Books
Chase, Edward Hawks, Edward L Fitzpatrick, Grenville Vernon, Harry McGuire, Mary Ellen
BOOKS The Liberal Spirit in Education Pedagogically Speaking, by Felix E. Schelling. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press. $2.00. The Aims of Education and Other Essays, by A. N....
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Professor Whitehead says-"It should be the chief aim of a university professor to exhibit himself in his own true character-that is, as an ignorant man thinking, actively utilizing his small share of knowledge...
...And so would Professor Whitehead...
...Now there is just enough truth in this answer to have made it live through the ages...
...I do not know who was first responsible for this analogy of the mind to a dead instrument...
...The text followed is that of the King James version...
...THE reading of Mr...
...So too with Professor Schelling...
...The teacher's together with the divine's is the most serious of all human trusts...
...Marie de L. Welch is one of the editors of the San Francisco Review...
...He would take the whole problem out of the cheap categories of pennies and of bread, and raise it to the category of ideas, perhaps dreams, and certainly romance...
...All death and destruction is caused by sin...
...Against piled up information, against encyclopaedic information, against mere information, both our authors vigorously protest...
...This leads to a discussion in which our authors apparently disagree...
...1.75...
...Cursed be the dullard who destroys wonder...
...And to surmount this barrier the Catholic writer needs heroism it is true, but also common sense...
...Budget Making in a Democracy...
...and the coarseness of many of its scenes is bathed in and regenerated by an exquisite tenderness which is unforgettable...
...Harry McGuire...
...Unless the pupils are continually sustained by the evocation of interest, the acquirement of technique, and the excitement of success, they can never make progress, and will certainly lose heart...
...And American education of every type would profit immensely by Professor Schelling's words to the teacher with which I close this review: "If, then, it shall be the high calling of any one of you to teach, to give to others knowledge out of the fulness of your own, do not carry on your further education in your classroom, trying experimental ideas on those who have as yet no critical basis by which to test the efficacy of your thought...
...that useful and necessary as it is, vocational training does not develop the mind in the manner and to the degree which we have a right to demand of the major part of education...
...it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus...
...Shuster expresses in these words the basic fact which the Catholic writer who would appeal to the general public must face: "In our time an individual author may have all the faith of a mediaeval doctor, but he must always reckon with the circumstance that a part of his audience is utterly incredulous...
...vulgarity, profanity and occasional obscenity may not be exactly cheering to our aesthetic tastes...
...whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now...
...That the American Catholic labors under exceedingly difficult conditions is also unfortunately true, and the great value of Mr...
...And Professor Schelling enters vigorously into the characterization of this view which he calls "quantitative education...
...Shuster shows, which separate the modern Catholic from the world around him, and are real barriers, frequently difficult to cross...
...Edward A. Fitzpatrick...
...Most of the characters are vague types, and the plot often strains credulity...
...there is much unwisdom in claiming for the classics alone that liberalizing influence which they possess in so high a degree, but which they share with many other studies...
...Komroff means those books of the Bible which many Protestant critics set apart as not having been included in the Hebrew canon, and to which some Catholic authorities affix the adjective "deuterocanonical...
...The child then knows how to solve a quadratic equation...
...These are words which should be taken to heart by every Catholic whether he be writer or reader...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...Shuster is in the last analysis an optimist he is also a realist who dares to set forth the present state of Catholic letters with no sop to sentimentality...
...Education is self-discipline-self-mastery-self-control-it must be self-education...
...Indeed, in the descriptions of the rights themselves one is frequently reminded of Hazlitt's famous narrative of the fight at Hungerford, particularly well reminded of Hazlitt, we may add, in this centenary of his death...
...Rev...
...not that, "but that cheap reckoning up of commercial values, that near-sighted and niggardly view of man and life in the light of petty immediate gains, that reduction of things, both human and divine, to monetary standards, which paralyzes liberal and disinterested endeavor and fills our learned professions-save the mark!- with expert but narrow and unlettered men...
...in this book the material is marred by sentimentalizing (the happy-ever-after disposal of characters in the last chapter is the worst sort of claptrap) and by a tedious, repetitious manner...
...Edward Hawks...
...That Catholic literature in the United States is far from what it should be is a statement the truth of which is self-evident, and Mr...
...Professor Schelling's echoing phrase, "The sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut," is challenged...
...But the preface merits reading and the illustrations are charming...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow...
...Professor Schelling probably has his eyes on those "little men of little soul" with little knowledge, little insight and no ideas, who have the sublime superiority of ignorance...
...2.75...
...In the chapter entitled The Splendor of Truth Mr...
...The Aims of Education and Other Essays, by A. N. White-head...
...The mind is never passive...
...Shuster's little volume was chosen by the Catholic Book Club as one of its two January books, for in it with extraordinary compactness and yet with admirable clarity is stated the problems which face the modern Catholic writer...
...But for all its half-truth, it embodies a radical error which bids fair to stifle the genius of the modern world...
...Professor Schelling traces the humanities from the time "of the conception of manhood which transmuted every full-grown male into a miniature steel fortress, bustling with weapons and offense, cherishing his honor, his lady and his life supereminently as things to fight for," when the humanities were unclerical, through sweeping revisions, restatements and transformations to our contemporary view in which two groups of opponents to the classical studies, if not the humanities, are to be found: "first the exponent of the superior advantage which they claim for purely scientific education and, secondly the utilitarians...
...the acquisition of the power of solving a quadratic equation is part of the process of sharpening the mind...
...But the tempo of the verse never rises above lumbering improvisation...
...A second point on which both writers agree is the place of information in a liberal education...
...Burnett, but alas...
...In what way it is an immolation theologians disagree...
...To Professor Schelling-"My point is that vocational education, so called, is often scarcely educational at all...
...By "practical utility, the most insidious enemy of modern education," Professor Schelling means not that "broad and philosophical outlook which recognizes the ultimate value and potency of all things human by the completeness and success with which each performs its function in life...
...When such names as Chesterton and Belloc in England, Bourget and Claudel in France, Karl Muth in Germany and Sigrid Undset in Norway are among the leaders in modern literature, there is no reason for pessimism as to the state of Catholicism in Europe, while there is much in America of splendid omen for the future of Catholic literature here...
...Professor Whitehead, contemplating the present which contains the timeless past, and opening into a partially determined future, is looking at the whole problem more dispassionately-or better, is looking at an entirely different problem...
...There are limitations to paradox and the Socratic method is best left to Socrates...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...Since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century there has not been, according to Professor Whitehead, any justification for a university as a place merely to impart information...
...An added largeness is contributed to the conception and the execution of Iron Man by the breadth and truth of the idea suggested by the author in the quotation which serves as foreword and thesis of his book: "Shepherd . . . the mair I think on't, the prof ounder is my conviction that the strength of human nature lies either in the highest or the lowest estate of life...
...and an unrelated fact is the lonesomest entity in the universe, like some atom that has strayed beyond the forces of gravitation, tossing in a chaos where there is neither up nor down, right nor left, nor point of compass...
...The question has been complicated by the common opinion that immolation involves destruction...
...Robert P. Tristram Coffin, professor of English at Wells College, is a poet and essayist...
...Whoever was the originator, there can be no doubt of the authority which it has acquired by the continuous approval bestowed upon it by eminent persons...
...William Collins is General Organizer for the American Federation of Labor...
...Harvest...
...Seemingly agreeing, Professor Whitehead says: "It is a libel upon human nature to conceive that zest for life is the product of pedestrian purposes directed toward the narrow routine of material comforts...
...Lindsay working a refrain miles beyond death...
...Iron Man is itself a tragedy...
...But Professor Schelling goes on very much in the spirit of Veblen's Higher Learning in America: "In a word," he says "the measure of the educational value of the humanities lies in their practical inutility...
...Our Lord was slain unjustly by sinners...
...2.50...
...Under the Black Flag...
...Schelling says: "Chronology and statistics are two of the most trifling games that men have ever invented to toss about and juggle the truth withal...
...Fools act on imagination without knowledge...
...With good discipline, it is always possible to pump into the minds of a class a certain quantity of inert knowledge...
...But," continues Professor Whitehead, "Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge...
...pedants act on knowledge without imagination...
...A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence...
...Mary Ellen Chase, professor of English in Smith College, is the author of The Golden Asse and Other Essays...
...That the Catholic writer, says Mr...
...Indeed it is often a case of Mr...
...Ernest Hartsock, editor of Bozart, is the author of Narcissus and Iscariot...
...The Sign of Submission What Is Sacrificial Immolation ?, by J. Brodie Brosnan...
...You cannot postpone its life until you have sharpened it...
...Do not seek repute by astonishing, untested theories which may attract attention peradventure as much to your precipitancy as to your ignorance...
...In my own work at universities," says Professor Whitehead, "I have been much struck by the paralyzing thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized...
...and by asserting that the immolation of the Mass must be as real as the immolation of Calvary...
...From the well-informed men both would flee as from the plague...
...To them the rebuke is well deserved...
...In this case the views are supplementary by virtue of their different emphasis...
...The mood is sentimental...
...The content does matter...
...Professor Whitehead's discussion of the use of the imagination in education and his vigorous and persistent condemnation of inert knowledge furnishes a way out of the problem that Professor Schelling might approve...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...No true lover of the humanities would deny "the value, even the imperative need, that science constitute an integral part of the education of the day...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The objectivity of Mr...
...It runs thus: the mind is an instrument, you first sharpen it, and then use it...
...It is an education in ideas, not for bread, more particularly "that openness of spirit, that quality of disinterestedness, that elevation of thought and that unquenchable faith in high ideals which is the most precious outcome of your sojourn with the humanities...
...The present contains all that there is...
...This intimate union of practice and theory aids both...
...Briefer Mention Every Soul Is a Circus, by Vachel Lindsay...
...This liberal education is in the world of ideas: "What education has to impart is an intimate sense for the power of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of ideas, together with a particular body of knowledge which has peculiar reference to the life of the being possessing it...
...For aught I know, it may have been one of the seven wise men of Greece, or a committee of the whole lot of them...
...whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now...
...The consideration of the other group leads to some of the most vigorous language of condemnation in the book-language with which I heartily agree...
...The Apocrypha...
...1.00...
...It is a powerful opportunity...
...IT IS not difficult to understand why Mr...
...and by so doing he will, from afar and in quite a different manner, be copying the custom of Holy Church, forever trailing the lost sheep...
...yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the true ballad where King Cophetua woos the beggar-maid...
...Grenville Vernon is the author of The Image in the Path...
...Public Administration...
...Margaret McGovern and Marion Canby are new contributors to The Commonweal...
...Grenville Vernon...
...Louis: B. Herder Book Company...
...William C. Murphy, jr., is with the Washington Bureau of the New York World...
...If his theory is correct it not only does away with the difficulty of Eucharistic destruction but also meets the objection that God the Father could not delight in the destruction by death of His Son...
...At least, this is the function which it should perform for society...
...An idle word or a careless jibe may start a trail away from the truth and foster that intolerant attitude of mind which is as hostile to true scholarship as it is to any true religion...
...Henry G. Lamond, an Australian rancher, contributes to the press of that continent...
...Both authors have a feeling for an "immortal contemporaneousness" as Professor Schelling calls it...
...The discussion for the last fifteen years of the so-called "dogma of formal discipline" is neglected and the "via media" of ideals and values is rejected or neglected...
...It is a precarious pedagogic experiment to attempt to teach correct doctrine by a glaring exploitation of its opposite deviation...
...I-35IS THE Eucharistic Sacrifice a real or only a symbolical immolation...
...The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations...
...With the condemnation of the spirit of materialism, of calculation, of mere information, of knowledge in disconnection, one cannot but be in accord...
...Geometry and mechanics, followed by workshop practice, gain that reality without which mathematics is verbiage...
...There is a traditional answer to this question...
...whatever its weight of authority, whatever the high approval which it can quote, I have no hesitation in denouncing it as one of the most fatal, erroneous, and dangerous conceptions ever introduced in the theory of education...
...Theodore Maynard, associate professor of English at Georgetown University is the author of Exile...
...What of the classics...
...The Man with the Gloves Iron Man, by W. R. Burnett...
...One wishes he might become among the young the founder of a school based on the ancient idea and ideal of art as imitation as against the modern and easier cry of art as self-expression...
...You take a text-book and make them learn it...
...David Morton is associate professor of English at Amherst College, and the author of Ships in Harbor...
...Less conscious than that of the latter, perhaps in a sense less artistic, it is nevertheless admirable and the best possible medium for a narrative such as this...
...Nevertheless, the picture of the rotting away of Mable Shingoos, a normal Indian type possessed of good instincts, is accurately if laboriously done...
...That it is an immolation is de fide...
...THE failure of this book is more than usually exasperating...
...Prize-fighters may not to many of us seem the highest type of human beings nor the ring just the setting we might choose for the enacting of a cross-section of human life...
...The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning...
...The death is a sign of inward submission...
...LINDSAY believes in poetry with a kick...
...The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively...
...For Coke Mason, the champion, George Regan, his friend and manager, Jeff Davis and Jim Pappas are big people in spite of their crudeness and illiteracy...
...It is the willingness to be slain that is the real immolation...
...4.00...
...The utilitarian opponents of the humanities and of classical literature are characterized as "those whom the life-sapping blighting of hand-to-mouth utilitarianism has stricken deaf and blind, but unhappily not dumb...
...Admirable too are Mr...
...The State of Catholic Letters The Catholic Church and Current Literature, by George N. Shuster...
...A day of repute or even a nine days' wonder is little to that solid reputation for scholarship which comes only in years as the ripe fruit of honest, modest toil on the basis of character and actual achievement...
...The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present...
...The first group may be treated briefly...
...The laying of unhallowed hands on things which are holy makes little toward godliness...
...Professor Whitehead's whole book is a "protest against dead knowledge" and one may add, dead students and dead teachers...
...Underlying the educational conceptions of both authors is a fine conception of the teacher finely put...
...Edward Hawks is pastor of the Church of Saint Joan of Arc in Philadelphia...
...There is no weakness in a strenuous advocacy of a study of the classics...
...a tragedy of unrequited love, a tragedy of conflicting ideals, of groping, undeveloped perceptions, of outraged simplicity...
...Set beside the Catholic revival in England and France, America cuts a pretty poor figure, but the fact that there are such revivals shows that the fault lies not in the impossibility of a Catholic literary movement in the modern world, but with our own Catholic writers...
...Shuster's book lies in the way he sets forth these conditions, and gives, let us not say the rules, but rather the spirit which must animate the Catholic who desires to write...
...Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now...
...and other books...
...These are differences, as Mr...
...Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts...
...He cannot hold, for instance that good and evil are merely constantly changing terms for what is expedient, and he cannot make compromises with his audience in matters of faith or morals...
...What are educational values in this field or that...
...Says Professor Whitehead "The understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present...
...A higher dignity, too, here invests both characters and action...
...This is doubtless what impelled the editor to assemble them in one volume as an addition to the Library of Living Classics...
...It is not among the privileges of the teacher to be banal or vulgar...
...If to the author's obvious sincerity were added the talents of an Oliver La Farge, we might have known the Ojibways as well after reading this novel as we did the Navajos after reading Laughing Boy...
...2.50...
...Burnett's treatment might happily commend itself to other novelists, young like Mr...
...And if Billy Sunday has made a baseball game out of the old revival meeting, the "Springfield bard" has all the stride of Casey himself and a constant but humble confidence...
...A sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut...
...There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision...
...1 HE Golden Ball, Alice Brown's new full-length play for children, is a fantasy about a little boy and his sister and Tick, the clock, who go off into the world of fairies and dryads to talk the Bad Fairy out of spoiling baby's christening...
...Shuster's exposition of the Catholic position regarding censorship, and his brief survey of the Catholic renaissance in England, France, Germany and Norway...
...Shuster makes no attempt to deny it...
...and The Public Welfare in Freedman's America...
...The intellect does not work best in a vacuum...
...If a priest causes destruction then he acts as a minister of Satan rather than of God...
...Ernest Hemingway...
...What of the new humanities ? What of science ? What of modern language ? What is the aim of education...
...Many are the theories of Eucharistic immolation, all of them pointing to some sort of symbolical destruction...
...Burnett's story is motivated almost entirely by dialogue, and by dialogue which, to one reviewer at least, competes successfully with that of Mr...
...Certain things, which the non-Catholic or rather the agnostic writer has made enormous capital of, the Catholic writer, of course, cannot descend to...
...And what is most praiseworthy is that while Mr...
...The Golden Ball, by Alice Brown...
...But-if one may return to a figure-the present book looks much like a case of Casey's striking out...
...What is the matter with contemporary education...
...He claims to have tradition and Saint Thomas on his side...
...So far, so good...
...and The Book of Modern Catholic Prose...
...In short, upheld by the liturgical life the Catholic writer must go gladly into battle, and must face society with the full realization that with rare exceptions he is a full-fledged member of that society...
...2.50...
...In simpler language, education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well...
...and yet the dignity of an intense realism in characters and setting alike is bound, in these pages at least, to command our admiration...
...Professor Whitehead views askance the "pedantry of dates...
...unlike him in the subjectivity of their methods...
...If there be a person who cannot enjoy The Congo or General Booth Enters Heaven (to date the most ambitious of the Lindsay publications) he deserves a vacation and a housewarming for having been slighted by nature...
...W. R. Burnett's Iron Man is bound to be an absorbing experience, not only because of the story itself but because of the conviction, steadily borne in upon the reader, that the nature of a book matters not a whit providing one is made certain on every page of the fidelity and reality, in other words of the absolute truth of the narrative...
...The few necessary expository and descriptive passages share its straightforward simplicity and do not for a moment stand in its way...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...Precisely because he is a maker of images, governed in the final analysis by the eternal laws of sincerity and honesty, he must mold the clay of life as it is...
...This, then, says the writer, is true sacrificial immolation, the making of something into a holy sign of inward immolation...
...and Golden Falcon...
...Speaking generally, during the last thirty years the schools of England have been sending up to the universities a disheartened crowd of young folk, inoculated against any outbreak of intellectual zeal...
...These are the questions...
...The author has set out to interpret to us the Ojibway Indians of northern Michigan under the influence of modern conditions...
...These simple children of the northwoods, by nature skilled as hunters, fishermen, basket-weavers, timbermen, are decaying physically and morally as white civilization encroaches more and more upon them...
...The contrasts between what they were and what they are now offer epic material...
...Would that more of them could successfully keep out of their stories as he has so refreshingly and assuringly done...
...Certainly, when taken by themselves, they form an interesting collection of narratives worthy of comparison as pure literature with Homer and Herodotus...
...By APOCRYPHA Mr...
...CONTRIBUTORS Don C. Seitz is the author of Joseph Pulitzer, His Life and Letters...
...The Book of Modern Catholic Verse...
...and there is absolute injustice in the denial of the liberalizing capabilities of a study of the sciences liberally conducted...
...What is this liberal spirit in education which has been at the basis of this discussion ? What is, in short, the character of the education which we call liberal ? It is to Professor Whitehead, an essentially imaginative use of knowledge, of "live knowledge...
...edited by Manuel Komroff...
...But Professor Schelling's emphasis is on the past: Professor Whitehead's is on the present...
...The task of a university is to weld together imagination and experience...
...Imagination is lacking in the syle and in the author's insight into Indian life...
...and ignorant zeal in the layman little compensates for the absence of that spirit of restraint, respect and veneration with which the consecrated teacher approaches the temples of knowledge no less than the altars, even of other men's worship...
...Edward A. Fitzpatrick, dean of the Graduate School of Marquette University, is the author of Educational Views and Influence of De Witt Clinton...
...and, most important of all, that when you pursue any study with an ulterior utilitarian end in view, that study is impaired educationally precisely to that extent...
...The fundamental Indian spirit is missing...
...IN A TIME when the spirit, if not the tradition, of a liberal education seems vanishing, or at least is not in accord with the dominant Zeitgeist, it is fortunate to have the subject discussed by two such fine liberal spirits as Professor Felix E. Schelling and Doctor A. N. Whitehead...
...No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present...
...But what is the point of teaching a child to solve a quadratic equation...
...You will find ideas, some of them excellent...
...superficialities are interpreted to us instead of essentials...
...There is a real danger and an actual condition too generally prevalent that Professor Schelling's point of view is likely to result in what Professor Whitehead calls "merely executing intellectual minuets...
...Lovers of Charles Lamb may be found who will echo the same truth from his Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis: "How would it sound in song that a great monarch had declined his affection upon the daughter of a baker...
...The swift action of Mr...
...Against the background of the claim of "new-minted epithets" like "sociology," "criminology," "degeneracy" and "psychiatry," the very word "humanities" looks dim and faded...
...Shuster, "should turn his eyes from the world's sores and see nothing in the universe but middle-class primness-in order to avoid shocking some imaginary schoolgirl-is an assumption too ridiculous to merit attention...
...It is holy ground...
...His latest books are An Attic Room...
...There is positive falsity in the position which some have taken, the attitude of opposition to the study of science...
...What is a liberal education...
...H. O. Peters is an authority on American aviation...
...as would, say, a more deeply-rooted fantasy of the James Stephens type, the action is direct enough and close enough to the ground to be readily intelligible to child actors...
...They have lost the faiths and virtues of primitives, and have acquired little of civilization except a smattering of English, some petty commercial cunning, and a taste for the worst of the white man's pleasures...
...The stimulation of creative impulse requires, especially in the case of a child, the quick transition to practice...
...In the same essay he adds, "The learned and imaginative life is a way of living and is not an article of commerce...
...for it is the past, and it is the future...
...Professor Schelling says he would run away from the well-informed man...
...How can the mere fact of His death be an act pleasing to God...
...Though the play will not appeal to adults (unless their own children appear in it...
...In the Mass, Our Lord so relates the appearances of bread and wine to Himself that not only does He make Himself and His inner sacrifice really present, and declare this to men, but He also gives all, the same outward meaning and efficiency which the Cross gave, and in this Eucharistic manner shows and indicates the Cross...
...and Uncommon Americans...
...The writer of this book cuts the knot by denying that immolation does involve destruction...
...and their inarticulate, fundamental loyalties have not a little in common with-dare we say it?-the nobility of Greek tragedy...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...A truer view is Professor Whitehead's: "The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious...
...and the central figure of her noble little son, Joe Pete, is appealing despite his Horatio Alger characteristics...
...Its bane is "inert ideas," "barren knowledge," "mental dryrot," the "fatal disconnection of subjects," "the crammer...
...Harry McGuire is editor of Outdoor Life...
...Ojibway Romance Joe Pete, by Florence E. McClinchey...
Vol. 11 • March 1930 • No. 18
