If many of these elder statesmen rule by virtue of distinguished ability and early adulthood, most do by virtue of a privileged position that delays adulthood and prolongs infancy more literally. The locus of this position is the high school and the college, especially the college. Owing to democracy, there has been a diffusion of some of the privileges of this status to the children of the masses. One of its marks is the war against child labor which we have noted, and the progressively later age at which work certificates are granted; another is the advancement, already referred to, of the age of consent and the measures for the protection of girls. Still another, and the most signal, is the increase of the high school population from the 300,000 of 1890 to the 5,000,000 of 1930, and the corresponding growth of the body of college students. 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.
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, 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. But the real McCoy is the “college preparatory.” 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. Indeed, since the “educative process” worked by the schools is defined from above downward, the colleges, which are for the most part resorts where the well-to-do keep their physiologically mature young in a state of personal irresponsibility and social-economic dependence, set the standard of education for the whole nation.
Practice under this standard maintains a gulf between the curriculum and student interests. The school work, as the teacher sees it, makes up the “serious purpose” for which schools and colleges exist. Yet here is what a boy who believes in this serious purpose writes to the New York Times about his education:
“In a few weeks I will be handed a diploma, have my hand shaken by sundry individuals, and then told that I have been graduated from high school. I am supposed to be educated. The city has provided me for some four years with skilled teachers and expensive apparatus and told me, ‘Be conscientious in your studies and you shall know.’ I know that I have been sincere, but I will tell a few things I do not know.
“I know by heart several slices of Shakespeare and Browning, but I do not know how to write an ordinary form letter that would be accepted by any business firm. I know some irregular French verbs but if I were lost in the streets of Paris I would not be able to ask my way home. I can, ‘amo, amas, amat,’ also ‘en to oikio ton anthropon horo,’ but I cannot keep the ledger in my father’s place of business nor send out his monthly statements. I am a member of the tennis team and know all the quirks and tricks used in hitting a tennis ball, but I do not know how to build a woodshed nor shingle a roof.
“I know how to parse a sentence from Macaulay’s essays, but I do not know how to light a match in the wind or chop down a tree. I have studied economics until my head is full of raw theories and long words, but I do not know the name of the Alderman from our ward nor the Congressman from our district, nor the political creeds and platforms they have pledged themselves to uphold. I can prove the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the base and the perpendicular, but I do not know how to hang a picture, put in a pane of glass or paint a chair. I have studied chemistry for a year and have received high marks, but I know nothing of food values and gorge myself on what pleases my palate. I received 85 per cent in English literature, but I cannot get $15 per week writing news for a newspaper, or write an acceptable advertisement, and my average conversation is on the level of the tabloid. With the exception of the Mayor, I do not know the names of the other important officials of the City Government, but I could at random name about 95 per cent of the prominent movie actresses and actors, prizefighters and baseball players.
“Surely, some vital element is wholly missing from our social system which provided for only a classical but not for a practical education. 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. 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 moment and if you stop struggling you sink and are gone.
“I was educated according to the ancient formulas for producing a scholar and a gentleman and I find I have to work for a living. I have no taste nor love for hard work, no habits for saving, no disposition to resist temptation and no skill in doing anything the world is willing to pay for. I am wholly untrained for efficiency, and before I succeed in life I will have to undo most of what has been taught to me in school.”
B. S.
And this boy is very exceptional. For the school work as the average student sees it, is the price in boredom and discomfort which the system exacts and which he somewhat unwillingly pays in return for the pleasure and excitement of the activities known (and not known) as extra-curricular. These and not his studies are what touch the life of the student. And these are what the curriculum excludes and teachers ignore until they present themselves as disciplinary problems. The age of high school and college is the age of poignant laboring over the ever-renewed questions of luck and destiny, good and God and evil, of groping after first and last things. It is the age of upsurging sexual energies, of inevitable preoccupation with sex in all its degrees and forms, from romantic love to promiscuity, from fantasy to perversity. So far, however, as the mechanisms of curriculum and instruction are concerned, students are not males, not females, but sheer intellects, uncontaminated by such a vital propulsion, or by any of the others whose development, gratification, obstruction, deviation, realization, or repression, compose the dynamic units of personality in the living adolescent, determining its timbre, emotional quality and behavior pattern.
For the most part there is no correspondence between what the students spontaneously and directly want and what the higher education provides. There is no opportunity for the idealistic initiative, for generous self-discipline and adventure, and for the accompanying responsibility on matters of serious social import such as adolescence craves and students do assume in backward cultures like China or India or Russia or the countries of continental Europe. Only athletics provides any occasion for the play of emotion and the exercise of the responsibility proper to an adult. But athletics is formally extra-curricular, is a preoccupation of alumni, highly specialized and professional among its practitioners, and to the residual mass of the students a spectacle, not a vocation or an activity.
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. The other life is the life of the fraternity or the sorority, the club, the prom, the press, class-politics, “contacts” and all the rest, including the “bull sessions.” To these, curriculum and professor are mostly irrelevant; president and dean affect them only as policemen affect corner gangs. Yet these are what is meant by “college life.” In a word, the correlation between the “serious purpose” of the academic establishment and the ruling passion of the youthful psyche is negative. “College life” and “serious purpose” of schools and colleges are in conflict.
Thus, authorities in secondary schools find obscene notes being passed; notice masturbation, spy out chanceful or organized petting parties; point to unnecessary noises, desultory killing of time, smart-aleckism, and especially to cheating. They make elaborate studies of disciplinary situations and talk about bad home conditions, natural meanness, and the like. But they ignore the fact that they are themselves passing judgment on situations in which they are active parties. How can the manifestations of the overruling sex-urge be anything but illicit, when school life is overtly organized as if sex were either evil or non-existent? To whom are unnecessary noises unnecessary? What else can one do with time but kill it desultorily, when one’s ruling passions are ignored and one is required to pay attention to matters one’s heart cannot possibly be in? As for smart-aleckism and cheating—are not those who succeed therein heroes in the eyes of their peers? Do they not overcome an enemy and put him in his place?