Horace Meyer Kallen

“ They are false to the students, false to the social purpose which nourishes them, false to the inward nature of education itself. They are false because they are irrelevant. And they are irrelevant because they are for the most part unabsorbed survivals from a pre-industrial past in an industrial age.
“Though education is customarily described as ‘preparation for life’, the ways and works of high schools and colleges are so irrelevant to ‘life’ that their prime achievement remains perforce the prolongation of infancy. They make adulthood harder to reach, not easier.” ”

“ College sits in excelsis. The topmost turn of the educational system, it sets the standards and defines the ideal both of knowledge and conduct. Secondary-school students consequently prepare for college in a far completer way than is recognized. They emulate and reproduce the whole pattern and structure of “college life,” with its fraternities and other societies, its athletics, its hidden sex interests, and all the rest. ”

“ Obviously the searching of the heart concerning the values of a college education does not reach to the essentials of the academic tradition. The ancient notions remain ineffable and inviolable. They presume that students exist for the sake of the school, not the school for the sake of the students. ”

“ Among primitive people, adulthood is initiated by puberty and established and confirmed by means of certain cruel and terrifying rites through which boys and girls are inducted into the society of men and women. Of these rites there survives among us today only that form of sadism and schadenfreude known as hazing, practiced by upperclassmen on newcomers and by fraternity brothers on neophytes. In the school tradition these cruelties are meaningless, but in the rites of the primitive they compose a part, perhaps a major part, of all the formal direct “education” the young savage ever gets. ”

“ I am taught a multitude of subjects, but I am not taught how to apply them so that I will be able to make a success of myself in my struggle for and with life. Life so far as I have viewed it is rose-colored, mellow and delightful, but I know that life is far different than I see it at present. ”

“ In essence, the secondary and tertiary academic establishments impose a double life on the students that enter them. One life is defined by the so-called “serious purpose” of the higher education: the course of study, the examination, the diplomas, the degrees. The other life is defined by the psychological traits, the wants and the frustrations of young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. One life is the life of the classroom. ”

“ For, as the New York boy found already in high school, the curriculum offers him no momentous living option. The subject matter is irrelevant to all that is dynamic in him, it lacks vital links with both the passions of his heart and the actual world where, after college, he must live and move and have his being. It is presented mostly by persons to whom teaching is as much a disagreeable penalty for the amenities of “scholarly” life as learning is to the student for the amenities of college life. ”

“ He in the main realizes that the child requires and somehow receives absorbed attention in extreme infancy. Past that stage, he leaves it more and more to itself. All that he asks of it is to make itself as little troublesome and as largely convenient as possible. For the rest, it is out on the street to grow its way into adulthood for itself, troubled by only occasional irruptions of disciplinary or exploitative parental interest, and by admonitions from the cop on the beat.
To the socially-minded part of the community this is a dangerous situation. They fear disease and crime. ”

“ A dog will reach adulthood in about a year. A human infant takes from eleven to fifteen years, if we mean by adulthood what constitutes it biologically—namely, sexual maturity. Birds and animals are ready and able to fend for themselves some time before sexual maturity sets in, and data are not lacking in the record that manchildren—like Russia’s bezprizorny or waifs—also can if need presses. But for all species alike, puberty sets a term. It is the very latest season for the young to leave the parental nest, to live their own lives and build their own nests for themselves. ”

“ As a community of consumers merely, a student body is no more homogeneous than a community of producers. Within the frame of similarity generated by the condition of dependence there exist both the formal academic gradations dividing year and year as rank and rank, and the non-academic but “collegiate” gradations of caste and class, interest and attitude. Every college, for example, has its tiny liberal group, its sparse collection of students [24] who trouble themselves with social problems, international relations, disarmament, and the like. ”

“ Physiological maturity comes as an instinctive ripening, in the course of nature. Social adulthood is a learned mode of behavior in the social environment; a system of habits acquired, not a state of the body grown into. This is why bodies may grow up and grow old while minds and hearts remain infantile. And this is why adulthood cannot be learned in colleges as they are any more than swimming can be learned on dry land; the medium is too different, too alien. ”

“ At puberty they leave school and go to work like their fathers before them, and it is not long until they are entirely on their own, and found families and repeat the cycle again like their fathers. If the practice of society carries their social infancy over into their physiological maturity, it does not do so for very long. In essentials they enter into the heritage, such as it is, of adulthood, while custom compels the young of the privileged residual population to remain in personal and social swaddling clothes. ”

“ Another is the correlated growth of population, cities, and natural resources: the dropsical school systems, public and private, are by-products of this increase. In a century the wealth of the United States has multiplied by inconceivable ratios. Even in 1932, at the very trough of a signal deflation, national wealth and income must be stated in figures that have no empirical living meaning. They are merely symbols of indefinitely extending power—manpower and machine-power; and of the organization of this power in dynamic patterns that constitute a social economy. ”

“ But so long as colleges are managed as they are managed, and college teaching continues as and what it is, it is impossible that students should not be, in one form or another, collegiate—that is, adults conducting themselves like children. For social adulthood consists in self-support and self-management, in moral responsibility and intellectual integrity. ”

“ In spite of the business-cycle, in spite of unemployment, social waste, and all the rest of the major evils of industrial civilization, its individual citizens are better fed, better housed, in better health, and have better times than their pre-industrial ancestors. Their average expectation of life has increased from forty-seven years to fifty-eight. The society they compose is physiologically more adult, more aged, than the society of their forbears. ”

“ Nevertheless the difference between the working young and the young at school remains still the difference between the responsibility of adulthood and the irresponsibility of infancy. The difference increases with the income level. The richer the class, the more likely are the young to be kept in a state of social infancy, the longer is the time delayed when they are permitted to assume the responsibilities of adulthood.
The secondary school and the college are by tradition and practice instruments pat to the social postponement of adulthood and the prolongation of social infancy. ”

“ Yet Jews are the exception that prove the rule. Between 1920 and 1930, the tradition of a love of learning which they brought to college has been dissipated. The adult responsibility which they felt for the problems of their own people and of the community at large, and which was signalized by their membership in such organizations as the Menorah Societies, the Zionist, the Liberal, or the Social Questions Clubs, has been destroyed. As their numbers grew, their fields of interest and modes of behavior conformed more and more to the prevailing conventions of undergraduate life. ”

“ None of life’s sorrows, pains or struggles have been my lot to embitter and mature my ambitious mind. I have been led to regard life as a nut that must be cracked to succeed, not as a long hard swim with the odds becoming greater against you every [20] moment and if you stop struggling you sink and are gone. ”

“ For tax gatherers and armies, as for religious sects, adulthood and sexual readiness lie close together.
And this readiness is recognized in women by custom and law, which set the “age of consent” at puberty and raise it nowhere beyond sixteen. Moreover the readiness finds its purpose more largely than we imagine in marriage. The United States census of 1920 shows that nearly a quarter of all young people from fifteen to twenty-four were married, and the proportion has not grown less since then. Nor are these marriages confined to the poor. ”

“ The immense national wealth makes this possible and easy; it enables the upkeep and expansion of an educational system whose per capita cost is greater than that of any other country in the world. Whether any connection obtains between these superiorities and the fact that Americans also enjoy a corresponding superiority in juvenile delinquency and crime I cannot say. The paradox is the more interesting because, as schoolmen are likely to boast, the school is often used by the child as a refuge from home and the street, as a place of sanctuary and safety. ”

“ By and large, only those children enter high school who do not need to work for a living. They enter about the time that children of the residual world enter life, at puberty. Their attending high school signalizes an invidious distinction between them and their contemporaries, [18] for the high school has been from its beginning a mark of “aristocracy.” Even the “commercial” high school, which is yet of low esteem beside the high school preparing for college, celebrates this invidious distinction. ”

“ Puberty is the time arranged for the young of the evangelical sects to be convicted of sin, to enter into grace, and to join the church. Puberty is the time when secularized Jews celebrate Bar Mitzvah as a merely religious event. In the definition of adulthood, the churches are at one with the ancients.
Almost equally so are the military establishments of states. Military duty comes at a much earlier age than civil responsibility. Modern industrial nations continue to conscript their young at from sixteen to eighteen. ”

“ But if a new “inherent right” has been born into the world, if undergraduate life is in conflict with the “serious purpose” of higher education, the causes thereof are better understood and faced than ignored or belittled. For they are constant causes, and their scope and intensity do not lessen with the days. Though the colleges remain tangent to the realities, they have been far from untouched.... ”

“ So, among the primitives and the ancients, physiological maturity was the occasion for signalizing and establishing social responsibility, of entering into adulthood. This is still the case among the churches. Ecclesiastical citizenship is reached at puberty. Puberty is the time when Catholic boys and girls are initiated by the priests into the mystery of salvation and are endowed with the responsibilities of the adult members of the religious community. ”

“ Instead of getting the job he believes his degree entitles him to, he finds himself a superfluity in the labor market. Employers are likely to speak of him as bumptious, immature, undeveloped, a cub. He finds, even for the simplest tasks, either that he must unlearn what he has learned, or, if he is lucky, that he has no training at all. He begins to regret his college life and to consider that college has failed him. ”

“ The ways of an undergraduate community are determined by standards which do not apply to men and women of the same age who must work for their livings. For example, there survives from the Middle Ages an antagonism between gown and town. When this began it involved all the members of the academic community—faculty even more than students. ”

“ Of these realities, one is the constant, if obstructed, drive toward democracy, based on the dogma of natural rights which animated the wars and works of the founding fathers: free public education is a primary, if abated, attainment of this drive. ”

“ College or university became a city within a city, sovereign over all affairs affecting it, and privileged in the national life. Today, faculty is for practical purposes a part of “town.” “Gown” consists only of the body of undergraduates. These often stand in a predatory relationship to the residual community. They may steal signs, fences, garments, and whatnot; they may destroy dishes, furniture, and other property not their own—academic or lay ”

“ Personal distinction also seems to go with the assumption of adulthood soon after puberty. Whether this is attained through some special attitude or general ability enchannelled by custom, opportunity, or accident in a particular vocation, makes little difference. Poets, painters, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, traders of distinction, assume the professional attitude and the responsibility of adulthood at an early age. ”

“ Thus, between 1900 and 1930 the high school population has multiplied ten-fold; the total number of pupils today is between five and six million. And more than a million young men and women are enrolled in the colleges and universities. High school and college are considered “advantages,” and the essence of the advantage is a social infantilism imposed upon a biological maturity. ”