The following article entitled "The Revolt Against Education," written by Glenn Frank, President of the University of Wisconsin, appears in the current issue of The Nation.

Students of civilization whose social studies have begun with biology as a point of departure have lately elaborated with an alluring richness of detail the theory of the burden of civilization. It is suggested that among civilized peoples each succeeding generation elaborates the social environment, increases the number of demands made upon the members of society, and complicates generally the problem of living and working. With the biological strength of the race at a standstill or on the decline while the burdens it must carry are on the increase, the time is likely to come in the life history of any civilized people when the structural overloading will become so great that the civilization in question will collapse, either by the involuntary lapse of the processes of society into chaos or by a deliberate revolt of the people against civilization.

"Our Race is Overweighted"

Sir Francis Galton put this theory briefly when he said several years ago: "Our race is overweighted. It will degenerate under circumstances which make demands that exceed its powers." The enormous increase of knowledge and the increasing complexity of the curriculum in our universities is analogous to the increase of things and the increasing complexity of social organization in our civilization as a whole. It is, perhaps, more than analogous. It may well be an organic part of the larger social process that Galton described. We are witnessing today both the collapse of our curricula from structural overloading and the beginnings of a student revolt against the sterilities of current academic procedure.

Knowledge Gained Too Fast

A hundred or more years ago the outlines of a college education were simple. In the centuries immediately preceding knowledge had not increased at a pace so rapid but that educators could digest, interpret, and relate to previous knowledge the new knowledge as it appeared. But with the nineteenth century the invigorating winds of a new critical and scientific spirit began to blow across the world. The scientific spirit began hunting, blasting, boring, probing, boiling, cooking, and dissecting. Men, animated by the Itch to know, began to dig up, at a disconcerting rate, all sorts of new, facts and new knowledge. Before long it became apparent that the new knowledge was coming too fast to be digested and fitted intelligently into any educational scheme. And there happened in the educational field the thing I saw happen in a Missouri hayfield about fifteen years ago.

"Damn it, Stack it Yourself!"

Six of us were putting up hay on Cal Shinn's farm. Among the six was a swashbuckling braggart who offered to bet five dollars that he could stack all the hay that the other five of us could pitch to him. We took the bet, prorating it at a dollar apiece. We laid the base for a stack and began pitching in dead earnest. The man on the stack managed to keep his head above hay for a while, but before long he was up to his neck in hay that he could not handle. He managed to extricate himself from the mass of unstackable hay, slid off the stack, stuck his pitchfork in the ground, and said: "Damn it, stack it yourself!"

It was thus that the elective system was born. I mean the elective system as a really popular movement. I am aware, of course, that the idea of the elective system was in existence at William and Mary College as a deliberate educational theory, although but little developed in practice, nearly half a century before its adoption at Harvard, and many years before it became generally the basis of what seems to me to have been essentially a strategic retreat of educators from an increasingly unmanageable mass of modern knowledge. Looked at historically, I think the hay-field episode is an accurate illustration of what has happened in our colleges during the last century. Overwhelmed by new facts that were coming faster than they could be managed, educators slid off the stack, stuck the pitchfork into the ground, and, turning to green freshmen, said, with the profanity deleted, "Stack it your-self!"

Specialization Inevitable

Confronted with new facts and new knowledge growing at a speed that outstripped the possibility of prompt correlation at the time, the educational world adopted as its fundamental method of handling knowledge the method that was producing knowledge, namely, specialization. Few will dispute that the primacy of the principle of specialization is 90 per cent inevitable. This 90 per cent inevitability need not, however, blind us to some of the bad by-products of specialization. It is in devising ways and means for preventing these bad by-products that the next fruitful advances in educational policy are most likely to be made.

The study of the classics was crippled if not killed by classroom pedants who forgot the meaning of the classic literature in their absorption in the minutiae of the classic languages. Did William James have this in mind when he said to F. C. S. Schiller that "the natural one my of any subject is the professor there-of"? At any rate, specialization in the classics has about succeeded in sealing the tomb of one of the richest sources, if not indeed the richest source, of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation and discipline. May not a too extreme specialization in the teaching of the sciences, of economics and political economy, of education, of literature, work a similar result?

No Swift Change Possible

I am not seduced by an extravagant hope that educators can assemble any single bag of tricks that will swiftly and sweepingly reverse what may be the irresistible tendency of modern civilization to create burdens it cannot carry and to set up a suicidal complexity of organization. Our civilization and the educational system it has produced may have to run their cycle until they break. But even if we suspect ourselves to be the victims of a process we cannot control, it is dangerous to admit it, and to surrender to it is simply to set ahead the date of our debacle. We must not rest content with a coward's refuge in unrelated specialisms.

We might undertake to prevent the abuse and to promote the ultmate utility of specialization by making an effort to insure, as far as possible, that students shall be exposed to a broadly conceived and coherently organized body of general knowledge during some definite period of the college years that precede the intensive specialization of graduate study and professional training. Such an organization of subject matter could be made possible only by the courageous willingness of educators to be tentatively dogmatic in saying what subject matter will best induct the student into an understanding of his contemporary world, of the forces that have gone into its making from the past, and of the living forces that are most likely to determine its future.