Chapter XII: The Ideal Teacher 229 (6)

To embody our national ideals in the personages of the great figures of history who did so much to establish them is the most elementary method of insuring their conservation and transmission. We are beginning to appreciate the value of this method in our introductory courses of history in the intermediate and lower grammar grades. The historical study outlined for these grades in most of our state and city school programs includes mainly biographical materials. As long as the purpose of this study is kept steadily in view by the teacher, its value may be very richly realized. The danger lies in an obscure conception of the purpose. We are always too prone to teach history didactically, and to teach biographical history didactically is to miss the mark entirely. The aim here is not primarily instruction, but inspiration; not merely learning, but also appreciation. To tell the story of Lincoln's life in such a way that its true value will be realized requires first upon the part of the teacher a sincere appreciation of the great lesson of Lincoln's life. Lincoln typifies the most significant and representative of American ideals. His career stands for and illustrates the greatest of our national principles,--the principle of equality,--not the equality of birth, not the equality of social station, but the equality of opportunity. That a child of the lowliest birth, reared under conditions apparently the most unfavorable for rich development, limited by the sternest poverty, by lack of formal education, by lack of family pride and traditions, by lack of an environment of culture, by the hard necessity of earning his own livelihood almost from earliest childhood,--that such a man should attain to the highest station in the land and the proudest eminence in its history, and should have acquired from the apparently unfavorable environment of his early life the very qualities that made him so efficient in that station and so permanent in that eminence,--this is a miracle that only America could produce. It is this conception that the teacher must have, and this he must, in some measure, impress upon his pupils.

V

In the teaching of history in the elementary school, the biographical treatment is followed in the later grammar grades by a systematic study of the main events of American history. Here the method is different, but the purpose is the same. This purpose is, I take it, to show how our ideals and standards have developed, through what struggles and conflicts they have become firmly established; and the aim must be to have our pupils relive, as vividly as possible, the pain and the struggles and the striving and the triumph, to the end that they may appreciate, however feebly, the heritage that is theirs.

Here again it is not the facts as such that are important, but the emotional appreciation of the facts, and to this end, the coloring must be rich, the pictures vivid, the contrasts sharply drawn. The successful teacher of history has the gift of making real the past. His pupils struggle with Columbus against a frightened, ignorant, mutinous crew; they toil with the Pilgrim fathers to conquer the wilderness; they follow the bloody trail of the Deerfield victims through the forest to Canada; they too resist the encroachments of the Mother Country upon their rights as English citizens; they suffer through the long winter at Valley Forge and join with Washington in his midnight vigils; they rejoice at Yorktown; they dream with Jefferson and plead with Webster; their hearts are fired with the news of Sumter; they clinch their teeth at Bull Run; they gather hope at Donelson, but they shudder at Shiloh; they struggle through the Wilderness with Grant; tired but triumphant, they march home from Appomattox; and through it all, in virtue of the limitless capacities of vicarious experience, they have shared the agonies of Lincoln.

Professor Mace, in his essay on _Method in History_, tells us that there are two distinct phases to every historical event. These are the event itself and the human feeling that brought it forth. It has seemed to me that there are three phases,--the event itself, the feeling that brought it forth, and the feeling to which it gave birth; for no event is historically important unless it has transformed in some way the ideals and standards of the people,--unless it has shifted, in some way, their point of view, and made them act differently from the way in which they would have acted had the event never occurred. One leading purpose in the teaching of history is to show how ideals have been transformed, how we have come to have standards different from those that were once held.

Many of our national ideals have their roots deep down in English history. Not long ago I heard a seventh-grade class discussing the Magna Charta. It was a class in American history, and yet the events that the pupils had been studying occurred three centuries before the discovery of America. They had become familiar with the long list of abuses that led to the granting of the charter. They could tell very glibly what this great document did for the English people. They traced in detail the subsequent events that led to the establishment of the House of Commons. All this was American history just as truly as if the events described had occurred on American soil. They were gaining an appreciation of one of the most fundamental of our national ideals,--the ideal of popular government. And not only that, but they were studying popular government in its simplest form, uncomplicated by the innumerable details and the elaborate organizations which characterize popular government to-day.

And when these pupils come to the time when this ideal of self-government was transplanted to American soil, they will be ready to trace with intelligence the changes that it took on. They will appreciate the marked influence which geographical conditions exert in shaping national standards of action. How richly American history reveals and illustrates this influence we are only just now beginning to appreciate. The French and the English colonists developed different types of national character partly because they were placed under different geographical conditions. The St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes gave the French an easy means of access into the vast interior of the continent, and provided innumerable temptations to exploitation rather than a few incentives to development. Where the French influence was dispersed over a wide territory, the English influence was concentrated. As a consequence, the English energy went to the development of resources that were none too abundant, and to the establishment of permanent institutions that would conserve these resources. The barrier of the Appalachians hemmed them in,--three hundred miles of alternate ridge and valley kept them from the West until they were numerically able to settle rather than to exploit this country. Not a little credit for the ultimate English domination of the continent must be given to these geographical conditions.

But geography does not tell the whole story. The French colonists differed from the English colonists from the outset in standards of conduct. They had brought with them the principle of paternalism, and, in time of trouble, they looked to France for support. The English colonists brought with them the principle of self-reliance and, in time of trouble, they looked only to themselves. And so the old English ideals had a new birth and a broader field of application on American soil. There is nothing finer in our country's history than the attitude of the New England colonists during the intercolonial wars. Their northern frontier covering two hundred miles of unprotected territory was constantly open to the incursions of the French from Canada and their Indian allies, to appease whom the French organized their raids. And yet, so deeply implanted was this ideal of self-reliance that New England scarcely thought of asking aid of the mother country and would have protested to the last against the permanent establishment of a military garrison within her limits. For a period extending over fifty years, New England protected her own borders. She felt the terrors of savage warfare in its most sanguinary forms. And yet, uncomplaining, she taxed herself to repel the invaders. The people loved their own independence too much to part with it, even for the sake of peace, prosperity, and security. At a later date, unknown to the mother country, they raised and equipped from their own young men and at their own expense, the punitive expedition that, in the face of seemingly certain defeat, captured the French fortress at Louisburg, and gave to English military annals one of its most brilliant victories. To get the pupil to live through these struggles, to feel the impetus of idealism upon conduct, to appreciate what that almost forgotten half-century of conflict meant to the development of our national character, would be to realize the greatest value that colonial history can have for its students. It lays bare the source of that strength which made New England preëminent in the Revolution, and which has placed the mint mark of New England idealism upon the coin of American character. Could a pupil who has lived vicariously through such experiences as these easily forsake principle for policy?

A newspaper cartoon published a year or so ago, gives some notion of the danger that we are now facing of losing that idealism upon which our country was founded. The cartoon represents the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The worthies are standing about the table dressed in the knee breeches and flowing coats of the day, with wigs conventionally powdered and that stately bearing which characterizes the typical historical painting. John Hancock is seated at the table prepared to make his name immortal. A figure, however, has just appeared in the doorway. It is the cartoonist's conventional conception of the modern Captain of Industry. His silk hat is on the back of his head as if he had just come from his office as fast as his forty-horse-power automobile could carry him. His portly form shows evidences of intense excitement. He is holding his hand aloft to stay the proceedings, while from his lips comes the stage whisper: "Gentlemen, stop! You will hurt business!" What would those old New England fathers think, could they know that such a conception may be taken as representing a well-recognized tendency of the present day? And remember, too, that those old heroes had something of a passion for trade themselves.

But when we seek for the source of our most important national ideal,--the ideal that we have called equality of opportunity,--we must look to another part of the country. The typical Americanism that is represented by Lincoln owes its origin, I believe, very largely to geographical factors. It could have been developed only under certain conditions and these conditions the Middle West alone provided. The settling of the Middle West in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries was part and parcel of a rigid logic of events. As Miss Semple so clearly points out in her work on the geographic conditions of American history, the Atlantic seaboard sloped toward the sea and its people held their faces eastward. They were never cut off from easy communication with the Old World, and consequently they were never quite freed from the Old World prejudices and standards. But the movement across the mountains gave rise to a new condition. The faces of the people were turned westward, and cut off from easy communication with the Old World, they developed a new set of ideals and standards under the stress of new conditions. Chief among these conditions was the immensity and richness of the territory that they were settling. The vastness of their outlook and the wealth of their resources confirmed and extended the ideals of self-reliance that they had brought with them from the seaboard. But on the seaboard, the Old World notion of social classes, the prestige of family and station, still held sway. The development of the Middle West would have been impossible under so severe a handicap. With resources so great, every stimulus must be given to individual achievement. Nothing must be permitted to stand in its way. The man who could do things, the man who could most effectively turn the forces of nature to serve the needs of society, was the man who was selected for preferment, no matter what his birth, no matter what the station of his family.

We might, in a similar fashion, review the various other ideals, which have grown out of our history, but, as I have said, my purpose is not historical but educational, and the illustrations that I have given may suffice to make my contention clear. I have attempted to show that the chief purpose of the study of history in the elementary school is to establish and fortify in the pupils' minds the significant ideals and standards of conduct which those who have gone before us have gleaned from their experience. I have maintained that, to this end, it is not only the facts of history that are important, but the appreciation of these facts. I have maintained that these prejudices and ideals have a profound influence upon conduct, and that, consequently, history is to be looked upon as a most practical branch of study.

* * * * *

The best way in this world to be definite is to know our goal and then strive to attain it. In the lack of definite standards based upon the lessons of the past, our dominant national ideals shift with every shifting wind of public sentiment and popular demand. Are we satisfied with the individualistic and self-centered idealism that has come with our material prosperity and which to-day shames the memory of the men who founded our Republic? Are we negligent of the serious menace that confronts any people when it loses its hold upon those goods of life that are far more precious than commercial prestige and individual aggrandizement? Are we losing our hold upon the sterner virtues which our fathers possessed,--upon the things of the spirit that are permanent and enduring?

A study of history cannot determine entirely the dominant ideals of those who pursue it. But the study of history if guided in the proper spirit and dominated by the proper aim may help. For no one who gets into the spirit of our national history,--no one who traces the origin and growth of these ideals and institutions that I have named,--can escape the conviction that the elemental virtues of courage, self-reliance, hardihood, unselfishness, self-denial, and service lie at the basis of every forward step that this country has made, and that the most precious part of our heritage is not the material comforts with which we are surrounded, but the sturdy virtues which made these comforts possible.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: An address delivered March 18, 1910, before the Central Illinois Teachers' Association.]

~X~

SCIENCE AS RELATED TO THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE[16]

The scientific method is the method of unprejudiced observation and induction. Its function in the scheme of life is to furnish man with facts and principles,--statements which mirror with accuracy and precision the conditions that may exist in any situation of any sort which man may have to face. In other words, the facts of science are important and worthy because they help us to solve the problems of life more satisfactorily. They are instrumental in their function. They are means to an end. And whenever we have a problem to solve, whenever we face a situation that demands some form of adjustment, the more accurate the information that we possess concerning this situation, the better we shall be able to solve it.

Now when I propose that we try to find out some facts about the teaching of English, and that we apply the scientific method in the discovery of these facts, I am immediately confronted with an objection. My opponent will maintain that the subject of English in our school curriculum is not one of the sciences. Taking English to mean particularly English literature rather than rhetoric or composition or grammar, it is clear that we do not teach literature as we teach the sciences. Its function differs from that of science in the curriculum. If there is a science of literature, that is not what we are teaching in the secondary schools, and that is not what most of us believe should be taught in the secondary schools. We think that the study of literature should transmit to each generation the great ideals that are crystallized in literary masterpieces. And we think that, in seeing to it that our pupils are inspired with these ideals, we should also teach literature in such a way that our pupils will be left with a desire to read good literature as a source of recreation and inspiration after they have finished the courses that we offer. When I speak of "inspiration," "appreciation," the development of "taste," and the like, I am using terms that have little direct relation to the scientific method; for, as I have said, science deals with facts, and the harder and more stubborn and more unyielding the facts become, the better they represent true science. What right have I, then, to speak of the scientific study of the teaching of English, when science and literature seem to belong to two quite separate rubrics of mental life?

I refer to this point of view, not because its inconsistencies are not fully apparent to you even upon the surface, but because it is a point of view that has hitherto interfered very materially with our educational progress. It has sometimes been assumed that, because we wish to study education scientifically, we wish to read out of it everything that cannot be reduced to a scientific formula,--that, somehow or other, we intend still further to intellectualize the processes of education and to neglect the tremendous importance of those factors that are not primarily intellectual in their nature, but which belong rather to the field of emotion and feeling.

I wish, therefore, to say at the outset that, while I firmly believe the hope of education to lie in the application of the scientific method to the solution of its problems, I still hold that neither facts nor principles nor any other products of the scientific method are the most important "goods" of life. The greatest "goods" in life are, and always must remain, I believe, its ideals, its visions, its insights, and its sympathies,--must always remain those qualities with which the teaching of literature is primarily concerned, and in the engendering of which in the hearts and souls of his pupils, the teacher of literature finds the greatest opportunity that is vouchsafed to any teacher.

The facts and principles that science has given us have been of such service to humanity that we are prone to forget that they have been of service because they have helped us more effectively to realize our ideals and attain our ends; and we are prone to forget also that, without the ideals and the ends and the visions, the facts and principles would be quite without function. I have sometimes been taken to account for separating these two factors in this way. But unless we do distinguish sharply between them, our educational thinking is bound to be hopelessly obscure.

You have all heard the story of the great chemist who was at work in his laboratory when word was brought him that his wife was dead. As the first wave of anguish swept over him, he bowed his head upon his hands and wept out his grief; but suddenly he lifted up his head, and held before him his hands wet with tears. "Tears!" he cried; "what are they? I have analyzed them: a little chloride of sodium, some alkaline salts, a little mucin, and some water. That is all." And he went back to his work.

The story is an old one, and very likely apocryphal, but it is not without its lesson to us in the present connection. Unless we distinguish between these two factors that I have named, we are likely either to take this man's attitude or something approaching it, or to go to the other extreme, renounce the accuracy and precision of the scientific method, and give ourselves up to the cult of emotionalism.

Now, while we do not wish to read out of the teaching of literature the factors of appreciation and inspiration, we do wish to find out how these important functions of our teaching may be best fulfilled. And it is here that facts and principles gained by the scientific method not only can but must furnish the ultimate solution. We have a problem. That problem, it is true, is concerned with something that is not scientific, and to attempt to make it scientific is to kill the very life that it is our problem to cherish. But in solving that problem, we must take certain steps; we must arrange our materials in certain ways; we must adjust hard and stubborn facts to the attainment of our end. What are these facts? What is their relation to our problem? What laws govern their operation? These are subordinate but very essential parts of our larger problem, and it is through the scientific investigation of these subordinate problems that our larger problem is to be solved.

Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. We may assume that every boy who goes out of the high school should appreciate the meaning and worth of self-sacrifice as this is revealed (not expounded) in Dickens's delineation of the character of Sidney Carton. There is our problem,--but what a host of subordinate problems at once confront us! Where shall we introduce _The Tale of Two Cities_? Will it be in the second year, or the third, or the fourth? Will it be best preceded by the course in general history which will give the pupil a time perspective upon the crimson background of the French Revolution against which Dickens projected his master character? Or shall we put _The Tale of Two Cities_ first for the sake of the heightened interest which the art of the novelist may lend to the facts of the historian? Again, how may the story be best presented? What part shall the pupils read in class? What part shall they read at home? What part, if any, shall we read to them? What questions are necessary to insure appreciation? How many of the allusions need be run down in order to give the maximal effect of the masterpiece? How may the necessarily discontinuous discussions of the class--one period each day for several days--be so counteracted as to insure the cumulative emotional effect which the appreciation of all art presupposes? Should the story be sketched through first, and then read in some detail, or will one reading suffice?

These are problems, I repeat, that stand to the chief problem as means stand to end. Now some of these questions must be solved by every teacher for himself, but that does not prevent each teacher from solving them scientifically. Others, it is clear, might be solved once and for all by the right kind of an investigation,--might result in permanent and universal laws which any one could apply.

There are, of course, several ways in which answers for these questions may be secured. One way is that of _a priori_ reasoning,--the deductive procedure. This method may be thoroughly scientific, depending of course upon the validity of our general principles as applied to the specific problem. Ordinarily this validity can be determined only by trial; consequently these _a priori_ inferences should be looked upon as hypotheses to be tested by trial under standard conditions. For example, I might argue that _The Tale of Two Cities_ should be placed in the third year because the emotional ferment of adolescence is then most favorable for the engendering of the ideal. But in the first place, this assumed principle would itself be subject to grave question and it would also have to be determined whether there is so little variation among the pupils in respect of physiological age as to permit the application to all of a generalization that might conceivably apply only to the average child. In other words, all of our generalizations applying to average pupils must be applied with a knowledge of the extent and range of variation from the average. Some people say that there is no such thing as an average child, but, for all practical purposes, the average child is a very real reality,--he is, in fact, more numerous than any other single class; but this does not mean that there may be not enough variations from the average to make unwise the application of our principle.

I refer to this hypothetical case to show the extreme difficulty of reaching anything more than hypotheses by _a priori_ reasoning. We have a certain number of fairly well established general principles in secondary education. Perhaps those most frequently employed are our generalizations regarding adolescence and its influences upon the mental and especially the emotional life of high-school pupils. Stanley Hall's work in this field is wonderfully stimulating and suggestive, and yet we should not forget that most of his generalizations are, after all, only plausible hypotheses to be acted upon as tentative guides for practice and to be tested carefully under controlled conditions, rather than to be accepted as immutable and unchangeable laws. We sometimes assume that all high-school pupils are adolescents, when the likelihood is that an appreciable proportion of pupils in the first two years have not yet reached this important node of their development.

I say this not to minimize in any way the importance that attaches to adolescent characteristics, but rather to suggest that you who are daily dealing with these pupils can in the aggregate add immeasurably to the knowledge that we now have concerning this period. A tremendous waste is constantly going on in that most precious of all our possible resources,--namely, human experience. How many problems that are well solved have to be solved again and again because the experience has not been crystallized in a well-tested fact or principle; how many experiences that might be well worth the effort that they cost are quite worthless because, in undergoing them, we have neglected some one or another of the rules that govern inexorably the validity of our inferences and conclusions. That is all that the scientific method means in the last analysis: it is a system of principles that enable us to make our experience worth while in meeting later situations. We all have the opportunity of contributing to the sum total of human knowledge, if only we know the rules of the game.

I said that one way of solving these subordinate problems that arise in the realization of our chief aims in teaching is the _a priori_ method of applying general principles to the problems. Another method is to imitate the way in which we have seen some one else handle the situation. Now this may be the most effective way possible. In fact, if a sufficient number of generations of teachers keep on blindly plunging in and floundering about in solving their problems, the most effective methods will ultimately be evolved through what we call the process of trial and error. The teaching of the very oldest subjects in the curriculum is almost always the best and most effective teaching, for the very reason that the blundering process has at last resulted in an effective procedure. But the scientific method of solving problems has its very function in preventing the tremendous waste that this process involves. English literature is a comparatively recent addition to the secondary curriculum. Its possibilities of service are almost unlimited. Shall we wait for ten or fifteen generations of teachers to blunder out the most effective means of teaching it, or shall we avail ourselves of these simple principles which will enable us to concentrate this experience within one or two generations?

I should like to emphasize one further point. No one has greater respect than I have for what we term experience in teaching. But let me say that a great deal of what we may term "crude" experience--that is, experience that has not been refined by the application of scientific method--is most untrustworthy,--unless, indeed, it has been garnered and winnowed and sifted through the ages. Let me give you an example of some accepted dictums of educational experience that controlled investigations have shown to be untrustworthy.

It is a general impression among teachers that specific habits may be generalized; that habits of neatness and accuracy developed in one line of work, for example, will inevitably make one neater and more accurate in other things. It has been definitely proved that this transfer of training does not take place inevitably, but in reality demands the fulfillment of certain conditions of which education has become fully conscious only within a comparatively short time, and as a result of careful, systematic, controlled experimentation. The meaning of this in the prevention of waste through inadequate teaching is fully apparent.

Again, it has been supposed by many teachers that the home environment is a large factor in the success or failure of a pupil in school. In every accurate and controlled investigation that has been conducted so far it has been shown that this factor in such subjects as arithmetic and spelling at least is so small as to be absolutely negligible in practice.

Some people still believe that a teacher is born and not made, and yet a careful investigation of the efficiency of elementary teachers shows that, when such teachers were ranked by competent judges, specialized training stood out as the most important factor in general efficiency. In this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,--for twenty-eight per cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against forty-four per cent of the college graduates. These investigations, I may add, were made by university professors, and I am giving them here in a university classroom and as a university representative. And of course I shall hasten to add that general scholarship is one important essential. Our mistake has been in assuming sometimes that it is the only essential.

Very frequently the controlled experience of scientific investigation confirms a principle that has been derived from crude experience. Most teachers will agree, for example, that a certain amount of drill and repetition is absolutely essential in the mastery of any subject. Every time that scientific investigation has touched this problem it has unmistakably confirmed this belief. Some very recent investigations made by Mr. Brown at the Charleston Normal School show conclusively that five-minute drill periods preceding every lesson in arithmetic place pupils who undergo such periods far in advance of others who spend this time in non-drill arithmetical work, and that this improvement holds not only in the number habits, but also in the reasoning processes.

Other similar cases could be cited, but I have probably said enough to make my point, and my point is this: that crude experience is an unsafe guide for practice; that experience may be refined in two ways--first by the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of trial and error could not encompass in a millennium.

The teaching of English merits treatment by this method. I recommend strongly that you give the plan a trial. You may not get immediate results. You may not get valuable results. But in any case, if you carefully respect the scientific proprieties, your experience will be worth vastly more than ten times the amount of crude experience; and, whether you get results or not, you will undergo a valuable discipline from which may emerge the ideals of science if you are not already imbued with them. I always tell my students that, even in the study of science itself, it is the ideals of science,--the ideals of patient, thoughtful work, the ideals of open-mindedness and caution in reaching conclusions, the ideals of unprejudiced observation from which selfishness and personal desire are eliminated,--it is these ideals that are vastly more important than the facts of science as such,--and these latter are significant enough to have made possible our present progress and our present amenities of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: A paper read before the English Section of the University of Illinois High School Conference, November 17, 1910.]

~XI~

THE NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD DRILL[17]

Wandering about in a circle through a thick forest is perhaps an overdrawn analogy to our activity in attempting to construct educational theories; and yet there is a resemblance. We push out hopefully--and often boastfully--into the unknown wilderness, absolutely certain that we are pioneering a trail that will later become the royal highway to learning. We struggle on, ruthlessly using the hatchet and the ax to clear the road before us. And all too often we come back to our starting point, having unwittingly described a perfect circle, instead of the straight line that we had anticipated.

But I am not a pessimist, and I like to believe that, although our course frequently resembles a circle, it is much better to characterize it as a spiral, and that, although we do get back to a point that we recognize, it is not, after all, our old starting point; it is an homologous point on a higher plane. We have at least climbed a little, even if we have not traveled in a straight line.

Now in a figurative way this explains how we have come to take our present attitude toward the problem of drill or training in the process of education. Drill means the repetition of a process until it has become mechanical or automatic. It means the kind of discipline that the recruit undergoes in the army,--the making of a series of complicated movements so thoroughly automatic that they will be gone through with accurately and precisely, at the word of command. It means the sort of discipline that makes certain activities machine-like in their operation,--so that we do not have to think about which one comes next. Thus the mind is relieved of the burden of looking after the innumerable details and may use its precious energy for a more important purpose.

In every adult life, a large number of these mechanized responses are absolutely essential to efficiency. Modern civilized life is so highly organized that it demands a multitude of reactions and adjustments which primitive life did not demand. It goes without saying that there are innumerable little details of our daily work that must be reduced to the plane of unvarying habit. These details vary with the trade or profession of the individual; hence general education cannot hope to supply the individual with all of the automatic responses that he will need. But, in addition to these specialized responses, there is a large mass of responses that are common to every member of the social group. We must all be able to communicate with one another, both through the medium of speech, and through the medium of written and printed symbols. We live in a society that is founded upon the principle of the division of labor. We must exchange the products of our labor for the necessities of life that we do not ourselves produce, and hence arises the necessity for the short cuts to counting and measurement which we call arithmetic. And finally we must all live together in something at least approaching harmony; hence the thousand and one little responses that mean courtesy and good manners must be made thoroughly automatic.

Now education, from the very earliest times, has recognized the necessity of building up these automatic responses,--of fixing these essential habits in all individuals. This recognition has often been short-sighted and sometimes even blind; but it has served to hold education rather tenaciously to a process that all must admit to be essential.

Drill or training, however, is unfortunate in one important particular. It invariably involves repetition; and conscious, explicit repetition tends to become monotonous. We must hold attention to the drill process, and yet attention abhors monotony as nature abhors a vacuum. Consequently no small part of the tedium and irksomeness of school work has been due to its emphasis of drill. The formalism of the older schools has been described, criticized, and lampooned in professional literature, and even in the pages of fiction. The disastrous results that follow from engendering in pupils a disgust for school and all that it represents have been eloquently portrayed. Along with the tendency toward ease and comfort in other departments of human life has gone a parallel tendency to relieve the school of this odious burden of formal, lifeless, repetitive work.

This "reform movement," as I shall call it, represents our first plunge into the wilderness. We would get away from the entanglements of drill and into the clearings of pleasurable, spontaneous activities. A new sun of hope dawned upon the educational world.

You are all familiar with some of the more spectacular results of this movement. You have heard of the schools that eliminated drill processes altogether, and depended upon clear initial development to fix the facts and formulæ and reactions that every one needs. You have heard and perhaps seen some of the schools that were based entirely upon the doctrine of spontaneity, governing their work by the principle that the child should never do anything that he did not wish to do at the moment of doing,--although the advocates of this theory generally qualified their principle by insisting that the skillful teacher would have the child wish to do the right thing all the time.

Let me describe to you a school of this type that I once visited. I learned of it through a resident of the city in which it was located. He was delivering an address before an educational gathering on the problems of modern education. He told the audience that, in the schools of this enlightened city, the antiquated notions that were so pernicious had been entirely dispensed with. He said that pupils in these schools were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line passing, static posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves, through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been eliminated; that corporal punishment was never even mentioned, much less practiced; that all was harmony, and love, and freedom, and spontaneity.

I listened to this speaker with intense interest, and, as his picture unfolded, I became more and more convinced that this city had at last solved the problem. I took the earliest opportunity to visit its schools. When I reached the city I went to the superintendent's office. I asked to be directed to the best school. "Our schools are all 'best,'" the secretary told me with an intonation that denoted commendable pride, and which certainly made me feel extremely humble, for here even the laws of logic and of formal grammar had been transcended. I made bold to apologize, however, and amended my request to make it apparent that I wished to see the largest school. I was directed to take a certain car and, in due time, found myself at the school. I inferred that recess was in progress when I reached the building, and that the recess was being celebrated within doors. After some time spent in dodging about the corridors, I at last located the principal.

I introduced myself and asked if I could visit his school after recess was over. "We have no recesses here," he replied (I could just catch his voice above the din of the corridors); "this is a relaxation period for some of the classes." He led the way to the office, and I spent a few moments in getting the "lay of the land." I asked him, first, whether he agreed with the doctrines that the system represented, and he told me that he believed in them implicitly. Did he follow them out consistently in the operation of his school? Yes, he followed them out to the letter.

We then went to several classrooms, where I saw children realizing themselves, I thought, very effectively. There were three groups at work in each room. One recited to the teacher, another studied at the seats, a third did construction work at the tables. I inquired about the mechanics of this rather elaborate organization, but I was told that mechanics had been eliminated from this school. Mechanical organization of the classroom, it seems, crushes the child's spontaneity, represses his self-activity, prevents the effective operation of the principle of self-realization. How, then, did these three groups exchange places, for I felt that the doctrine of self-realization would not permit them to remain in the same employment during the entire session. "Oh," the principal replied, "when they get ready to change, they change, that's all."

I saw that a change was coming directly, so I waited to watch it. The group had been working with what I should call a great deal of noise and confusion. All at once this increased tenfold. Pupils jumped over seats, ran into each other in the aisles, scurried and scampered from this place to that, while the teacher stood in the front of the room wildly waving her arms. The performance lasted several minutes. "There's spontaneity for you," the principal shouted above the roar of the storm. I acquiesced by a nod of the head,--my lungs, through lack of training, being unequal to the emergency.

We passed to another room. The same group system was in evidence. I noticed pupils who had been working at their seats suddenly put away their books and papers and skip over to the construction table. I asked concerning the nature of the construction work. "We use it," the principal told me, "as a reward for good work in the book subjects. You see arithmetic is dead and dry. You must give pupils an incentive to master it. We make the privileges of the construction table the incentive." "What do they make at this table?" I asked. "Whatever their fancy dictates," he replied. I was a little curious, however, to know how it all come out. I saw one child start to work on a basket, work at it a few minutes, then take up something else, continue a little time, go back to the basket, and finally throw both down for a third object of self-realization. I called the principal's attention to this phenomenon. "How do you get the beautiful results that you exhibit?" I asked. "For those," he said, "we just keep the pupils working on one thing until it is finished." "But," I objected, "is that consistent with the doctrine of spontaneity?" His answer was lost in the din of a change of groups, and I did not follow the investigation further.

Noon dismissal was due when I went into the corridor. Lines are forbidden in that school. At the stroke of the bell, the classroom doors burst open and bedlam was let loose. I had anticipated what was coming, and hurriedly betook myself to an alcove. I saw more spontaneity in two minutes than I had ever seen before in my life. Some boys tore through the corridors at breakneck speed and down the stairways, three steps at a time. Others sauntered along, realizing various propensities by pushing and shoving each other, snatching caps out of others' hands, slapping each other over the head with books, and various other expressions of exuberant spirits. One group stopped in front of my alcove, and showed commendable curiosity about the visitor in their midst. After exhausting his static possibilities, they tempted him to dynamic reaction by making faces; but this proving to be of no avail, they went on their way,--in the hope, doubtless, of realizing themselves elsewhere.

I left that school with a fairly firm conviction that I had seen the most advanced notions of educational theory worked out to a logical conclusion. There was nothing halfway about it. There was no apology offered for anything that happened. It was all fair and square and open and aboveboard. To be sure, the pupils were, to my prejudiced mind, in a condition approaching anarchy, but I could not deny the spontaneity, nor could I deny self-activity, nor could I deny self-realization. These principles were evidently operating without let or hindrance.

Before leaving the school, I took occasion to inquire concerning the effect of such a system upon the teachers. I led up to it by asking the principal if there were any nervous or anæmic children in his school. "Not one," he replied enthusiastically; "our system eliminates them." "But how about the teachers?" I ventured to remark, having in mind the image of a distracted young woman whom I had seen attempting to reduce forty little ruffians to some semblance of law and order through moral suasion. If I judged conditions correctly, that woman was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My guide became confidential when I made this inquiry. "To tell the truth," he whispered, "the system is mighty hard on the women."

A few years ago I had the privilege of visiting a high school which was operated upon this same principle. I visited in that school some classes that were taught by men and women, whom I should number among the most expert teachers that I have ever seen. The instruction that these men and women were giving was as clear and lucid as one could desire. And yet, in spite of that excellent instruction, pupils read newspapers, prepared other lessons, or read books during the recitations, and did all this openly and unreproved. They responded to their instructors with shameless insolence. Young ladies of sixteen and seventeen coming from cultured homes were permitted in this school to pull each other's hair, pinch the arms of schoolmates who were reciting, and behave themselves in general as if they were savages. The pupils lolled in their seats, passed notes, kept up an undertone of conversation, arose from their seats at the first tap of the bell, and piled in disorder out of the classroom while the instructor was still talking. If the lessons had been tedious, one might perhaps at least have palliated such conduct, but the instruction was very far from tedious. It was bright, lively, animated, beautifully clear, and admirably illustrated. It is simply the theory of this school never to interfere with the spontaneous activity of the pupils. And I may add that the school draws its enrollment very largely from wealthy families who believe that their children are being given the best that modern education has developed, that they are not being subjected to the deadening methods of the average public school, and above all that their manners are not being corrupted by promiscuous mingling with the offspring of illiterate immigrants. And yet soon afterward, I visited a high school in one of the poorest slum districts of a large city. I saw pupils well-behaved, courteous to one another, to their instructors, and to visitors. The instruction was much below that given in the first school in point of quality, and yet the pupils were getting from it, even under these conditions, vastly more than were the pupils of the other school from their masterly instructors.

The two schools that I first described represent one type of the attempt that education has made to pioneer a new path through the wilderness. I have said that many of these attempts have ended by bringing the adventurers back to their starting point. I cannot say so much for these schools. The movement that they represent is still floundering about in the tamarack swamps, getting farther and farther into the morass, with little hope of ever emerging.

May I tax your patience with one more concrete illustration: this time, of a school that seems to me to have reached the starting point, but on that new and higher plane of which I have spoken?

This school is in a small Massachusetts town, and is the model department of the state normal school located at that place. The first point that impressed me was typified by a boy of about twelve who was passing through the corridor as I entered the building. Instead of slouching along, wasting every possible moment before he should return to his room, he was walking briskly as if eager to get back to his work. Instead of staring at the stranger within his gates with the impudent curiosity so often noticed in children of this age, he greeted me pleasantly and wished to know if I were looking for the principal. When I told him that I was, he informed me that the principal was on the upper floor, but that he would go for him at once. He did, and returned a moment later saying that the head of the school would be down directly, and asked me to wait in the office, into which he ushered me with all the courtesy of a private secretary. Then he excused himself and went directly to his room.

Now that might have been an exceptional case, but I found out later that is was not. Wherever I went in that school, the pupils were polite and courteous and respectful. That was part of their education. It should be part of every child's education. But many schools are too busy teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and others are too busy preserving discipline, and others are too busy coquetting for the good will of their pupils and trying to amuse them--too busy to give heed to a set of habits that are of paramount importance in the life of civilized society. This school took up the matter of training in good manners as an essential part of its duty, and it accomplished this task quickly and effectively. It did it by utilizing the opportunities presented in the usual course of school work. It took a little time and a little attention, for good manners cannot be acquired incidentally any more than the multiplication tables can be acquired incidentally; but it utilized the everyday opportunities of the schoolroom, and did not make morals and manners the subject of instruction for a half-hour on Friday afternoons to be completely forgotten during the rest of the week.

When the principal took me through the school, I noted everywhere a happy and courteous relation between pupils and teachers. They spoke pleasantly to one another. I heard no nagging or scolding. I saw no one sulking or pouting or in bad temper. And yet there was every evidence of respect and obedience on the part of the pupils. There was none of that happy-go-lucky comradeship which I have sometimes seen in other modern schools, and which leads the pupil to understand that his teacher is there to gain his interest, not to command his respectful attention. Pupils were too busy with their work to talk much with one another. They were sitting up in their seats as a matter of habit, and it did not seem to hurt them seriously to do so. And everywhere they were working like beavers at one task or another, or attending with all their eyes and ears to a recitation.