Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 352
Let me quote from a recent educational book, one of a multiplying many:
John F — in school made life miserable for his teacher and also for the other children. He threw erasers across the room. He threw snowballs through the window. He dumped the waste paper all over the floor. He erased all the things the teacher had on the board.
The old-fashioned teacher [the author adds] would say he needed a good thrashing.
I must confess that it seems to me that the old-fashioned teacher would not be far wrong. In the days when I taught school, half a century ago, I think I could have solved the John F — problem to ten places of decimals with three feet of bamboo. But it appears from the text before us that I would have been all wrong. What John F — needed, we are told, is love. It was the lack of this that made him throw the erasers round. He was “expressing himself.” What he was trying to put across was “Love me, or I’ll sock you with this eraser.” It is somewhat the same idea as the Nazis have over in Central Europe.
Why did John F — need love? Because, apparently, he had picked up a complex, a little sister complex. At home his little sister Clara had been the family pet and he hadn’t. Who wouldn’t sling ink under provocation like that?
Or consider the psychology of business. This, with its sub-divisions on salesmanship and such, fills many courses. Is there any such thing? No, of course not, or only in the sense in which there is a psychology of conversation, or psychology of fishing, or of taking a motor ride, or a psychology of silence.
And salesmanship! Open any of the manuals on it (I admit they are getting fewer; it has been a flop) and you will be introduced to a nut called the Prospect. This doesn’t mean a landscape; it means the man to whom you are going to sell something. The nut called the Prospect doesn’t want it, but you are going to make him take it. You do it partly with your eye (the nut wilts when you look at him), partly by “suggestion” and partly by “personality.” This last attribute will sell anything, but to acquire it you need at least three hours a week for half a year, and must put up about a hundred dollars. This salesmanship psychology has invaded our language; people talk now of “selling an idea” — that is, making it popular. If you want to get up a club picnic you must get some live fellow to “sell fresh air”; if you’re going to help a church you’ll have to have a group of canvassers to go and sell religion. The last stage is when you are so smart that you can sell yourself. They did it in the Middle Ages and the idea is back again.
The psychology of politics — another piece of nonsense. I knew once a wealthy old Ontario lumber-man who said, “If any man can change his politics after an election quicker than I can, I want to see him.” You can, if you like, make a book of that sort of thing; but you don’t need four hours a week, four months a year (Mon., Tues., Thurs., Sat.) to understand it.
With that go the psychology tests and questionnaires:
As our firm has an application from Mr. William Worm for a job as a calliper, will you kindly give your (confidential) opinion as to his (1) Personality (2) Malleability (3) Obesity (4) Mortality....
In reply to which the Department of Psychology assigns to William Worm his proper percentage in each.
The psychologist, in other words, has managed so to impose himself on the world that he is now “called in” in a difficulty, like an emergency plumber. When he takes the final step of being “Open Day and Night,” his status will be complete. Meantime, as far as we are concerned with a curriculum for people who don’t want to lose a year of life over the futilities of behaviour and will take their chance on personality, psychology should be put back to where it was.
But we’re all afraid of it. It might put a curse on us, or an inhibition.
CHAPTER VIII. TEACHING THE UNTEACHABLE
THE BARNACLES ON the academic ship: Fake courses for the feeble-minded: Clothing Analysis, Dry Skiing and the Theory of Girls’ Sports as College Courses; Pedagogy and a year’s loss of life; Teaching Business; the Lotus Land of Idle Talk
In my opinion the great majority of the colleges of the United States and Canada contain in their curriculums of liberal arts an accumulation of courses which are little more than an attempt to teach the unteachable; which substitute for the rigour of real study a make-believe activity and a dilettante idleness; which try to make theory out of the commonplace and to turn the obvious into the intricate; which are as pretentious as they are futile and which in the extreme cases are the mere bogus coin of academic currency.
These courses are carried along as a dead weight, like the barnacles that gather on the bottom of a sailing ship. The only purpose that they serve is to enable young people to come to college who could never have done so in the sterner days of the old-time curriculum — young men who can study tap dancing and social behaviour but not Latin and physics; young women who can’t learn algebra but can manage archery; and young people of both sexes whose minds are nicely fitted to a course on the Theory and Practice of Badminton, or a course on Marriage, open only to seniors and pursued intensively in the spring quarter.
I cannot speak of what the situation is in Great Britain, but I am inclined to think that at any rate the newer British colleges have to some extent followed our false lead. Nor am I speaking here of the purely technical schools of medicine and applied science. I am certain that they have enough real subjects of study, of increasing interest and intensity, to make it unnecessary to fake up false ones. I am talking here of the schools of liberal arts and the associated schools of social science, commerce, education, journalism, and home economics which have invaded and overrun its territory.
The result is deplorable. Much of our study is turning to mere wool-gathering, to pretentious nonsense. The rigour of it is melting away like butter. A lot of it is so easy, so vague and so silly that anything nicely above an anthropoid ape can get a degree in it.
What are we to say, for example, to a course on Clothing Analysis, which the college curriculum says is “designed to create in the student an enthusiasm for possessing individuality in clothes”? What an awakening of genius must this course occasion! One imagines some young inspired dreamer, waking in the night and leaping from his couch to seize a piece of chalk and sketch out an idea for the shape of his pants. Graduates returning to the farm with a gold medal for individuality in clothes would be pretty expensive to keep. Yet the course is given in a university with an honoured name and a hundred years of history.
Let us set beside it, from the program of one of the largest of the State universities, a course in Kinesiology. What this is, I don’t know. I never got as far as that in Greek. But the context shows that it is for men only, and the derivation seems to indicate that it is for fast men, or perhaps for men who need speeding up. They get it three times a week — right after lunch. It must be a great strain.
And here, taken from the curriculum of a great Pacific institution, but findable in many other colleges, is an Introduction to Religion. Most of us got that at our mother’s knee. But these people get it every Tuesday and Thursday at eleven. The danger would be that they might go all to the devil by Monday night.
In the same college is a department of Physical Education for women which has among other things a set of “activities” courses. These include Dry Skiing, which ought to call for a balancing course in Wet Golf. In the list also appears “life-saving,” a thing which, in my day, students left to the bartender at seven o’clock the next morning. But these people evidently have a good time all the time; they do tennis, sailing, archery, tap dancing and wind up with tumbling. It is only fair to add that various colleges list tap dancing and archery, and one has the hardihood to announce a course on the Fundamentals of Golf for Beginners. One can imagine the boy who is taking the individual study in pants going out in plus fours to get his fundament in golf.
Even there the academic sin is not so unpardonable as in the creation of courses with made-up names that are a mere burlesque of scholarship such as Kinesiology. Put beside it, as drawing cards, taken from the 1939 calendars of various colleges, the courses in Eurambics, in Choric Speaking, and Human Ecology! This last sounds like being sick. But apparently there are students today prepared to take a course on anything with a name with a proper sound, such as Rheumatics, Spondulics or Peritonitis.
The courses I have cited above are all actual. Indeed, everything said in this chapter about these newer studies is based on an examination of the latest program of study issued by fifty American Universities, selected among the best known, among the largest and the most characteristic. I did not include any institutions of a purely freakish character. The examples that I have cited can be duplicated over and over again till even the fun squeezes dry out of them and leaves nothing but the fraud and the shame. Nor do I know of any university in the United States or Canada entirely free from this sloppy degeneration. Seven of them, Toronto, Chicago, Brown, Dartmouth, Queen’s, Bishop’s and McGill, I have the right to call my Alma Mater — either a mother under whose care I studied or at least as the wet-nurse of an honorary degree. But not even my gratitude toward these institutions can lead me to deny that they have gone astray in the wilderness with their sister colleges. Nor is this, I think, the mere complaint of an old man — Laudator temporis acti — to whom the grass was green and the sky blue fifty years ago. Some things that old men think might be true, even in this age of Youth.
All this false attempt to teach the unteachable has grown up in the last fifty years. When faith in the older classical curriculum began to weaken in a new world of science and industry, it seemed proper to expand the studies of a college to meet the expanding needs of the hour. The original motive was at least sound and praiseworthy. The idea was to make the college practical, to harmonize it with a practical world, to bring the college to the student and to teach him the things on which his livelihood would depend. A classical scholar of the older type began to appear singularly inept. He didn’t know how to drive a motor-car, or put a washer on a kitchen tap, or go down to the cellar to replace an electric fuse. For things like this you had to get “a man.” The classical scholar couldn’t go near the Stock Exchange unless a trustee held him by the hand, couldn’t read a balance sheet and didn’t know what F.O.B. meant. A mathematician was about as bad, useful to make insurance tables and the nautical almanac, but no personality, no magnetism. What the world began to need was “dynamos,” “live-wires,” “executives.”
So a new stream of studies began to flow into liberal arts — at first as a leak in the classical dam, then as a flood that swept the dam away and left only a few fragments of it as islands in the new water.
Political economy came first, highly respectable, with credentials from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. After it came sociology, a sort of windy first cousin to religion, with a letter of recommendation from Herbert Spencer. Then came education, hitherto only practice but turned now to a theory and a discipline, which not only invaded college, but set up a college of its own. Schools of commerce sprang up and flourished on the aid of business men, flattered by being automatically turned into a profession. There was now the same fervour to break away from Latin as with the Protestants to break away from Rome. With commerce came journalism and physical education, by which high jumping and skinning-the-cat were turned into theory, and home economics whereby such things as cooking, marketing and nursing the baby were dressed up as college courses, as African natives dress up in plug hats and soda water bottles on string.
In all these changes there is of course a certain modicum of reason, of sensible adaptation of older study to newer life. But the essential point is that the practical goal which they propose to reach cannot be reached by that road. Education, in the sense of the power to teach, is learned by becoming a teacher; commerce is learned in an office or a warehouse, and banking in a bank. Journalism is learned in a newspaper office and nursing the baby is learned by getting married.
College is meant to train the mind, not the thumb. A certain modicum of discussion and attention can be given in pauses of the sterner studies to such things as lectures on society at large (sociology) or to the theory of how best to learn and to teach (education). But these things as they stand are exalted and expanded out of all proportion to their usefulness. When a student turns his whole course into journalism it is as if he proposed to make his whole diet on sugar. If a student having had an Introduction to Religion goes ahead and takes ten more courses in it, I doubt if he is getting much nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven. If religion is what I think it is — a communing of the spirit with the unseen, an imminent sense of life beyond death and of duty laid upon us — I don’t see how you can take a “course” in it, unless you don’t believe in it. Human life itself is the only course in religion. What colleges call “comparative religion” would have seemed, in an age of belief, rank blasphemy.
Consider education. By this is meant not the body of knowledge itself, but the manner and mechanism of imparting it. Schools of education constantly forget this little distinction, and keep themselves well nourished by stealing over the fence. Kept within its own fields, the diet is pretty scanty. The notion that a student must spend one fifth of all his college life, one fifth of all his parents’ college money in learning how to teach the things he has learned already (four years arts, one year pedagogy) is just a sham and a fraud. If the idea is only designed to help keep the teaching profession closed, to help keep up the market, let us do it some other way, as they do in France with the closed shop called the Aggregation. But the pretence that “pedagogy” is worth a year of life is wicked.
I have a certificate in the stuff dating back to 1888. In those happy days we escaped with a three months’ sentence. I put in my time, aged eighteen, at the old Collegiate Institute of Strathroy, Ontario, and had among the pupils on whom I practiced General Sir Arthur Currie, then a boy of thirteen just entering high school. We had to study a book or two on the history of education, interesting enough, but as easy as mud pie to anyone trained on Greek and mathematics. We studied also a text or two on the theory of education, all of it as obvious as coming in out of the wet. We were taught that education must proceed from the concrete to the abstract, from the known to the unknown, and so forth.
In later life, with forty-six years of teaching, I have realized that, obvious as it is, a lot of this isn’t so. It is often very good business as a short cut to begin with something abstract and unknown, and for the moment unintelligible, and later come out into the sunlight of understanding. It is like going through a tunnel under a hill instead of wandering miles round it. All the side issues that are taught in education courses, such as school ventilation and the care of the teeth, should be left to a plumber or a doctor. Beyond these again are the excrescences, such things as a course on the list in front of me, called Field Practice in Guidance and Counselling. These are just sin against the light.
Education, as theory in a general sense, is interesting to read about and to think about. Like sociology it is fit reading for old men. But it isn’t a college course. Education, as practice, begins when you really start to teach, as I did in Uxbridge High School on a February morning in 1889. All that Strathroy had done for me was to break the ice; the plunge had still to come. A couple of months’ initiation into practical teaching, taken while still in the arts course, is all that any teacher can ever need or benefit by. To steal a year of youth is robbery. One recalls how Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case kept repeating J’accuse! That is how I feel. J’accuse Pedagogy.
Now hand me down commerce. We’ll take it on next. It is wholly impossible to teach “business” in a school or college. You can teach certain things useful as a training for an intelligent business man, such as how to read and write well, and express himself properly. In this, Latin is excellent, and enough mathematics to heighten his power of concentration. And alongside of his real education you can, if he wishes, give him a knowledge of book-keeping, though few business men know anything about it; and company organization, which most people leave to lawyers; and shorthand and typing, usually bought by the week. But the main part of the education of a business man is not to fit him for his business but to fit him to live. If a boy is to be trained for the coal and wood business, just for that, with no life apart from it and no soul, then he needs no college and college has nothing for him. Rub coal-dust on his face and put him to work at fourteen. Don’t cheat him into taking a six months’ credit on the Theory of Nut Coal.
The subject of journalism occupies an enormous space in the newer college curriculum, especially in certain universities in the Middle West. In more than one of them the courses number as many as forty, and would occupy, if taken as a total, several years of a student’s life. They range from such obvious things as the History of Journalism to special courses on writing editorials, city reporting, small town newspapers. One large institution situated among the oil wells offers a special course on reporting gas and oil, including, no doubt, explosions, a subject needing apparently an intensive training in lurid language.
Now anyone whose activity in life, in whole or in part, consists of writing must feel a certain sympathy with the attempt to bring college training to the aid of a prospective writer. That the college can be of enormous use to a young man who wants to be a journalist there is no doubt. But essentially what such a person needs is English — both literature and composition — and history with a special view of our contemporary era and our current government and a certain training in one or more modern languages, with Latin always as the background. In science he needs what is elsewhere described in the book as a “thorough smattering.” In other words a journalist must be a man with a wide education and a ready knowledge of the world in which we live. Such subjects as proof-reading and make-up and the handling of dispatches can be learned in a newspaper office, and can’t be learned anywhere else.
