Quantity and Quality in American Education

A fine masterpiece by Brand Blanshard, written about half a century back.

Americans have acquired a habit that, so far as I know, is theirs uniquely, of grateful and persistent giving to the colleges that nursed them.

We live in better days. Wherever the traveler goes in America, the evidences of public care for education strikes his eye.

The business of the state, said the philosopher Bosanquet, is not to produce the good life, which it cannot do, but to hinder the hindrances to the good life.

If the good life is to be lived with any fullness, it normally needs health of body and training of mind, and these things call for that unfortunate crass necessity, money. Here quality is more dependent on quantity than we may wish to think Sir Arthur Queller-Couch, after listing a dozen of the great poets of the last century, points out that nine of these were university men, with the background of means that this implies, and that of the remaining three, Browning was the son of a prosperous banker, Rosetti had a private income, and Keats, the only one without any sort of backing, died, broken with the struggle, at 25.

When quality is set over against quantity, two different things may be meant by quality. One is quality as such, as opposed to quantity as such. The other is higher quality as opposed to lower quality.

Plain men did not know what to make of the strange little German dominie and his bizarre announcement that we were living in a new world which was governed by the formula E = mc2, but when, aided by the magic of such formulas, there began to issue from the laboratories packets that could blast whole cities in a moment, they could only bow to a magic they could not in the least understand.

Have you noticed, again, how advertisers are aping the quantitative exactness of the scientists, whether it makes sense or not; we are assured that a soap will eliminate so many per cent more bacteria; I learned recently, as I listened to my radio, that if I used a new shampoo, the brightness of my hair would be increased up to 35 per cent.

We find every sort of cause or product urged upon us in language that seeks to borrow prestige from its use in physical science; and imitation is the sincerest flattery.

If we happen to want bright hair or red hair or curly hair, he can help us (though unfortunately not if what we want is just hair); but if we want to know whether it is of any importance to have one kind of hair or another, if we want to know what is worth reading, or feeling, or doing, if we want to know about the ends of life as opposed to the means, we find him silent. He is not only silent; he is deliberately and even ostentatiously silent.

This tendency to draw a sharp line between fact and value and to insist that knowledge or intelligence, identified with scientific method, has no concern with value, has been fortified by recent changes in the philosophy of science.

[Judgements] are expressions of the nonrational part of our nature.

When you call anything good or bad, the reflective man may interest himself in the cause or effect of your thus exploding into speech, but to consider whether your remark is true or not is to mistake the business of intelligence.

When you call anything good or bad, the reflective man may interest himself in the cause or effect of your thus exploding into speech, but to consider whether your remark is true or not is to mistake the business of intelligence.

The realm of values is bundled up by the scientists and other custodians of knowledge and left like an unwanted child on the doorstep for some passer-by to pick up.

Plato says: “It is not the life of knowledge, not even if it included all the sciences, that creates happiness and well-being, but a single branch of knowledge—the science of good and evil. If you exclude this from the other branches, medicine will be equally able to give us health, and shoemaking shoes, and weaving clothes. Seamanship will still save life at sea and strategy win battles. But without the knowledge of good and evil, the use and excellence of these sciences will be found to have failed us.”

The fact is that the measurable things of the world—its dollars and ships and refrigerators—are of value only as they contribute to nonmeasurable things, such as justice and happiness and love and poetry and laughter. In the end the usefulness of useful things lies in the help they give us in getting these useless things.

That is a vicious circle, education for gadgets, for education, and how is one to escape from it? Not by crying out that things are in the saddle and ride mankind, or trying to live like Gandhi or Thoreau; it is too late in the day to secede from civilization.

No, the only feasible escape is to make quantity subserve quality, to accept this vicious circle as a ring that provides a solid setting for a pearl of incalculable price.

One feels at once that such a world would be shrunken and impoverished, for so much that we are and do is made possible by these things. Would life in such dreary poverty be worth living at all? Well, let me remind you that this was the world of Socrates and Sophocles and Aristotle, of Virgil and St. Augustine and Dante. There was nothing poverty-stricken about these minds; indeed it is to these minds precisely that men in other times turn when they want to escape from their own poverty.

It is for persons, for better and more sensitive persons, for the knowledge and love and goodness of persons, that all the machinery of civilization exists.

My conclusion is that the machinery of civilization is to be justified only so far as it contributes to the qualities of persons.

Yet dislike may have keen eyes.

Ivor Brown has remarked that “there are naturalists without wonder, scholars without awe, theologians without worship, economists without anger, historians who never laughed or hated or despaired. They may be wise, but who is jealous of their wisdom? It is possible to know everything and understand nothing.”

Consider the ideal drawn for the American college by James Russell Lowell at Harvard’s 250th anniversary. What the college should try to produce, said Lowell, is a type of man, “a man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul.” The crown of quantity, and its justification, is quality.

Important as it is not to confuse quality with quantity, it is still more important, and far more difficult, not to confuse second-rate quality with first-rate.

Consider first how strong the forces are that make the good the enemy of the best and the commonplace the enemy of the good.

Economically, we are still a society in which production is determined by profit. The man who is producing books knows that his profits depend on circulation; the man who is producing movies knows that his profits depend on the length of the line at the box-office. Now if what he wanted in both cases is the largest number of buyers, the proper course is not to appeal to this or that group, with this or that taste, but to the largest possible group. And how is that to be reached? The answer can be given in mathematical terms—by appealing to the lowest common denominator. And where is this common ground to be found? Hardly in thoughtfulness, or in moral or psychological acuteness, or an interest in delicate portraiture. It is found rather in what is primitive about us, in sex and fear and anger, in sensation in both meanings of the term, and in those infantile daydreams of ourselves as princesses or supermen that all of us have when young and some of us never lose. Hence publishers find it profitable to fill the racks in stations and drugstores with paperbacks celebrating violence.

Here you see in vivid form the effect of mass appeal in confusing values.

Many of our movie heroes rare incarnations of what a critic has described as “ferocity modified by fatuousness.” The heroines were all dolls of faultless face, form, and costume, mammoth wealth, and total absence of ideas.

The profit motive is not the only leveler of values. Another is our impulse to conformity, which seems to be stronger in these days than ever before.

Van Wyck Brooks says, “the desire not to be of the herd is in itself a herd desire. It is a recognition of the herd of which the original man is incapable.”

They dislike the exceptional man or woman, because such a person is a challenge to their own standards and ways of thought. We all feel the tug of this impulse; Bernard Shaw has remarked that “the best of us is nine hundred and ninety-nine per cent mob (Mr. Shaw was no mathematician) and one per cent quality.”

Since this repressive attitude is directed against difference as such, it operates against good as well as bad; indeed the nonconformist intellectual, described as an egg-head, is particularly suspected because he touches the springs of fear and envy.

There is another and related force that makes against the first-rate. It is the curious conviction, more often felt than clearly formulated, that the very notion that some persons and subjects are better than others is undemocratic.

Snobbishness, to be sure, is an unpleasant trait. But so is inverted snobbishness that resists as priggish the suggestion that some types of manners, mind, and moral ought to be accepted as true titles of nobility.

“For all practical purposes you know the answer already. There may be disputes about who is better than who on the level of the third-rate, but there is surprisingly little dispute about the figures at the top.”

It is of no use to hang golden apples beyond a student’s reach if there is no ladder by which he can get to them. The point I would emphasize is that putting the ladder in place is chiefly the student’s business rather than the teacher’s. Unless the student has a genuine specific levity which carries him upward, some authentic interest, ambition, or enthusiasm, the teacher has nothing to work with.

And if I were advising students about their programs, I would say, watch your enthusiasms; keep them alight; only by letting the flame grow brighter will you ever do anything first-rate.

Samuel Butler said there were two rules about human motive, a general rule and a special one. The general rule was that everyone could make anything of himself if he wanted to badly enough. The special rule was that everyone was more or less an exception to the general rule. But that general rule is a charter of life.

Then some day you see a piece in a journal and realize that a new writer has arrived, a writer of idiosyncrasy and power and grace. You, the teacher, have not taught him those things. Like so many others, he has found himself by falling in love; he has had an affair with English prose. He has achieved with delight and by himself a quality that no amount of instruction could convey.

It is a great thing for a university to turn out engineers and doctors in regiments. It is a fine thing for a given engineer or doctor to a mastery of his technique. But the highest tribute to a college is not to have produced masses of technicians with a perfect technique. It is to have stamped on its sons and daughters the priceless imprint of the reasonable mind.

Just one such person—thoughtful in his judgments, fair in all his dealings, unruffled in his sweetness of temper, fearless because he has looked before and after and made his terms with life and death—just one such person may give light to a whole community. His spirit is beyond price because you cannot buy quality with any amount of quantity. And if he lives at an altitude hard to reach, we may remind ourselves, with Spinoza, that all precious things are as difficult as they are rare.

- Brand Blanshard