The meaning of a liberal education

Front matter

« ft t

THE MEANING OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION

The People’s Institute <fLectures-in-Print” Series

Preface

Most books that deal with the subject of education, and there are many, are concerned with the training of the young. Much is said about educational methods but very little about content. There is discussion, also, of the effec¬ tiveness of institutions, schools and colleges, and the in¬ terest of the State in education. This book does not deal with such matters.

It is concerned with other problems. What is an edu¬ cated person like? How does he differ from the unedu¬ cated? Does he think differently and, if so, why? We shall be empirical in our study. We shall study persons who are generally recognized as outstanding educated minds and ask what it is that characterizes them. Is an educated person one who is like Socrates, Erasmus, Montaigne, Goethe, Arnold, Santayana?

The theme of this book is that education is more than information, or skill, or propaganda. In each age edu¬ cation must take into account the conditions of that age. But the educated mind is not a mere creature of its own time. Education is emancipation from herd opinion, self-mastery, capacity for self-criticism, suspended judgment, and urbanity.

It is often believed that education, adult education in particular, is an avocation or an interest to occupy the indi¬ vidual in his leisure time, like music or stamp collecting.

vii

PREFACE viii

The work of The People’s Institute at Cooper Union, New York, where these lectures were given, is essentially that of adult education. I have tried to think through with those who attended the lectures what it is that for ten years we have been trying to achieve. Adult education is now becoming an important interest in American life, and the inquiry seems timely.

This book, then, contends that education is a spiritual revaluation of human life. Its task is to reorient the indi¬ vidual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals. If education is not liberalizing, it is not education in the sense of the title of the book. I use the term “liberal” not in the political sense, as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense mean¬ ing by a liberal education the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests. In this sense, education is simply philosophy at work. It is the search for the “good life.” Education is itself a way of living.

I have written the book not from the standpoint of the professional educator for whom education is frequently — if it be adult education — an enterprise designed for the uplift of other people, but from the standpoint of one who is concerned that his own education shall not stop in middlelife. No one is fit to be a teacher in whose own mental process education has ceased to go on. One is a student first and only incidentally a teacher. The best teacher is the seeker after truth amongst his students. Probably the most successful educator cannot tell what is the secret of his success in teaching. That which is important about

PREFACE

IX the philosophy of education is not method but that back¬ ground of knowledge which enables its possessor to judge what is worth knowing and doing.

Everett Dean Martin.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE . vii

I. INTRODUCTION . i

Introduction

The evidence is unmistakable that there is an important change in the attitude of the public toward education. There is an increasingly general demand for it in some form or other. Everywhere and in all classes of society the interest in acquiring better knowledge is apparent.

In England and on the continent of Europe there are thousands of classes and groups patiently pursuing long and serious courses of study. American colleges and univer¬ sities are crowded and many students are each year turned away. Vast and increasing numbers register annually for correspondence and university extension courses. The de¬ mand for more education is shown also in the increasing number of lecture courses, people’s colleges, and other cen¬ ters of public discussion.

While people do not always know just what it is they demand and frequently the thing which they receive is not education, nevertheless there is a new and very wide spread interest. This new interest shows itself not only in the increasing number of persons engaged in some kind of edu¬ cational activity but also in the fact that people are begin¬ ning to see that education properly may be extended into adult life.

Until recently, people have thought of education as some¬ thing for children, something which a man either got or

l missed in his early years, something which he generally for¬ got in his mature years. To the average person, education was a matter of fond memories or of unpleasant associa¬ tions with teachers, school houses and experiences of child¬ hood. The “highly” educated person was the exceptional person in the community, discussions of the philosophy of education did not appeal to a wide public interest. Now higher branches of learning are being pursued by numbers of people outside regular educational institutions. Some¬ thing very significant is happening. Perhaps at no time since the thirteenth century has the desire for knowledge so nearly approached a mass movement.

Certain qualifications must however be made. While much of the demand for education is genuine and sponta¬ neous, much of it is spurious, irrelevant, inconsequential. The increased attendance at school or university does not necessarily mean that more education is going on. It is frequently said that our colleges are crowded with inferior students. Athletics, fraternities, schools of business and the automobile tend to displace science and the classics. American youth has acquired its ideal of college life from the motion pictures. We should not infer from the large numbers engaged in adult education that democracy has sud¬ denly decided to rid itself of intellectual shoddiness. If the advertisements of correspondence courses in self-improvement which regularly appear in the popular maga¬ zines are an indication of the instruction offered for sale, people might better spend their money for patent medicine or in having their fortunes told. At best adult education consists largely of brief courses of a vocational nature. Even worker’s education, a movement which has inspired hope in many liberals, may easily be over estimated. Much

INTRODUCTION of it is little more than a recrudescence of antiquated radical propaganda, designed to enable the proletariat to “emanci¬ pate itself from the slavery of capitalism,” and to get it “ready for a millennial industrial democracy.” The initia¬ tive often comes not from studious minded workers, but from enthusiastic intellectuals and idealistic uplifters. The cultural gesture is often pathetic or comic. It is not un¬ common for those who have completed the courses of study in a “workers” college to find themselves more un¬ adjusted than they were before.

It is sought to make of adult education something which will broaden the interests and sympathies of people regard¬ less of their daily occupation — or along with it — to lift men’s thought out of the monotony and drudgery which are the common lot, to free the mind from servitude and herd opinion, to train habits of judgment and of apprecia¬ tion of value, to carry on the struggle for human excellence in our day and generation, to temper passion with wisdom, to dispel prejudice by better knowledge of self, to enlist all men, in the measure that they have capacity for it, in the achievement of civilization.

Adult education is a way of living which should be open to all who care for it for its own sake. It is not surprising that it frequently fails of its true aims. Education has always been regarded as a mere means to ends that have nothing to do with it. It is to be expected, therefore, that education in our day should be regarded primarily as a means of entrance to the already overcrowded professions, or to material gain or better social position. Doubtless it must remain so until the community becomes sufficiently civilized so that some degree of liberal education is the expected thing in all classes, an interest and a goal, a spiritual bond of union somewhat like the idea of catholic religion in the middle ages. This is an ideal which will not be realized by magic. There is no cheap popular substitute for education. Nor are we nearing the goal while as now almost anything passes for education.

Almost any method of salesmanship or trick of influenc¬ ing people for any ends whatever is now “education.” Every one educates the public. It is marvelous how large a portion of the population of these states is qualified to instruct. Education has become the game men perpetually work to convert their neighbors. It is the cure for every social ill. How shall we put an end to the crime wave, abolish war, how to prevent social revolution, — or bring rev¬ olution about, how induce unwilling people to accept cheerfully the coercion of national prohibition or give lip service to some one’s favorite brand of patriotism? The answer is in all cases — education. If you are engaged in increasing the sale of a certain soap, in putting everyone on guard against that social disability of which one’s best friend will not tell him, if you can frighten a multitude with the danger of pyorrhea and thus increase your profit in tooth paste — all this is now called education.

Many see in the general movement for more education a great hope for humanity. It was the belief in its political benefits that led to the compulsory education of children in the nineteenth century. Men were sure that all that held the world back was ignorance. People would surely wish to have their ignorance removed. Remove it, teach men the laws of a reasonable and beneficent nature, and man¬ kind in general would be wise and happy and good. Ingersoll used to rejoice whenever he visited a town where the school house was larger than the church.

As the humanitarians of the nineteenth century held that public school education must inevitably put an end to tyranny and superstition, so many of our contemporaries look upon adult education as the guarantor of a new and better civil¬ ization. There is to be an end of bigotry and partisan strife and of crowd hysteria and of the vulgarities which be¬ set democracy. They see genius appreciated, a selection by the masses of a sincere and competent leadership. Men everywhere are to learn “not only how to make a living, but how to live.”

Finally, it is hoped that adult education will give us new methods and aims which will be carried back into our schools and colleges and transform them. A better informed adult population will naturally take a more active and in¬ telligent interest in the education of youth. And when teachers try to instruct adults it will become necessary for them to make their teaching interesting and significant. The teachers will also learn something about life, gleaning sheaves of ripe wisdom out of the mature experience of their students; they will become better teachers. All this may or may not come to pass. The point of interest is that there is this tendency to make a gospel of education.

We Americans have a weakness for new gospels. They are a pleasant form of verbal exercise. Liberty, Democ¬ racy, Social Reform, the Cause of Labor, Psychoanalysis — all have been put to such evangelistic use. Now we are to become an educated nation by the simple process of every¬ one educating everyone else. Education is like reform, it is something which is always good for other people. There is much talk about adult education and there are many confer¬ ences. But I have not attended a conference for the dis¬ cussion of this subject in which anyone spoke of adult education as his own pursuit of knowledge. And as with most gospels, we are in such a hurry to save souls that we would begin proclaiming the new salvation to the nation before pausing to find out what education is.

Education has one thing in common with religion. One must come to it with clean hands and a pure heart or one can never know the secret power of it. This is as true of a nation as of an individual. As a people we have certain traits which may be praiseworthy in themselves, but are distinctly hostile to the work of education. I will enumer¬ ate them and then briefly indicate their element of hostility. They are, first, our genius for organization; second, our well-known utilitarianism; and third, our cleverness in find¬ ing shortcuts to the ends we seek; fourth, our tendency to make propaganda.

The American way of doing things is to proceed to or¬ ganize them. Our genius for organization is probably our most generally recognized national characteristic. It has given us such prestige as we enjoy among the nations of the earth. ,Ours is the land of the Woolworth Building, the Ford factories, the Anti-saloon League, Rotary, the Ku Klux Klan, and the college cheer leader. In organization there is power and there is efficiency, as seen in the success of our industries. Labor, politics, morals, religion, charity have all followed the same course. In fact a man gains recognition in this country only by virtue of his member¬ ship in some power-seeking group. He who remains un¬ organized is lost. And without a chairman, a committee, an executive secretary and a press agent no human interest can survive. We simply do not know what to do with it or how to think about it.

Organization, which is instrument or means, tends to be-

INTRODUCTION come an end in itself. This is the fate of most organized causes; a movement arises with its standardized labels and values, its stereotyped mannerisms, its rigamarole. Suc¬ cess is estimated in terms of material effects, tangible re¬ sults, numbers and power. The organizer takes precedence over those who possess the interest which it is his task to serve. When a man becomes a labor organizer, he stops work. Many university presidents are not themselves teachers or even scholars. They are good organizers, and with very much the same methods and standards of value one could as well organize a labor union or an insurance company. This is no criticism of the college president. His practical ability is requisite of modern conditions. But ways of thinking and of feeling are elusive and essentially personal, and when the attempt is made to institutionalize them they vanish and a lifeless imitation is substituted. You may as well try to organize the weather as to organize faith, hope and love. “Organized charity” is almost a contradiction in terms. Organized religion is a garden of artificial flowers, badly faded too. The spiritual life of the race was carefully weeded out long ago.

To know the effect of organization upon education, one need only attend a convention of the National Educational Association, or familiarize oneself with the public school system anywhere. The system supplants education. The present interest in adult education is in part a protest against the system. The thirst for knowledge is nowhere more genuine and healthy than in such groups as those which attend The People’s Institute of New York and other edu¬ cational centers where learning is pursued with a minimum of organization. In such places people who desire further knowledge of some subject in which they are interested come together, voluntarily, and their only basis of associa¬ tion is their common intellectual interest. There is no cult or “movement” ; there are no promoters for there is nothing to promote. There are no ulterior ends to serve and there are no outside influences or regulations save those necessary to insure honest scholarship and competent instruction. Many adult students would resent any attempt at further organization.

There is in existence at the present time a World Associa¬ tion for adult education, and there was recently formed an American Association. But these associations have no ambition to guide or control or to standardize. Nor are they equipped to do so. One of the greatest services that such an association, made up of teachers and students, could perform would be to work to prevent the diversion of the present interest in popular education to ends that are not educational.

“Adult Education” is becoming a slogan, a phrase to capitalize, a label to attach to various activities which have hitherto borne other brands, — Americanization for in¬ stance, or social work, or community organization, or re¬ forms and propagandas of one sort or another. Much that is now labeled Adult Education has a curiously familiar look. There are faces one has seen before somewhere in other climes that then enjoyed the sunshine of popular in¬ terest. Praiseworthy enterprises no doubt, and not less praiseworthy is the somewhat tardy discovery that the or¬ ganizers have all along been speaking the prose of adult education without knowing it.

The danger is that persons with long experience in pro¬ moting and administering many things may also conceive of each educational task as primarily one of organization.

In a recent conference on adult education in a New England state, an enthusiastic public school administrator in a burst of oratory proposed that adult education be made compul¬ sory. Another called attention to the appalling extent of illiteracy, particularly as regards the use of the English language, and urged that adult education be promoted as a preventive of crime. A third, a dean in an eastern college, insisted that adult education at once be departmen¬ talized; graded, I suppose, into its primary, secondary, col¬ legiate and post graduate branches. Nothing has yet been said about an adult kindergarten, though doubtless many people could profit by attending such an institution. Per¬ haps the associated kindergartens have not yet discovered the fact that they also have been engaged in adult education.

We shall be disappointed if it is our hope to send the grown-up population of the country back to Public School to receive still more of the thing that caused many of them to leave. One of the leading educators in America recently asked a group of teachers whether any among them were so well satisfied with what they had accomplished in their own sphere that they could wish to extend their work through the adult years.

It is very difficult for the man of the system to think of education itself, he is too much preoccupied with gradations, requirements, discipline, reports, with seeing that a given minimum of identical work is done by all in a given time. He thinks in terms of buildings and equipment, submission to authority, conformity to herd opinion, service to the state. All or at least some of these things are necessary, but it is obvious that they do not constitute an education. This lesson America has got to learn. There can be no quantity production of the things of the spirit.

Another national trait which influences our education is our utilitarianism. I do not use this term in the sense that it was used by those philosophers who held the principle of the Greatest Happiness. I refer to that in us which is spoken of as “Yankee shrewdness.” Except in politics and religion, we are a sensible people. And by sensible I mean — and most Americans would agree — practical. We can be very efficient when we wish to, — that is, when there is anything to gain by it. We are straightforward, and ex¬ cept in matters concerning which we prefer to deceive our¬ selves, not easily taken in. Whatever we profess, we are born pragmatists. Our first question about anything is ‘what good is it’, that is, what use is it? We demand results and we get them. We get things done because our philos¬ ophy of life is one of action, and our prevailing ethical standard is one of service. In the solution of a practical problem, and most problems to which we give our attention are practical, we pride ourselves on our directness. We come to the point. We dispense with the unnecessary, the ornamental, the traditional. It is a valuable trait.

But things sometimes have meanings other than that of usefulness. There are values which can not be measured in terms of money or personal advantage, or of time lost or gained, or of industrial efficiency. Health for instance is good not merely because the healthy man can do more work; it is good for its own sake. Yet people are fre¬ quently advised to guard their health for strictly economic reasons, and practical people have the habit of showing us the cost of disease, presenting statistics of labor time lost, estimating the loss to the community as so many thousands of dollars annually.

I have known people to take a like utilitarian view of

INTRODUCTION n

human relationships, making friends for the sake of com¬ mercial and social advancement, furnishing their houses, selecting their motor cars and even their clothes with the view to keeping up their credit at the bank. Many a man openly says that he belongs to certain clubs, and sometimes one even joins a church, for business reasons. How much the practical man misses is evident from the fact that it never occurs to him that there are other reasons for doing these things.

Practical men love to philosophize about the value of education. When I was a student I once rode up to the college with a farmer who was passing the campus on his way home from town. He informed me in no uncertain terms that he had no use for that institution. It irritated him to see all those “young loafers” wasting their time learning Latin and Greek and lawn tennis. Not one of them, not even the faculty, knew how to do anything; he had recently tested them out. He had asked the professor of Greek how many feet of lumber could be sawed from a log twenty-three inches in diameter and twenty feet long, and the professor did not know.

The farmer’s point of view is now that of many modern institutions of learning. Educators are determined to give people the knowledge they need for success in life and work. Courses are offered in scenario writing, millinery, salesman¬ ship. Whether courses are anywhere offered in paper hanging — with credit toward the bachelor’s degree, I do not know. But it is held that as thinking is really part of acting, only that knowledge is real which can be put in oper¬ ation. There is a truth in this statement if one takes a sufficiently broad view of activity. But the tendency is to make an easy and crude distinction between knowledge which is useful, and that which is merely “ornamental.” This distinction does not always hold. Knowledge may be like art, it may have values which are more than use or orna¬ mentation. Dr. Horace Kallen divides values into eco¬ nomic values and aesthetic values. Economic goods are those which are valuable because they are the means of getting some good other than themselves. Aesthetic goods are those which have value in themselves. Art is excel¬ lence. Education is the art of making living itself an art. It is the achievement of human excellence; it transcends both the useful and the ornamental. It is a way of life, just as truly as the religious life is a way of life, or the moral life, or the single life.

People motivated by a narrow utilitarianism do not really desire education. They are quite content with a vulgar substitute — if it pays. Education does not transform them; they tend to transform it after their own likeness. That many are seeking “education” from such motives is evident. One has only to study the advertising pages of the popular magazines to note the kind of appeal that is made to induce the ambitious to enroll in certain correspondence schools. The prospective student is given the promise that if he will subscribe for certain courses he may some day sit in the boss’s chair, and associate with the big men at the top who do real things. Usually there is an alluring picture of these big men at their desks, thinking great ideas; a picture which gives about the same notion of the lives of the success¬ ful as one sees in the motion pictures. Sometimes the pic¬ ture is of two men one on either side of the manager’s desk. One stands meekly, hat in hand, dressed as a laborer. On his face are the marks of sorrow, humility, hunger. The other man has the look of the typical “go-getter.” The lat¬ ter is seated; he is evidently giving an order. Such a pic¬ ture is not intended to be a comment upon the inequalities of our industrial system. The reader is informed that both men started at the bottom, that one improved his mind and his opportunities, the other’s is a wasted life.

Such advertisements are typical, and are worthy of note because they indicate something of the nature of the prevail¬ ing American interest in education. Here is an illustration of a domestic scene: The man stands at the door dejected. He has just been discharged from his position, and has come home to tell his wife. She sympathetically replies that he ought long ago to have bought that course of lessons. Or she consoles him with the question, “Why is it that all the others have gone ahead and you have not?”

By contrast there is a series of invitations to enter the temple of knowledge in which a wife is portrayed leaning affectionately over her husband’s shoulder. He holds a pay envelope in his hand and says, “I am making real money now.” It is well, when telling people of the advan¬ tages of education, to give them an idea of the conversation which takes place in the homes of the cultured.

But that anyone should seriously enter upon a course of study of the world’s classics in order that he may impress people with his knowledge, appear genteel, make himself attractive to women or gain entrance to an exclusive social set, is, I believe, a distinctly modern contribution to educa¬ tional theory. There recently came into my possession half a shelf of little old books bound in leather. They contain a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, some novels of Fielding and Smollet, and a book or two of seventeenth century religious meditations. The volumes are discolored with age and are worn with much reading, broken bindings are carefully repaired with hand stitching and torn pages pasted together by someone who prized and rever¬ enced their content. They are part of the small library of a New England farmer of the early years of the Republic, who read his books by his kitchen fireside when the day’s work was done, who lived with them for years, and found in them a perpetual source of interest and wisdom and a refuge in an existence of loneliness and toil. Imagine anyone trying to sell that man a work of art with the promise that a casual reading of it would enable him to appear more culti¬ vated than he really was.

Today a much advertised and in fact admirable selection of classic literature is offered with precisely this appeal. A full page display appears in the Sunday papers depicting a gaudy dining-room with three people conventionally dressed for dinner seated at the table. There are two men and a beautiful woman. She is talking to the man on her right, and is evidently fascinated with his brilliant conversa¬ tion. The man on the left sits dumb and miserable and un¬ noticed; he can not join in such sophisticated and scintillat¬ ing discussion. We are informed that the poor man has neglected to read his fifteen minutes a day. It is to this sort of thing that popular utilitarianism, aided and appealed to by commercialism, would divert a hesitating interest in education.

Even in the best of educational institutions the utilitarian point of view with its emphasis upon a narrow efficiency has its dangers. It is the source of that specialization which crams the student’s head full of information concern¬ ing one subject, leaving him in ignorance of all else and

INTRODUCTION

U;

hence unable to gain a proper perspective of the knowledge that he does possess.

In “Science and the Modern World,” Whitehead says

“The modern chemist is likely to be weak in zoology, weaker still in his general knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, and completely ignorant of the principles of rhythm in English versification. It is probably safe to ignore his knowledge of ancient history. Of course I am speaking of general tendencies; for chemists are no worse than engineers, or mathematicians, or classical scholars. Effective knowl¬ edge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a restricted acquaint¬ ance with useful subjects subservient to it.

This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further atten¬ tion is paid. But there is no groove of abstraction which is adequate for the comprehension of human life. . . .

The dangers arising from this aspect of professionalism are great, particularly in our democratic societies. The directive force of rea¬ son is weakened. The leading intellects lack balance. They see this set of circumstances, or that set ; but not both sets together. The task of coordination is left to those who lack either the force or the character to succeed in some definite career. . . . The point is that the discoveries of the nineteenth century were in the direction of professionalism, so that we are left with no expansion of wisdom and with greater need of it. Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development. It is this balanced growth of individuality which it should be the aim of education to secure.”