suburban high school where I had once studied as a boy. The teacher
let me sit, like one of the pupils, at an empty desk in the back of
the room, and for an hour I had before my eyes the interesting drama
of the American school as it unfolds itself day after day in how many
thousands of classrooms throughout the land. I had gone primarily to
study the teacher, but I soon found that the pupils, after they had
forgotten my presence, demanded most of my attention.
Their attitude towards the teacher, a young man just out of college
and amazingly conscientious and persevering, was that good-humored
tolerance which has to take the place of enthusiastic interest in many
of our American schools. They seemed to like the teacher and recognize
fully his good intentions, but their attitude was a delightful one of
all making the best of a bad bargain, and coöperating loyally with
him in slowly putting the hour out of its agony. This good-natured
acceptance of the inevitable, this perfunctory going through by its
devotees of the ritual of education, was my first striking impression,
and the key to the reflections that I began to weave.
As I sank down to my seat I felt all that queer sense of depression,
still familiar after ten years, that sensation, in coming into the
schoolroom, of suddenly passing into a helpless, impersonal world,
where expression could be achieved and curiosity asserted only in the
most formal and difficult way. And the class began immediately to
divide itself for me, as I looked around it, into the artificially
depressed like myself, commonly called the “good” children, and the
artificially stimulated, commonly known as the “bad,” and the envy and
despair of every “good” child. For to these “bad” children, who are,
of course, simply those with more self-assertion and initiative than
the rest, all the careful network of discipline and order is simply a
direct and irresistible challenge. I remembered the fearful awe with
which I used to watch the exhaustless ingenuity of the “bad” boys of
my class to disrupt the peacefully dragging recitation; and behold,
I found myself watching intently, along with all the children in my
immediate neighborhood, the patient activity of a boy who spent his
entire hour in so completely sharpening a lead-pencil that there was
nothing left at the end but the lead. Now what normal boy would do so
silly a thing or who would look at him in real life? But here, in this
artificial atmosphere, his action had a sort of symbolic quality; it
was assertion against a stupid authority, a sort of blind resistance
against the attempt of the schoolroom to impersonalize him. The most
trivial incident assumed importance; the chiming of the town-clock,
the passing automobile, a slip of the tongue, a passing footstep in
the hall, would polarize the wandering attention of the entire class
like an electric shock. Indeed, a large part of the teacher’s business
seemed to be to demagnetize, by some little ingenious touch, his little
flock into their original inert and static elements.
For the whole machinery of the classroom was dependent evidently upon
this segregation. Here were these thirty children, all more or less
acquainted, and so congenial and sympathetic that the slightest touch
threw them all together into a solid mass of attention and feeling.
Yet they were forced, in accordance with some principle of order, to
sit at these stiff little desks, equidistantly apart, and prevented
under penalty from communicating with each other. All the lines between
them were supposed to be broken. Each existed for the teacher alone. In
this incorrigibly social atmosphere, with all the personal influences
playing around, they were supposed to be, not a network or a group, but
a collection of things, in relation only with the teacher.
These children were spending the sunniest hours of their whole lives,
five days a week, in preparing themselves, I assume by the acquisition
of knowledge, to take their places in a modern world of industry, ideas
and business. What institution, I asked myself, in this grown-up world
bore resemblance to this so carefully segregated classroom? I smiled,
indeed, when it occurred to me that the only possible thing I could
think of was a State Legislature. Was not the teacher a sort of Speaker
putting through the business of the session, enforcing a sublimated
parliamentary order, forcing his members to address only the chair and
avoid any but a formal recognition of their colleagues? How amused,
I thought, would Socrates have been to come upon these thousands of
little training-schools for incipient legislators! He might have
recognized what admirably experienced and docile Congressmen such a
discipline as this would make, if there were the least chance of any of
these pupils ever reaching the House, but he might have wondered what
earthly connection it had with the atmosphere and business of workshop
and factory and office and store and home into which all these children
would so obviously be going. He might almost have convinced himself
that the business of adult American life was actually run according to
the rules of parliamentary order, instead of on the plane of personal
intercourse, of quick interchange of ideas, the understanding and the
grasping of concrete social situations.
It is the merest platitude, of course, that those people succeed
who can best manipulate personal intercourse, who can best express
themselves, whose minds are most flexible and most responsive to
others, and that those people would deserve to succeed in any form of
society. But has there ever been devised a more ingenious enemy of
personal intercourse than the modern classroom, catching, as it does,
the child in his most impressionable years? The two great enemies of
intercourse are bumptiousness and diffidence, and the classroom is
perhaps the most successful instrument yet devised for cultivating both
of them.
As I sat and watched these interesting children struggling with these
enemies, I reflected that even with the best of people, thinking cannot
be done without talking. For thinking is primarily a social faculty;
it requires the stimulus of other minds to excite curiosity, to arouse
some emotion. Even private thinking is only a conversation with one’s
self. Yet in the classroom the child is evidently expected to think
without being able to talk. In such a rigid and silent atmosphere, how
could any thinking be done, where there is no stimulus, no personal
expression?
While these reflections were running through my head, the hour dragged
to its close. As the bell rang for dismissal, a sort of thrill of
rejuvenation ran through the building. The “good” children straightened
up, threw off their depression and took back their self-respect, the
“bad” sobered up, threw off their swollen egotism, and prepared to
leave behind them their mischievousness in the room that had created
it. Everything suddenly became human again. The brakes were off,
and life, with all its fascinations of intrigue and amusement, was
flowing once more. The school streamed away in personal and intensely
interested little groups. The real world of business and stimulations
and rebounds was thick again here.
If I had been a teacher and watched my children going away, arms around
each other, all aglow with talk, I should have been very wistful for
the injection of a little of that animation into the dull and halting
lessons of the classroom. Was I a horrible “intellectual,” to feel
sorry that all this animation and verve of life should be perpetually
poured out upon the ephemeral, while thinking is made as difficult as
possible, and the expressive and intellectual child made to seem a sort
of monstrous pariah?
Now I know all about the logic of the classroom, the economies of
time, money, and management that have to be met. I recognize that in
the cities the masses that come to the schools require some sort of
rigid machinery for their governance. Hand-educated children have had
to go the way of hand-made buttons. Children have had to be massed
together into a schoolroom just as cotton looms have had to be massed
together into a factory. The difficulty is that, unlike cotton looms,
massed children make a social group, and that the mind and personality
can only be developed by the freely inter-stimulating play of minds
in a group. Is it not very curious that we spend so much time on
the practice and methods of teaching, and never criticize the very
framework itself? Call this thing that goes on in the modern schoolroom
schooling, if you like. Only don’t call it education.
VII
THE CULT OF THE BEST
A valuable inventory of our American ideals of taste and culture
should result from the request of the American Federation of Arts that
the Carnegie Foundation undertake an investigation of the teaching
of art in this country. We have devoted much attention to importing
æsthetic values and works of art from Europe, and to providing museums,
libraries and art courses for the public. But we have scarcely asked
ourselves what is to come of it all. A survey of what is being done
“in the schools and colleges and universities as well as in the
professional art schools of the country to promote the knowledge,
appreciation and production of art in America” will be of little
value, however, if it is to concern itself merely with discovering how
many art schools and how many students there are; how many courses
on art are given in the colleges, and the credits which each course
counts towards the degree. What we need to know is the direction of
the studies. We must not feel relieved in spirit if we find there
is “enough,” and correspondingly depressed if we find there is “not
enough” being done for art in America. We must clear up our ideas as
to what a genuine art education would be for the layman, and then ask
whether the present emphases are the ones to produce it.
Artistic appreciation in this country has been understood chiefly as
the acquiring of a familiarity with “good works of art,” and with the
historical fields of the different arts, rather than as the cultivating
of spontaneous taste. The millionaire with his magnificent collections
has only been doing objectively what the anxious college student is
doing who takes courses in the history and appreciation of art, music
or literature, or the women’s clubs that follow standard manuals of
criticism and patronize bureaus of university travel. Everywhere the
emphasis is on acquisition. A great machinery for the extension of
culture has grown up around us in the last generation, devoted to the
collection, objectively or imaginatively, of masterpieces. The zealous
friends of art in and out of the schools have been engaged in bringing
before an ever-widening public a roster of the “best.” Art education
has been almost entirely a learning about what is “good.” “Culture” has
come to mean the jacking-up of one’s appreciations a notch at a time
until they have reached a certain standard level. To be cultured has
meant to like masterpieces.
Art education has, in other words, become almost a branch of moral
education. We are scarcely out of that period when it was a moral
obligation upon every child to learn to play the piano. There is still
a thoughtful striving after righteousness in our attendance at the
opera. And this moral obligation is supported by quasi-ecclesiastical
sanctions. Each art, as taught in our schools and colleges, has its
truly formidable canon of the “best,” and its insistent discrimination
between the sanctified and the apocryphal scriptures. The teaching of
English literature in the colleges is a pure example of this orthodoxy.
Criticism and expression are neglected in favor of absorption and
reverence of the classics. The student enters college on a ritual of
examination in them. He remains only through his susceptibility to
their influence. Examine what passes for cultural education in other
fields, and you will find that it is historical, lexicographical,
encyclopædic, and neither utilitarian nor æsthetic. It is prompted by
the scholarly ideal rather than by an ideal of taste. The prize goes
to those who can acquire the most of these goods. No one is challenged
to spontaneous taste any more than the monk is asked to create his own
dogmas.
To me this conception of culture is unpleasantly undemocratic. I am
not denying the superlative beauty of what has come to be officially
labeled “the best that has been thought and done in the world.” But
I do object to its being made the universal norm. For if you educate
people in this way, you only really educate those whose tastes run to
the classics. You leave the rest of the world floundering in a fog of
cant, largely unconscious perhaps, trying sincerely to squeeze their
appreciations through the needle’s eye. You get as a result hypocrites
or “lowbrows,” with culture reserved only for a few. All the rest of
us are left without guides, without encouragement, and tainted with
original sin.
An education in art appreciation will be valueless if it does not
devote itself to clarifying and integrating natural taste. The emphasis
must be always on what you do like, not on what you ought to like.
We have never had a real test of whether bad taste is positive or
merely a lack of consciousness. We have never tried to discover strong
spontaneous lines of diversified taste. To the tyranny of the “best”
which Arnold’s persuasive power imposed upon this most inquisitive,
eager and rich American generation, can be laid, I think, our failure
to develop the distinctive styles and indigenous art spirit which the
soil should have brought forth abundantly. For as long as you humbly
follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital. If you are using your
energy to cajole your appreciations, you have none left for unforced
æsthetic emotion. If your training has been to learn and appreciate
the best that has been thought and done in the world, it has not
been to discriminate between the significant and the irrelevant that
the experience of every day is flinging up in your face. Civilized
life is really one æsthetic challenge after another, and no training
in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able
to react to forms and settings. The mere callousness with which we
confront our ragbag city streets is evidence enough of the futility
of the Arnold ideal. To have learned to appreciate a Mantegna and a
Japanese print, and Dante and Debussy, and not to have learned nausea
at Main street, means an art education which is not merely worthless
but destructive.
I know that such complaints are met by the plea that the fight has
been so hard in this country to get any art education at all that it
is idle to talk of cultivating public taste until this battle is won.
Mr. Edward Dickinson still pleads in a recent book the cause of music
to the stony educationists of the land. Let us get a foothold in the
colleges with our music courses, these defenders seem to say, and your
taste will evolve from them. But the way to reach a goal is not to
start off in the opposite direction, and my thesis is that education
in the appreciation of art has been moving exactly in this wrong
direction. Widespread artistic taste would have had a better chance
to develop in this country if we had not been so much concerned with
knowing what we ought to know and liking what we ought to like. The
movement has caught those whose taste happened to coincide with the
canons. It has perverted a much larger host who have tried to pretend
that their taste coincided. And it has left untouched the joyous masses
who might easily, as in other countries, have evolved a folk-culture
if they had not been outlawed by this ideal.
The ideal still dominates, although it becomes every day more
evident that its effect has been disastrous. A younger generation of
architects has filled our cities with sepulchral neo-classicism and
imitative débris of all the ages. We get its apotheosis in the fantasy
of Washington, where French chateaux snuggle up close to colonial
mansions, and the great lines of the city are slashed by cheap and
tawdry blocks. All this has been done with the best will in the world,
by men curious and skilful, well instructed in the “best” of all time.
It has been a conscientious following of an ideal of beauty. We are
just beginning to discover uneasily how false that ideal is. Art to
most of us has come to mean painting instead of the decoration and
design and social setting that would make significant our objective
life. Our moral sense has made us mad for artistic “rightness.” What
we have got out of it is something much worse than imitation. It is
worship.
This effort to follow the best, which even our revolutionists
engage in, has the effect of either closing the appreciation to new
styles or leaving it open to passing winds of fashion. That we are
fashion-ridden is the direct result of an education which has made
acquisition and not discrimination the motive. The cult of the best
is harmless only if it has been superimposed on the broadest basis of
personal discrimination, begun in earliest years. Let us admit that the
appreciations of the Brahmins marvelously coincide with what Matthew
Arnold has stamped as right. But perhaps for most of us there has not
been the environment to produce that happy coincidence. Our education
has forced us all to be self-made men in artistic appreciation. Our
tastes suffer from hiatuses and crotchinesses and color-blindnesses
because no effort has been made to integrate our sincere likes and
dislikes and focus and sharpen our reactions. Until the present ideal
is overthrown, we have no chance of getting a sincere and general
public taste. We can have only the mechanics of art education. I do not
mean that America has been unique in this. We have only been a little
worse than other countries because we have been more conscientious.
VIII
EDUCATION IN TASTE
There is a naïvely systematic way of teaching artistic appreciation to
the students of many of our city schools. To each class is allotted a
famous painter. The class is then taken en masse to the art museum,
and, under the guidance of one of the official show-women, confronted
with the masterpieces of its proprietary genius. The children hear the
dates of the painter’s life, details of his career, the significance
of his pictures, the particular beauties of his styles, and any other
loose fragments of knowledge that may appeal to their guide. After they
have been exposed long enough to the pictures to give confidence that
appreciation has taken place in them, they are allowed to exchange
painters with another class, and in rigid platoon proceed to appreciate
their new idol in the same way. Presumably their appreciation finally
flows over the entire museum, and they take their places among the
cultivated of the land.
The other day in a New Jersey school I was shown some wall-paper
designs that had just been made in a class of the youngest children.
A simple figure had been given them with which to cover a sheet of
paper in any pattern they chose. The thirty papers presented the most
astonishing variety. They ranged from mere blotches to orderly and
regular patterns. Some children had merely reproduced the figure in
parallel lines across the paper. Others had alternated their lines
and made a more pleasing scheme. Here was a living demonstration
of the variety of artistic skill, but I was more interested in the
appreciation. The teacher told me that she had pinned all the designs
on the wall, and without any suggestion to the children had asked them
to choose which they liked best. There had been a large consensus of
liking for the alternate lines, the pattern which was obviously the
most regular and the most pleasing.
In that museum system of class-painters who were to be duly
“appreciated” I had a perfect example of the old unregenerate cult
of the best. But my New Jersey school convinced me that these vestal
virgins of the museums were guarding a decaying fane. The young teacher
in the classroom had the beginnings of what would be a genuine
education in taste. If that same critical and discriminating spirit
could be carried forward with these littlest children all through
their schooling, most of them would get a robust sense of values that
would be spontaneous, that would never have to be cajoled, and that
could not be threatened. Might not this process of refining taste be
woven into our elementary education? Already we have its embryo in
these kindergartens and lower grades. It is a question of emphasis, of
making the teachers see that the constant challenge to taste is one of
the most important functions of the school. Types of school such as
the Play-School make expression and selection the basis of their life.
The most valuable feature of the Montessori school is the training of
the senses, the quickening of response to sounds and colors and forms.
Suppose a child were brought up from his earliest years in everyday
contact with forms and colors, without its ever being hinted to him
that some were “good” and others “bad.” Suppose the child were urged to
choose and to express his likes and dislikes, not giving his reasons
but merely telling as he could what he saw or heard. Suppose this
attempt were made through the course of his school life to clarify his
appeals and repugnances, not by rationalizing them but by synthesizing
them. Would not something like taste evolve out of it all?
Emphasis on what the pupil likes instead of what he ought to like would
change the tone of school or college. The average mediocre student
under our present regime gets an almost uncanny desire to do things
“right.” Since success in school depends on doing what the teacher
thinks is right, education becomes on the child’s part a technique of
accurate guessing. Anyone who has spent much time in high schools knows
how eagerly children will pounce on any official judgment concerning
a book or person or picture or idea. The study of English classics in
most schools becomes a festering bed of hypocrisy. And it is often the
intrinsically amenable who are the most conscientious and who therefore
most hopelessly overlay their own reactions with other people’s
judgments. The modern school recitation has degenerated into a skilful
guessing on the part of the child of what the teacher “wants” him to
say. And this is a symbol of the general attitude, in school and out,
towards cultural things.
A laudable attempt has been made in the colleges to teach the student
to think, but I wonder sometimes whether it has proceeded very far
beyond encouraging him to find reasons for ideas and attitudes which he
is persuaded he ought to have. For most college students it is already
too late. Expression and discrimination are the last things which the
primary and secondary schools have been emphasizing. The boy and girl
come to college with no background of taste or selection, and the old
docility, the old unconscious hypocrisy, must dog them all through
their course. I would make a larger part of the process of thinking
in school and college the discovery of what one likes and wants, the
control and direction of desire. Almost the whole object of education
should be to know what one truly and wholeheartedly likes and wants.