GOING TO COLLEGE 上大学.doc

Going to CollegeH. L. Mencken1 Up to a few years ago there was nothing more generally believed in the United States than that education, and especially education of the so-called higher variety, was a valuable thing, and worth any sacrifice of time and money. The notion had emanated, originally, from the Puritans of New England, who cherished it as they cherished their romantic belief in hot and eternal hell. With the passage of the year it had permeated the whole country, and only a few forlorn iconoclasts challenged it. The study of books, it appeared, could transform any plowboy into a Lincoln, and, what was even more wonderful and alluring, into a successful dealer in high grade investment securities. After the late war, with money flowing freely, all the yokels of the land began sending their progeny to college.2 The result was a great congestion in the halls of learning, and that congestion still continues. In some of the state universities there are so many students that merely keeping track of them enlists the services of whole hordes of bookkeepers, top sergeants, policemen, and adding machines. They cram the classrooms to suffocation, make the adjacent bootlegger rich, and drive the sweating professors frantic. There are not enough competent teachers in the country to handle them, and so a great many unprepared aspirants have had to be called in to help. These aspirants, I daresay, do the best they can, but certainly it is not much. While they are learning their trade, their pupils are learning nothing.3 Some of the latter, more earnest than the average, now begin to protest. They complain that their time is wasted by pedagogical ignoramuses. In some colleges they published stenographic reports of the lectures they are forced to listen to, seeking to show the world what bilge is in them. In others they denounce the faculty in their campus papers, and so get themselves expelled. Everywhere there seems to be a rising doubt about the efficacy and utility of the educational process. Every time I refer to pedagogues in this place I receive scores of letters from students, describing the imbecilities that oppress them, and fishing for support for their apparent theory that it would be wiser to quit college at once and go to work.4 This theory, unfortunately, I find myself unable to support. For, despite the rise of skepticism on the subject, the theory that a college education is a valuable thing is still very widely held in America, and so long as it prevails the sagacious youngster will bend it to his uses. It may not be true, but that is no argument against it. The important thing is that it is believed. So long as it is believed the young man or woman who has been through college will have an advantage among us, and though that advantage may not run beyond the first few hurdles of life, it will remain of the utmost values there.5 Nor is this belief entirely illusory. A college course, at worst, offers all the charms and benefits of a Wanderjahr: it is a sort of grand tour, and hence illuminating. The learned professors that the student encounters may be, in the great majority of cases, merely jackasses, but they at least differ from his father; they at least make him privy to notions and points of view that he has not encouraged at home. He may not grasp those new points of view or grasping them, he may reject them, but at all events he has heard of them. Certain fragments of novel ideas will linger in his consciousness. He will never be again quite the innocent that his father is.6 In this process his fellow students will often play a more important part than his professors, most of whom, perhaps, he will never apprehend save as vague shapes. Regimentation has gone far in the American college, but it can never go all the way. The campus Bolshevik survives almost undimmed from Emersons day. Is he quickly detected and expelled? Then it is not until he has spread his poisons not until he has awakened hundreds of his fellows to the charm of heretical ideas and to the joys of passing them on. They go home, perhaps, resolved that the ancient faiths are safer and even better, but they go home somewhat changed. Even George F. Babbitt, with four years of college behind him, was never the complete Babbitt. In the midst of his gaudy certainties he had his interludes of doubt.7 But the boys who now have doubts about college are not potential Babbitts: they are youngsters of more active and eager mind. Observing quickly that the great majority of their instructors are poor drudges who know little that is worth knowing and have small capacity to impart that little lucidly, and that at least nine-tenths of their campus brethren are numskulls doomed to be engulfed swiftly by Rotary, the Shrine, and the Klan observing this, they often conclude that it would be far better to depart at once for Wall Street, the coal regions, Park Row, or Hollywood.8 Here, too, it seems to me, there is error. It lies in the assumption that what college has to teach all comes out of books, or may be imparted by instructors. This is not true. What college has to teach, in the main, is simply familiarity with the notions and habits of that vast and mysterious organism known as human society. The world that the student comes into is measurably larger than nay world he had hitherto known, and far more complex. It is not quite the still larger world that will enter later on, but it is nevertheless a great deal like it. It has its rulers and is ruled, its drudges and its men of privilege, its sharp fellows and its dummies. Is it, basically, a fraud? Then so is the world that encompasses it.9 The discovery of the fraudulence, I believe, is one of the principal aims and achievements of true education, if not the first of them all. A man soundly fitted for life is not one who believes what he is told, as a schoolboy believes, but one trained in differentiating between the true and the false, and especially one trained in weighing and estimating authority. If the young man at college learns nothing else save the fact that many of the bigwigs of the college world are charlatans, and that position and attainments do not necessarily go together, then he has learned something of the utmost value. The tragedy of the world is that the great majority of human beings never learn it. If going to college can teach it, if only by the method of the horrible example, then going to college is worthwhile.10 I believe that it is being taught in the American colleges today, and on an unprecedented scale. Swamped by hordes of unteachable students, with their faculties overworked and what they call their plants strained to the uttermost, they have been forced to throw their old standards overboard, and to make in all sorts of pedagogical amateurs and quacks. These quacks now essay to instruct the young of the land. What they try to teach is not learned and maybe is not worth learning, but what they are themselves is detected and remembered, and in that remembrance there are the rudiments, at least, of true education.11 Moreover, they accomplish something else: they throw up in a brilliant light the merits of those of their colleagues who are genuinely men of learning. In the average American college, perhaps, there are not many of the latter, but in even the meanest college there are apt to be few. The influence of such men upon the students is immensely salubrious and valuable. They make it plain to even the dullest that there are ends in this world quite as alluring as material success that men of high character may and do pursue them, and gladly. They are standing answers to the