In this day of multiplied facilities for education, a day when
training begins with the kindergarten and ends in what is called
"higher education" both for men and women, the thoughtful observer is
constantly confronted by the question, why are not the people
educated? It is quite true that a great many people are; that very
many more believe they are; and still more believe the day is coming
when they are to _be_ educated in the broad and liberal sense of the
word. Our systems, founded upon the old scholastic idea, are generally
considered satisfactory, and any failure that may be observed in
results is attributed to the fact that, in particular cases, they have
not yet had time or opportunity for successful operation. And yet,
year after year, we are passing through the mills of our public
schools and colleges multitudes of minds that come out like travellers
who climb to the top of every high tower in their journey, because
they will not come home without being able "to say they have done it."
Apparently, too many of our students go through their course for no
better reason than to _say_ they have done it. There are grand and
noble exceptions, but these are generally among those who do not care
to SAY anything about it. The great majority, however, come forth in
the mental condition of the man, who laboriously climbs step by step
of the tower, takes his bird's-eye view of the field of learning,
accepts the impressions made upon his mind by the vast picture and the
vast mixture, and comes down to his own level again with no more real
knowledge of that at which he has glanced than has the traveller who
has taken a glimpse from the heights which he climbed, because the
guide-book said this was "the thing to do."
In every walk of life, among statesmen, men of business, and artisans,
exist noble examples of exceptional profundity and reality of
knowledge, but in the great average of so-called educated people of
our own generation, we find the majority possessing very fragmentary
interest in any of the subjects which, as students, were supposed to
engage their attention. What they would have been without the
so-called education we cannot judge, and it might be unfair to infer,
but what they are no discriminating person, with a knowledge of what
our systems claim, can fail to see. We cannot ignore the fact that for
some reason they have failed to attain their natural and possible
development.
Our educational theories, on paper and in text-books, are well-nigh
perfect; in actual operation why should they fail? Like a great
machine, fed with the material of thought, the crank turns, the wheels
go round, and the whole world is a-buzz with the work and the noise,
but the creature on whom all this power is expended, is only in rare
instances a truly educated man or woman. What, then, is the defect? If
the machine is right, then the material with which it is fed must be
defective. If the material is right, then the machine has every virtue
except that of adaptation to the use for which it was intended.
Since the whole end and aim of education is to develop, not the ideal
mental constitution, but the real mind just as we find it, the real
creature just as he is; and since we cannot change the human mind to
make it fit the machine, the effort should be to adapt the educational
process to suit the human mind. To what extent they are doing this is
one of the great questions for teachers of the present day. To what
extent,--admitting that now in some particulars they fail,--it may be
possible to modify and adapt methods to the actual and genuine needs
of human nature, is certainly a problem worthy of the earnest thought
of the broadest and best cultured minds. In attempts at adaptation we
have fallen into a process of analyzing the youthful human creature.
Having discovered that he possesses mathematical capacity, we have
supplied him with mathematical training, and have in this department
thrust upon him all, and sometimes more, hard work than he can bear.
Having found he possessed religious faculty, we have emptied upon him
the theologies and psychologies, and when we have supplied him in
these and other directions we look for the educated man. Judge of our
disappointment. We find the faculties, we find the modifications
produced by the training, but we look in vain for the man. With all
our multiplied facilities for producing a trained and disciplined
nature, what we think we have a right to expect,--but what we do not
find,--is a creature conscious of his own great heritage, conscious of
his kinship with all humanity, of his kingship over the universe, of
his power to grapple with the world outside of himself, and of his
rightful dominance over both the life without and the grander life
within. Instead, we find men weak where they should be most purposeful
and brave. We find him the slave of the body who should be able to
make the body the servant of his soul. We find hands untrained to
practical uses, minds unequal to grasping the common wants of
existence, hearts in which the high ideals of character and strong
impulses toward true usefulness are over-swept by that consideration
for self that makes one's own interests seem the very centre of the
universe of God.
The day needs giants; it produces pigmies. It needs men to fight; it
produces men to run. It needs women with minds broad enough to think
and hearts large enough to love. It needs motherhood that, while it
bends protectingly over the cradle of its own child, reaches out a
mother-heart to all the suffering childhood of the race. It needs the
capacity for heroism; it yields the tendency to cowardice. In the
midst of learning, ignorance triumphs, vice rules, and sensualism
thrives; and all this, not because of education, but in spite of it.
And when we consider that our schools in their lower grades, our
kindergartens and our primary and Sunday schools, take the infant mind
before the tendency to vice has had any chance for development, and
that the next higher grades take them on through successive years,
without being able to prevent such results as these mentioned above,
we naturally feel that, at the very outset, our educational system
must be wrong. However it may be suited to the ideal conditions it
cannot be adapted to the average human creature, taken exactly as he
is. The lack, which begins at the very basis of our so-called
intelligent discipline, runs through the whole, in constantly
increasing ratio. Brain is stimulated, and heart and soul are left to
starve, and nothing is more neglected than the cunning of the hand.
Even where some attempt is made at the training of the whole nature,
it is done without recognition of the infinite variety in the human
mind. Processes ought to be adapted, not only to the universal but to
the individual need. It does not follow that the universal need is
necessarily or invariably unlike the individual need, or that
individual needs are always identical, but any system of education
that gives, for a great variety of minds, precisely the same course of
training, is sure to be, for a majority of those minds, a pitiful and
conspicuous failure.
What then? Shall we have a separate school for every child? Shall we
have a special teacher for each mind? That would probably be
impossible, but we certainly should have so small a number of pupils
under each teacher that she (and we are taking it for granted that the
teachers of little children will largely be women) may be able to
study the whole nature of every little one committed to her care. She
should be not only in communication, but in real _communion_ with the
mother; should know the child's mental and moral inheritance, and, in
as far as her own watchful care and the help of the family physician
may enable her to do so, she should understand its physical
constitution. She should acquaint herself with the temperament, the
habits, the degree of affection, and the little germs of spiritual
insight and inspiration, all of which go to make up the nature of the
little creature in her charge. If she be the true teacher, she should
combine the threefold duties of mother, instructor, and physician for
the young life unfolding in her care. If she has not the heart to love
the child and to let the child love her, and so to lay foundation for
the larger loving, that, by and by, shall out-reach and take in the
whole humanity of God, then we will not say she has mistaken her
calling, but her own process of education has been defective and she
has much to learn.
Such threefold development for heart, hand, and brain of the little
child makes preparation for the next higher steps of educational work.
Whatever form the training may assume, the individuality of the human
soul should be kept inviolate. That individuality betrays itself in
many ways; by emotion and sentiment, by quickness or dullness of
perception, and above all, by preferences and dislikes. These minute
indications as to just what elements of spirit and mind have entered
into the nature of the child, are the little delicate fibres that show
the texture of the human soul with which we have to deal. The child
learns too soon to draw in and hide the frail, sensitive tendrils that
indicate that the life of the soul-plant is feeling its way toward the
light of God.
In the primary school, the teacher (and sometimes in the cradle, the
mother, who is, whether she would have it so or not, the child's first
teacher) begins the process of training by which the little one is
made to do as others do, to say what others say, and to conceal the
fact that it has any inward life or impulses that are not the same as
those of other children.
Instead of being able to read the God-given signs as to what the
infant nature really requires, we give it instead an arbitrary supply,
based upon what we think it ought to need, and then marvel that it
does not thrive upon its unnatural diet. We have not supplied what it
craved but that which, from our preconceived notion, we thought it
ought to want.
This process of applying our rule and line to the mind goes farther
and bears harder upon the student with every succeeding year, until,
long before the so-called education is completed, three quarters of
the students have lost the consciousness that they ever cared, or ever
_could_ have cared, for anything except that which the class supplied.
To be what the class is, to do what the class does, to be satisfied
with knowing what the class knows, to have lost the sense of the value
of the thing to be gained, and to measure by false standards, comes to
be the rule, until the conceit of knowledge takes the place of the
modesty of conscious ignorance, and the student becomes a drop in the
annual out-pouring stream of so-called teachers, many of whom, in the
highest sense, have never been genuine students at all.
Searching for causes of such results, we cannot fail to see that much
of this dead sameness of intellectual character is due to our habit of
educating in masses. We make an Arab feast of our knowledge. A dish is
prepared that contains something that might be strengthening for each
partaker. With hands more or less clean, students select their savory
morsels from the sop. As in the Arab family, for old and young, for
the babe in arms, and the strong man from his field of toil, the
provision is the same, so in all our class-work we have the sameness
of provision with almost as great disparity of capacity and need. If,
out of the whole mental "mess of pottage" that can be taken which
builds the student up in true wisdom and knowledge, it is fortunate;
but if nothing is assimilated on which the mind could truly thrive, no
fault is found with the provision, nor is resultant ignorance
considered to be specially worthy of blame.
The evil effects of educating in masses, or in classes, is
sufficiently apparent to cause us to consider the question whether
there is any possible remedy,--whether there could be a substitution
of individual for general training, or a combination of the two that
would produce a better result. That student is losing ground as an
individual who comes to be considered or to consider himself as simply
a factor of a class. If the general teaching must be that which is
applicable to the entire class, there should also be provision for
instruction that could be adapted to the individual need, and as great
effort as is made to adapt class work to the general need should be
made in the special direction also. But the objection arises that the
modern teacher is not able to work in both directions in the time
allotted for student life. We are very well aware that we have not yet
passed the stage where the value of the teacher's work is measured by
the number of hours in which he is engaged in the classroom. Trustees,
as a whole, pay for the professor's full time, and expect it to be
fully employed. Neither are the educators many who would know what to
do if simply let loose among students and left free to make their best
impressions upon the minds of the young.
To many teachers the mind of youth is, in reality, an unexplored
region, and until we have a change in this respect, and learn that the
knowledge of books is only the beginning of wisdom, and that the true
knowledge must include also that of the living book,--the student
entrusted to our care,--we have scarcely learned the alphabet of true
education.
The day will come, though it may be long in coming, when every
institution of learning will have, besides its technical teachers, its
lecturers and its conductors of recitations,--one man or one woman, or
as many men and women as are needed, whose special province it will be
to study the individual temperament, to discover native tendencies,
tastes, and capacities of the mind, and whose knowledge will be true
wisdom in the sense that they will know not only how to ascertain, but
how to supply real needs.
That cramping and stifling of natural tastes, which is now so marked a
feature of school training, will be replaced by the cultivation of
every good natural ability, and the suppression of only that which in
itself is evil. Quite too often, even in this latter day, the
restraint is put upon the natural powers, simply because their
development calls for extra labor and special trouble, or because
these powers indicate training in lines of work not being attempted by
the class.
Let the routine work continue to be done, and, if necessary, in the
routine fashion, but let every institution have on its Faculty one
soul, at least, whose province is not to crush, but to cultivate and
develop individual traits of mind and character. Such an instructor
must not be ignorant of books, but that intricate book, the human
heart, should be his special study, and he should know, not only what
human beings are, but should be able to help them to grow into what
God meant them to be. Such a man with a large and sympathetic heart
that can be hospitable to boyhood as it is, will do more toward the
moulding of genuine manhood than can a dozen professors of the
ordinary type. One such woman in every institution for the education
of girls holds really the future destiny of those girls in her own
hand, for her life among them could have but one dominant
desire,--that of helping them to be the thing God meant. Practically
living out that desire she becomes, not the restraint and destroyer of
their natural vitality of thought and feeling, but the guide and
director of all their native forces into every beautiful field of
learning, and into the highest type of development possible for woman,
under present limitations, to attain.
Whether we recognize the fact or not, there is not a phase of our
social or national life that is unaffected by the lack of proper
development of individuality. The whole tendency of our civilization
has been in the direction of making people, as nearly as possible,
like other people. Characters of marked individuality are relegated to
the class of so-called cranks. To be above the dead level of general
sentiment and attainment is to be in decidedly bad form. This work of
taking out of people the characteristics placed within them by nature,
and making them over into the convenient and conventional types that
think as others think, and do what others do, has marked our
civilization from its earlier stages, and the more civilized we become
the more pronounced are the results. Among these results are great
loss of spiritual and mental vitality. It is time to call a halt, to
change our methods, or to supplement them by methods of individual
training. The beginning of such a work will mark an educational era,
the inception of which should not be longer delayed.