A SUCCESSFUL FAILURE
By GLENN FRANK
(1887-). Editor ofThe Century Magazine.He is a member of many important associations, and was one of ex-President Taft's associates in suggesting a covenant for the League of Nations. His magazine articles are notable for constructive thought.
(1887-). Editor ofThe Century Magazine.He is a member of many important associations, and was one of ex-President Taft's associates in suggesting a covenant for the League of Nations. His magazine articles are notable for constructive thought.
Any subject is appropriate material for the essayist, and any method of treatment is satisfactory so long as the writer gives us his personal reaction on some province of human thought.The following critical essay begins with the writer's account of a series of papers that he once read. To this he adds his own serious comment, and he concludes his work by suggesting an ideal. In doing all this he makes free use of the pronoun “I,” and writes in an informal style.The work is therefore not hard and fast logic, but mature and serious comment on life.
Any subject is appropriate material for the essayist, and any method of treatment is satisfactory so long as the writer gives us his personal reaction on some province of human thought.
The following critical essay begins with the writer's account of a series of papers that he once read. To this he adds his own serious comment, and he concludes his work by suggesting an ideal. In doing all this he makes free use of the pronoun “I,” and writes in an informal style.
The work is therefore not hard and fast logic, but mature and serious comment on life.
Several years ago there appeared a series of papers that purported to be the confessions of a successful man who was under no delusion as to the essential quality of his attainments. The papers are not before me as I write, and I must trust to memory and a few penciled notes made at the time of their appearance, but it will be interesting to recall his confessions regarding his education. I think they paint a fairly faithful picture of the mind of the average college graduate.
He stated that he came from a family that prided itself on its culture and intellectuality and that had always been a family of professional folk. His grandfather was a clergyman; among his uncles were a lawyer, a physician, and a professor; his sisters married professional men. He received a fairly good primary and secondary education, and was graduated from his university with honors. He was, he stated, of a distinctly literary turn of mind, and during his four years at college imbibed some slight information concerningthe English classics as well as modern history and metaphysics, so that he could talk quite glibly about Chaucer,[136]Beaumont, and Fletcher,[137]Thomas Love Peacock,[138]and Ann Radcliffe,[139]and speak with apparent familiarity about Kant[140]and Schopenhauer.[141]
But, in turning to self-analysis, he stated that he later saw that his smattering of culture was neither broad nor deep; that he acquired no definite knowledge of the underlying principles of general history, of economics, of languages, of mathematics, of physics, or of chemistry; that to biology and its allies he paid scarcely any attention at all, except to take a few snap courses; that he really secured only a surface acquaintance with polite English literature, mostly very modern, the main part of his time having been spent in reading Stevenson[142]and Kipling.[143]He did well in English composition, he said, and pronounced his words neatly and in a refined manner. He concluded the description of his college days by saying that at the end of his course, twenty-three years of age, he was handed an imitation parchment degree and proclaimed by the president of the college as belonging to the brotherhood of educated men. On this he commented:
I did not. I was an imitation educated man; but though spurious, I was a sufficiently good counterfeit to pass current for what I wasdeclared to be. Apart from a little Latin, considerable training in writing the English language, and a great deal of miscellaneous reading of an extremely light variety, I really had no culture at all. I could not speak an idiomatic sentence in French or German. I had only the vaguest ideas about applied science or mechanics and no thorough knowledge about anything; but I was supposed to be an educated man, and on this stock in trade I have done business ever since, with the added capital of a degree of LL.B. Now, since graduation, twenty-seven years ago, I have given no time to the systematic study of any subject except law. I have read no serious works dealing with either history, sociology, economics, art, or philosophy. I have rarely read over again any of the masterpieces of English literature with which I had at least a bowing acquaintance when at college. Even this last sentence I must qualify to the extent of admitting that now I see that this acquaintance was largely vicarious, and that I frequently read more criticism than literature.I was taught about Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare. I was instructed in the history of literature, but not in literature itself. I knew the names of the works of numerous English authors and knew what Taine[144]and others thought about them, but I knew comparatively little of what was between the covers of the books themselves. I was, I find, a student of letters by proxy. As time went on I gradually forgot that I had not in fact actually perused these volumes, and to-day I am accustomed to refer familiarly to works I have never read at all.I frankly confess that my own ignorance is abysmal. In the last twenty-seven years what information I have acquired has been picked up principally from newspapers and magazines; yet my library table is littered with books on modern art and philosophy and with essays on literary and historical subjects. I do not read them. They are my intellectual window-dressings. I talk about them with others who, I suspect, have not read them either, and we confine ourselves to generalities, with careful qualifications of all expressed opinions, no matter how vague or elusive.
I did not. I was an imitation educated man; but though spurious, I was a sufficiently good counterfeit to pass current for what I wasdeclared to be. Apart from a little Latin, considerable training in writing the English language, and a great deal of miscellaneous reading of an extremely light variety, I really had no culture at all. I could not speak an idiomatic sentence in French or German. I had only the vaguest ideas about applied science or mechanics and no thorough knowledge about anything; but I was supposed to be an educated man, and on this stock in trade I have done business ever since, with the added capital of a degree of LL.B. Now, since graduation, twenty-seven years ago, I have given no time to the systematic study of any subject except law. I have read no serious works dealing with either history, sociology, economics, art, or philosophy. I have rarely read over again any of the masterpieces of English literature with which I had at least a bowing acquaintance when at college. Even this last sentence I must qualify to the extent of admitting that now I see that this acquaintance was largely vicarious, and that I frequently read more criticism than literature.
I was taught about Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare. I was instructed in the history of literature, but not in literature itself. I knew the names of the works of numerous English authors and knew what Taine[144]and others thought about them, but I knew comparatively little of what was between the covers of the books themselves. I was, I find, a student of letters by proxy. As time went on I gradually forgot that I had not in fact actually perused these volumes, and to-day I am accustomed to refer familiarly to works I have never read at all.
I frankly confess that my own ignorance is abysmal. In the last twenty-seven years what information I have acquired has been picked up principally from newspapers and magazines; yet my library table is littered with books on modern art and philosophy and with essays on literary and historical subjects. I do not read them. They are my intellectual window-dressings. I talk about them with others who, I suspect, have not read them either, and we confine ourselves to generalities, with careful qualifications of all expressed opinions, no matter how vague or elusive.
This quotation is made from slightly abbreviated notes and may be guilty of some verbal variation from the text, but it is entirely accurate as to content. As I remember the paper, the writer went on to catalogue his educational shortcomings in the various fields of interest, confessing fundamental ignorance, save for superficial smatterings of information, of art, history, biography, music, poetry, politics, science, and economics. He painted an amusing picture of the hollow pretense of culture with which the average man of his type covers his intellectual poverty. Men of his type speakcasually, he said, of Henry of Navarre,[145]Beatrice d'Este,[146]or Charles the Fifth,[147]without knowing within two hundred years when any of them lived or what was their rôle. His lack of knowledge goes deeper than mere names and dates; it goes, he said, to the significance of events themselves. For an illustration at random, he knew nothing about what happened on the Italian peninsula until Garibaldi,[148]and really never knew just who Garibaldi was until he read Trevelyan's[149]three books on the Risorgimento, the only serious books he had read in years, and he read them because he had taken a motor trip through Italy the summer before. He knew virtually nothing of Spain, Russia, Poland, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, or Belgium. He described his type going to the Metropolitan Opera House, hearing the best music at big prices, content to murmur vague ecstasies over Caruso, in ignorance of who wrote the opera or what it is all about, lacking enough virile intellectual curiosity even to spend an hour reading about the opera in one of the many available hand-books.
Coming to the vital matters of public affairs, he confessed that, although holding a prominent place on the citizens' committee at election-time, he knew nothing definite about the city's departments or its fiscal administration. He could not direct a poor man to the place where he might obtain relief. He knew the city hall by sight, but had never been in it. He had never visited the Tombs[150]or the criminal courts, never entered a police station, a fire-house, or prisonof the city. He did not know whether police magistrates were appointed or elected, nor in what congressional district he resided. He did not know the name of his alderman, assemblyman, state senator, or representative in Congress. He did not know who was head of the street-cleaning, health, fire, park, or water departments of his city. He could name only five of the members of the Supreme Court, three of the secretaries in the President's cabinet, and only one of the congressmen from his State. He had never studied save in the most superficial manner the single tax, minimum wage, free trade, protection, income tax, inheritance tax, the referendum, the recall, and other vital questions.
Of the authorship of these anonymous confessions I know nothing. They may have been fiction instead of biography, for all I know. But their content would still be true were their form fiction. I have recalled these confessions at length because in my judgment they present an uncomfortably true analysis of the average American college graduate's mind, his range of interests, and his grasp of those fundamentals which underlie a citizen's worth in a democracy. It is from the college graduates of this country that we must look for our leaders in the complex and baffling years ahead, and it is a matter of the gravest concern to the country if we are raising up a generation of men, into whose hands leadership will pass, whose minds have been atrophied by superficial study, whose imagination is unlit, who have an apathetic indifference toward the supreme issues of our political, social, and industrial life, who lack capacity and background for the analysis of broad questions and for creative thinking. If these confessions of “The Goldfish” papers tell a true story, if we are failing to produce a leader class adequate to meet the needs of the present time, as it seems to me there is sound evidence to prove, then it behooves us to reëxamine, reconceive, and reorganize our colleges.
If we are to raise up adequate leadership for the future, our colleges must contrive to give to students a genuinely liberal education that will make them intelligent citizens of the world; an education that will make the student at homein the modern world, able to work in harmony with the dominant forces of his age, not at cross-purposes to them; an education that will acquaint him with the physical, social, economic, and political aspects, laws, and forces of his world; an education that will furnish to the student that adequate background and primary information needed for the interpretation of current life; an education that will help the student to plot out the larger world beyond the campus; an education that will give the student an interest in those events and issues in which people generally are concerned; an education that will enable the student to give intelligent and informed consideration to the significant political and economic problems of American life; an education that will provide the student with a sort of Baedeker's[151]guide to civilization; in short, an education that will make for that spacious-minded type of citizen which alone can bring adequate leadership to a democracy.