A Little Learning

by WHITNEY GRISWOLD

I

I TAKE my title from these familiar lines of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism. The Pierian spring was the spring in North Thessaly from which the Muses drank and so refreshed 1 he wisdom and skill in the arts and sciences with which they inspired the human race. It was the symbol of pure learning and revered as such in Greek mythology. It was the fans et origo of a culture that exalted truth, beauty, reason, and freedom, that became the foundation of Western civilization, and that still inspires the free nations in their effort to preserve that civilization.

We have done away with this mythology and with it, I sometimes think, all but done away with the culture that supported it (and was supported by it) as well. We have made a monkey out of Prometheus with our cyclotrons. We have left Mercury in the lurch with our jets. We have discarded the Muses and their spring for teachers and books, and we are in the process of discarding the teachers and books for television and other mechanical marvels. We might better express Alexander Pope’s sentiments as follows: —

Or we might render it: —

Or, in short: —

This is a strange state of mind, is it not, for a people who more than three hundred years ago (1647) adopted the first general education act in modern times and founded nine colleges before achieving their independence. It is a strange state of mind for the descendants of Puritans who recognized ignorance as the chief weapon of “that old deluder, Satan,”and the heirs of Thomas Jefferson who saw it as the chief instrument of dictators and despots. It is a paradox in a nation that has led the world in bringing educational opportunities to its citizens and today sends more of them to school and college than any other free people has ever done in history.

Have I exaggerated our national attitude toward education? You can cite individual cases to prove that I have. This school is one. My university, I like to think, is another. But the attitude I describe is far too prevalent for those who have the welfare of American education at heart to be complacent about it, and even at Andover and Yale the attitude is not unknown. As a nation and a civilization we have wandered far from the Pierian spring, into an arid land where the waters of that spring are blended, bottled, and purveyed under a variety of persuasive labels but where, of the spring’s pure essence, it is a long time between drinks. Here, intoxicated by blends and substitutes, we dispute the merits of the original without really tasting it, after the fashion of tipplers, confused yet sure of ourselves, to the detriment of our educational system and the equal detriment of our civilization and our country.

The pure essence that is so much wanting in our educational system is that which has for its purpose neither the filling of categories with quantitative knowledge nor the communication of vocational skills, but the awakening and development of the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic powers in mail. This purpose is admirably stated in the recent report of a committee on general education, in the organization of which your headmaster was a prime mover. A liberal education, says this report, should help to “achieve the excellence of human nature,” to instill in the individual such qualities as intellectual curiosity, a love of excellence, inner strength and integrity, and above all, the capacity for selfeducation. To achieve thes results, the committee insists on three indispensable prerequisites: first, the recruiting and encouraging of imaginative, enthusiastic, creative teachers; second, making education a more personal affair through tutorials, seminars, and small courses; third, more active participation and personal involvement on the part of the student in the educational process, in distinction to the passive absorption of materials.

With all due credit to those individual schools and colleges that are making progress toward these goals, and with high hopes that they may sustain their momentum, we must face the fact that the country as a whole has neither adopted the goals nor set aside enough of its resources even to keep within sight of them. Our committee gives top priority to the recruitment of “imaginative, enthusiastic and creative teachers" and calls for a much higher ratio of teachers of this caliber to students. Yet according to an editorial in the New York Times we graduated from college this year only 32,000 teachers of all calibers to meet a nation-wide demand for 160,000. This demand, by the way, is calculated not on the basis of small seminars that will make education an individual experience, but on the minimum ratio of teachers to overcrowded classrooms that will bring the students in off the fire escapes without increasing the local tax rate. As to the quality of this teaching, you may draw your own conclusions from the facts that of 600.000 elementary teachers in our public schools, 300.000 do not hold college degrees and, according to the National Education Association, 100,000 are so poorly prepared that their continued presence in the classroom is considered “dangerous to the mental and emotional health of America’s youth.

There are reasons for these conditions, but there is no excuse. A principal reason is the low salaries paid to teachers, ranging on the average in our public schools from a high of $4500 in New York to a low of $1475 in Mississippi, for a national average of $3290. In 1950 the average annual earnings per full-time employee in American agriculture and industry was $3024. The comparable figure for public school teachers that year was $3097. There is this significant difference between the two figures. The first, the industrial, is an average of skilled and unskilled wages. The second, the educational, is an average of salaries paid to a skilled profession. The fact that the two figures are very nearly equal shows better than words not only the relative position of teaching in our national scale of values but also the teaching profession’s relatively feeble powers of competition for the kind of recruits it needs. If we compare our average teacher’s salary with the average salary of college graduates in other professions, we find 95 per cent of the latter earning $3000 or over, 79 per cent earning $5000 or over, and 59 per cent earning $7500 or over.

No one expects to get rich in teaching. We all lake a vow of poverty when we enter the profession. But if a teacher is to fulfill the requirements set for him by our committee, he must be able to share liberally in the cultural opportunities of his fellow men—raise a family, read, travel, cultivate his intellectual and aesthetic tastes, Alas, he cannot afford these essentials. He has all he can do to pay the grocer.

I know one excellent schoolteacher who spends his summers running a hot-dog stand in an amusement park so that he can afford to stick by his profession the rest of the year. He should be reading Plato. Or better still Aristotle. Or writing a book.

The plain fact is that the teaching profession is cut off from the type of recruits it most urgently needs of the source, in our colleges, where hundreds of actual candidates and thousands of potential ones are lost every year to other professions. Money alone will not rectify these conditions. Every teacher must have a sense of mission. But until we pay our teachers a wage that enables them to fulfill that mission our efforts to improve upon it with curricular reforms will be futile and we shall continue to suffer an enormous waste of cultural and human resources.

2

WE do not tolerate such a state of affairs in industry. Why do we tolerate it in education? Our excuse is that we cannot aford to do better. How valid is this excuse? In 1950 the gross national product of the United States—that is, the total market value of all goods and serviees produced was $282,000,000,000. Our educational expenditures that year, both public and private, were approximately $5,600,000 on primary and secondary education and $2,200,000 on higher education, a total of $7,800,000 or 2.7 per cent of our gross national product.

I will not compare this expenditure with our defense budget as I do not wish to suggest that the latter should be reduced. But I will compare it with consumer expenditures on radio, television sets, and musical instruments (with the last finishing a very poor third) of $3,120,000,000 or 1.1 per cent of our gross product, and with expenditures on new and used cars, not counting trucks, of $19,447,000,000 or 6.9 per cent of our gross product. These figures and others showing the amounts we spend each year on pleasures and creature comforts quite apart from our necessities prove to my satisfaction, at least, that we could spend more on education: as much more as is needed to accomplish the goals we are discussing. Our excuse that we cannot afford to do so is a lame one. The truth is that we do not wish to do so. This is not because we are obdurate and hardhearted. It is because we are deluded—deluded by a little learning. That is all we are paying for and all we are getting for our money. It is a cultural, not an economic, phenomenon, though it does have an economic reckoning. For the sums we imagine we are saving on education are spent on juvenile delinquency and other social and economic diseases which education might have cured at half the cost.

Is there no compromise, no substitute for able teachers? Are there no curricular devices that will compensate for the lack of them? Here our delusions multiply, and vocationalism, unrelated gobbets of quantitative knowledge, and downright nature-faking crowd liberal learning to the wall. In our nation-wide secondary school curriculum, the milieu in which millions of individuals plan their lives each year, courses in office training, commercial occupation, effective living, band music, and radio broadcasting press heavily on the serried remnants of the liberal arts.

I do not assume that every student in our secondary schools can or should go to college, nor do I question the motive behind such “vocational" courses for those who do not. But I do question the results. For students who go on to college they represent not only a waste of time but a confusion of values that has made serious inroads into higher education. For those who do not go on, they are poor substitutes for vocational apprenticeship and the subjective experience of life itself. There is too great a tendency in the Uinted States, even on the part of individuals who admit the value of a liberal education to students preparing for college and the professions, to discount its value to those for whom secondary school is the final educational experience. Too many of us are disposed to agree with Bentham’s view that in the enjoyment of life “pushpin is as good as poetry,”and, out of ignorance, laziness, or sometimes out of intellectual snobbery, and on the basis of highly inexact and often haphazard methods of selection, to relegate lives to pushpin that might have been redeemed by poetry.

I shall have more to say on this subject presently. Let me say here that I believe that for all students, those who go on to college and those who do not, the richer the experience of liberal education, limited only by the individual’s capacity to assimilate it, the better for our culture and the better for our country; and that in relation to this type of education the type I am criticizing bulks far too large.

This is no condescending lament from the ivory tower. It is the plea of students who have been through the mill and who deserve better of their country than it is giving them. Let me cite one of them who might almost be said to have died in this cause. He is Bert Stiles, author of the recently published war book, Serenade to the Big Bird (Norton). Bert Stiles left college to enlist in the Army Air Force, flew as copilot on thirtyfive bomber missions over France and Germany, won the Air Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross, and then, instead of taking up his leave and returning to the United States, requested transfer to fighters and was shot down in a P-51 over Germany in 1944, at the age of twenty-three.

Returning from a particularly savage mission over Munich one day—as it turned out, very near the end of his life—this young airman and his pilot rode their bicycles out into the English countryside, bought four pounds of strawberries, and while consuming them fell into a long educational colloquy in which our school and college committee will find strong support. I quote the part dealing with secondary education:

“I was involved in an outfit called the Progressive Education Group, with forty picked members from the two feeding junior high schools, picked for character and brains and general affability. We stayed together all the way through high school. We were a hot outfit all right . . . two teachers and forty eager beavers on our way to the moon.

“The School Board signed away all its powers. We could take a shot at anything, any subject, any whim, for as long or as short as we desired. We could pick our courses and our teachers. We could go on field trips, and use the school bus. We could do anything we chose, for two hours of the school day. The first year it was three hours a day. Progressive English one hour a day, progressive social science one hour (the names didn’t mean anything), and progressive science one hour.

“Progressive science turned out to be a spectacular flop and was discontinued. Each member of the class chose some scientific subject to investigate and report on to the others. It took a year to give all the reports.

“I chose sleeping bags, and the science of keeping warm in one, and made a gala report on this in April, and just sat there and slept the rest of the year. I think my report had something to do with their discontinuing the course. . . .

“I could remember most of the educational byways that class flung itself down ... a speed-up course in psychology, a quick survey of adolescent sex problems. We started to produce a series of plays and never finished. . . .

“We wrote poems and short stories, and seriously delved into the art of letter writing. We spent one spring learning the stories of operas. We debated whether to spend a little time on history, and decided not.

“We spoke extemporaneously. We spoke out of turn. We ranted and raised hell and went out on field trips and look in the key movies, and had a few parties to develop social poise.

“ When we made our reports at the end, I stated I hadn’t gotten a whole hell of a lot out of it.”

It is an easy step from these curricular delusions to the corruption of college athletics, which represents yet another symptom of shallow draughts from the Pierian spring. The whole sad, innocent and not so innocent confusion of values that produces sue h results as the West Point scandal and the basketball fixes; the million-dollar gate receipts; the open traffic in football scholarships and “additional compensations" averaging as high in some cases as three or four thousand dollars a year; the underground recruitment of football players by alumni and coaches of colleges that frown upon it in principle; the fantastic case histories of athletes majoring in physical education and receiving course credit for football, handball, elementary swimming, social dancing, rhythms, and fly fishing; the seamy double standard spreading through college communities as from a tainted well ... it is a tale of educational assets mortgaged to the entertainment industry, of educational opportunities squandered in the coliseum, of men content with a little learning and impatient with that if it gets in the way of a winning team.

Do you again suspect me of speaking from the ivory tower? I am uttering the thoughts of sports columnists as well as university presidents, of undergraduates as well as faculty members, of athletes as well as scholars, of athletes who are scholars and of scholars who are athletes, Two years of military service are crowding into the already overcrowded educational years of these young men, with perhaps an Iliad or an Odyssey lying beyond them, inclining their thoughts more and more to that unfinished business of Bert Stiles.

It is perfectly possible, I would say essential, to find room in these years for active participation in organized athletic sports. I am proud to represent a university in which no fewer than three thousand of its four thousand undergraduates participate in such sports, and I intend to do everything I can to increase rather than diminish this number. I believe this program should continue to include intercollegiate as well as intramural competition, and I hope we may be victorious at all times and events. But I also believe that the athletic cloth should be cut to the educational pattern: that intercollegiate competition should be conducted on a single-standard, amateur basis; that individual ethics should be substituted for the group ethics now governing that competition; and that according to these individual ethies it is no more justifiable for a college to recruit football or basketball players by special financial inducements or curricular concessions than it would be for me to inveigle your headmaster into a game of golf and then hire Sam Snead to disguise himself as me and go out and take the headmaster’s watch and pocket book away from him. To condone such practices in the name of education adds moral to intellectual confusion and puts one more delusion in the way of our proper educational goals.

3

Is learning safe? That is a question we often hear nowadays, and there are some Americans who have concluded in the negative. Our schools and colleges are accused of subversive activities, textbooks are banned, teachers are suspected for what they do and say not merely as individual citizens but as members of their profession. If a little learning is dangerous, a lot of learning is much more dangerous. It will destroy our faith and make us traitors to our country.

I believe that the people who talk this way prove better than any evidence I have offered here that Alexander Pope was right. Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

The cold war is the great fact of our day. It is a war of ideas. What folly it is to suppose that the schoolboy who hears and sees discussions of these ideas on radio and television, in the newspapers and magazines on his living-room table, or in the books in his local bookstores and library, is being protected from them by not mentioning them in the classroom. The whole genius and strength of democracy is epitomized in the man who prefers the better because he understands the worse. He is the perfect embodiment of the liberal education for which this Academy stands. It is not in countries where this type of education has flourished that Communism has made progress, but in countries where great ignorant masses of peasants were denied even a little learning. Communism itself, with its philosophical pretensions and its double talk, its captive science and literature, is the full flower of a little learning. Is not the obvious defense against it those deeper draughts prescribed by Pope, prohibited in Russia, yet still permissible in the United States? Is it not contorted logic to believe that liberal education, which the Kremlin fears (and therefore prohibits), will be the death of Communism in Russia, will be the birth of it in the United States?

You will hear it said, finally, that there is too much learning, that when people get too well educated they won’t want to work. Work at what? The learned professions? In these, work and education and satisfaction are synonymous. Work in industry? With their high wages and their fortyhour week, what will our factory workers do with their other 128 hours? Allowing 56 for sleep and 21 for meals, that still leaves 51 in which education might prove itself. What else will fill these hours? Television? Movies? Demagogues? A little learning? Often you will find that the man who argues too much education occupies the same cultural level as the man to whom he applies the argument. The minute he steps out of his office he steps into the same car, the same movie show, the same television program, the same sleepy evening; reads the same newspapers and magazines, drinks the same beer, smokes the same cigarettes, listens to the same radio broadcasts. Observing these two gentlemen in their use of leisure time, a man from another planet might conclude that their educational advantages had been identical. This is an infirm foundation, is it not, for the curtailment of these advantages to either. We all live in the same country, under the same government. We are all responsible for choosing this government and for understanding and judging its policies. We believe in equal opportunity. The proof of equal opportunity is mobility. The key to mobility is education. The idea that there can be too much education is all very well for a feudal system or a dictatorship, but it is a contradiction in terms in a democracy.

Gentlemen of Andover, your Academy was founded in the year 1778. This was a critical year in the history of our country. It is true that just the year before we had won the Battle of Saratoga and Benjamin Franklin had then signed certain treaties of commerce and alliance with France. But Washington was at Valley Forge and the British held New York and Philadelphia.

I will give you two propositions for the year 1778: a little learning was a dangerous thing, and so was being an American. It is to your everlasting credit that for over a century and three quarters, in the forefront of American education, your Academy has, with flawless logic, inspired teaching, and liberal learning, proved the first proposition and disproved the second. May you continue to do so, to the common benefit of American education and American democracy.