THE AIMS OF EDUCATION
by Robert M. Hutchins

Part I

Six years ago I had the honor of addressing my fellow Yale men on the Higher Learning in America. I was surprised to find that these lectures did not have the effect they were intended to produce. Instead, all the movements they were designed to arrest, all the attitudes they were calculated to change, went rushing onward, in the case of the movements, or became more firmly entrenched, in the case of the attitudes.

I attacked triviality, and forty-two students enrolled in the Oklahoma University short course for drum majors.

I attacked vocationalism, and the University of California announced a course in cosmetology, saying, "The profession of beautician is the fastest growing in this state."

I deplored a curriculum of obsolescent information, and one of America's most distinguished sociologists announced that our information was increasing so rapidly that in order to get time to pour it all into our students we should have to prolong adolescence at least until age forty-five.

I asserted that higher education was primarily intellectual, and the President of the New York State College for Teachers said, "Education is not even primarily intellectual, certainly not chiefly intellectual. It is the process by which the emotions are socialized."

I lamented the confusion that besets American education, and the President of a highly confused and very large college announced that chaos was a good thing. Though I should prefer chaos to an order imposed by force, I had never supposed that chaos was an ideal toward which all right-thinking men should strive. Chaos had always seemed to me something you tried to get out of. I had always thought that what we wanted, both in politics and education, was a rational order, rationally arrived at.

One professor accidentally agreed with me. He made the following outrageous remarks in a book of his own: "There will always remain," he said, "certain permanent values which education must cultivate, such as intellectual honesty, love of truth, ability to think clearly, moral qualities." The fact that he was from Teachers College, Columbia, and could be assumed to be only teasing, did not save him. He was sharply rebuked by a professor from Ohio State University who said that here he must "part company with the author of this indisputably significant volume, for the suspicion grows that the author is still something of an absolutist." The author actually wanted education to cultivate intellectual honesty, the love of truth, the ability to think clearly, and moral qualities.

Now I will not deny that one or two people did pay some attention to my book. They had to. And they got it free in the course of their trade as book reviewers. One of these, who in his spare time is a professor at Yale, summed up the whole thing by saying that the trouble with me was my intense moral idealism. Such a quality would naturally distort anybody's view of education. A university president guilty of moral idealism? What is the world coming to? By some process of association of ideas I am reminded of the remarks of one of our alumni who in a recent discussion at the University of Chicago said that everything I had said about football was logical, perfectly logical, very logical indeed. "But," he said, "if the University abolishes football, my son, now fifteen years old, will not want to go there." In other words, "logical" is a term of reproach, and the University of Chicago should be illogical because one of its alumni has an illogical child. I have even heard the word "educational" in the same slurring connotation, as when a Princeton graduate wrote to Woodrow Wilson saying, "I will have nothing more to do with Princeton. You are turning my dear old college into an educational institution. A university president who is suspected of an interest in morals, in intellect, or even in education deserves the severest condemnation from those who have the true interests of our country at heart."

But all these things are as nothing compared with the menace of metaphysics. I had mildly suggested that metaphysics might unify the modern university. I knew it was a long word, but I thought my audience of learned reviewers would know what it meant. I was somewhat surprised to find that to them metaphysics was a series of balloons, floating far above the surface of the earth, which could be pulled down by vicious or weak-minded people when they wanted to win an argument. The explosion of one of these balloons or the release of the gases it contained might silence, but never convince, a wise man. The wise man would go away muttering, "Words, words, words," or "Anti-scientific," "Reactionary," or even "Fascist." Knowing that there is nothing true unless experimental science makes it so, the wise man knows that metaphysics is simply a technical name for superstition.

Now I might as well make a clean breast of it all. I am interested in education, in morals, in intellect, and in metaphysics. I even go so far as to hold that there is a necessary relation among all these things. I am willing to assert that without one we cannot have the others and that without the others we cannot have the one with which I am primarily concerned, namely education.

I insist, moreover, that everything that is happening in the world today confirms the immediate and pressing necessity of pulling ourselves together and getting ourselves straight on these matters. The world is probably closer to disintegration now than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. If there are any forces of clarification and unification left, however slight and ineffectual they may appear, they had better be mobilized instantly, or all that we have known as Western Civilization may vanish.

Even if we assume that peace will soon be restored, we must grant that our country has long been afflicted with problems which, though apparently insoluble, must be solved if this nation is to be preserved or to be worth preserving. These problems are not material problems. We may have faith that the vast resources of our land and the technological genius of our people will produce a supply of material goods adequate for the maintenance of that interesting fiction, the American Standard of Living. No, our problems are moral, intellectual, and spiritual. The paradox of starvation in the midst of plenty illustrates the nature of our difficulties. This paradox will not be resolved by technical skill or scientific data. It will be resolved, if it is resolved at all, by wisdom and goodness.

Now wisdom and goodness are the aim of higher education. How can it be otherwise? Wisdom and goodness are the end of human life. If you dispute this, you are at once entering upon a metaphysical controversy; for you are disputing about the nature of being and the nature of man. This is as it should be. How can we consider man's destiny unless we ask what he is? How can we talk about preparing men for life unless we ask what the end of life may be ? At the base of education, as at the base of every human activity, lies metaphysics.

So it is with science. As Dr. H. S. Burr of the Yale Medical School has put it: "One of the primitive assumptions of science is that we live in a universe of order; order determined by, and controlled through, the operation of fundamental principles capable of elucidation and reasonably exact definition. This assumption states that there is a metaphysics, a body of universal laws which can be grasped by the human intellect and utilized effectively in the solution of human problems."

So it is with ethics and politics. We want to lead the good life. We want the good state as a means to that life. Once more, to find the good life and the good state, we must inquire into the nature of man and the ends of life. The minute we do that we are metaphysicians in spite of ourselves. Moreover, if ethics is the science of human freedom, we must know at the beginning whether and in what sense man is free. Here we are metaphysicians once again. And the soundness of our moral conclusions depends on whether we are good metaphysicians or bad ones. So the more preposterous positions of Mill's Essay on Liberty originate in his mistaken or inadequate analysis of the doctrine of free will; and Aristotle's defense of natural slavery results from his failure to remember that according to Aristotelian metaphysics there can be no such thing as a natural slave.

Continued next issue

ADLER ON R. M. HUTCHINS

Because Bob Hutchins played such a large part in my life and influenced me so pervasively in what I did at the University of Chicago and in our editorial work together at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Philosopher at Large is filled with stories about our collaboration and with excerpts from our correspondence. But nothing will be found there that is an appraisal, accurate as well as adulatory, of the man himself and of what it was like to be so closely associated with him.

Here, it seems to me, I can remedy that defect by presenting my assessment of Bob Hutchins at a memorial tribute to him in the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, shortly after his death.

In fifty years of close association with Bob Hutchins -- at the Yale Law School, at The University of Chicago, at Encyclopaedia Britannica, and at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions -- I never ceased to be astonished by the extraordinary power of his intelligence in dealing with difficult books that he was reading for the first time; in dealing with the practical problems of an administrator; in dealing with the arguments involved in the dispute of theoretical issues.

I concluded [the eulogy] with reminiscences about Bob Hutchins as a teacher, as Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and as President of the University of Chicago.

If anyone needs an explanation of the intellectual vitality and the excitement about ideas that, during the Hutchins' administration, distinguished this University from all others, before and after, he will find it in Bob's predilection and propensity for sustained discussion of fundamental issues.

That same predilection and propensity characterized his service to Encyclopaedia Britannica as a member of its Board of Directors from 1943,and as Chairman of its Board of Editors from 1949, until his retirement from both posts. During all those years, he was not only the moral conscience of the publishing company, but its persistent mentor as well. His leadership provided the guidance and the inspiration that led in 1952 to the publication of Great Books of the Western World, and to the production in 1974 of the radically reconstructed and greatly improved fifteenth edition of the encyclopaedia.

What may be, but should not be, forgotten is that, for fifteen of the twenty years that Robert Hutchins headed this University, he was also a teaching member of its faculty, actively engaged in teaching students in the University, in the University high school, and in the Law School. As is the case with every good teacher, his impulse to teach sprang from his desire to learn. He was a splendid teacher, one of the best I have ever known, because of his own avidity for learning, accompanied by an acute sense of the difficulties of learning, which made him sympathetic to the pains of others engaged in that process.

Though seldom free from preoccupation with the problems of money raising and of dealing with trustees and faculty, Bob Hutchins never lost sight of his chief problem as a University President -- the future of its students.

To convey to you the character of that abiding concern, permit me, in closing, to quote from his "Address to the Graduating Class," in this chapel on Commencement Day, 1935:

"It is now almost fifteen years since I was in the position you occupy. I can therefore advise you about the dangers and difficulties you will encounter . . .

. . . My experience and observation lead me to warn you that the greatest, the most insidious . . . the most paralyzing danger you will face is the danger of corruption. Time will corrupt you. Your friends, your wives or husbands, your business or professional associates will corrupt you; your social, political, and financial ambitions will corrupt you. The worst thing about life is that it is demoralizing . . .

. . . Believe me, you are closer to the truth now than you will ever be again. Do not let "practical" men tell you that you should surrender your ideals because they are impractical. Do not be reconciled to dishonesty, indecency, and brutality because gentlemanly ways have been discovered of being dishonest, indecent, and brutal.

. . . Take your stand now before time has corrupted you. Before you know it, it will be too late. Courage, temperance, honor, liberality, justice, wisdom, reason, and understanding, these are still the virtues. In the intellectual virtues, this University has tried to train you. The life you have lived here should have helped you toward the rest. If come what may you hold them fast, you will do honor to yourselves and to the University, and you will serve your country."

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Mortimer J. Adler on How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization, Edited by Max Weismann

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