Part 35

But now suppose we put in place of mere morality, the perfection of the social mind. Suppose we say that the central purpose of popular education ought to be the _development of a sensitive social conscience enlightened to the limits of opportunity_. To put it a little differently: suppose we could agree that the best possible result of education is a mind trained and habituated to think in terms of social obligation, and to act accordingly. We should then have, at any rate, something that is high enough and big enough for anybody; something that is capable of progressive realization from the kindergarten to the university and thereafter; something, in fine, that would reach out from the humblest ego to the utmost periphery of human existence.

Thirdly, religion. Let it be granted at the outset that for an immense number of the noblest souls that have ever lived "Thou God seest me" has been the highest, most inclusive, most compelling incentive to right social conduct, that we know anything about. In practise, however, a great deal depends on the nature of the God that is feared, and still more, perhaps, on whether that God is really and truly feared or only spoken of with conventional respect in token of some ecclesiastical loyalty. Can religion be "taught" in school--any kind of school? Can it be taught, I mean, not as a matter of formal observance and glib recitation, but in its vital essence as a quickening spirit destined to stick fast in the character and be a permanent incentive to right living? It is only in this sense that the "teaching" of religion has any bearing on good government and the general welfare.

The difficulty of teaching religion in this socially effective way is not confined to the secular public schools. It does not grow entirely out of the neutrality of the state, the jealousy of sects and the impossibility of finding a common basis free from any sectarian tinge. It goes deeper than that, and affects also church schools that fly the banner of religion and are conducted for the express purpose of giving prominence to the beliefs and usages of some particular denomination. What can be done to teach religion? Of course the pupil can be exposed to what are called religious influences, and made to breathe what is called a religious atmosphere. He can be required to attend chapel exercises, and to go to church on Sunday; to read the Bible or hear it read; to memorize texts, creeds, hymns and commandments. He can learn church history, and familiarize himself with the arguments and tenets of "our people." But when, as is usually the case, all this precedes any vital personal experience of religion, it is apt presently to float away, along with the Latin and algebra, into the limbo of things once known but no longer usable. The teaching of religion so that it will stick fast, not merely as an ecclesiastical loyalty, but as a socially regenerative force, is a very difficult matter. Multitudes of parents who are profoundly anxious about the matter, fail in the home, clergymen fail rather notoriously with their own sons and daughters. Can the school be expected to succeed where they are baffled?

But suppose it were understood that the supreme purpose of all education, no matter what banner the schoolhouse or college might fly, is the development of character trained and habituated to think in terms of social obligation, and to act accordingly: should we not then have a formula on which all who really mean well by their fellowmen could unite? For surely the perfection of the social mind--that and nothing else--is the finest flower of the religious spirit.

III

There are reasons for thinking that such a theory of popular education as has been outlined, and a modified practise based on the theory, are needed at the present time as a measure of social therapeutics. Without joining the prophets of evil who think we are moving swiftly toward a social revolution, one may say in all sobriety that there are signs which look ominous for the future of our democratic experiment. It is not merely that there is wide-spread discontent and a general breaking away from old standards and restraints. All that, which is apt to look so threatening to elderly people, especially if they are not much given to the reading of history, may be nothing but the sign of healthy life and growth. Stable democratic society may consist with almost any amount of discontent, provided it discharges itself by way of legal channels duly provided for the purpose in advance.

But the really menacing symptom of our time, is in a word,--lawlessness. I have not chiefly in mind the shocking and increasing prevalence of outrageous crimes against person and property. That is certainly bad enough. That life and property are not as safe in the United States as they were a generation ago, and not as safe as they are today in the British Empire, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, is surely a fact to give us pause. And yet, in that fact alone there is nothing highly ominous for the future of democracy. In all ages, under all forms of government, there have been murderers, thieves and ravishers, but social order has never been destroyed or even seriously imperiled by them. Society has found ways to protect itself. The statistics of crime vary from decade to decade under the operation of causes that are fairly well understood by experts. An excess at any time can be corrected by known methods if a people sets resolutely about it.

The danger lies rather in a diminishing respect for law as such among large masses of the nominally respectable population. Multitudes have come to look on the will of the community as expressed in law, not as an obligation binding on the conscience, but as a sort of solemn joke--something meant for the other fellow. This cynicism with regard to law has become a veritable cancer of the social body. The matter is difficult to treat statistically, but surely there can be no doubt about it. It is no illusion of perspective, not the nightmare of a pessimist, but simple damning truth, that the law-abiding spirit has of late been losing ground rapidly. The case is not stated too strongly by a recent writer when he says:

In spite of his vulnerability he [the capitalist] is of all citizens the most lawless. He appears to assume that the law will always be enforced by some special personnel whose duty lies that way, while he may evade the law, when convenient, or bring it into contempt, with impunity. The capitalist seems incapable of feeling his responsibility as a member of the governing class, in this respect, and that he is bound to uphold the law that others may do the like.... He therefore looks on the evasion of a law devised for public protection, but inimical to him, as innocent or even meritorious.[26]

[Footnote 26: Brooks Adams, _Theory of Social Revolutions_, page 212.]

Of course there are many honorable exceptions; indeed this very remark is made by Mr. Adams himself. It may be said too that the influential men who fall as a class under this sweeping indictment can often allege a colorable excuse for their anti-social conduct--as that the law they try to "beat" was devised in ignorance or malice by corrupt politicians. And so they play the game of money against politics, and are not aware of the social menace of their conduct. They subordinate the greater to the less, and know not what they do--any more than the aristocracy and clergy of France knew what they were doing just prior to 1789. They think themselves the salt of the earth. Many of them are more or less zealous church-members, and have had a "religious education." And yet, in playing fast and loose with the law, they are playing with fire in their own cellars. When a ruling class--our government is a qualified plutocracy--loses its sense of responsibility, and takes to violating the law, it takes the surest way to bring all law into contempt. And when the general contempt for law reaches a certain point, then comes anarchy and--the strong man on horse-back to tell us what to do, and shoot us if we don't do it.

* * * * *

The vocation of the croaker is not lightly tolerated by the public opinion of our day. Every one votes him a nuisance. A deep-seated American optimism expects that we shall somehow weather the storms of the future as we have weathered those of the past. The writer of these reflections has the national temperament, but he thinks the time has come to reef sails and trim ship. For law and obedience to law there must be, if society is to cohere and go on its way; and in a democracy lawlessness is not so much _a_ peril as _the_ peril. We must look to our democratic foundations, lest they be undermined while we go on gaily amusing ourselves, piling up money, and assuring each other that everything is all right in the best government the sun ever shone upon. There is need of a vast co-operative effort on the part of all the ethical forces of society--an effort directed consciously and vigorously to the specific end of checking and turning back the rising tide of lawlessness. There is work for the home, for the church, for the voluntary association; and of course there is work for the school, with which we are here more immediately concerned.

IV

What can the schools do for the better training of the social conscience? (I use the word "training" in the double sense of habituation and enlightenment). It is evident that that question needs more space than can be given to it here. A few words must suffice.

In the first place, teachers can recognize--that is, they can gradually be brought to recognize--that the training of the social conscience is the great work they have to do; that it is more important than anything else. A general recognition of that fact would itself have a highly stimulating effect. It would clarify ideas, furnish criteria of value that would be independent of personal or local whim, divert attention from piddling questions of routine, and so do something to elevate the business of teaching in the public estimation. It is now commonly spoken of as a noble profession, but only a very few really think of it in that light. In the better atmosphere I am thinking of, the teacher would not be a drill-sergeant bossing the details of a mental lock-step, but the physician of the social conscience. And, in harmony with the new drift in medicine, our physician would pin his faith to preventive treatment. He would not be able to avoid some punishment of the wrong-doer, but he would see his highest mission in the development of a sensitive conscience that would inhibit wrong-doing. This means skillful and well-paid teachers for children, not too many pupils to the teacher, and much friendly study of the individual pupil in school and out.

Then again teachers could put into practise far more generally than has been attempted hitherto, what has been found out by scientific men with regard to the social conscience and the way it works. They could appeal in every possible way to the social instinct, and make use of its well-known rewards and inhibitions. The foundation principle would be to make the penalty for misbehavior take the form, so far as possible, of social disapproval, with consequent suffering in self-esteem. To be effective, a penalty needs to be quick-acting and sure. It should depend as little as possible on the accident of getting caught. If a potential miscreant is taught to fear punishment at the hands of some authority outside of and above his own life, and if then he does wrong, and nothing unpleasant happens, he soon begins to enjoy the game of matching his wits against the law. Pretty soon he is really being schooled in the exciting art of law-breaking. Somehow he must learn to dread the disapproval of his mates and the prick of his own conscience.

Another principle, hardly less fundamental, would be to make the learner see that the rules he is called on to obey, at work or at play, are for the general good, _including his own_. Of course difficulty would be created by the young anarchist, the imp who refuses to play the game in accordance with the rules, is insensitive to communal opinion, and enjoys the excitement of beating the law. Such a mental twist is generally due to a vicious environment in home or street, where the standards are different from those of the school. How to deal with such cases, when they have reached the advanced stage of criminality, has always been one of the hardest problems of the civilized man, and no very satisfactory solution of it has yet been found. Down to quite recent time, our forbears put their faith in the deterrent effect of harsh and public punishments; and the rod of the schoolmaster kept pace, so to speak, with the stern decrees of the criminal law. It was found not to work very well, a humaner epoch set in, and with that too the schools have kept pace. We have come to feel that society itself is to blame for the miscreant, because it creates and perpetuates the conditions that make him. Meanwhile society is experiencing the disastrous effects of dealing gently with the criminal, and the schools are breeding up a generation to which anything like stern discipline is on the whole rather repugnant.

The one hopeful idea on the horizon is the idea of prevention. The potential miscreant must be caught and cured in the early stages of his making. It is unfortunately true that even the most enlightened and single-minded efforts of the school will produce but lame results so long as society permits criminals to breed with their kind, and tolerates the economic conditions which create for decently born children a hopelessly bad environment outside the schoolroom. It is for society to remedy these conditions as fast as it can. Meanwhile much would be gained if we could once clearly see, and begin to act on the principle, that the _chief end_ of popular education should be, not a smattering of knowledges, but the development of social-minded character.

THE BARBARIAN INVASION

Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.

Readers of Thackeray will remember that these are the lines in which Colonel Newcome used regretfully to sing the praises of those arts into which he had been but barely initiated. Of the thousands in the United States who are now annually certified as bachelors of arts, nine-tenths would be unable to translate the passage, and if the passage were translated, fully one-half would see little or nothing in it. When men are asking what is the matter with our colleges, one is tempted to suggest that perhaps this is the matter: that a controlling interest in the academic establishment is made up of those who have no belief that higher education should result in refinement of mind and transformation of character, and no comprehension of what these things would mean; or, in plain terms, that higher education is in the hands of the barbarians.

That our academic population has grown some three or four-fold within a generation, is no indication of a corresponding increase in the number of persons of cultivated intelligence. The growth has been brought about mainly through a change in the tone and purpose of the college course to appeal to those who formerly despised a college education as a useless luxury; so that now we have a large number of college graduates in whose eyes the degree confers no distinction and imposes no responsibility. It may be that the older science was crude and the older scholarship vague. By no means all college students of a generation ago were animated by a love of knowledge. Yet even the idlers, who sought the degree because it was reputable, testified to a general respect for higher education, and bore witness to the idea that a college graduate was supposed to be a gentleman. No such expectation prevails today; and least of all in the West, where the increase of numbers has been most marked. Today a college education is supposed to be merely useful. Yet at the same time it is felt to be a ground for wonder that so many can pass through the college course with no visible refinement of taste or speech, no clarification of the sense of honor and justice, and no increase in thoughtfulness or in independence of mind--that, in a word, a college graduate is indistinguishable in general society. Some time ago I sat at a hotel table with six commercial travellers and one college graduate, who was also a college professor,--all talking baseball. Sherlock Holmes himself could not have identified the professor. Some time before, I had ventured to propose in a talk to some students that a college degree should impose the obligation of _noblesse_, and preserve a man from some of the meaner things which might be condoned in the less fortunate. I learned afterwards that the idea was resented as "undemocratic"--yet not by the students: for today it seems to be the college professor who is chiefly contemptuous of liberal culture.

It is rather difficult to see how _higher_ education is to be conceived as "democratic" in the sense of creating no personal distinctions. Only, it should seem, if the gifts of education are purely external and without effect upon mind and character. On the other hand, if democracy is to stand simply for freedom of opportunity, and selection of the best, doubtless few will deny that the college should be open to every youth who shows himself capable of measuring up to the idea of an educated man. But this is another matter. The "democratic" theory of higher education stands for a process of measuring down. The process began when the teachers of science insisted that a student whose course was made up mostly of laboratory practice in natural science should nevertheless be graduated as a bachelor of arts. One may cheerfully admit the importance of scientific conceptions for general culture: the point is that if scientific training had developed half of the intellectual qualities that were claimed for it, the degree in science should soon have displaced that of bachelor of arts. As it was, the issue was obscured, and under the blessings of the blanket degree, "democracy" has made rapid progress. No form of speech is now too destitute of ideas to be called a science. Leaving aside the last new science of "efficiency," we have a science of cooking and of dressmaking, a science of carpentering (called manual training), a science of commerce, a science of journalism, and a science of football, any of which may now entitle one to credit towards a degree of bachelor of arts--so that no one can now charge that the college degree implies an invidious distinction.

Such is the outcome of "democracy." At first glance the term conveys the pleasing suggestion that our universities attach a high importance to the cultivation of individuality. But the suggestion is misleading. In the academic "democracy" every student, like every dollar, counts for just one "and nobody for more than one," and the only question of importance is how many. Not long ago, while crossing the Rocky Mountains, and listening to the admiration expressed by my fellow-travelers for the impressive engineering and industrial undertakings of that region and the Pacific Coast, I became gradually aware that the conventional mode of describing such an enterprise was to speak of it as "a two-million-dollar plant" or "twenty-million-dollar plant," as the case might be, on the ground, evidently, that no other aspect of the matter could conceivably be interesting. Such barbaric innocence seemed to me diverting until I remembered that this was the point of view and these the same tribe of barbarians as those whose aspirations now control the policies of our institutions of learning. With few exceptions, our academic managers prefer to state their attainments and their ambitions in terms of an n-million dollar plant, with n-thousand students and n-hundred instructors. And in the interest of bigness any argument is good. Just now the argument is vocational, and college presidents and professors, especially in the state-universities of the West, are fairly falling over one another to prove that they are "practical men," and incidentally to disavow any interest in the promotion of liberal culture. When the fashion changes, as it doubtless will--for it is unlikely that even the agricultural communities are as uncivilised as the appeal that is made to them--the argument will change. Especially instructive from this point of view is the standing appeal for more money to make good a deficit; or to improve the quality of instruction by paying better salaries to the faculty. In the logic of academic administration there appears to be no contradiction between pleading poverty and at the same time using the funds in hand to establish some new department, some advertising feature, such as a summer session, correspondence courses, university extension, or what not, which will attract a more illiterate class of students, scatter the energies of the faculty, lower their teaching efficiency, preserve the deficit, and leave the institution less than ever free to shape its own course or to act as a critic of popular opinion.

Academic authorities are accustomed to explain these seeming inconsistencies by a vague appeal to the obligations of the university to the community. These "social obligations" will repay a careful study. To grasp the idea that is now current in most of the state-universities, one must think of a state-hospital for the insane in which the care of patients is regarded as secondary to the purpose of impressing the people of the state with the evil of insanity, and the need of larger appropriations for the state-hospital. A careful analysis of present academic conceptions of "social obligation" fails to show that such obligation differs in any essential respect from the obligation of a merchant to procure new customers, and incidentally to take some of them away from his competitors. The merchant's obligation is made humanly intelligible by considerations of profit or prestige. It is rather difficult to grasp the sort of academic prestige that comes from cheapening the college degree. And when we find that even the older and richer institutions show a disposition to sacrifice their academic distinction for the prestige of numbers, it seems simpler to abandon the search for rational motive, and to refer the ambitions of our institutions of learning to the same primitive instinct that prompts one man or woman to outshine his neighbor in the splendor of his diamonds or his dinners, and another in the size of his motor-car.