Cui Bono?

To Train for Success is to Invite Bankruptcy

The private school, says John Dewey, may exist for such special training as it pleases, but the public school must serve the purpose of the community as a whole. Hence it must teach " those subjects which are found to be, first, necessary, and, secondly, highly useful in serving this purpose of developing good citizenship, industrial and political, for leisure as well as for work, good members of the family and the neighborhood as well as of the political state and the workshop and farm."

The difficulty with this formula is that it makes the present state of society the standard of sound education. Translated into terms of individual education it means that that individual is educated who is prepared for success in the world as it stands. And stated thus the formula partially justifies the point of view of Dean Heilman of the Northwestern University School of Commerce who is reported to have said: " The interest of education and the interests of business, to a considerable extent, are identical and mutual. Business must rely upon our educational institutions to conduct a large part of the scientific investigation and research, the results of which are broadly utilized in business. Business must depend upon education for teaching, directly or indirectly, all of those who receive any form of schooling."

If there ever was a time when the insecurity of an education based upon success in the preceding generation was apparent, it is now. Children educated in pre-war Russia upon such a scheme would be, and are, helpless in revolutionary Russia. The only education which could conceivably be valuable in a period of violent change would be an education which enabled the individual to so far free himself from the immediate prospect as to orient himself and measure tendencies and probabilities. To train for nothing but success in the present business world is to invite intellectual bankruptcy. There were men of the older generation in England who faced the war on Greek literature better than some of their fellow citizens faced it on the soundest economic education.

President Hibben apparently stands halfway between. " In the final analysis," says he, " the power of the student to grasp the essential features of problems is the great differentiation between the educated and the non-educated man." But it may be said truthfully that the power to know what problems to wrestle with, and when, is a differentiation equally profound. Intense application to the essential features of the problems of violin technique during the combustion of Rome is hardly the mark of a sound education.