OF WHAT USE is a college training?
We who have had it seldom hear the question raised might be
a little nonplussed to answer it offhand.
A certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest reply which I myself can give:
The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect,
the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you, is this:
that it should help you to know a good man when you see him.
This is as true of women's as of men's colleges;
but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction I shall now endeavor to show.
What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college education and the education
which business or technical or professional schools confer?
The college education is called higher because it is supposed to be so general and so disinterested.
At the schools you get a relatively narrow practical skill,
you are told, whereas the colleges give you the more liberal culture,
the broader outlook, the historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere,
or something which phrases of that sort try to express.
You are made into an efficient instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools;
but, apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum,
incapable of spreading light.The universities and colleges, on the other hand,
although they may leave you less efficient for this or that practical task,
suffuse your whole mentality with something more important than skill.
They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make good company of you mentally.
If they find you with a naturally boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so,
as a technical school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended;
this is what we hear among college-trained people
when they compare their education with every other sort.
Now, exactly how much does this signify?
It is certain, to begin with,
that the narrowest trade or professional training does something more
for a man than to make a skilful practical tool of him
to makes him also a judge of other men's skill.
Whether his trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing,
it develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation.
He understands the difference between second-rate
and first-rate work in his whole branch of industry;
he gets to know a good job in his own line as soon as he sees it;
and getting to know this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow,
that may, if circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work,
clean work, finished work; feeble work, slack work,
sham work hese words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity.
In so far forth,
then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a certain small degree of power
to judge of good work generally.
Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college training?
Is there any broader line ince our education claims primarily
not to be narrow n which we also are made good judges between
what is first-rate and what is second-rate only?
What is especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the humanities,
and these are often identified with Greek and Latin.
But it is only as literatures, not as languages,
that Greek and Latin have any general humanity-value;
so that in a broad sense the humanities mean literature primarily,
and in a still broader sense the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor.
Literature keeps the primacy;
for it not only consists of masterpieces but is largely about masterpieces,
being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes,
so far as it takes the form of criticism and history.
You can give humanistic value to almost anything by reaching it historically.
Geology, economics, mechanics,
are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses
to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar,
art a catalogue, history a list of dates,
and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.
The sifting of human creations! othing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities.
Essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore,
biographical history,that not of politics merely,
but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors
that have played their part.
Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time;
we acquire standards of the excellent and durable.
All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the part of men;
and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests,
how flexible the adaptations,
we gain a richer sense of what the terms better and worse may signify in general.
Our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical.
We sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act of penetrating them;
we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.
Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable.
What the colleges eaching humanities by examples
which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant hould at least try to give us,
is a general sense of what, under various disguises,
superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere,
the admiration of the really admirable the disesteem
of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent his is what we call the critical sense,
the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom.
Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so.
But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious,
and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian,
unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents,
to know it only when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others,
this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.