Delphi complete works of.., p.342
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 342
With all these changes college has pretty well ceased to mean, for the average individual student, the pursuit of learning, the search after absolute truth. A few, of course, in the realistic studies of physical and natural science, turn to real study for study’s sake. On the backs of these is carried the future of scientific knowledge. And another few, in what is called ‘liberal arts,’ turn into writers and playwrights and creative artists — but they would have, anyway. The real ‘student’ where he exists to-day is a ‘sport’ in the above biological sense; and the other students are ‘sports’ in the real sense.
At present, as I see it, college education is coming to be looked upon as a sort of prelude to life, a little intermission before work and sorrow begin. Broad-minded parents send the boys and girls to college, because — what else can they do with them? Let them be happy while they can. Let them dance a little in the sunshine. The shadows will fall on them soon enough. So it comes that people say with a sort of pride, ‘Yes, my son and my two girls are at college,’ meaning they are happy in the land of the blest, the land of chocolate creams, hot dogs after midnight, of cut classes and flunked courses. So when such parents go to see a college movie, with ‘Prexy,’ with ‘Profs,’ and the ‘Rah rah!’ they don’t realize what a queer amalgamation the picture is, made up of the old dead college of hard study, turned into romance and combining its shadows with the shifting colours of the new. Seen through the two must lie, somewhere out beyond, the vision of the future college. But we cannot see it: the light is too bright.
ALL IS NOT LOST!
A RECOLLECTION
I WAS JUST starting out trout fishing one day last week when I saw from a headline in an afternoon paper that war in Europe was just about a dead certainty — anything within twenty-four to twenty-six hours. The Lats (I think it was) had sent what was practically an ultimatum — the nearest they could write to one — to the Slats, and there was no likelihood that a high-chested people like the Slats would swallow it. As I say, I think it was the Lats and the Slats, or it may have been the Checks and the Shorts; at any rate, some of those high-chested people that fill the centre of Europe, who used to be content before the Great War to play the hand-organ and make toy clocks, and who now fill our whole foreground.
Of course, on top of news like that I couldn’t fish. A lump rose in my throat at the idea that unless the Slats (a high-minded people) would back down, that meant war, and everybody knows that war means ‘world chaos’ and that ‘world chaos’ means the end of trout fishing. What chance would a trout have in that?
So I came home feeling pretty sick; and then, after all, it turned out the Slats hadn’t ‘picked up’ the affront — by lucky chance — and, of course, if you don’t pick up a European affront right away, it goes bad.
It was too late to go trout fishing when I got the news in the evening paper that the Lat-Slat ‘crisis’ was over. But I got all set again for the next day to go with a friend of mine, all set with everything in the motor car — rods, tackle box, bait, fish baskets, lunch, flask. You know, perhaps, what fun it is getting it all packed, and the good old jokes about what gets forgotten and what never does? Then, just as we were starting, bang came the news that Mussolini had called Neville Chamberlain a ‘stiff,’ and that a first-class ‘crisis’ was imminent, and that England had recalled all the household troops from the saloons!
Well! Our hearts sank. Who could fish after that? It’s all right to try to disregard the smaller powers like Latvia and Czechoslovakia and Lithia and Seltzer, but when it comes to the great civilized nations like Italy and England, that’s different. So we didn’t start. And then it turned out in a few hours that the ‘crisis’ had blown over. It appeared, after an exchange of diplomatic notes, that Mussolini had not called Chamberlain a ‘stiff’ in the English sense, but had said he was a ‘stiffo’: that, in Italian, means something fine, and so the crisis passed, but it left everyone, even 4,000 miles away, pretty well prostrated. Even the British Cabinet itself lost half a day’s grouse shooting.
It seemed all the more pity to lose our trout fishing, because it was just an ideal day: bright summer weather, but a wisp of cloud in it; dry, but with a touch of wetness; what you’d call warm, but with just a little chill — if you are a trout fisherman you will know just the day I mean! And the place I go to — a stream just not big enough to be a river, or rather a river just too wide to be a stream, with open patches of sun and shadow (you must come with me some time). Wander along at that stream on an afternoon in early summer and you won’t care whether the Sudeten Germans go Nazi or go crazy.
But, on the contrary, once get your mind mixed up with the Sudeten Germans and you’re not fit to go fishing. You’re disqualified from the start. It’s the same with golf. You can’t go round the links with a man who says on the first green, ‘What about Albania?’ and stands with his club in the air, waiting to putt, while he tells you that if Daladier can form a bloc he may make a front, and on the ninth green is still murmuring, ‘If Hitler...’ No, the only way to deal with such a man is, when he says, ‘What about Albania?’ to say, ‘To hell with it.’
My friend and I, as I say, lost about a week of our trout fishing over Europe. The war crisis was no sooner gone than there was a sudden crash of the French franc, then a terrific naval scandal at the British Admiralty — not a damn gun would shoot — the whole Ministry were called back from Norway over the week-end! Well! You know what the European news is: once get sunk in it and your home life, your peace of mind, is all over.
Europe certainly can destroy your peace of mind; but, set all by itself, that’s not quite a fair statement. You can destroy it right at home if you try. Lots of people can collect just as much distress at home over the market news as people fetch back from Europe. Take, let us say, ‘base metals.’ What they are, I don’t know, but every now and then it seems base metals which have been buoyant and lively get dull, then stagnant, then collapse.
You’ve perhaps often gone through that yourself; but base metals seem to get it specially. I was out at a bridge party the other night, just after the last crash in ‘base metals.’ Half of the people, in spite of every effort, looked wretched; a lot of them had been hard hit with copper and others had had a terrible knock of manganese. They could hardly hold their cards. Yet here they were in a lovely house in the leafiest part of the city, in a huge room, something between a library and a living-room, the evening warm enough for early summer, but cool enough for a fire — how delightful it might have been — but ‘base metals’ had crashed that afternoon, and it was only by a brave hysterical sort of struggle that things could be kept going at all.
Even as it was, the men would drift into little clumps in the corners and gurgle about manganese.... And then, after all, two days later, ‘base metals’ got ‘buoyant,’ kicking up like a cow in the pasture — in fact, everything would have been great except at that very moment the sudden backfire of Congress against the T.V.A. decision of the Supreme Court — or, on, the other way — the backfire of the court — anyway, another explosion in Washington as sudden and arresting as the sound of a lamb chop blown up in a lunch wagon.
Remember, too, that during this same period of distress of which I speak wheat fell ten cents — a thing that simply spells disaster — and then rose eleven cents — meaning, of course, national ruin. Dust blew all over the Missouri Valley and the Canadian West, and then blew off again, leaving the farmers a perfect sight! And in with this background of imminent disaster there was an anvil chorus of sit-down strikers and stand-up agitators, money sterilized, credit paralysed, confidence pulverized, and ten million unemployed sitting in a row eating sandwiches with no proper psychological conception of the value of their leisure.
This, I say, is the background. But the funny thing is that the foreground isn’t like this at all. The foreground has all the beauty of summer-time, with leaves on the trees and trout in the streams, with every golf course an artistic dream, a vast lawn of green, gay with bright costumes of red and white, with every shimmering summer lake dotted with its pagodas and its canoes, and splashed with bathers, with every street of every little town gay as a mediaeval fair with its multiform gas signs, with every corner packed with the glistening cars of the people crowding into the magic world of the films. Just gods! If the pioneers who fought for economic life upon this continent could see this picture of colour and luxury that was to cover its surface, what would they think of us, its discontented, timorous, trembling inhabitants, shuddering at the fleeting shadows that fly over a landscape bathed in bright sunshine! Surely, all is not lost.
Let us take an inventory of our distress.
The world has got into a kind of mass idea, a mass gloom, mass apprehensiveness. Psychologists of to-day tell us that we live on one idea at a time and all get it together. The idea just now is distress or worry over the imminence of something that is just going to happen — but perhaps won’t. There is a Greek name for this, but I forget it. If translated it means ‘fear of the front page of the newspaper.’ Here, for example, are the things of which we are all scared to death just now: the French franc, the Sudeten Germans (section B, apartment 6, Czechoslovakia), the United States Supreme Court, base metals, drought, rain, over-population, under-population, over-production, death, life, dust.
Here, on the other hand, are the things of which we ought to be thinking — trout fishing, golf, chicken dinners, cool drinks, mixed bathing, summer hotels, wayside cabins — and if young enough, taking girls out so far in motor cars that they never come back.
Here is the European news that we read: war, more war, Mussolini, Hitler, crash of the franc, agony in Spain, bombs, cruelty, and the fall of freedom.
Nonsense — that’s all illusion! Here are the real things, the French news, for instance:
Summer tourists in Paris break all records.... Folies Bergère with standing room only ... bathing costumes at Deauville simply scandalous... French ping-pong team beats all Germany... Daladier opens pup show... President of the Republic bets a dollar on horse race... champagne vintage reported best in twenty years.
All about us is a beckoning world — ample as never before in its abundance: a little out of gear, just for a spell, but only because, speaking collectively, we are like the sudden heirs of a rich estate quarrelling over their inheritance.
All of us, I think, in some half-conscious way, chafe at this false distress of our submerged world. We long to escape to another one. Mathematicians — to ease their particular troubles as mathematicians — take refuge in the world of a fourth dimension, where there is no friction. So we, at a word, at a happy fancy, seek escape into an imaginary world. Witness how we have all flocked to the country of the Seven Dwarfs, a better world than our own — a world of simple and sweet little animals, just our own style, and waving trees and dancing sunlight, and music of voices that drips with the waterfall, a world of kindness and co-operation each with all. We are drawn to this because we know it is ours, and yet we cannot reach it.
Or take, to parallel the example, that queer, bright, next-door world that we see pictured in our advertisements. Here, indeed, is the country of human fancy, marvellous with the green of its grass, the utter blueness of its water (see any travel booklet) and the shimmer of its sand; marvellous with its motor cars glistening in the sun, its people — youths as straight as arrows and as broad as gods, girls with hair as golden as gamboge, and frilled children, clean enough to eat.
If you want to get relief from the French franc and the Czechoslovak, turn to the advertising pages, and there, among green lawns and glistening cars, trim bungalows and furnished libraries and vellum volumes, you may see again humanity reaching into the world of imagination for what the actual world denies us.
But the truth is that this, our actual world, would be as good as the bright world of imagination if we would only let it be so. Everything is there, the smiling abundance of our unrealized paradise, the goodwill toward men that all men feel and none dares act upon. It is all there for the asking, if we can only cast aside from the gateway the evil spirits of fear and apprehension and distrust which keep us from our kingdom.
Too Much College
CONTENTS
PREFACE
TOO MUCH COLLEGE
CHAPTER I. EDUCATION EATING UP LIFE
CHAPTER II. THE MACHINE AT WORK
CHAPTER III. WHAT GOOD IS LATIN?
CHAPTER IV. MATHEMATICS VERSUS PUZZLES
CHAPTER V. PARLEZ-VOUS FRANÇAIS? OR, WHY CAN’T WE LEARN MODERN LANGUAGES?
CHAPTER VI. HAS ECONOMICS GONE TO SEED?
CHAPTER VII. PSYCHOLOGY THE BLACK ART OF THE COLLEGE
CHAPTER VIII. TEACHING THE UNTEACHABLE
CHAPTER IX. RAH! RAH! COLLEGE!
KINDRED ESSAYS IN EDUCATION AND HUMOUR
WHEN MEN RETIRE
AS HISTORY GROWS DIM
TWENTY CENTS’ WORTH OF MURDER
READER’S JUNK
LITTLE STORIES FOR GOOD LUCK
THREE ON EACH
NOTHING MISSING
THINKING OF TOMORROW
INFORMATION WHILE YOU DRINK
NO PLACE FOR GENTLEMEN
“WE HAVE WITH US TONIGHT”
A HUMBLE LOVER
THE MAGIC OF FINANCE
HE GUESSED RIGHT
ELECTRIC SERVICE
OUR VANISHED INDUSTRIES
COULDN’T SLEEP A WINK
GO TO MOTHER
FIVE DOLLARS, RIGHT NOW
ARE PROFESSORS ABSENT-MINDED?
WANTED: A GOLD-FISH
MUSHROOMS
HELP WANTED
ATMOSPHERE
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT
HIS BETTER SELF
OH, SLEEP! OH, GENTLE SLEEP!
EPILOGUE
BASS FISHING ON LAKE SIMCOE WITH JAKE GAUDAUR
PREFACE
THIS BOOK IS based on an experience of nearly twenty years of school and college training, ten years of school-teaching, thirty-six years of college lecturing, and three years of retirement, to think it over. The opinion that I have reached is that education, in the narrow sense of school and college attendance, is taking too heavy a toll of the years of life and that the curriculum should be shortened. But, in the wider sense, what I want to advocate is not to make education shorter, but to make it much longer — indeed to make it last as long as life itself.
What I find wrong is the stark division now existing between the years of formal education and entry into the work of life. Education has become to a great extent a mere acquirement of a legal qualification to enter a closed profession, in place of being a process undertaken for its own sake. All that is best in education can only be acquired by spontaneous interest; thus gained it lasts and goes on. Education merely imposed as a compulsory prerequisite to something else finishes and withers when its task is done. Real education should mean a wonderful beginning, a marvellous initiation, a thorough “smattering,” and life will carry it on.
A part of the present difficulty is that our school and college curriculum in its one thousand years of development from the church schools of the Middle Ages has taken on a mass of subject matter beyond the range of any one mind. We have not yet learned to condense to useful essentials the things beyond study in detail. The best part of any subject is the general view, the thorough smattering just mentioned, that carries to the individual the results for which others have given the work of their lives. The outline of the world’s history can occupy half an hour, or half a session, or half a century.
We have further encumbered the curriculum with the attempt to teach things that cannot be imparted by classroom work — too practical for anything but actual practice, or too vague and general for anything but general reflection.
Nor is it only the subject matter of the curriculum that needs reduction. A saving of time perhaps equally important can be effected by altering the form and method of its progress. To a very great extent all our school children and students in America and in England move along in a system of one-year promotions, all advancing together — or staying back to join the next consignment.
Thus, by the time the student has reached middle high school on his way to college, he has already joined a sort of “convoy” that moves slowly down the widening stream of education, always at the pace of the slowest. It sweeps along majestically, working puzzles, muttering declensions, answering quizzes and translating “parlez-vous.”
Any ordinary bright boy could strike out from the convoy, like a sloop from a fleet, like a fast motor boat from among freighters, and distance it by two years. By the time the heavy convoy reached its goal, he would have been there already for years, married, with one and a half children, an established position, whiskers, debts, life. He would watch the convoy discharging its spectacled neophytes, thirty years old, timid in the daylight, shuddering at life, having lived for thirty years on other people’s money. That’s a little exaggerated, but it’s good enough.
The practical person asks how we are supposed to bring about this vastly altered program. To abolish overnight our whole system of examinations, promotions and graded classes moving all together would leave our education a hopeless mess. And to this the only answer is that there is nothing that we can do about it, nothing particular and all of a minute.
It is our current fault always to think in terms of deliberate regulation and ordinance. We seek to accomplish friendship with a league, Mother’s Day with a statute, welcome with a by-law and sobriety with a code. Without the spirit, all falls in a littered heap. If education is to change, there must first come the consciousness of the need of change.
