Doubts About University Extension

DURING the past year a step has been taken in American education which already excites the interest and hopes of us all. England has been our teacher,— England and a persuasive apostle from that country. A few years ago the English universities became discontented with their isolation. For generations they had been devoting themselves to a single class in the community, and that, too, a class which needed least to be brought to intelligence and power. The mass of the nation, those by whom its labor and commerce were conducted, had little access to Oxford and Cambridge. Poverty first, then social distinctions, and, until recent days, sectarian haughtiness barred them out. Their exclusion reacted on the training of the universities themselves. Conservatism flourished. The worth of an intellectual interest was rated rather by its traditional character than by its closeness to life. The sciences, latter-day things, were pursued hardly at all. The modern literatures, English included, had no place. Plato and Aristotle furnished most of the philosophy. While the rest of the world was deriving from Germany methods of study, from France methods of exposition, and from America methods of treating all men alike as rational, English scholarship, based on no gymnasia, lycés, or high schools, went its way, little regarding the life of its nation or that of the world at large.

But there has come a change. During the last twenty-five years Professor Stuart and others have been endeavoring to go out and find the common man, and, in connection with him, to develop those subjects which before, according to university tradition, were looked at somewhat askance. English literature, political economy, modern history, have been put in the foreground of this popularized education. Far and wide throughout England, an enthusiastic band of young teachers, under the guidance of officers of the universities, have been giving instruction in these subjects to companies in which social grades are for the time forgotten. And since public libraries are rare in England, and among the poorer classes the reading habit is but slightly formed, an ambitious few among the hearers have prized their opportunities sufficiently to undertake a certain amount of study, and to hand in papers for the lecturer to inspect and to mark. In exceptional cases, as many as one third of the audience have thus written exercises and passed examinations. The great majority of those in attendance during the three months’ term of course do nothing more than listen to the weekly lecture.

This is the very successful English movement which, for several years, has been exciting admiration the world over, and which it is now proposed to introduce into the United States. Rightly to estimate its worth, those aspects of it to which attention has just been directed should carefully be borne in mind. They are these: the movement is as much social as scholarly, and accompanies a general democratic upheaval of an aristocratic nation; it springs up in the neighborhood of universities, to which the common people do not resort, and in which those subjects which most concern the minds of modern men are little taught ; in its country other facilities for enabling the average man to capture knowledge — public libraries, readingclubs, illustrated magazines, free high schools — are not yet general; it flourishes in a small and compact land, where a multitude of populous towns are in such immediate neighborhood, and so connected by a network of railroads, that he who is busied in one place to-day can, with the slightest fatigue and expense, appear in five other towns during the remaining days of the week.

These conditions, and others as gravely distinctive, do not exist in America. From the first the American college has been organized by the people and for the people. It has been about as much resorted to by the poor as by the rich. Through a widely developed system of free public schools it has kept itself closely in touch with popular ideals. Its graduates go into commercial life as often as into medicine, the ministry, or the law. It has shown itself capable of expansion, too, in adjusting itself to the modern enlargement of knowledge. The rigid curriculum, which suited well enough the needs of our fathers, has been discarded, and every college, in proportion to the resources at its command, now offers elective studies, and seeks to meet the needs of differing men. To all who can afford four years (soon it may be three), and who are masters of about half as much capital as would support them during the same time elsewhere, the four hundred colleges of our country offer an education far too good to be superseded, duplicated, or weakened. In these colleges excellent provision has been made, and has been made once for all, for everybody who has a little time and a little money to devote to systematic education of the higher sort.

But our educational scheme has one serious limitation, and during the last fifty years there have been many earnest efforts to surmount it. Not every man is free to seek a systematic training. Multitudes are tied to daily toil, and only in the evening can they consider their own enlargement. Many grow old before the craving for knowledge arises. Many also, with more or less profit, have attended a college, but are glad subsequently to supply those defects ot education which the experiences of life relentlessly bring to view. To all these classes, caught in the whirl of affairs, the college does not minister. It is true that much that such people want they get from the public library, especially as our librarians of the modern type energetically accept their duties as facilitators of the public reading. Much is also obtainable from the cheap issues of the press, and from such endowed courses of higher instruction as those of the Lowell, Cooper, Brooklyn, Peabody, and Drexel institutes. But, after all, these supplementary aids, though valuable, are deficient in guiding power. Most persons, especially if novices, work best when under inspection. To learners teachers are generally important. There seems to be still a place in our well-supplied country for an organization which shall arouse a more general desire for knowledge ; which shall stand ready to satisfy this desire more cheaply, with less interruption to daily occupation, and, consequently, in ways more fragmentary, than the colleges can ; and yet one which shall not leave its pupils alone with books, but shall supply them with the impulse of the living word, and, through writing, discussion, and directed reading, shall economize and render effective the costly hours of learning. Unquestionably there is a field here which the colleges cannot till, — a field whose harvest would enrich us all. But can any other agency till it ? To every experiment thus far it has yielded only meagre, brief, and expensive returns. A capital thing it; would be to give to the busy that which normally requires time and attention ; but how to do it is the question, — how to do it in reality, and not in mere outward seeming.

Chautauqua has not done it, impassioned though that rough and generous institution has been for wide and fragmentary culture. Its work, indeed, has had a different aim ; and, amusing as that work often appears, it ought to be understood and acknowledged as of fundamental consequence in our hastily settled and heterogeneous land. Chautauqua sends its little books and papers into stagnant homes from Maine to California, and gives the silent occupants something to think about. Conversation springs up ; and with it fresh interests, fresh hopes. A new tie is formed between young and old, as together they pursue the same studies, and in the same graduating class walk through the Golden Gate. Any man who loves knowledge and Ins native land must be glad at heart when he visits a summer assembly of Chautauqua: there listens to the Orator’s Recognition Address; attends the swiftly successive Round Tables upon Milton, Temperance, Geology, the American Constitution, the Relations of Science and Religion, and the Doctrine of Rent; perhaps assists at the Cooking School, the Prayer Meeting, the Concert, and the Gymnastic Drill; or wanders under the trees among the piazzaed cottages, and sees the Hall of Philosophy and the wooden Doric Temple shining on their little eminences; and, best of all, perceives in what throngs have gathered here the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker, — a throng themselves, their wives and daughters a throng —all heated in body, but none the less aglow for learning and a good time. The comic aspects of this mixture of science, fresh air, flirtation, Greek reminiscence, and devoutness are patent enough; but the way in which the multitude is being won to discard distrust of knowledge, and to think of it rather as the desirable goal for all, is not so generally remarked by scholarly observers. Yet that is the weighty fact. The actual product in education may not be large ; enthusiasm and the memory may be more stimulated than the rational intelligence. But minds are set in motion ; an intellectual world, beyond the domestic and personal, begins to appear; studious thought forms its fit friendship with piety, gladness, and the sense of a common humanity; a groundwork of civilization is prepared. To find a popular movement so composite and aspiring, we must go back to the mediæval Crusades or the Greek Mysteries. In these alone do we observe anything so ideal, so bizarre, so expressive of the combined intellectual and religious hopes of a people. In many Chautauqua homes pathetic sacrifices will he made in the next generation to send the boys and girls to a real college.

Now, in proposing to transport to this country English extension methods, the managers have had in mind nothing so elementarily important as Chautauqua. They have felt the pity we all feel for persons of good parts who, through poverty or occupation, are debarred from a college training. They seek to reach minds already somewhat prepared, and to such they undertake to supply solid instruction of the higher grades. It is this more ambitious design which calls for criticism. Mr. R. G. Moulton speaks of extension education as ‘‘distinguished from school education, being moulded to meet the wants of adults.” And again, “ So far as method is concerned, we have considered that we are bound to be not less thorough, but more thorough, if possible, than the universities themselves.” If, in the general educational campaign, we liken Chautauqua to a guerrilla high school, university extension will be a guerrilla college. Both move with light armor, have roving commissions, attack individuals, and themselves appear in the garb of ordinary life ; but they are equipped for a service in which the more cumbrous organizations of school and college have thus far proved ineffective. It is a fortunate circumstance that, with fields of operation so distinct, no jealousy can exist between the two bands of volunteers, or between them both and the regular army. The success of either would increase the success of the other two. To Chautauqua we are all indebted for lessening the popular suspicion of expert knowledge ; and if the plans of the extension committee could be carried out, college methods would have a vogue, and a consequent respect, which they have never yet enjoyed.

Every one, accordingly, civilian or professional, wishes the movement well, and recognizes that the work it proposes to do in our country is not at present performed. Its aims are excellent. Are they also practicable ? We cannot with certainty say that they are not, but it is here that doubts arise, — doubts of three sorts: those which suspect a fundamental difference in the two countries which try the experiment; those which are incredulous about the permanent response which our people will make to the education offered; and those which question the possibility of securing a stable body of extension teachers. The first set of these doubts has been briefly but sufficiently indicated at the beginning of this paper ; the second may, with still greater brevity, be summed up here in the following connected series of inquiries : —

With the multitude of other opportunities for education which American life affords, will any large body of men and women attend extension lectures ? Will they attend after the novelty is worn off, — say during the third year ? Will they do anything more than attend ? Will they follow courses of study, write essays, and pass examinations ? Will the extension system, any better than its decayed predecessor, the old lyceum system, resist the demands of popular audiences, and keep itself from slipping out of serious instruction into lively and eloquent entertainment ? If the lectures are kept true to their aim of furnishing solid instruction, can they in the long run be paid for ? Will it be possible to find in our country clusters of half a dozen towns so grouped and so ready to subscribe to a course of lectures on each day of the week that out of the entire six a living salary can be obtained ? Will the new teachers be obliged to confine themselves to the suburbs of large cities, abandoning the scattered dwellers in the country, that portion of our population which is almost the only one at present cut off from tolerable means of culture? If, in order to pursue these destitute ones, correspondence methods are employed, in addition to the already approved methods of lecture instruction, will lowering of the standard follow? In England three or four years of extension lectures are counted equivalent to one year of regular study, and a person who has attended extension courses for this time may be admitted, without further examination, to the second year of university residence. Will anything of the sort be generally attempted here ?

These grave questions are as yet insusceptible of answer. Affirmative, desirable answers do not seem probable ; but experience alone can make the matter plain. Of course the managers are watchfully bearing such questions in mind, and critical watchfulness may greatly aid the better answer, and hinder the less desirable. Accordingly, anything like a discussion of this class of practical doubts would be inappropriate here. Data for the formation of a confident opinion do not exist. All that can be done by way of warning is to indicate certain large improbabilities, leaving them to be confirmed or thwarted by time and human ingenuity.

But with the third class of doubts the case is different. These relate to the constitution of the staff of teachers, and here sufficient facts are at hand to permit a few points to be demonstrated with considerable certainty. When, for example, we ask from what source teachers are to be drawn, we are usually told that they must come from college faculties. If the method of the extension lecturer is to be as thorough as that of the universities themselves, the lecturers must be experts, not amateurs ; and where, except at the colleges, does a body of experts exist ? No doubt many welltrained men are scattered throughout the community as merchants, doctors, schoolteachers, and lawyers. But these men, when of proved power, have more than they properly can attend to in their own affairs. It seems to be the colleges, therefore, to which the new movement must look for its teachers ; and in the experiments thus far made in this country the extension lecturing has been done for the most part by college officers. A professor of history, political economy, or literature has, in addition to his college teaching, also given a course of instruction elsewhere. This feature of the American system, one may say with confidence, must prove a constant damage to the work of the colleges, and, if persisted in, must ultimately destroy the extension scheme itself.

In England the extension teachers are not university teachers. To have no independent staff for extension work is a novelty of the American undertaking. The very name, university extension, besides being barbaric, is, in its English employment, largely misleading; since neither the agencies for extending, nor indeed, for the most part, the studies extended, are found at the universities at all. A small syndicate or committee, appointed from among the university officers, is the only share the university has in the business. The impression, so general in this country, that English university teachers are roaming about the island, lecturing to mixed audiences, is an entire error. The university teachers stay at home, and send other people — their own graduates, chiefly — to instruct the multitude. A committee of them decides on the qualifications for the work of such persons as care to devote themselves to itinerant teaching as a profession. For those so selected they arrange times, places, and subjects ; but they themselves do not move from their own lecture rooms. Nor is there occasion for their doing so. In the slender development of popular education in England, many more persons of the upper classes become trained as specialists than can find places as university teachers. There thus arises a learned and leisured accumulation which capitally serves the country in case of a new educational need. On this accumulated stock of cultured men — men who otherwise could not easily bring their culture to market — the extension movement draws. These men are its teachers,— its permanent teachers, since there are not competing places striving to draw them away. In the two countries the educational situation is exactly reversed: in England there are more trained men than positions; in America, more positions than trained men. It seems probable, too, that this condition of things will continue long, so far as we are concerned; at least there is no present prospect of our reaching a limit in the demand for competent men. Whenever a college has a chair to fill, it is necessary to hunt far and wide for a suitable person to fill it. The demand is not from the old places alone. Almost every year a new college is founded. Every year the old ones grow. In twenty-five years Harvard has quadrupled its staff. Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania,— indeed, almost every strong college in the country, — shows an immense advance. A Western State is no sooner settled than it establishes a state university, and each of the sects starts from one to three colleges besides. No such perpetual expansion goes on in England. The number of learned positions there is measurably fixed. If more experts than can fill them, or than care to enter political life, the liberal professions, and the civil service, are manufactured in the course of a year, the surplus stock is at the disposal of the extension syndicate. Many of these men, too, are persons of means, to whom a position of dignity is of more consequence than a large salary. The problem, accordingly, of organizing popular instruction out of such a body of waiting experts is a comparatively simple one; but it is not so simple here. In our country, any man who has a fair acquaintance with a special subject and moderate skill in imparting it, especially if he will be contented with a small salary, can he pretty sure of college appointment.

Naturally enough, therefore, the organizers of the extension movement, despairing of finding among us competent unattached teachers, have turned at once to the colleges ; but the colleges are a very unsafe support to lean upon. A professor in a university where the studies are elective has no more superfluous time than a busy lawyer, or doctor, or business man. Merely to keep up with the literature of a subject, to say nothing of that research and writing which should enlarge its limits, is an enormous task. Teaching, too, is no longer an affair of textbooks and recitations. Leisurely days of routine ease belong to the past. A professor, nowadays, must prepare lectures incessantly; must perpetually revise them ; must arrange examinations ; direct the reading of his students; receive their theses; himself read a large part of their voluminous written work ; personally oversee his advanced men ; gather them about him in laboratory, seminary, and conference; attend innumerable committee and faculty meetings ; devise legislation for the further development of his college and department; correspond with schools and colleg-es where his students, after taking their higher degree, may suitably be placed ; and if, at the end of a hardworked day, he can find an hour’s leisure, he must still keep his door open for students or fellow-officers to enter. So laborious have become the duties of a university teacher that few large staffs now go through a year without one or two of their members breaking down. With the growing complexity of work, it often seems as if the proper business of college officers, study and teaching, must some day cease altogether, crowded out by the multifarious tasks with which they are only indirectly connected. It is useless to say that these things are not necessary. Whoever neglects them will cease to make his college, his subject, and his influence grow. It is because professors now see that they cannot safely neglect them that the modern college differs fundamentally from its humdrum predecessor of a quarter of a century ago. Any movement which seeks to withdraw a professor’s attention from these things, and induces him to put his soul elsewhere, inflicts on the community a serious damage. No amount of intellectual stimulus furnished to little companies here and there can atone for the loss that must fall on education when college teachers pledge themselves to do serious work in other places than in their own libraries and lecture rooms To be an explorer and a guide in a department of human knowledge is an arduous profession. It admits no halfhearted service. Of course, if the work demanded elsewhere is not serious, the case is different. Rather with benefit than with damage a college teacher may, on occasion, recast the instruction that was intended for professionals and offer it to a popular audience. In this way a professor makes himself known, and makes his college known. Many of the small colleges are now engaging in university extension as an inexpensive means of advertising themselves. But such lecturing is incidental, voluntary, and perpetually liable to interruption. Beyond the immediate series ot lectures it cannot be depended on. There is nothing institutional about it. The men who undertake it are owned elsewhere, and a second mortgage is not usually a very valuable piece of property. A movement which places its reliance on the casual teaching of overworked men is condemned from the start. University extension can never pass beyond the stage of amateurism and temporary expedient until, like its English namesake, it has a permanent staff of instructors exclusively devoted to its service.

Where, then, is such a staff to be obtained ? In view of the conditions of education in this country, already described, it is improbable that it can be obtained at all. But something may still be done, — something, however, of a more modest sort than enthusiasts at, present have in mind. There issue from our great universities every year a number of men who have had two or three years’ training beyond their bachelor’s degree. Some of them have had a year or two of foreign study. They frequently wish to teach. Places do not immediately open to them. If the extension movement would set them to work, it might have all their time, at a moderate salary, for two or three years. Such men, it is true, would be inexperienced, and their connection with itinerant teaching could not be rendered lasting. As soon as one of them proved his power as a teacher, some college would call him ; and he would seldom prefer the nomadic and fragmentary life to an established one. Plainly, too, under the charge of such men, the grade of instruction could not be the highest; but it might be sound, inspiriting even, and it is in any case all that present circumstances render possible. We may mourn that those who are masters in their several provinces are already fully employed. We may wish there were a multitude of masters sitting about, ready for enlistment in a missionary undertaking. But there are no such masters. The facts are evident enough ; and if the extension movement aims at a durable existence, it will respect these facts. The men it wants it cannot have without damaging them ; and, damaging them, it damages the higher education of which they are the guardians. Teachers of a lower grade are at hand, ready to be experimented with. The few experiments already tried have been fairly successful, Let the extension leaders give up all thought of doing here what has been done in England. The principal part of that work is performed for us by other means. The wisest guidance, accordingly. may not lead the movement to any long success. If, however, university extension can keep itself clearly detached from other educational agencies and make a quiet offer of humble yet serviceable instruction, there is a fair prospect that, by somewhat slow degrees, a permanent new power may be added to the appliances for rendering busy Americans intelligent.

George Herbert Palmer.