Delphi complete works of.., p.660
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 660
But pieces of good fortune in mathematics were few and far between. In the classics and philosophy it was quite different. After I had ceased to be a professor and could safely divulge the secrets of the trade, I once wrote down for my ex-students some precepts on the art of passing examinations. I requote a sample or two in this place.
Here first is the case of Latin translation, the lists of extracts from Caesar, Cicero, etc., the origin of each always indicated by having the word Caesar, etc., under it. On this we seize as our opportunity. The student doesn’t need to know one word of Latin. He learns by heart a piece of translated Latin, selecting a typical extract, and he writes that down. The examiner merely sees a faultless piece of translation and notices nothing — or at least thinks the candidate was given the wrong extract. He lets him pass.
Here is the piece of Caesar as required.
‘These things being thus this way, Caesar, although not yet did he not know neither the copiousness of the enemy nor whether they had frumentum, having sent on Labienus with an impediment, he himself on the first day before the third day, ambassadors having been sent to Vercingetorix, lest who might which, all having been done, set out.
‘Caesar. Bellum Gallicum, Op. Cit.’
The summation of what is called the liberal arts course is reached with such subjects as political theory, philosophy, etc. Here the air is rarer and clearer and vision easy. There is no trouble at all in circling around the examiner at will. The best device is found in the use of quotations from learned authors of whom he has perhaps — indeed, very likely — never heard, and the use of languages which he either doesn’t know or can’t read in blurred writing. We take for granted that the examiner is a conceited, pedantic man — as they all are — and is in a hurry to finish his work and get back to a saloon.
Now let me illustrate.
Here is a question from a recent examination in Modern Philosophy. I think I have it correct or nearly so.
Discuss Descartes’ proposition, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ as a valid basis of epistemology.
Answer: Something of the apparent originality of Descartes’ dictum, ‘Cogito ergo sum,’ disappears when we recall that, long before him, Globulus had written, ‘Testudo ergo crepito,’ and the great Arab Scholar Alhelallover, writing about 200 Fahrenheit, has said, ‘Indigo ergo gum.’ But we have only to turn to Descartes’ own brilliant contemporary, the Abbé Pâté de Foie Gras, to find him writing ‘Avez vous vu le jardin de ma tante?’ which means as much or more than Descartes’ assertion. It is quite likely the Abbé himself was acquainted with the words of Pretzel, Weiner Schnitzel and Schmierkäse; even more likely still he knew the treatise of the low German, Fisch von Gestern, who had already set together a definite system or scheme. He writes: ‘Wo ist mein Bruder? Er ist im Hause. Habe ich den Vogel gesehen? Dies ist ein Gutes Messer. Holen Sie Karl und Fritz und wir werden ins Theater gehen. Danke Bestens.’
All that, you will be glad to know, is just the introduction. We are now getting near to the lecture itself. What the introduction has been trying to say is that there seems to be something wrong with education. Instead of learning things for their own sake, because we want to, we learn things as a purely mechanical exercise, because we have to. Unless we go through the organized compulsory curriculum of a school and college we can’t get the legal qualification to enter a profession. In order to be a dentist we must first know what a logarithm is, and in order to be a horse doctor you have to learn Latin. The idea is that any man who has tackled a Latin irregular verb has no trouble with the inside of a horse. Sometimes it works. Last summer up at the little place I call my farm I sent for a veterinary surgeon to come over and see what was wrong with my old horse. He came and looked puzzled and said that he guessed the horse was in a sort of decline. A few days later I fetched him again, but still all he could suggest was that the horse had fallen into a decline. When he came and gave the opinion the third time, I said: ‘Ah, now, that’s the third declension. I know all about that.’
Thus the great central problem opens up as to how far education has got to be compulsory and how far purely spontaneous — learning for learning’s sake the things we want to know. At first sight and without afterthought anyone would say that ideal education, if it were possible, would be the untrammelled pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It would probably be added that the ideal is not possible and hence education must be organized and compulsory and disciplinary. But it is doubtful whether the other thing is the ideal arrangement even if possible. Compulsion has its uses. If a boy learns nothing at school except to keep seated and silent, that in itself is good. We have to be made to do things; our frail human nature otherwise couldn’t live up to its own aspirations. Take as a minor instance such a case as compulsory attendance at lectures. Must the student be made to go, and checked off on a list like a factory hand? Yes, I think so. When I first went to teach at McGill, where such a rule was in force, I was horrified at it. I had been used to what seemed the superior liberty of other colleges, seeming more worthy of a man. But in reality students cut lectures from idleness, from whim, or from accident, and later on wish that they had been made to be present.
I recall the case of my late distinguished colleague, Dr. Francis Shepherd, Professor of Anatomy and sometime dean of the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University (clarum et venerabile nomen). Dr. Shepherd lectured on Anatomy at nine o’clock every morning. It was his custom, as nine o’clock drew near, to stand at the door of the classroom, his watch in his hand. At the exact hour of nine he entered the room, closed the door, locked it, and began his lecture. Any student locked out was counted absent; locked out eight times in the session he lost a year of his academic life. And who liked the system? The students did. They boasted of it. There is a whole generation of medical men who were brought up on it and still talk about it. I introduced it into my own classes in imitation of Dr. Shepherd, but I discontinued it as I found it meant locking myself outside rather too often. In the twenty years of his lecturing on Anatomy he was never once late.
Or take the compulsory college dress, the cap and gown, without which in my undergraduate days no students might enter a lecture-room. To some minds the rule seems ridiculous and barbarous. I don’t find it so. Some false notion of equality and democracy has created a public opinion against it. It has had to go. Yet great, I think, is the loss. The college gown of my undergraduate days cost one dollar and fifty cents. It lasted a lifetime, and might indeed have served for burial. It was not killed by the cost of it, though its declining use drove the cost up. Public opinion killed it. Yet never was there anything more consistent with the dignity and democracy of knowledge. The good old gown, like charity, covered up a multitude of shabby clothes. It obliterated all distinctions of rich and poor, and for those who knew its shape and cut it was the symbol of a whole cycle of history. The doubled sleeve of the gown was in reality and originally a bag in which the impecunious student of the Middle Ages might place the food supplied to him by kindly donors. It was the hall-mark of his local right to beg. You will note that even to-day the doubled sleeve of the gown of the doctor of philosophy has a larger cubic content than any other, and that these gowns, with their capacious sleeves, are only worn, as a rule, by the presidents of colleges!
Look back, then, over modern education, and you see the conflict between these two principles of spontaneity and compulsion running all through it and still at work. When our education first emerged from the cloisters of the church to become a general instrument of human knowledge, the principle of compulsion dominated it. Boys were taught at the point of the rod. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ was the maxim of the teacher.
One recalls as a typical figure at this period of education the great Dr. Busby of Westminster School. He used to boast that he had laid his rod on no less than sixteen bishops. He was so majestic that he would not let even King Charles II walk in front of him.
‘A great man,’ said Sir Roger de Coverley, ‘he caned my grandfather.’
Dr. Busby’s little charges learned, as I say, at the point of the stick. It didn’t matter whether Smith Minor, entering Form I, wanted to learn or not. He had to. For him knowledge was not a garden. It was a steep and rough ascent on a rocky path — gradus ad Parnassum. Up he went, with the stick to keep him moving. He learned what he didn’t want to learn. He didn’t understand what it meant, or where it led to. He was driven, like a donkey going to market, over the pons asinorum of Euclid. He learned the fact that similar triangles are in the duplicate ratio of their homologous sides. God knows he didn’t doubt it. He learned that the logarithm of a number to a given base is the index of the power to which the base must be raised to produce the given number. He was not allowed to ask why. But with it all there went, however, in a certain sense the honourable satisfaction of a task undertaken and done, a difficulty faced and conquered.
Such was the Busby method, and there was a lot in it. But an entirely different idea presently grew up in France and found expression from Jean Jacques Rousseau in his book Emile, ou de l’Education. Rousseau was a queer creature, contemptible in his private life, yet destined to typify, in the domain of government, of morals and of education, the opening of a new era. Rousseau’s eminence probably consisted in his finding the words to say what everyone was already thinking. The psychologists tell us that that is about as far as ‘originality’ gets. We have apparently just two or three mass thoughts at a time, like a herd of cattle, and what we call our opinions are caught by infections from the crowd. At any rate Rousseau’s doctrine of the state of nature as a lost paradise, of a return to natural liberty as the key to happiness, as they say in French, faisait fortune. His Contrat Social of 1762 went round the world, and his picture of little Emile’s education became the basis of great changes.
Little Emile and his lot was an exact contrast to Smith Minor. The two boys are long since dead, but their souls are still with us. All of us, who have taken pedagogical courses, have heard enough, and too much, of the spontaneous system of education, proceeding from the known to the unknown and from the concrete to the abstract. As a matter of fact all such ideas are only half truths. Take as an example the teaching of elementary English grammar. As Smith Minor learned it, it began with the brutal, straight-out statement, ‘There are eight parts of speech: the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection.’ He had no idea what this meant or where it was leading to. It was licked into him.
But little Emile — ah, no! He wandered among the flowers murmuring words at will, until presently he should say, ‘Dear mama, how funny words are!’
‘Are they not, darling,’ replied his mother.
‘I believe that some of them, dear mama, might be called adverbs.’
‘They are, darling, they are.’
Later, let us say, the two little boys learned navigation, with a view to entering the navies of their respective countries. Smith Minor was brutally made to learn by heart that longitude meant the number of angular degrees east or west of Greenwich. Emile had to wait till he met an angular degree in the words and got in a question about it. In time no doubt little Emile wandered on to the quarter-deck of a French man-of-war. Yet, after all, which navy beat the other?
In other words, I am trying to say that in much of our education (in practice at least) it is quicker to go from the unknown to the known. To proceed ad obscurum per obscurius is often as useful as to go through a tunnel to save walking round a mountain.
We turn to see to what extent we can allow each of these conflicting principles a place in our education. Plainly enough in a democratic state where everybody has to learn to read and write there must at least be a set curriculum of times and hours, of grades and classes, of promotions and graduations. You can’t get away from it. But at least you can try to see that the shadow never takes the place of the substance, nor the machine attempt to replace the principle of life.
The best example is seen in written examinations. In my opinion they are the curse of education. They are also absolutely necessary. They spoil everything. And you can’t do without them. Education without compulsory mechanical tests would, for the common run of us, turn to mush. If all I need for a degree in Persian literature is to go away and read it, or rather to come back and say I read it, I’ll get it fast enough. That would do for a genius — that was the education of Isaac Newton and of Gibbon — but it is not for you. You’ve got to be examined as carefully as a horse.
Yet, on the face of it, it is utterly ridiculous to attempt to reduce real knowledge to set forms of questions and answers that can be valued as a carpenter measures lumber. The exaction of a high percentage of excellence in a written examination compels an altogether unnatural and unwholesome accuracy of information. What is needed first is the broad outline of a subject and a deep interest in knowing about it. The attempt to get a high percentage on a written examination defeats its own end — each last increment of accuracy is obtained at higher and higher cost. The reality of the subject is lost in the agony of trying to remember it.
Thus, in learning languages, accuracy at first is out of place. A boy who learns all the French irregular verbs out of a list, before he uses French and reads French, will never get beyond a list. He might get a job in a French laundry, but that’s all.
The same is true of history and of knowledge in general. What is first needed is a thorough smattering so to speak, not accurate detail — the landscape first, the trees after.
Yet the moment we break away from the unnatural disciplinary test of the written examination, what is to take its place? We can’t let students enter, pass, and qualify on their faces — or at least only the girls.
Here for example is Master Willie Nut about to enter college. So in order to get away from the written examination method they try him out on the new and popular ‘questionnaire’ scheme — the method of confidential inquiry from those who ought to know. A paper of questions is sent round to Willie Nut’s friends, something like this:
1. What is your general idea of the character of Willie Nut, Junior?
2. How would he measure up in an emergency? . . . If someone dropped a brick on him, how would he react to the brick? . . . If he fell off a fifteen-storey building, what would he do?
3. What percentage would you say there is in Willie Nut’s character, (a) of personality, (b) of likability, (c) of enthusiasm, (d) of homogeneity, (e) of spontaneity, (f) of visibility?
4. Would you consider young William Nut a leader? . . . and, if so, of what? . . . of men or of women? . . . What proportion of women would he lead?
5. Getting down to facts, tell us if Willie Nut has ever been in jail, and if so where and for how long. Tell us at the same time any other dirty thing about him that occurs to you.
If the questionnaire were sent round to Willie’s enemies, it might be possible to get a fairly generous appreciation of what he amounts to. But, sent to his friends, it sinks him. The confidential opinion of a man’s friends is enough to send him to jail.
Another new idea is the Intelligence Test — intended to find out, not what Willie has learned by heart, but how snappy a mind he has, and whether he has caught up the items of general knowledge — such as the diameter of the earth’s orbit, and the number of hydrogen atoms in a cubic inch — without which no business man ought to be one. He must know also the general idea of the guiding outline of history, such as whether the Trojan War came before the French Revolution.
Hence Willie Nut’s intelligence test involves questions of three kinds. First is the snappy, psychology stuff to get his brain reactions, like this:
1. Blink your eyes six times while counting five. Reverse the process and unblink them five times while counting six.
2. Wave your left foot slowly twice around your head.
Then comes the division of useful and necessary information, such as:
1. What is the difference, in kilograms, between a long and a short ton?
2. Explain the action of a photo-cell.
Last of all comes the broad view of historical and current information. Here the examination suddenly turns soft. It is felt that after all we mustn’t expect too much. So they put it to Willie, something as follows:
1. What nation sailed in the Spanish Armada?
2. Who was the first President of the United States? Who will be the last?
3. How many legs has a dog?
4. What is the French for ‘adieu,’ ‘omelette,’ ‘pâté de foie gras’?
5. What relation is King George the VI to his great-grandmother Queen Victoria?
6. How much is one and one?
Looking over such substitute methods as these makes us realize that, to a great extent, we must keep the old-fashioned disciplinary examination. But if we do so, we must never forget how mechanical it is and how it tends to kill the soul of education.
I know of no department of learning where this is more the case than in that of pure literature, the humanities. Our own literature, in our own language, is a thing that we ought not to need to study, in the narrow sense, but to cultivate and to enjoy with spontaneous freedom and without ulterior purpose. Yet when the college takes hold of it, what a changed thing it becomes! We see our literature divided into periods and schools, all to be learned by heart and remembered. For example, we must be able to write down the six chief beauties of Milton, and the seven leading characteristics of the Elizabethan age, and the four vices of the Restoration. We are to memorize the effect of Shakespeare on Spenser and the effect of Spenser on Shakespeare. We must track out any chief tendencies as soon as they begin to swell, and to accept and memorize a standardized list of judgments, an orthodox and accepted measure of the excellences and eminences of our literature. It is for the most part a catalogue of the dead made by the dead, such as lies in the heart of an Egyptian pyramid. All this must be learned from little books and manuals, and written down from lecture notes given by a professor who had it all from a dead one, forty years ago.
