The Theory of Education in the United States by Albert Jay Nock

Author:Albert Jay Nock [Jay Nock, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61016-094-0
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
Published: 1932-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

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WE ARE now in a position, probably, to deal with the little problem which we set ourselves awhile ago, and which for convenience we may now restate. Why is it that our post-revolutionary conditions seem no more satisfactory than our pre-revolutionary conditions? We have done everything to our system that ingenuity can devise and that money can pay for; why, then, does it work no better in point of produce than it ever did? What is the meaning of the general chorus of complaint about it, and what are the specific bearings, the “indications,” as the physicians say, of surveys like those of Mr. Learned, Mr. Flexner, and others? Is it not clear that the whole difficulty lies with the theory upon which we are trying to erect a workable system? Is it not clear also that so long as we persist with an unsound theory, we never can, by any exercise of ingenuity, set up a system that will work any better than ours is now working?

I think there can be no doubt about it. Earlier in these Lectures, you may remember, I suggested a comparison between the product of the Continental university and ours. Compare the material resources, the “plant” and equipment, of, say, a French provincial university and one of ours; and then compare the general run of produce. In this year of depression, sixty-five of our institutions report themselves as proposing to spend $62,500,000 on building alone. Looking at a Continental university and at what comes out of it, one may very seriously ask, What for? By comparison with the “plant” which I see around me here at the University of Virginia, the great University of Bonn, which is in the very aristocracy of German universities, looks like a barrack. What would be the emotions of a really up-to-date, live-wire, go-getting American university-president (I venture to use these terms because in this particular connexion they seem to have passed out of the glossary of slang and into conventional good usage) if he were invited to Poitiers or Montpellier and went to take a look around his new domain? Yet see the produce that comes out of Bonn, Poitiers, Montpellier, and then see what comes out of ours!

The root of the matter is, I repeat, that the Continental institution has no false and fantastic conceptions of equality and democracy to which it must conform, and no inflated notion of the social value of a literate citizenry. We in the United States hear a great deal about the “average student,” and his capacities, needs and desires. The Continental institution feels under no obligation to regard the average student as a privileged person. He is there on his own, if he be there at all, and he finds nothing cut to his measure, no organised effort to make things easy and pleasant for him, no special consideration for his deficiencies, his infirmity of purpose, or the amount or quality of intellectual effort that he is capable of making. Equality and democracy enjoin no such responsibility on these institutions.

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