But I am getting away, from my text. You will remember that I said that
the most useful thing that we can teach the child is to attack
strenuously and resolutely any problem that confronts him whether it
pleases him or not, and I wanted to be certain that you did not
misinterpret me to mean that we should, for this reason, make our school
tasks unnecessarily difficult and laborious. After all, while our
attitude should always be one of interesting our pupils, their attitude
should always be one of effortful attention,--of willingness to do the
task that we think it best for them to do. You see it is a sort of a
double-headed policy, and how to carry it out is a perplexing problem.
Of so much I am certain, however, at the outset: if the pupil takes the
attitude that we are there to interest and entertain him, we shall make
a sorry fiasco of the whole matter, and inasmuch as this very tendency
is in the air at the present time, I feel justified in at least
referring to its danger.
Now if this ideal of persistent effort is the most useful thing that
can come out of education, what is the next most useful? Again, as I
analyze what I obtained from my own education, it seems to me that, next
to learning that disagreeable tasks are often well worth doing, the
factor that has helped me most in getting a living has been the method
of solving the situations that confronted me. After all, if we simply
have the ideal of resolute and aggressive and persistent attack, we may
struggle indefinitely without much result. All problems of life involve
certain common factors. The essential difference between the educated
and the uneducated man, if we grant each an equal measure of pluck,
persistence, and endurance, lies in the superior ability of the educated
man to analyze his problem effectively and to proceed intelligently
rather than blindly to its solution. I maintain that education should
give a man this ideal of attacking any problem; furthermore I maintain
that the education of the present day, in spite of the anathemas that
are hurled against it, is doing this in richer measure than it has ever
been done before. But there is no reason why we should not do it in
still greater measure.
I once knew two men who were in the business of raising fruit for
commercial purposes. Each had a large orchard which he operated
according to conventional methods and which netted him a comfortable
income. One of these men was a man of narrow education: the other a man
of liberal education, although his training had not been directed in
any way toward the problems of horticulture. The orchards had borne
exceptionally well for several years, but one season, when the fruit
looked especially promising, a period of wet, muggy weather came along
just before the picking season, and one morning both these men went out
into their orchards, to find the fruit very badly "specked." Now the
conventional thing to do in such cases was well known to both men. Each
had picked up a good deal of technical information about caring for
fruit, and each did the same thing in meeting this situation. He got out
his spraying outfit, prepared some Bordeaux mixture, and set vigorously
at work with his pumps. So far as persistence and enterprise went, both
men stood on an equal footing. But it happened that this was an unusual
and not a conventional situation. The spraying did not alleviate the
condition. The corruption spread through the trees like wildfire, and
seemed to thrive on copper sulphate rather than succumb to its corrosive
influence.
Now this was where the difference in training showed itself. The
orchardist who worked by rule of thumb, when he found that his rule did
not work, gave up the fight and spent his time sitting on his front
porch bemoaning his luck. The other set diligently at work to analyze
the situation. His education had not taught him anything about the
characteristics of parasitic fungi, for parasitic fungi were not very
well understood when he was in school. But his education had left with
him a general method of procedure for just such cases, and that method
he at once applied. It had taught him how to find the information that
he needed, provided that such information was available. It had taught
him that human experience is crystallized in books, and that, when a
discovery is made in any field of science,--no matter how specialized
the field and no matter how trivial the finding,--the discovery is
recorded in printer's ink and placed at the disposal of those who have
the intelligence to find it and apply it. And so he set out to read up
on the subject,--to see what other men had learned about this peculiar
kind of apple rot. He obtained all that had been written about it and
began to master it. He told his friend about this material and suggested
that the latter follow the same course, but the man of narrow education
soon found himself utterly at sea in a maze of technical terms. The
terms were new to the other too, but he took down his dictionary and
worked them out. He knew how to use indices and tables of contents and
various other devices that facilitate the gathering of information, and
while his uneducated friend was storming over the pedantry of men who
use big words, the other was making rapid progress through the material.
In a short time he learned everything that had been found out about this
specific disease. He learned that its spores are encased in a gelatinous
sac which resisted the entrance of the chemicals. He found how the
spores were reproduced, how they wintered, how they germinated in the
following season; and, although he did not save much of his crop that
year, he did better the next. Nor were the evidences of his superiority
limited to this very useful result. He found that, after all, very
little was known about this disease, so he set himself to find out more
about it. To do this, he started where other investigators had left off,
and then he applied a principle he had learned from his education;
namely, that the only valid methods of obtaining new truths are the
methods of close observation and controlled experiment.
Now I maintain that the education which was given that man was effective
in a degree that ought to make his experience an object lesson for us
who teach. What he had found most useful at a very critical juncture of
his business life was, primarily, not the technical knowledge that he
had gained either in school or in actual experience. His superiority lay
in the fact that he knew how to get hold of knowledge when he needed it,
how to master it once he had obtained it, how to apply it once he had
mastered it, and finally how to go about to discover facts that had been
undetected by previous investigators. I care not whether he got this
knowledge in the elementary school or in the high school or in the
college. He might have secured it in any one of the three types of
institution, but he had to learn it somewhere, and I shall go further
and say that the average man has to learn it in some school and under an
explicit and conscious method of instruction.