To a certain extent this might seem to be placing the responsibility on the public, but as is so often true in speaking of American education, we find ourselves arguing in a vicious circle. As Everett Dean Martin has well said, “The school cannot evade the responsibility for the present low level of mental life in this republic.” Considering the enormous outlay for public education and the colossal sums represented by the endowments of our private institutions, we have a right to ask why, when educators have had resources undreamed of in any other land, they have created merely a muddled system and a general level of cultural attainment among our[Pg 153] people below that of any one of eight or more European countries. In so far as there appears to be any definite trend in American educational aims, it would seem to be toward President Eliot’s ideal of “power and service”—one of the most baneful phrases, I fear, ever let loose by an educator upon an uneducated people. The stress is laid wholly upon the “doing.” We have, more particularly in innumerable smaller colleges, courses in cost accounting, in real estate selling, in “business English,” household decoration, basketball coaching as a profession, poultry raising, personnel management—all counting for “points” with philosophy or literature or science. I cannot see that, as a general rule, American universities or colleges leave the slightest cultural impress upon those who attend them. Once out in the world, the ideals and the interests of most of the university men are identical with those of any “go-getter” who, since leaving high school, has been learning his trade of stockbroking or real estate selling or manufacturing in the world of experience. A man who has attended the Harvard Business School may indeed get ahead a bit faster than his less-tutored competitor, but that is because of his specific technical training, similar to that of a cabinetmaker or lawyer. Some corporations, after exhaustive research, have come to the conclusion that a “college man” is likely to prove more valuable in the competition of business than one who is not; but that may be explained on many grounds quite divorced from education. College men come from a class that is at least moderately well up in the economic scale, with all that this implies in producing a superior animal—good air, food, and the rest. Moreover,[Pg 154] a college man has four years more of such things than has the non-college class. Then there are the social knowledge, the friendship, and the “mixing” experience gained in college. But none of these advantages is in any way related to the main business of a university in its undergraduate department, which is, to provide a cultural background and an education. The mere fact that the graduate is a better money-maker has nothing to do with that.