The liberal college

Preface

'HE title of this book was chosen by the managing editor of the series to which it belongs. It is appropriate, I think, that the title page of the first of the Amherst Books should thus express the authority of the Board and of the purpose by which the series is to be dominated. Amherst College enters upon the publication of these books with very high hopes. It is willing to set aside desires far more compelling than that of a writer for his title, if thereby something may be attempted in honor of the legend Terras Irradient.

The editor's justification of the title is that it indicates accurately, as it does, the subject-matter of the book. The writer, however, would have preferred another title. He would have chosen the name "Making Minds," and that largely because it invites misunderstanding. I am sure the editor will reward the willing submission of the writer by allowing him to use a few words in the Preface to indicate the notion which he would have liked to express.

The book itself is a collection of papers and addresses dealing with the liberal college. From cover to cover it expresses the conviction that liberal study enriches and strengthens the lives of individual men and of groups of men. It is based upon the belief that for a man and for his fellows it is well that he have a good mind, if possible an excellent or even a distinguished mind.

But with respect to such a belief as this misunderstandings flourish and abound. In general people have a peculiar interest in the processes by which they themselves were made. And the discussion of those processes and especially the suggestion that they might have been better than they were does not, for obvious reasons, conduce to calmness of mood. Psychologically it is not hard to understand viii PREFACE

why each man yearns to think his college best and hesi° tates to agree that changes might make it better. For this and for many other reasons men are not thinking thoughts when they discuss the teaching process. They are rather giving voice to affections, purposes, prejudices, desires; and the terms which they employ vary in quite undiscoverable ways with the emotional qualities which lie behind them.

In such a field as this misunderstandings are sure to come. With respect to them we may take either of two lines of action. We may ignore them in the hope that they will go away, or we may invite them to make themselves at home with the hope that they will lose the hostile quality of the alien. My own choice would be that of ready hospitality. It is good to be as well and as quickly as possible acquainted with the misunderstandings which may visit you. Acquaintance tends toward understanding and for misunderstandings there is no other cure.

If then the Editor will allow, I should like to present in this short Preface three misunderstandings which regularly call upon us. I should like also to devote the Introduction to a genuine attempt at making their acquaintance.

If one says that the purpose of the liberal college is to make minds, these misunderstandings or, shall I say, objections immediately appear. Education, we shall be told, should make not minds of men, but Men. And again it will be said that it is nonsense to speak of making minds or making men; such living things as these must grow; they are not made. And finally we shall be told that whether the process be one of minds or of men, be one of growth or of manufacture, the college has little to do with the achievement of the end; the college tends to take itself too seriously; men learn to live by living and not by spending four short years cut off from life by college walls and college customs.

To consider these misunderstandings will be the chief purpose of our Introduction.

Part IV. The Curriculum 134

I. A COURSE FOR FRESHMEN I35

II. A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE . . . I38

III. A REORGANIZATION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM . I49

A Final Word 164

MAKING MINDS — AN INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTIONS are of necessity rather formal affairs with some regard for rules and proprieties. Now there is one rule with respect to the meeting of arguments which may at least be mentioned as our misunderstanding friends draw near. It is this, — a number of different arguments may not properly oppose another argument if they are opposed to each other. They have no right to ask a common enemy to kill them off if they have within themselves the possibility of mutual extermination. In a word, arguments must settle their own differences before they attempt to settle a common foe. One need not press the point; it is sufficient to know that whether pressed or not the principle is at work in the inevitable logic of the situation.

I

The objection that the college should make Men rather than Minds is the most aggressive and headstrong of our opponents. Boys should be prepared for life, it says, not for the reading of books or the spinning of theories. Education should be practical; by it bodies should be strengthened, friendships should be established, manners should be acquired, spirits should be purified, appreciations should be enriched and directed, the will should be fortified and inspired and subjugated, all the powers of body, mind and soul should be so trained and correlated that from them shall be made such a man as a man should be.

This argument is hard to meet because it very discourteously gives us at once the feeling of being not merely in the wrong but quite disgracefully so. Without intending it we seem to have said that bodies should not be strong and that wills might just as well be weak, and that appreciations are of no importance, and that the spirit of man is a matter of no concern to us. Why do we seem to have said this? It is because the phrase, "Not minds but Men" seems to demand as its opposite "Not men but Minds. But we had no intention of saying this. We did not advocate the making of minds for the sake of opposing the making of men. We had rather supposed that the making of minds was just a part of the making of men. In fact, when we said "Making Minds" we meant "Making the minds of Men." Let us then protest at once that we are not hostile to the making of men; we are rather modestly engaged in it and are meanwhile keeping an eye on the third approaching objection which is waiting to jump at us for taking too seriously our part in the process.

This demand that a teacher of physics, for example, should make not minds but men is of the same general value as would be the assertion that a farmer should grow not wheat but men. What is the good of food stuffs, one asks; are they not for the feeding, the nourishing of men? And if they are, then why does not the farmer proceed directly to the end, why waste his time in seed and soil and all that care called agriculture; why not make men at once; why throw one's hours away on crops? It is a sordid soul that values crops above the men for whom the crops exist.

One can imagine a farmer somewhat bewildered by such an attack as this. And many a teacher is bewildered too. Are men more important than food ? Yes, food is for men. Are men more important than minds? Yes, minds are for men. Does it then follow that the farmer should grow men in his wheat fields, or that teachers of physics should construct men in the laboratory rather than make pupils wise in the realm of physics?

MAKING MINDS 5

The trouble with the argument is that it is so true that it cannot help becoming false if one dwells upon it. It is the lazy fallacy which confuses ends and means. It is a favorite fallacy of practical men in fields with which their practice has not made them familiar. It is the fallacy of those who say "Give us results" and who have no time to inquire what results are wanted nor how they may be gotten. It is also the fallacy of the sentimentalists who opine that telling a boy to be a man will make him one or that willing to be a man is all that one needs in the way of training and study.

But now we must stop calling names and meet our guest with proper decorum and respect. He comes suspecting that we are hostile to him, that we oppose minds to his men. We must try to make him see that this supposed hostility is an illusion, a misunderstanding. How shall we do it?

First let us assure him that we know the limitations of the mind and of its training. All the values of life, all the things worth while in life are found in the feelings, the emotions, the sentiments of men. And further, all the ways of realizing these values lie in the realm of will, of action. The mind, in the narrow sense, neither feels nor acts, neither is value nor makes value. But on the other hand the mind is the informing of the feelings and the directing of the actions. It is the guide which makes feelings delicate and true, which makes actions precise and successful. The mind is not all of life but it is the intelligence which directs life to the achievement of its ends. This is what we mean when we say that intelligence is power — not that it acts, but that it makes action successful. It is the eye which sees the rapier's mark but not the hand which it directs to grasp and thrust the weapon to the spot.

A second observation follows closely upon the first. We see that four short years of teaching minds is only a little part of human education. All that men are and do must be developed and trained. And in the doing of this all human institutions, all human experiences have a part.

The home, the church, the school, playmates, friends, climate, food, health, employers, servants, social relations of every sort, all these are making men, making a man for seventy years, making him until his day is done. Amidst all this the special training of the college course is rather a little thing. At any rate it is a very special thing, as special and peculiar a thing as books are in the material world, those collections of paper pages with ink-marks on them, as special as words are among the actions of men and nature, those sounds made by the human throat and lips. In terms of quantity the college course is not a major part of education. We count it some forty hours a week for thirty to forty weeks in each of the four years from seventeen or eighteen years of age to twenty-one or twentytwo. Not all of one's education is acquired in these hours.

And now since we are speaking in the spirit of friendship rather than of controversy, we must tell our inquiring guest what we actually do along this line of his suggestion. There are three aspects of our attitude of which he should approve.

First, we count upon the wider education which precedes the college training and upon that which follows it. The college experience we recognize as an episode, one of peculiar value, and yet as following from earlier experience and as leading into later living. In general we must send young men back again into the society from which they came, not as they were but better trained in mind for that society than any other kind of living would have made them.

Second, we recognize that during these four years, the life of the individual student and the social life of the community must be maintained, must be kept vigorous, fine, and high in quality. A college must be a good place in which to live as well as a good place in which to study. For this reason we have our chapel and church, our fraternity houses and dormitories, our athletic games and other student activities, our friendships of pupils and teachers each with his fellows and each with the members of the other group. Taking them all in all. I doubt if

MAKING MINDS 7

there are better communities in all our social scheme than are our colleges.

And finally let us make one genuine concession in the hope of friendly understanding. Let us admit that when we speak of Making Minds the meaning which we give to Mind is a very broad one. Judge us by our deeds and you will see. Our course of study includes the careful training of the body for three of the four years of residence, our teaching of music, of drama and of literature seeks to inspire as well as to inform the appreciations; (to many of us it seems that other arts should make this contribution greater than it is); the college discipline or lack of it intends to bring the will to fairness and to strength of character; but more than all things else the teacher, teaching his subject, captures his student for the kind of life he thinks worth while; to go to college is to live in fellowship with students and teachers; it is their personalities which give its liberal meaning to the phrase "Making Minds.

Our second guest comes with the objection that "Making" is not a term to apply to minds; "Minds," he says, "are not made; they grow." What shall we answer? There is no genuine difference here. Or rather, if there is a difference, our critic is right. Only in a certain peculiar sense may we speak of making minds. They are not made, as if they were constructed, but they are made to grow — made, by proper cultivation, to grow properly.

The objection to external or mechanical descriptions of education is a thoroughly valid one. No interpretation of teaching is more fallacious than that which regards the teacher as giving learning or knowledge or wisdom to the pupil, putting this desirable attribute into him. The teacher may feel wisdom going out of him in the teaching process, but, strictly speaking, he cannot be sure that the pupil is taking it in. The relation of teacher and pupil is always a somewhat mystical one. Learning is chiefly by imitation or by contagion. If a teacher is working and is influential, pupils will learn to work; if a teacher is trying to make others work, pupils will learn to do that too; if a teacher loves wisdom wisely, pupils will love it as well.

And yet we must not let the principle of growth run riot. A college is not a hot-house in which the whole being with all its powers is to be forced into early flowering. College teachers are men of special powers; they are quite different in type from other men; they have very different and very special lessons to impart. It is essential that they do their special work because they can do it and others cannot, and most of all because the opportunity for it is very brief. The mere establishing of an "atmosphere" for student growth is not enough. The "aromatic" theory of education is almost as bad and certainly far more unwholesome than the mechanical one. A college is a place where something is to happen and to happen definitely because certain men know what they intend, and are determined that what they intend shall be accomplished.

In this connection it may be noted that with respect to the relation of learning to hTe there are three types of able teachers. Of these three types, two should be kept away from a college by every device which the art of man can imagine. The third should be sought after as men of old sought after the philosopher's stone or the secret of perpetual youth, though one would hope with somewhat more success.

First there are men who are strong among their fellows but whose strength comes from sources other than abstract knowledge. They are men who have built up power by experience in practical affairs, by sentiment, by will, or in any other way than by the use of books and other instruments of study.

Second, there are men well versed in books, learned in scholarship of certain sorts, masters of some special aspects of a field of knowledge, who are yet negligible as men among their fellows; no one feels them to be important.

MAKING MINDS 9

Both these types of men the college should avoid when choosing teachers — avoid them as a merchant would shun the advertising of a competitor's wares. The college is engaged in making men stronger and finer by means of learning. It must not then take as its agents men who achieve strength primarily in other ways, nor men who have failed to achieve it in this way. As against these the college teacher of the third type is a man who is powerful among his fellows but whose power springs from the studying which he has done, from the learning which he loves and is. If teachers are of this type we may let young people grow in their presence with the assurance that they will grow properly in the special way in which a college seeks to make a student grow.

in

Our third objection has already had its say. In fact we have been speaking for it or it for us as we have sought to come to understanding with its fellows.

The college training is a limited, special thing. It is not all of education, it is not even all the education which one receives during the four years of its duration. And yet it counts — counts heavily in making men, in making groups of men. Out of the quiet little places where men and boys assemble for study of human life and of the world — out of those places has shone forth a light which has illumined human life, which has made clearer the world in which we live. These colleges are neither big nor strong nor independent in external ways. They are like nervous centres in an organism, — not very large in bulk, not selfsufficient, not adequate for action in the world of things and facts. And yet they are in charge of action, decide what it shall be, and see that it is done. Men everywhere are making human life, are making mankind to be a stronger, finer thing than it has been. And in the doing of that task, they choose to set aside some quiet groups for Making Minds. Those groups are Liberal Colleges.

Part I The Determining Purpose

THESE four papers are four different attempts to express the notion which underlies liberal college teaching.

The first paper, "What the College is Not," was given at the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of Allegheny College on June 23, 191 5. It was the closing paper of a long series dealing with the work of the American College. It is a study of the purpose of the college as revealed in the minds of its founders. It challenges the statement that the old college, having as a major aim the educating of ministers, was therefore professional in intent. It asks what kind of education was regarded as good for the ministers of older days and may be equally good for those of a later time.

The second paper, "What the College is," was given as an inaugural address of the President of Amherst College, October 16, 191 2. It is a consideration of the purpose of the college as perceived by the college teacher. It seeks, therefore, to define the college endeavor as it is construed and felt by the teachers and scholars who, in the deepest sense, are the college.

The third paper, "What does the College Prepare for," is a popular talk which has been given many times to different audiences and perhaps, alas, more than once to the same audience. It is intended primarily to state the purpose of the college to persons who are not familiar with college teaching, or who, having had such familiarity, have lost it. It is a controversial paper making its points, or trying to make them, over-sharply as one is tempted to do when speaking to audiences at whom one has only a single chance, or with whose point of view one is radically out of touch.

The fourth paper, "Making the Mind of a Nation," is an extract from a speech delivered at an Amherst Alumni banquet in Boston, February 4, 1916. It tries to indicate to the graduates of a college what part they have to play in building up the life of a nation. It demands that we achieve for the nation as a whole the same intellectual integrity and coherence which every good teacher seeks to fix upon the spirit of the individual student.

I MUST begin this paper by asking a question — a question addressed to the audience. The answer is a matter of vital concern to me. I wish to ask you whether from one statement which I shall give another logically follows. If we say that everything that could be said about the American college has been said, does it follow that there is nothing more to say ? My own opinion is that it does not follow at all and I appeal to the science of logic for justification. That science tells us that whatever has been said in one way can be said again in another, and that perhaps just such translation into other forms is the chief task of what we call thinking. And especially logic tells us that whatever has been said in affirmative terms may often, to great advantage, be expressed in negative terms.

If it is truly said that "John is in Boston," it is also safe to remark that "John is not in New York," and this latter statement may be of much greater importance to some of John's friends. There is, of course, a difficulty, namely, that it is hard to exhaust the content of the negative judgment. When once you start on this process the trouble is not to find something to say but to tell where to stop in the illimitable expanse which lies before you. It is well enough to say that John is not in New York, but if you proceed to tell all the places in which John is not, considerable time must be allowed for the operation. While, therefore, I insist that this logical principle be accepted in order that I may have a subject to talk about, I beg the audience not to be terrified by its possibilities. For general purposes, logical principles must be applied sparingly and with disi 4 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE

cretion. It is quite possible to have too much of a good thing.

But the one point on which I do insist is that in spite of all the wisdom of these ten wise men who have preceded me there is still something left to consider. They have told you what the college is. I may try to tell you what it is not. They have told you what the college has, what it does, what it has accomplished, what it dreams, what it will be in the days to come. Somewhere within the field of what it has not, what it does not do, what it has not done, what it does not dream, what it will not be — somewhere within this field, for which one might claim infinite time, there lies the subject of this paper.

If, then, we were with any fullness to define the function of the college in negative terms it would be necessary to show and to explain that the college is not a high school, not a professional school, not a university, nor any part thereof. But everyone knows that there are many kinds of high school, many types of professional school, many separate schools within a university. If we should discuss each one of these separatim et seriatim, showing that the college is not any one of them, is different from them all, I fear that the consequence for you would be much weariness of the flesh and great vexation of the spirit. But again the kindly science of logic will hurry to our rescue. That science has another valuable principle, viz., that there is no sense in denying a statement unless someone has asserted it. What assertions, then, of the identity of the college with other institutions are just now being made with sufficient insistence to demand our attention? There are teachers who seem to find little difference between the college and the high school, but their lack of perception is not very important. We are just emerging from a period in which the college has been regarded as a part of the university and has been identified with the whole in essential attitude and spirit. But the day of that confusion is rapidly closing. The one confusion which does today threaten our understanding of the function of the college is that which identifies it with the professional school, which declares that there is no genuine education which is not really professional, which characterizes the belief in a "liberal education," separate from and independent of vocational and professional study, as an idle creation of dream and fancy. In these pragmatic days such a confusion as this is likely to spread far and wide. It is not the only instance of pragmatic thinking which just now threatens the clarity of our educational policy, but it is an especially dangerous one because - strikes at the very roots of all our liberal teaching. Amid these days of celebration and study of the American liberal college, I should like to smite as hard as I can hit at this heresy which denies the very belief on which that college is built.

The heresy is hard to meet just now because in a sense it catches us ofF our balance. Under the influence of the university ideal the colleges had been saying to their students, "Study anything you like; all knowledge is good; in fact, all knowledge is equally good; make your choice, follow your bent; if only you keep going in any direction a liberal education is assured." But as against this, we are seeing more and more clearly every day that the content of a liberal education is not thus indefinite and indeterminate, that there is an intellectual culture which one must master if he is to travel the way of liberal education. And in our enthusiasm we have been crying: "Back to the good old college of earlier days, away with the extravagances of election and specialization, let us return again to the fathers, to the requirements which they established, to the college which they founded." And here it is that the subtle and dangerous heresy finds its opportunity. "Do you wish definite and coherent requirements?" it asks. "Very well, you will find them in the professional school." And if we protest that these are not the requirements that we had in mind, that they are not liberal but technical, then there descends upon us a crushing and bewildering argument. "You wish to return to the spirit and practice of the old colonial college," it says; "very well, do so, but first recognize that the college which you imitate was itself a professional school. The colonial forefathers were not wasting idle dreams on this airy nothing which you call 'liberal training.' They needed ministers for their churches and so they founded colleges to train those ministers. The colleges which they established were in essential purpose schools of divinity, schools to train young men for the profession of the ministry. They were devised for a special purpose and the forefathers were shrewd enough to see to it that that purpose was realized." And from this assertion as its premise, the argument proceeds to its conclusion.

"The old college was professional in spirit; then so too should they be who imitate it in spirit. But the old college intended to train for only one of the professions. To that end all its courses of study, all its methods of teaching, were adapted. It will never do to give the same courses of study, the same teaching, to the boys who are planning for other professions. Loyalty to the old college demands that for each profession its own special system of preparation be devised; we in our day must do for lawyers, engineers, physicians, architects, for each of these what the fathers in their day did for the students of divinity." So by the argument the college becomes simply a collection of professional schools; liberal education as a thing apart has disappeared. And we arrive at a new definition of the American liberal college, — it is an institution which some people had mistakenly believed to exist.

In considering the effect of such an argument as this it is necessary to take into account the secondary result as well as the primary. The first effect, as in the case of all honest conflicts with convincing arguments, is that you find yourself knocked down. The second stage of the experience, however, reveals two facts: (1) that you can get up again and (2) that you are not hurt, indeed that you are rather exhilarated by what has happened. This secondary stage is proof positive that you have not been hit by anything solid. At this time, it is in order to inquire what it was which, at the moment of impact, gave such an impression of solidity.