TheSocialValueoftheCollege-Bred-精選資料

1、thesocialvalueofthecollege-bredof what use is a college training? we who have had it seldom hear the question raised might be a little nonplussed to answer it offhand.a certain amount of meditation has brought meto this as the pithiestreplywhich i myself can give: the best claim that a college educa

2、tion can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to ac plish for you, is this:that it should help you to know a good man when youseehim. this is as true of womensas of menscolleges; but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction i shall now endeavor to show.what talk d

3、o we monly 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,

4、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; b

5、ut, apart from that, you mayremain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum, incapable of spreading light. the universities and colleges, on the other hand, although they mayleave you less efficient for this or that practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more important than skill. th

6、ey redeemyou, make you well-bred; they make good pany 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 pare their educat

7、ion with every other sort. now, exactly how muchdoes this signify?it is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional training does something more for a manthan to makea skilful practical tool of him msi t makes him also a judge of other mens skill. whether his trade be pleading a

8、t 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 kno

9、w this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what good work maymeananyhow, that may, if circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. sound work, clean work, finished work; feeble work, slack work, shamwork hese words express an identical contrast in many different departments of act

10、ivity. in so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade maybeget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally.now, what is supposed to be the line of us whohave the higher college training? is there any broader line ms ince our education claims primarily not to be narr

11、ow msi n which wealso are madegood 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 g

12、reek 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 humanendeavor. literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of masterpieces but is largely about

13、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 reaching it historically. geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the

14、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!othing less than this is whatwe ough

15、t to meanby the humanities. essentially this meansbiography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as humanefforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. studying in this way, welearn wha

16、t 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 manyquests 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 a

17、daptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms better and worse maysignify in general. our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. we sympathize with mensmistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we a

18、pplaud what overcame them.such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable. what the collegeseaching humanities by exampleswhich may be special, but which must be typical and pregnanthouldat least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguise

19、s, 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 his is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. it is the better part of what men

20、 know as wisdom. someof us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; someof us never be e so. but to have spent ones 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 humanexcellence or to divine it amid its acc

21、idents, to know it only whenticketed and labeled 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 engineers line and the surgeons is appen

22、dicitis. 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 cheapjacks. we ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in menand their proposals whenwe enter the world of affairs about us. expertness i

23、n this might well atone 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

24、but an empty epigram follows, from the fact that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracylike ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it isthis line more than any other. the people in their wisdom趺摞 his is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. democ

25、racy 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

26、 itwas 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 picture-papers of european continent are already drawing uncle sam with hog instead of

27、 the eagle for his heraldic emblem. the privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with all their iniquities, did at leastpreserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. but whendemocracy is sovereign, its doubters say, nobility will fo

28、rm a sort of invisible church, andsincerity 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 o

29、f democracy? nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted 趺摧 nd 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

30、no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croakers 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 menshall show the way a

31、nd 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

32、 save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, andimitationby the rest of ushese are the sole factors active in humanprogress. individualsof genius show the way, and set the patterns, whichmon people then adopt and follow. the rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world.

33、 our democratic problem thus is statable in ultra-simple terms: who are the kind of menfrom whomour 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

34、, 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 simpli

35、fied, of course, but such a birds-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 th

36、ey have; our motto, too, is noblesse oblige; and, unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have 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 ironical

37、ly by the party of red blood, the party of every stupid prejudice and passion, during the anti-dreyfus craze, to satirize the menin 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 carryin processions. aff

38、ections 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 pilots hand upon the tiller is relatively insignificant energy. but the affections, passions and interests are shifting, successive, and distraught

39、; they blow in alternation while the pilots hand is steadfast. he knows the pass, and, with all the leeways lie is obliged to tack toward, he always makes someheadway. a small force if it never lets up will accumulate effects more considerable than those of muchgreater forces if these work inconsist

40、ently. 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 birds-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 wh

41、at our colleges themselves should aim at. if we are to be the yeast-cake for democracys dough, if we are to make it rise with cultures 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 mo

42、dern subject, sure that any subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.stevenson says somewhereto his reader: you think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying downa link in the policy of mankind. well, your technical school should enable you to make y

43、our bargain splendidly; but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain pretty poor place, possibly 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 colleg

44、es must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning as harvard. to many ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. in edith wyatts exquisite book of chicago sketches call

45、ed every one his own way there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness: richard elliot and his feminine counterparteeble 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 o

46、f culture may exist near cambridge and boston, there may be specimens there, for priggishness is just like painters colic or any other trade-disease. but every good college makesits students immuneagainst this malady, of which the microbe haunts the neighborhood printed pages. it does so by its gene

47、ral tone being too hearty for the microbes life. real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain 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 t

48、he 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 eith

49、er 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 ind

50、ividuals 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 petitors outside. mcclures magazine, the american magazine, colliers weekly, and, in its fashion, the wo