NOTIONS OF CULTURE
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we can deliberately produce culture by educating a class, or a selected
group, or the whole people for culture, is to expect the cart before
the horse." One is tempted to remark that this expectation was duly
fulfilled when the motor car came! But, more seriously, is not Mr.
Eliot in the definition of "Education" he is using, doing the very
things he so skilfully avoids doing with "Culture"-using it in senses
which though current and accepted, and therefore indicative and im–
portant, are not the senses most needed in this discussion?
Let me grant at once that what he says about Education is true
-for his use of the word: "The only affirmation about education,
perhaps, that comes within the scope of this paper, is this: that it is
only in a very restricted sense that education produces culture-it is
more widely true to say that the culture produces the education."
I agree as to what he is talking about here. Education,
as we have
known and practised it)
won't produce even a tolerable
ersatz
culture
to replace our dying worlds. I share his view of the "laborious ineffi–
ciency" and "spasms of alarm" in and with which "we endeavor to
supply by education and enlightenment" the native culture we are
being deprived of. And yet ... is this because of the inefficiency,
because it is
alarm
not zeal which moves us, because we have as yet
neither seen clearly what to do in Education nor how to do it-or
is it a brute fact in the nature of things that better ways of imparting
"a right notion of what is valuable, of what we mean by success,
and of what types of men we admire" are necessarily and forever be–
yond human powers of discovery and use?
To be concrete: we are only now beginning to know how to
teach well the most teachable things-reading, writing and mathe–
matics. We are only now beginning to find out, through these humble
studies in method, how to avoid the wasteful, stultifying confusions,
misunderstandings and aberrations our random undesigned ways of
teaching in all subjects promote. I do not say that better ways of
communicating the active principle of moral order are in sight. I do
say that great improvements in Education as "a department of in–
tellectual design" are. And for me this changes the picture, lightening
the darkness.
Since what may be called the traditional means of maintaining
or renewing the culture are being destroyed by technological change,
the remedy, I conceive, is in improving our other means. The sense
of "Education" I miss in Mr. Eliot's Notes would make it "the study
and pursuit of intellectual and moral order." I am not certain how
far this differs from something Mr. Eliot would call by other names.
It
is not, for me, 'philosophy' in anything less than Plato's sense. It
