Part 11
Little has been said of what is called the graduate school. Germany credits us with eleven institutions that have either reached the standard of a genuine university or are rapidly approaching it. Of these eleven, five are state universities. This estimate, of course, is made in accord with the plan and standard of the German university. It appears certain that in time the name university in America will be applied only to those institutions which maintain the graduate school and raise the dignity of the professional schools. The university system will develop freely in this country only after a somewhat important reorganization of our higher education. The line must be drawn more sharply between foundation education and university work, the whole period of education must be somewhat shortened, and, in most of our universities, the graduate faculty must be strengthened. That these changes will be wrought, and that we shall have a rapid development of the genuine university is certain. Much is to be expected from our higher scholarship in many lines of investigation. In America, men are solving problems the existence of which has only been dimly conceived by the masses of people in the Old World. Inspired by our advanced conceptions of government and society, and by the free, inventive, truth-seeking spirit characteristic of our people, the American scholar will make leading contributions to the world’s literature of sociology, politics, and science. And when the spirit of reality, now superficial, gains a deeper insight into the nature of things, America may yet lead the world in those investigations which belong to the sphere of philosophy.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Read at the National Council of Education, Milwaukee, July 6, 1897. This is one of three papers on “University Ideals” there presented, the other two representing respectively Princeton and Leland Stanford, Jr. The author was requested to write on “State University Ideals.”
GENERAL EDUCATION PRACTICAL.
The possibilities of education depend upon inborn capacities, but the unfolding of them is education. A man of large capacity, born among savages, remains a savage, an Arab is a Mohammedan, an Englishman is a Christian, a child among thieves is a thief, a child in a home of culture imbibes refinement and truth. Tennyson, in the interior of Africa, would not have developed his exquisite rhyme and rhythm, metaphor and verse, and polish and sparkle of expression, would not have conceived thoughts that penetrate the earth and the nature of man, and shoot upward to the quivering stars; he would have mused under his palm tree, and have fed, perhaps somewhat daintily, upon unlucky missionaries. An African of natural ability in the homes of Massachusetts, under the influence of Harvard, would become a man of vigorous thought and fine feeling, possibly of genius.
Since education is so potent, what shall the nature of it be? Shall knowledge of mountain and forest and the seasons, and the common sense that grows from experience, and the practical power to read and compute be sufficient? If all minds were equal, if the stores of wisdom were valueless, if special investigators found nothing worth revealing, if thoughts of master minds did not inspire, if men, like brutes, were governed by instincts and had no possibilities beyond a certain physical skill, the education of nature might suffice.
This is a practical age, and no picture too bright can be drawn of the advantages of a high material civilization for bettering the condition of all classes of men. The necessity of being an active factor in the world of usefulness cannot be too strongly urged. But our material progress is dependent upon soul activity. This activity is nourished by general education. Soul activity finds expression in a thousand practical ways. We educate highly that the man may have more power, that he may have many resources, that he may do better what he has to do, and may not be dependent on one means of support or one set of conditions. It is not so much labor with the hands as intelligent directive power which is needed, and this power is largely derived from general education. Intelligent men are intelligent laborers. An educated man will learn more quickly, work more successfully, and attain a higher standard than the ignorant artisan. Theory teaches and practice proves that in business and manual pursuits educated men bring an intelligence to their work and accomplish results impossible for the ignorant man; that, as a class, they average high in all practical activities. There should be no haste to enter a trade. Life is long enough to accomplish all that may be done, and all the preparation made for its duties is a wise economy. It is hardly necessary here to state the inference that general education is practical education.
The demand for less of general education before the special is prominent. This demand does not necessarily imply that its authors believe there is too much preparation for life work; indeed, few of them would wish that preparation to be less; they would simply change the ratio between general and special training. We believe that a critical examination of rational courses of study in the schools would show that little of the work could well be omitted; that nearly all contributes toward the end of a well-rounded education, indeed is necessary to that end; and that the training of faculty is only well begun at the end of the high-school course. Even the study of the classics, besides other incidental advantages, trains the critical powers, refines the taste, and is in an important sense a subjective study. The inference is that, with less of general education, the forces of one’s being would not be properly trained and marshalled for active service in life.
If we define practical education as that which is capable of being turned to use or account, a high degree of general education before the special is eminently practical, inasmuch as it broadens and heightens a man’s possibilities. Moreover, it is of service to all that even a few should be educated ideally. Such education places ideals before men which tend to elevate them. We cannot easily estimate the value to the world of a genius, one of those men who stand on nature’s heights and see with clear vision, and proclaim the glories of their view to listening men, who picture at least feebly the things described. They are the heralds of new events, the inspirers of progress. A highly educated man, though not a genius, in a way may occupy a similar place, and may repay by his influence, many times, in practical ways, the expense of his education. Societies of laborers are already beginning to ascribe their troubles in part to lack of education, and are looking to education as a means of improving their condition. General education is practical education.
While every boy should be taught to earn a living, this should not be done needlessly at the expense of the higher development of the faculties. Too much attention to the practical dwarfs the powers, limits the horizon, and will result in the destruction of that spirit which makes a strong national character. There is little need to urge the practical; the more immediate and obvious motives constantly draw men toward it. The refinements of the soul are at first less inviting; they are hard to gain and easy to lose. Carlyle says: “By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass that, in the management of external things, we excel all other ages, while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are, perhaps, inferior to most civilized ages.... The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditioned one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good, but a calculation of the profitable.... Our true deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external nature for us, and we think it will do all other things.” Carlyle possessed a true insight when he penned these words. Popular demands tend to make the age more unpoetic than it is. In this age the tourney has been converted into a fair; the vision of the poet is obscured by the smoke of factories; Apollo no longer leads the Immortal Nine upon Parnassus; and we would dethrone the gods from Olympus.
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Men and peoples have made permanent contributions to the world’s progress, not by military achievement or accumulation of wealth, but by the something better called culture. The glory of the Greeks lay not in their civil wars, but in the spirit brought to the defence of their country at Thermopylæ; not in the cost and use of their temples and statuary, but in the art that found expression in them; not in their commerce, but in the lofty views of their philosophers and the skill of their poets. Men admire that which ennobles, without thought of price or utility, and the world still demands liberal education. Literature and philosophy have much more in them for the average student than has yet been gained from them. The æsthetic side of literature is too often condemned or neglected. There is genuine education in all æsthetic power, even in the lower form of appreciation of the ludicrous, the power to observe fine distinctions of incongruity. We say a thing is perfectly ludicrous, perfectly grotesque, and thereby recognize the art idea, namely, perfection in execution. Man is always striving to attain the perfect in some form, and the art idea is one of the highest in the field of education. Art leans toward the side of feeling, but is none the less rich and valuable for that. Shakespeare furnishes some of the highest types of art in literature. The flow of his verse, the light beauty of his sonnets, the boldness and wonderful aptness of his metaphors, the skill of his development, the ever-varying types, the humor, the joys, the sorrows, the wisdom, the folly of men, the condensation of events and traits and experiences in individual types, the philosophical and prophetic insight, the artistic whole of his plays, constitute a rich field of education.
The Gothic cathedral, with its pointed arch, its mullioned window, tapering spire, and upward-running lines, indicating the hope and aspiration of the middle ages, with its cruciform shape, typical of the faith of the Christian, is more than the stone and mortar of which it is constructed. The truly educated man in art perceives the adaptation, polish, and perfection in literature; discovers the grace, the just proportions, the ideal form and typical idea in sculpture; views the expression, grouping, sentiment, coloring, and human passion in painting; enjoys the harmonies, movements, and ideas in music, that combination of effects that makes subtile and evasive metaphors; discovers the conventionalized forms and mute symbols, the “frozen music” of architecture; finds grandeur in the mountains, glory in the sunset, metaphors of thought in every form of nature; laughs with the morning breeze, finds strength in the giant oak, and sorrow in the drooping willow.
We need the ideal. Let us not permit the mortal body to lord it too much over the immortal spirit. The ideal man is the purpose of education and the aim of existence, or life is not worth living. All material prosperity is naught except as contributing to that end. Sympathetic spirits are calling for more enlightenment and enjoyment, and leisure for the laboring classes. They believe that men should be men as well as machines, and that, if they are educated ideally, the practical will take care of itself. If we retain our belief in the high possibilities of the human soul, we shall have faith in ideal education, and shall confidently offer every opportunity for the highest development possible of the child’s power for knowledge, enjoyment, and action. And let his development be full and rounded. Let the roar of ocean and the sough of the pines make music for his ears as well as the whir of factories; let the starry heavens speak to his soul as vividly as the electric lamp to his eye. Let us evolve from the material present ideals that shall stand in place of the vanished ones.
ELEMENTS OF AN IDEAL LIFE.
ELEMENTS OF AN IDEAL LIFE.
THE MODERN GOSPEL OF WORK.
A gentleman who had resided some years in Central and South America, conversing one evening with friends upon a doctrine of happiness, illustrated his argument with an anecdote. A Yankee living in South America observed that the native bees had no care for the morrow. He thought to make a fortune by bringing hard-working honey bees from the North to this land of perennial flowers, where they could store up honey the year around, and he tried the experiment. The bees worked eagerly for a time, but soon discovered that there was no winter in this paradise, and they perched on the flowers and trees and dozed the livelong day. Our philosopher assumed that the indolent, improvident life of the ignorant natives of sunny climes is the one of real happiness, and that a life of great activity is not to be desired. If his theory holds, then the savage under his palm tree is happier than the civilized man of the temperate zone, the monkey in the tropical jungle is better off than the savage, and the clam is happiest of all.
An observant traveller, returning by the southern route from California, studies Indians of various tribes at successive stages of the journey. Near the Mohave desert he sees abject beings loafing about the railway station to beg from the curious passengers; further east he sees self-respecting red people offering for sale pottery or blankets—their own handiwork; later he notes members of another tribe working on railroad construction by the side of white laborers; as he approaches the settled region he observes yet others who have homes and farms and engage in civilized industry, and his thought runs along the ascending scale of being until he contemplates the highest energy of the most cultured and forceful minds of our best civilization. He instinctively decides that the desirable life is on the upper scale of intelligence, feeling, and action.
Happiness through work is the creed of the dawning century. The romance of chivalry gives place to the poetry of steam; democracy is teaching wealth and position the dignity of labor; evolution and psychology show action to be the consummate flower of thought and feeling; recent literature illustrates the gospel of effort; and religion reaffirms the doctrine that faith without works is dead.
Herbert Spencer’s philosophy defines life to be “the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” This adjustment implies self-activity. If man has been evolved through a long period of change, he is a survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. His ancestral history is one of exertion, his powers have been developed by use, he maintains himself by striving, his normal state is in the field of labor, and logically it is there his welfare and happiness are found.
Max Nordau wrote a book on “Degeneration.” It contains much interesting matter, many wholesome suggestions, and considerable false theory. He claims that the demands of modern civilization place men under too great a strain, that the human race is tending toward insanity, and that by and by we shall stop our daily newspapers, remove the telephones from our homes, and return to a life of greater simplicity. It is true that tension never relaxed loses its spring, and worry kills, but the most potent causes of degeneration are false pleasures and lack of healthful work. Evolution’s most important ethical maxim is that deadheads in society degenerate as do parasites in the lower animal kingdom. Every idler violates a great law of his being, which demands that thought and feeling shall emerge in action. Every class of people has its idlers, men who desire to possess without earning. The aimless son of wealth and the tramp tread the same path. Universal interest in honest, healthful employment would cure nearly all the evils of society and state. Manual labor is the first moral lesson for the street Arab and the criminal, and the best cure for some species of insanity. True charity does not give when it can provide the chance to earn. Idlers, lacking the normal source of happiness, seek harmful pleasures, and learn sooner or later that for every silver joy they must pay in golden sorrow. False stimuli, false excitement, purposeless activities, take the place of vocation. Tramps are not the only vagabonds; there are mental and moral vagabonds whom a fixed purpose, a definite interest and principles of conduct would turn from degeneration to regeneration. Balzac, with his keen analysis, describes the career of a graceless spendthrift who, finally weary of himself, one day resolved to give himself some reason for living. Under good influences he took up a life of regularity, simplicity, and usefulness, and learned that men’s happiness and saneness of mind are proportionate to their labors. This is the great lesson of Goethe’s “Faust,” set in imperishable drama for the instruction of the ages. Balzac’s Curé of Montegnac speaks to a repentant criminal: “There is no sin beyond redemption through the good works of repentance. For you, work must be prayer. The monasteries wept, but acted too; they prayed, but they civilized. Be yourself a monastery here.” Repentance, prayer, work—these are the way of salvation.
Every man of broad mind has full regard for the problems of labor and has faith in a progress that shall mean better conditions for the less fortunate, but Edwin Markham’s “Man With the Hoe,” as applied, not to special and extreme conditions of hardship, but in general to the problems of the human race, is wrong at the foundation; it is neither correct science, good philosophy, nor accurate history. It is the doctrine of the fall of man rather than of the ascent of man; it is the doctrine that labor is a curse. Without the hoe the human race would be chimpanzees, savages, tramps and criminals. In human development no useful labor ever “loosened and let down the brutal jaw” or “slanted back the brow” or “blew out the light within the brain” or deprived man of his birthright. At a stage of his progress, by cultivating the soil man of necessity cultivates his soul. The hoe has been an indispensable instrument to the growth of intelligence and morals, has been the great civilizer—a means of advance toward Plato and the divine image. Hardship may arrest development, but seldom causes degeneration. Our problem is not to free from bondage to work, but to relieve of burdens that are too heavy, and place a larger part on the shoulders of the strong and selfish.
Our educational philosophy at times wanders in dangerous bypaths, but there is a recent return to the plain highway. Some late notable utterances maintain that character must be formed by struggle, that a good impulse must prove its quality by a good act, that education is self-effort, and that passive reception of knowledge and rules of conduct may make mental and moral paupers. Here is an apt thrust from a trenchant pen: “Soft pedagogics have taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense to suppose that every step in education _can_ be interesting. The fighting impulse must often be appealed to.”
I like to discover philosophy in the literature of the day, literature which does not rank as scientific, but contains half-conscious, incidental expression of deep perceptions of human nature. Kipling at his best sounds great moral depths, and teaches the lesson of life’s discipline. He has a plain message for America as she takes her new place in the congress of the world. Civilized nations must take up the burden of aiding less favored peoples, not for glory or gain, but as an uncompromising duty without hope of appreciation or reward. We must expect the untaught races will weigh our God, our religion, and us by our every word and act in relation to them. We, as a nation, may no longer wear the lightly proffered laurel, but must expect the older, civilized nations will judge us by our wisdom, equity, and success in discharge of our new responsibilities. In Kipling’s “McAndrew’s Hymn” many years of hardship, sternly borne in obedience to duty, atone for misspent days under the influence of the soft stars in the velvet skies of the Orient. In “The ’Eathen” the author refers to the native inhabitants of India, whose most familiar household words are “not now,” “to-morrow,” “wait a bit,” and whose chief traits are dirtiness, laziness, and “doin’ things rather-more-or-less.” He describes the raw English recruit, picked out of the gutter, recounts the stages of discipline that make him a good soldier, and finally a reliable non-commissioned officer—a man that, returned to his country, would prove a good and useful citizen.
“The ’eathen in ’is blindness bows down to wood ’an stone. ’E don’t obey no orders unless they is ’is own; ’E keeps ’is side arms awful: ’e leaves ’em all about, An’ then comes up the regiment an’ pokes the ’eathen out.
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The ’eathen in ’is blindness must end where ’e began, But the backbone of the Army is the non-commissioned man.”
“L’Envoi” of “The Seven Seas” suggests the creed of a healthy soul: to accept true criticism; to find joy in work; to be honest in the search for truth; to believe that all our labor is under God, the Source of all knowledge and all good.
Robert Louis Stevenson is great as a novelist; he is greater in his brief writings and his letters. He presents some plain truths with attractive vigor. He says: “To have suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth, and has to be learned in the fire.... In almost all circumstances the human soul can play a fair part.... To me morals, the conscience, the affections, and the passions are, I will own frankly and sweepingly, so infinitely more important than the other parts of life, that I conceive men rather triflers who become immersed in the latter. To me the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood in my handkerchief are accidents; they do not color my view of life.... We are not put here to enjoy ourselves; it was not God’s purpose; and I am prepared to argue it is not our sincere wish.... Men do not want, and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry, effort, success. Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst hours of danger and fatigue.”
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A cartoon of Gladstone, appearing soon after he had ostensibly retired from public life, showed him, with eager look and keen eye, writing vigorous essays upon current political questions. It recalled the grandeur of a life filled with great interests, sane purposes, and perpetual action. Biography is the best source of practical ideals; it is philosophy teaching by example; the personal element gives force to abstract truths. Luther’s Titanic power and courage under the inspiration of a faith that could remove mountains has served the purpose of millions of men in great crises.