Professor Merle Curti, president of the American Historical Association in 1954, has addressed himself to the intellectual theme several times, including the impressive occasion of his 1955 Presidential Address. His propositions now stand expanded in the Brown and Haley Lectures, which he delivered at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, published in turn in a book by Rutgers University Press. The title reads American Paradox—The Conflict of Thought and Action.
It would be false to deny the disturbing and symptomatic impression of Professor Curti’s disputation. It is symptomatic because it reveals the continued domination of a philosophic approach which, at the risk of some imprecision, could be termed the absolute-secularist or the positivist-pragmatist approach that has been widespread, I am sorry to say, among the American professional intelligentsia for the past two generations. It is disturbing because it reveals how some powerful misconceptions, the fallacies of which by now are evident, still continue to prevail. I shall name them here:
- First, the (positivist) confusion of education with intelligence,
- Second, the (pragmatist) separation of thought from action,
- Third, the (democratist) separation of the European from the American tradition,
- Fourth, the (secularist) confusion of intellectuality with scholarship.
Now I think that of these four misconceptions, the last three began to develop during the 1890s and took hold of many minds thereafter. Yet I cannot stretch that flexible decade far enough to include the first.
The first is, simply, an expression of that belief in the actual powers of formal education which goes far back in American history; and which, after some reflection, may even be designated as perhaps the only enduring superstition of the American people. It is evident that necessity led to the very early delegation of certain domestic responsibilities to schools. But it is also evident how since the 1890s this existing inclination has become formidably expanded by scientific and psychological fads, through the timidity and the conformist habits of certain social groups, and most of all, through the propaganda of professional educators. It is evident how the delegation of moral and mental training from home to school has now grown almost absolute, and that it has recently shown certain symptoms of disastrous consequences. It is, then, amazing how this sorry confusion of education with intelligence is automatically shared by so eminent a scholar and educator as Professor Curti, since it is not conceivable how else he could see a paradox in something that is not a paradox at all:
Why do Americans prize education and yet fear intellectuals? Why do we spend millions every year on free schools and at the same time distrust “eggheads”?