Released 1961
This is part of the soundtrack of the National Film Board’s film University (1961); there is an untitled transcript in NFF, 1988, box 1, file p, with some minor inaccuracies. The film examines the crisis in university education brought about by the dramatic increase in enrolment, and questions the purpose of education in today’s world. As well as filming student discussions, director and narrator Stanley Jackson interviewed students and university officials, though his questions appear only as “voiceovers.” The segment with Frye includes a discussion with some remarkable students: Margaret Atwood (later distinguished poet and novelist), Dennis Lee (poet honoured as Toronto’s poet laureate, perhaps best known for his books of poetry for children), Alexandra Johnston (later professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of Victoria College), and Donna Youngblut (who went on to a teaching career and was soon to marry Lee). The section begins, however, immediately after footage of a seminar debating Plato’s view of education.
JACKSON: For some students, this constant collision of new ideas is a challenging experience, boldly entered into. For many others university is a confusing and upsetting experience after the certainties which were characteristic of their previous schooling. But Dr. Northrop Frye, principal of Victoria College, Toronto, and an eminent man of letters, feels that this is a necessary stage in a student’s development.
FRYE: I am afraid it is an essential part of the educating process—the educating process just can’t go on until the mind gets unsettled and very badly unsettled. The whole method of education that was laid down in the dialogues of Plato by Socrates begins by unsettling the mind: you begin by demonstrating to the student that he doesn’t actually know what he is talking about and that he uses words instinctively without the faintest notion of what they mean. By the time he has figured out what they mean he has got a very much wider perspective on life, but that doesn’t increase his security—it increases his feeling of doubt about the adequacy of what he knew before. It’s the same in religion. All religions have tried to shock and unsettle the mind—they have always tried to make a monkey out of the reasoning intellect—either by putting faith above it or by some technique of paradox. And there doesn’t seem to be any way of getting any further with the mind until a certain amount of tearing apart and reassembling is done. The beginning of the process is beginning to wonder if there aren’t other societies, other ways of life, other forms of culture, other modes of experience and of knowledge and apprehension which are utterly different from anything you have so far encountered. The first realization of that is bound to be unsettling.
JACKSON: We frequently hear that students come to college to learn to think. What would you say to that?
FRYE: I would be all in favour of learning to think if one takes certain precautions. The man in James Thurber’s story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was always assuring his wife that he was thinking, but what he was actually doing was simply mooning or day dreaming. There are all kinds of mental processes which we call thought which have nothing to do with thinking at all. Mooning and daydreaming and associating and worrying are some of the things that go on in our minds that have nothing whatever to do with thought. Thinking is not a natural process—it’s not something like eating or sleeping—it’s a very difficult technique that has to be learned.
JACKSON: I think you once used the phrase “those difficult techniques that set one free.”1 Would you explain what you meant by that, Dr. Frye?
FRYE: There’s a kind of half-baked notion in society that the untrained act is the free act, and I have never understood that feeling or that assumption. If you have a musical ability, for example, that is expressed in an ability to play the piano, you sit down and practise the piano for many long and weary hours, and by doing so you eventually begin to set your own musical talent free. But you can only set your musical talent free as a result of relentless discipline and very hard work. And I can associate freedom only with a disciplined act. I don’t see that free speech, for example, has anything to do with mumbling and grousing. I think free speech is pretty accurately disciplined speech.
JACKSON: How would you say such disciplines are useful? Most people feel that the study of literature, for example, hasn’t much to do with real life.
FRYE: Well, what’s real life? Is real life the life that is actually being lived around you or is it the life that man could live? What the university tries to give you is the sense of what man could do on the basis of what he has done. The whole aim of a university education is to get you maladjusted to your actual society because it tries to make you compare the society that you’re living in with what humanity has shown it can do. It tries to get you to compare the morning paper or the weekly periodical that comes into the house with Shakespeare and Milton, and it tries to get you to compare the kind of sympathy with humanity that you read in the news or hear over the radio with the wisdom of the philosophers and the love of the saints, and in all those it’s continually measuring what society is doing against what society in its greatest moments has done and could do. And it says that the latter is what is real.
JACKSON: Dr. Frye had once written “the university preserves the memory of mankind.”2 At one of his informal seminars we found fourth-year students arguing about whether an ordinary man of the present day can be a great tragic figure in a dramatic work. The case in point was the effectiveness of Willie Loman, the central figure in Death of a Salesman.
[Scene shifts to a seminar:]
STUDENT [MARGARET ATWOOD]: In what does it consist?
STUDENT [DONNA YOUNGBLUT]: In his tenacity—the way he won’t let go of his dream.
ATWOOD: If it were a sort of compelling dream you could see why he was being tenacious. But as it is, it is a very sort of commercial thing.
YOUNGBLUT: Oh, I object, it isn’t all commercial. I think his dream is the dream of all mankind translated into the terms of his day and age and that is the dream to be at the top—Number One—the god.
FRYE: Let us take a parallel. Take the case of King Lear, who is a tremendous titanic figure—the biggest in drama, I suppose—and yet Lear tries to become heroic through his royalty and finds that the only way that he can achieve any dignity at all is through a rather weak and suffering humanity when he is being cuddled by Cordelia.
STUDENT [ALEXANDRA JOHNSTON]: This is the point. The difference between them is that Lear comes through it and realizes it—that in this lies his dignity. But Willie never realizes it—he dies mad.
FRYE: Do you know what I thought was the most moving passage in that play? It was when his son Biff said to him, “I am a dime a dozen pop, you know that, and you’re a dime a dozen too,” and his father said, “I am not a dime a dozen, and neither are you. I am Willie Loman, and you are my son.”3 Suddenly at that point my mind went back to a very different play, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, where they have come to kill her and try to make her reconciled to being killed, and she stands with her back to the wall and says “I am Duchess of Malfi still” [4.2.142]. Now I think that that is a heroic statement, and it is when you are falling back on your humanity that you achieve a heroic dimension.
JACKSON: Gradually as he acquires the habit of trying to understand the experience of other ages the student may begin to reach some understanding of his own times, of his own experience.
STUDENT [DENNIS LEE]: … this is where I think it is tied in with real life. I think only a man of the stature of Sophocles or of Shakespeare who has to a greater or lesser extent experienced what Lear goes through—what Oedipus has gone through—
ATWOOD: In other words you are saying that Lear is a reflection of Shakespeare’s own life? And that is why he wrote King Lear? I think that is very unfair to Shakespeare.
LEE: No, I don’t say that’s why he wrote King Lear. But I don’t think he could have written King Lear without having the deepest, most profound elements of King Lear. I think Shakespeare must have been highly aware of …
JACKSON: Of course, not all students see the opportunity a university offers to become familiar with the larger world. We reminded Dr. Frye of the remark to the effect that the exposure to a university education is not in itself automatically beneficial.
FRYE: It is certainly possible to collect every degree that a university can hand out and still not be an educated man. There’s a difference between manipulating the machinery of learning and actually letting the learning affect you as an organism. Anybody can operate the machine—a reasonably bright student, whether he works hard or cares about what he’s doing at all, can usually get through his exams. He can usually get his degree and pass as an educated man. There’s no way of testing—no examination that has ever been devised will ever find out—whether the educating process has actually got into his soul or not. There are no instruments for diving that deeply. Only he knows that. It is perfectly possible to run the machine of learning and pass your exams and get your degree and have nothing happen to you.
JACKSON: “Nothing happen to you.” What do you think could happen?
FRYE: I think that there are two ways of going ahead. You can go ahead like an express train or you can grow as a plant does. What can happen to a student is the growth of his mind. Most of us live, I suppose, with eight to ten per cent of our total mental capacities. And whenever a student feels that a little higher percentage of his mental capacity is being used he feels that he is growing inside. That will be marked in all kinds of ways—it will be marked by an increase of wisdom, tolerance, and sympathy in ordinary practical affairs, but nobody can devise any methods of making this automatic. The student must do that himself.
JACKSON: It’s the first time that I have heard the word “wisdom” used, which I expected to hear a great deal of. I suggested this to a student. He said, “Well, how often do you hear ‘wisdom’ nowadays, how often do you hear ‘sin’?” He suggested that these are meaningless terms in the present day. What do you think?
FRYE: The words “wisdom” and “sin” are completely meaningless to people who are operating, as I say, with eight to ten per cent of their total mental capacity. To understand the seriousness of such ideas your mind has to grow up to the context in which words like that can be used. And that is partly what I meant. The old distinction between wisdom and knowledge is really a distinction between the mind’s actually growing, and operating the machinery of learning.