II

In the first place, let me make myself perfectly clear upon what I mean

by the word "useful." What, after all, is the "useful" study in our

schools? What do men find to be the useful thing in their lives? The

most natural answer to this question is that the useful things are those

that enable us to meet effectively the conditions of life,--or, to use a

phrase that is perfectly clear to us all, the things that help us in

getting a living. The vast majority of men and women in this world

measure all values by this standard, for most of us are, to use the

expressive slang of the day, "up against" this problem, and "up against"

it so hard and so constantly that we interpret everything in the greatly

foreshortened perspective of immediate necessity. Most of us in this

room are confronting this problem of making a living. At any rate, I am

confronting it, and consequently I may lay claim to some of the

authority that comes from experience.

And since I have made this personal reference, may I violate the canons

of good taste and make still another? I was face to face with this

problem of getting a living a good many years ago, when the opportunity

came to me to take a college course. I could see nothing ahead after

that except another struggle with this same vital issue. So I decided to

take a college course which would, in all probability, help me to solve

the problem. Scientific agriculture was not developed in those days as

it has been since that time, but a start had been made, and the various

agricultural colleges were offering what seemed to be very practical

courses. I had had some early experience on the farm, and I decided to

become a scientific farmer. I took the course of four years and secured

my degree. The course was as useful from the standpoint of practical

agriculture as any that could have been devised at the time. But when I

graduated, what did I find? The same old problem of getting a living

still confronted me as I had expected that it would; and alas! I had got

my education in a profession that demanded capital. I was a landless

farmer. Times were hard and work of all kinds was very scarce. The

farmers of those days were inclined to scoff at scientific agriculture.

I could have worked for my board and a little more, and I should have

done so had I been able to find a job. But while I was looking for the

place, a chance came to teach school, and I took the opportunity as a

means of keeping the wolf from the door. I have been engaged in the work

of teaching ever since. When I was able to buy land, I did so, and I

have to-day a farm of which I am very proud. It does not pay large

dividends, but I keep it up for the fun I get out of it,--and I like to

think, also, that if I should lose my job as a teacher, I could go back

to the farm and show the natives how to make money. This is doubtless an

illusion, but it is a source of solid comfort just the same.

Now the point of this experience is simply this: I secured an education

that seemed to me to promise the acme of utility. In one way, it has

fulfilled that promise far beyond my wildest expectations, but that way

was very different from the one that I had anticipated. The technical

knowledge that I gained during those four strenuous years, I apply now

only as a means of recreation. So far as enabling me directly to get a

living, this technical knowledge does not pay one per cent on the

investment of time and money. And yet I count the training that I got

from its mastery as, perhaps, the most useful product of my education.

Now what was the secret of its utility? As I analyze my experience, I

find it summed up very largely in two factors. In the first place, I

studied a set of subjects for which I had at the outset very little

taste. In studying agriculture, I had to master a certain amount of

chemistry, physics, botany, and zoölogy, for each and every one of which

I felt, at the outset, a distinct aversion and dislike. A mastery of

these subjects was essential to a realization of the purpose that I had

in mind. I was sure that I should never like them, and yet, as I kept at

work, I gradually found myself losing that initial distaste. First one

and then another opened out its vista of truth and revelation before me,

and almost before I was aware of it, I was enthusiastic over science. It

was a long time before I generalized that experience and drew its

lesson, but the lesson, once learned, has helped me more even in the

specific task of getting a living than anything else that came out of my

school training. That experience taught me, not only the necessity for

doing disagreeable tasks,--for attacking them hopefully and

cheerfully,--but it also taught me that disagreeable tasks, if attacked

in the right way, and persisted in with patience, often become

attractive in themselves. Over and over again in meeting the situations

of real life, I have been confronted with tasks that were initially

distasteful. Sometimes I have surrendered before them; but sometimes,

too, that lesson has come back to me, and has inspired me to struggle

on, and at no time has it disappointed me by the outcome. I repeat that

there is no technical knowledge that I have gained that compares for a

moment with that ideal of patience and persistence. When it comes to

real, downright utility, measured by this inexorable standard of getting

a living, let me commend to you the ideal of persistent effort. All the

knowledge that we can learn or teach will come to very little if this

element is lacking.

Now this is very far from saying that the pursuit of really useful

knowledge may not give this ideal just as effectively as the pursuit of

knowledge that will never be used. My point is simply this: that beyond

the immediate utility of the facts that we teach,--indeed, basic and

fundamental to this utility,--is the utility of the ideals and standards

that are derived from our school work. Whatever we teach, these

essential factors can be made to stand out in our work, and if our

pupils acquire these we shall have done the basic and important thing in

helping them to solve the problems of real life,--and if our pupils do

not acquire these, it will make little difference how intrinsically

valuable may be the content of our instruction. I feel like emphasizing

this matter to-day, because there is in the air a notion that utility

depends entirely upon the content of the curriculum. Certainly the

curriculum must be improved from this standpoint, but we are just now

losing sight of the other equally important factor,--that, after all,

while both are essential, it is the spirit of teaching rather than the

content of teaching that is basic and fundamental.

Nor have I much sympathy with that extreme view of this matter which

asserts that we must go out of our way to provide distasteful tasks for

the pupil in order to develop this ideal of persistence. I believe that

such a policy will always tend to defeat its own purpose. I know a

teacher who holds this belief. He goes out of his way to make tasks

difficult. He refuses to help pupils over hard places. He does not

believe in careful assignments of lessons, because, he maintains, the

pupil ought to learn to overcome difficulties for himself, and how can

he learn unless real difficulties are presented?

The great trouble with this teacher is that his policy does not work out

in practice. A small minority of his pupils are strengthened by it; the

majority are weakened. He is right when he says that a pupil gains

strength only by overcoming difficulties, but he neglects a very

important qualification of this rule, namely, that a pupil gains no

strength out of obstacles that he fails to overcome. It is the conquest

that comes after effort,--this is the factor that gives one strength and

confidence. But when defeat follows defeat and failure follows failure,

it is weakness that is being engendered--not strength. And that is the

trouble with this teacher's pupils. The majority leave him with all

confidence in their own ability shaken out of them and some of them

never recover from the experience.

And so while I insist strenuously that the most useful lesson we can

teach our pupils is how to do disagreeable tasks cheerfully and

willingly, please do not understand me to mean that we should go out of

our way to provide disagreeable tasks. After all, I rejoice that my own

children are learning how to read and write and cipher much more easily,

much more quickly, and withal much more pleasantly than I learned those

useful arts. The more quickly they get to the plane that their elders

have reached, the more quickly they can get beyond this plane and on to

the next level.

To argue against improved methods in teaching on the ground that they

make things too easy for the pupil is, to my mind, a grievous error. It

is as fallacious as to argue that the introduction of machinery is a

curse because it has diminished in some measure the necessity for human

drudgery. But if machinery left mankind to rest upon its oars, if it

discouraged further progress and further effortful achievement, it

_would_ be a curse: and if the easier and quicker methods of instruction

simply bring my children to my own level and then fail to stimulate them

to get beyond my level, then they are a curse and not a blessing.

I do not decry that educational policy of to-day which insists that

school work should be made as simple and attractive as possible. I do

decry that misinterpretation of this policy which looks at the matter

from the other side, and asserts so vehemently that the child should

never be asked or urged to do something that is not easy and attractive.

It is only because there is so much in the world to be done that, for

the sake of economizing time and strength, we should raise the child as

quickly and as rapidly and as pleasantly as possible to the plane that

the race has reached. But among all the lessons of race experience that

we must teach him there is none so fundamental and important as the

lesson of achievement itself,--the supreme lesson wrung from human

experience,--the lesson, namely, that every advance that the world has

made, every step that it has taken forward, every increment that has

been added to the sum total of progress has been attained at the price

of self-sacrifice and effort and struggle,--at the price of doing things

that one does not want to do. And unless a man is willing to pay that

price, he is bound to be the worst kind of a social parasite, for he is

simply living on the experience of others, and adding to this capital

nothing of his own.

It is sometimes said that universal education is essential in order that

the great mass of humanity may live in greater comfort and enjoy the

luxuries that in the past have been vouchsafed only to the few.

Personally I think that this is all right so far as it goes, but it

fails to reach an ultimate goal. Material comfort is justified only

because it enables mankind to live more effectively on the lower planes

of life and give greater strength and greater energy to the solution of

new problems upon the higher planes of life. The end of life can never

be adequately formulated in terms of comfort and ease, nor even in

terms of culture and intellectual enjoyment; the end of life is

achievement, and no matter how far we go, achievement is possible only

to those who are willing to pay the price. When the race stops investing

its capital of experience in further achievement, when it settles down

to take life easily, it will not take it very long to eat up its capital

and revert to the plane of the brute.