Of the ingredients of the educational catastrophe, the only one
remaining to be discussed is the Book. Is it to blame for the failure
of the process which has brought us to our present state of elaborate
ignorance, and ought it to be abolished?
What have books got to do with education, anyway?
Not half as much as most people think! If education is learning to be a
civilized human being, books have their place in it. But civilized life
is composed of a number of things besides books--it contains machinery,
art, political organization, handicraft, flowers and birds, and other
things too numerous to mention, all of which are notoriously capable
of being learned about in the great world outside without the use of
books. If in the great world outside the school, then why not in the
little world inside the school?
Not that the use of books should be ever avoided anywhere for the sake
of the avoidance. Books are a convenience--or an inconvenience, as the
case may be. Like other valuable human utilities, they are frequently a
nuisance if obtruded in the place of better things. Every intelligent
person has the same attitude toward books that he has toward his
sweetheart’s photograph: if she is out of reach, if the picture
furnishes him his only way of seeing her, he values it profoundly; but
if she is in the next room, he does not linger with the image. True, he
may fall in love with the picture first--the picture may reveal to him
the girl whom otherwise he might never have appreciated; and books do
make us appreciate aspects of reality which we have neglected. But in
education books are not an adequate substitute for direct contact with
the realities with which they deal, precisely because they do not give
the sense of power which only comes from direct contact with reality.
It is the function of books to assist in that educational contact--not
to take the place of it.
There is, indeed, a sense in which books are the most egregious fraud
ever perpetrated upon a world hungry for the knowledge which _is_
power. I am reminded of the scene in “The Wild Duck,” when the father
returns home from a grand dinner party. He has promised to bring
his little daughter some sweetmeats or cake--and he has forgotten
to do so. But--he grandly draws from his pocket a piece of printed
matter--“Here, my child, is the menu: you can sit down and read about
the whole dinner!” Poor little Hedvig knew that she wasn’t getting
anything to eat; but some of us don’t realize that for years and years;
we dutifully masticate the innutritious contents of text-books while we
are starving for a taste of reality.
Take geography, for instance. I know quite well that it was not the
intention of the author of the text-book which I studied that I should
conceive the state of Illinois as yellow and the neighbouring state of
Indiana as pale green: but I do to this day. They were not realities to
me, but pictures in a book; and they were not realities because they
had no relation whatever to real experience. If I had been asked to
draw a map of the school grounds, with the boys’ side distinguished by
one colour and the girls’ by another, that convention would thereafter
have seemed only what it was. If I had drawn a map of the town I
lived in, I would have been thenceforth unable, I am sure, to see a
map without feeling the realities of stream and wood and hill and
house and farm of which it is a conventional abstraction. I would, in
short, have learned something about geography. The very word would
have acquired a fascinating significance--the depiction of the surface
of the earth! whereas all the word geography actually means to me now
is--a large flat book. And if an aviator should stop me and ask which
is the way to Illinois, I couldn’t for my life tell him: but if you
brought me that old geography book and opened it to the map of the
United States, I could put my finger on Illinois in the dark! You see,
Illinois is for me not a part of the real world--it is a yellow picture
in a large flat book.
In the same way, I have the impression that the American Revolution
happened in a certain thick book bound in red cloth--not by any chance
in the New York and New England whose streets I have walked in. (And,
for that matter, as I have later discovered, much of the American
Revolution of the school histories--such as the Boston Tea-Party
as described--did not happen anywhere except in the pages of such
text-books). The only thing I know about the crossing of the Delaware,
for example, is that it is a Leading Fact of American History, and
occurred on the right hand page, a little below and to the left of
a picture. And this conception of historical events as a series of
sentences occurring in a certain order on a certain page, seems to me
the inevitable consequence of learning history from a text-book.
There are other objections to the use of text-books. One is their
frequent perversion or suppression of truth for moral, patriotic or
sentimental reasons: in this respect they are like practically all
books intended for children. They are generally pot-boilers written by
men of no standing in the intellectual or even in the scholastic world.
But even when a text-book is written by a man of real learning, the
absence of a critical audience of his equals seems often to deprive him
of a stimulus necessary to good writing, and leave him free to indulge
in long-repressed childishnesses of his own which he would never dare
exhibit to a mature public. And even when text-books are neither
grossly incompetent nor palpably dishonest, there is nevertheless
almost invariably something cheap and trashy about their composition
which repels the student who can choose his own books. Why should they
be inflicted upon helpless children?
Even if all text-books were miracles of accuracy and order, even if
they all showed literary talent of a high degree, their usefulness
would still be in question. If children are to be given a sense of the
reality of the events which they study, they must get some feeling of
contact with the facts. And to this project the use of a text-book is
fatal. Let us turn to history once more. I take it that a text-book
of history, as intended and as used, is a book which tells everything
which it is believed necessary for the pupil to know. Right there
it divorces itself, completely and irrevocably, from the historical
category. History is _not_ a statement of what people ought to
know. History is an _inquiry_ into the nature and relationship and
significance of past events. Not a pronouncement upon these things,
but a searching into them. Now the outstanding fact about past events
is that they happened some time ago. The historian does not, to begin
with, know what happened, let alone how and why it happened. He is
dependent upon other people’s reports. His chief task is often to
determine the comparative accuracy of these various reports. And when
we read the writings of a real historian, the sense of contact we have
with the events under discussion comes from our feeling that we have
listened to a crowd of contrary witnesses, and, with our author’s
assistance, got at the truth behind their words. More than that, the
historian himself is addressing you, not as if he thought you had never
read anything on the subject before and never would again, but with
implicit or explicit reference to the opinions of other historians.
He is himself only one of a crowd of witnesses, from all of whose
testimony he expects you to form your own opinion of those past events
which none of you will ever meet face to face.
Compare this with the school text-book. It was evidently written by
Omniscience Itself, for it does not talk as if the facts were in the
slightest doubt, as if there were any two opinions about them, as
if it were necessary to inquire into the past to find out something
about it. It does not condescend to offer an opinion in agreement
or in controversy with the views of others. It does not confess
any difficulty in arriving at a just conclusion. No--it says _This
happened_ and _That happened_. Perhaps it is all true as gospel. But
facts so presented are abstractions, devoid of the warmth and colour
of reality. Even the schools have learned how uninteresting dates are.
But they do not realize that dates are uninteresting because, since
nobody can possibly doubt them, it does no good whatever to believe in
them. It is only those truths which need the assistance of our belief
that engage our interest. It is only then that they concern us. We
are interested in politics because it is the process of making up our
minds about the future; and we are interested in history, when we _are_
interested, because it is the process of making up our minds about the
past.
By eliminating the text-book, or by using it simply as a convenient
syllabus and chronological guide to an inquiry into the significance
and relationship of the events of the past, with the aid of every good
historical work available for reference, the study of history would
become a matter of concern to the pupil; and the past, looked at from
several angles, and down a felt perspective of time, would become real.
I am aware that this is done in the higher flights of the educational
system. But why is it that the easy and profitable methods of learning
are put off so long and the hardest and most profitless forced upon
children? Is it that easier learning means harder teaching? I am
not sure of that; the only difficulty about such a method as I have
described would be in the mere change from the old to the new. No, I
think the real trouble lies in the superstition of the Book.
This may be seen in the teaching of mathematics. Before they come
to school, children have usually learned to count, and learned
easily because they were counting real objects. The objective aspect
of mathematics is almost immediately lost sight of in school. Even
the blackboard affords no release from the book, for who ever saw a
blackboard outside a schoolroom? Mathematics comes to seem something
horribly useless. The child simply does _not believe_ that people ever
go through these tortures when they grow up. Even the suggestive fables
into which the “examples” are sometimes cast, fail to convince him.
“If a carpenter--” “A salesman has--” But he is neither a carpenter
nor a salesman. He is a weary child, and he is not going to pretend to
be a carpenter or a salesman unless he gets some fun out of it. The
thing about a carpenter or a salesman which appeals to the child’s
imagination is something other than mathematics. No, the printed word
does not suffice. But let him _be_ a carpenter or salesman for the
nonce, let him with saw or sugar-scoop in hand find it to be necessary
to add, subtract, multiply, divide and deal in fractions, and he
will rise undaunted to the occasion. And, having found in actual
practice just what his difficulties are, he will cheerfully use book
and blackboard. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and mathematics
has only to come to seem a desirable acquisition to become an easily
mastered one. I should say that the ideal way of teaching a boy of
eight mathematics--including, if necessary, trigonometry--is as a part
of the delightful task of constructing a motorcycle. I remember that I
gained in twenty-four hours an insight into the mysteries of English
grammar which I had failed to get in the 1200 odd lessons previously
inflicted on me in school--and I gained that insight in writing my
first short story. When an effect that you yourself want to achieve
depends on a preposition or a fraction, then, and only then, are such
things humanly worth knowing.
If you want to see the most terrific and damning criticism of
text-books, open one of them which has been used by a child, and see it
written there on the margins in fretful and meandering curleques, which
say as plainly as the handwriting on Belshazzar’s wall, “I have weighed
this book in the balance and found it wanting. It does not interest me.
It leaves my spirit vexed and impatient.” I have estimated that the
scrawl-work in a single average schoolbook, if unwound and placed end
to end, would extend along the Lincoln Highway from Weehawken, N. J.,
to Davenport, Ia.; while the total energy which goes into the making
of these scrawls each day in the public schools of New York City alone,
would be sufficient to hoist a grand piano to the top of the Woolworth
building. The grand total for the United States of the soul-power that
dribbles out into these ugly pencilings, amounts to a huge Niagara of
wasted energy.
The Book, as the centre of our educational process, must be demoted. It
is a good servant, but a bad master. And only as a servant can it be
tolerated--as an adjunct to the gardens and workshops and laboratories
and kitchens and studios and playgrounds of the school-world.