Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 343
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Professor Emeritus McGill
University, B.A. (Toronto), Ph.D.
(Chicago), Litt.D. (Brown,
Dartmouth and Toronto),
LL.D. (Queen’s and McGill),
D.C.L. (Bishop’s).
McGill University
October 1, 1939
TOO MUCH COLLEGE
CHAPTER I. EDUCATION EATING UP LIFE
EDUCATION LONGER AND longer — Life ten years too late, and Death on time — Where we got our Curriculum — Mediaeval Schools with Modern Extension — A Scholar and a Gentleman, plus a Scientist and a Business Man — The Straws on the Camel’s Back
In this discussion of education, I am addressing myself to plain people. By this I mean people who shudder at mathematics, go no further in Latin than E Pluribus Unum and take electricity as they find it. As opposed to these are the academic class who live in colleges, or in the shadow of them, and claim education as their province. But the plain people are of necessity interested in education because their sons and daughters go to college, or, more important, can’t go to college.
Now the plain people have noticed that education is getting longer and longer. Fifty years ago people learned to read out of a spelling-book at six years old, went to high school at twelve, and taught school (for money) on a third-class certificate at sixteen. After that, two years in a saw-mill and two at a medical school made them doctors, or one year in a saw-mill and one in divinity fitted them for the church. For law they needed no college at all, just three summers on a farm and three winters in an office.
All our great men in North America got this education. Pragmatically, it worked. They began their real life still young. With the money they didn’t spend they bought a wife. By the age of thirty they had got somewhere, or nowhere. It is true that for five years of married life, they carried, instead of a higher degree, bills for groceries, coal, doctors and babies’ medicine. Then they broke out of the woods, into the sunlight, established men — at an age when their successors are still demonstrating, interning, or writing an advanced thesis on social impetus.
Now it is all changed. Children in school at six years old cut up paper dolls and make patterns. They are still in high school till eighteen, learning civics and social statistics — studies for old men. They enter college at about nineteen or twenty, take prerequisites and post-requisites in various faculties for nearly ten years, then become demonstrators, invigilators, researchers, or cling to a graduate scholarship like a man on a raft.
At thirty they are just beginning, ten years too late. They can’t marry till it’s ten years too late; they have children ten years too late, and die ten years too early. They know nothing of the early life of the man who worked in saw-mills, practiced medicine at twenty and married six months later, with no other property than a stethoscope and a horse and buggy; or of the young lawyer who married in debt, and lived happy in it ever after.
“Safety first” has put its stamp on life. Population begins to die at the top. And, all the time, education grows longer and longer. This does not deny that the average human life is now longer. It means that paternity is shorter. People do not see enough of their grandchildren — the sweetest prospect in the world. Life has all too little evening. It has all run in arrears and never catches up.
All this, you will say, is exaggerated, is overcolored, is not truth. Very likely. But a half truth in argument, like a half brick, carries better. High colors show up where neutral tints blend to nothing. Yet the main truth gets over. Education is eating up life.
In the above paragraphs I have formulated the plain man’s accusations against the continued lengthening of education; or, rather, I must not say his accusation. The poor fellow hasn’t the spirit to accuse. It is not an accusation that he formulates or a grievance that he voices. It is just a burden that he carries.
He carries it because of the prestige of education. Round the idea of education, as effort and opportunity, there have clustered centuries of tradition and association. These are stamped in such words and phrases as “the little red schoolhouse,” “the midnight oil,” “the eager student,” “the kindly dominie,” “the absent-minded professor.” With this has grown up the notion — no doubt partly true — that the harder the path of learning the higher the achievement. “There is no royal road to learning” still cheers those who are unaware that the public road itself has become over-grown with a jungle of underbrush.
In other words, people don’t complain. On the contrary, they are often proud of the burden that they carry. Parents have no regrets for the fifteen years of sacrifice that they made to give their children the education they should have had in half the time.
It is a tradition with us that education opens opportunity. To send a boy to college is an ambition that wakes to life beside a cradle. “How is your son doing at school, Mr. McGregor?” I once asked of a Scotsman of the traditional type. “Fine!” he answered. “If he keeps on as he is, we’ll have to put the college to him.”
Even in the clutter and failure of youth’s career among the blocked avenues of our misfit world the college comes into its own as a sort of refuge. “My son,” said another parent, “doesn’t seem to have any particular ability, so we think we’ll have to send him to college. He seems no good for anything else.” The one anxiety of such parents is, “Can he get in?” Beyond that no need to look. It’s like being dipped in the Jordan.
But even if the plain man were to raise his complaint against the lengthening road and the increasing burden, he would be laughed out of court by the academic class. He would be told that our education is all too short. The teachers in the high schools would say that the children come to them hopelessly unprepared and ought to stay a year longer in public school.
Every professor will tell them that the first-year students at college are simply hopeless and ought to have stayed at least a year, or call it two, at high school. The students in the second year ought never to have left the first; the third-year men haven’t the proper grounding for their work; and the fourth-year are so rotten that they have to be given degrees to get rid of them. As for the graduate school, the students in it should never have been admitted; they are not yet fit for advanced work. Their minds are immature. And even when they do get out of the graduate school, by sheer lapse of time, it seems ridiculous to think of them as fit to teach, or do anything. Oh, no; they have to go to Germany for a year — anyway, to somewhere for a year — and come back with whiskers and look like something.
I once put the question of shortening the college curriculum to my old friend Dean Elderberry Foible, dean of the Faculty of Arts. You didn’t know him, but there was a dean at your college just like him. “Preposterous,” he said, “preposterous!” And that settled it.
If we turn from the general view to the particular subjects, the case against any attempt to shorten the curriculum becomes simply overwhelming — so much so that we are crushed and humbled in presenting it. Imagine trying to leave out mathematics — the queen of sciences; or history — the very basis for understanding our modern life; or English literature — our legacy common to England and America, dear as the very hearthstones of our homes — who dares touch that?
Or who will dare disturb Latin, the bedrock of our culture; or foreign languages, the amenity of polite life; or geology, deep as the caverns of thought; biology, life’s interpretation; or the social sciences, the key to the padlock of happiness still closed. Help! Nothing but pretentious ignorance could suggest leaving out anything. As to any shortening, ask again my friend Dean Elderberry Foible and he will tell you that you can’t. “My dear sir, you may wish to, but you simply can’t” — with that academic finality with which professors dismiss the ideas of students.
So it appears even to ourselves on a first survey. Take mathematics. How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasture — nothing but years of effort can extract it. You can’t hurry the process.
Or pass from arithmetic to algebra: you can’t shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Indeed, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon. So died, for each of us, still bravely fighting, our mathematical training; except only for a set of people called “mathematicians” — born so, like crooks. Yet would we leave mathematics out? No, we hold our cross.
Latin too: do you want your son to grow up not knowing what a sine qua non is, and who wrote Virgil’s Aeneid? Then he not only needs the whole present curriculum but more! At present the student learns just enough Latin not to be able to read it; he stops short of the saturation point — just gets wet with it and no more.
But why recite the entire list? The same truth holds, for the academic profession, of every one of the subjects of the school and college course. The student is not saturated, when he ought really to be soaked.
A parallel resistance blocks the pathway leading to the professions. The idea of any immediate entry into them, for a young man just out of college is ridiculous. A hundred years ago a man just out of college looked as good as a coin fresh from the mint, a sickle from the whetstone. At twenty-seven he was a Member of Congress, had four or five children, owned three or four thousand dollars’ worth of property in his own right — and owed five thousand dollars. But nowadays! Imagine trusting a serious case of illness to a young fellow of twenty-seven barely out of college, and till yesterday an interne in a hospital. Out of the question!
And, later, when at last his turn comes, it is but a brief acme of success, and then, all of a sudden, it seems people are saying, “He’s too old for the job, losing his grip — in fact, he’s nearly fifty.” He’s an “old doctor” — once a term of esteem and confidence but now equivalent to an “old horse.”
Thus in our ill-fit world youth and age jostle and hurry one another together — too young and then too old. Those who follow gardening know that green peas are first too young to pick and then, overnight as it seems, too old to eat. So with our educated people. Homer long ago said, “As is the race of leaves, so is the race of men.” Make it college graduates and garden peas and it still holds good.
How did all this come about? Our system of education arose out of the mediaeval Latin schools of the church. It still carries, like a fossil snake in a stone, the mark of its original structure. Not that this was the earliest kind of education. But the others were different. Greek education included music and dancing and what we call the arts. It was supposed to fit people to live. Mediaeval education was supposed to fit people to die. Any school-boy of today can still feel the effect of it.
Greek education was free from the problems that have beset our own. It didn’t include the teaching of languages, the Greeks despising all foreigners as barbarians. It avoided everything “practical” like the plague, and would have regarded a professor of Engineering as a child of the devil, misusing truth. Mathematics, crippled by the want of symbols, became a sort of dream — intense, difficult and proudly without purpose. Greek education carried with it no “exams” and “tests” for entry to the professions. A Greek dentist didn’t have to pass in Latin. He used a hammer.
Thus philosophy, “the love of knowledge,” came into its own, in talk as endless as on the porch of a Kentucky country store.
“Scholars” would deny the truth of this summary and talk of Archimedes, the world’s first engineer, and Hippocrates, its earliest physician. But the proof of what I say is that Archimedes found no followers and Hippocrates waited five hundred years for Galen. Scholars always see exceptions where a plain man sees an even surface. But even a billiard ball, if you look close enough, is all covered with bumps.
Our education, then, comes down to us from the schools of the Middle Ages. These were organized by the church and the first aim was piety, not competence; the goal was the reading of the Scriptures and by that the salvation of the soul. On this basis, Alfred the Great planned schools for Saxon England. So, too, in France did Charlemagne, who couldn’t read or write and felt a religious admiration for those who could — the same as an oil magnate of today feels toward a university.
So presently the monastic schools arose, and from their oriel windows came forth among the elm trees the sound of Latin chants intoned by choristers; and in the silent scriptorium the light from a stained window fell on the quiet “copyist” rewriting, letter by letter, in pigment upon parchment, “In the beginning was the Word.” Thus passed monastic life in its quiet transition to Eternity.
These were the earliest schools — secluded, scholarly — born ancient like the “old-fashioned” children of aging parents. For the date, place them anywhere in the four hundred years from Alfred and Charlemagne to the days of Oxford and Paris.
These later schools — Oxford, Paris, and such — came when study no longer taught people how to die and keep out of hell, but how to live, as lawyers — two ambitions with an obvious relationship. Law hatched out under the wings of the church, as a duck hatches under a hen, later to horrify its parent.
Here again the vertebrate structure is still seen in the rock. Lincoln’s Inn and Grey’s Inn were originally, in a sense, works of God, the defunct Doctors Commons till its end a spirituality. Law, in England at least, struggled long before it shook off the hand of ghostly guidance. Even now the connection between law and religion remains in the quantity of oaths by which the business of the law secures its righteousness.
So there came, then, such schools as Oxford and Paris, which seem to have been at first huge random gatherings of students — mediaeval exaggeration puts 30,000 at Oxford in pre-record days. They had, before printing, hardly any books, and no examinations. The curriculum ran to endless discussion — more Kentucky. These “disputations” begot “tests” and awards (degrees) and brought into the world that child of sin, the written examination. A few odd people like Roger Bacon began digging into black knowledge about gunpowder, and so forth, and got put into jail for it. The lamp of learning still fell only on the Kingdom of Light, with lawyers dancing in the shadow.
The curriculum of these schools, the bedrock on which ours still rest, was the famous trinity of study, the Trivium, which meant grammar, rhetoric and logic; to this was supplemented the four further studies called the Quadrivium — music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. All were based on the use of Latin; they comprehended the whole circuit of human knowledge, and the supreme purpose of it all was salvation. The monk Alcuin, who was Charlemagne’s “specialist” in education, has described for us how he taught his students:
To some I administer the honey of the sacred writings; others I try to inebriate with the wine of the ancient classics. I begin the nourishment of some with the apples of grammatical subtlety. I strive to illuminate many by the arrangement of the stars, as from the painted roof of a lofty palace.
The whole extent of human knowledge was still within human comprehension. In our own day we meet men who think they “know it all.” In the Middle Ages there were men who were sure they did. Of course, where knowledge ended superstition began, and that was infinite.
It was this curriculum which in the course of centuries has been expanded beyond recognition like the toad in Aesop that would be an ox. And still it has not burst. It drags along its huge amorphous outline, flabby as a dinosaur, over fifteen years of life.
Here is what happened to expand it. The revival of learning resuscitated Greek, a study forgotten by all but the Arabs. The rising kingdoms that replaced feudalism brought national States and set people to learning one another’s languages. The English, having forgotten French, had to learn it again. Italian became “polite.” Milton suggested that one ought to learn it, “in an odd hour.” Modern languages were still not a part of education, but a sort of annex; so they remained till yesterday in England where all Englishmen were supposed to “know French” from a governess and a copy of Ollendorff’s Grammar and a trip to Boulogne. But, till yesterday, Eton, Rugby and Oxford never heard of it.
Printing, once in real use, expanded both opportunity and obligation. Students henceforth had books. Contacts with the Arabs revealed a system of decimal notation that made arithmetic a reality and algebra a power. Mathematics in the time of the Stuarts, with logarithms and the calculus, ceased to be a dream. Physics converted Alcuin’s wonder of the sky into classroom formulae.
But even though mathematics in the sixteen hundreds, in the days of Newton and Descartes, had become a real and intensive study — far transcending in reach and in difficulty anything within the range of the ordinary college man of today — it was still regarded rather as an annex to learning than as learning itself. The place of priority still lay with classical study, with the literature of Greece and Rome. In this America was a faithful child of England. Our earliest college education was stamped with Roman letters, and its passion for the Bible in the wilderness made it even revert somewhat to the mediaeval type. The rules that were promulgated in 1642 for admission to Harvard College lay down the qualification thus: —
When any scholar is able to understand Tully or such like classical Latin author extempore, and to make and speak true Latin in verse and prose, suo ut aiunt Marte: and to decline perfectly the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue: let him then and not before be capable of admission into the college.
For readers whose Latinity has slipped away from them, let it be explained that Tully is not Irish, but means Cicero. Earlier generations properly called Romans by their names, and not, as we have come to do, with many of them, by their nicknames. Tully was called “Cicero” (or bean-head) as one of us might be called “Shorty.” Harvard Latin in 1642 was still undefiled.
