XUNIFYING EDUCATION THROUGH LITERATURE
Unity is most useful, if not essential, to a satisfactory course of studies. In the university this unity is effected by the profession which the student has chosen. His field of concentration in art, literature, law, medicine, science, engineering or divinity dictates to him his subjects, and his own earnest choice, together with prescriptions and examinations, insures unity and thoroughness in concentration courses.
Lecturing is the predominant method of the university because professors of higher branches are few and students are comparatively numerous. Lecturing is the weakest and most ineffective of all means of education, and is only saved from complete failure by the serious purposes of university students and much more by the sanction of repetitions and examinations.
In the colleges, however, with the advent of electivism there was no unifying bond to the studies. University methods of studies and lectures prevailed where there were no university conditions. Thoroughgoingelectivists, like Dr. Eliot, admitted that the purpose of the college was a general education or culture, but held that any and every study could give such general training. President Lowell, Dr. Eliot’s successor, began to put order into the chaos of extreme electivism. He saw his coaches on the athletic fields build up expert athletes by a rigidly prescribed course of training, and proclaimed the analogy between body and mind, an analogy which would have been all the more cogent had his philosophy been materialistic like that of Dr. Eliot. The prescribed examination in one department at the end of four years is the latest advance of Harvard toward definiteness and unity.
All colleges in America took up electivism to some extent, and even where studies were still prescribed they adopted in their catalogs the language and methods of electivism. No longer were there classes, but everywhere you had courses and departments. One effect of this system has been to make coördinate and of equal importance many subjects which had formerly been subordinate. Colleges whose major subject, or field of concentration, had been language, with other subjects subordinate, now tended to make every subject a major and every field a field of concentration. The departmental system has helped to impair unity of education by disturbing the hierarchy of studies and by removing all subordination. It does not appear to be feasible to concentrate on everything. In some cases collegesseem about to give up the general-training idea and are tending to make their whole course subservient to a profession, obliging every one to take a pre-medical course because the American Medical Association is mighty and medical schools are very exacting.
Formerly high schools and colleges made language or self-expression the field of concentration, and other subjects, like history, mathematics, sciences, were kept subordinate. College and high school had then one purpose, which unified all their studies, as a profession unified lectures in the university—that purpose was the mastery of the art of expression. The French lycées, the German gymnasia, the English public schools, the JesuitRatio Studiorum, prepared for the university by making students masters of writing and speaking. The writer and speaker could express himself; his intellectual faculties could work properly, and therefore they had received a general training which prepared them for professional work of a special kind. The field of concentration was shown in the names of the classes. The teachers were teachers, not of Latin, Greek, English, but of grammar, of poetry, of oratory, of clear, interesting, forceful expression.
The departmental system destroys this fine unity or renders it very difficult of attainment. The departmental system has been perhaps the chief reason why the classics have been taught as means towards the acquisition of various sciences rather than asexemplifications of literary art. It is as literature and as models of perfect expression that the classics have hitherto survived; as literature and models of expression they were taught in the days preceding the university system of departments. Cicero was a model of letter-writing, of essay-writing, of speech-making. He was chosen with a view to composition; he was graded with a view to composition.
How can a department teacher preserve the former unity of system, where all literature was studied with one dominating purpose, self-expression? If the grade of the class is rhetoric or oratorical expression, will each department teach its own authors, Greek, Latin and English, following the same rhetorical precepts in the same order, or will each department follow its own terminology and its own order, or will, as has happened everywhere, the teaching of rhetoric be relegated to English or to a separate professor, leaving Cicero and Demosthenes to be taught as grammatical documents or historical documents or as legal documents, not as speeches, not as models of oratorical expression? Will the professor of Latin teach Virgil as epic poetry, and the professor of Greek teach Homer as epic poetry, and the professor of English teach Milton as epic poetry, or will the teaching of poetry be avoided by the Greek and Latin departments entirely? Cicero and Demosthenes survive because they are orators; Homer and Virgil live because they are epic poets, but thedepartmental system either forgets that fact entirely or has three professors teaching the same thing with confusion in the order and in the rules of art. The departmental system, which is a university device adapted for specialization, makes unity of education extremely difficult, and has taken all the interest out of literature by teaching it as everything else but literature!
Besides, as art is the power of doing, and science is chiefly systematized information, the process of education for doing will be different from the process of acquiring information. Too many cooks may spoil the broth because cooking is an art, but too many sign-posts may not always confuse the traveler. It is far easier to divide information among various agents and impart it piecemeal than to apportion the different faculties used in an art to different individuals who will train them to act together harmoniously. Different teachers may very well teach the geography of different countries, but it would not be feasible to let one teacher have the right hand and another the left in teaching the art of piano-playing.
Omitting the effect of personality, which is paramount in art, as the history of all religious movements shows it also to have been in the formation of character and in virtue, one cannot fail to see that departments cannot well coöperate in giving the formation of art. In fact, practically the art of composition has ceased to be the field of concentrationin modern high schools and colleges. All literatures, even English, are taught mostly as sciences. The only wholesome reaction in modern education against the predominance of science or systematized information is found in the present vogue for psychological tests. These are professedly tests of power, not of mere information, and in them the power of self-expression through language is preëminent. All the examinations are conditioned by the necessary medium of language, and by far the greater number of tests are and must always be tests in linguistic expression.
Language is the only practical measure of intelligence, and if such tests win favor, they may result in establishing once more the art of expression as the field of concentration or major subject in high schools and colleges which give a general education. Language, when taught as an art, educates the mind, giving it the powers of expression which are the guaranties of the mind’s adequate education. Professors become teachers of an art, not lecturers in a science. Perfect unity is found where the finest models of self-expression in all languages, especially the classical languages, are directed by one teacher to the mastery of the art of expression in one’s own language.