Part 2

Pursuant of the constructive design, the measure of the teacher's success is the degree in which ideas come not from him but from his pupils. A brilliant address may produce a temporary emotion of admiration, a dry lecture may produce a permanent productive impulse in the hearers. One may compare some who are popularly known as gifted teachers to expert swimmers who sit on the bank and talk inspiringly on analyses of strokes; the centrifugal teacher takes the pupils into the water with him, he may even pretend to drown and call for a rescue. In football parlance the coach must get into the scrimmage with the team. This was the lesson taught me by the great embryologist Francis Balfour of Cambridge, who was singularly noted for doing joint papers with his men. An experiment I have tried with marked success in order to cultivate centrifugal power and expression at the same time is to get out of the lecture chair and make my students in turn lecture to me. This is virtually the famous method of teaching law re-discovered by the educational genius of Langdell; the students do all the lecturing and discoursing, the professor lolls quietly in his chair and makes his comments; the stimulus upon ambition and competition is fairly magical; there is in the classroom the real intellectual struggle for existence which one meets in the world of affairs. I would apply this very Socratic principle in every branch of instruction, early and late, and thus obey the 'acceleration' law in education which I have spoken of above as bringing into earlier and earlier stages those powers which are to be actually of service in after life.

There is then no mystery about education if we plan it along the actual lines of self-development followed by these great leaders and shape its deep under-current principles after our own needs and experience. Look early at the desired goal and work toward it from the very beginning. The proof that the secret does not lie in subject, or language, but in preparation for the living productive principle is found in the fact that there have been _relatively_ educated men in every stage of history. The wall painters in the Magdalenian caves were the producers and hence the educated men of their day. This goal of production was sought even earlier by the leaders of Eolithic men 200,000 years ago and is equally magnetic for the men of dirigible balloons and aeroplanes of our day. It is, to follow in mind-culture the principle of addition and accretion characteristic of all living things, namely, to develop the highest degree of productive power, centrifugal force, original, creative, individual efficiency. Through this the world advances; the Neolithic man with his invention of polished implements succeeds the Palæolithic, and the man of books and printing replaces the savage.

The standards of a liberal mind are and always have been the same, namely, the sense of Truth and Beauty, both of which are again in conformity with Nature.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

KEATS' _Ode on a Grecian Urn_.

The sources of our facts are and always have been the same, namely, the learning of what men before you have observed and recorded, and the advance only through the observation of new truth, that is, old to nature but new to man. The handling of this knowledge has always been the same, namely, through human reason. The giving forth of this knowledge and thus the furthering of ideas and customs has and always will be the same, namely, through expression, vocal, written, or manual, that is, in symbols and in design.

It follows that the all round liberally educated man, from Palæolithic times to the time when the earth shall become a cold cinder, will always be the same, namely, _the man who follows his standards of truth and beauty, who employs his learning and observation, his reason, his expression, for purposes of production, that is, to add something of his own to the stock of the world's ideas_. This is the author's conception of a liberal education.

One cannot too often quote the rugged insistence of Carlyle: "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then."

Now note that whereas there are the above six powers, namely, truth and beauty, learning and observation, reason, and expression, which subserve the seventh, production or constructive thinking, and whereas the giving out of ideas is the object to be attained, only one power figures prominently in our modern system of college and school education, namely, the learning of facts and the memory thereof. It is no exaggeration to say that this makes up 95% of modern education. Who are the meteors of school and college days? For the most part those with precocious or well trained memories. Why do so many of these meteors flash out of existence at graduation? The answer is simple if you accept my conception of education. Whereas it takes six powers to make a liberally educated man or woman, and seven to make a productive man or woman, only one power has been cultivated assiduously in the 'centripetal' education; whereas there are two great gateways of knowledge, learning and observation, only one has been continuously passed through; whereas there are two universal standards of truth and beauty, only truth has constantly been held up to you, and that in precept rather than in practice. For nothing is surer than this, that the sense of truth must come as a daily personal experience in the life of the student through testing values for himself, as it does in the life of the scientist, the artist, the physician, the engineer, the merchant. Note that whereas you are powerless unless you can by the metabolism of logic make the sum of acquired and observed knowledge your own, that kind of work-a-day efficient logic has never been forced upon you and you are daily, perhaps hourly, guilty of the _non sequitur_, the _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, the 'undistributed middle,' and all those innocent sins against truth which come through the illogical mind.

"That man," says Huxley, "has had a liberal education ... whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind."

Note that whereas you are a useless member of society unless you can give forth something of what you know and feel in writing, speaking, or design, your expressive powers may have been atrophied through insufficient use. In brief, you may have shunned individual opinion, observation, logic, expression, because they are each and every one on the lines of greatest resistance. And your teachers not only allowed you but actually encouraged and rewarded you for following the lines of least resistance in the accurate reproduction, in examination papers and marking systems, of their own ideas and those you found in books.

May you, therefore, write down these seven words and read them over every morning: Truth, Beauty, Learning, Observation, Reason, Expression, Production.

In the wondrous old quilt work of inherited, or ancestral predispositions which make your being you may be gifted with all these seven powers in equal and well balanced degree; if you are so blessed you have a great career before you. If, as is more likely, you have in full measure only a part of each, or some in large measure, some in small, keep on the daily examination of your chart as giving you the canons of a liberal education and of a productive mind.

Remember that as regards the somewhat overworked word 'service' every addition in every conceivable department of human activity which is constructive of society is service; that the spirit of science is to transfer something of value from the unknown into the realm of the known, and is, therefore, identical with the spirit of literature; that the moral test of every advance is whether or not it is constructive, for whatever is constructive is moral.

I would not for a moment take advantage of the present opportunity to discourage the study of human nature and of the humanities, but for what is called the best opening for a constructive career let it be Nature.

The ground for my preference is that human nature is an exhaustible fountain of research; Homer understood it well; Solomon fathomed it; Shakespeare divined it, both normal and abnormal; the modernists have been squeezing out the last drops of abnormality.

Nature, studied since Aristotle's time, is still full to the brim; no perceptible falling of its tides is evident from any point at which it is attacked, from nebulæ to protoplasm; it is always wholesome, refreshing, and invigorating. Of the two creative literary artists of our time, Maeterlinck, jaded with human abnormality, comes back to the bee and the flowers and the 'blue bird,' with a delicious renewal of youth, while Rostand turns to the barnyard.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Life and Works of Darwin. Pop. Sci. Monthly, Apr., 1909, pp. 315-340. (Address delivered at Columbia University on the one hundredth anniversary of Darwin's birth, as the first of a series of nine lectures on "Charles Darwin and His Influence on Science.")