where studies were still prescribed they adopted in their catalogs the
language and methods of electivism. No longer were there classes, but
everywhere you had courses and departments. One effect of this system
has been to make coördinate and of equal importance many subjects which
had formerly been subordinate. Colleges whose major subject, or field
of concentration, had been language, with other subjects subordinate,
now tended to make every subject a major and every field a field of
concentration. The departmental system has helped to impair unity
of education by disturbing the hierarchy of studies and by removing
all subordination. It does not appear to be feasible to concentrate
on everything. In some cases colleges seem about to give up the
general-training idea and are tending to make their whole course
subservient to a profession, obliging every one to take a pre-medical
course because the American Medical Association is mighty and medical
schools are very exacting.
Formerly high schools and colleges made language or self-expression the
field of concentration, and other subjects, like history, mathematics,
sciences, were kept subordinate. College and high school had then one
purpose, which unified all their studies, as a profession unified
lectures in the university—that purpose was the mastery of the art of
expression. The French lycées, the German gymnasia, the English public
schools, the Jesuit _Ratio Studiorum_, prepared for the university by
making students masters of writing and speaking. The writer and speaker
could express himself; his intellectual faculties could work properly,
and therefore they had received a general training which prepared them
for professional work of a special kind. The field of concentration was
shown in the names of the classes. The teachers were teachers, not of
Latin, Greek, English, but of grammar, of poetry, of oratory, of clear,
interesting, forceful expression.
The departmental system destroys this fine unity or renders it very
difficult of attainment. The departmental system has been perhaps the
chief reason why the classics have been taught as means towards the
acquisition of various sciences rather than as exemplifications of
literary art. It is as literature and as models of perfect expression
that the classics have hitherto survived; as literature and models of
expression they were taught in the days preceding the university system
of departments. Cicero was a model of letter-writing, of essay-writing,
of speech-making. He was chosen with a view to composition; he was graded
with a view to composition.
How can a department teacher preserve the former unity of system, where
all literature was studied with one dominating purpose, self-expression?
If the grade of the class is rhetoric or oratorical expression, will each
department teach its own authors, Greek, Latin and English, following
the same rhetorical precepts in the same order, or will each department
follow its own terminology and its own order, or will, as has happened
everywhere, the teaching of rhetoric be relegated to English or to a
separate professor, leaving Cicero and Demosthenes to be taught as
grammatical documents or historical documents or as legal documents, not
as speeches, not as models of oratorical expression? Will the professor
of Latin teach Virgil as epic poetry, and the professor of Greek teach
Homer as epic poetry, and the professor of English teach Milton as epic
poetry, or will the teaching of poetry be avoided by the Greek and Latin
departments entirely? Cicero and Demosthenes survive because they are
orators; Homer and Virgil live because they are epic poets, but the
departmental system either forgets that fact entirely or has three
professors teaching the same thing with confusion in the order and in
the rules of art. The departmental system, which is a university device
adapted for specialization, makes unity of education extremely difficult,
and has taken all the interest out of literature by teaching it as
everything else but literature!
Besides, as art is the power of doing, and science is chiefly
systematized information, the process of education for doing will be
different from the process of acquiring information. Too many cooks may
spoil the broth because cooking is an art, but too many sign-posts may
not always confuse the traveler. It is far easier to divide information
among various agents and impart it piecemeal than to apportion the
different faculties used in an art to different individuals who will
train them to act together harmoniously. Different teachers may very well
teach the geography of different countries, but it would not be feasible
to let one teacher have the right hand and another the left in teaching
the art of piano-playing.
Omitting the effect of personality, which is paramount in art, as the
history of all religious movements shows it also to have been in the
formation of character and in virtue, one cannot fail to see that
departments cannot well coöperate in giving the formation of art. In
fact, practically the art of composition has ceased to be the field of
concentration in modern high schools and colleges. All literatures,
even English, are taught mostly as sciences. The only wholesome reaction
in modern education against the predominance of science or systematized
information is found in the present vogue for psychological tests.
These are professedly tests of power, not of mere information, and in
them the power of self-expression through language is preëminent. All
the examinations are conditioned by the necessary medium of language,
and by far the greater number of tests are and must always be tests in
linguistic expression.
Language is the only practical measure of intelligence, and if such
tests win favor, they may result in establishing once more the art of
expression as the field of concentration or major subject in high schools
and colleges which give a general education. Language, when taught as an
art, educates the mind, giving it the powers of expression which are the
guaranties of the mind’s adequate education. Professors become teachers
of an art, not lecturers in a science. Perfect unity is found where
the finest models of self-expression in all languages, especially the
classical languages, are directed by one teacher to the mastery of the
art of expression in one’s own language.
XI
THE INTERESTING TEACHER OF LITERATURE
The nineteenth century was a century of science. Its atmosphere was
surcharged with scientific discoveries and scientific theories, and
radiated a scientific influence in every direction. Among other
effects of that all-pervading spirit we may mention two that entered
the classroom and deeply modified the teaching of literature. Science
insisted on concrete results and tended to emphasize mechanical methods,
enhancing system at the expense of personality.
System was looked upon in some sense as automatic. Such a widespread
delusion, which is not yet fully dissipated, was the logical outcome
of the mechanical explanation of the universe. The world had evolved
along the lines of inflexible laws. Man was part of the machine, and
though the mechanism was complicated in his case, yet it was nothing but
mechanism after all. If system could run the universe without the help of
personality, it would not be hard for it to run the little universe of
man. The same reasoning would hold in a classroom. The teacher might be
asked to touch the button, but the system would do the rest.
It would not seem to require much argumentation to show the fallacy of
such a theory. Do we not all know that nothing in this world is wholly
automatic? Motion is a function of personality. Perpetual motion in
systems and organizations, that would dispense with personality, is just
as absurd as the same proposal in the physical order. Nothing in this
world will run of itself without personal coöperation. Somewhere there
must be a living, breathing, responsible individual. We may have to
travel a long way to find him, but we shall find him, the man behind the
motion. It is so with machines; it is much more so with organizations and
systems and laws; it is most of all so in education. Latin or German or
physics or anything else without a teacher (cf. catalog of correspondence
schools) are phrases that belong to the language of advertisement which
has omitted from its ethics the chapter on lying. All success, all
interest, all enthusiasm are harvests whose sowing is in a human head or
human heart. Even the universe calls for the constantly applied force
of omnipotence to keep it from disintegrating into nothingness and the
watchfulness of Providence to prevent it from wrecking itself. While
writers on education have been tracing the causes of the decrease of
interest in the classics have they not been overlooking the necessary
factor of personality?
The other depressing effect upon education exercised by the scientific
atmosphere was the insistence upon concrete results, leading likewise
to the elimination of human interest. Science said to every branch
of knowledge, “Collect your data, classify your instances, make your
deductions, enunciate your laws.” The literary classics were bade to
stand and deliver. They had to have data and deductions and laws. Homer
and Virgil, Demosthenes and Cicero became the chosen camping-ground
of the specialists. The pupils that finished the _Iliad_ with a taste
developed, an imagination warmed, a soul uplifted, might be refused
a degree. The pupil who had Homer undergo the surgical operations of
specialism, who had him pigeon-holed, who had him weighed and counted,
was the honor man of the class. He could write an essay on Homeric
Æolisms or Homeric ship-building or Homeric word-building. He knew more
about Homeric pottery than Homeric poetry. What if his heart never beat
faster as he read; what if he was too busy measuring the length of
Homeric swords or analyzing the metal of Homeric armor, to drink in the
imaginative delight of battle, with Homeric peers, “far on the ringing
plains of windy Troy,” he was scientific, he had some concrete results to
show for his schooling, and he was the pet child of the century. Assets
of the mind could not be weighed or measured; his doctor’s dissertation
in his grip could. It contained just twenty-five thousand words, and
weighed one pound and a half, and had a superficial area of about a
hundred square yards.
The final outcome of the baneful influence of the scientific atmosphere
is the almost complete perversion of the good old word, scholar. No
one can lay claim now to the title scholarly, unless he is equipped
with a formidable array of facts and figures. He must bristle with the
fretful quills of half a hundred sciences. In the study of the classics
he is so busy with the words of the text that he has not time for their
meaning. When he has settled the conflicting claims of innumerable
variant readings and all the arguments for the same, he has no leisure
left for the old-fashioned practice of trying to appreciate the accepted
reading. Scholarship is now a matter of memory, a something that deals
with introductions, footnotes, excursuses and critical apparatuses. Plead
guilty to an ignorance of all this, and you may be indulgently permitted
to call yourself judicious, appreciative, discerning, capable of enjoying
a literary masterpiece, but you could not presume to call yourself
scholarly. Justin McCarthy, in an article about his old schoolmaster,
alludes to the same fact. “I never knew a scholar,” he declares, “so
thorough who was less of a pedant, but I ought to say, perhaps, that the
general character of his teaching was not what would be called in our
days scholarly.”
This steady elimination of the subjective element of education with
the corresponding development of the objective side during the years of
the nineteenth century, all tended to the extinction of the individual.
Another factor also coöperated in achieving this result. The classes in
school and college grew more numerous, and the schoolmaster became in
turn a teacher, a professor, a lecturer. With each change he drew further
away from his hearers. The greater the audience the weaker the personal
note, the less individual the expression. The lecturer on a classical
author must stray more from the text than the teacher. He is necessarily
more general and hence more impersonal. He feels bound to give facts more
than impressions. He is committed to the formulating of theories based
on a dissection of the text, and shrinks from setting forth the feelings
which a masterpiece excites. The lecturer tends to subordinate the author
to his lecture, where the teacher’s more humble lot leads him to efface
himself in the presence of the author.
This leads us to set forth the proper attitude of the teacher toward
the text, and we could not begin the discussion better than by giving a
further description of Justin McCarthy’s old schoolmaster.
“I have,” he wrote, in March, 1899, “the most delightful and
tender memories of my dear old schoolmaster in Cork. He was
not, indeed, the first schoolmaster I ever had, but he taught
me all or put me in the way of learning all that I have ever
known, and after this long lapse of time I feel as strongly as
ever how much I owe him. His name was John Goulding, and he
kept a school in the city of Cork, my birthplace.
“To make us understand what we were reading and enjoy it, to
make us wish to read more and understand it better—such was the
object of his whole method. There was very little of what is
called ‘getting by heart’ in his system, unless when he wished
to train memory merely for the sake of training it. When we
were studying some Latin author he told us all about the author
and the scenes described in the pages before us, and he invited
all manner of questions on the subject. He showed us on the
maps where the places were which the author was describing, and
he illustrated the author’s meaning as if he were an artist
illustrating a story.
“I do not know to describe his method of teaching better than
by saying that it was literary rather than scholastic. His
great desire was that a boy should be able to read Greek and
Latin as easily as he read Shakespeare and Addison, and he
regarded grammar as a necessary means to that end, but not
as the end itself. He always took care that historical and
geographical knowledge should work in with and illustrate our
literary studies.
“I can only say for myself that whatever love of books I
may have had I owe in the main to his teaching and to his
influence, and I can say with literal truthfulness that
throughout a busy life in public and in private his influence
and teaching have always been with me and are with me still.”
John Goulding would not be considered in our day a remarkable pedagogist
and has not bequeathed his name to a system of education; yet he presents
many traits of the true teacher, and these details of his life are
pertinent to our question.
The true commentator, whose suggestion we see in the Cork schoolmaster,
will not be a philologist, but will use philology; he will not be a
grammarian, but he will refuse no point of grammar that will help. He
will press every science into service, but he will be the slave of
none. He will remember that his supreme object in teaching is not to
compose a dictionary of antiquities nor to collect extracts for rhetoric
or examples for grammar. His object rather is and should be to bring
the pupil to the text, to bring the mind of the author to the mind of
the reader. Away from dictionary and grammar, away from footnote and
appendix, back to the text, should be the teacher’s cry. The text should
be the center upon which every source of information should be focused,
not the center from which to radiate to the cheerless circumference of
specializations. We do not contend for superficiality, for slipshod
grammar, for inaccurate erudition. Thoroughness, care, accuracy, must
rule in the classroom. We are simply for liberal education, which opposes
early specialization in courses and must equally oppose it in the
teaching of literature.
The study of the classics should key up the whole intellectual apparatus.
It should sharpen the critical faculties, warm the imagination, cultivate
the judgment, develop the taste, ennoble the appreciation, exercise,
partially at least, the reasoning faculty, and finally endow the student
with perfected powers of expression. To subordinate literature to any one
of the swarm of sciences that sprang into life last century is to limit
its efficiency and degrade it as a means of general culture.
The teacher, however, must not look for an infallible recipe in this
matter. He cannot expect to stir up interest in the pupils by any
prescribed formula, by a rigid system of handling the text. A scheme
of suggestions may be drawn up, topics for discussion or observation
may be arranged. Such devices are helpful, but they should not become
stereotyped, because they deaden when they are hard and fast. It is a
mark of a crystal to settle into straight lines at fixed angles; it is
characteristic of organisms to be yielding and pliable in their outlines,
while they retain their life. The meaning is the life of the text, the
meaning as it was in the author’s mind, with all the associations that it
had for him. Let the meaning be the guide, and the explanation will not
be dead. Let the teacher use systems and hints and topics and all other
devices as helps to arrive at the sense and meaning, not as inflexible
molds into which he must always pour his commentary. A chemist may have
weighed and labeled all the constituent elements of a living cell, and
he may even succeed in mingling them in such a way as to have all these
elements in the very places they are in life, but his mixture will not
have the principle of life, that wonderful, unanalyzable bond that
unites into one organism, permeates and vivifies the separate atoms and
molecules. Because his analysis is complete and perfect, it does not
follow that his synthesis will be complete and perfect. Neither may a
teacher expect to get the synthesis of a vital, interesting commentary
from the detailed formula of the literary laboratory. He must have his
finger on the pulse; he must have seized the beating, warm heart; he
must have grasped the permeating, vivifying soul of his author, if he
would make his commentary living, and there is no other way to the heart
blood of an author, except by loving, enthusiastic meditation of his full
meaning.
I remember the first time in class that Homer ceased to be for me an
example factory for grammar or a shop for Grecian antiquities. We had
been translating Homer and parsing Homer; we now began to read him. The
change was as easy as it was pleasant. The teacher simply went back
behind the dictionary and the grammar, behind the cases and the tenses,
to the author’s meaning. He made us see the old priest of Apollo walking
along the seashore. He made us realize the fact that he was coming to
speak for his daughter. Our attention was called to the completeness and
appropriateness of his little speech. In a word, we began to move in
the poet’s world. We had used the grammar and dictionary to get there,
but when we reached our destination, we alighted from the train. We
were bound for the land of Homer, not for that of Goodwin or Liddell &
Scott, and the sooner we left our dusty, noisy cars, the better for us.
Our professor knew the translation and knew the grammar, but he had
left them behind him. He was on higher levels, and he threw away his
mountain staff and his guide rope. We were with him there, and we entered
into his enthusiasm for the broad view before us. Homer had been for us
a venerable mausoleum of well-preserved and dignified, but very dead
mummies. His enthusiasm let the life and light into that ancient tomb,
and the mummies took off their wraps and lived and moved. From that day
of resurrection until the present, Homer has lived for me; from that time
I have heard the Homeric heart beat and felt the Homeric pulse throb.
Nor need the teacher who follows these methods have fear that he is going
wrong, or that he is neglecting the proper education of his pupils. He
is achieving, too, concrete results, an achievement that must not be
considered the monopoly of science. Science may not supplant literature
in the school-room. It would be a sad day for both if ever it did. As
regards observation and induction, it has not been our wish to protest
against the use of these methods, but rather against the limiting of
their scope. To observe grammar only or archeology or philology and
neglect the author’s meaning is as ridiculous as to observe the paint and
not the picture, to put a microscope to the marble and not notice the
statue. We do not want less development, rather we want more. Develop the
powers of observation, but do not think that the only powers are the
senses. The world of imagination and the world of thought offer wider
fields for observation than the world of external sense. The horizon of
the mind is not restricted to the sky line that narrows the vision of the
eye.
If you train the powers of observation in the laboratory by asking
the pupil to see, to touch, to taste, to smell, train them, too, in
the classroom, by asking them to listen to the harmony of a sentence,
to trace out the development of a thought, to appreciate the wit, the
beauty, the sublimity of a passage. There was observation and training of
the powers of observation before the test tube was blown or the dynamo
was wound. Science has opened up new and wonderful worlds, not one of
which would we see closed; but the lands of literature have not ceased
for that reason to be inviting, and the soul, wearied with facts and
hampered with figures, gladly escapes into the restful regions of higher
and ampler realities.
The crossing of the borders of mere expression, the living and moving
in the realms of meaning, the appreciative following of an author’s
mind in all journeyings, may not develop grammarians or philologists
or ethnologists or archeologists. Perhaps it is not the life-work of
classical literature to stock the market with such commodities. The
student who travels with a master-mind through the land of thought, now
captivated with a view just under his eyes, again catching a glimpse
of some far-off scene, all the more glorious in promise, because it
lacks definiteness of detail, such a one may turn out to be more of a
tourist than a local antiquarian and may suffer some inconveniences in
consequence. He will be set right by the local antiquarian on names and
dates connected with some obscure town, but in turn he will convey to his
learned friend some ideas on the relative importance of localities and on
the topography of the whole country. The tourist will not be provincial
or municipal or suburban. He will not mistake his native hamlet for the
world or make it the sole standard of excellence. The tourist will give
you a map; the local antiquarian will draw up a surveyor’s chart, with
the number of inches to the grade and the number of feet to the surface.
Should not the teacher of literature consider it his duty to encourage
the tourist, to introduce the student into the world of meaning, and not
to keep him with theodolite and the leveling-rod along the borders of
expression, counting words, measuring phrases, or drawing up lifeless
charts of tabulated facts? When the student has come home from his
travels, he may, if he chooses, lay aside his guide book, and, having
seen the world, confine his energies to mastering a portion of it. If,
however, he should have brought home from his wanderings nothing more
than a love of literature and all that means, will his teacher’s life
have been in vain? John Goulding of Cork might be considered not entirely
useless, if he gave us no more than Justin McCarthy, who thus describes
the results of his master’s work:
“I do not venture to say that Mr. Goulding’s method of teaching
was directly adapted to create a thoroughly scholastic
knowledge of Greek and Latin, and I do not know whether his
pupils would have been likely by means of his instruction alone
to take honors in any university competition, but I know that
it made all of us, who had a taste for such, ready and fluent
readers in Greek and Latin and as familiar with most of the
Greek and Latin poets as with Shakespeare and Keats. It was in
truth literary rather than scholastic instruction.”
XII
EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS
Life is full to the brim with emotions. Not war only nor political
rallies nor the excited throngs at sports are vibrant with emotion, but
there is not a single act of life which has not some emotion, quiet
or intense, as its source, its companion and its effect. Man ought to
be ruled by cold reason, but he responds to feelings and succumbs to
feelings.