Second Mencken Chrestomathy (59 page)

E
DUCATION
in the highest (and rarest) sense—education directed toward awaking a capacity to differentiate between fact and appearance—is and always will be a more or less furtive and illicit thing, for its chief purpose is the controversion and destruction of the very ideas that the majority of men—and particularly the majority of official and powerful men—regard as incontrovertibly true. To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches. Progress consists precisely in attacking and disposing of these ordinary beliefs. It is thus opposed to education as the thing is now managed, and so there should be no surprise in the fact that the generality of pedagogues in the public-schools, like the generality of policemen and saloon-keepers, are bitter enemies to all new ideas.

Think of what the average American schoolboy is taught today, say of history or economics. Examine the specific orders to teachers issued from time to time by the School Board of New York City—a body fairly representative of the forces that must always control education at the cost of the state. Surely no sane man would argue that the assimilation of such a mess of evasions and mendacities will make the boy of today a well-informed and quick-minded citizen tomorrow, alert to error and wary of propaganda. This plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda—a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas readymade. The aim is to make “good” citizens, which is to say, docile
and uninquisitive citizens. Let a teacher let fall the slightest hint to his pupils that there is a body of doctrine opposed to the doctrine he is officially ordered to teach, and at once he is robbed of his livelihood and exposed to slander and persecution. The tendency grows wider as the field of education is widened. The pedagogue of Emerson’s day was more or less a free agent, at all events in everything save theology; today his successor is a rubber-stamp, with all the talent for trembling of his constituent gutta-percha. In the lower schools the thing goes even further. Here the teachers are not only compelled to stick to their text-books, but also to pledge their professional honor to a vast and shifting mass of transient doctrines. Any teacher who sought to give his pupils a rational view of the late Woodrow Wilson at the time Woodrow was stalking the land in the purloined chemise of Moses would have been dismissed from his pulpit, and probably jailed. The effects of such education are already distressingly visible in the Republic. Americans in the days when their education stopped with the three R’s, were a self-reliant, cynical, liberty-loving and extremely rambunctious people. Today, with pedagogy standardized and school-houses everywhere, they are the herd of sheep (
Ovis aries
).

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Dec. 31, 1928

The American public-schools inculcate far more nonsense than sense, and the great majority of American colleges are so incompetent and vicious that, in any really civilized country, they would be closed by the police. In all American States save a few anyone who has the yearning may start a college and, with the full consent and authority of the State, grant degrees. There is no official machinery for testing the competence of the professors and none for scrutinizing what they teach. Thousands of such burlesque colleges are scattered over the country, and in some States they are the only kind that exist. Their graduates, armed with formidable diplomas, go out into the world in the character of educated men and
women. What they really know is less than the average bright policeman knows.

The public-schools are even worse. In the typical American State they are staffed by quacks and hag-ridden by fanatics. Everywhere they tend to become, not centers of enlightenment, but simply reservoirs of idiocy. Not one professional pedagogue out of twenty is a man of any genuine intelligence. The profession mainly attracts, not young men of quick minds and force of character, but flabby, feeble fellows who yearn for easy jobs. The childish mumbo-jumbo that passes for technique among them scarcely goes beyond the capacities of a moron. To take a Ph.D. in education, at most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window-dressing.

Most pedagogues male, and the overwhelming majority of the female ones, are not even Ph.D.’s. They are simply dull persons who have found it easy to get along by dancing to whatever tune happens to be lined out. At this dancing they have trained themselves to swallow any imaginable fad or folly, and always with enthusiasm. The schools reek with this puerile nonsense. Their programmes of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. The teaching of the elements is abandoned for a dreadful mass of useless fol-de-rols, by quack psychology out of the uplift. No one ever hears of a pedagogue protesting against this bilge. The profession is almost completely lacking in professional conscience. If physicians, by some fiat of Demos, were ordered to dose all of their patients with Swamp Root, most of them would object and a great many of them would refuse. Even lawyers, I daresay, have a limit of endurance: there are things that they would decline to do, even at the cost of their incomes. But the pedagogues, as a class, seem to have no such qualms. They are perfectly willing, on the one hand, to teach the nonsense prescribed for them by frauds, and they are immensely fertile, on the other hand, in inventing nonsense of their own. Anything that will make their jobs secure seems good enough to inflict upon their pupils.

If you think I exaggerate, then all I ask is that you read a couple of issues of any high-toned educational journal, say, the
Journal of
the National Education Association
. Or examine a dozen or two of the dissertations, chosen at random, turned out by candidates for the doctorate at any eminent penitentiary for pedagogues, say Teachers College, Columbia. What you will find is a state of mind that will shock you. It is so feeble that it is scarcely a state of mind at all. The pedagogues harangue one another in the precise terms of visiting Odd Fellows, and when they discuss a technical subject they commonly do it so witlessly that one is almost tempted to suspect them of irony. It is an appalling experience to read such stuff. But, save in a few fortunate places, the men and women who perpetuate it run the public-schools of America, and have upon them the burden of making the youth of the land fit for citizenship. How badly they achieve that business is made manifest every time there is a fair test. After more than a century of free education at least two out of three Americans, here as elsewhere, remain completely ignorant of the veriest fundamentals of human knowledge, and are aroused to fury against them on hearing them stated.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Aug. 24, 1931

There was a time when teaching school was a relatively simple and easy job, and any young woman who had no talent for housework was deemed fit for it. But that time is no more. The pedagogue of today, whether male or female, must not only undergo a long and arduous course of preliminary training; he (or she) must also keep on studying after getting an appointment. The science of pedagogy has become enormously complicated, and it changes constantly. Its principles of today are never its principles of tomorrow: they are incessantly modified, improved, revised, adorned. They borrow from psychology, metaphysics, sociology, pathology, physical culture, chemistry, meteorology, political economy, psychiatry and sex hygiene. And through them, day and night, blows the hot wind of moral endeavor. Thus the poor gogue (or goguess) has to sweat incessantly. In Summer, when the rest of us are lolling
in the cool speakeasies, he suffers a living death in Summer school, trying to puzzle out the latest arcana from Columbia University. Has he a normal school diploma in his pocket? Then it is waste paper in two years. Is he
artium baccalaureus
? Then an M.A. is set to prodding and shaming him. Is he himself an M.A.? Then two Ph.D.s are on his tail. It is a dreadful life.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, June 6, 1927

The stray student of genuine intelligence must find life in the great rolling-mills of learning very unpleasant, and I suppose that he seldom stays until the end of his course. He must see very quickly that the learning on tap in them is mainly formal and bogus—that it consists almost wholly of feeble nonsense out of text-books, put together by men who are unable either to write or to think. And he must discover anon that its embellishment by the faculty is almost as bad—that very few college instructors, as he encounters them in practise, actually know anything worth knowing about the subject they presume to teach. Has the college its stars—great whales of learning, eminent in the land? Well, it is not often that an undergraduate so much as sees those whales, and seldom indeed that he has any communion with them. The teaching is done almost exclusively by understrappers, and the distinguishing marks of those understrappers is that they are primarily pedagogues, not scholars. The fact that one of them teaches English instead of mathematics and another mathematics instead of English is trivial and largely accidental. Of a thousand head of such dull drudges not ten, with their doctors’ dissertations behind them, ever contribute so much as a flyspeck to the sum of human knowledge.

Here, of course, I speak of the common run of colleges and the common run of pedagogues. The list of such colleges, in the World Almanac, runs to six pages of very fine print. They are scattered all over the land, but they are especially thick in the Cow States, where the peasants have long cherished a superstitious veneration
for education, and credit it with powers almost equal to those of a United Brethren bishop or Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The theory is that a plow hand, taught the binomial theorem and forced to read Washington Irving, a crib to Caesar’s “De Bello Gallico,” and some obscure Ph.D.’s summary of “The Wealth of Nations,” with idiotic review questions, becomes the peer of Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, and B. J. Palmer, the Mr. Eddy of chiropractic. It is, I fear, a false theory; he becomes simply a bad plow hand—perhaps with overtones, if Mendel is kind to him, of a good Rotarian. In the more pretentious vats of learning, I suppose there is an atmosphere more favorable to human husbandry, but even there it is probably far less favorable than popular legend makes it out. I can’t imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind. For even the good ones are manned chiefly by third-rate men, and any boy of sharp wits is sure to penetrate to their inferiority almost instantly. Men can fool other men, but they can seldom fool boys. The campus view of professors is notoriously highly critical, and even cruel. Well, the view is formulated by the whole body of students—the normal, half-simian majority as well as the intelligent minority. What must the really bright boys think!

Such bright boys, I believe, get little out of college, aside from the salubrious cynicism that I have mentioned. If they learn anything there, it is not by the aid of their instructors, but in spite of them. They read. They weigh ideas. They come into contact, perhaps, with two or three genuinely learned men. They react sharply against the general imbecility of their fellows. Such is the process of education.

The half-wits get even less, but what they get is obviously more valuable to them. Though they emerge with their heads quite empty of anything rationally describable as knowledge, they have at least gained something in prestige: the hinds back at home, still chained to the plow, admire and envy them. So they go into politics and begin the weary trudge to Congress, or they enter upon one of the learned professions and help to raise it to the level of the realtor’s art and mystery, or they become mortgage sharks, or perhaps they proceed to the lofty rank and dignity of Artium
Magister or Doctor Philosophiae, and consecrate themselves to ironing out the rabble following after them. In addition to the prestige, they carry home certain cultural (as opposed to intellectual) gains. They have learned the rules of basket-ball, football, high-jumping, pole-vaulting and maybe lawn tennis. They have become privy to the facts that a dress coat is not worn in the morning or with plus-fours, that an Episcopalian has something on a Baptist and even on a Presbyterian, that smoking cigarettes is not immediately followed by general paralysis, and that a girl may both believe in the literal accuracy of Genesis, and neck. They have become, in a sense, house-broken, and learned how to trip over a rug gracefully, without upsetting the piano. They have read “Mlle, de Maupin,” “Night Life in Chicago,” and the complete files of
Hot Dog
. They have tasted gin. Above all, they have acquired heroes: the aurochs who broke the Ohio Wesleyan line, the swellest dresser on the campus, the master politician, the cheer leader, the senior who eloped with the ingénue of the No. 8 “Two Orphans” company, the junior caught in the raid on the roadhouse, the sophomore who made $3,000 letting out “Ulysses” at $1 a crack, the baseball captain, the champion shot-putter, the winner of the intercollegiate golf tourney. In other words, they have become normal, healthy-minded Americanos, potential Prominent Citizens, the larvae of sound Coolidge men; they have learned how to meanly admire mean things.

If I had a son and he seemed middling dull, I’d send him to Harvard, for Harvard is obviously the best of all American universities. It not only inculcates the sublime principles of Americanism as well as any other; it also inoculates all its customers with a superior air, and that superior air, in a democratic country, is a possession of the utmost value, socially and economically. The great masses of men never question it: they accept it at once, as they accept a loud voice. These masses of men are uneasy in their theoretical equality: their quest is ever for superiors to defer to and venerate. Such superiors are provided for them by Harvard. Its graduates have a haughty manner. Moreover, they are entitled to it, for Harvard is plainly the first among American universities, and not only historically. I believe that a bright boy, sent to its halls, is damaged less than he would be damaged anywhere else, and that
a dull boy enjoys immensely greater benefits. Its very professors show a swagger; there is about them nothing of the hang-dog look that characterizes their colleagues nearly everywhere else. The tradition of the place is independent and contumacious. It was the first American university to throw out the theologians. It encourages odd fish. It cares nothing for public opinion. But all the while it insists upon plausible table manners, and has no truck with orators.