“Help!” cried Hungerford, as Brockhurst went rushing on. “Great Scott, what do we know?”
“You know absolutely nothing,” said Brockhurst savagely. “Here you are; look at yourselves—four years when you ought to learn something, some informing knowledge of all that has developed during the four thousand years the human race has fought its way toward the light, four years to be filled with the marvel and splendor of it all, and you don’t know a thing.
“You don’t know the big men in music; you don’t know the pioneers and the leaders in any art; you don’t know the great literatures of the world, and what they represent; you don’t know how other races are working out their social destinies; you’ve never even stopped to examine yourselves, to analyze your own society, to see the difference between a civilization founded on the unit of the individual, and a civilization, like the Latin, on the indestructible advance of the family. You have no general knowledge, no intellectual interests, you haven’t even opinions, and at the end of four years of education you will march up and be handed a degree—Bachelor of Arts! Magnificent! And we Americans have a sense of humor! Do you wonder why I repeat that our colleges are splendidly organized institutions for the prevention of learning? No, sir, we are business colleges, and the business of our machines is to stamp out so many business men a year, running at full speed and in competition with the latest devices in Cambridge and Princeton!”
“Brocky, you are terrific,” said Swazey in admiration. There was too much truth in the attack, violent as it was, not to have called forth serious attention.
“I feel a good deal the way you do,” said Bob Story, and Stover nodded, “only it seems to me, Brocky, a good deal of what you’re arguing for must come from outside—in just such informal talks as this.”
“That’s true,” said Brockhurst. “If the stimulus in the college life itself were toward education all our meetings would be educational. It’s true abroad, it isn’t here. You know my views. You think I’m extreme. I’m getting an education because I didn’t accept any such flap-doodle as, ‘What am I going to do for Yale?’ but instead asked, ‘What has Yale got to offer me?’ I’m getting it, too.”
Stover suddenly remembered the conversation they had together the year before, and looking now at Brockhurst, revealed in a new strength, he began to understand what had then so repelled him.
“The great fault,” continued Brockhurst, “lies, however, with the colleges. The whole theory is wrong, archaic and ridiculous—the theory of education by schedule. All education can do is to instil the love of knowledge. You get that, you catch the fire of it—you educate yourself. All education does today is to develop the memory at the expense of the imagination. It says: ‘Here are so many pounds of Greek, Latin, mathematics, history, literature. In four years our problem is to pass them through the heads of these hundreds of young barbarians so that they will come out with a lip knowledge.’ ”
“But come, we do learn something,” said Hungerford.
“No, you don’t, Joe,” said Brockhurst. “You’ve translated the Iliad—you’ve never known it. You’ve recited in Horace—you have no love for him. You’ve excavated the plays of Shakespeare, a couple of acts at a time; you don’t know what Hamlet means or Lear, the beauty of it all has escaped you. You’ve recited in Logic and Philosophy, but you don’t understand what you’re repeating. You’re only repeating all the time. Your memory is trained to hold a little knowledge a little time—that’s all. You don’t enjoy it, you’re rather apologetic—or others are.”
“Well, what other system is there?” said Regan.
“There is the preceptorial system of England,” said Brockhurst, “where a small group of men are in personal contact with the instructor. In French universities, education is a serious thing because failure to pass an examination for a profession means two extra years of army service. Men don’t risk over there, or divide up their time heeling the News or making a team. In Germany a man is given a certain number of years to get a degree, and I believe has to do a certain amount of original work.
“But of course the main trouble here is, and there is no blinking the fact, that the colleges have surrendered unconsciously a great deal of their power to the growing influence of the social organization. In a period when we have no society in America, families are sending their sons to colleges to place themselves socially. Some of them carry it to an extreme, even directly avow their hope that they will make certain clubs at Princeton or Harvard, or a senior society here. It probably is very hard to control, but it’s going to turn our colleges more and more, as I say, into social clearing houses. At present here at Yale we keep down the question of wealth pretty well; fellows like Joe Hungerford here come in and live on our basis. That’s the best feature about Yale today—how it will be in the future I don’t know, for it depends on the wisdom of the parents.”
“Social clearing house is well coined,” said Hungerford. “I think it’s truer though of Harvard.”
“That’s perhaps because you see the mote in your neighbors’ eyes,” said Brocky rising. “Well, discussion isn’t going to change it. Who’s always talking about school for character—Pike or Brown? We might as well stand for that—but it would not be very wise to announce it to the American nation, would it?—we might be dubbed a reformatory. Fathers, send your sons to college—reform their characters, straighten out the crooks. At the end give ’em a degree of—of, say—G.B.”
“What’s that, Brocky?” said Swazey, grinning with the rest.
“Good Boy,” said Brockhurst,
