The College of Discipline and the College of Freedom

THE college, as distinguished from the university, is America’s most distinctive educational institution. It is unusual in educational organization in the fact that it receives young men at an age when in most countries professional training is almost in sight, and for four years retains them in a school which confessedly does not train for a profession or for a specific calling, but aims at the general development of character and intellect. The German youth enters the university on the average only one year older than the American boy of to-day enters the college.

Until thirty years ago, the college was not only our most distinctive school of learning, but it was the crown of our educational organization. Professional schools of law and medicine and theology existed, but in most cases independently of the college, and were not articulated with it even when controlled by the college board of trustees. The college was the school which stood for scholarly ideals and methods.

A great change has come in three decades. With the establishment of the Johns Hopkins University, the growth of the state universities, and the increasing influence in education of Americans who had enjoyed European study, the university idea was transplanted to America. It has shown in three decades an extraordinary growth, measured by the number of universities and the facilities for study and research. One of the most significant results is the influence of the university idea upon the American college, and the growing need for a more consistent educational organization which shall coördinate secondary school, college, and university. Sir W. H. Preece, in a recent address before the Royal Society of Arts, says, “ In America a national coördinated system will be evolved which will make the United States the best secularly educated country in the world, and its educational policy thoroughly organized.” I believe that these hopeful words are likely to come true, but it is evident that, before that time, much must be done to clarify the present educational confusion. This is the educational problem of the next twenty years, and we are just now squarely facing it.

In the course of that examination and reorganization, that which we have come to know as the American college is to be subjected to a sharper scrutiny than it has ever been called upon to undergo. It will be necessary to show clearly just what the college undertakes to do, and what its efficiency is in the doing of it. Next, it will be necessary to show in just what way the college shall relate itself to the secondary school on the one hand, and to the university on the other. The university has been grafted on the college without very thorough consideration of its influence on the college, or the influence of the college on it. In the same way the college has exacted admission requirements with little regard to the interests of the secondary schools. This may have been an almost unavoidable phase of the growth of education in a new country. It cannot remain indefinitely. The college not only must know what it seeks to do and show a fair coefficient of efficiency, but it must relate itself to the general system of education of the state and of the nation.

Furthermore, it is misleading to speak of one set of colleges as private institutions, and of another set as public ones. There are no private colleges or universities. Harvard, Yale, and Columbia are as truly public institutions as are Wisconsin, California, and Michigan. The first group is sustained by tuition fees and the income from endowments; the second group, mainly by taxation. All are public institutions in the sense of common responsibility to the general educational effort of state and nation. All colleges alike must face the questions: What is the function of the college ? Is it discharging that function efficiently? Does it fit consistently into one general educational organization ?

It is interesting to note that the reasons which now press for answers to these questions arise out of economic and administrative considerations. In these thirty years the cost of conducting a college has risen enormously, but the cost of maintaining a university is out of all proportion to the estimates of a generation ago. Somehow we must decide what is a college and what a university, for economic reasons if for no other.

The administrative reason has only recently begun to make itself felt. Colleges have, for a large part of our educational history, been conducted as isolated enterprises. That day has gone by. The college must for the future find its place in a general system of education.

While these considerations are those which produced the present scrutiny of the college, the final settlement of its place in American education is not likely to rest wholly on economic or administrative grounds, although these influences wall have increasing effect upon its future. In the college one finds more clearly expressed than elsewhere certain fundamental theories concerning the education and training of human beings, and the final place of the college in an educational organization will rest mainly on the weight given to one or another of these fundamental educational theories.

All schools of general culture which, like the American college, have looked both to the development of character and to the training of the mind, have been evolved under the influence of two distinct educational ideals — one the ideal of discipline, the other that of freedom.

The first conception is the older. Men learned early in the history of civilization that every human being born into this world must first learn to obey, if later he is to command; must first control himself, if later he is to lead others. The conception of discipline as a means to education is universal; it has existed since schools began; it will always exist, because it is rooted in our universal human experience.

The ideal of freedom was a later development of educational experience. Long after men were familiar with the educational value of discipline, they came to realize that in the education of men, as in the development of nations, the highest type of character, like the finest order of citizenship, is developed under conditions of freedom; that the virtue which blossoms under the clear sky has a finer fragrance than that which develops in the cloister; that the finest efforts of education, like the ripest fruits of civilization, are to be sought where the realization of human freedom is most perfect.

For two thousand years, from the schools of Athens and Rome to those of Berlin and Boston, schools which seek to deal with the general training of youth have differentiated in accordance with their adherence to one or another of these fundamental ideals, or in accordance with their effort to combine the two. The differences which exist to-day among the stronger American colleges as to what the college ought to do, as well as the reasons which are advanced for a separation of the college from the high school on one side and from the university on the other, rest on the relative weight which is attached to the educational ideal of discipline or to the educational ideal of freedom. And the place which the college is ultimately to have will be fixed by the decision whether it is to represent squarely the ideal of discipline, the ideal of freedom, or both.

It is also to be remembered that each of these educational ideals has its relations to the development both of character and of intellect, and each may be interpreted differently according as one views it from the standpoint of the individual, or from the standpoint of the social order in which he moves. Personal discipline and social discipline, individual freedom and the freedom which can be had only by social organization, are all involved in the scheme of general education, but it is rare to have all of these phases simultaneously under the view of the same eyes. Specializing in education began at the beginning in the very conceptions of the fundamental processes by which education was to be effected.

In actual practice, American colleges represent to-day all the combinations and the compromises of these two conceptions. At one extreme are colleges organized to prescribe fixed lines of conduct and specified courses of study; at the other are colleges so planned as to spread out before the eyes of the eighteen-year-old boy an almost endless variety of sports and of studies from which he may choose at will. In the first group, the ideal of discipline is paramount, with the emphasis on the interests of organized society; in the second, the ideal of freedom is dominant, and the interests and development of the individual direct the line of vision.

There are perhaps no better illustrations of the consistent working out of the ideals of discipline and freedom than the two great colleges, West Point and Harvard, for each of which I have an unusual admiration and a sincere affection (having sent a boy through each). They represent more consistently than most colleges distinct educational policies, and for this reason, as well as for their nationwide influence, they furnish unusual lessons for the guidance of other colleges. The one is a college of discipline by virtue of a policy largely fixed by the traditions of army service; the other a college of freedom — a response in large measure to the leadership of a great man.

In the one are assembled some four hundred and fifty boys; in the other, some two thousand three hundred. The two groups of students enter their respective institutions at practically the same age, and are widely representative of alert American youth. The student in the one case becomes part of an organization whose ideal is discipline; the other enters a régime whose watchword is individual freedom. In the one, the boy of eighteen is ordered to comply with a rigid régime which for four years undertakes to arrange for each day, and almost for each hour, his work and his play, and the amount of money he may spend; in the second, he is invited to choose from a numerous list of studies and of sports as he will.

The strict discipline of the one, no less than the perfect freedom of the other, is, of course, tempered by the cross currents which run in all human affairs. The West Point plebe soon discovers that the austere economy of cadet life is mitigated by an underground arrangement through which New York tradesmen extend a practically unlimited credit, to be harvested on the far distant graduation day — a process which makes the problem of how to live on your income not materially different at the two colleges.

On the other hand, the Harvard freshman who, with the aid of an anxious parent, undertakes to select five courses from an apparently inexhaustible supply, finds his freedom seriously limited at the outset by a certain evident tendency on the part of teachers and students to crowd the most desirable courses into the hours between nine and one. Moreover, if the boy has athletic tastes, he is likely to get a warning from the coach to avoid afternoon classes and laboratory exercises, a consideration which may limit the freedom of choice in a surprising manner, and sometimes turns the honest freshman from a course in elementary chemistry to one on the history of the Fine Arts.

The West Point cadet, once entered upon his work, finds his studies absolutely determined for him. Whether he will or not, he must take an assigned measure of mathematics, science, modern languages, drawing, history, and dancing (this last is a good required study in any college). He becomes a member of a section of perhaps ten. The assigned lesson will cover each day certain pages of a text-book. At the call of the instructor he must rise, put his heels together, begin with the formula, “ I am required to recite, etc.;” and is most successful when he repeats the exact language of the textbook which is his guide. He must be ready every day, and his standing in comparison with every other man in his class is posted at the end of each week, made out to the fractional part of a per cent. The hours for work and play are fixed, and he may not go beyond the limits of the West Point reservation. Through the whole four-year course runs consistently the ideal of personal discipline.

His courses once chosen, the Harvard freshman finds himself one of a group of twenty or five hundred, according to the subject. If he occupies his place with fair regularity, he may work earnestly or very little. There is no day-by-day demand upon him such as the West Point cadet must expect. With occasional tests during the term — generally not difficult — and an examination at the end, which a mark of sixty per cent will pass, the subject is credited to him as a completed study. Meanwhile the opportunities for reading, for individual study, for fellowship, and for amusement, are unlimited. Individual freedom is the keynote of his college life.

It is sometimes urged that West Point exists to train men for a particular profession, and that, therefore, its work as a college is not comparable with that of other colleges. There is a measure of truth in this statement, but it is very easy to overestimate the significance which should be given it. West Point is not a school aiming to fit men for a given technical calling. It aims to give, along with a certain military training, a general education which shall count both for character and for intellect. In the essential things which they seek to accomplish, West Point and Harvard strive toward the same ends. Whether a man enter the life of the army or some calling in civil life, success will depend in each case upon moral and intellectual efficiency. Each college seeks to develop in its students moral purpose and the ability to think straight. The difference is that, in seeking to attain these ends, one institution proceeds under the dominating ideal of discipline, the other under that of freedom.

West Point has never been a strictly technical school, and it would be a misfortune for the academy and for the country if this should come about. It has been in fact a military college, in which men are fitted successfully for many stations both in military and civil life. It has lived more consistently than most institutions in conformity to the particular ideal in education for which it stands, although until the last thirty years all colleges shared to a large extent the disciplinary conception of education. The general likeness of the educational results at the academy to those of other good colleges is shown in the history of its graduates. Deductions concerning the efficiency of colleges, as determined by a roll of distinguished graduates, are to be received with extreme caution. In any such survey we are strongly inclined to that side of the argument which pictures the American college as the regenerator of our social order. We count the successes, but not the failures. We point to Mr. Roosevelt. of Harvard, Mr. Taft of Yale, and Mr. Hughes of Brown, as examples of college leadership in public life, but we rarely strike a balance by charging to the college such leaders as Mr. Boies Penrose of Harvard, Mr. Thomas C. Platt, of Yale, or Mr. Abraham Ruef of California. All that one can say is that, taken by and large, the work of the graduates of West Point, in all the walks of life during the last hundred years, has compared well in civic worth with that of the men of other colleges.

There was one critical epoch in our national life which furnished a very interesting comparison, and which has always seemed to me to speak well for that feature of West Point education which arises out of the close community life and the bringing together of boys from all parts of the Union. In the troubled days which marked the first efforts at reconstruction after the Civil War, three West Point graduates, Grant, Sherman, and Schofield, by virtue of their military commands, took definite positions as to the methods by which the seceded states were to be brought back into the Union. Eventually the matter went to Congress, and the plan which finally prevailed was due mainly to two college graduates, one in the Senate, the other in the House — Charles Sumner of Harvard, and Thaddeus Stevens of Dartmouth. I think it is fair to say that, looking back after forty years, the general judgment of thinking men is that the reconstruction policy of the West Point graduates was not only more just and merciful, but also politically wiser, than that of Sumner and Stevens.

Both of these colleges are noble agencies for the education of men; both have sent into our national life graduates who have done honor alike to their institutions and to their country. The remembrance of this fact ought to help toward educational liberality. It serves to remind us that, after all, we have no specifics in education; that men come into a larger usefulness, and into a finer intellectual and spiritual life, by many paths. Discipline and freedom both play their parts in the evolution of the best human character, and we may therefore not wonder that institutions varying so widely in ideals and in methods have alike achieved a high measure of success, and have won a place of singular honor and regard in the nation’s estimate.

Colleges, like all human organisms designed for moral and spiritual training, stand between the tendency to take the color of their environment, both good and bad, and the conscious duty to stand against certain tendencies of the society in which they exist. This is only another way of saying that colleges have a duty both to society and to the individual student and teacher. In the college of discipline, the tendency is to emphasize the duty to society, as represented by the organization, at the expense of the individual; in the college of freedom, the tendency is to emphasize the rights of the individual at the expense of social organization. The one view loses sight of the fact that discipline, to be effective, must in the long run be self-discipline; the other tends to overlook the truth that, in civilization, freedom for the individual is a function of the observance of social restraints. As a result, both the college of discipline and the college of freedom are peculiarly exposed to the prevailing American tendency to superficiality, but for exactly opposite reasons: the first on account of the multiplicity of standards, and the latter on account of the lack of definite standards.

In the college of discipline, the standards tend to become so numerous that the process of living up to them becomes disciplinary rather than educational. This arises out of the qualities of human nature. Once give to a group of men the power to select the things which other men ought to do or ought to learn, and the difficulties of moderation are great. In government, over-legislation, and in education, an overcrowded curriculum, is the almost universal result.

In nearly all schools with prescribed courses there has gone on for years a process of adding to the list of studies until the student is asked to absorb more in four years than he can possibly digest in that time. This régime is intensified at West Point by two facts peculiar to its organization — the low entrance requirements, and the lack of instructors who are masters of their subjects, able not only to hear recitations, but to impart intellectual enthusiasm.

The West Point plebe enters at practically the same age as the Harvard freshman, but under much lower entrance requirements. Consequently, the students in the first year are in nearly all cases repeating studies they have already had. This fact plays an important part in the process, for it enables the poor plebe to catch his breath and adapt himself in the course of his first year to the system of recitations, under which huge text-books are devoured with little regard to the element of time as a factor in intellectual digestion.

West Point is also at a disadvantage in comparison with other good colleges in the lack of trained teachers. Instructors are chosen more generally than formerly from young commissioned officers, themselves graduates — a system of intellectual inbreeding from which all American colleges suffer in greater or less degree. They serve only a few years, and have in many cases only a superficial knowledge of the subjects they teach, however energetically they may bend to their tasks. There is no more pathetic sight in education than that afforded by the army or navy officer who burns the midnight oil in the effort to keep one day ahead of the lesson which his class is to recite. The instruction given by such a teacher is necessarily of the routine and text-book sort, with little of the inspiration gained under a true teacher. All these factors — the overcrowding of the curriculum, the lack of experienced teachers, the extreme devotion to details — unite to make the exercises formal and academic, and to banish opportunities for individual cultivation in laboratories, in books, or in conference with a cultivated mind. The process tends strongly toward intellectual superficiality, for in such teaching the fundamental concepts and principles are sacrificed for details which do not linger in the mind long after examination time. And no human being is quicker than the college boy to appropriate to himself the lesson involved in the teaching of a subject by one who is not a master of it. The deduction which he makes is that if a man is ordered to do a thing, he can do it whether he understands it or not. This process may be disciplinary, but it is scarcely educational.

Every American will sympathize with the idea that the national military college should have the closest possible touch with the army, and should breath the spirit of the service. It will be, however, a misfortune, alike for the army and for education, if the theory is once accepted that this contact cannot be maintained consistently with high educational ideals and scholarly leadership.

There are two aspects of army service which have hitherto received in our country small consideration. The first is, that modern warfare is an applied science and those who undertake it successfully are members of a learned scientific profession. Secondly, the habits and routine of army life in time of peace are precisely those which tend to impair the professional efficiency of officers, to destroy initiative and the capacity to take responsibility.

These facts require that the members of the military profession shall be first of all trained men, and secondly that the tendencies to inefficiency shall be counteracted by some intellectual and professional stimulus. The traditions of discipline are so ingrained in the military service that in time of peace the disposition to regulate every detail, giving to subordinate officers little opportunity for independent action, becomes inexorable. The military profession is at a disadvantage in comparison with other great professions in the fact that, in the ordinary duties of army service, there is little to stimulate study or to develop interest in military science. In these respects the naval service has advantages. Only experts can enter it, and ships at least go to sea and manœuvre in squadrons, if they do not fight.

The essential problem, therefore, with modern nations in the maintenance of an army is to train a body of efficient men to the military profession, and having done this, to preserve their alertness, initiative, and efficiency in time of peace, in the face of the system of minute regulations and infinite detail which inevitably envelops the service. This problem is fundamental, for it is the man who thinks straight, and who has the initiative to take responsibility, who wins battles.

It seems clear that the greatest factor in the solution of this problem is the stimulus to intellectual activity which officers receive in their education. The establishment of the general staff and the staff colleges is an effort in this direction, but the basis of the officer’s professional efficiency as a member of a learned profession lies in the intellectual inspiration and the interest in his profession which his West Point education gives him. In this stimulus is to be found the most effective antidote for the deadening effect of routine, and the demoralizing influence of minute regulations. There is, therefore, no college in which the inspiration of good teaching, and the preservation of scholarly enthusiasm, mean more than in the national military college. And these are in no wise inconsistent with the traditions and ideals of military science. In the Military Academy of forty years ago were a number of the great teachers of America. The intellectual side of the West Point education should always be under the leadership of such men.

If the currents which run toward superficiality in the college of discipline are sometimes strong, it is certain that those which flow in this direction in the college of freedom are sometimes even swifter.

The fundamental objection to a régime of complete freedom for eighteen-year-old boys, independent of some test of their capacity to use it, lies to my thinking in the lack of standards which under these conditions prevail among students, and the exaggerated tendencies toward superficiality which are thereby not only invited, but practically assured. Two features of the college of to-day are specially significant of the practical outcome of these tendencies in the undergraduate college under the conditions of free election. These are the decadence of scholarly ideals, and the growth of secondary agencies for getting boys through college with a minimum of study.

If the college is to serve as a means for the general education of men, it is of course unlikely that any large percentage of college youths should turn out to be scholars. But so long as the college stands primarily for scholarly ideals, the conditions in it should be such that the ninety per cent who are not scholars should respect and admire the ten per cent who are. Such a condition holds in Oxford and Cambridge. To say that it does not exist in our larger American colleges is to put the case mildly. The captain of the football team has more honor in the college community than any scholar may hope for. It is a serious indictment of the standards of any organization when the conditions within it are such that success in the things for which the organization stands no longer appeal effectively to the imaginations of those in it.

The old-time college conception of culture was narrow. It has rightly given way before the enlarging intelligence of mankind. Nevertheless it did furnish standards by which not only teachers and scholars were able to orient themselves with respect to intellectual ideals, but society as well. Is not the time perhaps ripe for a broader and truer definition of culture in education ?

So few standards are to-day left in the college which gives itself completely to the régime of individual freedom that the world has but scant data to judge of its educational efficiency. The minimum intellectual equipment which a college education ought to furnish to a youth should enable him to do two things: first, to turn his mind fully anti efficiently to the solution of a given problem. In the second place, it should give him the analytic point of view, the ability to discriminate. Whether, judged on this basis, our colleges show to-day a fair coefficient of educational efficiency, I do not undertake to say, but I should like to see some estimate of it attempted.

The by-products of an organization are sometimes the most distinctive tests of its efficiency. There is, to my thinking, no more striking evidence of the tendencies to superficiality which have developed in our larger colleges than the agencies which have grown up about them for getting boys into college, and for passing them through it with the minimum amount of work. By the more successful and profitable coaching agencies, this process has been reduced to an art. Such parasites weaken the character-making and the scholarly side of college life, and have to the legitimate work of a college much the same relation that a lobby has to a legislative body.

It is a delicate thing to determine how much freedom is good for an individual or a nation. We must also admit that freedom means the right to be weak as well as the right to be strong; the ability to be foolish as well as to be wise. In education, as in government, moderation becomes difficult once a group of men undertakes to set bounds to freedom. There is probably no attribute of the Almighty which men find so difficult to understand, or to imitate, as the ability to let things alone, the power not to interfere.

And yet it is perfectly clear that some individuals, and some nations, have had more freedom than they knew what to do with, and such individuals and such nations have generally ended by becoming not only less efficient, but less free. I have not been able to persuade myself that the eighteen-year-old American boy has yet demonstrated his fitness for so large a measure of freedom as is involved in the free elective system. Groups of boys whom I have studied under such conditions have generally recalled Wordsworth’s phrase: —

The special function of the college seems to me to be, not to hold up exclusively the ideal of discipline or of freedom, but to serve as a transition school in which the boy grows out of one into the other. This conception of the college seems to me justified on the grounds of individual rights, social interest, and the efficiency of educational organization.

The process of transition from the tutelage of the boy to the freedom of the man is one of the difficult questions in civilized life. No method of solving it is perfect, or is adapted to every boy. German boys go from the strict régime of the gymnasium to the freedom of the university. They are older than the boys who enter American colleges, and are far better educated than they. The cost of the process is reflected in the saying current in the universities, that one-third of the students fail, one-third go to the devil, but the remaining third govern Europe. It seems clear that, under any system which makes the transition from discipline to freedom abrupt, many are taken. The special function of the college would seem to be to make this transition less expensive. Otherwise there seems little reason for departing from the German plan of a strong secondary school leading directly to the university.

It seems clear that a college must take account of its duty to the social order in which it exists, as well as to the individual. It is not enough for the college to reflect indiscriminately the strength and the weakness of the nation. It must stand against the current of superficiality and commercialism which are our national weaknesses. It is difficult to see how this duty to society is to be carried out by the college unless there be admitted some relation between the amount of freedom accorded to a boy and his ability to use it.

Until very recently, the college was at the top of our educational fabric. It had no direct relation to professional education. So long as this was true, the change in our standards operated simply to raise the college standards. So long as there was nothing beyond it, this went on without much questioning. For the future, the college is to be a part of a general system of education; and the university, with its professional schools and its schools of research, is to rest upon it. In no other form of educational organization is the college likely permanently to survive.

If the college is to be a school of free choice, it can scarcely take its students earlier than the present age, eighteen and a half. This brings the youth too late to the university. The picture of the university resting on a four-year college, which in turns rests on a four-year high school, reminds one forcibly of Chicago in the early days when the houses were boosted up on posts. The arrangement fitted a passing phase of municipal growth.

The pressure of economic, no less than educational, influences will demand a solution of American educational organization more efficient, better proportioned, and less wasteful of time, than that involved in a régime which delivers men to the university at the age of twentythree.

In the reorganization which will sooner or later come, the college years seem to me likely to be those between sixteen and twenty, rather than between eighteen and twenty-two. Under such an arrangement the college will take account both of discipline and of freedom. Its professors will be, first of all, teachers, and its function will be to lead boys out of the rule of the school into the freedom of the university; out of the tutelage of boyhood into the liberty of men. If the college does not fill this function, it will in the end be squeezed out between the reorganized secondary school and the fully developed university.

Meantime we may well be grateful both for the college of discipline and for the college of freedom. These are great words, and each stands for an idea in education which we cannot afford to forget. Perhaps it might be well to inscribe over the gate of the college of discipline and that of the college of freedom the sentence which surmounts the Worcester Courts: “ In Obedience to the Law is Liberty” — in the first case the emphasis to be laid on one part of the sentence, and in the other case on another part.