Americans as Students

by PIERRE EMMANUEL

1

THE audience of a summer-school course in Comparative Literature falls into several distinct categories. To begin with, there are more women enrolled than men; in a practical world, men are less attracted by literary subjects. Year after year, I found roughly the same ratio of ladies of ripe and respectable age (and one faithful auditor who for three summers never missed one of my lectures). Nothing is more moving than the attention with which they lislrn and the conscientiousness with which they work their way through reading lists. When, as sometimes happens, they are bewildered by ideas that arc new to them, they make a valiant attempt to understand them and to fit them into a framework of their own.

Among the persons taking the course for credit are to he found a few high school teachers, graduate students, and a large but fluctuating number of undergraduates who from time to time bring along their friends. I have always felt a great deal of respect for the high quality of those secondary school instructors who, in order to refresh their minds during the summer, sacrifice two months of vacation time. And my respect would turn into admiration whenever I learned that so-and-so, who was a teacher or a graduate student, worked in a factory at night to balance his budget..

The most conscientious and mature students are not always the most brilliant or the most original. Their papers, for instance, are solidly based on facts and readings: all you asked for is there, but seldom more. They seem no longer to feel the need of expressing their own ideas, and prefer simply to present in orderly fashion what they have learned. Their own reflections on the subject, are adequate, intelligent, and neutral. I suspect them of being somewhat wary of the reader’s moods; they know the minimum required to obtain a good grade, and they are unwilling to take chances.

The most exciting members of the summer school are the undergraduates. Here we find the budding genius who writes poetry or short, stories, Ieels the world just doesn’t understand him, dreams about suicide, speed, violence, and calls himself an existentialist on the faith of a few scattered readings or a lecture on Sartre; the Harvard junior, specializing in political and economic theory, who, thanks to literary history, enthusiastically discovers that social change goes hand in hand with transformations in the moral world; the son of European immigrants in search of his origins; the young Jewish student who becomes fully aware of his Hebrew heritage after reading Mersey’s The If all; ihe 200 per cent American who sees in Europe’s complexity a sign of her hopeless decadence and, as a contrast, sings fervent hymns in praise of the pioneering spirit, which in his eyes the businessman symbolizes; the sophomore from Smith or Wellesley, whose quiet and honest efforts bear witness to the fine teaching methods employed by these two institutions; the Radcliffe girl, whose zeal for work does not dampen her imagination and insights and who seems to reach maturity more quickly than the average girl; the “progressive college” girl, more loaded with “problems” than the ass in the fable was burdened with relics, who is up-to-date on everything, from Anouilh to Sehbnberg, not to mention the Marquis de Sade and Heidegger; the girl starving for love who has been cloistered in some out-of-the-way campus for nine long months and now has a heyday, brushing ihrough the boys and finding herself a new meal ticket every night; the Southern girl, at once an anarchist and a Puritan, torn by inner conflicts which, she discovers to her own surprise, make her astonishingly sensitive to certain tragic European destinies; and many others, each one infinitely individual in the midst of a world where everyone fancies that he resembles everyone else.

2

WHAT is the intellectual background of the twenty-year-old student in America? It is a varied and confused one, whose extent does not always compensate for the absence of the indispensable. I believe that I am not going too far in saying that education at the high school level is mediocre. The fault does not lie with the teaching staff. The lends of democratic egalitarianism are so strong in the United States that they assume a downright metaphysical importance. The postulate goes this way : All minds must have an equal chance at the start. They are like fertile fields; all that needs to be done is to sow them with method and prevent their differences from growing more’ marked, since differences contradict the principle of fundamental equality of all brains. This pseudo-Cartesian illusion leads to the adoption of the least astringent of all methods: that of the potpourri.

The criterion of immediate usefulness partly sterilizes education, turning it from a cultural undertaking into mere social adaptation to the American kaleidoscope. Often I have been fascinated, in my conversations with American students, by the bits of knowledge emerging without reason from the recesses of the mind, floating at the surface, then vanishing as others lake their place. In his first or second year of college an American student does not assimilate what he learns as efficiently as a French student in the last two years of the French lycée, which corresponds roughly to high school. The freshman is thus faced with the following alternative: either he makes the effort of acquiring the basic patterns which he lacks and which his secondary schooling should have given him, or he will launch out on a random quest into realms that are too vast for the limited scope of his actual comprehension.

This absence of basic information is particularly noticeable in the fields of literature and history. Instead of being concentrated, channeled, continually kept aware of that “spiritual duration” which is manifest in the evolution of thought, the attention roams distractedly and fails to grasp the unity of culture: only scattered components remain in the mind — ruins, one might almost say. At best, when the youthful mind strives to connect these disjecta membra without having in its possession the means necessary to resurrect them — the historical sequence, the sense of time, the network of causal relations — the student is led to formulate hazardous inductions, fantastic or superficial comparisons, pitiful attempts at synthesis which bring out clearly the disparity between the desire for an integrated kind of knowledge and the fragility of its foundations.

Of course the best students, gifted with a natural inclination for culture, strive as much to acquire knowledge as to develop the critical sense necessary to its organization. Those who come from the groat American universities whore the intellectual traditions inherited from Europe are still being upheld are helped in this task by methods more rigorous than elsewhere. At times I have observed, when, comparing undergraduates from different: institutions, variations in the level of the education received so great that they would he considered scandalous in France, where there exists only one form of education at university level, whether it is being dispensed at the Sorbonno, in Strasbourg, or in Algiers.

In a French lycee, every student spends four hours a week, lor live years, learning the literary history of his country; and he spends as much to gain a general notion of his country’s and the world’s political history. Education is designed to provide the mind, at a very early stage, with the notion of a lasting temporal structure as well as of a logic of history. This conception may be open to debate, but it is an efficient one and it has the advantage of forming into a continuous progression everything that has happened in Europe since the time of the Roman Empire.

In France, I admit, the teacher’s authority forces upon the child’s mind a uniform mold into which are cast abstract notions which actually he will experience only later. Having a fifteen-year-old hoy comment on Pascal and Rousseau according to a method which an adult mind alone can master would be a dangerous absurdity if it were anything but a temporary means of relating a mass of intellectual facts to a broader historical scheme. The strongest objection one could make to such a system of education is that it dismantles the classics in order to build up literary history with the broken fragments. The student does not read all of Montaigne, for instance, but forever dissects the same excerpts, which have been passed on from anthology to anthology over the last two centuries.

In America, you may he a citizen of the United States, a well-fitted part of the nation’s machinery, and yet remain a complete stranger to almost all of its history. Such a thing, barring a few special cases, is unthinkable in France. In the United States, everyone blends into the community which he chooses to join as an individual. On the soil of Europe, on the other hand, everyone thinks of himself as a mere shoot of a thousand-year-old tree, and the European’s manner of thinking, whenever he evolves a personal one, begins at the point, where his predecessors have left off.

On American faculties may be found some of the best specialists in European history and literary history, the most eminent proponents of Comparative Literature; yet a certain state of mind still remains to be created among the students, a sense of historical space which would enable them to move about effortlessly in the dense universe of systems and works. I am far from suffering from that date-fetishism, common among Frenchmen, at which Mark Twain poked fun in such an amusing manner. But I do believe that if we wish to avoid making fatal blunders, we must know the historical context in which Montaigne, Locke, or Schiller places himself. Human thought is not made up of juxtaposed monads-; it is a complex of relationships that must come out of the knowledge of certain specific facts and synchronisms.

Too many American students neglect the compass which history gives them, for the sake of a personal approach to the classics. This advent urous exploration has its good points, of course. Tou read the works from the first page to the last, instead of I uniting yourself to so-called significant excerpts. Instead of telling the student, “Readchapters such and such of The Social Contract, it is advisable to let him discover the work as a whole and in its newness, without weighing it down with interpretations, and above all without approaching the work through them. The contrary method leads a great many French students to content themselves with the commentaries before they even have caught a glimpse of the object to which these are applied.

How quickly the American student makes friends with a book or a man and treats them as if they were his contemporaries! He hardly knows the background from which they arise: they surge out of his own mental world, haunt him, call forth in him an instantaneous and, frequently, a passionate reaction. A fortnight later, however, others have taken their place; it is love at first sight, but inditlerence rapidly follows.

And when the boy and, particularly, the girl student look at the authors on the program with the eyes of their own “problems - that is, with a psychological narcissism that has been aggravated by a watered-down form of psychoanalysis the result of their investigation is likely to be ludicrous. I shall not even mention a certain perverted manner of reading, feet resting on the table, while phonograph or radio is blaring. True, all the reading gets done, but against a background of inner vacuousness, and all that remains in the memory is a kind of gelatinous magma. When the time has come to discuss the text in class, each phrase begins to float outside of its context; and the student, as if he could not wait to do his own thinking, lets himself be carried away by entirely personal associations of ideas which he attributes to the author under discussion. The two favorite expressions used by the American student to preface his comments are “It seems to mo . . . and I think . . .” These clearly reveal his indiv idualism. No attitude is more praiseworthy, as long as you are wary of using it as a basis for hasty generalizations.

Here is an illustration — a charming one — of this undaunted self-confidence. The incident took place on a beach on Cape Cod. One of my students had been invited, as had I, by some common friends; she brought along the Modern Library Nietzsche reader. A few days later, she was to give a report on the philosophy of the father of Zarathustra. As she lay on the sand, basking in the sun, she leafed lazily through the book. That was the moment she picked to ask me to sketch lor her a broad outline of Nietzsche’s philosophy! I began as best I could — most clumsily, 1 must say — trying to illustrate what I was saying with a few excerpts hastily — too hastily — picked.

After ten minutes, she interrupted me with the inevitable opening words, “It seems to me . . . ; and then she started to build an entire system before my eyes, naive and at the same time brilliant in spots. This she took for the master’s thought. Need 1 mention that she came from one of those “progressive’ colleges where any sophomore is encouraged to think of herself as sufliciently endowed with genius to reinvent, by starting from almost nothing, a world that some titanic creator spent a lifetime shaping" My pretty student, having concocted her picture of Nietzsche in a few moments, now read him through the image which she had constructed, and she retained from his words only enough to add a few concrete touches to that image. Vet her account was not lacking in interest, for it contained flashes of intuition which a more sustained analysis would certainly have brought into sharper evidence. You may be sure, however, that as soon as she had finished her work, she forgot her subject as lightly as she had learned it. For her, it had merely been an exercise in scholastic rhetoric.

3

IT IS said that. American students do not like to think. It would be better to say that they do not know how to think, through ignorance of a small number of rules which secondary schooling should have trained them to use. First of all, certain rules of attention. A good half of my students never took any notes: listening was a part of their soliloquy, and what they heard of my lectures was but an echo distorted by their inner dream. Their chief difficulty seemed to be to get out of themselves; as a result, what they were being taught was shredded into vague impressions on the surface of their minds.

Others, no less tormented by the desire to unbosom themselves, would be pathetically on their guard to keep from saying anything that concerned them intimately; and since they were unable to forget themselves for one minute, their monologue would quickly slop short. Those who were capable of abstracting themselves from their little private universe were also the most thoughtful ones, and consequently those most aware of their lack of discipline. Despite the extent of their information, they realized that without structures, knowledge is only chaos.

In the course of the summer, the students had two weeks to write an essay on some general theme. Although confused and badly presented, their ideas were not devoid of substance. One hardly could reproach American students with lacking personality, bill most of the time it. remains in a primitive state. On the day of the final examination, everything was changed. When the white sheet of paper stared up at them, most of the unhappy victims remained defenseless. The first two years, I had chosen a significant sentence from the works of the authors on the program, one that summarized the tendencies of the course, and I had asked the candidates to comment on it. by referring to what they had learned. Their collective failure — the graduates floundered no less than the undergraduates — assumed the proportions of a downright rout. The blue books handed in could not even be called rough drafts: they were, at best, vague cogitations jotted down as they came to mind.

What are the reasons for this:1 In the first place, the subject suddenly paralyzed their minds. During the course, they had accumulated notions which no general idea helped to relate; they had listened to me day after day, as one lets oneself be carried downstream by a river. It was thus impossible for them, in the space of three hours — or, let us say, twenty minutes: long enough to map out a general outline — to bring together all their scattered ideas and to organize them into a coherent whole.

I was so dismayed by this result that, the third year, I decided to assign six questions: three general ones and three dealing with a brief text to be commented upon. The answers and comments were successful, with the exception of one, which I had not discussed in class. It had to do with a sentence from Malraux’s Man’s Fate, a book that all had read. Most of the students committed the same error as those of the two preceding years. All they kept in mind was the name Malraux, and they began to disgorge whatever they knew about him.

However, American students possess some very positive qualities. The foreigner appreciates these all the more since, from the very first, he finds himself surrounded by an atmosphere of confidence. The most valuable perhaps, in my opinion, is a certain psychological liveliness: feelings interest them more than ideas. They attach more significance to what the hero of a novel — and even its author — does than to what he thinks. The delicate distinctions of the heart frequently call forth unexpected responses in these young adults; they discover a language fitting their own emotional experience, which up to then has not found a voice. Hence the freshness with which they become acquainted with their classics: no prejudice to mar the purity of the encounter.

They look at all books as if they had been written yesterday, and attempt to find in them a convenient mirror which they question — in vain sometimes, but always sincerely. They try to project what they feel or have guessed about themselves into all things, and, by means of examples drawn from external sources, seek to justify inner urges which they usually keep secret because their moral environment frowns upon them. Trapped in a conventional and gregarious society, they take advantage of their college years, with a kind of nervous haste, to have a little taste of everything in order to satisfy their unruly appetites, as if compelled to learn as much as possible about themselves before it is too late. Hence the professor, if he wants to fill In’s role successfully, must try to get to know his students intimately, to understand their personalities even more than their immediately recognizable gifts and abilities. This explains the importance — absolutely inexistent in France — of working in small groups or under the guidance of a tutor. In a way, the American student expects his teacher to become his mentor, a kind of intellectual director of his conscience. Such relationships can he fruitful and satisfying for both parties concerned, but I need hardly point out that they are sometimes dangerous.

Here we face defects which, in most American students — to a varying degree, of course — are the counterpart of their good trails. Whereas Europeans go through their critical stage of adjustment at the very beginning of adolescence, it seems that Americans experience this crisis at a later period. At the age of twenty, their personalities are too much concerned with themselves, their doubts, their fears before their environment, and not enough with the manifold aspects of the external world. Before another man’s thought, their attention is held only by the echo of their own haunt mg ego.

In my opinion, the faults which I have pointed out are by no means congenital. Social environment certainly accounts for a good many; but its influence is furthered by the system of education that has grown out of it. This vicious circle cannot easily he broken. It is in high school that students must be trained to use that objective type of attention without which each new bit of information merely adds to the chaos of thought. Such training is out of place at the college level. At the age of twenty, the mind has already contracted fatal habits. Secondary education has the duty of teaching adolescents to organize what they know and to express it in coherent terms.