Huxley and education Address at the Opening of the College Year, Columbia University, September 28, 1910

"The stars come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave comes to the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high Can keep my own away from me."

--BURROUGHS.

The most sanguine day of the college year is the opening one: the student has not yet faced the impossible task annually presented of embracing the modern world of knowledge; his errors and failures of earlier years are forgotten; he faces the coming months full of new hope.

How would my old master, Huxley, address you if he were to find you in this felicitous frame of mind, sharpening your wits and your pencils for the contest which will begin to-morrow morning in every hall and laboratory of this great University? May I speak for him as I heard him during the winter of 1879-80 from his lecture desk and as he kindly in conversation gave me of his stores of wisdom and experience? May I add from his truly brilliant essays entitled "Science and Education," delivered between 1874 and 1887? May I contribute also from my own thirty-seven years of life as a student and teacher, beginning in 1873 and reaching a turning point in 1910 when Columbia enrolled me among its research professors? It was Huxley's life, his example, the tone of his writings, rather than his actual precepts which most influenced me, for in 1879 he was so intensely absorbed in public work and administration, as well as in research and teaching, that little opportunity remained for laboratory conferences with his students. How I happened to go to him was as follows:

Unlucky--as they appeared to me at the time, but lucky as I look back upon them--were my own early flounderings and blunderings in seeking the true method of education. Huxley has observed of his "Voyage of the Rattlesnake" that it is a good thing to get down to the bare bones of existence. The same is true of self-education. As compared with the hosts of to-day, few men in 1877 knew how to guide the graduate youth; the Johns Hopkins was still nascent; the creative force of Louis Agassiz had spent itself in producing the first school of naturalists, including the genius, William James. One learnt one's errors through falling into pitfalls. With two companions I was guided by a sort of blind instinct to feel that the most important thing in life was to make a discovery of some kind. On consulting one of our most forceful and genial professors his advice was negative and discouraging: "Young men," he said, "go on with your studies for ten or twelve years until you have covered the whole subject; you will then be ready for research of your own." There appeared to be something wrong about this, although we did not know exactly what. We disregarded the advice, left the laboratory of this professor, and at the end of the year did succeed in writing a paper which subsequently attracted the attention of Huxley and was the indirect means of an introduction to Darwin. It was a lame product, but it was ours, and in looking back upon it, one feels with Touchstone in his comment upon Audrey:

"A poor virgin, Sir, An ill favored thing, Sir, But mine own."

I shall present in this brief address only one idea, namely, the lesson of Huxley's life and the result of my own experience is that productive thinking is the chief means as well as the chief end of education, and that the natural evolution of education will be to develop this kind of thinking earlier and earlier in the life of the student.

One of the most marvelous of the manifold laws of evolution is what is called '_acceleration_.' By this law the beginning of an important organ like the eye of the chick, for example, is thrust forward into a very early stage of embryonic development. This is, first, because the eye is a very complex organ and needs a long time for development, and second because the fully formed eye of most animals is needed immediately at birth. I predict that the analogy in the evolution of education will be very close. Productive thinking may be compared to the eye; it is needed by the student the moment he graduates, or is hatched, so to speak; it is now developed only in the graduate schools. It is such an integral and essential part of education that the spirit of it is destined to be 'accelerated,' or thrust forward into the opening and preparatory years.

If the lines of one's life were to be cast afresh, if by some metempsychosis one were moulded into what is known as a "great educator," a man of conventions and platforms, and were suddenly to become more or less responsible for 3,000 minds and souls, productive thinking, or the "centrifugal method" of teaching, would not be postponed to graduation or thereafter, but would begin with the Freshman, yes, among these humble men of low estate! It may be apropos to recall a story told of President McCosh of Princeton, a man who inspired all his students to production and enlivened them with a constant flow of humor. On one occasion he invited his predecessor, ex-President McLean, to offer prayers in the College Chapel. Dr. McLean's prayer was at once all embracing and reminiscent; it descended from the foreign powers to the heads of the United States government, to the State of New Jersey, through the Trustees, the Faculty, and, in a perfectly logical manner, finally reached the entering class. This naturally raised a great disturbance among the Sophomores, who were evidently jealous of the divine blessing. The disturbance brought the prayer to an abrupt close, and Dr. McCosh was heard to remark: "I should think that Dr. McLean would have more sense than to pray for the Freshmen."

As regards the raw material into which 'productive thinking' is to be instilled, I am an optimist. I do not belong to the 'despair school' of educators, and have no sympathy with the army of editorial writers and prigs who are depreciating the American student. The chief trouble lies not with our youth, nor with our schools, but with our adults. How can springs rise higher than their sources? On the whole, you students are very much above the average American. You are not driven to these doors; certainly in these days of youthful freedom and choice you came of your own free will. The very fact of your coming raises you above the general level, and while you are here you will be living in a world of ideas,--the only kind of a world at all worth living in. You are temporarily cut off more or less from the world of dollars and cents, shillings and pence. Here Huxley helps you in extolling the sheer sense of joy in thinking truer and straighter than others, a kind of superiority which does not mean conceit, the possession of something which is denied the man in the street. You redound with original impulses and creative energy, which must find expression somehow or somewhere; if not under the prevailing incurrent, or 'centripetal system' of academic instruction, it must let itself out in extra-academic activities, in your sports, your societies, your committees, your organizations, your dramatics, all good things and having the highest educational value in so far as they represent your output, your outflow, your centrifugal force.

You are, in fact, in a contest with your intellectual environment outside of these walls. Morally, according to Ferrero, politically, according to Bryce, and economically, according to Carnegie, you are in the midst of a 'triumphant democracy.' But in the world of ideas such as sways Italy, Germany, England, and in the highest degree France, you are in the midst of a 'triumphant mediocrity.' Paris is a city where ideas are at a premium and money values count for very little in public estimation. The whole public waits breathless upon the production of 'Chanticleer.' That Walhalla of French ambition, 'la Gloire,' may be reached by men of ideas, but not by men of the marts. Is it conceivable that the police of New York should assemble to fight a mob gathered to break up the opera of a certain composer? Is it conceivable that you students should crowd into this theatre to prevent a speaker being heard, as those of the Sorbonne did some years ago in the case of Brunetière? If you should, no one in this city would understand you, and the authorities would be called on promptly to interfere.

A fair measure of the culture of your environment is the depth to which your morning paper prostitutes itself for the dollar, its shades of yellowness, its frivolity or its unscrupulousness, or both. I sometimes think it would be better not to read the newspapers at all, even when they are conscientious, because of their lack of a sense of proportion, in the news columns at least, of the really important things in American life. Our most serious evening mentor of student manners and morals gives six columns to a football game and six lines to a great intercollegiate debate. Such is the difference between precept and practice. American laurels are for the giant captain of industry; when his life is threatened or taken away acres of beautiful forest are cut down to procure the paper pulp necessary to set forth his achievements, while our greatest astronomer and mathematician passes away and perhaps the pulp of a single tree will suffice for the brief, inconspicuous paragraphs which record his illness and death.

Your British cousin is in a far more favorable atmosphere, beginning with his morning paper and ending with the conversation of his seniors over the evening cigar. As a Cambridge man, having spent two years in London and the university, I would not describe the life so much as serious as worth while. There are humor and the pleasures of life in abundance, but what is done, is done thoroughly well. Contrast the comments of the British and American press on such a light subject as international polo; the former alone are well worth reading, written by experts and adding something to our knowledge of the game. In the more novel subject of aviation we look in vain in our press for any solid information about construction. Or take the practical subject of politics; the British student finds every great speech delivered in every part of the Empire published in full in his morning paper; as an elector he gets his evidence at first hand instead of through the medium of the editor.

I believe the greatest fault of the American student lies in the over-development of one of his greatest virtues, namely, his collectivism. His strong esprit de corps patterns and moulds him too far. The rewards are for the 'lock-step' type of man who conforms to the prevailing ideals of his college. He must parade, he must cheer, to order. Individualism is at a discount; it debars a man from the social rewards of college life. In my last address to Columbia students on the life of Darwin,[1] I asked what would be thought of that peculiar, ungainly, beetle collector if he were to enter one of our colleges to-day? He would be lampooned and laughed out of the exercise of his preferences and predispositions. The mother of a very talented young honor man recently confessed to me that she never spoke of her son's rank because she found it was considered "queer." This is not what young America generates, but what it borrows or reflects from the environment of its elders.