Delphi complete works of.., p.344
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 344
On the terms indicated few of us now would get into Harvard. Fewer still would get out, since, for that, every scholar had to be
“found able to read the originals of the Old and New Testaments into the Latin tongue and to resolve them logically: withal being of godly life and conversation.”
On the outside edge or fringe of the classical studies, of which mathematics and logic formed an adjunct, were such things as natural philosophy, destined to vast and rapid expansion, but of which the classical doctors of divinity remained ignorant.
By the time of Queen Anne, some scholars already admitted that they didn’t know everything — not many, though, or at least they qualified it by saying that what they didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.
What they referred to by this last phrase was this natural philosophy, the new range of knowledge that the eighteenth century was gathering, item by item, fact by fact. These grew into the sciences of life — botany and zoology, later to get their true name of biology. Reverend classical scholars, full to the throat with declensions, set them aside as a disturbance of the Book of Genesis. But they wouldn’t down.
Beside them grew, equally despised by the classicists, the electric science drawn by Franklin from the clouds, the oxygen distilled by Priestley from water, the geology of Lyell, dug up from what was once called Hades. All the world knows the story. Within another hundred years a vast series of studies known as the natural sciences — at first opposed, derided and left to mechanics and steam-engine drivers — broke at last the barriers of the schools and flooded wide over the curriculum.
But the barriers, in England at least, did not break until the waters had risen high and the pressure had become overwhelming. In the middle nineteenth century, as Professor Huxley complained, the so-called public schools had still a curriculum of the Middle Ages.
Until a few years back [he wrote in 1893], a boy might have passed through any one of the great public schools with the greatest distinction and credit and might never so much as heard of modern geography, modern history and modern literature,, of the English language as a language, or of the whole circle of the sciences, physical, moral and social; might never have heard that the earth goes round the sun; that England underwent a great revolution in 1688 and France another in 1789; that there once lived certain notable men called Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller.
With this protest of common sense went a certain protest of spite — as against aristocratic culture by those unable to share it. Witness Herbert Spencer’s diatribe against “The Education of a Gentleman.”
Men dress their children’s minds as they do their bodies in the prevailing fashion. As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before he leaves his hut ... so a boy’s drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted on, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them — that he may have the education of a gentleman.
But when at last the barriers broke, the new science came in a flood, till every high school student, in America more even than in England, turned alchemist, and every class-room sputtered with electricity. And with this, in the colleges first and spreading downwards to the schools, came a still newer set of studies — the social studies, economics and politics, the mingled brood of happiness and despair, of progress and poverty that Mill and Spencer and such people let loose upon the world. So deeply have they spread that little children learn “civics” first and find out what it means after; and so widely that the Japanese have studied it from Europe and teach it to the Chinese.
And as if civics and social welfare were not enough for the already overburdened curriculum, a chariot creaking up the rough slope of Parnassus, “Business,” in the form of schools of commerce, must needs leap on top of the load. It handed so heavy a tip to the driver that it could not be put off, and more than that it began to demand that the oldest and most respectable of the passengers be thrown out to make room for it.
So there we stand, or rather move slowly onward, the ascent of Parnassus turned into a ten years’ journey during which the passengers must amuse themselves as best they may with the cards and dice of college activities.
Meantime it is only to be expected that the conditions of the journey react upon the minds of the passengers. In other words it is only natural that this vast burden of an increasing curriculum sets up a reaction in the minds of the pupil and the student. From their earliest years they become accustomed to reckon up the things that they have done and finished with. “We’ve finished Scripture,” says a little girl in a child’s school; “we had it last year.” For her the mould of religious thought is all set. Don’t ask her the names of the twelve Apostles. She’s had them — last year. She is not responsible for the Apostles any more. So does the high school student count up his years still needed for matriculation as eagerly as a mariner measures his distance to the shore. The college student opens his career by classing himself not according to the year in which he enters but according to the year in which he hopes to get out. The class matriculating in 1940 call out in their infant breath, “Rah! Rah! Forty-four.”
How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, “When I am a big boy.” But what is that? The big boy says, “When I grow up.” And then, grown up, he says, “When I get married.” But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to “When I’m able to retire.” And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour. So it should be with education.
But so it is not; a false view discolours it all. For the vastly great part of it the student’s one aim is to get done with it. There comes a glad time in his life when he has “finished” mathematics, a happy day when he has done philosophy, an exhilarating hour when he realizes that he is finished with “compulsory English.” Then at last his four years are out, his sentence expired, and he steps out of college a free man, without a stain on his character — and not much on his mind.... Later on, he looks back wistfully and realizes how different it might have been.
It is the purpose of this book in the chapters that follow to discuss this discrepancy between education and life. The field of education here discussed is that of “general education” and the liberal arts which occupy about twenty years of the life of the great majority of college students. The work of technical and professional schools — engineering, medicine and law — lies apart. Here the adaptation of the means to the end is sufficiently direct to lessen the danger of wandering into the wilderness as liberal arts has done.
This wandering into the wilderness has made the journey of education too long, too cumbersome and too expensive. Worse still, at the end of its wandering it comes to a full stop. The road comes to an end just when it ought to be getting somewhere. The passengers alight, shaken and weary, to begin, all over again, something else.
CHAPTER II. THE MACHINE AT WORK
STRATEGIC PROGRESS: NO advance without security — Spelling costs two years — Classes and credits; the moving convoy — The end of the pavement, of examinations — History finds a magic mirror — Need of a thorough smattering of science — And of a snug corner of ignorance
I am a familiar guest in a household where there is a little girl, now rapidly lengthening into a big girl, who is attending what is called a ladies’ school. In return for help with Latin sentences and such things, I get much casual information about what educationalists call class method. I said to this young scholar the other day, “I thought, June, you were in the fifth declension?”
“We were before Xmas,” June answered, “but she’s gone back to the second. We’re reviewing.”
She is, of course, the teacher, and where she leads, June and her associates follow. I gather that their education in Latin takes the form of a series of forward rushes, from which they fall back and entrench themselves again on safe ground. A year ago at Easter they reached the passive voice, only to be beaten clear back out of it again. They are now reconsidering amo and closing up the ranks for a new attack. But as the term ends there will be a regular review in which they will fall steadily back toward the beginning of the book. Last year she gave them some prepositions, but there has since been a retreat that has entrenched them behind the safe lines of bonus.
The same method, I gather from June, is pursued in algebra. Last year they got as far as equations, but the ground proved shaky under their feet and he (mathematics is masculine) took them back for a review of factors and division. They needed, he said, more drill. They are drilling now and getting ready for the big algebraical mid-term review that will shove them clear backward out of the book — to re-form in the shelter of arithmetic.
At the beginning of each new term, of course, there is full review of last year’s work — at the very time, perhaps, when the class below are in a bold forward skirmish into next year’s work. Thus do June and her companions drift back and forward, like a star cluster moving among the constellations. In the course of time they will fortuitously drift out of the ladies’ school into college — a sudden effort and over the top. Meantime they seem to move around in a circle, like fish in a trap, among quadratic equations and moods and tenses, going past the same opening of salvation again and again and not seeing it.
It is their expectation that, when they get into the enchanted waters called college, they will swim right on. But not so. Ask any first-year student in Arts in the month of October what he is doing, and he will say that they are not doing anything much yet. The professor is “revising.” After Xmas he will be “reviewing” and by April they will pretty well be back to matriculation. There will be no advance without security. The second year will then review the work of the first, and so on. In a graduate school the students revise their undergraduate work, and admission to a Ph.D. degree, as I recall it, involves a general review of everything since the cradle.
Here then is the educational machine at work, grinding its way up the long slope of Parnassus, from its first loading up its freight of little children, all fluttering with kindergarten ribbons, till it finally stops among the debris and slag piles marked END OF TRACK, where it lets out its sad-eyed Ph.D.’s, looking for a job, five years too late, and engaged to be married five years later.
The first jolt in this upward ascent is when the children start to learn to spell and strike our crazy alphabet. Look what happens.
The eager child begins “N — O, no.” “S — O, so.” “All right so far,” thinks the child — like the man who fell out of the high window. Indeed, it’s more than all right. The thing is a pleasure. “N — O, no.” “S — O, so,” with a good hiss on the letter S. “It’s a delight,” says the child. “Show me more of it.” In fact the logic of it has all the appeal that goes with what is called “the inevitable” in art.
Then something happens. “D — O, do,” says the teacher, and a lifetime of trouble begins. Forty years later, the child, grown up but still unable to spell, will be calling to his wife from his writing-desk: “Mary, how do you spell ‘dough’? I mean what you make bread with.”
But there, I refuse to discuss phonetic spelling. It’s too wearisome. People get tired at the mention of it. They themselves have learned to spell, or pretty nearly, and look on spelling as part of the troubles of childhood, like measles and Sunday school and having to obey father. They don’t suspect that there is coiled up in it the loss of perhaps two years of human life.
If spelling were rational, universal and authoritative, an intelligent child would, in a month, be able to read any word that it could say. After that it would spell by reading. Best of all, it would enter at once into the magic garden that reading opens up. When one realizes the endless hours, the tears, the bad marks, the soiled, paper blotted by little inky fingers, one might think it worth while to make the effort. But the effort would have to be great; a vast inertia would have to be overcome in order to effect an international agreement for uniform, simultaneous action. Nothing else would do. The Turks can do that (they did it), because they are only Turks. But we, Americans and English, can’t; and, if we could, the Irish wouldn’t. They’d demand free spelling and die for it.
We grown-up people are so habituated to our crazy alphabet that we do not realize the full enormity of its imperfection. When we learn that a Chinaman must retain a recollection of five thousand distinct picture-form-combinations before he can do advanced reading, we are divided between amazement and pity. In reality we are doing much the same thing. We have, for instance, to learn the thirteen different ways of indicating, by our spelling, the sound of long o — the simplest, the earliest, and the last of all our utterances. We must choose as among the following competitive methods represented by the rival words: note, boat, toe, yeoman, soul, row, sew, hautboy, beau, owe, floor, oh, O, — Very fittingly the list ends in oh, O! Since each of the thirteen words could have been spelt in any of twelve other ways, the list alone involves 169 choices. When we add to it all the other words that have a long o sound, the choices will run into thousands, and the educated persons must remember by sight every one of them. Conversely we have to remember by sight the varying pronunciations attached to the combination ough, a thing which a Chinaman, with only a few thousand pictures to recognize, thinks atrocious.
These are not isolated vagaries, things of exception. The confusion and effort involved run all through our written language. What we are doing is in reality memorizing a vast multitude of picture forms. The Chinaman sooner or later learns to read. So do we. We can appreciate his ghastly loss of time. When we learn to spell we are too young to understand about our own till the thing is done.
The trouble is all with the instrument — our wretched alphabet made worse by our use of it, a deterioration spread over centuries that multiplied its original faults by thousands. The European peoples got lost in the maze of their own phonetics — so many rival forms, so many duplicate ways, so many alternate choices that spelling came to depend, as Mr. Weller said, on the taste and fancy of the speller.
When the explorers of America tried to write down in European spelling the Indian name now admitted to be Chicago, they wrote it in no less than twenty-one different fashions. Among these first prize may be awarded to Stktschagto, with honorable mention for Tschakko. A Chinaman starting with the Indian meaning of the word and not the sound would have made a little picture of a skunk, and scored one. Yet the alphabet, in its prime, was one of the great triumphs of the human race. It took its place beside the wheelbarrow, the dug-out canoe, and the iron pot, the stone ax and the great achievements that foreshadowed rotary motion, navigation, rum and conquest, and carried civilization round the world.
The other inventions went on. The wheelbarrow is an aeroplane and the dug-out a Queen Mary. The alphabet lagged behind. Its youth was its brightest period; the signs and the sounds probably fitted far better for the Phoenicians than for us. Our alphabet got into trouble. As it moved west and north it ran into new sounds and had no signs for them. The northern barbarians had a sound that we mark th which they got perhaps from the whistle of the wind at sea. Perhaps also they didn’t. They had no sign for it, so they marked it with a t and an h, neither of which had anything to do with it, which perplexes still today the nascent minds of ten million children. The Greeks had a sign something like th, which probably sounded as something else, and that made further confusion.
Other letters crowded in, not needed. Q, with u always in attendance, stole the whole business that it gets from the letter k. The letter c, a mere cuckoo in the nest, took right and left from both k and s. In retaliation x crashed in as a sort of abbreviation that turned into a letter and fairly put k out of business, except that x couldn’t start anything. W arose as a letter of despair: few people have a good enough sound-sense to hear what it really is. P and h joined in an illicit combination to steal from f — so that nowadays such words as filosofy look funny, nearly as funny as funny itself would if we spelt it phunny.
In other words our alphabet is a wreck. We could reform it easily enough if we were all of like mind and wanted to — easily enough, that is to say, with a few years’ effort traded for a millennium of ease. But it would have to be done internationally, by authority, with finality and at a stroke. As it is, the way is blocked partly by the cranks in the foreground, but more by inertia in the background. Here for instance is the crank who explains that the gradations of vowel sounds are infinite and that no phonetic representation of them is possible except with an alphabet or system of infinite complexity. Of course the gradations are infinite. But so are the colours that run across the spectrum; yet we talk of a blue hat and a green light without any trouble. Anyone with an ear and tongue for linguistic phonetics can shade the broad sound of the letter a all the way from the parent called “father” at Oxford to the one called “fether” in Inverness. But a phonetic alphabet hits at a middle average which the individual varies at will in reading.
More pretentious is the scholarly crank who complains that phonetic spelling would hide the etymology of our language and draw a veil over its history. He likes the b in the word debt to carry him back to the dear old Latin debitum. He would rather sing a psalm in good company, than a sam with the ignorant. A fotograf, so spelt, would rob him of the Greek Photos, light, and grapho, I write, and make a mystery of clarity itself. But these objections rest on little more than the pang of novelty. We should all get as used to it in no time as we do to false teeth. In any case if one wants to play at scholarship and make a row over it, our spelling very often misleads, and hides the real origin of the word. Who put the false u in honour and the mistaken s in island? If the g in reign cheers us up by reminding us of rego, the g in sovereign, a false analogy, lets us down again. But all of this can be left for the scholars of the future to use in making theses.
