A Pleasure Lost

What is the difference between the superior U.S. university student and his counterpart in Britain? After years of teaching on both sides of the Atlantic, British Critic David Daiches has come to his own conclusion: though not nearly so well prepared in secondary school, the American has usually more than caught up by the time he graduates from college. But in all the rush, he loses something invaluable along the way.

"In such fields as literature, philosophy, and history, at least," says Daiches in Commentary, "the bright British student will most appreciate the lecturer who plays with ideas cleverly and suggestively, but the bright American student resents that: he wants the truth, or the right methods, and no nonsense.

" 'Do you believe in that view of literature you were developing in your lecture this morning?' a Cornell student once asked me. I said that I did not, but I thought it was interesting to play with the idea a little and see where it led us. He replied, almost angrily, that if I did not believe the theory to be true I should not waste my own and the class's time discussing it at such length; it was sheer verbal gymnastics, and the students were there to learn, not to be played with.

" 'Is C. S. Lewis's book on 16th-century literature a book to be read?' a graduate student asked me the other day at Indiana. I replied that it was a fresh and sometimes brilliant reading of the texts of the period . . . 'But will it give me a proper view of the period?' she persisted. 'I don't know,' I replied. 'I'm not sure what the "proper" view of the period is. Read it and make up your own mind about it.' This answer was not regarded as satisfactory.

"I often have the feeling that the American student, who works hard and learns fast, never has time to enjoy his work. I am thinking especially of those who go on to graduate work. They have learned an immense amount by the time they enter graduate school and have often surpassed in knowledge and in methodological skill their British counterparts, but they have the air of never having lived long enough with their subject. A graduate student in English literature will rush on to do research on Marvell's imagery before he is really at home in English literature and really inward with its traditions and achievements. And there will be even less likelihood of his having any true sense of European culture as a whole . . .

"I think there is something to be said for spreading things out, for slow and cumulative learning. The hardworking, conscientious, somewhat puritanical American graduate student often outstrips his British opposite number at surprising speed; but in the process he grows old faster, too, and he also learns to regard his subject as a field to be covered rather than as a body of knowledge to be explored and relished."

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