concession to the question almost universally raised), I am not willing
to leave the matter in this more or less negative and explanatory
condition. Life is the great thing after all; the life of the child at
its time and in its measure no less than the life of the adult. Strange
would it be, indeed, if intelligent and serious attention to what the
child _now_ needs and is capable of in the way of a rich, valuable, and
expanded life should somehow conflict with the needs and possibilities of
later, adult life. “Let us live with our children” certainly means, first
of all, that our children shall live—not that they shall be hampered and
stunted by being forced into all kinds of conditions, the most remote
consideration of which is relevancy to the present life of the child. If
we seek the kingdom of heaven, educationally, all other things shall be
added unto us—which, being interpreted, is that if we identify ourselves
with the real instincts and needs of childhood, and ask only after its
fullest assertion and growth, the discipline and information and culture
of adult life shall all come in their due season.
Speaking of culture reminds me that in a way I have been speaking only
of the outside of the child’s activity—only of the outward expression
of his impulses toward saying, making, finding out, and creating. The
real child, it hardly need be said, lives in the world of imaginative
values and ideas which find only imperfect outward embodiment. We hear
much nowadays about the cultivation of the child’s “imagination.” Then
we undo much of our own talk and work by a belief that the imagination
is some special part of the child that finds its satisfaction in some
one particular direction—generally speaking, that of the unreal and
make-believe, of the myth and made-up story. Why are we so hard of heart
and so slow to believe? The imagination is the medium in which the child
lives. To him there is everywhere and in everything which occupies his
mind and activity at all a surplusage of value and significance. The
question of the relation of the school to the child’s life is at bottom
simply this: Shall we ignore this native setting and tendency, dealing,
not with the living child at all, but with the dead image we have
erected, or shall we give it play and satisfaction? If we once believe
in life and in the life of the child, then will all the occupations and
uses spoken of, then will all history and science, become instruments of
appeal and materials of culture to his imagination, and through that to
the richness and the orderliness of his life. Where we now see only the
outward doing and the outward product, there, behind all visible results,
is the readjustment of mental attitude, the enlarged and sympathetic
vision, the sense of growing power, and the willing ability to identify
both insight and capacity with the interests of the world and man. Unless
culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany over common
wood, it surely is this—the growth of the imagination in flexibility,
in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is
informed with the life of nature and of society. When nature and society
can live in the schoolroom, when the forms and tools of learning are
subordinated to the substance of experience, then shall there be an
opportunity for this identification, and culture shall be the democratic
password.
WASTE IN EDUCATION
III
WASTE IN EDUCATION
The subject announced for today was “Waste in Education.” I should like
first to state briefly its relation to the two preceding lectures. The
first dealt with the school in its social aspects, and the necessary
readjustments that have to be made to render it effective in present
social conditions. The second dealt with the school in relation to the
growth of individual children. Now the third deals with the school
as itself an institution, in relation both to society and to its own
members—the children. It deals with the question of organization, because
all waste is the result of the lack of it, the motive lying behind
organization being promotion of economy and efficiency. This question
is not one of the waste of money or the waste of things. These matters
count; but the primary waste is that of human life, the life of the
children while they are at school, and afterward because of inadequate
and perverted preparation.
So, when we speak of organization, we are not to think simply of the
externals; of that which goes by the name “school system”—the school
board, the superintendent, and the building, the engaging and promotion
of teachers, etc. These things enter in, but the fundamental organization
is that of the school itself as a community of individuals, in its
relations to other forms of social life. All waste is due to isolation.
Organization is nothing but getting things into connection with one
another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully. Therefore in
speaking of this question of waste in education I desire to call your
attention to the isolation of the various parts of the school system, to
the lack of unity in the aims of education, to the lack of coherence in
its studies and methods.
I have made a chart (I) which, while I speak of the isolations of the
school system itself, may perhaps appeal to the eye and save a little
time in verbal explanations. A paradoxical friend of mine says there is
nothing so obscure as an illustration, and it is quite possible that
my attempt to illustrate my point will simply prove the truth of his
statement.
[Illustration: Chart I.]
The blocks represent the various elements in the school system and are
intended to indicate roughly the length of time given to each division,
and also the overlapping, both in time and in subjects studied, of the
individual parts of the system. With each block is given the historical
conditions in which it arose and its ruling ideal.
The school system, upon the whole, has grown from the top down.
During the Middle Ages it was essentially a cluster of professional
schools—especially law and theology. Our present university comes down to
us from the Middle Ages. I will not say that at present it is a mediaeval
institution, but it had its roots in the Middle Ages, and it has not
outlived all mediaeval traditions regarding learning.
The kindergarten, rising with the present century, was a union of the
nursery and of the philosophy of Schelling; a wedding of the plays and
games which the mother carried on with her children to Schelling’s highly
romantic and symbolic philosophy. The elements that came from the actual
study of child life—the continuation of the nursery—have remained a
life-bringing force in all education; the Schellingesque factors made an
obstruction between it and the rest of the school system—brought about
isolations.
The line drawn over the top indicates that there is a certain interaction
between the kindergarten and the primary school; for, so far as the
primary school remained in spirit foreign to the natural interests of
child life, it was isolated from the kindergarten, so that it is a
problem, at present, to introduce kindergarten methods into the primary
school; the problem of the so-called connecting class. The difficulty is
that the two are not one from the start. To get a connection the teacher
has had to climb over the wall instead of entering in at the gate.
On the side of aims, the ideal of the kindergarten was the moral
development of the children, rather than instruction or discipline; an
ideal sometimes emphasized to the point of sentimentality. The primary
school grew practically out of the popular movement of the sixteenth
century, when, along with the invention of printing and the growth of
commerce, it became a business necessity to know how to read, write, and
figure. The aim was distinctly a practical one; it was utility; getting
command of these tools, the symbols of learning, not for the sake of
learning, but because they gave access to careers in life otherwise
closed.
The division next to the primary school is the grammar school. The term
is not much used in the West, but is common in the eastern states. It
goes back to the time of the revival of learning—a little earlier perhaps
than the conditions out of which the primary school originated, and,
even when contemporaneous, having a different ideal. It had to do with
the study of language in the higher sense; because, at the time of the
Renaissance, Latin and Greek connected people with the culture of the
past, with the Roman and Greek world. The classic languages were the
only means of escape from the limitations of the Middle Ages. Thus there
sprang up the prototype of the grammar school, more liberal than the
university (so largely professional in character), for the purpose of
putting into the hands of the people the key to the old learning, that
men might see a world with a larger horizon. The object was primarily
culture, secondarily discipline. It represented much more than the
present grammar school. It was the liberal element in the college,
which, extending downward, grew into the academy and the high school.
Thus the secondary school is still in part just a lower college (having
an even higher curriculum than the college of a few centuries ago) or a
preparatory department to a college, and in part a rounding up of the
utilities of the elementary school.
There appear then two products of the nineteenth century, the technical
and normal schools. The schools of technology, engineering, etc., are, of
course, mainly the development of nineteenth-century business conditions,
as the primary school was the development of business conditions of the
sixteenth century. The normal school arose because of the necessity for
training teachers, with the idea partly of professional drill and partly
that of culture.
Without going more into detail, we have some eight different parts of
the school system as represented on the chart, all of which arose
historically at different times, having different ideals in view, and
consequently different methods. I do not wish to suggest that all of the
isolation, all of the separation, that has existed in the past between
the different parts of the school system still persists. One must,
however, recognize that they have never yet been welded into one complete
whole. The great problem in education on the administrative side is how
to unite these different parts.
Consider the training schools for teachers—the normal schools. These
occupy at present a somewhat anomalous position, intermediate between
the high school and the college, requiring the high-school preparation,
and covering a certain amount of college work. They are isolated from
the higher subject-matter of scholarship, since, upon the whole, their
object has been to train persons _how_ to teach, rather than _what_ to
teach; while, if we go to the college, we find the other half of this
isolation—learning _what_ to teach, with almost a contempt for methods
of teaching. The college is shut off from contact with children and
youth. Its members, to a great extent, away from home and forgetting
their own childhood, become eventually teachers with a large amount of
subject-matter at command, and little knowledge of how this is related to
the minds of those to whom it is to be taught. In this division between
what to teach and how to teach, each side suffers from the separation.
It is interesting to follow out the interrelation between primary,
grammar, and high schools. The elementary school has crowded up and taken
many subjects previously studied in the old New England grammar school.
The high school has pushed its subjects down. Latin and algebra have been
put in the upper grades, so that the seventh and eighth grades are, after
all, about all that is left of the old grammar school. They are a sort of
amorphous composite, being partly a place where children go on learning
what they already have learned (to read, write, and figure), and partly a
place of preparation for the high school. The name in some parts of New
England for these upper grades was “Intermediate School.” The term was a
happy one; the work was simply intermediate between something that had
been and something that was going to be, having no special meaning on its
own account.
Just as the parts are separated, so do the ideals differ—moral
development, practical utility, general culture, discipline, and
professional training. These aims are each especially represented in
some distinct part of the system of education; and, with the growing
interaction of the parts, each is supposed to afford a certain amount
of culture, discipline, and utility. But the lack of fundamental unity
is witnessed in the fact that one study is still considered good for
discipline, and another for culture; some parts of arithmetic, for
example, for discipline and others for use; literature for culture;
grammar for discipline; geography partly for utility, partly for culture;
and so on. The unity of education is dissipated, and the studies become
centrifugal; so much of this study to secure this end, so much of that to
secure another, until the whole becomes a sheer compromise and patchwork
between contending aims and disparate studies. The great problem in
education on the administrative side is to secure the unity of the whole,
in the place of a sequence of more or less unrelated and overlapping
parts, and thus to reduce the waste arising from friction, reduplication,
and transitions that are not properly bridged.
[Illustration: Chart II.]
In this second symbolic diagram (II) I wish to suggest that really the
only way to unite the parts of the system is to unite each to life. We
can get only an artificial unity so long as we confine our gaze to the
school system itself. We must look at it as part of the larger whole of
social life. This block (A) in the center represents the school system as
a whole. (1) At one side we have the home, and the two arrows represent
the free interplay of influences, materials, and ideas between the home
life and that of the school. (2) Below we have the relation to the
natural environment, the great field of geography in the widest sense.
The school building has about it a natural environment. It ought to be in
a garden, and the children from the garden would be led on to surrounding
fields, and then into the wider country, with all its facts and forces.
(3) Above is represented business life, and the necessity for free play
between the school and the needs and forces of industry. (4) On the other
side is the university proper, with its various phases, its laboratories,
its resources in the way of libraries, museums, and professional schools.
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes
from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school
in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the
other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at
school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life. When
the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large
part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home
and neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday
experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of
means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies. While I was
visiting in the city of Moline a few years ago, the superintendent told
me that they found many children every year who were surprised to learn
that the Mississippi river in the textbook had anything to do with the
stream of water flowing past their homes. The geography being simply a
matter of the schoolroom, it is more or less of an awakening to many
children to find that the whole thing is nothing but a more formal and
definite statement of the facts which they see, feel, and touch every
day. When we think that we all live on the earth, that we live in an
atmosphere, that our lives are touched at every point by the influences
of the soil, flora, and fauna, by considerations of light and heat, and
then think of what the school study of geography has been, we have a
typical idea of the gap existing between the everyday experiences of
the child and the isolated material supplied in such large measure in
the school. This is but an instance, and one upon which most of us may
reflect long before we take the present artificiality of the school as
other than a matter of course or necessity.
Though there should be organic connection between the school and business
life, it is not meant that the school is to prepare the child for any
particular business, but that there should be a natural connection
of the everyday life of the child with the business environment
about him, and that it is the affair of the school to clarify and
liberalize this connection, to bring it to consciousness, not by
introducing special studies, like commercial geography and arithmetic,
but by keeping alive the ordinary bonds of relation. The subject of
compound-business-partnership is probably not in many of the arithmetics
nowadays, though it was there not a generation ago, for the makers of
textbooks said that if they left out anything they could not sell their
books. This compound-business-partnership originated as far back as
the sixteenth century. The joint-stock company had not been invented,
and as large commerce with the Indies and Americas grew up, it was
necessary to have an accumulation of capital with which to handle it.
One man said, “I will put in this amount of money for six months,” and
another, “So much for two years,” and so on. Thus by joining together
they got money enough to float their commercial enterprises. Naturally,
then, “compound partnership” was taught in the schools. The joint-stock
company was invented; compound partnership disappeared, but the problems
relating to it stayed in the arithmetics for two hundred years. They
were kept after they had ceased to have practical utility, for the sake
of mental discipline—they were “such hard problems, you know.” A great
deal of what is now in the arithmetics under the head of percentage is
of the same nature. Children of twelve and thirteen years of age go
through gain and loss calculations, and various forms of bank discount so
complicated that the bankers long ago dispensed with them. And when it is
pointed out that business is not done this way, we hear again of “mental
discipline.” And yet there are plenty of real connections between the
experience of children and business conditions which need to be utilized
and illuminated. The child should study his commercial arithmetic and
geography, not as isolated things by themselves, but in their reference
to his social environment. The youth needs to become acquainted with the
bank as a factor in modern life, with what it does, and how it does it;
and then relevant arithmetical processes would have some meaning—quite
in contradistinction to the time-absorbing and mind-killing examples in
percentage, partial payments, etc., found in all our arithmetics.
The connection with the university, as indicated in this chart, I need
not dwell upon. I simply wish to indicate that there ought to be a free
interaction between all the parts of the school system. There is much of
utter triviality of subject-matter in elementary and secondary education.
When we investigate it, we find that it is full of facts taught that
are not facts, which have to be unlearned later on. Now, this happens
because the “lower” parts of our system are not, in vital connection
with the “higher.” The university or college, in its idea, is a place
of research, where investigation is going on: a place of libraries and
museums, where the best resources of the past are gathered, maintained,
and organized. It is, however, as true in the school as in the university
that the spirit of inquiry can be got only through and with the attitude
of inquiry. The pupil must learn what has meaning, what enlarges his
horizon, instead of mere trivialities. He must become acquainted with
truths, instead of things that were regarded as such fifty years ago or
that are taken as interesting by the misunderstanding of a partially
educated teacher. It is difficult to see how these ends can be reached
except as the most advanced part of the educational system is in complete
interaction with the most rudimentary.
The next chart (III) is an enlargement of the second. The school building
has swelled out, so to speak, the surrounding environment remaining the
same, the home, the garden and country, the relation to business life
and the university. The object is to show what the school must become to
get out of its isolation and secure the organic connection with social
life of which we have been speaking. It is not our architect’s plan for
the school building that we hope to have; but it is a diagrammatic
representation of the idea which we want embodied in the school building.
On the lower side you see the dining-room and the kitchen, at the top
the wood and metal shops and the textile room for sewing and weaving.
The center represents the manner in which all come together in the
library; that is to say, in a collection of the intellectual resources
of all kinds that throw light upon the practical work, that give it
meaning and liberal value. If the four corners represent practice, the
interior represents the theory of the practical activities. In other
words, the object of these forms of practice in the school is not found
chiefly in themselves, or in the technical skill of cooks, seamstresses,
carpenters, and masons, but in their connection, on the social side,
with the life without; while on the individual side they respond to the
child’s need of action, of expression, of desire to do something, to be
constructive and creative, instead of simply passive and conforming.
Their great significance is that they keep the balance between the social
and individual sides—the chart symbolizing particularly the connection
with the social. Here on one side is the home. How naturally the lines
of connection play back and forth between the home and the kitchen and
the textile room of the school! The child can carry over what he learns
in the home and utilize it in the school; and the things learned in the
school he applies at home. These are the two great things in breaking
down isolation, in getting connection—to have the child come to school
with all the experience he has got outside the school, and to leave it
with something to be immediately used in his everyday life. The child
comes to the traditional school with a healthy body and a more or less
unwilling mind, though, in fact, he does not bring both his body and mind
with him; he has to leave his mind behind, because there is no way to
use it in the school. If he had a purely abstract mind, he could bring
it to school with him, but his is a concrete one, interested in concrete
things, and unless these things get over into school life he cannot take
his mind with him. What we want is to have the child come to school with
a whole mind and a whole body, and leave school with a fuller mind and an
even healthier body. And speaking of the body suggests that, while there
is no gymnasium in these diagrams, the active life carried on in its four
corners brings with it constant physical exercise, while our gymnasium
proper will deal with the particular weaknesses of children and their
correction, and will attempt more consciously to build up the thoroughly
sound body as the abode of the sound mind.
[Illustration: Chart III.]