The Potentialities of Education
THE EFFECT OF THE COLLEGE ON THE INDIVIDUAL ANDITS PREPARATION OF HIM FOR THE WHOLE LIFE
Senior Fellozv
WHEN I BEGAN to write this article about the purpose of a liberal arts education, I realized that I had never really thought much about it before. I also saw after a very short time that it had wider implications than I was able to cope with. I discussed it with officers of the administration and with the professors of the College whom I particularly respected, and I read articles about it, and thought about it more. Many of the ideas that developed came as a result of these discussions, but they are not necessarily the ideas of those men with whom I talked. Too many of them, I am afraid, are just my opinions of what should be, and as such they are not worth more than the opinion of any other undergraduate. Undoubtedly many of them are only tentative conclusions, for this is a subject that could be thought about for a lifetime.
Practically all of us came to college without knowing why, save that in a vague way it was a place where everybody went if they could. Probably we had the idea that we would make more money if we went; some colleges had even told us as much and they had figures too. If we came with that idea we probably fumed for a year or two over air of the stuff we had to learn about that would never help us in the coal business. After awhile we either settled down good-naturedly to take pipes and get through courses which were demanded by professors and deans who whimsically insisted that we learn about the culture pattern and what Socrates thought some twenty-four hundred years ago. Or perhaps we concluded that Dartmouth wasn't trying to teach us how to earn a larger income and if that was what we wanted we would be better off in a business or technical school. We might earn larger incomes after we graduated, it is true, but there did seem to be better ways of ensuring it. Usually we stopped there, or added mysteriously that we were getting cultured or being trained to become leaders.
BY-PRODUCTS OF EDUCATION
Attempting to go a little further it seems obvious that a college like Dartmouth is a good place to mature in, and if it is nothing else, it is a very enjoyable four years. Beyond that it's clear that we do pick up a lot of information which is undoubtedly valuable. It is particularly important in a democracy whose working success depends pretty largely on the facts that its members possess. In addition we need a certain amount of information just so we can learn our way around in a complex civilization like ours. And finally, some of us may be going to graduate school and we need to be prepared for that. But when all this is said, and I don't mean to minimize the importance of it a bit, we still have not defined a liberal arts education. Merely knowing a lot of factsor what we think are facts—does not in itself make a man educated.
Then what else is there? The answer, I think, consists very largely in the by products of education. I don't include the so-called "classic disciplines" because I am not quite convinced that the men who were trained under these disciplines were able to think any better than men trained under the present system, or that a mathematical wizard is a great thinker on political problems. I am also assuming that when a man enters college, certain basic disciplines, like grammar, are already taken care of. The most satisfactory single definition that I have heard was one made to me by Professor Kenneth Robinson: "Exposing the individual to the idea of a happy human being and a useful social being!"
A DOUBLE PURPOSE
The answer then falls into two parts: education as it affects the individual alone, and as it prepares the individual for society. These cannot really be split as clearly as I am going to split them. They are interdependent—and there indeed is where most of the confused thinking on the subject, including my own, results. If education prepared the individual solely to live a happy life, or solely to live a useful social life, the task of defining the ends would be fairly simple. But unfortunately that is not the case.
When I say that I think education makes an individual happier, I mean happiness in the broad sense of the word, not just a laughing sort of happiness. That education does this runs counter to a great many popular notions; there is the old Faustian idea of the unhappy fellow who knows too much, and there is the Rousseau idea that the only happy people are simple uneducated folk. The group that believes this even includes some professors. If that is really the case, I think it might be wiser to close the colleges and let the professors earn a living by selling real estate. But I do not believe it. I think the unhappy educated man may only be kidding himself; or he may be unhealthy, and if that is the case, it is too bad but not the fault of education; and finally there is just the possibility that he is not really educated.
Obviously education may impart the enjoyment of several new pleasures, such as great art and great literature and great music. It is very true that most of us come to college already able to enjoy dance music and the Saturday Evening Post. However, the main thing to be said for these new pleasures is that if you can enjoy them, you may experience a more intense and subtle reaction, it may awaken your senses and lift life to a plane of dignity and beauty that a detective story would not, and that these are probably pleasures which will last in a way that dance music and the Saturday Evening Post will not. That does not mean that an educated man becomes an intellectual snob. There is nothing wrong with somebody else who does not enjoy these particular arts, he is not as lucky as the man who does, but that is all there is to it. And certainly if we become ashamed of liking the Saturday Evening Post while at the same time we are not able to enjoy great literature, then it is a miscarriage of education. It is also self-delusion.
A liberal college also develops a pleasant sense of the past and the discovery that the past was vital and alive just as the present is today. And less obviously education stimulates an intellectual curiosity. This is usually due more to the personality of a professor than the facts of a course themselves. A pedant seldom interests us in his subject. Insofar as a teacher succeeds we become curious about the world the obvious things, and the more subtle things too and want to know what this is, why it is, and how it works. A tree becomes more than just a tree it is a growing organism producing oxygen and starch and by some strange means sucking food and water up to its top leaves; and a man you see on the street is not just an- other man in the street but an individual absolutely unique, changing all the time as biological, mental, and environmental forces interact in him. The world assumes a new freshness; it is no longer dull and stereotyped. All this is enjoyable and an end in itself.
THE QUESTIONING MIND
But we do not just enjoy these pleasures, they subtly mold us. They sharpen the senses and the emotions; they develop a greater capacity for feeling deeply and being strongly moved. And while some would say that this makes men unhappy, I think that awareness and intensity of feeling are what give life its color and make experience worthwhile; they are one of the main ways in which we differ from cows.
An intellectual curiosity implies an ability to think, and educators agree that they attempt to develop that rare art. This would imply a questioning mind and also a familiarity with the scientific method and the habit of using it whenever possible. Most thinking, of course, is not done that way; it is usually a rationalization of what we want to think. Furthermore, very many problems cannot be solved by this method for they may go beyond it into the realm of values, about which there cannot be very much scientific reasoning. And an educated man is not, of course, a cold rational machine. Yet he attempts to think, and insofar as he succeeds, he is free. He begins by realizing that current institutions, ideas, values and customs are not the absolutes he formerly thought. And once started, the questioning, thinking man is not as easily shoved this way and that by propagandists, by advertisers who try to tell him that he must buy a new car, and newspaper editors who tell him how to vote, and books which try to tell him what to think. He is not even at the mercy of his standard of living, and he probably will not stagger through life crushed by the weight of it, as we will. In other words, he is more independent; he is a little less at the mercy of his social environment; he has a little more free will.
All of these things which I have enumerated stimulate the man, and being relatively freer and more independent he develops along the particular pattern to which he is cut. In other words, he becomes an individual, different from any body else. "Each individual is a history identical with no other," said Dr. Carrel at Dartmouth this fall. "He is without like in the universe." He is physically different, his glands and digestive organs and the range of his emotions are different; his experiences have been unique. And under the wide stimuli of a liberal arts curriculum he can grow into what he really is. In the long run, I believe he can only be happy when he is himself. It is not natural or even healthy to expect him to react and think and be like everyone else, and thus I do not think that it is healthy when the state or social pressures create rubber stamps out of the members of society.
President Hopkins said that he thought the duty of the college was a relative one. In conservative times he felt it should be radical and the college should protect the radicals on its staff, and in radical times, it should be conservative. I should like to expand this idea, so that in times of rampant and socially dangerous individualism the college attempts to preach conformity, but that in periods when the individual is in danger of dying out, the college should try to develop the natural individuality of its students. Today I think that the college is largely in the latter position. For while we like to consider ourselves individualists, we are among the greatest conformists in the world outside of our economic activities. This is so true that if you know the group or class, you can usually predict the individual with a fair degree of accuracy. It is apparent even on the campus. Is it not a little surprising that most of us will enter the same occupations when we grataduate? Many of us would like to follow our individual bents, but at the last moment we will falter and decide to write advertising or go into selling, selling anything, we won't care.
I am particularly reminded of a classmate and his mother whom I met this summer. Somebody asked about the movie in the next town and an elderly Mew England woman rather primly remarked that it was one of those lecherous love movies, and that we probably wouldn't care to see it. "No, we don't like movies like that, do we Ralph?" his mother said turning to him, and my classmate gulped and blushed and said no he guessed we didn't. And we are constantly gulping and blushing and saying no, we guess we don't think what we do think, or no, we guess we don't do what we would like to do.
It follows, I think, that if education stimulates a man and lets him grow, he becomes unless his nature is warped a whole man with a whole point of view. And it is this, I think, which sets the educated man apart from the merely learned specialist. The man who has only mastered one branch of learning, whether it is economics or political science or botany, or understands only one type of human endeavor, is simply not educated if he does not have some idea of the world as a whole and where he and his particular branch of learning fit in. He is, as Emerson said, "A good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow but never a man." The only true picture of the history of man and the world he lives in is the whole picture, and the specialist who looks at it from his limited vantage, is like a man who looks at the world with blinders on his eyes which shut out a part of the view. It is necessary to departmentalize knowledge to some degree merely so that we can cope with it, but an educated man can never forget that the history of man and the world is his subject, and that strictly speaking, there is no aspect of it which is outside his field.
PLEA FOR THE WHOLE MAN
This sense of the whole can conceivably come before or after specialization, but until it comes, the individual is not educated. It also seems to me, that only insofar as a man can approach this whole point of view, and only as he becomes a whole man, does he assume the dignity which it is possible for humans to attain; insofar as he fails, he dwarfs himself. For "Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier."
To me this concept of the whole is the only intelligent and practical way to approach both the vast amount of knowledge we have accumulated, and individual life itself. If you stick your head into a bush, there is only complex differentiation which cannot be grasped, but if you step back and look at the whole bush, it becomes a bush and a fairly comprehendible thing. Similarly, when we step back and view the whole, this wider chaos of knowledge becomes simplicity, and we can cope with it, instead of being engulfed by it. In the same manner, unless we try to examine our individual lives as a whole, unless we attempt to determine our ends and ask why we should do this and then if it is worth doing at all, we cannot realize the potentialities of life or have any influence over its course. We confuse means with ends, and come to think that life is the production of soap chips, or that society exists to sell automobiles to. We like to call ourselves practical people, and yet we do not really approve of men who ask why, and if it is worth while. Yet that is being very practical, and for this reason I think that quite often the most "impractical" men, are the most practical.
With this broad outlook the individual is fortified. Seeing the whole flow of history and the slow change of the world, events assume their proper proportion. The educated man becomes just a little detached; he will not be as easily crushed by unfortunate events in his lifetime, or too unduly elated by happy occurrences, and he will prabably develop a sense of humor.
It is by means of this concept of the whole that the gap between the individual and the social being is bridged. Up until this point I have only described how education develops the individual. But we are not individuals alone, we do not live a hermit's life, and could not if we wanted to. Men are bound indissolubly to this vast social and economic machine contained within the state, and in a wider sense, as states are bound to states, to the whole world. Even if an individual wished to live his life alone, he could not; he is a cog in an economic machine over which he individually has no control; the state taxes him, war may be declared and he is drafted. To an educated man with a view of the whole, this is obvious. And being an independent individual he attempts to see how man can control this tremendous machine, instead of letting the machine control men.
It is evident that society needs men whose outlook is the whole outlook. When laborers, clerks, business men, and farmers, think only of the interests of laborers, clerks, business men, and farmers respectively, conflict and chaos result. From the whole point of view the cooperation of men is seen to be necessary. If this specialized economic machine we have developed is to be run without the pressure of force, the need of some idealism or ethics which will hold the machine together is necessary. It is only the whole man with the whole point of view who. can formulate it. This whole view was once supplied by the Greek concept of the state and the Mediaeval Catholic Church but today there is nothing comparable. And it will be increasingly true, as society continues to change, at a more rapid rate that the whole man, unhampered by provincial views, will be best able to adapt himself to new ideas relative to the outside world. Some degree of the whole view may even be necessary if we are going to go through change without struggles or revolution.
INDIVIDUALISM OR SELFISHNESS?
So a concept of the whole socializes the chief dangers of individualism which lie in the field of economics and government. Today we particularly suffer from economic "individualism," if it can be called real individualism instead of selfishness. This is one evidence of our lack of the whole point of view.
Thus the educated man is an individualist, who because he sees society as a whole, is also a social being. His individualism is further tempered by a sympathy for other individuals and groups growing out of an understanding of their development; by a tolerance, which he must honestly grant to others if he demands it for himself; and finally by an open mind which is taught to him by history. For if history shows anything, it shows the score of men and people who were dead sure that they had discovered the truth for all time .... and a generation later a new group which discovers more truths, all of them eternal absolutes.
I do not believe that the two sides of an educated man which I have tried to present negate each other. He is a happy human being and an individualist. He is also a useful, social being realizing the value and need of cooperation. But his is the cooperation of individuals and not of sheep. This dualism only recognizes the nature of man; in him there is both unity and difference.
It may seem that I have unduly emphasized education as it affects the happiness of the individual. Probably many would put that same emphasis on the social purpose instead. Aldous Huxley, for example, wrote that that which emphasizes the unity of men is good, and that which stresses their differences is bad. But I cannot help thinking that the final value of a society rests in its individuals, and that if a society cannot give its members a fairly happy life, it is a little futile. There is not much point in keeping going just for the sake of keeping going.
Finally I had better state again that all this has only been what I consider the purpose of a liberal arts education. It is obvious that after four years we are not educated. Most of us scarcely begin to approach this ideal, and no one reaches it.
FREDERICK E. WAGNER '3BSenior fellow of Milwaukee, Wis., whogives this month his evaluation of theobjectives of the College.
RUPERT BROOKE ROOM Lyle A. Devlin Jr. '3B of Detroit picturedwith the complete library of RupertBrooke in Sanborn House.
CAMPUS CELEBRITIES: ROBERT F. MACLEOD '39, RICHARD DURRANCE '39, DAVE BRADLEY '3B AND STEVE BRADLEY '39
