Although the month is March and not November, it is never unseasonable
to count up the blessings for which it is well to be thankful. In fact,
from the standpoint of education, the spring is perhaps the appropriate
time to perform this very pleasant function. As if still further to
emphasize the fact that education, like civilization, is an artificial
thing, we have reversed the operations of Mother Nature: we sow our seed
in the fall and cultivate our crops during the winter and reap our
harvests in the spring. I may be pardoned, therefore, for making the
theme of my discussion a brief review of the elements of growth and
victory for which the educator of to-day may justly be grateful, with,
perhaps, a few suggestions of what the next few years may reasonably be
expected to bring forth.
And this course is all the more necessary because, I believe, the
teaching profession is unduly prone to pessimism. One might think at
first glance that the contrary would be true. We are surrounded on every
side by youth. Youth is the material with which we constantly deal.
Youth is buoyant, hopeful, exuberant; and yet, with this material
constantly surrounding us, we frequently find the task wearisome and
apparently hopeless. The reason is not far to seek. Youth is not only
buoyant, it is unsophisticated, it is inexperienced, in many important
particulars it is crude. Some of its tastes must necessarily, in our
judgment, hark back to the primitive, to the barbaric. Ours is
continually the task to civilize, to sophisticate, to refine this raw
material. But, unfortunately for us, the effort that we put forth does
not always bring results that we can see and weigh and measure. The
hopefulness of our material is overshadowed not infrequently by its
crudeness. We take each generation as it comes to us. We strive to lift
it to the plane that civilized society has reached. We do our best and
pass it on, mindful of the many inadequacies, perhaps of the many
failures, in our work. We turn to the new generation that takes its
place. We hope for better materials, but we find no improvement.
And so you and I reflect in our occasional moments of pessimism that
generic situation which inheres in the very work that we do. The
constantly accelerated progress of civilization lays constantly
increasing burdens upon us. In some way or another we must accomplish
the task. In some way or another we must lift the child to the level of
society, and, as society is reaching a continually higher and higher
level, so the distance through which the child must be raised is ever
increased. We would like to think that all this progress in the race
would come to mean that we should be able to take the child at a higher
level; but you who deal with children know from experience the principle
for which the biologist Weismann stands sponsor--the principle, namely,
that acquired characteristics are not inherited; that whatever changes
may be wrought during life in the brains and nerves and muscles of the
present generation cannot be passed on to its successor save through the
same laborious process of acquisition and training; that, however far
the civilization of the race may progress, education, whose duty it is
to conserve and transmit this civilization, must always begin with the
"same old child."
This, I take it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster's
pessimism. In our work we are constantly struggling against that same
inertia which held the race in bondage for how many millenniums only the
evolutionist can approximate a guess,--that inertia of the primitive,
untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which,
for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man
possessed. This inertia has been conquered at various times in the
course of recorded history,--in Egypt and China and India, in Chaldea
and Assyria, in Greece and Rome,--conquered only again to reassert
itself and drive man back into barbarism. Now we of the Western world
have conquered it, let us hope, for all time; for we of the Western
world have discovered an effective method of holding it in abeyance, and
this method is universal public education.
Let Germany close her public schools, and in two generations she will
lapse back into the semi-darkness of medievalism; let her close both her
public schools and her universities, and three generations will fetch
her face to face with the Dark Ages; let her destroy her libraries and
break into ruin all of her works of art, all of her existing triumphs of
technical knowledge and skill, from which a few, self-tutored, might
glean the wisdom that is every one's to-day, and Germany will soon
become the home of a savage race, as it was in the days of Tacitus and
Cæsar. Let Italy close her public schools, and Italy will become the
same discordant jumble of petty states that it was a century ago,--again
to await, this time perhaps for centuries or millenniums, another
Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel to work her regeneration. Let Japan close
her public schools, and Japan in two generations will be a barbaric
kingdom of the Shoguns, shorn of every vestige of power and
prestige,--the easy victim of the machinations of Western diplomats. Let
our country cease in its work of education, and these United States must
needs pass through the reverse stages of their growth until another race
of savages shall roam through the unbroken forest, now and then to reach
the shores of ocean and gaze through the centuries, eastward, to catch
a glimpse of the new Columbus. Like the moving pictures of the
kinetoscope when the reels are reversed, is the picture that imagination
can unroll if we grant the possibility of a lapse from civilization to
savagery.
And so when we take the broader view, we quickly see that, in spite of
our pessimism, we are doing something in the world. We are part of that
machine which civilization has invented and is slowly perfecting to
preserve itself. We may be a very small part, but, so long as the
responsibility for a single child rests upon us, we are not an
unimportant part. Society must reckon with you and me perhaps in an
infinitesimal degree, but it must reckon with the institution which we
represent as it reckons with no other institution that it has reared to
subserve its needs.
In a certain sense these statements are platitudes. We have repeated
them over and over again until the words have lost their tremendous
significance. And it behooves us now and again to revive the old
substance in a new form,--to come afresh to a self-consciousness of our
function. It is not good for any man to hold a debased and inferior
opinion of himself or of his work, and in the field of schoolcraft it is
easy to fall into this self-depreciating habit of thought. We cannot
hope that the general public will ever come to view our work in the true
perspective that I have very briefly outlined. It would probably not be
wise to promulgate publicly so pronounced an affirmation of our
function and of our worth. The popular mind must think in concrete
details rather than in comprehensive principles, when the subject of
thought is a specialized vocation. You and I have crude ideas, no doubt,
of the lawyer's function, of the physician's function, of the
clergyman's function. Not less crude are their ideas of our function.
Even when they patronize us by saying that our work is the noblest that
any man or woman would engage in, they have but a vague and shadowy
perception of its real significance. I doubt not that, with the majority
of those who thus pat us verbally upon the back, the words that they use
are words only. They do not envy us our privileges,--unless it is our
summer vacations,--nor do they encourage their sons to enter service in
our craft. The popular mind--the nontechnical mind,--must work in the
concrete;--it must have visible evidences of power and influence before
it pays homage to a man or to an institution.
Throughout the German empire the traveler is brought constantly face to
face with the memorials that have been erected by a grateful people to
the genius of the Iron Chancellor. Bismarck richly deserves the tribute
that is paid to his memory, but a man to be honored in this way must
exert a tangible and an obvious influence.
And yet, in a broader sense, the preëminence of Germany is due in far
greater measure to two men whose names are not so frequently to be
found inscribed upon towers and monuments. In the very midst of the
havoc and devastation wrought by the Napoleon wars,--at the very moment
when the German people seemed hopelessly crushed and defeated,--an
intellect more penetrating than that of Bismarck grasped the logic of
the situation. With the inspiration that comes with true insight, the
philosopher Fichte issued his famous Addresses to the German people.
With clear-cut argument couched in white-hot words, he drove home the
great principle that lies at the basis of United Germany and upon the
results of which Bismarck and Von Moltke and the first Emperor erected
the splendid structure that to-day commands the admiration of the world.
Fichte told the German people that their only hope lay in universal,
public education. And the kingdom of Prussia--impoverished, bankrupt,
war-ridden, and war-devastated--heard the plea. A great scheme that
comprehended such an education was already at hand. It had fallen almost
stillborn from the only kind of a mind that could have produced it,--a
mind that was suffused with an overwhelming love for humanity and
incomparably rich with the practical experiences of a primary
schoolmaster. It had fallen from the mind of Pestalozzi, the Swiss
reformer, who thus stands with Fichte as one of the vital factors in the
development of Germany's educational supremacy.
The people's schools of Prussia, imbued with the enthusiasm of Fichte
and Pestalozzi,[3] gave to Germany the tremendous advantage that enabled
it so easily to overcome its hereditary foe, when, two generations
later, the Franco-Prussian War was fought; for the _Volksschule_ gave to
Germany something that no other nation of that time possessed; namely,
an educated proletariat, an intelligent common people. Bismarck knew
this when he laid his cunning plans for the unification of German states
that was to crown the brilliant series of victories beginning at Sedan
and ending within the walls of Paris. William of Prussia knew it when,
in the royal palace at Versailles, he accepted the crown that made him
the first Emperor of United Germany. Von Moltke knew it when, at the
capitulation of Paris, he was asked to whom the credit of the victory
was due, and he replied, in the frank simplicity of the true soldier and
the true hero, "The schoolmaster did it."
And yet Bismarck and Von Moltke and the Emperor are the heroes of
Germany, and if Fichte and Pestalozzi are not forgotten, at least their
memories are not cherished as are the memories of the more tangible and
obvious heroes. Instinct lies deeply embedded in human nature and it is
instinctive to think in the concrete. And so I repeat that we cannot
expect the general public to share in the respect and veneration which
you and I feel for our calling, for you and I are technicians in
education, and we can see the process as a comprehensive whole. But our
fellow men and women have their own interests and their own departments
of technical knowledge and skill; they see the schoolhouse and the
pupils' desks and the books and other various material symbols of our
work,--they see these things and call them education; just as we see a
freight train thundering across the viaduct or a steamer swinging out in
the lake and call these things commerce. In both cases, the nontechnical
mind associates the word with something concrete and tangible; in both
cases, the technical mind associates the same word with an abstract
process, comprehending a movement of vast proportions.
To compress such a movement--whether it be commerce or government or
education--in a single conception requires a multitude of experiences
involving actual adjustments with the materials involved; involving
constant reflection upon hidden meanings, painful investigations into
hidden causes, and mastery of a vast body of specialized knowledge which
it takes years of study to digest and assimilate.
It is not every stevedore upon the docks, nor every stoker upon the
steamers, nor every brakeman upon the railroads, who comprehends what
commerce really means. It is not every banker's clerk who knows the
meaning of business. It is not every petty holder of public office who
knows what government really means. But this, at least, is true: in
proportion as the worker knows the meaning of the work that he does,--in
proportion as he sees it in its largest relations to society and to
life,--his work is no longer the drudgery of routine toil. It becomes
instead an intelligent process directed toward a definite goal. It has
acquired that touch of artistry which, so far as human testimony goes,
is the only pure and uncontaminated source of human happiness.
And the chief blessing for which you and I should be thankful to-day is
that this larger view of our calling has been vouchsafed to us as it has
been vouchsafed no former generation of teachers. Education as the
conventional prerogative of the rich,--as the garment which separated
the higher from the lower classes of society,--this could scarcely be
looked upon as a fascinating and uplifting ideal from which to derive
hope and inspiration in the day's work; and yet this was the commonly
accepted function of education for thousands of years, and the teachers
who did the actual work of instruction could not but reflect in their
attitude and bearing the servile character of the task that they
performed. Education to fit the child to earn a better living, to
command a higher wage,--this myopic view of the function of the school
could do but little to make the work of teaching anything but drudgery;
and yet it is this narrow and materialistic view that has dominated our
educational system to within a comparatively few years.
So silently and yet so insistently have our craft ideals been
transformed in the last two decades that you and I are scarcely aware
that our point of view has been changed and that we are looking upon our
work from a much higher point of vantage and in a light entirely new.
And yet this is the change that has been wrought. That education, in its
widest meaning, is the sole conservator and transmitter of civilization
to successive generations found expression as far back as Aristotle and
Plato, and has been vaguely voiced at intervals down through the
centuries; but its complete establishment came only as an indirect issue
of the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, and its
application to the problems of practical schoolcraft and its
dissemination through the rank and file of teachers awaited the dawn of
the twentieth century. To-day we see expressions and indications of the
new outlook upon every hand, in the greatly increased professional zeal
that animates the teacher's calling; in the widespread movement among
all civilized countries to raise the standards of teachers, to eliminate
those candidates for service who have not subjected themselves to the
discipline of special preparation; in the increased endowments and
appropriations for schools and seminaries that prepare teachers; and,
perhaps most strikingly at the present moment, in that concerted
movement to organize into institutions of formal education, all of those
branches of training which have, for years, been left to the chance
operation of economic needs working through the crude and unorganized
though often effective apprentice system. The contemporary fervor for
industrial education is only one expression of this new view that, in
the last analysis, the school must stand sponsor for the conservation
and transmission of every valuable item of experience, every usable fact
or principle, every tiniest perfected bit of technical skill, every
significant ideal or prejudice, that the race has acquired at the cost
of so much struggle and suffering and effort.
I repeat that this new vantage point from which to gain a comprehensive
view of our calling has been attained only as an indirect result of the
scientific investigations of the nineteenth century. We are wont to
study the history of education from the work and writings of a few great
reformers, and it is true that much that is valuable in our present
educational system can be understood and appreciated only when viewed in
the perspective of such sources. Aristotle and Quintilian, Abelard and
St. Thomas Aquinas, Sturm and Philip Melanchthon, Comenius, Pestalozzi,
Rousseau, Herbart, and Froebel still live in the schools of to-day.
Their genius speaks to us through the organization of subject-matter,
through the art of questioning, through the developmental methods of
teaching, through the use of pictures, through objective instruction,
and in a thousand other forms. But this dominant ideal of education to
which I have referred and which is so rapidly transforming our outlook
and vitalizing our organization and inspiring us to new efforts, is not
to be drawn from these sources. The new histories of education must
account for this new ideal, and to do this they must turn to the masters
in science who made the middle part of the nineteenth century the period
of the most profound changes that the history of human thought
records.[4]
With the illuminating principle of evolution came a new and generously
rich conception of human growth and development. The panorama of
evolution carried man back far beyond the limits of recorded human
history and indicated an origin as lowly as the succeeding uplift has
been sublime. The old depressing and fatalistic notion that the human
race was on the downward path, and that the march of civilization must
sooner or later end in a cul-de-sac (a view which found frequent
expression in the French writers of the eighteenth century and which
dominated the skepticism of the dark hours preceding the
Revolution)--this fatalistic view met its death-blow in the principle of
evolution. A vista of hope entirely undreamed of stretched out before
the race. If the tremendous leverage of the untold millenniums of brute
and savage ancestry could be overcome, even in slight measure, by a few
short centuries of intelligence and reason, what might not happen in a
few more centuries of constantly increasing light? In short, the
principle of evolution supplied the perspective that was necessary to an
adequate evaluation of human progress.
But this inspiriting outlook which was perhaps the most comprehensive
result of Darwin's work had indirect consequences that were vitally
significant to education. It is with mental and not with physical
development that education is primarily concerned, and yet mental
development is now known to depend fundamentally upon physical forces.
The same decade that witnessed the publication of the _Origin of
Species_ also witnessed the birth of another great book, little known
except to the specialist, and yet destined to achieve immortality. This
book is the _Elements of Psychophysics_, the work of the German
scientist Fechner. The intimate relation between mental life and
physical and physiological forces was here first clearly demonstrated,
and the way was open for a science of psychology which should cast aside
the old and threadbare raiment of mystery and speculation and
metaphysic, and stand forth naked and unashamed.
But all this was only preparatory to the epoch-making discoveries that
have had so much to do with our present attitude toward education. The
Darwinian hypothesis led to violent controversy, not only between the
opponents and supporters of the theory, but also among the various camps
of the evolutionists themselves. Among these controversies was that
which concerned itself with the inheritance of acquired characteristics,
and the outcome of that conflict has a direct significance to present
educational theory. The principle, now almost conclusively
established,[5] that the characteristics acquired by an organism during
its lifetime are not transmitted by physical heredity to its offspring,
must certainly stand as the basic principle of education; for everything
that we identify as human as contrasted with that which is brutal must
look to education for its preservation and support. It has been stated
by competent authorities that, during the past ten thousand years, there
has been no significant change in man's physical constitution. This
simply means that Nature finished her work as far as man is concerned
far beyond the remotest period that human history records; that, for all
that we can say to-day, there must have existed in the very distant past
human beings who were just as well adapted by nature to the lives that
we are leading as we are to-day adapted; that what they lacked and what
we possess is simply a mass of traditions, of habits, of ideals, and
prejudices which have been slowly accumulated through the ages and which
are passed on from generation to generation by imitation and instruction
and training and discipline; and that the child of to-day, left to his
own devices and operated upon in no way by the products of
civilization, would develop into a savage undistinguishable in all
significant qualities from other savages.
The possibilities that follow from such a conception are almost
overwhelming even at first glance, and yet the theory is borne out by
adequate experiments. The transformation of the Japanese people through
two generations of education in Western civilization is a complete
upsetting of the old theory that as far as race is concerned, there is
anything significantly important in blood, and confirms the view that
all that is racially significant depends upon the influences that
surround the young of the race during the formative years. The complete
assimilation of foreign ingredients into our own national stock through
the instrumentality of the public school is another demonstration that
the factors which form the significant characteristics in the lower
animals possess but a minimum of significance to man,--that color, race,
stature, and even brain weight and the shape of the cranium, have very
little to do with human worth or human efficiency save in extremely
abnormal cases.
And so we have at last a fundamental principle with which to illumine
the field of our work and from which to derive not only light but
inspiration. Unite this with John Fiske's penetrating induction that the
possibilities of progress through education are correlated directly with
the length of the period of growth or immaturity,--that is, that the
races having the longest growth before maturity are capable of the
highest degree of civilization,--and we have a pair of principles the
influence of which we see reflected all about us in the great activity
for education and especially in the increased sense of pride and
responsibility and respect for his calling that is animating the modern
teacher.
And what will be the result of this new point of view? First and
foremost, an increased general respect for the work. Until a profession
respects itself, it cannot very well ask for the world's respect, and
until it can respect itself on the basis of scientific principles
indubitably established, its respect for itself will be little more than
the irritating self-esteem of the goody-goody order which is so often
associated with our craft.
With our own respect for our calling, based upon this incontrovertible
principle, will come, sooner or later, increased compensation for the
work and increased prestige in the community. I repeat that these things
can only come after we have established a true craft spirit. If we are
ashamed of our calling, if we regret openly and publicly that we are not
lawyers or physicians or dentists or bricklayers or farmers or anything
rather than teachers, the public will have little respect for the
teacher's calling. As long as we criticize each other before laymen and
make light of each other's honest efforts, the public will question our
professional standing on the ground that we have no organized code of
professional ethics,--a prerequisite for any profession.
I started out to tell you something that we ought to be thankful
for,--something that ought to counteract in a measure the inevitable
tendencies toward pessimism and discouragement. The hopeful thing about
our present status is that we have an established principle upon which
to work. A writer in a recent periodical stoutly maintained that
education was in the position just now that medicine was in during the
Middle Ages. The statement is hardly fair, either to medicine or to
education. If one were to attempt a parallel, one might say that
education stands to-day where medicine stood about the middle of the
nineteenth century. The analogy might be more closely drawn by comparing
our present conception of education with the conception of medicine just
prior to the application of the experimental method to a solution of its
problems. Education has still a long road to travel before it reaches
the point of development that medicine has to-day attained. It has still
to develop principles that are comparable to the doctrine of lymph
therapy or to that latest triumph of investigation in the field of
medicine,--the theory of opsonins,--which almost makes one believe that
in a few years violent accident and old age will be the only sources of
death in the human race.
Education, we admit, has a long road to travel before it reaches so
advanced a point of development. But there is no immediate cause for
pessimism or despair. We need especially, now that the purpose of
education is adequately defined, an adequate doctrine of educational
values and a rich and vital infusion of the spirit of experimental
science. For efficiency in the work of instruction and training, we need
to know the influence of different types of experience in controlling
human conduct,--we need to know just what degree of efficiency is
exerted by our arithmetic and literature, our geography and history, our
drawing and manual training, our Latin and Greek, our ethics and
psychology. It is the lack of definite ideas and criteria in these
fields that constitutes the greatest single source of waste in our
educational system to-day.
And yet even here the outlook is extremely hopeful. The new movement
toward industrial education is placing greater and greater emphasis upon
those subjects of instruction and those types of methods whose
efficiency can be tested and determined in an accurate fashion. The
intimate relation between the classroom, on the one hand, and the
machine shop, the experimental farm, the hospital ward and operating
room, and the practice school, on the other hand, indicates a source of
accurate knowledge with regard to the way in which our teachings really
affect the conduct and adjustment of our pupils that cannot fail within
a short time to serve as the basis for some illuminating principle of
educational values. This, I believe, will be the next great step in the
development of our profession.
There has been no intention in what I have said to minimize the
disadvantages and discouragements under which we are to-day doing our
work. My only plea is for the hopeful and optimistic outlook which, I
maintain, is richly justified by the progress that has already been made
and by the virile character of the forces that are operating in the
present situation.
On the whole, I can see no reason why I should not encourage young men
to enter the service of schoolcraft. I cannot say to them that they will
attain to great wealth, but I can safely promise them that, if they give
to the work of preparation the same attention and time that they would
give to their education and training for medicine or law or engineering,
their services will be in large demand and their rewards not to be
sneered at. Their incomes will not enable them to compete with the
captains of industry, but they will permit as full an enjoyment of the
comforts of life as it is good for any young man to command. But the
ambitious teacher must pay the price to reap these rewards,--the price
of time and energy and labor,--the price that he would have to pay for
success in any other human calling. What I cannot promise him in
education is the opportunity for wide popular adulation, but this, after
all, is a matter of taste. Some men crave it and they should go into
those vocations that will give it to them. Others are better satisfied
with the discriminating recognition and praise of their own
fellow-craftsmen.