I
Is it _not_ sublime? Really there appears to be no limit to the
demands that are made on our schools and colleges. They are supposed
to ground the rising generation in the principles and practise of good
citizenship, in morality, and to some extent in religion; to develop
the power to think (an endlessly difficult matter), the ability to
enjoy nature and art, the desire to be useful; to instil habits of
industry, self-control and wholesome living; and withal to impart
_memoriter_ a mass of miscellaneous book-knowledge such as can be
tested by examination. Of late, too, we hear more and more that the
schools should fit the young for some specific business in life--for a
job, that is. In short we look to the schools to inculcate all the
possible virtues of mind and character, and at the same time to turn
out what the newest jargon calls efficient social units. And then
there are special problems, more acute in some places than in others,
such as the induction of alien children into the mysteries of the
English language and American ways.
Now all that makes a pretty big task. It is safe to say that an army
of Pestalozzis, Arnolds and Horace Manns, if we could command their
services and give them all the money they might ask for, would never
perform it to our entire satisfaction. Here and there we should find
loose ends of failure. What wonder, then, if the schoolma'am, mostly
an ordinary sort of well-meaning mortal, who is the victim of routine
and must do her appointed work under hopeless conditions of
"mass-treatment"--what wonder if many people are saying that the
schoolma'am does not seem to measure up to her mission? It is not
altogether strange that she is being overtaken by the fate of Hamlet,
whose tragic calamity it was, according to Goethe, to be obliged to
shoulder a burden that was too heavy for him. In reading educational
literature, one is sometimes reminded of those tribal gods from whom
all things are demanded, and whom it is therefore proper to scold or
to flog if anything goes wrong. For illustration let me quote a recent
deliverance culled from a newspaper. It is by a man of some
distinction, whose name I do not give because the language is probably
nothing but a reporter's paraphrase. In speaking to an audience on
"the fundamental trouble with conditions and the cause of the unrest
today," the gentleman is said to have laid it all to "our national
educational system, which is teaching the youth of our land to be
consumers instead of producers, and only to acquire instead of to
serve."
There we have it in a nutshell. It is the schools which are really to
blame for the manifold ills that so many people are talking about. If
we only had the right kind of schools--teaching the right things in
the right way--our whole sea of troubles would quickly turn into
pleasant arable land. Historical pundits are just now much interested
in what is called the economic interpretation of history; that is, the
theory that the whole history of man, including his religions and
philosophies and ethnic movements, his flowerings of art, his
Periclean and Augustan Ages, his Protestant Reformations and French
Revolutions--has been determined primarily by economic conditions. And
now, behold, the economic conditions themselves are the work of the
schoolma'am. Verily, _das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan_ with a
vengeance!
* * * * *
The newest thing is to have the schools cure the ancient ills that
grow out of the pressure of sex--a subject that of late seems to claim
more than its fair share of the limelight. The Paris dressmakers,
accustomed for ages to attire women very seductively for evening
exhibition, suddenly take to attiring them rather less seductively
for the street. And lo, the Puritan eye is shocked. There are visions
of social ruin à la Sodom and Gomorrah. Coincidently the theaters,
newspapers and wofsmiths (Mr. Howells' word, wof meaning
work-of-fiction), go in for the public washing of dirty linen, the
existence and dirtiness of which have been known for some thousands of
years. At the same time a new race of "sociologists" seek to alarm us
by stirring up the foul pool of social vice and talking about it as if
the filth were a thing of the day before yesterday. Result: a pretty
general demand that the schools teach sex hygiene and physiology, in
order that the boys and girls may be warned betimes of the dangers
that lie in wait for them. I am not arguing that children should not
be told the truth about these things. I am merely animadverting on the
growing tendency to put everything on the schools.