Fossilized Europeans?

Again & again during his 13 months as a visiting lecturer in Continental universities (The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Belgium), Perry Miller, professor of American literature at Harvard, felt distinctly uneasy. Between the educated American and the educated European there seemed to stand an intellectual wall that made real understanding impossible. Was it the fault of U.S. education, which his European friends called "superficial and materialistic"? Not at all, declares Miller in the current Atlantic Monthly, the fault is European.

Unlike the American, says Miller, the university-educated European is fiercely jealous of his position. Whether the university man is French or Dutch or Swiss, he is basically the same. "Each university does cling proudly and even fiercely to its distinguishing 'tradition'--and yet education on the Continent, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, is standardized ... I am forced to declare that there are respects in which the Continental method has become a hindrance to the Continent's survival. It is, in short, fossilized.

"The serious student, after a high school that consists of intensive drill in memorization and very little else, enters the university at about 18 . . .is confined to a single 'faculty,' and never, intellectually speaking, gets outside it. Then and there he is committed for life to theology, law, or medicine." To impart knowledge of other fields is not the university's job. "It is a professional training ground, and it imparts standard and formal disciplines. In the university, the professor tells the student, and on examinations, the student repeats what the professor has told him."

European students do branch out into art and music, but they do so on their own. And "these amenities are cultivated, not because they are real knowledge, but as badges of class and status ... like needle point among Victorian women . . . Hence the careful student of Europe today discovers, with a horror . . . that the so-called culture of Europe does not go very deep. The American often leaves his campus still vulgar ... but we do have the opportunity ... of impressing upon him the glimmerings of a notion that learning is not something apart from life."

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