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  But there is a denominator to such courses and it is a highly appealing one; dangled before the student is the secret of happiness, for the courses explicitly instruct one in the skills of manipulating other people or the skills of adjusting oneself. The student can hardly be blamed if he passes up an opportunity of poring through William James. Why read books by dead people when you can take:

  36-250

  Personality Development. Factors contributing to personality development. Mental hygiene principles will be introduced. Offered at College of Business Administration. Prerequisite: 36-10 and Upper Division status.

  36-251

  Mental Hygiene. The purpose of this course is to provide the student with sufficient information and understanding of the factors contributing to good mental health to enable him to make a more satisfying type of adjustment with himself, with others and his environment.

  36-261.1, .2

  Psychology Applied to Life and Work. The application of psychological principles to practical problems in business, industry and professional fields. Some application to personal problems will be included along with a consideration of such topics as work and rest, monotony, accidents and incentives. Prerequisite: Upper Division status and course in introductory or general psychology.

  And look what’s happened to English. Now it is becoming “Communication Skills,” and in what is called an inter-disciplinary effort everybody from the engineers to applied psychologists are muscling in. In some places, Michigan State, for example, they not only have whole departments of communication but have made it the center of required under-class courses. In others, it has been made the heart of a vocational training in advertising and journalistic research.

  As a way of looking at society, communication can be a very absorbing subject—but one of the reasons it can be very absorbing is because nobody is quite sure yet just what communication amounts to, or, for that matter, whether it is really a separate discipline at all. Until a good bit more is known, it has no business whatsoever as a basic undergraduate discipline. As anyone who has ever tried to teach composition knows, the student who has yet to master it would give anything to be done with the chore. Of all times this is not the one to fascinate him with mass media content analyses and experiments in audience behavior; they not only divert him from first things, they delude him into thinking that he has long since outgrown them and is poised on the very frontier of discovery.

  And who are the technicians who are his mentors in this? Read their output in the learned journals. Many of these people don’t even like the language. They torture it with charts, they twist it with equations, and they have so little respect for the devices they recommend as the avenue to the masses that they never demean themselves with their use. Rarely has brevity been advocated so interminably.

  People concerned about overspecialization have been very much encouraged by the growth of the “general-education” movement. This, first given currency in the Harvard report of 1945, General Education in a Free Society, was not forwarded to denigrate specialization but rather to argue for a sounder underlying base. The free-elective system, pioneered by Harvard’s Eliot, had liberalized the curriculum, but in time it had led to a fragmentation in which the electives moved further and further away from a unifying center. In most cases the courses that the student took outside of his major were not designed for him but for men who would go on to specialize in the particular subject, and even were he not bored by it, the student would fail to grasp the relevance of this subject to other subjects, and thus the relevance to him. A unifying goal, the report argued, was sorely needed; the schools and colleges, it urged, should now set to work welding the different disciplines into a program by which the general student could be instructed in the parts in such a way that he would grasp a meaningful whole.

  So far, so good, and many colleges have undertaken a program that does just that. But “General Education,” alas, was too good a thing not to be for, and with tremendous flexibility educators committed to utilitarianism very quickly appropriated the term to clothe programs that achieved the opposite of what the Harvard report was talking about. For them, the term rationalized their dislike of “subject matter”—i.e., knowledge—and what they proceeded to construct were superficial “survey” and “core” courses which were, if anything, a step backward from the electives they supplanted. In the latter the student was at least prodded to master something, and while the subject itself might not have compelled his attention it did provide a standard of accomplishment—and one not unlike the standards enforced in what is called real life. In the “survey” courses, by contrast, he merely samples, and, worse yet, he is persuaded that this sampling is itself a discipline.

  A “survey” course can show the relationship between different areas of learning and thereby illuminate the whole. But it cannot do this at the expense of the parts; before he can see any relevance between two things—between, say, the Reformation and England’s industrial revolution—the student must learn what the two things were. But can he do this in the compass of courses that in a handful of semester hours touch on just about everything that has happened to man since the Deluge? This is precisely what many “survey” and “general-education” courses attempt to do. They do not combine the parts; they eliminate the parts.

  They eliminate the parts because the whole that the college often has in mind is quite frankly not intellectual development at all. It is, rather, the same old “personal-social development,” and again the familiar needs-of-modern-man theme is wrung in to refreshen it. I quote from a recent conference of educators on general-education programs. “We may devise a new cosmotron,” exclaimed a co-ordinator from Florida State, “some new design in curriculum structure, which would fit the atomic-age collegian with whom we work. And I would say that this planning is no less exciting than is the planning of ‘accelerator-development groups’ of our friends, the nuclear physicists.” Queries directed at a cross section of colleges, it was reported, revealed that much had already been accomplished along these lines. “The centralizing course in basic education here,” one college had declared, “is the course in Personal-Social Adjustment.” “This institution,” another said for the record, “believes that extracurricular counseling and assistance in real-life situations is as important and perhaps more important than a course using the method of didactic teaching.”

  Has vocationalism reached a saturation point? Those who like to think so would do well to ponder the history of U.S. education. Emphasis on utility is not a new development in our history. Many people speak of the education of a hundred years ago as an education tailored for an aristocracy, but American education was even then more utilitarian than the European model, and it was, in its way, a vocational training for the professions. When the great land-grant college movement began in the sixties, the country was so ready for a more “universal” education that in a remarkably few years a whole new slice of the population was enfranchised by scores of technical and agricultural schools. During this time the curriculum of the traditional liberal arts colleges was undergoing great changes too, and when Eliot introduced the elective system, college after college veered away from the old fixed regimen of studies. In similar fashion, the professional-school movement started by Johns Hopkins University was altering the institution of the college itself; by the turn of the century the liberal arts college was no longer the center of education but was becoming one more unit in a whole series of technical and professional schools. The changes that took place after 1900 in the great expansion of the high schools were also in character. In retrospect they seem revolutionary, but they were an extension, not a reversal.

  Whether exaggerated or not, the inclination to the practical, the contemporary, has been thoroughly in the American tradition. Education can never go back in the sense that so many fear, because what it is supposed to go back to never really existed in this country. This fear of medievalism resurgent is a bogy; American education will alw
ays lean toward the practical, toward the larger number than the smaller, and no reformation can ever succeed that runs counter to this tradition.

  Parents would not have it otherwise. They are not unwitting dupes of a cabal of educators; talk as they will of “fundamentals,” when they have to get down to cases they reveal themselves far more interested in the immediately practical. In 1949 Elmo Roper surveyed for Fortune a wide cross section of Americans on their attitude toward education. One of the questions asked was how much time they would like their children to devote to the liberal arts while in college. Of those who answered, college graduates were the most tolerant. They divided up this way: 7 per cent wanted the student to spend all his time on the liberal arts; 7 per cent wanted him to spend three quarters of his time. By contrast, 30 per cent wanted him to spend only one half his time; 28 per cent, a quarter of his time, and 10 per cent wanted him to spend all the time on technical or professional study. Today, the bias against the liberal arts is stronger yet. In the chapters on suburbia we will see how the new generation of parents wish their children to be educated, and suffice it to say here that they demonstrate themselves even more vocational in their leanings than their opposite numbers of a decade previous.

  The seeming opposition between traditionalism and modernism, as the Harvard report said, is a tragedy for Western thought. A more universal education does not have to be antithetical with the humanities. Granted that our national character inclines us excessively to the practical; granted that our youth must be prepared for an organizational world and not an entrepreneurial one—with all these qualifications an invigoration of the humanities can still make sense. It would not be a “return”; we cannot divide the U.S. into a vocationally trained majority with a small group of mandarins leading them—our society is much too national, much too transient for this. If the humanities are to flourish, their relevance to everyone must be demonstrated.

  Only the boldest kind of leadership can accomplish this. There is a real battle to be fought. It cannot be adjudicated, for there are deep philosophical differences over ends. The people who have been working for the social-adjustment curriculum are dedicated. You may feel, as this writer does, that they are profoundly wrong in their emphasis, but you must also acknowledge that they care. In preparing students for the organization life, they feel very strongly that what they are doing is for the common good, and this has given them an ideological sustenance that has united and invigorated them. They have earned their dominance; it is they who have harnessed contemporary social forces, and for many years it is they who will reap the rewards.

  In this struggle the stewards of the liberal arts have little reason for the smug self-satisfaction so many display. It was the liberal arts colleges which at the turn of the century abdicated to the normal schools their historic function of training teachers. Eventually, this abdication came home to roost, in the poorly prepared students the normal-school graduates were sending to the colleges. The colleges have been complaining loudly over the low level of high-school teaching, but only a handful have lifted a finger to do anything constructive about it. Rather than help educate secondary-school teachers, the majority have reacted in a negative sense; they have set up courses to make up for the freshmen’s deficiencies in fundamentals, but the nub of the problem they have left alone.

  The private schools have an even more dismal record. Potentially, they have a value far beyond their numbers as models and pace setters, but while most still give a good education they do it in camera. They are content simply to be. With very few exceptions—five would be too generous a number—they display no energy in showing their relevance to the rest of society, and the only issue which has roused them from their shameful torpor is the possibility of being taxed. The thought that the best way to insure that they won’t be is to display some of their usefulness to the rest of secondary education is rarely voiced, and the great debate in education continues without them. When the layman reads anything about the private schools, it is apt to be in reminiscences of a well-spent life, pious tributes to the whole man, and the like, and this is not enough. Read the Independent School Bulletin and then read the journals of the National Education Association, and you have a good clue as to why the life-adjustment educators are dominant. The NEA articles are often appalling but they throb with excitement. The voice of the private school is the still, small voice—and so content, so very content, that it is small and still.

  The stewards of the liberal arts are to blame for its low estate in another respect. If people swing away from them on the grounds that they are not useful enough, this cannot be explained entirely as a worship of false gods. There is nothing wrong with usefulness as a criterion; from the beginning, after all, the liberal arts were intended as a highly functional training. That they no longer seem so to the majority of people is rather strong evidence that something more is at fault than people’s judgment.

  Let’s go back to the subject of English a moment. Of all subjects none is potentially more useful—as Peter Drucker has remarked, the most vocational course a future businessman can take is one in the writing of poetry or short stories. That English is being slighted by business and students alike does not speak well of business. But neither does it speak well for English departments. They are right to recoil from justifying English on the narrow grounds of immediate utility, as better report writing and the like. But one can recoil too far. In so resisting the vocationalizing of English, they have contributed to it. If technicians of “business writing” and the psychologists have been able to denature English into a “communication” science, it is because the greater relevance of English has been left undrawn.

  And this, in the long run, means a less useful English. Who has the most to teach us about any subject? The geniuses—or the also-rans? It is to such as Lamb and Swift and Shakespeare that we should look and not to the prose engineers. The great models of thought and expression can seem far removed from our own immediate problems, but almost for this detachment they are the truest guide of all. It is the universals, not the particulars, that are important; only through them can we learn that simplicity is the product of thought, rather than the mechanics of chopping the number of sentences per hundred words. It is a long and tough discipline, yet in the long run what is more downright practical? It is sad that the prose engineers do not realize this. It is sadder still when the teachers of English do not.

  There are some good omens, the ivy league universities and some of the smaller liberal arts colleges have shown great energy and, if the word can be pardoned, pragmatism, in revitalizing the humanities, and their graduates remain in great demand. They are in demand, let it be conceded, largely for reasons other than the nature of the curriculum, but companies have found that the graduates weren’t permanently hurt by it. In time there could be more than this negative tribute; in running counter to the rest of U.S. education, such colleges are carving out a function that may be more important than any they have performed before.

  There are a few other good omens. As we have noted, several of the technical schools have been revamping their curriculums to give students some notion of what went on in the outside world the last 3,000 years; M.I.T., the California Institute of Technology, and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, among others, now require students to devote at least a fifth of their hours to the humanities, which, though hardly overpowering, is to be welcomed. Meanwhile, the number of commissions, programs, and conventions devoted to the humanities problem has been increasing. A series of studies has been exploding the myth of the thirteen-year-old I.Q. We do not lack for native talent, they have been demonstrating; the problem, indeed, is that most of our high-I.Q. people are not sufficiently challenged, and half of them never go on to college.

  But the trend may be more powerful than the counter-trend. By default, the anti-intellectual sector of education has been allowed to usurp the word “democratic” to justify the denaturing of the curriculum, and while liberal arts people may
win arguments on this score, the others won the war long ago. Once the uneducated could have the humility of ignorance. Now they are given degrees and put in charge, and this delusion of learning will produce consequences more critical than the absence of it.

  I return to my pessimistic forecast. Look ahead to 1985. Those who will control a good part of the educational plant will be products themselves of the most stringently anti-intellectual training in the country. Nor will the layman be out of tune with the vocationalists; to judge by the new suburbia the bulk of middle-class parents of 1985 will know no other standards to evaluate education of their children than those of the social-adjustment type of schooling. And who will be picking the schools to endow and sitting on the boards of trustees? More and more it will be the man of The Organization, the graduate of the business school—the “modern man,” in sum, that his education was so effectively designed to bring about.

  * Out of curiosity, Edward E. Booker, executive vice president of McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., checked the educational background of the top executives of Fortune’s list of the 500 biggest corporations. Of 365 men who indicated their educational background, 115 were not college graduates, 119 had liberal arts degrees, and 131 had degrees in the practical or applied fields, such as engineering. (Antioch Notes, March 1956.)

  * In charting the trends I have followed the classifications set by the Office of Education’s statistical reports. In the physical sciences, accordingly, I have included: astronomy, chemistry, geology, metallurgy, meteorology, and physics. In the social sciences: anthropology, sociology, history, economics, international relations, plus psychology (listed separately by the Office of Education). In the humanities I have included English, all of the foreign languages, and philosophy. Incidentally, the proportion in history and economics was 9.6 per cent in 1939-46, 6.3 per cent in 1954-55. Psychology, meanwhile, went up from 3.7 per cent to 7.5 per cent.