Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!…
Something like this, perhaps, is the feeling of many men—men by no means given to morbid gusts of panic—amid a society that laughs overmuch in its amusement and exults in the very lust of change. Nor is their anxiety quite the same as that which has always disturbed the reflecting spectator. At other times the apprehension has been lest the combined forces of order might not be strong enough to withstand the ever-threatening inroads of those [pg 134]who envy barbarously and desire recklessly; whereas today the doubt is whether the natural champions of order themselves shall be found loyal to their trust, for they seem no longer to remember clearly the word of command that should unite them in leadership. Until they can rediscover some common ground of strength and purpose in the first principles of education and law and property and religion, we are in danger of falling a prey to the disorganizing and vulgarizing domination of ambitions which should be the servants and not the masters of society.
Certainly, in the sphere of education there is a growing belief that some radical reform is needed; and this dissatisfaction is in itself wholesome. Boys come into college with no reading and with minds unused to the very practice of study; and they leave college, too often, in the same state of nature. There are even those, inside and outside of academic halls, who protest that our higher institutions of learning simply fail to educate at all. That is slander; but in sober earnest, you will find few experienced college professors, apart from those engaged in teaching purely utilitarian or practical subjects, who are not convinced that the general relaxation is greater now than it was twenty years ago. It is of considerable significance that the two student essays which took the prizes offered by the Harvard Advocate in 1913 were both on this theme. The first of them posed the question: “How can the leadership of the intellectual rather than the athletic student be fostered?” and was virtually a sermon on a text of President Lowell’s: “No one in close touch with American education has failed to notice the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, and the small regard for scholarly attainment.”
Now, the Advocate prizeman has his specific remedy, and President Lowell has his, and other men propose other systems and restrictions; but the evil is too deep-seated [pg 135]to be reached by any superficial scheme of honors or to be charmed away by insinuating appeals. The other day Mr. William F. McCombs, chairman of the National Committee which engineered a college president into the White House, gave this advice to our academic youth: “The college man must forget—or never let it creep into his head—that he’s a highbrow. If it does creep in, he’s out of politics.” To which one might reply in Mr. McCombs’s own dialect, that unless a man can make himself a force in politics (or at least in the larger life of the State) precisely by virtue of being a “highbrow,” he had better spend his four golden years otherwhere than in college. There it is: the destiny of education is intimately bound up with the question of social leadership, and unless the college, as it used to be in the days when the religious hierarchy it created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding place for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the jeunesse dorée (sc. the “gold coasters”). We must get back to a common understanding of the office of education in the construction of society, and must discriminate among the subjects that may enter into the curriculum, by their relative value towards this end.
A manifest condition is that education should embrace the means of discipline, for without discipline the mind will remain inefficient, just as surely as the muscles of the body, without exercise, will be left flaccid. That should seem to be a self-evident truth. Now it may be possible to derive a certain amount of discipline out of any study, but it is a fact, nevertheless, which cannot be gainsaid, that some studies lend themselves to this use more readily and effectively than others. You may, for instance, if by extraordinary luck you get the perfect teacher, make English literature disciplinary by the hard manipulation of ideas; but in practice it almost inevitably happens that a course in English literature either degenerates into the dull [pg 136]memorizing of dates and names or, rising into the O Altitudo, evaporates in romantic gush over beautiful passages. This does not mean, of course, that no benefit may be obtained from such a study, but it does preclude English literature generally from being made the backbone, so to speak, of a sound curriculum. The same may be said of French and German. The difficulties of these tongues in themselves, and the effort required of us to enter into their spirit, imply some degree of intellectual gymnastics, but scarcely enough for our purpose. Of the sciences it behooves one to speak circumspectly, and undoubtedly mathematics and physics, at least, demand such close attention and such firm reasoning as to render them an essential part of any disciplinary education. But there are good grounds for being sceptical of the effect of the non-mathematical sciences on the immature mind. Any one who has spent a considerable portion of his undergraduate time in a chemical laboratory, for example, as the present writer has done, and has the means of comparing the results of such elementary and pottering experimentation with the mental grip required in the humanistic courses, must feel that the real training obtained therein was almost negligible. If I may draw further from my own observation I must say frankly that, after dealing for a number of years with manuscripts prepared for publication by college professors of the various faculties, I have been forced to the conclusion that science, in itself, is likely to leave the mind in a state of relative imbecility. It is not that the writing of men who got their early drill too exclusively, or even predominantly, in the sciences lacks the graces of rhetoric—that would be comparatively a small matter—but such men in the majority of cases, even when treating subjects within their own field, show a singular inability to think clearly and consecutively, so soon as they are freed from the restraint of merely describing the process of an experiment. On the contrary, the manuscript of a classical scholar, despite the present dry-rot of philology, [pg 137]almost invariably gives signs of a habit of orderly and well-governed cerebration.
Here, whatever else may be lacking, is discipline. The sheer difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one’s self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain. And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the classics do actually surpass their unclassical rivals in any field where a fair test can be made. At Princeton, for instance, Professor West has shown this superiority by tables of achievements and grades, which he published in the Educational Review for March, 1913; and a number of letters from various parts of the country, printed in the Nation, tell the same story in striking fashion. Thus, a letter from Wesleyan (September 7, 1911) gives statistics to prove that the classical students in that university outstrip the others in obtaining all sorts of honors, commonly even honors in the sciences. Another letter (May 8, 1913) shows that in the first semester in English at the University of Nebraska the percentage of delinquents among those who entered with four years of Latin was below 7; among those who had three years of Latin and one or two of a modern language the percentage rose to 15; two years of Latin and two years of a modern language, 30 per cent.; one year or less of Latin and from two to four years of a modern language, 35 per cent. And in the Nation of April 23, 1914, Prof. Arthur Gordon Webster, the eminent physicist of Clark University, after speaking of the late B.O. Peirce’s early drill and life-long interest in Greek and Latin, adds these significant words: “Many of us still believe that such a training makes the best possible foundation for a scientist.” There is reason to think that this opinion is daily gaining ground among those who are [pg 138]zealous that the prestige of science should be maintained by men of the best calibre.