—therein lies the tragedy of the world. A few men of science have a knowledge of the means by which the human race can be destroyed in a brief space—and no statesmen, philosophers, or apostles of culture have the power to persuade the human race not to permit it to be done.
In another direction a great increase of specialization has taken place—in the preparation for business. Our colleges of business administration rival our scientific schools in the exactness of their aim, and the precision of their effort. Here again, however, it may be questioned whether their success is one to justify belief in the educational process as a whole. The result of such specialization upon the business organization of society can hardly be to arouse a critical, and hence truly constructive, attitude in regard to the whole economic problem; it is nearly certain to promote a disposition to take advantage of the manifest shortcomings of that organization for individual successful achievement. Whether society as a whole will profit by the efforts of such experts as our business colleges are turning out remains to be seen. Whether we are wise in strengthening the predatory elements which put a strain on the social organization, at a time when the whole structure is trembling, is open to question. Here again the faith of America in education as social salvation is not justified by individual results, however brilliant and fortunate.
The value of the specialist to society is unquestionable, but he alone will not save it. Such salvation must come from the diffusion and validity of the educational process as a whole, from the men and women of active intelligence, broad view, wide sympathy, and resolute character who are fitted as a result of it to see life steadily and see it whole, reason soundly to firm conclusions in regard to it, and hold those decisions in the face of death. The specialist indeed may be considered a necessary subtraction from the general social army, a person set apart for special duty, whose energies are concentrated and loyalties narrowed. We expect him to die, if need be, in maintaining that the world moves, but not for freedom of thought in the abstract. It is by the generally trained, all-round product of our education that the system must be judged. And what do we find?
The general student, it appears, tends to be the product of as narrow a process as the specialist, but not as deep. As the demands of specialization become more exacting, its requirements reach farther and farther back into the field of general education, and more and more of the area is restricted to its uses. The general student in consequence becomes a specialist in what is left over. Moreover, he exercises his right of private judgment and free election along the path of least resistance. Laboratory science he abhors as belonging to a course of specialization which he has renounced. The classics and mathematics, to which a good share of our educational machinery is still by hereditary right devoted, he scorns as having no raison d’être except an outworn tradition. With the decline of the classics has gone the preliminary training for modern languages, which the general student usually finds too exacting and burdensome, and from the obligation of which colleges and secondary institutions also are now rapidly relieving him. We boasted in the late war that we had no quarrel with the German language, and yet by our behaviour we recognized that one of the fruits of victory was the annihilation of at least one foreign speech within our borders. The general student is thus confined, by right of private judgment of course, to his own language and literature, and such superficial studies in history and social science as he can accomplish with that instrument alone. His view is therefore narrow and insular. His penetration is slight. He is, in short, a specialist in the obvious.
Not only does the general student tend to be as restricted in subject-matter as the specialist, but he lacks the training in investigation, reasoning, and concentration which the latter’s responsibility for independent research imposes. The definition of the aim of general education on which Professor Wendell rested his case for the old curriculum in the article quoted above, is “such training as shall enable a man to devote his faculties intently to matters which of themselves do not interest him.” Now clearly if the student persistently chooses only the subjects which interest him, and follows them only as far as his interest extends, he escapes all training in voluntary attention and concentration. In his natural disposition to avoid mental work he finds ready accomplices in his instructors and text-book writers. They realize that they are on trial, and that interest alone is the basis of the verdict. Accordingly they cheerfully assume the burden of preliminary digestion of material, leaving to the student the assimilation of so much as his queasy stomach can bear. One way in which the study of English literature or history can be made a matter of training in criticism and reasoning is to send the student to the sources, the original material, and hold him responsible for his conclusions. He may gain a wrong or inadequate view, but at any rate it is his own, and it affords him a solid basis for enlargement or correction. Instead of this the student is invited to a set of criticisms and summaries already made, and is usually discouraged if by chance he attempts a verification on his own account. The actual reading of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Swift, Burke will give the student at least a certain training in concentration; but this is hard, slow, and dry work. It is much easier and more comprehensive, instead of reading one play of Shakespeare, to read about all the plays, including the life of the author, his dramatic art, and some speculations in regard to the Elizabethan stage. It was William James who pointed out the difference between knowledge about and acquaintance with an author. The extent to which we have substituted for the direct vision, with its stimulating appeal to individual reaction, the conventional summary and accepted criticism, the official formula and the stereotyped view, is the chief reason for the ready-made uniformity of our educated product.