What the Young Man Should Know: 1933 Redux

A Curriculum of Character

This is based on an essay I have provided to thousands of students, even those on my Artificial Intelligence programs.

In the spring of 1933, Robert Littell stood by his window and watched his son climb a tree. The image served as a quiet metaphor for everything Littell feared, and hoped, for in the coming American century. “Should I rush out and tell him to get down?” he asked, rhetorically. “Or should I let him be, hoping he will not fall?” The answer, of course, is not about trees. It is about what a young man should know in a world that has lost track of what knowledge actually is.

Littell's piece, though published as an essay in Harper’s Magazine, is essentially a letter to his son, a private curriculum offered in public. It is a father thinking aloud, laying down what he believes to be the real syllabus of a well-lived life. And while he frames it in terms of “what a young man should know,” he explicitly acknowledges that many of these skills could just as well apply to girls. His focus is less on gender roles than on a universal standard of competence and character.

To read Littell's essay is to confront a quiet, civilized rebellion against the sterilized majesty of formal education. Littell has no use for the modern schoolmaster's cargo of John Dewey, IQ tests, and Dalton Plans. He surveys the industrialized curriculum of early 20th-century American schooling with the disenchanted eye of a man who knows a young man can emerge from sixteen years of lecture halls knowing how to conjugate Latin and yet be unable to scramble an egg, comfort a drunk, or fix a leaking tap.

But we must not forget the year: 1933. Littell is writing in the depths of the Great Depression, when hunger, joblessness, and national disillusionment had made the fragility of American life vivid to nearly everyone. When he urges that a young man should know how to gamble responsibly and not be a “poor loser,” he is not drawing from parlor games, but from the wreckage of the 1929 stock market crash, which he references as “the rout of the amateur gambler.” Likewise, his insistence that the educated should spend time working for daily wages, even go hungry, is not a contrived stoicism but a plain observation of how millions already lived. The rejection of “collections of medieval armor or ancient coins” gains sharpness when read against the backdrop of soup kitchens and breadlines.

Littell's central proposition is deceptively simple: true education consists of skills. Not just scholarly knowledge, but competencies of the hand, the will, and the sensibility. A young person should be able to ride a horse and handle a firearm, swim a mile and revive a drowning friend. He should be able to cook a decent onion soup and type at speed. Not because these are hobbies, but because they are thresholds of autonomy. “Skills,” Littell writes, “are tools which will help a man to mine his own vein of gold and some of the gold in the world about him.”

Leaving all formal subjects out of consideration, he or she should learn how to:

The great schools of Littell's time, and ours, do not teach this. They train young people for examinations, not for life. The consequence is a society of functionally helpless graduates, students who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, who can pass the bar but cannot change a tire or deliver a eulogy. Littell's list of requirements is thus less a syllabus than a theory of human dignity. Each item stands not as trivia but as a counterweight to an age increasingly built on abstraction.

And yet Littell does not merely offer critique. He envisions an alternative. If the formal schools insist on “pouring contents into rebellious minds,” then let another system rise in parallel. He imagines summer camps as proto-institutions of real education, places where a student learns canoeing and how to tie a knot. Places where the tools of life are taught with the same rigor as algebra. It is, on its face, a whimsical proposal. But as the essay progresses, its logic sharpens. These two systems, he imagines, might one day may converge.

Littell is unsentimental. He knows his vision is out of step. “I shall certainly be in a minority,” he admits, as he defends the necessity of drinking lessons, not to encourage vice, but to prepare the young for a society saturated with alcohol and to know their limits and the destruction alcohol brings. Likewise with gambling, boxing, or understanding women: these are not morals but terrains. A young man, like an explorer, must be trained in navigating hostile geographies without losing himself. Littell has little patience for the sentimental pedagogue who would leave boys to their own devices and expect wisdom to blossom from innocence.

His argument, often misread as a blueprint for moral instruction, is something subtler. “The skills I have in mind may fortify character, but chiefly as a by-product,” he writes. What they produce, first and foremost, is not virtue but competence. A richer life, a more self-reliant life, and from there, perhaps, character as a residue.

The controversial skills are often the most revealing. Littell defends the use of firearm, not for hunting, which he calls a “barbarous and childish method of asserting the superiority of the human race”, but for self-defense and not to hurt himself or others by accident and for “discipline of hand and eye.” Boxing is championed not as sport but as preparation: a man should know how to control their emotions, a discipline boxing provides.

One of the most arresting turns in the essay comes in a quiet paragraph toward the end, where Littell proposes that every educated man should spend a season working as a common laborer.

“Let every educated man, as a necessary part of his education, be thrown into the muddy stream of American industry,” he writes, “and see what it is like to swim alone on daily wages.”

In that single sentence, the genteel curriculum of piano playing and riding lessons hardens into social vision. The boy in the tree must climb down, eventually, and learn to survive in the world as it is. Not to dominate it. To understand it.

What gives this essay its enduring gravity is the breadth of its ambition. Littell wants young men to know things but more importantly, he wants them to know themselves. To test their mettle against the world, and to refuse the false comforts of possessions and credentials.

“Insensitiveness to his personal property,” Littell says, “unless of course it is extraordinarily beautiful, is a desirable skill for any man to have.”

It is hard to imagine a more subversive line in the America of 1933, or in ours.

Littell's real quarrel is not with education, but with the myth that education is synonymous with intelligence. He knows that it is possible to be brilliantly taught and catastrophically unwise. Against that illusion, he stages a quiet revolution, one where the measure of a young person is not his GPA but whether he or she can face misfortune with grace, fix a faucet, and roast a chicken without burning the house down.

He ends, characteristically, not with triumph but with irony. Having imagined a son who speaks French fluently, plays a sonata, and repairs a roof, he notes: “Will not there be something missing?” Yes, he says: such a young man must also learn to “seem almost exactly like” everyone else. It is, finally, not enough to be excellent; one must also learn the subtlest art of all, how to carry excellence lightly, without a boosted ego, vanity or isolation.

And so this letter, addressed to a child climbing trees in 1933, becomes something closer to a blueprint for civilizational resilience. Littell knew what many modern reformers have forgotten: that intelligence without dexterity is fragile, that morality without competence is ornamental, and that civilization without individuals capable of tending fires, treating wounds, and tying knots is no civilization at all. His list of skills is not nostalgic; it is insurgent. It dares to ask what kind of adults our culture actually produces, and whether they can stand, endure, or repair anything when the structure begins to shake.

Stay curious

Colin

Link to the March 1933 letter