In Place of Excellence

Professor Joseph Wood Krutch of Columbia University is willing to agree that this is the Age of the Common Man. But that does not mean that he approves. The trouble is, says Krutch in the current Saturday Review, the Age of the Common Man is rapidly becoming the Age of the Common Denominator.

"When we make ourselves the champion of any particular group," says Krutch, "we almost inevitably begin to idealize that group. From defending the common man we pass on to exalting him, and we find ourselves beginning to imply, not merely that he is as good as anybody else, but that he is actually better. Instead of demanding only that the common man be given an opportunity to become as uncommon as possible, we make his commonness a virtue . . .

"The logical extreme of this opinion would be the conviction that any deviation in either direction from the statistical average is unadmirable . . . We are . . . more inclined to boast how many Americans go to college than to ask how much the average college education amounts to; how many people read books rather than how good the books are ... Argue, as I myself have argued, that more can be learned about almost any subject from ten minutes with a printed page than from half an hour with even Qne of the better educational radio programs and you will be met with the reply: 'Perhaps. But so many more people will listen to the radio.' . . .

"Unfortunately, the fanatical exaltation of the common denominator has been taken up ... by those who are supposed to be educators and intellectual leaders. Instead of asking, 'What would a good education consist of?', many professors of education are asking, 'What do most college students want?' . . . Examination papers are marked, not in accordance with any fixed standard, but in accordance with a usual level of achievement; the amount of work required is fixed by the amount the average student does; even the words with which the average student is not familiar are edited out of the books he is given to read . . .

"The ideal now persistently held before the American citizen from the moment he enters kindergarten ... is a kind of conformity more or less disguised under the term 'adjustment.' 'Normality' has almost completely replaced 'Excellence' as an ideal. It has also rendered all but obsolescent such terms as 'Righteousness,' 'Integrity,' and 'Truth.' The question is no longer how a boy ought to behave but how most boys do behave; not how honest a man ought to be but how honest men usually are . . ."

Salvation is possible, "but [not] ... if the desire for excellence has been lost . . . There is not really anything undemocratic about either the desire for, or the recognition of, excellence."

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