THE SCHOOL-ROOM.
The late lamented Sam Weller once spoke of a schoolboy, who, having
learned the alphabet, wondered whether it was worth going through so
much to learn so little. The same reflection has come to millions of
Americans as they thought of how much time they had spent in schooling
and how little they knew when they got out.
There are parts of our vast country where the people are lucky enough to
have teachers who know so little about the theories of teaching that
they impart to their pupils more information than the law demands. But
in the cities and large towns where teaching has been elevated, or more
properly speaking, reduced to a science, where the most money is spent
on the schools and where the school terms are longest, the prevalence of
“how not to do it” is simply appalling.
The country boy who goes to school only four or five months in the year
knows quite as much as his city cousin who annually has nine or ten
months of schooling. What does the city pupil get for the double outlay
of time, bad air, back-ache and discipline?
As he cannot make any subsequent use of his accumulation of bad air and
back-ache, his entire gain over the country boy would seem to be in
discipline. What does this discipline do for him in the adult life for
which school life is a preparation?
Does it make him a better business man? No. If it does, why is it that
the majority of business men in our large cities are from the rural
districts? A few months ago I happened to be a guest at a dinner party
at which more than a dozen men prominent in New York business and
professional life came together. A question being asked about a social
custom of thirty years before, it gradually transpired that not one of
the party had been born or brought up in the city of New York, a city of
which all now were permanent citizens.
I have told this story to prominent citizens of Chicago, St. Louis and
Cincinnati, and in return received long lists of the great men of those
cities who came from the country. With some fear and trembling I tried
the same story in Boston at a large public dinner, but the man to whom I
told it--he was a man who seemed to know everybody’s antecedents--replied
that not more than one in ten of Boston’s Brahmans or live business men
were born at the Hub.
Congress is fairly a representative body, but if you will look at the
book which gives biographical sketches of all the members, you will be
astonished to find how few cities and large towns are represented by men
born in them. Nearly all the members were born and brought up in the
country. Occasionally you will find that some representative or senator
was born in Philadelphia or New York, but if you look at the head of the
page you will discover that he is representing a rural district of some
State other than his own.
You will find it the same way in the learned professions. In law,
medicine and theology, art, literature and science, the men who are most
prominent at all the great centres of education and intelligence date
back to some farmhouse and country school. Most of these men went to
college in the course of time, but whenever you find one of them and
talk with him so long that he feels inclined to unbosom himself to you,
you discover that the amount of schooling he had at his birthplace was
very small. As most of these men have passed the period of their boyhood
by at least a quarter of a century, it is not surprising to hear them
tell of school years consisting of only three or four months, and of
school-room exercises where the number of text-books were so few that
many of the lessons were delivered orally by the teacher, and boys and
girls took turns with one another’s books.
If discipline, school discipline, counts for anything, these professions
should be full of city-bred men. But they are not, except at the
bottom--way down at the bottom. City schools graduate an immense number
of young men who enter seminaries and especially departments of
colleges, to gain a special education, but somehow these are not the men
who are prominent in the new blood of their respective professions.
If discipline, so called, does not make the city-schooled youth superior
to his country cousin, what is it good for? Well, it is good to keep the
school-room in order. The larger the school the more necessary it is for
a teacher to maintain order. In a building containing two or three
thousand children, as many school-buildings in the larger cities do,
rigid discipline is absolutely necessary to this end. But, to come back
to original facts, why does it take seven or eight years to impart a
common, a very common, school course which any bright boy or girl of
fifteen years could master alone and unaided in a quarter of the time?
School systems, where there are any, seem designed for the special
purpose of making the school a machine which should do credit to the
individuals who run it. This would be excusable with an actual machine
made of wood and metal, but children are not tough enough to be put to
such use. Besides, there is better use for them. It is not odd that
teachers should look out for themselves and for their own records in the
management of schools. If they don’t look out for Number One they will
be an exception to all the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, compared with
the children, the teachers’ number one as about one to fifty, and their
importance should be judged from this standpoint of comparison.
School systems of study seem based on the capacity of the stupidest
pupils. All the others must crawl because the stupid ones cannot walk.
This isn’t right. If armies were trained in that way we never would have
any soldiers. Let schools, like regiments, have their awkward squads to
be specially trained, so that they may catch up with those who are
proficient.
What are the branches in which the common schools give elementary
instructions? Spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and
grammar. The farther from the large city, the surer the student is of
getting any instruction beyond those branches during the first six or
seven years of a common-school course. He may be qualified by home
reading to go into the natural sciences or into mathematics at an early
age, but that isn’t part of the system. It seldom pleases the teacher
of a graded school to be told of such acquirements of a new pupil. The
school exists not to improve the intelligence of the pupil from the
standpoint at which the teacher finds it, but to give him such
instruction as the teacher is already detailed and instructed by law to
give. A boy may forget all he knows of natural science, or algebra, or
geometry, in the many years in which he is drilled in elementary studies
leading up to the branches which he already understands.
In the country districts boys are often fit to pass rigid examinations
for matriculation at college at the age of fifteen years. But the boy
who does not begin to go to school until he is eight years of age finds
himself at fifteen, in a city, merely fit to enter a high-school, and
not a very high school either. Some of the most noted men in our
country’s history graduated from college at sixteen or seventeen years.
The curriculum of a college in those days was not as high as now.
Nevertheless, the graduates certainly gave a very good account of
themselves from their earliest entrance into public life. One of them
was Alexander Hamilton, who graduated at seventeen, and who elaborated a
system of financial management which a whole century of successive
Secretaries of the Treasury have not considered themselves competent to
improve upon. A very long list of men of similar prominence might be
given, but such illustrations are not necessary. Any intelligent man who
has been to school knows that a great deal of his class-room time has
been entirely at his own disposal, for the lessons were easily
memorized; and therefore his hands were idle and Satan found something
for them to do. The worst boys in school can often be found among the
scholars who stand highest in the classes, and for the very natural
reason that there is nothing to occupy their minds during a large
portion of the school time.
Seriously, what is there about the elementary branches, as taught in our
common schools almost anywhere, that should consume such an immense
amount of time? In the Southern States a number of the despised blacks,
children of slaves who themselves could date back their ancestors from
generations of slaves, became quite proficient in elementary branches
during a year or two, lounging about military camps in the capacity of
servants. Special schools were founded, as soon as the war ended, by
missionary societies, which prepared courses of study which they
considered within the comprehension of the Anglo-African mind. Of course
there were a great many stupid blacks; but, while some of these stupid
children were making faces at text-books and drawing inartistic pictures
on slates, their old fathers and mothers were learning from
[Illustration: TRANSPORTATION BUILDING.]
the same children’s text-books more rapidly than the best children in
the public schools of the North are allowed to learn.
Sir John Lubbock complains that “A thousand hours in the most precious
seed-time of life of millions of children spent in learning that _i_
must follow _e_ in _conceive_, and precede it in _believe_; that two
_e’s_ must, no one knows why, come together in _proceed_ and _exceed_,
and be separated in _precede_ and _accede_; that _uncle_ must be spelled
with a _c_, but ankle with a _k_,--while lessons in health and thrift,
sewing and cooking, which should make the life of the poor tolerable,
and elementary singing and drawing which should make it pleasant, and
push out lower and degrading amusements, are in many cases almost vainly
trying to gain admission.”
Take the course all through, and what is there about it that should
require any great consumption of time? Reading certainly is not hard to
acquire. Children out of school learn it in spite of any efforts to hold
them back. Spelling is learned more effectually through reading than
from any text-book. Writing requires only a model of which copies may be
made, for there is no business man in New York or in any other large
city who writes a copy-book hand. If he did, he would be considered
incompetent for whatever position he may occupy. The first thing that a
boy must learn on leaving school is to unlearn his writing-lessons.
Arithmetic undoubtedly requires considerable practice to make the pupil
perfect and quick in computations, but as it consists entirely of
applications of the first four rules, why is it that so much time is
spent over the text-books and very abstract propositions and problems?
Text-books of arithmetic seem to be skilfully designed for the purpose
of keeping the child from practical knowledge on the subject as long as
possible. Examples that are called practical are given in many of these
books, but only after a large amount of figuring, the purpose of which
the pupil is not allowed to clearly understand. A man whose education in
figures has been obtained on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk will
cypher more accurately and quickly any problem of ordinary nature that
may be given him than his own son or daughter who has been several years
in school, because he understands the relations and purposes of the
factors, which never seem to be impressed upon the child.
General F. A. Walker, once superintendent of the census and now
president of the Boston Institute of Technology, says: “The
old-fashioned readiness and correctness of cyphering have been to a
large degree sacrificed by the methods which it is now proposed to
reform. A false arithmetic has grown up and has largely crowded out of
place that true arithmetic, which is nothing but the art of numbers.”
Geography is so largely a matter of memory of the eye that no man who
was denied the privilege of studying this science while he was at school
ever thinks it necessary to spend a great amount of time over it
afterward, even if his business requires him to have a practical
knowledge of the subject. It is simply a question of sight and of
memory, just as is the case with knowledge of localities which he may
visit either to a great or small extent, yet geography in the public
schools is divided into two, three, and sometimes five different books,
by the use of which the pupil goes again and again over the same
lessons, obtaining in the end no more information than that he would get
by a few days’ deliberate study of an atlas or a set of maps.
Prof. Geikie, a recognized authority on this subject, says: “Every
question of geography should be one which requires for its answer that
the children have actually seen something with their own eyes and taken
note of it.” This is reasonable; it would also be practicable if globes
and large maps were in the class-rooms, but generally they are
conspicuous only by their absence.
It is quite true that grammar must occupy considerable of the pupils’
time. For all the persons who have studied it, there seem very few of
any age at the present time who are able to apply the principles of
this science in such a manner that they habitually write and speak
correctly. But this isn’t so much the fault of the pupil and of the
teacher as of the text-books from which the science shall be studied.
Good example, from which adults learn grammar more correctly and rapidly
than in any other way, seems to be considered too good for children, so
they are given text-books with definitions utterly beyond their
comprehension--definitions so subdivided that there is nothing which the
intelligent teacher so dreads as a few intelligent questions on the
subject from a pupil on the grammar-lesson of the day. I have seen an
intelligent man, himself a college graduate, and a public speaker of
high reputation and elegant style, labor with one of his children over a
lesson in grammar, and finally give up in despair and toss the book
across the room. If a man of such character is unable to understand a
grammatical text-book, what can be expected of the child?
The greater the scholar or teacher, the greater is his contempt for
text-books of grammar. Old Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth of
England, delights in saying that his distinguished pupil “never yet
tooke Greek or Latin Grammer in her hande after the first declininge of
a Noun and a Verb.” A more celebrated teacher, John Locke, complained
that “Our children are forced to stick unreasonably in grammatical
flats and shallows.” Dr. Parkhurst said recently: “The way for a boy to
talk correctly is to talk subject to correction--not to apply himself to
linguistic anatomy, surgery and dissection. I studied grammar in the
ordinary way about three weeks--just long enough to find out what a
genius some people can show for putting asunder what God hath joined
together. It is a splendid device for using up a boy’s time and souring
his disposition.”
Well, all this routine is being imposed upon the children, and the
little wretches are losing spirit and impulse through the delay to which
the cleverer ones are subjected and the lack of clearness which causes
the stupider ones to despair. Nothing whatever is done toward training
the senses and physical intelligence of the child. They do this sort of
thing abroad, but for some reason Americans are not allowed to follow
the foreigners’ example. Apparently our children have a divine call to
whatever handiwork may fall to their lot thereafter in the world, for
certainly they get as little training in it as the twelve apostles had
in theology before they were called to preach and teach. The French or
German, the Swedish child, and even many a Russian child, is taught to
use his hands and his eyes and all his senses that can be applied to
practical affairs, but the American child gets no opportunity of that
sort, except in the few schools which conform more or less to the
kindergarten system. We have a few technical schools in large cities,
but they are regarded as means to finish a course of education instead
of part of the ordinary elementary instruction.
When technical education, which means simply the use of the hands and
eyes, is spoken of to members of Boards of Education and Superintendents
of common school systems in large cities, the result is generally an
impatient gesture or word. There is no room for that sort of thing, we
are told; beside, it is a mere notion of theorists. The general run of
children are not equal to it and would be more troubled than benefited
by it.
Well, experience is more valuable than argument in answering assertions.
A few years ago a man who had scarcely ever done any work in the
school-room brought some theories on the subject of technical education
over here from Germany, although he was an American. He went to
Philadelphia and started a little class for the instruction of teachers.
The majority of common school teachers sneered at his theories, so he
proposed to silence all further opposition by a practical test. He
started a model school for the purpose of demonstrating that what he
asserted was practicable. He did not select the brighter pupils in the
public schools, but went deliberately into the streets and picked up at
random a lot of little gutter-snipes who had never been to school at
all, or who, if they had, were persistent truants ever since. In a short
time people saw--for it was necessary to have them see in order to make
them believe at all--these ignorant children of the street doing better
technical work in several directions than could be found anywhere else
in the city except in establishments paying high prices for artistic
labor. They carved wood, they modelled in clay, they made designs on
paper, they stamped leather and brass and even showed some capacity for
engraving and coloring in the direction of the higher arts.
The effect of this display should have been to have given the system
prominence and practical demonstration in the public schools, but it
amounted to little except the gathering of a few wide-awake teachers who
wished to learn to teach as the theorist had been teaching. A few of
those who took the course went into public school work elsewhere and
have succeeded admirably ever since. In the city of Elizabeth, New
Jersey, any child who wishes can now receive a technical education under
the direction of the common school authorities. The work began in a
single school with a single teacher. It has since been extended to all
the public schools of the city, and two teachers work hard from morning
until night. A strange development of this course of teaching deserves
notice. Elizabeth is a city containing a great many large manufacturing
establishments, and the modest young woman who had charge of the
technical education in the public schools was amazed one day to receive
a written request from a number of master mechanics in different
establishments for a night school for their own benefit, for which they
were willing to pay freely; and some of them told the teacher that their
attention to the subject was first attracted by their own children doing
clearer and more rapid work in the line of design than they, these
master mechanics, who had been in the business all their lives, had ever
yet succeeded in doing. So for months there was visible the astonishing
spectacle of a lot of middle-aged men being taught their own business by
a young woman who herself knew nothing whatever of their business.
The helplessness of the average American teacher when the subject of
technical education is mentioned was shown amusingly a few years ago
when one of the several superintendents who have general charge of the
New York city schools devised a system of teaching from what he called
object lessons. He prepared a manual and a set of charts and the Board
of Education in compliment to him purchased a great many and placed them
in the class-rooms. But it was almost impossible to have them used
unless the superintendent himself took the work in hand. The teachers
didn’t understand it. They said they couldn’t get the hang of it. The
truth was they had never had any education of the same kind themselves
and the matter was as foreign to their intelligence as Hebrew or
Sanscrit would have been. But, mark the difference; when news of this
system penetrated the wilds of the rowdy West, demands and orders for
the material to work with came East rapidly, and I was told that a
single State in the new West made more use of this system than all the
Eastern and Middle States combined. The West knows what it wants; the
teachers are closer to the children than in the East. This may be one of
the blessings, or perhaps penalties, of life in a new country, but,
whatever it may be, the results seem to justify a wish that all of us
could be transplanted to a new country, for at least a little while,
from the older centres of our American civilization.
General Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
says: “The introduction of shopwork into the public system of education
cannot fail to have a most beneficial influence in promoting a respect
for labor and in overcoming the false and pernicious passion of our
young people for crowding themselves into overdone and underpaid
departments where they may escape manual exertion.” Col. Auchmuty, the
philanthropic founder of New York’s great “Trades School,” says: “What
scientific schools are to the engineer and architect--what the law
school and the medical school are to the lawyer and the physician, or
what the business college is to the clerk--trade schools must be to the
future mechanics.” President Butler, late of Columbia College’s faculty,
now president of the Industrial Association’s great model school, says:
“Manual training does not claim admittance as a favor; it demands it as
a right. The future course of study will not be a Procrustean
structure--absolutely and unqualifiedly alike for all localities and for
all schools; but it will have in it a principle, and that principle will
be founded on a scientific basis--the highest duty of the educator will
be its application to his own particular needs and demands.”
Is the experience of practical educators like these to be cast aside in
favor of the antiquated theories of teaching now in vogue?
Any one who wonders why country boys become prominent city men, and why
there are about as many Western men in New York city in business as
there are men from the East, can find out by looking closely to the
difference between city and country systems of education. If a country
village is too small to have a high school, it is nevertheless generally
the case that the higher branches are taught to a large extent in the
commonest of schools. College graduates find the profession of teaching
a very handy means of paying their expenses while looking about the
country and seeing where to begin the practice of law or medicine, or
perhaps drop into the pulpit. Boys and girls of twelve or fourteen years
may be found studying physiology, algebra and geometry, natural sciences
and chemistry in schools all over the new West at a time when children
of the same age in the large Eastern cities are slowly wrestling with
the lessons and elementary text-books of geography and grammar and
arithmetic. When competitive examinations for West Point cadetships are
held in the West the general trouble is that the candidates are too
young to enter the military academy even could they pass the necessary
examination and succeed in winning the competitive prize. I saw such an
examination myself in one Western town, which was narrowed down to two
boys. These youngsters, the ablest of all the applicants, were aged
respectively thirteen and fourteen years. They passed rigid examinations
in mathematics, with scarcely a mark against them. That is more than
could be done by any boys of similar age in the public schools of New
York and Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the three largest cities in the
Union.
The rapidity with which children pass through text-books in the newer
States and more sparsely settled districts is the cause of the great
number of so-called colleges which are found all over our country. There
are more colleges by title in the United States than in all the rest of
the world beside. Their standards are never those of the universities of
Europe--seldom of Yale or Harvard. But they are higher than those of the
ordinary high schools, and the young man or young woman who passes
through them has a very fair general education, and is fitted to go on
by private reading to almost any extent. In the larger cities of the
East such opportunities are few. There is, perhaps, a single large
institution in each city, like the High School of Philadelphia or the
Normal College of New York, at which girls are educated, or the College
of the City of New York, to which the better boys are sent for a full
college course if they desire it. But these same facilities are demanded
and obtained in the newer cities at a rate that would astonish the
Eastern person who chose to look into the subject.
The most pressing need of our common school system is more teachers.
With more teachers greater personal attention could be paid to each
pupil, and smaller time would be required for the ordinary school
course. In the cities it is the rule that boys and girls must leave
school at a very early age in order to help earn a living for their
respective families. The majority of them are children of parents who
are very poor, who have to work terribly hard and save in every possible
way in order to keep their families from starvation. Consequently the
children go to work as soon as they are large enough to be accepted by
any employer at any sort of occupation. Their subsequent opportunities
for learning anything are necessarily limited. They must learn by
general reading if at all, except for such few opportunities as are
granted them by night schools, a beneficent class of educational
institutions, which those who most need them are least able to attend,
for how much studying can a boy or girl do after nine or ten hours of
work in a counting-room or shop or factory? With more teachers our city
children could obtain a fair high school education at the age of
fourteen, and be better able to make their way in the world at whatever
their work might be.
The best finishing school that the people of the United States have ever
been able to avail themselves of is the course of home reading which one
society or other has within a few years devised, and which some of them
are conducting with great care and success. Systems of reading and
consecutive study are devised, books are supplied, individuals are
selected to receive and inspect examination papers to show the capacity
of the students and to give suggestions according as the students may
seem to require, and in this way one single society has now eighty
thousand students, with more than a hundred instructors and inspectors.
This system might be definitely extended at very small expense by the
various States as part of the local system of education. Until the
blunders of the common school system are modified or done away with, it
is as little as the State can do to give an intelligent child this much
of consolation and assistance for the time that it has been compelled to
lose by incompetent tuition in the public schools.