Education -- Less Of It

Tertius Chandler

[Reprinted from The College Board Review, No. 144, Summer 1987]

WILL DURANT in his Lessons of History claimed that the greatest hope of the human race is increased education.

I venture to wonder why? School is unfree, rather like a jail with a term lasting 20 years, if you're able to stick the course. Childhood and youth are sacred times when innate curiosity is intense and health and zest tend to be strong. Those years are too important to be frittered away memorizing irrelevant trivia in herded mobs under the heavy hand of compulsion. Ben Franklin had just two years in school and flunked both times -- yet he went on to make himself the ablest and best-rounded leader in our history. Pascal and Petrie had no schooling at all. So learning can occur outside school as well as in -- perhaps even better, and especially now, when there are fine libraries open to all as well as television, bookstores, newspapers, and magazines. Think of the National Geographic!

Here on the other hand are arguments for education:

1. Older people know more, so the young can learn from them. Parental teaching might be preferable (and does increasingly occur), but in many families both parents are away at work. Anyway, teachers are specialists in particular subjects. These arguments are valid, and. it must be conceded, some learning does occur in schools.

2. Money! A school diploma is virtually useless on the job market, and so is a college degree. But school prepares for college, which prepares for postgraduate school, which prepares for entry into well-paid professions. In 1981 the average high school graduate made S18.138, whereas the average for those with five or more years of college was $32.887. Lifetime earnings for the high school graduates averaged $845.000, compared with $1,503.000 for live-year collegians.[1] Yet an underlying flaw vitiates the comparison, for college draws people of higher intelligence and those from richer families. Their lifelong earnings largely reflect these particular factors.

3. The rah-rah spirit. A person likes to say he or she has been to such-and-such college. It's the "in" thing.

4. High ambition. In this country of open opportunity parents naturally push their children all they can. It is refreshing to recall, however, that Washington. Lincoln, and Truman were among those who made it to president without going to college -- and they were unusually good presidents.

5. Culture. The claim is often made that if culture wasn't rammed into the young, they would never come to appreciate literature, art, and fine music. Frankly, that's ridiculous.

6. Meeting friends. There are, of course, other places to meet people, and most of them allow more leisure to enjoy the friendship. Nevertheless it must be said that college is a fine place to make interesting acquaintances. Students are easily met in the dining halls and on campus. Eventually one may make friends even among the professors.

To sum up, education does pass on some learning and introduces a person to many out-of-town folks, while being the only way to enter some professions. But it takes a long, long time!

Conditioned Robots

Raymond Moore observes that: "The biggest shortcoming of mass education is the fact that students end up completely turned off to learning."[2] Or as Bertrand Russell ruefully concluded: "We are faced with the paradox that education has become one of the chief obstacles of intelligence and freedom of thought."

The educational profession has become geared to the College Board examinations, which give it an awesome amount of rigidity. As a result, elective courses are rather few, and are becoming fewer even in college.

The number of school years is also prescribed. If a child masters mathematics in one year, so much the worse for him. Conversely, someone of low IQ has to suffer year after year with subjects that baffle him. Insofar as school is adjusted to anybody, it is adjusted to the mediocre student, and he, hopelessly unable to lead the class or win any prize, just drones on, loathing the whole procedure.

All that keeps the system from destroying the students altogether is that most of them instinctively rebel inwardly against it and cooperate only enough to get by, reserving as much energy and time as they can manage for other activities. Indeed, the most unruly boys in class sometimes tend to do better later on in life. Unfortunately some rebellious activities, such as smoking, heavy drinking, and fast driving, are not healthy, yet by a discreet degree of rebelliousness and shirking a boy can remain spiritually alive.

As Agatha Christie put it: "I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."[3]

Kahlil Gibran's great passage is relevant here: "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself … you may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls. Their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you may not visit, even in your dreams."

Gibran was not looking for conditioned robots.

A Shorter School Year

Some sadist must have written the law requiring 180 annual school days. They begin in August, when berries are still ripening, and last into the sweltering heat of June. Fall and spring, by their nature gorgeous season; become fixed in young minds as symbols of the agony of school.

It was when I was about halfway through prep school that teachers thought up a way to cut into the summer vacation -- our only prolonged free time. They began assigning compulsory reading of novels. This was a grief and an indignity I will not easily forget. I had been reading the finest sort of literature on my own in the summers. After that I read the minimum -- and hated it. Liberty dies hard in the human soul.

Change should be in the other direction: toward less schooling.

How Early?

Jean Piaget noticed stages in children's capacity to learn. To impose reading and mathematics on them before their minds are ready is to puzzle and torment them. School by its nature is force-feeding and when children are very young, not only their bodies but also their feelings are very tender. To separate them from their parents an to inflict cold drill in seemingly pointless subjects on them can drive their feelings inward and make them feel unwanted and lonely, even in a crowded room. All this Piaget understood. Indeed, it is perfectly obvious.

But, Piaget added, give the students those same subjects a few years later, and they can grasp them rather quickly, because their minds have become equal to the techniques needed and because they have reached the stage where they can see a purpose in what they are doing.

Raymond Moore in his book School Can Wait[4] suggests delaying school to the age of eight or ten and in recently published letter[5] opposes giving any exams before the age of ten. The idea is not new. A century ago Robert Owen withheld books from children in his famous school until their tenth year. Montessori, likewise. set the young to playing games. These are the real heroes for the cause of children.

Puberty

School treats pupils alike year after year. Yet somewhere in their teens boys notice girls. They are never the same again. School carries on as if the children were still just that. In the school where I went, aside from a warning to "stay pure." nothing changed. The hard drill on useless scholasticism to get us into college continued. We were to think college and nothing but college so that success in life would be automatic.

I got the message. When I was 17 I met a girl I liked on a ski trip. I deliberately dropped her and by a hard effort, managed to forget her, since I still had five years before I'd be clear of college (actually nine, but I didn't know about postgraduate study then). That was a romance that should have gotten off the ground and didn't. Looking back, I see that I could probably have worked in the girl's father's factory. The father and mother liked me. I was past the compulsory school-age, which was then 16 in my state -- but nobody told me things like that. College was a fixation for my parents and my teachers, and therefore for me, too.

I was not unique. Bernard DeVoto told us in a talk at Harvard around 1935, "No one marries his first love." He meant among the highly-educated, for of course some drop-outs do marry their first choice. It was, anyway, a chilling remark, an unpleasant commentary on how the educational system impacts on youth. The trade-off of love for a series of degrees is a poor deal.

Lately, private schools have done a sudden about-face and flung the boys and girls together. They are aroused to love earlier and so have longer to agonize. Education and puberty thus now clash head-on, but they still haven't come to terms.

On Teaching English

English can be dropped altogether. Charles W. Eliot of Harvard and others put English into our schools in 1900 by making it a requirement for the College Board Examinations. Eliot's idea was that pupils can be compelled to present ideas clearly and to enjoy literature. He would drill these skills into them. The sheer quantity of disciplined effort would get results and turn our 18-year-olds into incisive, clear, witty writers.

The result of all this massive drill over nearly a century-has been to make our youths somewhat duller than before. Our few famous writers now are notable for their gloom, their insobriety, and their utter inability to come up with answers to our problems. It would seem that English was made a required subject to no purpose whatsoever.

The correct way to teach English fundamentals -- grammar, spelling, sentence structure -- is to teach them as a pan of other subjects. That way, English has a chance of being interesting. Just in this way, one teaches the use of a hammer in the process of teaching carpentry: one does not take a special course in hammering. It would be fiendishly dull if one did.

Mathematics

Ever since the Russians put Sputnik into orbit in 1957 there have been spasmodic efforts to increase the mathematics load of all U.S. schoolchildren, including future janitors, nurses, maids, and ditch diggers. While I respect those occupations, they do not require higher mathematics. Actually any useful computations for war or business will be made by a very few experts -- perhaps by one hundreth of one percent of the population -- and they will be using computers.

Underwood Dudley of DePauw University, himself a mathematics teacher, believes that we teach mathematics not to solve problems or inculcate logical thinking but simply because we always have done so. As he puts it: "Practical? When was the last time you had to solve a quadratic equation? Was it just last week that you needed to find the volume of a cone? Isn't it a fact that you never need any mathematics beyond arithmetic? …Algebra? Good heavens! Almost all people never use algebra, ever, outside of a classroom."[6]

He rightly adds that mathematical talent is very easy to spot early in life. Surely he is right that a special annual test should be held to see which students should be allowed to take mathematics beyond arithmetic -- as an honor, not a requirement! The motivated proud few would then accomplish more than the slave-driven multitude.

Any School at All?

Once the need for school was clear. Back around 1800 schools were few and didn't take long, only four to six years. They taught basics and were almost the only place for the young to get books. Nowadays, alternative means of learning are plentiful. As already mentioned, they include public libraries, television, bookstores, newspapers, and magazines. These actually represent an overabundance.

If some state dropped schooling altogether. I wouldn't oppose it. (I would not wish this change to be imposed by the federal government however.)

Self-Reliance

Adult life calls for decision making and responsibility. These arise naturally at home but not in the educational system, where teachers make the decisions. A student, moreover, is competing against all the others, a self-centered attitude he will have to drop when he goes onto a job or into marriage.

Required Reading

In British colleges (but not schools!) the students pick their own reading. Here in the United States, students are told what to read and when to read it. Recoiling against this conformity, professor Carl Sauer told us in his class at the University of California in 1939: "The required book list defeats its own purpose. Books should enable you to meet ideas, meet other personalities, if you like, appropriating from them what you can use, what you need. I don't think I remember a single thing I had to read as required reading for any professor in college. I think if I had had any share in the discovery of something, a few ideas would have stuck. …Doing things for instructors is basically not doing anything at all."

Do Universities Broaden Minds?

Does university training help or hinder in developing intellectual capacity to do highly original work? Among highly creative modern thinkers the following were formally educated: Montesquieu, Jefferson, Goethe, Macaulay, Marx, Freud, Schweitzer, Proskouriakoff, Champollion. and Gandhi. These did not go to college: Voltaire, Hume, Owen, Austen, Balzac, Jairazbhoy, Gibran, Tolstoy, Twain, and Shaw.

Bright people can teach themselves. As Henry Adams said, "No one can educate anyone else. You have to do it for yourself." There should, of course, be equivalency exams for the self-taught, as well as on-the-job training for most professions.

Some would claim that if the youthful were encouraged to act freely, their initiative would be too great: that they would go berserk. But I think not: Most would marry, others would travel, invent, and carry on original work on all sorts of lines. Early marriage could balance many of them so they could work better. It is worth remembering in this connection that among the young, idealism and faith are uncommonly strong.

Those destined for ordinary jobs don't need to learn anything taught in college, and many of them know it. They attend college because it's the thing to do. They tend to take "snaps" such as English literature or sociology. I see no objection to letting them enjoy themselves at private colleges if they want to.

Public universities should, I think, confine themselves to serious training. The number entering should be preset as in Sweden, so as to train the quantity of people needed to fit the estimated number of openings in each profession, always allowing for the rise of some persons via equivalency exams.

College represents now too much of a good thing. There are too many learned professors and section leaders to adjust to, too many books to hasten through at a set speed, too many years to plod away on the treadmill. A Ph.D. in history is now expected to take four to eight years -- on top of the 12 in school and four in college. Perhaps, worst of all, the Ph.D. subject is deliberately kept small, so that the student will be able to claim mastery of something. Four to eight years of deliberate narrowing can have the effect of incapacitating him from ever taking a broad view of anything. The result of all this mental drill tends to be a mashed human, an eviscerated person. Only a very sturdy soul, such as a Freud or a Schweitzer, can come through all this and still retain the ability to think for himself. University study could, with no intrinsic loss, be shortened from eight years to four, and school could be limited to ages 10-15.

These suggested reductions in compulsory education would have another powerful advantage: they might set our people's minds largely free, a result surely to be wished.

References

1. Digest of Education Statistics. Washington. D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics. 1983. p. 181-2.
2. Raymond Moore. Parent Educator & Familv Report. August 1984. p. 6.
3. Agatha Christie. Autobiography. New York: Doubleday. 1978. p. 59.
4. Raymond Moore. School Can Wait.
5 Raymond Moore, correspondence cited in Parent Educator & Family Report. January 24. 1985.
6. Underwood Dudley. article in San Francisco Chronicle. April 28. 1984.