Ballyhoo at St. Johns College - Education in Retreat
HOOK, SIDNEY
Ballyhoo at St. Johns College - Education in Retreat By Sidney Hook NO enterprise in the hiitory of American education has provoked more interact and attention than the new curriculum of St....
...Hutchins had c a l l e d for a c r u s a d e t h a t would bring a b o u t " 0 moral, i n t e l l e c t u a l , and s p i r i t u a l revo l u t i o n t h r o u g h o u t the world...
...The predicaments of present life are partly the result of difficulties of communication wish alien ways and traditions...
...The whole notion that the past is to bo ransacked only to discover the " t r u t h s " It esn bequeath to the present is parochial...
...For if liberal education was so eminently successful in Fifth Century B.C...
...If we study the past for its own sake, we have no guide except the vagaries of personal taste or the enthusiasms of the Dean...
...This brings us to one of the great paradoxes of the St...
...e • UnDER the circumstances one would have expected a certain diffidence and modesty in advancing...
...R o b e r t Hut chins...
...WsAT is the content and subject matter of the S t ,**ys sntthumm T To what extent can it be used to •susses the objectives of a liberal education today ? An ••SanannloBV of the backbone of the curriculum—the enssg-heelm--ahows that it is' predominantly classical - « traditions...
...After a specified time, we would evaluate by appropriate tests, the relative performance of the two groups in respect to the idea or plan under consideration...
...fcat ef two articles ihwtBfijtf the |Jlilir|-M- McL Tko ooeotMl article, • l_mr*—' oavroBfJoa of the ideas ^fJsAshSS* Jo mm arch-opponent net ,0 of •sperimentallam which eritir 1 1 " ' saenter of Hatckiaa ia ^ fayjonmataral religion and tradipai butler and railed for their pargpfc otter oxseiples are Striagfallow lAsral Maratien...
...The only other work by an American bn the list is by William James, "hat justification is offered for this curriculum...
...John's is doing in the practice of the liberal arts was already done successfully on a large scale in Greece and in the medieval university...
...Those who urge us to take as our starting point contemporary problems of experience—whether social, political, intellectual, or if we like the word, s p i r i t u a l - maintain that these provide a focus of relevance to which the study of the past may be intelligently related...
...To understand totalitarianism our students should read not only great books of the past but some bed books of the present, perhaps large parts of Hitler's Melm Asms...
...John's curriculum can be resolved only on one assumption: that the true answers to our problems can be found by assaying the heritage of antiquity and the Middle Ages...
...Can its nature be understood without a social and economic analysis of capitalist society ? Can we come to grips with its rationalizations and achieve clarity in our own minds without some study of the ideas of men like Nietzsche, Hegel, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, Aquinss, Aristotle and Plato, as well as the principles contained in t he papal encyclicals ? What subject can bring home more forcibly the importance of sound ideas on biology, and the logic of evidence...
...In the remaining •ssr of their education, everything from 1739 to the ****** * levered...
...The St...
...The St...
...FEW contemporary problems can...
...If we study the past, not as antiquarians, but for the illumination it throws on the present, for its important truths, for its value as dramatic contrast or support to the values we find in modern experience, we can do no better than to follow the lead of progressive educators who use the focal problems of social life to test the large claims made for tradition...
...Every student ia studying the same subject through the same book at the same time as every other student in his class year...
...However, a sound position may sometimes be defended by bad arguments...
...claims on what has been achieved...
...The books are read in order, the earliest ones first The books are not sampled or perused in part but, so the President of St...
...Part of the reason for this is that the proponents of the plan have insisted that it be taken as a whole or rejected as a whole...
...John's plan are by now familiar to readers of current books and periodicals...
...Without even waiting for the program to get under way, those responsible for it burst upon the world with a barrage of articles and speeches purporting to prove that the St John's curriculum was superior to all others, and that it offered the final solution to our educational problems...
...Catholic educators) enthusiastically support St...
...This is like saying that since the aim ef medicine is to produce health for everybody, if the best diet is known, there is no individual whom it will not fit, and each should have all of it...
...If it were, it would betoken a woeful lack of understanding of the nature of scientific method which it is one of the aims of the curriculum to impart...
...They indicate to what points in the limitless past we can significantly run back our intellectual lines, what to select for detailed study out of its inexhaustible material, what to stress and, since something must be ignored in any case, what to intelligently ignore...
...An Barr, President of S t John's, and Mark Van Dor en, est*1 The crusade by Hntchins and his group far revebthsi This ia readily underetandable...
...Grant that the proper study of a liberal artr program should be man and the world...
...Their retreat, on the educational |s»j ia another aeries of articles in the "Partlsaa Review" ks»J Profeaaor Hook peaea here the crucial issue...
...It illustrates that facile use of oversimple disjunctions that betrays the fanatical and illliberal mind...
...Their only major criticism is that i t does not explicitly teach the truth faith, but permits questioning and a l lows students, if they are not convinced, freedom to doubt They herald it as the best kind of liberal education that can be expected In a non-Catholic college...
...J o h n ' s Colleoe...
...All of the assumptions behind this easy dichotomy are false...
...Differences in the needs, background and capacities of those who are at all educable point not to the necessity of a tailor-made curriculum in the early years of college but to the wisdom of adopting different techniques of instruction, specialized assignments, and projects of graded difficulty to students of different powers...
...Their one indisputable merit is to have shocked educators snd intelligent laymen into an awareness of the acute importance of educational issues...
...John's is not an "experiment" in education...
...Its more fruitful use, as In literature and art, where the past Is not relevant to present-day social problems er program* of action, ia the ever present occasion it offers for the enlargement of mesnlngs and the cultivation of the imagination...
...John's almost to a man...
...There is a curious inconsistency in this last claim when taken together with the assertion that the state of society depends in the main upon the state of liberal education...
...John's College la la the an of Robert M. Hutehlna, President of the University af { only of current American educational practices bat at aw risen them from n humanistic and scientific point ef vise,' Mortimer Adlar...
...The writings of all the spokesmen for St...
...But, tken, why ttudy Greek man and not American mant •As distinct from orthodox Thomists they do not believe that these truths, even of faith, should be indoctrinated but critically examined...
...The study of present-day materials is mandatory to make the historical excursions fruitful...
...John's list The aesthetic sensibilities of the architects of the program agree with those of Mr...
...The St...
...For all of their love of the classical tradition and the medieval synthesis, the organizing spirits behind this new program have not hesitated to use every device of publicity and salesmanship—so characteristic of the modem world they deplore—to put their ideas across...
...For whatever the alleged advantages of a curriculum organized around the materials of the past, they can also be won by an intelligent analysis of modern culture...
...Sorokin, one of its great admirers, who finds nothing in modern art and literature of any worth...
...The Catalogue of S t John's College explicitly states that the proper object of the liberal arts is "man and the world...
...be adequately grasped without exploring the causal and ideational lines that radiate from them to the events and ideas of the past...
...1. The main features of the St...
...The curriculum is identical for everybody...
...This has often been done to determine the relative merits of educational projects...
...All affirm that this happy union of powers, skills and knowledge will enable the student to understand himself, his cultural heritage, and the world he lives in—an understanding which is the prerequisite of intelligent and responsible action...
...It is designed not for precocious or superior students only, but for the average run of students whose capacities fit the normal curve of distribution...
...It is open to fifteen-year-olds who have corn* pleted the second year of high school...
...The t e a c h e r s do not want to b o committ e d to M y particular philosophical dogma...
...Merely a bare handful of students had completed -the curriculum in 1941 when the draft and the war began to play ducks and drakes with the program...
...Grant for the moment that there are perennial problems and even truths...
...Athens snd in thirteenth century Europe, the disastrous crises and bitter wars during those periods, so reminiscent of our own times, would be hard to explain...
...John's show clearly that they accept the view that man has an essential nature which cannot change and thst the truth about man, as distinct from opinion, consists in knowledge of his essential nature and what logically follows from it...
...Only two books of the twentieth ••Story are read, both in higher mathematics, and •ssellv studied by specialists in the graduate schools •'snivelallies...
...And for s very good reason—from the point of view of those who have devised its curriculum...
...Bat the steps thnt have been taken to remedy them have not ¦'artisans of the St Johns curriculum write as if the elective system in our eollogea is the result of progressive education, as if any prescription is incompatible with its philosophy, and as if all colleges operate with an unrestricted elective system with no common core of required studies...
...To Be Concluded) Ins—proponents of o p p o s i t e educotionol c o n c e p t s . The Old Man r e p r e - s o n t l p r o g r e s s i v e idea*, the young Mo* r e t r e a t s info medievalism...
...Their behavior has been consistent with their belief...
...What subject matter, if any, should be prescribed for all students T By what methods should it be taught...
...It is essential'to understand at the outset that the new curriculum at St...
...John's curriculum, forty-seven are devoted to social and cultural problems of the past...
...He has denounced professors whs 4s sj tional metaphysics aa more dangerous to Americas osssaa lag Adler is a leading propagandist for St...
...This paradox in the St...
...It is necessary, therefore, to examine this program in its own terms...
...ef Philosophy at Waahing- ] ag ether books, of "The Metaphysics of Pragmatism...
...It is obviously no more true than the statement that the S t John's curriculum is completely sunk in the worship of the past, and t h a t it has been devised by reactionaries palsied by f e a r of the p r e s e n t Exclusive absorption in the past or the present is impossible...
...At a p r e c e d e n t - b r e a k i n g meeting the f a c u I t y a p p e a l e d to the board of trustees to Intervene...
...John's program was launched in 1937 with only twenty students enrolled...
...From the truth that medicine has a common sni tor everybody it does not follow that there is a easunen means of achieving i t independently of whether a person has diabetes or leukemia, is thin or fat...
...It avoids holding them all to one dead level of uniformity, low or high, easy or hard...
...Once a week the entire college attends in a body a formal lecture on some topic that may or may not be connected with their reading...
...Not ancient man and the ancient world, nor modern man and the modern world but simply "man and the world...
...All of them are firmly convinced that ths classic tradition should constitute the substance of college studies because it is a great storehouse of truths which provide answers to the perennial problems of human life and destiny.* » * » LtEAVE the dubious metaphysics aside...
...And they have largely succeeded...
...The elective system in college was introduced many years before progressive education made any headway, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Its central theories...
...Since men art men, no matter where they art, the philosophers of St John't probably feel that if they know Greek man, they know all men...
...It is based upon an argument from certain assumptions, and on the claim that what St...
...The Association has not been able to act on St John's because, until now, it has not produced enough material to assess...
...Mark Van Doren, who has just published a book in defence of the S t John's program, writes: "If liberal education is, i t is the same for everybody...
...John's plan...
...There are no books " Assarican history except the Federalist Papers and «W Ce**t»torttoM of the United States to which a few • • • k s r a are devoted...
...They believe that the superiority of the St...
...Shall « direction of ear economic order, fascism, race ertjaokt, them democratic values, scientific method snd tbt fcatoh from these problems and the study of present d s j ssehty ancient problems will yield eternal truths that srs sals] The New Leader believes that these srticles by Pnjta enlnm, are among the most important srticles it has prists...
...On the college level, progressive education takes its point of departure not only from the objective needs and capacities of different individuals but from the declared aims of a liberal education...
...The great books are studied in various ways...
...John's College at Annapolis, Maryland...
...No detailed analysis has been made of the actual program and its relation to the declared objectives of the new curriculum...
...The objective needs of the individual, when considered In relation to the society of which he is a member, are such that the study of some subjects is clearly indicated as essential to intelligent living, no matter what his later professional interests may be...
...Barr, Buchanan and Hutchins are saying is that the social . problems of Graeco-Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance culture—out of which many of the great classics were born—are worth studying but not the social problems of the twentieth century...
...Since the majority of liberal arts colleges do not conduct high pressure publicity campaigns about their course of study, the advocates of the S t John's curriculum seem to feel quite safe in making the most outrageously inaccurate statements about what is actually going on in other institutions...
...But out of the hundred books, which make up the St...
...It attempts to discover through intelligent guidancs what course of study will best enable this particular student to achieve the most of what a liberal education strives to impart to all students...
...But could not the striking expressions of difference and conflict between nations and races today also be taken as subject matter for training of the imagination ? Our world today is a world of different contemporary cultures...
...The phrasing of the ends of a liberal education variea from one college bulletin to another but the variations are pretty much on the same theme...
...John's curriculum is predominantly concerned with the materials of the past organized in one central tradition that moves into the present...
...An experiment is an organised procedure designed to test an hypothesis, about which we are in doubt, by observation of the results...
...Or shall our schools retrest Mtaawyskal pedagogy which believes thst the study of eaBtaueT ssa, the I r s t full critical analysia of the St...
...s consider tradition first The charge that those *» disagree with the S t John's curriculum are decs decsdent liberals who have no place for tradition need n e t detain us long...
...The curriculum which opposes it is centered around the great problems of present-day culture and studies the traditions that are rslevant to these problems...
...Discussion has taken the form of outright total acceptance or outright total rejection...
...They therefore none the problem ia a way to suggest that ear choice is limited between a program m which everything is to be prescribed for everybody and one hi which nothing ia te be prescribed for anybody...
...It has conspicuously not been done at St...
...The defects of the elective system in curreat education have long been recognised...
...John's has suffered serious looses la students and faculty...
...John's program ean assure us of a good society...
...Although this may be good strategy for purposes of propaganda and conversion, it does not make for clarification...
...An overwhelming majority of the f a c u l t y members of t h e U n i v e r s i t y of C h i c a g o p r o t e s t e d against t h e threat to a c a d e m i c freedom Implicit In the one-man ml* of t h a t i n s t i t u t i o n b y Dr...
...The few critics of the St John's program—whose voices have hardly reached the public—have contented themselves with a criticism of the metaphysics of its founders...
...But it is not only to the past we must go...
...alssnKuas the fundamental question of our time—the r f a Mueaar« impact ef technology—bringing to bear on ad experience of the past...
...But not a single work in the imaginative literature of the last seventy years, ia poetry, drama or the novel, is on the St...
...f i n a l ly that this curriculum in conjunction with the ••thods employed in its study is better able to evoke <"1*1 a n d m * t u r ' t y i n "tudents, which accepted as the aims of a liberal education, sny other curriculum and set of methods...
...From Hegel tt I Possibility...
...They might with profit study Germany's cultural aad economic life since 19SS, read Stella's new constitution snd examine differential wage rates in the Soviet Union, examine the Lateran Treaty between Mussolini and the Church, see selected moving pictures snd plays, even pore over old newspapers—all as s directed part of their atudy, and all taboo on the St...
...The problems of unemployment are a proper subject of liberal arts study only if they bear on the decline of the Roman Empire...
...It is a monstrous pedagogic error on the Bart of the S t John's educators to regard the study ef present-day materials as irrelevant to proper liberal education...
...We • j * told that it, and i t alone, fulfills the requirements " t h e "proper" subject matter of the liberal arts, to J* * • "tudy of "man and the world...
...John's assures us, are read from cover to cover...
...The books are read in translation but some sections of the Greek classics are studied in the original for a little more than a year...
...I ';sad "The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and...
...In fact, most liberal arts colleges that reflect the philosophy of progressive education require almost a solid two years of prescription in certain fields of knowledge in order to assemble the data on the basis of which students sre permitted, under proper guidance, to concentrate in John Dewey versus Robert Hatch-special disciplinea...
...pl ftarsat haa found a wide hearing, rift eaatrete eodal and economic problems of our day— m tj Ier aeeurity to the absolutes of a safe and com ,Jje»r~*1 ' of what Professors Dewey, Hook snd Nagel 4 The New Failure of Nerve...
...Quite commendable is the use the program makes of the literature of antiquity to develop imagination...
...John's program would still be educationally unsound...
...Greek is the only foreign language taught, and after the first year the language tutorial consists of a more detailed study of some English translations of other books on the list A liberal arts curriculum may be evaluated in two ways—by its aims and by its success in achieving ita aims...
...Not a single book on or about or since t*s First World War is on the list...
...The question we must now explore is whether the St John's curriculum is better able to realize the aims of a liberal arts education than other curriculum...
...Why, indeed, should a liberal arts college prescribe an identical course of study for four years for everybody independently of prior preparation and varying capacities, interests and special needs as these are revealed in the processes of instruction ? The argument most often advanced for it contains a palpable fallacy...
...Jeha'a...
...The aims of the St- John's curriculum are for...
...The intelligent procedure would be to select two groups of students, more or less equally matched in intelligence and preparation, and submit one group to the first curriculum and one to the second...
...There is literally a world of difference between these • H I i H i l i u m * . Here is where the shooting begins...
...Leading spokesmen of its philosophy have gone even further...
...Why cannot they emerge from s consideration of the important issues of our age...
...John's, who acts as the Fuller brush man of the . institution, maintained a few months ago that six yean of experience with its curriculum "have convinced us that St John's may serve as a modal for the reorganization of liberal education in the United States...
...The heart of the curriculum consists in the study of a hundred great books which, in the eyes of those who have devised the curriculum, constitute the grand classicsl tradition in Western thought...
...This in feet is the hidden assumption in the philosophy underlying ft John's...
...Soma colleges, as distinct from St John's, include vocational and pre-professional training...
...Since 1941, like other colleges, St...
...The logical lapses in the writings of the inspirers of the St...
...The enormous differential gain in the latter approach is that the knowledge and valuea which emerge from inquiries into the massive and dramatic problems of our times have a definite relevance to the perennial task of making life better here and now...
...John't amaVsts have reached at the furthest point in their a. eoofc published in 17S9...
...On the other hand, if we assume that we already are in possession of eternal truths that need only be applied to the present, we are likely to overlook what Is distinctive in our own times...
...All assert that they therefore strive to develop in the student the powers of critical thought and disciplined imagination, to impart mastery of basic intellectual skills, and to give him an intimate familiarity with important bodies of knowledge...
...All declare their justifying purpose to be the education of intelligent and responsible citisens in the democratic community...
...John's rurri- I r today ia the educational world the battles are being 1 • tns social snd political arenas of the next decade...
...Nothing is more contemporary than presentday totalitarianism...
...This conviction is obviously not based upon the results of the truncated and incomplete experience of a few years at St...
...Is not imaginative sympathy with the problems end experience of the Chinese and Hindus, with whom we must desl tomorrow, just as important aa Imaginative grasp of the agonies of early Greek, late Roman and sixteenth century Italian societyf Yet net a single work of any non-Western culture it on ths lilt...
...fought oat which will take more powerful and drasutic f Profeaaor Hook ia a distinguished philosopher sad el ton Square College, New York University, and tat talks "Reason, Social Mytha and Democracy...
...In justifying the exclusion from the program of the study of the great social and cultural problems of our time, its administrators write: "Social studies at present do not provide an intelligible set of organizing principles...
...Chairman ef the Dept...
...At the end of the third year, St...
...Far from being artificial, as the St...
...They have contended that the cultural and social crisis of our times is a direct consequence of our faulty educational system and that only its radical transformation along the lines of the St...
...molly identical with the declared aims of other liberal arts colleges in the country...
...John's program has been acclaimed as a sure euro for our major* educational ills...
...Hutchins has boon associated with the educational concepts Ident i f i ed with St...
...In small seminars meeting twice a week, in daily tutorials in language and mathematics, and in laboratories where the student familiarizes himself with the instruments and experiments related to the scientific classics on the list...
...John's College admits that it is not on the approved list of the Middle' States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, the accrediting agency which operates in its region, whose imprimatur is withheld until certain minimum conditions have been met...
...Architecture, housing and politics warrant attention if only they can be related to the life and problems of the Greek city-slate...
...John's...
...There is a natural bias to discount the evidence showing that propositions believed eternally true are actually falae or have only a limited historical validity...
...The best type of experiment is checked by a control...
...John's program may not be relevant to its content...
...THIS artfcle "Ballyhoo at St Johns" by Binaey I * * , highly publicised "edaratioaal reforms" ef S t JeWsOka next week, will dJneoas "Groat Books in Educative," The MW curriculum of St...
...The creative sterility of modern adherents of great systems of past thought is in part due to their failure to dip into the fresh seas of contemporary experience to test and amplify their stock of "eternal truths...
...It has yet to graduate a normal class...
...John's program can be demonstrated bg argument, and that the conclusions of such demonstration are more certain and reliable than the merely probable findings of a controlled experiment...
...For instead of eenuag tjd which are a t the root of the crisis in contemporary eand fortable tradition...
...John's educators assert, these problems are so much alive that it is only by reference to them that we can tell which traditions are living and which are dead...
...John's College...
...In books and radio broadcasts, in editorials and news stories, in effusions of columnists and in articles of academic journals, the St...
...In effect, what Messrs...
...This has not prevented some ~? John's educators from joining the hue and cry •ffsinst other colleges for not teaching enough Amer**n history...
...John's classical curriculum...
...Since there is no experimental evidence at hand, we shall attempt to answer the question in the light of whstever is already known about the educational process, about similar educational curriculum* in the past, and about established weaknesses and virtues in alternative curriculums in the present The analysis will center around two issues...
...This tradition is accepted as our best support in facing the uncertainties of the modern world...
...Nonetheless, the President of St...
...Only two books published in the twentieth century are on the list—both in mathematics...
...In medicine an argument of this kind is an unfailing mark of • ana ok...
...The St...
...John's curriculum is an all prescribed four-year program of study...
...What is eternally true must be true at any time...
...The most recent Catalogue of St...
...Suppose we believed that a certain educational curriculum was better designed to achieve desirable results than an alternative curriculum...
...Every curriculum is a blend of the past and present The real issue is always the relative emphasis they should receive in instruction, and how tradition is to be used...
...It draws from both the past and present in order to provide building material for the creation of a new tradition, continuous with what is best in the old, one that enables us to meet our uncertainties with intelligent action rather than with pious resignation...
...Further, that Si**0 Hi alone, supplies the great tradition of the /V"" World whose "ghost frightens decadent 11b•*»»» who would have us get along without tradition...
...the training it requires, in addition to being formal, should be aosasganaouii through four years—if the best is known, taste fa) no student whom i t will not fit, and each should ban all of i f What this saya is that if we know what the end of education should be, then the means in every case must be the same no matter how different the individuals whom we are to educate...
Vol. 27 • May 1944 • No. 22
