I
I know that I do not need to plead with this audience for a recognition
of the scientific spirit in the solution of educational problems. The
long life and the enviable record of this Society of Pedagogy testify in
themselves to that spirit of free inquiry, to the calm and dispassionate
search for the truth which lies at the basis of the scientific method.
You have gathered here, fortnight after fortnight, to discuss
educational problems in the light of your experience. You have reported
your experience and listened to the results that others have gleaned in
the course of their daily work. And experience is the corner stone of
science.
Some of the most stimulating and clarifying discussions of educational
problems that I have ever heard have been made in the sessions of this
Society. You have been scientific in your attitude toward education, and
I may add that I first learned the lessons of the real science of
education in the St. Louis schools, and under the inspiration that was
furnished by the men who were members of this Society. What I knew of
the science of education before I came to this city ten years ago, was
gleaned largely from books. It was deductive, _a priori_, in its nature.
What I learned here was the induction from actual experience.
My very first introduction to my colleagues among the school men of this
city was a lesson in the science of education. I had brought with me a
letter to one of your principals. He was in the office down on Locust
Street the first Saturday that I spent in the city. I presented my
letter to him, and, with that true Southern hospitality which has always
characterized your corps, he took me immediately under his wing and
carried me out to luncheon with him.
We sat for hours in a little restaurant down on Sixth Street,--he was my
teacher and I was his pupil. And gradually, as the afternoon wore on, I
realized that I had met a master craftsman in the art of education. At
first I talked glibly enough of what I intended to do, and he listened
sympathetically and helpfully, with a little quizzical smile in his eyes
as I outlined my ambitious plans. And when I had run the gamut of my
dreams, he took his turn, and, in true Socratic fashion, yet without
making me feel in the least that I was only a dreamer after all, he
refashioned my theories. One by one the little card houses that I had
built up were deftly, smoothly, gently, but completely demolished. I did
not know the ABC of schoolcraft--but he did not tell me that I did not.
He went at the task of instruction from the positive point of view. He
proved to me, by reminiscence and example, how different are actual and
ideal conditions. And finally he wound up with a single question that
opened a new world to me. "What," he asked, "is the dominant
characteristic of the child's mind?" I thought at first that I was on
safe ground--for had I not taken a course in child study, and had I not
measured some hundreds of school children while working out a university
thesis? So I began with my list. But, at each characteristic that I
mentioned he shook his head. "No," he said, "no; that is not right." And
when finally I had exhausted my list, he said to me, "The dominant
characteristic of the child's mind is its _seriousness_. The child is
the most _serious_ creature in the world."
The answer staggered me for a moment. Like ninety-nine per cent of the
adult population of this globe, the seriousness of the child had never
appealed to me. In spite of the theoretical basis of my training, that
single, dominant element of child life had escaped me. I had gained my
notion of the child from books, and, I also fear, from the Sunday
supplements. To me, deep down in my heart, the child was an animated
joke. I was immersed in unscientific preconceptions. But the master
craftsman had gained his conception of child life from intimate,
empirical acquaintance with the genus boy. He had gleaned from his
experience that fundamental truth: "The child is the most serious
creature in the world."
Sometime I hope that I may make some fitting acknowledgment of the debt
of gratitude that I owe to that man. The opportunities that I had to
talk with him were all too few, but I did make a memorable visit to his
school, and studied at first hand the great work that he was doing for
the pupils of the Columbia district. He died the next year, and I shall
never forget the words that stood beneath his picture that night in one
of the daily papers: "Charles Howard: Architect of Character."