THERE is one experience that conservative-liberal America—bourgeois America, the pushing America that gets what it wants on this side of the ocean—possesses in common, and that is its education. We of the vast American middle class have all been to high school, or we have lived with high school graduates; we have all been to college, or we have worked with college graduates. Our education, when viewed with any detachment, is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given generation most of us have studied the same textbooks in mathematics and geography and history, read the same selections in literature, been inoculated with the same ethical principles from the Bible and the moralists. Ask us a question as to what makes right or wrong, as the President did in his war messages, and we will respond with a universal roar, like factory whistles when a button is punched on some celebration day.

This general American experience is largely responsible for the tenacity with which we of this generation blindly conserve the liberal principles of our ancestors, even while we keep them, like the tables of the ten commandments, safe from the rude touch of practical experience. Education such as ours seldom fails to influence men’s ways of thinking even when their actions pass beyond its control. The influence, however, is too often ineffectual, bloodless. That is a lesson we need to ponder in America.

Education in these colonies in the eighteenth century was bent toward theology. All but the lower schools, if, indeed, they could be excepted, were contrived to find and to train the pastor, the minister to the people. For him those studies that influence opinion—history, ethics—were chiefly taught. For his purposes, the languages of the classics were chiefly studied. It was the pastor that emerged as prime product of academies and colleges. And therefore theology, that arduous intellectual exercise for which he prepared, set its mark upon all intellects down to the humblest. We wonder at the obsession with religious thinking that the letters and diaries of farmers, merchants, and lawyers of our eighteenth century display to the amazement of their very untheological descendants. We should rather wonder at the intellectual energy expended in wrestling with a difficult and abstract subject. They entered, as we of the twentieth-century bourgeois do not, into the field of scholarship; they partook of disputes that were as international as Christendom; and shared with the chosen ones for whom all this education was made, Jonathan Edwards and his co-professionals, an interest in problems far broader than their strip of Atlantic clearings. That the experience, whatever we may think of the value of the theology, was good for them does not, I think, permit of argument. There have never been abler Americans than at the end of the eighteenth century.

But nineteenth-century America was a different world. Interest in theology abated for reasons that need not here be discussed. More and more the United States diverged intellectually from our colonial unity with Europe; our own problems engrossed us; and these were problems of material development, of local statecraft, of that elementary education which a democracy must necessarily take as its chief concern. What had been a professional training by which God’s ministers were to be selected became relatively unprofessional, a so-called “liberal education,” the object of which was to illumine and make pliable and broad the minds of laymen. The high purpose of the teacher was not now to choose the leaders of the spirit. It was rather to preserve in a new world of crude physical endeavor the arts and sciences that civilize the mind.

American life in the nineteenth century had many of the characteristics that we are accustomed to associate with heroic barbarism. It had the same insecurity—insecurity of life on the border, insecurity of fortune where life was safe. It had the same frequency of hazardous toil against wild nature; the same accompaniments of cold and privation; the same vast and shadowy enterprises, usually collapsing; the same intensity of physical sensation; the same ardor of emotional experience in the spiritual realm. And always education mitigated extravagance, restrained excess, directed effort. Through education our ancestral Europe restrained and guided us. Education kept us white.

But never, perhaps, has the divergence between life as it had to be lived and the civilities taught us in school been greater. Never has the ideal world, which, after all, it is the chief business of education to mirror, been more different from the facts of experience than in America. The ridiculous scientist of Cooper’s “Prairie” who mistakes his donkey for a new monster and thinks it more important to call the buffalo the bison than to eat when hungry of its hump, is a symbol of the contrast between what we learned and what we did in America. In the eighteenth century, education for most Americans was practical preparation for a knowledge of God’s ways with man. In the nineteenth it had become not a preparation for life so much as an antiseptic against the demoralizations of a purely material struggle to open up a continent. The results have been of grave political importance.

For the divergence between theory and practice explains the curiously traditional character of our schooling as we knew it in youth, as our grandfathers knew it in youth. I am not now speaking of the wearisome controversies over Latin and Greek and classic English literature, the so-called traditional subjects which make up a large part of education. It is not the letter, but the spirit, that makes the thing taught traditional. And ever since democracy began, the teacher has had to be the priest and guardian of tradition in America. He has been an anxious parent stretching the coverlet of racial culture over the restless limbs of little immigrants. He has taught reading, writing, and arithmetic as a means of holding fast to our tradition. He has taught literature and history and “moral ethics” and “natural science” as the containers of that tradition. We have almost forgotten that for a time in the early nineteenth century it seemed quite possible that the frontier would become Indian rather than European in its culture. We see clearly now how possible it would have been for whole regions of the South to relapse into negro semi-barbarism. We may guess that save for the teacher and his grinding in of tradition the white races of North America might have slipped backward, as too clearly have the white races in many parts of Latin America.

One element in this education by tradition was specially important. Liberalism, the principle upon which this republic was founded, education took up as soon as it dropped theology, if not earlier. American education became impregnated with liberalism, made liberalism its chief tradition. What we study in school and college stays by us, overlaid perhaps, scarcely vital any more, yet packed close to the roots of our conscious being. And the compost they gave us in America was liberalism. History enshrined the republican ideals of our founders and the democratic ideals of our nineteenth-century development. Sometimes it was taught in college classes with “sources” duly ticketed. Sometimes it trickled through commencement speeches or primers thumbed on back-row benches. The results were the same. In literature, whether English or American, the same ideas were predominant, or at least were made to seem so by careful selection. Democracy and the rights of man blow through the reading of the American school-boy, somewhat aridly it must be admitted; but still they blow. Civics and government and the social sciences in these latter days, as they are taught in America, advance the same standard.

Not less definite and persuasive was the influence of the men who taught us. Many of them have been aristocratic in taste and in their misprision of the stupidities of the common man, but their text also was of liberalism and democracy whenever the subject or the occasion permitted. Even geography and spelling were presented as the means whereby the child of the laboring man had been given his chance to rise in the world and perhaps become President. Properly considered, the things we have been taught, the men who taught us, the very organization of our school and college system, have been one vast engine for shaping the minds of young America in the turn and mold of liberalism.

But this liberalism, like most of our education, was highly traditional. Our subjects and the men who taught them looked prevailingly backward for inspiration, recalled us to the past, warned us of the future. The urge was always the old Roman one—preserve the piety of your ancestors. Preparation for new conditions, for a possible new liberty in industry or politics, for a possible new democracy in wealth, there was, we must confess, very little. We were linked to tradition; we were made profoundly and sincerely liberal, at least in our theories of life; we were implored to stand pat.

And though education, as the art was practised here in America, has perhaps kept us liberal, it has certainly given to liberalism that faint shadow of unreality, that sacrosanctity which belongs to all traditional beliefs. It is the traditional quality of American education that more than any other single agency has petrified American liberalism.

We plain Americans in our little red school-houses and our big brick high schools and our spreading universities have learned republicanism and the rights of man and the not-to-be-questioned opportunity of every person to go to the top of the ladder if he wished and were able. This we were taught explicitly and implicitly. And we believed these things because we were made to think that all right-thinking men everywhere believed them: and therefore we recited Gladstone and Lincoln and Toussaint L’Ouverture and passages from Carlyle’s “French Revolution” and Mrs. Browning on the freeing of Italy with confident hearts. Furthermore, we felt that these principles were sincere, because, no matter how poor or how stupid, we found educational opportunities opened on every side. There was no discrimination in the quantity of American education, and but little in its quality. Until we left the school or the campus, our liberal tradition fitted us like a garment. It never occurred to us that it might not always fit.

Yet as soon as we moved out into America, crossing that bridge from theory to practice, from ideas to application, which in all countries is long and in new countries longest of all, strange contradiction began to be apparent. Republicanism, it appeared, worked out in practice, at least in our town, into boss control and domination by party leaders, acting usually for vested interests. The rights of man, we discovered, had a curious sound when discussed by labor-unions or the unemployed. Opportunities, it became clear, could not be freely offered to the man without capital unless we were prepared to change radically an industrial system which our common sense taught us was better—at least for us—than the visionary industrial democracies that radicals without business experience wished to set up. Were these precious ideals of ours merely buncombe, then, held only in theory, in practice to be disregarded? Or was democracy good as a half-way measure, but false as a general principle? Was our education a tradition to be reverenced—and disregarded?

Not a few reached the indicated conclusion, though they kept, as a rule, their opinions to themselves. Perhaps as many swung to the other extreme, believed that only more democracy would cure us, and also kept out of print, for fear of being associated with radical aliens who held much the same opinions in politics and social affairs, but very different conceptions of cleanliness, morals, and polite conversation. These were our right and left wings merely. The great mass of us, the everyday Americans, took things as they were with a kind of shrewd childish good sense, and pushed ahead, being as democratic as was convenient in this unequal world, but taking no nonsense from people who would interfere with business in order to make us more so. And that is where we are now—at the end of the war, in the midst of a world revolution so great that no one knows whether it has just begun or is just ending.

But a revolution drives men back upon their principles, makes them scan willingly or unwillingly the things they live by—the prejudices, enlightenments, interpretations, convictions that in the largest sense are their education. And this is true not only of rapid revolutions, like the French and the Russian, but of slow ones, such as that revolution which has been slowly gathering headway in English-speaking countries for three decades or more, that revolution of social and industrial conditions now rapidly accelerating. And what have Americans thought of their education?

I think they have found it a brake, a stabilizer, a deterrent alike from violent reaction and dangerous experiment. I think also that they have found it what it is—traditional. They have felt it as a taboo, good on Sundays, but on week-days not to be too closely regarded. Where it has preached restraint to the more radical, they have listened, but grown restless. Was it not John Bright who said that England would be ruined if the hours for labor should be shortened? Did not Cooper, who wrote the epic of frontier freedom, sharpen his pen to defend the unearned increment of the landlord? Where it speaks of liberty and equality to the more conservative, they have listened, but not taken it too seriously. After all, the world must be governed and dividends paid. While the rights of the citizen should be safeguarded, business is business nevertheless, and politics politics. The Declaration of Independence, they felt, should be kept in its place, which was the Fourth of July. Theory—by which they meant education—has little place in practical affairs. They were liberals of course, but plain and prosperous Americans first of all, and the latter, at least, they intended to remain.

And thus, in its noble attempt to shape the minds of Americans to a similitude of their full-blooded ancestors who dared to be radical, American education itself has acquired the sanctity, the reverence, the ghostliness of the dead. Like the dead, it is most influential upon spirits sensitive to the past, and operates through love and veneration and mere habit rather than through immediate compulsion. Like them, it visits the minds of the living only in glimpses of the moon, and its influence, though wide-spread, is partial and easily forgotten in the noonday glare of active, practical life. Americans respect their education, but too seldom do they live by it.

It is a good tradition, this American ideal of noble and sturdy liberalism. The only detraction to be made is precisely that the education which embodies it is felt to be merely traditional. But this is much the same as to say that last year’s hat is a good hat, the only trouble being that when we wear it we invariably remember that it is last year’s hat. And at least one unhappy consequence follows.

American minds have been coddled in school and college for at least a generation. There are two kinds of mental coddling. The first belongs to the public schools, and is one of the defects of our educational system that we abuse privately and largely keep out of print. It is democratic coddling. I mean, of course, the failure to hold up standards, the willingness to let youth wobble upward, knowing little and that inaccurately, passing nothing well, graduating with an education that hits and misses like an old type-writer with a torn ribbon. America is full of “sloppy thinking,” of inaccuracy, of half-baked misinformation, of sentimentalism, especially sentimentalism, as a result of coddling by schools that cater to an easy-going democracy. Only fifty-six per cent of a group of girls, graduates of the public schools, whose records I once examined, could do simple addition, only twenty-nine per cent simple multiplication correctly; a deplorable percentage had a very inaccurate knowledge of elementary American geography.

A dozen causes are responsible for this condition, and among them, I suspect, one, which if not major, at least deserves careful pondering. The teacher and the taught have somehow drifted apart. His function in the large has been to teach an ideal, a tradition. He is content, he has to be content, with partial results. It is not for life as it is, it is for what life ought to be, that he is preparing even in arithmetic; he has allowed the faint unreality of a priestcraft to numb him. In the mind of the student a dim conception has entered, that this education—all education—is a garment merely, to be doffed for the struggle with realities. The will is dulled. Interest slackens.

But it is in aristocratic coddling that the effects of our educational attitude gleam out to the least observant understanding. This is the coddling of the preparatory schools and the colleges, and it is more serious for it is a defect that cannot be explained away by the hundred difficulties that beset good teaching in a public-school system, nation-wide, and conducted for the young of every race in the American menagerie. The teaching in the best American preparatory schools and colleges is as careful and as conscientious as any in the world. That one gladly asserts. Indeed, an American boy in a good boarding-school is handled like a rare microbe in a research laboratory. He is ticketed; every instant of his time is planned and scrutinized; he is dieted with brain food, predigested, and weighed before application. I sometimes wonder if a moron could not be made into an Abraham Lincoln by such a system—if the system were sound.

It is not sound. The boys and girls, especially the boys, are coddled for entrance examinations, coddled through freshman year, coddled oftentimes for graduation. And they too frequently go out into the world fireproof against anything but intellectual coddling. Such men and women can read only writing especially prepared for brains that will take only selected ideas, simply put. They can think only on simple lines, not too far extended. They can live happily only in a life where ideas never exceed the college sixty per cent of complexity, and where no intellectual or esthetic experience lies too far outside the range of their curriculum. A world where one reads the news and skips the editorials; goes to musical comedies, but omits the plays; looks at illustrated magazines, but seldom at books; talks business, sports, and politics, but never economics, social welfare, and statesmanship—that is the world for which we coddle the best of our youth. Many indeed escape the evil effects by their own innate originality; more bear the marks to the grave.

The process is simple, and one can see it in the English public schools (where it is being attacked vivaciously) quite as commonly as here. You take your boy out of his family and his world. You isolate him except for companionship with other nursery transplantings and teachers themselves isolated. And then you feed him, nay, you cram him, with good traditional education, filling up the odd hours with the excellent, but negative, passion of sport. Then you subject him to a special cramming and send him to college, where sometimes he breaks through the net of convention woven about him, and sees the real world as it should appear to the student before he becomes part of it; but more frequently wraps himself deep and more deeply in conventional opinion, conventional practice, until, the limbs of his intellect bound tightly, he stumbles into the outer world.

And there, in the swirl and the vivid practicalities of American life, is the net loosened? I think not. I think rather that the youth learns to swim clumsily despite his encumbrances of lethargic thinking and tangled idealism. But if they are cut? If he goes on the sharp rocks of experience, finds that hardness, shrewdness, selfish individualism pay best in American life, what has he in his spirit to meet this disillusion? Of what use has been his education in the liberal, idealistic traditions of America? Of some use, undoubtedly, for habit, even a dull habit, is strong; but whether useful enough, whether powerful enough, to save America, to keep us “white” in the newer and more colloquial sense, the future will test and test quickly.

Why do we coddle our aristocracy, who can pay for the best and most effective education? I think that the explanation again is to be sought in the traditionalism of American education. If our chief, our ultimate, duty to the boy that we teach is to make him an “American gentleman,” and if by this is meant that we are to instil the essence of the Americanism which made Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt, and let it go at that, and if all our education hovers about this central purpose—why, the stage is set for a problem play that may become tragedy or farce. It is not thinking we teach then so much as what has been taught. It is not life, but what has been lived; not American liberalism, but a conservatism that never has been characteristically American. The tradition is not at fault, nor the thought of the past, nor the lives of our ancestors; it is when all these things are taught as dead idealism unrelated to the facts of the present that they become merely traditional.

And the boy and girl are not deceived. They take all that is given them—no youth in the world are so pliable, so receptive as ours—and retain and respect and cherish what they remember of it. But it is clear that for them it is tradition, it is unreal in comparison with their sports, their social aspirations. It will be unreal in comparison with their business and their politics and their household affairs. It will be a venerated tradition of liberal thinking for them of which they will be highly conservative. But it will not function in their lives—not more at least than the sixty per cent that they sought for in order to get that degree of bachelor of arts which certified that they were versed in the thought of their forefathers. And so they merge in the common American mind that I have called conservative-liberal.

I know of no better proof of the truth of what I have just written than the history of our college undergraduates in war-time.

Here is such a demonstration as comes only once in a generation. Of all unpreparedness, the unpreparedness of the undergraduate for war was apparently chief. He knew little about the war, its causes, its manifestations, for he is not an ardent reader of current events outside his college world, nor does he hear much of the talk of the market-place. He knew little about war. The R. O. T. C. had spread some ideas of drill and discipline and the technic of fighting; but he was neither drilled nor disciplined in 1917. And as for the training in accurate obedience and in exact thinking which war is supposed to demand, he simply did not have it, or so we thought. Nor had his particularistic fashion of following his own little contests to the exclusion of loyalties to the world outside, and his indifference to politics beyond fraternity elections, or economics beyond the cost of theater-tickets and beer, led us to assume a ready response to a great moral emergency in national affairs.

We were utterly deceived. The response of the American undergraduate was immediate and magnificent. He crowded into the most dangerous military professions, and was eminent in the most difficult branches of organization and experiment. He did not, it is true, think very broadly about the war, but he thought intensely. He did not learn accuracy, steadiness, independence overnight, but he learned them. He was wholly admirable. And the women, who in ways not yet sufficiently celebrated made it possible for the country to stiffen to the crisis, were as eager to serve as the men.

And the reason, I believe, was that for the time the education of the undergraduate ceased being traditional and became a moving force in his experience. The dim liberal idealism in which his mind had been moving for many years suddenly took on color and became fire. Every impulse of his mental training urged him to do just what was asked of him, to struggle for democracy, for justice, for a square deal; to believe in the rights of man and the permanence of right and the supremacy of a righteous idealism. And his habits of hard, earnest play, where rules were obeyed and victory went to the best player, also were the very stuff the world wanted, also transformed miraculously into the very apparatus of war. His traditional education, with its extra-curriculum of games that also were traditional in their neglect of the new and special qualities required for success in modern life, precisely fitted the clamorous need of the hour. And the undergraduate for a little while silenced his critics, amazed his friends, and was in many respects happier than in those years of peace when he was trying to bridge the gap between his education and life as it was being lived in America.

And with peace he relapses—the American in general relapses into the old discontinuity. The crisis of self-defense over, our ideals once more begin to seem impractical, traditionary. As long as the patriotism lit by the war and danger crackled under the pot, our liberalism bubbled ardently; but peace chills the brew. For peace means that we drop our ardors and face again the insistent reachings of the democracy for a greater share in wealth, for a greater control over productivity, for representation in industry as well as in politics. Peace means that we must face not war, with its romantic thrills and its common enemy, but the prosaic causes of war that hide among friends as well as enemies, that for cure demand self-criticism, self-denial, and humbleness of spirit, a struggle in which the Croix de Guerre is likely to be reproach and contumely.

The break between our education and the life we are living again widens, and it is this break which emasculates our liberalism. Viewed alone, the fine ideals of our education are easily defensible; the hustling vigor of our life is also defensible. The trouble is that in ordinary times they fail somehow or another to connect. Education grows bloodless. Life becomes aimless or merely self-regarding. What we believe grows pallid and fades before it transmutes into what we do. Indeed, I would go further and say that Americans, and especially the graduates of universities, are somewhat weakened by their education. They go out into life with an enormous appetite for living and a set of ideals like a row of preserved vegetables canned and hermetically sealed for future contingencies. In 1917 and 1918 we opened some of those jars and found the contents good for a special emergency. But ordinarily the lids are tight, while we go about our business proud of our stores of education, but inwardly uncertain, like the housewife, as to whether or not those ideas that seemed so good when our teachers packed them away in the season of youth will not be sour to the taste of practical modernity.

The clamor for vocational education is a protest against this ineffectiveness of the merely traditional. But the cure does not lie in such a medicining. Vocational education is well enough, and we need more of it, but training of the hands and of the brain to purely material accomplishments will never save liberalism in America. The strength of vocational education is that it looks forward and prepares for things as they are. Its weakness, when administered alone, is that it neglects the directing mind. In any large sense it is aimless, or, rather, it aims at successful slavery quite as much as at successful freedom. Liberal education also must look forward, must put its traditions to work, must germinate, and become alive in the mind of the American, and then teach him by old principles to attack new problems.

We must either live by our education or live without it. The alternatives are desiccation and anarchy. If we live by it, education itself stays alive, grows, sloughs off dead matter, adapts itself like an organism to environment. If we live without and beyond and in neglect of education, as many “practical” Americans have always done once they left school or college, education decays, and sooner or later the man decivilizes, drifts toward that mere acceleration of busyness, which is the modern equivalent of barbarism.

Once before, and far more seriously, a civilization was threatened because its education became merely traditional and ceased to function in practical life. The society of Appolinaris Sidonius in the fifth century, as Dill describes it, was faced with economic disruption, with hordes of aliens, with a rampant individualism that put the acquisition of a secure fortune above everything else. The leaders failed to lead. “Their academic training only deepened and intensified the deadening conservatism of unassailable wealth.” “Faith in Rome had killed all faith in a wider future for humanity....” There was an “apparent inability to imagine, even in the presence of tremendous forces of disruption, that society should ever cease to move along the ancient lines.” Roman imperialism divorced itself from Roman thought and became a deadening tyranny. Roman thought divorced itself from Roman life and became an empty philosophy. And the sixth century and disaster followed.

The historical analogy is imperfect. Our civilization is still vigorous where the Roman was tired and weak. No outer barbarians threaten us. Science safeguards us from economic breakdown.

And yet, like the skeptic who does not believe in God, but refuses to take chances on his death-bed, I should not scoff at the parallel. Stale imperialism, shaken religions, a liberalism become an article of faith not an instrument of practice—all these are potential of decay, of explosion. We must look to our education. If it does not grip our life, we must change education. If life is not gripped, our life needs reforming. And the thing is so extraordinarily difficult that it is high time we ceased praising for a while the virtues of our forefathers or the wealth of our compatriots, and began the task. After all, it means no more than to teach the next generation not merely to preserve, but also to carry on, the traditions of America.