But these are not the only superstitions which have muddled the
educational process. You have heard that favourite speech of the
condemned criminal: “I never had no education.”
He does not refer to moral education; he is not complaining that he was
never instructed as to the sacredness of life and private property. He
means that he never studied arithmetic and geography and spelling--or
not enough to mention. He means that geography, etc., would have saved
him from a life of crime and a finish behind the bars.
And you have heard some unlettered parent, come from a foreign shore,
repeat over and over:
“My boy, _he_ get education. I no have education. But my boy--he get
education.” Or words to that effect.
True; his boy will have a better chance than he himself had; he may
become President of the United States or of a Fruit Trust. And it is
equally true of the other man, that if he had learned arithmetic in
school instead of sneak-thievery from the Carmine street gang, he would
probably now be making shoes in a factory instead of in Sing Sing.
There is much plain common sense in both these views of education. But
there is more of plain folk-mysticism.
Both speakers think of themselves as having had to struggle along in
the ordinary natural way, in the one case by day-labour and in the
other by petty larceny; and they contrast their lot with that of the
fortunate ones who by means of an esoteric kind of knowledge have
found an easy way of life. This knowledge, they believe, is reposed
exclusively in certain difficult and officially designated books,
which can be made to yield their secrets only through a process called
going-to-school, and by the aid of a kind of public functionary called
a teacher.
This mysterious and beneficent procedure is the popular conception
of education. The school building and the teacher are the later and
more external elements of the cult. It is at heart a belief in the
magic--one might call it the black-and-white magic--of books.
Now the essence of the belief in magic is the wish of the weak person
to be strong--magic being the short straight line in the wish-world
from weakness to strength.
Think for a moment of some childhood fairy tale. The Hero is not the
strong man. It is the wicked Giant who is strong. The rôle of brute
force is always played by malevolent powers. The Hero, stripped of his
magical appurtenances, is not much to look at. Almost invariably he
is the youngest of the family, and is often represented as diminutive
in size or stature. And the older the fairy tale, the more physically
insignificant he is. It is only later, when the motif of romantic love
enters into folk-fiction, that the hero must be tall and handsome. At
the earlier period he is frankly a weakling, as Man in primitive times
no doubt felt himself to be, in comparison with the mastodon and the
aurochs; and frequently he is regarded at the outset by the rest of the
family with contempt, as no doubt was Man by the other animals when
his great Adventure began. Like Man, the fairy-tale hero is confronted
with an impossible task--sometimes by a whole series of such tasks,
which he must somehow perform successfully if he wishes to survive;
and, by no superior strength, but by some blessed help from outside, a
singing bush, a talking bird, by the aid of some supernatural weapon,
and, above all, by the use of some talismanic Word, he achieves his
exploits. Thus does the weakling, the youngest child, the harassed prey
of hateful powers, become the Giant-Killer, the Dragon-Slayer, the
Conquering Hero!
It is very human, this pathetic assertion that weakness _must_ turn
into strength. And, if it had not been for such a confidence, primitive
Man might very well have given up the game, surrendered the field to
his contemporaries of the animal kingdom. And this confidence might,
somewhat fancifully, be described as a previsionary sense in early
Man of the larger destinies of his race. In very truth, the weakness
from which it sprang was the thing which made possible these larger
destinies. For the unlimited adaptations of mankind are due precisely
to his weakness. It is because Man lacked the horns of the bull and the
teeth of the tiger that he was forced to invent the club, the spear,
the sword, the bow-and-arrow; it was because he lacked the fleetness of
the deer that he had to tame and teach the horse to carry him; because
he felt himself to be intolerably inferior to bird and fish that he
could not rest content until he had invented the airplane and the
submarine. In short, because he was the weakest of all the creatures
on earth, he had to take refuge from the terrible truth in a childish
but dynamic wish-dream of becoming--by some mysterious help from
outside--the lord of creation.
Fairy lore may be read as a record of the ancient awe and gratitude of
mankind to the miracles of human adaptation which served that childish
wish. The all-powerful fairy wand is simply that unnatural and hence
supernatural thing, the stick, broken from a magically helping tree
and made to serve a human purpose; the sceptre of royalty is that same
magic stick preserved to us in the lingering fairy-tale of monarchy.
But more potent even than the magic of wand or sword in fairy lore is
the magic of words. And truly enough it was the miracle of language
which made the weakest creature on earth the strongest. _Writing_, that
mysterious silent speech, holding in leash the unknown powers of the
magic word until it met the initiate eye, must have had for mankind a
special awe and fascination, a quality of ultimate beauty and terror....
This flavour of magical potency still clings to the Book. It is the
greatest of the mysterious helps by which Man makes his dream of
power come true. Who can blame the poor jailbird who thinks that
there was, in the dull, incompetent pages of the text-books which you
and I carried so unwillingly to school, an Open Sesame to a realm of
achievement beyond his unaided power to reach! And who can blame the
poor immigrant parent if he regards the officially designated Books
which his children bring home from school as a talisman against those
harsh evils of the world which he in his ignorance has had to suffer!
But the magic theory is not the only popular superstition about
education. There is another, even more deeply and stubbornly rooted in
the human mind.