Come Back to School - Stephen Leacock

For the last few years before the present war, the British Isles, so it was understood, were being swept by a wave of Adult Education--the same wave which was almost washing the United States into the Gulf of Mexico. Washing by waves--crime waves, drink waves, waves of enthusiasm and of disillusionment--is a part of the progress of our great democracies. After the wave comes the back-wash of common sense that levels the ground again.

But this adult education; I'm all for it. For some it means carrying on school all through life, never ceasing to learn; for others, beginning late what they had not the chance to begin early; making opportunity by overtime effort; supplying, by their own initiative and will, the defects imposed by adversity. That is adult education, and that is what it does for the community at large. I am, I say, all for it. If I could think of anything I didn't know, I'd take classes in it right now, at seventy-two.

Only I don't like the name--adult education. I wouldn't want any one to call me an 'adult.' That word never seems quite right; it always sounds like a half-wit. Don't they have homes for adults? No? Well, surely there are adults in some of the homes, and you can hang an adult, can't you? And, of course, 'education' is a tainted word. It carries still its old false suggestion that it is something everybody had as a child, like measles, and doesn't need any longer. Say to any man, 'Look here, don't you think you need a little education, the kind they give to adults?' and see how he reacts to it.

But the reality of adult education, which is what I want to talk about, is one of the big things of the world to-day. What it means is that all the world is going back to school.

Now here is one of the reasons for it. People are no sooner out of school than they have a wistful longing to get back to it. Boys and girls take school as an accepted routine, understood by convention to be a sort of hardship, a violence to be done to youth. The teacher, if a man, is understood to be a pretty hard lot, and if a woman, a mean kind of cat. The child who says 'I love teacher' is the odd one out, and will go to heaven early. At best they say, 'She's not so bad,' or 'He's all right out of school.' But school is no sooner over for the last day than they begin to weave round it a gossamer web of retrospect.

Each year that passes adds to their wistful illusion. They go back after three years, and there are the same old bricks (still there) and the same old desk with their names cut on it--look, see it! And when they hear, after four years, the sound of the same old bell, at the old hour (no change), they almost break down. As the years go still farther, and get really on, they find out that the teacher (dead) was a grand man, a scholar of the real old type. All the real type are dead. In fact, as with the Indian, the only good teacher is a dead teacher. As for the woman teacher, they discover later on that she wasn't a woman at all, just a girl--young and timid. How it must have distressed her--the rough horseplay, and the classroom cut-ups. Too bad!

It is the same, of course, with college, only on a much bigger scale, just as a three-ring circus eclipses a local Fall show. All through college the students are counting up the time to get out of it. The minute they enter, they call their class not by the year it comes in but by the year in which it hopes to go out. 'Rah! Rahl '46!' they shout. Just as if a baby was christened 'Old Jones.' They count each course; they number each credit; they 'finish' trigonometry; after the second year they are no longer 'liable' to history; after the third 'not responsible' for Shakespeare; at the end of the fourth they are all signed off and paid off like a ship's crew from a long voyage. They shout 'Rah! Rah! '46!' But the sound weakens in their throat. Open the gates again! Isn't there any way to get us back?

So that is why, as they get on in life, people form all sorts of service clubs and luncheon clubs and go and hear speeches. They pretend, of course, that what they want is current information; that they want to get posted--but it isn't so. They want to get back to school, just as an old sailor wants to get back on a deck, and an old actor to get back on the boards. So there they sit, listening, back on their school benches, and the tougher the subject, the better they like it.

In my city, as in everybody else's, the luncheon clubs prefer a lecture on 'Egypt Before Christ' to a talk on 'England After Churchill.' A week or two ago, I met a group of my acquaintances coming out in a flock from their weekly gathering. 'What was it to-day?' I asked. 'Great stuff!' one answered. 'Professor Drydout was talking on Babylonian inscriptions. I couldn't get it all; in fact, I missed a lot of it, but it was great stuff.' You see, there's a peculiar charm in 'missing a lot of it.' It takes you back to the class in geometry at high school.

So the clubs, though the members wouldn't admit it, are really a sort of school, a branch of 'adult education.' You can prove it by realizing how unwilling they are to permit a 'humorous' lecture. In their hearts they'd really like something funny instead of Babylon, just as they like a joke in school. But dignity won't allow it. Fun isn't education. If you want to give them a humorous lecture you must call it something else--pretend that it's on 'The Later Tendencies of Democracy,' and fill it with stories about Pat and Mike, and what Bill Nye said to Josh Billings.

Meantime the clubs go on expanding information like ripples on a pond, and 'expanding' with it the capacity to listen, the desire to know, the sense of interest--in short, all those things which are the very soul of real education.

All power to the luncheon speeches. I only wish I could hear them. But like all old professors, I lost the power of listening years ago. I couldn't listen to Mohammed for more than four minutes.

One must remember that, after all, the continuance of education, the process of learning, or of trying to, brings its own reward. Human knowledge at large, in the huge philosophical sense, may indeed be more or less lost and bankrupt.

It was the custom, in the far back days that we now call Victorian, to insist that knowledge, in the sense of the contemplation of the universe, brought a sort of warm satisfaction. The stars sang together. A harmonious world fitted its parts like nickel-plated joints. Knowledge, so the poet said, unfolded to their eyes its ample page rich with the spoils of time. Study was even recommended to the Victorian working class, as a kind of sedative to put them to sleep.

'Oh, what a world of profit and delight,' sang one blithering poet, 'is open to the studious artisan.' It may have been in 1842. At present, he wouldn't get much of a feed out of it, not in a universe of matter that has dissolved into atoms which are now merely 'fields of force'--the whole physical world just a sort of disturbance, a universe 'expanding' with terrific rapidity, not where you think it is, 'out there,' but in a 'time-space continuum,' which beats the studious artisan right to the balkline. In short, there's nothing left except a mathematic frame--inside of which a world agonizes, while what we called civilization fights for its life. No, my poor artisan, go and look at another peep-show. Ours is no good.

But while that is true of the general outlook, the humble individual satisfaction in learning something still holds good. If there is conceit and vanity in it, it is too pardonable to notice. If there is mingled with its excellence a little false assumption of superiority over one's fellows, the recording angel will easily blot it out with a tear.

At least the conceit of learning is better than the boast of ignorance that used to vaunt itself as an aid to success. I say 'used to'; it was in the days before the great depression chastened the great conceit. 'Look at me,' once said in my hearing a big business man, a great big one. 'I can't do fractions.' I looked at him. He couldn't. But I felt that even a small decimal would have done him good.

But education, unless we carry it forward, dies out of itself. It is like a flood stream that runs away in the sand, like a garden choked under weeds, like a dim lumber room covered deep with dust. Such becomes education, even for the college graduate, if he never goes on with it. What's left? More wreckage. He has heard of an isosceles triangle and remembers that you mustn't produce the sides, or God knows what happens. He remembers that the third declension of Latin was a heller, and that Plato thought what Aristotle didn't think, and Aristotle didn't think what Plato thought. That's the grand old education that Oxford and Harvard used to sell, and it's all right too, on condition that you keep it in repair.

Otherwise, don't try to 'fall back on it.' You'll hurt yourself behind.

Compare with such neglect the bright and eager conceit of the 'graduate girls' of, say, forty, who are 'following a course' on Persian literature this Spring, at one another's houses; they 'took up' Dostoievsky last winter, took him up' and skinned him alive. And they're all right as a class too, the graduate girls of forty, far better than a class in school. Far too much has been said of the bright mind of youth and far too little of the ripened sympathy of the adult. It is the difference between light flashed from the surface of the water and the shadows that lie below. Not even youth can have everything as its part. Give adult life its share. Take, for example, all that goes with the appreciation of literature, of poetry. Children have not lived long enough yet, have not yet known, thank God, enough of sorrow and of disillusionment to draw the full meaning from the page in which the world has written and cross-written the record of our lot.

Children, bright children, exult in the clash of words and revel in sentiment of which the reality is as yet unknown. Look at them as they gather round the piano, little children of ten and twelve, to sing 'In-the gloaming-oh-my darling'--dragging out the words in a whine of ecstasy. 'Will-you-think of-one-who loved you-loved-you-dearly-lo-o-ong ago!' That's all right, dears; now run along to bed. People who look back across the years to lost love have no song for it; it lies too deep.

Children at school may exult in the boy's standing on a burning deck rhyming with wreck. They may climb in the shades of night with the 'Excelsior' boy--'going up,' Heaven knows where or why, except as a prevision of the elevator. But when one reads such lines as 'and the stately ships go on to their haven under the hill; but O for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still'--the echo of that is not for minds still in the opening of the pilgrimage of life. That is why, to my thinking, the class of adults--or no, I won't call them that; I mean grown-up people--is better than a group of children.

This only means that 'school' from its very nature has a lot of limitations--much of it must be more or less mechanical, cannot call forth the spontaneous interest and the power of reflection that later learning does. It is hard to be terribly keen on the alphabet. The ancient Phoenicians may have been so when they made it; but children up against S-O-so, D-O-U-G-.H-do, fall to get the same thrill. Nor can you reflect much on the multiplication table. You may try to sit and think how queer it is that 9x6 is 54, but you've got to be sure that it is, first. In other words, education that stops with school stops where it is beginning.

There are certain phases of adult education which give it, in a sense, a sterner aspect than when seen in the voluntary class taking the hide off an author, every winter evening on Wednesday. I refer to the cases where people have to work overtime, study in the hours that are meant for recreation, as part of a determined drive against adversity. But even there it's not as bad as it seems. Some of our greatest minds have done their life-work in that way.

One case is that of John Stuart Mill. People think of Mill as the author of On Liberty and Principles of Political Economy, and do not realize, or never knew, that Mill's 'day's work' in life was not literature. All that was overtime. In the day Mill worked in the London office of the East India Company, in the department of correspondence with Native States--making abstracts of the company's dealings with Ram Jam of Mysore and Dim Jim of Bengal. But by doing literary work he at last got free--to do literary work.

As a matter of fact, I may say with all modesty that I am myself another case. Fifty years ago I was a resident master in a boarding school, a sort of all-day-and-all-night job, with a blind wall in front of it. To find a way out of it, and on, I took to getting up at five o'clock in the morning and studying political economy for three hours, every day before school breakfast. This process so sharpened my sense of humour that I earned enough money by it to go away and study political; and that, you see, kept up my sense of humour like those self-feeding machines.

But I didn't mean to speak personally.

Anyway, what's the good of talking about it? Come on. Let's get busy. Give me a book. I want to study something. I realize I don't know a darned thing. Hand me that multiplication table. I'll begin all over again.