Chapter I: Part 1

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EDUCATION AND LIVING

RANDOLPH BOURNE

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

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917

_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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Education and livingChapter I: Part 1

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