OF

Devoted to the Science, Art, Philosophy and Literature

VOL. XLVII.

of Education

SEPTEMBER, 1926

The Obtrusive Ego

MARY EVELYN SHIPMAN,

No. I

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, PA. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal. -Stevenson.

I

T is a tonic experience to read certain pages in the history of learning. It reassures us that the race has a high potential for intellectual enthusiasm. We have reason to believe that the description of the banquet at the house of Agathon, with its rare spirits absorbed in discussing the nature of Love and what is good for the soul, was but an image of the reality which Plato knew when he entered his classroom in the grove of Academe. Like scenes come to mind if we pass here and there among the centuries with the selective instinct of one who would wring from history some knowledge of what man in his best moments has really wanted of life.

The episode of Charlemagne and his palace school was a candle lighted in the dark. With the spread of monasteries Europe saw a thousand candles lighted. Still more impressive was the swarming of youth about great teachers in the cathedral schools and embryo universities. Abelard in his hut in the forest could not be hid. "His retreat was made known; students began to gather round him and increased with such rapidity that the wilderness became thronged with

eager souls who improvised huts of reed and straw and once more listened to the voice which was more potent than any in that age." That learning should be in the hands of a heathen foe was no deterrent to those Christians of the tenth century who flocked to the universities of Cordova, Granada and Seville, not only from every village in Spain but from all parts of Europe, to drink in the Arabian learning. But the very best reading is the page of the Italian Renaissance. To be alive and young in that day of music, poetry and art, was to be favored of heaven. It was a time when wit flashed in academy and salon, when thought passed from mind to mind like a contagion, and when the Great Adventure was to discover the lost parchments of litteres humaniores. Here our fascination centers in Petrarch, who kept numerous copyists to transcribe the manuscripts which he had recovered and who "sometimes set his own tired fingers and used up pen upon the work." He is said to have kept by him a copy of Homer which he regarded lovingly, though he could not read it. The story of how Bocaccio found the letters of Cicero in the dusty loft of a remote monastery reads like adventure. And when the complete manuscript of Quintillian's Institutes was recovered there was a public celebration of the event in Rome! This may not have surprised a people who were accustomed to hear popular readings of Virgil in the Forum.

Intellectual stir of this sort always finds spokesmen. Leonardo, assuming that all his contemporaries were as gifted as himself, declared that everybody would naturally wish to know everything. "Abandon yourself to Nature's truth and let nothing in this world be unknown to you," said Rabelais. And Francis Bacon, still in the zone of light cast by the torches of the English humanists, declared with boyish exuberance that he had taken the whole field of knowledge for his province.

What the modern reader finds so refreshing in all this is the self-less, external-mindedness of master and disciple, monk

and scholar. How wholesomely objective was learning once upon a time. The world was so full of a number of things. The behavior of earth, air, fire and water; the magic of number, the potency of stars, the art of healing, the whole animate world; man himself and the records of his past,-these things teased them out of all thought. They wanted to know. So they deciphered the manuscripts and played with alphabet and printing-press, with crucible and syllogism like children with new toys, or with amazing detachment speculated on the phenomena of consciousness, on problems of Deity and the cosmos. Here was a fascinating and inexhaustible world, and with the wide-eyed wonder of children and as little given to introspection, they turned questioning minds upon the field of knowledge.

The picture is alluring. We would gladly re-capture the zeal of those clear-eyed youth who gathered about Abelard, or of those older but still adventurous spirits bending over their crucibles and manuscripts. Say what we will, there was something about their zeal which we have lost, a quality of unspoiled and unspent vigor which belonged to a simpler, younger world.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since those days. Educationally the world has grown up. Introspection and sophistication have set in. We have discovered the individual. and he has discovered himself. A line of thinkers from Rouseau to Dewey have established that, so far as he is concerned, the conquest of the field of knowledge is the lesser half of the business of getting an education, and that the really important matter is what happens to the mind while it is engaged in this process. Invaluable as has been the individualistic emphasis in education, there is one aspect in which the change of objective has the defects of its virtues. With the utilitarian aims which dominate our schools of today the results of modern psychology have combined to produce a condition in which the individualistic and social ends of education sometimes bear to each other an anomalous relation.

A glance at the college world of today will make this relation clear. Those who are most familiar with undergraduate life will be the first to admit that the spirit of the modern campus is not that which prevailed at the banquet of Socrates or in the grove of Academe. There has been a falling off in zeal since Abelard and Erasmus. The pendulum has swung far in the direction of individualism. It may be well to question whether it has not swung too far. The college youth of today cannot, to be sure, take all knowledge for his province, but we regret that he has no wish to do so. Disciples of Abelard would marvel at the composure with which he marks off that part of the curriculum which he chooses not to know. How nicely he discriminates between History 9 and Chemistry 14, between Poultry Judging and the Early Renaissance. For he has guides that they knew not of. Not forgetting his vocational aims, and with a nice eye for a program that will not embarrass him unduly in the pursuit of certain larger concerns which relate to "college life," he lists his courses. In doing so, he is often less aware of the demands of his spirit than Caliban. It is no business of his that his island is full of sweet sounds that give delight and hurt not; he must bring in the wood.

But let it not be thought that he is indifferent. On the contrary, once his program is in full swing, he shows extraordinary interest, not in his subjects, to be sure, but in his attainments, and especially in those measures of himself which he calls "marks." His watchfulness in this matter is almost valetudinarian. He has an inordinate desire to see estimates of himself in black and white, that he may test the pulse and temperature of his progress. He feels the need of the stimulus of the report card, a childish thing which he is loth to put away. In the interest of these same marks he chooses his instructors with care. There are, he knows, the entertainers and the high graders. They are on his honor role. Moreover, he is an adept in the care and training of instructors. He knows how to inject a knowledge of his past record and

his present efforts. He is not above mentioning his need to retain a scholarship, make a team, or gratify a widowed mother. If his rating is low, a protest is not thought out of the way. In extreme cases he may even seek to intimidate an unwary professor by bringing to bear on his case the prestige of his family or the influence of a robustious fraternity. Thus he looks after his interests.

The picture may appear extreme, but the type of student described will be easily recognized by college teachers. There are too many of him. Observing the hand-to-mouth nature of his efforts and his concentration on the "edible aspect" of life, one professor, with a discouraged shrug, rather unfairly sweeps the whole race into the simian category. "Scratch homo sapiens," he remarks acidly, "and you find pithecanthropus." The student of the better sort, though less designing and aggressive in his method, is no less interested in his intellectual measurements. If his talents are mediocre, he is often sadly unaware of this and struggles to rank higher than he can. If he is gifted, he is a collector of grade A's, medals and prizes. In this he is encouraged by his teachers, who with the best intentions have set before him tangible incentives for effort, from the star on the blackboard of the kindergarten to the cum laude degree. Provided with a sufficient number of decorations for his poor inconsequential self, the modern graduate thinks to front with composure an exacting world. The feeling that C is a "gentleman's grade," which is said to prevail at the seaboard universities, deplorable as it is, seems quite as respectable as the selfinflated watchfulness of ratings so common among students in the Middle West.

Nor is the interest in grades confined to the students. The faculty, poor dears, are also grubbing among symbols. The psychologists have furnished them with new instruments in questionnaires, intelligence tests, and scales of measurement. Allowing a modicum of scepticism as to the possibility of weighing the inner stirrings of the soul, we must admit that