Review of Veblen’s „The Higher Learning in America“,
by B. HARROW.

“The Liberator” (New York), Vol. 2, No. 6 (Jun., 1919), p. 50-51
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Scrapping the School System

The Higher Learning, by Thorstein Veblen. B. W. Huebsch.

THIS book is the contribution of the keenest analyst in this country to the 
problem of the higher learning. It is more than a penetrating criticism of the 
universities; it is a criticism of our present economic system, conducted as it 
is by business men for the accumulation of Profits. The Power arising from the 
illegitimate gains of vested interests has reached for the control of the 
university, as a means of acquiring additional Prestige. The control of the 
university, as well as of the present industrial system, is tenaciously held by 
the business men, and the explanation of the reactionary tendencies in our 
institutions of learning lies in the fact that our "elderly business men" are 
determined to maintain the present order.

The upshot of such a state of affairs is that virtually no higher learning 
exists today, while the university has become a commercial establishment, run on 
the most approved methods of conducting business for personal profit, with all 
the statistics, accounting, competition, and cheap publicity that this entails. 
As a suggestion for relieving such an untoward situation in the sanctuary of 
Higher Learning, Veblen advocates the complete abolition of the academic 
executive and the governing board, leaving those really interested in the higher 
learning free to pursue their quest of knowledge. He lets us speculate on what 
would happen.

The world is in a mood for scrapping useless appendages to public institutions. 
Along with the academic executive and the governing board, I should like to 
scrap Boards of Education, as at present constituted, and principals of high and 
elementary schools. These schools (penal settlements Veblen calls them) are 
relics of feudalism. They are con-trolled by autocrats, who, although they 
ostentatiously advocate free and popular education, prescribe the kind of 
education which shall be propagated by their vassals, which obviously is worse 
than no education. Schools are rotting because they reflect the control of 
business men, whose major interest, which is to say sole interest, is personal 
and class profit. For the maintenance and betterment of the present system of 
industry, for the benefit of the business manipulators, the traffic will bear 
only a certain degree of learning. At that point sabotage is introduced to limit 
the output of learning. Hence, there is virtually introduced a high protective 
tariff (working for the benefit of those who control industry) on liberal 
learning, on free speech, on scholarship, on individuality, on anything, in 
short, that makes for real as opposed to sham education.
 
In this country no other institution is so suited to the introduction of the 
soviet idea as the school-communal control by the teacher, the parent, the 
pupil, the social worker, and the educator, those primarily interested in the 
schools. The school is not the concern of Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce, 
retired business men, and principals, except as industrial and political 
manipulators. The latter surely [51] perform no educational function beyond that 
of obstructing initiative on the part of teachers and pupils and in retarding 
progress. They are the servants of the business interests concerned in 
maintaining the status quo and they are unalterably opposed to any revision 
which threatens to shift control from "captains of industry and erudition" to 
the common people. Today, the one institution par excellence where democracy is 
non-existent, where it is, in fact, obsolete is the public school.

B. HARROW.
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