CHAPTER XXX.
WHAT UNIVERSAL CULTURE MEANS.
It was one of those Indian summer afternoons when it seems sinful wasteof opportunity to spend a needless hour within. Being in no sort ofhurry, the doctor and I chartered a motor-carriage for two at the nextstation, and set forth in the general direction of home, indulgingourselves in as many deviations from the route as pleased our fancy.Presently, as we rolled noiselessly over the smooth streets, leaf-strewnfrom the bordering colonnades of trees, I began to exclaim about theprecocity of school children who at the age of thirteen or fourteen wereable to handle themes usually reserved in my day for the college anduniversity. This, however, the doctor made light of.
"Political economy," he said, "from the time the world adopted the planof equal sharing of labor and its results, became a science so simplethat any child who knows the proper way to divide an apple with hislittle brothers has mastered the secret of it. Of course, to point outthe fallacies of a false political economy is a very simple matter also,when one has only to compare it with the true one.
"As to intellectual precocity in general," pursued the doctor, "I do notthink it is particularly noticeable in our children as compared withthose of your day. We certainly make no effort to develop it. A brightschool child of twelve in the nineteenth century would probably notcompare badly as to acquirements with the average twelve-year-old in ourschools. It would be as you compared them ten years later that thedifference in the educational systems would show its effect. Attwenty-one or twenty-two the average youth would probably in your dayhave been little more advanced in education than at fourteen, havingprobably left school for the factory or farm at about that age or acouple of years later unless perhaps he happened to be one of thechildren of the rich minority. The corresponding child under our systemwould have continued his or her education without break, and attwenty-one have acquired what you used to call a college education."
"The extension of the educational machinery necessary to provide thehigher education for all must have been enormous," I said. "Ourprimary-school system provided the rudiments for nearly all children, butnot one in twenty went as far as the grammar school, not one in a hundredas far as the high school, and not one in a thousand ever saw a college.The great universities of my day--Harvard, Yale, and the rest--must havebecome small cities in order to receive the students flocking to them."
"They would need to be very large cities certainly," replied the doctor,"if it were a question of their undertaking the higher education of ouryouth, for every year we graduate not the thousands or tens of thousandsthat made up your annual grist of college graduates, but millions. Forthat very reason--that is, the numbers to be dealt with--we can have nocenters of the higher education any more than you had of the primaryeducation. Every community has its university just as formerly its commonschools, and has in it more students from the vicinage than one of yourgreat universities could collect with its drag net from the ends of theearth."
"But does not the reputation of particular teachers attract students tospecial universities?"
"That is a matter easily provided for," replied the doctor. "Theperfection of our telephone and electroscope systems makes it possible toenjoy at any distance the instruction of any teacher. One of muchpopularity lectures to a million pupils in a whisper, if he happens to behoarse, much easier than one of your professors could talk to a class offifty when in good voice."
"Really, doctor," said I, "there is no fact about your civilization thatseems to open so many vistas of possibility and solve beforehand so manypossible difficulties in the arrangement and operation of your socialsystem as this universality of culture. I am bound to say that nothingthat is rational seems impossible in the way of social adjustments whenonce you assume the existence of that condition. My own contemporariesfully recognized in theory, as you know, the importance of populareducation to secure good government in a democracy; but our system, whichbarely at best taught the masses to spell, was a farce indeed comparedwith the popular education of to-day."
"Necessarily so," replied the doctor. "The basis of education iseconomic, requiring as it does the maintenance of the pupil withouteconomic return during the educational period. If the education is toamount to anything, that period must cover the years of childhood andadolescence to the age of at least twenty. That involves a very largeexpenditure, which not one parent in a thousand was able to support inyour day. The state might have assumed it, of course, but that would haveamounted to the rich supporting the children of the poor, and naturallythey would not hear to that, at least beyond the primary grades ofeducation. And even if there had been no money question, the rich, ifthey hoped to retain their power, would have been crazy to provide forthe masses destined to do their dirty work--a culture which would havemade them social rebels. For these two reasons your economic system wasincompatible with any popular education worthy of the name. On the otherhand, the first effect of economic equality was to provide equaleducational advantages for all and the best the community could afford.One of the most interesting chapters in the history of the Revolution isthat which tells how at once after the new order was established theyoung men and women under twenty-one years of age who had been working infields or factories, perhaps since childhood, left their work and pouredback into the schools and colleges as fast as room could be made forthem, so that they might as far as possible repair their early loss. Allalike recognized, now that education had been made economically possiblefor all, that it was the greatest boon the new order had brought. Itrecorded also in the books that not only the youth, but the men andwomen, and even the elderly who had been without educational advantages,devoted all the leisure left from their industrial duties to making up,so far as possible, for their lack of earlier advantages, that they mightnot be too much ashamed in the presence of a rising generation to becomposed altogether of college graduates.
"In speaking of our educational system as it is at present," the doctorwent on, "I should guard you against the possible mistake of supposingthat the course which ends at twenty-one completes the educationalcurriculum of the average individual. On the contrary, it is only therequired minimum of culture which society insists that all youth shallreceive during their minority to make them barely fit for citizenship. Weshould consider it a very meager education indeed that ended there. As welook at it, the graduation from the schools at the attainment of majoritymeans merely that the graduate has reached an age at which he can bepresumed to be competent and has the right as an adult to carry on hisfurther education without the guidance or compulsion of the state. Toprovide means for this end the nation maintains a vast system of what youwould call elective post-graduate courses of study in every branch ofscience, and these are open freely to every one to the end of life to bepursued as long or as briefly, as constantly or as intermittently, asprofoundly or superficially, as desired.
"The mind is really not fit for many most important branches ofknowledge, the taste for them does not awake, and the intellect is notable to grasp them, until mature life, when a month of application willgive a comprehension of a subject which years would have been wasted intrying to impart to a youth. It is our idea, so far as possible, topostpone the serious study of such branches to the post-graduate schools.Young people must get a smattering of things in general, but reallytheirs is not the time of life for ardent and effective study. If youwould see enthusiastic students to whom the pursuit of knowledge is thegreatest joy of life you must seek them among the middle-aged fathers andmothers in the post-graduate schools.
"For the proper use of these opportunities for the lifelong pursuit ofknowledge we find the leisure of our lives, which seems to you so ample,all too small. And yet that leisure, vast as it is, with half of everyday and half of every year and the whole latter half of life sacred topersonal uses--even the aggregate of these great spaces, growing greaterwith every labor-saving invention, which are reserved for the higher usesof life, would seem to us of little value for intellectual culture
, butfor a condition commanded by almost none in your day but secured to allby our institutions. I mean the moral atmosphere of serenity resultingfrom an absolute freedom of mind from disturbing anxieties and carkingcares concerning our material welfare or that of those dear to us. Oureconomic system puts us in a position where we can follow Christ's maxim,so impossible for you, to 'take no thought for the morrow.' You must notunderstand, of course, that all our people are students or philosophers,but you may understand that we are more or less assiduous and systematicstudents and school-goers all our lives."
"Really, doctor," I said, "I do not remember that you have ever told meanything that has suggested a more complete and striking contrast betweenyour age and mine than this about the persistent and growing developmentof the purely intellectual interests through life. In my day there was,after all, only six or eight years' difference in the duration of theintellectual life of the poor man's son drafted into the factory atfourteen and the more fortunate youth's who went to college. If that ofthe one stopped at fourteen, that of the other ceased about as completelyat twenty-one or twenty-two. Instead of being in a position to begin hisreal education on graduating from college, that event meant the close ofit for the average student, and was the high-water mark of his life, sofar as concerned the culture and knowledge of the sciences andhumanities. In these respects the average college man never afterwardknew so much as on his graduation day. For immediately thereafter, unlessof the richest class, he must needs plunge into the turmoil and strife ofbusiness life and engage in the struggle for the material means ofexistence. Whether he failed or succeeded, made little difference as tothe effect to stunt and wither his intellectual life. He had no time andcould command no thought for anything else. If he failed, or barelyavoided failure, perpetual anxiety ate out his heart; and if hesucceeded, his success usually made him a grosser and more hopelesslyself-satisfied materialist than if he had failed. There was no hope forhis mind or soul either way. If at the end of life his efforts had wonhim a little breathing space, it could be of no high use to him, for thespiritual and intellectual parts had become atrophied from disuse, andwere no longer capable of responding to opportunity.
"And this apology for an existence," said the doctor, "was the life ofthose whom you counted most fortunate and most successful--of those whowere reckoned to have won the prizes of life. Can you be surprised thatwe look back to the great Revolution as a sort of second creation of man,inasmuch as it added the conditions of an adequate mind and soul life tothe bare physical existence under more or less agreeable conditions,which was about all the life the most of human being's, rich or poor, hadup to that time known? The effect of the struggle for existence inarresting, with its engrossments, the intellectual development at thevery threshold of adult life would have been disastrous enough had thecharacter of the struggle been morally unobjectionable. It is when wecome to consider that the struggle was one which not only preventedmental culture, but was utterly withering to the moral life, that wefully realize the unfortunate condition of the race before theRevolution. Youth is visited with noble aspirations and high dreams ofduty and perfection. It sees the world as it should be, not as it is; andit is well for the race if the institutions of society are such as do notoffend these moral enthusiasms, but rather tend to conserve and developthem through life. This, I think, we may fully claim the modern socialorder does. Thanks to an economic system which illustrates the highestethical idea in all its workings, the youth going forth into the worldfinds it a practice school for all the moralities. He finds full room andscope in its duties and occupations for every generous enthusiasm, everyunselfish aspiration he ever cherished. He can not possibly have formed amoral idea higher or completer than that which dominates our industrialand commercial order.
"Youth was as noble in your day as now, and dreamed the same great dreamsof life's possibilities. But when the young man went forth into the worldof practical life it was to find his dreams mocked and his ideals deridedat every turn. He found himself compelled, whether he would or not, totake part in a fight for life, in which the first condition of successwas to put his ethics on the shelf and cut the acquaintance of hisconscience. You had various terms with which to describe the processwhereby the young man, reluctantly laying aside his ideals, accepted theconditions of the sordid struggle. You described it as a 'learning totake the world as it is,' 'getting over romantic notions,' 'becomingpractical,' and all that. In fact, it was nothing more nor less than thedebauching of a soul. Is that too much to say?
"It is no more than the truth, and we all knew it," I answered.
"Thank God, that day is over forever! The father need now no longerinstruct the son in cynicism lest he should fail in life, nor the motherher daughter in worldly wisdom as a protection from generous instinct.The parents are worthy of their children and fit to associate with them,as it seems to us they were not and could not be in your day. Life is allthe way through as spacious and noble as it seems to the ardent childstanding on the threshold. The ideals of perfection, the enthusiasms ofself-devotion, honor, love, and duty, which thrill the boy and girl, nolonger yield with advancing years to baser motives, but continue toanimate life to the end. You remember what Wordsworth said:
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy.
I think if he were a partaker of our life he would not have been moved toextol childhood at the expense of maturity, for life grows ever wider andhigher to the last."
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