Natural science is
recommended on the ground of its practical utility, but is taught
as a special accomplishment in removal from application. On the
other hand, music and literature are theoretically justified on
the ground of their culture value and are then taught with chief
emphasis upon forming technical modes of skill.
If we had less compromise and resulting confusion, if we analyzed
more carefully the respective meanings of culture and utility, we
might find it easier to construct a course of study which should
be useful and liberal at the same time. Only superstition makes
us believe that the two are necessarily hostile so that a subject
is illiberal because it is useful and cultural because it is
useless. It will generally be found that instruction which, in
aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the development of
imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of
intellectual insight -- surely cultural values -- also in the
same degree renders what is learned limited in its use. Not that
it makes it wholly unavailable but that its applicability is
restricted to routine activities carried on under the supervision
of others. Narrow modes of skill cannot be made useful beyond
themselves; any mode of skill which is achieved with deepening of
knowledge and perfecting of judgment is readily put to use in new
situations and is under personal control. It was not the bare
fact of social and economic utility which made certain activities
seem servile to the Greeks but the fact that the activities
directly connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their
days, the expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on
because of a personal appreciation of their meaning.
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