Who took the Joy?

Wolfgang Yourgrau, then a professor at the University of Denver, a student of Albert Einstein and Max Planck, as well as novelist Thomas Mann at Berlin University, wrote an article in 1965 that has, perhaps, even greater relevance today. He titled it, "Who Took the Joy Out of Learning?" That question is certainly most appropriate at this time of year. And, like Dickens' ghosts of Christmas, may the ghost of Dr. Yourgrau haunt us.

The following are edited excerpts from that article:

"To make it clear from the beginning: according to my bias, I plead wholeheartedly for [education] as an idealistic nursery. A place where we may play marbles, ride rocking horses, and have gargantuan fun. [Education] should be a refuge for the dreamer, the star gazer, the Don Quixote. After all, some of the greatest discoveries have emerged from the abstruse speculations of oddballs who soldiered in the landscapes of fantasy. Is not the great scientist, the creative poet often a visionary, a crank, an outsider--an eccentric?

No doubt education is a training center for the professions. . . . But there is a dramatic difference between a university and a training college. [There is] the search for pure knowledge, our goal the pursuit of true insight. . . . [Education] should never be a mere teaching factory, a necessary evil to earn a diploma, an unavoidable market where one can purchase a veneer of so-called education or culture. . . .

There should always exist an interrelationship between the students and their teachers. [We] must attempt the grand and the sublime. Teaching a subject to youth must convey an ecstatic thrill. Monotony and repetition of textbook material are tantamount to killing any interest, any concern in the student's mind. Without intellectual passion, the teacher fails in the main task, namely, to communicate knowledge effectively. The chief enemies are mediocrity and dishonesty. The sole responsibility lies in one direction, to teach students to think independently, to condone one kind of fanaticism--veracity.

The devil once came to Cuvier, the famous French zoologist and threatened to eat him. Cuvier looked the devil up and down, shrugged his shoulders, and acidly remarked. You can't! You have horns and hooves. Go and eat grass--you can't eat me. I think that Cuvier's attitude is the paradigm case for how a genuine educated person should reason.

Let us never, never be satisfied with the superlativeness of the present; let us never lose the zest for striving for the impossible; let us never lose the zeal to approximate the ideal. The motto of the Delphic oracle was: Know Thyself. That of a European University: To the living spirit. And the motto of some of our education: To hell with all eccentrics. The cultural failure of [education] is sadly reflected in the fact that students have been apathetic, lacking convictions and deep respect for learning, for knowledge, for the excitement of reasoning.

Why are we so discontented with [education] today? [Because] we test the acquisition of data rather than imagination and intelligence. Small wonder then that tests dominate a student's mind, cramps style, performance, and spoils the ultimate results of teaching. We all agree that [education] is a human institution, not an automaton. Not buildings, offices, regulations, administrative activities shape the contour of education--students and teachers alone constitute a true center of learning."