It is safe to say that formalism is no longer a characteristic feature
of the typical American school. It is so long since I have heard any
rote learning in a schoolroom that I am wondering if it is not almost
time for some one to show that a little rote learning would not be at
all a bad thing in preadolescent education. We ridicule the memoriter
methods of Chinese education and yet we sometimes forget that Chinese
education has done something that no other system of education, however
well planned, has even begun to do in the same degree. It has kept the
Chinese empire a unit through a period of time compared with which the
entire history of Greece and Rome is but an episode. We may ridicule the
formalism of Hebrew education, and yet the schools of rabbis have
preserved intact the racial integrity of the Jewish people during the
two thousand years that have elapsed since their geographical unity was
destroyed. I am not justifying the methods of Chinese or Hebrew
education. I am quite willing to admit that, in China at any rate, the
game may not have been worth the candle; but I am still far from
convinced that it is not a good thing for children to reduce to verbal
form a good many things that are now never learned in such a way as to
make any lasting impression upon the memory; and our criticism of
oriental formalism is not so much concerned with the method of learning
as with the content of learning,--not so much with learning by heart as
with the character of the material that was thus memorized.
But, although formalism is no longer a distinctive feature of American
education, formalism is the point from which education is most
frequently attacked,--and this is the chief source of my dissatisfaction
with the present-day critics of our elementary schools. In a great many
cases, they have set up a man of straw and demolished him completely.
And in demolishing him, they have incidentally knocked the props from
under the feet of many a good teacher, leaving him dazed and uncertain
of his bearings, stung with the conviction that what he has been doing
for his pupils is entirely without value, that his life of service has
been a failure, that the lessons of his own experience are not to be
trusted, nor the verdicts of his own intelligence respected. Go to any
of the great summer schools and you will meet, among the attending
teachers, hundreds of faithful, conscientious men and women who could
tell you if they would (and some of them will) of the muddle in which
their minds are left after some of the lectures to which they have
listened. Why should they fail to be depressed? The whole weight of
academic authority seems to be against them. The entire machinery of
educational administration is wheeling them with relentless force into
paths that seem to them hopelessly intricate and bewildering. If it is
true, as I think it is, that some of the proposals of modern education
are an attempt to square the circle, it is certainly true that the
classroom teacher is standing at the pressure points in this procedure.
We hear expressed on every side a great deal of sympathy for the child
as the victim of our educational system. Sympathy for childhood is the
most natural thing in the world. It is one of the basic human instincts,
and its expressions are among the finest things in human life. But why
limit our sympathy to the child, especially to-day when he is about as
happy and as fortunate an individual as anybody has ever been in all
history. Why not let a little of it go out to the teacher of this child?
Why not plan a little for her comfort and welfare and encouragement? It
is her skill that is assimilating the children of our alien population.
It is her strength that is lifting bodily each generation to the
ever-advancing race levels. Her work must be the main source of the
inspiration that will impel the race to further advancement. And yet
when these half-million teachers who mean so much to this country gather
at their institutes, when they attend the summer schools, when they take
up their professional journals, what do they hear and read? Criticisms
of their work. Denunciations of their methods. Serious doubts of their
intelligence. Aspersions cast upon their sincerity, their patience, and
their loyalty to their superiors. This, mingled with some mawkish
sentimentalism that passes under the name of inspiration. Only
occasionally a word of downright commendation, a sign of honest and
heartfelt appreciation, a note of sympathy or encouragement.
Carnegie gives fifteen million dollars to provide pensions for
superannuated college professors; but the elementary teacher who is not
fortunate enough to die in harness must look forward to the almshouse.
The people tax themselves for magnificent buildings and luxurious
furnishings, but not one cent do they offer for teachers' pensions.
What a blot upon Western civilization is this treatment of the teachers
in our lower schools. These people are doing the work that even the
savage races universally consider to be of the highest type. Benighted
China places her teachers second only to the literati themselves in the
place of honor. The Hindus made the teaching profession the highest
caste in the social scale. The Jews intrusted the education of their
children to their Rabbis, the most learned and the most honored of their
race. It is only Western civilization--it is almost only our much-lauded
Anglo-Saxon civilization--that denies to the teacher a station in life
befitting his importance as a social servant.