I
Next to the clerk in holy orders, the fellow with the worst job in
the world is the schoolmaster. Both are underpaid, both fall steadily
in authority and dignity, and both wear out their hearts trying to
perform the impossible. How much the world asks of them, and how
little they can actually deliver! The clergyman’s business is to save
the human race from hell: if he saves one-eighth of one per cent.,
even within the limits of his narrow flock, he does magnificently.
The school-master’s is to spread the enlightenment, to make the great
masses of the plain people intelligent—and intelligence is precisely
the thing that the great masses of the plain people are congenitally
and eternally incapable of.
Is it any wonder that the poor birch-man, facing this labor that would
have staggered Sisyphus Æolusohn, seeks refuge from its essential
impossibility in a Chinese maze of empty technic? The ghost of
Pestalozzi, once bearing a torch and beckoning toward the heights, now
leads down stairways into black and forbidding dungeons. Especially in
America, where all that is bombastic and mystical is most esteemed,
the art of pedagogics becomes a sort of puerile magic, a thing of
preposterous secrets, a grotesque compound of false premises and
illogical conclusions. Every year sees a craze for some new solution of
the teaching enigma, at once simple and infallible—manual training,
playground work, song and doggerel lessons, the Montessori method,
the Gary system—an endless series of flamboyant arcanums. The
worst extravagances of _privat dozent_ experimental psychology are
gravely seized upon; the uplift pours in its ineffable principles and
discoveries; mathematical formulæ are worked out for every emergency;
there is no sure cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools
will not swallow it.
A couple of days spent examining the literature of the New Thought in
pedagogy are enough to make the judicious weep. Its aim seems to be
to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction,
to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of
competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create
an artificial receptivity in the child. The merciless application of
this formula (which changes every four days) now seems to be the chief
end and aim of pedagogy. Teaching becomes a thing in itself, separable
from and superior to the thing taught. Its mastery is a special
business, a transcendental art and mystery, to be acquired in the
laboratory. A teacher well grounded in this mystery, and hence privy
to every detail of the new technic (which changes, of course, with the
formula), can teach anything to any child, just as a sound dentist can
pull any tooth out of any jaw.
All this, I need not point out, is in sharp contrast to the old
theory of teaching. By that theory mere technic was simplified and
subordinated. All that it demanded of the teacher told off to teach,
say, geography, was that he master the facts in the geography book and
provide himself with a stout rattan. Thus equipped, he was ready for a
test of his natural pedagogical genius. First he exposed the facts in
the book, then he gilded them with whatever appearance of interest and
importance he could conjure up, and then he tested the extent of their
transference to the minds of his pupils. Those pupils who had ingested
them got apples; those who had failed got fanned with the rattan.
Followed the second round, and the same test again, with a second
noting of results. And then the third, and fourth, and the fifth, and
so on until the last and least pupil had been stuffed to his subnormal
and perhaps moronic brim.
I was myself grounded in the underlying delusions of what is called
knowledge by this austere process, and despite the eloquence of those
who support newer ideas, I lean heavily in favor of it, and regret to
hear that it is no more. It was crude, it was rough, and it was often
not a little cruel, but it at least had two capital advantages over all
the systems that have succeeded it. In the first place, its machinery
was simple; even the stupidest child could understand it; it hooked
up cause and effect with the utmost clarity. And in the second place,
it tested the teacher as and how he ought to be tested—that is, for
his actual capacity to teach, not for his mere technical virtuosity.
There was, in fact, no technic for him to master, and hence none for
him to hide behind. He could not conceal a hopeless inability to impart
knowledge beneath a correct professional method.
That ability to impart knowledge, it seems to me, has very little to
do with technical method. It may operate at full function without
any technical method at all, and contrariwise, the most elaborate of
technical methods, whether out of Switzerland, Italy or Gary, Ind.,
cannot make it operate when it is not actually present. And what does
it consist of? It consists, first, of a natural talent for dealing
with children, for getting into their minds, for putting things in a
way that they can comprehend. And it consists, secondly, of a deep
belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a concern
about it amounting to a sort of passion. A man who knows a subject
thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams
it—this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little
he knows of technical pedagogy. That is because there is enthusiasm
in him, and because enthusiasm is almost as contagious as fear or the
barber’s itch. An enthusiast is willing to go to any trouble to impart
the glad news bubbling within him. He thinks that it is important and
valuable for to know; given the slightest glow of interest in a pupil
to start with, he will fan that glow to a flame. No hollow formalism
cripples him and slows him down. He drags his best pupils along as fast
as they can go, and he is so full of the thing that he never tires of
expounding its elements to the dullest.
This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity
for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high
attainments in their specialties—for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl
Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and
Osier—men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of
pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had
heard them stated. It explains, too, the failure of the general run of
high-school and college teachers—men who are undoubtedly competent,
by the professional standards of pedagogy, but who nevertheless
contrive only to make intolerable bores of the things they presume
to teach. No intelligent student ever learns much from the average
drover of undergraduates; what he actually carries away has come out
of his textbooks, or is the fruit of his own reading and inquiry. But
when he passes to the graduate school, and comes among men who really
understand the subjects they teach, and, what is more, who really love
them, his store of knowledge increases rapidly, and in a very short
while, if he has any intelligence at all, he learns to think in terms
of the thing he is studying.
So far, so good. But an objection still remains, the which may be
couched in the following terms: that in the average college or high
school, and especially in the elementary school, most of the subjects
taught are so bald and uninspiring that it is difficult to imagine
them arousing the passion I have been describing—in brief, that only
an ass could be enthusiastic about them. In witness, think of the
four elementals: reading, penmanship, arithmetic and spelling. This
objection, at first blush, seems salient and dismaying, but only a
brief inspection is needed to show that it is really of very small
validity. It is made up of a false assumption and a false inference.
The false inference is that there is any sound reason for prohibiting
teaching by asses, if only the asses know how to do it, and do it
well. The false assumption is that there are no asses in our schools
and colleges to-day. The facts stand in almost complete antithesis to
these notions. The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the
lower levels, is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one
imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation? And,
the truth is that it is precisely his inherent asininity, and not his
technical equipment as a pedagogue, that is responsible for whatever
modest success he now shows.
I here attempt no heavy jocosity, but mean exactly what I say.
Consider, for example, penmanship. A decent handwriting, it must be
obvious, is useful to all men, and particularly to the lower orders of
men. It is one of the few things capable of acquirement in school that
actually helps them to make a living. Well, how is it taught to-day?
It is taught, in the main, by schoolmarms so enmeshed in a complex and
unintelligible technic that, even supposing them able to write clearly
themselves, they find it quite impossible to teach their pupils.
Every few years sees a radical overhauling of the whole business.
First the vertical hand is to make it easy; then certain curves are
the favorite magic; then there is a return to slants and shadings. No
department of pedagogy sees a more hideous cavorting of quacks. In none
is the natural talent and enthusiasm of the teacher more depressingly
crippled. And the result? The result is that our American school
children write abominably—that a clerk or stenographer with a simple,
legible hand becomes almost as scarce as one with Greek.
Go back, now, to the old days. Penmanship was then taught, not
mechanically and ineffectively, by unsound and shifting formulæ, but
by passionate penmen with curly patent-leather hair and far-away
eyes—in brief, by the unforgettable professors of our youth,
with their flourishes, their heavy down-strokes and their lovely
birds-with-letters-in-their-bills. You remember them, of course. Asses
all! Preposterous popinjays and numskulls! Pathetic idiots! But they
loved penmanship, they believed in the glory and beauty of penmanship,
they were fanatics, devotees, almost martyrs of penmanship—and so
they got some touch of that passion into their pupils. Not enough,
perhaps, to make more flourishers and bird-blazoners, but enough to
make sound penmen. Look at your old writing book; observe the excellent
legibility, the clear strokes of your “Time is money.” Then look at
your child’s.
Such idiots, despite the rise of “scientific” pedagogy, have not
died out in the world. I believe that our schools are full of them,
both in pantaloons and in skirts. There are fanatics who love and
venerate spelling as a tom-cat loves and venerates catnip. There
are grammatomaniacs; schoolmarms who would rather parse than eat;
specialists in an objective case that doesn’t exist in English;
strange beings, otherwise sane and even intelligent and comely,
who suffer under a split infinitive as you or I would suffer under
gastro-enteritis. There are geography cranks, able to bound Mesopotamia
and Beluchistan. There are zealots for long division, experts in the
multiplication table, lunatic worshipers of the binomial theorem. But
the system has them in its grip. It combats their natural enthusiasm
diligently and mercilessly. It tries to convert them into mere
technicians, clumsy machines. It orders them to teach, not by the
process of emotional osmosis which worked in the days gone by, but by
formulæ that are as baffling to the pupil as they are paralyzing to the
teacher. Imagine what would happen to one of them who stepped to the
blackboard, seized a piece of chalk, and engrossed a bird that held
the class spell-bound—a bird with a thousand flowing feathers, wings
bursting with parabolas and epicycloids, and long ribbons streaming
from its bill! Imagine the fate of one who began “Honesty is the best
policy” with an H as florid and—to a child—as beautiful as the
initial of a mediæval manuscript! Such a teacher would be cashiered and
handed over to the secular arm; the very enchantment of the assembled
infantry would be held as damning proof against him. And yet it is just
such teachers that we should try to discover and develop. Pedagogy
needs their enthusiasm, their naïve belief in their own grotesque
talents, their capacity for communicating their childish passion to the
childish.
But this would mean exposing the children of the Republic to contact
with monomaniacs, half-wits, defectives? Well, what of it? The vast
majority of them are already exposed to contact with half-wits in their
own homes; they are taught the word of God by half-wits on Sundays;
they will grow up into Knights of Pythias, Odd Fellows, Red Men and
other such half-wits in the days to come. Moreover, as I have hinted,
they are already face to face with half-wits in the actual schools,
at least in three cases out of four. The problem before us is not
to dispose of this fact, but to utilize it. We cannot hope to fill
the schools with persons of high intelligence, for persons of high
intelligence simply refuse to spend their lives teaching such banal
things as spelling and arithmetic. Among the teachers male we may
safely assume that 95 per cent. are of low mentality, else they would
depart for more appetizing pastures. And even among the teachers female
the best are inevitably weeded out by marriage, and only the worst
(with a few romantic exceptions) survive. The task before us, as I
say, is not to make a vain denial of this cerebral inferiority of the
pedagogue, nor to try to combat and disguise it by concocting a mass of
technical hocus-pocus, but to search out and put to use the value lying
concealed in it. For even stupidity, it must be plain, has its uses in
the world, and some of them are uses that intelligence cannot meet. One
would not tell off a Galileo or a Pasteur to drive an ash-cart or an
Ignatius Loyola to be a stockbroker, or a Brahms to lead the orchestra
in a Broadway cabaret. By the same token, one would not ask a Herbert
Spencer or a Duns Scotus to instruct sucklings. Such men would not only
be wasted at the job; they would also be incompetent. The business
of dealing with children, in fact, demands a certain childishness of
mind. The best teacher, until one comes to adult pupils, is not the one
who knows most, but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge
to that simple compound of the obvious and the wonderful which slips
easiest into the infantile comprehension. A man of high intelligence,
perhaps, may accomplish the thing by a conscious intellectual feat.
But it is vastly easier to the man (or woman) whose habits of mind are
naturally on the plane of a child’s. The best teacher of children, in
brief, is one who is essentially child-like.
I go so far with this notion that I view the movement to introduce
female bachelors of arts into the primary schools with the utmost
alarm. A knowledge of Bergsonism, the Greek aorist, sex hygiene and
the dramas of Percy MacKaye is not only no help to the teaching of
spelling, it is a positive handicap to the teaching of spelling,
for it corrupts and blows up that naïve belief in the glory and
portentousness of spelling which is at the bottom of all successful
teaching of it. If I had my way, indeed, I should expose all candidates
for berths in the infant grades to the Binet-Simon test, and reject all
those who revealed the mentality of more than fifteen years. Plenty
would still pass. Moreover, they would be secure against contamination
by the new technic of pedagogy. Its vast wave of pseudo-psychology
would curl and break against the hard barrier of their innocent
and passionate intellects—as it probably does, in fact, even now.
They would know nothing of cognition, perception, attention, the
subconscious and all the other half-fabulous fowl of the pedagogic
aviary. But they would see in reading, writing and arithmetic the gaudy
charms of profound and esoteric knowledge, and they would teach these
ancient branches, now so abominably in decay, with passionate gusto,
and irresistible effectiveness, and a gigantic success.