A Mencken Chrestomathy [1949, 1982, 2012] by H. L. Mencken

Author:H. L. Mencken [Mencken, H. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: DCC 814.5
Publisher: Vintage [repr, ebook, kindle]
Published: 1949-06-01T03:00:00+00:00

The Boon of Culture

From the American Mercury, Sept., 1931, pp. 36–48

EVERY American college president, it appears, is in duty bound to write and utter at least one book upon the nature, aims and usufructs of the Higher Education. That responsibility lies upon him as heavily as the obligation to edit at least one edition of “The Deserted Village” lies upon every professor of English. As a rule, he puts it off to his later Autumn days, when the hemlock of senility has begun to dull the edge of his troubles, but he seldom dodges it altogether. I have on my shelves a long row of such books, and I have read all of them in a respectful and hopeful spirit, for I think I may call myself, without vanity, a fan of learned men. But I must add in all honesty that I have yet to find, in any such tome, anything properly describable as wisdom.

What afflicts all of them—or, at all events, all of them that I have collected and read—is the assumption that the chief if not the only end of education is education. This, in the United States, is very far from true. Only a small minority of boys and girls go to college for the purpose of stuffing their heads with knowledge, whether real or false; the majority go there simply because it has come to be the prudent thing to do. What they get out of it is mainly what they will get, later on, out of joining country clubs, Rotary, the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, and other such fraternities—a feeling that they have somehow plunged into the main current of correct American thought, that they have emerged from the undifferentiated mass and gained admittance into an organized and privileged class, that they have ceased to be nobodies and come to be somebodies.

The impulse to make this grade is not to be confused with mere social pushing, which may go on (and usually does) on much lower levels. Nor is it to be confused, on the other hand, with genuine intellectual aspiration. The basic motive is probably a desire for security rather than a yearning for superiority. The virtue of a college degree is that it shuts off the asking of certain kinds of questions, some of them embarrassing. It is a certificate of safety, both to the holder and to the nation in general. A graduate is one who has been trained to act according to a pattern that is publicly considered to be normal and trustworthy. When he gets his diploma he makes a change, not in mere station, but in status. It lifts him over a definite fence, and maketh him to lie down in greener pastures.

Perhaps all of this should have been put into the past tense instead of the present. The general confidence in “education” has greatly multiplied the candidates for it, and this mutiplication has encouraged the proliferation of colleges. They spring up, in fact, in every third

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.