166
PARTISAN REVIEW
Emotionally Mr. Van Doren is sincerely committed to democ–
racy.
It
is natural that he should seek to relate his beliefs on education
to his views on democracy. But the way he does it is inexcusably crude.
He lays the failure of democracy at the door of modern illiberal edu–
cation, and then equates
the
nature of democracy with
the
nature of
liberal education as he conceives it. To do the first he is compelled to
support the canard that American youth is without faith, cynical
about truth and the values of democracy. For this he blames their
teachers. "The education of youth had slipped by default into the
hands of those who were bound to discredit education itself, and
democracy with it." "The last generation of students may never
forgive its teachers who taught contempt and fear of truth." This
charge against American youth-now quite in the patriotic mode–
arose because American campuses have not been fired by a propa–
ganda which paints the war against Hitlerism as a war
for
democracy.
But is it a war
for
democracy, or even for the Atlantic Charter?
American youth has performed its · duties cheerfully enough, and
there are other-and valid-justifications for fighting Hitlerism be–
sides transparently false ones.
If
it is the truth about the war that
Van Doren is seeking, some of these ostensibly misguided students
can teach
him
something his own methods cannot.
The sweeping accusations Van Doren hurls against his colleagues
is evidence that enthusiasm for liberal education is no specific against
illiberal and arrogant intellectual manners. For example, we are told
that modem educators have taught contempt for truth. They have
done so because they have insisted on the distinction between fact and
opinions, instead of between opinion and truth. Taken literally, of
course, this is absurd. For whatever a fact is, :it cannot be established
without affirming
propositio~
that are true. But what hides behind
the absurdity is the view that the best way to discover the facts is not
by relying upon scientific method but by resorting, in the manner this
book so well illustrates, to metaphysics.
Van Doren would save American students from the effects of
scientific thinking-the truth is that all too few are given to such
think–
ing-by dosing them with his patented brand of liberal education.
And this liberal education he identifies in another series of outrageous
non-sequiturs with education as such, and with democracy, too.
"Democracy as education is man teaching. It serves itself by making
its
pupils free-not free for or from the state but absolutely free. This
is another way of saying that it serves itself by making men. But edu–
cation, too, has the job of making men. So education is democracy,
and democracy is education." Not even the violent straining for
