Unlike textbooks and popularizations, the great books assume an audience of readers who are thoroughly competent to read. That is one of their major distinctions, and probably why they are so little read today. They are not only original communcations, rather than digests or repetitions, but unlike the latter they do not go in for spoon-feeding. they say: "Here is knowledge worth having. Come and get it."
The proliferation of textbooks and lecture courses in our educational system today is the surest sign of our declining literacy. Truer than the quip that those who can't teach, teach teachers, is the insight that teachers who cannot help their students read the great books write textbooks for them, or at least use those their colleagues have written. A textbook or manual might almost be defined as a pedagogical invention for geting
"something" into the heads of those who cannot read well enough to learn more actively. An ordinary classroom lecture is a similar device. When teachers no longer know how to perform the function of reading books with their students, they are forced to lecture at them instead.
Textbooks and popularizations of all sorts are written for people who do not know how to read or can read only for information. As dead teachers, they are like the live secondary teachers who wrote them. Alive or dead, the secondary teacher tries to impart knowledge without requiring too much or too skillful activity on the part of learner.
Theirs is an art of teaching which demands the least art of being taught in the students.
They stuff the mind rather than enlighten it. The measure of their success is how much the sponge will absorb.
Our ultimate goal is understanding rather than information, though information is a necessary steppingstone. Hence we must go to the primary teachers, for they have understanding to give. Can there be any question that the primary teachers are better sources of learning than the secondary ones? Is there are any doubt that the effort they demand of us leads to the vital cultivation of our minds? We can avoid effort in learning
, but we cannot avoid the results of effortless learning.—the assorted vagaries we collect by letting secondary teachers indoctrinate us.
If, in the same college, two men were lecturing, one a man who had discovered some truth, the other a man who was repeating secondhand what he had heard reported of the first man's work, which would you rather go to hear? Yes, even supposing that the repeater promised to make it a little simpler by talking down to your level, would you not suspect that the secondhand stuff lacked something in quality or quantity? If you paid the greater price in effort, you would be rewarded by better goods.
It happens to be the case, of course, that the most of the primary teachers dead—the men are dead, and the books they have left us are dead teachers—whereas most of the living teachers are secondary. But suppose that we could resuscitate the primary teachers of all times. Suppose there were a college or university in which the faculty was thus composed. Herdotus and Thucydides taught the history of Greece, and Gibbon lectured on the fall of Rome. Plato and St. Thomas gave a course in metaphysics together; Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill discussed the logic of science; Aristotle, Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant shared the platform on moral problems; Machivelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke talked about politics.
You could take a series of courses in mathematics form Euclid, Descartes, Riemann, and Cantor, with Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead added at the end. You could listen to St. Augustine and William James talk about the nature of man and the human mind, with hperhaps Jacques Maritain to comment on the lectures. Harvey discussed the circulation of the blood, and Galen, Claude Bernard, and Haldane taught general physiology.
Lectures on physics enlisted the talent of Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Maxwell, Planck and Einstein. Boyle, dalton, Lavosier, and Pasteur taught chemistry. Darwin and Mendel gave the main lectures on evolution and genetics, with supporting talks by Bateson and T.H. Morgan.
Aristotle, sir Philip Sidney, Wordsworth, and Shelley discussed the nature of poetry and the principle of literary criticism, with T.S. Eliot thrown in to boot. In economics, the lecturers were by Adam smith, Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Marshall. Boas discussed the human race and its races, Thorsetin Veblen and John Dewey, the economic and political problems of American democracy, and Lenin lectured on communism.
Etienne Gilson analyzed the history of philosophy, and Poincaré and Duhem, the history of science. There might even be lectures on art by Leonardo da Vinci, and a lecture on Leonardo by Freud. Hobbes and Locke might discuss Ogden and Richards, Korzybski and Stuart Chase. A much larger faculty than this is imaginable, but this will suffice.
Would anyone want to go to any other university, if he could get into this one? There need be no limitation of numbers. The price of admission—the only entrance requirement—is the ability and willingness to read. This school exists for everybody who is willing and able to learn from first-rate teachers, they theybe dead in the sense of not joining us out of our lethargy by their living presence. They are not dead in any other sense. If contemporary America dismisses them as dead, then, as a well-known writer recently said, we are repeating the folly of the ancient Athenians who supposed that Socrates died when he drank hemlock.
The great books can be read in or out of school. If they are read in school, in classes under the supervision of live teachers, the latter must properly subordinate themselves to the dead ones. We can learn only from our intellectual betters. The great books are better than most living teachers as well as their students.
The secondary teacher is simply a better student, and he should regard himself as learning. from the masters along with his younger charges. He should not act as if he were the primary teacher, using a great books as if it were just another textbook of the sort one of his colleagues might write. He should not masquerade as one who knows and can teach by virtue of his original disvoceries, if he is only one who has learned through being taught. The primary sources of his own knowledge should be the primary sources of learning for his students, and such a teacher functions honestly only if he does not aggrandize himself by coming between the great books and their young readers. He should not "come between" as nonconductor, but he should come between as a mediator—as one who helps the less competent make more effective contacts with the best minds.
All this is not news, or, at least, it should not be. For many centuries, education was regarded as the elevation of a mind by its betters. If we are honest, most of us living teachers should be willing to admit that, apart from the advantages which age bestows, we are not much better than our students in intellectual caliber or attainment. If elevation is to take place, better minds than ours will have to do the teaching. That is why, for many centuries, education was thought to be produced by contact with the great minds of past and presents.
There is only one fly in the ointment. We, the teachers, must know how to read for understanding. Our students must know how. Anyone, in school or out, must know how, if the formula is to work.
But, you may say, it isn't as simple as that. These great books are too difficult for most of us, in school or out. That is why we are forced to get our education from secondary teachers, from classroom lectures, textbooks, popularizations, which repeat and digest for us what would otherwise forever remain a closed book. Even though our aim be understanding, not infomation, we must be satisfied with a less rich diet. We suffer incurable limitations. The masters are too far above us. It is certainly better to gather a few crumbs which dropped from the table than to starve in futile adoration of the feast we cannot reach.
This I deny. For one thing, the less rich diet is likely not to be genuinely nourishing at all, if it is predigested food which can be passively acquired and only temporarily retained rather than actively assimilated. For another, as Professor Morris Cohen once told a class of his, the pearls which are dropped before real swine are likely to be imitation.
I am not denying that the great books are likely to require more arduous and diligent effort than the digest
s. I am only saying that the latter cannot be substituted for the former, because you cannot get the same thing out of them. They may be all right fi all you want is some kind of information, but not if it is enlightment you seek. There is no royal road. The path of true learning is strewn with rocks, not roses. Anyone who insists upon taking the easierway ends up in fool's paradise—a bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, a sophomore all his life.
At the same time, I am saying that the great books can be read by every man. The help he needs from secondary teachers does not consist of the get-learning-quick substitutes.
It consists of help in learning how to read, and more than that when possible, help actually in the course of reading the great books.
Let me argue a bit further the point the great books are the most readable. In some cases, of course, they are difficult to read. They require the greatest ability to read. Their art of teaching demands a corresponding and proportionate art of being taught. But, at the same time, the great books are the most competent to instruct us about the subject matters with which they deal. If we had the skill necessary to read them well, we would find them the easiest, because the most facile and adequate, way to master the subject matters in question.
There is something of a paradox here. It is due to the fact that two different kinds of mastery are involved. There is, on the one hand, the author's mastery of his subject matter; on the other, there is our need to master the book he has written. These books are recognized as great because of their mastery, and we rate ourselves as readers according to the degree of our ability to master these books.
If our aim in readingis to gain knowledge and insight, then the great books are the most readable, both for the less and for the more competent, because they are the most instructive. Obviously I do not mean " most readable" in the sense of "with the least effort"—even for the expert reader. I mean that these books reward every degree of effort and ability to the maximum. I may be harder to dig for gold than for potatoes, but each unit of successful effort is more amply repaid.
The relation between the great books and their subject matters, which makes them what they are, cannot be changed. That is an objective and unalterable fact. But the relation between the original competence of the beginning reader and books which most deserve to be read can be altered. The reader can be mase more competent, through guidance and practice. To the extent that this happens, he is not only more able to read the great books, but, as a consequence, comes nearer and nearer to understanding the subject matter as the masters have understood it. Such mastery is the ideal of education.
It is the obligation of secondary teachers to facilitate the approach to this ideal.
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In writing this book I am a secondary teacher. My aim is to help and mediate. I am not going to read any books for you to save you trouble of reading them yourself. this book has only two functions to perform: to interest you in the profit of reading and to assist you in cultivating the art.
If you are no longer in school, you may be forced to use the services of a dead teacher pf the art, such as this book. And no how-to-do book can ever be as helpful, in as many ways, as a good living guide. It may be just a little harder to develop skill when you have to practive according to the rules you find in a book, without being stopped, corrected, and shown how. But it certainly can be done. Too many men have done it to leave the possibility in doubt. It is never too late to begin, but we all have reason to be vexed with a school system which failed to give us a good start early in life.
The failure of schools, and their responsibility, belong to the next chapter. Let me end this one by calling your attention to two things. The first is that you have learned something about the rules of reading. In earlier chapters you saw the importance of picking out important words and sentences and interpreting them. In the course of this chapter you have followed an argument about the readability of the great gooks and their role in education. Discovering and following an author's argument is another step in reading. I shall discuss the rule for doing so more fully later.
The second point is that we have now pretty well defined the purpose of this book. It has taken many pages to do that, but I think you can see why it would have been unintelligible if I had stated it in the first paragraph. I could have said: "This book is intended to help you develop the art of reading for understanding, not information; therefore, it aims to encourage and assist you in reading the great books." But I do not think you would have known what I meant.
Now you do, even though you may still have some reservations about the profit or significance of the enterprise. You may think there are many books, other than the great ones, which are worth reading. I agree, of couse. But you must admit in turn that the better the book, the more it is worth reading. Furthermore, if you learn how to read the great books, you will have no difficulty in reading other books, or for that matter anything else. You can use your skill to go after easier game. May I remind you, however, that the sportsman doesn't hunt lame ducks?
CHAPTER FIVE
The Defeat of the Schools
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In the course of the preceding chapters, I said somethings about the school system which are libelous unless they are true. But if true they constitute a grave indictment of the educators who viloated a public trust. Though this chapter may seem like a long discussion from the business of teaching you how to read, it is needed to explain the sitiuation in which most of us find ourselves or our children—"educated" but illiterate.
If the schools were doing their job, this book would not be necessary.
So far I have spoken largely from my own experience as a teacher in high school, college, and university. But you need not take my uncorroborated word for the deplorable failures of American education. There are many other witnesses who can be called to the stand. Better than ordinary witnesses, who may also speak from their own experience, there is eomething like scientific evidence on the point. We can listen to the experts report the results of tests and measurements.
As far back as I can remember, there have been complaints about the schools for not teaching the young to write and speak well. The complaints have focused mainly on the products of high school and college. An elementary-school diploma never was expected to certify great competence in these matters. But after four or eight more years in school, it seemed reasonable to hope for a disciplined ability to perform these basic acts.
English courses were, and for the most part still are, a staple ingredient in the high-school curriculum. Until recently, freshman English was required course in every college. These courses were supposed to develop skill in writing the mother tongue.
Though less emplasized than writing, the ability to speak clearly, if not with eloquence, was also supposed to be one of the ends in view.
The complaints came from all sources. Businessmen, who certainly did not expect too much, protested the incompetence of the youngsters who came their way after school.
Newspaper editorials by the score echoed their protests and added a voice of their own, expressing the misery of the editor who had to blue-pencil the stuff college graduated passed across his desk.
Teachers of freshman English in college have had to do over again what should have been completed in high school. Teachers of other college courses have complained about the impossibily slopy and incoherent English which students hand in on term papers or examinations.
And anyone who has taught in the graduate school or in a law school knows that a B.A.
from our best colleges means very little with reference to a students skill in writing or speaking. Many candidate for the Ph.D. has to be coached in the writing of his dissertation, not from the point of view of scholoarship or scientific merit but with respect to the minimum requirements of simple clear, straightforward English. My colleagues in the law school frequently cannot tell whether a student does or does not know the law because of his inability to express himself coherently on a point in issue.<
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I have mentioned only writing and speaking, not reading. Untill very recently, no one paid much attention to the even greater or more prevalent incompetence in reading, except, perhaps, the law professors who, ever since the introduction of the case of method of studying law, have realized that half the time in a law school must spent in teaching the student how to read the cases. They thought, however, that this burden rested perculiarly on them, that there was something very special about reading cases.
They did not realize that if college graduates had a decent skill in reading, the more specialized technique of reading cases could be acauired in much less than half the time now spent
One reason for comparative neglect of reading and the stress on writing and speaking is a point I have already mentioned. Writing and speaking are, for most people, so much activities than reading is. Seince we associate skill with activity, it is a natural consequence of this error to attribute defects in writing and speaking to lack of technique, and to suppose that failure in reading must be dute moral defects—to lack of industry rather than of skill. The error is gradually being corrected. More and more attention is being paid to the problem of eraind. I do not mean that the educators have yet discovered what to do about it, but they have finally realized that the schools are failing just as badly, if not worse, in the matter of reading, as in writing and speaking.
It should be obvious at once that these skills are related. They are all arts of using language in the process of communication, whether initiating it or receiving it. We should not be surprized, therefore, if we find a positive correlation among defects in these several skills. Without the benefit of scientific research by means of educatiional measurements, I would be willing to predict that someone who cannot write well cannot read well either. In fact, I would go further. I would wager that his inability to read is partly responsible for his defects in writing.
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