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Title: Education and living

Author: Randolph Silliman Bourne

Release date: September 5, 2022 [eBook #68912]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Century Co

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDUCATION AND LIVING ***

EDUCATION AND LIVING




  BY

  RANDOLPH BOURNE

  AUTHOR OF “YOUTH AND LIFE,” “THE
  GARY SCHOOLS”


  [Illustration]


  NEW YORK
  THE CENTURY CO.
  1917




  Copyright, 1917, by
  THE CENTURY CO.

  Copyright, 1915, 1916, 1917, by
  THE REPUBLIC PUBLISHING CO.

  _Published, April, 1917_




PREFACE


These papers, reprinted with slight additions from the pages of the
“New Republic,” through the courtesy of the editors, do not pretend
to be anything more than glimpses and paraphrases of new tendencies
in the American school and college. The public school is the most
interesting and the most hopeful of our American social enterprises
during these days of sluggishness for us and dreary horror for the
rest of the world. It is becoming one of the few rational and one of
the few democratic things we have, and science and hope are laying
a foundation upon which a really self-conscious society could build
almost anything it chose. The school fascinates me because there is
almost no sociological, administrative or psychological truth that
cannot be drawn out of its manifold life. It is the laboratory for
human nature, and the only one that is simple enough to study with any
prospect of quick enlightenment. Experiment in education has come to
stay, and this means that we have it in our hands to approach ever more
closely our ideal of education as living. We can make the school ever
more and more nearly that child-community life towards which our best
endeavor points.

The point-of-view of these papers will be recognized as the product
of an enthusiasm for the educational philosophy of John Dewey. But
what is a good philosophy for except to paraphrase? The discovery of
truisms means merely that my enthusiasms are being communicated to an
unappreciative reader. Certainly the most recent educational sensation
indicates that there are still crowds of professional educators and
parents to whom such ideas are not truisms. To see education, not as a
preparation for life or as a process segregated from other activities,
but as identical with living, takes more imagination than most teachers
have yet acquired. If the school is a place where children live
intensively and expressively, it will be a place where they will learn.
The ideal educational system would continue with the adult all through
his or her active life, sharpening skill, interpreting experience,
providing intellectual tools with which to express and enjoy. Just as
education and play should be scarcely separable for the little child,
so education and work should be scarcely separable for the adult. By
closing off the school and boxing up learning we have really smothered
education. We are only just beginning to revive. We have first to make
over the school into a real child-community, filled with activities
which stimulate the child and focus his interest towards some
constructive work, and then we have to teach the teacher how to expose
the child to the various activities and guide his interest so that it
will be purposeful. The school can thus become a sifter where children
unconsciously as they live along from day to day are choosing the ways
in which they can best serve both themselves and their community as
workers and citizens in the great scheme.

The papers on the Gary schools are reprinted not because I wish to
exploit the system or its superintendent, but because of the usefulness
of a concrete example to hang wandering theory to. The schools of Mr.
Wirt’s conception, in spite of many inadequacies of realization, still
seem to me the happiest framework I have yet found in the American
public school for the fulfillment of the new educational ideals. No one
can deny that in the actual schools much of the old unconsciousness
and regimentation still stick their unwelcome head through, but my
somewhat naïve impressions do reflect, I am sure, a spirit which is
there, and a possibility that is very near for the American community
to catch. To praise one thing, however, is not to damn everything else,
and it would be false to pretend that almost every city in our country
has not latent within its system the embryo of the modern school. Some
are simply more conscious than others. Some actually envisage education
as living.




CONTENTS


                                           PAGE

  I EDUCATION AND LIVING                      3

  II THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL               11

  III THE WASTED YEARS                       18

  IV PUZZLE--EDUCATION                       26

  V LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL                   32

  VI IN A SCHOOLROOM                         41

  VII THE CULT OF THE BEST                   49

  VIII EDUCATION IN TASTE                    57

  IX UNIVERSAL SERVICE AND EDUCATION         66

  X THE SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE             77

  XI THE PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY              84

  XII WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION?        91

  XIII THE ORGANIC SCHOOL                   100

  XIV COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN              104

  XV REALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS                  116

  XVI APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL             127

  XVII THE NATURAL SCHOOL                   136

  XVIII THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL               146

  XIX THE TRAINED MIND                      154

  XX CLASS AND SCHOOL                       161

  XXI A POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION      173

  XXII AN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION     182

  XXIII ORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION        189

  XXIV EDUCATION FOR WORK                   197

  XXV CONTINUATION SCHOOLS                  206

  XXVI WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES            215

  XXVII THE UNDERGRADUATE                   222

  XXVIII MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES        230




EDUCATION AND LIVING




I

EDUCATION AND LIVING


What is the current broadening of the public school--the bringing in
of gymnasiums and pools, shops and gardens, dramatics and organized
play--but a new effort to realize the school as more a life and
less an institution? Are we not getting a little restless over the
resemblance of our schools to penitentiaries, reformatories, orphan
asylums, rather than to free and joyous communities? A school system
whose object was little more than to abolish illiteracy and prepare
the more fortunate for college was bound to fall an easy prey to the
mechanical organizer. Education in this country has been one-sidedly
professionalized. The machinery was developed before the moving
ideals were worked out. Professional educators have worked too much
for a logical system rather than for an experimental adjustment to
the life needs of individual children. We have achieved a democratic
education in the sense that common schooling is practically within the
reach of every one. But a democratic education in the sense of giving
equal opportunities to each child of finding in the school that life
and training which he peculiarly needs, has still to be generally
worked for. The problem of American education is now to transform an
institution into a life.

Let us not deny the value of that emphasis on administration. The
slow progress from the diffuse district school to the well organized
state system represents the welding of a powerful instrument for a
future democracy to use. Centralized and efficient administration is
indispensable for insuring educational benefits to all. But there
is a danger that we shall create capable administrators faster than
we create imaginative educators. It is so easy to forget that this
tightening of the machinery is only in order that the product may be
finer and richer. Unless it does so result in more creative life it
will be a detriment rather than a good. For it is too easy to make the
running of the machine, the juggling with schedules and promotions
and curricula and courses and credits, the end. To institutionalize a
social function is always the line of least resistance.

We are becoming used to the impressive schoolhouses that tower over
the unkempt and fragile houses of our American towns. The school
already overshadows the church. If this means that the school is the
most important place in the community, then it is a hopeful sign. But
if its slightly forbidding bulk means simply that there is another
institution to put people through a uniform process, or indeed through
any kind of process, then we are no further along. The educators of
the last generation, whether from false ideas of democracy or from
administrative convenience or necessity, imposed deadly uniformities of
subject matter and method on the children in the schools. They assumed
that a uniform process would give uniform results. But children are
infinitely varied in temperament and capacity and interests. So the
uniform process gave the most wildly heterogeneous results. And the
present unrest arises from our amazed dissatisfaction that so admirable
and long-continued a public-school education should have left the
masses of children so little stimulated and trained.

The pseudo-science of education under which most of us were brought up
assumed that children were empty vessels to be filled by knowledge.
Teachers and parents still feel that to cut down an arithmetic hour
to forty-five minutes is to deprive the child of a fourth of his
education. But children are not empty vessels, nor are they automatic
machines which can be wound up and set running on a track by the
teacher. They are pushing wills and desires and curiosities. They are
living, growing things, and they need nothing so much as a place where
they can grow. They live as wholes far more than older people do, and
they cannot be made to become minds and minds alone for four or five
hours a day--that is, without stultification. The school forgets that
we are only accidentally intellectual, that our other impulses are far
more imperious. Because a teacher can secure outward order, it does
not mean that she has harmonized the child’s personality. She has not
the least clue to the riot or apathy or delusion that may be going on
inside him. She may easily become a drill-sergeant, but she must not
think that she has thereby become an educational scientist.

To become that she will have to think of the school as a place where
children spend their time living not as artificially segregated minds
but as human things. She would have to judge their activities in terms
of an interesting life. And that involves good health, play, sport,
constructive work, talk, questioning, exercise, friendship, personal
expression, as well as reading and learning. A place where children
really lived would be a place that gave opportunities for all these
activities to just the extent that children were individually capable
of expressing themselves. Children want to be busy together, they want
to try their hand at tools and materials, they want to find out what
older people do and watch them at it. They have to flounder about
and have all sorts of experiences before they touch their spring of
interest and face their real direction. All their education is really
acquired in the same random way that the baby learns to control his
movements and respond to his environment. No matter how the school
tries to organize their learning, and feed it to them in graduated
doses, this way of trial and error is really the one by which they
will learn. You have no way of guaranteeing that they will learn what
you think you are teaching them. What you can do is to put them in
a controlled environment where they will most frequently strike the
electric contact of curiosity and response, and get experiences that
thrill with meaning for them.

Life in its lowest terms is a matter of passing the time. It would be
well if educators would more often remember this. If they did, would
they not examine more carefully the life which they provide for growing
youth? College and high school life is reasonably antiseptic, it is not
oppressive, it is not particularly arbitrary or shabby. But compared
abstractly with what might be a good life, given the interests and
outlook and needed training of youth, would it not seem a little sorry?
Is it not a travesty, except for the few, on a really stimulating and
creative way of spending time? Suppose educators seriously measured
their schools by this standard of the good life. Suppose we really
tried to carry out the principle that the secret of life is to pass
time worthily.

Most of this current educational interest is another stab at the
age-long problem of making education synonymous with living. We are
rediscovering the fact that we learn only as we desire, as we seek
to understand or as we are busy. We are trying to make the school a
place where children cannot escape doing these things. We see now that
education has grown up in this country in a separate institutional
compartment, jealously apart from the rest of the community life. It
has developed its own technique, its own professional spirit. Its
outlines are cold and logical. It is far the best ordered of our
institutions. Its morale is the nearest thing we have to compulsory
military service. There is something remote and antiseptic about
even our best schools. They contrast strangely with the color and
confusion of the rest of our American life. The bare class-rooms, the
stiff seats, the austere absence of beauty, suggest a hospital where
painful if necessary intellectual operations are going on. Additions of
gymnasiums and shops and studios to such a school will do little to set
the current of life flowing again. The whole school must be loosened
up, the stiff forms made flexible, children thought of as individuals
and not as “classes.” Thus new activities must be woven into a genuine
child-community life. These things must be the contacts with experience
that waken and focus children’s interests. They must be opportunities
for spontaneous living.

The school constantly encroaches on the home. It provides play and
work opportunities that even well-to-do homes cannot provide. It must
take over too the free and comradely atmosphere of the homes and the
streets where children play. Let teachers face the fact that they
cannot teach masses of children anything with the assurance that they
will really assimilate it. What they can do is to fill the school with
all kinds of typical experiences, and see that children are exposed to
them. They can see that children have a chance to dabble in them, touch
tools and growing things, read books, draw, swim, play and sing. Let
the teacher cleverly supervise and coördinate, see that the children’s
interests are drawn out, and that what they do contributes toward their
growth. In the last analysis, each child will have to educate himself
up to his capacity. He can only educate himself by living. The school
will be the place where he lives most worthily.

Our best American public schools are already in sight of such an ideal.
Americans need more than anything to learn how to live. This is the
first business of education.




II

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL


In the educational excitement of to-day we scarcely realize how far
the modern school is passing out of that era when the program for
work and study was carefully constructed with a view to the child’s
“preparation for life.” Educators saw the world as divided into two
radically different classes, adults and school-children. The adults
were functioning in a definite sphere, using a certain self-contained
and common body of knowledge to do their work and make their way in the
world. The children, on the other hand, were waiting like the little
unborn souls in “The Blue Bird,” to take their places in that active
world. If their parents were using knowledge as a current intellectual
coin with which experience could be bought and social exchange
effected, the child who had any chance of succeeding as an adult would
have to be put in possession of as much of this current coin as he
could hold, quite regardless of his own enthusiasm for it or his own
consciousness of what it was all about.

The free public school, therefore, became the place where children
took into themselves such automatically usable knowledge as would be
important for them in the remote future of their active adulthood.
Since book-knowledge had acquired honorific distinction as the badge
of a leisure class--and did not every democratic parent wish his child
to “rise in the world”?--and since it was of all knowledge the most
easily negotiable in the form of simple processes and facts, this type
of knowledge became the stock of the school. Then at some time a not
unintelligent attempt was supposedly made to compare this current stock
of intellectual paper money with the specie circulating outside in the
community at large, to see whether the school reserve was accurate and
sufficient. This attention lapsed, however, and the curriculum became a
closed system, handed down to the uncritical and unconscious child with
the authority of prestige and the sanctions of school discipline.

In this unconscious school, knowledge was presented to us not as
acquaintance with things but with “subjects.” Text-books were given us
holding the golden lore, and education became the slow nibbling away
at their facts for six to twelve years. We came to think of ourselves
as cupboards in which were laboriously stored bundles of knowledge.
We knew dimly the shape of the articles and the distinction of the
materials within. But we never expected to see the contents until we
were grown, when we would joyfully open our packages and use them to
the infinite glory of our worldly success and happiness. But it was
a slow child who did not begin to suspect, long before his shelves
were full, that most of his adult friends had lost no time, when their
schooldays were over, in locking their cupboards and leaving their
bundles to the dust and worms.

The fine technique of the unconscious school as worked out by educators
in normal schools and teachers’ colleges in the last forty years can
be read in any current school survey. Here the coincidence of work
and study with the child’s interests is accidental. Indeed, many
parents and teachers are still opposed to making too large a part of
the curriculum appeal to the child’s ephemeral interests. Discipline
is still thought of not as willed skill, which it is, but as the
ability to do painful things. A world where children do joyfully and
well what interests them, instead of what is “good” for them (because
unpleasant), still excites the envious mistrust of an older generation.

Yet the transformation from the unconscious school to the
self-conscious school is the very kernel of the present educational
excitement. The new schools which arouse enthusiasm are those in which
the child is learning what has meaning to him as a child. He no longer
does things because it is the “teacher’s way.” That old perverted
honor of the teacher never to admit that she is wrong lest the child’s
confidence be disturbed and he become conscious and critical of the
methods and materials of his education, is breaking down. We are
learning that in the unconscious school the prizes go to the docile and
unquestioning, not to those of initiative and skill. The school that
keeps children in ignorance of what they are doing trains them for an
uncritical life in society.

The discovery is not new that all the skill necessary to live an
effective life in America to-day is not contained in a few readers,
arithmetics, abridged histories and geographies, an elementary algebra
and plane geometry, a Latin, Greek, or German grammar, with cullings
from the works of Cæsar, Virgil, Xenophon, Cicero and Homer. When
educators found that adult life overflowed these narrow limits, they
introduced manual training, gymnastics, drawing and music; but the
child became no more self-conscious, for these were merely additional
“subjects.” The radical discovery of to-day is that the adult world
is not primarily engaged in turning information into power. The adult
rarely has a historical or a geographical or an arithmetical thought
unconnected with experience. What he does is to work very concretely at
a myriad of occupations, intellectual and mechanical, concerned with
making a living, bringing up a family, dealing with people, casting a
vote, reading newspapers. He has a great diversity of horizons, and the
most effective people are those who react most intelligently to their
experience as a whole. Power and information increase together, not
one at a time. The effective adult is a self-conscious personality.
The only school which can be a genuine preparation for life is a
self-conscious school. The child must learn to live in the same kind
of world that his elders live in. The school must be the community in
which his child-life develops. His play and work must be, first of
all, interesting activity.

Fortunately the modern movement to make the school self-conscious has
begun at the bottom. The four earlier years of the public school as
taught by recently trained teachers are now generally filled, even
in conservative city systems, with this new vivid consciousness.
Dramatization, the learning of reading and writing and arithmetic
through play, group-games and folk-dancing, gardening, constructive
wood-working--all this is a sign of the growing self-consciousness
of the school. In the more advanced schools, shop and science work,
community excursions, illustrative drawing and design, fertilize the
life of the older children. The most complete self-consciousness is
realized in a school of the Wirt type, where all the varied activities
are arranged to contribute to the upkeep or enrichment of the school
plant and the school community. For the older children the expanding
community becomes an extension of the school, and they learn the
operation of the adult world by going out to see the institutions of
their community and asking questions about them. In the self-conscious
school the child’s own curiosity sets the cue, and the school’s work
is to provide manifold opportunities for the satisfaction of that
curiosity.

As this self-consciousness spreads up through the school system, we
should get a new type of intelligence. Children will get a sense of
means used for ends, and this sense is the most imperative discipline
that we need. A revolutionary reorganization of the curriculum will
be effected. Already unapplied mathematics and unrelated classics
are passing. Yet those years which should most closely approximate
in function and appreciation and in intellectual attitude the adult
world remain unregenerated. Little seems to have been done to alter
the old high school, still regarded principally as the gateway to
the largely unconscious college. As a community of adolescent life,
meeting sex-interests, new idealisms and new assertions, it is a
failure. But as the older pedagogy fades out, and the younger children
trained in the self-conscious school advance, we may expect a new
orientation for the older years. Meanwhile our most valuable criterion
for any school, public or private, city or rural, is, “How far towards
self-consciousness, as expressed in the individual child and in the
school community as a whole, has the school progressed?”




III

THE WASTED YEARS


Only one child out of fourteen in our school system ever reaches the
high school; whatever education ninety per cent. of American children
are to have they must acquire before they are fourteen years old. So
elementary a fact as this, it would seem, should be at the background
of every discussion and criticism of the public schools. Yet the most
cursory inspection of the average city public school shows that its
significance has only recently and very dimly been realized.

Indeed, as the average city public school is at present organized,
there is every reason to believe that most of the children get
practically all their education before their tenth year. Limited as
this schooling is, they do not by any means get the full advantage of
what is supposed to be given them. One can hardly come from a study
of the everyday classroom work of the average city school without a
conviction that there is disastrous intellectual leakage which has
been strangely ignored by educators.

This leakage is not in the primary school and the high school. For
the teaching of “the three R’s” American normal schools and training
colleges in recent years have worked out many admirable techniques,
which seem to have been generally adopted. The younger generation of
teachers is doing efficiently its work of giving the child a mastery of
these essentials of civilized intercourse. The present primary school
on its intellectual side is an efficient institution.

Similarly the high school has had a large amount of attention and
skill lavished upon it. Its administrative peculiar problems have been
studied and met. The best high schools have been made to approximate
elementary colleges, with well-rounded courses of languages and
sciences, of artistic, manual and physical work. For the highly
selected group which reaches the high school it provides an excellent
purely intellectual curriculum, both for higher study and for social
orientation.

Between the primary school and the high school, however, there lies
a desert waste of four years, the significance and possibilities of
which seem to have been scarcely considered. They are the most urgent
years of all, for in them the educator must give compensation to the
children who are forced to leave school for the opportunities they are
to miss. Yet these middle years of what used to be called the “grammar
school” are now left not only unmotivated, but without any genuine
educational function. Instead of being prophetic of the future they
merely drag along the relics of the past. Some schools, it is true,
have timidly brought down the beginning of high school studies into the
lower grades, but in general the “grammar school” merely continues the
interests of the primary school on substantially the same lines.

Fifteen years ago, when I went to school, there may have been some
excuse for this system. Teachers may have been correct in their belief
that it took the average child eight years to learn arithmetic,
reading, writing, spelling, and a smattering of history and geography.
To-day such an assumption is ridiculous. I have seen children in large
classes in an ordinary city school system learn all the elements of
“the three R’s” in less than six months. The clear writing and accurate
reading of little children in the first grade who have only been
going to school for a few months is astonishing. It suggests that Mme.
Montessori could scarcely have known of the excellence of elementary
methods in this country when she urged her ideas as revolutionary. For
these small children, as for the Montessori child, the competitive
number-work, the writing from dictation, the oral reading, the
spelling, seemed not drudgery but interesting activity. Astonishing,
too, was the uniform excellence of the results.

Now it is little more than a truism to say that “the three R’s” have
not really been learned until they have become automatic, that reading,
writing and arithmetic are not ends in themselves but merely the tools
for work. To give command of the tools is the peculiar task of the
primary school, and of the primary school only. If children can be
given an acquaintance with “the three R’s” in six months, it does not
seem too much to expect them to acquire this automatic command in two
or three years. It is incredible that the child should have to study
eight years for this. Yet our elementary schools continue to assume
that every child is thus mentally backward. In the higher grades we
find the same subjects, formal reading lessons, formal penmanship
lessons, formal arithmetic and spelling. But something has happened to
these children. They are distinctly less interested, less interesting,
and even less capable than the smaller children. It is depressing to
realize that the elementary school has existed only to turn first-grade
children into seventh-grade children, and to realize that most of the
latter are nearing the end of their schooldays and will pass out into
the world with that intellectual listlessness and lack of command.

Let me suggest what has happened to these children. Formal work, the
learning of any technique, is apt to be pleasurable as long as we can
feel ourselves gradually acquiring a command over our instrument. But
after we have acquired the technique and can rely upon our skill, there
is no gain in continuing formal exercises. There is only gain in using
our skill in real work, the work for which we have studied. If we have
studied a language, we do not keep mulling over rules of grammar and
vocabularies, but we try as soon as possible to read. The means now
gives way to the end.

We can understand one cause for that situation of which employers
complain when children come to them from the public schools unprepared
in the very elements of education. In the bad memories, flimsy
information, inability to write or spell or figure accurately, is
found the very common indictment of the public school. The criticism
is usually that the groundwork has been poor, that the children have
not been trained in the fundamentals. If my thesis is correct, the
groundwork has not been poor. Of recent years, it has, on the contrary,
been unusually excellent and thorough. The leakage has come in the
middle years, which have simply disintegrated the foundations. The
school has sharpened the mind, and then, by providing only a repetition
of formal work instead of practical opportunity for use of the acquired
technique, has proceeded to dull it. Grammar has been studied,
literature in a curiously desiccated fashion, political history,
esoteric branches of arithmetic. Subjects like these have filled the
time that might have been given to copious individual reading, to
writing about what is read or experienced, to practical number-work
in simple statistics or accounting. Time which might have been given,
through use of pictures and newspapers, to the cultivation of an
imaginative historical and geographical background, has gone into
aimless memorizing, or into a glib use of words and phrases.

This situation is all the more preposterous because both the high
school and college are full of studies that could be begun by the
intelligent child as soon as a technical proficiency in “the three R’s”
was once obtained. What psychological law declares that before fourteen
a human being is incapable of learning languages, the sciences, or even
the sociological studies, but that after fourteen he is capable of
learning all these things? As a matter of fact, most of these “higher”
studies could be much more easily assimilated by the quick and curious
mind of the younger child than by the older. And for the worker in any
field, acquaintance with elementary science and the organization of
society is so emphatically important that we cannot afford to let the
vast majority of our citizens remain all their lives ignorant of their
very terms. In the four years of the “grammar school” an intelligent
interest could be awakened in these fields, and the main outlines
grasped. This would not mean the addition of many new subjects to an
already crowded curriculum. It would merely mean the dropping of “the
three R’s” back into their rightful place in the primary school. It
would lighten rather than overburden the school. We should then have a
fair division of labor and function between the schools, to the profit
of both.

If there is one criticism of the public school system on its
intellectual side that can justly be made general, it is this of
the wasted years. The school has found itself in this paradoxical
situation, that the more excellent became its primary methods the
poorer became the product at the end of the system. This paradox is
explained. Educators have simply failed to recognize that the sharper
they made the elementary tools and the better the facilities of
obtaining skill in their use, the more varied and immediate should be
the work upon which the tools are to be exercised. They have failed to
provide this work. They have left a leakage in public education which
has almost defeated its own ends.




IV

PUZZLE-EDUCATION


How righteously indignant did our teachers use to be if we ever
precociously objected to learning our mathematics and grammar in school
on the ground that if we were going to be doctors or policemen we
should never have any use when we grew up for that kind of knowledge!
Were we not entirely too young to know at all what kind of knowledge we
should need when we did grow up? Did not our teachers impress upon us
that in some mysterious way all was grist that came to our intellectual
mill? Did we wish to know merely what we could use in the daily
grubbing of bread and butter? Was not the fine flower of education
knowledge learned for its own sake? We could thus be assured, as we
cubed our roots or diagrammed our sentences, that all this work was
“training the mind,” so that we could almost feel our mental muscles
growing in strength and elasticity. We were too young to see it
then, but some day we should be heartily grateful to our painstaking
teachers. Some day, when we were successful men, we should come to
appreciate the superior wisdom of this educational system against which
our rational little wills so smolderingly rebelled.

In those days, would we not have given our young chances of promotion
to see ranged up before the teacher a group of great grown men, the
successful ones of the earth, to be put through the paces at which we
kicked? Would it not have tickled us to see a class consisting of a
state senator, a former lieutenant-governor, a manufacturer, a city
official, a banker, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, an editor, an
engineer and a clergyman, trying to spell daguerreotype and paradigm,
reconnaissance and erysipelas, guessing at the distance in degrees from
Portugal to the Ural Mountains, locating the desert of Atacama and
the Pamir Plateau, expressing 150° Cent. in terms of Fahrenheit, and
finding the area of the base of a cylindrical 1 gal. can, 10 ins. high?
If it was true that we should all find this knowledge useful some day,
then it would be preëminently these men who were finding it useful now.

Let the news go forth to all the children of the land who are
questioning the why and wherefore of what they are learning, that this
thing has actually been done. The eleven men have been assembled in
Springfield, Ill., and have had put to them these questions and others,
all taken from the prescribed work of the local public schools. The
class constituted one of those inquiries conducted with the deadly
accuracy of a laboratory experiment by the Russell Sage Foundation.
The results, it need hardly be said, were a complete demonstration
of the intuition of our childish precocity. Not one of these eleven
successful and intelligent gentlemen made so much as a passing mark in
any subject. In the spelling-match the best record was six words out
of ten, while one man, probably the editor, failed in every word. Only
one of the pupils knew the capital of Montenegro, while neither he nor
any of the others had the faintest reaction to Atacama or the Pamir
Plateau, much less to the length of South America or the distance in
degrees from Portugal to the Ural Mountains. Only one of the eleven
could do the thermometer problem--he must have been in Paris once
in January--and not one knew the specific gravity of alcohol when 2
liters weigh 1.58 kgms. As for the ten historical dates selected from
ninety-one, the only date that as many as ten men knew was the attack
on Sumter. Only one identified the date of the Mexican War, only one
the surrender of Cornwallis.

It must have seemed very curious to the eleven to be presented with
these questions, and then have the answers labeled “knowledge.” How
many of them drew the conclusion that our public schools were little
more in the higher reaches than a glorified puzzle-party, where
recitation is often more like a guessing of riddles, or trying to
discover the answer from the teacher’s tone, or the putting together of
a puzzle-picture? Look at the average school text-book, with its neat
and logical divisions, and see if you can’t hear the dry crackle of the
author’s wit as he has worked out his ingenious riddles, pieced his
cunning examples together, hunted the dictionary for words to spell,
dissected his history, carved up a continent. The intellect feeds on
syllogisms. Syllogisms are so much easier than appreciations. And
really it is far easier to reason than to interpret. In the first you
have merely to follow the beaten track, in the other you must break new
paths and put the thing in your own new language. Yet this whirling
around of the mental engine with the belting off is represented to us
as a process of “training the mind.” You might as well say that an
athlete could best train his legs by standing on his head and waving
them.

It is this scheme of puzzle-education which this Springfield inquiry--a
characteristic flash, we take it, of American genius--has so tellingly
shown up. And this riddle-curriculum tends to get worse instead of
better as the science of text-bookmaking waxes and the machinery
of scientific pedagogy accumulates. The avowed aim of teachers and
training-colleges in recent years has been to discover pedagogical
methods that would do the work regardless of the personality of the
teacher. The riotous absurdities of this scheme are being revealed by
such inquiries as these in Springfield. They suggest that the policy of
having our next generation’s mental attitudes, stock of information,
personal qualities, and moral biases cultivated by unimaginative
teachers whose intellectual capacity has been just sufficient to
acquire a few routine methods of “conducting” a class and keeping
order in a group of restless children, may have become antiquated.
Our genuine education--that is, a familiarity with the world we live
in--must wait until we get out of school. That may partly explain why
most children are so anxious to leave.

Some people might find in this inquiry not so much an evidence of
the inefficiency of our public schools as of how little intellectual
baggage one needs to become successful and eminent in these United
States. But this is in reality only to make a heavier indictment. It is
still primarily the schools that have failed to make the intellectual
baggage important to the minds of their pupils, that have left
uncultivated their tastes and horizons. It is for this reason that our
American intellectual background is so relatively thin.




V

LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL


A recent correspondent of the “New Republic” columns declares that the
real puzzle in education is as to content. She asks us to outline the
facts we have found of value, so that she may be sure, as she confesses
she is not now sure, what children should know when they leave school.

I search the memory of my nine years in the public schools, and wonder
what I really learned there. I must have learned to read and write
and spell and work sums, for I can do all those things now; but I
came out with no connected sense of my country’s history or that of
any other, and if I had any geographical grasp, it came only from a
certain abnormal delight I took in poring over maps by myself. Algebra,
geometry and physics I recall to have passed before my attention. I was
a very dutiful child, and it was my moral rather than my intellectual
sense which enabled me to get “marks” in these subjects. I cannot say
that they were “learned,” in the sense of being woven into experience
in any way. Latin rather appealed to me, chiefly because of its
elegance of form, which I remember to have been curiously reinforced
by the æsthetic format of the Collar and Daniell’s text-book we used.
Certain English classics appeared like dim ghosts on my horizon. At no
time could I have given an intelligent account of the plot or argument
of any of the books we read in Latin, Greek or German. The French
and Italian which I picked up later I can read more easily than the
German upon which I spent three school years. Imagined geographical
wanderings, the disentangling of some verses of Vergil, certain neat
algebraic solutions, are all of my “learning” that excited my interest
or enthusiasm. Nine years seems an unconscionable time to spend
learning these simple things.

I conclude that there is not much use teaching children things that
they will not assimilate with their own curiosity, and connect with
what they consider worth while in their world. In my own case this
curiosity rarely worked in school. I cannot defend its algebraic and
Vergilian workings except as springing from some embryo æsthetic
sense. But the geographical enthusiasm is perfectly intelligible. It
is connected with that intellectual education which I was pursuing
parallel to my school work, and which merged with it only occasionally.
This unofficial education, begun at a very early age, came through the
medium of the newspaper. The “New York Tribune,” lying freshly on our
doorstep every morning, was gathered in like intellectual manna by my
small and grateful self. It told me daily of a wide, fascinating and
important world, and to it I reacted with never failing curiosity. On
the political events, personalities, foreign wars, riots, strikes,
plays, books, and music that streamed disorganizedly through its
columns, no school subject threw any light except geography, which at
least enabled me to place things on the map. History, which might have
helped, was taught, not backwards, in the order that one’s curiosity
naturally approaches it, but forwards, so that at no time did we get
within hailing distance of the present.

My real education, as I look back on it, consisted in making some
sort of order out of this journalistic chaos. I got some help in the
debates on current events which a radical superintendent introduced
into our high school. I remember pulverizing, at the age of thirteen,
my opponents in debate, with proofs that a ruthless dictatorship was
the only form of government possible in the primitive state of Santo
Domingo. Our household, however, was innocent of current discussion.
The public library had not been born. I had to plot out this larger
world by myself. Indeed, the grown-up people whom I sought seemed on
the whole less familiar than I with the bearings of my curiosity. I
cannot say that there was anything subtle or complicated or critical in
my acceptance of the newspaper. It was all I could do to get the world
mapped out, and become familiar with the names that I read. I remember
following the Greco-Turkish War with a great deal of satisfaction,
though the issues involved and the real military operations never meant
anything at all. I got only the pleasant familiarity with this wider
social world that one would get in meeting the same faces constantly in
the street, without knowing the names of the people or speaking to them.

Whatever familiarity with the trend of events and the wider interests
of men and women I had when I left school was obtained in this way.
The school had been practically valueless in giving me the background
of the intellectual world in which I was henceforth to live. My
framework was bony enough and the content flimsy, but the outlines of
my interests were there, and curiosity enough to keep me ceaselessly
at filling in that content. Nothing has occurred since that time to
show me, through various vicissitudes, that it was not the most useful
I could have. That its foundations had to be laid outside the school
seems to me a sheer waste of educational energy on the school’s part.

Boldly then, and in true egocentric fashion, I say that the child
when he leaves school ought to have the foundations of interest in
the events and issues in which people generally are interested.
These practically all come within the attention of the metropolitan
newspaper. The child should be equipped to get some kind of intelligent
reaction to what he reads there about political and sociological events
and issues, personalities, art and literature. No one could accuse a
curriculum based on the newspaper of being aristocratic, esoteric, or
ultra-cultural. The newspaper is the one common intellectual food
of all classes and types in the community. Many persons, it is true,
may react only to certain specialized departments, and yet even into
the most rudimentary journals filter most of these larger issues
and events. To use this stock as clues and work out the historical,
geographical, and cultural ramifications in the school curriculum
would provide this broad familiarity with the world the child is to
live in which I suggest. I would not make the horrifying proposal that
the newspaper be used as a school text-book. I am too well aware of
that cardinal tenet of current educational morality which banishes
the newspaper entirely from the school. There is something rather
symbolic about that tenet, by the way. But to use a sort of generalized
newspaper as the nucleus and basis of a curriculum would be a different
matter. It would be using the actual current life of society as the
guiding thread of what the child is to know. As far as the purely
intellectual content of the school is concerned, it would do what so
many educators desire, connect the school with life.

This ideal may be incredible, but it is not necessarily impossible.
Take the child at its lowest terms, as a troublesome little person
whom its parents send to school to get it out of the way of the crowded
home until it is old enough to go to work. Then take the present
curriculum, a medley of equally emphasized cultural, scientific and
manual studies. Now the child certainly should have a command of the
three R’s before he is ten years old. Suppose then we transfer the
mathematical and scientific studies to a place subsidiary to the
vocational and manual work that is being so rapidly developed. They
would be taken up, that is, only as the theoretical basis for this
practical work. This would leave four or five years for the study of
the history, geography, literature, language, and civics, before the
minimum age at which the child in the more advanced states is allowed
to leave school. There seems to be no inherent reason why a great deal
could not be done in that time to prepare this imaginative background
for the world we live in.

If “cultivating the imagination” means anything it means ensuring
that what one experiences in daily life will call up interesting and
significant images and ideas. The public school sometimes attempts to
cultivate a sort of literary and mythological imagination, but as for
ensuring that those references to places, persons, books, political
institutions, ideas, which occur in the papers and weekly journals,
shall call up to the mind prompt, accurate, and stimulating images and
meanings, it has been a dead failure. An exploration of the current
imagination of the average person would be a curious and profitable
enterprise for a psychologist to undertake. For the cultivation of this
imagery, we are all left, as the child is left, to the chance provision
of the contemporary news-provider, the illustrated paper and “Sunday
magazine.” Here is where we get our notions of things as they look and
act.

Beyond all else the child should leave school with a wide and
reliable imagination--not with facts or theories so much as pictures,
sympathies, apprehensions, what we call “the feeling for the thing.”
Thus equipped, his curiosity will provide him with all the facts and
theories he needs. The custom of teaching by subjects is as artificial
and absurd as could be imagined. We do not think in terms of history
or geography or language. If I read a foreign newspaper, all these
are merged into one imaginative impression. We think in terms of
situations, which have settings in time and place, and all sorts of
fringes and implications. Unless the child is taught in this spirit,
the isolated subjects will have no meaning. Without the imaginative
background that fuses and vitalizes his studies, he will go out from
school untaught and unknowing.




VI

IN A SCHOOLROOM


The other day I amused myself by slipping into a recitation at the
suburban high school where I had once studied as a boy. The teacher
let me sit, like one of the pupils, at an empty desk in the back of
the room, and for an hour I had before my eyes the interesting drama
of the American school as it unfolds itself day after day in how many
thousands of classrooms throughout the land. I had gone primarily to
study the teacher, but I soon found that the pupils, after they had
forgotten my presence, demanded most of my attention.

Their attitude towards the teacher, a young man just out of college
and amazingly conscientious and persevering, was that good-humored
tolerance which has to take the place of enthusiastic interest in many
of our American schools. They seemed to like the teacher and recognize
fully his good intentions, but their attitude was a delightful one of
all making the best of a bad bargain, and coöperating loyally with
him in slowly putting the hour out of its agony. This good-natured
acceptance of the inevitable, this perfunctory going through by its
devotees of the ritual of education, was my first striking impression,
and the key to the reflections that I began to weave.

As I sank down to my seat I felt all that queer sense of depression,
still familiar after ten years, that sensation, in coming into the
schoolroom, of suddenly passing into a helpless, impersonal world,
where expression could be achieved and curiosity asserted only in the
most formal and difficult way. And the class began immediately to
divide itself for me, as I looked around it, into the artificially
depressed like myself, commonly called the “good” children, and the
artificially stimulated, commonly known as the “bad,” and the envy and
despair of every “good” child. For to these “bad” children, who are,
of course, simply those with more self-assertion and initiative than
the rest, all the careful network of discipline and order is simply a
direct and irresistible challenge. I remembered the fearful awe with
which I used to watch the exhaustless ingenuity of the “bad” boys of
my class to disrupt the peacefully dragging recitation; and behold,
I found myself watching intently, along with all the children in my
immediate neighborhood, the patient activity of a boy who spent his
entire hour in so completely sharpening a lead-pencil that there was
nothing left at the end but the lead. Now what normal boy would do so
silly a thing or who would look at him in real life? But here, in this
artificial atmosphere, his action had a sort of symbolic quality; it
was assertion against a stupid authority, a sort of blind resistance
against the attempt of the schoolroom to impersonalize him. The most
trivial incident assumed importance; the chiming of the town-clock,
the passing automobile, a slip of the tongue, a passing footstep in
the hall, would polarize the wandering attention of the entire class
like an electric shock. Indeed, a large part of the teacher’s business
seemed to be to demagnetize, by some little ingenious touch, his little
flock into their original inert and static elements.

For the whole machinery of the classroom was dependent evidently upon
this segregation. Here were these thirty children, all more or less
acquainted, and so congenial and sympathetic that the slightest touch
threw them all together into a solid mass of attention and feeling.
Yet they were forced, in accordance with some principle of order, to
sit at these stiff little desks, equidistantly apart, and prevented
under penalty from communicating with each other. All the lines between
them were supposed to be broken. Each existed for the teacher alone. In
this incorrigibly social atmosphere, with all the personal influences
playing around, they were supposed to be, not a network or a group, but
a collection of things, in relation only with the teacher.

These children were spending the sunniest hours of their whole lives,
five days a week, in preparing themselves, I assume by the acquisition
of knowledge, to take their places in a modern world of industry, ideas
and business. What institution, I asked myself, in this grown-up world
bore resemblance to this so carefully segregated classroom? I smiled,
indeed, when it occurred to me that the only possible thing I could
think of was a State Legislature. Was not the teacher a sort of Speaker
putting through the business of the session, enforcing a sublimated
parliamentary order, forcing his members to address only the chair and
avoid any but a formal recognition of their colleagues? How amused,
I thought, would Socrates have been to come upon these thousands of
little training-schools for incipient legislators! He might have
recognized what admirably experienced and docile Congressmen such a
discipline as this would make, if there were the least chance of any of
these pupils ever reaching the House, but he might have wondered what
earthly connection it had with the atmosphere and business of workshop
and factory and office and store and home into which all these children
would so obviously be going. He might almost have convinced himself
that the business of adult American life was actually run according to
the rules of parliamentary order, instead of on the plane of personal
intercourse, of quick interchange of ideas, the understanding and the
grasping of concrete social situations.

It is the merest platitude, of course, that those people succeed
who can best manipulate personal intercourse, who can best express
themselves, whose minds are most flexible and most responsive to
others, and that those people would deserve to succeed in any form of
society. But has there ever been devised a more ingenious enemy of
personal intercourse than the modern classroom, catching, as it does,
the child in his most impressionable years? The two great enemies of
intercourse are bumptiousness and diffidence, and the classroom is
perhaps the most successful instrument yet devised for cultivating both
of them.

As I sat and watched these interesting children struggling with these
enemies, I reflected that even with the best of people, thinking cannot
be done without talking. For thinking is primarily a social faculty;
it requires the stimulus of other minds to excite curiosity, to arouse
some emotion. Even private thinking is only a conversation with one’s
self. Yet in the classroom the child is evidently expected to think
without being able to talk. In such a rigid and silent atmosphere, how
could any thinking be done, where there is no stimulus, no personal
expression?

While these reflections were running through my head, the hour dragged
to its close. As the bell rang for dismissal, a sort of thrill of
rejuvenation ran through the building. The “good” children straightened
up, threw off their depression and took back their self-respect, the
“bad” sobered up, threw off their swollen egotism, and prepared to
leave behind them their mischievousness in the room that had created
it. Everything suddenly became human again. The brakes were off,
and life, with all its fascinations of intrigue and amusement, was
flowing once more. The school streamed away in personal and intensely
interested little groups. The real world of business and stimulations
and rebounds was thick again here.

If I had been a teacher and watched my children going away, arms around
each other, all aglow with talk, I should have been very wistful for
the injection of a little of that animation into the dull and halting
lessons of the classroom. Was I a horrible “intellectual,” to feel
sorry that all this animation and verve of life should be perpetually
poured out upon the ephemeral, while thinking is made as difficult as
possible, and the expressive and intellectual child made to seem a sort
of monstrous pariah?

Now I know all about the logic of the classroom, the economies of
time, money, and management that have to be met. I recognize that in
the cities the masses that come to the schools require some sort of
rigid machinery for their governance. Hand-educated children have had
to go the way of hand-made buttons. Children have had to be massed
together into a schoolroom just as cotton looms have had to be massed
together into a factory. The difficulty is that, unlike cotton looms,
massed children make a social group, and that the mind and personality
can only be developed by the freely inter-stimulating play of minds
in a group. Is it not very curious that we spend so much time on
the practice and methods of teaching, and never criticize the very
framework itself? Call this thing that goes on in the modern schoolroom
schooling, if you like. Only don’t call it education.




VII

THE CULT OF THE BEST


A valuable inventory of our American ideals of taste and culture
should result from the request of the American Federation of Arts that
the Carnegie Foundation undertake an investigation of the teaching
of art in this country. We have devoted much attention to importing
æsthetic values and works of art from Europe, and to providing museums,
libraries and art courses for the public. But we have scarcely asked
ourselves what is to come of it all. A survey of what is being done
“in the schools and colleges and universities as well as in the
professional art schools of the country to promote the knowledge,
appreciation and production of art in America” will be of little
value, however, if it is to concern itself merely with discovering how
many art schools and how many students there are; how many courses
on art are given in the colleges, and the credits which each course
counts towards the degree. What we need to know is the direction of
the studies. We must not feel relieved in spirit if we find there
is “enough,” and correspondingly depressed if we find there is “not
enough” being done for art in America. We must clear up our ideas as
to what a genuine art education would be for the layman, and then ask
whether the present emphases are the ones to produce it.

Artistic appreciation in this country has been understood chiefly as
the acquiring of a familiarity with “good works of art,” and with the
historical fields of the different arts, rather than as the cultivating
of spontaneous taste. The millionaire with his magnificent collections
has only been doing objectively what the anxious college student is
doing who takes courses in the history and appreciation of art, music
or literature, or the women’s clubs that follow standard manuals of
criticism and patronize bureaus of university travel. Everywhere the
emphasis is on acquisition. A great machinery for the extension of
culture has grown up around us in the last generation, devoted to the
collection, objectively or imaginatively, of masterpieces. The zealous
friends of art in and out of the schools have been engaged in bringing
before an ever-widening public a roster of the “best.” Art education
has been almost entirely a learning about what is “good.” “Culture” has
come to mean the jacking-up of one’s appreciations a notch at a time
until they have reached a certain standard level. To be cultured has
meant to like masterpieces.

Art education has, in other words, become almost a branch of moral
education. We are scarcely out of that period when it was a moral
obligation upon every child to learn to play the piano. There is still
a thoughtful striving after righteousness in our attendance at the
opera. And this moral obligation is supported by quasi-ecclesiastical
sanctions. Each art, as taught in our schools and colleges, has its
truly formidable canon of the “best,” and its insistent discrimination
between the sanctified and the apocryphal scriptures. The teaching of
English literature in the colleges is a pure example of this orthodoxy.
Criticism and expression are neglected in favor of absorption and
reverence of the classics. The student enters college on a ritual of
examination in them. He remains only through his susceptibility to
their influence. Examine what passes for cultural education in other
fields, and you will find that it is historical, lexicographical,
encyclopædic, and neither utilitarian nor æsthetic. It is prompted by
the scholarly ideal rather than by an ideal of taste. The prize goes
to those who can acquire the most of these goods. No one is challenged
to spontaneous taste any more than the monk is asked to create his own
dogmas.

To me this conception of culture is unpleasantly undemocratic. I am
not denying the superlative beauty of what has come to be officially
labeled “the best that has been thought and done in the world.” But
I do object to its being made the universal norm. For if you educate
people in this way, you only really educate those whose tastes run to
the classics. You leave the rest of the world floundering in a fog of
cant, largely unconscious perhaps, trying sincerely to squeeze their
appreciations through the needle’s eye. You get as a result hypocrites
or “lowbrows,” with culture reserved only for a few. All the rest of
us are left without guides, without encouragement, and tainted with
original sin.

An education in art appreciation will be valueless if it does not
devote itself to clarifying and integrating natural taste. The emphasis
must be always on what you do like, not on what you ought to like.
We have never had a real test of whether bad taste is positive or
merely a lack of consciousness. We have never tried to discover strong
spontaneous lines of diversified taste. To the tyranny of the “best”
which Arnold’s persuasive power imposed upon this most inquisitive,
eager and rich American generation, can be laid, I think, our failure
to develop the distinctive styles and indigenous art spirit which the
soil should have brought forth abundantly. For as long as you humbly
follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital. If you are using your
energy to cajole your appreciations, you have none left for unforced
æsthetic emotion. If your training has been to learn and appreciate
the best that has been thought and done in the world, it has not
been to discriminate between the significant and the irrelevant that
the experience of every day is flinging up in your face. Civilized
life is really one æsthetic challenge after another, and no training
in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able
to react to forms and settings. The mere callousness with which we
confront our ragbag city streets is evidence enough of the futility
of the Arnold ideal. To have learned to appreciate a Mantegna and a
Japanese print, and Dante and Debussy, and not to have learned nausea
at Main street, means an art education which is not merely worthless
but destructive.

I know that such complaints are met by the plea that the fight has
been so hard in this country to get any art education at all that it
is idle to talk of cultivating public taste until this battle is won.
Mr. Edward Dickinson still pleads in a recent book the cause of music
to the stony educationists of the land. Let us get a foothold in the
colleges with our music courses, these defenders seem to say, and your
taste will evolve from them. But the way to reach a goal is not to
start off in the opposite direction, and my thesis is that education
in the appreciation of art has been moving exactly in this wrong
direction. Widespread artistic taste would have had a better chance
to develop in this country if we had not been so much concerned with
knowing what we ought to know and liking what we ought to like. The
movement has caught those whose taste happened to coincide with the
canons. It has perverted a much larger host who have tried to pretend
that their taste coincided. And it has left untouched the joyous masses
who might easily, as in other countries, have evolved a folk-culture
if they had not been outlawed by this ideal.

The ideal still dominates, although it becomes every day more
evident that its effect has been disastrous. A younger generation of
architects has filled our cities with sepulchral neo-classicism and
imitative débris of all the ages. We get its apotheosis in the fantasy
of Washington, where French chateaux snuggle up close to colonial
mansions, and the great lines of the city are slashed by cheap and
tawdry blocks. All this has been done with the best will in the world,
by men curious and skilful, well instructed in the “best” of all time.
It has been a conscientious following of an ideal of beauty. We are
just beginning to discover uneasily how false that ideal is. Art to
most of us has come to mean painting instead of the decoration and
design and social setting that would make significant our objective
life. Our moral sense has made us mad for artistic “rightness.” What
we have got out of it is something much worse than imitation. It is
worship.

This effort to follow the best, which even our revolutionists
engage in, has the effect of either closing the appreciation to new
styles or leaving it open to passing winds of fashion. That we are
fashion-ridden is the direct result of an education which has made
acquisition and not discrimination the motive. The cult of the best
is harmless only if it has been superimposed on the broadest basis of
personal discrimination, begun in earliest years. Let us admit that the
appreciations of the Brahmins marvelously coincide with what Matthew
Arnold has stamped as right. But perhaps for most of us there has not
been the environment to produce that happy coincidence. Our education
has forced us all to be self-made men in artistic appreciation. Our
tastes suffer from hiatuses and crotchinesses and color-blindnesses
because no effort has been made to integrate our sincere likes and
dislikes and focus and sharpen our reactions. Until the present ideal
is overthrown, we have no chance of getting a sincere and general
public taste. We can have only the mechanics of art education. I do not
mean that America has been unique in this. We have only been a little
worse than other countries because we have been more conscientious.




VIII

EDUCATION IN TASTE


There is a naïvely systematic way of teaching artistic appreciation to
the students of many of our city schools. To each class is allotted a
famous painter. The class is then taken en masse to the art museum,
and, under the guidance of one of the official show-women, confronted
with the masterpieces of its proprietary genius. The children hear the
dates of the painter’s life, details of his career, the significance
of his pictures, the particular beauties of his styles, and any other
loose fragments of knowledge that may appeal to their guide. After they
have been exposed long enough to the pictures to give confidence that
appreciation has taken place in them, they are allowed to exchange
painters with another class, and in rigid platoon proceed to appreciate
their new idol in the same way. Presumably their appreciation finally
flows over the entire museum, and they take their places among the
cultivated of the land.

The other day in a New Jersey school I was shown some wall-paper
designs that had just been made in a class of the youngest children.
A simple figure had been given them with which to cover a sheet of
paper in any pattern they chose. The thirty papers presented the most
astonishing variety. They ranged from mere blotches to orderly and
regular patterns. Some children had merely reproduced the figure in
parallel lines across the paper. Others had alternated their lines
and made a more pleasing scheme. Here was a living demonstration
of the variety of artistic skill, but I was more interested in the
appreciation. The teacher told me that she had pinned all the designs
on the wall, and without any suggestion to the children had asked them
to choose which they liked best. There had been a large consensus of
liking for the alternate lines, the pattern which was obviously the
most regular and the most pleasing.

In that museum system of class-painters who were to be duly
“appreciated” I had a perfect example of the old unregenerate cult
of the best. But my New Jersey school convinced me that these vestal
virgins of the museums were guarding a decaying fane. The young teacher
in the classroom had the beginnings of what would be a genuine
education in taste. If that same critical and discriminating spirit
could be carried forward with these littlest children all through
their schooling, most of them would get a robust sense of values that
would be spontaneous, that would never have to be cajoled, and that
could not be threatened. Might not this process of refining taste be
woven into our elementary education? Already we have its embryo in
these kindergartens and lower grades. It is a question of emphasis, of
making the teachers see that the constant challenge to taste is one of
the most important functions of the school. Types of school such as
the Play-School make expression and selection the basis of their life.
The most valuable feature of the Montessori school is the training of
the senses, the quickening of response to sounds and colors and forms.
Suppose a child were brought up from his earliest years in everyday
contact with forms and colors, without its ever being hinted to him
that some were “good” and others “bad.” Suppose the child were urged to
choose and to express his likes and dislikes, not giving his reasons
but merely telling as he could what he saw or heard. Suppose this
attempt were made through the course of his school life to clarify his
appeals and repugnances, not by rationalizing them but by synthesizing
them. Would not something like taste evolve out of it all?

Emphasis on what the pupil likes instead of what he ought to like would
change the tone of school or college. The average mediocre student
under our present regime gets an almost uncanny desire to do things
“right.” Since success in school depends on doing what the teacher
thinks is right, education becomes on the child’s part a technique of
accurate guessing. Anyone who has spent much time in high schools knows
how eagerly children will pounce on any official judgment concerning
a book or person or picture or idea. The study of English classics in
most schools becomes a festering bed of hypocrisy. And it is often the
intrinsically amenable who are the most conscientious and who therefore
most hopelessly overlay their own reactions with other people’s
judgments. The modern school recitation has degenerated into a skilful
guessing on the part of the child of what the teacher “wants” him to
say. And this is a symbol of the general attitude, in school and out,
towards cultural things.

A laudable attempt has been made in the colleges to teach the student
to think, but I wonder sometimes whether it has proceeded very far
beyond encouraging him to find reasons for ideas and attitudes which he
is persuaded he ought to have. For most college students it is already
too late. Expression and discrimination are the last things which the
primary and secondary schools have been emphasizing. The boy and girl
come to college with no background of taste or selection, and the old
docility, the old unconscious hypocrisy, must dog them all through
their course. I would make a larger part of the process of thinking
in school and college the discovery of what one likes and wants, the
control and direction of desire. Almost the whole object of education
should be to know what one truly and wholeheartedly likes and wants.

Yet the modern school is just the place where this critical,
discriminating attitude has a chance of being cultivated. The secret
of all the current tendencies towards the “school of to-morrow” is
the increasing participation of the children in the work of their own
school. The Wirt plan, where the children help the mechanics decorate
the rooms, and dramatize their school-life in auditorium exercises,
perhaps carries this coöperation farthest, but in numberless schools
that have shopwork, gardens, dramatizations, etc., the same evolution
is apparent. Now every touch of dramatic, artistic and literary
expression made by the children in the school affords material for
education in taste. Expression and criticism play into each other’s
hands. Any expression which passes without a reaction from some part
of this little school public is expression wasted. If the child does
not learn in the school to observe and reflect upon and react to the
expressive life that flows around him in the school, he will never
react intelligently to anything outside the school. His childish
criticism will of course be as elementary as the expression is
elementary. But the emphasis of teachers should be there. Taste must
flow naturally and spontaneously out of the experiences of everyday
life.

Such an effort in the education of taste has a much better chance
of success than has our traditional guidance. To impose canons on a
younger generation, to make students appreciate the best in the arts,
we need hosts of teachers who are finely tuned to these appreciations
themselves, teachers whose tastes naturally coincide with what has
been consecrated by time, and who can communicate their admirations.
Experience has proved that we shall never have those hosts of teachers.
We should never have enough Matthew Arnolds to go round. What art
education suffers from in this country is teachers who have only the
mechanics of appreciation without the inner glow. And it is futile to
expect that we shall ever have enough with the classic inner glow.
In this new direction, however, the teacher need not be mentor, but
guide and provocative. Never being called upon to impart judgments or
appreciations to the student, what he requires most is not judgments
and appreciations of his own but curiosity as to the student’s
reactions. He need only be saying constantly to the student, what do
you like and how does it compare with something else that you like?
He need provide only the paraphernalia of art, the materials and
processes, for the student to do his own work. If the teacher is of
sound original taste, he can give the student criticism and aid him in
his analysis and comparison. If he is not, he is at least prevented
from making the student’s taste hypocritical.

If this attitude became general in our æsthetic education, it would
not be long before results became noticeable. We should get a variety
of tastes--some of them traditional, some of them strange and new,
but most of them at least spontaneous, indigenous. At present we have
no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of public
taste is conventional, fashion-induced, imitative, or sincerely
felt. Much spontaneous taste might turn out to be traditional.
The majority of children trained in discrimination might prove to
be incipient Brahmins. On the other hand we might get strange and
vigorous expressions like the contemporary architecture and sculpture
of Germany. I am assuming that taste and creation will fertilize each
other. For this fertilization we must have a liberation of taste from
the sterile control of the “best.” This does not mean that every person
would become endowed with original taste, but that we should have a
chance to find original taste out. We should have done all within human
power to create public taste, as our present ideal does everything
to prevent it. As a result we should have a chance of some kind of
integrated culture. In each art we might find several very strongly
marked directions of style and taste which should appeal to different
people. It would then be the task of criticism not to choose between
them but to discover their sincerity and significance. Style is a
matter of right relations. Things have style when their parts make each
other and the whole significant. Indigenous style is the only art that
really means anything. Out of an education in taste will grow creative
art as a flower from rich soil.




IX

UNIVERSAL SERVICE AND EDUCATION


The current agitation for preparedness has set hosts of Americans to
thinking out for the first time what a real national strength and
readiness would mean. We suddenly realize that if we are to defeat that
militaristic trend which we loathe we shall have to offer some kind of
action more stirring and more creative. The call now upon every citizen
is to be not nebulously patriotic, but clear and lucid as to America’s
aims, so that our natural energy shall not be squandered and misused.
There looms up as a crucial need that “moral equivalent for war” with
which William James first roused our imaginations. It seems no longer
so academic a proposal. Confronted with the crisis, we see that he
analyzed the situation with consummate accuracy.

All around us we see a very genuine craving for unity of sentiment, for
service, for some new national lift and broadening which shall keep
us out of the uneasy pettiness into which the American conscience has
threatened to fall. In our hearts we know that to crystallize this
desire into a meaningless sentiment, or into a piling-up of armaments
or a proscribing of alien cultures, would not satisfy us. We want
action, but we do not want military action. Even the wildest patriots
know that America would have to go through the most pernicious and
revolutionary changes to accept the universal military service which
they advocate. We wish to advance from where we stand. We begin to
suspect that military service, flag-reverence, patriotic swagger, are
too much the weary old deep-dug channels into which national feeling
always runs and is lost. The flooding river fills again its archaic
and forsaken paths. Our present confusion expresses the dilemma we
find ourselves in, when our instincts impel us into courses that our
intelligence tells us we ought not to follow.

Our American danger is not so much that we become militarists as that
we grope along, fretting and harrying each other into a unity which is
delusive, and expressing our “Americanism” in activities that are not
creative. The best will in America at the present time seems to crave
some kind of national service but it veers off from military service.
Until we satisfy that craving, we shall run at half-power, and suffer
all the dissatisfaction and self-despising that comes from repressed
energy. The question which all are asking, in the varied and disguised
forms, is: How can we all together serve America by really enhancing
her life?

To more and more of us the clue has come through James’s conception
of a productive army of youth, warring against nature and not against
men, finding in drudgery and toil and danger the values that war and
preparation for war have given. Ten years ago such an army seemed
Utopian. We had neither the desire nor the technique. It seemed a
project not to be realized without a reorganization of our life so
radical as to make the army itself unnecessary. To-day, however, a
host of new attitudes seem to give us the raw material out of which
such a national service could be created. We hear much of universal
military service as “education.” The Plattsburgs are sugar-coated as
“civic-training camps,” “schools for citizenship.” Universal service
no longer stands on its old ground of mere preparation for war. It
is frankly trying to get itself recognized as an indispensable mode
of education. The next pertinent step is evidently to ask why, if
universal service is valuable because it is educational, it should not
be constructed on a strict educational foundation.

James’s proposal sounded Utopian because it would require an entirely
new and colossal national organization to put it into action. Universal
military service in this country would certainly mean such a task.
But if our national service is to be educational, we already have the
organization in existence. The rapidly consolidating public school
systems in the states provide the machinery for such an organization.
As the public schools become better places for children to spend their
time in, we are growing less tolerant of the forms of schooling outside
of the public system. The tendency is towards the inclusion of all
children in the public school. And the progressive states are requiring
schooling up to the full age of sixteen years. We are rapidly creating
a public school system, effectively administered by the states, which
gives us the one universally national compulsory service which we
possess or are ever likely to consent to.

Education is the only form of “conscription” to which Americans have
ever given consent. Compulsory military service would require decades
of Napoleonic political evangelism to introduce. Compulsory education
is universally accepted. For a national service which shall be
educational you would have to convert nobody. The field is sown. No one
denies the right of the state to conscript the child for education. But
coupled with this assent is the insistence that the education shall be
the freest, fullest and most stimulating that we know how to give. The
current educational interest arises largely from the indignant demand
that a state which takes all the children must meet the needs of every
child. The very recent enthusiasm for “vocational education” means
that we want a schooling that shall issue in capacity for fruitful
occupation. A national educational service could give training for work
at the same time that it gave opportunity for service.

It is only a national service of this kind that would really be
universal. Military service is a sham universality. It omits the
feminine half of the nation’s youth. And of the masculine half it uses
only the physically best. France is the only country where the actual
levy on men for military service has approximated the number liable.
But worst of all, military service irons out all differences of talent
and ability. It does not even tap the resources it enlists. It makes
out of an infinitely varied group a mere machine of uniform, obeying
units. The personal qualities, the individual powers of the youth it
trains, are of no relevance whatever. Men are valuable exactly to the
degree that they crush out these differences.

A national service for education would not be a sham. It would
actually enlist the coöperation of every youth and girl. It would aim
at stimulation, not obedience. It would call out capacity and not
submerge it. It would organize varied tasks adapted to the capacities
and strengths of its young citizenry. It would be universal, but it
would be compulsory only in the sense that it called every one to
the service. The tasks would not be enforced drudgery, but work that
enlisted the will and toned up the aspirations.

Such a national service would be the logical outgrowth of our public
school system. Suppose the state said: All children shall remain in
school till the age of sixteen years. Between the ages of sixteen
and twenty-one they shall spend two years in national service. This
service shall be organized and administered by the state educational
administrations, but supervised and subsidized by the national
government. The service would be performed as national service, but
its work would be constructive and communal in its purposes and not
military. Special military training could be given as a branch of this
service to those who were best fitted for it. But defense would be but
an incident in our constructive life, and not the sinew of our effort.

The tasks for such a national service would evidently be different from
those contemplated by James. He thought of turning his army of youth
into the drudgery of the world, where they might win in heroic toil
and self-sacrifice the moral rewards which war had formerly given. But
if our service is to be universal, it cannot be mere unskilled labor
in mines and farms and forests. A large proportion of our youth would
be disqualified. Furthermore, a service which made such frontal attack
on industry would be bitterly resisted by those with whom its work
competed. We are not prepared for a service which clashes too suddenly
and harshly with the industrial system. What we need is a service which
shall not so much do the old work of the world as create new demands
and satisfy them. This national service could do the things which
need to be done, but which are not now being done. It could have for
its aim the improvement of the quality of our living. Our appalling
slovenliness, the ignorance of great masses in city and country as to
the elementary technique of daily life--this should be the enemy of the
army of youth. I have a picture of a host of eager young missionaries
swarming over the land, spreading the health knowledge, the knowledge
of domestic science, of gardening, of tastefulness, that they have
learned in school.

Such a service would provide apprentices for communal services in
town and country, as many schools and colleges are already actually
providing. Food inspection, factory inspection, organized relief, the
care of dependents, playground service, nursing in hospitals--all this
would be a field for such an educational service. On a larger scale,
tree-planting, the care and repair of roads, work on conservation
projects, the care of model farms, would be tasks for this army. As I
was burning caterpillars’ nests the other day in New Jersey and saw
the trees sinister with gray webs, I thought of the destroying army
of youth that should be invading the land clearing it of all insect
pests. We might even come to the forcible rebuilding of the slovenly
fences and outhouses which strew our landscape, and to an imposition of
cleanness upon our American countryside. With an army of youth we could
perform all those services of neatness and mercy and intelligence which
our communities now know how to perform and mean to perform, but have
not the weapons to wield.

The army could be organized in flying squadrons, so that its
youth could travel widely and see and serve all kinds of men and
communities. For its direction we would need that new type of
teacher-engineer-community-worker that our best school systems are
already producing. Scientific schools, schools of philanthropy,
are turning out men and women who could step into their places as
non-commissioned officers for such an army. The service could be
entirely flexible. Boys and girls could learn the rudiments of their
trade or profession in actual service with the army. Book studies
could be carried on, and college learning could come to its own as the
intellectual fertilizer of a wholesome and stimulating life. Athletics
and sports would be an integral part of the two years’ service. There
would be long periods of camping in the national parks or upon ocean
beaches. The Boy Scouts and Camp-Fire Girls already give the clue to
such an enterprise.

If objection is made that this national educational service would fail
to bring out the sterner qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice, and
would not be a genuine moral equivalent for war, the answer is that the
best kind of a moral equivalent is a moral sublimation. We want to turn
the energies of youth away from their squandering in mere defense or
mere drudgery. Our need is to learn how to live rather than die; to be
teachers and creators, not engines of destruction; to be inventors and
pioneers, not mere defenders. Our cities and isolated farms alike are
mute witnesses that Americans have never learned how to live. Suppose
we had a national service which was making a determined assault for
the enhancement of living. Would its standards and discipline be less
rigorous? Rather would the ingenuity and imagination have to be of the
finest.

Some such conception of national service is the only one which will
give us that thrill of unity and vigor which we seek. An educational
service built on the public school system puts the opportunity in
our hands. The raw material in attitudes and desires is here. Every
task that an army of youth might perform is already being done in
some school or college or communal service. All we need to do is to
coördinate and make universal what is now haphazard and isolated. An
army of youth which focused school work would provide just that purpose
that educators seek. The advocates of “preparedness” are willing
to spend billions on a universal military service which is neither
universal nor educational nor productive. Cannot we begin to organize a
true national service which will let all serve creatively towards the
toning up of American life?




X

THE SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE


To persons directing any complicated organization, criticism from
outsiders always seems either futile or irrelevant. Conscious of the
difficulty that has been met in creating the existing machinery, they
resent the debonair and nonchalant proposals tossed in upon them by
people who have only an amateurish or philosophical interest in their
work. There are very few able administrators in any work who do not
honestly believe they are doing their best with the material that is
given them.

To this resentment the educational world seems particularly prone.
The teacher finds it intolerable that the classroom should be judged
from any vantage-point but the teacher’s desk; the superintendent is
annoyed if you arraign his system in the light of the product turned
out. A public service which enlists so much conscientiousness as does
our public school system is naturally sensitive to public criticism.
Its very sensitiveness makes it difficult for it to distinguish between
criticism of motives and criticism of policies and philosophies.

This resentment to amateur criticism is offset by an almost pathetic
trust in expert overhauling. Letters from school principals to those
in charge of recent investigations into city school systems imply that
the expert has some kind of magical power not possessed by the ordinary
teacher or administrator. When we learn, however, that the defects
discovered are usually of so elementary and obvious a character that
few interested laymen could have ignored them, we suspect that the
magic is not so much a matter of the expert as it is of the outsider.
The thing is to get a new point-of-view, a new interpretation, which
shall not be so obsessed with the inside workings of the machinery that
the drift of policy and the value of the human product is ignored.

Educators, it is true, “welcome fair criticism,” and they have a fond
belief that they get it from one another in the educational press.
But in this mass of books and journals, crowded with exposition and
discussion of current educational conceptions and technical methods,
the whole setting, language, philosophy, are professional. The very
bases and premises which the lay critic wishes to criticize are taken
for granted. Educators decry “destructive” criticism, but in a sense
all criticism is destructive, for it is essentially an examination. It
requires a stripping away of the wrappings of routine and jargon, the
turning of the idea about on all sides, the placing of it in a light
where it may be clearly observed. There is another reason why amateur
criticism is likely to be pertinent in education. The whole business of
teaching and learning is a matter of personal psychology, and, in spite
of current cant, there is no science so elusive and so unformulated as
psychology. If the scientists will no longer deal with the problems of
the personal, conscious life, it is left for the amateur philosophers
to examine the psychological backgrounds of the teaching world, and
attempt newer and more personal interpretations.

Much of the public criticism of the school is no doubt unintelligent,
but what are we to say of that blanket defense we hear so often
from the educator, that the niggardliness of the public prevents
his providing the best schools and the best teachers? Now a country
that attempts almost universally to provide free secondary school
education--something provided in no European country--is certainly not
thus guilty. The prestige of education in America is extraordinarily
high. It is quite too late in the day to pretend that anyone still
regards public schools as a charity, or that ridicule of teaching
methods would only serve to discredit the schools and reduce the
already small appropriations. There is no more fear--though some of our
educators would have us believe it--that free criticism of the school
will leave us school-less than there is that denunciation of the New
York police resulted in leaving that city without police protection.
The public schools in this country have the standing of all other
public services.

It is not a question of more money, but of more intelligent use of
present resources. The inexpert public cannot be expected to spend
its money wisely. It has an incorrigible itch for objective results.
It likes to see its money go into handsome buildings with expensive
equipments. Large sums are spent in emulative waste. If one town boasts
a seventy-five thousand dollar high school, its neighbor must have a
hundred thousand dollar one. It is obvious that money which goes into
costly ventilating systems and the adoption of uncriticized fads, does
not go into teachers’ salaries. But it is the function of the educators
to offset this public childishness with their own wisdom, and see that
the public money is profitably spent. If they believe that we could
have better teachers if we paid more for them, they should see that the
money goes to the teachers and not into fussy mechanical details.

The trend of educational activity has been to encourage this objective
standard. More of the intellectual energy of the educational world has
gone into technique and organization than into psychology. It has been
more interested in seeing that the American child had enough cubic
feet of air, a hygienic desk, and a fire-proof building, than that
he acquired an alert and curious outlook on the modern world, and an
expressive personality. France, with public school buildings, even in
Paris, that you would scarcely perhaps stable your horse in, somehow,
by making expression the insistent motive of education, turns out
intellectual products strikingly superior to our own.

European experience tends, too, to challenge the common assumption
of American educators that quality of teaching is proportional to
salaries paid. American salaries are certainly as high as those paid
in European countries. There is no violent contrast, moreover, between
the intellectual and educational background of a primary teacher with
seven hundred a year and a principal with twenty-five hundred. They
would both subscribe to the same philosophy of life; they might easily
have come from the same training-school. The difference would be one of
age or executive capacity, or of “experience,” which generally means
nothing more than greater expertness with routine and a longer setting
of the intellectual cement.

It is this background, spirit, philosophy, behind the educational
mind that the critical public is becoming more and more restless
about. It does not challenge details of mechanical and administrative
organization. These have been worked out with an ingenuity and a
completeness all too thorough. The public is demanding now a similar
attention to the conscious and spiritual side of learning and teaching.
The ideal of the school as an embryonic community life, of the child
as a growing personality to whom the activity of the school must
have intense reality, of education as the training of expression,
creation--this has hardly begun to be generally felt. The faults
discovered by the Springfield and Portland school surveys arose largely
from a careless and mechanical philosophy of life, an educational
philosophy that had not sufficiently emphasized these ideals. The
investigators were able, for instance, to tell on the moment whether
a teacher had come from a certain training-school by her method and
attitudes.

The responsibility cannot be dodged by the professional educators.
They are responsible for primitive and mechanical attitudes which
make so much of the orthodox public school teaching a mere marking of
time rather than an education. Millions of the public’s money would
not effect this change in the background of the teaching world. That
background could be changed without its costing the public a cent. The
difficulty, huge, it is true, like any other attempt to change the
obscure and uncriticized assumptions that lie at the bottom of any
theory or practice, is psychological, not mechanical. It involves only
the substitution, for certain undemocratic, ultra-logical ideas, of
ideas more congenial to the time and social situation in which we live.




XI

THE PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY


If we are to have better schools in our cities we must know what kind
of schools we have now. In an attempt to tell us, the school survey has
in the last few years been developed with an admirable technique, and
the passion for being surveyed has spread to cities large and small.
No more illuminating document has come out of this effort than the
recently published study of the school system of Portland, Oregon. It
stirs enthusiasm because it shows the progress that has been made in
clarifying the current problems and the ideals which must be realized
if the public school is to prepare the child of to-day for intelligent
participation in the society of which he will form a part. Compared
with the investigations in New York City and Springfield, Illinois,
this Portland survey, under the direction of Professor Cubberley of
Stanford University, represents a new achievement in educational
thinking. Those surveys contented themselves with a criticism of
details, or, at best, with a vague groping for constructive plan. The
Portland survey represents a definite break with the tradition. It is
characterized by a clear idea not only of how the system fails to meet
the modern demands, but of how these demands can be met.

The investigators cannot, of course, explain how it is that one of
the wealthiest and most comfortable of American cities, a city at
once entirely modern and homogeneously American, should have the most
mechanical and formalistic school system these educators had ever seen.
One gets the sense of how without leadership the school may become
a little backwater in a community. In Portland, a city of 250,000
people, commercial and residential center for the great Northwest,
these investigators found the “maintenance unchanged of a rigidly
prescribed mechanical system poorly adapted to the needs either of
children or community.” “Universal practice,” they say, “is enlisted in
the maintenance of a rigid, minutely and mechanically prescribed system
of instruction, organization, administration, supervision, examination
and inspection. Any change in this elaborate mechanism meets with
resistance, positive as well as negative. So far as this system is
adapted at any point to the actual needs of the individual children and
youth that come under it, so far as it is adapted to the needs of the
communities for adequately trained recruits to serve the community, the
adaptation is accidental, not the result of intelligence now operative
at that point.”

This is a criticism of an American institution, and Portland might be
any large American city which has not had an educational awakening.
The survey is significant because it shows the machinery and motives
of public school education in this country for the last generation
not only in Portland but in a city like New York, whose militaristic,
mechanical system is now being thrown into convulsions by the sudden
challenge of the new type of school embodied in the Gary plan. Indeed
this Portland survey is a much better survey of New York school
conditions than the elaborate Hanus inquiry which was made a few years
ago.

The viciousnesses which the investigators found in the Portland system
are those which are familiar to all who feel the defects of their
own schooling, or have set about to examine the reasons for the poor
quality of the school output. On the administrative side there are
all the evils that come from retaining a scheme of amateur control in
a system which has of necessity become professionalized. A board which
is directing a village school must keep all school matters under its
supervision. But when that village has become a vast city, a school
board which keeps the strings in its own hands is simply manufacturing
wastefulness and inefficiency. A lay board which employs highly paid
and highly trained principals, supervisors, etc., and then insists on
directing all business--from the engaging of janitors and the personal
selection of teachers to the suspension of by-laws whereby a schoolroom
may be leased for an evening lecture or a teacher excused to attend
the funeral of her grandmother--labels itself as archaic and unfit. It
is one of the cardinal principles of modern political and industrial
organization that it is a waste of money to pay salaries large enough
to buy judgment, discretion and expert skill and then not permit them
to be used.

This refusal to delegate responsibility, the investigators found,
paralyzed initiative all through the school system. Nothing could be
done without reference to an untrained body of laymen who, however
conscientious they might be, must usually decide spasmodically and
without any definite educational policy. Indeed their conscientiousness
is often a positive vice. Shiftlessness on their part would have
permitted initiative on the parts of principals and teachers. Under
present conditions the distinction between good teachers and bad fades
out. The concern of every one becomes to keep the machinery going, not
to criticize the work and keep it adapted to the individual aptitudes
of the children.

This administrative lifelessness has its counterpart in a pedagogical
routine the focus of which is the “course of study.” The curriculum
is uniform for all children. It is “vivisected into fifty-four dead
pieces,” laid down in pages in certain adopted textbooks. “The only
thought devoted to the formulation of the course of study,” say the
investigators, “was the simple mathematical thought necessary to
parcel out the pages of the books.” The teacher’s duty is to haul the
pupil through the course of study. This is done by means of the formal
recitation, where “pupils answer hollow word-questions with memorized
hollow word-statements.” Term examinations discover how many of these
word-statements are left in the pupils’ minds. An elaborate system of
inspection and supervision exists to check up and grade both teachers
and principals and ensure that the hallowed “course of study” is fully
being carried out. Many of the teachers are trained in the local
schools and turned back into the system to perpetuate these methods. A
state tenure-of-office act keeps all teachers in their places.

The effect upon the children is logical. The school becomes an
automatic process of elimination. Those who can be hauled through the
course of study are hauled. Those whose talents do not lie in the
capacity to memorize printed pages pass out of the school or become
hopelessly mired in the lower grades. “If the sixteen-year-old child
has not yet transferred to his memory Parts 37 to 54, inclusive, of
the dead and comminuted curriculum, the chief constituents of which
are abstract arithmetic and technical grammar, then he must begin with
Part 37 and appropriate that and each of the succeeding 17 Parts in
order, before he can even be associated with youth of approximately
his own age, and before he can engage in study suited to his age and
condition--study and exercises that will be of immediate and practical
value to him in the effort he must shortly make to serve society
for the sake of his own livelihood.” And this system, formulated
and approved twenty years ago by high educational authorities, the
survey stigmatizes as valuable only in its “cheapness and facility of
administration, and the relief that it affords educational officers
and teachers from all responsibility of knowing and of meeting the
individual needs of their pupils.”

This type of public school, so bald and grotesque in the sober
pages of the Portland survey that it seems more like the ritual of
some primitive tribe than the deliberate educational activity of an
enlightened American community, is yet the type that still prevails
in the majority of our cities. This is the fact that we must face.
Yet a community that asks to be surveyed is a community dissatisfied
with itself. Other communities are likely to stir uneasily, and ask
themselves why, if Los Angeles and Indianapolis and Gary can have
modern and fruitful public school systems, other cities should not. We
may even hope that it is the last of the old system and the promise of
the school of to-morrow.




XII

WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION?


At a time when more people are thinking intelligently about American
education than ever before, it is unfortunate that there should be
any confusion between the widely diverse trails that experimentation
is opening up to the modern school. It is becoming increasingly
evident that the “experimental” in education does not at all mean the
same thing to educational administrators as it does to educational
idealists. “Experimental education” has not yet been pitted in
competition against the “experimental school,” but it is not unlikely
that the different techniques which they suggest may come to seem
hostile to each other, and so the real values of both be lost. At
present the two seem to be developing in a fairly complete disregard
of each other. It would be dangerous for American education to
tangle itself in the dilemma of choosing between them. On the other
hand, it would be even more disastrous to confuse them. If we
attempt to apply the quantitative standards of the new “experimental
education” to the life of the “experimental school,” or to infuse the
qualitative ideals of the “experimental school” into the technique of
“experimental education,” we run the risk of spoiling that modern and
socially-adjusted school towards which we are all feeling our way.

When the inventive school superintendent or professor of education
speaks of “experimental education,” he is thinking, not of the “model
school,” but of the new standard tests in the fundamental subjects
by which the work of large masses of public school children is being
regularly measured and compared. The city school survey has elaborated
a technique of intellectual measurements which is giving us very
rapidly a genuine quantitative science of education. A report like
Professor Judd’s in the “Cleveland Survey”--“Measuring the Work of
the Public Schools”--is a storehouse of suggestiveness for all who
like to see how mathematics can be fruitfully applied to living. These
statistical studies measure accurately the performance of children in
the different grades and at different ages in the specific literate
skills which everybody needs even to start fairly in the race of
opportunity. The standard tests have been worked out experimentally
with great numbers of school-children so that average norms of
accomplishment can be set for any class or any individual. Rates of
speed and quality of handwriting, and their relation to each other;
ability to spell common words; rate and capacity of accurate figuring;
rate and quality of silent and oral reading;--these are the aptitudes
that are rigidly measured by the tests. The children are treated as
segregated arithmetical minds, reading minds, spelling minds, as units
of intellectual behavior. The tests are not “examinations,” for they do
not aim to show any absolute attainment of “knowledge.” Their value is
in the comparison they afford of individual skill, and of deviations
from a norm of effectiveness. In the mass of scores you have an
intellectual relief map of your class, your school, your city system.

Now nothing could apparently be more deadly and mechanical than this
treating of living children as if they were narrowly isolated minds. In
this “experimental education” we are evidently in another world from
the “experimental school.” Yet out of these tests emerge the most
important implications for modern education. Out of this “experimental
education” we at last get a scientific basis for the “modern school.”
For we have irrefutable proof of the enormous diversity of minds
and aptitudes. We have a demonstration of the utter foolishness of
subjecting children to a uniform educational process. We have accurate
proof of the fallacy of the “average” in education. These tests are
added proof of the unscientific character of the typical public school
on that very technical and administrative side which has been most
carefully developed. The graded school was a brilliant invention for
its time, but the bases of classification are shown by these new
tests to be absurd. Children are now classified, for purposes of
education, largely by age and average standing. The tests show that
neither category has the slightest relevance for effective learning.
We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any
classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than
useless. But mere numerical age is no clue whatsoever to mental or
even physiological age, and minds with the same average may plot out
very differently for every individual one of the various skills and
interests that elementary training involves. Our educational grading
has been as sentimental and sterile as the ancient philosophers’
classification of matter into earth, water, fire, air. Such a
conception of the world was interesting, but there was nothing you
could do with it. All the school has done with its classifying has
been to get the children into groups where they could be dosed with an
orderly sequence of lessons. There has been no handle by which their
heterogeneous minds and wills could be taken hold of and directed. The
rule of the classroom is necessarily military, because such diverse
people could only be unified in the most objective and external and
coercive way. No internal control would be possible. So the teacher
must devote a large part of her educational energy to the mere business
of policing. When she actually “taught,” it was only the average child
that she could really address--the fairly bright mediocrity. The
other pupils wasted their time almost in direct proportion to their
deviation above or below that average. Children passed up through their
educational life on the basis of an “average mark,” which represented
nothing whatever but a number. The standard tests have shown repeatedly
that ability is so unevenly distributed that the brightest fourth-year
children overlap the poorest eighth-year children. However children may
average, scarcely two children in the same class will ever be found to
have the identical capacity in the different subjects. The tests reveal
not only that children differ, but just how curiously and widely they
do differ.

The traditional classification is enough to wreck any educational
system, even without the deadness of the curriculum. With the
progressive congestion of the public schools, teaching has become more
and more impossible. The traditional system of grading has successfully
resisted most improvement in teaching, and vitiated the newer values
that have been brought into the school. If children, clearly not
defective, cannot learn arithmetic, read slowly and unintelligently,
spell chaotically and write a slovenly hand, question the grading
system. Never have there been such admirable techniques for teaching
these fundamental things. But the classification defies them. The
“class” gives the teacher no leverage for improving the children’s
skill. An unscientific grading is as much a barrier to altering minds
as it is to changing materials.

These truths seem elementary and obvious, yet we had to wait for this
“experimental education” to shake complacency in the “graded school.”
Now if we accept these tests we have to conclude that it is useless
to grade children for education unless those “grades” correspond
accurately and specifically to the capacities of the children. Work
must be done in each specific subject with--and only with--those
who have approximately the same capacity. The “average” is totally
unknown in that “real life” which we are constantly forced to set up
in antithesis to the school. In no function of life is any one going
to be judged by a composite ability to read, write, spell, figure. One
succeeds not through any average skill or average information, but
through the ability to throw all one’s skill and all one’s intelligence
where it is demanded. A measurement of intelligence by averages will
always produce just that ineffectiveness and vagueness for which the
products of the public school are censured at present.

The fallacy of the educational “average” involves another fallacy,
equally obvious but equally prevalent. This is the fallacy of the
“partially perfect.” The school ranks the seventy per cent. child
equal to the hundred per cent. child. Children pass to more difficult
work on an admitted basis of imperfect accomplishment. But for any
real effectiveness in the world it is not enough to be habitually only
seventy per cent. right. Whenever you need to be literate, the world
demands that you be actually literate. If you have information, you
are either useless or dangerous unless your information is accurate.
It is better not to know arithmetic at all than persistently to make
only seven hits out of ten. For all practical purposes your child is
as much a failure at seventy per cent. as he is at zero per cent. It
will avail him little to be able to read and write and figure at a
rate and an excellence only seventy per cent. of the standard. In any
situation which requires these elementary skills he will be almost as
much handicapped as if he were entirely illiterate. It is time that
the school faced the bitter truth that life demands an approximate
perfection in whatever one tries to do. Education must shape all its
technique towards this approximate perfection. It is not necessary
that all should do the same thing. But it is necessary that what one
pretends to do one should succeed gradually in doing. The individual
who is allowed to persist continuously on a level of imperfect
accomplishment is not being educated. For him education is a failure.
He should either drop his technique, or ways should be found to improve
him towards mastery. What children are learning at any one time they
should be learning with a sense of control. The more difficult should
not be confronted till the less difficult has been absorbed. And this
controlled progress will be possible only in a school where children
work with their equals. Classification in education should be based
only on specific proficiency.

The new “experimental education” is engaged in making dramatic in
the schools these truths. It is a force even more revolutionary than
the idealism of the “experimental school.” The situation suggested
by the “curve of distribution” is one of the most momentous facts to
be reckoned with by us of to-day. It is making over our theories of
democracy, social reform and social progress. To work out its manifold
implications in the school is to touch the very nerve of our democratic
future.




XIII

THE ORGANIC SCHOOL


The Fairhope Summer School, which has just closed its season (Sept.,
1915), at Greenwich, Connecticut, has given to Northern people an
opportunity to see at work Mrs. Marietta Johnson’s widely known ideal
of “organic education.” Just as the Gary plan has shown how the city
school may give a varied training to great masses of children with a
freedom and flexibility never believed possible, so Mrs. Johnson has
demonstrated how the small community, or even household, by using the
natural environment and the natural needs as laboratory and workshop,
may adjust the child to life far more accurately than any formal
school. No school carries out more carefully Professor Dewey’s dictum
that the child can only be educated by concerning himself with what has
meaning to him as a child, and not what is to have meaning to him later
as an adult.

In the organic school, children grow up naturally and healthfully,
playing out-of-doors, following their curiosities, learning as their
life makes demands upon them. The teacher is there to answer their
questions, to sharpen their wits, to name for them and analyze the
flowers and soil and trees, to show how to plant vegetables and build
little coops or houses. In their winter school at the single-tax
colony of Fairhope, Alabama, on the shores of Mobile Bay, the children
can be out in the open air almost every day. The land is a complete
geological, botanical, and physical laboratory, and the household a
natural classroom where they learn to live. The school grew, in fact,
quite naturally out of the household, and the necessity for some sort
of school in a community where there was none. Mrs. Johnson, with her
teacher’s genius, simply sharpened and arranged her intercourse with
the children around her, and presently had a school which has become
one of the most interesting in the country.

Its very informality is its charm and success. The hundred or more
children are not classified in grades, but in “life-classes,” which
correspond roughly to those three periods in child life--the first
seven years of growth, the years to adolescence, and early adolescence.
The first class is really an outgrowth of the nursery. In the cool
rooms of the Fairhope Summer School one comes upon little farmhouses
and villages and doll-houses of building-blocks, which form the
basis for getting acquainted with the village the children lived in.
The next group is characterized by a tough practicality, a capacity
for drill and persistence, and this “life-class” was found in the
wood-working shop and garden. Literary studies are taken up very late
by the third class, whose recitations are rather informal discussions
in an outdoor cluster around the teacher. Only when a broad background
of acquaintance with real things is obtained, practical powers of
observation acquired, and an actual need felt for learning what books
can tell, are the conventional school studies begun. In the organic
school there is thus some chance left to the children for getting real
meanings and not mere words and phrases which they may glibly repeat.
Reading and writing are not taught by drill, but are picked up by
the child from the teacher or the other children, in the Rousseauan
fashion, whenever he finds that he is missing something very important
and interesting in not having this skill.

Learning in this kind of school becomes as natural as eating. One
learns when one is hungry to understand what is going on in the world.
Such schools, it will be said, are all very well as an ideal, but where
can teachers be found to direct them? Certainly many of Mrs. Johnson’s
children could teach others in the way they have learned themselves.
The way to get teachers for this free organic education in the “schools
of to-morrow” is clearly to teach more children in the same way.




XIV

COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN


Mr. Wirt’s schools at Gary are genuine public schools, in the sense
that they provide for every kind of child in the community and draw
into themselves the main aspects of the community life. They are not
artificial training-schools for vocations or for life; they are a life
itself. “The public school is still merely the old private school
publicly supported,” he says. The change of support has not really made
it a different kind of a school. It has not really grown up to urban
demands. School-boards usually act as if they were handling private
property. They gravely discuss “wider use of the school plant” as if
this were some gracious extension of privilege. The public does not
yet feel that the schools are its own. Organization, administration,
instruction, are highly authoritative, doctrinaire. The ideal has been
uniformity in methods and product. The educational system has become
as autocratic and military as the industrial. As for content, the
curriculum is the old medieval one, not transformed, but patched up, in
the good old Anglo-Saxon way, as interests which had been the concern
of the few were gradually demanded by the many. Art study, nature
study, physical education, science, organized play, manual training,
have been added to the public school work. But these new interests and
activities have become simply additional “subjects,” taught in much the
same spirit as the old. The problem of the educator has been, not how
may the new activity vitalize and transform the others, but how can it
be introduced with the least disturbance to what is already there. The
present discussion of professional educators about vocational training
shows the same mechanical effort to introduce an alien activity into
the traditional curriculum in such manner that the latter may remain
intact.

Mr. Wirt’s own school is not a tinkering-up of the present school
system. He is not an “educational reformer” making something over. He
has plowed up the educational ground. He actually has a new kind of a
school. It is not a “school of unspecialized vocational training,” or
“a school founded on play,” or an “efficiency school,” or any of the
other terms with which it has been designated. It is hard to describe
because it defies classification in the old terms. Nothing is more
delightful about the Gary schools than the absence of cant. Most of
the current educational problems, the books and ideas on pedagogy,
educational psychology, supervision, administration, teaching-methods,
classroom management, discipline, etc., which fill the attention of the
current educational world are here as if they were not. It is a school
built up outside the influence of the professors of education, the
teachers’ colleges, and the normal school of the land. It is true that
there is probably not a single idea operative that is original with Mr.
Wirt. Probably there is not a single idea that is not being applied
in some school in the country. The novelty is the synthesis, and the
democratic spirit that motivates it.

Here is provided for the first time a genuine public school, a school
which does reflect all the healthy interests of the community, and
where the child does become familiar with its life and with his own
interests and vocational opportunities through practical doing of work.
The school becomes “a clearing-house for community life.” To enter
the Emerson or Frœbel School in Gary--the two superb new buildings
constructed by Mr. Wirt--is like coming into a well-ordered city where
each citizen is going about his proper business. There is none of that
slightly depressing atmosphere of the mild if excellent prison for
half-day involuntary labor which is too often the ordinary school.
Classes do not seem to be neatly immured in rooms, or to be moving
about in lock-step. You are dealing with interested individuals who,
singly or in spontaneous groups, are utilizing all the facilities of a
lavishly equipped and stimulating community. The tone is of a glorified
democratic club, where members avail themselves of privileges which
they know are theirs. The schools are public in the same broad sense
that the streets and parks are public. The school is the children’s
institution. They unaffectedly own it and use it as a mechanic uses
his workshop or an artist his studio. To go to the schools in the
evening and see the children running and playing in the great broad
halls--incomparable playrooms--running in now and then to speak to
their parents who are studying in the evening school, is to get a new
emotional sense of what a school may be. The children do not seem to
be there because education is “compulsory,” or because the parents send
them there to get rid of them, but because what can be done there is so
interesting that they cannot stay away.

I am unable otherwise to account for their streaming back in such
numbers to the voluntary Saturday schools, voluntary for the teachers,
too, who are paid extra for their work. Saturday is a glorified
pay-day, where one may do anything one likes, from making swords in the
wood-shop to studying back work in the classroom. I spent a fascinating
hour watching the thronged wood-shop where little boys were fussing
with the scraps left from the regular work of the week. It occurred to
me then how little real difference there was between the well-to-do
home and the very poorest in the way of interesting activities for
children. How many homes of the comfortably enlightened classes were
fit places to bring up a child? How many even pretend to supply the
books and the wood-work and tools and plants and music with which these
wonderful buildings were running over? Without interesting activities
for children, city homes, both rich and poor, can provide only schools
for loafing. As between the street, to which the less well-to-do child
emerges for interest, and the vaudeville, the “movie” and the current
fads to which the well-to-do child escapes, I think the street is
probably the less demoralizing.

This Saturday workshop was a little study in spontaneous discipline.
Although the children were unwatched, they worked on their own little
jobs as indefatigably as if they were under a drill-master. If any
little boy became weary and was moved to interfere with another little
boy, he was apt to be brushed off as though he were an irritating
fly. Could it be that mischievousness, supposed to be an integral
part of child-nature, was simply a product of repression or idleness?
Could it be that school discipline was largely an attempt to solve
problems which artificial rules were directly manufacturing? Visiting
superintendents, appalled at the freedom in the Gary schools, tip-toe
about looking for signs of depredation. They do not seem to report any.
I decided that these schools had actually acquired the “public” sense.
It seemed really true that children, unless they were challenged to
inventive wickedness by teachers’ rules and precepts, were no more
likely to spoil their school than a lawyer is likely to deface the
panels in the library of his club. This children’s community seemed to
be enjoying its busy life in the same spirit that the wider public uses
its streets and libraries and museums and railroad trains.

This supremely democratic public sense is the motive of Mr. Wirt’s
genius. All this richness of opportunity--the playgrounds, gymnasia,
swimming-pools, gardens, science laboratories, work-shops, libraries,
conservatories--which this school provides so lavishly, is possible
to the public of a small and relatively poor city like Gary, exactly
because the schools are managed like any other public service. The
modern educational ideal, “to provide a desk and seat for every child,”
is as absurd as would be one to provide a seat in the park for every
inhabitant. No public service is used by more than a fraction of the
people at any one time. Mr. Wirt provides the coveted “desk and seat”
for about one-quarter of the children. While they are studying the
traditional three R’s, etc., the rest of the school is distributed in
shop and playgrounds, gymnasium and studio, or at home. By an ingenious
redistribution of the groups throughout the course of an eight-hour
day, Mr. Wirt is able not only to give every child the opportunity of
the varied facilities every day, but he is able to accommodate in one
school building twice the ordinary number of children. The insoluble
“part-time” problems of city schools disappear. The Gary school has
two complete schools, each with its set of teachers, functioning
together in the same building all day long. In the lower grades the
child spends two hours daily in the classroom, an hour in laboratory or
shop, half-an-hour in studio, and half-an-hour in gymnasium, an hour in
auditorium, and the rest of the day in study, play or outside activity.
The older child has three hours for formal instruction, and two hours
for more intensive shop or studio work. Children are passing back and
forth constantly between home and school, each with his or her own
scheme of work, and all the school is being used all the time.

The amount of money thus saved in school buildings alone is so large
that even a town like Gary, with relatively meager school revenues,
can afford not only the varied equipment, but also luxuries like
special school physicians and nurses, and special teachers for special
subjects. Mr. Wirt has been accused of “business efficiency,” but this
is scarcely the term for so artistically elegant a scheme of economy.
When you reflect that it is just because the traditional classrooms
are provided for only a proportion of the children that all of them
have the varied daily opportunities of many-sided work and play, you
are likely to call this “economy,” in the old golden Greek sense of
the wise management of household resources, so that every member may
share alike in the activity and the wealth. Such economy is creative;
it enriches, not impoverishes. I have said that Mr. Wirt thought in
terms of the rural community, but it is of the rural community and
its creative economy, expanded to fill and reorganize the life of the
modern city. The school trains the child by letting him do the things
the city does. His education is an acclimatization to the wider social
life.

A truly public school would let nothing communal remain alien to
itself. In the chemistry class at the Emerson School I actually
found the children helping in the necessary chemical work for the
city. The class was simply an extension of the municipal laboratory.
Gary, of course, has the good fortune or the good sense to have as
chemistry teacher the municipal chemist. The older children act as
his assistants. With him the class tests the city water, the various
milk supplies of the town. Under the inspector, they visit dairies,
workshops, bakeries and food-stores. Last year they published a milk
bulletin containing general information and reports of their tests.
I could not see that it was essentially inferior in quality to one
that an agricultural school might have issued. When I came upon this
class it was testing sugars and candies, from the different shops of
the town, for purity and for use of coloring matter. Another class
was experimenting with soft drinks, studying questions of solution,
suspension and crystallization, with ramifications, I was told,
towards the physiological effect of certain products. The children
were practically deputy food inspectors, and made reports on the
official blanks. The chemist assured me that he had not lost a case in
prosecuting for violation of the pure food laws. In East Chicago, where
school-children were ostensibly not trained as a vigilance committee
in scientific investigations, the chemist could not get a single
conviction.

The children also test the materials supplied to the school, the coal,
cement, etc., to see whether they come up to specifications. I saw
a group trying to make soap for the use of the school. The chemist
assured me--college-trained ignoramus that I was amidst this youthful
expertness--that there was scarcely a principle of the science,
theoretical or practical, that he could not develop from this work, all
so directly motivated by the daily life around the children. I wish
I could convey the fine caliber of this young chemist as he stood in
his laboratory with the children working around him, his clear poise
between the theoretical and the practical making him for me the ideal
symbol of science working ceaselessly at the world around to make it
cleaner and healthier and more livable.

That chemistry class in Gary has a high and momentous significance to
me. It was distinctly not play, as all other laboratory work in school
or college that I have seen has been play. I was surprised to find
how completely the doing of real work banished the amateur atmosphere
and at the same time made the work infinitely more interesting. Mr.
Wirt says the child is a natural scientist, indefatigably curious and
resourceful, quick and accurate. The little children actually seem
to achieve less breakage than the older. What kind of a community
we are going to have when any large proportion of the children grow
up to observe and test the physical conditions under which they
live--when they get the scientific-deputy-inspector habit, so to
say--and what would happen to some forms of political jugglery if a
younger generation got used to thinking in terms of qualitative and
quantitative tests, I leave to the imagination. But it seemed to me
that that chemistry class was one of the most important activities in
the United States to-day.




XV

REALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS


Characteristic of the “public sense” of the Gary schools is the class
in history and geography, which I found at work getting an imaginative
background of the larger social world. To the news-board in the
hall they brought clippings that seemed important. The history room
was smothered in maps and charts, most of them made by the children
themselves. There was a great red Indiana ballot, a chart of the
State Senate, a diagram of State administration, a table showing the
evolution of American political parties, war-maps and pictures. The
place was a workshop, with broad tables for map drawings, and a fine
spread of magazines and papers. “Laboratory” work in history, tried so
timorously in some of our most daring colleges, was in full swing in a
Gary high school class.

When I visited the room the class was concerning itself with reports
on “The city as a healthful place to live in,” with special
emphasis on parks, because the town had been waging its campaign
for the new water-front park. Little outlines on Greek and Roman
cities, medieval and modern cities, had been worked up in the school
library--bountifully equipped as a branch of the city public library.
I had walked into a true course on town-planning, at once the most
fascinating and significant of current social interests and the study
that packs into itself more historical, sociological and geographical
stimulation than almost any I know. A class that had gone through those
reports would have the materials for exactly the social background that
our current imaginations need; and, moreover, all those materials would
be firmly placed in the community setting.

There is a charming communal self-consciousness about Gary, and this
sort of history is the thing that feeds it. One class had been working
on a comparison of Athenian and Spartan education with Gary education.
This struck me as peculiarly delightful. Such social introspection
we rather badly lack in America, yet it is the only soil in which
intellectual virtue can ever grow. The ancient history class has for
its purpose: “to improve its members as American citizens by a study
of the experiences of the ancient peoples.” This class, after some
classroom turbulence, formed a voluntary society which is duly opened
and conducted by the president, while the instructor lingers in a
leisurely fashion outside. I know of no more admirable reason for
historical study than this phrase, the natural expression of the Gary
child who wrote the constitution for this class.

They do not seem to know whether they are studying “Civics” or not.
They are too busy soaking in from real events a familiarity with
history as it is lived and the community as it works. I throw in here
an advertisement for the “Literary Digest” and the “Independent,” which
the pupils regularly read. They study history backward, so that it
explains what is happening to-day. They repeatedly dramatize remote
times. They are talking of coöperating with the State historical
pageant. It seemed to me that these children were actually learning
their social world in the spontaneous natural way that the intelligent
child learns it from newspapers and books and from the slow,
unconscious widening of horizon for which he must usually look quite
outside the school.

If other community institutions have anything educational to offer
outside the school, or if parents and children think they have, Mr.
Wirt’s school lets the children go to these out of their auditorium or
play hour. The churches may have them for religious instruction--there
is no Bible-reading or prayer in the Gary schools--and thus avoid the
imagined necessity for a special kind of church day-school. Already
a Polish parochial school in Gary has lost its reason for being and
vanished. Y. M. C. A.’s, neighborhood houses, special music-teachers,
etc., may also act as extensions of the school. It will be interesting
to see how successfully some of these institutions which purport to
form the child’s morals and care for his soul’s destiny prove their
supplementary value, and how far they are not simply having joyfully
extended to them a long rope by which they may hang themselves.

To Mr. Wirt the school is not more a community than the community is
a school. He believes that parks and playgrounds should follow the
schools, and in Gary he demands twenty acres for every school plant. He
does not rely upon public playgrounds, to which, as experience shows,
only a proportion of children can be enticed from the streets, but
his playground is a part of the school on equal terms with the other
activities. Otherwise these very expensive grounds which cities are
providing are apt to be futile. Mr. Wirt’s policy is to make it as easy
as possible for the community to use the schools. He does not force
people to the opportunities, but he puts them where the people cannot
easily evade them. He does not drive children to the public library,
but he has a branch put in each school. The Gary schools are open night
and day, practically every day in the year. The Indiana law--protector
from tyranny--forbids more than ten months of school a year, but allows
vacation schools. Sunday sees popular lectures. The Gary schools seem
almost as public as the streets.

If the school is to be not only a community embryonic of current
society but also a school-community of itself, it must have some
forum or theater where everything that is peculiarly interesting in
any part of the school may be brought dramatically to the attention
of the rest of the school. This Mr. Wirt provides in the auditorium
hour, so drearily used in the ordinary school for religious exercises,
“speaking pieces,” and moral homilies. In Gary every child goes to
“auditorium” for an hour each day, but he listens there to talks by
the special teachers about their work, lantern-lectures and dramatic
dialogues written by the children themselves from their history or
literature work. There may be moving-pictures, instrumental music,
gymnastic exhibitions. The initiative and responsibility are left
to the teachers. There seems to be no limit to the interest and the
possibility of what may go on in this free little secular theater
except what the imagination of teachers and children can suggest. There
is always singing, and of a most excellent tone. “Auditorium” is one
of Mr. Wirt’s novel ideas. It seems to make unreal the old categories
of “entertainment” and “edification,” just as the rest of the school
seems to damage the conceptions of “work” and “play.” There was a
pleasant informality about things, with the girls sewing at the back
of the theater, and the young audience breaking into whistling as they
marched out to the music of the piano. “Auditorium” ought to be quite
as important as Mr. Wirt thinks it is. What school-work might become,
lived always in the possible light of its intelligent presentation to
the school audience in dramatic form, we do not know, because educators
have never been dramatists. The Gary schools have special teachers for
expression, but the American spirit is in many ways so inexpressive
that the idea can thus far be only a frank and delightful experiment.

I liked particularly in the “auditoriums” I visited the intermingling
of children of all ages. This is one of the many ways by which the
Gary school breaks down the snobbery of age which causes so much
unhappiness in childhood, and fixes the adult mind with so many
delusions. I came across a significant editorial in the Emerson School
paper which showed me how useful this intermingling was in smashing
caste lines that were already forming. The editor acknowledged that the
expected objectionableness of the “youngsters” had not asserted itself.
One got a real sense of a new sympathy breaking upon these already
sophisticating minds of high-school children.

I mention this because it is typical of Mr. Wirt’s genius to obliterate
artificial lines and avoid mechanical groupings. His ideal school is
one like the Emerson in Gary, a complete school, from kindergarten to
college, in the same building, with all the varied facilities used by
all classes. The grading is of the utmost flexibility. The traditional
twelve grades are followed, but classes work in “rapid,” “average,”
or “slow” groups, according as the various children give promise of
completing the State-prescribed curriculum in ten, twelve or fourteen
years. The child may pass from group to group or from grade to grade at
any time on the examination of the supervisor of instruction. The child
himself has no sense of being “graded” or even “marked.” Report-cards
are rather a concession to parents’ weaknesses. If the child needs
additional help, there is the parallel school, so that he may have a
double lesson the same day. And the Saturday school offers another
opportunity.

All studying is supposed to be done in school hours. The fearful
bogey of “home-work” is laid. In this free interchange of groups
the child acquires a sense of individuality. Each has practically
an individual schedule of work, for the organization of which the
executive principal, who devotes all his time to such matters, is
responsible. Except in the youngest classes, the children seem to
move about individually to their different rooms and shops. By this
drastic carrying down of college methods through the grades Mr. Wirt
has exploded another hoary superstition that great masses of children
in city schools can only be handled by uniform and machine methods,
in a lump. Frœbel School in Gary has twenty-five hundred children,
most of them very small alien immigrants. Yet the same flexible and
free methods are used there, apparently with success. These children,
because of the immensely varied equipment, and the possibility of small
classes in the shops, are getting something resembling individual
instruction. I picked up at random the card of an older girl at
Emerson. It read: “Printing, History, Gymnasium, French, Music, Botany,
Auditorium, English.” The very shock of that bold “Printing” gives
you a realization of the modern school you are in. And this is a girl
besides.

Now a program like this, and all this free election and flexibility,
would seem wilful and anarchical were it not for the fact that in
the Gary school these schedules are the result of a natural and very
careful process of selection, made by the child. What the child shall
study, outside of the regular classroom work, is neither forced upon it
nor aimlessly selected. Take the Emerson School, a beautiful building
with laboratories and studios, gymnasia and shops, and put your child
into its kindergarten or first grade. He runs about the halls. The
shops and studies and laboratories are not segregated, but distributed
over the building so as to convey the impression that they are equally
significant, and to give every child an opportunity of becoming
familiar with them. All the rooms have big glass doors or windows. The
child’s own unaided curiosity makes him look in and wonder about what
the older children are doing there. One could see children of all ages
peering into the foundry or machine-shop or printery.

When the child has reached the third or fourth grade he has a certain
idea of what activity interests him, and he is allowed to go into shop
or laboratory as observer or helper to the older child. He watches and
asks questions, and the older boy learns by teaching him. If the child
finds that the work does not actually interest him he still has the
chance to change. When he takes up the work in the higher grades he has
served his apprenticeship and is already familiar with the apparatus
and the technique. The teacher does not have to break in a new class
each year. It is almost a self-perpetuating and self-instructing
class. The child has been assimilated to the work as new members in
any profession or trade in society are assimilated. When the child is
exposed from his earliest years to the various vocational activities,
is allowed to come into them just as his curiosity ripens, you have as
perfect a “choice of a vocation” as could be imagined. Only this sort
of opportunity can really be called “vocational training.” The usual
vocation school work takes the child too late, when his curiosity is
likely to be dulled; it puts him into the work without any previous
familiarity. It can scarcely be anything but drudgery. If “capacities
are to be developed,” Mr. Wirt’s scheme gives the surest means of
developing them. It solves the grave problems of “vocational” and
“pre-vocational” training, which are so sorely vexing the professional
educational world, a large part of whose business in life seems to be
to create and have problems.




XVI

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL


Vocational training in the schools of Gary means that whatever work is
necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying or enhancing
the facilities, is done by the school itself. These large, lavishly
equipped modern school-buildings require a force of mechanics to keep
them in repair. Their shops are the industrial and manual shops for the
school. The children work in them with skilled union workmen, who are
employed not primarily as “manual training” teachers, but as assistants
to the building superintendent. The mechanics teach by allowing the
children to help them as apprentices. They earn their salaries by
repair and construction work, while the children who desire it get an
incomparable vocational training at practically no cost to the town.
Where the ordinary trade-school must have large classes to make the
enterprise pay, the Gary vocational work may be done with the smallest
groups, for the shops are paying for themselves anyway.

Manual training takes on quite a new meaning as you move about,
watching the boys in the carpenter-shop making desks or tables, or
cabinets for the botany collections, or book-racks for the library,
sending them on to the paint-shop when they have finished; boys in
the sheet-metal shop hammering zinc for the roof; young electricians
repairing bells; a couple of plumbers tinkering with pipes; little
groups of serious and absorbedly interested boys in foundry and
forge and pattern-making shop, all coöperating like the parts of a
well-ordered factory. There was obviously enough real work to keep busy
for his hour a day every child who desired training in a trade. Where
school and workshop are thus fused, the need for “continuation” and
“coöperative” courses--where the boy alternates between shop or factory
and school--disappears. The child has the advantages of both.

The ordinary school, and even the specialized vocational school, is
rarely doing more in its industrial, manual, or domestic science work
than playing a rather dreary game with toys. There could scarcely be a
greater contrast between the real shops of the Gary schools and those
ordinary “shops” and kitchens with their dozens of little machines at
which at a given time the entire class does its little stereotyped
“stunt.” In Gary the domestic science room is a real kitchen in which
the daily luncheon is prepared and served at cost to the teachers and
pupils who desire it. The cook is a real cook, and the girls come in
as observers, helpers or workers, just as the boys go into the shops.
The nearest approach to a luxury is the pottery shop, but this is
itself perhaps the best symbol of that fusion of the artistic and
the practical that is the Wirt genius. What are you to say when you
walk into the art studio and find a dozen girls and boys high on a
scaffolding painting a frieze which they have themselves designed,
while others are at work on stained-glass designs to go in varnished
paper on the panels of the door?

There is a genial, joyous quality about all the work that gives every
room a charm--the foundry with its deep shadows, the smooth gray
pottery shop with its turning wheels and bright glazed jugs, the botany
room with its mass of greenery. Even the history room at Emerson School
had the atmosphere which comes from concentrated interest and the slow
accretion of significant material. Emerson itself is a spacious and
dignified building with innumerable little touches of taste that one
usually associates only with the high schools of exceptionally wealthy
and cultivated suburban communities. It is a delightful paradox that so
beautiful a life should appear to be lived where every activity seems
to be motivated by direct utilitarian application. I said that you have
to plow your mind up to understand this kind of a school. Certainly I
have never seen a place which more nearly permitted to seem real that
old ideal of the joy of work which we imagine must have existed back in
guild days. It may be left to the imagination what children trained in
such a school are likely to have to say to the industrial society in
which we live.

The practical work of the school is only limited by local school needs,
but the shoeless condition of some of the Frœbel children inspired the
starting of a shoe shop where old shoes were made over. Both Emerson
and Frœbel have a printery from which come all the blanks, reports,
programs, etc., used in the school, as well as the bulletins and papers
by which the various classes are tempted to preserve the good things
they write. The commercial pupils have charge of all the accounting and
bookkeeping as well as the supplies. The children who work in the shops
are paid in checks, which are calculated on the basis of prevailing
union wages for the working-time. This provides opportunities for
a banking system, which is also in charge of the commercial class.
In the Jefferson School the boiler-room is an integral part of the
machine-shop.

The botany class was responsible for the beautiful and elaborate
conservatory at the entrance of the Emerson School, and for the window
hothouse in the botany room, where practical experiments are made. The
botanists also have charge of the shrubs and trees on the grounds,
and the vegetable gardens which they work communistically all through
the summer. Their study of food and textile products ramified into
the domestic science work, just as the zoology study was fused with
physiology. This latter class had a playground zoo, with foxes and
coyotes, raccoons and prairie-dogs, about whose habits and adventures
they were preparing a brochure, which was already in press at the
printery. When I stepped into the zoology laboratory itself, I found
that I was in an even more animated zoo. Crows, chickens and pigeons
in cages at the back of the room were lusty with vociferous greeting.
The imperturbability of the children amidst this racket showed me how
well aware they were that this was the way a zoology room ought to
behave.

Such a school, where the child works almost unconsciously into a
vocation which appeals to him as neither play nor drudgery, is far
more “vocational” than even the specialized school. The child,
beginning so young in shop or laboratory, and assimilating the work
very gradually, is able to lay deep foundations of interest and
skill. The Gary school is distinctly unspecialized. In a sense it
gives a completely “liberal education.” The child emerges a skilful
amateur. The industrial and scientific work no more “train” him to
take a definite place in the industrial world than the cultural work
trains him to be a college professor. But he should leave school well
equipped to cope with a dynamic, rapidly changing industrial society
which demands above all things versatility, and which scraps methods
and machines as ruthlessly as it does men. Only the man of rounded
training and resourcefulness who can turn his hand quickly to a variety
of occupations has much chance of success. Our public school, in spite
of its fancied “liberal” curriculum, has really been turning out only
very low-grade specialists. It has made no effort to produce the type
of mind most needed to-day--the versatile machinist, the practical
engineer, the mind that adapts and masters mechanism. This is probably
the best intellectual type our society produces. This exactness,
resourcefulness, inventiveness, pragmatic judgment of a mechanism by
its product, the sense of machinery as a means, not an end, are exactly
the qualities that society demands in every profession or trade.

The Gary school is the first I have seen that promises to cultivate
this kind of intelligence. It frankly accepts the machine not in the
usual sense of the vocational schools, as an exacting master that the
child is to learn docilely to obey, but as the basis of our modern
life, by whose means we must make whatever progress we may will. The
machine seems to be a thing to which society is irrevocably pledged.
It is time the school recognized it. In Gary it is with the child from
his earliest years. It is the motive of his scientific study. The
physics teacher at the Emerson School told me that he thought the
fascinating and irresponsible automobile had done more to educate the
younger generation than most of the public schools. Tinkering with an
automobile was a whole scientific training.

I dropped into his physics class, and found a dozen twelve-year-old
girls and their nine-year-old “helpers” studying the motor-cycle. With
that fine disregard for boundaries which characterizes Gary education,
the hour began with a spelling lesson of the names of the parts and
processes of the machine. After the words were learned, the mechanism
was explained to them as they pored over it, and their memory of
vaporization, evaporation, etc., called into play. The motor-cycle
was set going, the girls described its action, and the lesson was
over, as perfect a piece of teaching as I have ever heard. The intense
animation of that little group was all the more piquant for having
as a background the astounded disapprobation of three grave school
superintendents from the East.

To these physics classes the ventilating, heating and electric
systems in the schools are all text-books. The climate is studied.
The shops provide many physics problems. There was a class of boys
having explained to them the physical principles of various types of
machines. The impetuous rush of those little boys as they were sent
into the machine-shop to take apart a lawn-mower, a bicycle, and a
cream-separator, and the look of elation on their faces, would alone
make Gary unforgettable to me. It was evident that this was indeed a
different kind of school.




XVII

THE NATURAL SCHOOL


A surprisingly small amount of administrative machinery for so varied
a system is required by the schools of Gary. Mr. Wirt is the City
Superintendent of Schools. Under him each of the five school buildings
has an executive principal. Two supervisors of instruction look after
the pedagogical work of the system. The director of industrial work has
charge of building repair, and supervises the shops where the children
work under the mechanic-teachers. There is no attempt to segregate the
vocational work. Manual, physical, artistic and academic activities are
administered on an equal footing.

For the teacher the Gary school should be almost as liberating as it
is to the pupil. In the details of courses much initiative is left
to the teacher. It is really an inductive school where courses are
worked out by supervisors consulting together on the basis of classroom
experience. Teachers are encouraged to experiment and develop their
own ideas. Here is the first public school I have ever seen that
resolutely sets itself against uniformity of method or product, that
recognizes differences of individuality.

The working-day of the teacher may be longer, but she is relieved of
the burdensome home-work. The nervous strain is lessened also by the
freer method of discipline. There cannot be unruly children unless
children are ruled, and in the Gary school there is apparently no
artificial repression. One found in the classroom as much talking as
there would be in a concert audience, with the same natural motives,
freed of “rules of order,” for quiet. The frequent change of room and
activity in the Gary school prevents, too, that nervous restiveness
which must inevitably come to the child kept long at his desk. The
point is that only in a free and varied school like this can one talk
of effective discipline. When school activities are as attractive as
they are here, deprivation becomes punishment. There is at hand an
instrument for inculcating reason into refractoriness which is as
powerful as the stoutest disciplinarian could wish. The ordinary school
tries to keep up a military system of control, without any means,
now that corporal punishment is generally abolished, of punishing
infractions. In a Gary school “being sent home” for misbehavior usually
means being sent to a place infinitely less interesting. But there is
little talk about “mischievous and unruly boys.” Those children who, in
spite of everything, “are not adapted to our kind of school,” may go
to the school farm in the country to work. But this farm is not in any
sense a “reform” school. Delicate children may also be sent there, and
other classes go for a holiday. As to the personal manners prevailing
in such a free school as this, with its absence of moral homily, and
effort to “train character” through obedience and discipline, I can
only repeat the words of an Italian boy who had recently come from
orthodox schools elsewhere: “But they’re so polite!”

I was glad to see that there was no nonsense at Gary about schemes
of “self-government,” which can be little more than a humiliating
pretension in any school. A kindly judge did once institute “Boyville”
in a Gary school, with a parody of municipal functions, but its
unreality soon relegated it to limbo. Spontaneous organization there
is, but it grows out of real work. The boys’ ninth grade English
class, for instance, has organized itself as the Emerson Improvement
Association, and its work revolves around the speaking and writing
necessary in conducting the affairs of the organization. There seem
to be no “extra-curricular” activities, which create so many problems
elsewhere. Athletic teams and sports are connected with the gymnasium
work. Other societies spring up naturally out of the school interests.
Problems of “fraternities” and the control of athletics which confront
so many high schools are thus naturally avoided.

The Gary school not only lightens this strain of discipline for
the teacher and cultivates her initiative, but serves as a kind of
training-school for the teachers themselves. The new-coming teacher
learns by acting as helper or “apprentice” to the older teacher, just
as the children in shop or laboratory learn from one another. The
result is an uncommon and appealing equality between teachers and
children, without imposed authority on one side or subservience on the
other. Beside Mr. Wirt Mme. Montessori seems almost a beginner, so
daringly has he carried the principles of self-instruction up through
the higher grades. Even visiting teachers and superintendents who
wish to learn the theory and practice of the Gary school must learn
in the same way. Mr. Wirt does not lecture to them. He allows them
also to come into the school for a few months as helpers to teacher or
principal. Everybody who has anything to do with a Gary school must
evidently learn by doing the real work itself. Nothing shows more
clearly the whole-knit fiber of Mr. Wirt’s philosophy than this new
kind of “normal” school for visiting teachers.

I was pleased with the absence of self-display. Advertising has come
from the outside. The teachers seem innocent of the great number of
things they are doing which a large part of the orthodox educational
world believes to be impossible. You are talked with frankly and
genially, but nothing is done to impress you. You are left to
interpret it all for yourself. Those who miss the spirit will find
weaknesses. Professional educators hold up hands of horror at the
“looseness” of the teaching. They miss the dramatic effect of the
“well-conducted recitation”--the drawing-out of the pupil’s memory,
or the appeals to glib guesses at what the teacher wants. They judge
by the old-fashioned standard of how the teacher is teaching rather
than the new one of what the child is learning. My complaint would be
rather that there was still too much teaching that is conventional,
particularly in the lower grades. And I have an animus against the
deadly desks and seats which are still in use in too many of the
classrooms. But the significant thing is that this kind of a school is
not static or completed, but a constantly growing organism. The only
limit to which it may grow lies in the imagination and initiative of
teachers and pupils. And the school cannot be judged in cross-section.
Even when it starts with so admirable an equipment, its life has just
begun. For the mechanical and artistic, manual work and intellectual
study, are all directed towards enriching the physical body and the
spiritual life and atmosphere of the school. This intensive cultivation
of resources produces that “embryonic community life” which is
Professor Dewey’s ideal, where in actual work the child senses the
occupations and interests of the larger society into which he is to
enter.

Mr. Wirt’s schools would be unworthy of discussion were they not
capable of imitation generally in American towns and cities. Already
a number of communities have copied the essential features, and Mr.
Wirt is at present occupied in remodeling a few of the New York City
schools, successfully, too, in spite of the fact that New York, on
account of its rapid growth, its great alien population, and its
political cross-currents, presents perhaps the most formidable school
problems in the country. The only substantial difficulty in remodeling
schools according to the Gary scheme is the matter of playgrounds. Even
this is surmountable, for most cities have parks or usable vacant lots
within reach of the school. Mr. Wirt’s great triumph in Gary is the
old Jefferson School which he found when he came to the town. This was
an orthodox ten-room building built by the city fathers to accommodate
Gary children for many generations. By turning the spacious attic into
a gymnasium, transforming five of the classrooms into music and art
studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a jack-of-all-trades
workshop around the engine-room in the cellar, a domestic-science
kitchen in an unused corner, and by appropriating a nearby park space,
he transformed a perfectly ordinary school building, whose prototype
may be found in every town in the land, into a full-fledged, varied
and smoothly-functioning Wirt school. Through the “rotation of crops”
system, this school, built for three hundred and sixty children,
actually accommodates over eight hundred, and gives them every
facility, if less elaborately, of the specially designed new schools.

Perhaps I may here recapitulate. The mere prosaic business economy
of the Wirt scheme is enough to recommend it. No school board can
afford to neglect a plan which not only saves money to the taxpayers,
but provides better facilities, more varied equipment and better
educational opportunities than even well-to-do communities can at
present afford. The Wirt school solves the vexing “part-time” problem.
Gary is the only city I know that has room (March, 1915) in its present
buildings for at least one-third more children than there now are to go
to school.

In the second place, the plan solves most of the problems of vocational
and industrial training which now confront the public school. It
catches the child’s curiosity and skill on the upstroke. It makes no
separation of manual from intellectual work, and avoids that sinister
caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement.
And from the point of view of economy again, the scheme of devoting
industrial work to actual care of the school-plant enables the school
to provide a great variety of occupations almost without additional
cost to the community.

In the third place, the plan provides a large measure of individual
instruction. It is a school for every kind of a child. The flexibility
of schedules, the coöperation of outside agencies like the churches,
the varied activities, give opportunity for the fullest development of
differing interests and capacities.

In the fourth place, the plan carries out throughout the school life
the educational truth that learning can only come through doing. The
habits and attitudes of careful scientific observation, or purposeful
interesting activity which is neither work nor play, the social,
democratic, and coöperative background which such a school cultivates,
are exactly the qualities we need for our younger generation in
American society.

Such a school carries out the best ideals of American democracy, as I
see them, in an extremely effective way. Its philosophy is American,
its democratic organization is American. It is one of the institutions
that our American culture should be proudest of. Perhaps professional
educators, accustomed to other concepts and military methods and
administrative illusions, will not welcome this kind of school. But
teachers hampered by drill and routine will want it, and so will
parents and children.




XVIII

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL


A recent article in the “New York Times” (Oct. 17, 1915) by Dr. Thomas
S. Baker, Headmaster of the Tome School, contains an able pedagogical
criticism of the Gary school which is typical of the general attitude
towards the Gary idea on the part of conservative schoolmen. Nothing
could bring out more clearly the difference in educational values
between this professional teaching opinion and the broad social
vision of Superintendent Wirt. Dr. Baker admits the impressive social
effectiveness of the plan. It is “the last development in socializing
the schools.” Mr. Wirt is “not only an educator, but also a social
reformer, a city worker.” But Dr. Baker’s argument is really the
specialized pedagogical one against the social. Where Mr. Wirt sees the
school as a community center, a children’s world, Dr. Baker sees it
as an educational factory. “The social value of the Gary schools,” he
says, “is beyond question. Its pedagogic excellence has still to be
determined.” From his point of view, a school is not so much a place to
train effective citizens as to make “thorough scholars.” He questions
whether “these side issues in the scheme of child-training”--the
gymnasia, shops, laboratories, which the Gary school contains--“are
really essential in mental development.” He is afraid that the young
citizens of Gary learn more from their industrial shops and science
laboratories than from their books.

Dr. Baker’s guarded argument is really a glorification of “intellectual
discipline” as against an intelligent capacity to lead an organic
life in a modern society which needs above all things resourceful
adaptation and social appreciations. It is a question of ideals, and
no more important issue was ever put to a people than this one of how
we want our next generation trained. The school is not only the one
institution which assimilates all the people, but it is the most easily
modifiable. It is not only the easiest lever of social progress but the
most effective, for it deals with relatively plastic human material. To
decide what kind of a school we want is almost to decide what kind of a
society we want.

If we only want that kind of a school which would “make hard-working
and accurate scholars and produce thoughtful men,” we must resign
ourselves to a progressive softening of the fiber and capacity of
the mass of our people. The average educator acts as if he thought
of his child-world as a level plain of capacities. There is the mass
of unskilled, unawakened minds; here is the level of scholarship,
knowledge, civic virtue, appreciations. Education is to him the process
of lifting up the mass from their primitive level to the higher one.
The public school is the elevator into which all are to be shoveled and
transported to the upper story. And the American public school in the
last fifty years has been faithfully following this ideal.

The truth is, of course, that mental aptitude is not any such level
desert, but rather a series of inclined planes. When we try to
educate all the children of all the people, we are not dealing with a
homogeneous mass, but with sliding scales of capacity. A mental test
of the school-children of a state would reveal an incline extending in
orderly gradation from the genius down to the imbecile. A physical test
would give us a different slant, a test for artistic or mechanical
capacity another. Stand at the center of divine average and try to
lever any of these slopes into a horizontal position and you find half
of your society squatting heavily at the lower end. You may ascribe it
to race capacity, personal heredity, social environment, malnutrition,
defective nervous organization or anything you please, but the fact
remains that the greater part of the human raw material will be
permanently resistive to or only dully appreciative of any attempts
to elevate them to a level. This is true of any capacity you may
choose. The outstanding truth of society seems to be the heterogeneous
distribution of capacities. And the irony of it is that after artistic
capacity true intellectual capacity is probably the rarest. For the
public school to try to make intellectualists of all its children is a
sheer defiance of sociological reality.

Some educators, while they recognize this diversity, yet insist on
uniform standards, uniform curricula, uniform discipline, on the
ground that social order in a democracy is imperiled unless the
highest degree of like-mindedness prevails. Such a democracy would
be the stagnant democracy of China. The result of these attempts at
standardization have been the automatic centrifugal flinging off into
space of the children whose interests were not intellectual, who were
no more capable of being made into “accurate scholars” than they were
into artists and poets. And from those who did not get quite flung
off, but clung on with their teeth, we get most of our prevailing
pseudo-culture. To keep on trying to “develop the mind” and produce
“thorough scholarship” in those whom we force to submit to educational
processes, means simply to go on creating a nerveless and semi-helpless
mass of boys and girls who will never take their effective and
interested place in the world because they have no mental tools which
they can wield. Such a course is coming to be generally recognized as
a kind of slow national suicide, a slow suffocation of industrial and
social progress.

The schools do change, but the schoolmen yield grudgingly. Nothing
could be more naïve than the test which Dr. Baker proposes for
evaluating the Gary plan. Submit, he says, the highest class in the
Gary schools to an examination by the College Examining Board. If the
students pass, the Gary system will be justified of its children. Was
ever a more patent assertion of the professional bias? Let the children
drop out of the lower grades untrained except in the rudiments, but if
the small minority in the highest class passes its Vergil and algebra
and English literature and German with marks as high as the graduates
of the Tome School, then the Gary system will cease to be considered a
“mere experiment.” If this is what the critics of the Gary plan mean
when they plead for an “evaluation of this novel experiment,” we may
well hope that it will escape the peril.

Such a conception of educational values cannot become too speedily
obsolete. A public school is a mockery unless it educates the public.
It cannot make the rarefied and strained product at the top the test
of its effectiveness. And the public is not ideally educated unless
its individuals--all of them--are intelligent, informed, skilled,
resourceful, up to the limit of their respective capacities. Life
itself can no longer be trusted to provide this education; the school
must substitute. The Gary school deliberately sets such an ideal.
Democracy does not mean uniformity, but it does mean equality of
opportunity. A democratic school would be one where every child had
the chance to discover and develop aptitude. The Gary school, with its
harmonious activities of intellectual, manual, artistic and scientific
work, physical education and play, gives just this chance. Democratic
education does not mean the provision of separate schools for different
kinds of children, or even separate courses in the same school, as the
movement for industrial education is now threatening to bring. This is
to create at once invidious distinctions, and fasten class education
upon us. To say that children are different does not mean that some
are fitted to be scholars and others to be manual workers, some to be
artists and some to be scientists. The differences are differences of
focus and not of quality.

To most children will appear in the course of school life some dominant
interest, and it is upon the cultivation of that interest that the
child’s chance of being more than a nerveless mediocrity will depend.
It is upon that training that his chance of being absorbed out of the
school into the social and industrial world will depend. At the same
time, without a common background with his fellows he will be alien
and adrift in the world. Interest and skill in one’s work, whether
it be making automobiles or teaching Greek, an acquaintance with the
contemporary world, an alert intelligence which is always seeking to
diminish the area of things human that are alien to one--a man or woman
with this would be truly educated in any society. But both focus and
background are supremely necessary. The present educational system does
not really set itself to provide either. Only in a school organized on
some such plan as the Gary plan will such education be possible.

This does not mean that every child is to marvelously blossom into
ideally alert and skilled intelligence. But we can be sure that a
school which gives opportunity for the development of the most varied
aptitudes in the free play of a child-community life will have done
all that it could. No one pretends that the Gary education is the
intrinsically ideal education for all time. But we can say that, given
the best social demands of America to-day, this school will make for
the most robust, effective, intelligent citizenship of which we are at
present capable.




XIX

THE TRAINED MIND


How much longer are we to expect the headmasters of our private
secondary schools to view with anything but alarm the current radical
tendencies in education? In the November “Atlantic,” Dr. Alfred E.
Stearns of Phillips-Andover is stirred to wrath against the fallacies
of the modern school as expounded by Mr. Flexner and others. The paper
contributes little new to the well-worn theory of mental discipline
upon which upper-class education has so long been based. But it is
highly significant as a pattern of the “trained” mind as it works in
the exposure of fallacies. Dr. Stearns is presumably an immensely
successful product of the old idealistic and linguistic education,
gained by strenuous effort and vigorous thinking. It is worth while
to examine how such a mind argues, what it considers as clinching
evidence, how it hopes to convince the alert intellectual of to-day.

The “fallacies” in modern education which Dr. Stearns is exposing
are the materialistic and utilitarian ideal, the belief in the
non-transferability of mental power from one field to another, the
cultivation of interest rather than discipline, of play rather than
drudgery, the scientific rather than the cultural emphasis. He
wishes to persuade the reader that all these tendencies make for the
perversion of the child’s character, the weakening of his mental
grasp, the materializing of his soul. One waits eagerly for proofs of
such very serious menaces. The student of education to-day is rapidly
acquiring a belief in objective evidence, in statistical or at least
analytic experiment, in scientific formulation. The kind of evidence
that appeals to the alert student to-day is the kind that comes out
of the psychological laboratory of Clark University, or Columbia
or Chicago, out of the great city school surveys, like Portland or
Cleveland or New York, out of the experimental schools in different
parts of the country. These are the arenas where educational problems
will, he believes, ultimately be solved. And to him the so-called
“fallacies” in modern education are not “dogmas” or “assumptions” at
all, but rather hopeful hypotheses which are now being tested in
dozens of American schools.

Is this the sort of evidence to which Dr. Stearns’ trained mind appeals
when he wishes to discredit the “new” education? Not at all. He does
not even so much as show that he is acquainted with the existence of
the great mass of literature which would throw light on the success
or failure of the radical theories which he deplores. Educational
journals, school surveys, reports of intelligence tests, descriptions
of play schools,--none of these seem to have come into contact with
his training. For the benefit of the philosophically-minded, he does
not even refer to the writings of Dewey or Hall, or the other radical
writers on education. All this writing and doing which represents the
new education at work, he lumps into “the pedagogical expert,” upon
whom he lavishes his anxious scorn. The only concrete data he offers is
the record of the College Examination Board, which Dr. Flexner, whom
he is criticizing, had cited in his “Modern School.” Dr. Flexner had
argued against Latin and mathematics in the secondary school on the
ground that the majority of even the picked students failed in them.
Dr. Stearns succeeds in showing that a majority of college candidates
fail not only in Latin and Algebra but in all other subjects as well.
The normal mind, untrained by the old dispensation, would consider
these statistics very damaging to Dr. Stearns’ cause. The inexorable
conclusion would be not that Latin and algebra should be retained in
the secondary school curriculum, but that the entire curriculum should
undergo a radical reorganization in teaching methods and educational
philosophy.

Dr. Stearns, like most of the critics of the “new” education, makes
the fundamental error of confusing the narrow business man, who sees
no “use” for his son’s taking Latin or algebra in school, with the
“new” educator who would give these subjects a new orientation in
the curriculum. The “practical” business man is as much anathema to
the “modern school” as he is to the cultural school. The “modern
school” would not refuse any subject to minds that fed upon it and
fused it into vital experience. But it would not force it on minds
that could not digest it. And Dr. Stearns’ own figures show how
generally indigestible, with all the drudgery and mental discipline
in the world, is the entire conventional secondary school curriculum.
The pseudo-modern high school where science and manual arts have
been added, only to be taught in the same unilluminated way, is as
objectionable to the “new” educator as it is to Dr. Stearns.

Since the latter’s only use of objective evidence proves a boomerang,
what considerations does he think will be persuasive in his attack on
the “new” education? It is easy to see. His reliance is entirely on
authority, upon personal belief. Several very successful business men
of his acquaintance attribute their success to the training of the old
education. The majority of schoolmasters are not yet ready to abandon
the doctrine of mental discipline. The sons of Mr. Hill go to college
to get something which their father, for all his success, recognizes
that he missed. It is a serious question in the minds of many observers
whether Dr. Eliot’s advocacy of “observational” training is sound.
Always the reference to personal authority, to prestige, to anything
but objective standards on which both sides may agree! Always the naïve
appeal to schoolmasters and successful business men, the pillars of his
world! Dr. Stearns deplores the materialistic trend of the age, but he
does not consider how powerfully his own innocent use of the verdict of
successful business men as scientific evidence is likely to glorify
material success in the minds of his students.

Dr. Stearns’ logic is as unconvincing as his evidence. A doctrine is
monstrous. Therefore, he implies, it is untrue. Intelligent children
are usually bright in all their school subjects. Therefore, if you
force a child to learn through drudgery, you automatically endow him
with general intelligence. The interest of boys in wireless telegraphy
and automobiles, he thinks, is the best argument for keeping all these
things out of a school where one must learn to work. At the same time,
Dr. Stearns objects to scientific schools because students so soon lose
interest in their work. But, according to the gospel of drudgery, why
would not this make science the ideal “mental discipline”?

Such a paper as this shows the technique of a thoroughly obsolete mind.
Such “mental discipline” as this old education gave is evidently of
little use in handling a world of facts, of experiment, of recorded
tests. Criticism does not make such thinkers critical. It only makes
them belligerent. They do not analyze, they repel. They are more
interested in a moral justification for the structure of their craft
and their practices than in the truth. Dr. Stearns’ paper is the best
evidence of how little relevant is the old linguistic and idealistic
education to the intellectual demands of to-day. The critical,
analytic, impersonal, experimental approach is wholly lacking in
his paper. His evidence is personal authority, his logic is special
pleading. Parents with sons in private schools might well view with
grave concern the kind of “trained mind” which is likely to be
developed under such masters of the old education. They might ask how
likely a boy, taught to use his mind the way Dr. Stearns uses his, is
to analyze and grasp the complex facts of the world into which he will
come.




XX

CLASS AND SCHOOL


The proposed experimental school which the General Education Board is
to found in conjunction with Teachers’ College in New York has sent a
shiver through the conservative schoolmen of America. It is assumed
that the policy of the new school will follow Dr. Flexner’s manifesto
of the “Modern School,” that adroit and uncompromising crystallization
of the radical philosophy of our new American education. Dr. Flexner
has proved himself to be an admirable agitator, for he has succeeded,
with doctrines that public-school educators have been discussing for
ten years and which experimental schools all through the country have
been testing out, in rousing the slumberous camp of private secondary
schoolmasters to a sense of what is going on in the educational world.
The private secondary school is the last stronghold of educational
conservatism. Enlightenment has to proceed upward through thick layers
of prejudice and smugness. Dr. Flexner’s voice seems to have broken in
the walls and gotten a hearing for the new education even in the walls
of the traditional New England academy. It is for these people that the
“Modern School” was written, for only those will find its proposals
“revolutionary and dangerous” who have never read a line of Dewey or
G. Stanley Hall, never read a copy of an educational journal, never
visited an experimental school, or even the newer plants of the best
public schools in American cities. There is irony in the location of
the new school at Teachers’ College. For the latter has been one of
the most persistently experimental educational centers in the country.
If its “model” schools have felt in the course of time the blighting
touch of conventionality, at least in the Speyer course of industrial
arts there has been developed a method of permanent value. There is no
more accurate application of Dr. Flexner’s demand that “children should
begin by getting acquainted with objects,” “follow the life-cycles of
plants and animals,” “the observation and execution of industrial and
commercial processes,” and so forth. In this industrial arts course
the children are concerned from the beginning with food-products and
clothing and building and the way different peoples make their living.
Out of this handling of homely things grow the geography and science
and history and mathematics. It seems only a question of time before
there will be scarcely an elementary school untouched by this practical
approach to knowledge through objects and projects and concrete facts.

Dr. Flexner’s tilting is not against our rapidly improving public
elementary school so much as it is against the private secondary
school, with its sub-college, classical, formal curriculum, and
its obsolete educational theory of formal discipline and salvation
through drudgery. It is as an object-lesson for this branch of
American education that the new school will have permanent value.
It will be the heaviest assault which has yet had to be met by that
vested educational interest which we know as the private secondary
school. The private school has made it its function to prepare the
sons and daughters of the well-to-do for college, and so keep up
the tradition of leisured and cultured wealth. This is the ideal at
the bottom of the hearts of the conservative schoolmen. A knowledge
which is useless, like the formal classics and mathematics, is only
a sharpened tool of exclusiveness, for only the younger generation
of a ruling class can afford to give its time to it. In a growing
industrial society such an education becomes ever more and more a
dividing line between classes. That the public high school has been
largely controlled by the same ideals does not mean at all that
this kind of education has been democratized, but merely that the
unthinking and clambering middle classes have been hypnotized by vague
aspirations of “culture” and “intellectual training” into imitation
of the traditional ruling-class education. Some of the strongest
opposition to vocational education in the public schools comes even
from the ranks of the ambitious wage-earners who “want their children
to have the educational advantages they were denied.” They resent what
they misinterpret as an attempt to keep their younger generation in a
subordinate labor class. What they do not see is that the traditional
education which they admire is no real education for the modern world.
We find the industrious proletarian and the exclusive Tory joining
hands in opposing the new democratic education which is meant to have
the effects of freeing both classes and making them fit together to
administer a free society. The Tory wants to keep for his children his
privileged status; the wage-earner wants to obtain for his children
this privileged status. “Book” education, innocent of practicality
and use, is still an accepted mark of this geniality. Neither class
has any real sense yet of a democratic attitude that finds both the
“utilitarian” and the “cultural” irrelevant terms, and demands only
effective activity and imaginative understanding from every citizen up
to the limit of his capacity.

The “old” education then is a class-education, and therefore has no
place in a society which is trying to become democratic. How much
class-feeling is behind the current allegiance to the education of
discipline and drudgery is shown in a paper by Miss Edith Hamilton
of the Bryn Mawr School in the “New Republic” for February 10, 1917.
She pleads for the “old” education in behalf of her girls. But when
she says “school” she has in the back of her mind an institution
for the training of the well-to-do classes. Her argument against a
change in education seems to be based on the idea that change would
be prejudicial to the life which she accepts as worthiest for those
fortunate classes with which she is best acquainted. Her argument is
that life will make no stern demands upon the sheltered, economically
endowed leisure which most of her girls will enjoy. Without external
standards their fiber must deteriorate unless they have learned the
joy of work by the doing of things because they are hard. Without
impersonal intellectual interests, their personal energy, she says,
will waste away in futility or in a meddlesome control of their own
daughters. The boy is harnessed into some kind of self-discipline by
the exigencies of business life. But for the girl, the substitution in
the “modern school” of domestic science for “elegant accomplishments”
is only an illusory discipline. Not only are these arts of housekeeping
too easy to provide discipline, but they will never be demanded from
the upper-class girl. Only the traditional curriculum, therefore,
impersonal, cultural, laborious, will give her the needed stimulus to
play her leisured rôle worthily.

At first sight nothing could be more ironic than this gospel of
strenuous effort preached in the name of a sheltered class. Why
should a girl be disciplined, trained to do things “_because_ they
are hard,” for a life which becomes “easier and easier,” unless her
teachers wish to provide her with some kind of moral and intellectual
justification for her social rôle? The “old” education combines
uselessness and effort, and it is just this combination which would
maintain leisure-class functions and yet leave the individuals morally
justified. The uselessness makes you exclusive and the effort satisfies
your moral sense. It is a little curious to find Miss Hamilton using
the “utilitarian” argument against domestic science, that is, that
it will never be used by her girls. Yet she wishes them to acquire
“impersonal intellectual interests,” which they can never use except in
not very real “cultural” dabblings and social work.

Miss Hamilton’s argument for tradition is the orthodox one that is now
being repeated by all those who oppose the new Rockefeller school. “The
old education is superior to any training which makes interest not
discipline, efficiency not knowledge, the standard.” Now this point at
issue between interest and discipline has been so thoroughly discussed
by John Dewey in his “Interest as Related to Will” and other writings,
that one is surprised at this late day to find responsible educators
who are willing to give the impression that they are unacquainted
with Dewey’s arguments. Even if disciples like Dr. Flexner and myself
in our enthusiasm unconsciously caricature him, the philosophy is
there in its classic form in Dewey for all to read. The curious notion
of the “old” educator that interest makes work “easy,” instead of
intensifying the effort, is only possible, of course, to minds soaked
in a Puritan tradition. Dewey shows that interest and discipline are
not antagonistic to efficiency and knowledge, but that knowledge is
merely information effectively used and manipulated, and discipline is
willed and focused interest. Each has an element of the other. It is
meaningless to talk of interest vs. discipline when all real interest
has an organizing effect on one’s activity, and any real discipline is
built up on a foundation of interest. Indeed in one of my articles to
which Miss Hamilton takes exception, I define discipline as “willed
skill,” which is as far from any conception of “making things easy,”
of “smattering and superficiality,” as could well be imagined. It is
a superstition, of course, as Miss Hamilton says, to suppose that all
children burn with a hard gem-like flame of curiosity to know, but it
is equally a superstition to suppose that with all children strenuous
drudgery flowers into the immense joy of work and creation, or that
effort taken consistently against the grain of interest can suddenly
be transmuted into spontaneous activity. A certain habit, a mechanical
routine spirit, may be evolved by drudgery, but not imaginative skill.
All true discipline comes from overcoming obstacles beyond which one is
conscious of a goal in itself worth while. It is only a feeble spirit
which can be drugged by effort in and for itself. In those admired
cases where facility comes after conscientious but uninteresting
effort, let the old-fashioned educator ask herself whether the child
gained the satisfaction of accomplishment _because_ he went through
the discipline, or whether it was not only _because_ he liked the
satisfaction of accomplishment that he was willing to go through the
drudgery. If you admit the latter, then you have admitted the case
for the new education. Temperaments, impulses, interests--or, if you
like, the lack of interests--will insist on dominating, on determining
the way each child takes his experience. All education can ever do is
to provide the experience, and stimulate, guide, organize interests.
Anything else may produce, at its best, a trained animal. It will not
be education, and it will not produce men and women.

The task of the democratic school is to provide just this general
experience and stimulation. Miss Hamilton’s paper shows that such a
school would be a challenge to the kind of institution she has in
mind when she speaks of education. When leisure-class functions and
leisure-class education clasp in a perfect circle, a new sociological
and industrial emphasis, such as the “Modern School” suggests, might
make the leisure-class pupils uneasy, restless, questioning. If you
began emphasizing interest instead of drudgery, you might find yourself
calling into question the sincerity of those “impersonal intellectual
interests.” If you emphasized efficiency instead of knowledge, you
might make uncomfortably evident the unreality of much of what passes
for culture in society to-day. You would be making insecure the moral
and intellectual justifications of caste. But that is exactly the
critical and undermining work which a democratic education is designed
to stimulate.

These new educators are seeking a type of school which shall provide
for children as human beings and not as members of any one social
class. They want a school which creates a common sympathy, a common
intimacy with the various activities and expressions of the modern
well-rounded personality, just so far as each individual is capable,
with his endowments and intelligence, of acquiring such an intimacy.
The “Modern School” would turn the child’s attention to the projects,
objects, processes, facts, of the active world about him, not because
they are good in themselves, but because they are the common stock of
all classes. The development of communal functions and services forces
every family more or less into touch with the active world out of which
the “Modern School’s” curriculum grows. It is in the study of these
“real things,” rather than in the logical systems of text-books, the
predigested ideals of literature or a leisured class, the technical
manipulation of dead languages and official science, that common
interest and the sense of common possession will arise. The expectation
is that interpretations and ideals which grow out of such a study will
be more vital and sound because they will have come out of the child’s
own experience, and not have been merely shoveled into his memory. It
is expected that the “strenuous effort” of the past, which was so much
an effort of memory and routine, will become, in a curriculum harnessed
to occupational life, an effort of interest and intelligent enthusiasm.
Out of such a spirit and such a school should issue the self-sustained
discipline by which all good work is done in the world.




XXI

A POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION


Now that the passage of the Smith-Hughes bill is assured, interest
moves to the distribution of this federal subsidy for vocational
continuation and part-time schools. For the actual sums appropriated,
even the maximum which will be available in nine years, are too small
to be of constructive significance. Indeed there is something grotesque
about the solemn and arduous study which went into the passage of this
timid educational bill by a Congress which could appropriate a full
third of a billion for armaments. The Smith-Hughes bill has all the
aspect of a pious wish rather than the beginning of a thorough national
policy in education. There was nothing revolutionary in this principle
of federal aid. The principle was established by the Morrill act of
1862 and recently confirmed by the Smith-Lever bill for agricultural
education. The halting character of this new legislation must be
explained partly by the novelty of vocational training in America and
by the extremely confused condition of mind about it.

We scarcely know yet how to institute a vocational education that will
make out of our youth effective workers and at the same time free and
initiating citizens. The hopeless lack of coördination between industry
and our educational system blocks and bewilders our efforts. In working
towards a solution we meet two very real perils. When we attempt a
coördination we run the risk of turning the public school into a mere
preparatory school for factory, store and workshop, producing helpless
workers riveted by their very training to a rigid and arbitrary
industrial life. The better trained they are, or at least the more
intense their specialization, the greater will be their subjection.
Organized labor fears, and not unjustly, that a public vocational
education might be the means of over-crowding the labor market and
thereby “furnishing strike-breakers to industry.” This is always the
danger when we attempt to adjust our training too tightly to existing
industrial conditions. On the other hand, if we try to evade this
danger and make the young worker’s training more general, so that a
number of fields of industrial opportunity will be open to him, we may
leave him more helpless than ever, for he has no assurance of being fit
for the very concrete demands of skill that paying industry will make
upon him.

This is the dilemma. If the organization of vocational training is
left in charge of the representatives of the employers, educators
fear, and fear rightly, that the first result will ensue. If it is
left exclusively in the hands of educators, the employers fear the
other danger. Vocational education in this country has, therefore,
run its uncertain course through experiments in continuation schools,
“pre-vocational” courses in the regular schools, trade courses,
“coöperative” courses, until a certain skepticism has been aroused in
the minds of professional educators and the interested public whether
we can institute a workable system at all in our present public
school. Skepticism has meant hesitation. In spite of the propaganda
and survey work of an influential society of educators, employers
and labor men--the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial
Education--progress has been very slow. Only eight states have provided
for the encouragement of vocational education and in only one is
continuation schooling compulsory. The whole movement has needed some
very definite concentrated stimulus and some new, clear focusing of the
issues.

This is the real value of the new federal bill. If it is negligible
in its actual power for aid, its indirect effects should be of great
importance in the way of stimulus. It will undoubtedly suggest to the
majority of states the immediate establishment of a comprehensive
system of continuation schools. The grants will be just large enough
to make it seem possible. They are not nearly large enough to exempt
the states from local appropriations. According to the federal bill
these must duplicate the federal grants. The latter will therefore
mean actual additional resources, an increment to local and state
appropriations. If the states are wise, and appropriate this increment
to the payment and training of teachers, then these small sums may be
made to mean just the difference between the present hardly attained
mediocrity of vocational teaching and a new and effective type of
artisan-instructors.

The bill puts the distribution of the funds in the hands of such
state boards as the legislatures shall designate. The latter may
designate the regular state board of education, or a special board
of industrial education working under the direction of the regular
board, or it may create a new and independent board to handle
these funds. No state is likely to trifle with this now thoroughly
discredited “dual” system originally sponsored in Illinois under the
form of separate boards controlled wholly by employing interests. The
practical choice will lie between the purely “educational” control and
the mixed educational, industrial and labor control, such as exists
in Wisconsin. The objection to the former grows persistently on the
ground that the new vocational methods and work tend infallibly in
the hands of the professional educator to drift back to the academic.
Educators have too often shown a willingness either to divorce the
“pre-vocational” work entirely from the regular school, or else to
emasculate it of its realistic potency. Instead of seeing the new
practical emphasis infusing and reinvigorating the regular primary
and secondary school, the enthusiast for the “new” education has too
often had to watch merely the slow reduction of the vocational work
to the old unimaginative level of “manual training.” The question of
control, therefore, which the new bill puts indirectly to the states
is of the greatest moment, both to the traditional type of school and
to the new activities. The board that distributes the funds will in the
last analysis control the policy. Certainly the conservatism of the
professional educator is far less to be feared than the narrowness and
self-interest of employers’ associations. In following the provisions
of the federal bill that the aided schools shall be below college
grade, for children over fourteen, the state board will control the
standards of the individual schools. Whichever form of control is
adopted, the trend towards state centralization of the school system is
likely to be greatly strengthened.

In this development the states will be influenced largely by the
experience of Wisconsin and Massachusetts, where the continuation
schools, part-time schools, apprentice classes, which the bill
encourages, have been longest in operation. The Wisconsin experience
will be found particularly instructive. The state subsidizes its
vocational schools by duplicating the funds raised by the community
under an obligatory half-mill tax. The local schools are under the
control of a special board of industrial education appointed by the
local board of education, and consisting of the superintendent
of schools with two labor representatives and two employers. The
distribution of the state funds is in the hands of the regular state
educational administration. There is an advisory industrial board of
similar composition to the local boards. At present the situation
is much confused owing to the reluctance of this state board of
industrial education to remain merely advisory. A “developer” has
been appointed as its secretary, an expert in the field, but without
administrative power over the schools. His attempts at acceleration
have produced their inevitable and intense resentment among the regular
school officials. Obviously such a system, with two boards contending
for mastery, creates an impossible situation. With the exception of
this--and the actual effect of this very largely personal and political
feud upon the local development seems to have been negligible--the
Wisconsin system seems to be based on sound principles. The local
industrial boards have worked with effectiveness and responsibility.
In Milwaukee a remarkable system of continuation schools has been
built up, which provides for no less than eight thousand children
between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, children whom the public
and parochial schools have sloughed off into “blind-alley” work, and
at whose education and guidance the city makes a last stab in the
four-hour-a-week continuation school. One definite principle these
Milwaukee schools seem to have established--that education must not
be “preparatory” to work, that there is no real place for the merely
“pre-vocational,” but that education should accompany work and do
that just as long as there is anything to learn. The ideal vocational
education will be a liberal “part-time” education, in which the school
furnishes the background and the constant opening of new suggestions
and possibilities, and the shop or trade or office provides the arena
for acting skilfully on what is learned.

The Wisconsin system is particularly suggestive. For the local boards
constitute one of our first American attempts at representation by
interest instead of political parties or arbitrary geographical
divisions. Their success is largely ascribed in Wisconsin to this
fact, that they do accurately represent just the three classes most
concerned in this form of education--organized labor, the employers,
and the professional schoolman. The labor representatives are on the
board to see that the policy does not swing over to narrow employing
interests, the employers are on the board to see that the school is
kept in touch with the practical demands of industry. The professional
educator holds the balance of power between these two interests. With
this administrative development to build on, with the improvement in
teaching caliber that the new federal grants should bring, with the
state centralization of the school system to which the new bill will
give impetus, the future is good for a national system of education for
work and with work, a free and democratic vocational training.




XXII

AN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION


Nothing is more significant of the new spirit in public education
than our use of the term “vocational training.” It strikes out at a
blow the old antithesis between the cultural and the utilitarian. For
a genuine vocation implies neither a life devoted to thought, nor a
dull mechanical job to which personal and artistic and intellectual
interests are mere trimmings--recreations which can be easily omitted
by those who cannot afford to pay for them. A vocation is rather a
nucleus of any kind of interesting activity by which one earns one’s
living, and around which whatever else comes to one’s experience
clusters to enhance its value and interest. It is not fantastic to hope
that the very demands of modern industrial technique will make of most
trades just such nuclei. When we justify trade-schools and industrial
courses by the existence of law and medical and engineering schools, we
are implying that the skilled worker in modern industry can and should
lead a life as genuinely “professional” as the lawyer and doctor and
engineer.

New York City has at the present time (June, 1915) a unique opportunity
to meet these important issues. In no other city has the question been
so squarely presented. New York has to choose between what is called
the Ettinger plan, put into operation by a local superintendent to
solve “part-time” and vocational training problems, and the Gary plan,
as worked out by William Wirt and now on trial under his personal
direction in several of the New York schools. In that choice may be
indicated the tendencies and purposes of industrial education in this
country.

The Ettinger plan emphasizes in the sharpest way the difference
between “cultural” and “industrial” work. The child chooses between
them in his sixth or seventh year of school. If economic pressure is
going to force him into manual work, he is allowed to try a number of
different trades in the school industrial shops in order to discover
what he is best fitted for. This hasty experimentation has received the
schoolman’s label of “prevocational.” Having chosen his trade, the
young worker specializes in the shop, under conditions as nearly as
possible like the trade, continuing in trade-school or technical high
school, or in the industry under a coöperative scheme, as in the German
schools. His academic studies, as far as they are continued, are of a
severely practical character, theory and science being used merely to
explain the industrial processes which he is learning. The ideal is a
specialized school, gradually breaking off from the traditional one and
developing radically different methods and interests. The object of the
industrial course is to turn out a competent workman who has escaped
the blind occupations of those who leave school at the minimum age.

The school under this plan may give the child an elementary industrial
training, with an intellectual orientation better than he could get
under any system of apprenticeship, but it can scarcely be said to give
a vocational training. The Ettinger plan treats the child solely as
a potential workman who is to be absorbed as a permanent subordinate
in one specialized trade of a rigidly organized industrial system. It
makes of the school a mere downward extension of the staple trades and
machine industries, a sort of kindergarten where the employer gets
his workmen trained, free of cost to himself. It quite ignores any
other rôles the young worker may be called upon to play in society--as
citizen or as member of an economic class. It makes an undemocratic
class-division in the public school, and by divorcing the academic from
the industrial work gives to both the wrong setting.

The Gary plan, on the other hand, prepares for a genuinely vocational
life. It views the world outside the school not as a collection of
trades but as a community, a network of occupations and interests, of
interweaving services, intellectual, administrative, manual. It sees
the individual as a citizen who contributes his share to the community
and pays for the things he enjoys. The school itself is organized as
a community, self-supporting industrially and as varied in its work,
study and play as is the larger community. The industrial work is
made an indispensable part of the maintenance and enhancement of this
school community life. The Gary child begins in his third or fourth
school year as helper in a shop or laboratory that interests him. If
he is to work at a trade after he leaves school, he gets a long and
thorough training under real workmen in the school shops engaged in
the repair and maintenance of the school-plant. He is at no time called
upon to choose between the “academic” and the “industrial.” His work
is a focusing of all the interests of the school, and the attitudes
developed in the school are bound to be carried into productive life
and to give a new setting to the business of making a livelihood.
Science, apart from the light it throws upon the artisan’s trade,
is bound to mean something to him, for in the Gary school it has
answered his questions about the physical world around him. History
and geography and sociology and economics are likely to mean something
because they have answered questions about the social institutions
and the relations of men. Art and music will continue to interest him
because they have been an integral part of the school life. The Gary
plan would tend to produce not only a skilled workman but a critical
citizen, ready, like the energetic professional man, to affect the
standards and endeavors of his profession and the community life.

The Ettinger plan is as economically unsound as it is pedagogically
unsound. It requires special teachers, and expensive shops which are
unproductive. Without state or federal subsidies, the cost of any
extensive or even adequate industrial training in trade-school or
elementary school will continue to be prohibitive. The Gary plan, which
connects the school shops directly with the repair and maintenance
of the school-plant, demands and can afford a much greater variety
of shops than the ordinary school. And since the workmen-teachers
earn their salaries by their work, the children get their industrial
training practically without cost to the community. By the Gary plan
the vocational training features are only practicable if all the other
liberally varied “cultural” features are put into operation at the same
time. This effectually prevents that “exploitation” of the children
which its opponents fear because the young workers get their training
as “apprentices” in the school shops.

Many who admit the superior social aims of the Gary plan are inclined
to feel that the practical results of the two plans will not be
radically different. But the Gary plan and the Ettinger plan are not
merely two different ways of reaching the same end. They not only
involve different conceptions of the school and of industrial society,
but they are bound to turn out different kinds of people.

The Ettinger plan is dangerous because it is typical of most schemes
now being put forward by the advocates of industrial education. These
plans are concerned neither with genuine educational interests nor
with genuine industrial interests, but only with the interest of the
employer. No person who feels that the public schools should train
critical citizens who will have something to say to the industrial
system into which they go, and not mere docile workers, counting
socially no more than their tools, will fail to realize the vast
importance that the Gary plan should prevail over all these schemes.




XXIII

ORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION


At a recent labor conference in New York City, May, 1916, called to
present a program for the local public schools, Mr. Gompers expressed
himself as open-minded towards the Gary plan which is about to be
extended to thirty-five more New York schools. This open-mindedness
of Mr. Gompers is in welcome and significant contrast to the attitude
taken by some of the smaller leaders in the city, who have apparently
tried to line up organized labor with a personal political machine
and with reactionary schoolmen in obstructing the reorganization of
the elementary schools. But organized labor has better business than
opposing educational reform, and Mr. Gompers’s remarks, made with full
responsibility and in direct opposition to the thinly-veiled partisan
spirit of the conference, suggest that the responsible leaders of
labor are willing to take a more enlightened stand in this important
movement.

Organized labor has repeatedly gone on record in favor of a public
school system which will train a labor citizenry so versatile and
intelligent as to be able to protect itself from exploitation and the
hazards of our social shiftlessness. It has demanded that vocational
teaching be kept intimately related to life, so that children come
out from the school neither helpless unskilled workers nor narrow
machine-tenders, but potential citizens acquainted with the backgrounds
of their crafts, with the significance of the labor movement and the
institutions and movements of the world about them. Labor above all
classes has a vital interest in an education for all children which
acknowledges the full intellectual and social meanings of industrial
processes and occupations. The education that labor desires is one
which will give, particularly to those who engage in industrial
callings, the desire and ability to share in social control, and to
become masters of their industrial fate.

Now organized labor must be rapidly coming to see that this demand will
never be satisfied by the conventional type of city public school.
A traditional school founded on the bookish education of a leisure
class can never be made into a pre-vocational school that will give
power and dignity to labor, without a fundamental transformation of
the present spirit, subject matter and teaching methods. An elementary
school which gives its children no more than narrow drill in the three
R’s plus a little remote and unreal text-book information in history
and geography, with what little half-hearted music and drawing and
nature-study can be squeezed in, will never provide the foundation that
the trained worker will need. No system of trade-training or vocational
education superimposed upon such an elementary school will remedy the
evils. Children who have been listlessly and ineffectively drilled in
book-work will have acquired attitudes that are likely to be carried
over into vocational work. Except for the few, industrial training will
seem sheer drudgery, for it will have its roots in no interests and
powers developed in earlier years. Pre-vocational education must mean
something more than a mere sop to the motor-minded boys and girls who
are restless with their books and are on the verge of leaving school
for work. Such training, if it is to mean anything, must be woven in
as an organic part of the school course. The entire elementary school
could be a general, free, spontaneous, amateur pre-vocational school,
where in direct contact with machines and industrial processes as
well as books, with gardens and gymnasiums as well as laboratories
and kitchens, with tools and print and pottery shops and drawing and
music studios, children might have their imaginations stirred, try out
their busy hands on things, and gradually sift out of the variety the
interests that they can lay hold on with some promise of creative use.
The school might be a place where play passed insensibly into work, and
aimless experiment into purposeful construction.

Most of the current criticism of the public schools arises from the
rapidly growing conviction that only in such a school will the modern
city child have a chance to be educated in any way which will meet
the demands in industrial or commercial life that will be made upon
him. There is danger in current educational experiments that we become
too easily satisfied with the mere addition of desirable courses,
without at the same time transforming the school so that the new
work is organically assimilated. Labor cannot be content with the
school reform which many cities are adopting in the introduction of
vocational courses merely in the upper grades. Such a postponement
means an invidious class-distinction in those grades between the
children who are going on to academic work and those who are going on
to industrial work. It broadens the gulf between labor and leisure
rather than diminishes it. Labor should be the first to protest against
these “pre-vocational courses,” “junior high school plans,” as they
are variously called. A school which consists merely of six years of
bookish schooling with trade-learning and athletics tacked on at the
top would merely intensify the evils under which labor now suffers.
It would produce mechanical drudges. It would almost guarantee that
industrially exploitable horde of young workers the creation of which
organized labor so much fears.

In advocating such a system the lesser labor chiefs in New York have
been very badly advised. The program of “immediate demands,” put forth
under Mr. Gompers’s nose with a great flourish of the rights of labor,
is not only unprogressive but actually reactionary. It is exactly
the kind of specious program that the narrow-minded employer might
demand who wished a docile but intelligent labor force trained at the
public expense. In whose interest does labor demand the “immediate
elimination from the course of study of any activity which takes away
from the essentials and fundamentals of education in the elementary
schools?” To eliminate organized play, auditorium dramatics, shopwork,
gardening, dancing, etc., is surely the best way to drive children
out of school, or to train them into mere appendages to machines.
What labor needs is the most varied kind of work-study-and-play
school, where imagination and interest are awakened. Yet here we find
a conference on organized labor and education demanding simply more
of the old kind of traditional schools! What good will it do to have
more school buildings, more teachers, more pay for teachers, even
more night-schools and playgrounds, if the schools merely pursue the
old limited grind? Labor needs a school enriched in opportunity and
vitalized with the modern spirit of “learning by doing,” yet all it can
think of to demand is “a seat for every child”! And to ram home to the
public a sense of its straitened vision, this conference records its
“emphatic protest against any further extension of the Gary plan.”

Now opposition to the Gary plan may be a useful attitude for the
lesser labor leaders who are playing for political stakes, but we
cannot believe that this is the attitude of the intelligent elements
in the labor movement. For what the Gary plan does is exactly to make
possible for the first time on a large public scale this greatly
enriched elementary school which labor needs for the realization of its
own expressed educational ideals. The broad curriculum, the flexibility
which adapts the school to the needs of every child, the interweaving
work, study and play, transform the traditional school into a kind
of child-community, where children throughout the course are laying
the rudiments of their vocations. They have a chance from the early
years, by trial and error, by experiment and realization, to find out
what they can do and what they cannot do. To quote Superintendent
Wirt, the Gary school is educating them just as the home, shop and
school teacher educated the children of earlier American days. No
formal pre-vocational course begun in the seventh or eighth year can
do what this simple intimate contact with things and processes does.
In a sense, industrial education may begin in the Gary school as soon
as the small child is interested in going into the school-shops or
laboratories as helper or observer. All the activities may be tested
in the same way. The school is thoroughly democratic because the
opportunities, bookish, manual, artistic, are open on equal terms to
all the children. For labor to oppose the Gary plan means that labor
is suicidally opposing the very kind of school that holds out the most
opportunity for an enriched education for its children.

Mr. Gompers and the other responsible leaders of organized labor could
do nothing more important than make an immediate and thorough study of
the educational promise of the Gary school. If organized labor were to
put itself enthusiastically behind the Gary plan, it would have at once
an enlightened policy on elementary education which would effectively
prevent any insidious exploitation of the movement. It would be well if
the responsible leaders would repudiate these lesser labor chiefs who
manipulate education for political purposes. The time has come for a
bold and progressive stand.




XXIV

EDUCATION FOR WORK


The urgency of vocational education in this country has been immensely
reinforced during the past few years by the rapidly growing social
solicitude for child welfare. Child-labor laws, compulsory education,
minimum wage, children’s courts, welfare bureaus, devised primarily
as mere protective agencies for the weaker and less self-defensible
members of the community, are now suddenly seen to involve a host of
positive social responsibilities. We are recognizing that the state
has a duty not only to save the younger generation from exploitation,
premature labor and demoralizing environments, but also to give it
every possible opportunity to be trained for an effective vocation.
In particular, the recent raising of the age limit for child labor in
many of the states, by keeping in school thousands of children who
would otherwise have passed out to work, has put a great strain upon
the public school. The challenge so far has done little else than make
evident an alarming inadequacy of the present type of school to train
children for the work which they will shortly be called upon to do. The
school systems of the large northern cities are having thrust upon them
great numbers of children for whose education, in this new sense of the
word, they are unprepared. And the burden and urgency is one that will
increase rather than diminish.

This is one of the lessons of a document like the recent admirable
report of the Minneapolis Survey for Vocational Education, made last
year under the auspices of the National Society for the Promotion of
Industrial Education. It would be difficult to advise reading more
important for educator, employer and employee than this cross-section
of the skilled-labor life of a great American city, looked at with a
view to vocational guidance. In Minneapolis all the conditions were at
their best for such a social laboratory experiment. The rapid growth of
manufacturing and the unusually high proportion of skilled industries
make the demand for the training of workers paramount. The stringent
state laws require attendance at the school until the age of sixteen or
the completion of the entire elementary course. The city has a school
system of high traditional excellence. Clearly all the factors that
would stimulate a campaign for vocational education are here in their
most exacting form.

The analysis here given of the training which the manufacturing and
mechanical industries require for their various skilled positions,
the training which public schools and special schools are purporting
to give, the increase in resources which school and shop will have
to make to meet the social demands made upon them--all this will be
found typical in greater or less degree throughout the country. The
most general impression one gets from the Survey is of industrial
unpreparedness. The public school is seen not with its usual fault as
an institution of general education which has ignored pre-vocational
needs, but as a pre-vocational school of narrow and exclusive type,
for the vocational training of the classes in the community whose
actual need was least. For above the earlier years of rudimentary
schooling there has been superimposed a bookish school which is
really a pre-vocational school for the professions or for domestic
leisure. The boys and girls whose futures were to be professional and
domestic had the benefit of the public school. The vast majority, the
motor-minded and those whose aptitudes were not intellectual, very
properly and automatically left this bookish school as soon as they had
obtained their rudimentary general education. When the state suddenly
refuses to allow these children to leave the school until they have
finished the elementary course, the school system is faced with the
necessity of broadening itself from a narrow pre-vocational school for
the professions into a pre-vocational school for all the industries
and arts of the modern community. The smatterings of wood-working and
domestic science which the city schools have introduced are shown not
to have broadened the school in the least. Even the technical courses
in the high schools have quite failed to meet the problem. Of the
recent graduates from these courses in the Minneapolis schools it is
shown that one-half went directly to college, only one-tenth passing
into occupations for which the course could in any way be regarded
as preparatory. Most of these students, moreover, went into drafting
rooms. It may be said therefore that to the training of the great
artisan class of such a modern and progressive city the public schools
have contributed practically nothing. A typically American progressive
school system with all its technical and manual accessories is shown
functioning at its very highest limit as a pre-vocational school,
not for skilled labor, but for the professions and what the Survey
suggestively calls the “commissioned officers of industry.”

The industries themselves, however, are found to be no more adequately
engaged than the school in training their own workers. Apprenticeship
has all but died out, and among neither employers nor employees is
there any enthusiasm for its return. Yet, although all the trades
require a constant supply of trained workers, no substitute has yet
been found for apprenticeship. The movement for industrial education
has at times seemed like an attempt of employers to get their skilled
workers trained at public expense. The effort to establish separate
boards in the cities for industrial education threatened to limit
such training to the narrow skill which each industry would demand
and to supply employers with apprentices at no cost to the industry
itself. Fortunately the Minneapolis Survey warns against this narrow
and sinister conception of vocational education. Industrial interests
cannot shirk the responsibility for the special training of their
workers. The rapid growth of “corporation schools” shows that at
least the most prosperous and highly skilled shops and factories are
accepting this responsibility. All the employer has a right to demand
is that the school give the young worker a general pre-vocational
training which will introduce him to the special trade work. The
graduate of the elementary school should have been through a well
rounded course which not only cultivated a general intelligence, but
discovered, by submitting him to many different kinds of activity, his
particular flair or knack, and thus enlisted his interest in further
training for a particular vocation.

The elementary school should, in other words, be a general
pre-vocational school, where the boy or girl could get a bearing
towards every type of vocation. The Survey strikingly confirms the
far-sighted vision of William Wirt and his unspecialized and varied
Gary school in which the children from their earliest years are testing
out their powers in shop and foundry and laboratory and studio and
classroom. “What is needed,” it says, “is not a course in special
woodworking--the extent of manual work in most elementary schools of
the present time--but rather organized training in practical arts
which will include a variety of experiences fundamental to the life of
the community. Woodwork, metal work, printing and bookbinding, clay
modeling, concrete and electrical work, are some of the industries
which give an opportunity for experience in certain fundamental
processes which are most valuable to boys without respect to the
occupation in which they may later engage.”

In the last year of the elementary school, or in the years of the
junior high school, more specialized technical courses could be
introduced. For the advanced work, more and more responsibility should
be thrown on the shop, the school providing the background of theory,
the shop the practical application, and the student alternating between
shop and school as in the so-called coöperative course. For the workers
already engaged, part-time continuation classes are advised, with
“dull-season classes,” and evening trade-extension courses. For these
the various special schools in the city, commercial and technical,
could coöperate. In this correlation of shop and school a new form
of apprenticeship would grow up. The Survey reports trade agreements
already worked out in several trades which provide that after two
years of high-school instruction in practical, technical and academic
subjects, the worker will be placed in the occupation at wages equal to
those of a third-year apprentice. The agreements require the approval
of the union, and the employers agree to use the school as the first
source of supply in engaging new workers.

On some such constructive lines as are suggested in this Minneapolis
Survey will the problems of vocational education be worked out. In
its discussion of such topics as home gardening, office work, art
education, domestic service, the Survey suggests the breadth of the
field to be covered. An ideal system of vocational training would
not only give every boy and girl in the school an opportunity to
find an aptitude and cultivate some skill but it would make possible
the training of “non-commissioned officers” in the industrial army.
The education of such leaders will really be the goal of organized
vocational education. As the industries, trades and occupations
become more technical and more scientifically managed, the demand for
administrative, supervisory, directive and planning officers taken
from the ranks is constantly widening. Efficient management is becoming
recognized as almost the most important factor in production, and
management will be the reward for intelligence and skill. Until we have
an educational system which in coöperation with shop and factory gives
fullest opportunities for each child in the schools to work towards
qualifying as such a “non-commissioned officer” in some occupation
of the social army, we shall not have our democratic school or our
framework for the future democratization of industry. Nor shall we be
able to attack those mountainous problems of unskilled labor which no
system of vocational training can touch.




XXV

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS


The movement for vocational education has done nothing more valuable
than to show us how far we are still from realizing the public school
as a child-community, first of all as a quickening life and only
secondarily as an educational institution. The rapidly extending
“continuation school” is perhaps the most obvious symptom of this
failure. The term itself is unfortunate, for it drags along with it the
old separation of education from living. It suggests something in the
way of a surplus, of extension schooling beyond an allotted time, as if
its pupils were getting an educational largess out of some great social
bounty. Actually the “continuation school” represents educational
deficit; the necessity for it registers our failure to provide an
earlier school-community life for children which would have kept them
out of industry. Also it registers our failure to provide child-labor
laws which would have protected them.

The continuation school is officially a “school for employed minors
fourteen to sixteen years of age,” and is intended to hold, by the
tenuous thread of four to six hours a week school attendance, those
boys and girls who have gotten their employment certificates at the
earliest legal age and are floundering about in low-paid occupations,
mostly unskilled. New York City alone has 58,000 such children,
fourteen and fifteen years of age, two-thirds of whom have never
completed the elementary school. Stores, offices, shops, domestic
service, messenger service absorb these boys and girls, untrained and
unfocused, and the truly formidable burden is placed upon them of
making their skilful way in the world. Popular tradition tries to make
us glow with the belief that this world is a ladder up which virtue
and industry will automatically ascend. But unfortunately the ladder
of opportunity rarely reaches down so far. The lowest rung is beyond
their reach. The gap between it and the ground is often too great even
for initiative and character to bridge. The “employed minors fourteen
to sixteen years of age” become the nucleus for that partly employed,
sodden and anemic mass of drifters which drags down labor everywhere
and clogs social progress.

The education which these children have had has in most cases barely
fitted them to remain upright on the ground, not to speak of reaching
for the ladder. The acquirement of literacy, a more or less uncertain
skill in figuring, the exposure to some miscellaneous historical and
geographical information--this has been the real substance of their
five or six years’ schooling. To most of these children it is probable
that the world of printed symbols will never mean very much. A real
school would have striven to awaken their concrete and constructive
intelligence, given play to all the non-intellectual impulses. It is
just the tedium and artificiality of the old school which has sentenced
them now to stand at the bottom of the occupational scale. Without
class-prestige, economic advantages, manners, extraordinary initiative
or intelligence, most of these children are handicapped from the start.
Literate, they are perhaps fitted to compete on equal terms with each
other for work. But for the passing into better-paid, more interesting,
more responsible and skilful activity, their schooling, though it came
at the most plastic and active time of childhood, has done nothing
whatever.

We try, therefore, through the “continuation school” to make up bravely
to these children what they have lost. We try to lift them so that they
can clutch at the lowest rung of the ladder. We find it easier to make
stabs at repairing the damage than to reorganize the elementary school
so as to prevent it. In Wisconsin cities a boy or girl leaving school
at fourteen to go to work is required to attend day continuation school
four or five hours a week for three years. In Boston the children must
attend for four hours a week for two years. In Pennsylvania cities they
must attend eight hours a week for two years. Continuation schools
for 20,000 children are in process of formation by the New York City
Board of Education. Wisconsin’s forty-five industrial and continuation
schools are compulsory, while in the other states which have permissive
laws the schools may be made locally compulsory. Employers are required
to dismiss their child employees on working days and within working
hours, the school time being reckoned as part of the time that minors
are permitted by law to work.

Such laws obviously follow the line of least resistance. They add to
the school system without revitalizing it. At the same time, a scheme
like the Massachusetts plan suggests that the continuation school may
be developed into a real stimulus of incentive. This plan provides for
three kinds of classes. For those “employed minors” who are already in
semi-skilled work, it provides some training and background for the
trade or occupation chosen. There are also trade preparatory classes
for pupils who have definitely chosen the trade for which they wish
training, but have not yet found placement in the trade. Then there
are “pre-vocational” classes for those who are ambitious to make some
intelligent choice of an occupation. These pupils are given varied
shopwork, visits to shops and factories, and personal consultation
with teachers and employers. Classes are small, and intensive work can
be done. The other pupils, employed in unskilled labor and without
definite vocational leanings, go into “general improvement courses,”
where half the time is spent in regular school subjects continuing
the elementary school work; a quarter of the time is devoted to “the
discovery and development of dominant interests and powers,” and
the rest of the time to what is quaintly called “civics, hygiene,
recreation and culture.” In this latter activity one-quarter of the
time of the “pre-vocational” and trade courses is similarly spent.
Pupils may transfer from one class to another when they are ready. If
the purpose of the continuation school is to bridge that gap between
the ground and the level where opportunity can at all begin to mean
anything, this Massachusetts plan would seem to do it in an easily
graduated and flexible way. The untrained and unfocused worker has at
least a chance to have his imagination stimulated and to learn the
rudiments of some better work.

The sanguine advocates of the continuation school, however, are apt
to assume that this chance is equivalent to an effective vocational
training. They forget that of the 10,000 or more children whom
Wisconsin provides with compulsory continuation schooling a majority
must necessarily remain in the general improvement classes or else
get only a rudimentary training. And five hours a week for education
against fifty for routine labor is not likely to make over the boys
and girls who are pulled into the school for a brief respite from
the department stores, messenger and domestic service, mills and
factories, millinery and dressmaking shops. Even in the stimulating
Massachusetts atmosphere one hour a week for “civics, hygiene,
recreation and culture” seems hardly availing. In the light of the kind
of school-community life which every progressive state now knows enough
to provide and could afford to provide, the continuation school seems
a pathetic if necessary palliative for our educational sins. Already
loud complaints are heard against “allowing the public school to pass
on its failures for some one else to bury.” The first lesson of the
continuation school is that it should not be needed. Even employers
repeatedly declare that to industry children under sixteen are of no
real value as workers. The states are one after another jacking up
their child-labor limit to sixteen years. We are rapidly coming to
the public conviction that the school should care for all children’s
activity up to that age. What the continuation school does now for four
hours a week, we are insisting that the regular school shall do for
thirty or even forty hours a week.

But this means that we shall have to have a reinvigorated school. It
must not be a prison where children are kept when they long for the
freedom of outside work. It must be a place where full opportunity for
expression is provided for each child in a varied life of study and
work and play. It must be an organic life and not an institution. No
system of industrial and continuation schools piled on at the top will
effect this. The evening school has largely failed because it demanded
an impossible concentration and perseverance from the over-fatigued
and excitement-craving worker. The continuation school, dealing with
restless and unintegrated children, will be ineffective for the same
reason. The vocational movement goes blundering on in amazing disregard
of the psychology of the worker. Even the docile German child, it is
said, must be coerced into his admirable continuation school where he
gets a thorough orientation in his relations to his work, the community
and his comrades. What are admirable trades and studies going to mean
to boys and girls who are doing the most rudimentary work, their
impulses undirected, their minds filled with sex-fantasy, personal
mirages, and all the cheap and feeble excitements of the city streets?
The groping and desiring spirit of youth is going indomitably to resist
your most thoughtful schemes until you have a school which from the
earliest years, by its freedom, its expressive life, its broad communal
and personal excitements, its contact with real things, provides a
child-life which meets these inner needs. Our best American public
schools already begin to show that such a child-community life is not
at all impossible. Until we achieve it generally, our continuation
school will be one of the stop-gaps, and a lusty warning of what we
have failed to achieve.




XXVI

WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES


The marked and immediate reaction of the thinking public to the Scott
Nearing case shows a growing conviction that all is not well within
the conventional forms of university control. It implies a sense that
universities, whether supported by the state or privately, are becoming
too vitally institutions of public service to be much longer directed
on the plan of a private corporation. University trustees are generally
men of affairs, and as men of affairs they naturally tend to hold
the same attitude towards the university that they do to the other
institutions--the churches and railroads and corporations--they may
direct. The university officers whom they appoint seem to have exactly
the same duties of upholding the credit of the institution, of securing
funds to meet its pressing needs, of organizing the administrative
machinery, which their corporation officers would have. Professors
are engaged by contract as any highly-skilled superintendent would
be engaged in a factory. If a well-paid subordinate of a mining
corporation could not get along with his colleagues and his men, or
if he consorted with the I. W. W. or made revolutionary speeches
in the streets, his services would be dispensed with as readily as
the Pennsylvania trustees rid themselves of the unpleasantness of
Professor Nearing. Trustees may respect a professor more than they
do intrinsically a fourth vice-president. They may tend to err, as
Chancellor Day has suggested, on the side of “merciful consideration.”
But they cannot see that the amenities of the case materially alter the
professor’s status.

This would be the case of university trustees stated in its rawest
terms. That they tend so often to act as if they were a mere board of
directors of a private corporation gives rise to endless suspicion that
they consult their own interests and the interests of the donors of the
vested wealth they represent as trustees of the university, just as
they would protect, as faithful corporation directors, the interests
of the shareholders of the company. It is just this attitude which the
thinking public is no longer inclined to tolerate. We are acquiring a
new view of the place of the university in the community. When the
American college was no more than an advanced boys’ academy, there may
have been some excuse for this form of control by self-perpetuating and
irresponsible boards of trustees. But many things have changed since
Harvard and Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Columbia, were founded.

Now this determined autocracy may not have worked so badly when most
of the trustees and practically all of the instructors were ministers
of the Gospel, although even in those days faculties sometimes
complained that their careful plans were overridden by men ignorant of
collegiate business and little interested in educational policy. The
demand that trustees’ functions should be limited to the management of
funds, leaving the faculties to regulate administration and control
appointments is a hoary one. But with the passing of control from
the ghostly to the moneyed element, the gulf between trustee and
professor has become extreme. Professors have fallen into a more
and more subordinate place, and the president, who used to be their
representative, has now become almost entirely the executive agent of
the trustees, far removed in power and purse and public distinction
from the professor. The university president in this country has become
a convenient symbol for autocratic power, but even when he has become a
“mayor of the palace” and professors may not approach their governors
except through him, the real autocracy still lies in the external board
behind him.

This absentee and amateur form of university control is being
constantly ratified by our American notions of democracy, and that
folkway, which runs so omnipresently through our institutional life,
of giving the plain ultimate citizen control, in order that we may
be protected from the tyranny of the bureaucrat. The newer state
universities are controlled in exactly the same spirit. Regents,
elected by legislatures, have shown themselves quite as capable as the
most private trustees of representing vested political interests. Nor
has democracy been achieved by the cautious admission, in recent years,
of alumni trustees, as in the case of Columbia, or, as in the case of
Harvard and Yale, by the substitution of alumni for the former state
officials. Self-perpetuating boards will always propagate their own
kind, and even if alumni trustees were ever inclined to be anything but
docile, their minority representation would always be ineffective for
democracy.

The issues of the modern university are not those of private property
but of public welfare. Irresponsible control by a board of amateur
notables is no longer adequate for the effective scientific and
sociological laboratories for the community that the universities
are becoming. The protests in the most recent case imply a growing
realization that a professor who has a dynamic and not a purely
academic interest in social movements is an asset for the whole
community. The latest controversy between trustee and professors seems
to have been very definitely an issue between interested policy and
accurate, technical fact. It seems to have been clearly a case of old
tradition against new science, the prejudiced guesses of corporation
officials against the data of a scientific student of economics. Any
form of university control which gives the prejudiced guess the power
over the scientific research is thus a direct blow at our own social
knowledge and effectiveness. The public simply cannot afford to run
this risk of having the steady forging ahead of social and economic
research curtailed and hampered. We cannot afford to depend wholly
on the tempering of trustees by the fear of the clamor of public
opinion. It is wholly undesirable that trustees should be detained
only by “merciful consideration” from discharging professors whom they
find uncongenial or who they feel are spreading unsound doctrine.
Make university trustees directors of a private corporation and you
give them the traditional right of terminating contracts with their
employees without giving reasons or any form of trial. But if the
university is not to be a mere degree-manufactory, or a pre-vocational
school representing the narrow interests of a specialized economic
class, but is to be that public intellectual and scientific service
that we all want it to be, the governance must be different from that
of a mining company, and the status of the professor different from
that of a railroad employee. Professors should have some security of
office.

An interested public which feels this way will demand that the
faculties be represented strongly in the determination of all
university policy and in the selection and dismissal of the
instructors. It may even demand that the community itself be
represented. Trustees who really envisage the modern university as a
public service, as a body of scientific and sociological experts, will
gladly share their power. If they do not, they will demonstrate how
radically their own conception of a university differs from the general
one, and it will be the duty of professors to assert their rights by
all those forms of collective organization whereby controlled classes
from the beginning of time have made their desires effective.




XXVII

THE UNDERGRADUATE


In these days of academic self-analysis, the intellectual caliber of
the American undergraduate finds few admirers or defenders. Professors
speak resignedly of the poverty of his background and imagination.
Even the undergraduate himself in college editorials confesses that
the student soul vibrates reluctantly to the larger intellectual and
social issues of the day. The absorption in petty gossip, sports, class
politics, fraternity life, suggests that too many undergraduates regard
their college in the light of a glorified preparatory school where the
activities of their boyhood may be worked out on a grandiose scale.
They do not act as if they thought of the college as a new intellectual
society in which one acquired certain rather definite scientific and
professional attitudes, and learned new interpretations which threw
experience and information into new terms and new lights. The average
undergraduate tends to meet studies like philosophy, psychology,
economics, general history, with a frankly puzzled wonder. A whole
new world seems to dawn upon him, in its setting and vocabulary alien
to anything in his previous life. Every teacher knows this baffling
resistance of the undergraduate mind.

It is not so much that the student resists facts and details. He
will absorb trusts and labor unions, municipal government and direct
primaries, the poems of Matthew Arnold, and James’s theory of the
emotions. There is no unkindliness of his mind towards fairly concrete
material. What he is more or less impervious to is points-of-view,
interpretations. He seems to lack philosophy. The college has to let
too many undergraduates pass out into professional and business life,
not only without the germ of a philosophy, but without any desire for
an interpretative clue through the maze. In this respect the American
undergraduate presents a distinct contrast to the European. For the
latter does seem to get a certain intellectual setting for his ideas
which makes him intelligible, and gives journalism and the ordinary
expression of life a certain tang which we lack here. Few of our
undergraduates get from the college any such intellectual impress.

The explanation is probably not that the student has no philosophy, but
that he comes to college with an unconscious philosophy so tenacious
that the four years of the college in its present technique can do
little to disintegrate it. The cultural background of the well-to-do
American home with its “nice” people, its sentimental fiction and
popular music, its amiable religiosity and vague moral optimism, is far
more alien to the stern secular realism of modern university teaching
than most people are willing to admit. The college world would find
itself less frustrated by the undergraduate’s secret hostility if
it would more frankly recognize what a challenge its own attitudes
are to our homely American ways of thinking and feeling. Since the
college has not felt this dramatic contrast, or at least has not felt
a holy mission to assail our American mushiness of thought through the
undergraduate, it has rather let the latter run away with the college.

It is a trite complaint that the undergraduate takes his
extra-curricular activities more seriously than his studies. But he
does this because his homely latent philosophy is essentially a
sporting philosophy, the good old Anglo-Saxon conviction that life
is essentially a game whose significance lies in terms of winning or
losing. The passion of the American undergraduate for intercollegiate
athletics is merely a symbol of a general interpretation for all
the activities that come to his attention. If he is interested in
politics, it is in election campaigns, in the contests of parties
and personalities. His parades and cheerings are the encouragement
of a racer for the goal. After election, his enthusiasm collapses.
His spiritual energy goes into class politics, fraternity and club
emulation, athletics, every activity which is translatable into terms
of winning and losing. In Continental universities this energy would go
rather into a turbulence for causes and ideas, a militant radicalism
or even a more militant conservatism that would send Paris students
out into the streets with a “Cail-laux as-sas-sin!” or tie up an
Italian town for the sake of Italia Irredenta. Even the war, though
it has called out a fund of anti-militarist sentiment in the American
colleges, still tends to be spoken of in terms of an international
sporting event. “Who will win?” is the question here.

Now this sporting philosophy by which the American undergraduate
lives, and which he seems to bring with him from his home, may be a
very good philosophy for an American. It is of the same stuff with our
good-humored contempt for introspection, our dread of the “morbid,”
our dislike of conflicting issues and insoluble problems. The sporting
attitude is a grateful and easy one. Issues are decided cleanly. No
irritating fringes are left over. The game is won or lost. Analysis
and speculation seem superfluous. The point is that such a philosophy
is as different as possible from that which motivates the intellectual
world of the modern college, with its searchings, its hypotheses and
interpretations and revisions, its flexibility and openness of mind. In
the scientific world of the instructor, things are not won or lost. His
attitude is not a sporting one.

Yet the college has allowed some of these sporting attitudes to
be imposed upon it. The undergraduates’ gladiatorial contests
proceed under faculty supervision and patronage. Alumni contribute
their support to screwing up athletic competition to the highest
semi-professional pitch. They lend their hallowing patronage to
fraternity life and other college institutions which tend to emphasize
social distinction. And the college administration, in contrast to the
European scheme, has turned the college course into a sort of race with
a prize at the goal. The degree has become a sort of honorific badge
for all classes of society, and the colleges have been forced to give
it this quasi-athletic setting and fix the elaborate rules of the game
by which it may be won--rules which shall be easy enough to get all
classes competing for it, and hard enough to make it a sufficient prize
to keep them all in the race. An intricate system of points and courses
and examinations sets the student working for marks and the completion
of schedules rather than for a new orientation in important fields of
human interest.

The undergraduate can scarcely be blamed for responding to a system
which so strongly resembles his sports, or for bending his energies
to playing the game right, rather than assimilating the intellectual
background of his teachers. So strongly has this sporting technique
been acquired by the college that even when the undergraduate lacks
the sporting instinct and does become interested in ideas, he is apt
to find that he has only drawn attention to his own precocity and
won amused notice rather than respect. In spite of the desire of
instructors to get themselves over to their students, in spite of a
real effort to break down the “class-consciousness” of teacher and
student, the gulf between their attitudes is too fundamental to be
easily bridged. Unless it is bridged, however, the undergraduate is
left in a sort of Peter Pan condition, looking back to his schoolboy
life and carrying along his schoolboy interests with him, instead of
anticipating his graduate or professional study or his active life.
What should be an introduction to professional or business life in
a world of urgent political and social issues, and the acquiring
of intellectual tools with which to meet their demands, becomes a
sort of sequestered retreat out of which to jump from boyhood into a
badly-prepared middle age.

The college will not really get the undergraduate until it becomes
more conscious of the contrast of its own philosophy with his sporting
philosophy, and tackles his boyish Americanisms less mercifully, or
until it makes college life less like that of an undergraduate country
club, and more of an intellectual workshop where men and women in the
fire of their youth, with conflicts and idealisms, questions and
ambitions and desire for expression, come to serve an apprenticeship
under the masters of the time.




XXVIII

MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES


If the American college is to have a part in that new educational
movement which is beginning to make the school not merely a preparation
for life but life itself, interested in what has meaning to the student
at his particular age and situation, it will have to recast some of
its most cherished practices and ideals. The large university to-day
represents all stages in the adjustment of intellectual activity to
social demands, from the intensely practical schools of engineering,
correlating with the technical progress of industry, back to the
departments of literary scholarship--perhaps as pure an anachronism as
we have in the intellectual world to-day. The demands for technical
knowledge have pulled the university along, as it were, by the nose,
and strung it through the ages, so that a “professor” to-day may be an
electrical expert fresh from Westinghouse, or an archaic delver into
forgotten poetry.

The technical departments of the universities have kept bravely
up with the work of “learning by doing.” Laboratory and shopwork,
practical coöperation with industry, contact with technical experts,
have made the newer departments what they should be--energetic
workshops where theory and practice constantly fertilize each other,
and where the student comes out a competent technician in his craft.
But the place of the college in this scheme becomes more and more
anomalous. Devoted to the traditional studies--the literatures,
mathematics, philosophy, history--it is still strangely reminiscent of
old musty folkways of the schoolman and theologian. Every professor
knows the desire of the average student to finish his college course
and grapple with his professional studies. Every professor is aware
of the sharp quickening of interest which comes on entrance to the
professional schools. Though part of this feeling may be due to
impatience to get out into the world, much of it certainly arises from
a realization that at last one has come into a sphere where thinking
means action. The college, with its light and unexacting labor, is
cheerfully exchanged for the grind of the professional school, because
the latter touches a real world.

Whereas the higher schools give the student active work to do, almost
all the methods of the college teaching conspire to force him into
an attitude of passivity. The lecture system is the most impressive
example of this attitude, and the lecture system seems actually to
get a tightening grip upon the modern college. As standard forms
have become worked out, it is customary now actually to measure
the student’s course by the number of hours he exposes himself to
lectures. For the college course to be organized on a basis of lectures
suggests that nothing has happened since Abelard spoke in Paris to
twelfth-century bookless men. It is as if the magic word had still to
be communicated by word of mouth, like the poems of Homer of old. The
emphasis is continually upon the oral presentation of material which
the professor has often himself written in a text-book, or which could
be conveyed with much greater exactness and fullness from books. These
books the student knows only as “collateral reading.” Nothing is left
undone to impress him with the idea that the books and reviews and
atlases are mere subsidiaries to the thin but precious trickle of the
professor’s voice.

Now there may be some excuse for the lecture in a Continental
university, where the professor is a personality, is not compelled to
lecture, and may make of his delivery a kind of intellectual ceremony.
But American professors are not only likely to be atrocious lecturers,
but to hate such compulsory talking as the sheerest drudgery. Too
often their own palpable derision at the artificiality of it makes
the lecture an effective barrier between the student’s curiosity and
its satisfaction. This is not to deny that the lecture might be made
into a broad interpretative survey, which would give the student the
clues he needs through the maze of books. This is exactly what the best
college courses tend to become. But for this the college will need
interpreters, and not the humdrum recorders and collators that it has a
weakness for.

The continuance of the lecture system is only symptomatic of the
refusal of the college to see clearly the changing ideals of
scholarship. If the student has to think chiefly about exposing himself
to the required numbers of lectures, and then to examinations which
test his powers of receptivity, he will be forced into an attitude
which we are discovering is the worst possible for any genuine
learning. This passivity may have been all very well when education
was looked upon as an amassing of the “symbols of learning,” or the
acquiring of invidious social distinction. The old college education
was for a limited and homogeneous class. It presupposed social and
intellectual backgrounds which the great majority of college students
to-day do not possess. The idea of studying things “for their own
sake,” without utilitarian bearings, is seductive, but it implies a
society where the ground had been prepared in childhood and youth
through family and environmental influences. When higher education was
confined almost entirely to a professional intellectual class, the
youth was accustomed to see intellect in action around him. He did
not come to college ignorant even of the very terms and setting of
the philosophy and history and sociology studied there. Now, when all
classes come to college, the college must give that active, positive
background which in former generations was prepared for it outside. It
must create the intellectual stomach as well as present the food.

We are learning that this can only be done by putting ideas to work,
by treating the matter taught in the college as indispensable for any
understanding or improvement of our modern world. In the technical
schools, ideas and processes become immediately effective, but nothing
in the college is really “used”; ideas are not put to work. Professors
anxiously desire to “teach students to think,” but they do not give
them opportunities for that hard exercise which alone can produce
trained thought. The college organs of expression, the debating clubs,
literary magazines, newspapers, speaking contests, dramatic societies,
etc., are usually amateurish, spasmodic, unreal. The flimsy background
of the undergraduate is not to be wondered at where undergraduate
expression in any channel is left by the college authorities
unorganized and childish. And his low state must inevitably continue
until ideas are not merely collected, with some vague idea of gilding
the interior of his soul, but resolutely put to work. One reason for
the overmastering devotion to athletics in the modern college is
exactly its activity. In that field the student can do something. Here,
thank God, he says, is a place where one can act!

To make intellectual expression and not receptivity the keynote
of the college does not mean to turn it into an intellectual
engineering school or to make it severely utilitarian. It should
remain unspecialized, the field for working out a background for the
contemporary social world. The paradox is that only by this practical
exercise can any real cultural or scholarly power be attained. As long
as the student can speak of “taking courses” the receptive and slightly
medicinal character of college learning will be emphasized. Moreover,
as the schools both above and below the college adjust themselves to
the new conceptions of learning, the archaic forms of college will
cause it to lag in the race. The reason for their persistence is, of
course, that whereas the technical demands of industry and the keen
emulation in the professions have sharpened the higher schools and
forced a revision of ideals and methods, the practical application
of the cultural studies of the college has not seemed so urgent.
The turning of these cultural studies into power is to be the exact
measure of our growing conviction that ideas and knowledge about social
relations and human institutions are to count as urgently in our
struggle with the future as any mathematical or mechanical formulas did
in the development of our present.




Transcriber’s Notes

Page 48: “cottom looms” changed to “cotton looms”

Page 92: “Profesor Judd’s” changed to “Professor Judd’s”

Page 99: “imperfect acomplishment” changed to “imperfect accomplishment”

Page 164: “classics and mathemathics” changed to “classics and
mathematics”

Page 190: “particualarly to those” changed to “particularly to those”

Page 230: “The large university to-day represent” changed to “The large
university to-day represents”



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