15. Do Universities Broaden Minds?

Does university training help or hinder in developing intellectual capacity to do highly original work? Among highly creative modem thinkers the following were formally educated: Montesquieu, Jefferson, Goethe, Macaulay, Marx, Freud, Champollion, and Gandhi. These did not go to college: Voltaire, Hume, Owen, Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy, Twain, and Shaw.

Bright people can teach themselves. As Henry Adams said, "No one can educate anyone else. You have to do it for yourself." There should, of course, be equivalency exams for the self-taught, as well as on-the-job training, for most professions.

Some would claim that if the youthful were encouraged to act freely, their initiative would be too great; that they would go mad. But I think not: Most would marry, others would travel, invent, and carry on original work on all sorts of lines. Early marriage could balance many of them so they could work better. It is worth remembering in this connection that among the young, idealism and faith are uncommonly strong.

Those destined for ordinary jobs don't need to learn anything taught in college, and many of them know it. They attend college because it's the thing to do. They tend to take "snaps" such as English, literature or sociology. I see no objection to letting them enjoy themselves at private colleges if they want to.

Public universities should, I think, confine themselves to serious training. The number entering should be preset as in Sweden, so as to train the quantity of people needed to fit the estimated number of openings in each profession, always allowing for the rise of some persons via equivalency exams.

College represents now too much of a good thing. There are too many learned professors and section leaders to adjust to, too many books to hasten through at a set speed, too many years to plod away on the treadmill. A Ph.D. in history is now expected to take four to eight years—on top of the twelve in school and four in college. Perhaps, worst of all, the Ph.D. subject is deliberately kept small, so that the student will be able to claim mastery of something. Four to eight years of deliberate narrowing can have the effect of incapacitating him from ever taking a broad view of anything. The result of all this mental drill tends to be a mashed human, a weakened person. Only a very sturdy soul, such as a Freud or a Schweitzer, can come through all this and still retain the ability to think for himself. University study could, with no intrinsic loss, be shortened from eight years to four, and school could be limited to ages ten to fifteen.

These suggested reductions in compulsory education would have another powerful advantage: They might set our people's minds largely free, a result surely to be wished.