Page 20 Scribulus Winter Issue ON THE PROCESS OF UNLEARNING continued serve that democracy; he has read the words of Nathan Hale and he has memorized the Gettysburg address. He has learned to thrill to the strains of the "Star-Spangled Banner" and to the sight of white stars upon a field of blue. From countless Constitution day addresses he has learned to revere the old document that has weathered so many storms and triumphed over so many difficulties. In class after class he has marched westward with the pioneers and glorified in the surging spirit that carried our frontier west to the Pacific. Even in his last year of high school there was never a suggestion that maybe "the American system" the old tradition of patriotism, the Constitution and political democracy are not enough to bring us straight and sure to the perfect social state. But in college he comes in contact sooner or later with the thinkers who would overthrow this "system." He meets Socialism and Communism, which creeds strange as it may seem he never met in high school. He reads the "un-American" analyses written by the revolutionaries, and soon wonders whether the democracy and the economic order he learned to worship are not a little rotten at the core. He looks at the unemployed about him, and concludes that maybe the constitution is not impervious after all. He learns of the reasons why America fought in the World War and wonders whether the pledge of allegiance is not an ideal more tragic than beautiful. He is introduced to the bitter truth of politics, and learns that "the government of the people, by the people and for the people" has perished from the earth; he sees demagogues elected on the purest processes of majority vote, their machines growing strong on taxes raised to extortionary heights, while idealists go on the rocks in steady stream and reform movements batter themselves in endless futility. For a short time, perhaps, he turns to some Utopia, specialism or Communism or some more transient plan, and sees fulfillment in the new scheme for all the failures of the old. But his new illusion dies when he looks to the practical records of these social dreams, and it dies with even more finality than did the old illusion. The new order is as impractical and as hopeless of attainment as the old order is outnumbered or corrupt. He suspects that our governmental defects are but reflections of the unchanging defects of human nature. Our freshman, if he is typical, comes to college with a well-defined and well-entrenched religious creed. He prays to a personal God, who created him directly and intentionally. If he but trusts in his church leaders and his Bible for guidance, this God gives him strength while he lives and immortality when he dies. High school science did nothing to upset this dogma. But now he learns from evolution that the most insensate beast of the field has as much claim as he on the favor of whatever God exists. Astronomy tells him that this earth, previously the center of God's plan and the scene of the ministration of His own Son, is of infinite insignificance in the cosmic scheme. He learns that life is unlikely anywhere else in the infinities of space and wonders how these countless worlds, wasted so prodigiously, can possibly serve their main purpose as an unseen environment for the handful of souls on earth. Coincident with these disclosures, biology explains to him that his body is a machine, a most efficient machine, but one quite secure from any divine intervention, whether to kill or to cure. And from psychology comes the startling demonstration that the choices he makes are the choices outlined for him by the pre-determined operation of environment on heredity. The mechanism of the universe and of all life is now in every text-book and every test-tube and every expanse of earth under the stars. The revelations of scientists in 1936 seem to him more pertinent for 1936 than the revelations of 1830 or of two thousand years ago. And when he compares a thousand revelations, at a thousand differnt periods of history, through a thousand different prophets, all with the same credibility of substantiating evidence, he cannot, in spite of himself, see why some are true and others false. His professors try to save the day by verifying scriptures with scientific discovery, but when eternal truths are subject to modern-day tests, for him at least their authority is vanished. And with the loss of that authority, quite insurmountably, is also vanished the sanction the scriptures gave to certain Winter Issue Scribulus Page 21 codes of morals. The Bible offered temperance and brotherhood, unselfishness and chastity as virtues which would receive their due reward in heaven. But now there is no heaven, and the student must reexamine these codes on the basis of earthly reward. He looks about him. Quite easily he discovers the unselfish persons. They are crowding the relief rolls, and applying for bankruptcy papers and old-age pensions. He identifies the occupants of fine cars and fine homes as the men who have expropriated their brothers. He sees the tem-perant persons systematically excluded from those social gatherings where industrial and political advances are chiefly made. And so with all his old standards of judgment. Even the everlasting standards of art, the poetry of Tennyson and Shakespeare, the painting of the masters of the Renaissance, the music of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, are being challenged by modern forms on every side. And, last of all, his final illusion, that in college he will find the answers to all his questions, also is undermined. With its deadly vocational materialism and its mad round of memorization and examination, it robs him of his intellectual response and leaves only an anger and a profound disgust. The process is complete. This freshman was chosen, of course, for the extremity of his case. The usual student builds a new structure almost as fast as the old structure is destroyed. He discovers new values, and firmer values. He examines now, where once he accepted, and the stones he chooses will not crumble. The process is so gradual that he can hardly have sensed the disillusionment and the rebuilding. He can not tell exactly when he lost a given illusion. But the important thing is that he can look back and know that all of them are lost. He has unlearnt, and he sees that the unlearning was a vital preliminary to his education. And sometimes, in a bitter surge, he curses his forgotten Masters that the full majority, quite satisfied in their indoctrination, will never root out the propaganda of the home, the church and the elementary school in time to begin education. SCHOLARS KNOW MORE continued The professor struck again. "Why is the supernatural made so prominent in Mac-Beth?" Shakespeare tried several mouths before he got one that would speak the next answer. "The rival theatre, the Curtain, was taking the crowd away from Shakspeare's show with a play filled with blood and thunder. MacBeth had besides blood and thunder, darkness, witches, and ghosts, and the crowd came back. You've simply got to give the audience what it likes once in a while." "One more question," the man declared. Shakespeare noticed with surprise that his face was painfully red and apoplectic. He had been so busy concentrating that he had not noticed the fellow's illness. "One more question and only one." He was sawing the air now in the gestures that Hamlet denied the players and mouthing the words like the town crier. "Why did Shakespeare allow Lady MacBeth to dominate so much of the play?" The answer came from the quietest face in the class. "A lady friend wagered that he couldn't write a play in which a woman was strong enough and unscrupulous enough to make men shiver. She would have been a pretty good character if the rest of the company hadn't insisted upon repentance and all that stuff." The professor arose and picked up his books. His thin shoulders shook, his lean frame vibrated with his passion, the nostrils of his fine nose quivered. Student of emotions as he was, Shakespeare could not imagine why the man should react this way to first-hand information. "Students," he shouted, banging all of the books down at once, "I do not need to tell you that I am outraged. After all of my careful teaching you show no knowledge of Shakespeare or his technique! Besides" the man's voice and color rose simultaneously "besides, I'll have no such levity in my classroom." Now the visitor was thoroughly angry. With a haughty sweep of his cloak he arose, determined to cut his vacation on earth short. "I'd rather be in Hell," he thought as he eyed the professor scornfully and thoughtfully. "I won't have such levity in my classes," the man repeated. Then his mouth flew open with a click; a strange look came into his eyes. "I'd rather be in Hell!"