Discipline, fixed habits approved by the pedagogue are specially
enforced in our schools. To this may be added some “culture” in the art
of money-getting in the case of the boys, while in the case of girls the
æsthetic training of millinery and dressmaking may be included. The
colleges, in addition to class-discipline looked after by the professors
and college-authorities, are essentially an organization of
hasty-pudding clubs, football associations and athletic corporations.
What is the use of a college if not for its games? Many regard the
college as useful for the formation of business acquaintances in later
life. Others again consider the college a good place for learning fine
manners. In other words, the college and the school are for athletics,
good manners, business companionship, mechanical arts and money-getting.
They are for anything but education.
We have become so used to college athletics that it appears strange and
possibly absurd to demand of a college the cultivation of man’s genius.
Who expects to find an intellectual atmosphere among the great body of
our college undergraduates? Who expects of our schools and colleges true
culture and the cultivation of a taste for literature, art and science?
A dean, an unusually able man, of one of the prominent Eastern colleges
tells me that he and his friends are very pessimistic about his students
and especially about the great body of undergraduate students.
Literature, art, science have no interest for the student; games and
athletics fill his mental horizon.
In the training of our children, in the education of our young, we think
that discipline, obedience to paternal and maternal commands, whether
rational or absurd, are of the utmost importance. We do not realize that
in such a scheme of training we fail to cultivate the child’s critical
faculties, but only succeed in suppressing the child’s individuality. We
only break his will-power and originality. We also prepare the ground
for future nervous and mental maladies characterized by their fears,
indecisions, hesitations, diffidence, irritability, lack of
individuality and absence of self-control.
We laugh at the Chinese, because they bandage the feet of their girls,
we ridicule those who cripple their chest and mutilate their figure by
the tight lacing of their corsets, but we fail to realize the baneful
effects of submitting the young minds to the grindstone of our
educational discipline. I have known good fathers and mothers who have
unfortunately been so imbued with the necessity of disciplining the
child that they have crushed the child’s spirit in the narrow bonds of
routine and custom. How can we expect to get great men and women when
from infancy we train our children to conform to the philistine ways of
Mrs. Grundy?
In our schools and colleges, habits, discipline and behavior are
specially emphasized by our teachers, instructors and professors. Our
deans and professors think more of red tape, of “points,” of discipline
than of study; they think more of authoritative suggestion than of
critical instruction. The pedagogue fashions the pupil after his own
image. The professor, with his disciplinarian tactics, forces the
student into the imbecile mummy-like mannerism of Egyptian pedantry and
into the barrack-regulations of class-etiquette. Well may professors of
our “war-schools” claim that the best education is given in military
academies. They are right, if discipline is education. But why not the
reformatory, the asylum and the prison?
We trust our unfortunate youth to the Procrustean bed of the mentally
obtuse, hide-bound pedagogue. We desiccate, sterilize, petrify and
embalm our youth in keeping with the rules of our Egyptian code and in
accordance with the Confucian regulations of our school-clerks and
college mandarins. Our children learn by rote and are guided by routine.