The mind has a life, too:
Jr, David R Carlin
THE MIND HAS A LIFE, TOO CAN THE SCHOOLS SHARPEN IT? Not only is 1988 an election year in the United States, an election in which both candidates for president stress the importance of education...
...and increasingly the best that has been thought and said is becoming the esoteric possession of a handful of scholars, not a general possession of any halfway-educated man or woman...
...But the chief purpose of education is to produce an educated human being...
...The literature-versus-science issue was the subject of a debate Arnold engaged in with Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous defender of the Darwinian faith-Huxley was afraid of letting school graduates enter the modern world without solid grounding in the natural sciences, Arnold of letting them enter the modern or any other world without solid grounding in good literature-"the best that has been thought and said in the world...
...One of the abiding merits of Arnold is that he provides us with a good idea of what a properly educated person ought to look like...
...We are producing generations of young people that have the virtues of neither Jew nor Greek...
...If America is to compete in the twenty-first century...
...Neither can you blame him for declining to speak seriously about education...
...Second, in a brilliant stroke of impartiality, our high school graduates- concerned, no doubt, not to offend the partisans of either literature or science by leaning too much in one direction or the other-leave school knowing next to nothing about either literature or science...
...But the old Greeks discovered something important too, a value the Jews had missed or at all events underrated: the life of the mind...
...it is also the 100th anniversary of the death of Matthew Arnold, whose lasting fame rests on his achievements as poet and critic, but whose more perishable writings on education and society (especially Culture and Anarchy) remain readable today in a way that few other nineteenth-century writings of that genre do...
...One might just as well sell them on the idea that they should retire to the desert and live like St...
...We could do worse, I suppose, than to have presidential candidates who profess to be concerned about the future of American education...
...After all, once we get them loosened up, once we get the young people of the world liberated from the last remnants of Victorian morality, it should be easy to turn them on to the best that has been thought and said in the world...
...and (2) the pressing need of the day is not so much education in character as education of intellect...
...In America more than 100 years later, our practical genius for compromise has led us to resolve this ancient dispute in two ways...
...The complete and well-rounded human being, then, will value Hellenism as well as Hebraism...
...Sell them on sweetness and light...
...It is an entertaining exercise to juxtapose Arnold's thoughts on education with the current American educational situation...
...Not only is 1988 an election year in the United States, an election in which both candidates for president stress the importance of education for the nation's future ("I want to be the education president...
...it is not the unum necessarium...
...and while that may not be exactly what Arnold had in mind, nonetheless I imagine we could persuade him it's a step in the right direction...
...Present-day Americans, especially those of the younger generation, have followed half of Arnold's program-the part that calls on them to understand that morality is not the whole of life...
...Worse still, the reason no one wants to buy it is not that it is so difficult to attain (which of course it is), but that it is not even regarded as attractive...
...But he was pointing to pretty much the same reality when (borrowing Heinrich Heine's distinction between "Hebraism" and "Hellenism") he spoke of the Hebraism of the English middle classes, people whose religious, background was either the evangelical wing of the Church of England or the dissenting Protestant denominations (e.g., Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist...
...And the most urgent need of the mid-Victorian English middle classes, Arnold believed, was to develop a lively intellectual life to balance their admirable but one-sided moral development...
...Unfortunately, they are not turned on yet...
...and to try to sell young people on Arnold's ideal of a personality finely balanced between Hellenism and Hebraism is to try to sell something no one wants to buy...
...Anthony of EgyptYou can't blame a candidate for failing to promote monastic migrations...
...But he reminded the middle classes (whom he delighted to describe as "Philistines"- another borrowing from Heine), that conduct, though the single most important thing in life, is not the only thing...
...He commended the middle classes for their long devotion to Old Testament standards of conduct, and acknowledged that England's great wealth, its dominant position in the industrial and commercial world of the nineteenth century, was the result of its Puritan heritage...
...In their preoccupation with right conduct, the Jews of old discovered the most important value in human life...
...First, we have split the difference between Arnold and Huxley, offering a typical high school curriculum that is a mixture of literature and science (with some social science and a few other items thrown in to flavor the broth...
...and to cry from the rooftops that one is in favor of education, education, and yet more education, without stopping to define the nature of an educated person, is to say little or nothing at all...
...Though doing a certain amount of violence- to the subtlety and complexity of Arnold's argument, we might summarize his position on the content of education in two propositions: (1) the curriculum of the schools should be basically literary rather than scientific...
...But if we embrace his idea (which I myself do, more or less), we are bound to get discouraged...
...for contemporary American culture has something in it that makes it profoundly hostile to a chiefly literary education...
...As proof of their new understanding they have become prodigious drinkers, fornicators, and sabbath-breakers...
...Otherwise (and here Arnold sounds like a contemporary American politician) England would not be able to compete in the future with more intellectual nations like Germany and France...
...Resisting years of attempted seduction on the part of teachers, they have kept their literary-scientific virginity intact...
...Antedating Max Weber by a generation or so, Arnold did not have the term "Protestant ethic" at his disposal...
Vol. 115 • November 1988 • No. 19
