WHAT OF LIBERAL EDUCATION?

DAVID SNEDDEN

I

Is liberal education losing in power to attract youth? This is alleged in many quarters. In college and secondary schools the studies which wear a vocational aspect are being preferred, we are told, to those that minister to the larger ideals of life. Education toward practical achievement is being sought by an increasing number of students, while the numbers of those seeking in the humanities the elevating influences which a higher civilization needs do not increase proportionately. The advocates of an effective vocational education are not infrequently embarrassed by the charge that they are promoting the decay of much that makes for kindled ideal, sympathetic insight, and personal culture. They have not always the hardihood to suggest that perhaps the waning of interest in liberal education may be occasioned largely by lack of adaptation in its own instruments and methods. May it not be possible that the demand for the essentials of liberal education is no less strong than formerly, but that ancient ways of meeting it no longer suffice?

Clearly, better foundations are needed for liberal education in school and college. Professors and teachers of the liberal arts still reflect in a measure the ideals and methods of the cloister and of the leisured world in which their calling found its aristocratic and exclusive origins. Quite naturally, they are usually strong in their faiths, and

resentful of scrutiny into the social validity of their purposes; and it would be surprising if, under the circumstances, they proved themselves able to evaluate in any fundamental way the effectiveness of their means and methods in promoting culture and social worth under modern democratic conditions.

Schoolmen - teachers of the liberal arts in school and college can be credited with a fine devotion to the study of those fields of knowledge in which their scholarly interests lie; but, with rare exceptions, they have not been students of teaching. They have mastered subjectmatter, the means of education, but not pedagogy, the art of effectively applying the means. They have not yet evolved a satisfactory philosophy of liberal education to supersede the store of educational dogmas, psychological misconceptions, and cultural mysticisms which they inherited.

Yet our schools and colleges are thronged as never before by those seeking or sent to seek higher education. Over a million boys and girls, under no legal compulsion, now pursue the traditional types of liberal learning in public secondary schools in America; and the men and women in the colleges are to be numbered by hundreds of thousands. But much of the work done in these institutions is without clear purpose, and is therefore largely futile as regards the finer ends of liberal education.

Efficiency in education, as elsewhere in the regions of conscious effort, involves on the one hand a fairly clear conception of goals to be reached, and on the other a degree of certitude as to the probable functioning of the means and methods employed. Our institutions devoted to liberal education are not able to apply to themselves tests of efficiency along these lines; they have no acceptable formulations of their purposes; and equally — and partly as a consequence - they have no sufficient evidence

as to the efficacy of the procedures which they use. These schools receive the picked personalities of the community, from the standpoint both of natural inheritance and of social surroundings. Intelligent men and women naturally expect the schools to enhance in marked degree the civic and cultural possibilities of these young people. Neither parents nor public are satisfied with the results. In spite of the large attendance in school and college, faculties allege that there is a waning of interest in intellectual pursuits. Students are perfunctory in their devotion to serious studies, except to those appealing to practical motives. Vocational education seems often to have the stronger claims on attention and interest. Because of the greater efficiency of its procedures it may, indeed, tend to attract students at an age when, for them, a further liberal education, if effective, would be preferable.

Vocational education is capable, at best, of making only partial and somewhat incidental contributions to liberal education, no matter how we conceive the latter. A democracy surely needs liberal education, widely developed, as something distinct from vocational capacity. The lawyer can be given, somehow, interest in music and art quite unconnected with his vocation; the farmer may have his taste for literature, sociology, or astronomy; and the machinist may touch with some appreciation, in his leisure hours, such remote fields as the plant world, or the interior decoration of a home.

May we not, in fact, still find it desirable to defend, in a degree, liberal education in terms of its differences from vocational education; not indeed in disparagement of the latter, as the cloistered schoolman has done, but as furnishing the vital complementary factors to it? Man, to be of use to himself and to society, must be a producer of utilities of some sort; and it is folly to disparage this function or to deny its importance in any sane scheme of

education. But man is also a consumer; he is a user of the endlessly varied output of the labor and inspiration of others. To produce little and consume much is a characteristic of parasitical forms of life; but to produce well and consume badly gives us, in the human sphere, narrow, illiberal, self-limiting, and ultimately self-destroying individualities. The modern world insists on specialization in productive activities as the keynote to efficiency; but it must learn to insist equally on the democratization and universalizing of fine consuming capacities, as a condition of maintaining the larger forms of social life. One of the vices almost always inherent in certain forms of social aristocracy is the artificial specialization of some consuming functions.

Are there not revealed in the distinctions here presented the clues to the methods and functions of liberal education? Man stands in a twofold relationship to the world: he is a producer of utilities and also a consumer. As producer he writes books, or constructs machines, or raises wheat, or builds houses, or heals the sick, or conveys travelers; and for any of these activities he can be trained. As consumer he is inspired by books, served by machines, nourished by bread, sheltered by houses, healed by physicians, and carried by railways; and for the wise and profitable exercise of these activities he can also be trained. He specializes in production; but manufacture, and printing, and steam enable him to universalize in consumption. What we call the social inheritance - knowledge, ideals, institutions, inventions, all capitalized in more or less permanent forms-is at the disposal of any qualified user. In a world of specialized producers, each person who is sufficiently trained in utilization has for his enjoyment and service endless stores of science, of art, of religious ideals, of political capacity, and of economic

resources.

II

The world needs able producers, and education to that end will never be amiss; but it also needs, as a condition of social well-being, consumers who can utilize material and spiritual products to their own advantage, and also to the advantage of those who are of high grade among producers. Do I buy inferior newspapers, when better are available? I not only injure myself, but I lend my influence to lowering the standards of newspaper production. Does one prefer cheap and ephemeral fiction to the standard writings of the great masters? Not only does he fail to realize his own best good, but he becomes measurably responsible for the failure of other potential great masters to reach the stage of high creative work. Do we, as a people, reward with our approval and patronage unscientific medical attendance, conscienceless political service, and life-impairing industrial activity? We pay, as a rule, our own penalty; but society is also permanently the loser in scientific medicine, in political honesty, and in genuinely efficient industry.

Is not the essence of liberal education to be found in the conception of man as a user? Is it possible to call a man liberally educated, who, as a user, habitually makes inferior choices from the fields of art, literature, religion, applied science, convivial association, political leadership, and travel? Fortunately, we no longer hold the older notion that culture is inseparable from certain specialized forms of appreciation, such as ability to read Greek, speak French, recite sonnets, or discuss the latest fiction; and we are slowly learning to conceive it as something deeper than the mere possession of etiquette and a set of conventions.

The liberally educated man of the twentieth century will not be the member of a narrow cult. From many quarters