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THE EDWARD DOUGLASS WHITE
LECTURES ON CITIZENSHIP
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
1941
 OTHER BOOKS BY ROBERT M. HUTCHINS

NO FRIENDLY VOICE (l 936 )

THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA (1936)

EDUCATION
FOR
FREEDOM

ROBERT MAYNARD
HUTCHINS

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Baton RougOi Louisiana

*947
 COPYRIOHT, 1943, BY

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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ToV; a.6'1
 To
MPMH
 PREFACE
Much of the material In Chapters a, 3, and 5 of
this book was presented in the Edward Douglass
White lectures at Louisiana State University In
April, 1941. The authorities of the Louisiana State
University Press, in addition to many other cour-
tesies, have generously allowed me the opportunity
to rewrite the lectures and have permitted me to
add Chapters i and 4.

R. M. H.
Chicago
28 July 194a
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii

I The Autobiography of an Uneducated

Man I

u The Aims of Education 19

III Materialism and its Consequences 39

IV How to Save the Colleges 65

V Education at War 80

Appendix 107

u
 I

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN
UNEDUCATED MAN
WAS born in the usual way forty-three years ,

I ago and brought up in a way that was not unusual

for persons born at that time. We had morning
prayers with a Bible reading every day. We went
to church twice on Sunday. The result of the first

is that I was amazed three weeks ago when in a

class I was teaching I found a senior at the Uni-
versity of Chicago who had never heard of Joshua.
The result of the second is that it is very hard for
me to go to church now and that I find myself sing-
ing, humming, or moaning third-rate hymns like
“Blest Be the Tie That Binds" while shaving, while
waiting on the platform to make a speech, or in
other moments of abstraction or crisis.
We had at that time many advantages that have
been denied to college students in recent years, but
that may be restored to their successors. We had no
radios, and for all practical purposes no automo-
no movies, and no slick-paper magazines. We
biles,

had to entertain ourselves. We could not by turning

a small knob or paying a small fee get somebody
I
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
else to do it for us. It never occurred to us that
unless we could go somewhere or do something
our lives were empty. We had nowhere to go, and
no way to get there. Our recreations were limited
to two: reading and physical exercise. The first
meant reading anything you could lay your hands
on.The second meant playing tennis.
You will notice that the circumstances under
which I was brought up gave me some knowledge
of one great book, the Bible, and the habit of read-
ing.The habit of physical exercise I was fortunately
forced to abandon at an early date. You will notice,
too, that the educational system had nothing to do
with any of these accomplishments or habits. 1 do
not remember that I ever thought about being edu-
cated at all. I thought of getting through school.
This, as I recall it, was a business of passing exami-
nations and meeting requirements, all of which were
meaningless to me but presumably had some mean-
ing to those who had me in their power. I have no
doubt that the Latin and Greek I studied did me
good. All I can say is that I was not aware of it

at the tin\e. Nor did I have any idea of the particu-

lar kind of good it was intended
do me. Since to
I had got the habit of reading at home, 1 was per-
fectly willing to read anything anybody gave me.
Apart from a few plays of Shakespeare nobody
gave me anything good to read until I was a sopho-
more in college. Then I was allowed to examine the
2
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
grammar and philology of the Apology of Socrates
in aGreek course. And since I had had an unusual
amount of German, I was permitted to study Faust,
My father once happened to remark to me that he
had never liked mathematics. Since I admired my
father very much, it became a point of honor with
me not to like mathematics either. I finally squeezed
through Solid Geometry. But when, at the age of six-
teen, I entered Oberlin College, I found that the au-
thorities felt that one hard course was all anybody
ought to be asked to carry. You could take either
mathematics or Greek. Of course if you took Greek
you were allowed to drop Latin. I did not hesitate
a moment. Languages were pie for me. It would
have been uniilial to take mathematics. I took Greek,
and have never seen a mathematics book since. 1

have been permitted to glory in the possession of

an unmathematical mind.
My scientific attainments were of the same order.
I had a course in physics in prep school. Every
Oberlin student had to take one course in science,
because every Oberlin student had to take one
course in everything — in everything, that is, except
Greek and mathematics. After I had blown up all

the retorts in the chemistry laboratory doing the

Marsh test for arsenic, the chemistry teacher was
glad to give me a passing grade and let me go.
My philosophical attainments were such as may
be derived from a ten weeks’ course in the History
3
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
of Philosophy. I do not remember anything about
the course except that the book was green and that
it contained pictures of Plato and Aristotle. I
learned later that the pictures were wholly imagi-
nary representations of these writers. I have some
reason to believe that the contents of the books
bore the same relation to their doctrines.
So I arrived at the age of eighteen and the end
of my sophomore year. My formal education had
given me no understanding of science, mathematics,
or philosophy. It had added almost nothing to my
knowledge of had some facility with
literature. I
languages, but today I cannot read Greek or Latin
except by guesswork. What is perhaps more im-
portant, I had no idea what I was doing or why. My
father was and a professor. The sons
a minister
of ministers and the sons of professors were sup-
posed to go to college. College was a lot of courses.
You toiled your way through those which were
required and for the rest wandered around taking
those that seemed most entertaining. The days of
the week and day at which courses
the hours of the
were offered were perhaps the most important fac-
tor in determining the student’s course of study.
I spent the nexttwo years in the Army, Here I
developed some knowledge of French and Italian.
I learned to roll cigarettes, to blow rings, and to
swear, I discovered that there was a world far from

4
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Oberlin, Ohio, devoted to wine, women, and song;
but I was too well brought up even to sing.
The horrors of war are all that they are supposed
to be. They are even worse; for the worst horror
can never be written about or communicated. It is

the frightful monotony and boredom which is the lot

of the private with nothing to think about. Since my
education had given me nothing to think about, I

devoted myself, as the alternative to suicide, to the

mastery of all the arts implied in the verb "to sol-

dier.” I learned to protract the performance of any
task so that I would not be asked to do another.
By the end of the war I could give the impression
that I was busy digging a ditch without putting my
pick into the ground all day. I have found this train-
ing very asefal in my present capacity. But on the
whole, aside from the physiological benefits con-
ferred upon me by a regular, outdoor life, I write

off ray years in the Army as a complete blank. The

arts of soldiering, at least at the buck-private level,
are not liberal arts. The manual of arms is not a
great book.
When the war was over, I went to Yale. I thought
I would study history, because I could not study

mathematics, science, or philosophy; and history

was about all was left, I found that the Yale
there
history department was on sabbatical leave, But I
found, too, that you could take your senior year in
5
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
the Law School with credit for the bachelor’s de-
gree. So I decided to stay two years in Yale Cpllege
doing my last year’s work in the Law School.
all of
Yale was dissatisfied with my year of blowing up
retorts in the Oberlin chemistry laboratory. Yale
said I had to take another science any science
; would
do. Discussion with my friends revealed the fact
that the elementary course in biology was not con-
sidered difficult even for people like me. I took that
and spent a good deal of time in the laboratory

cutting up frogs.I don’t know why, I can tell you

nothing now about the inside of a frog. In addition
to the laboratory we had lectures. All I remember
about them is that the lecturer lectured with his
eyes closed.He was the leading expert in the country
on the paramecium. We all believed that he lectured
with his eyes closed because he had to stay up all
night watching the paramecia reproduce. Beyond
this experience Yale imposed no requirements on
mcy and I wandered aimlessly round until senior
year.
In that year I did all my work in the Law School,
except that I had to obey a regulation of obscure
origin and purpose which compelled every Yale
College student working in the Law School to take
one two-hour course in the College. I took a two-
hour course in American Literature because wasit

the only two-hour course in the College which came

at twelve o’clock. A special advantage of this course
6
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
was that the instructor, who was much in demand as
a lecturer to popular audiences, often had to leave
at 12:20 to make the 12 :29 for New York.

I see now that my formal education began in the

Law School. My formal education began, that is,
at the age of twenty-one. I do not mean to say that
I knew then that I was getting an education. I am
know they were giving
sure the professors did not
me They would have been shocked at such an
one.
insinuation. They thought they were teaching me

law. They did not teach me any law. But they did
something far more important: they introduced me
to the liberal arts.
It is sad but true that the only place in an Amer-
ican university where the student is taught to read,
write, and speak is the law school. The principal,

if not the sole, merit of the case method of instruc-

tion is that the student is compelled to read ac-
curately and carefully, to state accurately and care-

fully the meaning of what he has read, to criticize

the reasoning of opposing cases, and to write very

extended examinations in which the same standards
of accuracy, care, and criticism are imposed. It is

too bad that this experience is limited to very few

students and that those few arrive at the stage where

they may avail themselves of it only at about age

twenty-two. It is unfortunate that the teachers have
no training in the liberal arts as such. The whole
thing is on a rough-and-ready basis, but it is gram-

7
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
mar, rhetoric, and logic just the same, and a good
deal better than none at all.

One may upon

regret, too, that the materials
which these disciplines are employed are no more
significant than they are. No case book is a great

hook. Not more than two or three judges in the

history of Anglo-American law have been great
writers. One who is immersed long enough in the
turgidities of some of the masters of the split infini-
tive who have graced the American bench may even-
tually come to write like them.
One may regret as well that no serious attempt is
made in the law schools to have the student learn
anything about the intellectual history of the intel-

lectual content of the law. At only one law school

that I know of is it thought important to connect
the law with ethics and politics. In most law schools
there is a course in Jurisprudence, At Yale in my
day it was an elective one-semester course in the
last year, and was ordinarily taken by about ten
students. Still, the Yale Law School did begin my
formal education. Though it was too little and too
late, it was something, and I shall always be grate-
ful for it.

After I graduated from college and ended my

first year of law I took a year and a half off and
taught English and History in a preparatory school.
This continued my education in the liberal arts. I
did not learn any history, because the school was
8
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
solely interested in getting boys through the College
Board Examinations. We taught from textbooks,
usually themost compact we could find, for we were
reasonably sure that if the boys had memorized
what was in the textbook they could pass the ex-
aminations. We did not allow them to read anything
except the textbook for fear of confusing their
minds.
But in teaching, and especially in teaching English
Composition, I discovered that there were rules of
reading, writing, and speaking, and that it was
worth while to learn them, and even to try to teach
them. I came to suspect, for the first time, that my
teachers in school had had something in mind. 1
began to fall into a dangerous heresy, the heresy
that since the best way to learn something is to teach
it, the only way to learn anything is to teach it. I
am sure that in what is called “the curriculum”
of the conventional school, college, or university the
only people who are getting an education are the
teachers. They work in more or less coherent, if

somewhat narrow, and they work in more or

fields,

less intelligible ways. The student, on the other

hand, works through a multifarious collection of
disconnected courses in such a way that the realms of
knowledge are likely to become less and less intel-

ligible as he proceeds. In such an institution the only

way to learn anything is to teach it. The difficulty

with this procedure is that in the teacher’s early

9
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
years, at least, it is likely to make the education of
his students even worse than it would otherwise
have been.
After continuing my education in the liberal arts
in this rather unpleasant and inefficient way, I re-
turned to Yale at the age of twenty-three, became
an officer of the University, and finished my law
work out of hours. Just before I was about to grad-
uate from the Law School at the age of twenty-six,
a man who was scheduled to teach in the School
that summer got and a substitute had
appendicitis,
was already on the pay roll and
to be found. Since I
everybody else was out of town, I became a member
of the faculty of the Law School.
Here I continued my education in the liberal arts,
this time unconsciously, for I was no more aware
than the rest of the faculty that the liberal arts were
what we were teaching. At the end of my first year
of this the man who was teaching the law of Evi-
dence resigned, and, because of my unusual qualifica-
tions, Iwas put in his place. My qualifications were
that I had never studied the subject, in or out of
law school, and that I knew nothing of the disci-
plines on which the law of Evidence is founded,
namely psychology and logic, i

The law of Evidence bothered me. I couldn’t

understand what made it go. There is a rule, for
example, that evidence of flight from the scene of
a crime is admissible as tending to show guilt. After
10
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
painful research the only foundation I could find
for this was the statement, emanating, I grant,
from the very highest source, that the wicked flee
when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as
bold as a lion.
There is a rule which admits, as worthy the atten-
tion of the jury, utterances made immediately after
a blow on the head, or after any sudden shock, such
as having somebody say “boo” to you. As far as I
could discover, this doctrine rested on the psycho-
logical principle, long held incontrovertible, that a
blow on the head or having somebody say “boo”
to him prevents even the habitual liar, momentarily
but effectually, from indulging in the practice of his
art. Since I was supposed to lead my students to the
knowledge of what the rules ought to be, and not
merely of what they were, I wanted to find out
whether the wicked really do flee when no man
pursueth, whether the righteous really are as bold
as a lion, and whether you really can startle a liar
out of his disregard for the truth.
It was obviously impossible to conduct controlled
e3q>eriments on these interesting questions. I could
not think about them, because I had had no educa-
tion. The psychologists and logicians I met could
not think about them, because they had had no ed-
ucation either. I could think about legal problems
as legal. They could think about psychological prob-
lems as psychological. I didn’t know how to think
II
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
about legal problems as psychological; they didn’t
know how to think about psychological problems as
legal. Finally I heard that there was a young psy-
chologist, logician, and philosopher at Columbia
by the name of Adler who was actually examining
the bible of all Evidence teachers, the seven volumes
of Wigmore on Evidence, A man who was willing
to make such sacrifices deserved investigation, and
I got in touch with Mr, Adler right away.
I found that Mr. Adler was just as uneducated
as I was, but that he had begun to get over it, and
to do so in a way that struck me as very odd. He
had been teaching for several years in John Er-
skine’s Honors Course in the Great Books at Co-
lumbia. I paid no attention and went on trying to
find out how I could put a stopwatch on the return
of power to lie after a blow on the head.
I now transport you forward four years, from
1925 — to 1929. I am President of the University
of Chicago. Mr. Adler is a member of the faculty
of the University of Chicago. We had fled from
New Haven and New York, and we must have been
we had fled when I assure you no man had
guilty, for
any idea of pursuing us. By this time Mr. Adler had
had four more years with the Great Books at Co-
lumbia. He looked on me, my work, my education,
and my prospects and found us not good. He had
discovered that merely reading was not enough. He
had found out that the usefulness of reading was
12
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
some way related to the excellence of what was
read and the plan for reading it. I knew that reading
was a good thing, but had hitherto been under the
impression that it didn’t make any difference what
you read or how it was related to anything else you
read. I had arrived at the age of thirty, you will
remember, with some knowledge of the Bible, of
Shakespeare, of Faust, of one dialogue of Plato, and
of the opinions of many semiliterate and a few lit-

erate judges, and that was about all. Mr. Adler fur-
ther represented to me that the sole reading matter
of university presidents was the telephone book.
He intimated that unless I did something drastic I
would close my educational career a wholly unedu-
cated man. He broadly hinted that the president of
an educational institution ought to have some educa-
tion. For two years we discussed these matters, and

then, at the age of thirty-two, my education began in

earnest.
For eleven years we have taught the Great Books
in various parts of the University: in University
High School, in the College, in the Humanities
Division, in the Law School, in the Department of
Education, in University College, the extension divi-
sion, four hours a week three quarters of the year.
All this and the preparation for it has had to be car-
ried on between board meetings, faculty meetings,
committee meetings, conferences, trips, speeches,
money-raising efforts, and attempts to abolish foot-
13
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
ball, award the B.A. at the end of the sophomore
to
year, and otherwise to wreck the educational system.
Thanks to the kind co-operation of the students, I
have made some progress with my education. In
my more optimistic moments I flatter myself that I
have arrived at about the stage which I think the
American sophomore should have reached. But
this is an exaggeration. The American sophomore,

to qualify for the bachelor’s degree, should not be

ignorant of mathematics and science.
Now what I want to know is why I should have
had to wait until age forty-three to get an education
somewhat worse than that which any sophomore
ought to have. The liberal arts are the arts of free-
dom. To be free a man must understand the tradi-
tion in which he lives. A great book is one which
yields up through the liberal arts a clear and im-
portant understanding of our tradition. An educa-
tion which consisted of the liberal arts as understood
through great books and of great books understood
through the liberal arts would be one and the only
one which would enable us to comprehend the tradi-
tion in which we live. It must follow that if we want
to educate our students for freedom, we must edu-
cate them and in the great books.
in the liberal arts
And this education we must give them, not by the
age of forty-three, but by the time they are eighteen,
or at the latest twenty.
We have been so preoccupied with trying to find
14
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
out how to teach everybody to read anything that
we have forgotten the importance of what is read.
Yet it is obvious that if we succeeded in teaching
everybody to read, and everybody read nothing but
pulp magazines, obscene literature, and Mein
Kampf, the last state of the nation would be worse
than the first. Literacy is not enough.
The common answer is that the great books are
too difficult for the modern pupil. All I can say is

that it is amazing how the number of too difficult

books has increased in recent years. The books that

are now too difficult for candidates for the doctorate
were the regular fare of grammar-school boys in
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Most of the
great books of the world were written for ordinary
people, not for professors alone.Mr. Adler and I
have found that the books are more rather than less
effective the younger the students are. Students in
University High School have never heard that these
books are too hard for them and that they shouldn’t
read them. They have not had time to get as mis-
educated as their elders. They read the books and
like them because they think they are good books
about important matters. The experience at St.
John’s College, in the Humanities General Course
at Columbia, in the General Courses of the College
of the University of Chicago, and the University
of Chicago College course known as Reading, Writ-
ing, and Criticism is the same,

IS
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
Ask any foreign scholar you meet what he thinks
about American students. He will tell you that they
are eager and able to learn, that they will respond
to the best that is offered them, but that they are
miserably trained and dreadfully unenlightened. If
you put these two statements together you can come
to only one conclusion, and that is that it is not the
inadequacy of the students but the inadequacy of
the environment and the irresolution of teachers
that is responsible for the shortcomings of American
education.
So Quintilian said: “For there is absolutely no
foundation for the complaint that but few men have
the power to take in the knowledge that is imparted
to them, and that the majority are so slow of under-
standing that education is a waste of time and labor.
On the contrary you will find that most are quick
to reason and ready to learn. Reasoning comes as
naturally to man as flying to birds, speed to horses
and ferocity to beasts of prey; our minds are en-
dowed by nature with such activity and sagacity
that the soul is believed to proceedfrom heaven.
Those who are dull and unteachable are as abnormal
as prodigious births and monstrosities, and are but
few in number. A proof of what I say is to be found
in the fact that boys commonly show promise of
many accomplishments, and when such promise dies
away as they grow up, this is plainly due not to the
failure of natural gifts, but to lack of the requisite
l6
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
care. But, it will be urged, there are degrees of tal-
ent.Undoubtedly, I reply, and there will be a cor-
responding variation in actual accomplishment but ;

that there are any who gain nothing from education,

I absolutely deny.”
When we remember that only a little more than
1500 years ago the ancestors of most of us, many
of them painted blue, were roaming the trackless
forests of Caledonia, Britain, Germany, and trans-
alpine Gaul, despised by the civilized citizens of
Rome and Antioch, interested, in the intervals of
rapine, only in deep drinking and high gaming;
savage, barbarous, cruel, and illiterate, we may re-

flect with awe and expectation on the potentialities

of our race. When we remember, too, that it is only
a little more than fifty years ago that the “average
man” began to have the chance to get an education,
we must recognize that it is too early to despair of
him.
The President of Dalhousie has correctly said,
“Over most of Europe the books and monuments
have been destroyed and bombed. To destroy Eu-
ropean civilization in America you do not need to
burn its in a single fire. Leave those records
records
unread for a few generations and the effect will be
the same.”
The alternatives before us are clear. Either we
must abandon the ideal of freedom or we must edu-
cate our people for freedom. If an education in the

17
 EDUCATION for FREEDOM
liberal arts and in the great books is the education
for freedom, then we must make the attempt to give
this education to all our citizens. And since it is a
long job, and one upon which the fate of our country
in war and peace may depend, we shall have to start
 II

THE AIMS OF EDUCATION

IX years ago I had the honor of addressing my
S fellow Yale men on the Higher Learning in
America. I was surprised to iind that these lectures
did not have the effect they were intended to pro-
duce. Instead, all the movements they were designed
to arrest, all the attitudes they were calculated to
change, went rushing onward, in the case of the
movements, or became more firmly entrenched, in
the case of the attitudes.
I attacked trfvfaffty, and forty-two students en-
rolled in the Oklahoma University short course for
drum majors.
I attacked vocationalism, and the University of
California announced a course in cosmetology, say-
ing, “The profession of beautician is the fastest
growing in thia state.”

I deplored a curriculum of obsolescent informa-

tion, and one of America’s most distinguished sociol-
ogists announced that our information was increas-
ing so rapidly that in order to get time to pour it

all into our students we should have to prolong

adolescence at least until age forty-five.
I asserted that higher education was primarily
*9
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
intellectual, and the President of the New York
State College for Teachers said, “Education is not
even primarily intellectual, certainly not chiefly in-

tellectual. It is the process by which the emotions

are socialized.”
I lamented the confusion that besets American
education, and the President of a highly confused
and very large college announced that chaos was a
good thing. Though I should prefer chaos to an
order imposed by force, I had never supposed that
chaos was an ideal toward which all right-thinking
men should strive. Chaos had always seemed to me
something you tried to get out of. 1 ji ad ahyays
tlujyght tha^twha.t we wanted, both in politic^ and
education, was a rational order, rationally arrived

One professor accidentally agreed with me. He

made the following outrageous remarks in a book
of his own; “There will always remain,” he said,
“certain permanent values which education must
cultivate, such as intellectual honesty^ lovftjgfjjrujhi
ability to think clearly,moral qualities.” The fact
that he was 'from Teachers College, Columbia, and
could be assumed to be only teasing, did not save
him. He was sharply rebuked by a professor from
Ohio State University who said that here he must
“part company with the author of this indisputably
significant volume, for the suspicion grows that the

author is still something of an absolutist.” The

ao
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
author actually wanted education to cultivate intel-

lectual honesty, the love of truth, the ability to think

clearly, and moral qualities.

Now I will not deny that one or two people did

pay some attention to my hook. They had to. And
they got it free in the course of their trade as book
reviewers. One who in his spare time is a
of these,
professor at Yale, summed up the whole thing by
saying that the trouble with me was my intense
moral idealism. Such a quality would naturally dis-

tort anybody’s view of education. A university pres-

ident guilty of moral idealism? What is the world
coming to P By some process of association of ideas
I am reminded of the remarks of one of our alumni
who in a recent discussion at the University of Chi-

cago said that everything 1 had said about football

was logical, perfectly logical, very logical Indeed.
“But,” he said, “if the University abolishes foot-
ball, my son, now fifteen years old, will not want to
go there.” In other words, “logical” is a term of re*
jgroach, and the University of Chicago should be
illogical because one of its alumni has an illogical
child. I have even heard the word “educational” in
the same slurring connotation, as when a Princeton
graduate wrote to Woodrow Wilson saying, “I will
have nothing more to do with Princeton. You are
turning my dear old college into an educational
Institution.” A university president who is suspected
of an interest in morals, in intellect, or even in edu-
21
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
cation deserves the severest condemnation from
those who have the true interests of our country
at heart.
But all these things are as nothing compared
with the menace of metaphysics. I had mildly sug-
gested that metaphysics might unify the modern
university. I knew it was a long word, but I thought
my audience of learned reviewers would know what
itmeant. I was somewhat surprised to find that to
them metaphysics was a series of balloons, floating
far above the surface of the earth, which could be
pulled down by vicious or weak-minded people when
they wanted to win an argument. The explosion of
one of these balloons or the release of the gases it

contained might silence, but never convince, a wise

man. The wise man would go away muttering,
“Words, words, words,” or “Antiscientific,” “Re-
actionary,” or even “Fascist.” Knowing that there
is nothing true unless experimental science makes it

so, the wise man knows that metaphysics is simply

a technical name for superstition.
f^ow I might as well make a clean breast of it
all. I am interested in education, in morals, in intel-

lect, and in metaphysics. I even go so far as to hold

that there is a necessary relation among all these

things. I am willing to assert that without one we

cannot have the others and that without the others
we cannot have the one with which I am primarily
concerned, namely education.
22
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
I insist, moreover, that everything that is happen-
ing in the world today confirms the immediate and
pressing necessity of pulling ourselves together and
getting ourselves straight on these matters. The
world is probably closer to disintegration now than
at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire.
If there are any forces of clarification and unifica-
tion left, slight and ineffectual they may
however
appear, they had better be mobilized instantly, or
all that we have known as Western Civilization may

vanish.
Even assuming that normal conditions will soon
be restored, we must grant that our country has long
been afflicted with problems which, though appar-
ently insoluble, must be solved if this nation is to be
preserved or to be worth preserving. These prob-
lems are not material problems. We may have faith
that the vast resources of our land and the techno-
logical genius of our people will produce a supply of
material goods adequate for the maintenance of that
American Standard of Liv-
interesting fiction, the
ing. No, our problems are moral, intellectual, and
spiritual. The paradox of starvation in the midst

of plenty illustrates the nature of our difficulties.

This paradox will not be resolved by technical skill

or scientific data. It will be resolved, if it is resolved

at by wisdom and goodness.
all,

Now wisdom and goodness are the aim of higher

education. How can it be otherwise? Wisdom and
43
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
goodness are the end of human life. If you dispute
this, you are at once entering upon a metaphysical
controversy; for you are disputing about the nature
of being and the nature of man. This is as it should
be. How can we consider man’s destiny unless we
ask what he is ? How can we talk about preparing
men for life unless we ask what the end of life may
be ? At the base of education, as at the base of every
human activity, lies metaphysics.
So it is with science. As Dr. H. S. Burr of the Yale
Medical School has put it: “One of the primitive
assumptions of science is that we live in a universe of
order ; order determined by, and controlled through,
the operation of fundamental principles capable of
elucidation and reasonably exact definition. This
assumption states that there is a metaphysics, a
body of universal laws which can be grasped by the
human intellect and utilized effectively in the solu-
tion of human problems.”
So it is with ethics and politics. We want to lead
the good life. We wanj; the good state as a means to
that life. Once more, to find the good life and the
good state, we must inquire into the nature of man
and the ends of life. The minute we do that we are
metaphysicians in spite of ourselves. Moreover,
if ethics is the science of human freedom, we must

know at the beginning whether and in what sense

man is free. Here we are metaphysicians once again.
And the soundness of our moral conclusions depends
a4
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
on whether we are good metaphysicians or had ones.
So the more preposterous positions of Mill’s Essay
on Liberty originate in his mistaken or inadequate
analysis of the doctrine of free will ; and Aristotle’s
defense of natural slavery results from his failure
to remember that according to Aristotelian meta-
physics there can be no such thing as a natural slave.
So it is with education. Here the great criraifial

was Mr. Eliot, who as President of Harvard ap-

plied his genius, skill, and longevity to the task of
robbing American youth of their cultural heritage.
Since he held that there were no such things
good as
or bad subjects of study, his laudable effort to open
the curriculum to good ones naturally led him to
open it to bad ones and finally to destroy it alto-
gether. Today, though it is possible to get an edu-
cation in an American university, a man would have
to be so bright and know so much to get it that he
wouldn’t really need it. Our institutions give full

support to the proposition of Gibbon that “instruc-

tion is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy
dispositions in which it is almost superfluous.” To-
day the young American comprehends only by ac-
cident the intellectual tradition of which he is a part
and in which he must live ; and dis-
for its scattered
jointed fragments are strewn from one end of the
campus to the other. Our university graduates have
far more information and far less understanding
than in the colonial period. And our universities
25
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
present themselves to our people in this crisis either

as rather ineffectual trade schools or as places where

nice boys and girls have a nice time under the super-
vision of nice men and women in a nice environment.
The crucial error is that of holding that nothing

is any more important than anything else, that

there can be no order of goods and no order in the
intellectual realm. There is nothing central and
nothing peripheral, nothing primary and nothing
secondary, nothing basic and nothing superficial.
The course of study goes to pieces because there is

nothing to hold it together. Triviality, mediocrity,

and vocationalism take it over because we have no
standard by which to judge them. We have little to
offer as a substitute for a sound curriculum except
talk of personality, “character,” and great teachers,
the slogans of educational futilitarianism.
We see, then, that metaphysics plays a double
part in higher education. By way of their meta-
physics educators determine what education they
shall ofier. By way of metaphysics their students
must lay the foundations of their moral, intellectual,
and spiritual life. By way of metaphysics I arrive
at the conclusion that the aim of education is wisdom
and goodness and that studies which do not bring us
I
closer to this goal have no place in a university. If
I

I
you have a different opinion, you must show that
you have a better metaphysics. By way of meta-
physics, students, on their part, may recover a ra-
26
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
tional view of the universe and of their role in it.

If you deny this proposition you take the responsi-

bility of asserting that a rational view of the uni-
verse and one’s role in it is no better than an irra-
tional one or none at all.

Let us, in the light of these principles, look at

the relation of education to the improvement of
society. W want to improve society, and we want
e all

college graduates because of their education to want

to improve society and to know how to do it. Differ-
ences appear when we come to the method by which
these educational objects may be attained. Since the
issue before us is education, I shall not attempt to
deal with the problem of how a university may
through its scientific investigations best prevent or
cure soil erosion, juvenile delinquency, or war. I
shall discuss only the method by which an institu-

tion may develop in its students a social conscious-

ness and a social conscience.
At first glance it would seem that we should all

agree that in order to talk about society or its im-

provement we should have to inquire into the nature
of society. Into the common and abiding character-
istics of society, and of those unusual animals who
compose it, namely men. We should want to con-
sider the history of societies, their rise, develop-
ment, and decay. We should wish to examine their
object, the various ways of achieving it, and the
degree to which each succeeded or failed. In order
a?
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
to talk about success or failure we should have to
have some notions about what a good society was.
Without such notions we could not appraise the
societies that came under our eye or the one in which

we lived. We should need to have some conception

of a good society in order to decide what improve-
ment was for we all know that we have welcomed
;

many measures as beneficent which when adopted

have seemed to leave us in as unsatisfactory condi-
tion as we were in before. In short, if we approached
the great task of improving society without preju-
dice, we should think at once of trying to understand
the nature, the purpose, and the history of the Insti-

tutions which man has created. The quest for social

improvement is a perpetual quest. Ever since soci-
eties existed men have been trying to make them
better. The and the experience of mankind
ideas
should, one would think, he placed in the hands of
the rising generation as it goes forward on the per-
petual quest.
This would mean that if we wanted a student to
have a sense of social responsibility and the desire
to live up to his obligations we should have to give
’nim, to achieve this aim, whatever we gave him for
other purposes —an education^ history and philos-
ophy, together with the disciplines needed to under-
stand those fields. For the purpose of making him
an improver of society we should hope to make him,
in a modest way, master of thqjp,fi]iJicaiwi8^doaurf
28
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
the race. Without some inkling of it he could not
understand a social problem. He could not criticize
a social institution. He would be without the weap-
ons needed to attack or to defend one. He could not
tell a good one from a bad one. He could not think
intelligently about one.
It is hardly necessary for me add that nobody
to
can think about a practical problem like the problem
of improving society unless he knows the facts. He
cannot comment usefully on the situation in Ger-
many unless he knows what the situation is. Neither
can he do so unless he has some standard of criticism
and of action. This standard cannot, of course, be
a mathematical formula or some miraculous auto-
matic intellectual gadget which when applied to the
facts will immediately and infallibly produce the
right answer- The practical world is a world of con-
tingent singular things and not a mathematical sys-
tem. No one has emphasized this point more force-
fully than Aristotle, But this did not restrain him
from attempting in the Ethics and Politics to work
out the general principles of the good life and the
good state, or from trying to show the utility of such
principles in his society and, as I think, in any other.
If, then, we are to have standards of social criti-

cism and social action, and if they are to be anything

but emotional standards, they must result from phil-
osophical and historical study and from the habit
of straight thinking therein. It would be a wonderful

29
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
thing if we were all so conditioned that our reflexes
worked unanimously in the right direction when con-
fronted by political and economic injustice, if we
could be trained in infancy to recognize and flght it.

But even if we could arrive at adolescence in this

happy state I am afraid that our excellent habits
might fall away under pressure. Something is needed
to preserve them, and this is understanding. This Is

another way of saying that the intellect commands

the will. Our parents should make every effort in

our childhood to moderate our passions and to ha-

bituate us to justice and prudence. But the role of
higher education in this connection must be to supply
the firm and enduring groundwork to sustain these
habits when the tumult of adult life beats upon them.
It seems obvious to me^ therefore^ that the kind
of education I have been urging is the kind that helps
to develop a social consciousness and a social con-
science, Why isn’t it obvious to everybody else ? The
first reason, I think, is the popularity of the cult of
skepticism. I have been saying that I want to give
the student knowledge about society. But we have
got ourselves into such a state of mind that if any-
body knows any-
outside of natural science says he
thing, he is a dogmatist and an authoritarian. Any-
body who says, “I don’t know because nobody can”
or, “Everything is a matter of opinion” ; or, “I will
take no position because I am tolerant and open-
minded” is a liberal, progressive, democratic fellow

30
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
to whom the fate of the world may safely be en-
trusted.
am forced to remind you that the
I regret that I

two most eminent skeptics of modern times were

among its most stalwart reactionaries. Hume was
a Tory of the deepest dye, and Montaigne was, too.
This was a perfectly natural consequence of their
philosophical position. Montaigne held, in effect,
that “there was nothing more dangerous than to
touch a political order once it had been established.
For who knows whether the next will be better ? The
world is living by custom and tradition we should ;

not disturb it on the strength of private opinions

which express little more than our own moods and
humors, or, at the utmost the local prejudices of our
own country.” The decision to which the skepticism
of Hume and Montaigne led them was the decision
to let the world alone. There is another decision to
which they could have come and at which others of
their faith have actually arrived. If we can know
nothing about society, if we can have only opinion
about it, and if one man’^s opinion is as good as an-
other’s, then we may decide to get what we irration-

ally want by the use of irrational means, namely

force.The appeal to reason is vain in a skeptical
world. That appeal can only be successful if those
appealed to have some rational views of the society
of which they are a part.
A second reason why some people doubt the social
31
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
utility of the education I favor is that they belong
to the cult of immediacy, or of what may be called
presentism. In this view the way to comprehend the
world is to grapple with the reality you find about
you. You tour the stockyards and the steel plants
and understand the industrial system. There is no
past. Any reference to antiquity or the Middle Ages
shows that you are not interested in social progress.

Philosophy is merely a function of its time and place.

We live in a different time and usually a different
place. Hence philosophers who lived yesterday have
nothing to say to us today.
But we cannot understand the environment by
looking atit. It presents itself to us as a mass of

incomprehensible items. Simply collecting these

Items does not enUghten os. It may lead only to that
worship of information which, according to John
Dewey, still curses the social studies, and under*
standing escapes us still. We attack old problems
not knowing they are old and make the same mis-
takes because we do not know they were made. So
Stuart Chase and Thurman Arnold some years ago
renewed the mediaeval controversy between the
nominalists and the realists without showing that
they realized that the subject had ever been dis-

cussed before or that they had the knowledge or

training to conduct the discussion to any intelligible
end.
The method of disposing of philosophy by placing
3*
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
it in a certain time and then saying that time is gone
has been adequately dealt with by a contemporary
historian. He says, “It ascribes the birth of Aris-
totelianism to the fact that Aristotle was a Greek
and a pagan, living in a society based on slavery,
four centuries before Christ; it also explains the re-
vival of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century by
the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian,
a Christian, and even a monk, living in a feudal so-
ciety, whose political and economic structure was
widely different from that of the fourth-century
Greece ;
and It accounts equally well for the Aris-
totelianism of J. Maritain, who is French, a layman,
and living in the ‘bourgeois’ society of a nineteenth-
century republic. Conversely, since they were living
in the same times and the same places, just as Aris-
totle should have held the same philosophy as Plato,

so Abelard and St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure and

St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes and Gassendi, all

these men, who flatly contradicted one another,

should have said more or less the same things,”
You will see at once that skepticism and present-
ism are related to a third ism that distorts our view
of the method of education for social improvement.
This is the cult of scientism, a cult to which, curi-
ously enough, very few natural scientists belong. It

is a cult composed of those who misconceive the na-

ture or the role of science. They say that science is

modern; science is tentative; science is progressive.

33
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
Everything which is not science is antiquated, or
at best irrelevant. A writer in so respectable and
learned a publication as the International Journal
of Ethics has called upon us to follow science in our
quest for the good life, and the fact that he is a
philosopher suggests that the cult of scientism has
found members most unlikely places. For it
in the
must be clear that though we can and should use sci-
ence to achieve social improvement, we cannot fol-

low it to this destination. The reason is that science

does not tell us where to go. Men may employ it

for good or evil purposes but ; it is the men that have

the purposes, and they do not learn them from their
scientific studies.

Scientism is a disservice to science. The rise of

science is the most important fact of modern life.

No student should be permitted to complete his

education without understanding it. Universities
should and must support and encourage scientific

research. From a scientific education we may expect

an understanding of science. From scientific investi-

gation we may expect scientific knowledge. We are

confusing the issue and demanding what we have no
right to ask if we seek to learn from sdence the goals
of human life and of organized society.

Finally, we have the cult of anti-intellectualism,

which has some oddly assorted members. They
range from Hitler, who thinks with his red corpus-
cles, through the members of the three other cults,

34
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
to men of good will, who, since they are men of good
will, are at the opposite pole to Hitler, hut can give
no rational justification for being there. They hold
that philosophy of the heart which Auguste Comte
first celebrated. Comte belonged to the cult of sci-
entism. Therefore he could know nothing but what
science told him. But he wanted social improvement.
Hence he tried to make a philosophy and finally a
religion out of science,
and succeeded only in produc-
ing something which was no one of the three and
which was, in fact, little more than sentimentalism.
Sentimentalism is an irrational desire to be help-
ful to one’s fellow men. It sometimes appears as an
ingratiating and even a redeeming quality in those
who cannot or will not think. But the sentimentalist
is really a dangerous character. He distrusts the in-
tellect, because it might show him he is wrong, He
believes in the primacy pf the will, and this is what
makes him dangerouiJ^ You don’t know what you
ought to want; you don’t know why you wan^^hat
you want. But you do know that you want it. This
easily develops into the notion that since you want
it, you ought to have it. You are a man of good

will, and your opponents by definition are not. Since

you ought to have what you want, you should get it

if you have the power; and here the journey from

the man of good will to Hitler is complete.

This is indeed the position in which the members
of all four cults — skepticism, presentism, scientism,

35
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
and anti-intellectualism — find themselves on ques-
tions of social improvement. Since they cannot
know, they must feel. We can only hope that they
will feel good. But we cannot be very hopeful.
Where does the good will come from? Long ago
the campaign before the Austrian plebiscite gave us
the news for the first time that Hitler was guided by
a special revelation. Most other men of good will
do not claim such intimate contact with the Deity.
But they are uniformly mysterious about the source
of their inspiration. If it is not knowledge, and
—
hence in this case philosophy, it must be habit habit
of the most irrational kind. A university can have
nothing to do with irrational habits, except to try
to moderate the bad ones and support the good pnes.
But if by hypothesis we cannot do this by rational
means, we are forced to the conclusion that a uni-
versitymust be a large nursery school tenderly pre-
serving good habits from shock, in the hope that if
they can be nursed long enough they will last
through life, though* without any rational founda-
tion. In this view the boarding school in the country
would be the only proper training ground for Amer-
ican youth, and the University of Chicago could take
no part in social improvement. In fact, it would be
a subversive institution.
It hardly helps us here to say, as many anti-

intellectuals do, that education m,u9t educate “the

whole man.“ Of all the meaningless phrases in ed-
36
 AIMS OF EDUCATION
ucational discussion this is the prize. Does it mean
that education must do the whole job of translating
the whole infant into a whole adult ? Must it do what
the church, the family, the state, the Y.M.C.A., and
the Boy Scouts allege they are trying to do? If so,
what is the place of these important or interesting
organizations, and what becomes of that intellectual
training which educational institutions might be able
to give if they could get around to it? Arc we com-
pelled to assume that our students can learn nothing
from life or that they have led no life before coming
to us and lead none after they come? Moreover,
what we are seeking is a guide to the emphasis that
higher education must receive. Talk of the whole
man seems to imply that there should be no emphasis
at all. All “parts” of the man are of equal impor-
tance: his dress, his food, his health, his family, his
business. Is education to emphasize them all? That
would be like saying, if we were going to study the
war, that in studying itwe should emphasize the
war. A flat equality among subjects, interests, and
powers will hardly lead to the satisfactory develop-
ment of any. Is it too much to say that if we can teach
our students to lead the life of reason we shall do all

that can be expected of us and do at the same time

the best thing that can be done for the whole man?
The task of education is to make rational animals
more perfectly rational.
We see, then, that the quest for social improve-

37
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
ment is a perpetual one. Men have always wanted
not a different society, but a better one. What a bet-
ter society is and how to get it has been one of the
persistent problems of philosophy and one of the'

fundamental issues in the tradition of the Western'

World. Only those who recognize the important^
place that philosophy and the wisdom of the race^
must hold in education for citizenship can hope to <

educate men and women who can contribute to the ^

improvement of society and who will want to do so. *

The cults of skepticism, presentism, scientism, and ‘

anti-intellectualism will lead us to despair, not

merely of education, but also of society.

.38
 Ill

MATERIALISM AND ITS

CONSEQUENCES

W E see the world which we shall

going to pieces before our eyes. Europe as
we have known it seems fated to disappear.
have to

The
live

re-
percussions''of tlie war upon our political and eco-

nomic life are bound to be severe and may drastically

alter the political and economic structure in which
we have been brought up. We are under a duty to
inquire into the first causes of the catastrophe, into
the methods of averting its most serious conse-
quences, and into the foundations of the new order
which the survivors should seek to lay.
It will not be enough to examine these questions
in terms of the relocation of boundaries and the re-
distribution of power. We cannot be content with a
rearrangement of things in the material order. At
the root of the present troubles of the world we must
find a pervasive materialism, a devastating desire
for material goods, which sweeps everything before
it, up to, and perhaps over, the verge of the abyss.
Since the desire for material goods is unlimited, it

cannot possibly be satisfied. Everybody cannot pos-

39 *
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
sibly have everything he wants. Some nations must

he denied some things they want and must inevitably

try to wrest them from other nations. As long as this

spirit prevails, rearrangements of things in the ma-

terial order must be temporary. They will last only
so long as it takes the defeated nations to recuperate
and enter upon a new trial of strength.
We know now that mechanical and technical
progress is not identical with civilization. We must
conclude, in fact, that our faith that technology wiU
take the place of justice has been naive. Technology
supplies the goods we want, for material goods are
indubitably goods. Technology can give us bigger,
brighter, faster, and cheaper automobiles. It cannot
tell us who ought to have them, or how many, or

where they should go. The notion that a just and

equitable distribution of goods will be achieved by
the advance of technology or that by its aid we shall
put material goods in their proper relation to all

others is reduced to absurdity by the coincidence of

the zenith of technology and the nadir of moral and
political life.

The doctrine by which we have lived is that ma-

terial goods are an end in themselves. Hence all ac-

tivity is judged by the The principle

profits it brings.

is that of the largest returns at the lowest costs. The

criterion is purely ecohbmic. All extraeconomic or

noneconomic standards, since they impede the
struggle toward the goal, must be obliterated. Thus
40
 MATERIALISM
slavery was justified because it lowered costs, and
attacked because it was unfair competition. The ex-

ploitation of women and children was defended be-

cause it paid. The family could not be allowed to

block the path of “progress.” The state is valuable

if it helps to maximize profits, but is apparently to
have little part in economic life beyond this and be-
yond fulfilling functions which are too big or too
unprofitable for private enterprise. Even patriotism
and the love of country fall before the onslaught,
money-maker in
as in the case of the international
Ancient Greece who, when asked what country he
belonged to, replied, “I am one of the rich.”
This is the process of economic rationalization,
the process of looking at everything in economic
terms and testing everything by economic criteria.

Even the institution of property, often mistaken for

the sign of a materialistic civilization, may disap-
pear before the advance of economic rationaliza-
tion. As an Italian economist has pointed out, the
most technically perfect economic realization of ma-
terialism “is the Soviet system, in which all private
and public efforts have only one end ; the economic
rationalization of the whole of life, to the point of
abolishing private property and the family, and of
attempting the destruction of all religious ideals
that might threaten such materialistic rationaliza-
tion,” Communism does not reject the mechaniza-
tion of life ; it completes it. It does not deny that
41
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
economic activity is the principal basis of civiliza-
tion; it asserts that it is the sole basis. It does not
oppose huge concentrations of economic power on ;

the contrary, in order to facilitateand control the

work of concentration, it accumulates all capital and
concentrates all economic life in the hands of the
state. Russian communism is simply the logical pro-
longation of capitalistic materialism.
Materialism has captured our culture. It has cap-
tured the state. It has captured education; for no
one will deny that the test of education is whether
the graduates succeed in and even those who
life,

argue for intellectual development as the aim of

education are constrained to add that the man with
a developed intellect will make more money than
the man with an undeveloped one.
The educational creed offered by S. R. Living-
stone, Director of Personnel of the Thompson
Products Company, commands the general agree-
ipent he claims for it. He says, “I think most of us
will agree generally with this broad statement — that
the purpose of education is primarily and basically

to equip young people with knowledge and skill by

means of which they can most effectively contribute
to the production of food, clothing, shelter, and the
luxuries which go to make up our standard of living,
While knowledge of such fields as the arts, lan-
guages, philosophy, history, and others is of impor-
tance to society, still I believe these fields are sec-
42
 MATERIALISM
ondary, at least at this time, to the production of
the material necessities and luxuries, as society is
now demonstrating that it cannot be happy without
an abundance of the material things.”
As materialism has taken over education, so it

has taken over morals. It has retained the names

of the Christian virtues and changed their meaning
to suit its purposes. Mr. Kimpton, the jeweler in the
town where was brought up, had a sign in his win-
I
dow saying, “Honesty is the best policy, because it
pays.” Courage is the nerve it takes to run business
risks. Temperance means saving your money and

staying in good working condition. Prudence is just

another name for shrewdness. These translations
suggest that jnoral criteria .ha ve d e parted ^ tgJiave
their. plages .taken by economic criteria.

Yet, now that the triumph of materialism is com-

plete, now that we are all agreed that religion is
good for the people, and relief is needed to keep
them quiet, and education to teach them to consume
and produce, and the family to attach them to their
work, and the state to act as the guarantor of an
independent, autonomous economic machine —the
world this spirit has made is collapsing about us,
and this spirit offers us nothing but gold, with which
we cannot buy salvation.
It would be laughable to try to build a new order
with the old ideals. As Maritain has put it, if we
would change the face of the earth, we must first

43
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
change our own hearts. We are concerned, not with
a rearrangement of material things, but with a
moral and spiritual reformation. This reformation
must be intellectual, too for
;
it requires the substitu-
tion of rational views of man, the state, and the or-
der of goods for irrational or subrational ones.
Without pretending to any special revelation, let us
see whether we can make some tentative and hesi-
tant approaches to thq| lines which a moral, intel-
lectual, and spiritual revolution might follow.
Man is a moral, and spiritual being He
rational, .

^
needs material goods; unless he has them he cannot
survive. But he does not need them without limit.
Preoccupation with material goods will hinder and
*
not assist his progress toward his real goal, which is
the fullest development of his specific powers. Na-
ture will not forgive those who fail to fulfill the law
of their being. The law of human beings is wisdom
and goodness, not unlimited acquisition. The eco-
nomic rationalization of life proceeds in the face of
the basic law of human nature. That law would sug-
gest to us the idea of sufficiency rather than the idea
‘of unbounded possessions.
The economic rationalization of life, moreover,
proceeds in the face of the basic law of human soci-

ety. Men are banded together in society for mutual

aid toward the objectives of tl^eir personal lives,

which are, as we have seen, the development of their

highest powers. As John Stuart Mill said, “The
44
 MATERIALISM
most important point of excellence which any form
of government can possess is to promote the virtue
and the intelligence of the people.” The state is not
an end in itself, but a means to the virtue and intel-

ligence, that is the happiness, of the citizens. It is

held together by justice, through which it cares for

the common good. The common good, in fact, is

little but justice most broadly conceived: peace,

order, and an equitable distribution of economic
goods. Since the state is charged with responsibility
for the common good, and
since the production and
goods are one aspect of the
distribution of material
common good, the economic order must be subordi-
nate to the political order.
The economic rationalization of life makes the
political order subordinate to the economi c order o r
confuses the two. We can see this in any campaign,
when each candidate tells the citizens of the financial
rewards they will reap by voting for him. We are
accustomed to saying in the same breath that the
government must let economic activity alone and
that it must see to it that the particular economic
which we are engaged prospers. So we
activity in

look upon our neighbor either as a customer or a

competitor or an instrument of production. The emi-
nent dignity of human beings forbids us, even if the
two great commandments did not, to look upon our
neighbor in any of these ways, and particularly to
regard him as a means of enriching ourselves.
4S
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
In this setting we may understand the institution
of property. Since man is an artist, an animal that
makes things, the individual man is entitled to a
sense of participation in the ownership of the instru>
ments of production and in the goods produced. But
since the earth was given to man and not to individ-
ual men, since man is a social and political animal
with social responsibilities, one who acquires prop-
erty beyond the needs of himself and his family must
dedicate It to social purposes. This is the rule of rea-
son, which is nothing but the idea of sufEciency. It
is the opposite of the idea of unlimited gain. A vio-
lation of the rule of reason is one that nature will
not forgive.
In this view every act of every man is a moral act,

to be tested by moral, and not by economic, criteria.

Immoral means of acquiring goods are excluded.

The enjoyment of the goods acquired is limited. The
exclusionand the limitation are imposed by the na-
ture of man and the nature of organized society.
Personal and political rationalization subordinates
economic rationalization by relating the-material
well-being of the individual first to the material
well-being of his neighbor, and second to the high-
est good of the individual and of the whole so-
ciety. The principle of the good of the person

and the good of society is substituted for the prin-

ciple of the largest returns at the lowest costs.
Faith in asceticism and sacrifice is substituted for

46
 MATERIALISM
faith in technology. An order based on charity is

substituted for an order based on avarice.

The moral, intellectual, and spiritual reformation
for which the world waits depends, then, upon true
and deeply held convictions about the nature of man,
the ends of life, the purposes of the state, and the
order of goods. One cannot take part in this revolu-
tion if one believes that men are no different from
the brutes, that morals are another name for the
mores, that freedom is doing what you please, that
everything is a matter of opinion, and that the test
of truth is immediate practical success. Precisely
these notions lie at the bottom of the materialism
that afflicts us precisely these notions are used
;
in the
attempt to justify man's inhumanity to man. The
revolution to which we are called must end in the
destruction of these notions and their power over
individualand political action.
Those who are called most clearly to this revolu-
tion are the people of this country, who may yet have
time. We must, by reconstructing our own lives, be-
gin the reconstruction of economic, social, and polit-
ical life. This means that we must reconstruct edu-
cation, directing it to virtue and intelligence. It
means that we must look upon economic activity, not
as the end of life, but as a means of sustaining life,

a life directed to virtue and intelligence. It means,

too, that economic activity must be ordered to the
common good, the good of the political society, the
47
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
aim of which is virtue and intelligence. It means, in
short, the personal, rather than the economic, ra-
tionalization of life.
Every day that passes shows us what materialism
has done and is doing to American education. The
question most often put to me is “What is wrong ;

with our educational system?” The answer to this

question is “Nothing.” The educational system is'

operated by a million loyal and self-sacrificing indi-

viduals who have put on the greatest demonstration

of mass education the world has ever seen. I can
think of no criticism of them. On the contrary, they
deserve the gratitude and support of the people.
The answer to the question asked me may, how-
ever, be given in somewhat more general terms.
There is never anything wrong with the educational
system of a coxmtry. What is wrong is the country.
The educational system that any country has will be
the system that country wants. It will be, in general,
adapted to the needs and ideals of that country as
they are interpreted at any given time. In the words
of Professor Frank Knight, “Organized education,
democraticaUy controlled, is on its face, as regards
fundamental ideals, an agency for promoting conti-

nuity, or even for accentuating accepted values, not

a means by which ‘society’ can lift itself by own
its

bootstraps into a different spiritual world.” What-

ever is honored in a country will be cultivated there.
A means of cultivating it is the educational system.
48
 MATERIALISM
You may be sure, therefore, that the American
educational system will be engaged in the cultivation
of whatever is honored in the United States. Its
weaknesses will be the weaknesses of American
ideals. It may, of course, adopt methods of promot-
ing those ideals that are not always adequate ; but
mistakes of this temporary kind will shortly be cor-
rected.When experience shows that the people pro-
duced by the educational system do not honor what
the country honors, ways will be discovered of man-
ufacturing those who do.
If we look at the American democracy, we are
struck by the was
fact that the infinite variety that
the chief characteristic of the democracies of Plato’s
day is missing from our own. De Tocqueville and
Bryce devoted many pages to discussing the uni-
formity of American life. The democratic man is
not as Plato saw him, filled with all desires and all

interests. What he wants is financial success, and this

produces the uniformity that has depressed foreign
critics. We all know that in general the way to get
ahead is to be safe and sound. Exhibitions of orig-
inality may make your superiors nervous. So De
Tocciuevillc was finally forced to say: “I know of
no country in which there is so little true independ-
ence of mind and freedom of discussion as in Amer-
ica.” Such modifications as De Tocqueville would
now have to make in this statement are the result
of changes in other countries rather than our own,
49
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
I hope you will understand that, like all university
presidents, I have a high opinion of money and am
perfectly aware that without an adequate supply and
distribution of it no civilization can exist. I am talk-

ing about that excessive, overwhelming, and pri-

mary urge for material goods that may be said to
characterize our society. The discussion of social
and political questions in this intellectual environ-
ment must revolve around the cost of doing anything
about them. The cost of education is a valid objec-
tion to it if our people, including the educators, ad-
mit that financial success is the test of a good educa-
tion. If any president of the United States were to
regard the enrichment of the populace as his aim,
he could not object to a discussion of his plans in

terms of the outlay involved. The rich may legiti-

mately complain at having their money taken away

from them if the sole object of doing so is to make
somebody else rich.
Since this is the setting in which American edu-
cation operates, it is not enough, according to the
prevailing theory, to develop the intelligence of the
student so that he can cope with the problems of
practical life. That kind of thing is too remote from
the conditions of the economic struggle. What the
pupil must have is some sort of strictly practical,

technical training in the routines of a vocation that

will enable him to fit into it with a minimum of dis-
comfort to himself and his employer. The tendency
50
 MATERIALISM
is more and more to drive out of the course of study
everything which is not immediately concerned with
making a living.
Yet vocational education as we have understood
it in this one of the methods of training
country is

where the means temporarily chosen by the educa*

tional system are not adequate to achieve the end in
view. There is little evidence that vocational instruc-
tion of a strictly practical, technical, and routine
kind is useful in enabling the graduate to fit into the
vocation with any degree of success. As a matter of
fact, instruction of this sort is likely to unfit him to

meet the new and unforeseen problems raised by

technology and social change. Rube Goldberg’s car-
toon of the boy who learned arithmetic for the
wrong add figures in a
reason, namely, in order to
counting house, who found himself thrown out of
work by the adding machine and who had no re-
course except to slide down the banister rail toward
an axe tied at the bottom, has a present or potential
application to almost every gainful occupation.
Think of the havoc that may yet be wrought among
the stenographers of the nation, carefully trained in
the public schools, if the dictaphone becomes the
standard method of handling office correspondence.
Think of the fate of California’s beauticians if self-

beautification for ladies becomes as simple a matter

as it is for men. Or if this happy day shall not arrive,
think what will happen in that great state when so
51
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
many graduates of the University of California
have been educated as beauticians that no one of
them can make a living and there is nothing for them
to do except to beautify one another gratis.
Of must be trained in gain-
course young people
ful occupations. The question is how. In industry

95 per cent of them are trained on the job. If this

is regarded as too haphazard a procedure, an ap-

prenticeship system can be instituted. Part-time ar-

rangements, perhaps like those of the Engineering
School at the University of Cincinnati, suggest a
possible division of responsibility between education
and industry. And when a student has actually en-
tered a vocation something can be said for having
him return to school for parts of the day or year to
acquire further proficiency. This has been done in
some states with local vocational agricultural
schools. These devices, however, are quite different
types of vocational education from those which as-

sume that, beginning with infants, the school should

attempt to give vocational instruction on a full-time
basis under its own roof.
Vocational education has received new emphasis
in the past ten years because of the changed situation
the schools have confronted. Formerly, when a pupil
failed, industry absorbed him. If he has failed lately,
we have had to keep him still because he couldn’t get
a job. We haven’t known what to do with him. He
couldn’t handle the present course of study, and we
5*
 MATERIALISM
could think of nothing else except imitations of vo-
cational activity. But I suggest that the problem here
isone of communication, not of content. Thfi,st^d-
ard gurrigilum. still restsjjuxeading. It Is probably
fair to say that most of the pupils who have failed
up to now were pupils who could not read, We have
made great progress in developing new methods of
teaching reading. Perhaps if the schools used the
best methods now available they could communicate
with those whom they have been unable to reach so
far. Certainly they could materially reduce the num-
ber of the ITunctionallY illiteratel It is doubtful
whether they should rush into a vocational curricu-
lum as an alternative to one that requires reading.
We should try to frame a course of study that is

good for any pupil and then focus our attention on

developing the methods of transmitting it to those
we cannot teach today.
A second consequence of American ideals in
American education is that we have a tendency to
base the curriculum on “useful” information. Ideas,
which are, of course, the instruments of knowledge,
do not seem particularly productive at first glance.
If you can teach a boy how to become a second-rate
bookkeeper, you have done something that is grati-
fying to him and satisfactory to you. To discuss with
him the nature of justice, or the theory of the state,
or the problem of truth, or the existence of God does
not seem to have a very direct bearing on his eco-
53
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
notnic future. If you succeed in modifying your and
his financial interests somewhat and say that you are

going to fit him into the contemporary world, you

and he are likely to feel that the best way to do this
is to give him lots of obsolescent information about
the contemporary world. This is known as adjusting
the young to their environment.
But if the aim of education is the communication
of useful information, we may as well abandon the
enterprise at once for we shall be forced to the con-
;

clusion that Hendrik van Loon announced not long

ago. He said: “In the present state of the world the
educators might as well admit that there is no stable
or valid knowledge that can be communicated to the
young generation." Mr. van Loon isiright : if knowl:
edge is information about the con t6mparaix.sceiie,
we should withdraw from e ducation: there is no
stable or valid knowledge that can be communicated
to the young generat ion.
Certainly we shall have to withdraw from some
vast and important areas of *feducation, for many of
them have nothing todo with useful information or
vocational training. Take the fine arts and litera-
ture, for example. Though they have nothing to do
with vocational training or information, we must
teach them, becausewc vaguely feel that they must
ornament any reputable curriculum; But when we
teach them we cannot discuss the true or false.

54
 MATERIALISM
There can be no principles to which we can resort.
Therefore there are two standard methods that we
employ history and the communication of ecstasy.
;

The historical method happily frees us from any

consideration of the works themselves. We under-
stand a poem by learning about the social, political,
economic, and domestic conditions under which it

was written. It is one of the conventions of the time.

And it is to be understood in terms of the poverty,
of the conjugal infelicity, or the ductless glands of
its author.
The communication of ecstasy is less laborious
for the teacher than the historical method; but it is

likely to be even more wearing to the pupil. Reduced

to its lowest terms it may be described in the words
of one of my professors at Yale who told us that the
excellence of a work of art could be measured by the
thrill it sent down your spine. This may be called
the chiropractic approach to literature. Persons
with spines of peculiar rigidity or toughness would
be denied the privilege of artistic comprehension,
and an X-ray examination of the vertebrae would
be a prerequisite to employment as a literary critic.

At its best the communication of ecstasy leads to a

certain appreciation of a work of art which lasts as
long as the communicator is present, but which nei*
ther he nor his pupils can explain. This has a tend-

ency to promote the development of private cults

55
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
about the arts and to give support to the notion that
everybody is entitled to his own
in this field, at least,
opinion.
A further consequence of current ideals in Amer-
ican education is that intellectual development is sac-

rificed to that practice in vocational techniques and

that acquisition of information to which I have re-
ferred. The intellectual tradition in which we live

receives merely incidental attention. There is no par-

ticular reason for talking about intellectual develop-
ment if what you are concerned with is financial suc-
cess, for there is little evidence of any correlation
between the two. I do not deny that the law schools
have manufactured some very crafty fellows and
that the engineering schools have graduated some
smart mechanics . I do deny that either the public
schools or the universities are devoting themselves
to producing people who have had genuine intel-
lectual discipline and who have acquired those intel-
lectual habits which the ancients properly denom-
inated virtues.
As Mr. Butler of Columbia has said, “The youth
thus deprived of the privilege of real instruction and
real discipline is sent into the world bereft of his
great intellectual and moral inheritance. His own
share of the world’s intellectual and moral wealth
has been withheld from him. It is no wonder that the
best use he can so often find to make of his time is

56
 MATERIALISM
by whatever means he can devise, to share the
to try,
material wealth of some of his fellows.”
The vocational-informational philosophy of edu-
cation thatis coming to prevail is always defended
on the ground that it is scientific, experimental, and
liberal. On the contrary, he who proposes that edu-
cation be concerned first of all with ideas, with
principles, with the abiding and the permanent, is

the true scientist and the true liberal. He is the true

scientist because he understands the permanent ques-
tions with which science is concerned. He is the true
liberal because he understands not merely the con-
ventions of human society, but also the nature and
possibilities of mankind. At the moment, those who
hold that obsolescent information is the only proper
study would have the greatest difficulty in criticizing

the situation that obtained before the war in Italy.

The trains, we are told, ran on time. The beggars

had disappeared. There was less crime than there

is in the United States. Italy had gained power and

prestige. But it is only when we understand the

nature of man that we can understand the nature of
the state . And when we understand these we under-
stand that the Italian state is not a state at all. It is
an organization of force. It rests on a misconception
of the purpose of the state. It denies the proper end
of the person. It distorts the relation that should
obtain between the person and the state. Standards

57
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
of criticism, either in art or in politics, cannot be
derived from vocational-informational studies.
As a result of our interest in vocational training
and current information, there is today nothing to he
taught except things obviously not worth teaching.
Therefore, the general conclusion of anti-intellec-
tuals is that we must have great men and women do
the teaching. Only they can make the insignificant
significant. If the student learns no subject matter ,

his life will at le as.t...b.eJlluimna.tfid. by Jthejra(iian£.e

of t hese great perso nalities. Pay no attention to

what you should teach. Get Solomon in all his glory
to sit behind the desk and your pupils will get an
education.
I think they would. The trouble is that there is

only one Solomon, and he has been a long time dead.

What chance have ordinary teachers like us to light
up the dark recesses of the cosmetic industry or
enliven the reports of the Census Bureau? We have
here in truth the formula of educational futili-

tarianism.
If the question is, then, What is wrong with the
educational system? the answer is still: Nothing.
If the question is. What can be done about what is

wrong with American society? the answer is very

difficult. Education provides the great peaceful
means of improving society: and yet, as we have
seen, the character of education is determined hv the
character of society. Still we must not assume a
S8
 MATERIALISM
defeatist attitude. The alternative to a spiritual
revolution is a political revolution. I rather prefer

the former. The only way to secure a spiritual rev-

olution is through education. We must therefore
attempt the reconstruction of the educational sys-
tem, even if the attempt seems unrealistic or almost
silly.

We must first determine what ideals we wish to

propose for our country. I would remind you that
what is honored in a country will be cultivated there.
I suggest that the ideal that we should propose for
the United States is thecommon good as determined
in the light of reason. If we set this ideal before us,
what are the consequences to the educational sys-
tem? It is clear that the cultivation of the intellect
becomes the duty of the system. And the ques^
first

tion, then, is how can the system go about its task?

The only way in which the ideal proposed could
ever be accepted by our fellow citizens and by the
educational system would be by the gradual infiltra-

tion of this notion throughout the country. This can

be accomplished only by beginning. If one college
and one university —and only one— are willing to
take a position contrary to the prevailing American
ideology and suffer the consequences, then conceiv-
ably, over a long period of time, the character of
our civilization may change.
I am asking you to think, therefore, what one
college and one university might do to establish for

59
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
the country and the educational system the ideal of
the common good as determined in the light of
reason. I suggest again that the primary object
of institutions with this aim will be the cultivation
of the intellectual virtues. I suggest that the cultiva-
tion of the intellectual virtues can be accomplished
through the communication of our intellectual tradi-
tion and through training in the intellectual disci-

plines. This means understanding the great thinkers

of the past and present, scientific, historical, and
philosophical. It means a grasp of the disciplines
of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics read-;

ing, writing, and figuring. It does not, of course,

mean the exclusion of contemporary materials. They
should be brought in daily to illustrate, confirm, or
deny the ideas held by the writers under discussion.
As Professor Whitehead has said, “Fundamental
progress can he made only through the reinterpreta-
tion of basic ideas.” This curriculum makes funda-
mental, rather than superficial, progress possible.
This program of general education is one to
which all when they have learned to read,
students,
should he exposed. Those students who demonstrate
in this period of general education that they have the
intellectual qualifications for advanced work should
be permitted to go on to the university, which 1
think of as beginning at about the present junior
year. Those students who have not distinguished
themselves or who do not wish to go on should be
6o
 MATERIALISM
encouraged to betake themselves to practical life.
This is the actual situation in every country of the
world but this. In England, for example, not more

than 40 per cent of the graduates of the great public

schools like Eton, Harrow, and Rugby proceed to
the university. The reason is that what establishes
a boy’s social position in England is attendance at
a public school, which he leaves, ordinarily, at about
the end of our sophomore year. Graduation from a
university adds nothing to his acceptability. It is the
old school tie that counts. In this country the moral
equivalent of the old school tie is the bachelor’s de-
gree. I am in favor of awarding that degree as it

is awarded in France and in French Canada, at the

end of the period of general education, that is, at
about the end of the sophomore year. I should hope
that those students who have hitherto gone to
college merely to confirm or acquire a social position
could be induced to withdraw on receiving the docu-
ment they came for. What has been done in this

direction at the University of Chicago I shall set

forth in the next chapter.
In a university we should have students interested
in study and prepared for it. If the ideal of the
country and of the educational system is the common
good as determined in the light of reason, vocational
instruction will disappear from the university.
Courses designed solely to transmit information
about current affairs will disappear as well. Such
61
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
research as merely counting telephone poles will
also vanish. Professors whose only interest is in
dealing with immediate practical questions will van-
Ish too. These excisions will leave us with a group
of professors studying fundamental intellectual
problems with students equipped to face them.
These intellectual problems fall roughly into
three fields : those underlying problems that we call

philosophical, including those called metaphysical

and theological; those problems called scientific,
including those raised by medicine and engineering;
and those we find in the social sciences, including
those presented by law and public administration.
The consideration of principles in these fields in
a university might make these principles explicit.
It might make the professors and students conscious
of them. It might make them aware that these prin-
ciples are ordering and clarifying. It would make
them see that these principles, like all knowledge,
are derived from words of a
experience. In the
mediaeval saint who was as sensible as he was
saintly, “The human intellect is measured by things,

so that a human concept is not true by reason of

itself, but by reason of its being consonant with

things, since an opinion is true or false according

as it answers to the reality." These principles, then,
are refinements of common sense. They are methods
of understanding and interpreting the symbols
through which we know the environment. They
62
 MATERIALISM
are the basic ideas by the reinterpretation of which
Mr. Whitehead believes fundamental progress msy
be made.
The graduates of a university so organized artd
so conducted should after three years of study have
some rational conception of the common good and
of the methods of achieving it. They might have
learnedhow to use their heads. They might under-
stand how to use them on the problems of the con-
temporary world. They might have established
moral as well as intellectual standards. Their moral
standards might endure because they would be
based on reason and not on authority and precept
alone. They would be aware of the intellectual tradi-
tion they had inherited. They should be consciously
equipped with the intellectual instruments which we
now unconsciously employ. They might be ready
to take their place in a community devoted to the
achievement of the common good through reason.
But we know that the United States is not a
country devoted to the achievement of the common
good through reason. We know that we are a people
devoted to the acquisition of material goods by any
means not too outrageous. What will be the fate,
then, of our graduates ? They will be, in my opinion,'
as well equipped for financial success as our grad-
uates are today. But they may not want it; and they
should be quite unwilling to use some popular
methods of attaining It.
63
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
I am afraid, therefore, that I am proposing
some notable sacrifices on the altar of reform. The
first few generations of graduates of my educational

system might suffer the same fate as the martyrs

of the early church. They might be that phenomenon
horrible to American eyes, financial failures. Yet it
is possible that if the one college and the one unU
vcrsity for which Ihope could persevere, the blood
of martyrs might prove to be the seed of an en-
lightened nation. Like the early church this ideal
college and this ideal university might gain strength,
power, and influence. They might slowly alter the
aspirations of our people. They might become a
light to this country, and through it to the world.

64
 IV
HOW TO SAVE THE COLLEGES

T he University of Chicago has lately been con-

demned by almost all the academic potentates
in sight. It has been condemned by the Southern
Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, by
the Association of American Colleges, by the Na-
tional Conference ofChurch Related Colleges, by
the North Central Association of Colleges and
Secondary Schools, and by the American Associa-
tion of University Women. Although individual
educators have many times criticized the University
of Chicago in the last fifty years, although they
have attacked it for sponsoring the junior college,
for introducing the quarter system, for abolishing
course credits and required attendance at classes,
and for abandoning intercollegiate football, this
is the first time that full-dress assemblages of prin-
cipalities and powers have publicly, oiScially, and
formally deplored the University’s conduct. This
marks an all-time high in education deploring.
The University must have done something very
bad indeed.
What the University has done is to announce that
65
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
it will make it possible for students to get a liberal

education by the end of the sophomore year and

that it will award at that point, in recognition of

their efforts, the degree traditionally associated

with liberal education, namely the Bachelor of Arts.
Why is this bad? Offhand, it would appear highly
desirable. Nobody has ever complained that college
students work too hard. On the contrary, it Is sup-
posed that football and fun have consumed a large
proportion of their waking hours. It has even been
suggested that the course of study places so slight
a strain on the energies of students that they are
compelled to fill up their time with diversions which,
if not intellectual, have at least the merit of being
strenuous. It is believed that anybody can get into,
stay in, and eventually graduate from some kind
of college if he has the money to pay his bills. It

has often been asserted on very high authority that

the American educational system prolongs adoles-
cence far beyond the point at which young people
in other countries are turned out of education to
assume adult responsibilities. In other countries this

age is eighteen or nineteen; here the first honor-

able stopping place is at twenty-two. Hence the
postponement of entrance upon adult careers, of
professional study, and of marriage. Fortunate in-
deed is the young physician who can marry before
he is thirty. Apparently the time is available in the
educational system to complete liberal education by
66
 HOW TO SAVE COLLEGES
the age of twenty; and, if it can be done, there
seem to be great advantages in doing it.

The war emphasizes these advantages. The con-

scription age is twenty. If the members of the
American community are to get a liberal education,

which is the education every free citizen of a free

community ought to have, they must get it by the
time they are twenty years old. Can the American
educational system be so perfect — or so inflexible
that it cannot make the adjustment necessary to
give it to them? President Gannon of Fordham
concludes, and the impartial observer must agree
with him, that if the conscription age is lowered to
eighteen it will be possible to give a liberal edu-
cation even by that age. As Father Gannon has said,

the degree should be given at that age if the edu-

cation is complete at that age. The degree should
follow the education, not the education the degree .

The degree now has little significance in terms of

education. It is the recognition accorded a person
who has passed through an eight-year elementary
school, a four-year high school, and a four-year
college. These institutions are regarded as fixed and
immutable, to be eternally crowned by the bachelor’s
degree. What goes on in them is not important.
The degree does not stand for education; it stands
for a certain number of years in educational institu-
tions, and this is not the same thing. Though what
is done in those years is widely different from what
67
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
was done fifty or even twenty-five years ago, though
there are almost as many different college programs
as there are colleges, the same degree awaits the
student now that awaited his father and grand-
father, and it awaits him whether he goes to Har-
vard or the El Paso School of Animal Husbandry.
The United States Office of Education reports
1,07a institutions offering the bachelor’s degree in
the United States, Of this number, 485 had fewer
than 400 students and ai8 fewer than aoo students.
Of the 713 privately supported colleges and univer-
sities that reported the amount of their endowment,
382 had less than $500,000. Many small colleges
are first-class. They are small because they want to
be.Some colleges without endowment are excellent.
But many little, impoverished institutions are on the
verge of financial and intellectual bankruptcy. The
smallest and weakest of them give the same degree
as Harvard, Columbia, California, and Yale.
The most striking development in American edu-
cation in the last half century is the way in which
the high school has taken over the college curricu-
lum. Much of the education for which the bachelor’s
degree used to stand has now gone down into the
high school. The colleges have filled up their last
two years with specialized or professional work;
but they havedung to the degree and have given
Itfor the study of law, business, divinity, or any-
thing dse in which the student happened to spend
68
 HOW TO SAVE COLLEGES
his last two collegiate years. And this is the degree
which once represented a liberal education.
Before the war the degree had lost its educational
meaning. But it still had some meaning. It meant

four years in some kind of college after the tradi-

tional high school. Now this meaning is gone. The
colleges and universities are agreed on one thing:
they must “accelerate” to permit their students to
get as much education as they can before they are
called into the armed forces. By eliminating holi-
days and vacations and by condensing courses many
of them will make it possible for students to grad-
uate from college two and a half years after en-
trance. Many of them will admit boys and girls who
have not completed the senior year in high school.
Many of them will give substantial credit to men
called into the army. “Acceleration" sweeps away
the last remnant of meaning which the bachelor’s
degree possessed.
If, then, the bachelor’s degree has no meaning,
why is the action of the University of Chicago,
which is an attempt to give it meaning, so bad?
The answer is that the degree is the symbol of the
status quo. It is the symbol of the eight-year elemen-
tary school, the four-year high school, and the four-
year college. It is the only thing that holds this
system together. If you take away the degree, this

system must fall apart —or reorganize. The degree

has operated like a protective tariff in favor of this
69
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
system. If it can be awarded at the end of the sopho-
more year, then those committed to this system
must face the educational problems they have been
able to dodge. They must figure out what they are
doing at each level and why. They must change the
habits of their lives. Such suggestions are discon-
certing.
What the academic potentates want to do is to
keep things as they are. Hence the popularity of
"acceleration.” This process enables the institution
to be patriotic, to help the student complete his
work before he joins the army, and to do this with-
out changing any of its habits except the vacations.
This change is relatively painless to the professors,
for most of them will be paid extra for teaching
in the vacations. The colleges hope that it will be
made painless for them by Federal subsidies to help
the students pay their fees and even, perhaps, to
help pay the professors. They would be paid to do
what they are eager beyond anything to do, to main-
tain the status quo.
With the world in dissolution the status quo can-
not be maintained. But even if it could be, we should
not attempt it. We should welcome the opportunity
which the war gives us to rectify the American edu-
cational system. The resolutions of the various edu-
cational associations to which I have referred point
with pride to the fact that the American four-
year college and two-year junior college are unique
70
 HOW TO SAVE COLLEGES
“they have no exact counterpart” anywhere else in
the world. This is elevating a mistake Into an ideal.
One might as well say that because Prohibition had
no exact counterpart anywhere else In the world
it was a fine temperance measure for the United

States; or that because the American doughnnt,

or sinker, is unknown in Europe It is the perfect
diet for our fellow citizens. Since human nature
is everywhere the same, and since education has
been going on from the time human beings first
appeared on this planet, the uniqueness of an edu-
cational system is not a reason for pride but for
concern. When we find, for example, that we com-
plete education for citizenship from two to four
years later than any other nation, we are justified
in supposing that historical accidents, rather than
superior sagacity, are responsible for the peculiar-
ities of our educational system.
And this is in fact the case. At the root of our
troubles lies the eight-year elementary school. This
was a plain, everyday mistake. Horace Mann, who
laid down the pattern of American education, ad-
mired the eight-year Volksschule of Germany. This
was a terminal school; those who entered it were
not supposed to go beyond it. Mann introduced it

into the United States, where everybody is supposed

to go beyond it. It is one thing to organize a school
which is to give the pupil all the education he is

ever going to get, and another to organize one which

n
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
is to be the basis of a long educational career. In
Europe and Great Britain those who are going into

secondary education at all do so at around the age

of eleven or twelve as compared with fourteen in
the United States. If we had listened to Thomas
Jefferson instead of Horace Mann we might have
avoided this waste of time. Jefferson proposed to
send the American child into secondary education
at ten.
Since the eight-year elementary school was a
and one not adapted to the pur-
historical accident,
pose it was expected to serve, it soon began to break
up. By 1 9 10 the junior high school had in many
places split the twelve years of elementary and
secondary school into six years of elementary school,
three years of junior high school, and three years
of senior high school. In these communities the
young American entered upon secondary education
at the age of twelve. But the four-year college re-
mained untouched until the junior college move-
ment, which started fifty years ago, began to take
hold. It took hold fast. It accommodated freshmen
and sophomores. It often conducted its work at
public expense and in local high-school buildings,
so that students were spared the cost of living away
from home. There arc now more than 600 junior
colleges in the United States.
Many colleges and universities found it desirable
to reorganize on the lines suggested by the junior
7a
 HOW TO SAVE COLLEGES
college.They began to make a break between the
sophomore and junior years and one which they
often recognized by calling their freshman and
sophomore work a junior college or lower division
and their junior and senior work a senior college
or upper division. As
1909 the North Cen-
early as
tral Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges,
in attempting to say what a college was, began its
definition as follows: “The Standard American
College is a college with a four years’ curriculum
with a tendency to differentiate its parts in such
a way that the first two years are a continuation
of, and supplement to, the work of secondary in-

struction as given in the high school, while the last

two years are shaped more and more distinctly

in the direction of special, professional, or univer-

sity instruction.” This is a frank statement that
the traditional four-year collegiate program had
broken down. It had no object of its own. It was
to supplement the high school at one end and the
professional school at the other.
But the four-year collegiate structure remained,
though the apartments in the building were vacant
or filled with tenants of a startlingly new variety.
What held it together was the B.A. degree. The
B.A, did more than preserve an archaic and dis-
integrating collegiate organization; it prevented
the development of an intelligent university organi-
zation. A r^nlversi ty is an institut ion devoted to.

73
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
adva nced sludy. professiona l education, an d r e-
SAarch. It presupposes a liberal education and the
capacity to do independent intellectual work. A law
school, for example, should not be compelled to
teach its students to read and write or to train them
in good habits of study. Nor is there any evidence
that students who enter law school at age twenty-
two after graduation from college do any better
than those who enter at age twenty after two years
in college. In fact, most universities permit students

to devote all of their last college year to legal study,

and the University of Chicago Law School has for
a long time admitted men at the beginning of the
junior year in college.
University work, as distinguished from collegiate
work, can be begun at the beginning of the junior
year. If it can be, it should be. But in such a scheme
the B.A. degree loses meaning because it is awarded
for a mixture of liberal education and professional
study, or even for professional study alone. Since
the B.A. has lost all meaning anyway, this is not
a particularly serious matter. The plight of the
Master of Arts degree is a serious matter. This
degree is ordinarily awarded one year after the
B,A, and has come to mean little but the passage
of that one year. Students seek it because it is a
Idnd of union card needed in many states to get
a high-school teaching job. But it could stand for
something. If the B.A, were out of the way, con-

74
 HOW TO SAVE COLLEGES
ferred at the end of liberal education, that is, at
the end of the sophomore year, a three-year pro-
gram to the M.A,
could be developed which would
give a real university education to those who were
interested in and qualified for it.

As the academic potentates never tire of say-

ing, the bachelor’s degree is universally recognized
and time-honored. It is not universally recognized
as meaning the same thing everywhere. It is not
time honored in the sense that
it is honored at one

time for the same reasons as at another. But in

this country it is recognized and honored as some-
thing everybody should have if he can scrape up
the money to get it. This is just the trouble with
it. Since it is conferred at the wrong point for the
wrong reasons, it induces students to remain in
college till the wrong point for the wrong reasons.
Many students who should leave education at the
end of the sophomore year stay on till the end of
the senior year so that they can get the one recog-
nizable and honorable reward that college oiers.
Their presence gives the colleges the reputation
of kindergartens and country clubs. It interferes

with the education of those who are trying to get

an education. It confuses the aims and functions
of the higher learning. And the country is deprived
of the useful work these young people might be
doing instead of wasting their time in “college life,”

The national passion for the bachelor’s degree

75
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
has been deplored for many years. The late Pro-
fessor Barrett Wendell of Harvard saw no way
to remedy the sad consequences of this passion ex-
cept to confer the degree on every American citizen
at birth. This proposal would be better than leaving
it where it is. But a measure so extreme as Mr,
Wendell’s does not yet appear to be necessary. The
degree can be given meaning and by making
utility

it stand for what it used to stand for, namely a

liberal education, and by making it possible to com-
plete such an education by the end of the sophomore
year.
As many students are induced to stay in college
who should not be there, so many students who
are compelled to drop out of college are deprived
of any recognizable and honorable reward for their
educational efforts. Not many families can afford
to keep their children out of active life until the
age of twenty-two. President Rainey of the Univer-
sityof Texas has lately reported that 65 per cent
of the entering freshmen at his institution do not
continue beyond the end of the sophomore year.
What is the educational situation of such young
people in the traditional college or university? The
curriculum which they have followed was not
designed for them but for their more fortunate
brothers and sisters who can stay four years. They
have little which they can think of as an Intelligible
education. They have received no degree, or none
76
 HOW TO SAVE COLLEGES
that is “universally recognized and time-honored.”
A plan of liberal education be completed by the
to

end of the sophomore year and the award of the

bachelor’s degree in recognition of it would give
substance and significance to the college careers of
these students.
With a six-year elementary school, a three- or
four-year high school, and a three- or four-year
college, we could bring the young American to the
close of his formal liberal education and the B.A.
degree by the age of eighteen or twenty. Such an
organization the University of Chicago now has.
The University operates a six-year elementary
school, a four-year high school, and a four-year
college. For the completion of the work of this

four-year college the bachelor’s degree will be con-

ferred.For the time being, at least, students who
have graduated from traditional high schools will
be admitted to this college in the middle, that is,

at the beginning of the conventional freshman year.

They will be able to gain a mastery of the elements
of a liberal education by the end of the sophomore
year.
The potentates condemn this arrangement by
calling it a two-year degree. But the question is

not how long the student stays In college, but what

he does there. The University of Chicago should
be asked, not how many years its students take to
the bachelor’s degree, but what is the content of

77
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
the education that the degree represents. Not a
single educator, not a single educational association
has complained that the education Chicago gives
is unworthy of the degree. They have not even in-

quired what that education is.

But the Chicago degree is not a two-year degree,

unless all bachelor’s degrees are two-year degrees.
All over the country the colleges and universities
admit students at the beginning of the junior year
to a two-year program leading to the bachelor’s
degree. More than 6o per cent of the students re-
ceiving the degree at Chicago in any year have at-

tended one or more other institutions. They have

entered the University’s baccalaureate program in
the middle. The University’s new plan is a four-year
course of study beginning with the junior year in
high school into which qualilied students from other
institutions may transfer at any time. To such stu-
dents the University will undertake to give the edu-
cation which free men ought to have by the end of
thesophomore year in college.
Why is this bad? I have never found a layman
who thought it was. The potentates say it is bad be-
cause they think first of maintaining institutions,
jobs, vested interests, and habits. The laynian, when
he thinks of education, is likely to think first of the
students and the country. The potentates condemn
the Chicago Plan because they know that it is bad

for them. It is a challenge to them to rebuild the

78
 HOW TO SAVE COLLEGES
educational system in the interest of the students
and the country.
The cry is that Chicago is ruining the colleges.
On the contrary, Chicago is the hope of the colleges.
The Chicago Plan shows how to meet the problems
raispd by the war and its aftermaths and how to do
it, not by wild, makeshift dodges like “acceleration,”
but by a sound, long-term program which makes
sense in war or peace.
The war will compel the reconstruction of Ameri-
can education. The war will compel us to justify
every minute and every dollar that goes into educa-
tion. It will squeeze the waste, water, and frivolity
out of our educational system. It will force us to
frame a plan of liberal education for every citizen
and force us to make it available in such a way and
at such a time that the citizen may complete it be-

fore he joins the army. It will mean that we must

offer our people a scheme of education which com-
mands our intellectual allegiance and which is en-

titled to theirs. As its contribution to the formula-

tion of such a scheme the University of Chicago has
developed its new program to the bachelor’s degree.

79
 V
EDUCATION AT WAR
F you are going to war, you must know what you
I are willing to fight for. If you are going to de-
fend territory, you must know what territory you
are going to defend. If you are going to defend prin-
you must know what your principles are and
ciples,

why you hold them. We may be fainthearted, even

in defense of our native land, if we believe that the
enemy is just as right as we are or that we are just
as wrong as he.
We do not seem to get very far by talking about
democracy. We know that Germany is not one. She
says so. We know that Russia is not one, though
Stalin says she is one. We are not sure about some
elements in the government of England and France.
Wc are not altogether sure about this country. The
reason is, of course, that we do not know what a
democracy is or grasp the fundamental notions on
which it rests. We set out in the last war to make

die world safe for democracy. We had, I think, uo

very definite idea of what we meant. We seemed
then to favor a parliamentary system. No matter
what the system concealed, if the system was there.
So
 EDUCATION AT WAR
itwas democracy, and we were for it. Though Hitler
is mfinitely worse than the Kaiser, though the dan-

ger to the kind of government we think we believe in

is infinitely greater than in 1917, we have less real,

defensible conviction about democracy now than we

had then. Too many so-called democracies have
perished under the onslaught of an invader whose
technical and organizing ability commands the ad-
miration of a people brought up to admire technical
and organizing skill. With our vague feeling that
democracy is just a way of life, a way of living pleas-
antly in comparative peace with the world and one
another, we may soon begin to wonder whether it

can stand the strain of modern times, which, as our

prophets never tire of telling us, are much more
complicated than any other times whatever.
Is democracy a good form of government? Is

the United States a democracy? If we are to prepare

to defend democracy we must be able to answer
these questions. I repeat that our ability to answer
them is much more important than the quantity or
quality of aeroplanes, bombs, tanks, flame-throwers,
and miscellaneous munitions that we can hurl at

the enemy. You may from Hitler himself,

take it

Rauschning reports him as saying: “Mental confu-

sion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, panic s
these are our weapons.” In view of the huge re-
sources of this country, all that we have to fear is

that the moral and intellectual stamina of the de-

81
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
fenders will not be equal to the attack that has been
made upon it.
Now democracy is toot merely a ^ood form| of
government; it is the best. Though the democratic
ideal has long been cherished in this country, it has
never been attained. Nevertheless, it can be attained
if we have the intelligence to understand it and the
will to achieve it. We must achieve it if we would
defend democracy. J, Middleton Murry, an Eng-
lishman, said of England a year ago, "This country,
as it is, is incapable of winning a Christian victory,
because it simply is not Christian.” Without passing
on the specihe application of this general principle,
we can at least agree that the principle is sound and
that no country can win a democratic victory unless
it is democratic.
The reasons why democracy is the best form of
government are absurdly simple. It is the only form
of government that can combine three character-
istics : law, equality, and justice. A totalitarian state
has none of these, and hence, if it is a state at all,

it is the worst of all possible states.

Men have reason, but they do not always use it.

They are swayed by emotions and desires that must

be held in check. Law is an expression of their col-
lective rationality, by which they hope to educate
and control themselves. Law is law only if it is an
ordinance of reason directed to the good of the
community. It is not law if it is an expression of
82
 EDUCATION AT WAR
passion or designed for the benefit of pressure
groups. We
have a government of men and not of
laws when the cause of legislative enactments is
anything but reason and its object anything but the
common good.
The equality of all men in the political organiza-
tion results inexorably from the eminent dignity of
every individual. Ey:aFy man is a n end; no man is a
means. No man can be deprived of his participation
in the political society. He cannot be exploited or
slaughtered to serve the ends of others. We have
no compunctions about refusing animals the ballot.
We have few about exploiting or slaughtering them
in our own interest. But the human animal is bound
to recognize the human quality of every other hu-
man animal. Since human beings, to achieve their
fullest humanity, require political organization and
participation therein, other human beings cannot
deny them those political rights which human nature
inevitably carries with it.

These same considerations help us to understand

that the state is not an end in itself, as the Nazis
think, or a mere referee, as the Liberty Leaguers
used to say. Political organization is a means to the
good of the community. And the common good itself
is a means to the happiness and well-being of the

citizens. The common good is peace, order, and

justice, justice in all political, social, and economic

relations. Justice is the good of the community. But
83
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
what is the community? It is certainly something
more than an aggregation of people living in the
same area. A community implies that people are
working together, and people cannot work together
unless they have common principles and purposes.
If half a crew of men are tearing down a house as
the other half are building it, we do not say they are
working together. If half a group of people are en-
gaged in robbing, cheating, oppressing, and killing
the other half, we should not say the group is a
community. Common principles and purposes create
a community; justice, by which we mean a fair al-

location of functions, rewards, and punishments, in

terms of the rights of man and the principles and
purposes of the community, holds it together.
The state, then, is not merely conventional, rep-
resenting a compromise of warring interests who
have finally decided that mutual sacrifices by sub-
ordination to a central authority are preferable to
mutual extermination. The state is necessary to
achieve justice in the community. And a just society
is necessary to achieve the terrestrial ends of human
life.

We sec, then, that we are back where we started.

We began with the importance of prindples in de-
fense. We must now add that without principles and
common principles clearly understood and deeply
felt there can be no political community at all. There
can be only a conglomeration of individuals wres-
84
 EDUCATION AT WAR
tling with one another in the same geographical
region.
Let us inquire into what is needed if we are to
understand clearly and feel deeply the principles
on which democracy rests. What is the basis of these
principles of law, equality, and justice? In the first
place, in order to believe in these principles at all

we must believe that there is such a thing as truth

and that in these matters we can discover it. We are
generally ready to concede that there is truth, at

least of a provisional variety, in the natural sciences.

But there can be no experimental verification of the

proposition that law, equality, and justice are the

essentials of a good state. If there is nothing true
imless experiment makes it so, then what I have been
saying is not true, for I have not relied on any ex-
perimental evidence. But principles which are not
true are certainly not worth fighting for. We must
then agree that truth worth fighting for can be found
outside the laboratory.
Now truth is of two kinds, theoretical and prac-
tical. Theoretical truth tells us what is the case:
practical truth tells us what should be done. The
test of theoretical truth is conformity to reality. A
statement about the nature of man, for example,
is true if it describes man as he actually is. The test
of practical truth is the goodness of the end in view.
The first principle in the practical order is that men
should do good and avoid evil. The statement, for

85
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
example, that men should lay down their lives in a
just war is true, if the war is just. The statement
that they should wage war to gain power or wealth
or to display their virility is false.

In order to believe in democracy, then, we must

believe that there is a difference between truth and
falsity, good and bad, right and wrong, and that
truth, goodness, and right are objective standards
even though they cannot be experimentally verified.
They are not whims, prejudices, rationalizations, or
Sunday school tags. We must believe that man can
discover truth, goodness, and right by the exercise
of his reason, and that he may do so even as to those
problems which, in the nature of the case, science
can never solve.
It follows, of course, that in order to believe these
thmgs we must believe that man has reason, that
he does not act from instinct alone, and that all his
conduct cannot be explained in terms of his visceral
reactions or his emotional inheritance. As Gilbert
Murray once put it, not all human activities are the
efflorescence of man's despair at finding that by the
law of his religion he may not marry his grand-
mother. But in order to believe in democracy we
must believe something more. We must see that the
moral and intellectual powers of men are the powers
which make them men and that their end on earth is
the fullest development of these powers. This in-
volves the assumption, once again, that there is a
86
 EDUCATION AT WAR
diiference between good and bad and that man is a
rational animal. There is no use talking about

moral powers if there is no such thing as morals,

and none in talking about intellectual powers if
men do not possess them.
Our great preoccupation today is freedom. When
we talk about freedom we usually mean freedom
from something. Freedom of the press is free-
dom from censorship. Academic freedom is freedom
from presidents, trustees, and the public. Freedom
of thought is freedom from thinking. Freedom of
worship is freedom from religion. So too civil lib-

erty, the disappearance of which throughout the

world we watch with anxious eyes, is generally re-
garded as freedom from the state. This notion goes
back to Rousseau. He located the natural man in a
world of anarchy. The natural man had no politi-
cal organization, and Rousseau strongly hinted that
this was the most delightful aspect of his condition.
The political state was a compromise, no less un-
fortunate because it was necessary. This inew has
been popular ever since. It is reflected every day in
the attitude of those who look upon the activities

of government as an evil. Though they admit that

society must suffer certain necessary evils, they
naturally have no wish to multiply them, Hence the
attraction and power of the slogan; that govern-
ment is best which governs least.
This notion of government and its role is based
87
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
on a myth, on a misconception of the nature of man
and the nature of the state. It is not surprising that
a doctrine absurdly grounded and workable only
in countries of vast and untapped resources should
contain in itself the seeds of an opposing doctrine,
the doctrine that the state is all, that men are noth-
ing but members of it,and that they achieve their
ultimate fulfillment, not through freedom from the
state, but through complete surrender to it. This
is fascism. It ascribes to the political organization
qualities that can belong only to God. It denies

the eminent dignity of the person. It deprives man

of the characteristic that raises him above the
beasts, his reason. It sacrifices all that is specifically

human, that is, moral, intellectual, spiritual devel-

opment, and glorifies a specifically subhuman attri-

bute, namely force.

These are the consequences of thinking of free-
dom as freedom from something. Freedom is not
an end in itself. We do not want to be free merely
to be free. We want to be free for the sake of be-
ing or doing something that we cannot be or do
unless we are free. We want to be free to obtain
the things we want.
Now the things we want are good things. First,
we want our private and individual good, our eco-
nomic We want food, clothing, and
well-being.
and a chance for our children. Second, we
shelter,

want the common good; peace, order, and justice.

8S
 EDUCATION AT WAR
But most of we want a third order of good, our
all

personal or human good. We want, that is, to

achieve the limit of our moral, intellectual, and
spiritual powers. This personal, human good is

the highest of all the goods we seek. As the private

good, which is our individual economic interest,

is subordinate to the common good, which is the

interest of the community, so the common good is

subordinate to our personal and human good and

must be ordered to it. Any state in which the com-
mon good is sacrificed to private interests, or in

which the moral, intellectual, and spiritual good of

the citizens is sacrificed to the political organization

is not a state. It is a fraud subsisting by force.

We in universities are concerned with free minds.

How can we get them? We must remember that
it is not freedom from something that we are seek-

ing. We want minds that are free because they

understand the order of goods and can achieve
them in their order. The proper task of education
is the production of such minds. But we can now
see that are not likely to produce them by fol-
we
lowing the recommendations of the more extreme
of those called progressives in education. Freedom
from discipline, freedom to do nothing more than
pursue the interests that the accident of birth or
station has supplied may result in locking up the
growing mind in its own whims and difficulties.

The identification of freedom with lack of dis-

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 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
cipline is, in the somewhat lurid language of Mr.
Butler of Columbia, the “rabbit theory” of educa-
tion, according to which, he says, “any infant is

encouraged to roam about an enclosed field, nib-

bling here and there at whatever root of flower
or weed may, for the moment, attract his attention
or tempt his appetite.” Mr. Butler adds, varying
the figure slightly, “Those who call this type of
school work progressive reveal themselves as afloat
on a sea of inexperience without chart or compass
or even rudder.” Obviously we should not look to
rudderless rabbits to lead us through the mazes of
the modern world.
If we cannot produce free minds by adopting
the suggestions of the more undisciplined progres-
sives, we cannot hope for much better luck by con-
tinuing the almost universal practice of regarding
education as a tour of the current events in the
various fields of knowledge. The pupils that we
have today will leave our hands between 194a and
1955. I doubt if we prepare them for the long
years ahead by telling them anecdotes of 1941.
It is doubtful, too, whether we can achieve free
minds by concentrating our efforts on making our
pupils economically independent. We want free
minds which will seek the goods in their order.
Those who seek primarily their private economic in-
terests may become enslaved to them and try to en-
slave the rest of us as well.

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 EDUCATION AT WAR
When we say we want free minds we mean that
we want minds able to operate well. The glory
and the weakness of the human mind is that it is

not determinate to certain things. It may range

at will over the good and the bad. To be free to
operate well, therefore, the mmd requires habits
that fix it on the good. So St, Augustine remarked
that virtue, or good habits, is the right use of our
freedom. What is needed for free minds is dis-

cipline, discipline which forms the habits which

enable the mind to operate well. Nothing better
can be said on this subject than the concise state-
ment of John Dewey. “The discipline,” he said,

“that is identical with trained power is also identi-

cal with freedom.” The free mind is first of all the
disciplined mind. The first step in education is to
give the mind good habits.
The next step in the education of free minds is

the understanding of what is good. The mind can-

not be free if it is a slave to what is bad. It is free

enslaved to what is good. To determine the

if it is

good and the order of goods is the prime object

of all moral and political education. We cannot
hope that one who has never confronted these is-
sues can be either a good citizen or a good man.
Yet^ today it is perfectly possible to attain to the

highest reaches of the university without ever fac-

ing these questions. An educational system which
does not make these questions the center of its at-

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 EDUCATION EOR FREEDOM
tention is not an educational system at all. It is a
large-scale housing venture. It may be effective in

keeping young people out of worse places until

they can go to work. It cannot contribute to the
growth of free minds. It cannot help the rising gen-
eration solve the great problem of our time.
The great problem of our time is moral, intel-

lectual, and spiritual. With a superfluity of goods

we arc sinking into poverty. With a multitude of
gadgets we arc no happier than we were before.
With a declining death rate we have yet to dis-

cover what to do with our lives. With a hatred of

war we are now deeply engaged in the greatest war
in history. With a love of liberty we see much of

the world in chains.

How can these things be? They can be because
we have directed our lives and our education to
means instead of ends. We have been concerned
with the transitory and superficial instead of the
enduring and basic problems of life and of society.
Since the freedom of autonomy is the end of
human life, everything else m life should be a means
to it and should be subordinate to means must it as
be to ends. This is which
true of material goods,
are means, and a very necessary one, but not an
end. It is true of the state, which is an indispensable
means, but not an end. It is true of all human activ-
ities and ail human desires : they are all ordered to,

92
 EDUCATION AT WAR
and roust be judged by, the end of moral and intel-

lectualdevelopment.
The political organization must be tested by its

conformity to these ideals. Its basis is moral. Its

end is good for man. Only democracy has this
the
basis. Only democracy has this end. If we do not

believe in this basis or this end, we do not believe

in democracy. These are the principles which we

must defend if we are to defend democracy.

Are we prepared to defend these principles? Of
For forty years and more our intellec-
course not.
tual leaders have been telling us they are not true.

In the whole realm of social thought there is noth-

ing but opinion. Since there is nothing but opinion,
everybody is entitled to his own opinion. There is no
cfiiference between good and bad; there is onfy tie
difference between expediency and inexpediency. We
cannot even talk about good and bad states or good
and bad men. There are no morals; there are only
the folkways. Man is no different from the other
animals; human societies are no different from ani-
mal societies. The aim of animals and animal socie-

ties, if there is an aim, is subsistence. The aim of

human beings and human societies, if there is one, is

material comfort. Freedom is simply doing what you
please. The only common principle that we are urged
to have Is that there are no principles at all.

All this results in a colossal confusion of means

93
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
ing, a kind without which all other preparation is

worthless. This kind of preparedness has escaped

us so far. It is our duty to our country to do our
part to recapture and revitalize those principles
which alone make life worth living or death on the

field of battle worth facing.

The part of the universities in this effort is not,

at first glance, entirely clear. Today, when my uni-

versity has just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary,

we must ask ourselves whether it is not already an
anachronism. It rests on faith and hope, and pre-
supposes a certain degree of economic stability.

When faith is shaken and hope is dimmed and

economic life disordered, the university may seem
like an ornament of an age that is gone. It may
arouse a certain nostalgic admiration, like a ruined
abbey. It is beautiful. It is charming. It once had
a place in society. But what is its function now?
How trivial now seem all the reasons for going
to college, and hence for the existence of colleges,
on which ray generation was brought up : making
friends, having a good time, getting plenty of fresh
air and exercise, and advancing in the social or
finandal scale. I can even remember hearing from
the president of a great university about the benef-
icent influence of collegiate Gothic on the aesthetic
sensibilities of the young. These slogans may have
sufficed in the carefree twenties. They wiU not do
today.

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 EDUCATION AT WAR
The change in more fundamental matters is just
as striking. The time of the founders of the Univer-

sity of Chicago was one of conscious or uncon-

scious agreement upon the ultimate foundations of
society and the ultimate purposes of the individual.
Though men differed sharply, they differed not so
much about their destination as about the methods
of arriving at it. They would have been shocked
to hear from any responsible person that morality
was a matter of opinion, the state an end in itself,

or God the product of wishful thinking. They did

not need the warning of Socrates that the unex-
amined life was no life for man, because the exam-

ination had been conducted long before, and its re-

sults were imbedded in the tradition which guided
the daily actions of men. The American university
did not need to reformulate the ideals which should
animate mankind, and still less to suggest that
ideals were important. All that was needed, men
thought, was more knowledge to enable them to
reach the goals which they more or less clearly had
before them. The university would supply the
means to improve a civilization the main lines of
which were laid down and the aims of which were
taken for granted by those who enjoyed its bless-
ings.

In those areas in which the last half century has

brought no change in the fixity and clarity of be-

liefs the American university has surpassed the

97
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
highest hopes of its founders. People still want
material goods; and through the natural sciences
we can now produce a range and luxuriance of such
goods that would embarrass a Roman emperor.
People stiU want health; and through the American
university we may sometime achieve a longevity
comparable to that of the heroes who flourished
before the Flood, Wherever we know what we
want, wherever we want it badly enough, the Amer-
ican university can help us get it.

But we still vaguely feel that there are other

goods beyond bodily and external goods; and we
are no longer in conscious or unconscious agree-
ment on the nature and existence of the other
goods beyond. The last half century has substituted
confusion and bewilderment for the simple faith
in the light of which the universities carried on
their work. The civilization which we thought so
well established seems on the verge of dissolution.
The religious belief which led so many denomina-
tions to found universities does not sustain their
constituencies today. Instead of feeling that we
were born with a common inheritance of ideas
about the purpose of the state and the destiny of
man, we listen to competing alErmations of contra-
dictory positions on these issues without being able
either to accept or deny them in a manner satisfac-
tory to ourselves.
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 EDUCATION AT WAR
Sincewe are confused about ends, we do not
know how to employ means. Though our means of
improving the material conditions of existence ex-

ceed those of any previous generation, we could not

use them, in the great depression, to protect our
fellow citizens from starvation and despair. The
means of improving the material conditions of ex-

istence are now diverted to the extermination of

mankind on a greater scale than ever before.

Gibbon, in his celebrated chapter summarizing

the reasons for the fall of the Western Empire,
relieves the fears of Europe by saying that there

will never be another barbarian conqueror. His

reason is simple. War now requires the knowledge

of a large number of arts and sciences. Hence to

excel in wat the barbarian must cease to be barba-

rous. Since man first discovered how to master the

forces of nature all history has been tending toward

this goal. Gibbon’s final remark is, “We may there-
fore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every
age of the world has increased and still increases
the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and
perhaps the virtue of the human race.”
The conclusion is pleasing; the premise is false.

Professor Nef’s researches show that the rate of

increase of real wealth is rapidly declmmg. Though
knowledge has grown from more to more, happi-
ness and virtue have not. And we see that a bar-

99
 EDUCATION fOR FREEDOM
barian conqueror equipped with knowledge can be
more barbarous, as well as more dangerous, than
any of his unlettered predecessors.
The centrifugal forces released through the dis-
solution of ultimate beliefs have split the universi-

tics into a thousand fragments. When men begin

to doubt whether there is such a thing as truth or
whether it can ever be discovered, the search for
truth must lose that precision which it had in the
minds of those who founded the American univer-
sities. And if the traditional notion of freedom,
when dragged up out of our subconscious, looks
less impressive than we had always supposed it

would, free inquiry ceases to be that infallible guide

to terrestrial salvation which our academic ances-
tors thought it was. We must sow confess that the
beacons established to illuminate the pathway of
our people give a light that is flickering and dim.
The universities, instead of leading us through
the chaos of the modern world, mirror its confu-
sion.

If the members of universities are now to do

A

for their own day what their academic ancestors

did for theirs, they will have to continue what their
ancestors did, and they will have to do something
more. They will have to recapture, revitalize, and
reformulate for our time the truths which gave
purpose and significance to the work of their pred-
ecessors. We are in the midst of a great moral,
100
 EDUCATION AT WAR
intellectual, and spiritual crisis. To pass it success-
fully or to rebuild the world after it is over we
shall have to get clear about those ends and ideals
which are the first principles of human life and of
organized society. Our people should be able to
look to the universities for the moral courage, the
intellectual clarity, and the spiritual elevation
needed to guide them and uphold them in this
critical hour. The universities must continue to
pioneer on the new frontiers of research. But to-
day research is not enough either to hold the uni-
versity together or to give direction to bewildered
humanity. We must now seek not knowledge alone,
but wisdom.
This is what the University Grants Committee
of England meant when it said, “Here arises the
responsibility of the universities. They arc the in-
heritors of the Greek tradition of candid and
intrepid thinking about the fundamental issues in-
volved in the life of the individual and of the
community, and of the Greek principle that the
unexamined life is no life for maa.“
Candid and intrepid thinking about fundamental
issues — ^in the crisis of our time this is the central
obligation of the universities. This is the standard
by which they roust be judged. This is aimthe
which will give unity, intelligibility, and meaning
to their work. This is the road to wisdom. Upon
that road the American university will regain Its

xoi
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
own, soul and bring hope and comfort to a dis-
tracted world.
In this view the university is a symbol. As such,
its importance is greater than at any time in its

history. The celebration of its ideals was never so

necessary as now. The light it has shed since earliest
antiquity isnow extinguished in almost the whole
of Europe. With the whole world in flames we
must raise a standard to which all honest and right-
thinking men can repair, to which embattled hu-
manity can rally. It is the standard of freedom,
truth, and reason. To the forces of brutality, chaos,
and ignorance the university opposes the power of
righteousness, order, and knowledge. Upon the
triumph of that power the survival of Western
Civilization depends.
An ancient sage remarked that the state came
into being for the sake of life, for mutual assist-

ance and protection. It made mere living possible.

But, he went on, the state continued in existence
for the sake of the good life, to develop and per-
fect through common efiort the noblest abilities

of aU the citizens. We can see the analogy in educa-

tion. Education must exist for the sake of mere
life.Every citizen must be able to read, at least
enough to see “Danger” on a sign or “Poison” on
a bottle. Every citizen must be able to count, 'or
his difficulties in paying his fare may impede the
movements of others. Every citizen must discover
toz
 EDUCATION AT WAR
somehow that some diseases are contagious and
that intimacy with a sufferer from smallpox is un»
wise. Every citizen must learn, in the educational
system or out of it, whatever he has to learn in
order to earn a he will not starve to
living, so that

death from sheer incompetence. These things are

necessary for mere life. Even the modern dictator
must sec to it that his subjects acquire this kind of
education. But as all modern dictators have shown,
they cannot tolerate a university devoted to candid
and intrepid thinking. The reason is that such a
university is good life. A good
the symbol of the
life is a life directed to knowing the truth and do-

, ing justice. It is impossible without freedom of

action and freedom of thought. Freedom, -truth,
and justice would be fatal to the totalitarian state.
They are the aspirations of democracy. The univer-
sity can symbolize these aspirations in the United
States.
Yet at the time when candid and intrepid think-,
mg is more necessary than ever it is harder than
ever to carry it on. The universities are now mstru-
mentalities of total war. The obligation pressed
most urgently upon them is that of conducting re-
search on military secrets, of training men and
women for war, and of housing and feeding mem-
bers of the armed forces.

“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
X03
 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
My answer is that the basic function of the
universities is candid and intrepid thinking about
fundamental issues. Other tasks have now been im-
posed upon them which will make it difficult, per-
haps very difficult, perhaps impossible, to perform
their basic function. The degree of difficulty will

depend on the length and intensity of the war. But

the effort to perform the basic function must be
made.
Victory cannot save civilization. It can merely
prevent its destruction by one spectacular method.
Since civilization was well on its way to destruc-
tion before the war began, success in the war will
not automatically preserve it. The domination of
the world by England, the United States, and Rus-
sia is not ideatical with civilization. The victory
of these powers gives mankind a better chance to
be civilized than their defeat. Whether or not man-
kind will take that chance depends on the kind of
intellectual, moral, and spiritual leadership it has.
Civilization is not a standard of living. It is not
a way of life. Civilization is the deliberate pursuit
of acommon ideal. Education is the deliberate at-
tempt to form human character in terms of an ideal.
The chaos in education with which we are famil-
iar is an infallible sign of the disintegration of civil-

ization; for it shows that ideals are no longer com-

monly held, clearly understood, or deliberately
pursued. To formulate, to clarify, to vitalize the
104
 EDUCATION AT WAR
ideals which should animate mankind — ^this is the
incredibly heavy burden which rests, even in total
war, upon the universities. If they cannot carry it,

nobody else will; for nobody else can. If it cannot be

carried, civilization cannot be saved. The task is

stupendous. But we must remember the words of

William the Silent: “It is not necessary to hope in

order to undertake, or to succeed in order to per-

severe.” With determination, energy, unselfishness,
and humility the universities must struggle to meet
the challenge of our time.
 APPENDIX
The first lecture foundation in the Graduate
School of Louisiana State University was estab-
lished in 1933, and named “The Edward Douglass
White Lectures on Citizenship” in honor of one of
Louisiana’s greatest sons who, as United States Sen-
ator from Louisiana and Chief Justice of the United
States, brought distinction and honor both to public
life and to the profession of law of which he was a
member. Each year a distinguished scholar or states-

man is invited to give lectures dealing with problems

of citizenship to stimulate a broader interest in pub-
ife afi'afrs and to interpret ideals of democracy based
upon and justice and peace.
principles of law
The Edward Douglass White Lectures have been
given by Howard W. Odum, Kenan Professor of
Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research
in Social Science at the University of North Caro-
lina, on “New Frontiers of Citizenship” (1933) ;

Manley O. Hudson, Bemis Professor of Interna-

tional Law at Harvard University, on "Three Pacts
of Peace” (1935); William Y. Elliott, Chairman
of the Department of Government at Harvard
University, on “The Future of the Constitution”
(1936) 5
Thomas Reed’Powell, Langdell Professor
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 EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM
of Law at Harvard University and President of the
American Political Science Association, on “Some
Ways of a Written Constitution" ( 1937) Herman
;

Finer, Head of the Department of Public Admin-

istration, and Chairman of the Board of Adminis-
tration and Examiners for the University Diploma
in Public Administration at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, on "The State in
the Twentieth Century" (1938) Robert Morrison
;

Maciver, Lieber Professor of Political Philosophy

and Sociology and Executive Officer of the Depart-
ment of Social Science at Columbia University, on
"The New Leviathan the State in Crisis" (1939)
:

Frank Porter Graham, President of the University

of North Carolina, on "Some Problems of Freedom
and Democracy in the Modern World" (1940)
and Robert M, Hutchins, Chancellor of the Univer-
sity of Chicago, on “Citizenship and Education"
(1941).
Professor Maciver’s lectures were published by
the L.ouisiana State University Press ux 1939 under
the title "Leviathan and the People."
Dr. Hutchins’ lectures are presented in this vol-
^
umc, with two additional chapters, "The Autobiog-
raphy of an Uneducated Man" and "How to Save
the Colleges."