Craftsmanship in Teaching

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Ti­tle: Crafts­man­ship in Teach­ing

Au­thor: William Chan­dler Bagley

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CRAFTS­MAN­SHIP IN TEACH­ING

by

WILLIAM CHAN­DLER BAGLEY

Au­thor Of “The Ed­uca­tive Pro­cess,” “Class­room Man­age­ment,” “Ed­uca­tion­al Val­ues,” Etc.

New York The MacMil­lan Com­pa­ny 1912 All rights re­served Copy­right, 1911, by the MacMil­lan Com­pa­ny. Set up and elec­trotyped. Pub­lished April, 1911. Reprint­ed June, Oc­to­ber, 1911; May, 1912. Nor­wood Press J.S. Cush­ing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Nor­wood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO MY PAR­ENTS

PREF­ACE

The fol­low­ing pa­pers are pub­lished chiefly be­cause they treat in a con­crete and per­son­al man­ner some of the prin­ci­ples which the writ­er has de­vel­oped in two pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished books, _The Ed­uca­tive Pro­cess_ and _Class­room Man­age­ment_, and in a forth­com­ing vol­ume, _Ed­uca­tion­al Val­ues_. It is hoped that the more in­for­mal dis­cus­sions pre­sent­ed in the fol­low­ing pages will, in some slight mea­sure, sup­ple­ment the the­oret­ical and sys­tem­at­ic treat­ment which nec­es­sar­ily char­ac­ter­izes the oth­er books. In this con­nec­tion, it should be stat­ed that the ma­te­ri­als of the first pa­per here pre­sent­ed were drawn up­on in writ­ing Chap­ter XVI­II of _Class­room Man­age­ment_, and that the sec­ond pa­per sim­ply states in a dif­fer­ent form the con­clu­sions reached in Chap­ter I of _The Ed­uca­tive Pro­cess_.

The writ­er is in­debt­ed to his col­league, Pro­fes­sor L.F. An­der­son, for many crit­icisms and sug­ges­tions and to Miss Ber­nice Har­ri­son for in­valu­able aid in edit­ing the pa­pers for pub­li­ca­tion. But his heav­iest debt, here as else­where, is to his wife, to whose en­cour­ag­ing sym­pa­thy and in­spi­ra­tion what­ev­er may be valu­able in this or in his oth­er books must be large­ly at­tribut­ed.

UR­BANA, ILLI­NOIS, March 1, 1911

CON­TENTS

CHAP­TER PAGE

I. CRAFTS­MAN­SHIP IN TEACH­ING 1

II. OP­TI­MISM IN TEACH­ING 23

III. HOW MAY WE PRO­MOTE THE EF­FI­CIEN­CY OF THE TEACH­ING FORCE? 43

IV. THE TEST OF EF­FI­CIEN­CY IN SU­PER­VI­SION 63

V. THE SU­PER­VI­SOR AND THE TEACH­ER 77

VI. ED­UCA­TION AND UTIL­ITY 96

VII. THE SCI­EN­TIF­IC SPIR­IT IN ED­UCA­TION 123

VI­II. THE POS­SI­BIL­ITY OF TRAIN­ING CHIL­DREN TO STUDY 144

IX. A PLEA FOR THE DEF­INITE IN ED­UCA­TION 164

X. SCI­ENCE AS RE­LAT­ED TO THE TEACH­ING OF LIT­ER­ATURE 191

XI. THE NEW AT­TI­TUDE TO­WARD DRILL 204

XII. THE IDE­AL TEACH­ER 229

CRAFTS­MAN­SHIP IN TEACH­ING

~I~

CRAFTS­MAN­SHIP IN TEACH­ING[1]

I

“In the lab­ora­to­ry of life, each new­com­er re­peats the old ex­per­iments, and laughs and weeps for him­self. We will be ex­plor­ers, though all the high­ways have their guide­posts and ev­ery by­path is mapped. He­len of Troy will not de­ter us, nor the wounds of Cæsar fright­en, nor the voice of the king cry­ing 'Van­ity!' from his throne dis­may. What won­der that the stars that once sang for joy are dumb and the con­stel­la­tions go down in si­lence.”--ARTHUR SHER­BURNE HARDY: _The Wind of Des­tiny_.

We tend, I think, to look up­on the ad­vice that we give to young peo­ple as some­thing that shall dis­il­lu­sion­ize them. The cyn­ic of forty sneers at what he terms the plat­itudes of com­mence­ment ad­dress­es. He knows life. He has been be­hind the cur­tains. He has looked up­on the oth­er side of the scenery,--the side that is just frame­work and bare can­vas. He has seen the ug­ly ma­chin­ery that shifts the stage set­ting--the stage set­ting which ap­pears so im­pres­sive when viewed from the front. He has seen the rouge on the cheeks that seem to blush with the bloom of youth and beau­ty and in­no­cence, and has caught the cold glint in the eyes that, from the dis­tance, seem to lan­guish with ten­der­ness and love. Why, he asks, should we cre­ate an il­lu­sion that must thus be rude­ly dis­pelled? Why re­vamp and re­fur­bish the old plat­itudes and dole them out each suc­ceed­ing year? Why not tell these young peo­ple the truth and let them be pre­pared for the fate that must come soon­er or lat­er?

But the cyn­ic for­gets that there are some peo­ple who nev­er lose their il­lu­sions,--some men and wom­en who are al­ways young,--and, what­ev­er may be the type of men and wom­en that oth­er call­ings and pro­fes­sions de­sire to en­roll in their ser­vice, this is the type that ed­uca­tion needs. The great prob­lem of the teach­er is to keep him­self in this class, to keep him­self young, to pre­serve the very things that the cyn­ic pleas­es to call the il­lu­sions of his youth. And so much do I de­sire to im­press these novi­tiates in­to our call­ing with the ne­ces­si­ty for pre­serv­ing their ide­als that I shall ask them this evening to con­sid­er with me some things which would, I fear, strike the cyn­ic as most il­lu­sion­ary and im­prac­ti­cal. The ini­ti­ation cer­emonies that ad­mit­ted the young man to the priv­ileges and du­ties of knight­hood in­clud­ed the tak­ing of cer­tain vows, the mak­ing of cer­tain pledges of de­vo­tion and fi­deli­ty to the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples for which chival­ry stood. And I should like this evening to imag­ine that these grad­uates are un­der­go­ing an anal­ogous ini­ti­ation in­to the priv­ileges and du­ties of school­craft, and that these vows which I shall enu­mer­ate, em­body some of the ide­als that gov­ern the work of that craft.

II

And the first of these vows I shall call, for want of a bet­ter term, the vow of “artistry,”--the pledge that the ini­ti­ate takes to do the work that his hand finds to do in the best pos­si­ble man­ner, with­out ref­er­ence to the ef­fort that it may cost or to the re­ward that it may or may not bring.

I call this the vow of artistry be­cause it rep­re­sents the es­sen­tial at­ti­tude of the artist to­ward his work. The cyn­ic tells us that ide­als are il­lu­sions of youth, and yet, the oth­er day I saw ex­pressed in a mid­dle-​aged work­ing-​man a type of ide­al­ism that is not at all un­com­mon in this world. He was a house painter; his task was sim­ply the pro­sa­ic job of paint­ing a door; and yet, from the pains which he took with that work, an ob­serv­er would have con­clud­ed that it was, to the painter, the most im­por­tant task in the world. And that, af­ter all, is the true test of craft artistry: to the true crafts­man the work that he is do­ing must be the most im­por­tant thing that can be done. One of the best teach­ers that I know is that kind of a crafts­man in ed­uca­tion. A stu­dent was once sent to ob­serve his work. He was giv­ing a les­son up­on the “at­tribute com­ple­ment” to an eighth-​grade gram­mar class. I asked the stu­dent af­ter­ward what she had got from her vis­it. “Why,” she replied, “that man taught as if the very great­est achieve­ment in life would be to get his pupils to un­der­stand the at­tribute com­ple­ment,--and when he had fin­ished, they did un­der­stand it.”

In a nar­row­er sense, this vow of artistry car­ries with it an ap­pre­ci­ation of the val­ue of tech­nique. From the very fact of their nor­mal school train­ing, these grad­uates al­ready pos­sess a cer­tain mea­sure of skill, a cer­tain mas­tery of the tech­nique of their craft. This ini­tial mas­tery has been gained in ac­tu­al con­tact with the prob­lems of school work in their prac­tice teach­ing. They have learned some of the rudi­ments; they have met and mas­tered some of the rougher, crud­er dif­fi­cul­ties. The fin­er skill, the del­icate and in­tan­gi­ble points of tech­nique, they must ac­quire, as all be­gin­ners must ac­quire them, through the stren­uous pro­cess­es of self-​dis­ci­pline in the ac­tu­al work of the years that are to come. This is a pro­cess that takes time, en­er­gy, con­stant and per­sis­tent ap­pli­ca­tion. All that this school or any school can do for its stu­dents in this re­spect is to start them up­on the right track in the ac­qui­si­tion of skill. But do not make the mis­take of as­sum­ing that this is a small and unim­por­tant mat­ter. If this school did noth­ing more than this, it would still re­pay ten­fold the cost of its es­tab­lish­ment and main­te­nance. Three fourths of the fail­ures in a world that some­times seems full of fail­ures are due to noth­ing more nor less than a wrong start. In spite of the growth of pro­fes­sion­al train­ing for teach­ers with­in the past fifty years, many of our low­er schools are still filled with raw re­cruits, fresh from the high schools and even from the grades, who must learn ev­ery prac­ti­cal les­son of teach­ing through the medi­um of their own mis­takes. Even if this were all, the pro­cess would in­volve a tremen­dous and un­called-​for waste. But this is not all; for, out of this mul­ti­tude of un­trained teach­ers, on­ly a small pro­por­tion ev­er rec­og­nize the mis­takes that they make and try to cor­rect them.

To you who are be­gin­ning the work of life, the mas­tery of tech­nique may seem a com­par­ative­ly unim­por­tant mat­ter. You rec­og­nize its ne­ces­si­ty, of course, but you think of it as some­thing of a me­chan­ical na­ture,--an in­te­gral part of the day's work, but un­invit­ing in it­self,--some­thing to be re­duced as rapid­ly as pos­si­ble to the plane of au­toma­tism and dis­missed from the mind. I be­lieve that you will out­grow this no­tion. As you go on with your work, as you in­crease in skill, ev­er and ev­er the fas­ci­na­tion of its tech­nique will take a stronger and stronger hold up­on you. This is the great sav­ing prin­ci­ple of our worka­day life. This is the fac­tor that keeps the toil­er free from the dead­en­ing ef­fects of me­chan­ical rou­tine. It is the fac­tor that keeps the farmer at his plow, the ar­ti­san at his bench, the lawyer at his desk, the artist at his palette.

I once worked for a man who had ac­cu­mu­lat­ed a large for­tune. At the age of sev­en­ty-​five he di­vid­ed this for­tune among his chil­dren, in­tend­ing to re­tire; but he could find plea­sure and com­fort on­ly in the rou­tine of busi­ness. In six months he was back in his of­fice. He bor­rowed twen­ty-​five thou­sand dol­lars on his past rep­uta­tion and start­ed in to have some fun. I was his on­ly em­ploy­ee at the time, and I sat across the big dou­ble desk from him, writ­ing his let­ters and keep­ing his ac­counts. He would sit for hours, plan­ning for the es­tab­lish­ment of some in­dus­try or run­ning out the lines that would en­tan­gle some old ad­ver­sary. I did not stay with him very long, but be­fore I left, he had a half-​dozen thriv­ing in­dus­tries on his hands, and when he died three years lat­er he had ac­cu­mu­lat­ed an­oth­er for­tune of over a mil­lion dol­lars.

That is an ex­am­ple of what I mean by the fas­ci­na­tion that the tech­nique of one's craft may come to pos­sess. It is the joy of do­ing well the work that you know how to do. The fin­er points of tech­nique,--those lit­tle things that seem so triv­ial in them­selves and yet which mean ev­ery­thing to skill and ef­fi­cien­cy,--what pride the com­pe­tent ar­ti­san or the mas­ter artist takes in these! How he de­lights to rev­el in the jar­gon of his craft! How he prides him­self in pos­sess­ing the knowl­edge and the tech­ni­cal skill that are de­nied the lay­man!

I am aware that I am some­what un­ortho­dox in urg­ing this view of your work up­on you. Teach­ers have been en­cour­aged to be­lieve that de­tails are not on­ly unim­por­tant but stul­ti­fy­ing,--that teach­ing abil­ity is a func­tion of per­son­al­ity, and not a prod­uct of a tech­nique that must be ac­quired through the stren­uous dis­ci­pline of ex­pe­ri­ence. One of the most skill­ful teach­ers of my ac­quain­tance is a wom­an down in the grades. I have watched her work for days at a time, striv­ing to learn its se­cret. I can find noth­ing there that is due to ge­nius,--un­less we ac­cept George Eliot's def­ini­tion of ge­nius as an in­fi­nite ca­pac­ity for re­ceiv­ing dis­ci­pline. That teach­er's suc­cess, by her own state­ment, is due to a mas­tery of tech­nique, gained through suc­ces­sive years of growth checked by a rigid re­spon­si­bil­ity for re­sults. She has found out by re­peat­ed tri­al how to do her work in the best way; she has dis­cov­ered the at­ti­tude to­ward her pupils that will get the best work from them,--the clear­est meth­ods of pre­sent­ing sub­ject mat­ter; the most ef­fec­tive ways in which to drill; how to use text-​books and make study pe­ri­ods is­sue in some­thing be­sides mis­chief; and, more than all else, how to do these things with­out los­ing sight of the true end of ed­uca­tion. Very fre­quent­ly I have tak­en vis­it­ing school men to see this teach­er's work. In­vari­ably af­ter leav­ing her room they have turned to me with such ex­pres­sions as these: “A born teach­er!” “What in­ter­est!” “What a per­son­al­ity!” “What a voice!”--ev­ery­thing, in fact, ex­cept this,--which would have been the truth: “What a trib­ute to years of ef­fort and strug­gle and self-​dis­ci­pline!”

I have a the­ory which I have nev­er ex­ploit­ed very se­ri­ous­ly, but I will give it to you for what it is worth. It is this: el­emen­tary ed­uca­tion es­pe­cial­ly needs a lit­er­ary in­ter­pre­ta­tion. It needs a lit­er­ary artist who will por­tray to the pub­lic in the form of fic­tion the re­al life of the el­emen­tary school,--who will ide­al­ize the tech­nique of teach­ing as Kipling ide­al­ized the tech­nique of the ma­rine en­gi­neer, as Balzac ide­al­ized the tech­nique of the jour­nal­ist, as Du Mau­ri­er and a hun­dred oth­er nov­el­ists have ide­al­ized the tech­nique of the artist. We need some one to ex­ploit our shop-​talk on the read­ing pub­lic, and to show up our work as you and I know it, not as you and I have been told by lay­men that it ought to be,--a lit­er­ature of the el­emen­tary school with the cant and the plat­itudes and the goody-​goody­ism left out, and in their place some­thing of the viril­ity, of the se­ri­ous study, of the man­ful ef­fort to solve dif­fi­cult prob­lems, of the re­al and vi­tal achieve­ments that are char­ac­ter­is­tic of thou­sands of el­emen­tary schools through­out the coun­try to-​day.

At first you will be fas­ci­nat­ed by the nov­el­ty of your work. But that soon pass­es away. Then comes the strug­gle,--then comes the pe­ri­od, be it long or short, when you will work with your eyes up­on the clock, when you will count the weeks, the days, the hours, the min­utes that lie be­tween you and va­ca­tion time. Then will be the need for all the strength and all the en­er­gy that you can sum­mon to your aid. Fail here, and your fate is de­cid­ed once and for all. If, in your work, you nev­er get be­yond this stage, you will nev­er be­come the true crafts­man. You will nev­er taste the joy that is vouch­safed the ex­pert, the ef­fi­cient crafts­man.

The length of this pe­ri­od varies with dif­fer­ent in­di­vid­uals. Some teach­ers “find them­selves” quick­ly. They seem to set­tle at once in­to the teach­ing at­ti­tude. With oth­ers is a long, up­hill fight. But it is safe to say that if, at the end of three years, your eyes still ha­bit­ual­ly seek the clock,--if, at the end of that time, your chief re­ward is the check that comes at the end of ev­ery fourth week,--then your doom is sealed.

III

And the sec­ond vow that I should urge these grad­uates to take is the vow of fi­deli­ty to the spir­it of their call­ing. We have heard a great deal in re­cent years about mak­ing ed­uca­tion a pro­fes­sion. I do not like that term my­self. Ed­uca­tion is not a pro­fes­sion in the sense that medicine and law are pro­fes­sions. It is rather a craft, for its du­ty is to pro­duce, to mold, to fash­ion, to trans­form a cer­tain raw ma­te­ri­al in­to a use­ful prod­uct. And, like all crafts, ed­uca­tion must pos­sess the craft spir­it. It must have a cer­tain code of craft ethics; it must have cer­tain stan­dards of craft ex­cel­lence and ef­fi­cien­cy. And in these the nor­mal school must in­struct its stu­dents, and to these it should se­cure their pledge of loy­al­ty and fi­deli­ty and de­vo­tion.

A true con­cep­tion of this craft spir­it in ed­uca­tion is one of the most price­less pos­ses­sions of the young teach­er, for it will for­ti­fy him against ev­ery crit­icism to which his call­ing is sub­ject­ed. It is re­veal­ing no se­cret to tell you that the teach­er's work is not held in the high­est re­gard by the vast ma­jor­ity of men and wom­en in oth­er walks of life. I shall not stop to in­quire why this is so, but the fact can­not be doubt­ed, and ev­ery now and again some in­ci­dent of life, tri­fling per­haps in it­self, will bring it to your no­tice; but most of all, per­haps you will be vexed and in­censed by the very thing that is meant to put you at your ease--the pa­tron­iz­ing at­ti­tude which your friends in oth­er walks of life will as­sume to­ward you and to­ward your work.

When will the good pub­lic cease to in­sult the teach­er's call­ing with emp­ty flat­tery? When will men who would nev­er for a mo­ment en­cour­age their own sons to en­ter the work of the pub­lic schools, cease to tell us that ed­uca­tion is the great­est and no­blest of all hu­man call­ings? Ed­uca­tion does not need these com­pli­ments. The teach­er does not need them. If he is a mas­ter of his craft, he knows what ed­uca­tion means,--he knows this far bet­ter than any lay­man can tell him. And what boots it to him, if, with all this cant and hypocrisy about the dig­ni­ty and worth of his call­ing, he can some­times hold his po­si­tion on­ly at the sac­ri­fice of his self-​re­spect?

But what is the re­la­tion of the craft spir­it to these facts? Sim­ply this: the true crafts­man, by the very fact that he is a true crafts­man, is im­mune to these in­flu­ences. What does the true artist care for the plau­dits or the sneers of the crowd? True, he seeks com­men­da­tion and wel­comes ap­plause, for your re­al artist is usu­al­ly ex­treme­ly hu­man; but he seeks this com­men­da­tion from an­oth­er source--from a source that metes it out less lav­ish­ly and yet with un­con­di­tioned can­dor. He seeks the com­men­da­tion of his fel­low-​work­men, the ap­plause of “those who know, and al­ways will know, and al­ways will un­der­stand.” He plays to the pit and not to the gallery, for he knows that when the pit re­al­ly ap­proves the gallery will of­ten echo and reë­cho the ap­plause, al­beit it has not the slight­est con­cep­tion of what the whole thing is about.

What ed­uca­tion stands in need of to-​day is just this: a stim­ulat­ing and per­va­sive craft spir­it. If a hu­man call­ing would win the world's re­spect, it must first re­spect it­self; and the more thor­ough­ly it re­spects it­self, the greater will be the mea­sure of homage that the world ac­cords it. In one of the ed­uca­tion­al jour­nals a few years ago, the ed­itors ran a se­ries of ar­ti­cles un­der the gen­er­al cap­tion, “Why I am a teach­er.” It re­mind­ed me of the spir­it­ed dis­cus­sion that one of the Sun­day pa­pers start­ed some years since on the world-​old query, “Is mar­riage a fail­ure?” And some of the ar­ti­cles were ful­ly as sick­en­ing in their har­row­ing de­tails as were some of the whin­ing mat­ri­mo­ni­al con­fes­sions of the lat­ter se­ries. But the point that I wish to make is this: your true crafts­man in ed­uca­tion nev­er stops to ask him­self such ques­tions. There are some men to whom school­craft is a mis­tress. They love it, and their de­vo­tion is no make-​be­lieve, fash­ioned out of sen­ti­ment, and donned for the pur­pose of hid­ing in­ef­fi­cien­cy or na­tive in­do­lence. They love it as some men love Art, and oth­ers Busi­ness, and oth­ers War. They do not stop to ask the rea­son why, to count the cost, or to care a fig what peo­ple think. They are prop­er­ly jeal­ous of their spe­cial knowl­edge, gained through years of spe­cial study; they are just­ly jeal­ous of their spe­cial skill gained through years of dis­ci­pline and train­ing. They re­sent the in­ter­fer­ence of lay­men in mat­ters pure­ly pro­fes­sion­al. They re­sent such in­ter­fer­ence as would a rep­utable physi­cian, a rep­utable lawyer, a rep­utable en­gi­neer. They re­sent of­fi­cious pa­tron­age and “fussy” med­dling. They re­sent all these things man­ful­ly, vig­or­ous­ly. But your true crafts­man will not whine. If the con­di­tions un­der which he works do not suit him, he will fight for their bet­ter­ment, but he will not whine.

IV

And yet this vow of fi­deli­ty and de­vo­tion to the spir­it of school­craft would be an emp­ty form with­out the two com­ple­men­tary vows that give it worth and mean­ing. These are the vow of pover­ty and the vow of ser­vice. It is through these that the true craft spir­it must find its most vig­or­ous ex­pres­sion and its on­ly jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. The very cor­ner stone of school­craft is ser­vice, and one fun­da­men­tal les­son that the ty­ro in school­craft must learn, es­pe­cial­ly in this ma­te­ri­al­is­tic age, is that the val­ue of ser­vice is not to be mea­sured in dol­lars and cents. In this re­spect, teach­ing re­sem­bles art, mu­sic, lit­er­ature, dis­cov­ery, in­ven­tion, and pure sci­ence; for, if all the work­ers in all of these branch­es of hu­man ac­tiv­ity got to­geth­er and de­mand­ed of the world the re­al fruits of their self-​sac­ri­fice and la­bor,--if they de­mand­ed all the rich­es and com­forts and ameni­ties of life that have flowed di­rect­ly or in­di­rect­ly from their ef­forts,--there would be lit­tle left for the rest of mankind. Each of these ac­tiv­ities is rep­re­sent­ed by a craft spir­it that rec­og­nizes this great truth. The artist or the sci­en­tist who has an itch­ing palm, who pros­ti­tutes his craft for the sake of world­ly gain, is quick­ly rel­egat­ed to the obliv­ion that he de­serves. He los­es caste, and the caste of craft is more pre­cious to your true crafts­man than all the gold of the mod­ern Mi­das.

You may think that this is all very well to talk about, but that it bears lit­tle agree­ment to the re­al con­di­tions. Let me tell you that you are mis­tak­en. Go ask Rönt­gen why he did not keep the X-​rays a se­cret to be ex­ploit­ed for his own per­son­al gain. Ask the shade of the great Helmholtz why he did not patent the oph­thal­mo­scope. Go to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin and ask Pro­fes­sor Bab­cock why he gave to the world with­out mon­ey and with­out price the Bab­cock test--an in­ven­tion which is es­ti­mat­ed to mean more than one mil­lion dol­lars ev­ery year to the farm­ers and dairy­men of that state alone. Ask the men on the ge­olog­ical sur­vey who laid bare the great gold de­posits of Alas­ka why they did not leave a thank­less and ill-​paid ser­vice to ac­quire the wealth that lay at their feet. Be­cause com­mer­cial­ized ide­als gov­ern the world that we know, we think that all men's eyes are jaun­diced, and that all men's vi­sion is cir­cum­scribed by the milled rim of the almighty dol­lar. But we are sad­ly, mis­er­ably mis­tak­en.

Do you think that these ide­als of ser­vice from which ev­ery taint of self-​seek­ing and com­mer­cial­ism have been elim­inat­ed--do you think that these are mere fig­ments of the im­prac­ti­cal imag­ina­tion? Go ask Per­ry Hold­en out in Iowa. Go ask Luther Bur­bank out in Cal­ifor­nia. Go to any agri­cul­tur­al col­lege in this broad land and ask the sci­en­tists who are do­ing more than all oth­er forces com­bined to in­crease the wealth of the peo­ple. Go to the sci­en­tif­ic de­part­ments at Wash­ing­ton where men of ge­nius are toil­ing for a pit­tance. Ask them how much of the wealth for which they are re­spon­si­ble they pro­pose to put in­to their own pock­ets. What will be their an­swer? They will tell you that all they ask is a liv­ing wage, a chance to work, and the just recog­ni­tion of their ser­vices by those who know and ap­pre­ci­ate and un­der­stand.

But let me has­ten to add that these men claim no es­pe­cial mer­it for their al­tru­ism and un­selfish­ness. They do not pose be­fore the world as phi­lan­thropists. They do not strut about and preen them­selves as who would say: “See what a no­ble man am I! See how I sac­ri­fice my­self for the wel­fare of so­ci­ety!” The at­ti­tude of cant and pose is en­tire­ly alien to the spir­it of true ser­vice. Their de­light is in do­ing, in serv­ing, in pro­duc­ing. But be­yond this, they have the faults and frail­ties of their kind,--save one,--the sin of cov­etous­ness. And again, all that they ask of the world is a liv­ing wage, and the priv­ilege to serve.

And that is all that the true crafts­man in ed­uca­tion asks. The man or wom­an with the itch­ing palm has no place in the school­room,--no place in any craft whose keynote is ser­vice. It is true that the teach­er does not re­ceive to-​day, in all parts of our coun­try, a liv­ing wage; and it is equal­ly true that so­ci­ety at large is the great­est suf­fer­er be­cause of its penu­ri­ous pol­icy in this re­gard. I should ap­plaud and sup­port ev­ery move­ment that has for its pur­pose the rais­ing of teach­ers' salaries to the lev­el of those paid in oth­er branch­es of pro­fes­sion­al ser­vice. So­ci­ety should do this for its own ben­efit and in its own de­fense, not as a mat­ter of char­ity to the men and wom­en who, among all pub­lic ser­vants, should be the last to be ac­cused of feed­ing gra­tu­itous­ly at the pub­lic crib. I should ap­prove all hon­est ef­forts of school men and school wom­en to­ward this much-​de­sired end. But when­ev­er men and wom­en en­ter school­craft be­cause of the ma­te­ri­al re­wards that it of­fers, the virtue will have gone out of our call­ing,--just as the virtue went out of the Church when, dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages, the Church at­tract­ed men, not be­cause of the op­por­tu­ni­ties that it of­fered for so­cial ser­vice, but be­cause of the op­por­tu­ni­ties that it of­fered for the ac­qui­si­tion of wealth and tem­po­ral pow­er,--just as the virtue has gone out of cer­tain oth­er once-​no­ble pro­fes­sions that have com­mer­cial­ized their stan­dards and tar­nished their ide­als.

This is not to say that one con­demns the man who de­votes his life to the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of prop­er­ty. The tremen­dous strides that our coun­try has made in ma­te­ri­al civ­iliza­tion have been con­di­tioned in part by this type of ge­nius. Cre­ative ge­nius must al­ways com­pel our ad­mi­ra­tion and our re­spect. It may cre­ate a world epic, a match­less sym­pho­ny of tones or pig­ments, a sci­en­tif­ic the­ory of tremen­dous grasp and lim­it­less scope; or it may cre­ate a vast in­dus­tri­al sys­tem, a com­mer­cial en­ter­prise of gi­gan­tic pro­por­tions, a pow­er­ful or­ga­ni­za­tion of cap­ital. Ge­nius is pret­ty much the same wher­ev­er we find it, and ev­ery­where we of the com­mon clay must rec­og­nize its worth.

The grave de­fect in our Amer­ican life is not that we are hero wor­shipers, but rather that we wor­ship but one type of hero; we rec­og­nize but one type of achieve­ment; we see but one sort of ge­nius. For two gen­er­ations our youth have been led to be­lieve that there is on­ly one am­bi­tion that is worth while,--the am­bi­tion of prop­er­ty. Suc­cess at any price is the ide­al that has been held up be­fore our boys and girls. And to-​day we are reap­ing the re­wards of this dis­tort­ed and un­just view of life.

I re­cent­ly met a man who had lived for some years in the neigh­bor­hood of St. Paul and Min­neapo­lis,--a sec­tion that is peo­pled, as you know, very large­ly by Scan­di­na­vian im­mi­grants and their de­scen­dants. This man told me that he had been par­tic­ular­ly im­pressed by the high ide­al­ism of the Nor­we­gian peo­ple. His busi­ness brought him in con­tact with Nor­we­gian im­mi­grants in what are called the low­er walks of life,--with work­ing­men and ser­vant girls,--and he made it a point to ask each of these young men and young wom­en the same ques­tion. “Tell me,” he would say, “who are the great men of your coun­try? Who are the men to­ward whom the youth of your land are led to look for in­spi­ra­tion? Who are the men whom your boys are led to im­itate and em­ulate and ad­mire?” And he said that he al­most al­ways re­ceived the same an­swer to this ques­tion: the great names of the Nor­we­gian na­tion that had been burned up­on the minds even of these work­ing­men and ser­vant girls were just four in num­ber: Ole Bull, Björn­son, Ib­sen, Nansen. Over and over again he asked that same ques­tion; over and over again he re­ceived the same an­swer: Ole Bull, Björn­son, Ib­sen, Nansen. A great mu­si­cian, a great nov­el­ist, a great drama­tist, a great sci­en­tist.

And I con­jec­tured as I heard of this in­ci­dent, What would be the an­swer if the youth of our land were asked that ques­tion: “Who are the great men of _your_ coun­try? What type of achieve­ment have you been led to im­itate and em­ulate and ad­mire?” How many of our boys and girls have even heard of our great men in the world of cul­ture,--un­less, in­deed, such men lived a half cen­tu­ry ago and have got in­to the school read­ers by this time? How many of our boys and girls have ev­er heard of Mac­Dow­ell, or James, or Whistler, or Sar­gent?

I have said that the teach­er must take the vow of ser­vice. What does this im­ply ex­cept that the op­por­tu­ni­ty for ser­vice, the priv­ilege of serv­ing, should be the op­por­tu­ni­ty that one seeks, and that the achieve­ments to­ward which one as­pires should be the achieve­ments of serv­ing? The keynote of ser­vice lies in self-​sac­ri­fice,--in self-​for­get­ful­ness, rather,--in merg­ing one's own life in the lives of oth­ers. The at­ti­tude of the true teach­er in this re­spect is very sim­ilar to the at­ti­tude of the true par­ent. In so far as the par­ent feels him­self re­spon­si­ble for the char­ac­ter of his chil­dren, in so far as he holds him­self cul­pa­ble for their short­com­ings and in­stru­men­tal in shap­ing their virtues, he los­es him­self in his chil­dren. What we term parental af­fec­tion is, I be­lieve, in part an out­growth of this feel­ing of re­spon­si­bil­ity. The sit­ua­tion is pre­cise­ly the same with the teach­er. It is when the teach­er be­gins to feel him­self re­spon­si­ble for the growth and de­vel­op­ment of his pupils that he be­gins to find him­self in the work of teach­ing. It is then that the ef­fec­tive de­vo­tion to his pupils has its birth. The af­fec­tion that comes pri­or to this is, I think, very like­ly to be of the sen­ti­men­tal and tran­si­to­ry sort.

In ed­uca­tion, as in life, we play al­to­geth­er too care­less­ly with the word “love.” The test of true de­vo­tion is self-​for­get­ful­ness. Un­til the teach­er reach­es that point, he is con­scious of two dis­tinct el­ements in his work,--him­self and his pupils. When that time comes, his own _ego_ drops from view, and he lives in and for his pupils. The young teach­er's ten­den­cy is al­ways to ask him­self, “Do my pupils like me?” Let me say that this is be­side the ques­tion. It is not, from his stand­point, a mat­ter of the pupils lik­ing their teach­er, but of the teach­er lik­ing his pupils. That, I take it, must be con­stant­ly the point of view. If you ask the oth­er ques­tion first, you will be tempt­ed to gain your end by means that are al­most cer­tain to prove fa­tal,--to bribe and pet and ca­jole and flat­ter, to re­sort to the dan­ger­ous ex­pe­di­ent of play­ing to the gallery; but the lik­ing that you get in this way is not worth the price that you pay for it. I should cau­tion young teach­ers against the short-​sight­ed ed­uca­tion­al the­ories that are in the air to-​day, and that def­inite­ly rec­om­mend this at­ti­tude. They may sound sweet, but they are soft and sticky in prac­tice. Bet­ter be guid­ed by in­stinct than by “half-​baked” the­ory. I have no dis­po­si­tion to crit­icize the at­tempts that have been made to ra­tio­nal­ize ed­uca­tion­al prac­tice, but a great deal of con­tem­po­rary the­ory starts at the wrong end. It has failed to go to the sources of ac­tu­al ex­pe­ri­ence for its da­ta. I know a fa­ther and moth­er who have brought up ten chil­dren suc­cess­ful­ly, and I may say that you could learn more about man­ag­ing boys and girls from ob­serv­ing their meth­ods than from a half-​dozen promi­nent books on ed­uca­tion­al the­ory that I could name.

And so I re­peat that the true test of the teach­er's fi­deli­ty to this vow of ser­vice is the de­gree in which he los­es him­self in his pupils,--the de­gree in which he lives and toils and sac­ri­fices for them just for the pure joy that it brings him. Once you have tast­ed this joy, no carp­ing sneer of the cyn­ic can cause you to lose faith in your call­ing. Ma­te­ri­al re­wards sink in­to in­signif­icance. You no longer work with your eyes up­on the clock. The hours are all too short for the work that you would do. You are as light-​heart­ed and as hap­py as a child,--for you have lost your­self to find your­self, and you have found your­self to lose your­self.

V

And the fi­nal vow that I would have these grad­uates take is the vow of ide­al­ism,--the pledge of fi­deli­ty and de­vo­tion to cer­tain fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of life which it is the busi­ness of ed­uca­tion care­ful­ly to cher­ish and nour­ish and trans­mit un­tar­nished to each suc­ceed­ing gen­er­ation. These but for­mu­late in an­oth­er way what the vows that I have al­ready dis­cussed mean by im­pli­ca­tion. One is the ide­al of so­cial ser­vice, up­on which ed­uca­tion must, in the last anal­ysis, rest its case. The sec­ond is the ide­al of sci­ence,--the pledge of de­vo­tion to that per­sis­tent un­weary­ing search af­ter truth, of loy­al­ty to the great prin­ci­ples of un­bi­ased ob­ser­va­tion and un­prej­udiced ex­per­iment, of will­ing­ness to ac­cept the truth and be gov­erned by it, no mat­ter how dis­agree­able it may be, no mat­ter how rough­ly it may tram­ple down our pet doc­trines and our pre­con­ceived the­ories. The nine­teenth cen­tu­ry left us a glo­ri­ous her­itage in the great dis­cov­er­ies and in­ven­tions that sci­ence has es­tab­lished. These must not be lost to pos­ter­ity; but far bet­ter lose them than lose the spir­it of free in­quiry, the spir­it of un­tram­meled in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the no­ble de­vo­tion to truth for its own sake that made these dis­cov­er­ies and in­ven­tions pos­si­ble.

It is these ide­als that ed­uca­tion must per­pet­uate, and if ed­uca­tion is suc­cess­ful­ly to per­pet­uate them, the teach­er must him­self be filled with a spir­it of de­vo­tion to the things that they rep­re­sent. Sci­ence has tri­umphed over su­per­sti­tion and fraud and er­ror. It is the teach­er's du­ty to see to it that this tri­umph is per­ma­nent, that mankind does not again fall back in­to the black pit of ig­no­rance and su­per­sti­tion.

And so it is the teach­er's province to hold aloft the torch, to stand against the ma­te­ri­al­is­tic ten­den­cies that would re­duce all hu­man stan­dards to the com­mon de­nom­ina­tor of the dol­lar, to in­sist at all times and at all places that this na­tion of ours was found­ed up­on ide­al­ism, and that, what­ev­er may be the pre­vail­ing ten­den­cies of the time, its chil­dren shall still learn to live “among the sun­lit peaks.” And if the teach­er is im­bued with this ide­al­ism, al­though his work may take him very close to Moth­er Earth, he may still lift his head above the fog and look the morn­ing sun square­ly in the face.

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 1: An ad­dress to the grad­uat­ing class of the Os­wego, New York, State Nor­mal School, Febru­ary, 1907.]

~II~

OP­TI­MISM IN TEACH­ING[2]

Al­though the month is March and not Novem­ber, it is nev­er un­sea­son­able to count up the bless­ings for which it is well to be thank­ful. In fact, from the stand­point of ed­uca­tion, the spring is per­haps the ap­pro­pri­ate time to per­form this very pleas­ant func­tion. As if still fur­ther to em­pha­size the fact that ed­uca­tion, like civ­iliza­tion, is an ar­ti­fi­cial thing, we have re­versed the op­er­ations of Moth­er Na­ture: we sow our seed in the fall and cul­ti­vate our crops dur­ing the win­ter and reap our har­vests in the spring. I may be par­doned, there­fore, for mak­ing the theme of my dis­cus­sion a brief re­view of the el­ements of growth and vic­to­ry for which the ed­uca­tor of to-​day may just­ly be grate­ful, with, per­haps, a few sug­ges­tions of what the next few years may rea­son­ably be ex­pect­ed to bring forth.

And this course is all the more nec­es­sary be­cause, I be­lieve, the teach­ing pro­fes­sion is un­du­ly prone to pes­simism. One might think at first glance that the con­trary would be true. We are sur­round­ed on ev­ery side by youth. Youth is the ma­te­ri­al with which we con­stant­ly deal. Youth is buoy­ant, hope­ful, ex­uber­ant; and yet, with this ma­te­ri­al con­stant­ly sur­round­ing us, we fre­quent­ly find the task weari­some and ap­par­ent­ly hope­less. The rea­son is not far to seek. Youth is not on­ly buoy­ant, it is un­so­phis­ti­cat­ed, it is in­ex­pe­ri­enced, in many im­por­tant par­tic­ulars it is crude. Some of its tastes must nec­es­sar­ily, in our judg­ment, hark back to the prim­itive, to the bar­bar­ic. Ours is con­tin­ual­ly the task to civ­ilize, to so­phis­ti­cate, to re­fine this raw ma­te­ri­al. But, un­for­tu­nate­ly for us, the ef­fort that we put forth does not al­ways bring re­sults that we can see and weigh and mea­sure. The hope­ful­ness of our ma­te­ri­al is over­shad­owed not in­fre­quent­ly by its crude­ness. We take each gen­er­ation as it comes to us. We strive to lift it to the plane that civ­ilized so­ci­ety has reached. We do our best and pass it on, mind­ful of the many in­ad­equa­cies, per­haps of the many fail­ures, in our work. We turn to the new gen­er­ation that takes its place. We hope for bet­ter ma­te­ri­als, but we find no im­prove­ment.

And so you and I re­flect in our oc­ca­sion­al mo­ments of pes­simism that gener­ic sit­ua­tion which in­heres in the very work that we do. The con­stant­ly ac­cel­er­at­ed progress of civ­iliza­tion lays con­stant­ly in­creas­ing bur­dens up­on us. In some way or an­oth­er we must ac­com­plish the task. In some way or an­oth­er we must lift the child to the lev­el of so­ci­ety, and, as so­ci­ety is reach­ing a con­tin­ual­ly high­er and high­er lev­el, so the dis­tance through which the child must be raised is ev­er in­creased. We would like to think that all this progress in the race would come to mean that we should be able to take the child at a high­er lev­el; but you who deal with chil­dren know from ex­pe­ri­ence the prin­ci­ple for which the bi­ol­ogist Weis­mann stands spon­sor--the prin­ci­ple, name­ly, that ac­quired char­ac­ter­is­tics are not in­her­it­ed; that what­ev­er changes may be wrought dur­ing life in the brains and nerves and mus­cles of the present gen­er­ation can­not be passed on to its suc­ces­sor save through the same la­bo­ri­ous pro­cess of ac­qui­si­tion and train­ing; that, how­ev­er far the civ­iliza­tion of the race may progress, ed­uca­tion, whose du­ty it is to con­serve and trans­mit this civ­iliza­tion, must al­ways be­gin with the “same old child.”

This, I take it, is the deep-​ly­ing cause of the school­mas­ter's pes­simism. In our work we are con­stant­ly strug­gling against that same in­er­tia which held the race in bondage for how many mil­len­ni­ums on­ly the evo­lu­tion­ist can ap­prox­imate a guess,--that in­er­tia of the prim­itive, un­tu­tored mind which we to-​day know as the mind of child­hood, but which, for thou­sands of gen­er­ations, was the on­ly kind of a mind that man pos­sessed. This in­er­tia has been con­quered at var­ious times in the course of record­ed his­to­ry,--in Egypt and Chi­na and In­dia, in Chaldea and As­syr­ia, in Greece and Rome,--con­quered on­ly again to re­assert it­self and drive man back in­to bar­barism. Now we of the West­ern world have con­quered it, let us hope, for all time; for we of the West­ern world have dis­cov­ered an ef­fec­tive method of hold­ing it in abeyance, and this method is uni­ver­sal pub­lic ed­uca­tion.

Let Ger­many close her pub­lic schools, and in two gen­er­ations she will lapse back in­to the se­mi-​dark­ness of me­dieval­ism; let her close both her pub­lic schools and her uni­ver­si­ties, and three gen­er­ations will fetch her face to face with the Dark Ages; let her de­stroy her li­braries and break in­to ru­in all of her works of art, all of her ex­ist­ing tri­umphs of tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and skill, from which a few, self-​tu­tored, might glean the wis­dom that is ev­ery one's to-​day, and Ger­many will soon be­come the home of a sav­age race, as it was in the days of Tac­itus and Cæsar. Let Italy close her pub­lic schools, and Italy will be­come the same dis­cor­dant jum­ble of pet­ty states that it was a cen­tu­ry ago,--again to await, this time per­haps for cen­turies or mil­len­ni­ums, an­oth­er Garibal­di and Vic­tor Em­manuel to work her re­gen­er­ation. Let Japan close her pub­lic schools, and Japan in two gen­er­ations will be a bar­bar­ic king­dom of the Shoguns, shorn of ev­ery ves­tige of pow­er and pres­tige,--the easy vic­tim of the machi­na­tions of West­ern diplo­mats. Let our coun­try cease in its work of ed­uca­tion, and these Unit­ed States must needs pass through the re­verse stages of their growth un­til an­oth­er race of sav­ages shall roam through the un­bro­ken for­est, now and then to reach the shores of ocean and gaze through the cen­turies, east­ward, to catch a glimpse of the new Colum­bus. Like the mov­ing pic­tures of the kine­to­scope when the reels are re­versed, is the pic­ture that imag­ina­tion can un­roll if we grant the pos­si­bil­ity of a lapse from civ­iliza­tion to sav­agery.

And so when we take the broad­er view, we quick­ly see that, in spite of our pes­simism, we are do­ing some­thing in the world. We are part of that ma­chine which civ­iliza­tion has in­vent­ed and is slow­ly per­fect­ing to pre­serve it­self. We may be a very small part, but, so long as the re­spon­si­bil­ity for a sin­gle child rests up­on us, we are not an unim­por­tant part. So­ci­ety must reck­on with you and me per­haps in an in­finites­imal de­gree, but it must reck­on with the in­sti­tu­tion which we rep­re­sent as it reck­ons with no oth­er in­sti­tu­tion that it has reared to sub­serve its needs.

In a cer­tain sense these state­ments are plat­itudes. We have re­peat­ed them over and over again un­til the words have lost their tremen­dous sig­nif­icance. And it be­hooves us now and again to re­vive the old sub­stance in a new form,--to come afresh to a self-​con­scious­ness of our func­tion. It is not good for any man to hold a de­based and in­fe­ri­or opin­ion of him­self or of his work, and in the field of school­craft it is easy to fall in­to this self-​de­pre­ci­at­ing habit of thought. We can­not hope that the gen­er­al pub­lic will ev­er come to view our work in the true per­spec­tive that I have very briefly out­lined. It would prob­ably not be wise to pro­mul­gate pub­licly so pro­nounced an af­fir­ma­tion of our func­tion and of our worth. The pop­ular mind must think in con­crete de­tails rather than in com­pre­hen­sive prin­ci­ples, when the sub­ject of thought is a spe­cial­ized vo­ca­tion. You and I have crude ideas, no doubt, of the lawyer's func­tion, of the physi­cian's func­tion, of the cler­gy­man's func­tion. Not less crude are their ideas of our func­tion. Even when they pa­tron­ize us by say­ing that our work is the no­blest that any man or wom­an would en­gage in, they have but a vague and shad­owy per­cep­tion of its re­al sig­nif­icance. I doubt not that, with the ma­jor­ity of those who thus pat us ver­bal­ly up­on the back, the words that they use are words on­ly. They do not en­vy us our priv­ileges,--un­less it is our sum­mer va­ca­tions,--nor do they en­cour­age their sons to en­ter ser­vice in our craft. The pop­ular mind--the non­tech­ni­cal mind,--must work in the con­crete;--it must have vis­ible ev­idences of pow­er and in­flu­ence be­fore it pays homage to a man or to an in­sti­tu­tion.

Through­out the Ger­man em­pire the trav­el­er is brought con­stant­ly face to face with the memo­ri­als that have been erect­ed by a grate­ful peo­ple to the ge­nius of the Iron Chan­cel­lor. Bis­mar­ck rich­ly de­serves the trib­ute that is paid to his mem­ory, but a man to be hon­ored in this way must ex­ert a tan­gi­ble and an ob­vi­ous in­flu­ence.

And yet, in a broad­er sense, the preëmi­nence of Ger­many is due in far greater mea­sure to two men whose names are not so fre­quent­ly to be found in­scribed up­on tow­ers and mon­uments. In the very midst of the hav­oc and dev­as­ta­tion wrought by the Napoleon wars,--at the very mo­ment when the Ger­man peo­ple seemed hope­less­ly crushed and de­feat­ed,--an in­tel­lect more pen­etrat­ing than that of Bis­mar­ck grasped the log­ic of the sit­ua­tion. With the in­spi­ra­tion that comes with true in­sight, the philoso­pher Fichte is­sued his fa­mous Ad­dress­es to the Ger­man peo­ple. With clear-​cut ar­gu­ment couched in white-​hot words, he drove home the great prin­ci­ple that lies at the ba­sis of Unit­ed Ger­many and up­on the re­sults of which Bis­mar­ck and Von Moltke and the first Em­per­or erect­ed the splen­did struc­ture that to-​day com­mands the ad­mi­ra­tion of the world. Fichte told the Ger­man peo­ple that their on­ly hope lay in uni­ver­sal, pub­lic ed­uca­tion. And the king­dom of Prus­sia--im­pov­er­ished, bankrupt, war-​rid­den, and war-​dev­as­tat­ed--heard the plea. A great scheme that com­pre­hend­ed such an ed­uca­tion was al­ready at hand. It had fall­en al­most still­born from the on­ly kind of a mind that could have pro­duced it,--a mind that was suf­fused with an over­whelm­ing love for hu­man­ity and in­com­pa­ra­bly rich with the prac­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ences of a pri­ma­ry school­mas­ter. It had fall­en from the mind of Pestalozzi, the Swiss re­former, who thus stands with Fichte as one of the vi­tal fac­tors in the de­vel­op­ment of Ger­many's ed­uca­tion­al suprema­cy.

The peo­ple's schools of Prus­sia, im­bued with the en­thu­si­asm of Fichte and Pestalozzi,[3] gave to Ger­many the tremen­dous ad­van­tage that en­abled it so eas­ily to over­come its hered­itary foe, when, two gen­er­ations lat­er, the Fran­co-​Prus­sian War was fought; for the _Volkss­chule_ gave to Ger­many some­thing that no oth­er na­tion of that time pos­sessed; name­ly, an ed­ucat­ed pro­le­tari­at, an in­tel­li­gent com­mon peo­ple. Bis­mar­ck knew this when he laid his cun­ning plans for the uni­fi­ca­tion of Ger­man states that was to crown the bril­liant se­ries of vic­to­ries be­gin­ning at Sedan and end­ing with­in the walls of Paris. William of Prus­sia knew it when, in the roy­al palace at Ver­sailles, he ac­cept­ed the crown that made him the first Em­per­or of Unit­ed Ger­many. Von Moltke knew it when, at the ca­pit­ula­tion of Paris, he was asked to whom the cred­it of the vic­to­ry was due, and he replied, in the frank sim­plic­ity of the true sol­dier and the true hero, “The school­mas­ter did it.”

And yet Bis­mar­ck and Von Moltke and the Em­per­or are the heroes of Ger­many, and if Fichte and Pestalozzi are not for­got­ten, at least their mem­ories are not cher­ished as are the mem­ories of the more tan­gi­ble and ob­vi­ous heroes. In­stinct lies deeply em­bed­ded in hu­man na­ture and it is in­stinc­tive to think in the con­crete. And so I re­peat that we can­not ex­pect the gen­er­al pub­lic to share in the re­spect and ven­er­ation which you and I feel for our call­ing, for you and I are tech­ni­cians in ed­uca­tion, and we can see the pro­cess as a com­pre­hen­sive whole. But our fel­low men and wom­en have their own in­ter­ests and their own de­part­ments of tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and skill; they see the school­house and the pupils' desks and the books and oth­er var­ious ma­te­ri­al sym­bols of our work,--they see these things and call them ed­uca­tion; just as we see a freight train thun­der­ing across the viaduct or a steam­er swing­ing out in the lake and call these things com­merce. In both cas­es, the non­tech­ni­cal mind as­so­ciates the word with some­thing con­crete and tan­gi­ble; in both cas­es, the tech­ni­cal mind as­so­ciates the same word with an ab­stract pro­cess, com­pre­hend­ing a move­ment of vast pro­por­tions.

To com­press such a move­ment--whether it be com­merce or gov­ern­ment or ed­uca­tion--in a sin­gle con­cep­tion re­quires a mul­ti­tude of ex­pe­ri­ences in­volv­ing ac­tu­al ad­just­ments with the ma­te­ri­als in­volved; in­volv­ing con­stant re­flec­tion up­on hid­den mean­ings, painful in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to hid­den caus­es, and mas­tery of a vast body of spe­cial­ized knowl­edge which it takes years of study to di­gest and as­sim­ilate.

It is not ev­ery steve­dore up­on the docks, nor ev­ery stok­er up­on the steam­ers, nor ev­ery brake­man up­on the rail­roads, who com­pre­hends what com­merce re­al­ly means. It is not ev­ery banker's clerk who knows the mean­ing of busi­ness. It is not ev­ery pet­ty hold­er of pub­lic of­fice who knows what gov­ern­ment re­al­ly means. But this, at least, is true: in pro­por­tion as the work­er knows the mean­ing of the work that he does,--in pro­por­tion as he sees it in its largest re­la­tions to so­ci­ety and to life,--his work is no longer the drudgery of rou­tine toil. It be­comes in­stead an in­tel­li­gent pro­cess di­rect­ed to­ward a def­inite goal. It has ac­quired that touch of artistry which, so far as hu­man tes­ti­mo­ny goes, is the on­ly pure and un­con­tam­inat­ed source of hu­man hap­pi­ness.

And the chief bless­ing for which you and I should be thank­ful to-​day is that this larg­er view of our call­ing has been vouch­safed to us as it has been vouch­safed no for­mer gen­er­ation of teach­ers. Ed­uca­tion as the con­ven­tion­al pre­rog­ative of the rich,--as the gar­ment which sep­arat­ed the high­er from the low­er class­es of so­ci­ety,--this could scarce­ly be looked up­on as a fas­ci­nat­ing and up­lift­ing ide­al from which to de­rive hope and in­spi­ra­tion in the day's work; and yet this was the com­mon­ly ac­cept­ed func­tion of ed­uca­tion for thou­sands of years, and the teach­ers who did the ac­tu­al work of in­struc­tion could not but re­flect in their at­ti­tude and bear­ing the servile char­ac­ter of the task that they per­formed. Ed­uca­tion to fit the child to earn a bet­ter liv­ing, to com­mand a high­er wage,--this my­opic view of the func­tion of the school could do but lit­tle to make the work of teach­ing any­thing but drudgery; and yet it is this nar­row and ma­te­ri­al­is­tic view that has dom­inat­ed our ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem to with­in a com­par­ative­ly few years.

So silent­ly and yet so in­sis­tent­ly have our craft ide­als been trans­formed in the last two decades that you and I are scarce­ly aware that our point of view has been changed and that we are look­ing up­on our work from a much high­er point of van­tage and in a light en­tire­ly new. And yet this is the change that has been wrought. That ed­uca­tion, in its widest mean­ing, is the sole con­ser­va­tor and trans­mit­ter of civ­iliza­tion to suc­ces­sive gen­er­ations found ex­pres­sion as far back as Aris­to­tle and Pla­to, and has been vague­ly voiced at in­ter­vals down through the cen­turies; but its com­plete es­tab­lish­ment came on­ly as an in­di­rect is­sue of the great sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, and its ap­pli­ca­tion to the prob­lems of prac­ti­cal school­craft and its dis­sem­ina­tion through the rank and file of teach­ers await­ed the dawn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. To-​day we see ex­pres­sions and in­di­ca­tions of the new out­look up­on ev­ery hand, in the great­ly in­creased pro­fes­sion­al zeal that an­imates the teach­er's call­ing; in the widespread move­ment among all civ­ilized coun­tries to raise the stan­dards of teach­ers, to elim­inate those can­di­dates for ser­vice who have not sub­ject­ed them­selves to the dis­ci­pline of spe­cial prepa­ra­tion; in the in­creased en­dow­ments and ap­pro­pri­ations for schools and sem­inar­ies that pre­pare teach­ers; and, per­haps most strik­ing­ly at the present mo­ment, in that con­cert­ed move­ment to or­ga­nize in­to in­sti­tu­tions of for­mal ed­uca­tion, all of those branch­es of train­ing which have, for years, been left to the chance op­er­ation of eco­nom­ic needs work­ing through the crude and un­or­ga­nized though of­ten ef­fec­tive ap­pren­tice sys­tem. The con­tem­po­rary fer­vor for in­dus­tri­al ed­uca­tion is on­ly one ex­pres­sion of this new view that, in the last anal­ysis, the school must stand spon­sor for the con­ser­va­tion and trans­mis­sion of ev­ery valu­able item of ex­pe­ri­ence, ev­ery us­able fact or prin­ci­ple, ev­ery tini­est per­fect­ed bit of tech­ni­cal skill, ev­ery sig­nif­icant ide­al or prej­udice, that the race has ac­quired at the cost of so much strug­gle and suf­fer­ing and ef­fort.

I re­peat that this new van­tage point from which to gain a com­pre­hen­sive view of our call­ing has been at­tained on­ly as an in­di­rect re­sult of the sci­en­tif­ic in­ves­ti­ga­tions of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. We are wont to study the his­to­ry of ed­uca­tion from the work and writ­ings of a few great re­form­ers, and it is true that much that is valu­able in our present ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem can be un­der­stood and ap­pre­ci­at­ed on­ly when viewed in the per­spec­tive of such sources. Aris­to­tle and Quin­til­ian, Abelard and St. Thomas Aquinas, Sturm and Philip Melanchthon, Come­nius, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Herbart, and Froebel still live in the schools of to-​day. Their ge­nius speaks to us through the or­ga­ni­za­tion of sub­ject-​mat­ter, through the art of ques­tion­ing, through the de­vel­op­men­tal meth­ods of teach­ing, through the use of pic­tures, through ob­jec­tive in­struc­tion, and in a thou­sand oth­er forms. But this dom­inant ide­al of ed­uca­tion to which I have re­ferred and which is so rapid­ly trans­form­ing our out­look and vi­tal­iz­ing our or­ga­ni­za­tion and in­spir­ing us to new ef­forts, is not to be drawn from these sources. The new his­to­ries of ed­uca­tion must ac­count for this new ide­al, and to do this they must turn to the mas­ters in sci­ence who made the mid­dle part of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry the pe­ri­od of the most pro­found changes that the his­to­ry of hu­man thought records.[4]

With the il­lu­mi­nat­ing prin­ci­ple of evo­lu­tion came a new and gen­er­ous­ly rich con­cep­tion of hu­man growth and de­vel­op­ment. The panora­ma of evo­lu­tion car­ried man back far be­yond the lim­its of record­ed hu­man his­to­ry and in­di­cat­ed an ori­gin as low­ly as the suc­ceed­ing up­lift has been sub­lime. The old de­press­ing and fa­tal­is­tic no­tion that the hu­man race was on the down­ward path, and that the march of civ­iliza­tion must soon­er or lat­er end in a cul-​de-​sac (a view which found fre­quent ex­pres­sion in the French writ­ers of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry and which dom­inat­ed the skep­ti­cism of the dark hours pre­ced­ing the Rev­olu­tion)--this fa­tal­is­tic view met its death-​blow in the prin­ci­ple of evo­lu­tion. A vista of hope en­tire­ly un­dreamed of stretched out be­fore the race. If the tremen­dous lever­age of the un­told mil­len­ni­ums of brute and sav­age an­ces­try could be over­come, even in slight mea­sure, by a few short cen­turies of in­tel­li­gence and rea­son, what might not hap­pen in a few more cen­turies of con­stant­ly in­creas­ing light? In short, the prin­ci­ple of evo­lu­tion sup­plied the per­spec­tive that was nec­es­sary to an ad­equate eval­ua­tion of hu­man progress.

But this in­spir­it­ing out­look which was per­haps the most com­pre­hen­sive re­sult of Dar­win's work had in­di­rect con­se­quences that were vi­tal­ly sig­nif­icant to ed­uca­tion. It is with men­tal and not with phys­ical de­vel­op­ment that ed­uca­tion is pri­mar­ily con­cerned, and yet men­tal de­vel­op­ment is now known to de­pend fun­da­men­tal­ly up­on phys­ical forces. The same decade that wit­nessed the pub­li­ca­tion of the _Ori­gin of Species_ al­so wit­nessed the birth of an­oth­er great book, lit­tle known ex­cept to the spe­cial­ist, and yet des­tined to achieve im­mor­tal­ity. This book is the _El­ements of Psy­chophysics_, the work of the Ger­man sci­en­tist Fech­ner. The in­ti­mate re­la­tion be­tween men­tal life and phys­ical and phys­io­log­ical forces was here first clear­ly demon­strat­ed, and the way was open for a sci­ence of psy­chol­ogy which should cast aside the old and thread­bare rai­ment of mys­tery and spec­ula­tion and meta­physic, and stand forth naked and unashamed.

But all this was on­ly prepara­to­ry to the epoch-​mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies that have had so much to do with our present at­ti­tude to­ward ed­uca­tion. The Dar­wini­an hy­poth­esis led to vi­olent con­tro­ver­sy, not on­ly be­tween the op­po­nents and sup­port­ers of the the­ory, but al­so among the var­ious camps of the evo­lu­tion­ists them­selves. Among these con­tro­ver­sies was that which con­cerned it­self with the in­her­itance of ac­quired char­ac­ter­is­tics, and the out­come of that con­flict has a di­rect sig­nif­icance to present ed­uca­tion­al the­ory. The prin­ci­ple, now al­most con­clu­sive­ly es­tab­lished,[5] that the char­ac­ter­is­tics ac­quired by an or­gan­ism dur­ing its life­time are not trans­mit­ted by phys­ical hered­ity to its off­spring, must cer­tain­ly stand as the ba­sic prin­ci­ple of ed­uca­tion; for ev­ery­thing that we iden­ti­fy as hu­man as con­trast­ed with that which is bru­tal must look to ed­uca­tion for its preser­va­tion and sup­port. It has been stat­ed by com­pe­tent au­thor­ities that, dur­ing the past ten thou­sand years, there has been no sig­nif­icant change in man's phys­ical con­sti­tu­tion. This sim­ply means that Na­ture fin­ished her work as far as man is con­cerned far be­yond the re­motest pe­ri­od that hu­man his­to­ry records; that, for all that we can say to-​day, there must have ex­ist­ed in the very dis­tant past hu­man be­ings who were just as well adapt­ed by na­ture to the lives that we are lead­ing as we are to-​day adapt­ed; that what they lacked and what we pos­sess is sim­ply a mass of tra­di­tions, of habits, of ide­als, and prej­udices which have been slow­ly ac­cu­mu­lat­ed through the ages and which are passed on from gen­er­ation to gen­er­ation by im­ita­tion and in­struc­tion and train­ing and dis­ci­pline; and that the child of to-​day, left to his own de­vices and op­er­at­ed up­on in no way by the prod­ucts of civ­iliza­tion, would de­vel­op in­to a sav­age undis­tin­guish­able in all sig­nif­icant qual­ities from oth­er sav­ages.

The pos­si­bil­ities that fol­low from such a con­cep­tion are al­most over­whelm­ing even at first glance, and yet the the­ory is borne out by ad­equate ex­per­iments. The trans­for­ma­tion of the Japanese peo­ple through two gen­er­ations of ed­uca­tion in West­ern civ­iliza­tion is a com­plete up­set­ting of the old the­ory that as far as race is con­cerned, there is any­thing sig­nif­icant­ly im­por­tant in blood, and con­firms the view that all that is racial­ly sig­nif­icant de­pends up­on the in­flu­ences that sur­round the young of the race dur­ing the for­ma­tive years. The com­plete as­sim­ila­tion of for­eign in­gre­di­ents in­to our own na­tion­al stock through the in­stru­men­tal­ity of the pub­lic school is an­oth­er demon­stra­tion that the fac­tors which form the sig­nif­icant char­ac­ter­is­tics in the low­er an­imals pos­sess but a min­imum of sig­nif­icance to man,--that col­or, race, stature, and even brain weight and the shape of the cra­ni­um, have very lit­tle to do with hu­man worth or hu­man ef­fi­cien­cy save in ex­treme­ly ab­nor­mal cas­es.

And so we have at last a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple with which to il­lu­mine the field of our work and from which to de­rive not on­ly light but in­spi­ra­tion. Unite this with John Fiske's pen­etrat­ing in­duc­tion that the pos­si­bil­ities of progress through ed­uca­tion are cor­re­lat­ed di­rect­ly with the length of the pe­ri­od of growth or im­ma­tu­ri­ty,--that is, that the races hav­ing the longest growth be­fore ma­tu­ri­ty are ca­pa­ble of the high­est de­gree of civ­iliza­tion,--and we have a pair of prin­ci­ples the in­flu­ence of which we see re­flect­ed all about us in the great ac­tiv­ity for ed­uca­tion and es­pe­cial­ly in the in­creased sense of pride and re­spon­si­bil­ity and re­spect for his call­ing that is an­imat­ing the mod­ern teach­er.

And what will be the re­sult of this new point of view? First and fore­most, an in­creased gen­er­al re­spect for the work. Un­til a pro­fes­sion re­spects it­self, it can­not very well ask for the world's re­spect, and un­til it can re­spect it­self on the ba­sis of sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ples in­du­bitably es­tab­lished, its re­spect for it­self will be lit­tle more than the ir­ri­tat­ing self-​es­teem of the goody-​goody or­der which is so of­ten as­so­ci­at­ed with our craft.

With our own re­spect for our call­ing, based up­on this in­con­tro­vert­ible prin­ci­ple, will come, soon­er or lat­er, in­creased com­pen­sa­tion for the work and in­creased pres­tige in the com­mu­ni­ty. I re­peat that these things can on­ly come af­ter we have es­tab­lished a true craft spir­it. If we are ashamed of our call­ing, if we re­gret open­ly and pub­licly that we are not lawyers or physi­cians or den­tists or brick­lay­ers or farm­ers or any­thing rather than teach­ers, the pub­lic will have lit­tle re­spect for the teach­er's call­ing. As long as we crit­icize each oth­er be­fore lay­men and make light of each oth­er's hon­est ef­forts, the pub­lic will ques­tion our pro­fes­sion­al stand­ing on the ground that we have no or­ga­nized code of pro­fes­sion­al ethics,--a pre­req­ui­site for any pro­fes­sion.

I start­ed out to tell you some­thing that we ought to be thank­ful for,--some­thing that ought to coun­ter­act in a mea­sure the in­evitable ten­den­cies to­ward pes­simism and dis­cour­age­ment. The hope­ful thing about our present sta­tus is that we have an es­tab­lished prin­ci­ple up­on which to work. A writ­er in a re­cent pe­ri­od­ical stout­ly main­tained that ed­uca­tion was in the po­si­tion just now that medicine was in dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages. The state­ment is hard­ly fair, ei­ther to medicine or to ed­uca­tion. If one were to at­tempt a par­al­lel, one might say that ed­uca­tion stands to-​day where medicine stood about the mid­dle of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. The anal­ogy might be more close­ly drawn by com­par­ing our present con­cep­tion of ed­uca­tion with the con­cep­tion of medicine just pri­or to the ap­pli­ca­tion of the ex­per­imen­tal method to a so­lu­tion of its prob­lems. Ed­uca­tion has still a long road to trav­el be­fore it reach­es the point of de­vel­op­ment that medicine has to-​day at­tained. It has still to de­vel­op prin­ci­ples that are com­pa­ra­ble to the doc­trine of lymph ther­apy or to that lat­est tri­umph of in­ves­ti­ga­tion in the field of medicine,--the the­ory of op­sonins,--which al­most makes one be­lieve that in a few years vi­olent ac­ci­dent and old age will be the on­ly sources of death in the hu­man race.

Ed­uca­tion, we ad­mit, has a long road to trav­el be­fore it reach­es so ad­vanced a point of de­vel­op­ment. But there is no im­me­di­ate cause for pes­simism or de­spair. We need es­pe­cial­ly, now that the pur­pose of ed­uca­tion is ad­equate­ly de­fined, an ad­equate doc­trine of ed­uca­tion­al val­ues and a rich and vi­tal in­fu­sion of the spir­it of ex­per­imen­tal sci­ence. For ef­fi­cien­cy in the work of in­struc­tion and train­ing, we need to know the in­flu­ence of dif­fer­ent types of ex­pe­ri­ence in con­trol­ling hu­man con­duct,--we need to know just what de­gree of ef­fi­cien­cy is ex­ert­ed by our arith­metic and lit­er­ature, our ge­og­ra­phy and his­to­ry, our draw­ing and man­ual train­ing, our Latin and Greek, our ethics and psy­chol­ogy. It is the lack of def­inite ideas and cri­te­ria in these fields that con­sti­tutes the great­est sin­gle source of waste in our ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem to-​day.

And yet even here the out­look is ex­treme­ly hope­ful. The new move­ment to­ward in­dus­tri­al ed­uca­tion is plac­ing greater and greater em­pha­sis up­on those sub­jects of in­struc­tion and those types of meth­ods whose ef­fi­cien­cy can be test­ed and de­ter­mined in an ac­cu­rate fash­ion. The in­ti­mate re­la­tion be­tween the class­room, on the one hand, and the ma­chine shop, the ex­per­imen­tal farm, the hos­pi­tal ward and op­er­at­ing room, and the prac­tice school, on the oth­er hand, in­di­cates a source of ac­cu­rate knowl­edge with re­gard to the way in which our teach­ings re­al­ly af­fect the con­duct and ad­just­ment of our pupils that can­not fail with­in a short time to serve as the ba­sis for some il­lu­mi­nat­ing prin­ci­ple of ed­uca­tion­al val­ues. This, I be­lieve, will be the next great step in the de­vel­op­ment of our pro­fes­sion.

There has been no in­ten­tion in what I have said to min­imize the dis­ad­van­tages and dis­cour­age­ments un­der which we are to-​day do­ing our work. My on­ly plea is for the hope­ful and op­ti­mistic out­look which, I main­tain, is rich­ly jus­ti­fied by the progress that has al­ready been made and by the vir­ile char­ac­ter of the forces that are op­er­at­ing in the present sit­ua­tion.

On the whole, I can see no rea­son why I should not en­cour­age young men to en­ter the ser­vice of school­craft. I can­not say to them that they will at­tain to great wealth, but I can safe­ly promise them that, if they give to the work of prepa­ra­tion the same at­ten­tion and time that they would give to their ed­uca­tion and train­ing for medicine or law or en­gi­neer­ing, their ser­vices will be in large de­mand and their re­wards not to be sneered at. Their in­comes will not en­able them to com­pete with the cap­tains of in­dus­try, but they will per­mit as full an en­joy­ment of the com­forts of life as it is good for any young man to com­mand. But the am­bi­tious teach­er must pay the price to reap these re­wards,--the price of time and en­er­gy and la­bor,--the price that he would have to pay for suc­cess in any oth­er hu­man call­ing. What I can­not promise him in ed­uca­tion is the op­por­tu­ni­ty for wide pop­ular adu­la­tion, but this, af­ter all, is a mat­ter of taste. Some men crave it and they should go in­to those vo­ca­tions that will give it to them. Oth­ers are bet­ter sat­is­fied with the dis­crim­inat­ing recog­ni­tion and praise of their own fel­low-​crafts­men.

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 2: An ad­dress be­fore the Os­wego, New York, Coun­ty Coun­cil of Ed­uca­tion, March 28, 1908.]

[Foot­note 3: It should be added that the move­ment to­ward uni­ver­sal ed­uca­tion in Ger­many owed much to the work of pre-​Pestalozzian re­form­ers,--es­pe­cial­ly Francke and Base­dow.]

[Foot­note 4: While the years from 1840 to 1870 mark the pe­ri­od of in­tel­lec­tu­al rev­olu­tion, it should not be in­ferred that the ed­uca­tion of this pe­ri­od re­flect­ed these fun­da­men­tal changes of out­look. On the con­trary, these years were in gen­er­al marked by ed­uca­tion­al stag­na­tion.]

[Foot­note 5: The writ­er here ac­cepts the con­clu­sions of J.A. Thom­son (_Hered­ity_ New York, 1908, ch. vii).]

~III~

HOW MAY WE PRO­MOTE THE EF­FI­CIEN­CY OF THE TEACH­ING FORCE?[6]

I

Ef­fi­cien­cy seems to be a word to con­jure with in these days. Pop­ular speech has tak­en it in its present con­no­ta­tion from the tech­ni­cal vo­cab­ulary of en­gi­neer­ing, and the term has brought with it a very re­fresh­ing sense of ac­cu­ra­cy and prac­ti­cal­ity. It sug­gests blueprints and T-​squares and math­emat­ical for­mulæ. A faint and rather pleas­ant odor of lu­bri­cat­ing oil and cot­ton waste seems to hov­er about it. The ef­fi­cien­cy of a steam en­gine or a dy­namo is a def­inite­ly de­ter­minable and mea­sur­able fac­tor, and when we use the term “ef­fi­cien­cy” in pop­ular speech we con­vey through the word some­what of this qual­ity of cer­tain­ty and ex­ac­ti­tude.

An ef­fi­cient man, very ob­vi­ous­ly, is a man who “makes good,” who sur­mounts ob­sta­cles, over­comes dif­fi­cul­ties, and “gets re­sults.” Rowan, the man who achieved im­mor­tal­ity on ac­count of a cer­tain mes­sage that he car­ried to Gar­cia, is the con­tem­po­rary stan­dard of hu­man ef­fi­cien­cy. He was giv­en a task to do, and he did it. He did not stop to in­quire whether it was in­ter­est­ing, or whether it was easy, or whether it would be re­mu­ner­ative, or whether Gar­cia was a pleas­ant man to meet. He sim­ply took the mes­sage and brought back the an­swer. Here we have ef­fi­cien­cy in hu­man en­deav­or re­duced to its low­est terms: to take a mes­sage and to bring back an an­swer; to do the work that is laid out for one to do with­out shirk­ing or “sol­dier­ing” or whin­ing; and to “make good,” to get re­sults.

Now if we are to im­prove the ef­fi­cien­cy of the teach­er, the first thing to do is to see that the con­di­tions of ef­fi­cien­cy are ful­filled as far as pos­si­ble at the out­set. In oth­er words, ef­fi­cien­cy is im­pos­si­ble un­less one is set a cer­tain task to ac­com­plish. Rowan was told to car­ry a mes­sage to Gar­cia. He was to car­ry it to Gar­cia, not to Queen Vic­to­ria or Li Hung Chang or J. Pier­pont Mor­gan, or any one else whom he may have felt in­clined to choose as its re­cip­ient. And that is just where Rowan had a de­cid­ed ad­van­tage over many teach­ers who have ev­ery am­bi­tion to be just as ef­fi­cient as he was. To ex­pect a young teach­er not on­ly to get re­sults, but al­so to de­ter­mine the re­sults that should be ob­tained, mul­ti­plies his chances of fail­ure, not by two, as one might as­sume at first thought, but al­most by in­fin­ity.

Let me give an ex­am­ple of what I mean. A young man grad­uat­ed from col­lege dur­ing the hard times of the mid­dle nineties. It was im­per­ative that he se­cure some sort of a re­mu­ner­ative em­ploy­ment, but places were very scarce and he had to seek a long time be­fore he found any­thing to which he could turn his hand. The po­si­tion that he fi­nal­ly se­cured was that of teach­er in an un­grad­ed school in a re­mote set­tle­ment. School-​teach­ing was far from his thoughts and still far­ther from his am­bi­tions, but forty dol­lars a month looked too good to be true, es­pe­cial­ly as he had come to the point where his al­lowance of food con­sist­ed of one plate of soup each day, with the small sup­ply of crack­ers that went with it. He ac­cept­ed the po­si­tion most grate­ful­ly.

He taught this school for two years. He had no su­per­vi­sion. He read var­ious books on the sci­ence and art of teach­ing and up­on a cer­tain sub­ject that went by the name of psy­chol­ogy, but he could see no con­nec­tion be­tween what these books told him and the tasks that he had to face. Fi­nal­ly he bought a book that was ad­ver­tised as in­dis­pens­able to young teach­ers. The first words of the open­ing para­graph were these: “Teach­er, if you know it all, don't read this book.” The young man threw the vol­ume in the fire. He had no de­sire to prof­it by the teach­ing of an au­thor who be­gan his in­struc­tion with an in­sult. From that time un­til he left the school, he nev­er opened a book on ed­uca­tion­al the­ory.

His first year passed off with what ap­peared to be the most en­cour­ag­ing suc­cess. He talked to his pupils on sci­ence and lit­er­ature and his­to­ry. They were very good chil­dren, and they lis­tened at­ten­tive­ly. When he tired of talk­ing, he set the pupils to writ­ing in their copy books, while he thought of more things to talk about. He cov­ered a great deal of ground that first year. Scarce­ly a field of hu­man knowl­edge was left un­touched. His pupils were du­ly in­formed about the plants and rocks and trees, about the plan­ets and con­stel­la­tions, about atoms and molecules and the laws of mo­tion, about di­ges­tion and res­pi­ra­tion and the won­ders of the ner­vous sys­tem, about Shake­speare and Dick­ens and George Eliot. And his pupils were very much in­ter­est­ed in it all. Their faces had that glow of in­ter­est, that look of won­der­ment and ab­sorp­tion, that you get some­times when you tell a lit­tle four-​year-​old the sto­ry of the three bears. He nev­er had any trou­bles of dis­ci­pline, be­cause he nev­er asked his pupils to do any­thing that they did not wish to do. There were six pupils in his “chart class.” They were anx­ious to learn to read, and three of them did learn. Their moth­ers taught them at home. The oth­er three were still learn­ing at the end of the sec­ond year. He con­clud­ed that they had been “born short,” but he liked them and they liked him. He did not teach his pupils spelling or writ­ing. If they learned these things they learned them with­out his aid, and it is safe to say that they did not learn them in any sig­nif­icant mea­sure. He did not like arith­metic, and so he just touched on it now and then for the sake of ap­pear­ances.

This teach­er was elect­ed for the fol­low­ing year at a hand­some in­crease of salary. He took this to mean a hearty in­dorse­ment of his meth­ods; con­se­quent­ly he fol­lowed the same gen­er­al plan the next year. He had told his pupils about ev­ery­thing that he knew, so he start­ed over again, much to their de­light. He left at the close of the year, amidst gen­er­al lamen­ta­tion. School-​teach­ing was a de­light­ful oc­cu­pa­tion, but he had mas­tered the art, and now he wished to at­tack some­thing that was re­al­ly dif­fi­cult. He would study law. It is no part of the sto­ry that he did not. Nei­ther is it part of the sto­ry that his suc­ces­sor had a very hard time get­ting that school straight­ened out; in fact, I be­lieve it re­quired three or four suc­ces­sive suc­ces­sors to make even an im­pres­sion.

Now that man's work was a fail­ure, and the sad­dest kind of a fail­ure, for he did not re­al­ize that he had failed un­til years af­ter­ward. He failed, not be­cause he lacked am­bi­tion and en­thu­si­asm; he had a large mea­sure of both these in­dis­pens­able qual­ities. He failed, not be­cause he lacked ed­uca­tion and a cer­tain mea­sure of what the world calls cul­ture; from the stand­point of ed­uca­tion, he was bet­ter qual­ified than most teach­ers in schools of that type. He failed, not be­cause he lacked so­cial spir­it and the abil­ity to coöper­ate with the church and the home; he min­gled with the oth­er mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty, lived their life and thought their thoughts and en­joyed their so­cial di­ver­sions. The com­mu­ni­ty liked him and re­spect­ed him. His pupils liked him and re­spect­ed him; and yet what he fears most of all to-​day is that he may come sud­den­ly face to face with one of those pupils and be forced to lis­ten to a first-​hand ac­count of his sins of omis­sion.

This man failed sim­ply be­cause he did not do what the el­emen­tary teach­er must do if he is to be ef­fi­cient as an el­emen­tary teach­er. He did not train his pupils in the habits that are es­sen­tial to one who is to live the so­cial life. He gave them a mis­cel­la­neous lot of in­ter­est­ing in­for­ma­tion which held their at­ten­tion while it last­ed, but which was nev­er mas­tered in any re­al sense of the term, and which could have but the most su­per­fi­cial in­flu­ence up­on their fu­ture con­duct. But, worst of all, he per­mit­ted bad and in­ad­equate habits to be de­vel­oped at the most crit­ical and plas­tic pe­ri­od of life. His pupils had fol­lowed the lines of least ef­fort, just as he had fol­lowed the lines of least ef­fort. The re­sult was a well-​es­tab­lished prej­udice against ev­ery­thing that was not su­per­fi­cial­ly at­trac­tive and in­trin­si­cal­ly in­ter­est­ing.

Now this man's teach­ing fell short sim­ply be­cause he did not know what re­sults he ought to ob­tain. He had been giv­en a mes­sage to de­liv­er, but he did not know to whom he should de­liv­er it. Con­se­quent­ly he brought the an­swer, not from Gar­cia, but from a host of oth­er per­son­ages with whom he was bet­ter ac­quaint­ed, whose lan­guage he could speak and un­der­stand, and from whom he was cer­tain of a warm wel­come. In oth­er words, hav­ing no def­inite re­sults for which he would be held re­spon­si­ble, he did the kind of teach­ing that he liked to do. That might, un­der cer­tain con­di­tions, have been the best kind of teach­ing for his pupils. But these con­di­tions did not hap­pen to op­er­ate at that time. The an­swer that he brought did not hap­pen to be the an­swer that was need­ed. That it pleased his em­ploy­ers does not in the least mit­igate the fail­ure. That a teach­er pleas­es the com­mu­ni­ty in which he works is not al­ways ev­idence of his suc­cess. It is dan­ger­ous to make a state­ment like this, for some are sure to jump to the op­po­site con­clu­sion and as­sume that one who is un­pop­ular in the com­mu­ni­ty is the most suc­cess­ful. Need­less to say, the rea­son­ing is fal­la­cious. The mat­ter of pop­ular­ity is a sec­ondary cri­te­ri­on, not a pri­ma­ry cri­te­ri­on of the ef­fi­cien­cy of teach­ing. One may be suc­cess­ful and pop­ular or suc­cess­ful and un­pop­ular; un­suc­cess­ful and pop­ular or un­suc­cess­ful and un­pop­ular. The ques­tion of pop­ular­ity is be­side the ques­tion of ef­fi­cien­cy, al­though it may en­ter in­to spe­cif­ic cas­es as a fac­tor.

II

And so the first step to take in get­ting more ef­fi­cient work from young teach­ers, and es­pe­cial­ly from in­ex­pe­ri­enced and un­trained teach­ers fresh from the high school or the col­lege, is to make sure that they know what is ex­pect­ed of them. Now this looks to be a very sim­ple pre­cau­tion that no one would be un­wise enough to omit. As a mat­ter of fact, a great many su­per­in­ten­dents and prin­ci­pals are not ex­plic­it and def­inite about the re­sults that they de­sire. Very fre­quent­ly all that is asked of a teach­er is that he or she keep things run­ning smooth­ly, keep pupils and par­ents good-​na­tured. Let me as­sert again that this ought to be done, but that it is no mea­sure of a teach­er's ef­fi­cien­cy, sim­ply be­cause it can be done and of­ten is done by means that de­feat the pur­pose of the school. As a young prin­ci­pal in a city sys­tem, I learned some vi­tal lessons in su­per­vi­sion from a very skill­ful teach­er. She would come to me week af­ter week with this state­ment: “Tell me what you want done, and I will do it.” It took me some time to re­al­ize that that was just what I was be­ing paid to do,--telling teach­ers what should be ac­com­plished and then see­ing that they ac­com­plished the task that was set. When I fi­nal­ly awoke to my du­ties, I found my­self ut­ter­ly at a loss to make pre­scrip­tions. I then learned that there was a cer­tain doc­ument known as the course of study, which mapped out the gen­er­al line of work and in­di­cat­ed the min­imal re­quire­ments. I had seen this course of study, but its func­tion had nev­er im­pressed it­self up­on me. I had thought that it was one of those doc­uments that of­fi­cials pub­lish as a mat­ter of form but which no one is ev­er ex­pect­ed to read. But I soon dis­cov­ered that a prin­ci­pal had some­thing to do be­sides pass­ing from room to room, look­ing wise­ly at the work go­ing on, and pat­ting lit­tle boys and girls on the head.

Now a def­inite course of study is very hard to con­struct,--a course that will tell ex­plic­it­ly what the pupils of each grade should ac­quire each term or half-​term in the way of habits, knowl­edge, ide­als, at­ti­tudes, and prej­udices. But such a course of study is the first req­ui­site to ef­fi­cien­cy in teach­ing. The sys­tem that goes by hit or miss, let­ting each teach­er work out his own sal­va­tion in any way that he may see fit, is just an ag­gre­ga­tion of such schools as that which I have de­scribed.

It is true that re­form­ers have very stren­uous­ly crit­icized the pol­icy of re­strict­ing teach­ers to a def­inite course of study. They have main­tained that it cur­tails in­di­vid­ual ini­tia­tive and crush­es en­thu­si­asm. It does this in a cer­tain mea­sure. Ev­ery pre­scrip­tion is in a sense a re­stric­tion. The fact that the steamship cap­tain must head his ship for Liv­er­pool in­stead of wher­ev­er he may choose to go is a re­stric­tion, and the cap­tain's in­di­vid­ual­ity is doubt­less crushed and his ini­tia­tive lim­it­ed. But this re­sult seems to be in­evitable and he gen­er­al­ly man­ages to sur­vive the blow. The course of study must be to the teach­er what the sail­ing or­ders are to the cap­tain of the ship, what the stat­ed course is to the wheels­man and the of­fi­cer on the bridge, what the time-​ta­ble is to the lo­co­mo­tive en­gi­neer, what Gar­cia and the mes­sage and the an­swer were to Rowan. One may de­cry or­ga­ni­za­tion and pre­scrip­tion in our ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem. One may say that these things tend in­evitably to­ward mech­anism and for­mal­ism and the stul­ti­fy­ing of ini­tia­tive. But the fact re­mains that, when­ev­er pre­scrip­tion is aban­doned, ef­fi­cien­cy in gen­er­al is at an end.

And so I main­tain that ev­ery teach­er has a right to know what he is to be held re­spon­si­ble for, what is ex­pect­ed of him, and that this in­for­ma­tion be just as def­inite and un­equiv­ocal as it can be made. It is un­der the stress of def­inite re­spon­si­bil­ity that growth is most rapid and cer­tain. The more un­cer­tain and in­tan­gi­ble the end to be gained, the less keen­ly will one feel the re­spon­si­bil­ity for gain­ing that end. Un­hap­pi­ly we can­not say to a teach­er: “Here is a mes­sage. Take it to Gar­cia. Bring the an­swer.” But we may make our work far more def­inite and tan­gi­ble than it is now. The cours­es of study are be­com­ing more and more ex­plic­it each year. Vague and gen­er­al pre­scrip­tions are giv­ing place to def­inite and spe­cif­ic pre­scrip­tions. The teach­ers know what they are ex­pect­ed to do, and know­ing this, they have some mea­sure for test­ing the ef­fi­cien­cy of their own ef­forts.

III

But to make more def­inite re­quire­ments is, af­ter all, on­ly the first step in im­prov­ing ef­fi­cien­cy. It is not suf­fi­cient that one know what re­sults are want­ed; one must al­so know how these re­sults may be ob­tained. Im­prove­ment in method means im­prove­ment in ef­fi­cien­cy, and a cry­ing need in ed­uca­tion to-​day is a sci­en­tif­ic in­ves­ti­ga­tion of meth­ods of teach­ing. Teach­ers should be made ac­quaint­ed with the meth­ods that are most eco­nom­ical and ef­fi­cient. As a mat­ter of fact, what­ev­er is done in that di­rec­tion at the present time must be al­most en­tire­ly con­fined to sug­ges­tions and hints.

Our dis­cus­sions of meth­ods of teach­ing may be di­vid­ed in­to three class­es: (1) Dog­mat­ic as­ser­tions that such and such a method is right and that all oth­ers are wrong--as­ser­tions based en­tire­ly up­on _a pri­ori_ rea­son­ing. For ex­am­ple, the as­ser­tion that chil­dren must nev­er be per­mit­ted to learn their lessons “by heart” is based up­on the gen­er­al prin­ci­ple that words are on­ly sym­bols of ideas and that, if one has ideas, one can find words of his own in which to for­mu­late them. (2) A sec­ond class of dis­cus­sions of method com­pris­es de­scrip­tions of de­vices that have proved suc­cess­ful in cer­tain in­stances and with cer­tain teach­ers. (3) Of a third class of dis­cus­sions there are very few rep­re­sen­ta­tive ex­am­ples. I re­fer to meth­ods that have been es­tab­lished on the ba­sis of ex­per­iments in which ir­rel­evant fac­tors have been elim­inat­ed. In fact, I know of no clear­ly de­fined re­port or dis­cus­sion of this sort. An ap­proach to a sci­en­tif­ic so­lu­tion of a def­inite prob­lem of method is to be found in Browne's mono­graph, _The Psy­chol­ogy of Sim­ple Arith­meti­cal Pro­cess­es_. An­oth­er ex­am­ple is rep­re­sent­ed by the ex­per­iments of Miss Stef­fens, Marx Lob­sien, and oth­ers, re­gard­ing the best meth­ods of mem­oriz­ing, and prov­ing be­yond much doubt that the com­plete rep­eti­tion is more eco­nom­ical than the par­tial rep­eti­tion. But these con­clu­sions have, of course, on­ly a lim­it­ed field of ap­pli­ca­tion to prac­ti­cal teach­ing. We stand in great need of a def­inite ex­per­imen­tal in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the de­tailed prob­lems of teach­ing up­on which there is wide di­ver­gence of opin­ion. A very good il­lus­tra­tion is the con­tro­ver­sy be­tween the how and the why in pri­ma­ry arith­metic. In this case, there is a vast amount of “opin­ion,” but there are no clear­ly de­fined con­clu­sions drawn from ac­cu­rate tests. It would seem pos­si­ble to do work of this sort con­cern­ing the de­tails of method in the teach­ing of arith­metic, spelling, gram­mar, pen­man­ship, and ge­og­ra­phy.

IV

Lack­ing this ac­cu­rate type of da­ta re­gard­ing meth­ods, the next re­course is to the ac­tu­al teach­ing of those teach­ers who are rec­og­nized as ef­fi­cient. Wher­ev­er such a teach­er may be found, his or her work is well worth the most care­ful sort of study. Suc­cess, of course, may be due to oth­er fac­tors than the meth­ods em­ployed,--to per­son­al­ity, for ex­am­ple. But, in ev­ery case of rec­og­nized ef­fi­cien­cy in teach­ing that I have ob­served, I have found that the meth­ods em­ployed have, in the main, been pro­duc­tive of good re­sults when used by oth­ers. The ex­pe­ri­enced teach­er comes, through a pro­cess of tri­al and er­ror, to se­lect, per­haps un­con­scious­ly, the meth­ods that work best. Some­times these are not al­ways to be iden­ti­fied with the meth­ods that the­oret­ical ped­agogy had worked out from _a pri­ori_ bases. For ex­am­ple, the type of les­son which I call the “de­duc­tive de­vel­op­ment” les­son[7] is one that is not in­clud­ed in the old­er dis­cus­sions of method; yet it ac­cu­rate­ly de­scribes one of the meth­ods em­ployed by a very suc­cess­ful teach­er whose work I ob­served.

One way, then, to im­prove the ef­fi­cien­cy of young teach­ers, in so far as im­prove­ment in meth­ods leads to im­proved ef­fi­cien­cy, is to en­cour­age the ob­ser­va­tion of ex­pert teach­ing. The plan of giv­ing teach­ers vis­it­ing days of­ten brings ex­cel­lent re­sults, es­pe­cial­ly if the teach­er looks up­on the priv­ilege in the prop­er light. The hy­per-​crit­ical spir­it is fa­tal to growth un­der any con­di­tion. When­ev­er a teach­er has come to the con­clu­sion that he or she has noth­ing to learn from study­ing the work of oth­ers, an­abolism has ceased and katabolism has set in. The self-​suf­fi­cien­cy of our craft is one of its weak­est char­ac­ter­is­tics. It is the fac­tor that more than any oth­er dis­counts it in the minds of lay­men. For­tu­nate­ly it is less fre­quent­ly a pro­fes­sion­al char­ac­ter­is­tic than in for­mer years, but it still per­sists in some quar­ters. I re­cent­ly met a “ped­agogue” who im­pressed me as the most “know­ing” in­di­vid­ual that it had ev­er been my priv­ilege to be­come ac­quaint­ed with. An en­thu­si­as­tic friend of his, in di­lat­ing up­on this man's virtues, used these words: “When you pro­pose a sub­ject of con­ver­sa­tion in what­ev­er field you may choose, you will find that he has mas­tered it to bed rock. He will go over it once and you think that he is wise. He starts at the be­gin­ning and goes over it again, and you re­al­ize that he is deep. Once more he tra­vers­es the same ground, but he is so far down now that you can­not fol­low him, and then you are aware that he is pro­found.” That sort of pro­fun­di­ty is still not rare in the field of gen­er­al ed­uca­tion. The per­son who has all pos­si­ble knowl­edge pi­geon­holed and clas­si­fied is still in our midst. The pedant still does the cause of ed­uca­tion in­cal­cu­la­ble in­jury.

Of the use to which read­ing cir­cles may be put in im­prov­ing the ef­fi­cien­cy of teach­ing, it is nec­es­sary to say but lit­tle. Such or­ga­ni­za­tions, un­der wise lead­er­ship, may doubt­less be made to serve a good pur­pose in pro­mot­ing pro­fes­sion­al en­thu­si­asm. The dif­fi­cul­ty with us­ing them to pro­mote im­me­di­ate and di­rect ef­fi­cien­cy lies in the pauci­ty of the lit­er­ature that is at our dis­pos­al. Most of our present-​day works up­on ed­uca­tion are very gen­er­al in their na­ture. They are not with­out their val­ue, but this val­ue is gen­er­al and in­di­rect rather than im­me­di­ate and spe­cif­ic. A book like Miss Win­ter­burn's _Meth­ods of Teach­ing_, or Chubb's _Teach­ing of En­glish_[8] is es­pe­cial­ly valu­able for young teach­ers who are look­ing for first-​hand helps. But books like this are all too rare in our lit­er­ature.

On the whole, I think that the im­prove­ment of teach­ers in the mat­ter of meth­ods is the most un­sat­is­fac­to­ry part of our prob­lem.[9] All that one can say is that the work of the best teach­ers should be ob­served care­ful­ly and faith­ful­ly, that the meth­ods up­on which there is lit­tle or no dis­pute should be giv­en and ac­cept­ed as stan­dard, but that one should be very care­ful about giv­ing young teach­ers an idea that there is any sin­gle form un­der which all teach­ing can be sub­sumed. I know of no term that is more thor­ough­ly a mis­nomer in our tech­ni­cal vo­cab­ulary than the term “gen­er­al method.” I teach a sub­ject that of­ten goes by that name, but I al­ways take care to ex­plain that the name does not mean, in my class, what the words seem to sig­ni­fy. There are cer­tain broad and gen­er­al prin­ci­ples which de­scribe very crude­ly and rough­ly and in­ad­equate­ly cer­tain phas­es of cer­tain pro­cess­es that mind un­der­goes in or­ga­niz­ing ex­pe­ri­ence--per­cep­tion, ap­per­cep­tion, con­cep­tion, in­duc­tion, de­duc­tion, in­fer­ence, gen­er­al­iza­tion, and the like. But these terms have on­ly a vague and gen­er­al con­no­ta­tion; or, if their con­no­ta­tion is spe­cif­ic and def­inite, it has been made so by an ar­ti­fi­cial pro­cess of def­ini­tion in which coun­sel is dark­ened by words with­out mean­ing. The on­ly full-​fledged law that I know of in the ed­uca­tive pro­cess is the law of habit build­ing--(1) fo­cal­iza­tion, (2) at­ten­tive rep­eti­tion at in­ter­vals of in­creas­ing length, (3) per­mit­ting no ex­cep­tion--and I am of­ten told that this “law” is fal­la­cious. It has dif­fered from some oth­er so-​called laws, how­ev­er, in this re­spect: it al­ways works. When­ev­er a com­plex habit is ad­duced that has not been formed through the op­er­ation of this law, I am will­ing to give it up.

V

A third gen­er­al method of im­prov­ing the ef­fi­cien­cy of teach­ing is to build up the no­tion of re­spon­si­bil­ity for re­sults. The teach­er must not on­ly take the mes­sage and de­liv­er it to Gar­cia, or to some oth­er in­di­vid­ual as def­inite and tan­gi­ble, but he must al­so bring the an­swer. So far as I know there is no oth­er way to in­sure a max­imum of ef­fi­cien­cy than to de­mand cer­tain re­sults and to hold the in­di­vid­ual re­spon­si­ble for gain­ing these re­sults. The present stan­dards of the teach­ing craft are less rig­or­ous than they should be in this re­spect. We need a craft spir­it that will judge ev­ery man im­par­tial­ly by his work, not by sec­ondary cri­te­ria. You re­mem­ber Fin­layson in Kipling's _Bridge Builders_, and the agony with which he watched the wa­ters of the Ganges tear­ing away at the cais­sons of his new bridge. A vi­tal ques­tion of Fin­layson's life was to be an­swered by the suc­cess or fail­ure of those cais­sons to re­sist the flood. If they should yield, it meant not on­ly the wreck of the bridge, but the wreck of his ca­reer; for, as Kipling says, “Gov­ern­ment might lis­ten, per­haps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge as that stood or fell.”

Pres­ident Hall has said that one of the last sen­ti­ments to be de­vel­oped in hu­man na­ture is “the sense of re­spon­si­bil­ity, which is one of the high­est and most com­plex psy­chic qual­ities.” How to de­vel­op this sen­ti­ment of re­spon­si­bil­ity is one of the most press­ing prob­lems of ed­uca­tion. And the prob­lem is es­pe­cial­ly press­ing in those de­part­ments of ed­uca­tion that train for so­cial ser­vice. To en­gen­der in the young teach­er an ef­fec­tive prej­udice against scamped work, against the mak­ing of ex­cus­es, against the se­duc­tive al­lure­ments of ease and com­fort and the lines of least re­sis­tance is one of the most im­por­tant du­ties that is laid up­on the nor­mal school, the train­ing school, and the teach­ers' col­lege. To do well the work that has been set for him to do should be the high­est am­bi­tion of ev­ery work­er, the am­bi­tion to which all oth­er am­bi­tions and de­sires are sec­ondary and sub­or­di­nate. Pride in the mas­tery of the tech­nique of one's call­ing is the most whole­some and help­ful sort of pride that a man can in­dulge in. The joy of do­ing each day's work in the best pos­si­ble man­ner is the keen­est joy of life. But this pride and this joy do not come at the out­set. Like all oth­er good things of life, they come on­ly as the re­sult of ef­fort and strug­gle and stren­uous self-​dis­ci­pline and dogged per­se­ver­ance. The emo­tion­al col­or­ing which gives these things their sub­jec­tive worth is a mat­ter very large­ly of con­trast. Suc­cess must stand out against a back­ground of strug­gle, or the chief virtue of suc­cess--the con­scious­ness of con­quest--will be en­tire­ly missed. That sort of suc­cess means strength; for strength of mind is noth­ing more than the abil­ity to “hew to the line,” to fol­low a giv­en course of ef­fort to a suc­cess­ful con­clu­sion, no mat­ter how long and how te­dious be the road that one must trav­el, no mat­ter how dis­agree­able are the tasks in­volved, no mat­ter how tempt­ing are the in­sid­ious siren songs of mo­men­tary fan­cy.

What teach­ers need--what all work­ers need--is to be in­spired with those ide­als and prej­udices that will en­able them to work stead­fast­ly and un­remit­ting­ly to­ward the at­tain­ment of a stat­ed end. What in­spired Rowan with those ide­als of ef­fi­cien­cy that en­abled him to car­ry his mes­sage and bring back the an­swer, I do not know, but if he was a sol­dier, I do not hes­itate to haz­ard an opin­ion. Our reg­ular army stands as the clear­est type of ef­fi­cient ser­vice which is avail­able for our study and em­ula­tion. The work of Colonel Goethals on the Pana­ma Canal bids fair to be the finest fruit of the train­ing that we give to the of­fi­cers of our army. If we wish to learn the fun­da­men­tal virtues of that train­ing, it is not suf­fi­cient to study the cur­ricu­lum of the Mil­itary Acade­my. Tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and skill are es­sen­tial to such re­sults, but they are not the prime es­sen­tials. If you wish to know what the prime es­sen­tials are, let me re­fer you to a se­ries of pa­pers, en­ti­tled _The Spir­it of Old West Point_, which ran through a re­cent vol­ume of the _At­lantic Month­ly_ and which has since been pub­lished in book form. They con­sti­tute, to my mind, one of the most im­por­tant ed­uca­tion­al doc­uments of the present decade. The army ser­vice is ef­fi­cient be­cause it is in­spired with ef­fec­tive ide­als of ser­vice,--ide­als in which ev­ery oth­er de­sire and am­bi­tion is to­tal­ly and com­plete­ly sub­or­di­nat­ed to the ide­al of du­ty. To those who main­tain that close or­ga­ni­za­tion and def­inite pre­scrip­tion kill ini­tia­tive and cur­tail ef­fi­cien­cy, the record of West Point and the army ser­vice should be a si­lenc­ing ar­gu­ment.

And yet ed­uca­tion is more im­por­tant than war; more im­por­tant, even, than the build­ing of the Pana­ma Canal. We be­lieve, and right­ly, that no train­ing is too good for our mil­itary and naval of­fi­cers; that no dis­ci­pline which will pro­duce the ap­pro­pri­ate habits and ide­als and prej­udices is too stren­uous; that no in­di­vid­ual sac­ri­fice of com­fort or ease is too cost­ly. Equal or even com­men­su­rable ef­fi­cien­cy in ed­uca­tion can come on­ly through a like pro­cess. From the times of the an­cient Egyp­tians to the present day, one vi­tal truth has been re­vealed in ev­ery for­ward move­ment; the home­ly truth that you can­not make bricks with­out straw; you can­not win suc­cess with­out ef­fort; you can­not at­tain ef­fi­cien­cy with­out un­der­go­ing the pro­cess­es of dis­ci­pline; and dis­ci­pline means on­ly this: do­ing things that you do not want to do, for the sake of reach­ing some end that ought to be at­tained.

The nor­mal schools and the train­ing schools and the teach­ers' col­leges must be the nurs­eries of craft ide­als and stan­dards. The in­struc­tion that they of­fer must be up­on a plane that will com­mand re­spect. The in­tol­er­able pedantry and the hyp­ocrit­ical goody-​goody­ism must be ban­ished for­ev­er. The crass sen­ti­men­tal­ism by which we at­tempt to cov­er our pauci­ty of craft ide­als must al­so be elim­inat­ed. Those who are most strong­ly im­bued with ide­als are not those who cheap­en the val­ue of ide­als by con­stant ver­bal re­it­er­ation. Ide­als do not of­ten come through ex­plic­it­ly im­part­ed pre­cepts. They come through more im­pal­pa­ble and hid­den chan­nels,--now through state­ly build­ings with vine-​cov­ered tow­ers from which the past speaks in the si­lence of great halls and clois­tered re­treats; now through the un­writ­ten and scarce­ly spo­ken tra­di­tions that are ex­pressed in the very bear­ing and at­ti­tude of those to whom youth looks for in­spi­ra­tion and guid­ance; now through a dom­inant and pow­er­ful per­son­al­ity, some­times rough and crude, some­times warm-​heart­ed and lov­able, but al­ways sin­cere. Tra­di­tions and ide­als are the most price­less part of a school's equip­ment, and the school that can give these things to its stu­dents in rich­est mea­sure will have the great­est in­flu­ence on the suc­ceed­ing gen­er­ations.

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 6: A pa­per read be­fore the Nor­mal and Train­ing Teach­ers' Con­fer­ence of the New York State Teach­ers' As­so­ci­ation, De­cem­ber 27, 1907.]

[Foot­note 7: See _Ed­uca­tive Pro­cess_, New York, 1910, Chap­ter XX.]

[Foot­note 8: Rowe's _Habit For­ma­tion_ (New York, 1909), Brig­gs and Coff­man's _Read­ing in Pub­lic Schools_ (Chica­go, 1908), Foght's _The Amer­ican Ru­ral School_, Adams's _Ex­po­si­tion and Il­lus­tra­tion in Class Teach­ing_ (New York, 1910), and Per­ry's _Prob­lems of El­emen­tary Ed­uca­tion_ (New York, 1910) should cer­tain­ly be added to this list.]

[Foot­note 9: “It seems to me one of the most press­ing prob­lems in ped­agogy to-​day is that of method.... It is the sub­ject in which teach­ers of ped­agogy in Col­leges and Uni­ver­si­ties are weak­est to-​day. Of what prac­ti­cal val­ue is all our study of ed­uca­tion­al psy­chol­ogy or the his­to­ry of ed­uca­tion, our child study, our ex­per­imen­tal ped­agogy, if it does not fi­nal­ly re­sult in the de­vis­ing of bet­ter meth­ods of teach­ing, and make the teach­er more skill­ful and ef­fec­tive in his work.”--T.M. BAL­LI­ET: “Un­der­grad­uate In­struc­tion in Ped­agogy,” _Ped­agog­ical Sem­inary_, vol. xvii, 1910, p. 67.]

~IV~

THE TEST OF EF­FI­CIEN­CY IN SU­PER­VI­SION[10]

I

I know of no way in which I can bet­ter in­tro­duce my sub­ject than to de­scribe very briefly the work of a su­per­in­ten­dent who once fur­nished me with an ex­am­ple of a def­inite and ef­fec­tive method of su­per­vi­sion. This man was a “long range” su­per­in­ten­dent. It was im­pos­si­ble for him to vis­it his schools very fre­quent­ly, and so he did the next best thing: he had the schools brought to him. When I first saw him he was por­ing over a pile of pa­pers that had just come in from one of his schools. I soon dis­cov­ered that these pa­pers were ar­ranged in sets, each set be­ing made up of sam­ples tak­en each week from the work of the pupils in the schools un­der his su­per­vi­sion. The pa­pers of each pupil were ar­ranged in chrono­log­ical or­der, and by look­ing through the set, he could note the growth that the pupil in ques­tion had made since the be­gin­ning of the term. Up­on these pa­pers, the su­per­in­ten­dent record­ed his judg­ment of the amount of im­prove­ment shown both in form and in con­tent.

I was par­tic­ular­ly im­pressed by the char­ac­ter of his crit­icisms. There was noth­ing vague or in­tan­gi­ble about them. Ev­ery an­no­ta­tion was clear and def­inite. If pen­man­ship hap­pened to be the point at is­sue, he would note that the lines were too close to­geth­er; that the let­ters did not have suf­fi­cient in­di­vid­ual­ity; that the spaces be­tween the words were not suf­fi­cient­ly wide; that the in­den­ta­tion was in­ad­equate; that the writ­ing was cramped, show­ing that the pen had not been held prop­er­ly; that the mar­gin need­ed cor­rec­tion. If the pa­pers were de­fec­tive from the stand­point of lan­guage, the crit­icisms were equal­ly clear and def­inite. One pupil had mis­spelled the same word in three suc­ces­sive pa­pers. “Be sure that this word ap­pears in the next spelling list,” was the com­ment of the su­per­in­ten­dent. An­oth­er pupil ha­bit­ual­ly used a bit of false syn­tax: “Place this up­on the list of er­rors to be tak­en up and cor­rect­ed.” Still oth­ers were un­cer­tain about para­graph­ing: “De­vote a lan­guage les­son to the para­graph be­fore the next writ­ten ex­er­cise.” On the cov­ers of each bun­dle of class pa­pers, he wrote di­rec­tions and sug­ges­tions of a more gen­er­al na­ture; for ex­am­ple: “Im­prove­ment is not suf­fi­cient­ly marked; try for bet­ter re­sults next time”; or: “I note that the pupils draw rather than write; look out for free move­ment.” Of­ten, too, there were words of well-​mer­it­ed praise: “I like the way in which your pupils have re­spond­ed to their drill. This is good. Keep it up.” And not in­fre­quent­ly sug­ges­tions were made as to con­tent: “Tell this sto­ry in greater de­tail next time, and have it re­pro­duced again”; or: “The form of these pa­pers is good, but the na­ture study is poor; don't sac­ri­fice thought to form.”

In sim­ilar fash­ion, the oth­er writ­ten work was gone over and an­no­tat­ed. Ev­ery pupil in this sys­tem of schools had a sam­ple of his writ­ten work ex­am­ined at reg­ular and fre­quent in­ter­vals by the su­per­in­ten­dent. Ev­ery teach­er knew just what her chief de­mand­ed in the way of re­sults, and did her best to gain the re­sults de­mand­ed. I am not tak­ing the po­si­tion that the re­sults that were de­mand­ed rep­re­sent­ed the high­est ide­als of what the el­emen­tary school should ac­com­plish. Good pen­man­ship and good spelling and good lan­guage, in the light of con­tem­po­rary ed­uca­tion­al thought, seem to be some­thing like hap­pi­ness--you get them in larg­er mea­sure the less you think about get­ting them. But this pos­si­ble ob­jec­tion aside, the su­per­in­ten­dent in ques­tion had de­vel­oped a sys­tem which kept him in very close touch with the work that was be­ing done in wide­ly sep­arat­ed schools.

He told me fur­ther that, on the in­fre­quent oc­ca­sions when he could vis­it his class­rooms, he gave most of his time and at­ten­tion to the mat­ters that could not be su­per­vised at “long range.” He found out how the pupils were im­prov­ing in their read­ing, and es­pe­cial­ly in oral ex­pres­sion, in its syn­tax, its free­dom from er­rors of con­struc­tion, its clear­ness and flu­en­cy. He list­ed the com­mon er­rors, di­rect­ing his teach­ers to take them up in a sys­tem­at­ic man­ner and erad­icate them, and he did not fail to note at his next vis­it how much progress had been made. He not­ed the con­di­tion of the black­board work, and kept a list of the im­prove­ments that he sug­gest­ed. He test­ed for ra­pid­ity in arith­meti­cal pro­cess­es, for the pa­pers sent to his of­fice gave him on­ly an in­dex of ac­cu­ra­cy. He not­ed the habits of per­son­al clean­li­ness that were be­ing de­vel­oped or ne­glect­ed. In fact, he had a long list of spe­cif­ic stan­dards that he kept con­tin­ual­ly in mind, the progress to­ward which he con­stant­ly watched. And last, but by no means least, he car­ried with him wher­ev­er he went an at­mo­sphere of breezy good na­ture and cheer­ful­ness, for he had mas­tered the first prin­ci­ple in the art of both su­per­vi­sion and teach­ing; he had learned that the best way to pro­mote growth in ei­ther pupils or teach­ers is nei­ther to let them do as they please nor to force them to do as you please, but to get them to please to do what you please to have them do.

I in­stance this su­per­in­ten­dent as one type of ef­fi­cien­cy in su­per­vi­sion. He was ef­fi­cient, not sim­ply be­cause he had a sys­tem that scru­ti­nized ev­ery least de­tail of his pupils' growth, but be­cause that scruti­ny re­al­ly in­sured growth. He ob­tained the re­sults that he de­sired, and he ob­tained uni­form­ly good re­sults from a large num­ber of young, un­trained teach­ers. We have all heard of the su­per­in­ten­dent who boast­ed that he could tell by look­ing at his watch just what any pupil in any class­room was do­ing at just that mo­ment. Sure­ly here sys­tem was not lack­ing. But the boast did not strike the vi­tal point. It is not what the pupil is do­ing that is fun­da­men­tal­ly im­por­tant, but what he is gain­ing from his ac­tiv­ity or in­ac­tiv­ity; what he is gain­ing in the way of habits, in the way of knowl­edge, in the way of stan­dards and ide­als and prej­udices, all of which are to gov­ern his fu­ture con­duct. The su­per­in­ten­dent whom I have de­scribed had the qual­ities of bal­ance and per­spec­tive that en­abled him to see both the woods and the trees. And let me add that he taught reg­ular­ly in his own cen­tral high school, and that prac­ti­cal­ly all of his su­per­vi­sion was ac­com­plished af­ter school hours and on Sat­ur­days.

But my chief rea­son for choos­ing his work as a type is that it rep­re­sents a suc­cess­ful ef­fort to su­per­vise that part of school work which is most dif­fi­cult and irk­some to su­per­vise; name­ly, the for­ma­tion of habits. What­ev­er one's ide­als of ed­uca­tion may be, it still re­mains true that habit build­ing is the most im­por­tant du­ty of the el­emen­tary school, and that the ef­fi­cien­cy of habit build­ing can be test­ed in no oth­er way than by the means that he em­ployed; name­ly, the care­ful com­par­ison of re­sults at suc­ces­sive stages of the pro­cess.

II

The essence of a true habit is its pure­ly au­to­mat­ic char­ac­ter. Re­ac­tion must fol­low up­on the stim­ulus in­stan­ta­neous­ly, with­out thought, re­flec­tion, or judg­ment. One has not taught spelling ef­fi­cient­ly un­til spelling is au­to­mat­ic, un­til the cor­rect form flows from the pen with­out the in­ter­ven­tion of mind. The re­al test of the pupil's train­ing in spelling is his abil­ity to spell the word cor­rect­ly when he is think­ing, not about spelling, but about the con­tent of the sen­tence that he is writ­ing. Con­se­quent­ly the test of ef­fi­cien­cy in spelling is not an ex­am­ina­tion in spelling, al­though this may be valu­able as a means to an end, but rather the in­fre­quen­cy with which mis­spelled words ap­pear in the com­po­si­tion work, let­ter writ­ing, and oth­er writ­ten work of the pupil. Sim­ilar­ly in lan­guage and gram­mar, it is not suf­fi­cient to in­struct in rules of syn­tax. This is but the ini­tial pro­cess. Gram­mat­ical rules func­tion ef­fec­tive­ly on­ly when they func­tion au­to­mat­ical­ly. So long as one must think and judge and re­flect up­on the form of one's ex­pres­sion, the ex­pres­sion is nec­es­sar­ily awk­ward and in­ad­equate.

The same rule holds in re­spect of the fun­da­men­tal pro­cess­es of arith­metic. It holds in pen­man­ship, in ar­tic­ula­tion and enun­ci­ation, in word recog­ni­tion, in moral con­duct and good man­ners; in fact, in all of the ba­sic work for which the el­emen­tary school must stand spon­sor. And one source of dan­ger in the new­er meth­ods of ed­uca­tion lies in the ten­den­cy to over­look the im­por­tance of car­ry­ing habit-​build­ing pro­cess­es through to a suc­cess­ful is­sue. The re­ac­tion against drill, against for­mal work of all sorts, is a health­ful re­ac­tion in many ways. It bids fair to break up the me­chan­ical lock step of the el­emen­tary grades, and to in­tro­duce some wel­come life, and vig­or, and whole­some­ness. But it will sad­ly de­feat its own pur­pose if it un­der­rates the ne­ces­si­ty of habit build­ing as the ba­sic ac­tiv­ity of ear­ly ed­uca­tion.

What is need­ed, now that we have got away from the lock step, now that we are hap­pi­ly eman­ci­pat­ed from the mean­ing­less thrall­dom of me­chan­ical rep­eti­tion and the wor­ship of drill for its own sake--what is need­ed now is not less drill, but bet­ter drill. And this should be the net re­sult of the re­cent re­forms in el­emen­tary ed­uca­tion. In our first en­thu­si­asm, we threw away the spelling book, poked fun at the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion ta­bles, de­cried basal read­ing, and re­lieved our­selves of much wit and sar­casm at the ex­pense of for­mal gram­mar. But now we are swing­ing back to the ad­equate recog­ni­tion of the true pur­pose of drill. And in the wake of this new­er con­cep­tion, we are learn­ing that its drudgery may be light­ened and its ef­fi­cien­cy height­ened by the in­tro­duc­tion of a rich­er con­tent that shall pro­vide a greater va­ri­ety in the rep­eti­tions, in­sure an ad­equate mo­tive for ef­fort, and re­lieve the dead monotony that fre­quent­ly ren­dered the old­er meth­ods so fu­tile. I look for­ward to the time when to be an ef­fi­cient drill­mas­ter in this new­er sense of the term will be to have reached one of the pin­na­cles of pro­fes­sion­al skill.

III

But there is an­oth­er side of teach­ing that must be su­per­vised. Al­though habit is re­spon­si­ble for nine tenths of con­duct, the re­main­ing tenth must not be ne­glect­ed. In sit­ua­tions where habit is not ad­equate to ad­just­ment, judg­ment and re­flec­tion must come to the res­cue, or should come to the res­cue. This means that, in­stead of act­ing with­out thought, as in the case of habit, one an­alyzes the sit­ua­tion and tries to solve it by the ap­pli­ca­tion of some fact or prin­ci­ple that has been gained ei­ther from one's own ex­pe­ri­ence or from the ex­pe­ri­ence of oth­ers. This is the field in which knowl­edge comes to its own; and a very im­por­tant task of ed­uca­tion is to fix in the pupils' minds a num­ber of facts and prin­ci­ples that will be avail­able for ap­pli­ca­tion to the sit­ua­tions of lat­er life.

How, then, is the ef­fi­cien­cy of in­struc­tion (as dis­tin­guished from train­ing or habit build­ing) to be test­ed? Need­less to say, an ad­equate test is im­pos­si­ble from the very na­ture of the sit­ua­tion. The ef­fi­cien­cy of im­part­ing knowl­edge can be test­ed on­ly by the ef­fect that this knowl­edge has up­on lat­er con­duct; and this, it will be agreed, can­not be ac­cu­rate­ly de­ter­mined un­til the pupil has left the school and is face to face with the prob­lems of re­al life.

In prac­tice, how­ev­er, we adopt a more or less ef­fec­tive sub­sti­tute for the re­al test--the sub­sti­tute called the ex­am­ina­tion. We all know that the ul­ti­mate pur­pose of in­struc­tion is not pri­mar­ily to en­able pupils suc­cess­ful­ly to pass ex­am­ina­tions. And yet as long as we teach as though this were the main pur­pose we might as well be­lieve it to be. Now the ex­am­ina­tion may be made a very valu­able test of the ef­fi­cien­cy of in­struc­tion if its lim­ita­tions are ful­ly rec­og­nized and if it does not ob­scure the true pur­pose of in­struc­tion. And if we re­mem­ber that the true pur­pose is to im­part facts in such a man­ner that they may not on­ly “stick” in the pupil's mind, but that they may al­so be amenable to re­call and prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion, and if we set our ex­am­ina­tion ques­tions with some ref­er­ence to this re­quire­ment, then I be­lieve that we shall find the ex­am­ina­tion a de­pend­able test.

One im­por­tant point is like­ly to be over­looked in the con­sid­er­ation of ex­am­ina­tions,--the fact, name­ly, that the form and con­tent of the ques­tions have a very pow­er­ful in­flu­ence in de­ter­min­ing the con­tent and meth­ods of in­struc­tion. Is it not per­ti­nent, then, to in­quire whether ex­am­ina­tion ques­tions can­not be so framed as rad­ical­ly to im­prove in­struc­tion rather than to en­cour­age, as is of­ten the case, meth­ods that are ped­agog­ical­ly un­sound? Grant­ed that it is well for the child to mem­orize ver­ba­tim cer­tain un­re­lat­ed facts, even to mem­orize some facts that have no im­me­di­ate bear­ing up­on his life, grant­ed that this is valu­able (and I think that a lit­tle of it is), is it nec­es­sary that an en­tire year or half-​year be giv­en over al­most en­tire­ly to “cram­ming up” on old ques­tions? Would it not be pos­si­ble so to frame ex­am­ina­tion ques­tions that the “cram­ming” pro­cess would be prac­ti­cal­ly val­ue­less?

What the pupil should get from ge­og­ra­phy, for in­stance, is not on­ly a knowl­edge of ge­ograph­ical facts, but al­so, and more fun­da­men­tal­ly, the pow­er to see the re­la­tion of these facts to his own life; in oth­er words, the abil­ity to ap­ply his knowl­edge to the im­prove­ment of ad­just­ment. Now this pow­er is very close­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the abil­ity to grasp fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples, to see the re­la­tion of cause and ef­fect work­ing be­low the sur­face of di­verse phe­nom­ena. Ge­og­ra­phy, to be prac­ti­cal, must im­press not on­ly the fact, but al­so the prin­ci­ple that ra­tio­nal­izes or ex­plains the fact. It must em­pha­size the “why” as well as the “what.” For ex­am­ple: it is well for the pupil to know that New York is the largest city in the Unit­ed States; it is bet­ter that he should know why New York has be­come the largest city in the Unit­ed States. It is well to know that South Amer­ica ex­tends very much far­ther to the east than does North Amer­ica, but it is bet­ter to know that this fact has had an im­por­tant bear­ing in de­ter­min­ing the com­mer­cial re­la­tions that ex­ist be­tween South Amer­ica and Eu­rope. Ques­tions that have ref­er­ence to these larg­er re­la­tions of cause and ef­fect may be so framed that no amount of “cram­ming” will alone in­sure cor­rect an­swers. They may be so framed that the pupil will be forced to do some think­ing for him­self, will be forced to solve an imag­inary sit­ua­tion very much as he would solve a re­al sit­ua­tion.

Ex­am­ina­tion ques­tions of this type would re­act ben­efi­cial­ly up­on the meth­ods of in­struc­tion. They would tend to place a pre­mi­um up­on that type of in­struc­tion that de­vel­ops ini­tia­tive in solv­ing prob­lems, in­stead of en­cour­ag­ing the mem­orit­er meth­ods that tend to crush what­ev­er germs of ini­tia­tive the pupil may pos­sess. This does not mean that the mem­orit­er work should be ex­clud­ed. A sol­id ba­sis of fact is es­sen­tial to the mas­tery of prin­ci­ples. Per­son­al­ly I be­lieve that the work of the in­ter­me­di­ate grades should be planned to give the pupil this fac­tu­al ba­sis. This would leave the up­per grades free for the more ra­tio­nal work. In any case, I be­lieve that the ef­fi­cien­cy of ex­am­ina­tions may be great­ly in­creased by giv­ing one or two ques­tions that must be an­swered by a rea­son­ing pro­cess for ev­ery ques­tion that may be an­swered by ver­bal mem­ory alone.

IV

Thus far it seems clear that an ab­so­lute stan­dard is avail­able for test­ing the ef­fi­cien­cy of train­ing or habit build­ing, and that a fair­ly ac­cu­rate stan­dard may be de­vel­oped for test­ing the ef­fi­cien­cy of in­struc­tion. Both train­ing and in­struc­tion, how­ev­er, are sub­ject to the mod­ify­ing in­flu­ence of a third fac­tor of which too lit­tle ac­count has hith­er­to been tak­en in ed­uca­tion­al dis­cus­sions. Train­ing re­sults in habits, and yet a cer­tain sort of train­ing may not on­ly re­sult in a cer­tain type of habit, but it may al­so re­sult in the de­vel­op­ment of some­thing which will quite negate the habit that has been de­vel­oped. In the pro­cess of de­vel­op­ing habits of neat­ness, for ex­am­ple, one may em­ploy meth­ods that re­sult in prej­udic­ing the child against neat­ness as a gen­er­al virtue. In this event, al­though the lit­tle spe­cif­ic habits of neat­ness may func­tion in the sit­ua­tions in which they have been de­vel­oped, the prej­udice will ef­fec­tu­al­ly pre­vent their ex­ten­sion to oth­er fields. In oth­er words, the gen­er­al emo­tion­al ef­fect of train­ing must be con­sid­ered as well as the spe­cif­ic re­sults of the train­ing. The same stric­ture ap­plies with equal force to in­struc­tion. In­struc­tion im­parts knowl­edge; but if a man knows and fails to feel, his knowl­edge has lit­tle in­flu­ence up­on his con­duct.

This fac­tor that con­trols con­duct when habit fails, this fac­tor that may even negate an oth­er­wise ef­fi­cient habit, is the great in­de­ter­mi­nate in the work of teach­ing. To know that one has trained an ef­fec­tive habit or im­part­ed a prac­ti­cal prin­ci­ple is one thing; to know that in do­ing this, one has not en­gen­dered in the pupil's mind a prej­udice against the very thing taught is quite an­oth­er mat­ter.

That phase of teach­ing which is con­cerned with the de­vel­op­ment of these in­tan­gi­ble forces may be termed “in­spi­ra­tion”; and it is the lack of an ad­equate test for the ef­fi­cien­cy of in­spi­ra­tion that makes the task of su­per­vi­sion so dif­fi­cult and the re­sults so of­ten un­sat­is­fac­to­ry.

Nev­er­the­less, even here the out­look is not en­tire­ly hope­less. One may be tol­er­ably cer­tain of at least two things. In the first place, the great “emo­tion­al­ized prej­udices” that must come pre­dom­inant­ly from school in­flu­ences are the love of truth, the love of work, re­spect for law and or­der, and a spir­it of coöper­ation. These fac­tors un­doubt­ed­ly have their ba­sis in spe­cif­ic habits of hon­esty, in­dus­try, obe­di­ence, and re­gard for the rights and feel­ings of oth­ers; and these habits may be de­vel­oped and test­ed just as thor­ough­ly and just as ac­cu­rate­ly as habits of good spelling and cor­rect syn­tax. With­out the sol­id ba­sis of habit, ide­als and prej­udices will be of but lit­tle ser­vice. The one cau­tion must be tak­en that the meth­ods of train­ing do not de­feat their own pur­pose by en­gen­der­ing prej­udices and ide­als that negate the habits. It is here that the per­son­al­ity of the teach­er be­comes the all-​im­por­tant fac­tor, and the task of the su­per­vi­sor is to de­ter­mine whether the in­flu­ence of the per­son­al­ity is good or evil. Most su­per­vi­sors come to judge of this in­flu­ence by an un­de­fined fac­tor that is best termed the “spir­it of the class­room.”

The sec­ond hope­ful fea­ture of the task of su­per­vi­sion in re­spect of in­spi­ra­tion is that this “spir­it” is an ex­treme­ly con­ta­gious and per­va­sive thing. In oth­er words, the prin­ci­pal or the su­per­in­ten­dent may dom­inate ev­ery class­room un­der his su­per­vi­sion, al­most with­out re­gard to the lim­ita­tions of the in­di­vid­ual teach­ers. Typ­ical schools in ev­ery city sys­tem bear com­pelling tes­ti­mo­ny to this fact. The prin­ci­pal _is_ the school.

And if I were to sum up the es­sen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tics of the ide­al su­per­vi­sor, I could not ne­glect this point. Af­ter all, the two great dan­gers that be­set him are, first, the dan­ger of sloth--the old Adam of lazi­ness--which will tempt him to avoid the de­tails, to shirk the drudgery, to es­cape the close and weari­some scruti­ny of lit­tle things; and, sec­ond­ly, the sin of triv­ial­ity--the in­er­tia which holds him to de­tails and nev­er per­mits him to take the broad­er view and see the true ends to­ward which de­tails are but the means. The prop­er com­bi­na­tion of these two fac­tors is all too rare, but it is in this com­bi­na­tion that the ide­al su­per­vi­sor is to be found.

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 10: A pa­per read be­fore the fifty-​sec­ond an­nu­al meet­ing of the New York State As­so­ci­ation of School Com­mis­sion­ers and Su­per­in­ten­dents, Novem­ber 8, 1907.]

~V~

THE SU­PER­VI­SOR AND THE TEACH­ER

I

It is dif­fi­cult not to be de­pressed by the ir­ra­tional rad­ical­ism of con­tem­po­rary ed­uca­tion­al the­ory. It would seem that the work­ers in the high­er ranges of ed­uca­tion­al ac­tiv­ity should, of all men, pre­serve a bal­anced judg­ment and a sane out­look, and yet there is prob­ably no oth­er hu­man call­ing that presents the strange phe­nomenon of men who are called ex­perts throw­ing over­board ev­ery­thing that the past has sanc­tioned, and em­bark­ing with­out chart or com­pass up­on any new ven­ture that hap­pens to catch pop­ular fan­cy. The non-​pro­fes­sion­al char­ac­ter of ed­uca­tion is nowhere more painful­ly ap­par­ent than in the ex­pres­sion of this ten­den­cy. The lit­er­ature of teach­ing that is writ­ten di­rect­ly out of ex­pe­ri­ence--out of ac­tu­al ad­just­ment to the teach­ing sit­ua­tion--is al­most laughed out of court in some ed­uca­tion­al cir­cles. But if one wish­es to win the ap­plause of the mul­ti­tude one may do it eas­ily enough by pro­claim­ing some new and un­tried plan. At our ed­uca­tion­al gath­er­ings you no­tice above ev­ery­thing else a strain­ing for spec­tac­ular and bizarre ef­fects. It is the nov­el that catch­es at­ten­tion; and it some­times seems to me that those who know the least about the ed­uca­tion­al sit­ua­tion in the way of di­rect con­tact of­ten re­ceive the largest share of at­ten­tion and have the largest in­flu­ence.

It is in the at­ti­tude of the pub­lic and of a cer­tain pro­por­tion of school men to­ward el­emen­tary teach­ing and the el­emen­tary teach­er that this de­struc­tive crit­icism finds its most pro­nounced ex­pres­sion. Through­out the length and breadth of the land, the ef­fi­cien­cy of the pub­lic school and the sin­cer­ity and in­tel­li­gence of those who are giv­ing their lives to its work are be­ing called in­to ques­tion. It is dis­cour­ag­ing to think that years of ser­vice in a call­ing do not qual­ify one to speak au­thor­ita­tive­ly up­on the prob­lems of that call­ing, and es­pe­cial­ly up­on tech­nique. And yet it is pre­cise­ly up­on that point of tech­nique that the crit­icisms of el­emen­tary ed­uca­tion are most dras­tic.

Our ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem is some­times brand­ed as a fail­ure, and yet this same ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem with all its weak­ness­es has ac­com­plished the task of as­sim­ilat­ing to Amer­ican in­sti­tu­tions and ide­als and stan­dards the most het­ero­ge­neous in­fu­sion of alien stocks that ev­er went to the mak­ing of a unit­ed peo­ple. The el­emen­tary teach­er is crit­icized for all the sins of omis­sion that the cal­en­dar enu­mer­ates, and yet this same el­emen­tary teach­er is dai­ly lift­ing mil­lions of chil­dren to a plane of civ­iliza­tion and cul­ture that no oth­er peo­ple in his­to­ry have even thought pos­si­ble. I am will­ing to ad­mit the de­fi­cien­cies of Amer­ican ed­uca­tion, but I al­so main­tain that the teach­ers of our low­er schools do not de­serve the op­pro­bri­um that has been heaped up­on them. I be­lieve that in ed­uca­tion, as in busi­ness, it would be a good thing if we saw more of the dough­nut and less of the hole. When I hear a promi­nent ed­uca­tor say that we must dis­card ev­ery­thing that we have pro­duced thus far and be­gin anew in the realm of ed­uca­tion­al ma­te­ri­als and meth­ods, I con­fess that I am dis­cour­aged, es­pe­cial­ly when that same au­thor­ity is ex­treme­ly ob­scure as to the ma­te­ri­als and meth­ods that we should sub­sti­tute for those that we are now em­ploy­ing. I heard that state­ment at a re­cent meet­ing of the De­part­ment of Su­per­in­ten­dence, and I heard oth­er things of like tenor,--for ex­am­ple, that nor­mal schools were per­pet­uat­ing types of skill in teach­ing that were un­wor­thy of per­pet­ua­tion, that the ob­ser­va­tion of teach­ing was val­ue­less in the train­ing of teach­ers be­cause there was noth­ing that was be­ing done at the present time that was wor­thy of im­ita­tion, that prac­tice teach­ing in the train­ing of young teach­ers is a farce, a delu­sion, and a snare. Those very words were em­ployed by one man of high po­si­tion to ex­press his opin­ion of con­tem­po­rary prac­tices. You can­not pick up an ed­uca­tion­al jour­nal of the bet­ter sort, nor open a new ed­uca­tion­al book, with­out be­ing brought face to face with this de­struc­tive crit­icism.

I protest against this, not on­ly in the name of jus­tice, but in the name of com­mon sense. It can­not be pos­si­ble that gen­er­ations of deal­ing with im­ma­ture minds should have left no residu­um of ef­fec­tive prac­tice. The very prin­ci­ple of progress by tri­al and er­ror will in­evitably mean that cer­tain prac­tices that are pos­si­ble and help­ful and ef­fec­tive are per­pet­uat­ed, and that cer­tain oth­er pro­cess­es that are in­ef­fec­tive and waste­ful are elim­inat­ed. To re­pu­di­ate all this is the height of fol­ly. If the his­to­ry of progress shows us any­thing, it shows us that progress is not made by re­pu­di­at­ing the lessons of ex­pe­ri­ence. The­ory is the last word, not the first. The­ory should ex­plain: it should take suc­cess­ful prac­tice and find out what prin­ci­ples con­di­tion its ef­fi­cien­cy; and if these prin­ci­ples are in­con­sis­tent with those hereto­fore held, it is the the­ory that should be mod­ified to suit the facts, not the facts to suit the the­ory.

My op­po­nents may point to medicine as a pos­si­ble ex­am­ple of the op­po­site pro­ce­dure. And yet if there is any­thing that the his­to­ry of med­ical sci­ence demon­strates, it is that the first cues to new dis­cov­er­ies were made in the field of prac­tice. Lymph ther­apy, which is one of the tri­umphs of mod­ern medicine, was dis­cov­ered em­pir­ical­ly. It was an ac­ci­dent of prac­tice, a blind pro­ce­dure of tri­al and suc­cess that led to Jen­ner's dis­cov­ery of the virtues of vac­ci­na­tion. A cen­tu­ry passed be­fore the­ory ad­equate­ly ex­plained the phe­nomenon, and opened the way to those wider ap­pli­ca­tions of the prin­ci­ple that have done so much to re­duce the rav­ages of dis­ease.

The val­ue of the­ory, I re­peat, is to ex­plain suc­cess­ful prac­tice and to gen­er­al­ize ex­pe­ri­ence in broad and com­pre­hen­sive prin­ci­ples which can be eas­ily held in mind, and from which in­fer­ences for fur­ther new and ef­fec­tive prac­tices may be de­rived. We have a small body of sound prin­ci­ples in ed­uca­tion to-​day,--a body of prin­ci­ples that are thor­ough­ly con­sis­tent with suc­cess­ful prac­tice. But the sort of prin­ci­ples that are put forth as the last words of ed­uca­tion­al the­ory are of­ten far from sound. Per­son­al­ly I firm­ly be­lieve that a vast amount of dam­age is be­ing done to chil­dren by the ap­pli­ca­tion of fal­la­cious prin­ci­ples which, be­cause they em­anate from high au­thor­ity, ob­tain an ar­ti­fi­cial va­lid­ity in the minds of teach­ers in ser­vice.

I can­not un­der­stand why, when an ed­uca­tion­al ex­per­iment fails lamentably, it is not re­ject­ed as a fail­ure. And yet you and I know a num­ber of in­stances where cer­tain ed­uca­tion­al ex­per­iments that have un­de­ni­ably re­versed the hy­pothe­ses of those who ini­ti­at­ed them are ex­cused on the ground that con­di­tions were not fa­vor­able. That, it seems to me, should tell the whole sto­ry, for pre­cise­ly what we need in ed­uca­tion­al prac­tice is a body of doc­trine that will work where con­di­tions _are_ un­fa­vor­able. We are told that the suc­cess­ful ap­pli­ca­tion of moot­ed the­ories de­pends up­on the prop­er kind of teach­ers. I main­tain that the most ef­fec­tive sort of the­ory is the sort that brings re­sults with such teach­ers as we must em­ploy in our work. It would be a poor rec­om­men­da­tion for a the­ory of medicine to say that it worked all right when peo­ple are healthy but failed to help the sick. Nor is it true that good teach­ers can get good re­sults by fol­low­ing bad the­ory. They of­ten ob­tain the re­sults by evad­ing the the­ory, and when they live up to it, the re­sults faith­ful­ly re­flect the the­ory, no mat­ter how skill­ful the teach­ing.

II

State­ments like these are very apt to be mis­con­strued or mis­in­ter­pret­ed un­less one is very care­ful to de­fine one's po­si­tion; and, af­ter what I have said, I should do my­self an in­jus­tice if I did not make cer­tain that my po­si­tion is clear. I be­lieve in ex­per­imen­ta­tion in ed­uca­tion. I be­lieve in ex­per­imen­tal schools. But I should wish these schools to be in­ter­pret­ed as ex­per­iments and not as mod­els, and I should wish that the fail­ure of an ex­per­iment be ac­cept­ed with good, sci­en­tif­ic grace, and not with the un­sci­en­tif­ic at­ti­tude of mak­ing ex­cus­es. The trou­ble with an ex­per­imen­tal school is that, in the eyes of the great mass of teach­ers, it be­comes a mod­el school, and the prin­ci­ples that it rep­re­sents are ap­plied _ad li­bi­tum_ by thou­sands of teach­ers who as­sume that they have heard the last word in ed­uca­tion­al the­ory.

No one is more fa­vor­ably dis­posed to­ward the rights of chil­dren than I am, and yet I am thor­ough­ly con­vinced that soft-​heart­ed­ness ac­com­pa­nied by soft-​head­ed­ness is weak­en­ing the men­tal and moral fiber of hun­dreds of thou­sands of boys and girls through­out this coun­try. No one ad­mires more than I ad­mire the sagac­ity and far-​sight­ed­ness of Judge Lind­sey, and yet when Judge Lind­sey's meth­ods are pro­posed as mod­els for school gov­ern­ment, I can­not lose sight, as so many peo­ple seem to lose sight, of the con­tin­gent fac­tor; name­ly, that Judge Lind­sey's le­nien­cy is based up­on au­thor­ity, and that if Judge Lind­sey or any­body else at­tempt­ed to be le­nient when he had no pow­er to be oth­er­wise than le­nient, his “bluff” would be called in short or­der. If you will give to teach­ers and prin­ci­pals the same pow­er that you give to the po­lice judge, you may well ex­pect them to be le­nient. The great trou­ble in the school is sim­ply this: that just in the pro­por­tion that le­nien­cy is de­mand­ed, au­thor­ity is tak­en away from the teach­er.

And I should per­haps say a qual­ify­ing word with re­gard to my at­ti­tude to­ward ed­uca­tion­al the­ory. I have ev­ery feel­ing of af­fec­tion for the sci­ence of psy­chol­ogy. I have ev­ery faith in the val­ue of psy­cho­log­ical prin­ci­ples in the in­ter­pre­ta­tion of ed­uca­tion­al phe­nom­ena. But I al­so rec­og­nize that the sci­ence of psy­chol­ogy is a very young sci­ence, and that its da­ta are not yet so well or­ga­nized that it is safe to draw from them any­thing more than ten­ta­tive hy­pothe­ses which must meet their fi­nal test in the cru­cible of prac­tice. Some day, if we work hard enough, psy­chol­ogy will be­come a pre­dic­tive sci­ence, just as math­emat­ics and physics and chem­istry and, to a cer­tain ex­tent, bi­ol­ogy, are pre­dic­tive sci­ences to-​day. Mean­time psy­chol­ogy is of in­es­timable val­ue in giv­ing us a point of view, in clar­ify­ing our ideas, and in ra­tio­nal­iz­ing the truths that em­pir­ical prac­tice dis­cov­ers. A very few psy­cho­log­ical prin­ci­ples are strong­ly enough es­tab­lished even now to form the ba­sis of pre­dic­tion. Among the most im­por­tant of these are the laws of habit build­ing, some laws of mem­ory, and the larg­er prin­ci­ples of at­ten­tion. Suc­cess­ful ed­uca­tion­al prac­tice is and must be in ac­cord with these in­dis­putable tenets. But the bane of ed­uca­tion to-​day is in the pseu­do-​sci­ence, the “half-​baked” psy­chol­ogy, that is laud­ed from the house-​tops by un­trained en­thu­si­asts, turned from the press­es by ir­re­spon­si­ble pub­lish­ing hous­es, and foist­ed up­on the hun­gry teach­ing pub­lic through the ev­er-​present medi­um of the read­ing cir­cle, the teach­ers' in­sti­tute, the sum­mer school, and I am very sor­ry to ad­mit (for I think that I rep­re­sent both in­sti­tu­tions in a way) some­times by the nor­mal schools and uni­ver­si­ties.

Most of the doc­trines that are turn­ing our prac­tice top­sy-​turvy have ab­so­lute­ly no sup­port from com­pe­tent psy­chol­ogists. The doc­trine of spon­tane­ity and its at­ten­dant _lais­sez-​faire_ dog­ma of school gov­ern­ment is thor­ough­ly in­con­sis­tent with good psy­chol­ogy. The rad­ical ex­treme to which some ed­uca­tors would push the doc­trine of in­ter­est when they main­tain that the child should nev­er be asked to do any­thing for which he fails to find a need in his own life,--this doc­trine can find no sup­port in good psy­chol­ogy. The doc­trine that the pread­oles­cent child should un­der­stand thor­ough­ly ev­ery pro­cess that he is ex­pect­ed to re­duce to habit be­fore that pro­cess is made au­to­mat­ic is ut­ter­ly at vari­ance with long-​es­tab­lished prin­ci­ples which were well un­der­stood by the Greeks and the He­brews twen­ty-​five hun­dred years ago, and to which Moth­er Na­ture her­self gives the lie in the in­stincts of im­ita­tion and rep­eti­tion. It is con­ceiv­able that these rad­ical doc­trines were jus­ti­fied as means of re­form, es­pe­cial­ly in sec­ondary and high­er ed­uca­tion, but, even grant­ing this, their func­tion is ful­filled when the re­form that they ex­ploit­ed has been ac­com­plished. That time has come and, as pal­pa­ble un­truths, they should ei­ther be mod­ified to meet the facts, or be rel­egat­ed to obliv­ion.

III

It is safe to say that for­mal­ism is no longer a char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­ture of the typ­ical Amer­ican school. It is so long since I have heard any rote learn­ing in a school­room that I am won­der­ing if it is not al­most time for some one to show that a lit­tle rote learn­ing would not be at all a bad thing in pread­oles­cent ed­uca­tion. We ridicule the mem­orit­er meth­ods of Chi­nese ed­uca­tion and yet we some­times for­get that Chi­nese ed­uca­tion has done some­thing that no oth­er sys­tem of ed­uca­tion, how­ev­er well planned, has even be­gun to do in the same de­gree. It has kept the Chi­nese em­pire a unit through a pe­ri­od of time com­pared with which the en­tire his­to­ry of Greece and Rome is but an episode. We may ridicule the for­mal­ism of He­brew ed­uca­tion, and yet the schools of rab­bis have pre­served in­tact the racial in­tegri­ty of the Jew­ish peo­ple dur­ing the two thou­sand years that have elapsed since their ge­ograph­ical uni­ty was de­stroyed. I am not jus­ti­fy­ing the meth­ods of Chi­nese or He­brew ed­uca­tion. I am quite will­ing to ad­mit that, in Chi­na at any rate, the game may not have been worth the can­dle; but I am still far from con­vinced that it is not a good thing for chil­dren to re­duce to ver­bal form a good many things that are now nev­er learned in such a way as to make any last­ing im­pres­sion up­on the mem­ory; and our crit­icism of ori­en­tal for­mal­ism is not so much con­cerned with the method of learn­ing as with the con­tent of learn­ing,--not so much with learn­ing by heart as with the char­ac­ter of the ma­te­ri­al that was thus mem­orized.

But, al­though for­mal­ism is no longer a dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of Amer­ican ed­uca­tion, for­mal­ism is the point from which ed­uca­tion is most fre­quent­ly at­tacked,--and this is the chief source of my dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the present-​day crit­ics of our el­emen­tary schools. In a great many cas­es, they have set up a man of straw and de­mol­ished him com­plete­ly. And in de­mol­ish­ing him, they have in­ci­den­tal­ly knocked the props from un­der the feet of many a good teach­er, leav­ing him dazed and un­cer­tain of his bear­ings, stung with the con­vic­tion that what he has been do­ing for his pupils is en­tire­ly with­out val­ue, that his life of ser­vice has been a fail­ure, that the lessons of his own ex­pe­ri­ence are not to be trust­ed, nor the ver­dicts of his own in­tel­li­gence re­spect­ed. Go to any of the great sum­mer schools and you will meet, among the at­tend­ing teach­ers, hun­dreds of faith­ful, con­sci­en­tious men and wom­en who could tell you if they would (and some of them will) of the mud­dle in which their minds are left af­ter some of the lec­tures to which they have lis­tened. Why should they fail to be de­pressed? The whole weight of aca­dem­ic au­thor­ity seems to be against them. The en­tire ma­chin­ery of ed­uca­tion­al ad­min­is­tra­tion is wheel­ing them with re­lent­less force in­to paths that seem to them hope­less­ly in­tri­cate and be­wil­der­ing. If it is true, as I think it is, that some of the pro­pos­als of mod­ern ed­uca­tion are an at­tempt to square the cir­cle, it is cer­tain­ly true that the class­room teach­er is stand­ing at the pres­sure points in this pro­ce­dure.

We hear ex­pressed on ev­ery side a great deal of sym­pa­thy for the child as the vic­tim of our ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem. Sym­pa­thy for child­hood is the most nat­ural thing in the world. It is one of the ba­sic hu­man in­stincts, and its ex­pres­sions are among the finest things in hu­man life. But why lim­it our sym­pa­thy to the child, es­pe­cial­ly to-​day when he is about as hap­py and as for­tu­nate an in­di­vid­ual as any­body has ev­er been in all his­to­ry. Why not let a lit­tle of it go out to the teach­er of this child? Why not plan a lit­tle for her com­fort and wel­fare and en­cour­age­ment? It is her skill that is as­sim­ilat­ing the chil­dren of our alien pop­ula­tion. It is her strength that is lift­ing bod­ily each gen­er­ation to the ev­er-​ad­vanc­ing race lev­els. Her work must be the main source of the in­spi­ra­tion that will im­pel the race to fur­ther ad­vance­ment. And yet when these half-​mil­lion teach­ers who mean so much to this coun­try gath­er at their in­sti­tutes, when they at­tend the sum­mer schools, when they take up their pro­fes­sion­al jour­nals, what do they hear and read? Crit­icisms of their work. De­nun­ci­ations of their meth­ods. Se­ri­ous doubts of their in­tel­li­gence. As­per­sions cast up­on their sin­cer­ity, their pa­tience, and their loy­al­ty to their su­pe­ri­ors. This, min­gled with some mawk­ish sen­ti­men­tal­ism that pass­es un­der the name of in­spi­ra­tion. On­ly oc­ca­sion­al­ly a word of down­right com­men­da­tion, a sign of hon­est and heart­felt ap­pre­ci­ation, a note of sym­pa­thy or en­cour­age­ment.

Carnegie gives fif­teen mil­lion dol­lars to pro­vide pen­sions for su­per­an­nu­at­ed col­lege pro­fes­sors; but the el­emen­tary teach­er who is not for­tu­nate enough to die in har­ness must look for­ward to the almshouse. The peo­ple tax them­selves for mag­nif­icent build­ings and lux­uri­ous fur­nish­ings, but not one cent do they of­fer for teach­ers' pen­sions. What a blot up­on West­ern civ­iliza­tion is this treat­ment of the teach­ers in our low­er schools. These peo­ple are do­ing the work that even the sav­age races uni­ver­sal­ly con­sid­er to be of the high­est type. Be­night­ed Chi­na places her teach­ers sec­ond on­ly to the literati them­selves in the place of hon­or. The Hin­dus made the teach­ing pro­fes­sion the high­est caste in the so­cial scale. The Jews in­trust­ed the ed­uca­tion of their chil­dren to their Rab­bis, the most learned and the most hon­ored of their race. It is on­ly West­ern civ­iliza­tion--it is al­most on­ly our much-​laud­ed An­glo-​Sax­on civ­iliza­tion--that de­nies to the teach­er a sta­tion in life be­fit­ting his im­por­tance as a so­cial ser­vant.

IV

But what has all this to do with school su­per­vi­sion? As I view it, the su­per­vi­sor of schools as the over­seer and di­rec­tor of the ed­uca­tion­al pro­cess, is just now con­front­ed with two great prob­lems. The first of these is to keep a clear head in the present mud­dled con­di­tion of ed­uca­tion­al the­ory. From the very fact of his po­si­tion, the su­per­vi­sor must be a lead­er, whether he will or not. It is a max­im of our pro­fes­sion that the prin­ci­pal is the school. In our city sys­tems the su­per­vis­ing prin­ci­pal is giv­en al­most ab­so­lute au­thor­ity over the school of which he has charge. In him is vest­ed the ul­ti­mate re­spon­si­bil­ity for in­struc­tion, for dis­ci­pline, for the care and con­di­tion of the ma­te­ri­al prop­er­ty. He may be a despot if he wish­es, benev­olent or oth­er­wise. With this pow­er goes a cor­re­spond­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty. His school can stand for some­thing,--per­haps for some­thing new and strange which will bring him in­to the lime­light to-​day, no mat­ter what its char­ac­ter; per­haps for some­thing sol­id and en­dur­ing, some­thing that will last long af­ter his own name has been for­got­ten. The temp­ta­tion was nev­er so strong as it is to-​day for the su­per­vi­sor to seek the for­mer kind of glo­ry. The need was nev­er more acute than it is to-​day for the su­per­vi­sor who is con­tent with the im­per­son­al glo­ry of the lat­ter type.

I ad­mit that it is a some­what thank­less task to do things in a straight­for­ward, ef­fec­tive way, with­out fuss or feath­ers, and I sup­pose that the ap­plause of the gallery may be eas­ily mis­tak­en for the ap­plause of the pit. But nev­er­the­less the seek­er for no­to­ri­ety is do­ing the cause of ed­uca­tion a vast amount of harm. I know a prin­ci­pal who won ephemer­al fame by in­tro­duc­ing in­to his school a form of the Japanese jiu-​jit­su phys­ical ex­er­cis­es. When I vis­it­ed that school, I was led to be­lieve that jiu-​jit­su would be the sal­va­tion of the Amer­ican peo­ple. Whole class­es of girls and boys were marched to the large base­ment to be put through their paces for the delec­ta­tion of vis­itors. The news­pa­pers took it up and her­ald­ed it as an­oth­er in­di­ca­tion that the for­mal­ism of the pub­lic school was grad­ual­ly break­ing down. Vis­itors came by the hun­dreds, and my friend basked in the lime­light of pub­lic adu­la­tion while his col­leagues turned green with en­vy and set them­selves to de­vis­ing some means for turn­ing at­ten­tion in their di­rec­tion.

And yet, there are some prin­ci­pals who move on in the even tenor of their ways, year af­ter year, while all these cur­rents and coun­ter­cur­rents are seething and ed­dy­ing around them. They hold fast to that which they know is good un­til that which they know is bet­ter can be found. They be­lieve in the things that they do, so the chances are great­ly in­creased that they will do them well. They refuse to be bul­lied or sneered at or laughed out of court be­cause they do not take up with ev­ery fan­cy that catch­es the pop­ular mind. They have their own pro­fes­sion­al stan­dards as to what con­sti­tutes com­pe­tent school­man­ship,--their own stan­dards gained from their own spe­cial­ized ex­pe­ri­ence. And some­how I can­not help think­ing that just now that is the type of su­per­vi­sor that we need and the type that ought to be en­cour­aged. If I were talk­ing to Chi­nese teach­ers, I might preach an­oth­er sort of gospel, but Amer­ican ed­uca­tion to-​day needs less tur­moil, less dis­trac­tion, few­er sweep­ing changes. It needs to set­tle it­self, and look around, and find out where it is and what it is try­ing to do. And it needs, above all, to rise to a con­scious­ness of it­self as an in­sti­tu­tion manned by in­tel­li­gent in­di­vid­uals who are per­fect­ly com­pe­tent them­selves to set up craft stan­dard and ide­als.

IV [Tran­scriber's note: This is a ty­po­graph­ical er­ror in the orig­inal, and should read “V”]

But in what­ev­er way the su­per­vi­sor may uti­lize the op­por­tu­ni­ty that his po­si­tion presents, his sec­ond great prob­lem will come up for so­lu­tion. The su­per­vi­sor is the cap­tain of the teach­ing corps. Di­rect­ly un­der his con­trol are the main­springs of the school's life and ac­tiv­ity,--the class­room teach­ers. It is com­ing to be a max­im in the city sys­tems that the su­per­vi­sor has not on­ly the pow­er to mold the school to the form of his own ide­als, but that he can, if he is skill­ful, turn weak teach­ers in­to strong teach­ers and make out of most un­promis­ing ma­te­ri­al, an ef­fi­cient, ho­mo­ge­neous school staff. I be­lieve that this is com­ing to be con­sid­ered the prime cri­te­ri­on of ef­fec­tive school su­per­vi­sion,--not what skill the su­per­vi­sor may show in test­ing re­sults, or in keep­ing his pupils up to a giv­en stan­dard, or in choos­ing his teach­ers skill­ful­ly, but rather the suc­cess with which he is able to take the teach­ing ma­te­ri­al that is at his hand, and train it in­to ef­fi­cien­cy.

A for­mer Com­mis­sion­er of Ed­uca­tion for one of our new in­su­lar pos­ses­sions once told me that he had come to di­vide su­per­vi­sors in­to two class­es,--(1) those who knew good teach­ing when they saw it, and (2) those who could make poor teach­ers in­to good teach­ers. Of these two types, he said, the lat­ter were in­finite­ly more valu­able to pi­oneer work in ed­uca­tion than the for­mer, and he named two or three city sys­tems from which he had se­lect­ed the su­per­vi­sors who could do this sort of thing,--for there is no lim­it to this pro­cess of train­ing, and the su­per­in­ten­dent who can train su­per­vi­sors is just as im­por­tant as the su­per­vi­sor who can train teach­ers.

It would take a vol­ume ad­equate­ly to treat the var­ious prob­lems that this con­cep­tion of the su­per­vi­sor's func­tion in­volves. I can do no more at present than in­di­cate what seems to me the most press­ing present need in this di­rec­tion. I have found that some­times the su­per­vi­sors who in­sist most stren­uous­ly that their teach­ers se­cure the coöper­ation of their pupils are among the very last to se­cure for them­selves the coöper­ation of their teach­ers.

And to this im­por­tant end, it seems to me that we have an im­por­tant sug­ges­tion in the present con­di­tion of the class­room teach­er as I have at­tempt­ed to de­scribe it. As a type, the class­room teach­er needs just now some ad­equate ap­pre­ci­ation and recog­ni­tion of the work that she is do­ing. If the lay pub­lic is un­able ad­equate­ly to judge the teach­er's work, there is all the more rea­son that she should look to her su­per­vi­sor for that recog­ni­tion of tech­ni­cal skill, for that com­men­da­tion of good work, which can come on­ly from a fel­low-​crafts­man, but which, when it does come, is worth more in the way of re­al in­spi­ra­tion than the loud­est ap­plause of the crowd.

Up­on the whole, I be­lieve that the out­look in this di­rec­tion is en­cour­ag­ing. While the teach­er may miss in her in­sti­tutes and in the sum­mer school that sort of en­cour­age­ment, she is, I be­lieve, find­ing it in larg­er and larg­er mea­sure in the lo­cal teach­ers' meet­ings and in her con­sul­ta­tions with her su­per­vi­sors. And when all has been said, that is the place from which she should look for in­spi­ra­tion. The teach­ers' meet­ing must be the nurs­ery of pro­fes­sion­al ide­als. It must be a place where the re­al first-​hand work­ers in ed­uca­tion get that san­ity of out­look, that pro­fes­sion­al point of view, which shall for­ti­fy them ef­fec­tive­ly against the ris­ing tide of un­pro­fes­sion­al in­ter­fer­ence and dic­ta­tion which, as I have tried to in­di­cate, con­sti­tutes the most se­ri­ous men­ace to our ed­uca­tion­al wel­fare.

And it is in the en­cour­age­ment of this craft spir­it, in this lift­ing of the teach­er's call­ing to the plane of craft con­scious­ness, it is in this that the su­per­vi­sor must, I be­lieve, find the true and last­ing re­ward for his work. It is through this fac­tor that he can, just now, work the great­est good for the schools that he su­per­vis­es and the com­mu­ni­ty that he serves. The most ef­fec­tive way to reach his pupils is through the medi­um of their teach­ers, and he can help these pupils in no bet­ter way than to give their teach­ers a jus­ti­fi­able pride in the work that they are do­ing through his own recog­ni­tion of its worth and its val­ue, through his own re­spect for the sig­nif­icance of the lessons that ex­pe­ri­ence teach­es them, through his own sug­ges­tive help in mak­ing that ex­pe­ri­ence prof­itable and sug­ges­tive. And just at the present mo­ment, he can make no bet­ter start than by as­sur­ing them of the truth that Emer­son ex­press­es when he de­fines the true schol­ar as the man who re­mains firm in his be­lief that a pop­gun is on­ly a pop­gun al­though the an­cient and hon­ored of earth may solemn­ly af­firm it to be the crack of doom.

~VI~

ED­UCA­TION AND UTIL­ITY[11]

I

I wish to dis­cuss with you some phas­es of the prob­lem that is per­haps fore­most in the minds of the teach­ing pub­lic to-​day: the prob­lem, name­ly, of mak­ing ed­uca­tion bear more di­rect­ly and more ef­fec­tive­ly up­on the work of prac­ti­cal, ev­ery­day life. I have no doubt that some of you feel, when this prob­lem is sug­gest­ed, very much as I felt when I first sug­gest­ed to my­self the pos­si­bil­ity of dis­cussing it with you. You have doubt­less heard some phas­es of this prob­lem dis­cussed at ev­ery meet­ing of this as­so­ci­ation for the past ten years--if you have been a mem­ber so long as that. Cer­tain it is that we all grow weary of the re­it­er­ation of even the best of truths, but cer­tain it is al­so that some prob­lems are al­ways be­fore us, and un­til they are solved sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly they will al­ways stim­ulate men to de­vise means for their so­lu­tion.

I should say at the out­set, how­ev­er, that I shall not at­tempt to jus­ti­fy to this au­di­ence the in­tro­duc­tion of vo­ca­tion­al sub­jects in­to the el­emen­tary and sec­ondary cur­ricu­lums. I shall take it for grant­ed that you have al­ready made up your minds up­on this mat­ter. I shall not take your time in an at­tempt to per­suade you that agri­cul­ture ought to be taught in the ru­ral schools, or man­ual train­ing and do­mes­tic sci­ence in all schools. I am per­son­al­ly con­vinced of the val­ue of such work and I shall take it for grant­ed that you are like­wise con­vinced.

My task to-​day, then, is of an­oth­er type. I wish to dis­cuss with you some of the im­pli­ca­tions of this mat­ter of util­ity in re­spect of the work that ev­ery el­emen­tary school is do­ing and al­ways must do, no mat­ter how much hand work or vo­ca­tion­al ma­te­ri­al it may in­tro­duce. My prob­lem, in oth­er words, con­cerns the or­di­nary sub­ject-​mat­ter of the cur­ricu­lum,--read­ing and writ­ing and arith­metic, ge­og­ra­phy and gram­mar and his­to­ry,--those things which, like the poor, are al­ways with us, but which we seem a lit­tle ashamed to talk about in pub­lic. Tru­ly, from read­ing the ed­uca­tion­al jour­nals and hear­ing ed­uca­tion­al dis­cus­sion to-​day, the lay­man might well in­fer that what we term the “use­ful” ed­uca­tion and the ed­uca­tion that is now of­fered by the av­er­age school are as far apart as the two poles. We are all fa­mil­iar with the state­ment that the el­emen­tary cur­ricu­lum is em­inent­ly adapt­ed to pro­duce clerks and ac­coun­tants, but very poor­ly adapt­ed to fur­nish re­cruits for any oth­er de­part­ment of life. The high school is crit­icized on the ground that it pre­pares for col­lege and con­se­quent­ly for the pro­fes­sions, but that it is to­tal­ly in­ad­equate to the needs of the av­er­age cit­izen. Now it would be fu­tile to de­ny that there is some truth in both these as­ser­tions, but I do not hes­itate to af­firm that both are gross­ly ex­ag­ger­at­ed, and that the cur­ricu­lum of to-​day, with all its im­per­fec­tions, does not jus­ti­fy so sweep­ing a de­nun­ci­ation. I wish to point out some of the re­spects in which these charges are fal­la­cious, and, in so do­ing, per­haps, to sug­gest some pos­si­ble reme­dies for the de­fects that ev­ery one will ac­knowl­edge.

II

In the first place, let me make my­self per­fect­ly clear up­on what I mean by the word “use­ful.” What, af­ter all, is the “use­ful” study in our schools? What do men find to be the use­ful thing in their lives? The most nat­ural an­swer to this ques­tion is that the use­ful things are those that en­able us to meet ef­fec­tive­ly the con­di­tions of life,--or, to use a phrase that is per­fect­ly clear to us all, the things that help us in get­ting a liv­ing. The vast ma­jor­ity of men and wom­en in this world mea­sure all val­ues by this stan­dard, for most of us are, to use the ex­pres­sive slang of the day, “up against” this prob­lem, and “up against” it so hard and so con­stant­ly that we in­ter­pret ev­ery­thing in the great­ly fore­short­ened per­spec­tive of im­me­di­ate ne­ces­si­ty. Most of us in this room are con­fronting this prob­lem of mak­ing a liv­ing. At any rate, I am con­fronting it, and con­se­quent­ly I may lay claim to some of the au­thor­ity that comes from ex­pe­ri­ence.

And since I have made this per­son­al ref­er­ence, may I vi­olate the canons of good taste and make still an­oth­er? I was face to face with this prob­lem of get­ting a liv­ing a good many years ago, when the op­por­tu­ni­ty came to me to take a col­lege course. I could see noth­ing ahead af­ter that ex­cept an­oth­er strug­gle with this same vi­tal is­sue. So I de­cid­ed to take a col­lege course which would, in all prob­abil­ity, help me to solve the prob­lem. Sci­en­tif­ic agri­cul­ture was not de­vel­oped in those days as it has been since that time, but a start had been made, and the var­ious agri­cul­tur­al col­leges were of­fer­ing what seemed to be very prac­ti­cal cours­es. I had had some ear­ly ex­pe­ri­ence on the farm, and I de­cid­ed to be­come a sci­en­tif­ic farmer. I took the course of four years and se­cured my de­gree. The course was as use­ful from the stand­point of prac­ti­cal agri­cul­ture as any that could have been de­vised at the time. But when I grad­uat­ed, what did I find? The same old prob­lem of get­ting a liv­ing still con­front­ed me as I had ex­pect­ed that it would; and alas! I had got my ed­uca­tion in a pro­fes­sion that de­mand­ed cap­ital. I was a land­less farmer. Times were hard and work of all kinds was very scarce. The farm­ers of those days were in­clined to scoff at sci­en­tif­ic agri­cul­ture. I could have worked for my board and a lit­tle more, and I should have done so had I been able to find a job. But while I was look­ing for the place, a chance came to teach school, and I took the op­por­tu­ni­ty as a means of keep­ing the wolf from the door. I have been en­gaged in the work of teach­ing ev­er since. When I was able to buy land, I did so, and I have to-​day a farm of which I am very proud. It does not pay large div­idends, but I keep it up for the fun I get out of it,--and I like to think, al­so, that if I should lose my job as a teach­er, I could go back to the farm and show the na­tives how to make mon­ey. This is doubt­less an il­lu­sion, but it is a source of sol­id com­fort just the same.

Now the point of this ex­pe­ri­ence is sim­ply this: I se­cured an ed­uca­tion that seemed to me to promise the acme of util­ity. In one way, it has ful­filled that promise far be­yond my wildest ex­pec­ta­tions, but that way was very dif­fer­ent from the one that I had an­tic­ipat­ed. The tech­ni­cal knowl­edge that I gained dur­ing those four stren­uous years, I ap­ply now on­ly as a means of recre­ation. So far as en­abling me di­rect­ly to get a liv­ing, this tech­ni­cal knowl­edge does not pay one per cent on the in­vest­ment of time and mon­ey. And yet I count the train­ing that I got from its mas­tery as, per­haps, the most use­ful prod­uct of my ed­uca­tion.

Now what was the se­cret of its util­ity? As I an­alyze my ex­pe­ri­ence, I find it summed up very large­ly in two fac­tors. In the first place, I stud­ied a set of sub­jects for which I had at the out­set very lit­tle taste. In study­ing agri­cul­ture, I had to mas­ter a cer­tain amount of chem­istry, physics, botany, and zoöl­ogy, for each and ev­ery one of which I felt, at the out­set, a dis­tinct aver­sion and dis­like. A mas­tery of these sub­jects was es­sen­tial to a re­al­iza­tion of the pur­pose that I had in mind. I was sure that I should nev­er like them, and yet, as I kept at work, I grad­ual­ly found my­self los­ing that ini­tial dis­taste. First one and then an­oth­er opened out its vista of truth and rev­ela­tion be­fore me, and al­most be­fore I was aware of it, I was en­thu­si­as­tic over sci­ence. It was a long time be­fore I gen­er­al­ized that ex­pe­ri­ence and drew its les­son, but the les­son, once learned, has helped me more even in the spe­cif­ic task of get­ting a liv­ing than any­thing else that came out of my school train­ing. That ex­pe­ri­ence taught me, not on­ly the ne­ces­si­ty for do­ing dis­agree­able tasks,--for at­tack­ing them hope­ful­ly and cheer­ful­ly,--but it al­so taught me that dis­agree­able tasks, if at­tacked in the right way, and per­sist­ed in with pa­tience, of­ten be­come at­trac­tive in them­selves. Over and over again in meet­ing the sit­ua­tions of re­al life, I have been con­front­ed with tasks that were ini­tial­ly dis­taste­ful. Some­times I have sur­ren­dered be­fore them; but some­times, too, that les­son has come back to me, and has in­spired me to strug­gle on, and at no time has it dis­ap­point­ed me by the out­come. I re­peat that there is no tech­ni­cal knowl­edge that I have gained that com­pares for a mo­ment with that ide­al of pa­tience and per­sis­tence. When it comes to re­al, down­right util­ity, mea­sured by this in­ex­orable stan­dard of get­ting a liv­ing, let me com­mend to you the ide­al of per­sis­tent ef­fort. All the knowl­edge that we can learn or teach will come to very lit­tle if this el­ement is lack­ing.

Now this is very far from say­ing that the pur­suit of re­al­ly use­ful knowl­edge may not give this ide­al just as ef­fec­tive­ly as the pur­suit of knowl­edge that will nev­er be used. My point is sim­ply this: that be­yond the im­me­di­ate util­ity of the facts that we teach,--in­deed, ba­sic and fun­da­men­tal to this util­ity,--is the util­ity of the ide­als and stan­dards that are de­rived from our school work. What­ev­er we teach, these es­sen­tial fac­tors can be made to stand out in our work, and if our pupils ac­quire these we shall have done the ba­sic and im­por­tant thing in help­ing them to solve the prob­lems of re­al life,--and if our pupils do not ac­quire these, it will make lit­tle dif­fer­ence how in­trin­si­cal­ly valu­able may be the con­tent of our in­struc­tion. I feel like em­pha­siz­ing this mat­ter to-​day, be­cause there is in the air a no­tion that util­ity de­pends en­tire­ly up­on the con­tent of the cur­ricu­lum. Cer­tain­ly the cur­ricu­lum must be im­proved from this stand­point, but we are just now los­ing sight of the oth­er equal­ly im­por­tant fac­tor,--that, af­ter all, while both are es­sen­tial, it is the spir­it of teach­ing rather than the con­tent of teach­ing that is ba­sic and fun­da­men­tal.

Nor have I much sym­pa­thy with that ex­treme view of this mat­ter which as­serts that we must go out of our way to pro­vide dis­taste­ful tasks for the pupil in or­der to de­vel­op this ide­al of per­sis­tence. I be­lieve that such a pol­icy will al­ways tend to de­feat its own pur­pose. I know a teach­er who holds this be­lief. He goes out of his way to make tasks dif­fi­cult. He re­fus­es to help pupils over hard places. He does not be­lieve in care­ful as­sign­ments of lessons, be­cause, he main­tains, the pupil ought to learn to over­come dif­fi­cul­ties for him­self, and how can he learn un­less re­al dif­fi­cul­ties are pre­sent­ed?

The great trou­ble with this teach­er is that his pol­icy does not work out in prac­tice. A small mi­nor­ity of his pupils are strength­ened by it; the ma­jor­ity are weak­ened. He is right when he says that a pupil gains strength on­ly by over­com­ing dif­fi­cul­ties, but he ne­glects a very im­por­tant qual­ifi­ca­tion of this rule, name­ly, that a pupil gains no strength out of ob­sta­cles that he fails to over­come. It is the con­quest that comes af­ter ef­fort,--this is the fac­tor that gives one strength and con­fi­dence. But when de­feat fol­lows de­feat and fail­ure fol­lows fail­ure, it is weak­ness that is be­ing en­gen­dered--not strength. And that is the trou­ble with this teach­er's pupils. The ma­jor­ity leave him with all con­fi­dence in their own abil­ity shak­en out of them and some of them nev­er re­cov­er from the ex­pe­ri­ence.

And so while I in­sist stren­uous­ly that the most use­ful les­son we can teach our pupils is how to do dis­agree­able tasks cheer­ful­ly and will­ing­ly, please do not un­der­stand me to mean that we should go out of our way to pro­vide dis­agree­able tasks. Af­ter all, I re­joice that my own chil­dren are learn­ing how to read and write and ci­pher much more eas­ily, much more quick­ly, and with­al much more pleas­ant­ly than I learned those use­ful arts. The more quick­ly they get to the plane that their el­ders have reached, the more quick­ly they can get be­yond this plane and on to the next lev­el.

To ar­gue against im­proved meth­ods in teach­ing on the ground that they make things too easy for the pupil is, to my mind, a grievous er­ror. It is as fal­la­cious as to ar­gue that the in­tro­duc­tion of ma­chin­ery is a curse be­cause it has di­min­ished in some mea­sure the ne­ces­si­ty for hu­man drudgery. But if ma­chin­ery left mankind to rest up­on its oars, if it dis­cour­aged fur­ther progress and fur­ther ef­fort­ful achieve­ment, it _would_ be a curse: and if the eas­ier and quick­er meth­ods of in­struc­tion sim­ply bring my chil­dren to my own lev­el and then fail to stim­ulate them to get be­yond my lev­el, then they are a curse and not a bless­ing.

I do not de­cry that ed­uca­tion­al pol­icy of to-​day which in­sists that school work should be made as sim­ple and at­trac­tive as pos­si­ble. I do de­cry that mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of this pol­icy which looks at the mat­ter from the oth­er side, and as­serts so ve­he­ment­ly that the child should nev­er be asked or urged to do some­thing that is not easy and at­trac­tive. It is on­ly be­cause there is so much in the world to be done that, for the sake of econ­omiz­ing time and strength, we should raise the child as quick­ly and as rapid­ly and as pleas­ant­ly as pos­si­ble to the plane that the race has reached. But among all the lessons of race ex­pe­ri­ence that we must teach him there is none so fun­da­men­tal and im­por­tant as the les­son of achieve­ment it­self,--the supreme les­son wrung from hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence,--the les­son, name­ly, that ev­ery ad­vance that the world has made, ev­ery step that it has tak­en for­ward, ev­ery in­cre­ment that has been added to the sum to­tal of progress has been at­tained at the price of self-​sac­ri­fice and ef­fort and strug­gle,--at the price of do­ing things that one does not want to do. And un­less a man is will­ing to pay that price, he is bound to be the worst kind of a so­cial par­asite, for he is sim­ply liv­ing on the ex­pe­ri­ence of oth­ers, and adding to this cap­ital noth­ing of his own.

It is some­times said that uni­ver­sal ed­uca­tion is es­sen­tial in or­der that the great mass of hu­man­ity may live in greater com­fort and en­joy the lux­uries that in the past have been vouch­safed on­ly to the few. Per­son­al­ly I think that this is all right so far as it goes, but it fails to reach an ul­ti­mate goal. Ma­te­ri­al com­fort is jus­ti­fied on­ly be­cause it en­ables mankind to live more ef­fec­tive­ly on the low­er planes of life and give greater strength and greater en­er­gy to the so­lu­tion of new prob­lems up­on the high­er planes of life. The end of life can nev­er be ad­equate­ly for­mu­lat­ed in terms of com­fort and ease, nor even in terms of cul­ture and in­tel­lec­tu­al en­joy­ment; the end of life is achieve­ment, and no mat­ter how far we go, achieve­ment is pos­si­ble on­ly to those who are will­ing to pay the price. When the race stops in­vest­ing its cap­ital of ex­pe­ri­ence in fur­ther achieve­ment, when it set­tles down to take life eas­ily, it will not take it very long to eat up its cap­ital and re­vert to the plane of the brute.

III

But I am get­ting away, from my text. You will re­mem­ber that I said that the most use­ful thing that we can teach the child is to at­tack stren­uous­ly and res­olute­ly any prob­lem that con­fronts him whether it pleas­es him or not, and I want­ed to be cer­tain that you did not mis­in­ter­pret me to mean that we should, for this rea­son, make our school tasks un­nec­es­sar­ily dif­fi­cult and la­bo­ri­ous. Af­ter all, while our at­ti­tude should al­ways be one of in­ter­est­ing our pupils, their at­ti­tude should al­ways be one of ef­fort­ful at­ten­tion,--of will­ing­ness to do the task that we think it best for them to do. You see it is a sort of a dou­ble-​head­ed pol­icy, and how to car­ry it out is a per­plex­ing prob­lem. Of so much I am cer­tain, how­ev­er, at the out­set: if the pupil takes the at­ti­tude that we are there to in­ter­est and en­ter­tain him, we shall make a sor­ry fi­as­co of the whole mat­ter, and inas­much as this very ten­den­cy is in the air at the present time, I feel jus­ti­fied in at least re­fer­ring to its dan­ger.

Now if this ide­al of per­sis­tent ef­fort is the most use­ful thing that can come out of ed­uca­tion, what is the next most use­ful? Again, as I an­alyze what I ob­tained from my own ed­uca­tion, it seems to me that, next to learn­ing that dis­agree­able tasks are of­ten well worth do­ing, the fac­tor that has helped me most in get­ting a liv­ing has been the method of solv­ing the sit­ua­tions that con­front­ed me. Af­ter all, if we sim­ply have the ide­al of res­olute and ag­gres­sive and per­sis­tent at­tack, we may strug­gle in­def­inite­ly with­out much re­sult. All prob­lems of life in­volve cer­tain com­mon fac­tors. The es­sen­tial dif­fer­ence be­tween the ed­ucat­ed and the un­ed­ucat­ed man, if we grant each an equal mea­sure of pluck, per­sis­tence, and en­durance, lies in the su­pe­ri­or abil­ity of the ed­ucat­ed man to an­alyze his prob­lem ef­fec­tive­ly and to pro­ceed in­tel­li­gent­ly rather than blind­ly to its so­lu­tion. I main­tain that ed­uca­tion should give a man this ide­al of at­tack­ing any prob­lem; fur­ther­more I main­tain that the ed­uca­tion of the present day, in spite of the anath­emas that are hurled against it, is do­ing this in rich­er mea­sure than it has ev­er been done be­fore. But there is no rea­son why we should not do it in still greater mea­sure.

I once knew two men who were in the busi­ness of rais­ing fruit for com­mer­cial pur­pos­es. Each had a large or­chard which he op­er­at­ed ac­cord­ing to con­ven­tion­al meth­ods and which net­ted him a com­fort­able in­come. One of these men was a man of nar­row ed­uca­tion: the oth­er a man of lib­er­al ed­uca­tion, al­though his train­ing had not been di­rect­ed in any way to­ward the prob­lems of hor­ti­cul­ture. The or­chards had borne ex­cep­tion­al­ly well for sev­er­al years, but one sea­son, when the fruit looked es­pe­cial­ly promis­ing, a pe­ri­od of wet, mug­gy weath­er came along just be­fore the pick­ing sea­son, and one morn­ing both these men went out in­to their or­chards, to find the fruit very bad­ly “specked.” Now the con­ven­tion­al thing to do in such cas­es was well known to both men. Each had picked up a good deal of tech­ni­cal in­for­ma­tion about car­ing for fruit, and each did the same thing in meet­ing this sit­ua­tion. He got out his spray­ing out­fit, pre­pared some Bor­deaux mix­ture, and set vig­or­ous­ly at work with his pumps. So far as per­sis­tence and en­ter­prise went, both men stood on an equal foot­ing. But it hap­pened that this was an un­usu­al and not a con­ven­tion­al sit­ua­tion. The spray­ing did not al­le­vi­ate the con­di­tion. The cor­rup­tion spread through the trees like wild­fire, and seemed to thrive on cop­per sul­phate rather than suc­cumb to its cor­ro­sive in­flu­ence.

Now this was where the dif­fer­ence in train­ing showed it­self. The or­chardist who worked by rule of thumb, when he found that his rule did not work, gave up the fight and spent his time sit­ting on his front porch be­moan­ing his luck. The oth­er set dili­gent­ly at work to an­alyze the sit­ua­tion. His ed­uca­tion had not taught him any­thing about the char­ac­ter­is­tics of par­asitic fun­gi, for par­asitic fun­gi were not very well un­der­stood when he was in school. But his ed­uca­tion had left with him a gen­er­al method of pro­ce­dure for just such cas­es, and that method he at once ap­plied. It had taught him how to find the in­for­ma­tion that he need­ed, pro­vid­ed that such in­for­ma­tion was avail­able. It had taught him that hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence is crys­tal­lized in books, and that, when a dis­cov­ery is made in any field of sci­ence,--no mat­ter how spe­cial­ized the field and no mat­ter how triv­ial the find­ing,--the dis­cov­ery is record­ed in print­er's ink and placed at the dis­pos­al of those who have the in­tel­li­gence to find it and ap­ply it. And so he set out to read up on the sub­ject,--to see what oth­er men had learned about this pe­cu­liar kind of ap­ple rot. He ob­tained all that had been writ­ten about it and be­gan to mas­ter it. He told his friend about this ma­te­ri­al and sug­gest­ed that the lat­ter fol­low the same course, but the man of nar­row ed­uca­tion soon found him­self ut­ter­ly at sea in a maze of tech­ni­cal terms. The terms were new to the oth­er too, but he took down his dic­tio­nary and worked them out. He knew how to use in­dices and ta­bles of con­tents and var­ious oth­er de­vices that fa­cil­itate the gath­er­ing of in­for­ma­tion, and while his un­ed­ucat­ed friend was storm­ing over the pedantry of men who use big words, the oth­er was mak­ing rapid progress through the ma­te­ri­al. In a short time he learned ev­ery­thing that had been found out about this spe­cif­ic dis­ease. He learned that its spores are en­cased in a gelati­nous sac which re­sist­ed the en­trance of the chem­icals. He found how the spores were re­pro­duced, how they win­tered, how they ger­mi­nat­ed in the fol­low­ing sea­son; and, al­though he did not save much of his crop that year, he did bet­ter the next. Nor were the ev­idences of his su­pe­ri­or­ity lim­it­ed to this very use­ful re­sult. He found that, af­ter all, very lit­tle was known about this dis­ease, so he set him­self to find out more about it. To do this, he start­ed where oth­er in­ves­ti­ga­tors had left off, and then he ap­plied a prin­ci­ple he had learned from his ed­uca­tion; name­ly, that the on­ly valid meth­ods of ob­tain­ing new truths are the meth­ods of close ob­ser­va­tion and con­trolled ex­per­iment.

Now I main­tain that the ed­uca­tion which was giv­en that man was ef­fec­tive in a de­gree that ought to make his ex­pe­ri­ence an ob­ject les­son for us who teach. What he had found most use­ful at a very crit­ical junc­ture of his busi­ness life was, pri­mar­ily, not the tech­ni­cal knowl­edge that he had gained ei­ther in school or in ac­tu­al ex­pe­ri­ence. His su­pe­ri­or­ity lay in the fact that he knew how to get hold of knowl­edge when he need­ed it, how to mas­ter it once he had ob­tained it, how to ap­ply it once he had mas­tered it, and fi­nal­ly how to go about to dis­cov­er facts that had been un­de­tect­ed by pre­vi­ous in­ves­ti­ga­tors. I care not whether he got this knowl­edge in the el­emen­tary school or in the high school or in the col­lege. He might have se­cured it in any one of the three types of in­sti­tu­tion, but he had to learn it some­where, and I shall go fur­ther and say that the av­er­age man has to learn it in some school and un­der an ex­plic­it and con­scious method of in­struc­tion.

IV

But per­haps you would main­tain that this state­ment of the case, while in gen­er­al true, does not help us out in prac­tice. Af­ter all, how are we to im­press pupils with this ide­al of per­sis­tence and with these ide­als of get­ting and ap­ply­ing in­for­ma­tion, and with this ide­al of in­ves­ti­ga­tion? I main­tain that these im­por­tant use­ful ide­als may be ef­fec­tive­ly im­pressed al­most from the very out­set of school life. The teach­ing of ev­ery sub­ject af­fords in­nu­mer­able op­por­tu­ni­ties to force home their lessons. In fact, it must be a very grad­ual pro­cess--a pro­cess in which the con­crete in­stances are nu­mer­ous and rich and im­pres­sive. From these con­crete in­stances, the gen­er­al truth may in time emerge. Cer­tain­ly the chances that it will emerge are great­ly mul­ti­plied if we our­selves rec­og­nize its worth and im­por­tance, and lead our pupils to see in each con­crete case the op­er­ation of the gen­er­al prin­ci­ple. Af­ter all, the chief rea­son why so much of our ed­uca­tion mis­car­ries, why so few pupils gain the strength and the pow­er that we ex­pect all to gain, lies in the in­abil­ity of the av­er­age in­di­vid­ual to draw a gen­er­al con­clu­sion from con­crete cas­es--to see the gen­er­al in the par­tic­ular. We have in­sist­ed so stren­uous­ly up­on con­crete in­struc­tion that we have per­haps failed al­so to in­sist that fact with­out law is blind, and that ob­ser­va­tion with­out in­duc­tion is stu­pid­ity gone to seed.

Let me give a con­crete in­stance of what I mean. Not long ago, I vis­it­ed an eighth-​grade class dur­ing a ge­og­ra­phy pe­ri­od. It was at the time when the dis­cov­ery of the Pole had just set the whole civ­ilized world by the ears, and the teach­er was do­ing some­thing that many good teach­ers do on oc­ca­sions of this sort: she was turn­ing the vivid in­ter­est of the mo­ment to ed­uca­tive pur­pos­es. The pupils had read Peary's ac­count of his trip and they were dis­cussing its de­tails in class. Now that ex­er­cise was vast­ly more than an in­ter­est­ing in­for­ma­tion les­son, for Peary's achieve­ment be­came, un­der the skill­ful touch of that teach­er, a type of all hu­man achieve­ment. I wish that I could re­pro­duce that les­son for you--how vivid­ly she pic­tured the sit­ua­tion that con­front­ed the ex­plor­er,--the bit­ter cold, the shift­ing ice, the treach­er­ous open leads, the lack of game or oth­er sources of food sup­ply, the long march­es on scant ra­tions, the short hours and the un­com­fort­able con­di­tions of sleep; and how from these that fun­da­men­tal les­son of pluck and en­durance and courage came forth nat­ural­ly with­out preach­ing the moral or in­dulging in sen­ti­men­tal “goody-​goody­ism.” And then the oth­er and equal­ly im­por­tant part of the les­son,--how pluck and courage in them­selves could nev­er have solved the prob­lem; how knowl­edge was es­sen­tial, and how that knowl­edge had been gained: some of it from the ex­pe­ri­ence of ear­ly ex­plor­ers,--how to avoid the dread­ed scurvy, how to build a ship that could with­stand the tremen­dous pres­sure of the floes; and some from the Es­ki­mos,--how to live in that bar­ren re­gion, and how to trav­el with dogs and sledges;--and some, too, from Peary's own ear­ly ex­pe­ri­ences,--how he had strug­gled for twen­ty years to reach the goal, and had added this ex­pe­ri­ence to that un­til fi­nal­ly the prize was his. We may dif­fer as to the val­ue of Peary's deed, but that it stands as a type of what suc­cess in any un­der­tak­ing means, no one can de­ny. And this was the les­son that these eighth-​grade pupils were ab­sorb­ing,--the world-​old les­son be­fore which all oth­ers fade in­to in­signif­icance,--the les­son, name­ly, that achieve­ment can be gained on­ly by those who are will­ing to pay the price.

And I imag­ine that when that class is study­ing the con­ti­nent of Africa in their ge­og­ra­phy work, they will learn some­thing more than the names of rivers and moun­tains and bound­aries and prod­ucts,--I imag­ine that they will link these facts with the names and deeds of the men who gave them to the world. And when they study his­to­ry, it will be vast­ly more than a bare recital of dates and events,--it will be alive with these great lessons of strug­gle and tri­umph,--for his­to­ry, af­ter all, is on­ly the record of hu­man achieve­ment. And if those pupils do not find these same lessons com­ing out of their own lit­tle con­quests,--if the prob­lems of arith­metic do not fur­nish an op­por­tu­ni­ty to con­quer the pres­sure ridges of par­tial pay­ments or the Po­lar night of bank dis­count, or if the in­tri­ca­cies of for­mal gram­mar do not re­solve them­selves in­to the North Pole of cor­rect ex­pres­sion,--I have mis­judged that teach­er's ca­pac­ities; for the great tri­umph of teach­ing is to get our pupils to see the fun­da­men­tal and the eter­nal in things that are seem­ing­ly triv­ial and tran­si­to­ry. We are fond of di­vid­ing school stud­ies in­to the cul­tur­al and the prac­ti­cal, in­to the hu­man­ities and the sci­ences. Be­lieve me, there is no study worth the teach­ing that is not prac­ti­cal at ba­sis, and there is no prac­ti­cal study that has not its hu­man in­ter­est and its hu­man­iz­ing in­flu­ence--if on­ly we go to some pains to search them out.

V

I have said that the most use­ful thing that ed­uca­tion can do is to im­bue the pupil with the ide­al of ef­fort­ful achieve­ment which will lead him to do cheer­ful­ly and ef­fec­tive­ly the dis­agree­able tasks that fall to his lot. I have said that the next most use­ful thing that it can do is to give him a gen­er­al method of solv­ing the prob­lems that he meets. Is there any oth­er use­ful out­come of a gen­er­al na­ture that we may rank in im­por­tance with these two? I be­lieve that there is, and I can per­haps tell you what I mean by an­oth­er ref­er­ence to a con­crete case. I know a man who lacks this third fac­tor, al­though he pos­sess­es the oth­er two in a very gen­er­ous mea­sure. He is full of am­bi­tion, per­sis­tence, and courage. He is mas­ter of the ra­tio­nal method of solv­ing the prob­lems that be­set him. He does his work in­tel­li­gent­ly and ef­fec­tive­ly. And yet he has failed to make a good liv­ing. Why? Sim­ply be­cause of his stan­dard of what con­sti­tutes a good liv­ing. Mea­sured by my stan­dard, he is do­ing ex­cel­lent­ly well. Mea­sured by his own stan­dard, he is a mis­er­able fail­ure. He is de­pressed and gloomy and out of har­mo­ny with the world, sim­ply be­cause he has no oth­er stan­dard for a good liv­ing than a fi­nan­cial one. He is by pro­fes­sion a civ­il en­gi­neer. His work is much more re­mu­ner­ative than is that of many oth­er call­ings. He has it in him to at­tain to pro­fes­sion­al dis­tinc­tion in that work. But to this op­por­tu­ni­ty he is blind. In the great in­dus­tri­al cen­ter in which he works, he is con­stant­ly ir­ri­tat­ed by the ev­idences of wealth and lux­ury be­yond what he him­self en­joys. The mil­lion­aire cap­tain of in­dus­try is his hero, and be­cause he is not num­bered among this class, he looks at the world through the bluest kind of spec­ta­cles.

Now, to my mind that man's ed­uca­tion failed some­where, and its fail­ure lay in the fact that it did not de­vel­op in him ide­als of suc­cess that would have made him im­mune to these ir­ri­tat­ing fac­tors. We have of­ten heard it said that ed­uca­tion should rid the mind of the in­cubus of su­per­sti­tion, and one very im­por­tant ef­fect of uni­ver­sal ed­uca­tion is that it does of­fer to all men an ex­pla­na­tion of the phe­nom­ena that for­mer­ly weight­ed down the mind with fear and dread, and opened an easy ingress to the forces of su­per­sti­tion and fraud and er­ror. Ed­uca­tion has ac­com­plished this func­tion, I think, pass­ably well with re­spect to the more ob­vi­ous sources of su­per­sti­tion. Necro­man­cy and mag­ic, de­monism and witchcraft, have long since been rel­egat­ed to the lim­bo of ex­posed fraud. Their con­quest has been one of the most sig­nif­icant ad­vances that man has made above the sav­age. The truths of sci­ence have at last tri­umphed, and, as ed­uca­tion has dif­fused these truths among the mass­es, the tri­umph has be­come al­most uni­ver­sal.

But there are oth­er forms of su­per­sti­tion be­sides those I have men­tioned,--oth­er in­stances of a false per­spec­tive, of dis­tort­ed val­ues, of in­ad­equate stan­dards. If be­lief in witchcraft or in mag­ic is bad be­cause it falls short of an ad­equate in­ter­pre­ta­tion of na­ture,--if it is false be­cause it is in­con­sis­tent with hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence,--then the wor­ship of Mam­mon that my en­gi­neer friend rep­re­sents is ten­fold worse than witchcraft, mea­sured by the same stan­dards. If there is any les­son that hu­man his­to­ry teach­es with com­pelling force, it is sure­ly this: Ev­ery race which has yield­ed to the de­mon of in­di­vid­ual­ism and the lust for gold and self-​grat­ifi­ca­tion has gone down the swift and cer­tain road to na­tion­al de­cay. Ev­ery race that, through un­usu­al ma­te­ri­al pros­per­ity, has lost its grip on the eter­nal ver­ities of self-​sac­ri­fice and self-​de­nial has left the les­son of its down­fall writ­ten large up­on the pages of his­to­ry. I re­peat that if su­per­sti­tion con­sists in be­liev­ing some­thing that is in­con­sis­tent with ra­tio­nal hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence, then our present wor­ship of the gold­en calf is by far the most dan­ger­ous form of su­per­sti­tion that has ev­er be­fud­dled the hu­man in­tel­lect.

But, you ask, what can ed­uca­tion do to al­le­vi­ate a con­di­tion of this sort? How may the weak in­flu­ence of the school make it­self felt in an en­vi­ron­ment that has crys­tal­lized on ev­ery hand this un­for­tu­nate stan­dard? In­di­vid­ual­ism is in the air. It is the dom­inant spir­it of the times. It is reën­forced up­on ev­ery side by the un­mis­tak­able ev­idences of na­tion­al pros­per­ity. It is easy to preach the sim­ple life, but who will live it un­less he has to? It is easy to say that man should have so­cial and not in­di­vid­ual stan­dards of suc­cess and achieve­ment, but what ef­fect will your puerile as­ser­tion have up­on the sit­ua­tion that con­fronts us?

Yes; it is eas­ier to be a pes­simist than an op­ti­mist. It is far eas­ier to lie back and let things run their course than it is to strike out in­to mid­stream and make what must be for the pi­oneer a fa­tal ef­fort to stem the cur­rent. But is the sit­ua­tion ab­so­lute­ly hope­less? If the forces of ed­uca­tion can lift the Japanese peo­ple from bar­barism to en­light­en­ment in two gen­er­ations; if ed­uca­tion can in a sin­gle cen­tu­ry trans­form Ger­many from the weak­est to the strongest pow­er on the con­ti­nent of Eu­rope; if five short years of a cer­tain type of ed­uca­tion can change the course of des­tiny in Chi­na;--are we war­rant­ed in our as­sump­tion that we hold a weak weapon in this fight against Mam­mon?

I have in­ti­mat­ed that the at­ti­tude of my en­gi­neer friend to­ward life is the re­sult of twist­ed ide­als. A good many young men are go­ing out in­to life with a sim­ilar de­fect in their ed­uca­tion. They gain their ide­als, not from the great well­springs of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence as rep­re­sent­ed in his­to­ry and lit­er­ature, in re­li­gion and art, but from the en­vi­ron­ment around them, and con­se­quent­ly they be­come vic­tims of this su­per­sti­tion from the out­set. As a train­er of teach­ers, I hold it to be one im­por­tant part of my du­ty to for­ti­fy my stu­dents as strong­ly as I can against this false stan­dard of which my en­gi­neer friend is the vic­tim. It is just as much a part of my du­ty to give my stu­dents ef­fec­tive and con­sis­tent stan­dards of what a good liv­ing con­sists in as it is to give them the tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and skill that will en­able them to make a good liv­ing. If my stu­dents who are to be­come teach­ers have stan­dards of liv­ing and stan­dards of suc­cess that are in­con­sis­tent with the great ide­al of so­cial ser­vice for which teach­ing stands, then I have fall­en far short of suc­cess in my work. If they are con­stant­ly ir­ri­tat­ed by the ev­idences of lux­ury be­yond their means, if this ir­ri­ta­tion sours their dis­po­si­tions and checks their spon­tane­ity, their ef­fi­cien­cy as teach­ers is great­ly less­ened or per­haps en­tire­ly negat­ed. And if my en­gi­neer friend places world­ly emol­uments up­on a high­er plane than pro­fes­sion­al ef­fi­cien­cy, I dread for the safe­ty of the bridges that he builds. His ed­uca­tion as an en­gi­neer should have for­ti­fied him against just such a con­tin­gen­cy. It should have left him with the ide­al of crafts­man­ship supreme in his life. And if his tech­ni­cal ed­uca­tion failed to do this, his gen­er­al ed­uca­tion ought, at least, to have giv­en him a bias in the right di­rec­tion.

I be­lieve that all forms of vo­ca­tion­al and pro­fes­sion­al ed­uca­tion are not so strong in this re­spect as they should be. Again you say to me, What can ed­uca­tion do when the spir­it of the times speaks so strong­ly on the oth­er side? But what is ed­uca­tion for if it is not to pre­serve midst the chaos and con­fu­sion of trou­blous times the great truths that the race has wrung from its ex­pe­ri­ence? How dif­fer­ent might have been the fate of Rome, if Rome had pos­sessed an ed­uca­tion­al sys­tem touch­ing ev­ery child in the Em­pire, and if, dur­ing the years that wit­nessed her de­cay and down­fall, those schools could have kept steadi­ly, per­sis­tent­ly at work, im­press­ing up­on ev­ery mem­ber of each suc­ces­sive gen­er­ation the virtues that made the old Ro­mans strong and vir­ile--the virtues that en­abled them to lay the foun­da­tions of an em­pire that crum­bled in ru­ins once these truths were for­got­ten. Is it not the spe­cif­ic task of ed­uca­tion to rep­re­sent in each gen­er­ation the hu­man ex­pe­ri­ences that have been tried and test­ed and found to work,--to rep­re­sent these in the face of op­po­si­tion if need be,--to be faith­ful to the trustee­ship of the most price­less lega­cy that the past has left to the present and to the fu­ture? If this is not our func­tion in the scheme of things, then what is our func­tion? Is it to stand with bat­ed breath to catch the first whis­per that will ush­er in the next change? Is it to sur­ren­der all ini­tia­tive and sim­ply al­low our­selves to be tossed hith­er and yon by the waves and cross-​waves of a fick­le pub­lic opin­ion? Is it to cow­er in dread of a crit­icism that is not on­ly un­just but of­ten ill-​ad­vised of the re­al con­di­tions un­der which we are do­ing our work?

I take it that none of us is ready to an­swer these ques­tions in the af­fir­ma­tive. Deep down in our hearts we know that we have a use­ful work to do, and we know that we are do­ing it pass­ably well. We al­so know our de­fects and short­com­ings at least as well as one who has nev­er faced our prob­lems and tried to solve them. And it is from this lat­ter type that most of the dras­tic crit­icism, es­pe­cial­ly of the el­emen­tary and sec­ondary school, em­anates. I con­fess that my gorge ris­es with­in me when I read or hear the in­vec­tives that are be­ing hurled against teach­ing as a pro­fes­sion (and against the work of the el­emen­tary and sec­ondary school in par­tic­ular) by men who know noth­ing of this work at first hand. This is the great­est hand­icap un­der which the pro­fes­sion of teach­ing labors. In ev­ery oth­er im­por­tant field of hu­man ac­tiv­ity a man must present his cre­den­tials be­fore he takes his seat at the coun­cil ta­ble, and even then he must sit and lis­ten re­spect­ful­ly to his el­ders for a while be­fore he ven­tures a crit­icism or even a sug­ges­tion. This plan may have its de­fects. It may keep things on too con­ser­va­tive a ba­sis; but it avoids the dan­ger in­to which we as a pro­fes­sion have fall­en,--the dan­ger of “half-​baked” the­ories and un­ma­tured poli­cies. To-​day the on­ly man that can get a re­spectable hear­ing at our great na­tion­al ed­uca­tion­al meet­ings is the man who has some­thing new and bizarre to pro­pose. And the more startling the pro­pos­al, the greater is the mea­sure of adu­la­tion that he re­ceives. The re­sult of this is a con­tin­ual strain­ing for ef­fect, an enor­mous an­nu­al crop of fads and fan­cies, which, though most of them are hap­pi­ly short-​lived, keep us in a state of con­tin­ual tur­moil and con­fu­sion.

* * * * *

Now, it goes with­out say­ing that there are many ways of mak­ing ed­uca­tion hit the mark of util­ity in ad­di­tion to those that I have men­tioned. The teach­ers down in the low­er grades who are teach­ing lit­tle chil­dren the arts of read­ing and writ­ing and com­pu­ta­tion are do­ing vast­ly more in a prac­ti­cal di­rec­tion than they are ev­er giv­en cred­it for do­ing; for read­ing and writ­ing and the ma­nip­ula­tion of num­bers are, next to oral speech it­self, the prime ne­ces­si­ties in the so­cial and in­dus­tri­al world. These arts are be­ing taught to-​day bet­ter than they have ev­er been taught be­fore,--and the tech­nique of their teach­ing is un­der­go­ing con­stant re­fine­ment and im­prove­ment.

The school can do and is do­ing oth­er use­ful things. Some schools are train­ing their pupils to be well man­nered and cour­te­ous and con­sid­er­ate of the rights of oth­ers. They are teach­ing chil­dren one of the most ba­sic and fun­da­men­tal laws of hu­man life; name­ly, that there are some things that a gen­tle­man can­not do and some things that so­ci­ety will not stand. How many a painful ex­pe­ri­ence in solv­ing this very prob­lem of get­ting a liv­ing could be avoid­ed if one had on­ly learned this les­son pass­ing well! What a pity it is that some schools that stand to-​day for what we call ed­uca­tion­al progress are fail­ing in just this par­tic­ular--are send­ing out in­to the world an an­nu­al crop of boys and girls who must learn the great les­son of self-​con­trol and a prop­er re­spect for the rights of oth­ers in the bit­ter school of ex­pe­ri­ence,--a school in which the rod will nev­er be spared, but whose chas­ten­ing scourge comes some­times, alas, too late!

There is no fea­ture of school life which has not its al­most in­fi­nite pos­si­bil­ities of util­ity. But af­ter all, are not the ba­sic and fun­da­men­tal things these ide­als that I have named? And should not we who teach stand for ide­al­ism in its widest sense? Should we not our­selves sub­scribe an undy­ing fi­deli­ty to those great ide­als for which teach­ing must stand,--to the ide­al of so­cial ser­vice which lies at the ba­sis of our craft, to the ide­als of ef­fort and dis­ci­pline that make a na­tion great and its chil­dren strong, to the ide­al of sci­ence that dis­si­pates the black night of ig­no­rance and su­per­sti­tion, to the ide­al of cul­ture that hu­man­izes mankind?

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 11: An ad­dress be­fore the East­ern Illi­nois Teach­ers' As­so­ci­ation, Oc­to­ber 15, 1909. Pub­lished as a Bul­letin of the East­ern Illi­nois Nor­mal School, Oc­to­ber, 1909.]

~VII~

THE SCI­EN­TIF­IC SPIR­IT IN ED­UCA­TION[12]

I

I know that I do not need to plead with this au­di­ence for a recog­ni­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic spir­it in the so­lu­tion of ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems. The long life and the en­vi­able record of this So­ci­ety of Ped­agogy tes­ti­fy in them­selves to that spir­it of free in­quiry, to the calm and dis­pas­sion­ate search for the truth which lies at the ba­sis of the sci­en­tif­ic method. You have gath­ered here, fort­night af­ter fort­night, to dis­cuss ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems in the light of your ex­pe­ri­ence. You have re­port­ed your ex­pe­ri­ence and lis­tened to the re­sults that oth­ers have gleaned in the course of their dai­ly work. And ex­pe­ri­ence is the cor­ner stone of sci­ence.

Some of the most stim­ulat­ing and clar­ify­ing dis­cus­sions of ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems that I have ev­er heard have been made in the ses­sions of this So­ci­ety. You have been sci­en­tif­ic in your at­ti­tude to­ward ed­uca­tion, and I may add that I first learned the lessons of the re­al sci­ence of ed­uca­tion in the St. Louis schools, and un­der the in­spi­ra­tion that was fur­nished by the men who were mem­bers of this So­ci­ety. What I knew of the sci­ence of ed­uca­tion be­fore I came to this city ten years ago, was gleaned large­ly from books. It was de­duc­tive, _a pri­ori_, in its na­ture. What I learned here was the in­duc­tion from ac­tu­al ex­pe­ri­ence.

My very first in­tro­duc­tion to my col­leagues among the school men of this city was a les­son in the sci­ence of ed­uca­tion. I had brought with me a let­ter to one of your prin­ci­pals. He was in the of­fice down on Lo­cust Street the first Sat­ur­day that I spent in the city. I pre­sent­ed my let­ter to him, and, with that true South­ern hos­pi­tal­ity which has al­ways char­ac­ter­ized your corps, he took me im­me­di­ate­ly un­der his wing and car­ried me out to lun­cheon with him.

We sat for hours in a lit­tle restau­rant down on Sixth Street,--he was my teach­er and I was his pupil. And grad­ual­ly, as the af­ter­noon wore on, I re­al­ized that I had met a mas­ter crafts­man in the art of ed­uca­tion. At first I talked glibly enough of what I in­tend­ed to do, and he lis­tened sym­pa­thet­ical­ly and help­ful­ly, with a lit­tle quizzi­cal smile in his eyes as I out­lined my am­bi­tious plans. And when I had run the gamut of my dreams, he took his turn, and, in true So­crat­ic fash­ion, yet with­out mak­ing me feel in the least that I was on­ly a dream­er af­ter all, he re­fash­ioned my the­ories. One by one the lit­tle card hous­es that I had built up were deft­ly, smooth­ly, gen­tly, but com­plete­ly de­mol­ished. I did not know the ABC of school­craft--but he did not tell me that I did not. He went at the task of in­struc­tion from the pos­itive point of view. He proved to me, by rem­inis­cence and ex­am­ple, how dif­fer­ent are ac­tu­al and ide­al con­di­tions. And fi­nal­ly he wound up with a sin­gle ques­tion that opened a new world to me. “What,” he asked, “is the dom­inant char­ac­ter­is­tic of the child's mind?” I thought at first that I was on safe ground--for had I not tak­en a course in child study, and had I not mea­sured some hun­dreds of school chil­dren while work­ing out a uni­ver­si­ty the­sis? So I be­gan with my list. But, at each char­ac­ter­is­tic that I men­tioned he shook his head. “No,” he said, “no; that is not right.” And when fi­nal­ly I had ex­haust­ed my list, he said to me, “The dom­inant char­ac­ter­is­tic of the child's mind is its _se­ri­ous­ness_. The child is the most _se­ri­ous_ crea­ture in the world.”

The an­swer stag­gered me for a mo­ment. Like nine­ty-​nine per cent of the adult pop­ula­tion of this globe, the se­ri­ous­ness of the child had nev­er ap­pealed to me. In spite of the the­oret­ical ba­sis of my train­ing, that sin­gle, dom­inant el­ement of child life had es­caped me. I had gained my no­tion of the child from books, and, I al­so fear, from the Sun­day sup­ple­ments. To me, deep down in my heart, the child was an an­imat­ed joke. I was im­mersed in un­sci­en­tif­ic pre­con­cep­tions. But the mas­ter crafts­man had gained his con­cep­tion of child life from in­ti­mate, em­pir­ical ac­quain­tance with the genus boy. He had gleaned from his ex­pe­ri­ence that fun­da­men­tal truth: “The child is the most se­ri­ous crea­ture in the world.”

Some­time I hope that I may make some fit­ting ac­knowl­edg­ment of the debt of grat­itude that I owe to that man. The op­por­tu­ni­ties that I had to talk with him were all too few, but I did make a mem­orable vis­it to his school, and stud­ied at first hand the great work that he was do­ing for the pupils of the Columbia dis­trict. He died the next year, and I shall nev­er for­get the words that stood be­neath his pic­ture that night in one of the dai­ly pa­pers: “Charles Howard: Ar­chi­tect of Char­ac­ter.”

II

The essence of the sci­en­tif­ic spir­it is to view ex­pe­ri­ence with­out prej­udice, and that was the les­son that I learned from the school sys­tem of St. Louis.

The dif­fer­ence be­tween the ide­al child and the re­al child,--the dif­fer­ence be­tween what fan­cy pic­tures a school­room to be and what ac­tu­al first-​hand ac­quain­tance shows that it is, the dif­fer­ence be­tween a pre­con­ceived no­tion and an ac­tu­al stub­born fact of ex­pe­ri­ence,--these were among the lessons that I learned in these schools. But, at the same time, there was no crass ma­te­ri­al­ism ac­com­pa­ny­ing this teach­ing. There was no loss of the broad­er point of view. A fact is a fact, and we can­not get around it,--and this is what sci­en­tif­ic method has in­sist­ed up­on from its in­cep­tion. But al­ways be­yond the fact is its sig­nif­icance, its mean­ing. That the St. Louis schools have for the last fifty years stood for the larg­er view; that they have nev­er, so far as I know, ex­ploit­ed the new and the bizarre sim­ply be­cause it was new and strange,--this is due, I be­lieve, to the in­sight and in­spi­ra­tion of the man[13] who first fash­ioned the frame­work of this sys­tem, and breathed in­to it as a sys­tem the vi­tal­iz­ing el­ement of ide­al­ism. Per­son­al­ly, I have not al­ways been in sym­pa­thy with the teach­ings of the Hegelian phi­los­ophy,--I have not al­ways un­der­stood them,--but no man could wit­ness the silent, steady, unchecked growth of the St. Louis schools with­out be­ing firm­ly and in­deli­bly im­pressed with dy­nam­ic val­ue of a rich­ly con­ceived and rigid­ly wrought sys­tem of fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples. The cause of ed­uca­tion has suf­fered much from the fail­ure of ed­uca­tors to break loose from the shack­les of the past. But it has, in some places, suf­fered still more from the ten­den­cy of the hu­man mind to con­fuse fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples with the shack­les of tra­di­tion. The rage for the new and the un­tried, sim­ply be­cause it is new and un­tried,--this has been, and is to-​day, the rock up­on which re­al ed­uca­tion­al progress is most like­ly to be wrecked. This is a rock, I be­lieve, that St. Louis has so far es­caped, and I have no doubt that its es­cape has been due, in large mea­sure, to the care­ful, rigid, la­bo­ri­ous, and yet il­lu­mi­nat­ing man­ner in which that great cap­tain chart­ed out its course.

III

Fun­da­men­tal­ly, there is, I be­lieve, no dis­crep­an­cy, no in­con­sis­ten­cy, be­tween the sci­en­tif­ic spir­it in ed­uca­tion and what may be called the philo­soph­ical spir­it. As I have sug­gest­ed, there are al­ways two dan­gers that must be avoid­ed: the dan­ger, in the first place, of think­ing of the old as es­sen­tial­ly bad; and, on the oth­er hand, the dan­ger of think­ing of the new and strange and un­known as es­sen­tial­ly bad; the dan­ger of con­fus­ing a sound con­ser­vatism with a blind wor­ship of es­tab­lished cus­tom; and the dan­ger of con­fus­ing a sound rad­ical­ism with the blind wor­ship of the new and the bizarre.

Let me give you an ex­am­ple of what I mean. There is a rather bit­ter con­tro­ver­sy at present be­tween two fac­tions of sci­ence teach­ers. One fac­tion in­sists that physics and chem­istry and bi­ol­ogy should be taught in the high school from the eco­nom­ic point of view,--that the eco­nom­ic ap­pli­ca­tions of these sci­ences to great hu­man arts, such as en­gi­neer­ing and agri­cul­ture, should be em­pha­sized at ev­ery point,--that a great deal of the ma­te­ri­al now taught in these sci­ences is both use­less and unattrac­tive to the av­er­age high-​school pupil. The oth­er fac­tion main­tains that such a course would mean the de­struc­tion of sci­ence as an in­te­gral part of the sec­ondary cul­ture course,--that sci­ence to be cul­tur­al must be pure sci­ence,--must be viewed apart from its eco­nom­ic ap­pli­ca­tions,--apart from its re­la­tions to the bread-​and-​but­ter prob­lem.

Now many of the ad­vo­cates of the first point of view--many of the peo­ple that would em­pha­size the eco­nom­ic side--are an­imat­ed by the spir­it of change and un­rest which dom­inates our lat­ter-​day civ­iliza­tion. They wish to fol­low the pop­ular de­mand. “Down with scholas­ti­cism!” is their cry; “Down with this blind wor­ship of cus­tom and tra­di­tion! Let us do the thing that gives the great­est im­me­di­ate ben­efit to our pupils. Let us dis­card the el­ements in our cours­es that are hard and dry and bar­ren of prac­ti­cal re­sults.” Now these men, I be­lieve, are bas­ing their ar­gu­ment up­on the fal­la­cy of im­me­di­ate ex­pe­di­en­cy. The old is bad, the new is good. That is their ar­gu­ment. They have no sheet an­chor out to wind­ward. They are will­ing to drift with the gale.

Many of the ad­vo­cates of the sec­ond point of view--many of the peo­ple who hold to the old line, pure-​sci­ence teach­ing--are, on the oth­er hand, an­imat­ed by a spir­it of ir­ra­tional con­ser­vatism. “Down with rad­ical­ism!” they shout; “Down with the in­no­va­tors! Things that are hard and dry are good men­tal dis­ci­pline. They made our fa­thers strong. They can make our chil­dren strong. What was good enough for the great minds of the past is good enough for us.”

Now these men, I be­lieve, have gone to the oth­er ex­treme. They have con­fused cus­tom and tra­di­tion with fun­da­men­tal and eter­nal prin­ci­ples. They have thought that, just be­cause a thing is old, it is good, just as their an­tag­onists have thought that just be­cause a thing is new it is good.

In both cas­es, ob­vi­ous­ly, the sci­en­tif­ic spir­it is lack­ing. The most fun­da­men­tal of all prin­ci­ples is the prin­ci­ple of truth. And yet these men who are teach­ers of sci­ence are--both class­es of them--ruled them­selves by dog­ma. And mean­time the sci­ences are in dan­ger of los­ing their place in sec­ondary ed­uca­tion. The rich promise that was held out a gen­er­ation ago has not been ful­filled. With­in the last decade, the en­roll­ment in the sci­ence cours­es has not in­creased in pro­por­tion to the to­tal en­roll­ment, while the en­roll­ment in Latin (which fif­teen years ago was about to be cast up­on the ed­uca­tion­al scrap heap) has grown by leaps and bounds.

Now this is a type of a great many con­tro­ver­sies in ed­uca­tion. We talk and the­orize, but very sel­dom do we try to find out the ac­tu­al facts in the case by any ad­equate tests.

It was the lack of such tests that led us at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois to en­ter up­on a se­ries of im­par­tial in­ves­ti­ga­tions to see whether we could not take some of these moot­ed ques­tions out of the realm of eter­nal con­tro­ver­sy, and pro­vide some def­inite so­lu­tions. We chose among oth­ers this con­tro­ver­sy be­tween the eco­nom­ic sci­en­tists and the pure sci­en­tists. We took a high-​school class and di­vid­ed it in­to two sec­tions. We tried to place in each sec­tion an equal num­ber of bright and mediocre and dull pupils, so that the con­di­tions would be equal­ized. Then we chose an ex­cel­lent teach­er, a man who could ap­proach the prob­lem with an open mind, with­out prej­udice or fa­vor. Dur­ing the present year he has been teach­ing these par­al­lel sec­tions. In one sec­tion he has em­pha­sized eco­nom­ic ap­pli­ca­tions; in the oth­er he has taught the class up­on the cus­tom­ary pure-​sci­ence ba­sis. He has kept a care­ful record of his work, and at stat­ed in­ter­vals he has giv­en both sec­tions the same tests. We pro­pose to car­ry on this in­ves­ti­ga­tion year af­ter year with dif­fer­ent class­es, dif­fer­ent teach­ers, and in dif­fer­ent schools. We are not in a hur­ry to reach con­clu­sions.

Now I said that the safe­guard in all work of this sort is to keep our grip firm and fast on the eter­nal truths. In this work that I men­tion we are not try­ing to prove that ei­ther pure sci­ence or ap­plied sci­ence in­ter­ests our pupils the more or helps them the more in meet­ing im­me­di­ate eco­nom­ic sit­ua­tions. We do not pro­pose to mea­sure the suc­cess of ei­ther method by its ef­fect up­on the bread-​win­ning pow­er of the pupil. What we be­lieve that sci­ence teach­ing should in­sure, is a grip on the sci­en­tif­ic method and an il­lu­mi­nat­ing in­sight in­to the forces of na­ture, and we are sim­ply at­tempt­ing to see whether the eco­nom­ic ap­pli­ca­tions will make this grip firmer or weak­er, and this in­sight clear­er or more ob­scure. I trust that this point is plain, for it il­lus­trates what I have just said re­gard­ing the dan­ger of fol­low­ing a pop­ular de­mand. We need no ex­per­iment to prove that eco­nom­ic sci­ence is more use­ful in the nar­row sense than is pure sci­ence. What we wish to de­ter­mine is whether a ju­di­cious mix­ture of the two sorts of teach­ing will or will not en­able us to re­al­ize this rich cul­tur­al val­ue much more ef­fec­tive­ly than a tra­di­tion­al pure­ly cul­tur­al course.

Now that il­lus­trates what I think is the re­al and im­por­tant ap­pli­ca­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic spir­it to the so­lu­tion of ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems. You will read­ily see that it does not do away nec­es­sar­ily with our ide­als. It is not nec­es­sar­ily ma­te­ri­al­is­tic. It is not nec­es­sar­ily ide­al­is­tic. Ei­ther side may uti­lize it. It is a quite im­per­son­al fac­tor. But it does promise to take some of our ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems out of the field of use­less and waste­ful con­tro­ver­sy, and it does promise to get men of con­flict­ing views to­geth­er,--for, in the case that I have just cit­ed, if we prove that the right ad­mix­ture of meth­ods may en­able us to re­al­ize both a cul­tur­al and a util­itar­ian val­ue, there is no rea­son why the cul­tur­ists and the util­itar­ians should not get to­geth­er, cease their quar­rel­ing, take off their coats, and go to work. Few peo­ple will de­ny that bread and but­ter is a rather es­sen­tial thing in this life of ours; very few will de­ny that ma­te­ri­al pros­per­ity in tem­per­ate amounts is good for all of us; and very few al­so will de­ny that far more fun­da­men­tal than bread and but­ter--far more im­por­tant than ma­te­ri­al pros­per­ity--are the great fun­da­men­tal and eter­nal truths which man has wrought out of his ex­pe­ri­ence and which are most ef­fec­tive­ly crys­tal­lized in the cre­ations of pure art, the mas­ter­pieces of pure lit­er­ature, and the dis­cov­er­ies of pure sci­ence.

Cer­tain­ly if we of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry can agree up­on any one thing, it is this: That life with­out toil is a crime, and that any one who en­joys leisure and com­fort and the lux­uries of liv­ing with­out pay­ing the price of toil is a so­cial par­asite. I be­lieve that it is an im­por­tant func­tion of pub­lic ed­uca­tion to im­press up­on each gen­er­ation the high­est ide­als of liv­ing as well as the arts that are es­sen­tial to the mak­ing of a liveli­hood, but I wish to protest against the doc­trine that these two fac­tors stand over against one an­oth­er as the pos­itive and neg­ative poles of hu­man ex­is­tence. In oth­er words, I protest against the no­tion, that the study of the prac­ti­cal ev­ery­day prob­lems of hu­man life is with­out what we are pleased to call a cul­ture val­ue,--that in the prop­er study of those prob­lems one is not able to see the op­er­ation of fun­da­men­tal and eter­nal prin­ci­ples.

I shall read­ily agree that there is al­ways a grave dan­ger that the triv­ial and tem­po­rary ob­jects of ev­ery­day life may be viewed and stud­ied with­out ref­er­ence to these fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples. But this dan­ger is cer­tain­ly no greater than that the per­ma­nent and eter­nal truths be stud­ied with­out ref­er­ence to the ac­tu­al, con­crete, worka­day world in which we live. I have seen ex­er­cis­es in man­ual train­ing that had for their pur­pose the per­fec­tion of the pupil in some lit­tle art of join­ery for which he would, in all prob­abil­ity, have not the slight­est use in his lat­er life. But even if he should find use for it, the pro­cess was not be­ing taught in the prop­er way. He was be­ing made con­scious on­ly of the lit­tle triv­ial thing, and no part of his in­struc­tion was di­rect­ed to­ward the much more im­por­tant, fun­da­men­tal les­son,--the les­son, name­ly, that “a lit­tle thing may be per­fect, but that per­fec­tion it­self is not a lit­tle thing.”

I say that I have wit­nessed such an ex­er­cise in the very prac­ti­cal field of man­ual train­ing. I may add that I went through sev­er­al such ex­er­cis­es my­self, and emerged with a dis­gust that al­ways re­curs to me when I am told that ev­ery boy will re­spond to the stim­ulus of the ham­mer and the jack plane. But I should has­ten to add that I have al­so seen what we call the hu­man­ities so taught that the pupil has emerged from them with a supreme con­tempt for the life of la­bor and a feel­ing of dis­gust at the pet­ty and triv­ial prob­lems of hu­man life which ev­ery one must face. I have seen art and lit­er­ature so taught as to leave their stu­dents not with the high pur­pose to mold their lives in ac­cor­dance with the high ide­als that art and lit­er­ature rep­re­sent, not the firm res­olu­tion to do what they could to re­lieve the ug­li­ness of the world where they found it ug­ly, or to do what they could to en­no­ble life when they found it vile; but rather with an at­ti­tude of calm su­pe­ri­or­ity, as if they were in some way priv­ileged to the de­lights of æs­thet­ic en­joy­ment, leav­ing the baser born to do the world's drudgery.

I have seen the prin­ci­ples of agri­cul­ture so taught as to leave with the stu­dent the im­pres­sion that he could raise more corn than his neigh­bor and sell it at a high­er price if he mas­tered the prin­ci­ples of ni­tri­fi­ca­tion; and all with­out one sin­gle ref­er­ence to the ba­sic prin­ci­ple of con­ser­va­tion up­on which the wel­fare of the hu­man race for all time to come must in­evitably de­pend,--with­out a sin­gle ref­er­ence to the moral in­iq­ui­ty of waste and sloth and ig­no­rance. But I have al­so seen men who have mas­tered the sci­en­tif­ic method,--the method of con­trolled ob­ser­va­tion, and un­prej­udiced in­duc­tion and in­fer­ence,--in the lab­ora­to­ries of pure sci­ence; and who have gained so over­ween­ing and hy­per­tro­phied a re­gard for this method that they have con­sid­ered it too holy to be con­tam­inat­ed by ap­pli­ca­tion to prac­ti­cal prob­lems,--who have sneered con­temp­tu­ous­ly when some ad­ven­tur­er has pro­posed, for ex­am­ple, to sub­ject the teach­ing of sci­ence it­self to the search­light of sci­en­tif­ic method.

I trust that these ex­am­ples have made my point clear, for it is cer­tain­ly sim­ple enough. If vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion means sim­ply that the arts and skills of in­dus­tri­al life are to be trans­mit­ted safe­ly from gen­er­ation to gen­er­ation, a min­imum of ed­uca­tion­al ma­chin­ery is all that is nec­es­sary, and we do not need to wor­ry much about it. If vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion means sim­ply this, it need not trou­ble us much; for eco­nom­ic con­di­tions will soon­er or lat­er pro­vide for an ef­fec­tive means of trans­mis­sion, just as eco­nom­ic con­di­tions will soon­er or lat­er per­fect, through a blind and em­pir­ical pro­cess of elim­ina­tion, the most ef­fec­tive meth­ods of agri­cul­ture, as in the case of Chi­na and oth­er over­pop­ulat­ed na­tions of the Ori­ent.

But I take it that we mean by vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion some­thing more than this, just as we mean by cul­tur­al ed­uca­tion some­thing more than a ve­neer of lan­guage, his­to­ry, pure sci­ence, and the fine arts. In the for­mer case, the prac­ti­cal prob­lems of life are to be lift­ed to the plane of fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples; in the lat­ter case, fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples are to be brought down to the plane of present, ev­ery­day life. I can see no dis­crep­an­cy here. To my mind there is no cul­tur­al sub­ject that has not its prac­ti­cal out­come, and there is no prac­ti­cal sub­ject that has not its hu­man­iz­ing in­flu­ence if on­ly we go to some pains to seek it out. I do not ob­ject to a sub­ject of in­struc­tion that promis­es to put dol­lars in­to the pock­ets of those that study it. I do ob­ject to the mode of teach­ing that sub­ject which fails to use this ef­fec­tive eco­nom­ic ap­peal in stim­ulat­ing a glimpse of the broad­er vi­sion. I do not ob­ject to the sub­ject that ap­peals to the pupil's cu­rios­ity be­cause it in­forms him of the won­der­ful deeds that men have done in the past. I do ob­ject to that mode of teach­ing this sub­ject which sim­ply arous­es in­ter­est in a spec­tac­ular deed, and then fails to use this in­ter­est in the in­ter­pre­ta­tion of present prob­lems. I do not con­tend that in ei­ther case there must be an ex­plic­it point­ing of morals and draw­ing of lessons. But I do con­tend that the teach­er who is in charge of the pro­cess should al­ways have this pur­pose in the fore­front of his con­scious­ness, and--now by di­rect com­par­ison, now by in­di­rec­tion and sug­ges­tion--guide his pupils to the goal de­sired.

I hope that through care­ful tests, we shall some day be able to demon­strate that there is much that is good and valu­able on both sides of ev­ery con­tro­vert­ed ed­uca­tion­al ques­tion. Af­ter all, in this com­plex and in­tri­cate task of teach­ing to which you and I are de­vot­ing our lives, there is too much at stake to per­mit us for a mo­ment to be dog­mat­ic,--to per­mit us for a mo­ment to hold our­selves in any oth­er at­ti­tude save one of open­ness and re­cep­tion to the truth when the truth shall have been demon­strat­ed. Nei­ther your ideas nor mine, nor those of any man or group of men, liv­ing or dead, are im­por­tant enough to stand in the way of the best pos­si­ble ac­com­plish­ment of that great task to which we have set our hands.

IV

But I did not pro­pose this morn­ing to talk to you about sci­ence as a part of our ed­uca­tion­al cur­ricu­lum, but rather about the sci­en­tif­ic spir­it and the sci­en­tif­ic method as ef­fec­tive in­stru­ments for the so­lu­tion of our own pe­cu­liar ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems. I have tried to give you rea­sons for be­liev­ing that an adop­tion of this pol­icy does not nec­es­sar­ily com­mit us to ma­te­ri­al­ism or to a nar­row­ly eco­nom­ic point of view. I have at­tempt­ed to show that the sci­en­tif­ic method may be ap­plied to the so­lu­tion of our prob­lems while we still re­tain our faith in ide­als; and that, un­less we do re­tain that faith, our in­ves­ti­ga­tions will be with­out point or mean­ing.

This prob­lem of vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion to which I have just re­ferred is one that is like­ly to re­main un­solved un­til we have made a search­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion of its fac­tors in the light of sci­en­tif­ic method. Some peo­ple pro­fess not to be wor­ried by the dif­fi­cul­ty of find­ing time in our el­emen­tary and sec­ondary schools for the in­tro­duc­tion of the new­er sub­jects mak­ing for in­creased vo­ca­tion­al ef­fi­cien­cy. They would cut the Gor­dian knot with one sin­gle op­er­ation by elim­inat­ing enough of the old­er sub­jects to make room for the new. I con­fess that this so­lu­tion does not ap­peal to me. Fun­da­men­tal­ly the core of the el­emen­tary cur­ricu­lum must, I be­lieve, al­ways be the arts that are es­sen­tial to ev­ery one who lives the so­cial life. In oth­er words, the lan­guage arts and the num­ber arts are, and al­ways must be, the fun­da­men­tals of el­emen­tary ed­uca­tion. I do not be­lieve that spe­cial­ized vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion should ev­er be in­tro­duced at the ex­pense of thor­ough train­ing in the sub­jects that al­ready hold their place in the cur­ricu­lum. And yet we are con­front­ed by the eco­nom­ic ne­ces­si­ty of solv­ing in some way this vo­ca­tion­al prob­lem. How are we to do it?

It is here that the sci­en­tif­ic method may per­haps come to our aid. The ob­vi­ous av­enue of at­tack up­on this prob­lem is to de­ter­mine whether we can­not save time and en­er­gy, not by the dras­tic op­er­ation of elim­inat­ing old sub­jects, but rather by im­prov­ing our tech­nique of teach­ing, so that the waste may be re­duced, and the time thus saved giv­en to these new sub­jects that are so vo­cif­er­ous­ly de­mand­ing ad­mis­sion. In Cleve­land, for ex­am­ple, the method of teach­ing spelling has been sub­ject­ed to a rigid sci­en­tif­ic treat­ment, and, as a re­sult, spelling is be­ing taught to-​day vast­ly bet­ter than ev­er be­fore and with a much small­er ex­pen­di­ture of time and en­er­gy. It has been due, very large­ly, to the ap­pli­ca­tion of a few well-​known prin­ci­ples which the sci­ence of psy­chol­ogy has fur­nished.

Now that is vast­ly bet­ter than say­ing that spelling is a sub­ject that takes too much time in our schools and con­se­quent­ly ought forth­with to be elim­inat­ed. In all of our school work enough time is un­doubt­ed­ly wast­ed to pro­vide am­ple op­por­tu­ni­ty for train­ing the child thor­ough­ly in some vo­ca­tion if we wish to vo­ca­tion­al­ize him, and I do not think that this would hurt him, even if he does not fol­low the vo­ca­tion in lat­er life.

To-​day we are at­tempt­ing to de­tect these sources of waste in tech­nique. The prob­lems of habit build­ing or mem­oriz­ing are al­ready well on the way to so­lu­tion. Care­ful tests have shown the val­ue of do­ing mem­ory work in a cer­tain def­inite way--learn­ing by unit wholes rather than by frag­ments, for ex­am­ple. Ex­per­iments have been con­duct­ed to de­ter­mine the best length of time to give to drill pro­cess­es, such as spelling, and pen­man­ship, and the fun­da­men­tal ta­bles of arith­metic. It is al­ready clear­ly demon­strat­ed that brief pe­ri­ods of in­tense con­cen­tra­tion are more eco­nom­ical than longer pe­ri­ods dur­ing which the monotony of rep­eti­tion fags the mind to a point where it can no longer work ef­fec­tive­ly. We are al­so be­gin­ning to see from these tests, that a sys­tem­at­ic method of at­tack­ing such a prob­lem as the mem­oriz­ing of the ta­bles will do much to save time and pro­mote ef­fi­cien­cy. We are find­ing that it is ex­treme­ly prof­itable to in­struct chil­dren in the tech­nique of learn­ing,--to start them out in the right way by care­ful ex­am­ple, so that much of the time and en­er­gy that was for­mer­ly dis­si­pat­ed, may now be con­served.

And there is a sug­ges­tion, al­so, that in the av­er­age school, the vast pos­si­bil­ities of the child's la­tent en­er­gy are on­ly im­per­fect­ly re­al­ized. A friend of mine stum­bled ac­ci­den­tal­ly up­on this fact by in­tro­duc­ing a new method of grad­ing. He di­vid­ed his pupils in­to three groups or streams. The group that pro­gressed the fastest was made up of those who av­er­aged 85 per cent and over in their work. A mid­dle group av­er­aged be­tween 75 per cent and 85 per cent in their work, and a third, slow group was made up of those who av­er­aged be­low 75 per cent. At the end of the first month, he found that a cer­tain pro­por­tion of his pupils, who had for­mer­ly hov­ered around the pass­ing grade of 70, be­gan to forge ahead. Many of them eas­ily went in­to the fastest stream, but they were still sat­is­fied with the min­imum stand­ing for that group. In oth­er words, whether we like to ad­mit it or not, most men and wom­en and boys and girls are con­tent with the pass­ing grades, both in school and in life. So com­mon is the phe­nomenon that we think of the mat­ter fa­tal­is­ti­cal­ly. But sup­ply a stim­ulus, raise the stan­dard, and you will find some of these in­di­vid­uals forg­ing up to the next lev­el.

Pro­fes­sor James's doc­trine of la­tent en­er­gies bids fair to fur­nish the so­lu­tion of a vast num­ber of per­plex­ing ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems. Cer­tain it is that our pupils of to-​day are not over­bur­dened with work. They are some­times ir­ri­tat­ed by too many tasks, some­times dulled by dead rou­tine, some­times ex­hil­arat­ed to the point of men­tal _en­nui_ by spec­tac­ular ap­peals to im­me­di­ate in­ter­est. But they are sel­dom over­worked, or even worked to with­in a health­ful de­gree of the fa­tigue point.

El­emen­tary ed­uca­tion has of­ten been ac­cused of trans­act­ing its busi­ness in small coin,--of deal­ing with and em­pha­siz­ing triv­ial­ities,--and yet ev­ery time that the sci­en­tif­ic method touch­es the field of ed­uca­tion, it re­veals the fun­da­men­tal sig­nif­icance of lit­tle things. Whether the third-​grade pupil should mem­orize the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion ta­bles in the form, “8 times 9 equals 72” or sim­ply “8-9's--72” seems a mat­ter of in­signif­icance in con­trast with the larg­er prob­lems that be­set us. And yet sci­en­tif­ic in­ves­ti­ga­tion tells us clear­ly and un­equiv­ocal­ly that any use­less ad­di­tion to a for­mu­la to be mem­orized in­creas­es the time for re­duc­ing the for­mu­la to mem­ory, and in­ter­feres sig­nif­icant­ly with its re­call and ap­pli­ca­tion. It may seem a mat­ter of triv­ial im­por­tance whether the pupil in­creas­es the sub­tra­hend num­ber or de­creas­es the min­uend num­ber when he sub­tracts dig­its that in­volve tak­ing or bor­row­ing; and yet in­ves­ti­ga­tion proves that to in­crease the sub­tra­hend num­ber is by far the sim­pler pro­cess, and elim­inates both a source of waste and a source of er­ror, which, in the ag­gre­gate, may as­sume a sig­nif­icance to men­tal econ­omy that is well worth con­sid­er­ing.

In fact, if we are ev­er to solve the broad­er, big­ger, more at­trac­tive prob­lems,--like the prob­lem of vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion, or the prob­lem of re­tar­da­tion,--we must first find a so­lu­tion for some of the small­er and seem­ing­ly triv­ial ques­tions of the very ex­is­tence of which the lay pub­lic may be quite un­aware, but which you and I know to mean an un­told to­tal of waste and in­ef­fi­cien­cy in the work that we are try­ing to do.

And one rea­son why the sci­en­tif­ic at­ti­tude to­ward ed­uca­tion­al prob­lems ap­peals to me is sim­ply be­cause this at­ti­tude car­ries with it a re­spect for these seem­ing­ly triv­ial and com­mon­place prob­lems; for just as the great­est tri­umph of the teach­ing art is to get our pupils to see in those things of life that are fleet­ing and tran­si­to­ry the op­er­ation of fun­da­men­tal and eter­nal prin­ci­ples, so the glo­ry of the sci­en­tif­ic method lies in its pow­er to re­veal the sig­nif­icance of the com­mon­place and to teach us that no slight­est de­tail of our dai­ly work is nec­es­sar­ily de­void of in­spi­ra­tion; that ev­ery slight­est de­tail of school method and school man­age­ment has a mean­ing and a sig­nif­icance that it is worth our while to pon­der.

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 12: An ad­dress de­liv­ered be­fore the St. Louis So­ci­ety of Ped­agogy, April 16, 1910.]

[Foot­note 13: Dr. W.T. Har­ris.]

~VI­II~

THE POS­SI­BIL­ITY OF TRAIN­ING CHIL­DREN HOW TO STUDY[14]

I

In its widest as­pects, the prob­lem of teach­ing pupils how to study forms a large part of the larg­er ed­uca­tion­al prob­lem. It means, not on­ly teach­ing them how to read books, and to make the con­tent of books part of their own men­tal cap­ital, but al­so, and per­haps far more sig­nif­icant­ly, teach­ing them how to draw lessons from their own ex­pe­ri­ences; not on­ly how to ob­serve and clas­si­fy and draw con­clu­sions, but al­so how to eval­uate their ex­pe­ri­ence--how to judge whether cer­tain things that they do give ad­equate or in­ad­equate re­sults.

In the nar­row­er sense, how­ev­er, the art of study may be said to con­sist in the abil­ity to as­sim­ilate the ex­pe­ri­ences of oth­ers, and it is in this nar­row­er sense that I shall dis­cuss the prob­lem to-​day. It is not on­ly in books that hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence is record­ed, and yet it is true that the read­ing of books is the most eco­nom­ical means of gain­ing these ex­pe­ri­ences; con­se­quent­ly, we may still fur­ther nar­row our prob­lem to this: How may pupils be trained ef­fec­tive­ly to glean, through the medi­um of the print­ed page, the great lessons of race ex­pe­ri­ence?

The word “study” is thus used in the sense in which most teach­ers em­ploy it. When we speak of a pupil's study­ing his lessons, we com­mon­ly mean that he is bend­ing over a text-​book, at­tempt­ing to as­sim­ilate the con­tents of the text. Just what it means to study, even in this nar­row sense of the term,--just what it means, psy­cho­log­ical­ly, to as­sim­ilate even the sim­plest thoughts of oth­ers,--I can­not tell you, and I do not know of any one who can an­swer this seem­ing­ly sim­ple ques­tion sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly. We all study, but what hap­pens in our minds when we do study is a mys­tery. We all do some think­ing, and yet the psy­chol­ogy of think­ing is the great undis­cov­ered and un­ex­plored re­gion in the field of men­tal sci­ence. Un­til we know some­thing of the psy­chol­ogy of think­ing, we can hope for very lit­tle def­inite in­for­ma­tion con­cern­ing the psy­chol­ogy of study, for study is so in­ti­mate­ly bound up with think­ing that the two are not to be sep­arat­ed.

But even if it is im­pos­si­ble at the present time to an­alyze the pro­cess of study­ing, we are pret­ty well agreed as to what con­sti­tutes suc­cess­ful study, and many rules have been for­mu­lat­ed for help­ing pupils to ac­quire ef­fec­tive habits of study. These rules con­cern us on­ly in­di­rect­ly at the present time, for our prob­lem is still nar­row­er in its scope. It has to do with the pos­si­bil­ity of so train­ing chil­dren in the art of study, not on­ly that they may study ef­fec­tive­ly in school, but al­so that they may car­ry over the habits and meth­ods of study thus ac­quired in­to the tasks of lat­er life. In oth­er words, the top­ic that we are dis­cussing is but one phase of the prob­lem of for­mal dis­ci­pline,--the prob­lem of se­cur­ing a trans­fer of train­ing from a spe­cif­ic field to oth­er fields; and my pur­pose is to view this top­ic of “study” in the light of what we know con­cern­ing the pos­si­bil­ities of trans­fer.

Let me take a spe­cif­ic ex­am­ple. I am not so much con­cerned with the prob­lem of get­ting a pupil to mas­ter a his­to­ry les­son quick­ly and ef­fec­tive­ly,--not how he may best as­sim­ilate the facts con­cern­ing the Mis­souri Com­pro­mise, for ex­am­ple. My task is rather to de­ter­mine how we can make his mas­tery of the Mis­souri Com­pro­mise a les­son in the gen­er­al art of study,--how that mas­tery may help him de­vel­op what we used to call the gen­er­al pow­er of study,--the ca­pac­ity to ap­ply an ef­fec­tive method of study to oth­er prob­lems, per­haps, very far re­moved from the his­to­ry les­son; in oth­er words, how that sin­gle les­son may help him in the more gen­er­al task of find­ing any type of in­for­ma­tion when he needs it, of as­sim­ilat­ing it once he has found it, and of ap­ply­ing it once he has as­sim­ilat­ed it.

In an au­di­ence of prac­ti­cal teach­ers, it is hard­ly nec­es­sary to em­pha­size the sig­nif­icance of do­ing this very thing. From one point of view, it may be as­sert­ed that the whole fu­ture of what we term gen­er­al ed­uca­tion, as dis­tin­guished from tech­ni­cal or vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion, de­pends up­on our abil­ity to solve prob­lems like this, and solve them sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly. We can nev­er jus­ti­fy uni­ver­sal gen­er­al ed­uca­tion be­yond the mer­est rudi­ments un­less we can demon­strate ac­cept­ably that the train­ing which gen­er­al ed­uca­tion fur­nish­es will help the in­di­vid­ual to solve the ev­ery­day prob­lems of his life. Ei­ther we must train the pupil in a gen­er­al way so that he will be able to ac­quire spe­cial­ized skill more quick­ly and more ef­fec­tive­ly than will the pupil who lacks this gen­er­al train­ing; or we must give up a large part of the gen­er­al-​cul­ture cours­es that now oc­cu­py an im­por­tant part in our el­emen­tary and sec­ondary cur­ricu­lums, and re­place these with tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al sub­jects that shall have for their pur­pose the de­vel­op­ment of spe­cial­ized ef­fi­cien­cy.

All teach­ers, I take it, are alive to the grave dan­gers of the lat­ter pol­icy. Whether we have thought the mat­ter through log­ical­ly or not we cer­tain­ly _feel_ strong­ly that too ear­ly spe­cial­iza­tion will work a se­ri­ous in­jury to the cause of ed­uca­tion, and, through ed­uca­tion, to the larg­er cause of so­cial ad­vance­ment and en­light­en­ment. We view with grave fore­bod­ing any pol­icy that will shut the door of op­por­tu­ni­ty to any child, no mat­ter how hum­ble or how un­promis­ing. And yet we al­so know that, un­less the gen­er­al ed­uca­tion that we now of­fer can be dis­tinct­ly shown to have a ben­efi­cial in­flu­ence up­on spe­cial­ized ef­fi­cien­cy, we shall be forced by eco­nom­ic con­di­tions in­to this very pol­icy. It is small won­der, then, that so many of our ed­uca­tion­al dis­cus­sions and in­ves­ti­ga­tions to-​day turn up­on this prob­lem; and among the var­ious phas­es of the prob­lem none is more sig­nif­icant than that which is cov­ered by our top­ic of to-​day,--How may we de­vel­op in the pupil a gen­er­al pow­er or ca­pac­ity for gain­ing in­for­ma­tion in­de­pen­dent­ly of schools and teach­ers? If we could ad­equate­ly de­vel­op this pow­er, there is much in the way of spe­cial­ized in­struc­tion that could be safe­ly left to the in­di­vid­ual him­self. If we could teach him how to study, then we could per­haps trust him to mas­ter some of the prin­ci­ples of any call­ing that he un­der­takes in so far as these prin­ci­ples can be mas­tered from books. To teach the child to study ef­fec­tive­ly is to do the most use­ful thing that could be done to help him to ad­just him­self to any en­vi­ron­ment of mod­ern civ­ilized life in­to which he may be thrown. For there is one thing that the more rad­ical ad­vo­cates of a nar­row vo­ca­tion­al ed­uca­tion com­mon­ly for­get, and that is the con­stant change that is go­ing on in in­dus­tri­al pro­cess­es. When we lim­it our vo­ca­tion­al teach­ing to a mere mas­tery of tech­nique, there is no guar­an­tee that the pro­cess which we teach to-​day may not be dis­card­ed in five or ten years from to-​day. Even the nar­row­er tech­ni­cal prin­ci­ples which are so ex­treme­ly im­por­tant to-​day may be rel­ative­ly in­signif­icant by the time that the child whom we are train­ing takes his place in the in­dus­tri­al world. But if we can arm the in­di­vid­ual with the more fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples which are fixed for all time; and if, in ad­di­tion to this, we can teach him how to mas­ter the spe­cial­ized prin­ci­ples which may come in­to the field un­her­ald­ed and un­ex­pect­ed, and turn top­sy-​turvy the old­er meth­ods of do­ing his work, then we shall have done much to­ward help­ing him in solv­ing that per­plex­ing prob­lem of gain­ing a liveli­hood.

II

I shall not try in this dis­cus­sion of the prob­lem of study to sum­ma­rize com­plete­ly the prin­ci­ples and pre­cepts that have been pre­sent­ed so well in the four books on the sub­ject that have ap­peared in the last two years. I do not know, in fact, of any book that is more use­ful to the teach­er just at present than Pro­fes­sor Frank Mc­Mur­ry's _How to Study and Teach­ing how to Study_. It is a book that is both a help and a de­light, for it is clear and well-​or­ga­nized, and writ­ten in a vi­va­cious style and with a wealth of con­crete il­lus­tra­tion that holds the at­ten­tion from be­gin­ning to end. The chief fault that I have to find with it is the fault that I have to find with al­most ev­ery ed­uca­tion­al book that comes from the press to-​day,--the ten­den­cy, name­ly, to im­ply that the teach­er of to-​day is do­ing very lit­tle to solve these trou­ble­some prob­lems. As a mat­ter of fact, many teach­ers are se­cur­ing ex­cel­lent re­sults from their at­tempts to teach pupils how to study. Oth­er­wise we should not find so many en­er­get­ic young men to-​day who are mak­ing an ef­fec­tive in­di­vid­ual mas­tery of the prin­ci­ples of their re­spec­tive trades and pro­fes­sions in­de­pen­dent­ly of schools and teach­ers. Our at­ti­tude to­ward these ques­tions, far from be­ing that of the pes­simist, should be that of the op­ti­mist. Our task should be to seek out these suc­cess­ful teach­ers, and find out how they do their work.

Among the most im­por­tant points em­pha­sized by the re­cent writ­ers up­on the art of study is the ne­ces­si­ty for some form of mo­ti­va­tion in the work of mas­ter­ing the text. We all know that if a pupil feels a dis­tinct need for get­ting in­for­ma­tion out of a book, the chances are that he will get it if the book is avail­able and if he can read. To cre­ate a prob­lem that will in­volve in its so­lu­tion the gain­ing of such in­for­ma­tion is, there­fore, one of the best ap­proach­es to a mas­tery of the art of study. It is, how­ev­er, on­ly the be­gin­ning. It fur­nish­es the nec­es­sary en­er­gy, but does not map out the path along which this en­er­gy is to be ex­pend­ed. And this is where the greater em­pha­sis, per­haps, is need­ed.

One of the best teach­ers that I ev­er knew taught the sub­ject that we now call agron­omy,--a branch of agri­cul­tur­al sci­ence that has to do with field crops. I was a mere boy when I sat un­der his in­struc­tion, but cer­tain points in his method of teach­ing made a most dis­tinct im­pres­sion up­on me. Lec­tures we had, of course, for lec­tur­ing was the or­tho­dox method of class in­struc­tion. But this man did some­thing more than mere­ly lec­ture. He as­signed each one of his stu­dents a plat of ground on the col­lege farm. Up­on this plat of ground, a def­inite ex­per­iment was to be con­duct­ed. One of my ex­per­iments had to do with the smut of oats. I was to try the ef­fect of treat­ing the seed with hot wa­ter in or­der to see whether it would pre­vent the fun­gus from lat­er de­stroy­ing the ripen­ing grain. The very na­ture of the prob­lem in­ter­est­ed me in­tense­ly. I be­gan to won­der about the life-​his­to­ry of this fun­gus,--how it looked and how it ger­mi­nat­ed and how it grew and wrought its de­struc­tive in­flu­ence. It was not long be­fore I found my­self spend­ing some of my leisure mo­ments in the li­brary try­ing to find out what was known con­cern­ing this sub­ject. I was not so suc­cess­ful as I might have been, but I am con­fi­dent that I learned more about par­asitic fun­gi un­der the spur of that cu­rios­ity than I should have done in five times the num­ber of hours spent in for­mal, mean­ing­less study.

But the point of my ex­pe­ri­ence is not that a prob­lem in­ter­est had been awak­ened, but rather that the white heat of that in­ter­est was not uti­lized so com­plete­ly as it might have been uti­lized in fix­ing up­on my mind some im­por­tant de­tails in the gen­er­al method of run­ning down ref­er­ences and ac­quir­ing in­for­ma­tion. That was the mo­ment to strike, and one se­ri­ous de­fect of our school or­ga­ni­za­tion to-​day is that most teach­ers, like my teach­er at that time, have so much to do that any­thing like in­di­vid­ual at­ten­tion at such mo­ments is out of the ques­tion.

Next to in­di­vid­ual at­ten­tion, prob­ably, the best way to over­come the dif­fi­cul­ty is to give class in­struc­tion in these mat­ters,--to set aside a def­inite pe­ri­od for teach­ing pupils the tech­nique of us­ing books. If one could arouse a suf­fi­cient­ly gen­er­al prob­lem in­ter­est, this sort of in­struc­tion could be made most ef­fec­tive. But even if the prob­lem in­ter­est is not gen­er­al, I think that it is well to as­sume that it ex­ists in some pupils, at least, and to give them the ben­efit of class in­struc­tion in the art of study,--even if some of the seed should fall up­on bar­ren soil.

This as­pect of teach­ing pupils how to study is par­tic­ular­ly im­por­tant in the up­per grades and the high school, where pupils have suf­fi­cient­ly mas­tered the tech­nique of read­ing to be in­trust­ed with in­di­vid­ual prob­lems, and where some ref­er­ence books are com­mon­ly avail­able. Chief among these al­ways is the dic­tio­nary, and to get pupils to use this pon­der­ous vol­ume ef­fec­tive­ly is one of the im­por­tant steps in teach­ing them how to study. Here, too, it is easy to be pedan­tic. As I shall in­sist stren­uous­ly a lit­tle lat­er, the chief fac­tor in in­sur­ing a trans­fer of train­ing from one sub­ject to an­oth­er is to leave in the pupil's mind a dis­tinct con­scious­ness that the method that he has been trained to fol­low is worth while,--that it gets re­sults. The dic­tio­nary habit is like­ly to be­gin and end with­in the school­room un­less steps are tak­en to in­sure the op­er­ation of this fac­tor. It is easy to over­work the dic­tio­nary and to use it fruit­less­ly, in so great a mea­sure, in fact, that the pupil will nev­er want to see a dic­tio­nary again.

Aside from the use of the dic­tio­nary, is the use of the helps that mod­ern books pro­vide for find­ing the in­for­ma­tion that may be de­sired,--in­dices, ta­bles of con­tents, marginal and cross-​ref­er­ences, and the like. These, again, are most sig­nif­icant in the work of the up­per grades and the high school, and here again if we wish the skill that is de­vel­oped in their use to be trans­ferred, we must take pains to see that the pupil re­al­ly ap­pre­ci­ates their val­ue,--that he re­al­izes their time-​sav­ing and en­er­gy-​sav­ing func­tions. I do not know that there is any bet­ter way to do this than to let him floun­der around with­out them for a lit­tle so that his sense of their val­ue may be en­hanced by con­trast.

III

An­oth­er im­por­tant step em­pha­sized by the re­cent writ­ers is the need for train­ing chil­dren to pick out the sig­nif­icant fea­tures in the text or por­tion of the text that they are read­ing. This, of course, is work that is to be un­der­tak­en from the very mo­ment that they be­gin to use books. How to do it ef­fec­tive­ly is a puz­zling prob­lem and one that will am­ply re­pay study and ex­per­imen­ta­tion by the in­di­vid­ual teach­er. Much study­ing of lessons by teach­ers and pupils to­geth­er will help, pro­vid­ed that the ex­er­cise is spir­it­ed and vi­tal, and is not looked up­on by the pupils as an easy way of get­ting out of recita­tion work. Mc­Mur­ry strong­ly rec­om­mends the mark­ing of books to in­di­cate the top­ic sen­tences and the oth­er salient fea­tures. Per­son­al­ly, I am sure from my own ex­pe­ri­ence that the as­sign­ment is all-​im­por­tant here, and that study ques­tions and prob­lems which can be an­swered or solved by ref­er­ence to the text will help mat­ters very much; but care must, of course, be tak­en that the con­tin­ued use of such ques­tions does not pre­clude the pupil's own mas­tery of the art of study. To elim­inate this dan­ger, it is well that the pupils be re­quest­ed fre­quent­ly to make out their own lists of ques­tions, and, as speed­ily as pos­si­ble, both the ques­tions made by the pupil and those made by the teach­er, should be re­placed by top­ical out­lines. By tak­ing care that the ques­tions are log­ical­ly ar­ranged,--that is, that a gen­er­al ques­tion re­fer to the top­ic of the para­graph, and oth­er sub­or­di­nate ques­tions to the sub­or­di­nate de­tails of the para­graph,--the tran­si­tion from the ques­tions to the top­ical out­line may be read­ily made. Si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly with this will go the tran­si­tion in recita­tion from the ques­tion-​and-​an­swer type to the top­ical type; and when you have trained a class in­to the habit of top­ical recita­tion,--when each pupil can talk right through a top­ic (not around it or un­der­neath it or above it) with­out the use of “pump­ing” ques­tions by the teach­er,--you have gone a long way to­ward de­vel­op­ing the art of study.

The trans­fer of this train­ing, how­ev­er, is quite an­oth­er mat­ter. There are pupils who can work up ex­cel­lent top­ical recita­tions from their school text-​books but who are ut­ter­ly at sea in get­ting a grasp on a sub­ject treat­ed in oth­er books. Here again the prob­lem lies in get­ting the pupil to see the method apart from its con­tent, and to show him that it re­al­ly brings re­sults that are worth while. If, in our train­ing in the top­ical method, we are too for­mal and di­dac­tic, the art of study will be­gin and end right there. It is here that the fac­tor of mo­ti­va­tion is of supreme im­por­tance. When re­al prob­lems are raised which re­quire for their so­lu­tion in­tel­li­gent read­ing, the gen­er­al worth of the method of study can be clear­ly shown. I do not go so far as to say that the pupil should nev­er be re­quired to study un­less he has a re­al prob­lem that he wish­es to solve. In fact, I think that we still have a large place for the for­mal, sys­tem­at­ic mas­tery of texts by ev­ery pupil in our schools. I do con­tend, how­ev­er, that the fre­quent in­tro­duc­tion of re­al prob­lems will give us an op­por­tu­ni­ty to show the pupil that the method that he has uti­lized in his more for­mal school work is ad­equate and es­sen­tial to do the thing that ap­peals to him as worth while. On­ly in this way, I be­lieve, can we in­sure that trans­fer of train­ing which is the im­por­tant fac­tor from our present stand­point.

And I ought al­so to say, par­en­thet­ical­ly, that we should not in­ter­pret too nar­row­ly this word “mo­ti­va­tion.” Let us re­mem­ber that what may ap­peal to the adult as an ef­fec­tive mo­tive does not al­ways ap­peal to the child as such. Eco­nom­ic mo­tives are the most ef­fec­tive, prob­ably, in our own adult lives, and prob­ably very ef­fec­tive with high-​school pupils, but eco­nom­ic mo­tives are not al­ways strong in young chil­dren, nor should we wish them to be. It is not al­ways true that the child will ap­proach a school task sym­pa­thet­ical­ly when he knows that the task is an es­sen­tial prepa­ra­tion for the life that is go­ing on about him. He may work hard­er at a task in or­der to get ahead of his fel­low-​pupils than he would if the mo­tive were to fit him to en­ter a shop or a fac­to­ry. Mo­tive is large­ly a mat­ter of in­stinct with the child, and he may, in­deed, be per­fect­ly sat­is­fied with a school task just as it stands. For ex­am­ple, we all know that chil­dren en­joy the right kind of drill. Rep­eti­tion, es­pe­cial­ly rhyth­mic rep­eti­tion, is in­stinc­tive,--it sat­is­fies an in­born need. Where such a con­di­tion ex­ists, it is an ob­vi­ous waste of time to search about for more in­di­rect mo­tives. The eco­nom­ical thing to do is to turn the ready en­er­gy of the child in­to the chan­nel that is al­ready open to it, so long as this pro­ce­dure fits in with the re­sults that we must se­cure. I feel like em­pha­siz­ing this fact, inas­much as the terms “prob­lem in­ter­est” and “mo­ti­va­tion” seem most com­mon­ly to be as­so­ci­at­ed in the minds of teach­ers with what we adults term “re­al” or eco­nom­ic sit­ua­tions. To learn a les­son well may of­ten be a suf­fi­cient mo­tive,--may of­ten con­sti­tute a “re­al” sit­ua­tion to the child,--and if it does, it will serve very ef­fec­tive­ly our pur­pos­es in this oth­er task,--name­ly, get­ting the pupil to see the worth of the method that we ask him to em­ploy.

IV

There are one or two points of a gen­er­al na­ture in con­nec­tion with the art of study that should be em­pha­sized. In the first place, the up­per-​grade and high-​school pupils are, I be­lieve, ma­ture enough to ap­pre­ci­ate in some de­gree what knowl­edge re­al­ly means. One of the fal­la­cies of which I was pos­sessed on com­plet­ing my work in the low­er schools was the be­lief that there are some men who know ev­ery­thing. I nat­ural­ly con­clud­ed that the su­per­in­ten­dent of schools was one of these men; the fam­ily physi­cian was an­oth­er; the lead­ing man in my town was a third; and any one who ev­er wrote a book was put, _ex of­fi­cio_ so to speak, in­to this class with­out fur­ther in­quiry. One of the most as­tound­ing rev­ela­tions of my lat­er ed­uca­tion was to learn that, af­ter all, the amount of re­al knowl­edge in this world, vo­lu­mi­nous though it seems, is af­ter all pitiably small. Of opin­ion and spec­ula­tion we have a sur­plus, but of re­al, down­right, hard fact, our cap­ital is still most in­signif­icant. And I won­der if some­thing could not be done in the high school to teach pupils the dif­fer­ence be­tween fact and opin­ion, and some­thing al­so of the slow, la­bo­ri­ous pro­cess through which re­al facts are ac­cu­mu­lat­ed. How many mis­takes of life are due to the lack of the ju­di­cial at­ti­tude right here. What mis­takes we all make when we try to eval­uate writ­ings out­side of our own spe­cial field of knowl­edge or ac­tiv­ity. Noth­ing de­press­es me to-​day quite so much as the readi­ness with which lay­men mis­take opin­ion for fact in the field of psy­chol­ogy and ed­uca­tion,--and I sup­pose that my own hasty ac­cep­tance of state­ments in oth­er fields would have a sim­ilar ef­fect up­on the spe­cial­ists of those fields.

Can gen­er­al ed­uca­tion help us out at all in this mat­ter? I have on­ly one or two sug­ges­tions to make, and even these may not be worth a great deal. In the re­cent Po­lar con­tro­ver­sy, the sym­pa­thies of the gen­er­al pub­lic were, I think, at the out­set with Cook. This was per­haps, nat­ural, and yet the trained mind ought to have with­held judg­ment for one rea­son if for no oth­er,--and that one rea­son was Peary's long Arc­tic ser­vice, his un­ques­tioned mas­tery of the tech­nique of po­lar trav­el, his gen­er­al rep­uta­tion for hon­esty and cau­tion in ad­vanc­ing opin­ions. By all the lessons that his­to­ry teach­es, Peary's word should have had prece­dence over Cook's, for Peary was a spe­cial­ist, while Cook was on­ly an am­ateur. And yet the gen­er­al pub­lic dis­count­ed en­tire­ly those lessons, and trust­ed rather the novice, with what re­sults it is now un­nec­es­sary to re­view,--and in nine cas­es out of ten, the re­sults will be the same.

Could we not, as part of our work in train­ing pupils to study, al­so teach them to give some sort of an eval­ua­tion to the au­thor­ities that they con­sult? Could we not teach them that, in nine cas­es out of ten, at least, the man who has the mes­sage most worth lis­ten­ing to is the man who has worked the hard­est and the longest in his field, and who en­joys the best rep­uta­tion among his fel­low-​work­ers? Some­times, I ad­mit, the rule does not work, and es­pe­cial­ly with men whose rep­uta­tions as au­thor­ities have out­lived their pe­ri­od of pro­duc­tiv­ity, but even this mis­take could be guard­ed against. Cer­tain­ly high-​school pupils ought dis­tinct­ly to un­der­stand that the au­thors of their text-​books are not al­ways the most learned men or the great­est au­thor­ities in the fields that they treat. The use of bi­ograph­ical dic­tio­nar­ies, of the books that are ap­pear­ing in var­ious fields giv­ing brief bi­ogra­phies and of­ten some au­thor­ita­tive es­ti­mate of the work­ers in these fields, is im­por­tant in this con­nec­tion.

Mc­Mur­ry rec­om­mends that pupils be en­cour­aged to take a crit­ical at­ti­tude to­ward the prin­ci­ples they are set to mas­ter,--to judge, as he says, the sound­ness and worth of the state­ments that they learn. This is cer­tain­ly good ad­vice, and wher­ev­er the pupil can in­tel­li­gent­ly deal with re­al sources, it is well fre­quent­ly to have him check up the state­ments of sec­ondary sources. But, af­ter all, this is the age of the spe­cial­ist, and to trust one's un­trained judg­ment in a field re­mote from one's knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence is like­ly to lead to un­for­tu­nate re­sults. We have all sorts of il­lus­tra­tions from the ig­no­rant man who will not trust the physi­cian or the health of­fi­cial in mat­ters of san­ita­tion; be­cause he lacks the prop­er per­spec­tive, he jumps to the con­clu­sion that the spe­cial­ist is a fraud. Would it not be well to sup­ple­ment Mc­Mur­ry's sug­ges­tion by the one that I have just made,--that is, that we train pupils how to eval­uate au­thor­ities as well as facts,--how to pro­tect them­selves from the quack and the fak­er who live like par­asites up­on the ig­no­rance of lay­men, both in medicine, in ed­uca­tion, and in Arc­tic ex­plo­ration?

And I be­lieve that there is a place, al­so, in the high school, es­pe­cial­ly in con­nec­tion with the work in sci­ence and his­to­ry, for giv­ing pupils some idea of how knowl­edge is re­al­ly gained. I should not teach sci­ence ex­clu­sive­ly by the lab­ora­to­ry method, nor his­to­ry ex­clu­sive­ly by the source method, but I should cer­tain­ly take fre­quent op­por­tu­ni­ty to let pupils work through some sim­ple prob­lems from the be­gin­nings, strug­gling with the con­di­tions some­what as the dis­cov­er­ers them­selves strug­gled; fol­low­ing up “blind leads” and toil­some­ly re­turn­ing for a fresh start; meet­ing with dis­cour­age­ment; and fi­nal­ly feel­ing, per­haps, some of the joy that comes with suc­cess af­ter strug­gle; and all in or­der that they may know bet­ter and ap­pre­ci­ate more ful­ly the cost and the worth of that in­tel­lec­tu­al her­itage which the mas­ter-​minds of the world have be­queathed to the present and the fu­ture. And along with this, as they mas­ter the prin­ci­ples of sci­ence, let them learn al­so the hu­man side of sci­ence,--the sto­ry of New­ton, with­hold­ing his great dis­cov­ery for years un­til he could be ab­so­lute­ly cer­tain that it was a law; un­til he could get the very com­mon­place but ob­streper­ous moon in­to har­mo­ny with his law of falling bod­ies;--the sto­ry of Dar­win, with his twen­ty-​odd years of the most pa­tient and per­sis­tent kind of toil; delv­ing in­to the most un­promis­ing ma­te­ri­als, read­ing the dri­est books, al­ways on the look­out for the facts that would point the way to the ex­pla­na­tion of species;--the sto­ry of Morse and his bit­ter strug­gle against pover­ty, and sick­ness, and in­nu­mer­able dis­ap­point­ments up to the time when, in ad­vanc­ing years, suc­cess crowned his ef­forts.

All this may seem very re­mote from the pro­sa­ic task of teach­ing pupils how to study; and yet it will lend its in­flu­ence to­ward the at­tain­ment of that end. For, af­ter all, we must lead our pupils to see that some books, in spite of their formidable dif­fi­cul­ties and their ap­par­ent ab­strac­tions, are still close to life, and that the truth which lies in books, and which we wish them to as­sim­ilate, has been wrought out of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence, and not brought down mirac­ulous­ly from some re­mote store­house of wis­dom that is ac­ces­si­ble on­ly to the elect. We poke a good deal of fun at book learn­ing nowa­days, and there is a pedan­tic type of book learn­ing that cer­tain­ly de­serves all the ridicule that can be heaped up­on it. But it is not wise to car­ry satire and ridicule too far in any di­rec­tion, and es­pe­cial­ly when it may mean cre­at­ing in young minds a dis­trust of the force that, more than any oth­er sin­gle fac­tor, has op­er­at­ed to raise man above the sav­age.

V

To teach the child the art of study means, then, that we take ev­ery pos­si­ble oc­ca­sion to im­press up­on his mind the val­ue of study as a means of solv­ing re­al and vi­tal prob­lems, and that, with this as an in­cen­tive, we grad­ual­ly and per­sis­tent­ly and sys­tem­at­ical­ly lead him to grasp the method of study as a method,--that is, slow­ly and grad­ual­ly to ab­stract the method from the par­tic­ular cas­es to which he ap­plies it and to emo­tion­al­ize it,--to make it an ide­al. On­ly in this way, so far as we may know, can the art be so gen­er­al­ized as to find ready ap­pli­ca­tion in his lat­er life. To this end, it is es­sen­tial that the steps be tak­en re­peat­ed­ly,--not be­gun to-​day and nev­er thought of again un­til next year,--but dai­ly, even hourly, in­sur­ing a lit­tle growth. This means, too, not on­ly that the teach­er must pos­sess a high de­gree of pa­tience,--that first prin­ci­ple of ped­agog­ic skill,--but al­so that he have a com­pre­hen­sive grasp of the prob­lem, and the abil­ity to sep­arate the woods from the trees, so that, to him at least, the chief aim will nev­er be lost to view.

But, even at its best, the task is a se­vere one, and we need, here as else­where in ed­uca­tion, care­ful­ly con­trolled tests and ex­per­iments, that will en­able us to get at the facts. Above all, let me protest against the in­ci­den­tal the­ory of teach­ing pupils how to study. To adopt the in­ci­den­tal pol­icy in any field of ed­uca­tion,--whether in arith­metic, or spelling, or read­ing; whether in de­vel­op­ing the pow­er of rea­son­ing or the mem­ory, or the art of study,--is to throw wide open the doors that lead to the lines of least re­sis­tance, to lax meth­ods, to easy hon­ors, to weak­ened men­tal fiber, and to scamped work. Just as the per­ni­cious doc­trine of the sub­con­scious is the first and last refuge of the psy­cho-​fak­er, so in­ci­den­tal learn­ing is the first and last refuge of soft ped­agogy. And I mean by in­ci­den­tal learn­ing, go­ing at a teach­ing task in an in­do­lent, un­re­flec­tive, hit-​or-​miss fash­ion in the hope that some­how or oth­er from this pro­cess will emerge the very def­inite re­sults that we de­sire.

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 14: A pa­per read be­fore the Su­per­in­ten­dents' Sec­tion of the Illi­nois State Teach­ers' As­so­ci­ation, De­cem­ber 29, 1910.]

~IX~

A PLEA FOR THE DEF­INITE IN ED­UCA­TION[15]