CHAPTER FIVE The
Defeat of the Schools In the course of the preceding chapters, I said somethings about the school system which are libelous unless they are true. But if true they constitute a grave indictment of the educators who viloated a public trust. Though this chapter may seem like a long discussion from the business of teaching you how to read, it is needed to explain the sitiuation in which most of us find ourselves or our children—"educated" but illiterate. If the schools were doing their job, this book would not be necessary.
So far I have spoken largely from my own experience as a teacher in high school, college, and university. But you need not take my uncorroborated word for the deplorable failures of American education. There are many other witnesses who can be called to the stand. Better than ordinary witnesses, who may also speak from their own experience, there is eomething like scientific evidence on the point. We can listen to the experts report the results of tests and measurements.
As far back as I can remember, there have been complaints about the schools for not teaching the young to write and speak well. The complaints have focused mainly on the products of high school and college. An elementary-school diploma never was expected to certify great competence in these matters. But after four or eight more years in school, it seemed reasonable to hope for a disciplined ability to perform these basic acts. English courses were, and for the most part still are, a staple ingredient in the high-school curriculum. Until recently, freshman English was required course in every college. These courses were supposed to develop skill in writing the mother tongue. Though less emplasized than writing, the ability to speak clearly, if not with eloquence, was also supposed to be one of the ends in view.
The complaints came from all sources. Businessmen, who certainly did not expect too much, protested the incompetence of the youngsters who came their way after school. Newspaper editorials by the score echoed their protests and added a voice of their own, expressing the misery of the editor who had to blue-pencil the stuff college graduated passed across his desk.
Teachers of freshman English in college have had to do over again what should have been completed in high school. Teachers of other college courses have complained about the impossibily slopy and incoherent English which students hand in on term papers or examinations.
And anyone who has taught in the graduate school or in a law school knows that a B.A. from our best colleges means very little with reference to a students skill in writing or speaking. Many candidate for the Ph.D. has to be coached in the writing of his dissertation, not from the point of view of scholoarship or scientific merit but with respect to the minimum requirements of simple clear, straightforward English. My colleagues in the law school frequently cannot tell whether a student does or does not know the law because of his inability to express himself coherently on a point in issue.
I have mentioned only writing and speaking, not reading. Untill very recently, no one paid much attention to the even greater or more prevalent incompetence in reading, except, perhaps, the law professors who, ever since the introduction of the case of method of studying law, have realized that half the time in a law school must spent in teaching the student how to read the cases. They thought, however, that this burden rested perculiarly on them, that there was something very special about reading cases. They did not realize that if college graduates had a decent skill in reading, the more specialized technique of reading cases could be acauired in much less than half the time now spent
One reason for comparative neglect of reading and the stress on writing and speaking is a point I have already mentioned. Writing and speaking are, for most people, so much activities than reading is. Seince we associate skill with activity, it is a natural consequence of this error to attribute defects in writing and speaking to lack of technique, and to suppose that failure in reading must be dute moral defects—to lack of industry rather than of skill. The error is gradually being corrected. More and more attention is being paid to the problem of eraind. I do not mean that the educators have yet discovered what to do about it, but they have finally realized that the schools are failing just as badly, if not worse, in the matter of reading, as in writing and speaking.
It should be obvious at once that these skills are related. They are all arts of using language in the process of communication, whether initiating it or receiving it. We should not be surprized, therefore, if we find a positive correlation among defects in these several skills. Without the benefit of scientific research by means of educatiional measurements, I would be willing to predict that someone who cannot write well cannot read well either. In fact, I would go further. I would wager that his inability to read is partly responsible for his defects in writing.
However difficult it may be to read, it is easier than writing and speaking well. To communicate well to others, one must know how communications are received, and be able, in addition, to master the medium to produce the desired effects. Though the arts of teaching and being taught are corrrelative, the teacher, either as writer or speaker, must prevision the process of being taught in order to direct it. He must, in short, be able to read what he writes, or listen to what he says, as if he wre being taught by it. When teach rs themselves do not possess the art of being taught, they cannot be very good teachers.
I do not have to askj yo to accept my unsupported prediction or to meet my wager in the blind. The experts can be called to tesify in the light of scientific evidence. The product of our schools has been measured by the accredited apparatus of achievement tests. These tests touch all sorts of academic accomplishment—standard areas of information, as well as the basic skills, the three R's. They show not only that the high-school graduate is unskilled but also that he is shockingly uninformed. We must confine our attention to the defects of skill and especialy to reading, although the finding on writing and speaking are supporting evidence that the high-school graduate is generally at sea when it comes to any aspect of communication.
This is hardly a laughing matter. However deplorable it may that those who have gone through twelve years of schooling should lack rudimentary information, how much more so is it that they should be disbarred from using the only means that can remedy the situatiion. If they could read—not to mention write and speak—they might be able to inform themselves throughout their adult life.
Notice that the defect which the tests discover is in the easier type of reading—reading for information. For the most part, the tests do not even measure ability to read for understanding. If they did, the results would cause a riot.
Last year Profesor James Mursell, of Columbia's Teachers of College, wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly, entitled "The Defeat of Schools." He based his allegation on "thousands of investigations" which comprise the "consistent testimony of thirty years of enormously varied research in education." A large mass of evidence comes from a recent survey of the schools of Pennsylvania carried on by the Carnegie Foundation. Let me quote his own words:
What about English? Here, too, there is a record of failure and defeat. Do pupils in school learn to read their mother tongue effectively? Yes and no. Up to the fifth and sixth grade, reading, on the whole, is effectively ttaught and well learned. To that level we find a steady and general improvement, but beyond it the curves flatten out to a dead level. This is not because a person arrives at his natural limit of efficiency when he reaches the sixth grade, for it has been shown again and again that with special tuition much older children, and also adults, can make enormous improvement. Nor does it mean that most sixth-graders read well enough for all practical purposes. A great many pupils do poorly in high school because of sheer ineptitude in getting meaning from the printed page. They can improve; they need to improve; but they don't.
The average high-school graduates has done a great deal of reading, and if he goes on to college he will do a great deal more; but he is likely to be poor and incompetent reader. (Note that this holds true of the average student, not the person who is a subject for special remedial treatment.) He can follow a simple piece of fiction and enjoy it. But put him up against a closely written exposition, a carefully and economically stated argument, or a passage requiring critical consideration, and he is at a loss. It has been shown, for instance, that the average high-school student is amazingly inept at indicating the central thought of a passage, or the levels of emphasis and subordination in an argument or exposition. To all intents and purposes he remains a sixth-grade reader till well along in college.
Even after he has finished college, I must add, he is not much better. I think it is true that no one can get through college who cannot read for information with reasonable efficiency. It may even be that he could not get into college were he thus deficient. But if we keep in mind the distinction between the types of reading, and remember that the tests measure primarily the ability to do the simpler sort, we cannot take much consolation from the fact that college students read better than sixth-graders. Evidence from the graduate and professional schools tends to show that, so far as reading for understanding is concerned, they are still sixth-graders.
Professor Mursell writes even more dismally of the range of reading in which the schools succeed in engaging the interest of students:
Pupils in school, and also high-school and college graduates, read but little. Medium-grade magazines and fair-to-medium fiction are the chief standbys. Reading choices are made on hearsay, casual recommendations, and display advertising. Education is clearly not producing a discriminating or venturesome reading public. As one investigator concludes, there is no indication "that the schools are developing permanent interest in reading as a leisure-time activity."
It is somewhat sanguine to talk about students and graduates reading the great books, when it appears that they do not read even the good nonfiction books which come out every year.
I pass rapidly over Mursell's further report of the facts about writing: that the average student cannot express himself "clearly, exactly, and orderly in his native tongue"; that "a great many high-school pupils are not able to discriminate between what is a sentence and what is not"; that the average student has an impoverished vocabulary. "As one goes from senior year in high school to senior year in college, the vocabulary content of written English hardly seems to increase at all. After twelve years in school a great many students still use English in many respects childish and undeveloped; and four years more bring slight improvement." These facts have bearing on reading. The student who cannot "express find and precise shades of meaning" certainly cannot detect them in the expression of anyone else who is trying to communicate above the level of subtlety which a sixth-grader can grasp.
There is more evidence to cite. Recently the Board of Regents of New York State solicited an inquiry into the achievement of its schools. This was carried out by an commission under the supervision of Professor Luther Gulick of Columbia. One of the volumes of the report treats of the high schools, and in this a section is devoted to the "command of the tools learning." Let me quote again:
Large numbers even of the high school graduates are seriously deficient in the basic tools of learning. The tests given to leaving pupils by the Inquiry included a test of ability to read and understand straightforward English... The passages presented to the pupils consisted of paragraphs taken from simple scientific articles, historical accounts, discussions of economic probles, and the like. The test was originally constructed for eighth grade pupils.
They discovered that the average high-school senior could pass a test designed to measure an achievement proper in the eighth grade. This is ceratainly not a remarkable victory for the high schools. But they also discovered that "a disturbingly large proportion of New York State boys and girls leave the secondary schools, -even go to higher schools,—without having attained a desirable minimum." One must agree with their sentiment when they say that "in skills which everyone must use"—such as areading and writing—"everyone should have at least a minimum of competence." It is clear that Professor Mursell is not using language too strong when he speaks of "the defeat of the schools."
The Regents' Inquiry investigated the kind of learning which high-school students do by themselves, apart from school and courses. This, they rightly thought, could be determined by their out-of-school reading. And they tell us, from their results, "that once out of school, most boys and girls read soley for recreation, chiefly in magazines of mediocre or inferior fiction and in daily newspapers." The range of their reading, in school and out, is woefully slight and of the simplest and poorest sort. Nonfiction is out of the question. They are not even acquainted with the best novels published during their years in school. They know the names only of the most obvious best sellers. Worse than that, "once out of school, they tend to let books alone. Fewer than 40 per cent. of the boys ans gilrs interviewed had read any book or any part of a book in the two weeks preceding the interviews. Only one in ten had read nonfiction books." For the most part, they read magazines, if anything. And even here the level of their reading is low: "fewer than two young people in a hundred read magazines of the type of Harper's, Scribner's, or The Atlantic Monthly."
What is the cause of this shocking illiteracy? The Regentsts' Inquiry report points its finger at the heart of the trouboe when it says that "the reading habits of these boys and girls are no doubt directly affected by the fact that many of them have never learned to read understandingly." Some of them "apparently felt that they were completely educated, and that reading was therefore unnecessary." But, for the most part, they do not know how to read, and therefore they do not enjoy reading. The possession of skill is an indispensable condition of its use and enjoyment in its exercise. In the light of what we know about their general inability to read—for understanding and even, in some cases, for information—it is not surprsing to discover the limited range of reading among high-school graduates, and the poor quality of what they do read.
The serious consequences are obvious. "The inferior quality of reading done by large numbers of these boys and girls," this section of the Regents' report concludes, "offers not great hope that their independent reading will add very much to their educational stature." Nor, from what we know of the achievement in college, is the hope for the college graduate much greater. He is only little more likely to do much serious reading after he graduates, because he only a little more skilled in reading after four more years spent in educational institutions.
I want to repeat, because I want to remember, that however distressing these findings may seeem, they are not half as bad as they would if the tests were themselves more severe. The tests measure a relatively simple grasp of relatively simple passages. The questions the students being measured must answer after they have read a short paragraph call for very little more than a precise knowledge of what the writer said. They do not demand much in the way of interpretation, and almost nothing of critical judgment.
I say that the tests are not severe enough, but the standard I would set is certainly not too stringent. Is it too much to ask that a student be able to read a whole book, not merely a paragraph, and report not only what was said therein but show an increased understanding of the subject matter being discussed? Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgment if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree? I hardly think that such demands would be exorbitant to make of high school or college, yet if such requirements were incorporated into tests, and a satisfactory performance were the condition of graduation, not one in a hundred students now getting their diplomas each June would wear the cap and gown.
You may think that the evidence I have so far presented is local, being restricted to New York and Pennsylvania, or that it places too much weight on the average or poorer high-school student. That is not the case. The evidence represents what is going on in the country generally. The schools of New York and Pennsylvania are better than average. And the evidence includes the best high-school seniors, not merely the poorer ones.
Let me suupse this last statement by one other citation. In June, 1939, the University of Chicago held a four-day conference on reading for teachers attending the summer session. At one of the meetings, Professor Diederich, of the department of education, reported the results of a test given at Chicago to top-notch high-school seniors who came there from all parts of the country to complete for scholarships. Among other things, these candidates were examined in reading. The results, Professor Diederich told the thousand teachers assembled, showd that most of these very "able" students simply could not understand what they read.
Moreover, he went on to say, "our pupils are not getting very much direct help in understanding what they read or hear, or in knowing what they mean by what they say or write." Nor is the situation limited to high schools. It applied equally to colleges in this country, and even in England concerning the linguistic skill of undergratuates in Cambridge University.
Why are the students not getting any help? It cannot be because the professional educators are unaware of the situation. That conference at Chicago ran for four days—with many papers presented at morning , afternoon, and evening sessions—all on the problem of reading. It must be because the educators simply do not know what to do about it; in addition, perhaps, because they do not realize how much time and effort must expected to teaech students how to read, write, and speak well. Too many other things, of much less importance, have come to clutter up the curriculm.
Some years ago I had an experience which is illuminating in this connection. Mr. Hutchins and I had undertaken to read the great books with a group of hihg-school juniors and seniors in the experimental school which the university runs. This was thought to be a novel "experiment" or worse, a wild idea. Many of these books were not being read by college juniors and seniors. They were reserved for the delectation of graduate students. And we were going to read them with high-school boys and girls!
At the end of the first year, I went to the principal of the high school to report on our progress. I said that these younger students were clearly interested in reading the books. The questions they asked showed that. The acuteness and vitality of their discussion of matters raised in class shoed that they were better than older students who had been dulled by years of listening to lectures, taking notes, and passing examinations. They had much more edge than college seniors or graduate students. But, I said, it was perfectly obvious that they did not know how to read a book. Mr. Hutchins and I, in the few hours a week we had with them, could not discuss the books and also teach them how to read. It was a shame that their native talents were not being to trained to perform a function that was plainly of the highest educational importance.
"What was the high school doing about teaching students how to read?" I asked. I developed that the principal had been thinking about this matter for some time. He suspected that the students couldn't read very well, but there wasn't time in the program for training them. He enumerated all the more important things they were doing. I refrained from saying that, if the students knew how to read, they could dispense with most of these courses and learn the same thing by reading books. "Anyway," he went on, "even if we had the time, we couldn't do much about reading until the school of education has finished its researches on the sobject."
I was puzzled. In terms of wha I knew about the art of reading, I could not imagine what kind of experimental research was being done that migh help the students learn to read or their teachers to train them in doing so. I knew the experimental literature on the subject very well. There have been thousands of investigations and countless reports to constitute the "psychology of reading." They deal with eye movements in relation to different kinds of type, page layout, illumination, and so forth. They treat of other aspects of optical mechanics and sensory acuity or disability. They consist of all sorts of tests and measurementss leading to the standardization of achievement at different educational levels. And there have been both laboratory and clinical studies which bear on the emotional aspects of reading. Psychiatrists have found out that some children get into emotional tantrums about reading, as others do about mathematics. Sometimes emotional difficulties seem to cause reading disability; sometimes thy result from it.
All of this work has, at best, two practical applications. The tests and measurements facilitate school administration, the classification and the gradation of students, the determination of the efficiency of one or another porcedure. The work on emotions and the senses, especially the eye, in its movements and as an organ of vision, has led to the therapeutic program which is part of "remedial reading." But none of this work even begins to touch on the problem of how to teach the young the art of reading well, for enlightment as well as information. I do not mean that the work is useless or unimportant, or that remedial reading may not save a lot of children from the most serious disabilities. I mean only that it has the same relation to making good readers as the development of proper muscular coordination has to the development of a novelist who must use his and eye in penmanship or typewriting.
One example may make this point clear. Suppose you want to learn how to play tennis. You go to a tennis coach for lessons in the art. He looks you over, watches you on the court for while, and then, being an unusually discriminating fellow, he tells you that he connot teach you. You have a corn on your big toe, and papilloma on the ball of one foot. Your posture is generally bad, and you are muscle-bound in your shoulder movements. You need glasses. And, finally, you seem to have jitters whenever the ball comes at you, and a tantrum whenever you miss it.
Go to a chiropodist and a osteopath.. Have a masseur get you relaxed. Get your eyes attended to, and your emotions straightened out somehow, with or without the aid of psychoanalysis. Do all these things, he says, and then come back and I'ii try to teach you how to play tennis.
The coach who said this would not only be discriminating but sound in his judgment. There would be no point in trying to instruct you in the art of tennis while you were sufering from all these disabilities. The educational psychologists have made this sort of contribution. They have diagnosed the disabilities which prevent of hinder a person from learning how to read, better than the coach, they have devised all sorts of therapy which contribute to remedial reading. But when all this work is done, when the maximum in therapy is accomplished, you still have to learn how to read or play tennis.
The doctors who fix your feet, prescribe your glasses, corect your posture, and relieve your emotional tensions cannot make you into a tennis player, though they transform you from a person who cannot learn how to one who can. Similarly, the psychologists who diagnose your reading disabilities and presecribe their cure do not know how to make you a good reader.
Most of this educational research is merely preliminary to the main business of learning to read. It spots and removes obstacles. It help cure disability, but it does not remove inability. At best it makes those who are abnormal in one way or another more like the normal person whose native gifts nmake him freely susceptible training
But the normal individual has to be trained. He is gifted whth the power to learn, but he is not born with the art. That must be cultivated. The cure of abnormality may overcome the inequalities of birth or the accidents of early development. Even if it succeeded in making all men approximately equal in their initial capacity to learn, it could go no further. At that point, the development of skill would have to begin. Genuine instructioin in the art of reading begins, in short, where the educational psychologists leave off.
It should begin. Unfortunately, it does not, as all the evidence shows. And, as I have already suggested, there are two reasons why it is not. First, the curriculum and the educational program in general, from grammar school through college, is too croweded with other time-consuming things to permit enough attention to be geven the basic skills. Second, most educators do not seem to know how to teach the art of reading. The three R's exist in the curriculum today only in their most rudimentary form. Theya re regarded as belonging to the primary grades, instead of extending all the way up to the bachelor's degree. As a result, the bachelor of arts is not much more competent in reading and writing than a sixth-grader.
I would like to discuss these two reasons in a little more detail. With respect to the first, the issue is not whether the three R's belonging in education, but to what extent they belong and how far they must be developed. Everyone, even the most extreme progressive educator, admits that children must be given the basic skills, must be taught to read and write. But there isn't general agreement about how much skill is the absolute minimum for an educatted man to possess, and how much educational fime it would take to give the minimim to the average student.
Last year I was invited to participate in a national boradcast on the Town Meeting hour. The subject was education in a democracy. The other two participants were Professor Gulick of Columbia and Mr. John Studebaker, national commissioner of education. If you heard the broadcast, or read the pamphlet containing the speeches, you observed that there appeared to be agreement all of us about the three R's as indispensable traininf gor democratic citizenship.
The agreement was only apparent ans superficial, however. For one thing, I meant by the three R's, the arts of reading, writing, and reckoning as these should be possessed by a bachelor of those arts; whereas my colleagues meant only the most rudimentary sort of grammar-school training. For another thing, they mentioned such things as reading and writing as only a few of the many ends which education, especially in a democracy, must serve. I did not deny that reading and writing are only a part and not the whole, but I did disagree about the order of importance of the several ends. If one could enumerate all the essentials which a sound educational program consider, I would say that the techniques of communication, which make for literacy, are our first obligation, and more so in a cemocracy than in any other kind of society, because it depends on a literate electorate.
This is the issue in a nutshell. First things should come first. Only after we are assured that we have adequately accomplished them is there any time or energy for less important considerations. That, however, is not the way things are done in the schools and colleges today. Matters of unequal importance are given equal attention. The relaitvely tirvial is often made the whole of an education program, as in certain colleges which are little better than finishing schools. What used to be regarded as extracurricular activity has seized the conter of the stage, and the basic curricular elements are piled up somewhere in the wings, marked for cold storage or the junkman. In this process, begun by the elective system and completed by the excesses of progressive educatioin, the basic intellectual disciplines got pushed into a corner or off the stage entirely.
In their false liberalism, the progressive educators confused discipline with regimentation, and forgot that true freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline. I never tire of quoting John Dewy at them. He said long ago: "The discipline that is identical with trained power is also identical with freedom... Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought." A discipline mind, trained in the poer of thought, is one which can read and write critically, as well as do efficient work in discovery. The art of thinking, as we have seen, is the art of learning through being taught or through unaided research.
I am not saying, let me repeat, that knowing how to read and learning through books are the whole of education. One should also be able to carry out investigation intelligently. Beyond that one should be well informed in all the areas of fact which are a necesary groundwork for thinking. There is no reason why all these things cannot be accomplished in the educational time at our disposal. But if one had to make a choice among them, one should certainly place the primary emphasis on the fundmental skills and let information of any sort take send place. Those who make the opposite choice must regard an education as a burden of fact one requires in school and tries to carry around for the rest of life, though the baggage becomes heavier as it progressively proves less useful.
the sounder view of education, it seems to me, is one which emphasizes discipline. In this view, what one gets in school is not so much learning as the technique of learning, the arts of educating oneself through all the media the environment affords. Institutions educate only if they enable one to continue learning forever after. The art of reading and the technique of research are the primary instruments of learning, of being taught thnings and of finding them out. That is why they must be primary objectives of a sound educational system.
Although I do not disagree with Carlyle that "all that a university or final highest school can do for us is still what the first school began,—teach us to read," I do agree with Professor Tenney of Cornell that if the school does teach students to read, it has placed in their hands "the primary instrument of all higher education. Thereafter, the student, if he so wills, can educate himself." If the schools taught their pupils to read well, they would make students of them, and students they would be out of school and after it as well.
Let me call your attention, in passing, to a fault of reading which many persons commit, especially professors. A writer says he thinks sonething is of primary importance, or more important than something else. The bad reader interprets him as saying that nothing else but the thing he stresses is important. I have read many reviews of President Hutchin's Higher Learning in America which have stupidly or even viciously mistaken in his insistence upon literacy as indispensable to liberal or general education for an exclusion of everything else. To affirm, as he does clearly, that nothing else comes first is not to deny that other things come second, third, and so forth.
What I have been saying will probably be similarly misinterpreted by the professors or the professionals in education. They will probably go further, and charge me with neglecting "the whole man" because I have not discussed the discipline of emotion in education and the formation of moral character. Every character that is not discussed is not necessarily denied, however. It that were the implication of omissions, writing about any one subject would involve infinite possibilites of error. This books is about reading, not about everything. The context should therefore indicate that we are primarily concerned with intellectual educatiion, and not the whole education.
If I were asked, as I was from the floor on the night of the Town Meeting broadcast, "Which do you consider the most important to a student, the three R's or a good moral character? I would answer, as I did then:
The choice between the intellectual and the moral virtues is a hard one to make; but if I had to make the choice, I would choose the moral virtues always, because the intellectual virtues without the moral virtues can be vicious misused, as they are misused by anyone who knoelwdge and skill, but doesn't know the ends of life.
Knowledge and skill of mind are not the most important items in this life. Loving the right things is more important. Education as a shole must consider more than man's intellect. I am saying only that , in so far as it concerns then intellect, there is nothihg more important than the skills by which it must be disciplined to function well.
I turn now to the second reason why the schools have failed in the matter of reading and writing. The First reason was that they underestimated the importance and extent of the task, and hence misconceived the relatively greater time effort which must be devoted to it than to anything else. The second is that the arts have been almost lost. The arts I am referring to now are the liberal arts which once were called grammaer, logic, and rhetoric. These are the arts which a B.A. is supposed to be a bachelor of, and an M.A. a master. These are the arts of reading and writing, speaking and listening. Anyone who knows anything about the rules of grammar, logic, and rhetoric knows that they govern the operations we perform with language in the process of communication.
The various rules of reading, to which I have already more or less explicitly referred, involve points of grammar or logic or rhetoric. The rule about words and terms, or the one about sentences and propositions, has a grammatical and logical aspect. The rule about proof and other types of argument is obviously logical. The rule about interpreting the emphasis a writer places on one thing rather than another entails rhetorical considerations.
I shall discuss these different apspects of the rules of reading later. Here the only point is that the loss of these arts is in large part responsible for our inability to read and toteach students how to read. It is highly significant that when Mr. I.A. Richards writes a book about Interpretation in Teaching, which is really a book one some aspects of reading, he finds it necessary to resuscitate the arts, and to divide his treatment into three main parts: grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
When I say that the arts are lost, I do not mean that the sciences of grammar and logic, for instance, are gone. There are still grammarians and logicians in the universities. The scientific study of grammar and logic is still pursued, and in some quaters and under certain auspices with renewed vigor. You have probably heard about the "new" discipline which has been advertized lately under the name "semantics." It is not new, of course. It is also as old as Plato and Aristotle. It is nothing but new name for the scientific study of the rinciples of linguistic usage, combining grammatical and logical considerations.
The ancient and medieval grammarians, and an eighteenth-century writer such as John Locke, could teach the contemporary "semanticists" a lot of principles they do not know, principles they need not try to discover if they would and could read a few books. It is interesting that, just about the time when grammar has almost dropped out of the grammar school, and when logic is a course taken by few college students, these studies should be revived in the graduate schools with a great fanfare of original discovery.
The reivval of the study of grammar and logic by the semanticists does not alter my point, however, about the loss of the arts. There is all the difference in the world between studying science of something and practicing the art of it. We would not like to served by a cook whose only merit was an ability to recite the cookbook. It is an old saw that some logicians are the least logical of men. When I say that the linguistic arts have reached a new low in contemnporary education and culture, I am referring to the practice of grammar and logic, not to acquaintance with these sciences. The evidende for my statement is simply that we cannot write and read as well as men of other ages could, and that we cannot teach the next generation how to do so, either.
It is a well-known fact that those periods of European culture in which men were least skillful in reading and writing were periods in which the greatest hullabaloo was raided about eh unitelligibility of everything that had been written before. This is what happened in the decadent Hellenictic period and in the fifteenth century, and it is happening again today. When men are incompetent in reading and writing, their inadequacy seems to express itself in their being hypercritical about everybody else's writing. A psychoanalyst would understand this as a pathological projection of one's own inadequacies on to others. The less well we are able to use words intelligibly, the more likely we are to blame others for their unintelligible speech. We may even make a fetish of our nightmares about language, and then we become semanticists for fair.
The poor semanticists! They do now know what they are confessing about themselves when they report all the books they unable to understand. Nor does semantics seem to have helped them when, after practicing its rituals, they still find so many passages uninteligible. It has not helped them to become better readers than they were before they supposed that "semantics" had the magic of "sesame." If they only had the grace to assume that the trouble was not with the great writers of the past and present, but with them as readers, they might give semantics up or, at least, use it to try to learn how to read. If they could read a little better, they would find that the world conatined a much larger number of intelligible books than they now suppose. As matters now stand for them, there are almost none.
The fact that the liberal arts are no longer generally practiced, in school or out, is plain from its consequence: namely, that students do not learn to read and write, and teachers do not know how to help them. But the cause of this fact is complicated and obscure. To explain how we got the way we are today, educationally and culturally, would probably require an elaborate history of modern times from the fourteenth century on. I shall be content to offer two incomplete and superficial explanations of what has happened.
The first is that science is the major achievement of modern times. Not only do we worship for all the comforts and utitlties, all the command over nature, which it bestowes, but we are captivated by its method as the elixir of knowledge. I am not going to argue(though I think it true) that the experimental method is not the magic key to every masnsion of knowledge. The only point I wish to make is that, under such cultural auspieces, it is natural for education to emphasize the kind of thinking and learning the scientist does, either to the neglect or to the total exclusion of all others.
We have come to disdain the kind of learning which consists in being taught by others, in favor of the kind which discovering things for ourselves. As a result, the arts appropriate to the first kind of learning, such as the art of reading, are neglected, while the arts of independent inquiry flourish.
The second explanation is related to the first. In the age of science, which is progressively discovering new things and adding to our knowledge every day, we tend to think that the past can teach us nothing. The great books on the shelves of every library are of antiquarian interest only. Let those who wish to write the history of our culture dabble in them, but who are concerned to know about ourselves, the aims of life and society, and the world of nature in which we live, must either be scientists or read the newspaper reposrts of the most recent scientific meeting.
We need not bother to read the great works of scientists now dead. They can teach us nothing. The same attitude soon extends to philosophy, to moral, political, and economic problems, to the great histories that were written before the latest researches were completed, and even to the field of literary criticism. The paradox here is that we thus come to disprage the past even in fields which do not employ the experimental method and cannot be affected by the changing content of experimental findings.
Since, in any gemeration, only a few great books ge written, most of the great ones necessarily belong to the past. After we have stopped reading the great ones of the past, we soon do not even read the few great ones of the present, and content ourselves with second- and third-hand accounts of them. There is a vicious circle in all this. Because of our preoccupation with the present moment and the latest discovery, we do not read the great books of the past. Because we do not this sort of reading, and do not think it is important, we do not bother about trying to learn to read difficult books. As a result, we do not learn to read well at all. We cannot even read the great books of the present, though we may admire them from the distance and through the seven veils of popularization. Lack of exercise breeds flabbiness. We end up by not being able to read even the good popularizations as well.
The cicious circle is worth looking at more closely. Just as you cannot improve your tennis game by playing only against opponents you can readily beat, so you cannot improve your skill in reading unless you work on something that taxes your effort and demands new resources. It follows, therefore, that in proportion as the great books have fallen from their traditional place as major sources of learning, it has become less and less possible to teach students how to read. You cannot cultivate their skill abouve the low level of their daily practice. You cannot teach them how to read well if, for the most part, they are not called upon to use the skill in its highest forms.
So much for the vicious circle as it moves in one direction. Now, coming around the other way, we find there is not much point in trying to read the great books with students who have no preaparation at all in the art of reading from their prior schooling and are not getting any in the rest of their education. That was the trouble with the Honors cours at Columbia in my day, and I suspect it still is the case with similar reading courses now given there.
In one course, which takes a small part of the students' time, you cannot discuss the books with him and also teach him how to read them. This is especially true if he comes from an elementary and secondary schooling which has paid little attention even to the rudiments of reading skill, and if the other courses in college which he is taking concurently make no demands on his ability to read for enlightment.
That has been our experience here in Chicago, too. Mr. Hutchins and I have been reading the great books with students these last ten years. For the most part, we have failed if our aim was go tive these students a liberal education. By a liberally educated student, one who deserves the degree of bachelor of liberal arts, I mean one who is able to read well enough to read the great books and who has in fact them read well. If that is the standrad, we have seldom succeeded. The fault may be ours, of course, but I am more inclined to think that we could not, in one course out of many, overcome the inertia and lack of preparation due to the rest of the antecedent and concurrent schooling.
The reform of education must start far below the college level and it must take place radically at the college level itself, if the art of reading is to become well developed and the range of reading is to be adequately by the time the bachelor's degree awarded. Unless that does happen, the bachelor's degree must remain a travesty on the liberal arts from which it takes its name. We will continue to gradute, not liberal artists bu chaotically informed and totally undisciplined minds.
There is only one college that I know of in this country which is trying to turn out liberal artists in the true sense. That is St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. There they recognize that four years must be spent in training students how to read, write, and reckon, and how to observe in a laboratory, at the same time that they are reading the great books in all fields. There they realize that there is no point trying to read the books without developing all the arts needed to read them, and likewise that it is impossible to cultivate these basic intellectual skills without at the samt time giving the right matter toexercise them on.
They have many handicaps to overcome at St. John's, but not lack of interest in the students or unwillingness to do the work which is required of no other college students today. The students do not feel that their sacred liberties are being trampled on because they do not have the freedom of elective choices. What is good for them educationally is prescribed. The students are interested and are doing the work. But one of the major handicap is that the students come to St. John's from high schools which turn them out totally unprepared. Another is the inability of the American public, the parents as well as the educators, to appreciate what St. John's is trying to do for American education.
This is the deplorable state of American education today, despite the pronouncements and programs of some of its leaders.
President Butler has writter eloquently, in his annual reports and elsewhere, of the primary importance of such intellectual disciplines as manifest themselves in good writing and reading. He has summarized the truth about the tradition of learning in a single pragraph:
Only the scholar can realize how little that is being said and thought in the modern world is in anys sense new. It was the colossal triumph of the Greeks and Romans and of the great thinkers of the middle ages to sound the depths of almost every problem which human nature has to offer, and to interpret human thought and human aspiration with astounding profundity and insight. Unhappily, these deep-lying facts which should be controlling in the life of a civilized people, are known only to few, while the many grasp, now at an ancient and well-demonstrated falsehood ahd how at an old and well-proved truth, as if each had all the attractions of novelty.
The many need not be unfortunate, if schools and colleges trained them to read and made them read the books which constitute their cultural heritage. But it is not being done, certainly not to any extent, at Columbia or Harvard, at Princeton, Yale, or California. It is not being more spoken than Dr. Butler, and has been unquestionably explicit in his plan for the reform of the college curriculum so that the ends of liberal education may ve served.
Why? There are many causes, not the least of which are such familiar ones as the inertia of vested interests; the devotion of most college teachers to competence in some field of specialized research rather than in general or liberal education; and undue magnification of the scientific method and its latest findings. But one other cause, certainly, is general apathy about this whole business of reading, an apathey which comes, I think, from an equally general lack of understading of what is involved. I have often wondered if the situation could be changed until the faculties themselves had learned to read the great books and had read them—not the rew which belong to their own academic niche, but all of them.
The situation I have described exists not only in school but outside as well. The public is paying for the education; it must be satisfied with what it is getting. The only way that one can account for the failure of the public to rise up in arms is that it doesn't care or that it really doesn't understand what's wrong. I cannot believe the first. It must be the second. An educational system and the culture in which it exists tend to perpetuate each other.
There is a vicious circle here too. Perhaps it can be broken by adult education, by making the adult population aware of what is wrong with the schools they went through and to which they are now sending their children. One of the first thing to do is to make them appropriate what a liberal education could be in terms of skill reading and writing, and the profit in books to be read. I would rather try to overcome their apathy than to addres myself to some of my colleagues in the educational business.
That the general public is also apathetic about reading cannot be questioned. You know it, and do not have to be told. The publishers know it also. It might interest you to eavesdrop on the publishers talking about you, the general public, their trade. Here is one addressing his fellow publishers in their weekly trade journal.
He begins by saying that "college graduates who do not know how to read constitute a major indictment of American educational methods, and a constant challenge to the country's publishers and booksellers. Large numbers college educators do know how to read, but there are far too many whose acute reading apathy might be described as an occupational disease.
He knows what the trouble is: "Students are taught by teachers who are themselves victims of the same educational process, and who openly or sub-consciously have a positive distaste for disinterested reading... Instead of stepping forth as an eager candidate for continuing education, who should look forward to a lifetime of learning and reading after commencement, we get an unripe bachelor of arts, who is scarcely an adult and who shuns education like the plague."
He calls upon the publishers and booksellers to do their share in winning the nation back to books, and concludes thus:
If the five million college graduates of this country increased their book-reading time by even as little as ten percent., the results would be tremendous. If people generally changed their intellectual fuel or re-charged their mental batteries with same reggularity they devoted to changing motor oil every thousand miles, or replacing frayed playing cards, there might be something like a rebirth of learning in our republic... As it is, we are distinctly not a book-reading country. We wallow in magazines, and drug ourselves with movies...
People sometimes marvel at spectacular best-sellers like The Outline of History, The Story of Philosophy, The art of Thinking, or Van Loon's Geography—books which sell in hundreds of thousands, and sometines reach a million readers. My comment is "Not enough!" I look at the census figures, and behold the intellectual apathy of most college men, and exclaim "Wait till the graduates begin reading!" I applaud Walter B. Pitkin's commencement day advice. "Don't sell your books and keep yor diplomas. Sell your diplomas, if you can get anyone to buy them, and keep your books."
To sum it all up, too many men and women use their college degrees as an official license to "settle down" in an intellectual rut, as a social sanction exempting them from thinking their own thoughts, and buying their own books.
Another publishers says, "millions of people who can read and do read newspapers and magazines never read books." He figures out they might be induced to read books if they were only made a little more like magazine articles—shorter, simpler, and designed in general for those who like to run while reading. This enter rise, called The People's Library, and described as "a scientific effort to increase the reading of serious books," seems to me to defeat its own avowed purpose. You cannot elevate people by going down to their level. If they succeed in geting you there, there they will keep you, for it is easier to get you to stay down than for them to move up.
Not by making books less like books, but by making people more like readers, must be the change be effected. The plan behind The People's Library is as blind to the causes of the situations its sponsors are trying to cure as the people are at Harvard who complain about the rampant tutoring schools, without realizing that the way to remedy that evil is to lift the Harvard education above the level where the turoting schools can prepare students more efficiently for ene examinations than the faculty can.
The publishers are not concerned so much about the reading of the great books as about the good new books they would like to publish if they could find readers for them. But they know—or if they don't, they should—that these two things are connected. The ability to read for enlightment, and consequent upon that the desire to do so, is the sine qua non of any serious reading. It may be that the causal sequence works either way. Starting with good current books, a reader may be lead to the great books, or vice versa. I am sure that the readr who does one will eventually do the other. I would guess that the probability of this doing either is higher if he has ever once read a great book through and with suficient skill to enjoy his mastery fo the subject mattter.
This has been a long jeremiad. There has been much weping and gnashing of teeth about the state of the nation. Because you just dislike the words, you may despari of "a new deal," or maybe you are the hopeless type who says, "'Twas ever thus." On the latter point. I must disagree. There have been times in European history when the level of reading was higher than it is now.
In the late Middle Ages, for instance, there were men who could read better than the best readers today. Of couse, it is true that there were fewer men who could read, that they had fewer books to read, and that they depended upon reading more than we do as a source of learning. The point remains, however, that they mastered the books they valued, as we mastered nothing today. Maybe we do not respect any book as they valued the Bible, the Koran, or the Talmud; a text of Aristotle; a dialogue of Plato; or the Institute of Justinian. However that may be, they developed the art of reading to a higher point than it ever reacherd before or since.
We must get over all our funny prejudices about the Middle Ages and go to the men who wrote exegeses of Scripture, glosses on Justinian, or commentaries on Aristotle for the most perfect models of reading. These glosses and commentaries were not condensations or digests. They were analytical and interpretative readings of a wrothy text. In fact, I might as well confess here that I have learned much of what I know about reading from examining a medieval commentary. The rules I am going to prescribe are simply a formulation of the method I have observed in watching a medieval teacher read a book with his students.
Compared to the brilliance of thw twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the present era is much more like the dark ages of the sixth and the seventh centuries. Then the librarires had been burned or closed. There were few books available and fewer readers. Today, of course, we have more books and libraries than ever before in the history of man. In one sense, too, there are more men who can read. But it is the sense in which this is true that makes the point. So far as reading for understanding goes, the libraries might just as well be close and the printing presses stopped.
But, you will say, we are libing in a democratic era. It is mnore important that many men should be able to read a little than a few men should be able to read well. There is some truth in that, but not the whole truth. Genuine participation in democratic processes of self-government requires greater literacy than many have yet been given.
Instead of comparing the present with the late middle ages, let us make the comparison with the eighteenth century, for in its way that was a period of enlightenment which sets a relevant standard for us. The democratization of society had already then begun. The leaders of the movement, in this country and abroad, were liberally educated men, as no college graduate is today. The men who wrote and ratified the Constitution knew how to read and write.
While we have properly undertaken to make the public education more widespread than it was in the eighteenth century education need not become less liberal as it becomes more universal. At every level and for all elements in the population, the same kind of education—for freedom through discipline—which enabled democracy to take root in this country must be regained if its flowering it to be protected today from the winds of violence abroad in the world.
All you have to do is to read the writings os John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, to know that they could read and write better than we or our leaders can today. If you look into the curriculum of the colonial colleges, you may discover how this happened. You will discover that a liberal educatiion was once given in this country. True, not everyone received this liberal education. Democracy had not het matured to the point of widespread popular education.
Even today it may true that some part of the population must be vocationally trained, while another part is liberally educated. For even a democracy must have leaders, and its safety depends on their caliber, their liberalism. If we do not want leaders who boast of thinking with their blood, we had better educate and, more than that, cultivate a respect for those who can think with their minds, minds liberated by discipline.
One point more. There is a lot of talk today, among liberal educators who fear the rise of Fascism, about the dangers of regimentation and indoctrination. I have already pointed out that many of them confuse discipline with Prussian drill and the goose step. They confuse authority, which is nothing but the voice of reason, with autocracy or tyranny. But the error they make about indoctrination is the saddest. They, and most of us, do not know what docility is.
To be docile is to be teachable. To be teachable one must have the art of being taught and must practice it actively. The more active one is in learning from a teacher, dead or alive, and the more art one uses to master what he has to teach, the more docile one is. Docility, in short, is the precise opposite of passivity and gullibility. Those who lack docility—the students who fall asleep during a class—are the most likely to be indoctrinated. Lacking the art of being taught, whether thath be skill in listening or in reading, they do not know how to be active in receiving what is communicated to them. Hence, they either receive nothing at all or what they receive they absorb uncritically.
Slighting the three R's in the beginning, and neglecting the liberal arts almost entirely at the end, our present education is essentially illiberal. It indoctrinates rather than disciplines and educates. Our students are indoctrinated with all sorts of local prejudices and predigested pap. They have been fattened and made flabby for the demogogues to prey upon. Their resistance to specious authority, which is nothing but pressure of opinion, has been lowered. They will even swallow the insidious porpaganda in the headlines of some local newspapers.
Even when the doctrines they impose are sound democratic ones, the schools fails to cultivate free judgement because they have forsaken discipline. They leave their students open to opposite indoctrination by more powerful orators or, what is worse, to the sway of their own worst passions.
Ours is a demagogic rather than a democratic education. The student who has not learned to think critically, who has not come to respect reason as they only arbiter of truth in human generalizations, who has not been lifted out of the blind alleys of local jargons and shibboleths, will not be saved by the orator of the classroom from later succumbing to the orator of the platform and the press.
To be saved, we must follow the precept of the Book Common Prayer: "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest."
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