“The Search for the Major Premise”

Student disorders underline the resentment that many young people feel while undergoing the clinical depersonalization of modern education. Upon leaving elementary school, for example, a child must exchange the security of one incompletely prepared teacher for team-teaching expertise. High schools schedule efficiently at the expense of giving certain awkwardly oriented students a daily program they can count on. College requires young people to exercise judgment, to make decisions that the very frightened lack comparative experience to make. Given these difficulties, how can we both advise and discipline students properly? That is, how can we achieve the human yet dispassionate, integrated yet focused effect that students need?

Perhaps we can find a clue in a little book first published in 1921 entitled The Nature of the Judicial Process. It was written by Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. Quietly but rapidly, it went through several editions; and, over the years, it has attracted a host of admirers who have little to do with the law, for Justice Cardozo’s lucid prose is as memorable as his analysis is perceptive.

One of the unforgettable phrases in this work refers to “the search for the major premise.” In discussing the logic of judicial decisions, Justice Cardozo rather wryly comments that we often have the conclusion to our experiential syllogism rather clearly in mind—and even a minor premise to illustrate and support it—but we really need a major premise to justify both minor premise and conclusion. Since we ordinarily think of starting with a major premise instead of ending with one, Cardozo’s assertion is almost shocking, until we check it by reflecting on our own experience. At that point we must agree that our usual approach is inductive even though we prefer to describe our method deductively.

This realization is both revealing and significant, for it documents our distrust of the isolated instance on the involved sample. Somehow we would all be more comfortable if we could begin trying to solve a particular problem by employing general statements such as “All students from broken homes will have problems adjusting emotionally to college.” As soon as such statements are clearly set down, however, their absurdity becomes evident. So we stop short of actually saying them, but often react under the influence of their unspoken neatness.

If what I suggest is really a problem, perhaps we should simply avoid most generalizations. Many of us try. But doing so can leave us no less uneasy, for thousands of discrete particulars argue against professional training at all. As we try to standardize procedures and agree upon techniques, in other words, we run the risk of becoming witch doctors—doing the same song and dance for every ailment. But failure to review and compare and organize is no less contemptible. There is an unmistakable odor of ego about advisors or counselors who cite Emerson (a trifle incorrectly) to the effect that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” unctuously insisting that they decide each case “strictly on its merits.” Unfortunately for such a stunt, “merits” is a relative word that must always be determined in terms of something else. While standardized procedures often appear a bit wooden, therefore, they probably have better academic standing than whim, which is an accurate description of what I call intuition when I am feeling a bit defensive.

I suspect the tentative nature of much we try to do keeps us slightly off-balance when we contrast our efforts with the crisp experiments used in the physical and biological sciences. That the precision of chemical experiment is more apparent than real (ask any chemist friend what an atom actually looks like) is of little comfort if we assume that scientific predictability is the goal of student advisement. Our research problem, however, may simply be that we are investigating questions so basic as to be beyond usual scientific method. We insist on trying to say what the atoms look like. If our tools are imprecise and our results ambiguous, we simply share the frustrations of all pioneering research. We grope, but we grope in faith sustained by repeated effort.

I recently read an amusing account of two men sitting on a bus. They had just put in some overtime—at time-and-a-half rates—and were excitedly trying to determine how much they would make that week. They finally decided that they needed to multiply to arrive at the figure they needed. One turned to the other and asked if he knew how to multiply. After a moment’s hesitation, the other man said he thought he could, and he carefully wrote his figures on the edge of a newspaper. Very precisely, he wrote down his daily wage, then wrote one-and-a-half below it. Under the intense scrutiny of his companion, he triumphantly put a big “X” at the side of the one-and-a-half, drew a line below the whole problem, and waited. Both stared expectantly at the paper. Nothing happened. Finally, the one who had been doing all the writing crumpled the paper disgustedly] and, turning to his friend, said in despair: “In multiplying, you have to know the answer you are trying to get before you start.”

I imagine most of us know the frustration of needing to know an answer before we start—so the search for the major premise goes on and should go on. The danger lies only in arriving too soon. Without faith in answers, our efforts become especially expedient. With too easy answers, we put Bandaids on cancers. In the concluding, resolving lines of “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot sums up what might well be a student adviser’s credo when he says:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.

We start with human beings, and our only hope, finally, is to understand human beings. Our difficulties are often compounded by the borders of fear, guilt, or failure that those who come—or are brought—to us carry.

A host of modern writers have been telling us that death or approaching death is the only valid commentary upon life. Similarly, failure or the limbo of probation may tell us more about our curriculum, our teaching, and our educative climate than the most exhaustive research among the obviously successful. Anyone who has had close association with an honors program, for example, is struck by the almost incredible spread of ability among students who all rate in the top two percent on standardized tests. In the opening lines of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy suggests that all happy families are alike but unhappy families are unhappy in a thousand different ways. I would hazard a similar comment about students’ academic experience. Successful students come out with the “right” answers—in many cases identical answers. Failing students come apart with virtuoso individuality.

We would not easily find counselors who consciously describe their charges as general failures. Most of us are careful to talk about failure in a given situation or task. But a series of individual failures needs only the catalyst of uncooperation to turn an accumulation into a generalization. I would not be misunderstood here, but my own experiences in this regard are so vivid that perhaps I am hypersensitive. Indeed, my experiences have forced me to realize that I am an accessory to my students’ failures: I am an accessory when I give a failing grade or when, in a counseling situation, I give not bread but a stone.

In conclusion, I would note how insecurity prevents us from helping students as effectively as we should. Through sober introspection, I have realized that my difficulties stem from nothing more than an insecurity only slightly more sophisticated than that of my students. Worried lest my peers not consider me a true professional, I have tried to be “scientific” with subject matter that does not yield itself easily to scientific verification. For fear of being thought naïve, I have been both skeptical and conventional, and in so doing have confessed both cowardice and a lack of imagination. The day may yet come when my idealistic search for major premises—the academic equivalent of the Quest for the Holy Grail—can unite faith and practice in dynamic synthesis. Only then will my students and I truly educate each other.