should have a pleasant birthday and so asked him what he would most like
to do. The answer came in a flash: "Thank you, Mother, I should most like
just to be let alone." This answer leads us at once to the inner sanctuary
of childhood. Children yearn to be let alone and must grow restive under
the incessant attentions of their elders. In school there is ever such a
continuous fusillade of questions and answers, assigning of lessons,
recitations, corrections, explanations, and promulgations, rules and
restrictions that the children have no time for growing inside. They are
not left to their own devices but are pulled and pushed about, and
managed, and coddled or coerced all day long, so that there is neither
time nor scope for the exercise and development of initiative. The
teacher, at times, seems to think of the school as a mammoth syringe with
which she is called upon to pump information into her bored but passive
pupils.
Silence is the element in which initiative thrives, but our school
programs rarely provide any periods of silence. They assume that to be
effective a school must be a place of bustle, and hurry, and excitement,
not to mention entertainment. Sometimes the child is intent upon
explorations among the infinities when the teacher summons him back to
earth to cross a _t_ or dot an _i_. The teacher who would implant a
thought-germ in the minds of her pupils and then allow fifteen minutes of
silence for the process of germination, should be ranked as an excellent
teacher. When the child is thinking out things for himself the process is
favorable to initiative; but when the teacher directs his every movement,
thought, and impulse, she is repressing the very quality that makes for
initiative and ultimate leadership. When the boy would do some things on
his own, the teacher is striving to force him to travel in her groove.
Henderson well says: "We do not invariably cultivate initiative by letting
children alone, but in nine cases out of ten it is a highly effective
method. In our honest desire for their betterment, the temptation is
always to jump in and to do for them, when we would much better keep hands
off, and allow them, under favorable conditions, to do for themselves.
They may do something which, from an objective point of view, is much less
excellent than our own well-considered plan. But education is not an
objective process. It is subjective and was wrapped up in the funny
blundering little enterprise of the child, rather than in our own
intrusive one." The crude product of the boy's work in manual training is
far better for him and for the whole process of education than the
finished product of the teacher's skill which sometimes passes for the
boy's own work. Some manual training teachers have many a sin charged to
their account in this line that stands in dire need of forgiveness.
There are many worthy enterprises through which initiative may be
fostered. Prominent among these are some of the home and school projects
that are in vogue. These projects, when wisely selected with reference to
the child's powers and inclination, give scope for the exercise of
ingenuity, resourcefulness, perseverance, and unhampered thinking and
acting. Besides, some of the by-products are of value, notably
self-reliance and self-respect. A child yearns to play a thinking part in
the drama of life and not the part of a marionette or jumping-jack that
moves only when someone pulls the string. He yearns to be an entity and
not a mere echo. Paternalism, in our school work, does not make for
self-reliance, and, therefore, is to be deplored. There is small hope for
the child without initiative, who is helped over every slightest obstacle,
and who acquires the habit of calling for help whenever he encounters a
difficulty.
Here we have ample scope for the problem element in teaching and we are
recreant to our opportunities and do violence to child-nature if we fail
to utilize this method. We are much given to the analytic in our teaching,
whereas the pupil enjoys the synthetic. He yearns to make things.
Constructing problems in arithmetic, or history, or physics makes a
special appeal to him and we do violence to his natural bent if we fail to
accord him the opportunity. We can send him in quest of dramatic
situations in the poem, or derivatives in his reading lesson, set him
thinking of the construction of farm buildings or machinery, or lead him
to seek the causes that led up to events in history. In brief, we can
appeal to his curiosity and intelligence and so engage the intensest
interest of the whole boy.
A school girl assumed the task of looking after all the repairs in the way
of plumbing in the home and, certainly, was none the worse for the
experience. She is now a dentist and has achieved distinction both at home
and abroad in her chosen profession. She gained the habit of meeting
difficult situations without abatement of dignity or refinement. The
school, at its best, is a favorable situation for self-education and the
wise teacher will see to it that it does not decline from this high plane.
Only so will its products be young men and women who need no leading
strings, who can find their way about through the labyrinth of life and
not be abashed. They are the ones to whom we must look for leadership in
all the enterprises of life, for they have learned how to initiate work
and carry it through to success. That school will win distinction which
makes initiative one of its big goals and is diligent in causing the
activities of the pupils to reach upward toward the achievement of this
end.
We may well conclude with a quotation from Dr. Henry van Dyke: "The mere
pursuit of knowledge is not necessarily an emancipating thing. There is a
kind of reading which is as passive as massage. There is a kind of study
which fattens the mind for examination like a prize pig for a county fair.
No doubt the beginning of instruction must lie chiefly in exercises of
perception and memory. But at a certain point the reason and the judgment
must be awakened and brought into voluntary play. As a teacher I would far
rather have a pupil give an incorrect answer in a way which showed that he
had really been thinking about the subject, than a literally correct
answer in a way which showed that he had merely swallowed what I had told
him, and regurgitated it on the examination paper."
CHAPTER EIGHT
IMAGINATION
In his very stimulating book, _Learning and Doing_, Professor Swift quotes
from a business man as follows: "Modern business no longer waits for men
to qualify after promotion. Through anticipation and prior preparation
every growing man must be largely ready for his new job when it comes to
him. I find very few individuals make any effort to think out better ways
of doing things. They do not anticipate needs, do not keep themselves
fresh at the growing point. If ever they had any imagination they seem to
have lost it, and imagination is needed in a growing business, for it is
through the imagination that one anticipates future changes and so
prepares for them before they come. Accordingly, as a general proposition,
the selection of a man for a vacancy within the organization is more or
less a matter of guesswork. Now and then an ambitious, wide-awake young
man works into the organization and in a very short time is spotted by
various department managers for future promotion, but the number of such
individuals is discouragingly small. The difficulty with which we are
always confronted is that our business grows faster than do those within
it. The men do not keep up with our changes. The business grows away from
them, and quite reluctantly the management is frequently compelled to go
outside for necessary material. We need, at the present time, four or five
subordinate chiefs in various parts of the factory and I can fill none of
the positions satisfactorily from material in hand."
This business man, unconsciously perhaps, puts his finger upon one of the
weak places in our school procedure. He convicts us of stifling and
repressing the imagination of our pupils. For it is a matter of common
knowledge that every normal child is endowed with a vivid imagination when
he enters school. No one will challenge this statement who has entered
into the heart of childhood through the gateway of play. He has seen a rag
doll invested with all the graces of a princess; he has seen empty spools
take on all the attributes of the railway train; and he has seen the
child's world peopled with entities of which the unimaginative person
cannot know. Children revel in the lore of fairyland, and in this realm
nothing seems impossible to them. Their toys are the material which their
imagination uses in building new and delightful worlds for them. If this
imagination is unimpaired when they become grown-ups, these toys are
called ideals, and these ideals are the material that enter into the lives
of poets, artists, inventors, scientists, orators, statesmen, and
reformers. If the child lacks this quality at the end of his school life,
the school must be held responsible, at least in part, and so must face
the charge of doing him an irreparable injury. It were better by far for
the child to lose a leg or an arm somewhere along the school way than to
lose his imagination. Better abandon the school altogether if it tends to
quench the divine fire of imagination. Better still, devise some plan of
so reconstructing the work of the school that we shall forever forestall
the possibility of producing a generation of spiritual cripples.
The business man already quoted gives to the schools their cue. He shows
the need of imagination in practical affairs and, by implication, shows
that the school has been recreant to its opportunities in the way of
stimulating this requisite quality. We must be quite aware that the men
and women who have done things as well as those who are doing things have
had or have imagination. Otherwise no achievements would be set down to
their credit. It is the very acme of unwisdom to expect our pupils to
accomplish things and then take from them the tools of their craft.
Imagination is an indispensable tool, and the teacher assumes a grave
responsibility who either destroys or blunts it. Unless the school
promotes imagination it is not really a school, seeing that it omits from
its plans and practices this basic quality. Too much emphasis cannot be
laid upon this patent truth, nor can we deplore too earnestly the tendency
of many teachers to strangle imagination.
We all recognize C. Hanford Henderson as one of our most fertile and sane
writers on educational themes and we cannot do better just here than to
quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: "To say of man or woman
that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and
potential sins. Such a defect means obtuseness in manners and morals,
sterility in arts and science, blundering in the general conduct of life.
Children are often accused of having too much imagination, but in reality
that is hardly possible. The imagination may run riot, and, growing by
what it feeds upon, come dangerously near to untruthfulness,--the store of
facts may have been too small. But the remedy is not to cripple or kill
the imagination; it is rather to provide the needed equipment of facts and
to train the imagination to work within the limits of truth and
probability. The unimaginative man is exceedingly dull company. From the
moment he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them at night, he
is prone to the sins of both omission and commission. No matter how good
his intentions, he constantly offends. No matter how great his industry,
he fails to attain. One can trace many immoralities, from slight breaches
of manners to grave criminal offenses, to a simple lack of imagination.
The offender failed to see,--he was, to all intents and purposes, blind.
At its best, imagination is insight. It is the direct source of most of
our social amenities, of toleration, charity, consideration,--in a word,
of all those social virtues which distinguish the child of light." Another
fertile writer says: "Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into
corroding silence by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood
when they were in reality repressing the imagination--the faculty which
master-artists denote as the first and loveliest possession of the
creative mind."
Some of our boys will be farmers but, if they lack imagination, they will
be dull fellows, at the very best, and, relatively speaking, not far above
the horse that draws the plow. The girls will be able to talk, but if they
lack imagination they can never become conversationalists. The person who
has imagination can cause the facts of the multiplication table to
scintillate and glow. The person who lacks imagination is unable to invest
with interest and charm even the mountain, the river, the landscape, or
the poem. The gossip, the scandal-monger, or the coarse jester proves his
lack of imagination and his consequent inability to hold his own in real
conversation. We hope, of course, that some of our pupils may become
inventors, but this will be impossible unless they possess imagination. A
sociologist states the case in this fashion: "Wealth, the transient, is
material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The products of
achievement are not material things at all. They are not ends, but means.
They are methods, ways, devices, arts, systems, institutions. In a word,
they are _inventions_." In short, to say that one is an inventor is but
another way of saying that he has imagination.
It is one thing to know facts but quite another thing to know the
significance of facts. And imagination is the alembic that discovers the
significance of the facts. A thousand men of England knew the facts
touching the life and education of the children of that country, but the
facts remained mere facts until the imagination of Dickens interpreted
them and thus emancipated childhood from the thralldom of ignorance and
cruelty. A thousand men knew the fact touching the steam that issues from
the tea-kettle, but not until Watts discovered the significance of the
fact did the tea-kettle become the precursor of the steam-engine that has
transformed civilization. It required the imagination of Newton to
interpret the falling of the apple and to cause this simple, common fact
to lead on to the discovery of the great truth of gravitation. Had Galileo
lacked imagination, the chandelier might have kept on swinging but the
discovery of the rotation of the earth would certainly have been
postponed.
In this view of the matter we can see one of the weaknesses of some of the
work in our colleges as well as in other schools. The teachers are fertile
in arriving at facts, but seem to think their tasks completed with these
discoveries and so proclaim the discovery of facts to be education. It
matters not that the facts are devoid of significance to their students,
they simply proceed to the discovery of more facts. They combine two or
more substances in a test-tube and thus produce a new substance. This fact
is solemnly inscribed in a notebook and the incident is closed. But the
student who has imagination and industry inquires "What then?" and
proceeds with investigations on his own initiative that result in a
positive boon to humanity. Imagination takes the facts and makes something
of them, while the college teacher has disclosed his inability to cope
with his own students in fields that only imagination can render
productive.
To quote Henderson once again: "In most of our current education, instead
of cultivating so valuable a quality, we have stupidly done all that we
can to suppress it. We have not sufficiently studied the actual boy before
us to find out what he is up to, and what end he has in mind. On the
contrary, we proclaim, with curious indifference, some end of our own
devising, and with what really amounts to spiritual brutality, we try to
drive him towards it. We do this, we irresponsible parents and teachers,
because we ourselves lack imagination, and do not see that we are
blunting, instead of sharpening, our human tool. Yet we define education
in terms of imagination when we say that education is the unfolding and
perfecting of the human spirit; or, that education is a setting-up in the
heart of the child of a moral and æsthetic revelation of the universe; for
the human spirit which we are trying to establish is not a fact, but a
gracious possibility of the future."
Happy is the child whose teacher possesses imagination; who can touch the
common things of life with the magic wand of her fancy and invest them
with supreme charm; who can peer into the future with her pupils and help
them translate the bright dreams of today into triumphs in the realms of
art, music, science, philosophy, language, and philanthropy; and who
builds air-castles of her own and thus has the skill to help the children
build theirs. It is not easy, if, indeed, it is possible, for the teacher
to quicken imagination in her pupils unless she herself is endowed with
this animating quality. Dr. Henry van Dyke puts the case thus: "I care not
whether a man is called a tutor, an instructor, or a full professor; nor
whether any academic degrees adorn his name; nor how many facts or symbols
of facts he has stored away in his brain. If he has these four
powers--clear sight, quick imagination, sound reason, strong will--I call
him an educated man and fit to be a teacher." And, of a surety,
imagination is not the least of these.
To this end every teacher should use every means possible to keep her
imagination alive and luxuriant, and never, on any account, permit the
exigencies of her task to repress it. The success of her pupils depends
upon her, and she should strive against stagnation as she would against
death. The passing out, the evaporation of imagination is an insidious
process, and when it is gone she is but a barren fig-tree. If her
imagination is strong and healthy she cannot have a poor school and her
pupils will bless her memory throughout the years. As applying to every
grade of school we may well note the words of Van Dyke: "Every true
university should make room in its scheme for life out-of-doors. There is
much to be said for John Milton's plan of a school whose pupils should go
together each year on long horseback journeys and sailing cruises to see
the world. Walter Bagehot said of Shakespeare that he could not walk down
a street without knowing what was in it. John Burroughs has a college on a
little farm beside the Hudson; and John Muir has a university called
Yosemite. If such men cross a field or a thicket they see more than the
seven wonders of the world. That is culture. And without it, all
scholastic learning is arid, and all the academic degrees known to man are
but china oranges hang on a dry tree." And without imagination this type
of culture is impossible.
All reforms and, indeed, all progress depend upon imagination. We must be
able to picture the world as it ought to be before we can set on foot
plans for betterment. It is the high province of the imagination to enter
into the feelings and aspirations of others and so be able to lend a hand;
to build a better future out of the materials of the present; to soar
above the solemnities and conventions of tradition and to smile while
soaring; to see the invisible and touch the intangible; and to see the
things that are not and call them forth as realities. Seeing that the
business man, the fertile-brained essayist, and the gifted poet agree in
extolling the potential value of imagination, we have full warrant for
according to it an honored place in the curriculum of the school. Too long
has it been an incidental minor; it is now high time to advance it to the
rank of a major.
CHAPTER NINE
REVERENCE
At the basis of reverence is respect; and reverence is respect amplified
and sublimated. A boy must be either dull or heedless who can look at a
bird sailing in the air for five minutes and not become surcharged with
curiosity to know how it can do it. His curiosity must lead him to an
examination of the wing of a bird, and his scrutiny will reveal it as a
marvelous bit of mechanism. The adjustment and overlapping of the feathers
will convince him that it presents a wonderful design and a no less
wonderful adaptation of means to ends. He sees that when the bird is
poised in the air the wing is essentially air-tight and that when the bird
elects to ascend or descend the feathers open a free passage for the air.
Even a cursory examination of the bird's wing must persuade the boy that,
with any skill he might attain, he could never fabricate anything so
wonderful. This knowledge must, in the nature of things, beget a feeling
of respect, and thereafter, whenever the boy sees a bird, he will
experience a resurgence of this feeling.
Some one has said, "Everything is infinitely high that we can't see over,"
and because the boy comes to know that he cannot duplicate the bird's wing
it becomes infinitely high or great to him and so wins his respect. To the
boy who has been taught to think seriously, the mode of locomotion of a
worm or a snake is likewise a marvel, and he observes it with awe. The boy
who treads a worm underfoot gives indisputable evidence that he has never
given serious thought to its mode of travel. Had he done so, he would
never commit so ruthless an act. The worm would have won his respect by
its ability to do a thing at which he himself would certainly fail. He
sees the worm scaling the trunk of a tree with the greatest ease, but when
he essays the same task he finds it a very difficult matter. So he tips
his cap figuratively to the worm and, in boyish fashion, admits that it is
the better man of the two. And never again, unless inadvertently, will he
crush a worm. Even a snake he will kill only in what he conceives to be
self-defense.
An American was making his first trip to Europe. On the way between the
Azores and Gibraltar the ship encountered a storm of great violence. For
an hour or more the traveler stood on the forward deck, watching the
titanic struggle, feeling the ship tremble at each impact of the waves,
and hearing the roar that only a storm at sea can produce. Upon returning
to his friends he said, "Never again can I speak flippantly of the ocean;
never again can I use the expression, 'crossing the pond.' The sea is too
vast and too sublime for that." He had achieved reverence. Many a child in
school can spell the name of the ocean and give a book definition rather
glibly, who, nevertheless, has not the faintest conception of what an
ocean really is. The tragedy of the matter is that the teacher gives him a
perfect mark for his parrot-like definition and spelling and leaves him in
crass ignorance of the reality. The boy deals only with the husk and
misses the kernel. When he can spell and define, the work has only just
begun, and not until the teacher has contrived to have him emotionalize
the ocean will he enter into the heart of its greatness, and power, and
utility in promoting life, and so come to experience a feeling of respect
for it. When it has won his respect he can read Victor Hugo's matchless
description of the sea with understanding, measurable appreciation, and,
certainly, a thrill of delight.
It is rare fun for children, and even for grown-ups, to locate the
constellations, planets, and stars. Of course, the North Star is
everybody's favorite because it is so steady, so reliable, so dependable.
We know just where to find it, and it never disappoints us. Two boys who
once were crossing from New York to Naples found great delight in a star
in the Southern sky that retained its relative position throughout the
journey. At the conclusion of dinner in the evening the boys were wont to
repair to the deck to find their star and receive its greetings. In their
passage through the Mediterranean they became curious, wondering how it
came about that the star failed to change its relative position in their
journey of three thousand miles. When they realized that their star is the
apex of a triangle whose base is three thousand miles but whose other legs
are so long that the base is infinitesimally short by comparison, their
amazement knew no bounds and for the first time in their lives they gained
a profound respect for space.