FRAGMENTS OF TRUTH
THE DISTINCTION O£ a college is not so much in what its scholars teach as in what its students learn. Therefore, at the opening of the academic year those responsible for the direction of an educational institution are principally concerned in regard to the capacity to learn on the part of those enrolled as undergraduates. Do these know what education is and have they genuine desire to acquire it?
Assuming that careful selection of the student body at Dartmouth makes it possible to answer in a qualified affirmative and that the influence and atmosphere of the college will make this affirmation more positive as time goes on, let us consider for a moment what is the method of the liberal college. First, it is not indoctrination in a partisan sense. I shall discuss this more at length later. Colleges are not rightfully sponsors for special causes. Much confusion of thought about colleges would be avoided were this to be understood. In the curriculum diverse and sometimes contradictory points of view will be presented. Problems will be approached from different angles. Beliefs will be challenged not for the purpose of destroying them, but that a man may consider the validity of those he holds and may substantiate them, or if he cannot do this, replace them with others which he can substantiate.
Learning is a man's job and requires the balanced judgment, the sense of proportion, and the mental effort which are attributes of developing maturity. The Apostle Paul wrote, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things." It is to you as men who have put away childish things in the field of learning that I wish to speak. In the conception of general educa- tion, approach to which is offered by the liberal college, lies the hope of civilization. But no college and no institution of society can give a man more than fragments of knowledge. It is by the student's persistence in learning how these fragments are related that any vision of the unity of all knowledge is acquired. Thus is real education sought and found.
It is told that on one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated. "As much," said he, "as the living are to the dead." The same implication lies in Horace Mann's assertion that "a human being is not in any proper sense a human being till he is educated." In such statements are embodied convictions which have impelled men for centuries to offer to youth some medium which should make education more quickly, more easily, and more comprehensively obtainable than in the labors, difficulties, and pains of self-acquisition. Dartmouth is one such agency. The College aspires in our behalf to an understanding of life in its wholeness rather than simply to an acquaintanceship with detached sections of life. To the end that in some of us ambition may be kindled to attain the as yet unattainable, the College strives. To abundance of life and to the realization of our fullest possibilities as human beings, the College summons us.
Addison comments that the influence of education upon the human soul is like the influence of sculpture upon a block of marble. He adds, "The philosopher, the saint, the hero, the wise and the good, or the great, very often lie hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred and brought to light." If one cares to develop the analogy, it might also be said that among some of us self-sufliciency and opinionatedness may so harden the substance surrounding the soul that tools of education can never reach it, while among others the unconcern which leads to inertia or dissipation of our powers on superficial things may render the quality of the soul so putty-like as to be incapable of holding any form.
IN REFLECTION, however, upon conditions in the educational field in our time, I have often thought of a remark about politics of Senator Dwight Morrow, who salted his keen intelligence with humor. He said that a political party which arrogated exclusive credit to itself for all of the blessings derived by a people through favorable natural conditions could not logically complain at having responsibility ascribed to it when adversity befell because of correspondingly unfavorable conditions.
The world's greatest thinkers have contended from the beginning of time that the refining and elevating influences which make for civilization are largely engendered through education. If this be accepted as true, then it would appear that education can justly be called to account when civilization lags—when mankind abandons its ideals, lowers its standards, and yields to the more primitive of its appetites and the more brutal of its instincts.
At the close of the Great War, when Sir Ernest Shackleton returned from his long isolation from world affairs in the Antarctic and compared conditions as he found them with those existent when he had last known them, he was quoted as saying:
"People do not realize that the flower of the World has gone. The United States is the one nation left intact. Here in Europe the high spirit, the faith, the enterprise of youth have been mown down as with a scythe."
Looking backward after nearly two decades and with the advantage of the proportionally clearer perspective offered by distance, it is difficult to find the fallacies of this assumption in regard to the United States that it was intact. Relatively, we had been called upon to endure small proportion of the grief and suffering that pervaded Europe; comparatively, our self-sacrifice had been inconsiderable; and economically, our impairment had been trifling. The ranks of youth awaiting call to the responsibilities of maturity were little depleted. Surely the belief was justified that as a nation we had been little affected. Yet the integration of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties as a people, which then seemed possible from our status, has not developed.
On the contrary, there has been an obvious retrogression. We not only have not moved on from strength to greater strength, but have rather yielded with but feeble resistance to forces making for weakened aspirations and for less worthy accomplishments. In circumstances where loyalty to high idealism was imperative, we as individuals and as a people have compromised with expediency; in situations where bold resolution was demanded, we have sought refuge from responsibility in self-pity; under circumstances demanding courage, we have fallen back upon cynicism to justify avoidance of accepting any risk; among the shadows which have needed illumination, if we were to find truth, we have shaded our mental eyes lest light should reveal to us what we have not wished to see; and amid the confusions resulting from unrest of the spirit, we have sought surcease from concern in new dissipations and in more self-indulgence. As a people we have been afraid to grow up, and we have played with our principles, with our emotions, and with our responsibilities.
Such is to some extent, at least, a justifiable description of the nation which less than twenty years ago appeared to be intact. Surely it is requisite that we examine our principles of education in home and church and school before tendencies already clearly defined be set into customs and habits which shall be enduring.
OF NECESSITY, I shall confine myself in these brief minutes to discussion of the affairs of the liberal college.
For one thing, there is the question of attitude of those seeking an education. They in many cases have assumed that the very inexperience of youth constituted a reason for accepting all of the desires and theories of youth as determinative of what education should be. Not infrequently in recent years the mood of the undergraduate who has adjudged himself intellectually precocious has seemed to be that education must be offered to him on his own terms, and that it was his conscientious duty to neutralize himself against any educational influence that was not in conformity with his preconceived ideas. For college officials to have yielded to this point of view in any major degree would have been to do so at the ultimate expense of the undergraduate. Too much needs to be done in this world in the briefest possible time for us to throw away all of the lessons of experience and to begin entirely anew.
We need to rid ourselves of the post-war fiction, to which some committed themselves, that there is an inevitable conflict between the generations, that the interests of youth and their elders are exclusive of each other, or that either group can benefit by conditions that are not favorable to both. "Half the art of government," Sir Arthur Salter has said, "is the luck of having people who can be governed." Certainly, half the art of education is the luck of having educable students. Without such, there is no point in developing any other percentage of the art. Under conditions of the greatest community of interests between succeeding generations, one of the tragic disappointments to which any generation eventually comes is its inability in any measure to transmit to oncoming youth the lessons of its sorrows and joys, its discontents and satisfactions, its futile efforts and its accomplishments. Under a theory of differences in interest, such as has been widely pervasive in recent years, the inevitable difficulties in conserving the intellectual and moral wealth of the world and of transmitting this from one generation to another have been greatly intensified.
SOMEWHAT MORE than a decade ago promise seemed to exist in the apparent idealism of the youth movements in countries of the old world. Through disregard of the customs, principles, and proprieties of the past, through self-expression in the establishment of new ideals and the assumption of new liberties, and through the clarity of a new and keener vision which they assumed themselves to have, they were to bring peace where there had been war and social justice where there had been oppression. What of the melancholy sequence? The boast of Fascism and Communism alike is the fervor of youth in support of the respective movements. Such resistance as exists at all and such forces as work for liberalism are predominantly among those of older years, out of whose experience and maturity arose hopes of something quite different from the exchange of one tyranny for another.
There is no comparison to be made between conditions such as these and any to be found among our own people, excepting at the point where youth in the zest of rationalizing believes it possible to disregard unbroken experience as a factor in education or as a guide to the art of living. Were its argument to be granted, youth would encounter anew, and be under the necessity of overcoming, obstacles which lessons of the past teach one to avoid.
Even so, I would pay tribute to the qualities of such of our modern-day youth as we find enrolled in our American institutions of higher learning. In the group as a whole there are, I believe, an eagerness for self-improvement, an earnestness of endeavor, and a readiness for assuming responsibility for bettering social conditions, that have been unsurpassed in American colleges at any time. It is only in comparison with the enlarged demands of contemporary life that I am concerned lest the degree to which the college serves the need of the community may not be as great in the present day as it has been in the past.
More than ever before, the undergraduate in the liberal college should understand the philosophy of the educational method, the advantages of which he seeks. Briefly, this is that the cultural progress of a people and the mental and spiritual enlargement of the individual are dependent always upon opportunity for free inquiry as to how the good may be made better and how evil may be sloughed off. It was the belief of the founders of our historic colleges, to which we hold, that ultimate goodness is correlated with knowledge and that ignorance, in its least harmful aspect, makes for worthlessness and easily makes for unwholesomeness.
I HAVE FREQUENTLY quoted the aphorism ascribed to Bruno that "ignorance is the most delightful science in the world, because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy." Certainly, the acquisition of knowledge, on the contrary, does require labor and pains under the direction of a rigid self-discipline. The college cannot ignore this fact, and it must establish and hold to requirements and must impose exactions. It is no less the fact in education than elsewhere that inertia must be overcome and purposeful effort must be made, if strength is to be developed in our mental, spiritual, or physical selves. To the extent that our colleges have made knowledge more easily acquired, in increased instruction and in laboratories, libraries, and added comforts of environment, it has been to the end that men might get more education and not that they should simply get the same amount with less effort.
Again, the undergraduate in the liberal college should consider that in the world of today our profoundest scholars can possess themselves only of fragments of knowledge. It is from among those who can see the interrelations of these fragments that leadership in world affairs must come. The more highly specialized life becomes, the more indispensable is general education, such as is offered by the liberal college. It was no academic theorist, unacquainted with business and finance, but Dr. Anderson, economist of the Chase National Bank, who in public address last year said of college offerings of practical courses that he protested against permitting these "to crowd out other essential elements of general education, which help to give a man an understanding of the world and his place in it, of society and h:s duties to it, of government and the duties of citizenship." He continued: "If the institutions of learning will send to the business and banking world men with good general education, with eager and inquiring minds, and with an understanding of principles, the business and banking community will quickly teach them the particular jobs assigned to them. The demand for narrow practicality is self-defeating."
In like manner speak our great industrial leaders with few exceptions. So say the deans of our great graduate schools of law, of medicine, of theology, and of engineering.
But inquiry may be made how general education can be advantageous if in its maximum accomplishment it still leaves the individual with nothing but fragmentary knowledge. The answer is that if in small degree the student comes to appreciate that all facts of which he gains knowledge are related to all other facts of which he knows, and if he comes to acquaintanceship with facts in a number of different fields, he then is in a position to understand that nothing which he knows is without relationship to all that is to be known.
In other words, he comes to some sense of proportion and reaches a position wherein he can think in terms of relative values, as the specialist who is nothing but a specialist can never think. It is one of the laws of life that the more a man is master of the knowable, the deeper and the more fruitfully he can project himself as an explorer into the unknown. This art of discovery, cultivated by research men in highly specialized fields, is no less applicable to the problem of understanding life through general education. Illustrations without number could be given of masters of knowledge in one specialized field finding themselves suddenly dependent upon developments in other fields for vital steps in progress. A distinguished medical authority stated this spring that important advances in his field had developed by an entirely new approach to them made possible by advances in the field of photomicrography. There is abundant reason to argue that he who seeks the paths of wisdom must thread his way painstakingly among the trails of specialized learning. To aid in such endeavor the liberal college strives.
FINALLY NOW, as in all discussions of college responsibilities, we come to the question of what constitutes truth, the Holy Grail of all untrammeled educational quest.
I sometimes wonder to what extent constant reiteration of words like "truth" makes them meaningless. I have recently heard discussion among a group of men, representative graduates of different institutions of learning, concerning what colleges should be allowed to teach. These were men highly intelligent in their own fields. Any one of them would have indignantly denied lack of reverence for truth. The only fallacy evident was in the certainty felt by each of them that he had possessed himself of it, and that truth had reached its full realization in the beliefs he held and in the convictions he treasured. I was reminded of the homely maxim of the great research engineer, Charles F. Kettering, who once said, "It isn't what you don't know, but what you know for sure and which isn't so that will get you into trouble."
Analogies between the attitudes of individuals and of governments are frequently not accurate, but in this matter of the attitude towards truth there is a definite parallelism. The moment that the argument is admitted that indoctrination is a legitimate principle of education, then is stimulated the seizure of the educational establishment of a people by special interests and the erection of boundaries beyond which truth may not be sought and within which egregious fallacies may not be attacked. Nevertheless, indoctrination is the essence of dictatorships, and without it they could not survive. This is practically admitted by their apologists.
The Commissariat of Education in the Soviet Republic has been completely frank in this matter. There is too much general knowledge as to what has happened not only to university officials who have been critical of the Bolshevist regime but to those who have been at all restrained in their enthusiasm for it for us to doubt the ruthlessness of restriction existent in higher education in Russia.
Let us turn to the words of the distinguished Oddone Fantini, Professor of Political Science in Perugia University, writing on "The University in the Fascist State." Among other like statements, he says: "It is desired to create a definite type of Italian, 'the Italian of Mussolini,' whose character and personality must be perfectly adapted to the ideal and practical necessities of Italy, for which he will shape by his own faith and tenacity of purpose, an independent future, dignified and sufficient for her moral and material needs."
And lastly let us consider from a German view- point what are the possibilities in regard to defining truth if we accept belief that education can safely accept a theory of indoctrination as a desirable principle. The University of Heidelberg recently renamed its Physical Institute in honor of Professor Lenard of its faculty, and held a public celebration of the event. Professor Lenard is a well-known author and has been respected as a scientist of some eminence. His reply to congratulations was as follows:
"I am very grateful to the students of the University of Heidelberg for their congratulations on the renaming, by the Ministry, of the institute which was built some years ago under my direction. I hope that the institute may stand as a battle flag against the Asiatic Spirit in Science. Our Leader has eliminated this same spirit in politics and national economy—where it is known as Marxism. In natural science, however, with the over-emphasis of Einstein, it still holds sway. We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German—and indeed only harmful to him—to be the intellectual follower of a Jew. Natural science properly so-called is of completely Aryan origin and Germans must to-day also find their own way out into the unknown. Heil, Hitler!"
COMPARE SUCH systems with what we conceive liberal education to be. They are based upon the theory that some governing group is competent and entitled to tell people what may be thought and what may be believed. By high pressure propaganda they exclusively stress such supporting data or invent such fallacies as will substantiate their claims. By rigid censorship they suppress all knowledge that might create doubt in regard to their pronunciamentos. Fundamentally, they work to develop the legend that ultimate truth has been attained and that there is no other truth. Such is the vogue in educational philosophy which dominates the greater part of the population of the earth at the present time.
As contrasted with this, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of education is that though never attaining final perfection, we approach it nearer and nearer by ever increasing our store of knowledge; that by inquiry, discussion, and investigation we propressively acquire ability to distinguish truth from error; and that freedom to inquire, to speak, and to investigate is the essence of the liberty we prize. This is what is meant by a liberal education. It is an education which makes a man free; and only the free man can see reality.
It is idle to assume that a society in which men are not free can in any measure expect enhancement of the composite spiritual and intellectual qualities which we know as civilization. Civilization cannot make genuine progress without synthesis of the fragments of truth of which it may have possessed itself, in different times, among different peoples, and under different governments. Only in such synthesis can any approach to integrity be found. This is the essence of a liberal education. To interpretation of its ideals, and to making these influential, Dartmouth is committed by the terms of her foundation, by the history of her achievement, and by her present determination. Commitment in support of such aspirations is the one great pledge Dartmouth asks of her undergraduates.
The President's Address in Opening the College's 167th Tear
