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THE JOHN DAY PAMPHLETS—No. 16

COLLEGE
PROLONGS INFANCY

by

HORACE M. KALLEN

“... the ideals and methods which are dynamic in our institutions of higher learning are false. They are false to the students, false to the social purpose which nourishes them, false to the inward nature of education itself. They are false because they are irrelevant. And they are irrelevant because they are for the most part unabsorbed survivals from a pre-industrial past in an industrial age.

“Though education is customarily described as ‘preparation for life’, the ways and works of high schools and colleges are so irrelevant to ‘life’ that their prime achievement remains perforce the prolongation of infancy. They make adulthood harder to reach, not easier.”

***

See back flap for the complete list of
THE JOHN DAY PAMPHLETS.

THE JOHN DAY COMPANY

386 Fourth Avenue, New York

AN IRONIST reviewing higher education in America since 1920 would find himself struck by three things.

First, perhaps, he would appreciate the gargantuan inflation of pedagogic lore, with its elaborate formalism, its pretensions to precise measurements of mind and character, its blowing up “scientific method” into a meticulous ceremonial with the efficacy of a church ritual. Second, the overgrowth of the educational plant might captivate him: the immense accretion of endowment, the blowsy additions to properties, and the multiplication by millions of teachers and students. Lastly, our ironist might admire a wide and spreading unrest about the effectiveness of the system as an instrument of education. He would take note of much fuss and ferment respecting “progressive education” and “adult education.” He would overhear oracles by parents, teachers, and college presidents on why students do anything but study and on how to make them study. He would discern how the prescriptions vary, all the way from Mr. Lowell’s house-system at Harvard University to Mr. Meiklejohn’s “experimental college” at the University of Wisconsin. As a popular alternative, the suggestion would intrigue him that far more students are enrolled than are “fit” for the higher education, and that this aristocratic privilege should be limited to the “fit” alone; the “fit,” of course, being those young people who are shown to be as nearly like their teachers as differences of age, income and interest permit.

“The idea that going to college is one of the inherent rights of man,” President Lowell wails, “seems to have obtained a baseless foothold in the minds of many of our people. To select the fit and devote our energies to them is our duty to the public for whose service we exist.” And[8] President Comfort of Haverford bemoans how the diversions which are college life “have cut deep into the serious purpose for which the colleges exist.”

Obviously the searching of the heart concerning the values of a college education does not reach to the essentials of the academic tradition. The ancient notions remain ineffable and inviolable. They presume that students exist for the sake of the school, not the school for the sake of the students. Hence the inquiry treats only of who shall be admitted to the sacred fane and by what steps. That in any issue between system and student, the system might be wrong is inconceivable. The pedagogues, like the prohibitionists, find it unbelievable that their engines of grace can be tools of darkness; that they fail, not because those to whom they are applied are intransigently bad, but because their own methods and ideals are intransigently false....

As I see them, the ideals and methods which are dynamic in our institutions of higher learning are false. They are false to the students, false to the social purpose which nourishes them, false to the inward nature of education itself. They are false because they are irrelevant. And they are irrelevant because they are for the most part unabsorbed survivals from a pre-industrial past in an industrial age. But in the eyes of the academicians the failure of the colleges is caused by the deficiencies of the environment, not by their own inherent incapacities. To save themselves, therefore, they reaffirm anew the invidious ideals of a bygone social economy, and appeal to a persisting snobbism to offset their own growing desuetude. So they complain about the elevation of going to college into an “inherent right” and about the droves of undergraduates whose heedless ways cut deep into “the serious purpose” for which college exists.

[9]

II

But if a new “inherent right” has been born into the world, if undergraduate life is in conflict with the “serious purpose” of higher education, the causes thereof are better understood and faced than ignored or belittled. For they are constant causes, and their scope and intensity do not lessen with the days. Though the colleges remain tangent to the realities, they have been far from untouched....

Of these realities, one is the constant, if obstructed, drive toward democracy, based on the dogma of natural rights which animated the wars and works of the founding fathers: free public education is a primary, if abated, attainment of this drive. Another is the correlated growth of population, cities, and natural resources: the dropsical school systems, public and private, are by-products of this increase. In a century the wealth of the United States has multiplied by inconceivable ratios. Even in 1932, at the very trough of a signal deflation, national wealth and income must be stated in figures that have no empirical living meaning. They are merely symbols of indefinitely extending power—manpower and machine-power; and of the organization of this power in dynamic patterns that constitute a social economy.

With this organization, there has come an increase in essential security. In spite of the business-cycle, in spite of unemployment, social waste, and all the rest of the major evils of industrial civilization, its individual citizens are better fed, better housed, in better health, and have better times than their pre-industrial ancestors. Their average expectation of life has increased from forty-seven years to fifty-eight. The society they compose is physiologically more adult, more aged, than the society of their forbears. More of its members are over forty, fewer of them are under seventeen. During the century of industrialization the proportion of children to adults has[10] decreased by more than a half. This does not mean that the same number of children are born and more die. It means that fewer are born and far fewer die.

Far fewer die because all receive a great deal better care than even the children of the richest used to get a hundred years ago. This care comes only somewhat accidentally and in a disordered way from the parents. It comes systematically from the community. The average parent of the working class deals with his children much as his own parents dealt with him. He in the main realizes that the child requires and somehow receives absorbed attention in extreme infancy. Past that stage, he leaves it more and more to itself. All that he asks of it is to make itself as little troublesome and as largely convenient as possible. For the rest, it is out on the street to grow its way into adulthood for itself, troubled by only occasional irruptions of disciplinary or exploitative parental interest, and by admonitions from the cop on the beat.

To the socially-minded part of the community this is a dangerous situation. They fear disease and crime. They talk about corner gangs; about the break-down of family life. They regard it as of supreme importance “to get the children off the street.” Social settlements, boys’ clubs, scouting, playgrounds, and other semi-public and public enterprises have come up largely as instruments toward this end. But the chief instrument has become the school.

Since 1900, the school, more than any other social agency, is conceived first as supplementing, then as replacing, the home, and as exercising its function. The school authority is established in a practically complete jurisdiction over the child. Its field expands from indoctrination in the three R’s and patriotism to teaching personal hygiene; from teaching personal hygiene to official supervision over the details of health—the care of the teeth, ears and eyes, the adequacy of diet; and finally to keeping an eye on the personal relations of children with[11] their parents themselves. In a word, the school invades the home and takes over more and more of its functions. By its means the control of the child is “socialized.”

Now on the face of it, this socialization appears unconnected with the drive and intent of industry as such. It looks rather like a defense against industry. Its animus is humanitarian, not economic; its effect is to delay the functional installation of the child in the economic system. Child labor is quite properly frowned on and hemmed in with rules and restrictions. Schooling is imposed and prolonged to later and later years; where it cannot be made exclusive it is made concurrent with the work-life by means of the continuation schools. And high schools and state universities extend the possibility of schooling as a free public function right up to the voting age and beyond. The immense national wealth makes this possible and easy; it enables the upkeep and expansion of an educational system whose per capita cost is greater than that of any other country in the world. Whether any connection obtains between these superiorities and the fact that Americans also enjoy a corresponding superiority in juvenile delinquency and crime I cannot say. The paradox is the more interesting because, as schoolmen are likely to boast, the school is often used by the child as a refuge from home and the street, as a place of sanctuary and safety.

Explanation is not easy. On the face of it, the socialization of child-control tends to defeat its own ends. And it tends to defeat its own ends because its instrument is an unnatural environment which offers no field for the assumption and discharge of natural responsibilities such as develop in the circle of an adequate family life. It keeps the young in a state that is tantamount to an artificial prolongation of infancy.

[12]

III

Now, in terms of the mechanics of the social economy, infants are parasites upon the body politic. They are sheer consumers, producing nothing; and in the world of nature they absorb the time and attention of adults only until they are ready to produce for themselves what they consume. The more complex the organism, the more highly organized the nervous system and the social life of a species, the longer the period of gestation, and the more prolonged the dependence of the new-born and the young on the parents. A dog will reach adulthood in about a year. A human infant takes from eleven to fifteen years, if we mean by adulthood what constitutes it biologically—namely, sexual maturity. Birds and animals are ready and able to fend for themselves some time before sexual maturity sets in, and data are not lacking in the record that manchildren—like Russia’s bezprizorny or waifs—also can if need presses. But for all species alike, puberty sets a term. It is the very latest season for the young to leave the parental nest, to live their own lives and build their own nests for themselves. This holds true also for the vast majority of the human young, even under the protection of industrialized society. At puberty they leave school and go to work like their fathers before them, and it is not long until they are entirely on their own, and found families and repeat the cycle again like their fathers. If the practice of society carries their social infancy over into their physiological maturity, it does not do so for very long. In essentials they enter into the heritage, such as it is, of adulthood, while custom compels the young of the privileged residual population to remain in personal and social swaddling clothes.

This compulsion is usually identified with “having advantages.” It is exercised upon the young of the rich and protected, not of the poor and unprotected. But because the notion prevails that education is the chief if not the[13] sole instrument of democracy, and that every man, if he has a chance, can be as good as his betters and is entitled to the same rights and privileges, the number whom the compulsion reaches has increased, since the beginning of the century, well-nigh geometrically. Thus, between 1900 and 1930 the high school population has multiplied ten-fold; the total number of pupils today is between five and six million. And more than a million young men and women are enrolled in the colleges and universities. High school and college are considered “advantages,” and the essence of the advantage is a social infantilism imposed upon a biological maturity.

IV

Though education is customarily described as “preparation for life,” the ways and works of high schools and colleges are so irrelevant to “life” that their prime achievement remains perforce the prolongation of infancy. They make adulthood harder to reach, not easier.

What, socially, adulthood consists in, varies a good deal from civilization to civilization and from age to age. But everywhere, and at all times, it is grounded upon sexual maturity and maintained on personal responsibility for winning food, clothing, and shelter, and defending one’s self against enemies and disease. Among primitive people, adulthood is initiated by puberty and established and confirmed by means of certain cruel and terrifying rites through which boys and girls are inducted into the society of men and women. Of these rites there survives among us today only that form of sadism and schadenfreude known as hazing, practiced by upperclassmen on newcomers and by fraternity brothers on neophytes. In the school tradition these cruelties are meaningless, but in the rites of the primitive they compose a part, perhaps a major part, of all the formal direct “education” the young savage ever gets. They impose bitter fear and[14] exquisite pain which the elders require shall be unflinchingly endured. During three weeks, more or less, primitives torture their young. When they have finished, the young are utterly initiate, finally and completely adults, fully responsible members of their communities.

Classical antiquity prolonged and rationalized this initiatory period. Pain and endurance were imposed less directly but, in one way or another, they were exacted. The boys of Sparta were segregated from their women folk in their seventh year and made charges of the state. From their twelfth year to their eighteenth, they were in the constant company of their elders, often their elders’ favorite company. They collaborated in purveying food, in hunting and in worship. In what time remained, they prepared to practise war, the primary vocation of the citizen. At eighteen, war became their exclusive concern. In Athens, as in Sparta, formal schooling began at the age of seven and ended with puberty at about sixteen. Then the boy was presented at the Agora. He associated freely with his contemporaries and elders, he trained at the gymnasium, attended the law courts and the theatre. He was an ephebus, and after two years he took the oath of the ephebus and his name was written on the list of free citizens. He had thereby left the jurisdiction of his parents for the jurisdiction of the state. In Rome, a boy entered upon the responsibility of manhood when he doffed the toga praetexta and put on manhood’s dress. This was during puberty, at about the age of fifteen. Before then he had learned at home and in the Forum the arts of war and the law of the Twelve Tables. After Roman life became Hellenized, schools acquired a vogue; but unless a boy was destined for public life, schooling ended at puberty. Otherwise, a boy entered the Rhetoric School and trained for his vocation. Among the Jews, a boy assumed adult responsibility (he still does so, though it is now merely religious) upon entering adolescence. He was then Bar Mitzvah. He, and not his father, had become responsible[15] for his fulfilling the law and the commandments. He underwent a short, formal, preliminary training, and on the Sabbath following his birthday his father took him to the synagogue and formally renounced responsibility for his son’s life and works.

So, among the primitives and the ancients, physiological maturity was the occasion for signalizing and establishing social responsibility, of entering into adulthood. This is still the case among the churches. Ecclesiastical citizenship is reached at puberty. Puberty is the time when Catholic boys and girls are initiated by the priests into the mystery of salvation and are endowed with the responsibilities of the adult members of the religious community. They undergo confirmation. Puberty is the time arranged for the young of the evangelical sects to be convicted of sin, to enter into grace, and to join the church. Puberty is the time when secularized Jews celebrate Bar Mitzvah as a merely religious event. In the definition of adulthood, the churches are at one with the ancients.

Almost equally so are the military establishments of states. Military duty comes at a much earlier age than civil responsibility. Modern industrial nations continue to conscript their young at from sixteen to eighteen. Also, the taxing power defines the young as self-supporting members of the economic order at eighteen; at that age exemption on their account ceases. For tax gatherers and armies, as for religious sects, adulthood and sexual readiness lie close together.

And this readiness is recognized in women by custom and law, which set the “age of consent” at puberty and raise it nowhere beyond sixteen. Moreover the readiness finds its purpose more largely than we imagine in marriage. The United States census of 1920 shows that nearly a quarter of all young people from fifteen to twenty-four were married, and the proportion has not grown less since then. Nor are these marriages confined to the poor. The rich signalize their daughters’ readiness by “presenting[16] them to society” at from sixteen to eighteen; and there is much rivalry among “debs” about getting married or at least engaged during their first year “out.” The men of this class, on the other hand, tend to marry much later, while the average age of marriage for the “college bred” of both sexes is unnaturally higher. The whole contrasts sharply with the early marriage age of a hundred years ago.

V

Personal distinction also seems to go with the assumption of adulthood soon after puberty. Whether this is attained through some special attitude or general ability enchannelled by custom, opportunity, or accident in a particular vocation, makes little difference. Poets, painters, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, traders of distinction, assume the professional attitude and the responsibility of adulthood at an early age. Shelley, Keats, Bryant, Peter Cooper, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Eliot, Thomas Edison, Maxwell, Galileo, and countless others of the great, all began young. Nelson went to sea at twelve and commanded a ship at fifteen. His contemporary captains in the American merchant marine were boys of eighteen and nineteen. Much of the work of the world continues to be done by men and women under twenty-five. Prizefighters are old at thirty. It is a favorite doctrine of representative American employers, such as Henry Ford, that workingmen over forty are antiquated, and to be scrapped. Did not the great Osler advise euthanasia for all men over sixty? Nevertheless, the ruling personages in the ruling classes—the captains of industry, the masters of finance, the public officials, the judges, the generals—are progressively older and older now. They are men whose minds had matured and set while their bodies were young, and whose policies derive from the unconscious premise that what was modern and advanced in[17] their youth is necessarily so in their old age. They are the elder statesmen who in their prolonged infancy rule the world....

VI

If many of these elder statesmen rule by virtue of distinguished ability and early adulthood, most do by virtue of a privileged position that delays adulthood and prolongs infancy more literally. The locus of this position is the high school and the college, especially the college. Owing to democracy, there has been a diffusion of some of the privileges of this status to the children of the masses. One of its marks is the war against child labor which we have noted, and the progressively later age at which work certificates are granted; another is the advancement, already referred to, of the age of consent and the measures for the protection of girls. Still another, and the most signal, is the increase of the high school population from the 300,000 of 1890 to the 5,000,000 of 1930, and the corresponding growth of the body of college students. Nevertheless the difference between the working young and the young at school remains still the difference between the responsibility of adulthood and the irresponsibility of infancy. The difference increases with the income level. The richer the class, the more likely are the young to be kept in a state of social infancy, the longer is the time delayed when they are permitted to assume the responsibilities of adulthood.

The secondary school and the college are by tradition and practice instruments pat to the social postponement of adulthood and the prolongation of social infancy.

By and large, only those children enter high school who do not need to work for a living. They enter about the time that children of the residual world enter life, at puberty. Their attending high school signalizes an invidious distinction between them and their contemporaries,[18] for the high school has been from its beginning a mark of “aristocracy.” Even the “commercial” high school, which is yet of low esteem beside the high school preparing for college, celebrates this invidious distinction. But the real McCoy is the “college preparatory.” College sits in excelsis. The topmost turn of the educational system, it sets the standards and defines the ideal both of knowledge and conduct. Secondary-school students consequently prepare for college in a far completer way than is recognized. They emulate and reproduce the whole pattern and structure of “college life,” with its fraternities and other societies, its athletics, its hidden sex interests, and all the rest. Indeed, since the “educative process” worked by the schools is defined from above downward, the colleges, which are for the most part resorts where the well-to-do keep their physiologically mature young in a state of personal irresponsibility and social-economic dependence, set the standard of education for the whole nation.

Practice under this standard maintains a gulf between the curriculum and student interests. The school work, as the teacher sees it, makes up the “serious purpose” for which schools and colleges exist. Yet here is what a boy who believes in this serious purpose writes to the New York Times about his education:

And this boy is very exceptional. For the school work as the average student sees it, is the price in boredom and discomfort which the system exacts and which he somewhat unwillingly pays in return for the pleasure and excitement of the activities known (and not known) as extra-curricular. These and not his studies are what touch the life of the student. And these are what the curriculum excludes and teachers ignore until they present themselves as disciplinary problems. The age of high school and college is the age of poignant laboring over the ever-renewed questions of luck and destiny, good and God and evil, of groping after first and last things. It is the age of upsurging sexual energies, of inevitable preoccupation with sex in all its degrees and forms, from romantic love to promiscuity, from fantasy to perversity. So far, however, as the mechanisms of curriculum and instruction are concerned, students are not males, not females, but sheer intellects, uncontaminated by such a vital propulsion, or by any of the others whose development, gratification, obstruction, deviation, realization, or repression, compose the dynamic units of personality in the living adolescent, determining its timbre, emotional quality and behavior pattern.

For the most part there is no correspondence between what the students spontaneously and directly want and what the higher education provides. There is no opportunity[21] for the idealistic initiative, for generous self-discipline and adventure, and for the accompanying responsibility on matters of serious social import such as adolescence craves and students do assume in backward cultures like China or India or Russia or the countries of continental Europe. Only athletics provides any occasion for the play of emotion and the exercise of the responsibility proper to an adult. But athletics is formally extra-curricular, is a preoccupation of alumni, highly specialized and professional among its practitioners, and to the residual mass of the students a spectacle, not a vocation or an activity.

In essence, the secondary and tertiary academic establishments impose a double life on the students that enter them. One life is defined by the so-called “serious purpose” of the higher education: the course of study, the examination, the diplomas, the degrees. The other life is defined by the psychological traits, the wants and the frustrations of young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. One life is the life of the classroom. The other life is the life of the fraternity or the sorority, the club, the prom, the press, class-politics, “contacts” and all the rest, including the “bull sessions.” To these, curriculum and professor are mostly irrelevant; president and dean affect them only as policemen affect corner gangs. Yet these are what is meant by “college life.” In a word, the correlation between the “serious purpose” of the academic establishment and the ruling passion of the youthful psyche is negative. “College life” and “serious purpose” of schools and colleges are in conflict.

Thus, authorities in secondary schools find obscene notes being passed; notice masturbation, spy out chanceful or organized petting parties; point to unnecessary noises, desultory killing of time, smart-aleckism, and especially to cheating. They make elaborate studies of disciplinary situations and talk about bad home conditions, natural meanness, and the like. But they ignore the fact[22] that they are themselves passing judgment on situations in which they are active parties. How can the manifestations of the overruling sex-urge be anything but illicit, when school life is overtly organized as if sex were either evil or non-existent? To whom are unnecessary noises unnecessary? What else can one do with time but kill it desultorily, when one’s ruling passions are ignored and one is required to pay attention to matters one’s heart cannot possibly be in? As for smart-aleckism and cheating—are not those who succeed therein heroes in the eyes of their peers? Do they not overcome an enemy and put him in his place?

VII

Allowing for the small differences of tradition and maturity, the situation is the same in the colleges. The ways of an undergraduate community are determined by standards which do not apply to men and women of the same age who must work for their livings. For example, there survives from the Middle Ages an antagonism between gown and town. When this began it involved all the members of the academic community—faculty even more than students. It turned on conflicts over the very structure of the municipal economy in the course of which “gownsmen” established and vindicated their autonomous jurisdiction over the persons, properties, and actions of their “own.” College or university became a city within a city, sovereign over all affairs affecting it, and privileged in the national life. Today, faculty is for practical purposes a part of “town.” “Gown” consists only of the body of undergraduates. These often stand in a predatory relationship to the residual community. They may steal signs, fences, garments, and whatnot; they may destroy dishes, furniture, and other property not their own—academic or lay; they may brawl on the public street and on occasion beat up policemen and citizens without being held responsible[23] as workers of the same age would be. They may endeavor in every way to “beat the game” in relation to their studies—wangle more cuts than they are entitled to, hand in work as their own which is not their own, cheat at examinations, and in every other possible way “put it over” on the faculty. For an undergraduate to be serious about the “serious purpose” of college, to be academically law-abiding, to show an interest in studies, is at best to be slightly declassé, at worst to be a greasy grind. Any manifestation of friendliness to a teacher is “boot-licking.” The total impression which undergraduate conduct makes in the mass is of an underground class war between student and faculty; and the traditional undergraduate code is a warlike code, requiring students under all circumstances whatsoever to stand by each other and against the faculty. Even under an “honor system” a “squealer” is as total a loss among students as among gangsters.

In sum, tradition allows the college man certain privileges and protects his abuse of them. Like the infant, he is held not accountable for violations of the adult social code. He is maintained in a state of infantile irresponsibility. This state is even more significant, if not so conspicuous, in the matter of the basic economy of life. For the representative undergraduate does not keep himself. He is kept. He does not earn his food and clothing and shelter and entertainment. Again, like the infant, he is sheer consumer, not producer; Veblen would call him an instrument of “conspicuous consumption” and a foremost avatar of the leisure class.

As a community of consumers merely, a student body is no more homogeneous than a community of producers. Within the frame of similarity generated by the condition of dependence there exist both the formal academic gradations dividing year and year as rank and rank, and the non-academic but “collegiate” gradations of caste and class, interest and attitude. Every college, for example, has its tiny liberal group, its sparse collection of students[24] who trouble themselves with social problems, international relations, disarmament, and the like. This group is usually looked upon as a troublemaking nuisance by the college administration (the high point of this attitude may be found in the University of Pittsburgh), and as “lousy” by the arbitres elegantiae of undergraduate opinion. “Political and social agitation,” declares a Yale senior who had degraded himself by concern with such agitation, “is frowned upon by undergraduate leaders, and consequently relegated to the obscurity of almost clandestine off-campus coteries.”

To no small degree such coteries are made up of students who are working their way through college, and what is worse, Jews count heavily among them. Yet Jews are the exception that prove the rule. Between 1920 and 1930, the tradition of a love of learning which they brought to college has been dissipated. The adult responsibility which they felt for the problems of their own people and of the community at large, and which was signalized by their membership in such organizations as the Menorah Societies, the Zionist, the Liberal, or the Social Questions Clubs, has been destroyed. As their numbers grew, their fields of interest and modes of behavior conformed more and more to the prevailing conventions of undergraduate life. Although excluded by expanding anti-Semitism from participation in that life, they reproduce it, heightened, in an academic ghetto of fraternities, sororities, and the like. And they emulate the invidious distinctions they suffer from by projecting them upon the Jews too proud, too poor, or too Jewish to be eligible for “collegiate” secret societies of Jews.

Because the dynamic distinctions within the academic community are invidious only. College is not a republic of letters but a plutocracy of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and “activities.” Scholarship is no attribute of merit for a student. Athletic prowess, especially if conspicuous, could be; but the prepotent properties are wealth, sectarian[25] affiliations, and “contacts and connections.” These delimit members of the fraternities and sororities. Since initiation fees run from $50 to $1000, and membership is correspondingly expensive, a rich father is the prime qualification for the prospective “pledge.” Before pledging, such a prospect is courted like a bride. Pledging is followed by initiation, which often lasts months. It begins in hazing and may grow into sadistic torture, recalling the rites of the primitives. It culminates in a solemn self-dedication with highfalutin’ vows whose practical application to the subsequent daily life amounts to training in the amenities (à la Emily Post); “loyalty” to “brothers” in the competition for the cream in undergraduate activities such as class-politics, proms, athletics, and the like; collaboration, mostly illicit, with brothers and sisters to insure their passing examinations or any other kind of test; and most of all, in the facilitation of “contacts.”

Thus the academic aristocracy are indoctrinated in the academic “traditions” and equipped to watch over them. These have primarily to do with the mores of garb and conduct ordained for freshmen, with the prerogatives of upperclassmen, such as wearing shorts and slickers, and similar matters reminiscent of the primitives. If they are moved by social and political questions at all, it is at times of presidential elections, when national committees—Republican, mostly—have been known to put a good deal of money into corralling “the college vote.” In times of strike, as during the Boston street railway strike, some of the better-class Harvard undergraduates had almost as much fun strike-breaking as they used to have rioting after a rare football victory over Yale. But the record hardly ever shows considered idealism, spontaneous, generous giving of goods and self, such as one finds among the students in Europe and Asia. The American undergraduate makes the impression of a self-centered and selfish creature, absorbed in trivialities, comfort-loving, reactionary and irresponsible; in a word, infantile.

[26]

VIII

Graduates, recalling their college life, tend to fall into two groups. One group see college as the happiest time of their lives—and why should they not? This group composes the backbone of the alumni associations, forever whoops it up for “dear ol’ Whatsis,” and proves the life of the party at alumni reunions, especially those where good liquor is poured out in the hopeless effort to make the man a boy again, while he stays a father too.

By the other group, college is recalled as a waste of time. The transition from the position of a kept and protected favorite child into that of a grown man under the imperative of having to earn his own keep has worked a disillusionment. Instead of getting the job he believes his degree entitles him to, he finds himself a superfluity in the labor market. Employers are likely to speak of him as bumptious, immature, undeveloped, a cub. He finds, even for the simplest tasks, either that he must unlearn what he has learned, or, if he is lucky, that he has no training at all. He begins to regret his college life and to consider that college has failed him. Thinking about it, as did Philip Wylie, he realizes that “the serious purpose” of college not only was not serious to him, but could not have been. For, as the New York boy found already in high school, the curriculum offers him no momentous living option. The subject matter is irrelevant to all that is dynamic in him, it lacks vital links with both the passions of his heart and the actual world where, after college, he must live and move and have his being. It is presented mostly by persons to whom teaching is as much a disagreeable penalty for the amenities of “scholarly” life as learning is to the student for the amenities of college life. Hence, the student seeks to pay the minimum penalty, which is to pass his examination by any means whatsoever. Sometimes the disillusion rises during undergraduate years. Then there are editorials in the college papers.[27] Administrations are criticized, professors are graded, courses are scored, abuses are denounced. Deans and faculties squirm and are glad when the student interest in education subsides. Fortunately such bursts of interest are rare interludes. For the most part, it is faculties, not students, who are agitated about education.

And why should students be agitated about anything still so monastic, that isolates nearly all of those who enter upon it from the realities among which they expect to spend their lives, and sustains them in a state of irresponsibility and irrelevance? At an age when body and mind cry out against infancy, “the higher education” prolongs infancy; it sets up and maintains a conflict between psychobiological adulthood and social childishness. In this conflict “college life” has its fertile soil. It nourishes all those psychological expressions which fall into the patterns of undergraduate attitudes and behavior that are designated by the word “collegiate.”

An apt example of what “collegiate” has come to mean in these United States broke into public view during the fall of 1931. The occasion was an article from the pen of the editor-in-chief of the Spectator, which is the student daily paper at Columbia University in New York City. The article was a serious and intelligent endeavor by a student whose social maturity had by some stroke of chance kept pace with his physiological adulthood, to deal seriously with the realities of athletics, especially football, at Columbia. It called for the public recognition of football as the professional vocation it actually is, and for ordaining coaches as reasonably-paid instructors and not as super-salaried dictators. Of course the response was anger, denunciation, threats against the writer. Among the commentators was the alumni secretary. “The editorial is nonsense,” he said. “The matter is complicated but there are lots of reasons why the head football coach should get a larger salary than a professor. The editor[28] of the Spectator is too serious-minded. He should be more collegiate.”

So standard is this usage of “collegiate” that the very students whose habits sustain it, admonish each other: “Oh, don’t be so collegiate,” and in one of the women’s colleges—women’s, nota bene—“Don’t be collegiate” is a commandment which upperclassmen deliver from the Sinai of their seniority to freshmen entering.

But so long as colleges are managed as they are managed, and college teaching continues as and what it is, it is impossible that students should not be, in one form or another, collegiate—that is, adults conducting themselves like children. For social adulthood consists in self-support and self-management, in moral responsibility and intellectual integrity. These are facilitated by physiological maturity but are by no means identical with it. Physiological maturity comes as an instinctive ripening, in the course of nature. Social adulthood is a learned mode of behavior in the social environment; a system of habits acquired, not a state of the body grown into. This is why bodies may grow up and grow old while minds and hearts remain infantile. And this is why adulthood cannot be learned in colleges as they are any more than swimming can be learned on dry land; the medium is too different, too alien. This is why such academic reformations as those at Harvard or Wisconsin or Chicago are futile jugglings of the same pieces, whereas what is required are new materials and new forms. Antioch comes closer to putting the student on his own as a self-supporting, self-managing adult, but in Antioch the work on the job and the classes in the college are far from the interfusion they require. Nevertheless, Antioch points the hopeful direction of change for colleges that desire to stop prolonging infancy and to begin educating adults.

THE JOHN DAY COMPANY

386 Fourth Avenue, New York