Shall the Teacher be abolished?...
What’s that you say?--Oh, but surely not before she has had a
hearing!--the worst criminal deserves that much consideration. I beg
of you to let me speak one moment in her behalf.--Ah, thank you, my
friends.
(Sister, you had a tight squeak just then! If it hadn’t been for my
presence of mind and my habitual coolness in the presence of infuriated
mobs, I hate to think what would have happened.--And now let me see:
what _can_ I say in your behalf? H’m.... H’m....)
My friends, this unhappy woman (for we shall centre our attention
on the female of the species) is more sinned against than sinning.
Reflect! The status of women in the United States has changed in the
last fifty years. Modern industry has almost utterly destroyed the
old pioneer home with its partnership-marriage; ambitious young men
no longer have an economic need for capable women-partners; women
have lost their wonted economic value as potential helpers, and their
capacity for motherhood appears to the largest section of young
manhood in the aspect of a danger rather than a blessing. Women have,
to be sure, acquired a new value, in the eyes of a smaller class of
economically “arrived” men, as a sign of their “arrival”--that is,
they are desired as advertisements of their husbands’ economic status.
In one sense, the task of demonstrating the extent of a husband’s
income is easier than the pioneer task of helping take care of a farm
and raising a houseful of babies; but, after all, such a career does
require either natural talent or a high degree of training in the
graceful habits of conspicuous idleness and honorific extravagance.
And, whether it is that the vast majority of women spurned such
a career as an essentially immoral one, or whether they were not
really up to its requirements, or whether the demand was found to
be more than met by the hordes of candidates turned out yearly by
the boarding-schools--whatever the reason, the fact remains that a
large number of women began to see the necessity and to conceive
the desirability of some career other than marriage. But industrial
evolution, which had destroyed their former opportunities, had failed
to make any considerable or at least any decent room for them in
the industrial scheme. Most particularly was this true for the young
women of the middle class. They were unable to go into the professions
or the respectable trades, and unwilling (for excellent reasons) to
enter the factories; they were given no opportunity to learn how to
do anything--they were (quite against their will, but inevitably)
condemned to profound ignorance of the most important things in the
world--work and love; and so, naturally, they became Teachers.
The world did not want them, and so they stayed out of the world, in
that drab, quasi-religious edifice, the School Building, and prepared
others to go into the world....
Good Heavens! do you suppose for a minute, if this unfortunate woman
had known enough about Anything in Particular to get a respectable job
outside, that she would have stayed in there to teach Everything in
General?[1] Do you suppose she _wants_ to be a Teacher? Do you suppose
she likes pretending to be adept in a dozen difficult subjects at once,
inflicting an impossible ideal of “order” upon the forty restless
children whom her weary, amateur, underpaid efforts at instruction
have failed to interest, spending her days in the confronting of an
impossible task and her nights in the “correcting” of an endless series
of written proofs of her failure--and, on top of that, being denied
most of her human rights? The munition-factory girls at least had
their fling when the day’s work was over; but she is expected to be a
Vestal. In some places she can’t get married without losing her job;
in New York, if she is married, she can’t have a baby! No--it is her
misfortune, not her fault, that she is what she is.
In fact, I think that if we could have managed to keep the war going a
little longer, she would have pretty much abolished herself. Abdication
is becoming popular, and she among all the monarchs is not the least
uncomfortable and restricted and hedged in by useless divinity. Her
abdication will be as disturbing an event as the Russian Revolution.
The Russians were accustomed to their Czar; but they just had to learn
to get along without him. And perhaps a similar lesson is in store for
us....
You find it a little difficult to imagine what School would be like
without Teachers? Well, for one thing, it would be more like the rest
of the world than it is now--and that, we agreed, was what we wanted.
Where else, indeed, except in School, do you find Teachers? The rest of
the world manages to get along without them very well. Perhaps it is
merely a superstition that they are needed in School! Let us inquire
into the matter.
What do people in the outside world do when they want to learn
something? They go to somebody who knows about it, and ask him. They
do not go to somebody who is reputed to know about everything--except,
when they are very young, to their parents: and they speedily become
disillusioned about _that_ variety of omniscience. They go to somebody
who might reasonably be expected to know about the particular thing
they are interested in. When a man buys a motor-car, he does not say
to himself: “Where can I find somebody who can teach me how to run a
motor-car and dance the tango and predict a rise on the stock-market?”
He does not look in the telephone directory under T. He just gets an
experienced driver to teach him. And when the driver tells him that
this is the self-starter, and proceeds to start the car with it, a
confidence is established which makes him inclined to believe all
he can understand of what he is presently told about the mysterious
functions of the carburetor. He does not even inquire if the man has
taken vows of celibacy. He just pays attention and asks questions and
tries to do the thing himself, until he learns.
But this case, of course, assumes an interest of the pupil in the
subject, a willingness and even a desire to learn about it, a feeling
that the matter is of some importance to himself. And come to think of
it, these motives are generally present in the learning that goes on in
the outside world. It is only in School that the pupil is expected to
be unwilling to learn.
When you were a child, and passed the door of the village blacksmith
shop, and looked in, day after day, you saw the blacksmith heating
a piece of iron red hot in the furnace, or twisting it deftly with
his pincers, or dropping it sizzling into a tub of water, or paring
a horse’s hoofs, or hammering in the silvery nails with swift blows;
you admired his skill, and stood in awe of his strength; and if he had
offered to let you blow the bellows for him and shown you how to twist
a red-hot penny, that would have been a proud moment. It would also
have been an educational one. But suppose there had been a new shop
set up in the town, and when you looked in at the open door you saw a
man at work painting a picture; and suppose a bell rang just then, and
the man stopped painting right in the middle of a brush-stroke, and
commenced to read aloud “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix”; and suppose when he was half way through, the bell rang again,
and he said, “We will go on with that tomorrow,” and commenced to
chisel the surface of a piece of marble; and then, after a little,
somewhat exhaustedly, started in to play “The Rock of Ages” on a flute,
interrupting the tune to order you to stand up straight and not whisper
to the little boy beside you. There’s no doubt what you would think of
him; you would know perfectly well that he was crazy; people don’t do
things in that way anywhere in the world, except in school. And even
if he _had_ assured you that painting and poetry, sculpture and music,
were later in your life going to be matters of the deepest importance
and interest, and that you should start in now with the determination
of becoming proficient in the arts, it would not have helped much. Not
very much.
It’s nonsense that children do not want to learn. Everybody wants
to learn. And everybody wants to teach. And the process is going
on all the time. All that is necessary is to put a person who knows
something--really knows it--within the curiosity-range of some one
who doesn’t know it: the process commences at once. It is almost
irresistible. In the interest of previous engagements one has to tear
one’s self away from all sorts of opportunities to learn things which
may never be of the slightest use but which nevertheless are alluring
precisely because one does not know them.
People talk about children being hard to teach, and in the next breath
deplore the facility with which they acquire the “vices.” That seems
strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application
to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet
consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a
schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night
parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the
best map of the North Atlantic States? And when you come to think of
it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to
drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day.
I think that if there were no teachers--no hastily and superficially
trained Vestals who were supposed to know everything--but just ordinary
human beings who knew passionately and thoroughly one thing (but
you’d be surprised to find what a lot of other knowledge that would
incidentally comprise!) and who had the patience to show little boys
and girls how to do that thing--we might get along without Immaculate
Omniscience pretty well. Of course, we’d have to pay them more, because
they could get other jobs out in the larger world; and besides, you
couldn’t expect to get somebody who knows how to do something, for
the price you are accustomed to pay those who only know how to teach
everything.
Nor need the change necessarily be abrupt. It could probably be
effected with considerable success by firing all the teachers at the
beginning of the summer vacations, and engaging their services as human
beings for the next year. Many of them would find no difficulty at all
in readjusting themselves....