and accurate scholars and produce thoughtful men,” we must resign
ourselves to a progressive softening of the fiber and capacity of
the mass of our people. The average educator acts as if he thought
of his child-world as a level plain of capacities. There is the mass
of unskilled, unawakened minds; here is the level of scholarship,
knowledge, civic virtue, appreciations. Education is to him the process
of lifting up the mass from their primitive level to the higher one.
The public school is the elevator into which all are to be shoveled and
transported to the upper story. And the American public school in the
last fifty years has been faithfully following this ideal.
The truth is, of course, that mental aptitude is not any such level
desert, but rather a series of inclined planes. When we try to
educate all the children of all the people, we are not dealing with a
homogeneous mass, but with sliding scales of capacity. A mental test
of the school-children of a state would reveal an incline extending in
orderly gradation from the genius down to the imbecile. A physical test
would give us a different slant, a test for artistic or mechanical
capacity another. Stand at the center of divine average and try to
lever any of these slopes into a horizontal position and you find half
of your society squatting heavily at the lower end. You may ascribe it
to race capacity, personal heredity, social environment, malnutrition,
defective nervous organization or anything you please, but the fact
remains that the greater part of the human raw material will be
permanently resistive to or only dully appreciative of any attempts
to elevate them to a level. This is true of any capacity you may
choose. The outstanding truth of society seems to be the heterogeneous
distribution of capacities. And the irony of it is that after artistic
capacity true intellectual capacity is probably the rarest. For the
public school to try to make intellectualists of all its children is a
sheer defiance of sociological reality.
Some educators, while they recognize this diversity, yet insist on
uniform standards, uniform curricula, uniform discipline, on the
ground that social order in a democracy is imperiled unless the
highest degree of like-mindedness prevails. Such a democracy would
be the stagnant democracy of China. The result of these attempts at
standardization have been the automatic centrifugal flinging off into
space of the children whose interests were not intellectual, who were
no more capable of being made into “accurate scholars” than they were
into artists and poets. And from those who did not get quite flung
off, but clung on with their teeth, we get most of our prevailing
pseudo-culture. To keep on trying to “develop the mind” and produce
“thorough scholarship” in those whom we force to submit to educational
processes, means simply to go on creating a nerveless and semi-helpless
mass of boys and girls who will never take their effective and
interested place in the world because they have no mental tools which
they can wield. Such a course is coming to be generally recognized as
a kind of slow national suicide, a slow suffocation of industrial and
social progress.
The schools do change, but the schoolmen yield grudgingly. Nothing
could be more naïve than the test which Dr. Baker proposes for
evaluating the Gary plan. Submit, he says, the highest class in the
Gary schools to an examination by the College Examining Board. If the
students pass, the Gary system will be justified of its children. Was
ever a more patent assertion of the professional bias? Let the children
drop out of the lower grades untrained except in the rudiments, but if
the small minority in the highest class passes its Vergil and algebra
and English literature and German with marks as high as the graduates
of the Tome School, then the Gary system will cease to be considered a
“mere experiment.” If this is what the critics of the Gary plan mean
when they plead for an “evaluation of this novel experiment,” we may
well hope that it will escape the peril.
Such a conception of educational values cannot become too speedily
obsolete. A public school is a mockery unless it educates the public.
It cannot make the rarefied and strained product at the top the test
of its effectiveness. And the public is not ideally educated unless
its individuals--all of them--are intelligent, informed, skilled,
resourceful, up to the limit of their respective capacities. Life
itself can no longer be trusted to provide this education; the school
must substitute. The Gary school deliberately sets such an ideal.
Democracy does not mean uniformity, but it does mean equality of
opportunity. A democratic school would be one where every child had
the chance to discover and develop aptitude. The Gary school, with its
harmonious activities of intellectual, manual, artistic and scientific
work, physical education and play, gives just this chance. Democratic
education does not mean the provision of separate schools for different
kinds of children, or even separate courses in the same school, as the
movement for industrial education is now threatening to bring. This is
to create at once invidious distinctions, and fasten class education
upon us. To say that children are different does not mean that some
are fitted to be scholars and others to be manual workers, some to be
artists and some to be scientists. The differences are differences of
focus and not of quality.
To most children will appear in the course of school life some dominant
interest, and it is upon the cultivation of that interest that the
child’s chance of being more than a nerveless mediocrity will depend.
It is upon that training that his chance of being absorbed out of the
school into the social and industrial world will depend. At the same
time, without a common background with his fellows he will be alien
and adrift in the world. Interest and skill in one’s work, whether
it be making automobiles or teaching Greek, an acquaintance with the
contemporary world, an alert intelligence which is always seeking to
diminish the area of things human that are alien to one--a man or woman
with this would be truly educated in any society. But both focus and
background are supremely necessary. The present educational system does
not really set itself to provide either. Only in a school organized on
some such plan as the Gary plan will such education be possible.
This does not mean that every child is to marvelously blossom into
ideally alert and skilled intelligence. But we can be sure that a
school which gives opportunity for the development of the most varied
aptitudes in the free play of a child-community life will have done
all that it could. No one pretends that the Gary education is the
intrinsically ideal education for all time. But we can say that, given
the best social demands of America to-day, this school will make for
the most robust, effective, intelligent citizenship of which we are at
present capable.
XIX
THE TRAINED MIND
How much longer are we to expect the headmasters of our private
secondary schools to view with anything but alarm the current radical
tendencies in education? In the November “Atlantic,” Dr. Alfred E.
Stearns of Phillips-Andover is stirred to wrath against the fallacies
of the modern school as expounded by Mr. Flexner and others. The paper
contributes little new to the well-worn theory of mental discipline
upon which upper-class education has so long been based. But it is
highly significant as a pattern of the “trained” mind as it works in
the exposure of fallacies. Dr. Stearns is presumably an immensely
successful product of the old idealistic and linguistic education,
gained by strenuous effort and vigorous thinking. It is worth while
to examine how such a mind argues, what it considers as clinching
evidence, how it hopes to convince the alert intellectual of to-day.
The “fallacies” in modern education which Dr. Stearns is exposing
are the materialistic and utilitarian ideal, the belief in the
non-transferability of mental power from one field to another, the
cultivation of interest rather than discipline, of play rather than
drudgery, the scientific rather than the cultural emphasis. He
wishes to persuade the reader that all these tendencies make for the
perversion of the child’s character, the weakening of his mental
grasp, the materializing of his soul. One waits eagerly for proofs of
such very serious menaces. The student of education to-day is rapidly
acquiring a belief in objective evidence, in statistical or at least
analytic experiment, in scientific formulation. The kind of evidence
that appeals to the alert student to-day is the kind that comes out
of the psychological laboratory of Clark University, or Columbia
or Chicago, out of the great city school surveys, like Portland or
Cleveland or New York, out of the experimental schools in different
parts of the country. These are the arenas where educational problems
will, he believes, ultimately be solved. And to him the so-called
“fallacies” in modern education are not “dogmas” or “assumptions” at
all, but rather hopeful hypotheses which are now being tested in
dozens of American schools.
Is this the sort of evidence to which Dr. Stearns’ trained mind appeals
when he wishes to discredit the “new” education? Not at all. He does
not even so much as show that he is acquainted with the existence of
the great mass of literature which would throw light on the success
or failure of the radical theories which he deplores. Educational
journals, school surveys, reports of intelligence tests, descriptions
of play schools,--none of these seem to have come into contact with
his training. For the benefit of the philosophically-minded, he does
not even refer to the writings of Dewey or Hall, or the other radical
writers on education. All this writing and doing which represents the
new education at work, he lumps into “the pedagogical expert,” upon
whom he lavishes his anxious scorn. The only concrete data he offers is
the record of the College Examination Board, which Dr. Flexner, whom
he is criticizing, had cited in his “Modern School.” Dr. Flexner had
argued against Latin and mathematics in the secondary school on the
ground that the majority of even the picked students failed in them.
Dr. Stearns succeeds in showing that a majority of college candidates
fail not only in Latin and Algebra but in all other subjects as well.
The normal mind, untrained by the old dispensation, would consider
these statistics very damaging to Dr. Stearns’ cause. The inexorable
conclusion would be not that Latin and algebra should be retained in
the secondary school curriculum, but that the entire curriculum should
undergo a radical reorganization in teaching methods and educational
philosophy.
Dr. Stearns, like most of the critics of the “new” education, makes
the fundamental error of confusing the narrow business man, who sees
no “use” for his son’s taking Latin or algebra in school, with the
“new” educator who would give these subjects a new orientation in
the curriculum. The “practical” business man is as much anathema to
the “modern school” as he is to the cultural school. The “modern
school” would not refuse any subject to minds that fed upon it and
fused it into vital experience. But it would not force it on minds
that could not digest it. And Dr. Stearns’ own figures show how
generally indigestible, with all the drudgery and mental discipline
in the world, is the entire conventional secondary school curriculum.
The pseudo-modern high school where science and manual arts have
been added, only to be taught in the same unilluminated way, is as
objectionable to the “new” educator as it is to Dr. Stearns.
Since the latter’s only use of objective evidence proves a boomerang,
what considerations does he think will be persuasive in his attack on
the “new” education? It is easy to see. His reliance is entirely on
authority, upon personal belief. Several very successful business men
of his acquaintance attribute their success to the training of the old
education. The majority of schoolmasters are not yet ready to abandon
the doctrine of mental discipline. The sons of Mr. Hill go to college
to get something which their father, for all his success, recognizes
that he missed. It is a serious question in the minds of many observers
whether Dr. Eliot’s advocacy of “observational” training is sound.
Always the reference to personal authority, to prestige, to anything
but objective standards on which both sides may agree! Always the naïve
appeal to schoolmasters and successful business men, the pillars of his
world! Dr. Stearns deplores the materialistic trend of the age, but he
does not consider how powerfully his own innocent use of the verdict of
successful business men as scientific evidence is likely to glorify
material success in the minds of his students.
Dr. Stearns’ logic is as unconvincing as his evidence. A doctrine is
monstrous. Therefore, he implies, it is untrue. Intelligent children
are usually bright in all their school subjects. Therefore, if you
force a child to learn through drudgery, you automatically endow him
with general intelligence. The interest of boys in wireless telegraphy
and automobiles, he thinks, is the best argument for keeping all these
things out of a school where one must learn to work. At the same time,
Dr. Stearns objects to scientific schools because students so soon lose
interest in their work. But, according to the gospel of drudgery, why
would not this make science the ideal “mental discipline”?
Such a paper as this shows the technique of a thoroughly obsolete mind.
Such “mental discipline” as this old education gave is evidently of
little use in handling a world of facts, of experiment, of recorded
tests. Criticism does not make such thinkers critical. It only makes
them belligerent. They do not analyze, they repel. They are more
interested in a moral justification for the structure of their craft
and their practices than in the truth. Dr. Stearns’ paper is the best
evidence of how little relevant is the old linguistic and idealistic
education to the intellectual demands of to-day. The critical,
analytic, impersonal, experimental approach is wholly lacking in
his paper. His evidence is personal authority, his logic is special
pleading. Parents with sons in private schools might well view with
grave concern the kind of “trained mind” which is likely to be
developed under such masters of the old education. They might ask how
likely a boy, taught to use his mind the way Dr. Stearns uses his, is
to analyze and grasp the complex facts of the world into which he will
come.
XX
CLASS AND SCHOOL
The proposed experimental school which the General Education Board is
to found in conjunction with Teachers’ College in New York has sent a
shiver through the conservative schoolmen of America. It is assumed
that the policy of the new school will follow Dr. Flexner’s manifesto
of the “Modern School,” that adroit and uncompromising crystallization
of the radical philosophy of our new American education. Dr. Flexner
has proved himself to be an admirable agitator, for he has succeeded,
with doctrines that public-school educators have been discussing for
ten years and which experimental schools all through the country have
been testing out, in rousing the slumberous camp of private secondary
schoolmasters to a sense of what is going on in the educational world.
The private secondary school is the last stronghold of educational
conservatism. Enlightenment has to proceed upward through thick layers
of prejudice and smugness. Dr. Flexner’s voice seems to have broken in
the walls and gotten a hearing for the new education even in the walls
of the traditional New England academy. It is for these people that the
“Modern School” was written, for only those will find its proposals
“revolutionary and dangerous” who have never read a line of Dewey or
G. Stanley Hall, never read a copy of an educational journal, never
visited an experimental school, or even the newer plants of the best
public schools in American cities. There is irony in the location of
the new school at Teachers’ College. For the latter has been one of
the most persistently experimental educational centers in the country.
If its “model” schools have felt in the course of time the blighting
touch of conventionality, at least in the Speyer course of industrial
arts there has been developed a method of permanent value. There is no
more accurate application of Dr. Flexner’s demand that “children should
begin by getting acquainted with objects,” “follow the life-cycles of
plants and animals,” “the observation and execution of industrial and
commercial processes,” and so forth. In this industrial arts course
the children are concerned from the beginning with food-products and
clothing and building and the way different peoples make their living.
Out of this handling of homely things grow the geography and science
and history and mathematics. It seems only a question of time before
there will be scarcely an elementary school untouched by this practical
approach to knowledge through objects and projects and concrete facts.
Dr. Flexner’s tilting is not against our rapidly improving public
elementary school so much as it is against the private secondary
school, with its sub-college, classical, formal curriculum, and
its obsolete educational theory of formal discipline and salvation
through drudgery. It is as an object-lesson for this branch of
American education that the new school will have permanent value.
It will be the heaviest assault which has yet had to be met by that
vested educational interest which we know as the private secondary
school. The private school has made it its function to prepare the
sons and daughters of the well-to-do for college, and so keep up
the tradition of leisured and cultured wealth. This is the ideal at
the bottom of the hearts of the conservative schoolmen. A knowledge
which is useless, like the formal classics and mathematics, is only
a sharpened tool of exclusiveness, for only the younger generation
of a ruling class can afford to give its time to it. In a growing
industrial society such an education becomes ever more and more a
dividing line between classes. That the public high school has been
largely controlled by the same ideals does not mean at all that
this kind of education has been democratized, but merely that the
unthinking and clambering middle classes have been hypnotized by vague
aspirations of “culture” and “intellectual training” into imitation
of the traditional ruling-class education. Some of the strongest
opposition to vocational education in the public schools comes even
from the ranks of the ambitious wage-earners who “want their children
to have the educational advantages they were denied.” They resent what
they misinterpret as an attempt to keep their younger generation in a
subordinate labor class. What they do not see is that the traditional
education which they admire is no real education for the modern world.
We find the industrious proletarian and the exclusive Tory joining
hands in opposing the new democratic education which is meant to have
the effects of freeing both classes and making them fit together to
administer a free society. The Tory wants to keep for his children his
privileged status; the wage-earner wants to obtain for his children
this privileged status. “Book” education, innocent of practicality
and use, is still an accepted mark of this geniality. Neither class
has any real sense yet of a democratic attitude that finds both the
“utilitarian” and the “cultural” irrelevant terms, and demands only
effective activity and imaginative understanding from every citizen up
to the limit of his capacity.
The “old” education then is a class-education, and therefore has no
place in a society which is trying to become democratic. How much
class-feeling is behind the current allegiance to the education of
discipline and drudgery is shown in a paper by Miss Edith Hamilton
of the Bryn Mawr School in the “New Republic” for February 10, 1917.
She pleads for the “old” education in behalf of her girls. But when
she says “school” she has in the back of her mind an institution
for the training of the well-to-do classes. Her argument against a
change in education seems to be based on the idea that change would
be prejudicial to the life which she accepts as worthiest for those
fortunate classes with which she is best acquainted. Her argument is
that life will make no stern demands upon the sheltered, economically
endowed leisure which most of her girls will enjoy. Without external
standards their fiber must deteriorate unless they have learned the
joy of work by the doing of things because they are hard. Without
impersonal intellectual interests, their personal energy, she says,
will waste away in futility or in a meddlesome control of their own
daughters. The boy is harnessed into some kind of self-discipline by
the exigencies of business life. But for the girl, the substitution in
the “modern school” of domestic science for “elegant accomplishments”
is only an illusory discipline. Not only are these arts of housekeeping
too easy to provide discipline, but they will never be demanded from
the upper-class girl. Only the traditional curriculum, therefore,
impersonal, cultural, laborious, will give her the needed stimulus to
play her leisured rôle worthily.
At first sight nothing could be more ironic than this gospel of
strenuous effort preached in the name of a sheltered class. Why
should a girl be disciplined, trained to do things “_because_ they
are hard,” for a life which becomes “easier and easier,” unless her
teachers wish to provide her with some kind of moral and intellectual
justification for her social rôle? The “old” education combines
uselessness and effort, and it is just this combination which would
maintain leisure-class functions and yet leave the individuals morally
justified. The uselessness makes you exclusive and the effort satisfies
your moral sense. It is a little curious to find Miss Hamilton using
the “utilitarian” argument against domestic science, that is, that
it will never be used by her girls. Yet she wishes them to acquire
“impersonal intellectual interests,” which they can never use except in
not very real “cultural” dabblings and social work.