The marks of an educated man

Front matter

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OF AN WIG

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Contents

PAGE Hz CuuTivaTEs THE OPEN MIND 13

He ComMBINES THE THREE GREAT HERITAGES OF EDUCATION 19

He AcHIEVES THE TECHNIQUES OF OPEN- MINDEDNESS 39

Preface

Tuts book is not an attempt to write an essay on the philosophy of education or on educational psychology or experimental education. The advances in the sclence and philosophy of education during the past generation are among the most heartening signs of genuine human progress. But my hope here is simply to make education appear worth while, attractive and attainable to the humblest man. IJ am convinced that, without any increase in our natural abilities we could all be much better educated than we are and consequently much happier and more useful. I wish I might make education seem, as Matthew Arnold said of culture, ‘‘a disinterested endeavor after perfection,’’—an endeavor that is not a ‘‘having’’ or a ‘‘being’’ but an eternal ‘‘becoming,’’ an eternal becoming something finer, better, happier and more useful; an endeavor that never ceases, an endeavor that loses all its power if it fail for a moment to be disinterested, that loses all its beauty if it be for a less ideal than perfection.

And I hope I shall convince the reader that perfection as some state of unchanging bliss is not only impossible but undesirable, but that, by man’s very nature, the going toward it, the striving for it, the adventure, the excitement, the romance of the search is the very perfection that he seeks. The Holy Grail is unattainable and would bring no joy if it were found. To become perfectly educated, therefore, is impossible, but to try to become educated is education—as nearly perfect education as one can have. The experimenters have of course discovered that some ways of striving produce much greater results in learning, achievement and power than other ways; but after all, educational

Ix x PREFACE effort, the inner striving ‘‘to comprehend the beauty and wonder of the world,’’ and to enrich this beauty and wonder with the flood and glow and passion of your own personality—this is the thing to which men have given the magic name of education.

No one can write such a book without acknowledging his debt on every page to such great masters as William James, Stanley Hall and Edward L. Thorndike; and included herein is also the conscious and unconscious inspiration of so many other of our great present-day psychologists that it would require pages to mention them. In Chapters VII and VIII I am obviously indebted to Dr. David Mitchell, consulting psychologist, and in Chapters XX and XXI to Dean Carl Emil Seashore of the Graduate School of Education of Iowa University. |

As in all my books, I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Wiggam for her extensive readings in the massive literature of education and her constant assistance. My secretary, Mr. H. J. Lee, should be mentioned for his patient labor far into some of these spring nights, editing and correcting the manuscript.

Thanks are due to Good Housekeeping, The Amencan Magazine, World’s Work and The Scientific Monthly for permission to reprint or rewrite the gist of articles that have appeared in their pages. Some of these articles have brought me thousands of letters from all parts of the world, and I take this opportunity of extending my deep appreciation to those kindly readers.

ALBERT Epwarp WiccaM New York, May 31, 1930.

EDUCATED MAN

OF AN:

CHAPTER I Hz Cuutivatses tHE Open Minp

Wauenever I get to thinking about the marks of an educated man, my mind always goes back to an old working man friend, Uncle Noah Smith.

Uncle Noah was a model-maker in the old Wagner plow factory at Vernon, Indiana,—the place I always feel I am away from, although I have lived in many parts of the United States; and the place you feel you are away from, no matter where you may happen to be, the place that always rests your mind and heart to think about amid the world’s grime and turmoil, the place whose memories always come to you with unspoiled sweetness and amid whose magical dreams you plan some day to go back and live again—that is the place that to you will always be home.

Uncle Noah retired after the plow factory moved to Indianapolis in the autumn of 1901. In those days I used to make long lecture trips and when I would come home Uncle Noah would always come over to see me; and when the weather was fine, we often sat out under the old apple tree in the back yard and talked— as you know men will when the air is quiet—of science, love and religion, of money, destiny and God. The old apple tree went down in the big cyclone that struck Vernon at twenty minutes to six o’clock on the evening of May 26, 1917; but the memory of my talks with Uncle Noah will always remain.

I knew more than Uncle Noah did. He was not a learned man, as the notion goes. I had read more and traveled more and seen more; but I doubt that I had thought or felt more. I doubt that my attitudes of mind, which are the main things in a man’s education, were any finer, any richer with the flavors of an untarnished imagination, or any more discriminating between the true and the false, the tawdry and genuine, the trappings and the realities of life, than were Uncle Noah’s. He had made the first models for the old Buckeye mowing-machine when it was first invented back in the ’seventies. He was skilled in his craft, and as a matter of course that is the first thing a man must be if he is ever to become educated.

But a man does not get all of his education out of his work. If he did or could, the problem of each man to achieve his own education would be much simpler than it is now or ever will be. With vast numbers of men, whose sole work is to screw nut 979 and unscrew nut 841, day after day and year after year, education would thus be an automatic process. A man could drop a nickel or a dollar into a slot and get out just the amount of education he had paid for. A great many ambitious parents who send their boys to college seem to imagine that education is that kind of process. But many of them, after dropping five or twenty-five thousand dollars into a collegiate slot, when they get the boy or girl back out of the machine, are both amazed and disillusioned at the meager improvement achieved.

But education is for the whole of life, and work is not the whole of life. In this machine age, when man has applied science to invention and industry and is only beginning to apply it to himself, when society is organized for profit instead of for happiness, and when the ‘‘economic man”’ is probably more nearly realized than at any period in the world’s history, it is un-

HE CULTIVATES THE OPEN MIND fortunately true for enormous numbers of people that work has to be nearly all of life. But a man who has achieved the slightest leisure from the sheer struggle for existence and has no wish to get anything out of life except his work, will never know the nourishing freedom of true education. This is because life is not only work, but is also play and suffering, beauty and pain, joy and sorrow, sunshine and rain, disgrace and glory, darkness, storm and terror, as well as sweetness, peace and light.

No form of work therefore, however rich and varied, can furnish the means for satisfying the entire gamut of even the humblest man’s possibilities for entering into all the adventures and exaltations of education. In fact, many a man who regards himself as educated, just because he works eighteen hours a day upon some problem of art or science, would find he could achieve a new mastery over his own problem if he should, now and then at least, catch his breath and remember with Herbert Spencer that ‘‘work and learning were made for life, and not life for learning and work.’’ Provided a man has attained the slightest economic freedom, he must discover that work and learning were made for life, or else he will find, as he approaches the sunset, that he has missed much of the great adventures of education. And just to the degree you have missed education, you have missed life itself.

So, as I was saying, Uncle Noah was not a man of much learning and had worked nearly all his life at one thing, whereas, compared to him, I had a great deal of learning of a sort, and had worked at many things. In contrast to Uncle Noah’s limited worldly experiences, I had had rather wide contacts with the world. I had traveled perhaps a quarter of a million miles as a platform lecturer; I had started to college from the farm at the age of fourteen—something fairly easy in those days when the college course was not much above the present-day third year in high school; I had worked in the chemical laboratory of a sugar factory, had been for a time a gold and silver assayer, superintendent of a mining camp, a police reporter, a traveling salesman, and once I had run a bankrupt hotel and made it pay; I had gone through two pretty long sieges with tuberculosis which had sadly broken up my academic career; I had been an editorialist on a metropolitan daily and had knocked about and been knocked about at numerous other things. |

I mention these varied items of experience merely to say that aman may pass through all of them and many more without ever coming even in sight of an education. Some of these experiences help, some do not. I had had an enormous number of them and Uncle Noah had had very few; and yet, as I sit down this afternoon, the seventh day of March, 1930, to dictate a book on some phases of education that have interested me, and as I look back through the mist and mystery of the years since Uncle Noah went to his reward, which I am sure was a great one, I find myself honestly, deeply, sincerely wondering whether I am or ever will be as well educated a man as was my old friend Uncle Noah Smith.

My reason for this feeling is that it has always seemed to me Uncle Noah possessed in an unusual degree a number of the great marks—and those the most essential ones—that my years of knocking against all sorts and conditions of men and all sorts and conditions of educational theories have led me to believe are the mental badges, the habits and attitudes of mind and spirit that distinguish a man of genuine education.

Above all, Uncle Noah had one characteristic that had grown to be so much a second nature to him—

HE CULTIVATES THE OPEN MIND although he had achieved it with effort and humility of spirit—that he did not realize he possessed in it the supreme thing that is preliminary to all education. It is the thing that brings us straight to the one habit of mind, more fundamental, more outstanding, more serviceable than any other in achieving education. Without this very simple but very basic way of looking at the world and at people and at our own experience, education is impossible. True, we see many people who make a great stir in the world, persons of ability, persons who exercise a very wide and often baneful influence, in whom the absence of this habit is the most conspicuous thing about them. An enormous part: of the world’s misery and mistakes have been directly brought about by people who possessed great mental abilities but who had never achieved this way of using them. It was because Uncle Noah had this habit so deeply. rooted in every word he spoke and every thought he expressed that I have always thought of him as having been, in this basic sense, a truly educated man. It is an achievement possible to the humblest man, and without it the greatest man becomes as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Indeed, most of the sounding brass voices that have misled men in all ages and which, when they get a hearing, mislead them just as much to-day as ever, are voices that have never become informed with this habit of arriving at the truth or falsity of their utterances. It is the first of all _ the marks of an educated man and it is this:

He keeps his mind open on every question until the evidence is all in.

Uncle Noah was very strong on this point. He used often to say to me, ‘‘It does not matter greatly what a man knows or how much he knows; the thing

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that separates an educated man from an uneducated man more than anything else is how he learned what he does know.’’

In this remark Uncle Noah struck at the roots of every man’s problem with reference to his own education. Moreover he voiced the essence of the problem as to how humanity has ever advanced in its intellectual conquests and how it may hope to go on toward the achievement of a free and intelligent society. We shall see this more clearly if we reflect on what school and college does to some people and fails to do to others. It has been rightly said that about half of what a man learns in school and college is of no use, and that he forgets most of the other half. However, this is not serious, provided he acquired in school ‘and college right habits of learning. If a man learns either in school or in college or, as Uncle Noah did, from work and life, to keep his mind open to new facts, even though some new fact might, so to speak, jab some of his personal opinions in the ‘‘proud flesh’’; if he has got over being afraid to change his mind, no matter what it may cost his personal pride; if he has got so he is not afraid to think on all sides of every question; if he is not afraid to review carefully and without prejudice the evidence against his own opinions; above everything else, if he has learned to hold back his judgment and not to come to any conclusion at all until the evidence is all in, or, at least, sufficient evidence to make a rational conclusion possible, then that man will likely wake up some fine morning and find he is one of the most trusted men in his community, and, it may be, one of the great human spirits of his day and generation,

CHAPTER II Hz ComsBines THE Turee Great HErrraces or EDUCATION

Tis mark of an educated mind—open-mindedness—could easily take us out over the whole history of science and the progress of rational thought, because it is the very essence of the scientific way of looking at the world. It is true that men have lived significant lives without science, but they can never understand the universe in which they live in any other way. It has not been war or natural resources, or changes in trade routes, or differences in economic or political organization that have made men advance or recede, so much as mere changes in mental habits. Only when the method of waiting upon evidence before reaching conclusions, the method of open-minded investigation of the facts of nature, became a mental habit with a number of men, was what we call science born. And the day science was born was the day when humanity started upon the only kind of progress that could possibly be cumulative, self-perpetuating and, so to speak, self-progresswe.

I do not believe any one can understand the miracle of modern life without understanding that not superior mental ability but merely a difference in mental habits has made it all possible. And I want to point out again and again throughout this book that these mental habits can be achieved by every one and that they constitute the essence of education. I wonder, indeed, if you realize that in order to have electric lights and steam-engines and washing-powders and radios and antitoxins and automobiles and pure milk and airplanes that a few unique and wonderful men called scientists had to introduce a new kind of life into the world. It was not a sudden augmentation of mental ability but a change of mental habits that made all science possible. These marvelous inventions and discoveries are probably due not to our having more ingenious minds than men of former ages, even the men of the Stone Age, but merely to the fact that we use our minds ina different way; to the fact that at least a few men have achieved a new sort of spiritual existence, a habit of deciding things only on evidence. It is this, far more than all else combined, I think, that has made you and me partners in the most brilliant and interesting civilization of all history.

I think we may profitably pause here a moment in order to reflect how dramatic as well as practically interesting it would be if we could only know where and how this habit of mind began; because, while the average man does not realize it, it is the most extraordinary occurrence in the whole history of mankind. We know a great deal as to where it began but very little as to how. Men had been going along for ages, living, fighting, loving, dying, building civilizations and tearing them down, without ever developing either the interest or the will that is necessary for this mental habit, when, rather suddenly, it laid hold of a number of men and not only began to produce astonishing practical results, but revolutionized the whole outlook of men upon the nature of the universe and the meaning of life itself.

The most masterly account of the beginnings of this new habit in the world—this new way of using the mind—has been recently written by the man who, I think, knows more about the history of science than any one else, namely, Dr. George Sarton, editor of the intellectualist magazine, Isis, and Associate in the

History of Science of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. It is a piece of good fortune for both education and science that Doctor Sarton has planned a majestic history of all science, a work that will run into many volumes and require the labors of a generation.

The first volume of nearly one thousand pages, published in 1927, brings the history of science from the time of Homer down to the period of Omar Khayyam, and in the beautiful and profound introductory chapter of this noble undertaking Doctor Sarton defines science as ‘‘systematized positive knowledge.’’

It is important to keep this definition in our minds if we are ever to understand what education in the modern sense really means. 'T’'o be able to systematize knowledge into positive constructive thought constitutes the difference between a man of large information who never gets anywhere with what he knows, and the man who can combine his knowledge into a logical synthetic whole and who does get somewhere. It is the difference between passive items of information and creative knowledge. It was just when this habit of synthetic constructive thinking about nature entered the world that there occurred what will always be known as the ‘‘Greek miracle.’’ It is just as much a miracle when it happens to-day in the mind of an individual man as it was in Greece six centuries before _ Christ, because it constitutes one of the great differences between being educated and uneducated.

In a widely sweeping and penetrating passage, in which the italics are my own, Doctor Sarton eloquently sums up for us the way these efforts to achieve systematized positive knowledge were crystallized by the Greeks with sufficient breadth, continuity and practical fruitfulness to be properly termed a genuine scientific discipline:

One has often spoken of the ‘‘Greek miracle’’ with reference to the sudden bloom of a wonderful literature and the unequaled creations of their sculptors and architects, but the development of Greek science was not a bit less marvelous. Of course, we realize now that it was not entirely spontaneous, but rather the fructification of a long evolution of which we find many vestiges in Mesopotamia, in Kigypt, and in the Aigean world. Yet what a distance between those crude empirical efforts and the clear-cut, pregnant dicta of the early Greek philosophers and mathematicians! If science is more than an accumulation of facts; if it is not simply positive knowledge, but systematized positive knowledge; if it is not simply unguided analysis and haphazard empiricism, but synthesis; if it is not simply a passive recording, but a constructive activity ; then, undoubtedly, Hellas was its cradle. The progress of our own studies makes us see more and more clearly how much they borrowed from earlier peoples, but by way of contrast this enhances our opinion of their originality and fortifies our admiration of their scientific genius. It becomes increasingly easy to tell where they found their rough material, but this hardly helps us to understand what enabled them to assume a scientific attitude and to give the earliest conspicuous examples of scientific investigations which were at once deliberate and disinterested. How did it come to pass that some of those early Greek philosophers managed to distinguish scientific issues and to discuss them with a clarity, directness, and freedom from prejudice which remained almost unequaled until modern times? Where did they get that genius for striking the nail on the head? We try to explain this by referring to racial qualities, to geographic and meteorological considerations, to politics and religion, but in reality our explanations do not explain, and it is that very failure which we express when we speak of the Greek miracle.*

*From Introduction to the History of Science, by Dr. George Sarton; used by permission of the publishers, The Williams & Wilkins Company, 22

Of course a great deal had been discovered about nature prior to the Greeks, and as our archeologists unearth more primitive civilizations, we find more and more where the Greeks got their ‘‘rough material’’ for a scientific approach to nature. But as Doctor Sarton points out, none of this seems to explain where the Greeks got their attitude of mind and their analytical method of thinking about natural phenomena, their marvelous capacity for hitting the nail on the head. It is this and this alone that makes science or that gives us the materials for a critical philosophy of man and the universe. The more thoughtful men of every age have, of course, pondered upon the facts of nature and have sought to wrest a satisfying explanation of these facts from their observations. But it was first in Greece that this effort was communicated widely from man to man and from generation to generation as a continuous mental discipline and an unbroken method of research by which one set of facts could be compared with another set of facts, and some sort of logical picture of nature as a whole be achieved. It was in Greece that this effort of men to understand the world they lived in took on sufficient vitality, depth and continuity to permit it to be called science.

Moreover, these men approached nature with such an unflinching courage that even to-day their effort lays hold of our minds and hearts as the most hopeful and inspiring spiritual development, up to that time, in the annals of men. Previously Jewish peoples by looking within had developed the idea of one God, and this had hitherto been the most significant achievement of the human mind. But the Greeks, looking outward, saw the unity of all nature and saw man as a part of nature, which was an achievement of still greater value, because their fearless investigations developed a unified system of thought about nature on the one hand and, on the other, gave us for all time a method by which knowledge could be progressively accumulated. ' By this method, and by it alone, could the mental conquests of one man or one age be handed on in such a way that the men of the future could not only repeat the mental operations involved and arrive at the same results, but also, though possessed of no greater mental ability, would have an Archimedes’ lever with which they could still more deeply pry open the secrets both of the outer world and of their own minds as well. And as Doctor Sarton intimates, if for the past twenty-five centuries mankind had only walked humbly and constantly in the footsteps of the Greek scientists, the progress of civilization would surely have been greatly accelerated.

I stress at some length the historical development of this new attitude of mind, because it is the very core of any education that to-day can be called liberal, although I do not mean for a moment that it constitutes the whole of education or the only kind of education. But it was this gift of critical thought which came chiefly from the Greeks that offers the largest promise of genuine human progress and universal material comfort, and the happiness that may spring from them. For, as opposed to scientific discoveries and inventions, whatever achievements any age or race makes in politics or art are almost entirely personal, unique and incommunicable. Neither the Greeks nor any other people can tell us how to repeat their superlative triumphs in art and literature. This may for a moment seem strange, because the artist is the most cooperative and communicative of all human beings. His whole passion isto share his emotions, through some outward expression in sculpture, painting, music, dancing, architecture, poetry, fiction or drama, with his fellow men. But he can not tell how he does it so that others also can do it. This is the most fundamental difference, it seems to me, between art and science although I am ready to admit, as I understand Havelock Ellis to claim, that in its higher reaches science itself may be a form of art. Science makes its achievements by mental processes that can be, to a very great extent at least, taught to others, although it may take the artist to carry these processes to their highest fulfilments. And it is because the Greeks, more than any other race, taught us these mental processes and habits that we owe them as great a debt for their science as we do for their art and literature.

Moreover, if we are ourselves open-minded we must see how the world suffers when this scientific spirit and this clear-eyed looking at nature disappear. I am so eager for the reader to appreciate the whole situation as it has affected the actual lives of men and as it is affecting them to-day that I can not refrain from quoting another passage from Doctor Sarton’s brilliant sketch in which he outlines the long struggle that went on for centuries among various attitudes of mind toward life and God and nature. This struggle constitutes the real essence of the history of Western civilization, and we must understand it in some degree if we are to grasp with any adequacy a true philosophy of education for ourselves. The outlook of an educated man to-day is to an immense extent the outcome of the conflict among ideals of life which have caused the past twenty-five centuries to run red with the blood of men who hated one another, not because of any differences in animal appetites and passions or because they were driven by hunger and animal need, but because they differed in their ideas about nature and God and brotherly love. Differing ideas of brotherly love and to whom and under what circumstances it should be extended, have caused more wars than perhaps any-

THE MARKS OF AN HDUCATED MAN thing else in human history. It is at least interesting to see that when the ‘‘glory that was Greece’’ and the ‘‘orandeur that was Rome’’ and the love that was Christianity came into conflict upon the great stage of the ancient world that the varying fortunes of these three actors in the human comedy, namely Grecian science, gaiety and beauty, Roman utilitarianism, legal organization and brute force, and Christian love and theology were to furnish the chief episodes in the great drama of European history.

Doctor Sarton first sketches briefly the meaning of the culture of Alexandria, which was a mixture of Greece, Rome and the Orient. He shows how it ‘‘combined some of the noblest features of Greek genius with new aspirations derived from Egyptian and Hastern sources,’’ and points out that the whole Greco-Roman-

lexandrian world was subjected to ‘‘one of the greatest intellectual conflicts in history, the clash between Greek ideals and various Oriental religions, chiefly Judaism and Christianity,’’ during which ‘‘gigantic struggle between lay and religious ideals . . . every notion was put into the crucible and new scales of value were slowly adjusted:’’ Describing in bold strokes this tremendous period in human history, Doctor Sarton Says:

The reader knows that this protracted struggle ended with the triumph of Christianity. It was a distinct gain from the point of view of morality, but a loss from the point of view of scientific research. This might be considered a third tempering of mankind. The Greeks had taught the nobility of scientific study and that the pursuit of disinterested knowledge is the greatest purification; the Romans had urged the necessity of applying knowledge to immediate needs; the Christians were now insisting that if we have not charity it profits us nothing. The Greeks laid stress upon truth and beauty; the Romans upon strength and usefulness; the Christians, upon love. The value of the last message in a barbarous and cruel world can hardly be overestimated. Unfortunately, most men are incapable of grasping an idea, unless they exaggerate it to the exclusion of all others. Thus, in this ease, most of the people who finally understood that charity was essential did not stop there, but jumped to the conclusion that it was all-sufficient. This led them to consider scientific research not only useless, but pernicious. Thus the ruin of science, begun by Roman utilitarianism, was in danger of being completed by Christian piety. It has taken about one millennium and a half to make people generally understand that knowledge without charity and charity without knowledge are equally worthless and dangerous; a great many people do not understand it yet.