ARGUMENTS
429
No man should escape our universities knowing how little he knows.
He must have some sense of the fact that not through his fault, not
through his sloth (though he may be lazy and not very bright) but
inherently in the nature of things, he is going to be an ignorant
man and so is everybody else.
But surely too all the traditional fields are imparting or try to im–
part more information than is necessary and they could all stand some
pruning, some de-essentializing, for the
whole
past cannot be carried,
still vital, into the future, although all we know of it can be recorded
and stored in books. In short we must pick and choose as to what mat–
ters are to be preserved in education as the living links in the total
history of mankind. Further, rote learning, storing information in
human memories, will be less and less relevant as time goes on. The
most profound and important changes in the human organism usually
happen right before our eyes, but they are accomplished, usually, before
they are noticed. One such change certainly in modern history is the
decay, through atrophy or desuetude, of the human memory. In 1846
in a review of Grote's
History of Greece
John Stuart Mill mentioned
the poor memory of "our degenerate days" and speculated on how
mighty ·an instrument it once must have been:
In our time, when the habit is formed of recording all things in
permanent characters, and when everyone relies, not on memory,
but on substitutes for it, we can scarcely form an idea of what its
intrinsic powers must have been....
Since Mill's day memory has only become less and less relevant, and
more and more what will be sought in students will not be
total recall,
although genuine erudition will always be prized, but a certain mental
style:
swiftness, grace, subtlety, the ability to synthesize, the faculty of
being able to steer successfully between an endless series of S
cyllas
and
Charybdes.
More and more the whole educational enterprise will have
as its motto: what is concluded that we should reach conclusions
about it?
Bell says that he is concerned only with the program of instruction
at Columbia College (this was his mandate) and, quite understandably,
would not be concerned with the student and the administration. Thus
it is no criticism of his book to say that in the larger perspective, and
in the nation as a whole, it will become increasingly difficult to deal
with anyone component of the college or the university in isolation
from the others. All large modern problems, urban renewal, air pollution
control, population control, eradication of poverty, racial relations, can-
