discriminating attitude has a chance of being cultivated. The secret
of all the current tendencies towards the “school of to-morrow” is
the increasing participation of the children in the work of their own
school. The Wirt plan, where the children help the mechanics decorate
the rooms, and dramatize their school-life in auditorium exercises,
perhaps carries this coöperation farthest, but in numberless schools
that have shopwork, gardens, dramatizations, etc., the same evolution
is apparent. Now every touch of dramatic, artistic and literary
expression made by the children in the school affords material for
education in taste. Expression and criticism play into each other’s
hands. Any expression which passes without a reaction from some part
of this little school public is expression wasted. If the child does
not learn in the school to observe and reflect upon and react to the
expressive life that flows around him in the school, he will never
react intelligently to anything outside the school. His childish
criticism will of course be as elementary as the expression is
elementary. But the emphasis of teachers should be there. Taste must
flow naturally and spontaneously out of the experiences of everyday
life.
Such an effort in the education of taste has a much better chance
of success than has our traditional guidance. To impose canons on a
younger generation, to make students appreciate the best in the arts,
we need hosts of teachers who are finely tuned to these appreciations
themselves, teachers whose tastes naturally coincide with what has
been consecrated by time, and who can communicate their admirations.
Experience has proved that we shall never have those hosts of teachers.
We should never have enough Matthew Arnolds to go round. What art
education suffers from in this country is teachers who have only the
mechanics of appreciation without the inner glow. And it is futile to
expect that we shall ever have enough with the classic inner glow.
In this new direction, however, the teacher need not be mentor, but
guide and provocative. Never being called upon to impart judgments or
appreciations to the student, what he requires most is not judgments
and appreciations of his own but curiosity as to the student’s
reactions. He need only be saying constantly to the student, what do
you like and how does it compare with something else that you like?
He need provide only the paraphernalia of art, the materials and
processes, for the student to do his own work. If the teacher is of
sound original taste, he can give the student criticism and aid him in
his analysis and comparison. If he is not, he is at least prevented
from making the student’s taste hypocritical.
If this attitude became general in our æsthetic education, it would
not be long before results became noticeable. We should get a variety
of tastes--some of them traditional, some of them strange and new,
but most of them at least spontaneous, indigenous. At present we have
no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of public
taste is conventional, fashion-induced, imitative, or sincerely
felt. Much spontaneous taste might turn out to be traditional.
The majority of children trained in discrimination might prove to
be incipient Brahmins. On the other hand we might get strange and
vigorous expressions like the contemporary architecture and sculpture
of Germany. I am assuming that taste and creation will fertilize each
other. For this fertilization we must have a liberation of taste from
the sterile control of the “best.” This does not mean that every person
would become endowed with original taste, but that we should have a
chance to find original taste out. We should have done all within human
power to create public taste, as our present ideal does everything
to prevent it. As a result we should have a chance of some kind of
integrated culture. In each art we might find several very strongly
marked directions of style and taste which should appeal to different
people. It would then be the task of criticism not to choose between
them but to discover their sincerity and significance. Style is a
matter of right relations. Things have style when their parts make each
other and the whole significant. Indigenous style is the only art that
really means anything. Out of an education in taste will grow creative
art as a flower from rich soil.
IX
UNIVERSAL SERVICE AND EDUCATION
The current agitation for preparedness has set hosts of Americans to
thinking out for the first time what a real national strength and
readiness would mean. We suddenly realize that if we are to defeat that
militaristic trend which we loathe we shall have to offer some kind of
action more stirring and more creative. The call now upon every citizen
is to be not nebulously patriotic, but clear and lucid as to America’s
aims, so that our natural energy shall not be squandered and misused.
There looms up as a crucial need that “moral equivalent for war” with
which William James first roused our imaginations. It seems no longer
so academic a proposal. Confronted with the crisis, we see that he
analyzed the situation with consummate accuracy.
All around us we see a very genuine craving for unity of sentiment, for
service, for some new national lift and broadening which shall keep
us out of the uneasy pettiness into which the American conscience has
threatened to fall. In our hearts we know that to crystallize this
desire into a meaningless sentiment, or into a piling-up of armaments
or a proscribing of alien cultures, would not satisfy us. We want
action, but we do not want military action. Even the wildest patriots
know that America would have to go through the most pernicious and
revolutionary changes to accept the universal military service which
they advocate. We wish to advance from where we stand. We begin to
suspect that military service, flag-reverence, patriotic swagger, are
too much the weary old deep-dug channels into which national feeling
always runs and is lost. The flooding river fills again its archaic
and forsaken paths. Our present confusion expresses the dilemma we
find ourselves in, when our instincts impel us into courses that our
intelligence tells us we ought not to follow.
Our American danger is not so much that we become militarists as that
we grope along, fretting and harrying each other into a unity which is
delusive, and expressing our “Americanism” in activities that are not
creative. The best will in America at the present time seems to crave
some kind of national service but it veers off from military service.
Until we satisfy that craving, we shall run at half-power, and suffer
all the dissatisfaction and self-despising that comes from repressed
energy. The question which all are asking, in the varied and disguised
forms, is: How can we all together serve America by really enhancing
her life?
To more and more of us the clue has come through James’s conception
of a productive army of youth, warring against nature and not against
men, finding in drudgery and toil and danger the values that war and
preparation for war have given. Ten years ago such an army seemed
Utopian. We had neither the desire nor the technique. It seemed a
project not to be realized without a reorganization of our life so
radical as to make the army itself unnecessary. To-day, however, a
host of new attitudes seem to give us the raw material out of which
such a national service could be created. We hear much of universal
military service as “education.” The Plattsburgs are sugar-coated as
“civic-training camps,” “schools for citizenship.” Universal service
no longer stands on its old ground of mere preparation for war. It
is frankly trying to get itself recognized as an indispensable mode
of education. The next pertinent step is evidently to ask why, if
universal service is valuable because it is educational, it should not
be constructed on a strict educational foundation.
James’s proposal sounded Utopian because it would require an entirely
new and colossal national organization to put it into action. Universal
military service in this country would certainly mean such a task.
But if our national service is to be educational, we already have the
organization in existence. The rapidly consolidating public school
systems in the states provide the machinery for such an organization.
As the public schools become better places for children to spend their
time in, we are growing less tolerant of the forms of schooling outside
of the public system. The tendency is towards the inclusion of all
children in the public school. And the progressive states are requiring
schooling up to the full age of sixteen years. We are rapidly creating
a public school system, effectively administered by the states, which
gives us the one universally national compulsory service which we
possess or are ever likely to consent to.
Education is the only form of “conscription” to which Americans have
ever given consent. Compulsory military service would require decades
of Napoleonic political evangelism to introduce. Compulsory education
is universally accepted. For a national service which shall be
educational you would have to convert nobody. The field is sown. No one
denies the right of the state to conscript the child for education. But
coupled with this assent is the insistence that the education shall be
the freest, fullest and most stimulating that we know how to give. The
current educational interest arises largely from the indignant demand
that a state which takes all the children must meet the needs of every
child. The very recent enthusiasm for “vocational education” means
that we want a schooling that shall issue in capacity for fruitful
occupation. A national educational service could give training for work
at the same time that it gave opportunity for service.
It is only a national service of this kind that would really be
universal. Military service is a sham universality. It omits the
feminine half of the nation’s youth. And of the masculine half it uses
only the physically best. France is the only country where the actual
levy on men for military service has approximated the number liable.
But worst of all, military service irons out all differences of talent
and ability. It does not even tap the resources it enlists. It makes
out of an infinitely varied group a mere machine of uniform, obeying
units. The personal qualities, the individual powers of the youth it
trains, are of no relevance whatever. Men are valuable exactly to the
degree that they crush out these differences.
A national service for education would not be a sham. It would
actually enlist the coöperation of every youth and girl. It would aim
at stimulation, not obedience. It would call out capacity and not
submerge it. It would organize varied tasks adapted to the capacities
and strengths of its young citizenry. It would be universal, but it
would be compulsory only in the sense that it called every one to
the service. The tasks would not be enforced drudgery, but work that
enlisted the will and toned up the aspirations.
Such a national service would be the logical outgrowth of our public
school system. Suppose the state said: All children shall remain in
school till the age of sixteen years. Between the ages of sixteen
and twenty-one they shall spend two years in national service. This
service shall be organized and administered by the state educational
administrations, but supervised and subsidized by the national
government. The service would be performed as national service, but
its work would be constructive and communal in its purposes and not
military. Special military training could be given as a branch of this
service to those who were best fitted for it. But defense would be but
an incident in our constructive life, and not the sinew of our effort.
The tasks for such a national service would evidently be different from
those contemplated by James. He thought of turning his army of youth
into the drudgery of the world, where they might win in heroic toil
and self-sacrifice the moral rewards which war had formerly given. But
if our service is to be universal, it cannot be mere unskilled labor
in mines and farms and forests. A large proportion of our youth would
be disqualified. Furthermore, a service which made such frontal attack
on industry would be bitterly resisted by those with whom its work
competed. We are not prepared for a service which clashes too suddenly
and harshly with the industrial system. What we need is a service which
shall not so much do the old work of the world as create new demands
and satisfy them. This national service could do the things which
need to be done, but which are not now being done. It could have for
its aim the improvement of the quality of our living. Our appalling
slovenliness, the ignorance of great masses in city and country as to
the elementary technique of daily life--this should be the enemy of the
army of youth. I have a picture of a host of eager young missionaries
swarming over the land, spreading the health knowledge, the knowledge
of domestic science, of gardening, of tastefulness, that they have
learned in school.
Such a service would provide apprentices for communal services in
town and country, as many schools and colleges are already actually
providing. Food inspection, factory inspection, organized relief, the
care of dependents, playground service, nursing in hospitals--all this
would be a field for such an educational service. On a larger scale,
tree-planting, the care and repair of roads, work on conservation
projects, the care of model farms, would be tasks for this army. As I
was burning caterpillars’ nests the other day in New Jersey and saw
the trees sinister with gray webs, I thought of the destroying army
of youth that should be invading the land clearing it of all insect
pests. We might even come to the forcible rebuilding of the slovenly
fences and outhouses which strew our landscape, and to an imposition of
cleanness upon our American countryside. With an army of youth we could
perform all those services of neatness and mercy and intelligence which
our communities now know how to perform and mean to perform, but have
not the weapons to wield.
The army could be organized in flying squadrons, so that its
youth could travel widely and see and serve all kinds of men and
communities. For its direction we would need that new type of
teacher-engineer-community-worker that our best school systems are
already producing. Scientific schools, schools of philanthropy,
are turning out men and women who could step into their places as
non-commissioned officers for such an army. The service could be
entirely flexible. Boys and girls could learn the rudiments of their
trade or profession in actual service with the army. Book studies
could be carried on, and college learning could come to its own as the
intellectual fertilizer of a wholesome and stimulating life. Athletics
and sports would be an integral part of the two years’ service. There
would be long periods of camping in the national parks or upon ocean
beaches. The Boy Scouts and Camp-Fire Girls already give the clue to
such an enterprise.
If objection is made that this national educational service would fail
to bring out the sterner qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice, and
would not be a genuine moral equivalent for war, the answer is that the
best kind of a moral equivalent is a moral sublimation. We want to turn
the energies of youth away from their squandering in mere defense or
mere drudgery. Our need is to learn how to live rather than die; to be
teachers and creators, not engines of destruction; to be inventors and
pioneers, not mere defenders. Our cities and isolated farms alike are
mute witnesses that Americans have never learned how to live. Suppose
we had a national service which was making a determined assault for
the enhancement of living. Would its standards and discipline be less
rigorous? Rather would the ingenuity and imagination have to be of the
finest.
Some such conception of national service is the only one which will
give us that thrill of unity and vigor which we seek. An educational
service built on the public school system puts the opportunity in
our hands. The raw material in attitudes and desires is here. Every
task that an army of youth might perform is already being done in
some school or college or communal service. All we need to do is to
coördinate and make universal what is now haphazard and isolated. An
army of youth which focused school work would provide just that purpose
that educators seek. The advocates of “preparedness” are willing
to spend billions on a universal military service which is neither
universal nor educational nor productive. Cannot we begin to organize a
true national service which will let all serve creatively towards the
toning up of American life?
X
THE SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE
To persons directing any complicated organization, criticism from
outsiders always seems either futile or irrelevant. Conscious of the
difficulty that has been met in creating the existing machinery, they
resent the debonair and nonchalant proposals tossed in upon them by
people who have only an amateurish or philosophical interest in their
work. There are very few able administrators in any work who do not
honestly believe they are doing their best with the material that is
given them.
To this resentment the educational world seems particularly prone.
The teacher finds it intolerable that the classroom should be judged
from any vantage-point but the teacher’s desk; the superintendent is
annoyed if you arraign his system in the light of the product turned
out. A public service which enlists so much conscientiousness as does
our public school system is naturally sensitive to public criticism.
Its very sensitiveness makes it difficult for it to distinguish between
criticism of motives and criticism of policies and philosophies.
This resentment to amateur criticism is offset by an almost pathetic
trust in expert overhauling. Letters from school principals to those
in charge of recent investigations into city school systems imply that
the expert has some kind of magical power not possessed by the ordinary
teacher or administrator. When we learn, however, that the defects
discovered are usually of so elementary and obvious a character that
few interested laymen could have ignored them, we suspect that the
magic is not so much a matter of the expert as it is of the outsider.
The thing is to get a new point-of-view, a new interpretation, which
shall not be so obsessed with the inside workings of the machinery that
the drift of policy and the value of the human product is ignored.
Educators, it is true, “welcome fair criticism,” and they have a fond
belief that they get it from one another in the educational press.
But in this mass of books and journals, crowded with exposition and
discussion of current educational conceptions and technical methods,
the whole setting, language, philosophy, are professional. The very
bases and premises which the lay critic wishes to criticize are taken
for granted. Educators decry “destructive” criticism, but in a sense
all criticism is destructive, for it is essentially an examination. It
requires a stripping away of the wrappings of routine and jargon, the
turning of the idea about on all sides, the placing of it in a light
where it may be clearly observed. There is another reason why amateur
criticism is likely to be pertinent in education. The whole business of
teaching and learning is a matter of personal psychology, and, in spite
of current cant, there is no science so elusive and so unformulated as
psychology. If the scientists will no longer deal with the problems of
the personal, conscious life, it is left for the amateur philosophers
to examine the psychological backgrounds of the teaching world, and
attempt newer and more personal interpretations.
Much of the public criticism of the school is no doubt unintelligent,
but what are we to say of that blanket defense we hear so often
from the educator, that the niggardliness of the public prevents
his providing the best schools and the best teachers? Now a country
that attempts almost universally to provide free secondary school
education--something provided in no European country--is certainly not
thus guilty. The prestige of education in America is extraordinarily
high. It is quite too late in the day to pretend that anyone still
regards public schools as a charity, or that ridicule of teaching
methods would only serve to discredit the schools and reduce the
already small appropriations. There is no more fear--though some of our
educators would have us believe it--that free criticism of the school
will leave us school-less than there is that denunciation of the New
York police resulted in leaving that city without police protection.
The public schools in this country have the standing of all other
public services.
It is not a question of more money, but of more intelligent use of
present resources. The inexpert public cannot be expected to spend
its money wisely. It has an incorrigible itch for objective results.
It likes to see its money go into handsome buildings with expensive
equipments. Large sums are spent in emulative waste. If one town boasts
a seventy-five thousand dollar high school, its neighbor must have a
hundred thousand dollar one. It is obvious that money which goes into
costly ventilating systems and the adoption of uncriticized fads, does
not go into teachers’ salaries. But it is the function of the educators
to offset this public childishness with their own wisdom, and see that
the public money is profitably spent. If they believe that we could
have better teachers if we paid more for them, they should see that the
money goes to the teachers and not into fussy mechanical details.
The trend of educational activity has been to encourage this objective
standard. More of the intellectual energy of the educational world has
gone into technique and organization than into psychology. It has been
more interested in seeing that the American child had enough cubic
feet of air, a hygienic desk, and a fire-proof building, than that
he acquired an alert and curious outlook on the modern world, and an
expressive personality. France, with public school buildings, even in
Paris, that you would scarcely perhaps stable your horse in, somehow,
by making expression the insistent motive of education, turns out
intellectual products strikingly superior to our own.
European experience tends, too, to challenge the common assumption
of American educators that quality of teaching is proportional to
salaries paid. American salaries are certainly as high as those paid
in European countries. There is no violent contrast, moreover, between
the intellectual and educational background of a primary teacher with
seven hundred a year and a principal with twenty-five hundred. They
would both subscribe to the same philosophy of life; they might easily
have come from the same training-school. The difference would be one of
age or executive capacity, or of “experience,” which generally means
nothing more than greater expertness with routine and a longer setting
of the intellectual cement.
It is this background, spirit, philosophy, behind the educational
mind that the critical public is becoming more and more restless
about. It does not challenge details of mechanical and administrative
organization. These have been worked out with an ingenuity and a
completeness all too thorough. The public is demanding now a similar
attention to the conscious and spiritual side of learning and teaching.
The ideal of the school as an embryonic community life, of the child
as a growing personality to whom the activity of the school must
have intense reality, of education as the training of expression,
creation--this has hardly begun to be generally felt. The faults
discovered by the Springfield and Portland school surveys arose largely
from a careless and mechanical philosophy of life, an educational
philosophy that had not sufficiently emphasized these ideals. The
investigators were able, for instance, to tell on the moment whether
a teacher had come from a certain training-school by her method and
attitudes.
The responsibility cannot be dodged by the professional educators.
They are responsible for primitive and mechanical attitudes which
make so much of the orthodox public school teaching a mere marking of
time rather than an education. Millions of the public’s money would
not effect this change in the background of the teaching world. That
background could be changed without its costing the public a cent. The
difficulty, huge, it is true, like any other attempt to change the
obscure and uncriticized assumptions that lie at the bottom of any
theory or practice, is psychological, not mechanical. It involves only
the substitution, for certain undemocratic, ultra-logical ideas, of
ideas more congenial to the time and social situation in which we live.
XI