Education: The Study of Mannikins

What U.S. education needs, says President Gordon Keith Chalmers of Ohio’s Kenyon College, is a complete “reversal of thinking.” In the swelling chorus of educators now trying to define the aims of education, Chalmers’ voice is clear and strong in a new book called The Republic and the Person (Regnery; $4).

Until World War II, says Chalmers, U.S. thinking in general was hopelessly adrift. It had degenerated into a superficial sentimentalism, dominated “by wishes which were taken for facts” and by “the widespread conviction . . . that evil does not really exist in individuals, but arises only because of bad arrangements among them.” In their blind pursuit of objectivity, scholars had become as indifferent to values as scientists, and semanticists had concluded that “ideas behind words are so varying and inconstant that all we really have left at any time is names.” All in all, it was the era of the abolished absolute: men had forgotten that “what has really made possible the liberty of the individual has been not only its root in truth but the constancy of human agreement about the relation of men to God, right and wrong, good and evil.”

History & Homemaking. In the ’30s and early ’40s, says Chalmers, “the presiding ideas in school and university were of a piece with [such] sentimentalism . . . Critical judgment and the will were already in eclipse.” Teachers thought of education in terms of group attitudes; they thought of good as “preeminently a social matter.” Thus, education itself became a matter of social adjustment—a theory that homemaking is just as important as history.

Today U.S. education is still trudging along on its sentimental journey. It has not only become stereotyped through its neglect of disciplines (“One might say we have improved on Pope: ‘The proper study of mankind is mannikins’ “), it has also substituted means for ends and perverted the study of man into the study of “the Behavior of Man as a Social Animal.” The key word in school and society is now “welfare,” and the general belief is that students “are to be taught the functions of modern society and how to function in it.” Says Gordon Chalmers: “A cynical view indeed! The cynicism lies here: that the mass must be ‘conditioned,’ its ‘attitude’ molded.”

Gigantic Inquiry. U.S. education’s only salvation, Chalmers believes, is to return to the study of man, to face up once again to the “gigantic inquiry taken from the Old Testament: ‘What is man that Thou art mindful of him?’ . . . The immediate responsibility of American education to the United States and to human freedom is to equip the young with the ability and the disposition to think about the twofold proposition that the individual is valuable and within himself subject to law. The critical establishment of this dual statement, over which the whole world is now officially divided, entails at its center the study of history, poetry and philosophy.”

These three subjects are closely woven together. Though history provides the evidence of the human experience, poetry (i.e., literature) and philosophy provide understanding and meaning. Poetry “equips us to reason about history and to see the well-perceived person, place, or event, not from the point of view of our own times or of our party or of the age under consideration, but from history’s own point of view, which is human . . . Philosophy cultivates the skill of examining. It leads the student to theorize . . . Like letters and history, philosophy is a skill as well as a corpus of experience . . .”

With these skills, students can begin to understand man viewed “from within.” After that can come the study of externals —of social science (the study of groups, laws, customs, etc.) and of natural science, the “law for thing.” But these must never be the core, for taken alone they can actually become a menace. “To the student who knows nothing but social science, man is known only by his function or participation in the group. If a man himself is most notable because he is a member of a social institution, no matter how exalted the institution, he is already a slave.”

When properly taught, says Chalmers, the study of man will end not only in the understanding of the moral law. It will also end in faith—the faith that “unpredictable though we are, given to failure and even to evil, there is something in us which has proved abiding; that though lower than the angels, we also are higher than the beasts; and that the elements of manhood discoverable in our own nature, for all its variety and contrariness, are rather admirable than the reverse. This is the common faith, and for each student reasoning and seeing, there is also the faith that manhood in its fullness is available to him.”