Oxford Professor, Formerly at Princeton, Compares English and American Education

The view that England and America have discovered their errors in education and are moving towards a common point is advanced by Robert McN. McElroy, professor of American History at Oxford University in the current issue of "Current History." Professor McElroy, who was formerly at Princeton, discusses the tendency in America to assume that one and all are fitted for higher education. Harvard and Yale house units, he says, are in no immediate danger of becoming Oxonian. His article, in part, follows:

In educational matters, England and America are slowly approaching a common point, by the simple process of moving in opposite directions. That common point is the point at which both nations shall train for leadership the best minds, carefully selected for capacity, and shall train also the less gifted minds for the no less important tasks of efficient, contented and self-respecting subordination.

Any sound system of education, in whatever nation, must provide both for the training of leaders and for the training of those only fitted to be followers, but until recent tendencies began to emerge, England concentrated upon the first to the neglect of the second, while America neglected the first and fixed almost her whole attention upon the second. The central fact of recent English and American educational history is the fact that each nation has discovered its error and is seeking to correct it.

Opening Doors

England is now rapidly moving toward effective universal school training, not alone in primary, but in secondary grades as well. And the universities are rapidly opening their doors to the product of the ever-increasing secondary schools, instead of confining their entrants almost exclusively to graduates of the old "public schools," (such as Eton and Harrow, which correspond to American private preparatory schools).

In America, on the other hand, the most marked tendency is to devise methods for selecting, at each stage of education, the minds best fitted to benefit by further, more advanced study, in an attempt to develop more effective selection for higher education.

England's too exclusive emphasis upon the training of leaders was, of course, the natural outcome of her ancient and still dominant social system. It led inevitably to the conclusion, which Washington so often expressed with reference to military leadership, that the best leaders almost inevitably come from what is called "the ruling class." Thus, England's earliest educational development, indeed, almost her only advanced educational development until 1870, was the highly exclusive and class-conscious "public schools" and universities.

Miscellaneous Mass Training

America's too exclusive concentration upon miscellaneous mass training was doubtless the result of a theory of human equality which early took root in the Colonies and found an unfortunately ambiguous expression in the Declaration of independence. But nothing is more certain than the fact that when Thomas Jefferson used the phrase, borrowed from John Locke, "all men are created equal," he had no intention of giving voice to the idea that all men are born with equal capacity for thought, equal gifts for leadership, equal potentiality of personality, equal ability to profit by the pursuit of higher learning. In the Virginia Bill of Rights, which he wrote some weeks before he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson used the more concise and definite sentence, "all men are by nature equally free." There is here no ground for the idea of equality of natural endowment, an idea which caused generations of Americans to consider it undemocratic, un-Jeffersonian, to question the natural right of any individual to remain an educational charge upon the public for as many years as he pleased.

Indeed the carefully expounded educational philosophy of Jefferson is the very antithesis of this. Early in life he set himself the task of devising a plan of public education for his native State of Virginia, a brief summary of which appears in his "Notes on the State of Virginia." The central feature of this plan is careful selection of advanced students upon the bases of natural gifts and their separate training as leaders, or, to quote his own words, the "culling from every condition of our people the natural aristocracy of talents and virtue and . . . preparing it by education, at public expense, for the care of the public concerns. . . We hope to avail the State of these talents which nature has down as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated."

In spite of Jefferson's carefully elaborated theory of democratic education, America, in the name of the equality of men, has allowed her higher institutions of learning, her secondary schools, colleges and universities alike, to be clogged with a mass of reluctant, if not inferior minds, to the detriment of the best and with comparatively little advantage to the worst material there congregated. President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University was recently reported as stating that 78 per cent of the college students of Columbia--undergraduates--remain in Columbia University or go to some other university for graduate and professional study. But, within twelve months of this surprising statement. Dr. Samuel S. Drury, Rector of St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., confessed that "not over 75 per cent of each graduating class here, for example, can show either the intellectual fiber or the vocational urge to justify higher education."

"Minds Willing and Able"

Most American educators are now alive to the fact that 919,381 enrolled college and university students, the product in too many cases of chance, fashion or fancy, are by no means the triumph of education which they once thought them. Instead, they are now seeking a way back to Jeffersonian democracy in education, a method of unscrambling the egg, a system which shall restore to higher education its democratic duty of confining its ministrations to minds willing and able to profit by care and direction.

Of all recent tendencies in American education, this is probably the most wholesome, for what America most needs is a leadership trained for its vast responsibilities. For over a century and a half America proceeded upon the theory that if you open all grades of education to all kinds of minds, and leave them open and without cost to the individual, the natural leaders will automatically emerge. But they have not emerged. Sound, sane, informed leadership has failed the nation more and more as she has extended her system of wide-open training schools.

"Educated American Ill-Informed

Americans are compelled to admit that the "educated American," the normal product of free institutions, is still, on the average, ill-informed and, worse still, lacking in those vital intellectual interests which insure continued intellectual effort after the initial course, the university days, are over. By neglecting the principle of selection for fitness, America has failed to give to prospective leadership the training and, equally important, the lasting interest in the world of ideas, which alone can insure effective leadership. Her soundest educational leaders still have, as had Jefferson, full faith in the doctrine of universal education; but they are beginning to see that there must be two systems--one for the ambitious and intellectually gifted, and another for those upon whom the expense of the higher training would be lost.

But as fast as educators invent new systems designed to make effective selection and special training possible, the multitude rushes in and overwhelms them. The junior high school, designed to enable the best minds to go more rapidly through elementary and secondary schools and thus enter skilled vocations and professions at an earlier age, has grown into an overwhelmed hope. The selective process has not been sufficiently discerning to prevent the institutions from being packed with incompetent or reluctant minds. Statistics show that selection tends to become less ruthless rather than more so, and further retrogression in this respect would be most lamentable.

Jefferson's Ruthless Selection

The older and better tested system of free high schools has been similarly overwhelmed, 50 per cent of all the children of proper high school age entering and spending from one to four years without compulsion of any kind. This is proof of a widespread faith in education, but it is also proof that Jefferson's idea of ruthless selection has not deeply affected its theory or its operation. There are 13,951 high schools of all classes in the United States, of which 632 enroll over 500 pupils, 278 enroll over 1,000 pupils, while the Los Angeles Commercial High School for Boys has 8,440, the Brooklyn Commercial High School for Boys 7,508, the Morris High School of New York 6,733 boys and girls, the Washington Irving High School of New York 5,785 girls. The aggregate high school enrolment grew from 200,000 in 1890 to 3,750,000 in 1923.

The junior college movement has not had time to make clear its full meaning. In so far as it aims to tempt the able and more ambitious minds from the schools to seek training beyond the obligation limit of 14 years, and to make easier the elimination of minds not fit for the advanced work of the university, it is a wholesome movement. But its danger, too, is the inrush of the multitude which no man can handle, at least upon the high lands of calm thought and effective intellectual training.

Harvard and Yale

The separation of the best minds is being attempted also in colleges and universities by honors schools, comprehensive examinations and exemption fom the compulsion of routine. The notable experiments now in train at Harvard and at Yale, anticipated by a generation in the thwarted plans of Woodrow Wilson as President of Princeton, are attempts to recapture the advantage of the old-fashioned American college, without loss of the advantage of the great university; and the magnificent gift by Mr. Edward S. Barkness to Phillips Exeter Academy is designed to make possible an experiment which will enable "students from secondary schools better to meet conditions of college life in the tutorial and house systems which are now being developed in so many of our leading universities."

To anyone familiar with that system however, the element of complete autonomy for the smaller unit appears essential. If the Harvard and Yale houses are to be merely administrative units, not completely autonomous units, the results, though they may be important, will certainly not be Oxonian, since the very essence of Oxford is the autonomy of the college; and that autonomy is guarded with a jealous love which the outsider finds it hard to understand or to value at its true worth.

American Faith in Education

Whatever the faults of America's present system of university education, it must be admitted that nowhere--save perhaps in Scotland--is there so general a demand for education, so universal a faith in its sovereign power of ministering to success. America has about 920,000 college and university students. There were about 145 colleges and universities under public control, 520 under private control and 260 junior colleges in the United States in 1926, according to The World Almanac. The value of their property alone, in 1927, was estimated at $2,413,748,981. The spiritual returns from this investment are incalculable, but America is in desperate need of some sane and safe method of separating the sheep--always few in number in intellectual pasture lands--from the multitude of goats.

An Unsurpassed Leadership

The finished pupils of these exclusive "public schools", if ambitious for intellectual careers, passed into the two great universities, there to enjoy again the exclusive privilege of employing for their own development the unearned increment of centuries. Or if destined for the public service, naval, military or civil, or for the professions, they might enter upon their future careers directly from the "public school." And, to a surprising degree, they justified their special privileges, developing into ripe scholars, as profound and unpretentious, skillful and public-spirited political leaders, or as honest, efficient civil servants. As a result, England enjoyed and still enjoys, an unsurpassed leadership in scholarship, in politics and in colonial administration, whether judged from the point of view of intellectual adequacy or personal integrity.

Unfortunately for England, this courageous program (the education of every child according to his abilities) was rendered partly unrealizable, for the time at least, by the financial crisis which still holds the nation in its grasp. The act itself, however, remains upon the statute books, and many of its most important provisions are in operation. The provision that 60 per cent of the salaries of teachers shall be paid by the Central Board, for example, still enables local boards to keep the standard of teachers high; while the provision that the Central Board may reduce the promised 50 per cent of total local expenses in the case of schools which allow overcrowding of classes, unsanitary conditions, or other causes of inefficiency, helps to maintain a high standard of school administration. The advance of school age which Mr. Fisher contemplated has not yet been realized, but night schools, vocational schools and other special classes for children of over 14 years of age, help to compensate for this failure.

Uneducated Masses

Despite this progress, surprisingly rapid since 1902 and surprisingly sane, the chasm which separated the educated privileged classes from the uneducated masses has not yet been fully bridged. Much remains to be done before the selfish old system which reserved education for the privileged classes is finally overthrown, but it is only fair to say that today both the "public schools" and the universities of England, old as well as new, are open to talent, no matter what the accidents of birth. At Oxford it has been recently shown, "out of 1,263 male students who matriculated in the year 1928-29, less than half came from English public schools and no fewer than 223 had begun their education in public elementary schools.

American Experimentation

The keynote of American education is experimentation, too often without patience--that of English education is patience, with a constitutional aversion to experimentation. While highly optimistic, the average American of university training is also highly critical and cherishes the belief that there is something wrong with education as with art, religion, ethics and politics.

To him education offers the one sure road to economic prosperity, social soundness and a safe democracy. What he questions is the soundness of the particular formula, not the possibility of achievement through education when the right formula is found. He therefore gives the warmest welcome to every idea labeled "new".

What We Might Become

The average Englishman of public school or university training, on the other hand, while highly pessimistic, is but little disposed to question the soundness of the established order into which he was born. The Church, the State, the public school, the university, while not considered perfect, are not generally within the list of things to be blamed for existing imperfections in English society. He complacently places them at the head of the list of things which "have made us what we are"; and does not dream too eagerly of those latent forces which if developed would make us what we might become.