Bits on the Surface

Three terms of teaching at the Harvard summer school taught French Author-Lecturer Pierre Emmanuel enough about American students to give him serious misgivings. Compared to his former lycee pupils in France, he reports in the Atlantic Monthly, the average U.S. college student--in spite of his spontaneity and curiosity--has an intellectual background that is often chaotic, usually confused, and generally notable for its "absence of basic information."

"I believe," says he, "that I am not going too far in saying that [U.S.] education at the high-school level is mediocre. The fault does not lie with the teaching staff. The tenets of democratic egalitarianism are so strong in the United States that they assume a downright metaphysical importance. The postulate goes this way: All minds must have an equal chance at the start. They are like fertile fields; all that needs to be done is to sow them with method and prevent their differences from growing more marked, since differences contradict the principle of fundamental equality of all brains.

Social Adaptations. The American belief that education must be immediately useful "partly sterilizes education, turning it from a cultural undertaking into mere social adaptation to the American kaleidoscope. Often I have been fascinated, in my conversations with American students, by the bits of knowledge emerging without reason from the recesses of the mind, floating at the surface, then vanishing as others take their place . . .

"[An] absence of basic information is particularly noticeable in the fields of literature and history. Instead of being concentrated, channeled, continually kept aware of that 'spiritual duration' which is manifest in the evolution of thought, the attention roams distractedly and fails to grasp the unity of culture: only scattered components remain in the mind--ruins, one might almost say. At best, when the youthful mind strives to connect these disjecta membra without having in its possession the means necessary to resurrect them--the historical sequence, the sense of time, the network of causal relations--the student is led to formulate hazardous inductions, fantastic or superficial comparisons, pitiful attempts at synthesis which bring out clearly the disparity between the desire for an integrated kind of knowledge and the fragility of its foundations . . ."

Love at First Sight. It is true, says Emmanuel, that the American often presents a kind of freshness that the European student lacks, but "too many American students neglect the compass which history gives them for the sake of a personal approach to the classics . . . How quickly the American student makes friends with a book or a man and treats them as if they were his contemporaries! He hardly knows the background from which they arise. They surge out of his own mental world, haunt him, call forth in him an instantaneous and, frequently, a passionate reaction. A fortnight later, however, others have taken their place; it is love at first sight, but indifference rapidly follows."

All in all, American students "look at all books as if they had been written yesterday, and attempt to find in them a convenient mirror which they question . . . Trapped in a conventional and gregarious society, they take advantage of their college years, with a kind of nervous haste, to have a little taste of everything in order to satisfy their unruly appetites, as if compelled to learn as much as possible about themselves before it is too late . . . Before another man's thought, their attention is held only by the echo of their own haunting ego . . ."

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