Priorities in Education

by GEORGE BOAS

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IT WAS commonly noticed in the last war, and appears also to be true in this one, that the closer one gets to the front, the finer the moral quality of the people one meets. Soldiers in the line seldom betray their lower natures; petty jealousies, selfishness, cowardice, are traits which are reserved for GHQ, the services of supply, the civilian groups at home for whom the soldiers are dying. I recall November 11, 1918, at a brigade headquarters near Bordeaux. I had just left the front to join a general officer who had been promoted for gallantry in action. The rest of the staff had recently arrived from the United States and had never seen the front. When the news of the Armistice came through, the General’s first comment was: “Well, the boys up there can have a fire tonight.” But the rest of the staff almost unanimously said, “There goes our chance for promotion.”

That a war is an opportunity for personal advancement and that it must not be allowed to interfere with the usual course of life are two assumptions which it would be folly to deny. We were told before the present war that on M-Day all of us, young and old, laborers and entrepreneurs, rich and poor, would be mobilized and that each and every man jack of us would be given the privilege of serving his country in its hours of peril. But no sooner had the bombs fallen on Pearl Harbor than industrialists began clamoring for contracts plus profits, laborers began shouting for a share in the booty, coffee drinkers began hoarding coffee, the sweet-toothed collected sugar, automobilists rushed to buy tires, a black market sprang up overnight, and one would have thought the issue was not whether the United States was to survive or not, but whether there wasn’t some way of keeping the Packard rolling instead of taking the streetcar. In fact, during the early months of the conflict one would have thought that rationing was simply another of the President’s diabolical contrivances to plague Republicans.

I suppose one must expect that attitude behind the lines, however depressing it may be. But one group of people surely might be assumed to be above it. I refer to those men and women who are responsible for educating our children. If education is worth the time that is spent upon it, it ought to have prepared its administrants for a crisis like the present, ought to have given them the power to penetrate the surface of things to the greater issues which lie at their heart. But one has only to live in a university to see that the professors are no nobler than the most ignorant peasant and are, in my opinion, even less prepared morally to weather the storm.

The great fear of the universities today is precisely that of the most backward industrialist or most forward laborer: What are we going to lose? To talk to some of one’s colleagues these days is to be given the impression that the major issue of the war is the retention of the classics in the curriculum or maintaining the enrollment in elementary English. “What are you doing,” asked a letter which I received yesterday, “to meet the decreased enrollment in philosophy?” My answer was, “Nothing.”

If enrollment in the humanities is decreasing — which as a matter of fact is not true everywhere — in favor of “technical” courses, the reason for it is that technical courses prepare a man better for military service than courses in the humanities do. That is the answer and it ought to suffice. I would have given anything in the last war for a better knowledge of mathematics. The nation’s business now is to win the war. If training men in trigonometry and physics and chemistry, to the detriment of the humanities, will win the war, then for God’s sake and our own, let us forget our Greek, our Latin, our art, our literature, our history, and get to business learning trigonometry and physics and chemistry. It would be a great satisfaction to meet Tojo riding down the Mall in Washington, on his way to the White House, with the firm knowledge that at least we had not given up “the great heritage of Western culture.” What a comfort one could take in the thought that we might be slaves, but at least we could conjugate tithemi and discuss the concept of synthesis in Hegel.

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The answer which is proudly given to such outbursts is that we are fighting to preserve civilization and that the way to begin is to hang on to what we already possess. That answer rests on certain misconceptions of what civilizations are and who preserves them.

There ought to be no need to point out that civilizations are not the exclusive property of universities, but permeate a nation. They are the total complex of the way a people behaves. They consist in part of a nation’s reactions to problems as well as in that nation’s dreams and aspirations. They consist in what a nation is doing at present as well as in what it did in the past. They do not consist largely in the records of the past, but in the effect of the past upon the present — in memories, to be sure, but not necessarily in memories that have to be recorded in books in order to live. It is just as much a part of American civilization to have unguarded mailboxes at the end of one’s lane, as it is to play jazz; it is perhaps a larger part of our civilization to have luncheon clubs than it is to have philological associations.

When a civilization gets so feeble that it has to be lectured about and written about and taught in classrooms, one would be pretty shrewd to guess that that civilization is at best moribund. Greek civilization never died, to be sure, even after the Roman conquest, but its survival was only in small part attributable to the Ph.D.’s. It survived only in so far as it became incorporated into the way of life of Western Europe, in European art, in religion, in science, above all in philosophy, and not mainly in so far as students took courses in “The Greek View of Life.”

All ages are stratified culturally, retaining in their manners much of the past and anticipating much of the future. It would be absurd to deny that the work of humanistic scholars has some part in retaining the past, but it would be equally absurd to deny that each generation of scholars asks different questions about the past and that those questions are determined by certain definite needs for knowledge which arise in the present. If a scholar is to be an integral part of his civilization, he cannot avoid participating in its troubles, sharing its anguish, rejoicing in its successes. He can, if he choose, be a pedant, and say that the useless is beautiful because it is useless. He can heap up information which nobody needs and call it disinterested scholarship. But why call such busywork saving civilization?

One might say dogmatically — and of course with a certain exaggeration — that a civilization which needs to be saved had best be left to die. For a civilization worth having is one which invigorates its people, which seems right because it answers its people’s needs, which is accepted uncritically, if need be, because — like breathing itself — it is an indispensable basis for a people’s collective life. But everyone struggles to retain his past as one of his most precious possessions. To be able to let go is an ability which only a few sages have. But whether one have it or not, one is going to be forced to let go, and the proper question is not what one is losing but what one is gaining. After some twenty-five years of university life I confess that much of what we call scholarship means very little to anyone other than the men who made it.

What the saviors of civilization also forget is that they are doing all in their power to create a class of privileged men and women who will have been kept in college at the expense of other men’s lives. It may seem unfair to take a promising scholar and send him to the Pacific or to the Libyan Desert to be shot. But in what sense of the word is it any unfairer than to send a bookkeeper on the same mission? Of course if we think that a scholar’s life is in itself, and regardless of other considerations, more inherently valuable than a bookkeeper’s, I can see the justification for our behavior. But one might think that such conceptions died out some years ago.

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A man’s life is to be valued not only in relation to the life of the nation, but also in relation to that of his parents, his wife, his children, himself. To be a scholar does not mean that one has become a saint or a priest, a medicine man, from whose being exudes an effluence of magic, beneficent in its effect upon the rest of mankind. Scholars are just as nasty, brutish, and mean as ignoramuses. Their difference from other people is that they know more than other people. If what they know is useful in times of crisis, by all means protect them, as one would protect the nation’s food and gunpowder. But if it has simply those values which commencement orators toss in the air like colored balls to dazzle a group of parents, there is no reason why special privileges should be granted it and its possessors protected by the bodies of less fortunate men. Scholarship is either an intellectual or a technical attainment. It has no moral effect. Scholars are not even more truthful than other people. I dare say that, if necessary, I could find among the farmers I know and among the laborers in the factories men whose moral character is just as high as that of my colleagues and indeed higher than that of some of us. What right then have we to ask this sacrifice of others?

But even more serious is the unfairness of this program to the students themselves. One cannot expect a young man of eighteen or nineteen to give up the protection of college for the hardships of army life unless he has to. There is nothing glamorous about military service. There is more servitude than grandeur in it. But it is only once or twice in a man’s lifetime that he is asked to do something for others, to repay to his country the inestimable gifts his country has given him. National service, one may say without fear of sentimentality, is a privilege, in spite of the hardships it entails. It is something to be able to say, “When my country was in danger, I helped defend it.”

I can talk only from my own experience and that experience was far from heroic. Yet I should be lying if I denied that my two years and some months in the Army gave me more than I gave in return. I was the least military of men. I had spent all my life in universities. My world was almost entirely a world of books. I was in the Army three hours after teaching my last class. The transition was thus as abrupt as could have been imagined. I had not even played on a football team, to say nothing of living, eating, sleeping, with other men. It had never even occurred to me to join the National Guard. With all the difficulties of adjustment, I had at least the comfort that I had asked nothing of others which I was not prepared to give myself. And my country has meant something more real to me ever since — something which is not merely a geographical name, but living beings who, whatever their station and their habits, were just as good as I was. Was that not worth as much as another article on epistemology?

At the basis of our thinking, I suspect, is that form of cynicism which, whether conscious or not, prompts men to think of their country as something which gives everything and demands nothing. National service thus becomes a sort of penalty, a sacrifice, a heavy price, which is not an integral part of every man’s life who is living in a democracy, but something which is to be avoided if possible, like jury duty, taxes, even obedience to the laws. It is one thing to be given the King’s shilling and quite another to be drafted into a citizens’ army. If our people do not see that difference, it is time their eyes were opened.

As a matter of fact, the people, in the vulgar sense of the word, do see it and take pride in national service. They proudly display service flags and one overhears them boasting about their sons and brothers and husbands who are serving under the colors. It is the intellectuals who are the cynics. Fortunately they have very little influence in the United States. We used to deplore the caricature of professors which appeared in the papers and cartoons. Perhaps it emanated from sound instincts. Whatever the case may be, only a few of them — like the Harvard Group — can hold up their heads and look the soldiers in the face. Too many of us are talking nobly and acting servilely. I may be a traitor to my class, but when a student asks me whether he should request deferment because he is a student, I tell him that he ought to thank his God if he has a body and a mind capable of fighting, and to consider it a privilege to share the dangers which his fellow countrymen are undergoing. All the learning in the world is not worth the experience which he will gain from his military career; and if he is killed, at least he will not have asked someone else to die for him.