EDUCATION AND LIVING
BY
RANDOLPH BOURNE
AUTHOR OF “YOUTH AND LIFE,” “THE
GARY SCHOOLS”
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1917, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1915, 1916, 1917, by
THE REPUBLIC PUBLISHING CO.
_Published, April, 1917_
PREFACE
These papers, reprinted with slight additions from the pages of the
“New Republic,” through the courtesy of the editors, do not pretend
to be anything more than glimpses and paraphrases of new tendencies
in the American school and college. The public school is the most
interesting and the most hopeful of our American social enterprises
during these days of sluggishness for us and dreary horror for the
rest of the world. It is becoming one of the few rational and one of
the few democratic things we have, and science and hope are laying
a foundation upon which a really self-conscious society could build
almost anything it chose. The school fascinates me because there is
almost no sociological, administrative or psychological truth that
cannot be drawn out of its manifold life. It is the laboratory for
human nature, and the only one that is simple enough to study with any
prospect of quick enlightenment. Experiment in education has come to
stay, and this means that we have it in our hands to approach ever more
closely our ideal of education as living. We can make the school ever
more and more nearly that child-community life towards which our best
endeavor points.
The point-of-view of these papers will be recognized as the product
of an enthusiasm for the educational philosophy of John Dewey. But
what is a good philosophy for except to paraphrase? The discovery of
truisms means merely that my enthusiasms are being communicated to an
unappreciative reader. Certainly the most recent educational sensation
indicates that there are still crowds of professional educators and
parents to whom such ideas are not truisms. To see education, not as a
preparation for life or as a process segregated from other activities,
but as identical with living, takes more imagination than most teachers
have yet acquired. If the school is a place where children live
intensively and expressively, it will be a place where they will learn.
The ideal educational system would continue with the adult all through
his or her active life, sharpening skill, interpreting experience,
providing intellectual tools with which to express and enjoy. Just as
education and play should be scarcely separable for the little child,
so education and work should be scarcely separable for the adult. By
closing off the school and boxing up learning we have really smothered
education. We are only just beginning to revive. We have first to make
over the school into a real child-community, filled with activities
which stimulate the child and focus his interest towards some
constructive work, and then we have to teach the teacher how to expose
the child to the various activities and guide his interest so that it
will be purposeful. The school can thus become a sifter where children
unconsciously as they live along from day to day are choosing the ways
in which they can best serve both themselves and their community as
workers and citizens in the great scheme.
The papers on the Gary schools are reprinted not because I wish to
exploit the system or its superintendent, but because of the usefulness
of a concrete example to hang wandering theory to. The schools of Mr.
Wirt’s conception, in spite of many inadequacies of realization, still
seem to me the happiest framework I have yet found in the American
public school for the fulfillment of the new educational ideals. No one
can deny that in the actual schools much of the old unconsciousness
and regimentation still stick their unwelcome head through, but my
somewhat naïve impressions do reflect, I am sure, a spirit which is
there, and a possibility that is very near for the American community
to catch. To praise one thing, however, is not to damn everything else,
and it would be false to pretend that almost every city in our country
has not latent within its system the embryo of the modern school. Some
are simply more conscious than others. Some actually envisage education
as living.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I EDUCATION AND LIVING 3
II THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL 11
III THE WASTED YEARS 18
IV PUZZLE--EDUCATION 26
V LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL 32
VI IN A SCHOOLROOM 41
VII THE CULT OF THE BEST 49
VIII EDUCATION IN TASTE 57
IX UNIVERSAL SERVICE AND EDUCATION 66
X THE SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE 77
XI THE PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY 84
XII WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION? 91
XIII THE ORGANIC SCHOOL 100
XIV COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN 104
XV REALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 116
XVI APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL 127
XVII THE NATURAL SCHOOL 136
XVIII THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL 146
XIX THE TRAINED MIND 154
XX CLASS AND SCHOOL 161
XXI A POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 173
XXII AN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 182
XXIII ORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION 189
XXIV EDUCATION FOR WORK 197
XXV CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 206
XXVI WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES 215
XXVII THE UNDERGRADUATE 222
XXVIII MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES 230
EDUCATION AND LIVING
I
EDUCATION AND LIVING
What is the current broadening of the public school--the bringing in
of gymnasiums and pools, shops and gardens, dramatics and organized
play--but a new effort to realize the school as more a life and
less an institution? Are we not getting a little restless over the
resemblance of our schools to penitentiaries, reformatories, orphan
asylums, rather than to free and joyous communities? A school system
whose object was little more than to abolish illiteracy and prepare
the more fortunate for college was bound to fall an easy prey to the
mechanical organizer. Education in this country has been one-sidedly
professionalized. The machinery was developed before the moving
ideals were worked out. Professional educators have worked too much
for a logical system rather than for an experimental adjustment to
the life needs of individual children. We have achieved a democratic
education in the sense that common schooling is practically within the
reach of every one. But a democratic education in the sense of giving
equal opportunities to each child of finding in the school that life
and training which he peculiarly needs, has still to be generally
worked for. The problem of American education is now to transform an
institution into a life.
Let us not deny the value of that emphasis on administration. The
slow progress from the diffuse district school to the well organized
state system represents the welding of a powerful instrument for a
future democracy to use. Centralized and efficient administration is
indispensable for insuring educational benefits to all. But there
is a danger that we shall create capable administrators faster than
we create imaginative educators. It is so easy to forget that this
tightening of the machinery is only in order that the product may be
finer and richer. Unless it does so result in more creative life it
will be a detriment rather than a good. For it is too easy to make the
running of the machine, the juggling with schedules and promotions
and curricula and courses and credits, the end. To institutionalize a
social function is always the line of least resistance.
We are becoming used to the impressive schoolhouses that tower over
the unkempt and fragile houses of our American towns. The school
already overshadows the church. If this means that the school is the
most important place in the community, then it is a hopeful sign. But
if its slightly forbidding bulk means simply that there is another
institution to put people through a uniform process, or indeed through
any kind of process, then we are no further along. The educators of
the last generation, whether from false ideas of democracy or from
administrative convenience or necessity, imposed deadly uniformities of
subject matter and method on the children in the schools. They assumed
that a uniform process would give uniform results. But children are
infinitely varied in temperament and capacity and interests. So the
uniform process gave the most wildly heterogeneous results. And the
present unrest arises from our amazed dissatisfaction that so admirable
and long-continued a public-school education should have left the
masses of children so little stimulated and trained.
The pseudo-science of education under which most of us were brought up
assumed that children were empty vessels to be filled by knowledge.
Teachers and parents still feel that to cut down an arithmetic hour
to forty-five minutes is to deprive the child of a fourth of his
education. But children are not empty vessels, nor are they automatic
machines which can be wound up and set running on a track by the
teacher. They are pushing wills and desires and curiosities. They are
living, growing things, and they need nothing so much as a place where
they can grow. They live as wholes far more than older people do, and
they cannot be made to become minds and minds alone for four or five
hours a day--that is, without stultification. The school forgets that
we are only accidentally intellectual, that our other impulses are far
more imperious. Because a teacher can secure outward order, it does
not mean that she has harmonized the child’s personality. She has not
the least clue to the riot or apathy or delusion that may be going on
inside him. She may easily become a drill-sergeant, but she must not
think that she has thereby become an educational scientist.
To become that she will have to think of the school as a place where
children spend their time living not as artificially segregated minds
but as human things. She would have to judge their activities in terms
of an interesting life. And that involves good health, play, sport,
constructive work, talk, questioning, exercise, friendship, personal
expression, as well as reading and learning. A place where children
really lived would be a place that gave opportunities for all these
activities to just the extent that children were individually capable
of expressing themselves. Children want to be busy together, they want
to try their hand at tools and materials, they want to find out what
older people do and watch them at it. They have to flounder about
and have all sorts of experiences before they touch their spring of
interest and face their real direction. All their education is really
acquired in the same random way that the baby learns to control his
movements and respond to his environment. No matter how the school
tries to organize their learning, and feed it to them in graduated
doses, this way of trial and error is really the one by which they
will learn. You have no way of guaranteeing that they will learn what
you think you are teaching them. What you can do is to put them in
a controlled environment where they will most frequently strike the
electric contact of curiosity and response, and get experiences that
thrill with meaning for them.
Life in its lowest terms is a matter of passing the time. It would be
well if educators would more often remember this. If they did, would
they not examine more carefully the life which they provide for growing
youth? College and high school life is reasonably antiseptic, it is not
oppressive, it is not particularly arbitrary or shabby. But compared
abstractly with what might be a good life, given the interests and
outlook and needed training of youth, would it not seem a little sorry?
Is it not a travesty, except for the few, on a really stimulating and
creative way of spending time? Suppose educators seriously measured
their schools by this standard of the good life. Suppose we really
tried to carry out the principle that the secret of life is to pass
time worthily.
Most of this current educational interest is another stab at the
age-long problem of making education synonymous with living. We are
rediscovering the fact that we learn only as we desire, as we seek
to understand or as we are busy. We are trying to make the school a
place where children cannot escape doing these things. We see now that
education has grown up in this country in a separate institutional
compartment, jealously apart from the rest of the community life. It
has developed its own technique, its own professional spirit. Its
outlines are cold and logical. It is far the best ordered of our
institutions. Its morale is the nearest thing we have to compulsory
military service. There is something remote and antiseptic about
even our best schools. They contrast strangely with the color and
confusion of the rest of our American life. The bare class-rooms, the
stiff seats, the austere absence of beauty, suggest a hospital where
painful if necessary intellectual operations are going on. Additions of
gymnasiums and shops and studios to such a school will do little to set
the current of life flowing again. The whole school must be loosened
up, the stiff forms made flexible, children thought of as individuals
and not as “classes.” Thus new activities must be woven into a genuine
child-community life. These things must be the contacts with experience
that waken and focus children’s interests. They must be opportunities
for spontaneous living.
The school constantly encroaches on the home. It provides play and
work opportunities that even well-to-do homes cannot provide. It must
take over too the free and comradely atmosphere of the homes and the
streets where children play. Let teachers face the fact that they
cannot teach masses of children anything with the assurance that they
will really assimilate it. What they can do is to fill the school with
all kinds of typical experiences, and see that children are exposed to
them. They can see that children have a chance to dabble in them, touch
tools and growing things, read books, draw, swim, play and sing. Let
the teacher cleverly supervise and coördinate, see that the children’s
interests are drawn out, and that what they do contributes toward their
growth. In the last analysis, each child will have to educate himself
up to his capacity. He can only educate himself by living. The school
will be the place where he lives most worthily.
Our best American public schools are already in sight of such an ideal.
Americans need more than anything to learn how to live. This is the
first business of education.
II
THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL
In the educational excitement of to-day we scarcely realize how far
the modern school is passing out of that era when the program for
work and study was carefully constructed with a view to the child’s
“preparation for life.” Educators saw the world as divided into two
radically different classes, adults and school-children. The adults
were functioning in a definite sphere, using a certain self-contained
and common body of knowledge to do their work and make their way in the
world. The children, on the other hand, were waiting like the little
unborn souls in “The Blue Bird,” to take their places in that active
world. If their parents were using knowledge as a current intellectual
coin with which experience could be bought and social exchange
effected, the child who had any chance of succeeding as an adult would
have to be put in possession of as much of this current coin as he
could hold, quite regardless of his own enthusiasm for it or his own
consciousness of what it was all about.
The free public school, therefore, became the place where children
took into themselves such automatically usable knowledge as would be
important for them in the remote future of their active adulthood.
Since book-knowledge had acquired honorific distinction as the badge
of a leisure class--and did not every democratic parent wish his child
to “rise in the world”?--and since it was of all knowledge the most
easily negotiable in the form of simple processes and facts, this type
of knowledge became the stock of the school. Then at some time a not
unintelligent attempt was supposedly made to compare this current stock
of intellectual paper money with the specie circulating outside in the
community at large, to see whether the school reserve was accurate and
sufficient. This attention lapsed, however, and the curriculum became a
closed system, handed down to the uncritical and unconscious child with
the authority of prestige and the sanctions of school discipline.
In this unconscious school, knowledge was presented to us not as
acquaintance with things but with “subjects.” Text-books were given us
holding the golden lore, and education became the slow nibbling away
at their facts for six to twelve years. We came to think of ourselves
as cupboards in which were laboriously stored bundles of knowledge.
We knew dimly the shape of the articles and the distinction of the
materials within. But we never expected to see the contents until we
were grown, when we would joyfully open our packages and use them to
the infinite glory of our worldly success and happiness. But it was
a slow child who did not begin to suspect, long before his shelves
were full, that most of his adult friends had lost no time, when their
schooldays were over, in locking their cupboards and leaving their
bundles to the dust and worms.
The fine technique of the unconscious school as worked out by educators
in normal schools and teachers’ colleges in the last forty years can
be read in any current school survey. Here the coincidence of work
and study with the child’s interests is accidental. Indeed, many
parents and teachers are still opposed to making too large a part of
the curriculum appeal to the child’s ephemeral interests. Discipline
is still thought of not as willed skill, which it is, but as the
ability to do painful things. A world where children do joyfully and
well what interests them, instead of what is “good” for them (because
unpleasant), still excites the envious mistrust of an older generation.
Yet the transformation from the unconscious school to the
self-conscious school is the very kernel of the present educational
excitement. The new schools which arouse enthusiasm are those in which
the child is learning what has meaning to him as a child. He no longer
does things because it is the “teacher’s way.” That old perverted
honor of the teacher never to admit that she is wrong lest the child’s
confidence be disturbed and he become conscious and critical of the
methods and materials of his education, is breaking down. We are
learning that in the unconscious school the prizes go to the docile and
unquestioning, not to those of initiative and skill. The school that
keeps children in ignorance of what they are doing trains them for an
uncritical life in society.
The discovery is not new that all the skill necessary to live an
effective life in America to-day is not contained in a few readers,
arithmetics, abridged histories and geographies, an elementary algebra
and plane geometry, a Latin, Greek, or German grammar, with cullings
from the works of Cæsar, Virgil, Xenophon, Cicero and Homer. When
educators found that adult life overflowed these narrow limits, they
introduced manual training, gymnastics, drawing and music; but the
child became no more self-conscious, for these were merely additional
“subjects.” The radical discovery of to-day is that the adult world
is not primarily engaged in turning information into power. The adult
rarely has a historical or a geographical or an arithmetical thought
unconnected with experience. What he does is to work very concretely at
a myriad of occupations, intellectual and mechanical, concerned with
making a living, bringing up a family, dealing with people, casting a
vote, reading newspapers. He has a great diversity of horizons, and the
most effective people are those who react most intelligently to their
experience as a whole. Power and information increase together, not
one at a time. The effective adult is a self-conscious personality.
The only school which can be a genuine preparation for life is a
self-conscious school. The child must learn to live in the same kind
of world that his elders live in. The school must be the community in
which his child-life develops. His play and work must be, first of
all, interesting activity.
Fortunately the modern movement to make the school self-conscious has
begun at the bottom. The four earlier years of the public school as
taught by recently trained teachers are now generally filled, even
in conservative city systems, with this new vivid consciousness.
Dramatization, the learning of reading and writing and arithmetic
through play, group-games and folk-dancing, gardening, constructive
wood-working--all this is a sign of the growing self-consciousness
of the school. In the more advanced schools, shop and science work,
community excursions, illustrative drawing and design, fertilize the
life of the older children. The most complete self-consciousness is
realized in a school of the Wirt type, where all the varied activities
are arranged to contribute to the upkeep or enrichment of the school
plant and the school community. For the older children the expanding
community becomes an extension of the school, and they learn the
operation of the adult world by going out to see the institutions of
their community and asking questions about them. In the self-conscious
school the child’s own curiosity sets the cue, and the school’s work
is to provide manifold opportunities for the satisfaction of that
curiosity.
As this self-consciousness spreads up through the school system, we
should get a new type of intelligence. Children will get a sense of
means used for ends, and this sense is the most imperative discipline
that we need. A revolutionary reorganization of the curriculum will
be effected. Already unapplied mathematics and unrelated classics
are passing. Yet those years which should most closely approximate
in function and appreciation and in intellectual attitude the adult
world remain unregenerated. Little seems to have been done to alter
the old high school, still regarded principally as the gateway to
the largely unconscious college. As a community of adolescent life,
meeting sex-interests, new idealisms and new assertions, it is a
failure. But as the older pedagogy fades out, and the younger children
trained in the self-conscious school advance, we may expect a new
orientation for the older years. Meanwhile our most valuable criterion
for any school, public or private, city or rural, is, “How far towards
self-consciousness, as expressed in the individual child and in the
school community as a whole, has the school progressed?”
III
THE WASTED YEARS
Only one child out of fourteen in our school system ever reaches the
high school; whatever education ninety per cent. of American children
are to have they must acquire before they are fourteen years old. So
elementary a fact as this, it would seem, should be at the background
of every discussion and criticism of the public schools. Yet the most
cursory inspection of the average city public school shows that its
significance has only recently and very dimly been realized.
Indeed, as the average city public school is at present organized,
there is every reason to believe that most of the children get
practically all their education before their tenth year. Limited as
this schooling is, they do not by any means get the full advantage of
what is supposed to be given them. One can hardly come from a study
of the everyday classroom work of the average city school without a
conviction that there is disastrous intellectual leakage which has
been strangely ignored by educators.
This leakage is not in the primary school and the high school. For
the teaching of “the three R’s” American normal schools and training
colleges in recent years have worked out many admirable techniques,
which seem to have been generally adopted. The younger generation of
teachers is doing efficiently its work of giving the child a mastery of
these essentials of civilized intercourse. The present primary school
on its intellectual side is an efficient institution.
Similarly the high school has had a large amount of attention and
skill lavished upon it. Its administrative peculiar problems have been
studied and met. The best high schools have been made to approximate
elementary colleges, with well-rounded courses of languages and
sciences, of artistic, manual and physical work. For the highly
selected group which reaches the high school it provides an excellent
purely intellectual curriculum, both for higher study and for social
orientation.
Between the primary school and the high school, however, there lies
a desert waste of four years, the significance and possibilities of
which seem to have been scarcely considered. They are the most urgent
years of all, for in them the educator must give compensation to the
children who are forced to leave school for the opportunities they are
to miss. Yet these middle years of what used to be called the “grammar
school” are now left not only unmotivated, but without any genuine
educational function. Instead of being prophetic of the future they
merely drag along the relics of the past. Some schools, it is true,
have timidly brought down the beginning of high school studies into the
lower grades, but in general the “grammar school” merely continues the
interests of the primary school on substantially the same lines.
Fifteen years ago, when I went to school, there may have been some
excuse for this system. Teachers may have been correct in their belief
that it took the average child eight years to learn arithmetic,
reading, writing, spelling, and a smattering of history and geography.
To-day such an assumption is ridiculous. I have seen children in large
classes in an ordinary city school system learn all the elements of
“the three R’s” in less than six months. The clear writing and accurate
reading of little children in the first grade who have only been
going to school for a few months is astonishing. It suggests that Mme.
Montessori could scarcely have known of the excellence of elementary
methods in this country when she urged her ideas as revolutionary. For
these small children, as for the Montessori child, the competitive
number-work, the writing from dictation, the oral reading, the
spelling, seemed not drudgery but interesting activity. Astonishing,
too, was the uniform excellence of the results.
Now it is little more than a truism to say that “the three R’s” have
not really been learned until they have become automatic, that reading,
writing and arithmetic are not ends in themselves but merely the tools
for work. To give command of the tools is the peculiar task of the
primary school, and of the primary school only. If children can be
given an acquaintance with “the three R’s” in six months, it does not
seem too much to expect them to acquire this automatic command in two
or three years. It is incredible that the child should have to study
eight years for this. Yet our elementary schools continue to assume
that every child is thus mentally backward. In the higher grades we
find the same subjects, formal reading lessons, formal penmanship
lessons, formal arithmetic and spelling. But something has happened to
these children. They are distinctly less interested, less interesting,
and even less capable than the smaller children. It is depressing to
realize that the elementary school has existed only to turn first-grade
children into seventh-grade children, and to realize that most of the
latter are nearing the end of their schooldays and will pass out into
the world with that intellectual listlessness and lack of command.
Let me suggest what has happened to these children. Formal work, the
learning of any technique, is apt to be pleasurable as long as we can
feel ourselves gradually acquiring a command over our instrument. But
after we have acquired the technique and can rely upon our skill, there
is no gain in continuing formal exercises. There is only gain in using
our skill in real work, the work for which we have studied. If we have
studied a language, we do not keep mulling over rules of grammar and
vocabularies, but we try as soon as possible to read. The means now
gives way to the end.
We can understand one cause for that situation of which employers
complain when children come to them from the public schools unprepared
in the very elements of education. In the bad memories, flimsy
information, inability to write or spell or figure accurately, is
found the very common indictment of the public school. The criticism
is usually that the groundwork has been poor, that the children have
not been trained in the fundamentals. If my thesis is correct, the
groundwork has not been poor. Of recent years, it has, on the contrary,
been unusually excellent and thorough. The leakage has come in the
middle years, which have simply disintegrated the foundations. The
school has sharpened the mind, and then, by providing only a repetition
of formal work instead of practical opportunity for use of the acquired
technique, has proceeded to dull it. Grammar has been studied,
literature in a curiously desiccated fashion, political history,
esoteric branches of arithmetic. Subjects like these have filled the
time that might have been given to copious individual reading, to
writing about what is read or experienced, to practical number-work
in simple statistics or accounting. Time which might have been given,
through use of pictures and newspapers, to the cultivation of an
imaginative historical and geographical background, has gone into
aimless memorizing, or into a glib use of words and phrases.
This situation is all the more preposterous because both the high
school and college are full of studies that could be begun by the
intelligent child as soon as a technical proficiency in “the three R’s”
was once obtained. What psychological law declares that before fourteen
a human being is incapable of learning languages, the sciences, or even
the sociological studies, but that after fourteen he is capable of
learning all these things? As a matter of fact, most of these “higher”
studies could be much more easily assimilated by the quick and curious
mind of the younger child than by the older. And for the worker in any
field, acquaintance with elementary science and the organization of
society is so emphatically important that we cannot afford to let the
vast majority of our citizens remain all their lives ignorant of their
very terms. In the four years of the “grammar school” an intelligent
interest could be awakened in these fields, and the main outlines
grasped. This would not mean the addition of many new subjects to an
already crowded curriculum. It would merely mean the dropping of “the
three R’s” back into their rightful place in the primary school. It
would lighten rather than overburden the school. We should then have a
fair division of labor and function between the schools, to the profit
of both.
If there is one criticism of the public school system on its
intellectual side that can justly be made general, it is this of
the wasted years. The school has found itself in this paradoxical
situation, that the more excellent became its primary methods the
poorer became the product at the end of the system. This paradox is
explained. Educators have simply failed to recognize that the sharper
they made the elementary tools and the better the facilities of
obtaining skill in their use, the more varied and immediate should be
the work upon which the tools are to be exercised. They have failed to
provide this work. They have left a leakage in public education which
has almost defeated its own ends.
IV
PUZZLE-EDUCATION
How righteously indignant did our teachers use to be if we ever
precociously objected to learning our mathematics and grammar in school
on the ground that if we were going to be doctors or policemen we
should never have any use when we grew up for that kind of knowledge!
Were we not entirely too young to know at all what kind of knowledge we
should need when we did grow up? Did not our teachers impress upon us
that in some mysterious way all was grist that came to our intellectual
mill? Did we wish to know merely what we could use in the daily
grubbing of bread and butter? Was not the fine flower of education
knowledge learned for its own sake? We could thus be assured, as we
cubed our roots or diagrammed our sentences, that all this work was
“training the mind,” so that we could almost feel our mental muscles
growing in strength and elasticity. We were too young to see it
then, but some day we should be heartily grateful to our painstaking
teachers. Some day, when we were successful men, we should come to
appreciate the superior wisdom of this educational system against which
our rational little wills so smolderingly rebelled.
In those days, would we not have given our young chances of promotion
to see ranged up before the teacher a group of great grown men, the
successful ones of the earth, to be put through the paces at which we
kicked? Would it not have tickled us to see a class consisting of a
state senator, a former lieutenant-governor, a manufacturer, a city
official, a banker, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, an editor, an
engineer and a clergyman, trying to spell daguerreotype and paradigm,
reconnaissance and erysipelas, guessing at the distance in degrees from
Portugal to the Ural Mountains, locating the desert of Atacama and
the Pamir Plateau, expressing 150° Cent. in terms of Fahrenheit, and
finding the area of the base of a cylindrical 1 gal. can, 10 ins. high?
If it was true that we should all find this knowledge useful some day,
then it would be preëminently these men who were finding it useful now.
Let the news go forth to all the children of the land who are
questioning the why and wherefore of what they are learning, that this
thing has actually been done. The eleven men have been assembled in
Springfield, Ill., and have had put to them these questions and others,
all taken from the prescribed work of the local public schools. The
class constituted one of those inquiries conducted with the deadly
accuracy of a laboratory experiment by the Russell Sage Foundation.
The results, it need hardly be said, were a complete demonstration
of the intuition of our childish precocity. Not one of these eleven
successful and intelligent gentlemen made so much as a passing mark in
any subject. In the spelling-match the best record was six words out
of ten, while one man, probably the editor, failed in every word. Only
one of the pupils knew the capital of Montenegro, while neither he nor
any of the others had the faintest reaction to Atacama or the Pamir
Plateau, much less to the length of South America or the distance in
degrees from Portugal to the Ural Mountains. Only one of the eleven
could do the thermometer problem--he must have been in Paris once
in January--and not one knew the specific gravity of alcohol when 2
liters weigh 1.58 kgms. As for the ten historical dates selected from
ninety-one, the only date that as many as ten men knew was the attack
on Sumter. Only one identified the date of the Mexican War, only one
the surrender of Cornwallis.
It must have seemed very curious to the eleven to be presented with
these questions, and then have the answers labeled “knowledge.” How
many of them drew the conclusion that our public schools were little
more in the higher reaches than a glorified puzzle-party, where
recitation is often more like a guessing of riddles, or trying to
discover the answer from the teacher’s tone, or the putting together of
a puzzle-picture? Look at the average school text-book, with its neat
and logical divisions, and see if you can’t hear the dry crackle of the
author’s wit as he has worked out his ingenious riddles, pieced his
cunning examples together, hunted the dictionary for words to spell,
dissected his history, carved up a continent. The intellect feeds on
syllogisms. Syllogisms are so much easier than appreciations. And
really it is far easier to reason than to interpret. In the first you
have merely to follow the beaten track, in the other you must break new
paths and put the thing in your own new language. Yet this whirling
around of the mental engine with the belting off is represented to us
as a process of “training the mind.” You might as well say that an
athlete could best train his legs by standing on his head and waving
them.
It is this scheme of puzzle-education which this Springfield inquiry--a
characteristic flash, we take it, of American genius--has so tellingly
shown up. And this riddle-curriculum tends to get worse instead of
better as the science of text-bookmaking waxes and the machinery
of scientific pedagogy accumulates. The avowed aim of teachers and
training-colleges in recent years has been to discover pedagogical
methods that would do the work regardless of the personality of the
teacher. The riotous absurdities of this scheme are being revealed by
such inquiries as these in Springfield. They suggest that the policy of
having our next generation’s mental attitudes, stock of information,
personal qualities, and moral biases cultivated by unimaginative
teachers whose intellectual capacity has been just sufficient to
acquire a few routine methods of “conducting” a class and keeping
order in a group of restless children, may have become antiquated.
Our genuine education--that is, a familiarity with the world we live
in--must wait until we get out of school. That may partly explain why
most children are so anxious to leave.
Some people might find in this inquiry not so much an evidence of
the inefficiency of our public schools as of how little intellectual
baggage one needs to become successful and eminent in these United
States. But this is in reality only to make a heavier indictment. It is
still primarily the schools that have failed to make the intellectual
baggage important to the minds of their pupils, that have left
uncultivated their tastes and horizons. It is for this reason that our
American intellectual background is so relatively thin.
V
LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL
A recent correspondent of the “New Republic” columns declares that the
real puzzle in education is as to content. She asks us to outline the
facts we have found of value, so that she may be sure, as she confesses
she is not now sure, what children should know when they leave school.
I search the memory of my nine years in the public schools, and wonder
what I really learned there. I must have learned to read and write
and spell and work sums, for I can do all those things now; but I
came out with no connected sense of my country’s history or that of
any other, and if I had any geographical grasp, it came only from a
certain abnormal delight I took in poring over maps by myself. Algebra,
geometry and physics I recall to have passed before my attention. I was
a very dutiful child, and it was my moral rather than my intellectual
sense which enabled me to get “marks” in these subjects. I cannot say
that they were “learned,” in the sense of being woven into experience
in any way. Latin rather appealed to me, chiefly because of its
elegance of form, which I remember to have been curiously reinforced
by the æsthetic format of the Collar and Daniell’s text-book we used.
Certain English classics appeared like dim ghosts on my horizon. At no
time could I have given an intelligent account of the plot or argument
of any of the books we read in Latin, Greek or German. The French
and Italian which I picked up later I can read more easily than the
German upon which I spent three school years. Imagined geographical
wanderings, the disentangling of some verses of Vergil, certain neat
algebraic solutions, are all of my “learning” that excited my interest
or enthusiasm. Nine years seems an unconscionable time to spend
learning these simple things.
I conclude that there is not much use teaching children things that
they will not assimilate with their own curiosity, and connect with
what they consider worth while in their world. In my own case this
curiosity rarely worked in school. I cannot defend its algebraic and
Vergilian workings except as springing from some embryo æsthetic
sense. But the geographical enthusiasm is perfectly intelligible. It
is connected with that intellectual education which I was pursuing
parallel to my school work, and which merged with it only occasionally.
This unofficial education, begun at a very early age, came through the
medium of the newspaper. The “New York Tribune,” lying freshly on our
doorstep every morning, was gathered in like intellectual manna by my
small and grateful self. It told me daily of a wide, fascinating and
important world, and to it I reacted with never failing curiosity. On
the political events, personalities, foreign wars, riots, strikes,
plays, books, and music that streamed disorganizedly through its
columns, no school subject threw any light except geography, which at
least enabled me to place things on the map. History, which might have
helped, was taught, not backwards, in the order that one’s curiosity
naturally approaches it, but forwards, so that at no time did we get
within hailing distance of the present.
My real education, as I look back on it, consisted in making some
sort of order out of this journalistic chaos. I got some help in the
debates on current events which a radical superintendent introduced
into our high school. I remember pulverizing, at the age of thirteen,
my opponents in debate, with proofs that a ruthless dictatorship was
the only form of government possible in the primitive state of Santo
Domingo. Our household, however, was innocent of current discussion.
The public library had not been born. I had to plot out this larger
world by myself. Indeed, the grown-up people whom I sought seemed on
the whole less familiar than I with the bearings of my curiosity. I
cannot say that there was anything subtle or complicated or critical in
my acceptance of the newspaper. It was all I could do to get the world
mapped out, and become familiar with the names that I read. I remember
following the Greco-Turkish War with a great deal of satisfaction,
though the issues involved and the real military operations never meant
anything at all. I got only the pleasant familiarity with this wider
social world that one would get in meeting the same faces constantly in
the street, without knowing the names of the people or speaking to them.
Whatever familiarity with the trend of events and the wider interests
of men and women I had when I left school was obtained in this way.
The school had been practically valueless in giving me the background
of the intellectual world in which I was henceforth to live. My
framework was bony enough and the content flimsy, but the outlines of
my interests were there, and curiosity enough to keep me ceaselessly
at filling in that content. Nothing has occurred since that time to
show me, through various vicissitudes, that it was not the most useful
I could have. That its foundations had to be laid outside the school
seems to me a sheer waste of educational energy on the school’s part.
Boldly then, and in true egocentric fashion, I say that the child
when he leaves school ought to have the foundations of interest in
the events and issues in which people generally are interested.
These practically all come within the attention of the metropolitan
newspaper. The child should be equipped to get some kind of intelligent
reaction to what he reads there about political and sociological events
and issues, personalities, art and literature. No one could accuse a
curriculum based on the newspaper of being aristocratic, esoteric, or
ultra-cultural. The newspaper is the one common intellectual food
of all classes and types in the community. Many persons, it is true,
may react only to certain specialized departments, and yet even into
the most rudimentary journals filter most of these larger issues
and events. To use this stock as clues and work out the historical,
geographical, and cultural ramifications in the school curriculum
would provide this broad familiarity with the world the child is to
live in which I suggest. I would not make the horrifying proposal that
the newspaper be used as a school text-book. I am too well aware of
that cardinal tenet of current educational morality which banishes
the newspaper entirely from the school. There is something rather
symbolic about that tenet, by the way. But to use a sort of generalized
newspaper as the nucleus and basis of a curriculum would be a different
matter. It would be using the actual current life of society as the
guiding thread of what the child is to know. As far as the purely
intellectual content of the school is concerned, it would do what so
many educators desire, connect the school with life.
This ideal may be incredible, but it is not necessarily impossible.
Take the child at its lowest terms, as a troublesome little person
whom its parents send to school to get it out of the way of the crowded
home until it is old enough to go to work. Then take the present
curriculum, a medley of equally emphasized cultural, scientific and
manual studies. Now the child certainly should have a command of the
three R’s before he is ten years old. Suppose then we transfer the
mathematical and scientific studies to a place subsidiary to the
vocational and manual work that is being so rapidly developed. They
would be taken up, that is, only as the theoretical basis for this
practical work. This would leave four or five years for the study of
the history, geography, literature, language, and civics, before the
minimum age at which the child in the more advanced states is allowed
to leave school. There seems to be no inherent reason why a great deal
could not be done in that time to prepare this imaginative background
for the world we live in.
If “cultivating the imagination” means anything it means ensuring
that what one experiences in daily life will call up interesting and
significant images and ideas. The public school sometimes attempts to
cultivate a sort of literary and mythological imagination, but as for
ensuring that those references to places, persons, books, political
institutions, ideas, which occur in the papers and weekly journals,
shall call up to the mind prompt, accurate, and stimulating images and
meanings, it has been a dead failure. An exploration of the current
imagination of the average person would be a curious and profitable
enterprise for a psychologist to undertake. For the cultivation of this
imagery, we are all left, as the child is left, to the chance provision
of the contemporary news-provider, the illustrated paper and “Sunday
magazine.” Here is where we get our notions of things as they look and
act.
Beyond all else the child should leave school with a wide and
reliable imagination--not with facts or theories so much as pictures,
sympathies, apprehensions, what we call “the feeling for the thing.”
Thus equipped, his curiosity will provide him with all the facts and
theories he needs. The custom of teaching by subjects is as artificial
and absurd as could be imagined. We do not think in terms of history
or geography or language. If I read a foreign newspaper, all these
are merged into one imaginative impression. We think in terms of
situations, which have settings in time and place, and all sorts of
fringes and implications. Unless the child is taught in this spirit,
the isolated subjects will have no meaning. Without the imaginative
background that fuses and vitalizes his studies, he will go out from
school untaught and unknowing.
VI
IN A SCHOOLROOM