quality, it must be kept clearly in mind every day and every hour of the
day that the children with whom we have to do are not all alike. On the
contrary, they differ, and often differ widely, in respect of mental
ability, environment, inheritances, and native disposition. If they were
all alike, it would be most unfortunate, but we could treat them all alike
in our teaching and so fix and perpetuate their likeness to one another.
Some teachers have heard and read a hundred times that our teaching should
attach itself to the native tendencies of the child; yet, in spite of
this, the teacher proceeds as if all children were alike and all possessed
the same native tendencies. Herein lies a part of the tragedy of our
traditional, stereotyped, race-track teaching. We assume that children are
all alike, that they are standardized children, and so we prescribe for
them a standardized diet and serve it by standardized methods. If we were
producing bricks instead of embryo men and women our procedure would be
laudable, for, in the making of bricks, uniformity is a prime necessity.
Each brick must be exactly like every other brick, and, in consequence, we
use for each one ingredients of the same quality and in like amount, and
then subject them all to precisely the same treatment.
This procedure is well enough in the case of inanimate bricks, but it is
far from well enough in the case of animate, sentient human beings. It
would be a calamity to have duplicate human beings, and yet the
traditional school seems to be doing its utmost to produce duplicates. The
native tendencies of one boy impel him toward the realms of nature, but,
all heedless of this big fact, we bind him hard and fast to some academic
post with traditional bonds of rules and regulations and then strive to
coerce him into partaking of our traditional pabulum. His inevitable
rebellion against this regime we style incorrigibility, or stupidity, and
then by main strength and authority strive to reduce him to submission
and, failing in this, we banish him from the school branded for life. Our
treatment of this boy is due to the fact that another boy in the school is
endowed with other native tendencies and the teacher is striving to
fashion both boys in the same mold.
In striving to inculcate the quality of integrity, wholeness, soundness,
rectitude in Sam Brown our aim is to develop this specific boy into the
best Sam Brown possible and not to try to make of him another Harry Smith.
We need one best Sam Brown and one best Harry Smith but not two Harry
Smiths. If we try to make our Sam Brown into a second Harry Smith, society
is certain to be the loser to the value of Sam Brown. We want to see Sam
Brown realize all his possibilities to the utmost, for only so will he win
integrity. Better a complete Sam Brown, though only half the size of Harry
Smith, than an incomplete Sam Brown of any size. If the native tendencies
of Sam Brown lead toward nature, certain it is that by denying him the
stimulus of nature study, we shall restrict his growth and render him less
than complete. If we would produce a complete Sam Brown, if we would have
him attain integrity, we must see to it that the process of teaching
engages all his powers and does not permit some of these powers to lie
fallow.
If Sam Brown is a nature boy, no amount of coercion can transform him into
a mathematics boy. True he may, in time, gain proficiency in mathematics,
but only if he is led into the field of mathematics through the gateway of
nature. He may ultimately achieve distinction as a writer, but not unless
his pen becomes facile in depicting nature. Unless his native interests
are taken fully into account and all his powers are enlisted in the
enterprise of education toward integrity, he will never become the Sam
Brown he might have been and the teacher cannot win special comfort in the
reflection that she has helped to produce a cripple. We can better afford
to depart from the beaten path, and even do violence to the sanctity of
the course of study, than to lose or deform Sam Brown. If his soul yearns
for green fields and budding trees, it is cruel if not criminal to fail to
cater to this yearning. And only by cultivating and ministering to this
native disposition can we hope to be of service in aiding him to achieve
integrity.
It needs to be emphasized that integrity signifies one hundred per cent,
nothing less, and that such a goal is quite worth working toward. On the
physical side, the problem looms large before us. Since we can produce
thoroughbred live stock that scores one hundred per cent, we ought to
produce one hundred per cent men and women. In a great university,
physical examinations covering a period of seventeen years discovered one
physically perfect young woman and not one physically perfect young man.
Our live stock records make a better showing than this. For years we have
been quoting "a sound mind in a sound body" in various languages but have
failed in a large degree to achieve sound bodies. Nor, indeed, may we hope
to win this goal until we become aroused to the importance of physical
training in its widest import for all young people and not merely for the
already physically fit, who constitute the ball teams. If the child is
physically sound at the age of six, he ought to be no less so at the age
of eighteen. If he is not so, there must have been some blundering in the
course of his school life, either on the part of the school itself or of
the home. When we set up physical soundness as the goal of our endeavors
and this ideal becomes enmeshed in the consciousness of all citizens, then
activities toward this end will inevitably ensue. Physical training will
be made an integral part of the course of study, medical and dental
inspection will obtain both in the school and in the home, insanitary
conditions will no longer be tolerated, intemperance in every form will
disappear, and every child will receive the same careful nurture that we
now bestow upon the prize winners at our live-stock exhibition. The
thinking of people will be intent toward the one hundred per cent standard
and, in consequence, they will strive in unison to achieve this goal.
The large amount of incompleteness that is to be found among the products
of our schools may be traced, in a large measure, to our irrational and
fictitious procedure in the matter of grading. We must keep records, of
course, but it will be recalled that in the parable of the talents men
were commended or condemned according to the use they made of the talents
they had and were not graded according to a fixed standard. Seeing that
seventy-five per cent will win him promotion, the boy devotes only so much
of himself to the enterprise as will enable him to attain the goal and
directs the remainder of himself to adventures along the line of his
native tendencies. The only way by which we can develop a complete Sam
Brown is so to arrange matters that the whole of Sam Brown is enlisted in
the work. Otherwise we shall have one part of the boy working in one
direction and another part in another direction, and that plan does not
make for completeness. We must enlist the whole boy or we shall fail to
develop a complete boy. If we can find some study to which he will devote
himself unreservedly, then we may well rejoice and can afford to let the
traditional subjects of the course of study wait. We are interested in Sam
Brown just now and he is far more important than some man-made course of
study. We are interested, too, in one hundred per cent of Sam Brown, and
not in three fourths of him. If arithmetic will not enlist all of this boy
and nature will enlist all of him, then arithmetic must be held in
abeyance in the interest of the whole boy.
The seventy-five per cent standard is repudiated by the world of affairs
even though it is emphasized by the school. Seventy-five per cent of
accuracy will not do in the transactions of the bank. The accounts must
balance to the penny. The figures are right or else they are wrong. There
is no middle ground. In the school the boy solves three problems but fails
with the fourth. None the less he wins the goal of promotion. Not so at
the bank. He is denied admission because of his failure with the fourth
problem. Seventy-five will not do in joining the spans of the great bridge
across the river. We must have absolute accuracy if we would avoid a wreck
with its attendant horrors. The druggist must not fall below one hundred
per cent in compounding the prescription unless he would face a charge of
criminal negligence. The wireless operator must transcribe the message
with absolute accuracy or dire consequences may ensue. The railway crew
must read the order without a mistake if they would save life and property
from disaster.
But, in the school, the teachers rejoice and congratulate one another when
their pupils achieve a grade of seventy-five. It matters nothing,
apparently, that this grade of seventy-five is a fictitious thing with no
basis in logic or reason, in short a mere habit that has no justification
save in tradition, and that, in very truth, it is a concession to
inaccuracy and ignorance. When we promote the boy for solving three out of
four problems we virtually say to him that the fourth problem is
negligible and he may as well forget all about it. Sometimes a teacher
grieves over a grade of seventy-three, never realizing that another
teacher might have given to that same paper a grade of eighty-three. We
proclaim education to be a spiritual process, and then, in some instances,
employ mechanics to administer this process. By what process of reasoning
the superintendent or the teacher arrives at the judgment that
seventy-five is good enough is yet to be explained. Our zeal for grades
and credits indicates a greater interest in the label than in the contents
of the package.
Teaching is a noble work if only it is directed toward worthy goals.
Nothing in the way of human endeavor can be more inspiring than the work
of striving to integrate boys and girls. The mere droning over geography,
and history, and grammar is petty by comparison. And yet all these studies
and many others may be found essential factors in the work and they will
be learned with greater thoroughness as means to a great end than as ends
in themselves. The supply stations take on a new meaning to the boy who is
yearning to reach the flag at the top. But it needs to be said here that
the traditional superintendent and teacher will greet this entire plan
with a supercilious smile. They will call it visionary, unpractical, and
idealistic--then return to their seventy-five per cent regime with the
utmost complacency and self-satisfaction. It is ever so with the
traditional teacher. He seeks to be let alone, that he may go on his
complacent way without hindrance. To him every innovation is an
interference, if not a positive impertinence. But, in spite of the
traditional teacher, the school is destined to rise to a higher level and
enter upon a more rational procedure. And we must look to the dynamic
teacher to usher in the renaissance--the teacher who has the vitality and
the courage to break away from tradition and write integrity into the
course of study as one of the big goals and think all the while toward
integrity, physical, mental, and moral.
CHAPTER FIVE
APPRECIATION
Education may be defined as the process of raising the level of
appreciation. This definition will stand the ultimate test. Here is
bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation
as a goal in every rational system of education. Appreciation has been
defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of
things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. It must
be so or civilization cannot be. Without appreciation there can be no
distinction between the coarse and the fine, none between the high and the
low, none between the beautiful and the ugly, none between the sublime and
the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir. Hence, appreciation is
inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the
courage to proclaim it or not. Just why it has not been written into the
course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the
educational process. It is far from clear why the superintendent permits
teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that
arithmetic is their final destination, or why he fails to take the
tax-payers into his confidence and explain to them that appreciation is
one of the lode-stars toward which the schools are advancing. In his heart
he hopes that the schools may achieve appreciation, and it would be the
part of frankness and fairness for him to reveal this hope to his teachers
and to all others concerned.
It is common knowledge that business affairs do not require more than ten
pages of arithmetic and it would seem only fair that the study of the
other pages should be justified. These other pages must serve some useful
purpose in the thinking of those who retain them, and, certainly, no harm
would ensue from a revelation of this purpose. If they are studied as a
means to some high end, they will prove no less important after this fact
has been explained. We may need more arithmetic than we have, but it is
our due to be informed why we need it; to what use it is to be put. These
things we have a right to know, and no superintendent, who is charged with
the responsibility of making the course of study, has a right to withhold
the information. If he does not know the explanation of the course of
study he has devised, he ought to make known that fact and throw himself
"on the mercy of the court."
In these days of conservation and elimination of waste every subject that
seeks admission to the course of study should be challenged at the door
and be made to show what useful purpose it is to serve. Nor should any
subject be admitted on any specious pretext. If there are subjects that
are better adapted to the high purposes of education than the ones we are
now using, then, by all means, let us give them a hearty welcome.
Above all, we should be careful not to retain a subject unless it has a
more valid passport than old age to justify its retention. If Chinese will
help us win the goal of appreciation more effectively than Latin, then, by
all means, we should make the substitution. But, in doing so, we must
exercise care not to be carried away by a yearning for novelty. Least of
all should any subject be admitted to the course of study that does not
have behind it something more substantial and enduring than whim or
caprice.
The subjects that avail in generating and stimulating the growth of
appreciation are many and of great variety. Nor are they all found in the
proverbial course of study of the schools. When the boy first really sees
an ear of corn from another viewpoint than the economic, he finds it
eloquent of the marvelous adaptations of nature. From being a mere ear of
corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty. No change has taken
place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in
the boy. Such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that
it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for
all that. It is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the
accepted definition of education. Though it defies analysis and the rule
of thumb, the boy is conscious of it and can say with the man who was born
blind, "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see," and no
cabalistic marks in a grade-book can express the value of the change
indicated by that statement.
The sluggard deems the sunrise an impertinence because it disturbs his
morning slumber; but such a change may be wrought in him as to cause him
to stand in reverence before the very thing he once condemned. The
sunrise, once an affront, is now nothing less than a miracle, and he
stands in the sublime presence with uncovered and lowered head. He is a
reverent witness of the re-birth of the world. An hour ago there was
darkness; now there is light. An hour ago the world was dead; now it is
gloriously alive. An hour ago there was silence; now there is sound of
such exquisite quality as to ravish the soul with delight. As the first
beams of sunlight come streaming over the hills, ten thousand birds join
in a mighty chorus of welcome to the newborn day and the world is flooded
with song; and the whilom sluggard thrills under the spell of the scene
and feels himself a part of the world that is vibrant with music. Can it
be denied that this man is all the better citizen for his ability to
appreciate the wonderfulness of a sunrise?
But while we extol and magnify the quality of appreciation, it is well to
note that it cannot be superinduced by any imperial mandate nor does it
spring into being at the behest of didacticism. It can be caught but not
taught. Indeed, it is worthy of general observation that the choice things
which young people receive from the schools, colleges, and normal schools
are caught and not taught, however much the teachers may plume themselves
upon their ability to impart instruction. Education, at its best, is a
process of inoculation. The teacher is an important factor in this process
of generating situations that render inoculation far more easy; and we
omit one of the most vital things in education when we refer only to the
teacher's ability to "impart instruction." The pupil gets certain things
in that room, but the teacher does not give them. The teacher's function
is to create situations in which the spirit of the pupil will become
inoculated with the germs of truth in all its aspects. If he could give
the things that the pupils get, then all would share alike in the
distribution. If the teacher could impart instruction, he certainly would
not fail to lift all his pupils over the seventy-five per cent hurdle.
If instruction or knowledge could be imparted, education would no longer
be a spiritual process but rather one of driving the boy into a corner,
imparting such instruction as the teacher might decree and keeping on
until the point of saturation was reached or the supply of instruction
became exhausted, when the trick would be done. The process would be as
simple as pouring water from one vessel into another. Sometimes the
teacher of literature strives to engender appreciation in a pupil by
rhapsodizing over some passage. She reads the passage in a frenzy of
simulated enthusiasm, with a quaver in her voice and moisture in her eyes,
only to find, at the end, that her patient has fallen asleep. Appreciation
cannot be generated in such fashion. The boy cannot light his torch of
appreciation at a mere phosphorescent glow. There must be heat behind the
light or there can be no ignition. The boy senses the fictitious at once
and cannot react to what he knows to be spurious. Only the genuine can win
his interest.
Napoleon Bonaparte once said that no one can gaze into the starry sky at
night for five minutes and not believe in the existence of God. But to
people who lack such appreciation the night sky is devoid of significance.
There are teachers who never go forth to revel in the glories of this
star-lit masterpiece of creation, because, forsooth, they are too busy
grading papers in literature. Such a teacher is not likely to be the cause
of a spiritual ignition in her pupils, for she herself lacks the divine
fire of appreciation. If she only possessed this quality no words would be
needed to reveal its presence to the boy; he would know it even as the
homing-pigeon knows its course. When the spirits of teacher and pupils
become merged as they must become in all true teaching, the boy will find
himself in possession of this spiritual quality. He knows that he has it,
the teacher knows that he has it, and his associates know that he has it,
and one and all know that it is well worth having.
It is related of Keats that in reading Spenser he was thrown into a
paroxysm of delight over the expression "sea-shouldering whales." The
churl would not give a second thought to the phrase, or, indeed, a first
one; but the man of appreciation finds in it a source of pleasure. Arlo
Bates speaks with enthusiasm of the word "highly" as used in the
Gettysburg Speech, and the teacher's work reaches a high point of
excellence when it has given to the pupil such a feeling of appreciation
as enables him to discover and rejoice in such niceties of literary
expression. It widens the horizon of life to him and gives him a deeper
and closer sympathy with every form and manifestation of life. Every phase
of life makes an appeal to him, from bird on the wing to rushing
avalanche; from the blade of grass to the boundless plains; from the
prattle of the child to the word miracles of Shakespeare; from the stable
of Bethany to the Mount of Transfiguration.
Geography lends itself admirably to the development of appreciation if it
is well taught. Indeed, to develop appreciation seems to be the prime
function of geography, and the marvel is that it has not been so
proclaimed. In this field geography finds a clear justification, and the
superintendent who sets forth appreciation as the end and geography as the
means is certain to win the plaudits of many people who have long been
wondering why there is so much geography in the present course of study.
Certainly no appreciation can develop from the question and answer method,
for no spiritual quality can thrive under such deadening conditions. If
the questions emanated from the pupils, the situation would be improved,
but such is rarely the case. Teaching is, in reality, a transfusion of
spirit, and when this flow of spirit from teacher to pupil is unimpeded
teaching is at high tide. When the subject is artfully and artistically
developed the effect upon the child is much the same as that of unrolling
a great and beautiful picture. The Mississippi River can be taught as a
great drama, from its rise in Lake Itasca to its triumphal entry into the
Gulf. As it takes its way southward pine forests wave their salutes, then
wheat fields, then corn fields, and, later, cotton fields. Then its
tributaries may be seen coming upon the stage to help swell the mighty
sweep of progress toward the sea. When geography is taught as a drama,
appreciation is inevitable.
The resourceful teacher can find a thousand dramas in the books on
geography if she knows how to interpret the pages of the books, and with
these inspiring dramas she can lift her pupils to the very pinnacle of
appreciation. Such tales are as fascinating as fairy stories and have the
added charm of being true to the teachings of science. A raindrop seems a
common thing, but cast in dramatic form it becomes of rare charm. It
slides from the roof of the house and finds its way into the tiny rivulet,
then into the brook, then into the river and thus finally reaches the sea.
By the process of evaporation, it is transformed into vapor and is carried
over the land by currents of air. As it comes into contact with colder
currents, condensation ensues and then precipitation, and our raindrop
descends to earth once more. Sinking into the soil at the foot of the tree
it is taken up into the tree by capillary attraction, out through the
branches and then into the fruit. Then comes the sunshine to ripen the
fruit, and finally this fruit is harvested and borne to the market, whence
it reaches the home. Here it is served at the breakfast table and the
curtain of our drama goes down with our raindrop as orange-juice on the
lip of the little girl.
When we come to realize, in our enlarged vision, the possibilities of
geography in fostering the quality of appreciation, our teaching of the
subject will be changed and vitalized, our textbooks will be written from
a different angle, and our pupils will receive a much larger return upon
their investment of time and effort. The study of geography will be far
less like the conning of a gazetteer or a city directory and more like a
fascinating story. In our astronomical geography we shall make many a
pleasing excursion into the far spaces and win stimulating glimpses into
the infinities. In our physical geography we shall read marvelous stories
that outrival the romances of Dumas and Hugo. And geography as a whole
will reveal herself as the cherishing mother of us all, providing us with
food, and drink, and shelter, and raiment, giving us poetry, and song, and
story, and weaving golden fancies for the fabric of our daily dreams.