THE ASSAULT ON HUMANISM

No more effective spokesman for the classics exists than Dr. Paul Shorey, who is a graduate of Harvard and Munich, besides having studied at several other American and European universities. He has also received honorary degrees from nine American universities. He has been professor and head of the department of Greek at the University of Chicago for many years. In addition to writing numerous classical studies, Dr. Shorey has been the editor of Classical Philology since 1908.

Points of View

1. PRESIDENT ELIOT directs his argument not against Latin as a choice or opportunity but against Latin as a requirement. To what extent is Latin still a requirement? To what extent is Latin elected by those who are not required to take it?

2. What are the values of Latin for boys and girls of linguistic and literary interest? Can these values be realized through the Latin taught in our secondary schools? If a pupil drops Latin on entrance to college without having studied Horace, Catullus, or other lyric poets, Livy or other historians, Terence, Plautus or other dramatists, can he get from Latin its full literary, historical, or social values? How many who study Latin in secondary school drop it in college? Would it be advisable to insist that Latin, once carried beyond its elements, receive enough attention to yield to the student its values as literature and as a medium for the expression of the Roman mind?

3. Is Professor Shorey's argument for the retention of Latin as an offering or of Latin as a requirement?

4. Is it possible for anyone who does not study the classics to acquire the humanist attitude and spirit in any other way? Because boys who study Latin show certain characteristics, is that any proof that Latin is responsible?

THE SCHOOL SHOP

EDWARD YEOMANS

THE significance of the shop in the grade school, or even in the high school, is not understood in its total bearing on the development of children and the society for which they are being prepared.

If you are content · as most schools imply by their standard processes — with society as it is, and if you expect and hope for nothing very different, then things may remain more or less as they are, with the shop in the very inferior place in which it is found, and with the people who teach in shops wholly unequal to the magnificent opportunity afforded. At the bottom of this comparative indifference to the school shop is the philosophy - a social philosophy on which the world's institutions, even of the standard democratic type, may smash up- that the hand may be dishonored with impunity. By dishonored, I mean that hand-work may be considered inferior to brain-work to such an extent that the disparity between the rewards has, in the industries, reached the elastic limit, and prompt and copious adjustments in the other direction are imperative.

There is no health or promise of longevity in any society that consists of a huge mass of Nibelungen, spiritually, mentally, and sometimes physically, underground, beating incessantly on the anvils of their monotonous tasks, and at the other end the people of Walhalla, engaged in intrigue and exploitation, in the great game of industrial

production, and, as a result of it all, poisoning the air with their banalities.

Between these two extremes wanders at present a rather bewildered multitude, convinced of but one thing on the whole, namely, that climbing up into the seats of the scornful leisure-class is the important issue in life, overrating the brain-worker, underrating the hand-worker, their own hands hanging, - rather limply, - rattling knives, spoons, and forks; largely uninformed, unskilled, wasted.

Too many people confess without shame that they "can't use their hands.'

Do they know or care, I wonder, that the only reason why a brain-worker has a brain is because his ancestor, that blue-faced, grimacing, arboreal apparition, had a hand — a small, black, sinuous hand — with an opposable thumb? It picked things up and gazed intently at them in its shifty, nervous way dropped them, picked them up, took apart anything that would come apart, and then put it together again; got a stick and dug a hole with it; got a stone and beat nuts with it; tied the stone to the stick, and was electrified by the results. And so, painfully, agonizingly, while geologic ages crept by, under the same sun, moon, and stars that light us on our own confident way, these hands of our poor ancestors built your nest and mine, O complacent one! And will you then forget this? Is there any point of honor involved in this matter of hand-work?

A

Whether there is or no, you are involved. You cannot longer neglect the sources of sanity and strength; and these are not in brains, but in brains plus hands. And out of brains and hands combined comes that spiritual thing which alone irrigates the life of men - the thing which, after thirty years as carpenter's son and carpenter, produced a man capable of stooping to the earth before the Magdalen, and asking that most penetrating question of

the brain-workers standing there with their stones; and in his profound oriental way, telling those immortal stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Will you trace that genealogy back to the black hand of the ape and then not reverence that hand and all hands?

The old school-system under which the writer suffered was, of course, far worse than the present one in respect to this shop question. But then the life of families was much more manual than it is now. There were no telephones or electric lights, very few theatres and those expensive, no amusement parks, no automobiles, no moving pictures; in fact, there was a very different standard of interests. It was much more common to make things that could be made than to buy them, and children did more housework. Mother was not so apt to be either a "great lady" or an imitation of one, with a charming manner but defective discrimination. And father was not diverted by an automobile and a golf stick to a condition of almost total futility so far as teaching his children was concerned.

Mother and father taught the boys and girls very many very important things involving both hands and brains. Since they stopped, we have domestic science and manual training in schools. But they are still occupying humble places. The school person does not yet admit the value of shops in the school. He still sees mostly the formulæ dictated by the high schools and colleges in the form of requirements. To be "educated" or not is to pass or not pass the tests of the school people. You may be educated and still be able to pass those tests, but there are many chances that you can pass them only by stultifying yourself. And also it can safely be stated that fifty per cent of the cultivatable area of children's minds is not touched at all, but goes to complete waste like a rainless land.

However that may be, it is well to consider this: that

under the greenness and blossoming and fruitage of the mind there are certain very deep foundations, namely, the work of men's hands. And if you get a generation of people to thinking that the vegetation that grows out of this soil is so superior to it that it can afford to insulate itself, why then you get a generation whose strength has clean gone out of it, like the strength of Antæus, held off the earth by Hercules.

Teachers, lawyers, ministers, statesmen, writers, and business men must be only phantoms and something less than real when they are in touch only with their own kind, and shut off from this other kind, whose opinion, though slow and sometimes inarticulate, after all is the final opinion, because the whole organic chemistry of society can be produced only by the salts which they supply. There is a very strong current in our affairs even to-day running from a region known as feudalism, which is not any particular place in history so much as a particular area in the human heart, and one of the coldest and darkest. And this feudalistic polar current can chill a great many generous efforts in school and out.

And yet, too, hand-work needs always to be interpreted to itself, in order to feel itself an integral part of all that is beautiful and illuminative. It cannot be merely vocational; it cannot be postponed to the high-school and technical-school period. It belongs in the elementary school, and should be given there the space and the time its importance demands, namely, as much space and time as any most favored subject. Over the door of such a school you could then write these two words of Horace, “Integer vitæ," meaning wholeness of life, symmetry of life, soundness of life, and therefore poise and strength of life.

May I describe a shop and a shopman as, let us say, they exist in the school at X.