Chapter VI: Part 6

A thing for which one has spent good money should not only be used as long as possible, but it should also be kept capable of use as long as possible. Good care and proper attention in the way of repair will extend its life very considerably. This is a matter of conservation as well as one of economy.

Of course, there is no plan by which the ends of economy and thrift can be accomplished automatically. The human factor will always be the determining one. These principles will not practice themselves. Only human mind and will can do that. They are not a machine for the conservation of money. They are only a plan by which money may be made to accomplish the most.

The poor we always have with us, but many of them are with us unnecessarily. We shall always have a poverty problem, but it would be reduced to a small minimum by the right use of money. Money is made to spend, but the financially independent are those who have learned to spend it wisely.

The Three Agencies in Child Training (1909)

Every normal child is born with certain tendencies and propensities in which either the good or the evil of past generations preponderates. If it is the good, there must be some agency to call forth, develop, and strengthen it; if, on the other hand, it is the evil, there is all the more need why some influence should be brought to bear to check the evil and inculcate the good. Upon three great institutions devolves this momentous responsibility. They are the home, the school, and the Church. Each must help the other two, and no one is complete without the co-operation of the others. Of the three, the home will perhaps come nearest to completeness within itself. The sooner these three agencies, which in the final analysis have a common purpose, come to understand each other and co-operate with each other, the better it will be for the child. For the responsibility of no one of the three ends with this life. The Church is not the only one that builds for eternity, nor should the other two be the only two that build for time, but all may well unite in building for both time and eternity, and the aim of each should be the perfection of personality.

Three forces of equal power, pulling each in a different direction, must either offset the influence of each other and result in stationary failure, or force each other to aimless wandering. Besides all this, the strain is uncomfortably intense for the object upon which the pull is exerted. The child who has had these influences pulling him about in different or totally opposite directions all his life is an object deserving of pity, and if in his case life becomes a failure, the wonder will only be why the failure was not more complete. But when these forces unite in a common purpose, and their purpose should be a common one, the child can only blame himself if he does not attain some very definite goal. And when that common purpose is a good one, that goal can not choose but be a worthy one.

A great many parents are wondering these days why their children did not grow up to be good. If their children are spiritually delinquent, they blame the Church, regardless of what the home example or precept has been. If the children use bad grammar or do not exercise good judgment, the blame falls upon the school, regardless of the standards of those with whom those children have spent the days of their mental unfolding. Sometimes it is more than the Church can do to merely offset the evil done at home, without ever reaching the aggressive side of development. Sometimes it is more than lies within the ability of the school to rescue the child from the misconceptions and errors of everyday life and speech, without arriving at the constructive point at all. God has committed to the home the arduous but sacred task of guiding the first faltering steps of the little ones into the ways of righteousness and truth. The first is out of the reach of the Church’s ability; the second is a part in education that the school can never play. Neither the school nor the Church is an orphans’ home for the purpose of taking the responsibility of raising people’s children from the shoulders of those to whom it belongs. They can only do their work upon the chief cornerstone of home instruction, guidance, and discipline. Better children’s meetings can be held at mother’s knee than anywhere else in the world, and it is wrong to deny to maturity the golden memories of such a childhood. The business of the Church is spiritual ministration, and it ought not to need to be anything more. Spiritual ministration, however, is a broad term, and it ought never to be allowed to center in earthly things. The home, then, ought to be the first school, and it must lay proper foundation for the work of the Church, for never will teachings be better learned nor longer remembered than those received in its quiet precincts.

In this day, the school has been narrowed down in the scope of its work to mere mental discipline. And yet the schools from whose halls the world’s greatest minds have come, have not been mere knowledge machines. Our schools claim to teach literature, and yet their curricula ignore the greatest piece of literature ever written. In some States the law goes so far as to forbid the reading of the Bible in the public schools on the ground that it might engender sectarianism. The Bible is not a sectarian book, nor does the teaching of it need to be sectarian. There is scarcely a truly great life that is not a standing witness to the fact that education is not complete without a knowledge of the Bible, at least as literature and history. And yet pedagogical fads and public customs deny public school students the benefit of the study of it. Public school students are taught the pagan religions. They are taught the mythology of Greece and Rome, but the living and vital religion, to which even the school owes its being, is ignored for the petty fear of sectarianism. A man’s education can not be measured by what he has committed to memory, but by what he has learned by heart. Education is no more what one knows than what he is. The school needs to train the mind, but it can not afford to ignore the necessity of a right culture of the heart.

But it is scarcely a greater mistake for the school to hold itself strictly to mental training to the exclusion of everything pertaining to religion, than it is for the Church to hold itself strictly to religious work to the exclusion of educative effort. In physical science, radiant light and heat are exactly the same thing manifested to different avenues of sense perception. Who knows but that in the spiritual realm, the light of truer wisdom and the warmth of Christian experience are one and the same thing, except that, in the one case, it is perceived through the mind and, in the other, through the heart? Upon the Church devolves the responsibility of lifting the thought of the community to whose needs it ministers to the highest, purest, and best possible plane. In this measure, it needs to be an educative influence. It will be able to reach some minds through the heart, and it will be able to reach some hearts through the mind, and in both cases it will be lifting men to God, who is both love and light. What does it matter if the preacher does lecture once in a while? The Old Book will always supply food for the profoundest thought. We not only need our hearts comforted, however important that may be, but if we expect to understand God’s message and plan, we will have to think, also. Jesus was a Scholar and will baffle the scholarship of this world for many years yet to come. Let the Church not ignore the educational side of Christianity.

And so these three agencies can not encroach on each others’ territory, for they have a common work to do if they are true to their trust. Let the home give the first lessons, and all through the changing years let it be both an educative and religious influence. Let the school be solicitous of both the unfolding mind and the craving heart. Let the Church minister to spiritual needs and not forget that the true education of the heart does not despise the education of the mind. Then shall the child have it said of him, as it was said of that Child of the long ago, “And He advanced in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man.”

The Association of Mind and Muscle (1918)

In Nicholas Nickleby, the book in which Charles Dickens attempted to set forth the evils of the boarding school system in England in his day, one of the things at which we have sometimes pointed a finger of ridicule really sets forth an important pedagogical principle. It is that part of the story which tells how Squeers, the schoolmaster, first taught a boy to spell a word—usually incorrectly—and then sent him to perform some manual task associated with it. The imperfect spelling cannot be called good pedagogy, and the work to be done was not always calculated to contribute to the dignity of a gentleman, but it is a fact that there is something about the actual doing of a thing which enables the memory the more tenaciously to retain the concept of the thing itself.

In other words, there is some strange but very real and definite association between the mind and the muscle. They act in close cooperation with one another. The mind may be capable of learning things without the corresponding action of the muscle, but it can learn a thing very much more easily and permanently with that cooperative action.

This is a principle which runs through all educational effort. It has had expression from quite remote times. An apostle reminded his hearers of their duty to be doers of the word and not hearers only. His words constituted a very good educational gospel. We not only owe it to ourselves and to the world to act in accordance with the best of our knowledge, but we actually learn better the thing which we take the time and pains to do.

We have always had a certain notion that it is important to keep note books. We have usually supposed that the chief value of a note book is in the fact that it affords a means of quickly referring to any facts which may have fled from memory. If this were the value of a note book, however, those who keep them and then never look at them again would derive no benefit from the process. Yet there are thousands of people who know that they have received large value from the keeping of note books to which they have never referred since they were written. The fact is that the great value of a note book lies in the power of muscular action to record upon the tablet of the mind the thing written down on paper. The fingers themselves seem to possess a certain power to remember. We know a thing better after having written it. One reason may be that the necessity of writing it has forced us to think it through, but another undoubtedly is the fact that the movement of the muscles inscribes its story in the processes of the brain.

It is frequently noticeable, too, that a thing is better remembered after it has been spoken. To give a class recitation upon it, to deliver an address upon it, to make it a subject of conversation with a friend, or even to talk aloud about it to the silences often engraves its subject matter in the memory in an indelible fashion. The very movement of the muscles of speech cooperated with the mind in making the subject an everlasting possession. All this is simply another indication of the principle involved. It also submits proof that there is a certain value in saying what one honestly thinks or truly knows.

In this discussion lies a point of high value to the teacher. It is one thing to get a pupil to take in the knowledge of a fact in such a way as to retain it until some seemingly more commanding fact has forced it from his thought. It is a very different, and a much better, thing to help him to assimilate the matter in question. When knowledge has once been assimilated, nothing save a mental breakdown can ever rob its owner of it. It is then a part of himself. This is the goal of the teacher, and one of the chief paths to it is to induce the pupil to live his knowledge as he gains it.

When this is done, knowledge becomes more than a thing of the mind alone. It is not our concern to merely educate the brain. It is our commission to educate the whole life and to cultivate the entire being. Genuine education is a symmetrical process, and the person who has really learned a thing will profit from it in every interest of his life. As knowledge becomes a matter of action, it becomes a matter of purpose, ideal, and character.

In other words, it is translated into terms of life. It is at this point that the teacher’s work reaches its highest stage of being and usefulness. It is in this sense that both he and his work are immortal.

It would be a serious question whether our earnest attempts at teaching the race would be altogether worth their while if they amounted to nothing more than getting the young to know so many things, to possess such and such a sized storehouse of knowledge, filled with appropriately selected and labelled morsels of fact. It becomes a tremendously worthwhile proposition, however, when it is seen as a means to a larger and richer life. As knowledge is taught to a pupil, it should be as a means of enabling him to live more happily, wholesomely, and successfully. It should be as a sort of transfusion of blood for the living of the larger life.

The principle stated here works both ways and with equal beauty either way. Not only is it true that the actual doing of a thing enables one to learn it better and works the knowledge deeper into life and experience, but it is also true that it best vindicates the useful mission of education.

It is not mere bookishness that the world will want on the part of the girls and boys when they shall at last come to take their places in the ranks of endeavor. It will be expecting people who are capable of earning their keep. It will want them not only to be brilliant and cultivated, but also to be able to meet practical questions and perform everyday tasks.

The boy or girl who has been trained to do the things he knows to do is the one who will best prove to the world the value of the school and the importance of the work of the teacher. The sending of such young people into the arena of action will bring a flood of service which will spell out an ever-accelerated progress for civilization.

It is definite action alone which achieves progress. All the mere knowledge possible to men would not be of any real help, except insofar as it finds its expression in definite and positive action. Mere knowledge is like mere good intentions. Their presence is no better than their absence until they are incarnated into deeds. Knowledge has the largest of all potentialities for the good of mankind when it becomes calculated action and wise service. For this reason, the entertaining of such an educational ideal is significant for the good of the world as well as for the educational progress of the pupil himself.

A Korean boy came to a missionary one day with the information that he had learned the entire Sermon on the Mount by heart. The missionary congratulated him upon his effort, but reminded him that it was a better thing to follow its teachings than to learn to repeat its words.

“Oh,” said the boy, “That’s the way I learned it.” He had solved an important pedagogical problem. It was the same old process that we saw in the Squeers school. There it was grotesquely conceived and followed out, but the effect lay along the right track. When a boy learned a thing, he was told to go and do it.

The modern school must teach boys and girls much more dependable knowledge than was imparted at Dotheboys Hall, and no modern teacher will abuse his privilege and opportunity as did Mr. Squeers; but it will be a good thing if it is remembered in the modern schoolroom that the educational ideal is twofold. It demands, first, that the child shall be taught to know a thing. It requires, second, that he shall not fail to make definite use of the knowledge which he has gained. Thus it will be made to mean the most in education to him and the most in service to the world.

The Sound-Reproducing Machine as a Music Teacher (1919)

Many changes for the better have taken place in American life during the past two decades; among these is a remarkable advance in musical art, knowledge, and appreciation. Europe once had sufficient grounds to look down upon us for our crudity in matters musical, but now we are beginning to have dignity and standing in the musical world.

In this marked advance, the sound-reproducing machine has borne an important part. During the period named, it has evolved from the status of a curious toy to that of a splendid instrument, present and active in the best homes in this country.

It is true, people often start in with the flimsiest of popular music, “rags,” “blues,” and such; but let one good classic find its accidental way into this motley collection—and things begin to change. The taste of the listener is on its way to better things.

The small daughter of a friend of mine stepped out from the home into public school. At once, the parents were distressed to notice that she began to show a taste for the cheapest sort of music—a natural contagion from the class of children with whom she associated. The parents cast about for an antidote to this ill. They found it in the purchase of a sound-reproducing machine and an abundance of really good records—ranging from simple ballads to symphony movements.

It worked. At once, instead of humming and whistling popular songs with their often vulgar words, she begged for the better music of the machine at home, and this music gradually pushed the other stuff out of her mind—the inevitable action of good over bad. No doubt this little seriocomedy has been enacted all over the country, raising the standard of musical taste.

The sound-reproducing machine has inaugurated a veritable Democracy of Music. To places inaccessible to the high-priced artist or teacher it has come, bringing the best music, rendered in the best way, and at a comparatively small cost—certainly much smaller than journeys to far-off cities and the charge for seats at concerts. It is the tragedy of most good things of this life that they go only to a special few. But the sound-reproducing machine has been no respecter of persons—it goes into the humble home as well as into the wealthy one. Anyone can spend fifty cents or a dollar a week on a new record. And for this small sum there are hours of pleasure and musical profit. This is the reason why it has become such a strong factor in our musical life and the reason par excellence why we are well on the way to becoming a seriously musical nation.

The School Teacher and the Republic (1920)

At Plymouth, Massachusetts, there stands the monument which memorializes the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and the ideals for which they stood. The Pilgrim Monument lifts aloft five sculptured figures, each symbolic of one of the moving and controlling principles of early New England life. The large central figure bears the name of Faith. At each of the four corners stands one of four others—Freedom, Law, Morality, and Education.

These things represent fundamental principles in the moulding of our nation and its life. We have all profited more than we have realized from the fact that they had a place in the characters, minds, and purposes of our forefathers. Each is highly important, but the Pilgrims would have been seriously in error if they had failed to include the last named.

That they did not fail to include it is evidenced by the fact that, very early in the colonial history of America, representative leaders met in conference on the question of establishing a free system of public schools. There is hardly a better recommendation for a nation or a more dependable indication of its quality than the fact that its system of free public schools dates almost back to the time of its original settlement. Such is the case with America. At no period in her history has she been unaccustomed to the sight of the pedagogue.

America has been made what she is largely by means of the public school. If she is democratic, it is largely because the public school has so faithfully sown the seeds of democracy in the thinking of her boys and girls in their plastic periods. In so far as she is clean and righteous, the fact is largely due to the teaching the children have received in the public schools. Their work in character-building, their inculcation of the principles of scientific temperance, and now their efforts to teach Americanism to all classes and ages have all been good seed sown in fertile and productive soil. Today every schoolhouse is a symbol of freedom, of democracy, and of productive efficiency. To neglect the schools would be to neglect the source of much that is entirely necessary in the nation’s life.

What America did for herself by means of the school in the days when her interests did not reach beyond her own borders, she has since done by the same means in the territories for which she has assumed responsibility. Since Spain ceded the Philippines to us, the life of their people has been entirely regenerated. The old insanitary cities with their shacks and their squalor have changed into orderly and well-improved municipalities. The unkempt and ignorant people are now bright, industrious, and efficient. A practically savage land has become a civilized one in slightly more than two decades.

Alaska has been transformed from a fruitless wilderness into a territory of awakened and forward-looking people. They have developed such industries as their land would support. They have achieved a large degree of economic independence. They acquitted themselves with as great credit as did almost any of the states in the various responsibilities incident to the war. They have cleaned up their towns and developed their social institutions. Through their town meetings, they are becoming more and more a self-governing people.

Hawaii is rapidly learning to make the most of herself. Porto Rico is doing the same. The new Virgin Islands will follow along in the same course the others have travelled. Cuba has developed in the last twenty years largely because of the start American leadership, organization, and education gave her. Panama has been revolutionized by American influence.

There are, of course, a number of answers to the question as to why all this has happened. One of the chiefest of them, however, is the work of the public school system inaugurated wherever the hand of America holds sway for any length of time. Even the leadership, the scientific attainment, the medical skill, the genius for organization, and the commercial power that have entered into the moulding of these new civilizations all owe themselves, in greater or less degree, to the public school and to the work of the teacher.

Our plight would be sorry indeed had it not been for the presence of the little red school house among us. No country has ever gotten along without it and escaped the penalty which Fate is certain to impose. The situation in Russia now is undoubtedly largely the result of the age-long lack of an adequate educational system. Civilization simply cannot be moulded without the patient and painstaking work of the pedagogue.

Bismarck once said that whatever one would put into the state he must first put into the schools. This was a great utterance, and its truth has been repeatedly demonstrated in the years since. His own country used the principle wrongly, but her use of it demonstrated its correctness. When William II came to the German throne, he did not long retain Bismarck as his chancellor, but he did follow many of Bismarck’s policies to the end of his career. This was one of them.

Imperial Germany was largely built upon this principle. The educational system from the beginner’s classes to the universities was standardized and utilized to inculcate the Pan-German theory of the state and its development. Philosophy was prostituted to this end. Literature and art were bought by the state for its own purposes. History was written with the ambitions of the state in view. According to the German theory, this was perfectly proper, for, as General von Bernhardi once said, “There is no power above the state.” The result is familiar. A loyal nation and a mighty military power were built up by first putting into the schools what the leaders wished to inject into the life of the state.

Under German guidance, Turkey did much the same thing. When Abd-ul-Hamid II was dethroned in 1909, and the Young Turk party came into power, an imperialistic program was undertaken in behalf of the Ottoman state. One of the first things done was to standardize the educational system and set it to work to weave the Ottoman spirit and faith into the lives of the young.

The leading military spirit of Turkey for centuries was the organization of soldiers called the Janizaries. This organization was started in the fourteenth century by Orkhan, son of Osman. The first members of it were the children exacted as tribute from conquered Christian peoples. It was kept up afterward by levying a tax on Christian towns to be paid in children. These children of Christian parents were trained to be Turks, Mohammedans, and soldiers, and they became all three things with a vengeance. They were the most loyal Turks, the most fanatical Mohammedans, and the most cruel soldiers. Such is the force of education. One may take a vine and train it in any direction. One may take a young life and make of it what he will.

Germany and Turkey used the power of the school wrongly, of course, but they demonstrated what can be done with it. It is as great a force for weal as it is for woe, and America has thus far used it for the doing of good things rather than evil. The possibilities of education in either direction are practically boundless.

When one speaks of the public school system, he speaks really of an army of teachers. A school has buildings and books, but it is really made and determined by the teacher. One may have a school without either a building or a book, but he cannot have one without a teacher.

The nation cannot recognize its obligation to the teacher too soon or too completely. He has never received his just due, and the time has come when we need to take an inventory of the service he has rendered and reward him in some fair proportion to it. What we do for him we really do for the country and its future.

Some Overlooked Compensations in Teaching (1920)

The economic aspect of the teaching profession has never been encouraging. It was least so at the close of the recent great war. In 1918 we were paying our male teachers the munificent wage of $82.35 per month for the six to nine months of the year during which they were employed. During the same period, our female teachers were getting an average of $64.72.

The natural consequence of such a situation was a shortage of teachers. A report of the Federal Bureau of Education indicated that the shortage in 1918 was not less than 30,000. About 87,500 new recruits are needed annually for the rural schools alone. In 1916 we graduated less than one-third of that number from all our teacher-training institutions together.

In former days a young man was usually delighted to obtain a position on a college faculty. Recently a senior in a state university was offered a position in the Chemistry department and refused it, on the ground that it might tie him up to the teaching profession and thus commit him to poverty. This attitude is not one of utter selfishness on the part of young people. Most of them are willing to serve their day, and allow the reward to be a secondary consideration. They feel, however, that they have a right to physical comfort while they do serve. They realize that the standards of the profession are high in every way, and they feel that such exacting requirements warrant good pay.

They are right; yet there are certain aspects of the teaching profession which they should not overlook. It involves less pay than it should, but it also involves certain compensations, some of which are very valuable and some of which are priceless. It places in the hands of those who choose it privileges which many of the rich would gladly give their gold to obtain. It brings within the scope of their experience things which many men, otherwise successful, have been disappointed in not possessing.

One of these is the privilege of living in the atmosphere and under the influence of the best thought of all the ages. It is a great mistake to suppose that bread and raiment are the only necessities of life. Some of its intellectual and spiritual necessities are quite as commanding as its physical ones. Those who fail to obtain them pay the penalty by living cramped lives and usually dying with their deeper longings unsatisfied. Good pictures, good music, good books, and good friends are among the kinds of meat that never perish. The values they bring are everlasting.

A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses. When one has made a living, he has not necessarily lived. He has made only it possible to exist while he tries to live. His life is made up of the thoughts he thinks, the hopes he entertains, the associations he enjoys, and the tasks he performs. Earth and its physical necessities are only the stage and the setting for the drama. The play itself lies beyond them and is separate from them. The teacher is permitted to play always a leading role.

He also enjoys the privilege of doing a work which carries with it something of its own reward. Some kinds of work detract from one’s strength and fitness. The work of the teacher adds to them. Each lesson he prepares leaves him by so much bigger and stronger. Each problem he masters adds to his mental sinew. Each instance in which he helps someone on the way benefits him more than it does the recipient of his attention. His is a treasure which only increases by being given away. His is the blessing of daily growth and development.

Another compensation he enjoys is the privilege of living among the best people of the community. One is largely made by his associations, and his success in life depends largely on the type of friends he can cultivate. His admittance into the best society is itself a long step on the road to the highest success.

The ordinary person must live in a new community for a long while before the best people make up their minds regarding him. Even after a long period of decision, they do not always see their way clear to admit him to their circle. The teacher is excused from much of this severe testing. His very work serves as his credentials. People assume that if he is a successful teacher he is eligible for the best society anywhere, and they are usually right about it.

This means very much indeed. One cannot hope to reach a much higher level than that of the society in which he moves. A certain law of social erosion is always operative. By it the minds and personalities of people so act and react upon one another that they all tend to become alike. This being true, one cannot afford to move in any but the best society into which he can find his way. This is a matter in which the teacher has no difficulty.

The teacher obtains a high value in the simple consciousness of being a worth-while person. One does not have to proclaim such a fact to the world. If it is true, the world is quite certain to learn about it. It brings health to one’s body and soul, however, for one to be able to feel honestly that his life is not a failure. It is a blessed thought to entertain that one really stands for something in his generation.

The teacher can congratulate himself that he is a world builder. He has his hand upon the throttle of human progress. He turns the key that swings open the gate of the future.

The inner life which he possesses is coveted by thousands who can never have it. They may try to substitute what money can buy for what only mind can possess, but the effort always ends in pitiful failure. One cannot long conceal a lack of mind and soul with clothes and paint. The result is only a vulgar display. The more flash and parade the ignorant indulge in, the cheaper they look.

The person who possesses real quality and worth does not have to cover himself over with artificialities and affectations. He has only to stand forth as he is. The soul within him will tell its own story. Despite all the cheap ways in which the world indulges, its real hunger is for genuine worth, unveneered culture, real character.

Some have missed these things because they made the mistake of setting out to make money alone. If one can have both these things and wealth, so much the better. If one must choose between the two, however, there is no question that money is the second choice. Thousands of people of every age could testify from their own experience that this is true.

One can do much more working for society than he can if he works only for himself. Incidentally, he may fare best from a selfish point of view when all things have been considered.

For many years an old colored woman sold peanuts on the grounds of Tuskegee Institute. A young negro girl who had just enrolled was one day admiring the buildings. Coming from a poor home in a backward community, she was amazed that one man had been able to gather together enough money to erect them.

“If Dr. Washington had worked for himself instead of running this school, wouldn’t he have been rich?” she said one day to the old peanut woman.

“Law, child! He wouldn’t a been worth a nickel,” was the reply.

She was probably right. Plenty of people have made their only claim to riches by serving others. Others, with talents as promising, have spent their lives on mediocre levels, because it never occurred to them to live for anything but themselves.

Dollars Versus Sense (1921)

In their normal and proper relations, money and learning are very helpful each to the other. Money is not only a desirable thing but a necessary one in the work of building up our educational systems. Certain items of material equipment nothing but money can provide. It is also the only thing which can obtain certain purely educational values in the way of teaching talent. As educational processes become more elaborate and complete, they cost more.

On the other hand, education exerts a natural and favorable reaction upon money-making. In this country, where the educational aim is not so much to turn out gentlemen of leisure as it is to manufacture sons of toil, school training is one of the greatest aids in the increase of earning capacity. Statistics proving by figures that the product of the schools can make more money than the uneducated man can do are familiar to us all. This is not the highest possible motive for the getting of an education, but it is a motive which is worth considering.

However, there is something about great economic wealth in a country which seems to make against the interest of education. This is a surprising fact, but it is a fact nevertheless. One might most easily think the reverse would be true. Certainly it is true that the greater wealth a country possesses the more it could afford to invest in education if it cared to do so. It looks like a safe assumption that a long step in the direction of intellectual greatness would have been taken when a people becomes great commercially. However, this assumption is not borne out by the facts. There seems to be more truth, especially from the educational viewpoint, in the idea that where wealth accumulates, men decay.

This principle is nothing new. It seems to be clearly indicated in history. At least one instance may be cited from the story of quite ancient times to indicate how true to form things have always run.

The Phoenician Empire was one of the most remarkable dominions of the ancient world. Geographically it was small. It was only about 140 miles long and 15 miles wide, skirted by the sea on one side and by a mountain range on the other. With the well-known Semitic genius for trading, its people planted colonies, operated mines, and established trading points on many rivers and seas. The volume of their trade was never surpassed until that day, centuries afterward, when the discovery of America opened up a new world to exploitation.

In the process of their trading, the Phoenicians carried letters and arts to many Old World lands. They were not their own letters and arts. All the intellectual treasures they had were borrowed from others. They were too busy buying and selling to take time to develop any of their own. Consequently, the only monument to Phoenicia that remains today is the memory of her commercial greatness. She concerned herself only with that which was temporary. She built nothing that could endure.

That period which was characterized by the most serious search for knowledge in America came during the poorer days of our people. The educational facilities of that period were meager. The highest diploma then given represented a degree of learning which almost anyone may easily obtain now. Yet those were days when young people endured the most severe sacrifice in order to obtain a measure of educational advantage for themselves. From the modern educational viewpoint, the little red school house at the cross roads may look like a rather poor affair, but it housed some tremendously earnest spirits. Some of our most distinguished public servants were there prepared for usefulness to their times.

In those days, poverty threw some severe limitations around the young person seeking an education. At the same time, it provided a great incentive to go forward, and it placed behind the obtaining of an education a motive that was of great credit and value. Many young people defeated the limitations of poverty by winning scholarships. This within itself was of great value because it required a high standard of studentship. Its advantage is unknown in the institution which caters to rich men’s sons.

We have been through our periods of poverty that pinched boys and girls into preparing themselves for better things. We have also had our periods of economic independence. We have just emerged from one of actual prodigality. Its unfavorable effect upon education cannot escape our eyes.

Conditions incident to the war write a few entries on the credit side of the ledger. It put many soldier boys into schools for technical training. It helped to awaken the country to its weakness along these lines. These things, however, were overshadowed by the way in which the recent period of swollen incomes made against learning.

The high wages of the war period and of the time immediately following it lured from the schools a vast number who would otherwise have remained. The economic incentive to getting an education was removed. It was a time when a boy could obtain high wages without learning. In many cases he could go into the shops and get better pay than his instructors were receiving for work that demanded thorough preparation and intense application.

Statistics showing how much more money the educated man could make had lost their meaning. The time had come when brawn possessed greater earning capacity than brain. School men all over the country had hard work to keep their schools from going to pieces because of the depletion in attendance which they suffered.

It was only natural that this situation should make teachers restless. Their pay had never been adequate, and now they saw it dwindling to a still smaller figure in comparison with that of a day laborer. The morale of the teaching force was disturbed everywhere. Many teachers found other work. The American school faced a crisis. That crisis seems now to be passing, partly because teachers are being better compensated and partly because the abnormal production, the prodigal buying, and the inflated wages of the war period are over.

The same disturbance showed itself on college faculties. One state university lost twenty-three men in a single year because the whole country was growing rich and leaving them poorer than they were before. One prominent member of a certain university faculty resigned to enter the employ of a firm headed by one of his former students.

Technical schools had the same trouble. During 1919 when the country was literally rolling in wealth, there was very little increase in the amount of money placed at the disposal of agricultural schools in America. Meanwhile, the various industries with their offers of better salaries had taken many of the best teachers from these institutions. The Secretary of Agriculture hoisted the danger signal by declaring that our nation must have a well-balanced program of research and that the most capable staffs possible must be secured and maintained.

One of the chief troubles with a great commercial period is its preoccupation with material things. Minds become cloyed; hearts grow dull; and souls grow no wings with which to lift themselves above the mire and the clay. When a generation gets too busy to read books, hear music, and encourage learning, it is an easy thing for its sons to assume that a job is better than an education.

Education and Production (1921)

A few years ago so great an emphasis on manual training and industrial arts was evident in our school work that some feared a decline in the cultural ideal in the educational process. The trend was bringing its benefits, to be sure, but there seemed ground for fear that the end might be a generation educated in hand and seriously lacking in educated mind and personality.

It has not worked out as many expected it would. The result has rather been the contrary one. We face today an unexpected situation at the close of a war that has tried the powers and resources of the earth. We have an abundance of people who are willing to work at seemingly dignified and necessarily high-salaried tasks. We have a shortage of men willing to do the manual labor necessary to make the world go round.

The difficulty does not lie in any lack of training for manual tasks. We have never had so many people with hands trained to construct buildings and machinery, to set type, and to till soil to the best advantage. The schools have been training people for this kind of work long enough so that several graduating classes have been emptied out into the arena of the world’s life. The number is constantly increasing. Yet the shortage seems to grow.

The trouble seems to root in a certain mistaken attitude toward labor. Our people do not find it easy to get over the notion that gentlemen do not labor with their hands. The idea persists, in spite of all the wealth of our philosophy to the contrary, that a certain aristocracy inheres in idleness. People are ashamed to be seen in their working clothes, and if anyone comes upon them when they are engaged in some manual task, they are prone to make excuses. They seem to feel that they have been overtaken in a fault.

Parents, trained in the ways mentioned, are partially responsible. Many of them go on in the path of error, despite the fact that they realize their mistaken attitude. Their solicitude for their children impels them, and it often impels them to courses that are not best for the children themselves.

Just the other day I heard a mother say that she realized the need of the world for workers, and that she realized the benefits of work to the individual. Yet she could not bring herself to feel willing that her two sons should spend their lives working with their hands.

“I cannot help wanting them to prepare for some line of work that will be easy and dignified,” she said.

So the story has been through the years. So long as this is the motive from which parents send their sons and daughters to school we can hardly expect any great change in the situation.

A certain notion persists that education and work are incompatible. The assumption is that something is wrong when an educated man is seen employed at something involving physical exertion.

The other day a friend told me that he had just learned a strange thing. In a certain nearby city, he said, a graduate of the state university and of a well-known law school was working as a motorman on a street car.

Perhaps something had gone wrong in the case of this man. The wages now paid to street car motormen compare so poorly with the money made by a successful lawyer that one is naturally led to this suspicion. At the same time, however, there is no reason why educated men should despise such work as that of a motorman. Neither is there any reason why the position of a motorman should not be made attractive to men of the highest grade.

The day is coming when low grade men will not be desired for any kind of work on earth. If there is real truth in the old saying that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, we shall gradually learn that we must set men at all our work who are capable of doing it well. It is a great question whether cheap labor is really cheap after all. The chances are that the most capable labor obtainable in any line is the highest economy.

In a recent short story, one colored man is made to remark to another that work is not to be expected from a gentleman of brains like himself. “Brains,” he went on to say, “is to keep you from wukkin’.”

This has too long been the general notion about intellectual ability. Training, both real and fancied, has too often been made the excuse for parasitism. The purpose of education is not to qualify one for getting through life on a minimum of toil. It is rather calculated to enable one to perform a maximum of work with a minimum of friction and waste. In other words, education at its best is not a means to idleness but to efficiency.

The most representative products of our best schools are sufficient proofs of the productive element in the highest educational ideal. They are not idlers, but workers. Their work does not consist of mere fuss and parade. It brings forth the fruit of achievement. The idler is either a product of no school at all, a product of a school with a mistaken educational ideal, or a mutation from the really cultured type.

In this regard, our notion of education is essentially different from the European one. In the Old World, the prevailing idea of an educational institution was that its work was the preparation of young people to be polished aristocrats. The desired product was the graceful and courtly gentleman or lady. That conception may have been somewhat changed by the war, but such was what it was before the world was so largely made over in that great crucible of death.

Our idea of the aim of education is much the same here, except that our schools and teachers try to foster a somewhat different idea of what it takes to make an aristocrat. They do not proceed upon the theory that an idler is an aristocrat. The accepted canon in educational circles is that a man is not trained at all unless trained to be good for something, and that he must prove his culture by bringing forth fruits meet for it.

In their efforts to establish the productive ideal in the thinking of the public as well as in the work of the school itself, our educational system has many handicaps to overcome. One of them is the fact that idleness has been so long and so well glorified in fiction and on the moving picture screen. Too many characters that walk before the eyes of our people, especially the boys and girls, are rich without working for their wealth. They live in palatial houses. They wear the finest of clothing. They indulge in the most expensive pleasures. Yet they toil not, neither do they spin.

This sort of thing has soaked into the public mind pretty deeply. It has exerted its effect upon the life of this generation. The number who would like to live without much exertion are a more or less direct result of it. It is one of the things that must be overcome. Some day it will begin to right itself, for the public will realize the mistaken assumption underlying it. Then a reaction will set in, but we dare not wait for the reaction. We must be trying to stem the current for the sake of those who need to be shown the light now. Just now we are probably at the crest of the billow.

It is to the credit of the public school system that it has always glorified work. We have never needed work and workers so much as we do now. Our armies have torn the world to pieces. We must now have workers to rebuild it into a finer and grander thing than it was before. Therefore, the person who expects to take up room on it and live from it must produce. The life of society is co-operative. Each must do his share. The test of learning is service.

The School as a Reform Agency (1921)

In the little red school house that stood on the hillside thirty years ago some crude things were done. At the same time, some very important and helpful things were done. Even some of the crude things now seem to have had an indispensable value. The years teach us that the only test of the correctness of any educational method is its result in terms of life.

In those days a great deal of moralizing was done. A moral was drawn from everything. The great bulk of the teaching was didactic. Each lesson in the old-fashioned reader had its definite ethical point. Often the moral was stated in so many words at the end. Patriotism, thrift, industry, the fact that there is always room at the top—all these things came in for their share of attention. The result was a patriotic, thrifty, industrious, and ambitious generation of people. We owe that generation and its work largely to the teacher who did not fear to frankly face the moral implications of things. He may have moralized a little too much, but his work had its effects for good.

The history of the world is largely made up of actions and reactions. The reaction against all this came on in due time. We witnessed the development of a great dislike for all stories with apparent morals and of a distinct resentment against all didactic teaching. We still make some effort at character-building, but that effort is usually veiled and often neglected altogether.