第79章 CHAPTER VI(9)

All this applies with gradually lessened force to the other vocational schools, occupied with training for occupations that are of more substantial use to the community and less widely out of touch with the higher learning. In the light of their professions on the one side and the degree of their fulfilment on the other, it would be hazardous to guess how far the university directorate in any given case is animated with a spontaneous zeal for the furtherance of these "practical" aims which the universities so pursue, and how far on the other hand it may be a matter of politic management, to bring content to those commercially-minded laymen whose good-will is rated as a valuable asset. These men of substance have a high appreciation of business efficiency -- a species of self-respect, and therefore held as a point of honour -- and are consequently inclined to rate all education in terms of earning-capacity. Failure to meet the presumed wishes of the businessmen in this matter, it is apprehended, would mean a loss of support in endowment and enrolment. And since endowment and enrolment, being the chief elements of visible success, are the two main ends of current academic policy, it is incumbent on the directorate to shape their policy accordingly.

So the academic authorities face the choice between scholarly efficiency and vocational training, and hitherto the result has been equivocal. The directorate should presumably be in a position to appreciate the drift of their own action, in so diverting the university's work to ends at variance with its legitimate purpose; and the effect of such a policy should presumably be repugnant to their scholarly tastes, as well as to their sense of right and honest living. But the circumstances of their office and tenure leave them somewhat helpless, for all their presumed insight and their aversion to this malpractice;and these conditions of office require them, as it is commonly apprehended, to take active measures for the defeat of learning, -- hitherto with an equivocal outcome. The schools of commerce, even more than the other vocational schools, have been managed somewhat parsimoniously, and the effectual results have habitually fallen far short of the clever promises held out in the prospectus. The professed purpose of these schools is the training of young men to a high proficiency in the larger and more responsible affairs of business, but for the present this purpose must apparently remain a speculative, and very temperately ingenuous, aspiration, rather than a practicable working programme.

NOTES:

1. "Our professors in the Harvard of the '50s were a set of rather eminent scholars and highly respectable men. They attended to their studies with commendable assiduity and drudged along in a dreary, humdrum sort of way in a stereotyped method of classroom instruction...

"And that was the Harvard system. It remains in essence the system still -- the old, outgrown, pedagogic relation of the large class-recitation room. The only variation has been through Eliot's effort to replace it by the yet more pernicious system of premature specialization. This is a confusion of the college and university functions and constitutes a distinct menace to all true higher education. The function of the college is an all-around development, as a basis for university specializations. Eliot never grasped that fundamental fact, and so he undertook to turn Harvard college into a German university -- specializing the student at 18. He instituted a system of one-sided contact in place of a system based on no contact at all. It is devoutly to be hoped that, some day, a glimmer of true light will effect an entrance into the professional educator's head. It certainly hadn't done so up to 1906."- Charles Francis Adams, An Autobiography.

2. The college student's interest in his studies has shifted from the footing of an avocation to that of a vocation.

3. So, e.g., in the later eighties, at the time when the confusion of sentiments in this matter of electives and practical academic instruction was reaching its height, one of the most largely endowed of the late-founded universities set out avowedly to bend its forces singly to such instruction as would make for the material success of its students; and, moreover, to accomplish this end by an untrammelled system of electives, limited only by the general qualification that all instruction offered was to be of this pragmatic character. The establishment in question, it may be added, has in the course of years run a somewhat inglorious career, regard being had to its unexampled opportunities, and has in the event come to much the same footing of compromise between learning and vocational training, routine and electives, as its contemporaries that have approached their present ambiguous position from the contrary direction; except that, possibly, scholarship as such is still held in slightly lower esteem among the men of this faculty -- selected on grounds of their practical bias -- than among the generality of academic men.

4. "And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings."5. Cf. Adam Smith on the "idle curiosity." Moral Sentiments, 1st ed., p. 351 -- , esp. 355.