Alumni Oration

"Alumni Oration, J.T. Hebert, M.A., L.L.B.,'12" Brunswickan 45, 7 (May 1926): 41-52. (UA Case 67a, Box 2)

My subject this afternoon is "The College and the Nation." It might also be called Education for Citizenship. At the outset, however, the mistake must not be made that I am advocating a purely political education, although in a Provincial University, maintained by a democracy for the benefit of its people, the subject of government and political science should occupy an important place. But whatever vocation the graduates of such an institution may follow, they will all be citizens, and some of them will be leading citizens; and it is with citizenship in the larger sense, the function of a free citizen in a free state, and the place of the College or University in the formation of such a citizen, that I wish to deal. My topic therefore, is the public purpose of education, what the state has a right to expect from its institution of higher education, and whether these expectations are being realized at the present time. It will accordingly be my purpose to point out what a democratic and progressive community, such as ours strives and hopes to be, requires of its members and how its seats of higher learning can help it to that end. To describe the preparation which I conceive the college should give for the varied activities of citizenship, I have found no words more adequate than those of John Milton written almost three centuries ago in his "Tractate:" "I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of Peace and War."

It will not be considered presumptuous, I trust, for one who but yesterday was an instructor in this institution, and but the day before one of its students to request this encaenial audience to give a little honest thought to this most important subject, and he hopes to be accused of disloyalty if he refuses to lull his hearers with the well-worn sentiments of affection so dear to the heart and lips of the elder alumnus proposing the toast to Alma Mater. It is well, no doubt, to echo Daniel Webster's "It is, Sir, a small College, yet there are those who love it." It is better surely, to strive that though it remain a small college, all should respect it.

College Course A Liberal Education

It is generally said that the end of a college course is a liberal education, but when we ask what the meaning or use of a liberal education is, the answer is not always satisfactory. There was a time when a college head at Oxford could tell his students without shame, "Gentlemen, study the Classics. For a knowledge of the Classics, gentlemen, not only enables you to look down with contempt on those who are less well educated than yourselves, but may lead to positions of considerable emolument even in this world." Today, we are hardly satisfied with such a motive, any more than we are convinced of the plain inference intended that a knowledge of the Classics would certainly lead to positions of considerable emolument in the next world. If we who count ourselves fortunate in being college graduates ask ourselves honestly what our college course has done for us, is it possible that our answer would be as absurd as that of the Oxford Don? Let us see what the average college graduate, as represented by that typical American business man, Mr. George F. Babbitt, thinks about it. You will remember that he is arguing with his son Ted, who, instead of wasting four years in college, wants to take a correspondence course in Engineering, and go off and build bridges in China; in the best Americanese, Mr. Babbitt tells us what College has done for him. "No, and I'll tell you why, my son. I've found out it's a mighty nice thing to be able to say that you're a B.A. Some client who doesn't know what you are and thinks you are just a plug business man, he gets to shooting off his mouth about economics and literature, or foreign trade conditions, and you just ease in something like 'When I was at college—of course I got my B.A. in sociology and all that junk.' Oh, it puts an awful crimp in their style! You see, my dad was a pretty good old coot but he never had much style to him, and I had to work darn hard to earn my way through college. Well, it’s been worth it to be able to associate with the finest gentlemen in Zenith at the clubs and so on and I wouldn't want to drop out of the gentleman class—the class that are just as red-blooded as the Common People, but still have power and personality. It would kind of hurt me if you did that, old man." There is great danger to fear that the Arts degree has become for many graduates just what Mr. Babbitt said, a symbol of gentility, and that apart from being such a symbol, it is thoroughly useless, to its possessor and to the community.

The True Purpose of Education

After the contemptible ideal advanced by the Oxford Don, and the useless upstartism which Mr. Babbitt thought justified his four years at college, is it not refreshing and heartening to return to Milton's majestic prose: "I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly and magnanimously all offices, both private and public, of Peace and War." Is not that the true purpose of education, to develop the qualities of the human animal to fit him for membership in a civilized society, to give him those habits of discipline which will make the state strong in time of war, and those habits of decency which will serve to keep it safe in times of peace? Certainly if we keep in view the public purpose of education, there is no other or better answer, than that education to be a preparation for the varied activities of citizenship, and what I would have you bear in mind is the place the college should occupy in that preparation. Former President Hadley has said that the three fundamental things which seem to distinguish civilization from barbarism are order, cleanliness and prudence, and that in a community governed by an absolute monarch or a religious oligarchy, they represent about all that is essential as a basis for citizenship. A free commonwealth or democracy, however, requires more than these. If it is to enjoy civil liberty, it must develop in addition habits of self-control among the great body of its members, and habits of leadership among a considerable number of them. And such habits of self-control and leadership are much harder to secure than habits of order, cleanliness and prudence, for the latter may be imposed and maintained by authority from above, but the latter arise and are sustained in each man's soul. Not only are habits of self-control and leadership more difficult to nurture, but they may be more easily abused. The liberty to do right is also the liberty to do wrong, and the only guarantee the community has against the misuse of self-control and leadership is in the vision and intelligence of its members. To quote President Hadley again, "They must have vision to see and feel what the community needs to have them see and feel, so that ideals of order and cleanliness and upbuilding which tend to carry them forward will have a stronger and more constant appeal than the mere animal instincts which tend to carry them backward. And they must have intelligence to know how these ideals are to be compassed, so that the pursuit of their visions will lead them and their followers in the general direction in which they want to go—not backward into the wilderness, but forward into the promised land. To the habit by which vision is acquired we give the name imagination; to the habit by which intelligence is acquired we give the name of thinking."

Various Habits of Teaching

These habits, as all history teaches, are what the free nations of the world have had to acquire gradually and painfully; these are the qualities which their individual members still have to acquire in order to fit themselves for citizenship in the free communities of modern times. Of course, many different educational agencies contribute to the difficult process of learning these habits; "for teaching habits of order and decency we have the family and the police, for teaching habits of prudence, we have private property, for teaching habits of imagination in the largest and truest sense, we have the theatre, the press and the church, and for teaching habits of thinking, we have the schools." It is obvious that the work of each of, these agencies overlaps one or some of the others, but it is equally patent that the primary duty of the school, in its largest sense, is to teach the habit and train the power of thinking, to develop as high a degree as possible of mental health and intellectual strength.

This then is the business of the College or University, to make intellectual culture its direct scope, to employ itself in the education of the mind. In this process of education, two elements enter, first, the medium through which it is to be wrought and, second, the method by which it is to be achieved. Most of the old controversies have dealt only with the first of these—should the Classics or Mathematics be preferred? Was it possible to acquire culture and sweetness and light from a study of the Natural Sciences? How large a place should be assigned to the Social Sciences? These disputes leave us cold, partly because we are dealing not with a theory of which subject matter is best, but with a condition in which all of them are given a place in the curriculum; but mainly for the reason that the controversies were over the wrong things, as I hope to show you later. They are instructive nevertheless in a negative way, for they illustrate one conception of education which is still extremely prevalent. The ordinary intelligent citizen undoubtedly regards the University or College as a place for acquiring a great deal of knowledge on a great many subjects. The fond parent who sends his offspring to College has usually the same idea. Either he wants his son or daughter to study nothing that is not useful, because that is what he will need in later life, or else nothing that is useful for the reason that unless he learns it in College he will never learn it anywhere. In either case, it is the subject matter that is important, and the prospective student is regarded as a sort of reservoir into which knowledge is to be poured by different teachers in proper proportion. And even the professors have come to regard their function to be merely that of purveyors of information. It is no wonder then that the public have taken at its face value the fundamentally false maxim that Knowledge is Power, when a little thought would show that knowledge, while an indispensable condition of the expansion of mind that is power, is not the same thing. The possession of information is a totally different thing from the power or habit of thought, and it is fallacious to assume that if you secure the former the latter will follow as a matter of course. A memory stored with all sorts of information does not make the educated man or woman, any more than a large dictionary makes a grammar.

Education and Instruction

This confusion of treating education as synonymous with instruction has had very serious consequences in America. It has resulted in much misapplied power on the part of the teachers, in much wasted expense on the part of the administrators, and most important of all, in a failure to train the students so as to fit them to perform justly and magnanimously the offices of peace and war. We are coming to realize that while instruction is and always must be an important element in education, and while knowledge is and always will be of exceptional value to the citizens of a free state, yet the acquisition of knowledge is not the end of education; that it is simply an incident in the larger and more important process of training for the varied work of life, whether it be industrial, social or political; in a word, is the process of training for citizenship.

There is nothing revolutionary or particularly novel in the conception of education I am advocating. On the contrary, it is simply going back to its primary meaning, for to educate is to educe, to make something of a man rather than to put something into him. And I hope to show you that it is the only conception of education that is worth holding and the goal at which we should aim.

Half a century ago the University of New Brunswick, with four or five professors, a curriculum based for the most part on the Classics and Mathematics, and with comparatively limited resources, turned out men second to none in the Dominion. To our modern eyes, the curriculum provided poor and barren fare when contrasted with the interesting mental pabulum it now offers. But with all its barrenness and poverty, this education had two great advantages which went far to balance its defects and which it would have been well to have retained. In the first place it taught the students habits of hard mental work. Whether they were translating Greek or solving problems in higher mathematics, they were doing something for themselves and usually a something that was pretty hard. In such a school habits were formed which enabled men to do difficult things for the sake of a remote end. And in the second place, the college students of that day were compelled to regard the college course as the beginning rather than the end of their education, for the actual knowledge they attained was moderate in amount and not infrequently lacking in human interest. But it was not so much the subject matter that was important, it was the mental discipline acquired in the process. By means of it there was placed in their hands instruments by the use of which they could teach themselves the things they needed to know. The system turned out men mentally alert and trained for the pursuit of whatever calling they might choose in the future.

To Meet Needs of Students

The trouble with the old-fashioned training was that it was too narrow—it tried to teach everybody in the same way, whether the bent of the particular student was a literary one or not. It took no account of two or three other types of mind, to develop which other kinds of subject matter were necessary, and in these cases it tended to degenerate into a treadmill. To meet the demands of this large circle of students, and at the same time that a place might be found in the curriculum for the vast accumulation of scientific knowledge, the colleges added professional or semi-professional courses to replace the old apprenticeship system; they introduced the laboratory method so that a student might gain habits of work and thought by seeing and doing things himself instead of merely reading about them in books, and they adopted the elective system, partly because there were now too many courses to be all taken and partly that the student might indulge his taste and follow his aptitude in the work he would study. The change was inevitable and on the whole salutary, but it has had its drawbacks, from which we are still suffering. The new subjects were less well organized than the old ones; there was a greater temptation offered the teacher to make them purely informational and to require little or no work from the student. They certainly developed the interest of the students and increased their knowledge, but they did not always develop habits of hard work nor the power of independent thinking. Thinking, that is, real thinking is hard work. It requires a serious discipline to force the habit and a disciplined mind to keep it up. If, therefore, a student is encouraged to take only those things which interest him, there is certainly danger that he will dodge the hard parts of thinking, that he "will choose the easy way to knowledge rather than the hard road power." It has further resulted also in the idea that taking a college course is a pleasant way to pass four years of one's youth and in a mob clamoring to be educated, whether its members are capable of benefitting from a college education or not. The financial burden becomes a very serious one for the colleges and in some cases hopeless one, and they are forced, even the richest and largest of them, like Harvard, to limit the number of students they will admit. And it has resulted in hopelessly over-worked college staffs, so busy preparing and delivering lectures that they have themselves little time to think.

Places of Costly Instruction

In short, our colleges have become places of costly instruction instead of economical education. Now, I will be asked, how do I propose to remedy this condition? Certainly not by turning back the hands of the clock; but equally certain a great deal can be accomplished by a change in our methods of education. The first defect is the prevalent attitude that a student should be permitted to take any subject he may see fit, on the ground that in this way he will achieve what is euphemistically called a broad and general education; and the second is the naive suggestion that students will ever be made to think for themselves by the magic of a lecture system.

The superstition of a broad and general education is the accidental result of the elective system. As the new sciences kept enforcing their claims to recognition in the University curriculum, it soon became impossible for any student, no matter how gifted, to attempt all the courses, and consequently he was left to pick and choose pretty much as he pleased. On the general principle of "try anything once," the average students picked out courses all over the curriculum, and the authorities made a virtue of necessity and justified the elective system by inventing the explanation that the student was thereby acquiring a broad and general education. It is true that many colleges adopted only a modified form of the elective system, and also that many who at first embraced it with all the fervor of converts have gradually abandoned the principle of indiscriminate election and now insist on a choice of a group of subjects. Nevertheless the American and Canadian University system is still based upon the elective idea. That is: that it is really desirable for the student to acquire information about a wide variety of subjects. The innocent Freshman is accordingly required to sprawl himself over the kingdom of knowledge, to take a little science, a bit of mathematics, something in a dead tongue and somewhat in a live language. Possibly the instruction given in elementary subjects in our high schools is not sufficiently advanced in matter or manner at the present time to avoid this in the fist year of the college course; but certainly after the first year the student should not be allowed to philander among the departments. He should not be permitted us a former colleague of mine once said, "to flirt a while with public finances, then cast his languishing eyes on medieval history and anon dart off to caress organic chemistry." But the fetish of a broad and general education has its effect on the college also, it feverishly sets itself to establish new courses and thus establishes new temptations for the fickle-minded. Every University and especially every State University professes to teach a little of everything, until it reminds one of the little mid-western college which advertised it could offer prospective students everything they could get at Harvard except the "A" as in "Father."

Intellectual Interests

It has already been said that it was originally believed, and rightly believed, that a wider choice of courses would create a greater intellectual stimulus for the student, because it would give him a wider range of intellectual interests. It is obvious now that it has resulted in intellectual dissipation. The student is forced to load his mind with a score of subjects against a memory examination. He has too much on his hands to indulge himself in thinking or investigating for himself. The result is he devours conclusion and premise, the one as greedily as the other; he commits demonstrations to memory and he takes practically everything he is told on faith because he has no time to do anything else. He never settles down to serious work in anything, and as a result he is not really possessed of his knowledge, but merely possessed by it. It is true that he knows a little of everything, but he has become a mere passive receptacle for scraps and details, and finally he leaves his place of education dissipated and relaxed by the multiplicity of subjects, none of which he has ever begun to master, and so shallow as not to know his own shallowness. In many cases about the only part of him that grows during his college years is his body.

It ought to be obvious that only by prolonged and continuous effort upon a single coherent subject, with excursions where necessary into related matters (but without the entangling alliances of unrelated subjects) will a student develop these two qualities of good workmanship—accuracy and thoroughness. If our system insisted on the student growing up mentally under the care of one professor, or a small group of professors teaching related subjects, it would be better for the professors and infinitely better for the students. As it is now, instructors are attempting to teach too many things to too many different kinds of students. "A fragment of a professor instructs a fragment of a pupil in a fragment of a subject," as a brilliant Frenchman has put it. There is too little personal contact between the two. And what mutual relations there are reminds one of the Harvard Lampoon's cartoon of Harvard yard filled with little memorial stones commemorating historical events, on one of which the artist had written the legend, "On this spot President Eliot once bowed to a Freshman."

The Lecture System

The theory that the end of a college course is instruction is responsible in the second place, for the present method of teaching, that is, by the lecture system. No doubt before the art of printing was invented, the teacher had to give his pupils the information they needed. In our day and generation, however, with text books and source books in profusion, it is difficult if not impossible to find a plausible excuse for the criminal waste of time involved in passing out information which the student can and should be made to get for himself. It is bad for the professor. We are all acquainted with the teacher who uses the same notes year after year, until even the jokes become stabilized at certain psychological points in the lectures. It is bad for the instructor also because it gives no chance to the student to put occasional awkward questions and to pry a bit into his ignorance, and stir up again in him that divine restlessness which once possessed him when he began to teach, and before he learned how easy it is to bluff when we know we are acting a part before an audience of children. But it is fatal for the student, because by it we are making it easy for him not to grow mentally, not to observe and listen for himself, and above all not to read for himself. The professor is a pedagogue an instructor of children, not a trainer of men and women. Everything is done for the student which he ought to do for himself. He is entirely too passive, a sort of human sponge soaking up information. He is fed nothing but pre-digested knowledge, he is told the solution before he has really appreciated the problem. The scholar is kept a pupil, a ward under his instructor's care, and not a student in the true sense of the word—one who applies his own mind to the mastery of a subject. The inevitable result of this regurgative method of teaching is that there is a loss of intellectual independence and a failure to develop the power of judgment. It is too easy for the student to accept the ipse dixit of the professor, and to fly to him as his ever present help in time of troubles. Nor does it encourage his powers of initiative, that restless habit of looking out for new facts himself instead of waiting to have them pointed out to him by his instructor, of asking himself questions instead of waiting to have them asked by the teacher in the quiz period. Too often a lecture course means a loaf of ten weeks, and a preparation for examination of one night, and it is not unknown for a student to receive more mental stimulus from writing one article for the college magazine, or preparing one speech for a debate than he does out of his regular work.

Standardized Courses

Is it too much to ask that we get away from this mechanical factory of standardized courses, and that we attempt instead a really creative teaching? That we cease attempting to teach our youth to compete with the enclyclopaedia, and that instead we train it to use the encyclopaedia to the best advantage? As Cardinal Newman has well said: "Education is a high word; it is the preparation for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation. We require intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes for sight. We need both objects and organs intellectual; we cannot gain them without setting about it; we cannot gain them in our sleep or by haphazard. The best telescope does not dispense with eyes; the printing press or the lecture room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to ourselves, we must be parties in the work. A University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill." Society is not so much concerned with what its members know as with the use they can make of their knowledge. It requires men and women who can verify their information, see its bearing on their own conduct and act accordingly. It is thinking in the practical sense of the word that is necessary, and it is this which the colleges should teach, whatever else they do or leave undone. If we can train students in the habits of mind they will need to use in their lives, by the use of subjects they will probably not use, and if we can train each of for the kind of profession he is fitted for without attempting to forestall the professional school or exhausting the field of knowledge we should be content. Let the student settle down to at least a two-year marriage with one of the departments, and abandon his wanton flirtations with all of them, let the courses be so framed that he will have to do his own reading and thinking, and let the examinations be tests of power rather than of memory, and we shall have gone a long way toward a real education. With a group of students working with one professor in an entire subject, the latter directing and stimulating the former, a system of instruction in which the formal lecture would be replaced by an analytical discussion of a part of the subject matter already read and at least partially understood, and an examination made up of problems involving the principles discussed in class, but differing in the facts presented from any the student has heretofore studied, a college would become a place of real mental illumination and intellectual culture. The student would not he sent out, as now only too often he is, with nothing, to use a phrase made famous by Mr. Justice Holmes, "but a rag-bag full of general principles—a throng of glittering generalities—like a swarm of little bodiless cherubs fluttering at the top of one of Corregio's pictures." The teacher would become a modern Socrates, an intellectual mid-wife aiding the student to bring forth his own ideas.

An Ideal to be Approached

I have no doubt the programme I have outlined seems a hard saying. After a decade of teaching in High School, College and Professional School, I am bound to admit that it is an ideal to be approached rather than a result to be attained. But that does not detract from its value. Practically all objections come from two sources: the old graduate would complain that the college was making a lot of grinds of its students, and that no time would be left for extra-curriculum activities. There is little danger, however, that a body of live young men and women could not find time for physical and social recreation. On the other hand, I am free to admit that it would drive out the student for whom the intellectual side of the institution is merely an incident to his athletic or social career, the one for whom in the words of President Wilson, "the side-show has swallowed the circus." The second objection would come from that large group of the public which holds it as true and self-evident that every person has a right to a higher education if he wants it, whether he be fitted to profit by it or not. Let us not forget, however, that university education is for the benefit of the public, that what the student or his parents pay does not begin to represent the cost of his education. We cannot afford to make our colleges and universities asylums for the wilfully uninterested. "Higher education at public expense should be regarded as a privilege to be earned, not as a right to be abused."