The care and culture of men: a series of addresses on the higher education by David Starr Jordan

Prefatory Note

This volume is made up of addresses relating to higher education, delivered at different times before assemblies of teachers and students. The writer is under obligation to the publishers of the Popular Science Monthly, the Forum, and the Occidental Medical Times for the permission to reprint articles which have appeared in these periodicals. The article on "The Evolution of the College Curriculum," first pubhshed in ** Science Sketches," is here reprinted by consent of A. C. McClurg & Co., and that on "The Higher Education of Women" is reprinted by consent of the Irving Syndicate. Most of the articles have been freely retouched since their original publication.

Palo Alto, Cal., May 14, 1896.

Table Of Contents

PAGE

I. The Value of Higher Education i

II. The Evolution of the College Curriculum 24

I. The Value Of Higher Education

WHAT I have to say here is addressed to young men and young women. It is a plea, as strong as I know how to make it, for higher education, for more thorough preparation for the duties of life. I know those well to whom I wish to speak. And to such as these, with the life and duties in the busy world before you, the best advice I or any one can give is this: *' Go to college."

And you may say : *' These four years are among the best of my life. The good the college does must be great, if I should spend this time and money in securing it. What will the college do for me ? "

It may do many things for you, — if you are made of the right stuff; for you cannot fasten a two-thousand-dollar education to a fifty-cent boy. The fool, the dude, and the shirk come out of college pretty much as they went in. They dive deep in the Pierian springs, as the duck dives in the pond, — and they come up as dry as the duck does. The college will not do everything for

*Address before the California State Teachers' Association at Fresno, 1892. B I you. It is simply one of the helps by which you can win your way to a noble manhood or womanhood. Whatever you are, you must make of yourself; but a well-spent college life is one of the greatest helps to all good things.

So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can do for you: It will bring you in contact with the great minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through the ages, have borne a mission to young men and young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer and Euripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought will be limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but the great men of all ages and all climes will become your brothers. You will learn to feel what the Greek called the * * consolations of philosophy." To turn from the petty troubles of the day to the thoughts of the masters, is to go from the noise of the street through the door of a cathedral. If you learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. The whole of your life must be spent in your own company, and only the educated man is good company for himself. The uneducated man looks out on life through narrow windows, and thinks the world is small.

The college can bring you face to face with the great problems of nature. You will learn from your study of nature's laws more than the books can tell you of the grandeur, the power, the omnipotence of God. You will learn to face great problems seriously. You will learn to work patiently at their solution, though you know that many generations must each add its mite to your work before any answer can be reached.

Your college course will bring you in contact with

THE IDEAL TEACHER. 3

men whose influence will strengthen and inspire. The ideal college professor should be the best man in the community. He should have about him nothing mean, or paltry, or cheap. He should be to the student as David Copperfield's Agnes, ''always pointing the way upward,' '

That we are all this, I shall not pretend. Most college professors whom I know are extremely human. We have been soured, and starved, and dwarfed in many ways, and many of us are not the men we might have been if we had had your chances for early education. But unpractical, pedantic, fossilized though the college professor may be, his heart is in the right place ; he is not mercenary, and his ideals are those of culture and progress. We are keeping the torch burning which you, young men of the twentieth century, may carry to the top of the mountain.

But here and there among us is the ideal teacher, the teacher of the future, the teacher to have known whom is of itself a liberal education. I have met some such in my day — Louis Agassiz, Charles Frederick Hartt, Asa Gray, George William Curtis, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Dickson White, among others, and there are many more such in our land. It is worth ten years of your life to know well one such man as these. Garfield once said that a log with Mark Hopkins at one end of it and himself at the other, would be a university. In whatever college you go, poor and feeble though the institution may be, you will find some man who, in some degree, will be to you what Mark Hopkins was to Garfield. To know him will repay you for all your sacrifices. It was said of Dr. Nott, of Union College, that he "took the sweepings of other colleges, and sent them back into society pure gold." Such was his influence on young men.

Moreover, the training which comes from association with one's fellow-students cannot be overestimated. Here and there, it is true, some young invertebrate, overburdened with money or spoiled by home-coddling, falls into bad company, and leaves college in worse condition than when he entered it. These are the windfalls of education. However much we may regret them, we cannot prevent their existence. But they are few among the great majority. Most of our apples are not wormeaten at the core. The average student enters college for a purpose ; and you will lose nothing, but may gain much, from association with him. Among our college students are the best young men of the times. They mold each other's character, and shape each other's work. Many a college man will tell you that, above all else which the college gave, he values the friendships which he formed in school. In the German universities, the ' ' fellow-feeling among free spirits ' ' is held to be one of the most important elements in their grand system of higher education.

Many a great genius has risen and developed in solitude, as the trailing arbutus grows in the woods and scorns cultivation. Poets sing because their souls are full of music, not because they have learned the gamut of passions in schools. But all great work, in science, in philosophy, in the humanities, has come from entering into the work of others.

There was once a Chinese emperor who decreed that he was to be the first; that all history was to begin

ENTERING INTO THE WORK OF OTHERS. 5

with him, and that nothing should be before him. But we cannot enforce such decree. We are not emperors of China. The world's work, the world's experience does not begin with us. We must know what has been done before. We must know the paths our predecessors have trodden, if we would tread them farther. We must stand upon their shoulders — dwarfs upon the shoulders of the giants — if we would look farther into the future than they. Science, philosophy, statesmanship cannot for a moment let go of the past.

The college intensifies the individuality of a man. It takes his best abilities and raises him to the second, or third, or tenth power, as we say in algebra. It is true enough that colleges have tried, and some of them still try, to enforce uniformity in study — to cast all students in the same mold. Colleges have been conservative, old-fogyish, if you please. Musty old men in the dust of Hbraries have tried to make young men dry and dreary like themselves. Colleges have placed readiness above thoroughness, memory above mastery, glibness above sincerity, uniformity above originality, and the dialectics of the dead past above the work of the Hving present The scepter of the Roman emperor has crumbled into dust, but the * ' rod of the Roman schoolmaster is over us still. ' '

But say what you will of old methods, they often attained great ends. Colleges have aimed at uniformity. They did not secure it. The individuality of the student bursts through the cast-iron curriculum. '*The man's the man for a' that," and the man is so much more the man nature meant him to be, because his mind is trained.

The educated man has the courage of his convictions, because only he has any real convictions. He knows how convictions should be formed. What he believes he takes on his own evidence — not because it is the creed of his church or the platform of his party. So he counts as a unit in his community — not as part of a dozen or a hundred whose opinions are formed by their town's place on the map, or who train under the party flag because their grandfathers did the same. * * To see things as they really are, ' ' is one of the crowning privileges of the educated man, and to help others to see them so, is one of the greatest services he can render to the community.

But you may say: "All this may be fine and true, but it does not apply in my case. I am no genius; I shall never be a scholar. I want simply to get along. Give me education enough to teach a district school, or to run an engine, or to keep account-books, and I am satisfied. Any kind of a school will be good enough for that.'*

* ' The youth gets together his materials, ' ' says Thoreau, * ' to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middleaged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. ' '

Now, why not plan for a woodshed at first, and save this waste of time and materials ?

But this is the very good of it. The gathering of these materials will strengthen the youth. It may be the means of saving him from idleness, from vice. So long as you are at work on your bridge to the moon, you will shun the saloon, and we shall not see you on the dry-goods box in front of the corner-grocery. I

THE MAN WHO CAN WILL. 7

know many a man who in early life planned only to build a woodshed, but who found later that he had the strength to build a temple, if he only had the materials. Many a man the world calls successful would give all life has brought him could he make up for the disadvantages of his lack of early training. It does not hurt a young man to be ambitious in some honorable direction. In the pure-minded youth, ambition is the sum of all the virtues. Lack of ambition means failure from the start. The young man who is aiming at nothing, and cares not to rise, is already dead. There is no hope for him. Only the sexton and the undertaker can serve his purposes.

The old traveler, Rafinesque, tells us that, when he was a boy, he read the voyages of Captain Cook, and Pallas, and Le Vaillant, and his soul was fired with the desire to be a great traveler like them. ** And so I became such," he adds shortly.

If you say to yourself, ' ' I will be a naturalist, a traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar"; if you never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that direction, and take advantage of all those aids that help toward your ends, and reject all that do not, you will some time reach your goal. The world turyis aside to let any vian pass who knows whither he is going.

*'Why should we call ourselves men," said Mirabeau," unless it be to succeed in everything, everywhere? Say of nothing, *This is beneath me,' nor feel that anything is beyond your powers. Nothing is impossible to the man who can will. ' '

"But a college education costs money," you may say. ** I have no money; therefore, I cannot go to college."

But this is nonsense. If you have health and strength, and no one dependent on you, you cannot be poor. There is, in this country, no greater good luck that a young man can have than to be thrown on his own resources. The cards are stocked against the rich man's son. Of the many college men who have risen to prominence in my day, very few did not lack for money in college. I remember a little boarding-club of the students at Cornell, truthfully called the " Struggle for Existence," and named for short, ''The Strug," which has graduated more bright minds than any other single organization in my Alma Mater.

The young men who have fought their way, have earned their own money, and know what a dollar costs, have the advantage of the rich. They enter the world outside with no luxurious habits, with no taste for idleness. It is not worth while to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, when a litde effort will secure you a gold one. The time, the money that the unambitious young man wastes in trilling pursuits or in absolute idleness will suilice to give the ambitious man his education. The rich man's son may enter college with better preparation than you. He may wear better clothes. He may graduate younger. But the poor man's son can make up for lost time by greater energy and by the greater clearness of his grit. He steps from the commencement stage into no unknown world. He has already measured swords with the great antagonist, and the first victory is his. It is the first struggle that counts.

But it is not poverty that helps a man. There is no virtue in poor food or shabby clothing. It is the effort by which he throws off the yoke of poverty that en-

THE COW'S MAN. 9

larges the powers. It is not hard work, but work to a purpose, that frees the soul. If the poor man lie down in the furrow and say: " I won't try. I shall never amount to anything. I am too poor; and if I wait to earn money, I shall be too old to go to school." If you do this, I say, you won' t amount to anything, and later in life you will be glad to spade the rich man's garden and to shovel his coal at a dollar a day.

I have heard of a poor man in Wisconsin who earns a half-dollar every day by driving a cow to pasture. He watches her all day as she eats, and then drives her home at night. This is all he does. Put here your half-dollar and there your man. The one balances the other, and the one enriches the world as much as the other. If it were not for the cow, the world would not need that man at all!

A young man can have no nobler ancestry than one made up of men and women who have worked for a living and who have given honest work. The instinct of industry runs in the blood. Naturalists tell us that the habits of one generation may be inherited by the next, reappearing as instincts. Whether this be literally true or not, this we know: it is easy to inherit laziness. No money or luck will place the lazy man on the level of his industrious neighbor. The industry engendered by the pioneer life of the last generation is still in your veins. Sons and daughters of the Western pioneers, yours is the best blood in the realm. You must make the most of yourselves. If you cannot get an education in four years, take ten years. It is worth your while. Your place in the world will wait for you till you are ready to fill it Do not say that I am expecting too much of the lo THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

effects of a firm resolution; that I give you advice which will lead you to failure. For the man who will fail will never make a resolution. Those among you whom fate has cut out for nobodies are the ones who will never try !

I said just now that you cannot put a two-thousand-dollar education on a fifty-cent boy. This has been tried again and again. It is tried in every college. It fails almost every time. What of that ? It does not hurt to try. A few hundred dollars is not much to spend on an experiment like that; — the attempt to make a man out of a boy whose life might otherwise be a waste of so much good oxygen.

But what shall we say of a man who puts a fifty-cent education on a ten-thousand-dollar, a million-dollar boy, and narrows and cramps him throughout his after life ? And just this is what ten thousand parents to-day in California are doing for their sons and daughters. Twenty years hence, ten thousand men and women of California will blame them for their shortness of sight and narrowness of judgment, in weighing a few paltry dollars, soon earned, soon lost, against the power which comes from mental training.

" For a man to have died who might have been wise and was not — this," says Carlyle, " I call a tragedy."

Another thing which should never be forgotten is this : A college education is not a scheme to enable a man to live without work. Its purpose is to help him to work to advantage — to make every stroke count. I have heard a father say sometimes : "I have worked hard all my life. I will give my boy an education, so that he will not have to drudge as I have had to do." And the boy going out in the world does not work as his father

THE MAXIMS OF LOW PRUDENCE. ii

did. The result every time is disappointment ; for the manhood which the son attains depends directly on his own hard work. But if the father says : " My son shall be a worker, too; but I will give him an education, so that his work may count for more to himself and to the world than my work has done for me." Then, if the son be as persistent as his father, the results of his work may be far beyond the expectations of either. The boys who are sent to college often do not amount to much. From the boys who go to college come the leaders of the future.

Frederic Denison Maurice tells us that * * All experience is against the notion that the means to produce a supply of good, ordinary men is to attempt nothing higher. I know that nine-tenths of those the university sends out must be hewers of wood and drawers of water; but if I train the ten-tenths to be such, then the wood will be badly cut, and the water will be spilt. Aim at something noble. Make your system of education such that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be a manhood in your little men of which you did not dream ! ' '

"You will hear every day around you," says Emerson, "the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that your first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What is this truth you seek? What is this beauty ? ' men will ask in derision. If, nevertheless, God has called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true! When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions. I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go until a more convenient season. '

Then dies the man in you. Then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a hundred thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your destiny."

But you may ask me this question : * ' Will a college education pay, considered solely as a financial investment?"

Again I must answer, ' ' Yes. ' ' But the scholar is seldom disposed to look upon his power as a financial investment. He can do better than to get rich. The scholar will say, as Agassiz said to the Boston publisher, ' ' I have no time, sir, to make money. ' '

But in the rank and file it is true that the educated men get the best salaries. In every field, from football to statesmanship, it is always science that wins the game. Brain-work is higher than hand-work, and it is worth more in any market. The man with the mind is the boss, and the boss receives a larger salary than the hands whose work he directs.

George William Curtis has said: "I have heard it said that liberal education does not promote success in life. A chimney-sweep might say so. Without education he could gain the chimney-top — poor little blackamoor! — brandish his brush and sing his song of escape from soot to sunshine. But the ideal of success measures the worth of the remark that it may be attained without liberal education. If the accumulation of money be the standard, we must admit that a man might make a fortune in a hundred ways without education. But he could make a fortune, also, without purity of life, or noble character, or lofty faith. A man can pay much too high a price for money, and not every man who buys

PRACTICAL WORTH. 13

it knows its relative value with other possessions. Undoubtedly, Ezra Cornell and Matthew Vassar did not go to college, and they succeeded in life. But their success — what was it? Where do you see it now? Surely not in their riches, but in the respect that tenderly cherishes their memory, because, knowing its inestimable value, they gave to others the opportunity of education which had been denied to them."

Some time ago. Chancellor Lippincott, of the State University of Kansas, wrote to each of the graduates of that institution, asking them to state briefly the advantages which their experience showed that they have derived from their college life and work.

Among these answers, I may quote a few:

One says : * ' My love for the State grew with every lesson I received through her care. I saved five years of my life by her training, and I am a more loyal and a better citizen."

Another says this: *'I have a better standing in the community than I could have gained in any other way. ' *

Another says : "I would not exchange the advantages gained for a hundred times their cost, either to Kansas or to myself."

Another declares: **It is financially the best investment I ever made. ' '

To another it had given ''strong friendship with the most intelligent young men of the State, those who are certain to largely influence its destiny.' '

One said: *' It has given me a place and an influence among a class of men whom I could not otherwise reach at all."

Another said: ** I am better company for myself, and a better citizen, with far more practical interest in the State."

Thus it is in Kansas, and thus it is everywhere. To the young man or young woman of character, the college education does pay, from whatever standpoint you may choose to regard it.

When I was a boy on a farm in Western New York, some one urged my parents to send me to college. " But what will he find to do when he gets through college?" they asked. *' Never mind that," a friend said; ' ' he will always find plenty to do. There is always room at the top." There is always room at the top! All our professions are crowded in America, but the crowd is around the bottom of the ladder!

We are proud, and justly proud, of our common-school system. The free school stands on every Northern cross-road, and it is rapidly finding its way into the great New South. Every effort is made for the education of the masses. There is no upper caste to reap the benefits of an education, for which the poor man has to pay. There is no class educated and ruling by right of birth — no hereditary House of Lords. Our scholars and our leaders are of the people, from the people. The American plan is making us an intelligent people, as compared with the masses of any other nation. The number of those indifferent or ignorant is less in our Northern States than in England, or Germany, or France. But our leadership is worse than theirs. We have, for our numbers, fewer educated men than they have in any of these countries. Our statesmen are but children by the side of Gladstone or Bismarck. We are all too

WASTE OF UNTRAINED TALENT. 15

familiar with the American type of * * statesman. ' ' The cross-ties of the railroads which lead in every direction out of Washington are every fourth year graven with the prints of his returning boot-heels. He is the butt of our national jokes, as well as the sign of our national shame ! We have been too busy chopping our trees and breaking our prairies to educate our sons. Thus it comes, that in literature, in science, in philosophy, in everything except mechanical invention, American work has been contented to bear the stamp of mediocrity.

This is not so true as it was a few years ago; for Young America has made great strides toward the front in all these fields within the last twenty years. But it should not be true to any extent at all. Nowhere in the world, I believe, is the raw material out of which scholars and statesmen should be made so abundant as in America. Nowhere is native intelligence and energy so plentiful; but far too often does it waste itself in unworthy achievement. The journalist Sala says that "nowhere in the world is so much talent lying around loose as in America." In other words, in no other country are so many men of natural ability who fail in effectiveness in life for want of proper training.

In the different training-schools of California, large and small, nearly two thousand young people are gathered together to prepare for the profession of teaching. Of these, not one in fifty remains in school long enough to secure even the rudiments of a liberal education. Fifteen minutes for dinner; fifty weeks for an education! For the lowest grades of schools, there are candidates by the hundred; but when one of our really good schools wants a man for a man's work, it can make i6 THE VALUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

no use of these teachers. We must search far and wide for the man to whom a present offer of fifty dollars a month has not seemed more important than all the grand opportunities the scholar may receive. Many of our young teachers are making a mistake in this regard. Every year the demand for educated men and women in our profession is growing. Every year scores of halfeducated teachers are crowded out of their places to make way for younger men who have the training which the coming years demand. What kind of a teacher do you mean to be? One who has a basis of culture, and will grow as the years go on, or one with nothing in him, who will hang on, a burden to the profession, until he is finally turned out to starve ? What is the use of preparing for certain failure ? The bird in the hand is not worth ten in the bush. You cannot afford to sell your future at so heavy a discount.

The general purpose of public education, it is said, is the elevation of the masses. This is well; but as the man is above the mass,, there is a higher aim than this. Training of the individual is to break up the masses, to draw from the multitude the man. We see a regiment of soldiers on parade — a thousand men; in dress and mein all are alike — the mass. To the sound of the drum or the command of the officer, they move as one man. By and by, in the business of war, comes the cry for a man to lead some forlorn hope, to do some deed of bravery in the face of danger. From the mass steps the man. His training shows itself. On parade, no more, no less than the others; he stands above them all on the day of trial. So, too, in other things, in other places; for the need of men is not alone on the field of battle.