of what use is a college training? we who have had it seldom hear the question raised; we might be a little nonplussed to answer it offhand. a certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest reply which i myself can give: the best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you, is this: that it should help you to know a good man when you see him. this is as true of women’s as of men’s colleges; but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction i shall now endeavor to show.
what talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college education and the education which business or technical or professional schools confer? the college education is called higher because it is supposed to be so general and so disinterested. at the “schools” you get a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas the “colleges” give you the more liberal culture, the broader outlook, the historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere, or something which phrases of that sort try to express. you are made into an efficient instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but, apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum, incapable of spreading light. the universities and colleges, on the other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more important than skill. they redeem you, make you well-bred; they make “good company” of you mentally. if they find you with a naturally boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical school may leave you. this, at least, is pretended; this is what we hear among college-trained people when they compare their education with every other sort. now, exactly how much does this signify?
it is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional training does something more for a man than to make a skilful practical tool of him — it makes him also a judge of other men’s skill. whether his trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing, it develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. he understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own line as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. sound work, clean work, finished work: feeble work, slack work, sham work — these words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity. in so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally.
now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college training? is there any broader line — since our education claims primarily not to be “narrow”— in which we also are made good judges between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? what is especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the “humanities,” and these are often identified with greek and latin. but it is only as literatures, not as languages, that greek and latin have any general humanity-value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of masterpieces, but is largely about masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. you can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. not taught thus literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.
the sifting of human creations! — nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. all our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms “better” and “worse” may signify in general. our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. we sympathize with men’s mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.
such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable. what the colleges — teaching humanities by examples which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant — should at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. the feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent — this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. it is the better part of what men know as wisdom. some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. but to have spent one’s youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.
the sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line, as boring subways is the engineer’s line and the surgeon’s is appendicitis. our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheap jacks. we ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us. expertness in this might well atone for some of our awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. the best claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase in which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what i said: it should enable us to know a good man when we see him.
that the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it is this line more than any other. “the people in their wisdom”— this is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. fickleness and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. what its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. so it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end. vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny; and the picture-papers of the european continent are already drawing uncle sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. the privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human quality, and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. but when democracy is sovereign, its doubters say, nobility will form a sort of invisible church, and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and favor, will have to vegetate on sufferance in private corners. they will have no general influence. they will be harmless eccentricities.
now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of democracy? nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. but, on the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture. the best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty. our better men shall show the way and we shall follow them; so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher education in helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see him.
the notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us — these are the sole factors active in human progress. individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. the rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world. our democratic problem thus is statable in ultra-simple terms: who are the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their cue? whom shall they treat as rightful leaders? we and our leaders are the x and the y of the equation here; all other historic circumstances, be they economical, political, or intellectual, are only the background of occasion on which the living drama works itself out between us.
in this very simple way does the value of our educated class define itself: we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and better leaders. the terms here are monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird’s-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. in our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries. we have continuous traditions, as they have; our motto, too, is noblesse oblige; and, unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and wield no powers of corruption. we ought to have our own class-consciousness. “les intellectuels!” what prouder club-name could there be than this one, used ironically by the party of “redblood,” the party of every stupid prejudice and passion, during the anti-dreyfus craze, to satirize the men in france who still retained some critical sense and judgment! critical sense, it has to be confessed, is not an exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in processions. affections for old habit, currents of self-interest, and gales of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving; and the pressure of the judicious pilot’s hand upon the tiller is a relatively insignificant energy. but the affections, passions, and interests are shifting, successive, and distraught; they blow in alternation while the pilot’s hand is steadfast. he knows the compass, and, with all the leeways he is obliged to tack toward, he always makes some headway. a small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate effects more considerable than those of much greater forces if these work inconsistently. the ceaseless whisper of the more permanent ideals, the steady tug of truth and justice, give them but time, must warp the world in their direction.
this bird’s-eye view of the general steering function of the college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to help us to a wider vision of what our colleges themselves should aim at. if we are to be the yeast-cake for democracy’s dough, if we are to make it rise with culture’s preferences, we must see to it that culture spreads broad sails. we must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject, sure that any subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.
stevenson says somewhere to his reader: “you think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind.” well, your technical school should enable you to make your bargain splendidly; but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain — a pretty poor place, possibly — in the whole policy of mankind. that is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with it.
we of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as harvard. to many ignorant outsiders, the name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. in edith wyatt’s exquisite book of chicago sketches called “every one his own way” there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness, richard elliot and his feminine counterpart — feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. possibly this type of culture may exist near cambridge and boston. there may be specimens there, for priggishness is just like painter’s colic or any other trade-disease. but every good college makes its students immune against this malady, of which the microbe haunts the neighborhood of printed pages. it does so by its general tone being too hearty for the microbe’s life. real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. if a college, through the inferior human influences that have grown regnant there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for its social function stops: democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear.
“tone,” to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. by their tone are all things human either lost or saved. if democracy is to be saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. if we are to impress it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. it all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. as a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. it ought to have the highest spreading power.
in our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have formidable competitors outside. mcclure’s magazine, the american magazine, collier’s weekly, and, in its fashion, the world’s work, constitute together a real popular university along this very line. it would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like these: “by the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence over public opinion in the united states. but the mission of raising the tone of democracy, which they had proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and for the clarification of their human sympathies and elevation of their human preferences, the people at large acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain private literary adventures, commonly designated in the market by the affectionate name of ten-cent magazines.”
must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this? vague as the phrase of knowing a good man when you see him may be, diffuse and indefinite as one must leave its application, is there any other formula that describes so well the result at which our institutions ought to aim? if they do that, they do the best thing conceivable. if they fail to do it, they fail in very deed. it surely is a fine synthetic formula. if our faculties and graduates could once collectively come to realize it as the great underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less obscurely groping, a great clearness would be shed over many of their problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system, it would embark upon a new career of strength.
