In the little red school house that stood on the hillside thirty years ago
some crude things were done. At the same time, some very important and
helpful things were done. Even some of the crude things now seem to have
had an indispensable value. The years teach us that the only test of the
correctness of any educational method is its result in terms of life.
In those days a great deal of moralizing was done. A moral was drawn from
everything. The great bulk of the teaching was didactic. Each lesson in
the old-fashioned reader had its definite ethical point. Often the moral
was stated in so many words at the end. Patriotism, thrift, industry, the
fact that there is always room at the top—all these things came in for
their share of attention. The result was a patriotic, thrifty,
industrious, and ambitious generation of people. We owe that generation
and its work largely to the teacher who did not fear to frankly face the
moral implications of things. He may have moralized a little too much,
but his work had its effects for good.
The history of the world is largely made up of actions and reactions. The
reaction against all this came on in due time. We witnessed the
development of a great dislike for all stories with apparent morals and
of a distinct resentment against all didactic teaching. We still make some
effort at character-building, but that effort is usually veiled and often
neglected altogether.
Certain things will help to show whether we have gained or lost by this
change in our educational policy. Let us take, for instance, the matter of
patriotism. The Spanish-American War of 1898 came on before the old order
ended. Every youth wanted to go because the country was aflame with zeal
for the American cause. The recent world war came after a new generation
of school boys had grown up. The necessities incident to that conflict
disclosed the fact that American loyalty was partly asleep. It took very
serious efforts to wholly awaken it.
Take the question of thrift. The successful business man of today, that
loyal public servant who carries the economic responsibilities of the
country so capably, is a product of the times when some new lesson in
thrift and industry came in each day of the public school course. Many
a man who has succeeded would testify now that his first impulse to try
came from the reading of the sayings of Poor Richard or some similar
material. Since such things have been largely dropped, we have on our
hands a growing race of spendthrifts.
All this is not merely comparing the present unfavorably with the past.
Everyone knows that we cannot properly do so. Taken as a whole, the public
school is now far in advance of what it was in the days of the little red
school house. The present purpose is to point out to the educator the
really incomparable power and opportunity that are his. Whatever the
future contains, the school teacher holds the key to it. The possession of
great power is at once an opportunity and a peril, but the teacher
certainly possesses that power. It is a wonderful thing to mould the
world’s life into right patterns. It is a fearful thing to mould it
wrongly, or to fail to mould it when one might. The teacher can do any one
of these.
Bismarck once said: “Whatever you would put into the state you must first
put into the schools.” The truth of his statement was well proven in the
subsequent history of the empire of which he was then chancellor. A whole
people was led astray by being fed upon the false philosophy of Nietzsche
and others. The Teuton mind and heart could not have been so completely
shackled by any other means than the processes of popular education.
When the Ottoman Empire was first founded, its fiercest military
organization, the Janizaries, was recruited wholly from the children of
Christian parents, taken from their homes in battle or exacted from their
towns as tribute. They made the fiercest of soldiers, the most loyal of
Turks, and the most fanatical of Mohammedans. This is but an example of
what education will do.
When Germany took Alsace-Lorraine from France in 1870, her first task was
the Teutonizing of the people. She began by introducing the German
language in the schools and the press—both educational agencies. When the
Young Turks wrested his empire from Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid II, in 1909, they
began making it over according to their own fanciful dreams by introducing
their ideals into the school system.
Certainly the school can be made as potent a force for good as for evil.
In fact, it has been made such a force in certain instances. Prohibition
of the liquor traffic was a long time coming in America, but it came as
soon as we adopted the best means of establishing a better order of
things. A careful analyst of social influences could have told almost the
year it would arrive. He would have taken the date when Scientific
Temperance became a public school subject and then have reckoned how long
it would take the boys and girls of that period to come into control of
the country. When that time arrived America went dry. Bismarck was right.
There are plenty of reasons why it happens this way. One is the general
fact that people do about as well as they know. Most evils remain only
because people do not realize that there is a better way. When the facts
are laid before them, they generally act accordingly.
Another is the fact that ideals and truths can be built into the lives of
growing boys and girls more readily and more firmly than in those of older
people. A child can learn a foreign language more readily than can an
adult. It is the same with an ethical ideal. The growing life most easily
adapts itself to newly discovered fact.
Another is the natural position of authority occupied by the teacher. His
words are taken as those of an oracle. Children who refuse to heed the
instructions of their parents take those of their teachers as final.
Still another is the amount of time the child is surrounded by school
influences. No other institution has any such chance at him as does the
public school. He spends as many waking hours there as he does at home,
or more.
Knowledge alone does not constitute education. The etymology of the word
education is sufficient to indicate a very much wider scope. Education
has to do with the whole life. Its measure is not merely how many
questions one can answer, but how well he can realize upon himself in the
actual affairs of life. Therefore, the school has for its work the making
of men and women, and the person who builds manhood and womanhood may well
remember that in doing so he is building the future. We can never have a
world that is anything more or less than it is made by the people who live
in it.
The highest grade of manhood and womanhood cannot be built without a
considerable amount of ethical teaching. No matter what we do now, the
action and reaction law of history will ultimately sweep us back again to
the moralizing days. Then we shall carry didacticism to the same extreme
that we are now carrying the lack of it. A better way is to have a
reasonable amount of it all the while.
Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby had a clear conception of the ethical phases of
the highest educational ideal. He once said that he did not merely seek to
turn out young men trained to take first in the schools, but “thoughtful,
manly-minded men, conscious of duty and obligation.” Such is the largest
service the school can render to the world, because it constantly sweeps
us in the direction of a better order of things.