Were You Ever
a Child?
Were You Ever a Child?
Were you ever a child?...
I ask out of no indecent curiosity as to your past. But I wish to
address only those who would naturally be interested in the subject
of Education. Those who haven’t been children themselves are in many
respects fortunate beings; but they lack the background of bitter
experience which makes this, to the rest of us, an acutely interesting
theme--and they might just as well stop reading right here. I pause to
allow them to put the book aside....
With my remaining audience, fit though few, I feel that I can get
down at once to the brass tacks of the situation. _We have all been
educated_--and just look at us!
We ourselves, as products of an educational system, are sufficiently
damning evidence against it. If we think of what we happily might
have been, and then of what we are, we cannot but concede the total
failure or the helpless inadequacy of our education to educe those
possibilities of ours into actuality.
Looking back on those years upon years which we spent in school, we
know that something was wrong. In this respect our adult convictions
find impressive support in our earlier views on the subject. If we
will remember, we did not, at the time, exactly approve of the school
system. Many of us, in fact, went in for I. W. W. tactics--especially
sabotage. Our favourite brand of sabotage was the “withdrawal of
efficiency”--in our case a kind of instinctive passive resistance.
Amiable onlookers, such as our parents or the board of education, might
have thought that we were learning something all the while; but that’s
just where we fooled ’em! There were, of course, a few of us who really
learned and remembered everything--who could state off-hand, right
now, if anybody asked us, in what year Norman the Conqueror landed in
England. But the trouble is that so few people ask us!
There was one bit of candour in our schooling--at its very end.
They called that ending a Commencement. And so indeed we found it.
Bewildered, unprepared, out of touch with the realities, we commenced
then and there to learn what life is like. We found it discouraging
or inspiriting in a thousand ways; but the thing which struck us at
the time most forcibly was that it was in every respect quite unlike
school. The values which had obtained there, did not exist outside.
One could not cram for a job as if it were an examination; one could
not get in the good graces of a machine as if it were a teacher;
the docility which won high “marks” in school was called lack of
enterprise in the business world, dulness in social life, stupidity
in the realm of love. The values of real life were new and different.
We had been quite carefully prepared to go on studying and attending
classes and taking examinations; but the real world was not like that.
It was full of adventure and agony and beauty; its politics were not
in the least like the pages of the Civics Text-Book; its journalism
and literature had purposes and methods undreamed of by the professor
who compiled (from other text-books compiled by other professors) the
English Composition Book; going on the road for a wholesale house was
a geographical emprise into whose fearful darknesses even the Advanced
Geography Course threw no assisting light; the economics of courtship
and marriage and parenthood had somehow been overlooked by the man who
Lectured upon that Subject.
Whether we had studied our lessons or not; whether we had passed our
examinations triumphantly, or just got through by the skin of our
teeth--what difference did it make, to us or to the world? And what to
us now are those triumphs and humiliations, the failure or success of
school, except a matter of occasional humorous reminiscence?
What would we think of a long and painful and expensive surgical
operation of which it could be said afterward that it made not the
slightest difference to the patient whether it succeeded or failed?
Yet, judged by results in later life, the difference between failing
and succeeding in school is merely the difference between a railroad
collision and a steamboat explosion, as described by Uncle Tom:
“If you’s in a railroad smash-up, why--thar yo’ is! But if yo’s in a
steamboat bus’-up, why--whar is yo’?”
It is our task, however, to investigate this confused catastrophe, and
fix the responsibility for its casualties.