IX EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP

“Tradition is the experience of society. It is stored up for use by what may be called the objective memory. The chief function of education is to transfer the wealth of a selective tradition from society to the individual.”—Paul Elmer More in The Drift of Romanticism: Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series.

Insufficient attention has been paid by intelligent unacademic people to the educational ideas and constructive suggestions for academic reform offered by the New Humanists. Only one commentator in the flurry of debate that ensued on the issuance of Humanism and America wrote with gratitude of the salutary effect on literary scholarship produced by the unremitting efforts of American Humanists, and he was Henry Seidel Canby, who has known at first hand the literae inhumaniores that flourish rankly in our universities. Nowhere better, it seems to me, than in their dissertations on the teaching of the humanities—nowhere better than in such books as Babbitt’s Literature and the American College and Foerster’s The American Scholar—can we witness the law of measure being applied to current problems. Moreover, if anything calls for the most tactful mediatory treatment, it is the tendencies and objectives of our colleges and universities.

It is right, I think, to regard American Humanism, when one refers to the movement rather than the doctrine and discipline, as being primarily an educational force. Many of its adherents are actively engaged in teaching and therefore the problems of education possess a personal urgency for them. They do not dream at present of marching on the literary citadels of the country and subduing their garrisons to standards they have foresworn, but the teacher-classicists definitely do propose to wrest education from the control of humanitarians. There, in the field of education, the New Humanist affirms “the battle that is to determine the fate of American civilization will be fought out first of all.” For this reason I am giving a chapter to the members of the movement as educators rather than as literary critics. As literary critics, they consider the prevalent impressionism to be a low form of criticism and seek to restore criticism to its former acknowledged business, judgment by humane standards. But I feel no regret in neglecting in this book the numerous important ideas for contemporary literary critics which stud the works of Babbitt and More. With such writers as T. S. Eliot and F. McEachran in England, Robert Shafer and Seward Collins in America lifting them up and weighing them, they are certain of a distinguished attention. So my conscience does not trouble me because in the present interpretation only incidentally do I visit the purely literary front of the New Humanist campaign. The most serious fighting is on the educational front, and the enemy is educational impressionism.

We can divide the educational front into three sectors,—the lower schools, the college, and the university with its graduate schools. On the first the New Humanists are not very active, on the second they take a very determined stand. If they can hold the college to its function, as they conceive it, they are willing to make concessions in the graduate schools. The leading ideas they put at stake in each sector are very easy to state. In the lower schools, where it is granted that the humanitarian tinge is not undesirable, the pupil should be acquisitive and receptive. In college the student should be assimilative and reflective. In the university the scholar may be productive, investigatory, original on the basis of his humane discipline in the college. Reception when young, assimilation in college years, productive research in graduate school—these are the functions that should underlie our educational system. But the college is being ground out between the encroachments of preparatory schools and the invasion of university ideals of research. And there is where the situation is most tense and critical. We shall begin, however, with the lower schools and the theory of John Dewey, arch-foe of American Humanism in education as well as in philosophy.

No one can be insensible to the value of Dewey’s correction of certain evils in our public school system. He has perceived the dangers of too much abstractness in its curriculum, and the need for more education by doing. It is largely through his influence that the Project Method, as it is now called, the method of teaching by correlating school subjects around some social activity of the children, around weaving, for example, has been given its present vogue. But it is the leading ideas of Dewey that are at issue, and not any desirable modification of the elementary school curriculum.

We live in a democratic society: therefore, say the disciples of Dewey, education should adapt itself to the needs and the condition of the many children, not of the few exceptional ones. We live in an industrial society: therefore education should be closely connected with the major actualities of an industrial society. Going to school is not “a preparation for life.” It is experience as much as any other phase of life. The gap between life in school and life in the family and on the playground should be decreased as much as possible. In a sentence, education should be socialized. It should be thoroughly democratic. It should develop the virtue of coöperation to the highest degree.

To these guiding ideas every one must in some measure give assent, but many people feel that their limited assent must be combined with a great deal of criticism. Robert Shafer, for one, looking over the records of educational experiments along the lines mapped out by Dewey, has repeated the old proverb: one swallow does not make a summer. The experiments have been made with picked children and picked teachers. But, Shafer asks, can conclusions be drawn that will be valid for the educational system as a whole, since in the whole system the children are unpicked, the coöperation of the majority of parents cannot be secured, and the quality of the teachers must inevitably sink far below the standard of the experimental school enthusiasts. Waiving every other consideration, are the new lower-school ideas feasible for a wide application? But presupposing practicality, those other waived considerations become the very important ones, and the New Humanist cannot satisfy his strong doubts of the ideals of the Dewey reform. Others, besides New Humanists, have come to experience like doubts, and some of these are persons who at one time were wholly convinced or almost convinced of the soundness of Dewey’s proposals. One of them is a woman who, to my belief, is the most brilliant of all the contemporary pioneering spirits in the “new education.” I mean Margaret Naumburg, the founder and for eight years (1914–1922) the director of the Walden School in New York city. In 1928 a book from her pen appeared, The Child and the World, a series of dialogues on modern education, in which she summed up the results of her thinking and experience in her special field. In spite of the author’s reputation, the book was not, as a rule, thoroughly reviewed. One surmises that this was in part due to Miss Naumburg’s having abandoned and criticized the positions so many other new educators were still clinging to. However it happened, the central point of the book was overlooked: very little attention was paid to the clash she staged between Dewey’s program for socialized education and Whitehead’s views on education which stress the encouragement of individual development.

Our immediate interest lies, of course, not in Miss Naumburg’s partial advocacy of Whitehead, but in her critique of Dewey. Naturally, as who would not, she speaks of Rousseau as the common ancestor of the new school movement in America, approving of his praise of learning by doing; to Rousseau she links Dewey as the immediate parent of present-day experiments. But Rousseau’s general influence on the new school movement, she emphasizes, has had very unfortunate consequences. This is due to establishing so many experiments on “Rousseau’s romantic hope that maladjusted human functions could right themselves by a return to the simple life of nature ... the belief that we can right ourselves by simply removing certain limiting trammels of civilization.” Miss Naumburg, her book makes clear, has shed all her illusions about so naïve a belief. Her counts against Dewey are four: (1) he underestimates emotional culture in his educational plans, (2) he has framed these plans too closely in accord with his own bias as a psychological type, being particularly unfair to the possibilities of the training of intuition, (3) he is too chary of the inner, the subjective life, and (4) his socialized education completely neglects individual psychology.

She holds up for close scrutiny a quotation from Dewey’s Democracy and Education which the New Humanist would certainly agree is an amazing piece of sophistry. It is the concentration of all the arguments for socialized education. “From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone—an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.”

On this strange argument Miss Naumburg’s comment is: “Much of the present social philosophy that wishes to sacrifice the individual to the good of the group is nothing but instinctive herd psychology, translated into modern terms.... I’m sure the world now needs more complete individuals so that group life can become integrated on a higher plane. Dewey places emphasis on the individual’s living for the group rather than for himself and suggests that his failure to do so is the cause of much of the world’s suffering. But to me it seems that the failure of the individual to know himself remains the cause of his ineffectual adaptation to a positive and adequate social existence.”

This is pointed criticism from the inside of a movement whose advanced minds are now beginning to realize that they have envisaged their problems far too simply,—that self-expression is not the magic formula, that psycho-analysis produces as much trouble as it dissolves, that socialized education too much disregards the individual gifted pupil, that liberty is a hard concept to understand aright. The New Humanist on the outside phrases his criticism differently. It is that Dewey offers no contribution to the urgent problem of producing leaders of quality in a democratic society. For the New Humanist makes no fetich of democracy, as does Dewey, nor does he stand for an unmixed aristocracy either. To him the social problem is the blending of the two, the securing of an aristocratic and selective democracy, and he would like to see education from the kindergarten upwards organized for the furtherance of that aim.

Dewey is a Baconian philosopher with an admixture of Rousseauism. I am here making use of the Babbittean classification of modern naturalists into two types, those prefigured by Francis Bacon who are known as scientific naturalists, and those prefigured by Rousseau and known as sentimental naturalists. The classification causes so much resentment among present-day intellectuals, it is so hotly repudiated, that I am led to wonder if Babbitt has not again probed to the bottom of our era’s mind and located basic trends we have not known we were exemplifying. Certainly, his two types, however petty many of the exemplars today may be, are of epical stature. The drama of the last three centuries is no mean one, and requires as its leading characters personages to fit the scale of the action.

Of course, we must discriminate between Babbitt’s estimates of Bacon and Rousseau as personages and his description of the types of men he names after them. In the character of Bacon, for instance, he notes the presence of traditional Christianity and Renascence humanistic elements. Babbitt does not, to my mind, allow sufficiently for the enigmatic in Bacon—hardly any one today is cautious enough for that—and he accounts for the Lord Chancellor’s fall, which is still inexplicable when all is said, on too general grounds. But, to get his types, Babbitt does not simplify either Bacon or Rousseau: he merely extracts from them the large formative elements which released into the world have created the Baconian and the Rousseauist. It is undeniable that Bacon was, in Whitehead’s words, “one of the great builders who constructed the mind of the modern world.” He was the prophet of the Kingdom of Man, Babbitt declares. He foresaw man’s dominion over the earth, he made efficient the impulse to unlock Nature with the keys of Science, he stimulated men to the astounding utilitarian triumphs which the centuries since Bacon have achieved. It was his genius that made the idea of progress so potent.

The Baconians have gone forth and conquered the earth. If most of them lack the slightest touch of Bacon’s dignity as a human being, they nevertheless partake of the majesty of numbers and are not unworthy of a mass-part in a planetary drama. But it has been a mass with notable leaders down to John Dewey in our day. The mass firmly believes in technological advance, material progress, the pragmatic life. For it the “law for thing” is supreme. The leaders subtilize and rationalize these beliefs.

The Baconians and Rousseauists are often superficially hostile to each other. We all know the contempt the scientific analyst frequently expresses for the dreamer, and in turn the dreamer’s horror of the analyst. But Babbitt demonstrates that the two types are in close accord underneath. Both deny the “law for man.” Both subscribe fervently to the doctrine of progress. And oftentimes in the same person you will find prominent strains of both types, happy in each other’s company.

It scarcely needs saying that the Rousseauist is in a much greater emotional ferment. The Baconian exalts practical intelligence, strenuous deeds accompanied by acute if narrow thought: the Rousseauist exalts sympathy, revery, spontaneity and liberty. His idea of liberty is summed up in the popular expression, “doing as one likes,” which means, Matthew Arnold labored to show, doing as one’s ordinary self likes. “Do what thou wilt,” the injunction over the Abbey of Theleme, is a far sterner permission and closer to the true idea of liberty.

It is, I think it necessary to repeat, not claimed by the New Humanist that contemporary Baconians and Rousseauists have been directly influenced by the remarkable men they are named after. The actual matter is very complex, as you will see by recourse to Babbitt’s books, but what is maintained is that unconsciously we breathe in the widespread gaseous elements of the teachings of Rousseau and Bacon and are profoundly modified in our entire outlook on civilization by the fact that they once lived.

In recent years the American college has been overrun by the Baconian scientific hustlers and by the Rousseauistic relaxed dilettantes—both menaces to humanistic education.

In college circles the Baconian is usually a specialist eager to advance learning in his branch of research but applying quantitative tests to his department and to the college in general. He is strenuous and imbued with the spirit of change. When he invades the arts, he is scientific rather than artistic. To give a concrete example, in the literature department the Baconian is the philologist, engaged in original and minute research, but usually lacking in æsthetic appreciation or in general ideas. He is supposed to teach the humanities: he has prepared for his vocation by composing a dissertation on the use of the present participle in some minor Elizabethan.

His colleague in the literature department is often a Rousseauist, a gelatinous æsthete, incapable of hard mental labor, who utilizes literature only as an agreeable source of sensations and impressions. The philologist, taking his cue from Herbert Spencer, is inclined to think of purely literary studies as a form of play, a relaxation, after the exacting labors of scientific analysis: the æsthete-teacher confirms him in the notion.

Against these men in the colleges the New Humanist fights. He opposes the quantitative and dynamic standards the Baconian would introduce, and he scorns the shallow impressionism of the dilettante teacher. His program calls for the continued teaching of the classics and the intimate relating of the classics to modern life. He insists that literature in the colleges should be taught as a vital subject bearing in countless important ways on the formation of character.

Instances abound of the contrary feeling that the classics cannot hold much import for the forming of modern character, and as one instance is as good as another, I will take the most recent to come to my notice. “Shakespeare No Benefit to This Age” is the heading of a newspaper column written by a former college professor, Harry Elmer Barnes, in which he declares that much might be said in support of the argument that “the beauty of Shakespeare’s diction and the shrewdness of his analysis are more than offset by the influence he exerts in keeping alive ancient superstitions like witchcraft, ghost-walking, devil-lore and the like. In short, Shakespeare does more harm than good to the twentieth century intellect.” It is grotesque narrow views of literature like this that the contemporary Humanist deplores in the ranks of teachers.

A succinct way of summing up the American Humanist’s educational program is to say that he favors the imitation of French scholarship rather than German. The latter of course reigns in our universities, and in these octopus-institutions, but not in the colleges, the Humanist grants it plenty of room, for the university may well exist for the advancement of learning, even if it is only the digging up of a trivial fact concerning some Alexandrian grammarian. But on the whole, “might we not advisedly turn now to France, where, to be sure, the scientific study of literature has also had a marked influence, but where other traditions of scholarship have offered a resistance wholly wanting with us? French reflection, French lucidity, French finesse, French moderation, the French concern for humane assimilation, the French devotion to general ideas, the French insistence upon taste and style, the French interest in criticism—these qualities, all but absent from our own work, I take to be worthy of emulation.” The words are from Norman Foerster’s The American Scholar, a lucid diagnosis of the ills of our literary scholarship:—its tendencies to be absorbed into linguistics, into history, into psychology, to become one of the lesser and dismal sciences.

By the way, the conditions analyzed by Foerster and the practical remedies he proposes at the end of his monograph ought to receive very thoughtful attention from the professional men of letters. The sufficient reason is contained in the following quotation: “Modern American scholarship is in a way to becoming a veritable Polyphemus, choicely nourished on human food yet endowed with one eye only. We must set about restoring the traditional alliance of scholarship and criticism, the divorce of which has worked injury to both and played havoc with education. It has made American scholarship narrowly mechanical and progressively tangential. It has encouraged an American criticism that can only be characterized as ignorant and aimlessly impressionistic, for the lamentable state of our critical journals is largely the consequence of academic failure to uphold the past as a school of judgment. And it has played a major rôle in the disintegration of American education, for it has made the study of the humanities scientific in an age already blinded with excess of scientific light, an age that is groping in vain for such other light as literature could shed if it were rightly studied.”

But my purpose precludes entering upon the details of the New Humanist’s criticism of college instruction or upon the concrete plans he presents for honors degrees and doctorate reforms. The broad idea is that the university may exist for the advancement of learning, but the college should stand for the assimilation of learning and the perpetuation of culture. It should train for wisdom and character by the processes of assimilation and reflection. It needs teachers of quality—not linguistic Dryas-dusts or quivering dilettanti. What is wanted, says the Humanist, is the teacher who has expended his originality (in our age it is originality) in grasping the “constant mind of man,” who has disciplined himself on the best models of literature and formed from them a wise appreciation of the normal and representative, who has approximated to that type almost extinct in a civilization dominated by the Baconian specialist and the Rousseauistic thrill-monger, the honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien.

The full significance of the educational program of the American Humanists comes out best in a comparison of the policies advocated by Charles W. Eliot and Irving Babbitt. Eliot was President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909. In that position he became famous as the father of the free-elective system, and until his death in 1926 ranked as America’s most ardent crusader for educational reform. He was highly esteemed for his character, a late flowering of the Puritan tradition, and he was immensely influential through his theories which were not Puritan: the theories were derived from Rousseau and therefore at variance with the Puritan tradition in its most vigorous state.

It is ironical that teaching under President Eliot for fourteen or fifteen years was his best weaponed and fearless critic, and that today this critic who condemned Eliot’s theories and influence should be acknowledged as the greatest mind at Harvard. Yet it is the case that Babbitt with his great strength for rending fallacies apart matured to power within the very baliwick of President Eliot.

The first clash was over the free-elective system. Eliot with his trust in human nature had reasoned that each student had a pronounced bent, some special aptitude, some absorbing interest which he was eager to follow, and that this interest or bent or aptitude was thwarted by a fixed curriculum. He was also impressed by the half-truth which he took to be a whole truth, namely, every person is unique and the college should therefore give full play to his uniqueness. To this Babbitt replied in substance that there is quality in subjects as well as quality in teaching. The free-elective system tends to deny quality in subjects and makes higher education miscellaneous. And he replied further that men have constant elements coexisting with their variability, and that it was the constant in man, not the diverse and fluctuating, which education should reckon with.

Facts have refuted President Eliot’s optimism about the free-elective system. It was found that students followed in choosing their courses not the line of their aptitudes, of which often they were unaware, but the line of least resistance. It was found that their uniquenesses were not so precious after all. The result was a partial retreat from the free-elective stand in favor of a compromise between the old restricted curriculum and the new unlimited one.

But the issue comes to a clearer head when the formulæ of the champions of utilitarian-humanitarian education and of humanistic-religious education are put side by side. “Training for power and service,” said President Eliot. Babbitt answered in words I have already used: “Training for wisdom and character.” Obviously President Eliot’s is a Bacon-Rousseau formula. How does it work? Power in our society means material efficiency, and service means, not the traditional service of God, but the service of man. The assumption is that “the material efficiency promoted by utilitarian effort will be used altruistically.” But after the Great War this assumption looks tragically ludicrous.

These are the conventions established by the age President Eliot represented so faithfully: self-expression as a value (or falling in the direction one’s character leans, an unfriendly critic might mutter), strenuousness (the pursuit of happiness by intense outer activity), the “religion of service” (nowadays satirized by the American Mercury and Sinclair Lewis as only a veneer for commercialism), and complete faith in the natural man (in religious language, the hope of salvation without conversion). These conventions Babbitt has wrenched to pieces in his analysis and now proposes a return to the old humanistic-religious conventions.

In so far as the movement called American Humanism has a definite program of action, this is it. First, that “a considerable number of persons get at least within hailing distance of one another as to the definition of the word humanism itself and the nature of the discipline that this definition entails.” Next, that they then proceed “in the literal sense of that unjustly discredited term, to work out a convention.” And next, that they concern themselves with education. By setting up a convention is meant the thorough agreement among the members of a considerable group on certain fundamentals, the complete conviction of truth concerning certain underlying statements about life. The conventions that the New Humanists wish to reëstablish are: (1) that “happiness is a kind of working” (inner, not outer, working, according to Aristotle, who is here quoted), (2) that man needs to be disciplined in his natural self to some standard (that is, to undergo conversion or turning away from the natural self, such conversion to be accomplished in the Aristotelian way by the gradual formation from childhood of right habits), and (3) that education should culminate in the idea of leisure (also Aristotelian, since according to the New Humanist leisure is valuable for supplying a background of meditation to life).

Now I imagine that when the policy is thus reduced to essentials, many people will wonder why there is any opposition to American Humanism in the field of education. Yet the fact is that the principal forces in education move, blindly most of them, directly counter to the fundamental views of Humanism. It is an against-the-current struggle that the New Humanists undertake. They are fighting for quality of teaching in the humanities, and the current sweeps down upon them a horde of linguistic specialists. They are fighting for quality of subjects, and the classical subjects are steadily being submerged. Finally, they are fighting for quality of students, and the colleges and universities in their competition for big enrollments flood them with quantities of the less fit for the intellectual life. For the New Humanist declares flatly that the college should exist for the intellectually best of each generation. Humanitarian coddling in the colleges he denounces as a danger to democracy, pointing out that in a quantitative age the college must make its great purpose to be the production of men of quality. In fine, the educational problem is closely associated with the problem of leadership, and the problem of leadership leads us straight into the subject of the next chapter—the political problems of a democracy.