The Death of Judgment, Experience, Inititative, and Character

There is, I have heard, somewhere around fifty different kinds of intelligence. America's public schools, I have heard, only instruct and test in about thirteen. I tend to believe it. However, my voice alone may not convince the reader. For that reason, I have recorded below the sentiments of French psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon on the subject of instruction and education -

Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)

Foremost among the dominant ideas of the present (time) is to be found the notion that instruction is capable of considerably changing men (and women), and has for its unfailing consequence to improve them and even make them equal...

(Now), (f)rom the top to the bottom of the social pyramid, from the humblest clerk to the professor and the prefect, the immense mass of persons boasting diplomas besiege the professions...The number of the chosen being restricted, that of the discontented is perforce immense...

One might consent, perhaps, to continue to accept all the disadvantages of our (educational system)...did the superficial acquisition of so much knowledge, the faultless repeating by heart of so many text-books, raise the level of intelligence. But does it really raise this level? Alas no! The conditions of of success in life are the possession of judgment, experience, initiative, and character-qualities which are not bestowed by books.

To under-gird his point, Le Bon proceeded to quote Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893),  the French critic and historian -

Ideas are only formed in their natural and normal surroundings; the promotion of the growth is effected by the innumerable impressions appealing to the senses which a young (person) receives daily in the work(place).; at the sight of tools, materials and operations; in the presence of customers, workers, and labour, of work well and ill done, costly and lucrative. In such a way are obtained those trifling perceptions of detail of the eyes, the ear, the hands, and even the sense of smell, which, picked up involuntarily, and silently elaborated, take shape within the learner, and suggest to him sooner or later this or that new combination, simplification, economy, improvement, or invention. The young (person) is deprived, and precisely at the age when they are most fruitful, of all these precious contacts, and all these indispensable elements of assimilation. For (ten, or twelve, or sixteen years) on end (she) is shut up in a school...

At least nine out of ten have wasted their time and pains during several years years of their life - telling important, even decisive years...Too much has been demanded of them...(and) on a given day...before a board (of exams) they..be living repertories of all human knowledge. In point of fact they were, or nearly so...on that particular day, but a month later they are no longer...(Soon enough) (s)ettled down, married, resigned to turning in a circle, and indefinitely in the same circle, (they) shut (them)selves up in (a) confined function, which (they) fulfill adequately, but nothing more.

In the three stages of instruction, those of childhood, adolescence, and youth, the theoretical and pedagogic preparation by books...has lengthened out and become overcharged in view of the exam(s), the degree, the diploma, and the certificate, and solely in this view, and by the worst methods, by the application of an unnatural and anti-social regime...by mechanical cramming...by overwork, without thought for the time that is to follow, for the adult age and the function of man, without regard for the real world on which the (student) will shortly be thrown, for the society in which we move and to which we must be adapted...for the struggle in which humanity is engaged, and in which to defend herself and to keep her footing she ought previously to have been equipped...This indispensable equipment, this acquisition of more importance than any other, this sturdy common sense and nerve and will-power, our schools do not procure...

In consequence (the student's) entry into the world and his first steps in the field of action are most often merely successions of painful falls, whose effect is that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillsion has supervened. The deceptions have been to great, the disappointments too keen.

Now the skeptic of this article and of what Le Bon and Taine, both Frenchmen, thought and wrote over one hundred years ago might be tempted to argue that little of what is contained in this article applies to 21st Century America. Allow the author to make the following observations:

• What are 21st Century employers saying about the preparedness of today graduates?

A good place to look for answers to that question would be in the recently released book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, which makes the following point (among others) -

According to (the author's) analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, forty-five percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills - including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing - during their first two years of college. 

• What has changed in American education since Le Bon and Tine wrote the above?

A failed school teacher named John Dewey corrupted America's educational system. See John Dewey & Decline Of American Education: How Patron Saint Of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching & Learning. Things are probably worse in education in the United States since Le Bon and Tine wrote what is quoted in this post.


Primary source for this article: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon