Today the old pedagogy has gone out, and a new and complicated science has taken its place. Unluckily, it is largely the confection of imbeciles, and so the unhappiness of the young continues. In the whole realm of human learning there is no faculty more fantastically incompetent than that of pedagogy. If you doubt it, go read the pedagogical journals. Better still, send for an armful of the theses that Kandidaten write and publish when they go up for their ph.D.’s. Nothing worse is to be found in the literature of astrology, scientific salesmanship, or Christian Science. But the poor schoolma’ams, in order to get on in their trade, must make shift to study it, and even to master it. No wonder their dreams are of lawful domestic love, even with the curse of cooking thrown in.
The school-children of today are exposed to this cataract of puerility from the time they escape from the kindergarten until the time they escape into college or wage-slavery. Are their lives happy? Ask yourself if you would be happy if you had to listen six or seven hours a day to speeches by spiritualists and Seventh Day Adventists. It must be dreadful for a bright child to submit to such vivisection, and its discomforts are surely not ameliorated by the fact that the poor ma’am is suffering too. It is no longer sufficient that she love her art and practise it diligently. She must also sweat through Summer-school every year, damning her luck and boldly laying on more and more rouge. In the end her mind is a black abyss of graphs and formulae, by bogus statistics out of snide psychology, and she is no more fit to teach than an adding machine.
There should be more sympathy for school-children. The idea that they are happy is of a piece with the idea that the lobster in the pot is happy. They are, in more ways than one, the worst and most pathetic victims of the complex of inanities and cruelties called civilization. The human race is so stupid that it has never managed to teach them its necessary tricks and delusions in a painless and pleasant manner. The cats and dogs do better by their young, and so, in fact, do savages. All that is taught to the end of grammar school could be imparted to an intelligent child, by genuinely scientific methods, in two years and without any cruelty worse than that involved in pulling a tooth. But now it takes nine years, and in a long series of laparotomies without anesthetics.
Is anything really valuable ever learned at school? I sometimes doubt it. Moreover, many wiser men doubt it, though they commonly make an exception of reading and writing. The ma’am, they say, can teach her customers to read and write: afterward, whatever they learn they pick up themselves. I go further. I believe that even in the matter of reading and writing children commonly teach themselves, or one another. The ma’am may show them how to learn, and make them want to do so, but she seldom actually teaches them. She is too busy making out reports, passing examinations, and trying to find out what the innumerable super-gogues who beset her desire her to do and say. She is as unhappy as her charges, and hates learning quite as bitterly.
I suggest hanging all the professors of pedagogy, arming the ma’am with a rattan, and turning her loose. Back to Bachl The new pedagogy has got so complicated that it often forgets the pupil altogether, just as the new medicine often forgets the patient. It is driving the poor ma’ams crazy, and converting the children into laboratory animals. I believe that the old sing-song system, with an occasional fanning of the posterior, was better. At all events, it was simpler. One could grasp it without graphs.
Classical Learning
From the New York American, January 20, 1936
A PALL of medievalism still hangs over the universities of the world, including even some of the universities of this great free Republic. The highest degree that the latter offer in course is still called the doctorate in philosophy, though philosophy, though philosophy itself is only a gaudy kind of logic-chopping, and hardly more valid as a science than astrology. And in most universities Latin retains something of the academic respectability that it had in the year 1350. To be sure, all of the boys are not forced to master it, but those who do so are still thought to be more refined and scholarly than those who do not.
During the Middle Ages, when every educated man spoke it, Latin was esteemed for its everyday utility, and for no other reason. It was the lingua franca of Christendom, and no man could get around in the world who lacked it. But not a single soul, so far as I have been able to make out, ever ventured to argue that acquiring its complicated and irrational grammar was an elevating intellectual exercise, or that the literature written in it was better than any other literature. These imbecilities were invented after Latin had ceased to be useful, not while it was in use by all educated men. The medieval student had no illusions about it. He studied it because it enabled him to learn other things, not because he had any respect for it in itself. He regarded his struggles with it as a filthy chore, to be accomplished as quickly as possible, and he read its classical literature so little that most of the chief works thereof went out of print, so to speak, and were almost forgotten.
Their revival by pedagogues of later ages has proved only that the medieval student was right. In them, in fact, one finds precious little that is worth reading. The literatures of England, France and Germany have immensely more to offer in every department of thought, and even the literature of Spain, Italy and Russia offer quite as much. No rational man can go through the endless volumes of the Loeb Library without concluding that the Romans were an essentially dull and practical people, without much more fancy in them than a Congressman or a cow doctor. They had their high virtues, of course, but a lush and charming imagination was certainly not one. They were not poets, but policemen and lawyers.
The Boon of Culture
From the American Mercury, Sept., 1931, pp. 36–48
EVERY American college president, it appears, is in duty bound to write and utter at least one book upon the nature, aims and usufructs of the Higher Education. That responsibility lies upon him as heavily as the obligation to edit at least one edition of “The Deserted Village” lies upon every professor of English. As a rule, he puts it off to his later Autumn days, when the hemlock of senility has begun to dull the edge of his troubles, but he seldom dodges it altogether. I have on my shelves a long row of such books, and I have read all of them in a respectful and hopeful spirit, for I think I may call myself, without vanity, a fan of learned men. But I must add in all honesty that I have yet to find, in any such tome, anything properly describable as wisdom.
What afflicts all of them—or, at all events, all of them that I have collected and read—is the assumption that the chief if not the only end of education is education. This, in the United States, is very far from true. Only a small minority of boys and girls go to college for the purpose of stuffing their heads with knowledge, whether real or false; the majority go there simply because it has come to be the prudent thing to do. What they get out of it is mainly what they will get, later on, out of joining country clubs, Rotary, the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, and other such fraternities—a feeling that they have somehow plunged into the main current of correct American thought, that they have emerged from the undifferentiated mass and gained admittance into an organized and privileged class, that they have ceased to be nobodies and come to be somebodies.
The impulse to make this grade is not to be confused with mere social pushing, which may go on (and usually does) on much lower levels. Nor is it to be confused, on the other hand, with genuine intellectual aspiration. The basic motive is probably a desire for security rather than a yearning for superiority. The virtue of a college degree is that it shuts off the asking of certain kinds of questions, some of them embarrassing. It is a certificate of safety, both to the holder and to the nation in general. A graduate is one who has been trained to act according to a pattern that is publicly considered to be normal and trustworthy. When he gets his diploma he makes a change, not in mere station, but in status. It lifts him over a definite fence, and maketh him to lie down in greener pastures.
Perhaps all of this should have been put into the past tense instead of the prese
nt. The general confidence in “education” has greatly multiplied the candidates for it, and this mutiplication has encouraged the proliferation of colleges. They spring up, in fact, in every third country town, and operating them becomes a kind of racket, carried on by all sorts of dubious persons, lay and clerical. They are even spattered over such barbaric States as Mississippi and North Dakota, where it would be dangerous to be educated in any real sense. The result is somewhat unhappy. The public belief that four years in college make a boy measurably more reliable, socially speaking, than he was before is still entertained, but it begins to be suspected that one college is not precisely like another. Thus there is a noticeable movement among the lesser ones to imitate, as closely as possible, the greater ones—first, by throwing off their theological obsessions (the real moving springs, in many cases, of their being), and secondly, by going in for gaudy Gothic buildings, and other such prodigalities.
But these gestures fool only the most naïve. Everyone who knows anything at all knows that a boy who has been through Harvard or Yale is apt to run far nearer to the American ideal than a boy who has been through, say, the Hardshell Baptist “University” of Smithvile, Okla. He has been broken to an older, and hence to a better esteemed tradition, he has encountered more ornaments of it, and he has seen more impressive evidences of its value. No one knows this better than the graduate of the Hardshell seminary. It doesn’t take him long to discover that what he sweated to attain was not quite attained, after all—that if he has escaped from the scullery he is not yet admitted to the first table in the hall. He is somewhat in the position of a conscript who went through all the pains of training, and then missed service at the front. Such a conscript is, of course, a war hero, but he is plainly a war hero of a lesser sort.
I suspect that a growing realization of all this is gradually filling the United States with inferiority complexes of a peculiarly malignant type. We are turning out thousands of college graduates who will have to go through life explaining and apologizing, which is precisely what college training among us is mainly designed to prevent. They have got the appearance without the essence. In fact, such one-legged collegians are already innumerable, for there have been bad colleges in the country since the earliest days. One cannot fail to observe their discomfort in the presence of graduates of the more tasty and reliable seminaries. They have, in many cases, far more actual education than the latter, but they lack the inner assurance; they are not so confident that sound American opinion respects and trusts them. Nor does it. It is a sad state of mind to be in.
If I had a son I should send him to Harvard, for more is to be had for the money there than anywhere else—more that is real, and will last. I don’t think he’d learn more at Cambridge than he could learn at Siwash (given any desire to learn at all), but I believe a Harvard diploma would help him a great deal more in his later life, American ideas being what they are, whether God cast him for the rôle of metaphysician or for that of investment securities broker.
Bearers of the Torch
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, March 12, 1923
THE GREAT problems of human society are plainly too vexatious and difficult to be set before college undergraduates or pupils yet lower down the scale. The best that the teacher can hope to do, considering the short time at his disposal and the small attention that he can engage, is to fill his students with certain broad generalizations and conclusions. But precisely what generalizations and conclusions? Obviously, the safest are those that happen to be official at the moment, not only because they are most apt to slip into the minds of the pupils with least resistance, but also and more importantly because they are most apt to coincide with the prejudices, superstitions and ways of thought of the pedagogue himself, an ignorant and ninth-rate man.
In brief, the teaching process, as commonly observed, has nothing to do with the investigation and establishment of facts, assuming that actual facts may ever be determined. Its sole purpose is to cram the pupils, as rapidly and as painlessly as possible, with the largest conceivable outfit of current axioms, in all departments of human thought—to make the pupil a good citizen, which is to say, a citizen differing as little as possible, in positive knowledge and habits of mind, from all other citizens. In other words, it is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.
This central aim of the teacher is often obscured by pedagogical pretension and bombast. The pedagogue, discussing himself, tries to make it appear that he is a sort of scientist. He is actually a sort of barber, and just as responsive to changing fashions. That this is his actual character is now, indeed, a part of the official doctrine that he must inculcate. On all hands, he is told plainly by his masters that his fundamental function in America is to manufacture an endless corps of sound Americans. A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no matter how often it may change. The instant he challenges it, no matter how timorously and academically, he ceases by that much to be a loyal and creditable citizen of the Republic.
XVIII. PSYCHOLOGY
Psychologists in a Fog
From the American Mercury, July, 1927, pp. 382–83. A review of Psychology: a simplification, by Loyd Ring Coleman and Sexe Commins: New York, 1927
THE SO-CALLED science of psychology is now in chaos, with no sign that order is soon to be restored. It is hard to find two of its professors who agree, and when the phenomenon is encountered it usually turns out that one of them is not a psychologist at all, but simply a teacher of psychology. Even the Freudians, whose barbaric raid first demoralized and scattered the placid experts of the old school, now quarrel among themselves. Worse, the same psychologist frequently turns upon and devours himself. The case of Dr. William McDougall, late of Harvard, comes to mind at once.1 Every time he prints a new book, which is very frequently, he changes his list of instincts. Some of the others go much further: Dr. McDougall, indeed, is a conservative. These gay boys, at short intervals, throw overboard their whole baggage. There are psychologists in America who started out with the classical introspective psychology, abandoned two-thirds of it in order to embrace Freudism, then took headers into Behaviorism, and now incline toward the Gestalt revelation of Köhler and Koffka. Some say one thing and some another. It is hard for the layman to keep his head in this whirl. Not even anthropology offers a larger assortment of conflicting theories, or a more gaudy band of steaming and blood-sweating professors.
Nevertheless, certain general tendencies show themselves, and in the long run they may lay the foundation of a genuinely rational and scientific psychology. The chief of them is the tendency to examine the phenomena of the mind objectively, and with some approach to a scientific method. The old-time psychologist did not bother with such inquiries, some of which are very laborious. He simply locked himself in his study, pondered on the processes of his own pondering, and then wrote his book. If, as an aid to his speculations, he went to the length of mastering the elements of physiology, he regarded himself as very advanced, and was so regarded by his customers. Basically, he was a metaphysician, not a scientist. His concepts of the true were constantly mellowed and ameliorated by concepts of the what ought to be true. These old-time psychologists, like the metaphysicians, had a great gift for inventing terminology, and their masterpieces still harass the students in the more backward seminaries of learning. Most of them, again like the metaphysicians, believed that they had sufficiently described a thing when they had given it a name.
But the psychology of today is mainly experimental. Its professors do not attempt to account for the thought process by introspection, but by observation. Th
eir learning is not on philosophy, but on physiology. So far, it must be confessed, they have failed to solve any of the fundamental problems of psychology—for example, the problem of consciousness—but they have swept away a great mass of futile speculation, and unearthed a large number of interesting, if often embarrassing facts. Here the Behaviorists, who are relatively recent comers in the field, have done some good work. Being psychologists, they are of course inclined to nonsense, and so one finds them plunging into doctrines that war upon common observation—for example, the doctrine that the qualities of the mind are never inherited, but spring wholly out of environmental causes –, but they have at least cleared off the old view of the mental machine as a mechanism working in a sort of vacuum, with no relation to the other organs of the body. These Behaviorists have proved, what should have been obvious long ago: that a man thinks with his liver as well as with his brain—in brief, that the organism is an actual organism, and not a mere congeries of discordant units. In their studies of children, in particular, they have got at some simple and useful facts, and so disposed of a formidable accumulation of idle speculations. But their formula is too simple to be wholly true, and they seem very likely to ruin it by trying to get more work out of it than it is capable of.
So with the Freudians. So with the Gestalt enthusiasts. So with the endocrine psychologists. So with all the rest. Why don’t they get together as the pathologists, physiologists and other scientists get together, pool their facts, scrap their theories, and so lay the foundations of a rational psychology? Messrs. Coleman and Commins hint at the reason. No professional kudos is to be got by pooling facts. The one way to make a splash in psychology is to come out with a new and revolutionary theory. In other words, public opinion among psychologists is not yet genuinely enlightened. They paddle around in what ought to be a science, but they are not quite scientists. Some day, perhaps, they will make the grade, and so become brothers to the pathologists. But at this moment they are nearer the osteopaths.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 36