and so far from the conventions of society that two of them have been
arrested in the State of New York for circulating indecent matter
through the mails, and one has been convicted on this charge. To run
amuck through the formalities of civilization, and then proclaim
yourself a martyr to science and the public good, is one way of
acquiring notoriety. To invite the selfish and the cowardly to follow
the line of least resistance is one way, and a very easy way, of
ensuring popularity. Thirty years ago, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson
wrote the story of a Spanish girl, born of a decadent and perishing
race, to whom comes the promise of love, and of escape from her dire
surroundings. Both these boons she rejects, knowing that the line
from which she springs is fit for nothing but extinction, and knowing
also that lesson hard to learn,--“that pain is the choice of the
magnanimous, that it is better to suffer all things, and do well.”
Twenty years ago, Miss Elizabeth Robins gave us her solution of a
similar problem. The heroine of her novel, fully aware that she comes
of a stock diseased in mind and body, and that her lover, who is near
of kin, shares this inheritance, forces upon him (he is a quiescent
gentleman, more than willing to be let alone) first marriage, and then
suicide. We must have our hour of happiness, is her initial demand.
We must pay the price, is her ultimate decision. In our day, the
noble austerity commended by Mr. Stevenson, the passionate wilfulness
condoned by Miss Robins, are equally out of date. The International
Neo-Malthusian Bureau has easier methods to propose, and softer ways to
sanction.
It is touching to hear Mr. Percy MacKaye lament that “Mendelism has
as yet hardly begun to influence art or popular feeling”; but he must
not lose hope,--not, at least, so far as popular feeling is concerned.
“Practical eugenics” is a phrase as familiar in our ears as “intensive
farming.” “How can we make the desirable marry one another?” asks Dr.
Alexander Graham Bell, and answers his own question by affirming that
every community should take a hand in the matter, giving the “support
of public opinion,” and the more emphatic support of “important and
well-paid positions” to a choice stock of men, provided always that,
“in the interests of the race,” they marry and have offspring.
This is practical eugenics with a vengeance, but it is not practical
business. Apart from the fact that most men and women regard marriage
as a personal matter, with which their neighbours have no concern,
it does not follow that the admirable and athletic young husband
possesses any peculiar ability. Little runts of men are sometimes the
ablest of citizens. When Nature is in a jesting mood, her best friends
marvel at her blunders.
The connection between Mendelism and art is still a trifle strained.
It is an alliance which Mendel himself--good abbot of Brünn working
patiently in his cloister garden--failed to take into account. The
field of economics is not Art’s chosen playground; the imparting of
scientific truths has never been her mission. Whether she deals with
high and poignant emotions, or with the fears and wreckage of life,
she subdues these human elements into an austere accord with her own
harmonious laws. She is as remote from the crudities of the honest
but uninspired reformer who dabbles in fiction and the drama, as she
is remote from the shameless camp-followers of reform, for whose
base ends, no less than for our instruction and betterment, the
Seven Deadly Sins have acquired their present regrettable popularity.
Liberated from the unsympathetic atmosphere of the catechism, they are
urged upon the weary attention of adults, embodied in the lessons of
youth, and explained in words of one syllable to childhood. Yet Hogarth
never designed his pictures to decorate the fans of women. Suetonius
never related his “pleasant atrocities” to the boys and girls of Rome.
Popular Education
This is so emphatically the children’s age that a good many of us are
beginning to thank God we were not born in it. The little girl who said
she wished she had lived in the time of Charles the Second, because
then “education was much neglected,” wins our sympathy and esteem.
It is a doubtful privilege to have the attention of the civilized
world focussed upon us both before and after birth. At the First
International Eugenics Congress, held in London in the summer of 1912,
an Italian delegate made the somewhat discouraging statement that the
children of very young parents are more prone than others to theft;
that the children of middle-aged parents are apt to be of good conduct,
but of low intelligence; and that the children of elderly parents are,
as a rule, intelligent, but badly behaved. It seems to be a trifle
hard to bring the right kind of a child into the world. Twenty-seven
is, in this eugenist’s opinion, the best age for parentage; but how
bend all the complicated conditions of life to meet an arbitrary date;
and how remain twenty-seven long enough to insure satisfactory results?
The vast majority of babies will have to put up with being born when
their time comes, and make the best of it. This is the first, but by no
means the worst, disadvantage of compulsory birth; and compulsory birth
is the original evil which scientists and philanthropists are equally
powerless to avert.
If parents do not know by this time how to bring up their children, it
is not for lack of instruction. A few generations ago, Solomon was the
only writer on child-study who enjoyed any vogue. Now his precepts, the
acrid fruits of experience, have been superseded by more genial, but
more importunate counsel. Begirt by well-wishers, hemmed in on every
side by experts who speak of “child-material” as if it were raw silk or
wood-pulp, how can a little boy, born in this enlightened age, dodge
the educational influences which surround him? It is hard to be dealt
with as “child-material,” when one is only an ordinary little boy. To
be sure, “child-material” is never thrashed, as little boys were wont
to be, it is not required to do what it is told, it enjoys rights and
privileges of a very sacred and exalted character; but, on the other
hand, it is never let alone, and to be let alone is sometimes worth
all the ministrations of men and angels. The helpless, inarticulate
reticence of a child is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a barrier
which protects the citadel of childhood from assault.
We can break down this barrier in our zeal; and if the child will not
speak, we can at least compel him to listen. He is powerless to evade
any revelations we choose to make, any facts or theories we choose to
elucidate. We can teach him sex-hygiene when he is still young enough
to believe that rabbits lay eggs. We can turn his work into play, and
his play into work, keeping well in mind the educational value of his
unconscious activities, and, by careful oversight, pervert a game of
tag into a preparation for the business of life. We can amuse and
interest him until he is powerless to amuse and interest himself. We
can experiment with him according to the dictates of hundreds of rival
authorities. He is in a measure at our mercy, though nature fights
hard for him, safeguarding him with ignorance of our mode of thought,
and indifference to our point of view. The opinions of twelve-year-old
Bobby Smith are of more moment to ten-year-old Tommy Jones than are
the opinions of Dr. and Mrs. Jones, albeit Dr. Jones is a professor
of psychology, and Mrs. Jones the president of a Parents’ League. The
supreme value of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s much-quoted “Lantern
Bearers” lies in its incisive and sympathetic insistence upon the
aloofness of the child’s world,--an admittedly imperfect world which we
are burning to amend, but which closed its doors upon us forever when
we grew into knowledge and reason.
My own childhood lies very far away. It occurred in what I cannot help
thinking a blissful period of intermission. The educational theories
of the Edgeworths (evolved soberly from the educational excesses of
Rousseau) had been found a trifle onerous. Parents had not the time to
instruct and admonish their children all day long. As a consequence, we
enjoyed a little wholesome neglect, and made the most of it. The new
era of child-study and mothers’ congresses lay darkling in the future.
“Symbolic education,” “symbolic play,” were phrases all unknown. The
“revolutionary discoveries” of Karl Groos had not yet overshadowed the
innocent diversions of infancy. Nobody drew scientific deductions from
jackstones, or balls, or gracehoops, save only when we assailed the
wealth of nations by breaking a window-pane. Nobody was even aware that
the impulses which sent us speeding and kicking up our heels like young
colts were “vestigial organs of the soul.” Dr. G. Stanley Hall had not
yet invented this happy phrase to elucidate the simplicities of play.
How we grasped our “objective relationship” to our mothers without
the help of bird’s-nest games, I do not know. Perhaps, in the general
absence of experimentation, we had more time in which to solve the
artless problems of our lives. Psychologists in those days were frankly
indifferent to us. They had yet to discover our enormous value in the
realms of conjectural thought.
The education of my childhood was embryonic. The education of to-day
is exhaustive. The fact that the school-child of to-day does not seem
to know any more than we knew in the dark ages, is a side issue with
which I have no concern. But as I look back, I can now see plainly that
the few things little girls learned were admirably adapted for one
purpose,--to make us parts of a whole, which whole was the family. I do
not mean that there was any expression to this effect. “Training for
maternity” was not a phrase in vogue; and the short views of life, more
common then than now, would have robbed it of its savour. “Training for
citizenship” had, so far as we were concerned, no meaning whatsoever.
A little girl was a little girl, not the future mother of the race, or
the future saviour of the Republic. One thing at a time. Therefore no
deep significance was attached to our possession of a doll, no concern
was evinced over our future handling of a vote. If we were taught
to read aloud with correctness and expression, to write notes with
propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and whist as well as our
intelligence permitted, it was in order that we should practise these
admirable accomplishments for the benefit of the families of which we
were useful, and occasionally ornamental features.
And what advantage accrued to _us_ from an education so narrowed, so
illiberal, so manifestly unconcerned with great social and national
issues? Well, let us admit that it had at least the qualities of
its defects. It was not called training for character, but it was
admittedly training for behaviour, and the foundations of character are
the acquired habits of youth. “Habit,” said the Duke of Wellington, “is
ten times nature.” There was precision in the simple belief that the
child was strengthened mentally by mastering its lessons, and morally
by mastering its inclinations. Therefore the old-time teacher sought to
spur the pupil on to keen and combative effort, rather than to beguile
him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern slides. Therefore the
old-time parent set a high value on self-discipline and self-control.
A happy childhood did not necessarily mean a childhood free from
proudly accepted responsibility. There are few things in life so dear
to girl or boy as the chance to turn to good account the splendid
self-confidence of youth.
If Saint Augustine, who was punished when he was a little lad because
he loved to play, could see how childish pastimes are dignified in the
pedagogy of the twentieth century, he would no longer say that “playing
is the business of childhood.” He would know that it is the supremely
important business, the crushing responsibility of the pedagogue.
Nothing is too profound, nothing too subtle to be evolved from a
game or a toy. We are gravely told that “the doll with its immense
educational power should be carefully introduced into the schools,”
that “Pussy-in-the-Corner” is “an Ariadne clew to the labyrinth of
experience,” and that a ball, tossed to the accompaniment of a song
insultingly banal, will enable a child “to hold fast one high purpose
amid all the vicissitudes of time and place.” If we would only make
organized play a part of the school curriculum, we should have no need
of camps, or drills, or military training. It is the moulder of men,
the upholder of nations, the character-builder of the world.
Mr. Joseph Lee, who has written a book of five hundred pages on
“Play in Education,” and Mr. Henry S. Curtis, who has written a book
of three hundred and fifty pages on “Education through Play,” have
treated their theme with profound and serious enthusiasm, which, in its
turn, is surpassed by the fervid exaltation of their reviewers. These
counsellors have so much that is good to urge upon us, and we are so
ready to listen to their words, that they could have well afforded to
be more convincingly moderate. There is no real use in saying that it
is play which makes the world go round, because we know it isn’t. If
it were, the world of the savage would go round as efficaciously as
the world of the civilized man. When Mr. Lee tells us that the little
boy who plays baseball “follows the ball each day further into the
unexplored regions of potential character, and comes back each evening
a larger moral being than he set forth,” we merely catch our breath,
and read on. We have known so many boys, and we are disillusioned.
When Mr. Curtis points out to us that English school-boys play more
and play better than any other lads, and that their teachers advocate
and encourage the love of sport because it breeds “good common sense,
and resourcefulness which will enable them to meet the difficulties of
life,” we ask ourselves doubtfully whether Englishmen do meet life’s
difficulties with an intelligence so keen and adjusted as to prove
the potency of play. The work which is demanded of French and German
school-boys would seem to English and American school-boys (to say
nothing of English and American parents) cruel and excessive; yet
Frenchmen and Germans are not destitute of resourcefulness, and they
meet the difficulties of life with a concentration of purpose which is
the wonder of the world.
Even the moderate tax which is now imposed upon the leisure and
freedom of American children has been declared illegal. It is possible
and praiseworthy, we are assured, to spare them all “unnatural
restrictions,” all uncongenial labour. There are pastimes in plenty
which will impart to them information, without demanding any effort
on their part. Folk-songs, and rhythmic dances, and story-telling,
and observation classes, and “wholesome and helpful games,” fill up a
pleasant morning for little pupils; and when they grow bigger, more
stirring sports await them. Listen to Judge Lindsey’s enthusiastic
description of the school-room of the future, where moving pictures
will take the place of books and blackboards, where no free child
will be “chained to a desk” (painful phrase!), and where “progressive
educators” will make merry with their pupils all the happy day.
“Mr. Edison is coming to the rescue of Tony,” says Judge Lindsey. (Tony
is a boy who does not like school as it is at present organized.) “He
will take him away from me, and put him in a school that is not a
school at all, but just one big game;--just one round of joy, of play,
of gladness, of knowledge, of sunshine, warming the cells in Tony’s
head until they all open up as the flowers do. There will be something
moving, something doing at that school all the time, just as there is
when Tony goes down to the tracks to see the engines.
“When I tell him about it, Tony shouts, ‘Hooray for Mr. Edison!’ right
in front of the battery, just as he used to say, ‘To hell wid de cop.’”
Now this is an interesting exposition of the purely sentimental view of
education. We have been leading up to it for years, ever since Froebel
uttered his famous “Come, let us live with our children!” and here it
is set down in black and white by a man who has the welfare of the
young deeply at heart. Judge Lindsey sympathizes with Tony’s distaste
for study. He points out to us that it is hard for a boy who is “the
leader of a gang” to be laughed at by less enterprising children
because he cannot cipher. Yet to some of us it does not seem altogether
amiss that Tony should be brought to understand the existence of other
standards than those of hoodlumism. Ciphering is dull work (so, at
least, I have always found it), and difficult work too; but it is
hardly fair to brand it as ignoble. Compared with stealing rails from
a freight-car, which is Tony’s alternative for school attendance, it
even has a dignity of its own; and the perception of this fact may be
a salutary, if mortifying lesson. Judge Lindsey’s picturesque likening
of our antiquated school system which compels children to sit at desks,
with the antiquated Chinese custom which bound little girls’ feet,
lacks discernment. The underlying motives are, in these instances,
measurably different, the processes are dissimilar, the results have
points of variance.
Nobody doubts that all our Tonys, rich and poor, lawless and
law-abiding, would much prefer a school that is not a school at all,
“but just one big game”; nobody doubts that a great deal of desultory
information may be acquired from films. But desultory information is
not, and never can be, a substitute for education; and habits of play
cannot be trusted to develop habits of work. Our efforts to protect
the child from doing what he does not want to do, because he does
not want to do it, are kind, but unintelligent. Life is not a vapid
thing. “The world,” says Emerson, “is a proud place, peopled with men
of positive quality.” No pleasure it can give, from the time we are
seven until the time we are seventy, is comparable to the pleasure of
achievement.
Dr. Münsterberg, observing with dismay the “pedagogical unrest” which
pervades our communities, expresses a naïve surprise that so much sound
advice, and so much sound instruction, should leave the teacher without
inspiration or enthusiasm. “The pile of interesting facts which the
sciences heap up for the teacher’s use grows larger and larger, but the
teacher seems to stare at it with growing hopelessness.”
I should think so. A pile of heterogeneous facts--segments of segments
of subjects--reduces any sane teacher to hopelessness, because he, at
least, is well aware that his pupils cannot possibly absorb or digest
a tithe of the material pressed upon their acceptance. Experience has
taught him something which his counsellors never learn,--the need of
limit, the “feasibility of performance.” Hear what one teacher, both
sane and experienced, has to say concerning the riot of facts and
theories, of art and nature, of science and sentiment, which the school
is expected to reduce into an orderly, consistent, and practical system
of education.
“It is not enough that the child should be taught to handle skilfully
the tools of all learning,--reading, writing, and arithmetic. His sense
of form and his æsthetic nature must be developed by drawing; his hand
must be trained by manual work; his musical nature must be awakened by
song; he must be brought into harmony with his external environment
by means of nature lessons and the study of science; his patriotic
impulses must be roused by American history and by flag-drills;
temperance must be instilled into him by lessons in physiology, with
special reference to the effects of alcohol on the human system;
his imagination must be cultivated by the help of Greek and Norse
mythology; he must gain some knowledge of the great heroes and events
of general history; he must acquire a love for and an appreciation of
the best literature through the plentiful reading of masterpieces,
while at the same time his mind should be stocked with choice gems of
prose and verse, which will be a solace to him throughout his later
life.
“It might be well if, by displacing a little arithmetic or geography,
he could gain some knowledge of the elements of Latin or of a modern
language; in some manner there must be roused in him a love for trees,
a respect for birds, an antipathy to cigarettes, and an ambition for
clean streets; and somewhere, somewhere in this mad chaos he must learn
to spell! Do you wonder that teachers in progressive schools confide
to us that they fear their pupils are slightly bewildered? Do you
wonder that pupils do not gain the habit and the power of concentrated,
consecutive work?”[1]
[1] _The Existing Relations between School and College_, by Wilson
Farrand.
And this irrational, irrelevant medley, this educational vaudeville,
must be absorbed unconsciously, and without effort, by children roused
to interest by the sustained enthusiasm of their teachers, whom may
Heaven help! If the programme is not full enough, it can be varied
by lectures on sex-hygiene, lessons in woodcraft (with reference to
boy scouts), and pictures illustrating the domestic habits of the
house-fly. These, with plenty of gymnastics, and a little barefoot
dancing for girls, may bring a school measurably near the ideal
proposed by Judge Lindsey,--a place where “there is something moving,
something doing all the time,” and which finds its closest counterpart
in the rushing of engines on their tracks.
The theory that school work must appeal to a child’s fluctuating
tastes, must attract a child’s involuntary attention, does grievous
wrong to the rising generation; yet it is upheld in high places, and
forms the subject-matter of many addresses vouchsafed year after year
to long-suffering educators. They should bring to bear the “energizing
force of interest,” they should magnetize their pupils into work. Even
Dr. Eliot reminds them with just a hint of reproach that, if a child is
interested, he will not be disorderly; and this reiterated statement
appears to be the crux of the whole difficult situation. Let us boldly
suppose that a child is not interested,--and he may conceivably weary
even of films,--is it then optional with him to be, or not to be,
disorderly, and what is the effect of his disorder on other children
whose tastes may differ from his own?
The Right Reverend Mandell Creighton, who appears to have made more
addresses to the teachers of England than any other ecclesiastic of
his day, repeatedly warned them that they should not attempt to teach
any subject without first making clear to children why this subject
should command attention. If they failed to do so, said the bishop
triumphantly, the children would not attend. He was of the opinion that
little pupils must not only be rationally convinced that what they are
asked to do is worth their doing, but that they must enjoy every step
of their progress. A teacher who could not make a child feel that it is
“just as agreeable” to be in school as at play, had not begun his, or
her, pedagogical career.