A literate, thoughtful essay on culture and education from Carl Bridenbaugh

Bridenbaugh was a distinguished historian, specializing in Colonial America. This address was presented to the American Historical Association in 1962.

It will take some time to read it, but it's worth the effort.

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On the educational and cultural side, perhaps nothing so marks the age as the decline in reading, especially reading for enjoyment, and with it, a shrinking of the imagination that reading has always stimulated. Must we abandon Masefield's beautiful poem "Cargoes," and, for the quinquereme of Nineveh, the stately Spanish galleon, and the dirty British coaster, substitute the submarine, the jet plane, and the rocket? A west coast colleague told me of a freshman coed at the University of California who complained to him about receiving a "D" in a history examination, for she claimed that she had always made "B's" in high school history courses. Upon her mentioning the French Revolution, she was asked, "What did you make in that"? "A guillotine," was the quick response of this young woman, who had been educated for life.

Yes, we may smile, but what are we to make of my own rencontre with a psychologist and an anthropologist, younger than I am, but each nationally prominent in his subject. I had been lamenting the failure of several of my best graduate students to recognize an allusion at the end of one of my lectures: "But, as Alice said, it is nothing but a pack of cards." There was a brief silence and then, almost in unison, they demanded, "Well, who was Alice"? Alice is apparently out for the duration-she is as dead as the Dodo. Is allusion as a literary and teaching device now outmoded?

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