least moderate wealth. But in our fluctuating country this is no proof
that they will go through their lives without feeling the necessity of
doing something at some time for their own support or the support of
others. What that will be we cannot tell, for the march of invention is
so swift that if we should prepare the girl for any one industry, she
might find herself unable to make her living out of it when the need
should come. She will probably be, we may say, a wife and a mother. But
if we assume this, we still do not know how to fit her for the duties
of those positions in a definite way. The best thing still is to make
the most of a woman we can out of her, and then to trust the disciplined
woman we have fashioned to answer for herself the demands to come to
her in the misty future, which she will see, and which she can judge,
but which we shall not see and which no man can foretell. The province
of education is to lift the individual out of her naturalness, and not
to allow her to remain in it. All education is this. The child would
prefer to take her food in her fingers, for it is natural to her to do
so; but education takes her immediately in hand, and makes her eat in
the way not of nature, but of civilization. There is no natural way of
education; it is all completely unnatural, and must be so. The natural
child protests against discipline of whatever kind, and seeks to follow
her cravings; but out of this fools’ paradise—which would be no paradise
at all, as her teacher knows—she must be driven, and out of it she must
be kept, though it be with a flaming sword. It has been said that the
natural man washes up on the shores of knowledge as the shipwrecked
Irishman on the desert island, exclaiming: “Is any government established
in this country? If so, I’m agin it!” This not too strongly illustrates
the opposition made by the natural mind to the training necessary for its
attainment of the stature which rightfully belongs to it as heir of all
the ages. If the home do its work well, the task of the teacher and the
school is comparatively easy; but there are too many American families,
as every teacher knows, where this work has not been done, and where,
consequently, much effort has to be spent in supplementing the lack of
skill or the foolish indulgence of the mother. When a little six-year-old
girl on her first day at school tries to strike her teacher over the head
with her heavy slate because she is told to do some little thing, we may
not unreasonably assume that that home has failed of its purpose, if
indeed it ever had any.
The main object of the school may be said to be to create character, and
for this end it should seize upon every opportunity of strengthening the
will and of making it controlled and consecrated. There is no lesson
and no regulation which may not be consciously used for this; and when
everything is used for this purpose, everything will fall into its proper
place, and the school will be what it should be. The soul, which is
the person, is not divisible; we cannot work on the intellect without
affecting the play of the feelings; nor can there be in the life of
man or woman any great moral lapse without the intellect’s suffering.
Wherever God’s distinctions are blurred in any one of the so-called
faculties of the soul, the power of distinction is blurred in all. The
soul is one, and any school will be a failure, no matter how much money
it may make, where this truth does not stand at the foundation of every
detail of its work. Two hundred years ago Mary Astell wrote, as she was
pleading for a wider education for her countrywomen, “The great secret
of education lies in affecting the soul with a lively sense of what is
truly its perfection, and exerting the most ardent desires after it.”
We can find no wiser word in all the pedagogical societies of to-day. I
quote also, as bearing on the same point, from an article by the Rev. L.
A. Griffin in the _Unitarian Review_: “The teacher reflects not ‘What
shall I have when I am forgotten?’ but ‘_What shall I be when I forget?_
When all I know has vanished, leaving only its effect on character, _what
shall I have_?’ Shall the inner man recall his aliment any more than the
outer? In both alike it passes away, for its function is fulfilled; it
was not to be stored, but assimilated. Men will hereafter boast of what
they knew no more than of what they ate. There is naught we know now that
we may need to know hereafter, but what we _are_ now, in every worthy
quality of the spirit, that we must needs be, so long as it pleases God
to continue us in life.” It might be well for teachers to ponder these
things in their hearts.
The teachers who attain to and hold this doctrine firmly, carrying it out
in every smallest detail of their daily work, constitute the profession,
and they need no diploma from any school of pedagogy. The rest belong
more or less to a trade-union, which seasons its talk with the usual
amount of cant. Next to religious cant, there is nothing so disgusting
as educational cant. The members of the profession are all artists, and
they live in regions and partake of divine pleasures of which the world
knows not. In the great future professional _Verein_, if this ever exist,
they will associate with Theodore Thomas, whose whole career, as George
William Curtis says, has been a campaign of education, “because of its
dignity, its absolute fidelity to a high ideal, and its total freedom
from charlatanry of every kind.” But such company as this is to be won
only by a very high quality of courage and persistence. Of the forces at
work tending in the other direction, we may know more clearly when we
come to consider some of the conditions under which the teacher of the
private school for girls must work in any American city.
Professional teachers know that they cannot test the worth of their
effect on their pupils by abstract arithmetical signs. They know that
the girl is not an arithmetical problem, but a living soul, and they
are ever aiming at moral and educational influences, to which marks and
daily percentages are only impediments. Sometimes they labor for these
ends under fetters which make of their most worthy efforts only continual
failures. I know of two strong women at this moment who are working under
protest as heads of large schools, because they cannot get authority
from the trustees of the schools to abolish the use of what one of them
wittily calls “weak stimulants” to induce her girls to study. She sees
the evil effect of the marks, prizes, and rewards which are daily and
yearly given, and knows that she is gaining only a factitious success
while she is using them. Again and again she has begged to be allowed
to abolish the whole old system, and to show what she could do, both
intellectually and morally, if she could bring to bear only the real
stimulant of interest in work for the work’s sake. She has represented
the evil effects, which she cannot avoid seeing, on the characters of
the girls; but her protest has been so far of no use, and she does the
best she can, knowing that the whole tendency is in the wrong direction,
but unable to straighten it. The other in the same situation came to me
a few years ago with the question how, since she was not allowed to do
the educationally right thing, she was to diminish as far as possible
the evil effect of the wrong order. After a long conversation, in which
she showed by her questions that she knew exactly what she wanted to get
at, she said, with a deep sigh, “I see; it is of no use to try anything
unless you can make the thing right from the bottom up.” She had got
a new insight into the way in which a school might be founded so on
principle that “the stout-hearted trunk below and the firm-set roots”
would take care of the branches and the twigs, out to the farthest little
tips, but it grew for her in a land that was very far off.
I am sure that I utter the simple truth when I say that if the private
schools for girls are failing to-day, they are failing not primarily
because of the low aims or the lack of insight of the women who stand at
their heads. I know, and pretty well, a great many principals of girls’
schools, and I know that in a large majority of cases they want and try
to do better things for their girls than the mothers will let them do.
They deserve that some one who knows should make widely public this
testimony to their character and their aspirations, as well as to the
discouragement under which they are forced to do their daily work. An
Englishwoman said lately, in the London _Journal of Education_, with a
keenness of insight for which every teacher will respect her: “In England
the choice of schools is almost entirely in the hands of the parents; but
here [in America] it is very frequently entirely left to the children,
and as at the end of every school year pupils are free to leave without
notice, the principal is obliged to depend for her school connection
on the whims and caprices of the girls. This necessitates a constant
attention to their comfort and happiness, which, though beneficial in
many respects, is apt to allow the consideration of temporary ease to
overrule that of the girl’s highest good.” The truth is that there are
to-day in every American city a large number of highly educated and
cultivated women of the noblest character and aims who are too often
literally at the mercy of the whims and caprices of a lot of ignorant,
often under-bred, and petted little girls.
The conditions under which the girls’ private school must exist remain to
be more fully spoken of. The average mother is most especially anxious
that her little girl shall not suffer from the home treatment which she
feels was a mistake in her own case; but instead of considering from any
philosophical point of view the treatment which is needed, taking into
account the different nature of the child, the different circumstances,
and the different influences which are around her, and then making and
working upon a reasonable plan, she resolves to do only the diametrical
opposite of that which was done with herself. As the little girl grows
up, she does the same with her own children, and thus there results
in one family a pulse of sternness and indulgence which bids fair to
perpetuate itself, not in favor of advancement, unless there can be
secured for the girls of this generation what I have already referred to
as being the chief end of all education—an ability to poise the judgment
in the presence of emotionally exciting causes. If we can secure this, we
have secured potentially everything. It must be noticed, however, that
this assumes the existence of the cultivation of something that can be
called judgment—a thing hardly to be tested by the percentages which so
many schools produce as evidence that they have done the work rightfully
belonging to them.
Parents may be roughly divided into two classes—those, to use a
proverbial expression, to whom all their own geese are swans; and
those who are persuaded that their swans are geese; there is a middle
class, but it is so very small that it may almost be disregarded in a
description. Strange to say, the second class is quite as large as the
first. Then, again, with regard to confidence in their own judgment, they
may be divided also into two classes—those who desire no suggestions
from the teacher, and become very angry if they are offered; and those
who will not be satisfied till she tells them whether they shall put
corned-beef, tongue, or ham into the sandwiches which the child is to
bring for luncheon if they should decide to send her to that school.
Between the danger of offending if we suggest anything, and that of
offending if we do not at once answer categorically any question which
may be sprung upon us, the problem of first conversations with parents
presents considerable difficulty.
The teacher’s position in the educational world is that of the physician,
and not that of the trained nurse; this is a point which is not generally
understood, and one that needs to be insisted on. It is as respectable
to be a nurse as to be a doctor, but the fact remains that if you
are competent to be the latter, you do not consent to be put by the
relations of the patient into the place of the former. What physician
would accept a case if the father and mother of the little patient, to
say nothing of the aunts and uncles and grandmothers, were to prescribe
the medicines, and he were expected only to give them? And yet this is
exactly what parents too often propose to do in the case of the education
of their girls. There is no fancy in this statement. I have known of a
father who took five children at once out of a school, though he had
engaged places for them months before, because the teacher arranged to
change one study for one of the five; the girl was gaining nothing in the
study which was to be dropped, and the one proposed was in the same line,
and yet, by its difference and novelty, might be hoped to accomplish that
which the other had failed to do. That was the judgment of the teacher,
and she had known the girl for years and understood her character, as
she did that of every other girl in her school. She declined to be put
in the position of a nurse, and to teach the child only what the parent
prescribed. It was a question of principle, and of respect for the
profession. The five sisters left the school. The father was a physician.
This story could be paralleled over and over again from the remembrance
of every professional teacher.
One often regrets that she cannot, at least for a time, live in a country
where the question of precedence is fixed, and sometimes looks back
longingly to the caste system in India. It is easy to remember the time
when many a New England village, at least, had circles of what was really
“the best society,” into which no amount of wealth could give entrance.
We all know that there was such a time even in New York, but that time
is long gone by; it takes people of steady heads to live there now and
not get drawn into the great currents of society which swirl around
them, not to desire to make as much show as their neighbors, not to have
all simple and sweet home life spoiled by the outside influences. It is
doubly hard if one has lately come into possession of money, and sees the
whole city filled with all sorts of indulgences and show which his money
can purchase. So it often happens that a family which, if it had lived
in some country place, would have been a delight to see, gets carried
off its feet by the mad rush of the currents around it, fascinated by
the glitter, and loses all its own character by becoming one more of the
struggling drops which are trying to overtop each other in the social
ocean. Now the private schools for girls, as has been said before, are
composed almost entirely of daughters of wealthy families, and the
parents are subject to all these influences.
It is a hard thing to utter, and yet it is the truth, that the mothers do
not really mean what they say when they tell you that what they ardently
desire is the best education possible for their girls. They may think so,
but what they really want for the little girl is that she shall grow up
into what an Englishwoman says “we expect American girls to be—bright,
witty, apparently intelligent, and possessed of sufficient knowledge to
conceal an ignorance of which they may or may not be conscious.” The
President of Wellesley College once showed a foreign gentleman who was
supposed to have a great interest in education, over the buildings. He
listened to the work of the eager students, saw all the beautiful things
which had been provided, and as he said farewell at the door, remarked,
with great interest, “This is all very fine, but may I venture to ask,
how does it affect their chances?” The story carries its own suggestion.
It is really true that what the mother is in many cases thinking of,
when she selects a school for her little girl, is not whether the
teaching is what it ought to be, but how association with the girls
already members of the school in question will “affect her chances.”
To a real teacher the tardily acquired knowledge that the school to
which she has given her life and all her power is regarded simply as a
social “Exchange,” only as a means by which some young woman may press
her way into a certain “set,” comes as an insult. If that is what the
school is for, were it not better to do any other work than this? Pearls
are very beautiful things, and it takes much deep-sea diving where the
billows go over one’s head to gain them. She may perhaps find some bitter
consolation for her pain by recognizing the fact that people do not
hesitate to use the churches of the city for the same purpose, but her
work drags heavily after the discovery has been made.
The girls that attend private schools—mostly from the moneyed class—have
scarcely any remembrance of nursery life, and of simple games and
pleasures. From their earliest years they have been satiated with all
sorts of ingenious toys, fit things for adults, but not for children.
Many of them have spent every summer of their lives in large hotels,
amusing the loungers on the piazzas with their speeches and their
dresses; they have been carefully shielded from pain and trial of
any kind. Effort has been a stranger to them. What wonder that it is
difficult to lead them to make real and persistent effort on their school
tasks! What wonder that they balk at any honest and unsparing work! Many
of them are under the spell of hereditary tendencies handed down from
ancestors of varied nationality, who earned their bread by the sweat
of their brows and the skill of their hands, while their children and
grandchildren have nothing to do. Among no children, perhaps, is the
tendency to mental mechanism so strong as among the Americans. It is not,
perhaps, entirely the fault of the teachers that this tendency has had
its course and been glorified in our schools. But it is the teacher’s
great duty to fight it, if she would produce in never so small a degree
out of these languid, amusement-desiring minds anything which may be fit
to stand the storm and strain of life—to
“keep at bay
The changeful April sky of chance
And the strong tide of circumstance.”
Few people realize in the least degree the change in the popular
philosophy which, in this country especially, has transformed the whole
aspect of teaching within forty years. Miss Beale, the well-known
principal of the college for girls at Cheltenham, England, says: “The
_tabula rasa_ theory of Locke, the impressionist, has given way to the
mixed idealism of Kant, who emphasizes the constructive power of the
mind; and for passive creations we have substituted the theory of active
development. Once we thought rather of the child as acted upon; now we
think much more of making _her_ active, of invigorating, of showing
her how to learn.” It is probable that not many have realized how
all-powerful has been this influence in every smallest school-room in
the land. There could be no more beautiful and striking example of the
secondary nature of the work of education, and none more wonderful in
showing the fruitful power of really great thoughts—how they filter down
and penetrate the strata of thought and life which would seem farthest
removed from them. The teacher of children now does not keep in mind the
subject she is teaching so much as the mind of the child; that it is
which she is working on, and the studies are only the tools that are
used; it is the live mind of the child that she is watching, and by its
reactions she directs her labor. The parent should decide upon the school
to which the little girl is to go by the best light he has, and when the
decision is made, he should leave the child to the teacher, in the same
way as he would leave the arrangement of the pipes in his house to the
best plumber he knows. If the teacher be not better fitted to direct the
education of the child than is the parent, then she is not a fit person
to be at the head of the school, or, indeed, to teach at all.
In addition to all these conditions under which, at least in America,
the school has to work, there must not be forgotten the present excited
state of the public mind with regard to education. This produces, to
supply a constantly increasing demand for better results, a vast number
of new “systems” and “crazes,” towards which the teacher is pushed, if
she have not strength enough to keep steady in her course. The schools
do not depend so much as of old on the services of teachers or lecturers
who come in only for special hours, and who therefore cannot work into
the general effect of the whole school, and this is well. But, on the
other hand, we have all sorts of so-called new ways presented. I think
if Pestalozzi and Froebel were now living, they would ask for new
names, so weary would they be of having all sorts of crude and absurd
labor ascribed to them, though the spirit in which they worked is in
the schools—especially the girls’ schools—to-day everywhere. But to do
just what they did in other countries, circumstances, and times, is to
destroy that spirit. Then we have those who claim a great discovery in
the “natural method” of teaching, and who forget that the natural order
of acquisition must always differ widely from the logical order of
exposition. In the study of languages these people would have us throw
away all that we have already gained of facility, and reduce ourselves
to a state of primitive ignorance, assuming that because a child through
his poverty is obliged to learn in such a way, we with our experience
and stored minds must also do so. They would have the carpenter throw
away his tools and build houses with his hands, or the implements which
he should be able to fashion for himself, not those which the practice
of all the ages has given him as his birth-right. They forget that the
child mind and that of the adult are so different as to be almost of
different stuff, and insist upon teaching us as if we were children,
in spite of our humble protest that we are no longer so. They remind
us of the old people who used to insist upon it that we should go to
bed when and because the chickens went to roost. Even in our childhood
we dimly felt that the reasoning was faulty somewhere, long before we
timidly ventured to suggest that we were not chickens, and also that
we did not go to roost. Because a child who knew nothing had to learn
English in the “natural way”—though even this assertion is not absolutely
true as it stands—it does not follow that she must learn French in the
same way after she has acquired some knowledge of English, and it by no
means follows that any foreigner who may have immigrated is the best
teacher for her. The manual-training craze is one of the latest. It is
true that for a joint to fit or a seam to go into its place without a
wrinkle, the maker must work with accuracy; but it is also true that
she must be accurate with an example in arithmetic if she is to solve
it, and there is no one of all the qualities claimed to be won for the
mind by manual training which cannot also be secured without it, if the
school be what it ought to be. The colleges for women were expected to
raise the level of teaching in the girls’ schools, and some principals
have gone so far as to say that in future they will have none but
college-trained women for teachers. But it is a great disadvantage to a
teacher to have been for four years entirely out of touch with children
and with the regulations which, not in place in a college, are yet
imperatively necessary in a school for children. And, again, the new
methods of teaching penetrate the colleges slowly. The larger part of
the work in them is, as it should be with comparatively mature minds,
in the form of lectures, not of recitations, and generally the college
graduate is entirely ignorant of what a recitation is. It takes her a
long time to get out of the ways to which she has been accustomed, and
to grasp the conditions under which she must labor with the mind of the
child, so poor in material, and generally so wanting in anything that
can be called imagination. To know about a subject, and to know about
teaching it, are two entirely different things. What we do need for
those intending to teach is a normal school with a course of at least a
year at the top of the college course. I can imagine no more delightful
work, unless it be giving a child its first lessons in language, than
to have the management of such a school; but such a school, with the
competent teacher as its head, lies far in the future. Towards it all the
psychologists are working. In view of the great problems which teaching
presents, and the great value of wide experience in it, it might be worth
while for the colleges to insert a course in Humility for the last part
of the Senior year, especially for the benefit of those who are proposing
to teach. The profession to which Dr. Arnold belonged is not to be
stormed by girls simply because they have read Latin and Greek, and the
questions which waylay its every step are not to be so lightly settled.
For the girls’ school the question of health is a grave one. If the
children in the average American home were properly fed, properly
dressed, and properly exercised, if they had plenty of fresh air and
plenty of sleep, if they were allowed to grow in quietness, with simple
pleasures, and in an atmosphere undisturbed by the passions and ambitions
of the grown-up world, our task would indeed be easy. If the mothers
could understand that health and activity of the mind are an essential
to health of the body, we should be in a sort of paradise. There is one
phrase which I am sure no teacher of girls who may read these pages
will be able to see without a smile. It is this: “Health is the first
consideration.” It generally comes from the lips of mothers of homes
where little if any reasonable thought is given to the question of health
till the doctor becomes a frequent visitor, and kindly provides this
formula. The teacher can do nothing with a child if she be not healthy.
To her, indeed, health _is_ the first consideration, and all her efforts
are towards its maintenance. But such as the mothers have made the
children that they bring us to teach, we have to work with them, and to
do the best we can. This is little enough in many cases.