Craftsmanship in Teaching

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

FOOT­NOTES:

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

~X~

SCI­ENCE AS RE­LAT­ED TO THE TEACH­ING OF LIT­ER­ATURE[16]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOT­NOTES:

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

~XI~

THE NEW AT­TI­TUDE TO­WARD DRILL[17]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it seemed to me that this school was op­er­at­ed with a min­imum of waste or loss. Ev­ery item of en­er­gy that the pupils pos­sessed was be­ing giv­en to some ed­uca­tive ac­tiv­ity. Noth­ing was lost by con­flict be­tween pupil and teach­er. Noth­ing was lost by bursts of anger or by fits of de­pres­sion. These sources of waste had been elim­inat­ed so far as I could de­ter­mine. The pupils could read well and write well and ci­pher ac­cu­rate­ly. They even took a keen de­light in the drills. And I found that this phase of their work was en­light­ened by the mod­ern con­tent that had been in­tro­duced. In their hand­work and man­ual train­ing they could see that arith­metic was use­ful,--that it had some­thing to do with the great big buzzing life of the out­er world. They learned that spelling was use­ful in writ­ing,--that it was not some­thing that be­gan and end­ed with­in the cov­ers of the spelling book, but that it had a re­al and vi­tal re­la­tion to oth­er things that they found to be im­por­tant. They had their dra­mat­ic ex­er­cis­es in which they and their fel­lows, and, on oc­ca­sions, their par­ents, took a keen de­light, and they were glad to af­ford them plea­sure and to re­ceive con­grat­ula­tions at the close. And yet they found that, in or­der to do these things well, they must read and study and drill on speak­ing. They liked to have their draw­ings in­spect­ed and praised at the school ex­hi­bi­tions, but they soon found that good draw­ing and paint­ing and de­sign­ing were strict­ly con­di­tioned by a mas­tery of tech­nique, and they wished to mas­ter tech­nique in or­der to win these re­wards.

Now what was the se­cret of the ef­fi­cien­cy of this school? Not mere­ly the fact that it had in­tro­duced cer­tain types of con­tent such as draw­ing, man­ual train­ing, do­mes­tic sci­ence, drama­ti­za­tion, sto­ry work,--but al­so that it had not lost sight of the fun­da­men­tal pur­pose of el­emen­tary ed­uca­tion, but had so or­ga­nized all of its stud­ies that each played in­to the hands of the oth­ers, and that ev­ery­thing that was done had some def­inite and tan­gi­ble re­la­tion to ev­ery­thing else. The man­ual train­ing ex­er­cis­es and the me­chan­ical draw­ing were ex­er­cis­es in arith­metic, but, let me re­mind you, there were oth­er lessons, and for­mal lessons, in arith­metic as well. But the one ex­er­cise en­light­ened and made more mean­ing­ful the oth­er. In the same way the sto­ry and drama­ti­za­tion were in­ti­mate­ly re­lat­ed to the read­ing and the lan­guage, but there were for­mal lessons in read­ing and for­mal lessons in lan­guage. The ge­og­ra­phy il­lus­trat­ed na­ture study and em­ployed lan­guage and arith­metic and draw­ing in its ex­er­cis­es. And so the whole struc­ture was or­ga­nized and co­her­ent and uni­fied, and what was taught in one class was uti­lized in an­oth­er. There was no need­less du­pli­ca­tion, no need­less or mean­ing­less rep­eti­tion. But rep­eti­tion there was, over and over again, but al­ways it was ef­fec­tive in still more firm­ly fix­ing the habits.

One would be an in­grate, in­deed, if one failed to rec­og­nize the great good that an ex­treme re­form move­ment may do. Some very pre­cious in­cre­ments of progress have re­sult­ed even from the most ex­treme and ridicu­lous re­ac­tions against the drill and for­mal­ism of the old­er schools. Let me briefly sum­ma­rize these re­al­ly sub­stan­tial gains as I con­ceive them.

In the first place, we have come to rec­og­nize dis­tinct­ly the im­por­tance of en­list­ing in the ser­vice of habit build­ing the na­tive in­stincts of the child. Up to a cer­tain point na­ture pro­vides for the fix­ing of use­ful re­spons­es, and we should be un­wise not to make use of these ten­den­cies. In the spon­ta­neous ac­tiv­ities of play, cer­tain fun­da­men­tal re­ac­tions are con­tin­ual­ly re­peat­ed un­til they reach the plane of ab­so­lute mech­anism. In im­itat­ing the ac­tions of oth­ers, ad­just­ments are learned and made in­to habits with­out ef­fort; in fact, the pro­cess of im­ita­tion, so far as it is in­stinc­tive, is a source of pure de­light to the young child. Fi­nal­ly, close­ly re­lat­ed to these two in­stincts, is the na­tive ten­den­cy to rep­eti­tion,--na­ture's pri­ma­ry pro­vi­sion for drill. You have of­ten heard lit­tle chil­dren re­peat their new words over and over again. Fre­quent­ly they have no con­cep­tion of the mean­ings of these words. Na­ture seems to be un­trou­bled by a ques­tion that has both­ered teach­ers; name­ly, Should a child ev­er be asked to drill on some­thing the pur­pose of which he does not un­der­stand? Na­ture sees to it that cer­tain es­sen­tial re­spons­es be­come au­to­mat­ic long be­fore the child is con­scious of their mean­ing. Just be­cause na­ture does this is, of course, no rea­son why we should im­itate her. But the fact is an in­ter­est­ing com­men­tary up­on the ex­treme to which we some­times car­ry our prin­ci­ple of ra­tio­nal­iz­ing ev­ery­thing be­fore per­mit­ting it to be mas­tered.

I re­peat that the re­form move­ment has done ex­cel­lent ser­vice in ex­tend­ing the recog­ni­tion in ed­uca­tion of these fun­da­men­tal and in­born adap­tive in­stincts,--play, im­ita­tion, and rhyth­mic rep­eti­tion. It has erred when it has in­sist­ed that we could de­pend up­on these alone, for na­ture has adapt­ed man, not to the com­pli­cat­ed con­di­tions of our mod­ern high­ly or­ga­nized so­cial life, but rather to prim­itive con­di­tions. Left to them­selves, these in­stinc­tive forces would take the child up to a cer­tain point, but they would still leave him on a prim­itive plane. I know of one good au­thor­ity on the teach­ing of read­ing who main­tains that the nor­mal child would learn to read with­out for­mal teach­ing if he were placed in the right en­vi­ron­ment,--an en­vi­ron­ment of books. This may be pos­si­ble with some ex­cep­tion­al chil­dren, but even an en­vi­ron­ment rea­son­ably re­plete with books does not ef­fect this mir­acle in the case of cer­tain chil­dren whom I know very well and whom I like to think of as per­fect­ly nor­mal. These chil­dren learned to talk by im­ita­tion and in­stinc­tive rep­eti­tion. But na­ture has not yet gone so far as to pro­vide the av­er­age child with spon­ta­neous im­puls­es that will lead him to learn to read. Read­ing is a much more com­pli­cat­ed and high­ly or­ga­nized pro­cess. And so it is with a vast num­ber of the ac­tiv­ities that our pupils must mas­ter.

An­oth­er in­cre­ment of progress that the re­form move­ment has giv­en to ed­uca­tion­al prac­tice is a recog­ni­tion of the fact that we have been re­quir­ing pupils to ac­quire un­nec­es­sary habits, un­der the im­pres­sion, that even if the habits were not use­ful, some­thing of val­ue was gained in their ac­qui­si­tion. As a re­sult, we have passed all of our grain through the same mill, un­mind­ful of the fact that dif­fer­ent life ac­tiv­ities re­quired dif­fer­ent types of grist. To-​day we are see­ing the need for care­ful­ly se­lect­ing the types of habit and skill that should be de­vel­oped in _all_ chil­dren. We are rec­og­niz­ing that there are many phas­es of the ed­uca­tive pro­cess that it is not well to re­duce to an au­to­mat­ic ba­sis. When I was in the el­emen­tary school I mem­orized Barnes's _His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States_ and Harp­er's _Ge­og­ra­phy_ from cov­er to cov­er. I have nev­er great­ly re­gret­ted this au­to­mat­ic mas­tery; but I have of­ten thought that I might have mem­orized some­thing rather more im­por­tant, for his­to­ry and ge­og­ra­phy could have been mas­tered just as ef­fec­tive­ly in an­oth­er way.

In the third place, and most im­por­tant of all, we have been led to an­alyze this com­plex pro­cess of habit build­ing,--to find out the fac­tors that op­er­ate in learn­ing. We have now a good­ly body of prin­ci­ples that may even be char­ac­ter­ized by the ad­jec­tive “sci­en­tif­ic.” We know that in habit build­ing, it is fun­da­men­tal­ly es­sen­tial to get the pupil start­ed in the right way. A re­cent writ­er states that two thirds of the dif­fi­cul­ty that the teach­er meets fix­ing habits is due to the ne­glect of this prin­ci­ple. In­ad­equate and in­ef­fi­cient habits get start­ed and must be con­tin­ual­ly com­bat­ed while the de­sir­able habit is be­ing formed. How im­por­tant this is in the ini­tial pre­sen­ta­tion of ma­te­ri­al that is to be mem­orized or made au­to­mat­ic we are just now be­gin­ning to ap­pre­ci­ate. One writ­er in­sists that faulty work in the first grade is re­spon­si­ble for a large part of the re­tar­da­tion which is both­er­ing us so much to-​day. The wrong kind of a start is made, and when­ev­er a faulty habit is formed, it much more than dou­bles the dif­fi­cul­ty of get­ting the right one well un­der way. We are slow­ly com­ing to ap­pre­ci­ate how much time is wast­ed in drill pro­cess­es by in­ad­equate meth­ods. Tech­nique is be­ing im­proved and the time thus saved is be­ing giv­en to the new­er con­tent sub­jects that are de­mand­ing ad­mis­sion to the schools.

Again, we are com­ing to ap­pre­ci­ate as nev­er be­fore the im­por­tance of mo­ti­vat­ing our drill work,--of not on­ly read­ing in­to it pur­pose and mean­ing so that the pupil will un­der­stand what it is all for, but al­so of en­gen­der­ing in him the _de­sire_ to form the habits,--to un­der­go the dis­ci­pline that is es­sen­tial for mas­tery. Here again the re­form move­ment has been help­ful, show­ing us the waste of time and en­er­gy that re­sults from at­tempt­ing to fix habits that are on­ly weak­ly mo­ti­vat­ed.

All this is a vast­ly dif­fer­ent mat­ter from sug­ar-​coat­ing the drill pro­cess­es, un­der the mis­tak­en no­tion that some­thing that is worth while may be ac­quired with­out ef­fort. I think that ed­uca­tors are gen­er­al­ly agreed that such a pol­icy is thor­ough­ly bad,--for it sub­verts a ba­sic prin­ci­ple of hu­man life the op­er­ation of which nei­ther ed­uca­tion nor any oth­er force can al­ter or re­verse. To teach the child that the things in life that are worth do­ing are easy to do, or that they are al­ways or even of­ten in­trin­si­cal­ly pleas­ant or agree­able, is to teach him a lie. Hu­man his­to­ry gives us no ex­am­ples of wor­thy achieve­ments that have not been made at the price of strug­gle and ef­fort,--at the price of do­ing things that men did not want to do. Ev­ery great truth has had to strug­gle up­ward from de­feat. Ev­ery man who has re­al­ly found him­self in the work of life has paid the price of sac­ri­fice for his suc­cess. And when­ev­er we at­tempt to give our pupils a mas­tery of the com­pli­cat­ed arts and skills that have lift­ed civ­ilized man above the plane of his sav­age an­ces­tors, we must ex­pect from them strug­gle and ef­fort and self-​de­nial.

Let me quote a para­graph from the re­port of a re­cent in­ves­ti­ga­tion in the psy­chol­ogy of learn­ing. The habit that was be­ing learned in this ex­per­iment was skill in the use of the type­writ­er. The writ­er de­scribes the pro­cess in the fol­low­ing words:

“In the ear­ly stages of learn­ing, our sub­jects were all very much in­ter­est­ed in the work. Their whole mind seemed to be spon­ta­neous­ly held by the writ­ing. They were al­ways anx­ious to take up the work anew each day. Their gen­er­al at­ti­tude and the re­sul­tant sen­sa­tions con­sti­tut­ed a pleas­ant feel­ing tone, which had a help­ful re­ac­tionary ef­fect up­on the work. Con­tin­ued prac­tice, how­ev­er, brought a change. In place of the spon­ta­neous, rapt at­ten­tion of the be­gin­ning stages, at­ten­tion tend­ed, at cer­tain def­inite stages of ad­vance­ment, to wan­der away from the work. A gen­er­al feel­ing of monotony, which at times as­sumed the form of ut­ter dis­gust, took the place of the for­mer pleas­ant sen­sa­tions and feel­ings. The writ­ing be­came a dis­agree­able task. The un­pleas­ant feel­ings now present in con­scious­ness ex­ert­ed an ev­er-​re­strain­ing ef­fect on the work. As an ex­pert skill was ap­proached, how­ev­er, the learn­ers' at­ti­tude and mood changed again. They again took a keen in­ter­est in the work. Their whole feel­ing tone once more be­came fa­vor­able, and the move­ments de­light­ful and pleas­ant. The ex­pert typ­ist ... so thor­ough­ly en­joyed the writ­ing that it was as pleas­ant as the spon­ta­neous play ac­tiv­ities of a child. But in the course of de­vel­op­ing this per­ma­nent in­ter­est in the work, there were many pe­ri­ods in near­ly ev­ery test, many days, as well as stages in the prac­tice as a whole, when the work was much dis­liked, pe­ri­ods when the learn­ing as­sumed the rôle of a very monotonous task. Our records showed that at such times as these no progress was made. Rapid progress in learn­ing type­writ­ing was made on­ly when the learn­ers were feel­ing good and had an at­ti­tude of in­ter­est to­ward the work.”[18]

Who has not ex­pe­ri­enced that feel­ing of hope­less­ness and de­spair that comes at these suc­ces­sive lev­els of the long pro­cess of ac­quir­ing skill in a com­pli­cat­ed art? How des­per­ate­ly we strug­gle on--striv­ing to put ev­ery item of en­er­gy that we can com­mand in­to our work, and yet feel­ing how hope­less it all seems. How tempt­ing then is the ham­mock on the porch, the fas­ci­nat­ing nov­el that we have placed on our bed­side ta­ble, the hap­py com­pa­ny of friends that are talk­ing and laugh­ing in the next room; or how we long for the green fields and the open road; how se­duc­tive is that siren call of change and di­ver­sion,--that evil spir­it of pro­cras­ti­na­tion! How fee­ble, too, are the ef­forts that we make un­der these con­di­tions! We are not mak­ing progress in our art, we are on­ly mark­ing time. And yet the psy­chol­ogists tell us that this mark­ing time is an es­sen­tial in the mas­tery of any com­pli­cat­ed art. Some­where, deep down in the ner­vous sys­tem, sub­tle pro­cess­es are at work, and when fi­nal­ly in­ter­est dawns,--when fi­nal­ly hope re­turns to us, and life again be­comes worth while,--these heart­break­ing strug­gles reap their re­ward. The psy­chol­ogists call them “plateaus of growth,” but some one has said that “sloughs of de­spond” would be a far bet­ter des­ig­na­tion.

The progress of any in­di­vid­ual de­pends up­on his abil­ity to pass through these sloughs of de­spond,--to set his face res­olute­ly to the task and per­se­vere. It would be the idlest fol­ly to lead chil­dren to be­lieve that suc­cess or achieve­ment or even pass­ing abil­ity can be gained in any oth­er man­ner. And this is the dan­ger in the sug­ar-​coat­ing pro­cess.

But mo­ti­va­tion does not mean sug­ar-​coat­ing. It means the de­vel­op­ment of pur­pose, of am­bi­tion, of in­cen­tive. It means the de­vel­op­ment of the will­ing­ness to un­der­go the dis­ci­pline in or­der that the pur­pose may be re­al­ized, in or­der that the goal may be at­tained. It means the cre­at­ing of those con­di­tions that make for strength and viril­ity and moral fiber,--for it is in the con­scious­ness of hav­ing over­come ob­sta­cles and won in spite of hand­icaps,--it is in this con­scious­ness of con­quest that men­tal strength and moral strength have their source. The vic­to­ry that re­al­ly strength­ens one is not the vic­to­ry that has come eas­ily, but the vic­to­ry that stands out sharp and clear against the back­ground of ef­fort and strug­gle. It is be­cause this sub­jec­tive con­trast is so ab­so­lute­ly es­sen­tial to the con­scious­ness of pow­er,--it is for this rea­son that the “sloughs of de­spond” still have their func­tion in our new at­ti­tude to­ward drill.

But do not mis­take me: I have no sym­pa­thy with that ed­uca­tion­al “stand-​pat­tism” that would mul­ti­ply these need­less­ly, or fail to build sol­id and com­fort­able high­ways across them wher­ev­er it is pos­si­ble to do so. I have no sym­pa­thy with that phi­los­ophy of ed­uca­tion which ap­proves the plac­ing of ar­ti­fi­cial bar­ri­ers in the learn­er's path. But if I build high­ways across the morass­es, it is on­ly that youth may the more read­ily tra­verse the re­gion and come the more quick­ly to the points where strug­gle is ab­so­lute­ly nec­es­sary.

You re­mem­ber in George Eliot's _Daniel Deron­da_ the sto­ry of Gwen­dolen Harleth. Gwen­dolen was a but­ter­fly of so­ci­ety, a young wom­an in whose child­hood drill and dis­ci­pline had found no place. In ear­ly wom­an­hood, she was, through fam­ily mis­for­tune, thrown up­on her own re­sources. In cast­ing about for some means of self-​sup­port her first re­course was to mu­sic, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some slight train­ing. She sought out her old Ger­man mu­sic teach­er, Klesmer, and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this train­ing to fi­nan­cial ac­count. Klesmer's re­ply sums up in a nut­shell the psy­chol­ogy of skill:

“Any great achieve­ment in act­ing or in mu­sic grows with the growth. When­ev­er an artist has been able to say, 'I came, I saw, I con­quered,' it has been at the end of pa­tient prac­tice. Ge­nius, at first, is lit­tle more than a great ca­pac­ity for re­ceiv­ing dis­ci­pline. Singing and act­ing, like the fine dex­ter­ity of the jug­gler with his cup and balls, re­quire a shap­ing of the or­gans to­ward a fin­er and fin­er cer­tain­ty of ef­fect. Your mus­cles, your whole frame, must go like a watch,--true, true, true, to a hair. This is the work of the spring­time of life be­fore the habits have been formed.”

And I can for­mu­late my own con­cep­tion of the work of habit build­ing in ed­uca­tion no bet­ter than by para­phras­ing Klesmer's epi­gram. To in­crease in our pupils the ca­pac­ity to re­ceive dis­ci­pline; to show them, through con­crete ex­am­ple, over and over again, how per­sis­tence and ef­fort and con­cen­tra­tion bring re­sults that are worth while; to choose from their own child­ish ex­pe­ri­ences the il­lus­tra­tions that will force this les­son home; to sup­ple­ment, from the sto­ries of great achieve­ments, those il­lus­tra­tions which will in­spire them to ef­fort; to lead them to see that Peary con­quer­ing the Pole, or Wilbur Wright per­fect­ing the aëro­plane, or Morse strug­gling through long years of hope­less­ness and dis­cour­age­ment to give the world the elec­tric tele­graph,--to show them that these men went through ex­pe­ri­ences dif­fer­ing on­ly in de­gree and not in kind from those which char­ac­ter­ize ev­ery achieve­ment, no mat­ter how small, so long as it is dom­inat­ed by a uni­tary pur­pose; to make the in­evitable sloughs of de­spond no less morass­es, per­haps, but to make their con­quest add a per­ma­nent in­cre­ment to growth and de­vel­op­ment: this is the task of our drill work as I view it. As the prophe­cy of Isa­iah has it: “Pre­cept must be up­on pre­cept; pre­cept up­on pre­cept; line up­on line; line up­on line; here a lit­tle and there a lit­tle.” And if we can suc­ceed in giv­ing our pupils this vi­sion,--if we can re­veal the deep­er mean­ing of strug­gle and ef­fort and self-​de­nial and sac­ri­fice shin­ing out through the lit­tle de­tails of the day's work,--we are our­selves achiev­ing some­thing that is rich­ly worth while; for the high­est tri­umph of the teach­er's art is to get his pupils to see, in the small and seem­ing­ly triv­ial af­fairs of ev­ery­day life, the op­er­ation of fun­da­men­tal and eter­nal prin­ci­ples.

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 17: An ad­dress be­fore the Kansas State Teach­ers' As­so­ci­ation, Tope­ka, Oc­to­ber 20, 1910.]

[Foot­note 18: W.F. Book, _Jour­nal of Ed­uca­tion­al Psy­chol­ogy_, vol. i, 1910, p. 195.]

~XII~

THE IDE­AL TEACH­ER[19]

I wish to dis­cuss with you briefly a very com­mon­place and oft-​re­peat­ed theme,--a theme that has been han­dled and han­dled un­til its once-​glo­ri­ous rai­ment is now quite thread­bare; a theme so full of pit­falls and dan­gers for one who would at­tempt its dis­cus­sion that I have hes­itat­ed long be­fore mak­ing a choice. I know of no oth­er theme that lends it­self so read­ily to a su­per­fi­cial treat­ment--of no theme up­on which one could find so eas­ily at hand all of the proverbs and plat­itudes and max­ims that one might de­sire. And so I can­not be ex­pect­ed to say any­thing up­on this top­ic that has not been said be­fore in a far bet­ter man­ner. But, af­ter all, very few of our thoughts--even of those that we con­sid­er to be the most orig­inal and worth while--are re­al­ly new to the world. Most of our thoughts have been thought be­fore. They are like dolls that are passed on from age to age to be dressed up and dec­orat­ed to suit the taste or the fash­ion or the fan­cy of each suc­ceed­ing gen­er­ation. But even a new dress may add a touch of new­ness to an old doll; and a new phrase or a new set­ting may, for a mo­ment, re­ju­ve­nate an old truth.

The top­ic that I wish to treat is this, “The Ide­al Teach­er.” And I may as well start out by say­ing that the ide­al teach­er is and al­ways must be a fig­ment of the imag­ina­tion. This is the es­sen­tial fea­ture of any ide­al. The ide­al man, for ex­am­ple, must pos­sess an in­fi­nite num­ber of su­perla­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics. We take this virtue from one, and that from an­oth­er, and so on in­def­inite­ly un­til we have con­struct­ed in imag­ina­tion a paragon, the coun­ter­part of which could nev­er ex­ist on earth. He would have all the virtues of all the heroes; but he would lack all their de­fects and all their in­ad­equa­cies. He would have the man­ners of a Chester­field, the courage of a Winkel­ried, the imag­ina­tion of a Dante, the elo­quence of a Ci­cero, the wit of a Voltaire, the in­tu­itions of a Shake­speare, the mag­netism of a Napoleon, the pa­tri­otism of a Wash­ing­ton, the loy­al­ty of a Bis­mar­ck, the hu­man­ity of a Lin­coln, and a hun­dred oth­er qual­ities, each the coun­ter­part of some su­perla­tive qual­ity, drawn from the his­toric fig­ure that rep­re­sent­ed that qual­ity in rich­est mea­sure.

And so it is with the ide­al teach­er: he would com­bine, in the right pro­por­tion, all of the good qual­ities of all of the good teach­ers that we have ev­er known or heard of. The ide­al teach­er is and al­ways must be a crea­ture, not of flesh and blood, but of the imag­ina­tion, a child of the brain. And per­haps it is well that this is true; for, if he ex­ist­ed in the flesh, it would not take very many of him to put the rest of us out of busi­ness. The re­lent­less law of com­pen­sa­tion, which rules that un­usu­al growth in one di­rec­tion must al­ways be coun­ter­bal­anced by de­fi­cient growth in an­oth­er di­rec­tion, is the sav­ing prin­ci­ple of hu­man so­ci­ety. That a man should be su­perla­tive­ly good in one sin­gle line of ef­fort is the de­mand of mod­ern life. It is a plat­itude to say that this is the age of the spe­cial­ist. But spe­cial­ism, while it al­ways means a gain to so­ci­ety, al­so al­ways means a loss to the in­di­vid­ual. Dar­win, at the age of forty, sud­den­ly awoke to the fact that he was a man of one idea. Twen­ty years be­fore, he had been a youth of the most var­ied and di­verse in­ter­ests. He had en­joyed mu­sic, he had found de­light in the mas­ter­pieces of imag­ina­tive lit­er­ature, he had felt a keen in­ter­est in the dra­ma, in po­et­ry, in the fine arts. But at forty Dar­win quite by ac­ci­dent dis­cov­ered that these things had not at­tract­ed him for years,--that ev­ery in­cre­ment of his time and en­er­gy was con­cen­trat­ed in a con­stant­ly in­creas­ing mea­sure up­on the un­rav­el­ing of that great prob­lem to which he had set him­self. And he lament­ed bit­ter­ly the loss of these oth­er in­ter­ests; he won­dered why he had been so thought­less as to let them slip from his grasp. It was the same old sto­ry of hu­man progress; the sac­ri­fice of the in­di­vid­ual to the race. For Dar­win's loss was the world's gain, and if he had not lim­it­ed him­self to one line of ef­fort, and giv­en him­self up to that work to the ex­clu­sion of ev­ery­thing else, the world might still be wait­ing for the _Ori­gin of Species_, and the rev­olu­tion in hu­man thought and hu­man life which fol­lowed in the wake of that great book. Car­lyle de­fined ge­nius as an in­fi­nite ca­pac­ity for tak­ing pains. George Eliot char­ac­ter­ized it as an in­fi­nite ca­pac­ity for re­ceiv­ing dis­ci­pline. But to make the def­ini­tion com­plete, we need the for­mu­la­tion of Goethe, who iden­ti­fied ge­nius with the pow­er of con­cen­tra­tion: “Who would be great must lim­it his am­bi­tions; in con­cen­tra­tion is shown the Mas­ter.”

And so the great men of his­to­ry, from the very fact of their ge­nius, are apt not to cor­re­spond with what our ide­al of great­ness de­mands. In­deed, our ide­al is of­ten more near­ly re­al­ized in men who fall far short of ge­nius. When I stud­ied chem­istry, the in­struc­tor burned a bit of di­amond to prove to us that the di­amond was, af­ter all, on­ly car­bon in an “al­lotrop­ic” form. There seems to be a sim­ilar al­lotropy work­ing in hu­man na­ture. Some men seem to have all the con­stituents of ge­nius, but they nev­er reach very far above the plane of the com­mon­place. They are like the di­amond,--ex­cept that they are more like the char­coal.

I wish to de­scribe to you a teach­er who was not a ge­nius, and yet who pos­sessed cer­tain qual­ities that I should ab­stract and ap­pro­pri­ate if I were to con­struct in my imag­ina­tion an ide­al teach­er. I first met this man five years ago out in the moun­tain coun­try. I can re­call the oc­ca­sion with the most vivid dis­tinct­ness. It was a sparkling morn­ing, in mid­dle May. The val­ley was just be­gin­ning to green a lit­tle un­der the in­flu­ence of the length­en­ing days, but on the sur­round­ing moun­tains the snow line still hung low. I had just set­tled down to my morn­ing's work when word was brought that a vis­itor wished to see me, and a mo­ment lat­er he was shown in­to the of­fice. He was tall and straight, with square shoul­ders and a deep chest. His hair was gray, and a rather long white beard added to the ef­fect of age, but de­tract­ed not an io­ta from the ev­idences of strength and vig­or. He had the look of a West­ern­er,--of a man who had lived much of his life in the open. There was a rugged­ness about him, a stur­dy strength that told of many a day's toil along the trail, and many a night's sleep un­der the stars.

In a few words he stat­ed the pur­pose of his vis­it. He sim­ply wished to do what half a hun­dred oth­ers in the course of the year had en­tered that of­fice for the pur­pose of do­ing. He wished to en­roll as a stu­dent in the col­lege and to pre­pare him­self for a teach­er. This was not or­di­nar­ily a startling re­quest, but hith­er­to it had been made on­ly by those who were just start­ing out on the high­road of life. Here was a man ad­vanced in years. He told me that he was six­ty-​five, and six­ty-​five in that coun­try meant old age; for the re­gion had but re­cent­ly been set­tled, and most of the peo­ple were ei­ther young or mid­dle-​aged. The on­ly old men in the coun­try were the few sur­viv­ing pi­oneers,--men who had come in away back in the ear­ly days of the min­ing fever, long be­fore the ad­vent of the rail­road. They had trekked across the plains from Om­aha, and up through the moun­tain­ous pass­es of the Ore­gon trail; or, a lit­tle lat­er, they had come by steam­boat from St. Louis up the twelve-​hun­dred-​mile stretch of the Mis­souri un­til their progress had been stopped by the Great Falls in the very foothills of the Rock­ies. What heroes were these gray­beards of the moun­tains! What pos­si­bil­ities in know­ing them, of lis­ten­ing to the re­count­ing of tales of the ear­ly days,--of run­ning fights with the In­di­ans on the plains, of am­bush­ments by des­per­adoes in the moun­tain pass­es, of the lurid life of the ear­ly min­ing camps, and the des­per­ate deeds of the Vig­ilantes! And here, be­fore me, was a man of that type. You could read the main facts of his his­to­ry in the very lines of his face. And this man--one of that small band whom the whole coun­try unit­ed to hon­or--this man want­ed to be­come a stu­dent,--to sit among ado­les­cent boys and girls, lis­ten­ing to the lec­tures and dis­cus­sions of in­struc­tors who were babes in arms when he was a man of mid­dle life.

But there was no doubt of his de­ter­mi­na­tion. With the ea­ger­ness of a boy, he out­lined his plan to me; and in do­ing this, he told me the sto­ry of his life,--just the barest facts to let me know that he was not a man to do things half-​heart­ed­ly, or to drop a project un­til he had car­ried it through ei­ther to a suc­cess­ful is­sue, or to in­dis­putable de­feat.

And what a life that man had lived! He had been a youth of promise, keen of in­tel­li­gence and quick of wit. He had spent two years at a col­lege in the Mid­dle West back in the ear­ly six­ties. He had left his course un­com­plet­ed to en­ter the army, and he had fol­lowed the for­tunes of war through the lat­ter part of the great re­bel­lion. At the close of the war he went West. He farmed in Kansas un­til the drought and the grasshop­pers urged him on. He joined the first sur­vey­ing par­ty that picked out the line of the transcon­ti­nen­tal rail­road that was to fol­low the south­ern route along the old San­ta Fé trail. He car­ried the chain and worked the tran­sit across the Rock­ies, across the desert, across the Sier­ras, un­til, with his com­pan­ions, he had--

“led the iron stal­lions down to drink Through the cañons to the wa­ters of the West.”

And when this task was ac­com­plished, he fol­lowed the lure of the gold through the Cal­ifor­nia plac­ers; east­ward again over the moun­tains to the boom­ing Neva­da camp, where the Com­stock lode was al­ready turn­ing out the wealth that was to build a half-​dozen colos­sal for­tunes. He “prospect­ed” through this coun­try, with vary­ing suc­cess, liv­ing the life of the camps,--rich in its ex­pe­ri­ences, vivid in its col­or­ing, call­ing forth ev­ery item of en­er­gy and courage and hardi­hood that a man could com­mand. Then word came by that mys­te­ri­ous wire­less and key­less teleg­ra­phy of the moun­tains and the desert,--word that back to the east­ward, ore de­posits of un­told wealth had been dis­cov­ered. So east­ward once more, with the stam­pede of the min­ers, he turned his face. He was suc­cess­ful at the out­set in this new re­gion. He quick­ly ac­cu­mu­lat­ed a for­tune; he lost it and amassed an­oth­er; lost that and still gained a third. Five suc­ces­sive for­tunes he made suc­ces­sive­ly, and suc­ces­sive­ly he lost them. But dur­ing this time he had be­come a man of pow­er and in­flu­ence in the com­mu­ni­ty. He mar­ried and raised a fam­ily and saw his chil­dren com­fort­ably set­tled.

But when his last for­tune was swept away, the old _Wan­der­lust_ again claimed its own. Hous­es and lands and mort­gages and mills and mines had slipped from his grasp. But it mat­tered lit­tle. He had on­ly him­self to care for, and, with pick and pan strapped to his sad­dle­bow, he set his face west­ward. Along the ridges of the high Rock­ies, through Wyoming and Mon­tana, he wan­dered, ev­er on the look­out for the glint of gold in the white quartz. Lit­tle by lit­tle he moved west­ward, pick­ing up a suf­fi­cient liv­ing, un­til he found him­self one win­ter shut in by the snows in a re­mote val­ley on the up­per wa­ters of the Gal­latin Riv­er. He stopped one night at a lone­ly ranch house. In the course of the evening his host told him of a catas­tro­phe that had be­fall­en the wide­ly scat­tered in­hab­itants of that re­mote val­ley. The teach­er of the dis­trict school had fall­en sick, and there was lit­tle like­li­hood of their get­ting an­oth­er un­til spring.

That is a true catas­tro­phe to the ranch­ers of the high val­leys cut off from ev­ery line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the out­er world. For the op­por­tu­ni­ties of ed­uca­tion are high­ly val­ued in that part of the West. They are reck­oned with bread and hors­es and cat­tle and sheep, as among the ne­ces­si­ties of life. The chil­dren were cry­ing for school, and their par­ents could not sat­is­fy that pe­cu­liar kind of hunger. But here was the re­lief. This wan­der­er who had ar­rived in their midst was a man of parts. He was let­tered; he was ed­ucat­ed. Would he do them the fa­vor of teach­ing their chil­dren un­til the snow had melt­ed away from the ridges, and his cayuse could pick the trail through the cañons?

Now school-​keep­ing was far­thest from this man's thoughts. But the needs of lit­tle chil­dren were very near to his heart. He ac­cept­ed the of­fer, and en­tered the log school­house as the dis­trict school­mas­ter, while a hand­ful of pupils, num­ber­ing all the chil­dren of the com­mu­ni­ty who could ride a bron­cho, came five, ten, and even fif­teen miles dai­ly, through the win­ter's snows and storms and cru­el cold, to pick up the crumbs of learn­ing that had lain so long un­touched.

What hap­pened in that lone­ly lit­tle school, far off on the Gal­latin bench, I nev­er right­ly dis­cov­ered. But when spring opened up, the mas­ter sold his cayuse and his pick and his ri­fle and the oth­er im­ple­ments of his trade. With the earn­ings of the win­ter he made his way to the school that the state had es­tab­lished for the train­ing of teach­ers; and I count it as one of the priv­ileges of my life that I was the first of­fi­cial of that school to lis­ten to his sto­ry and to wel­come him to the vo­ca­tion that he had cho­sen to fol­low.

And yet, when I looked at his face, drawn in­to lines of strength by years of bat­tle with the el­ements; when I looked at the clear, blue eyes, that told of a far clean­er life than is lived by one in a thou­sand of those that hold the fron­tiers of civ­iliza­tion; when I caught an ex­pres­sion about the mouth that told of an in­nate hu­man­ity far be­yond the pow­er of world­ly loss­es or mis­for­tunes to crush and sub­due, I could not keep from my lips the words that gave sub­stance to my thought; and the thought was this: that it were far bet­ter if we who were sup­posed to be com­pe­tent to the task of ed­uca­tion should sit rev­er­ent­ly at the feet of this man, than that we should pre­sume to in­struct him. For knowl­edge may come from books, and even youth may pos­sess it, but wis­dom comes on­ly from ex­pe­ri­ence, and this man had that wis­dom in far greater mea­sure than we of books and lab­ora­to­ries and class­rooms could ev­er hope to have it. He had lived years while we were liv­ing days.

I thought of a learned schol­ar who, through pa­tient la­bor in amass­ing facts, had demon­strat­ed the in­flu­ence of the fron­tier in the de­vel­op­ment of our na­tion­al ide­als; who had point­ed out how, at each suc­ces­sive stage of Amer­ican his­to­ry, the heroes of the fron­tier, push­ing far­ther and far­ther in­to the wilder­ness, con­quer­ing first the low coastal plain of the At­lantic seaboard, then the forest­ed foothills and ridges of the Ap­palachi­ans, had fi­nal­ly pen­etrat­ed in­to the Mis­sis­sip­pi Val­ley, and, sub­du­ing that, had fol­lowed on west­ward to the prairies, and then to the great plains, and then clear across the great di­vide, the al­ka­li deserts, and the Sier­ras, to Cal­ifor­nia and the Pa­cif­ic Coast; how these fron­tiers­men, at ev­ery stage of our his­to­ry, had sent back wave af­ter wave of strength and viril­ity to keep alive the stur­dy ide­als of toil and ef­fort and in­de­pen­dence,--ide­als that would coun­ter­act the mel­low­ing and soft­en­ing and de­gen­er­at­ing in­flu­ences of the hot­house civ­iliza­tion that grew up so rapid­ly in the suc­ces­sive re­gions that they left be­hind. Turn­er's the­ory that most of what is typ­ical and unique in Amer­ican in­sti­tu­tions and ide­als owes its ex­is­tence to the back­set of the fron­tier life found a liv­ing ex­em­plar in the man who stood be­fore me on that May morn­ing.

But he would not be dis­cour­aged from his pur­pose. He had made up his mind to com­plete the course that the school of­fered; to take up the thread of his ed­uca­tion at the point where he had dropped it more than forty years be­fore. He had made up his mind, and it was easy to see that he was not a man to be de­terred from a set pur­pose.

I shall not hide the fact that some of us were skep­ti­cal of the out­come. That a man of six­ty-​five should have a thirst for learn­ing was not re­mark­able. But that a man whose life had been spent in scenes of ex­cite­ment, who had been as­so­ci­at­ed with deeds and events that stir the blood when we read of them to-​day, a man who had lived al­most ev­ery mo­ment of his life in the open,--that such a man could set­tle down to the un­event­ful life of a stu­dent and a teach­er, could shut him­self up with­in the four walls of a class­room, could find any­thing to in­spire and hold him in the dull pre­sen­ta­tion of facts or the dry elu­ci­da­tion of the­ories,--this seemed to be a mir­acle not to be ex­pect­ed in this re­al­is­tic age. But, mir­acle or not, the thing ac­tu­al­ly hap­pened. He re­mained near­ly four years in the school, earn­ing his liv­ing by work that he did in the in­ter­vals of study, and do­ing it so well that, when he grad­uat­ed, he had not on­ly his ed­uca­tion and the diplo­ma which stood for it, but al­so a bank ac­count.

He lived in a lit­tle cab­in by him­self, for he wished to be where he would not dis­turb oth­ers when he sang or whis­tled over his work in the small hours of the night. But his meals he took at the col­lege dor­mi­to­ry, where he presid­ed at a ta­ble of young wom­en stu­dents. Nev­er was a man more pop­ular with the ladies than this weath­er-​beat­en pa­tri­arch with the girls of his ta­ble. No mat­ter how gloomy the day might be, one could al­ways find sun­shine from that quar­ter. No mat­ter how grievous the trou­bles of work, there was al­ways a bit of cheer­ful op­ti­mism from a man who had tast­ed al­most ev­ery joy and sor­row that life had to of­fer. If one were in a blue funk of de­jec­tion be­cause of fail­ure in a class, he would lend the sym­pa­thy that came from his own rich ex­pe­ri­ence in fail­ures,--not on­ly past but present, for some things that come easy at six­teen come hard at six­ty-​five, and this man who would ac­cept no fa­vors had to fight his way through “flunks” and “goose-​eggs” like the younger mem­bers of the class. And even with it all so com­plete an em­bod­iment of hope and courage and whole­some light-​heart­ed­ness would be hard to find. He was an op­ti­mist be­cause he had learned long since that any­thing but op­ti­mism is a crime; and learn­ing this in ear­ly life, op­ti­mism had be­come a deeply seat­ed and in­erad­ica­ble prej­udice in his mind. He could not have been gloomy if he had tried.

And so this man fought his way through sci­ence and math­emat­ics and phi­los­ophy, slow­ly but sure­ly, just as he had fought inch by inch and link by link, across the Ari­zona desert years be­fore. It was a much hard­er fight, for all the force of life­long habit, than which there is none oth­er so pow­er­ful, was against him from the start. And now came the hu­man temp­ta­tion to be off on the old trail, to sad­dle his horse and get a pick and a pan and make off across the west­ern range to the gold­en land that al­ways lies just un­der the sun­set. How of­ten that tur­bu­lent _Wan­der­lust_ seized him, I can on­ly con­jec­ture. But I know the spir­it of the wan­der­er was al­ways strong with­in him. He could say, with Kipling's _Tramp Roy­al_:

“It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But present­ly you feel that you will die Un­less you get the page you're read­ing done, An' turn an­oth­er--like­ly not so good; But what you're af­ter is to turn them all.”

And I knew that he fought that temp­ta­tion over and over again; for that lit­tle ex­pe­ri­ence out on the Gal­latin bench had on­ly par­tial­ly turned his life from the chan­nels of wan­der­ing, al­though it had bereft him of the old de­sire to seek for gold. Of­ten he out­lined to me a well-​for­mu­lat­ed plan; per­haps he had to tell some one, lest the fever should take too strong a hold up­on him, and force his sur­ren­der. His plan was this: He would teach a term here and there, grad­ual­ly work­ing his way west­ward, al­ways to­ward the re­mote cor­ners of the earth in­to which his rov­ing in­stinct seemed unerring­ly to lead him. Alas­ka, Hawaii, and the Philip­pines seemed easy enough to ac­cess; sure­ly, he thought, teach­ers must be need­ed in all those re­gions. And when he should have turned these pages, he might have mas­tered his vo­ca­tion in a de­gree suf­fi­cient to war­rant his at­tempt­ing an alien soil. Then he would sail away in­to the South Seas, with New Zealand and Aus­tralia as a base. And grad­ual­ly mov­ing west­ward through En­glish-​speak­ing set­tle­ments and colonies he would fi­nal­ly com­plete the cir­cuit of the globe.

And the full fruition of that plan might have formed a fit­ting cli­max to my tale, were I telling it for the sake of its ro­mance; but my pur­pose de­mands a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion. My hero is now prin­ci­pal of schools in a lit­tle city of the moun­tains,--a city so tiny that its name would be un­known to most of you. And I have heard vague ru­mors that he is ris­ing rapid­ly in his pro­fes­sion and that the com­mu­ni­ty he serves will not lis­ten to any­thing but a per­ma­nent tenure of his of­fice. All of which seems to in­di­cate to me that he has aban­doned, for the while at least, his in­ten­tion to turn quite all the pages of the world's great book, and is con­tent to live true to the ide­al that was born in the log school­house--the con­vic­tion that the true life is the life of ser­vice, and that the love of wan­der­ing and the lure of gold are on­ly siren calls that lead one al­ways to­ward, but nev­er to, the promised land of dreams that seems to lie just over the west­ern range where the pink sun­set stands sharp against the pur­ple shad­ows.

The end­ing of my sto­ry is pro­sa­ic, but ev­ery­thing in this world is pro­sa­ic, un­less you view it ei­ther in the per­spec­tive of time or space, or in the con­trasts that bring out the high lights and deep­en the shad­ows.

But if I have left my hero hap­pi­ly mar­ried to his pro­fes­sion, the courtship and win­ning of which formed the theme of my tale, I may be per­mit­ted to in­dulge in a very lit­tle mor­al­iz­ing of a rather more ex­plic­it sort than I have yet at­tempt­ed.

It is a sim­ple mat­ter to con­struct in imag­ina­tion an ide­al teach­er. Mix with im­mor­tal youth and abound­ing health, a max­imal de­gree of knowl­edge and a max­imal de­gree of ex­pe­ri­ence, add per­fect tact, the spir­it of true ser­vice, the most per­fect pa­tience, and the most stead­fast per­sis­tence; place in the cru­cible of some good nor­mal school; stir in twen­ty weeks of stan­dard psy­chol­ogy, ten weeks of gen­er­al method, and vary­ing amounts of patent com­pounds known as spe­cial meth­ods, all war­rant­ed pure and with­out drugs or poi­son; sweet­en with a lit­tle mu­sic, tough­en with fif­teen weeks of log­ic, bring to a slow boil in the prac­tice school, and, while still siz­zling, turn loose on a cold world. The for­mu­la is sim­ple and com­plete, but like many an­oth­er good recipe, a com­pe­tent cook might find it hard to fol­low when she is short of but­ter and must shame­ful­ly skimp on the eggs.

Now the man whose his­to­ry I have re­count­ed rep­re­sents the most price­less qual­ities of this for­mu­la. In the first place he pos­sessed that qual­ity the key to which the philoso­phers of all ages have sought in vain,--he had solved the prob­lem of eter­nal youth. At the age of six­ty-​five his en­thu­si­asm was the en­thu­si­asm of an ado­les­cent. His en­er­gy was the en­er­gy of an ado­les­cent. De­spite his gray hair and white beard, his mind was peren­ni­al­ly young. And that is the on­ly type of mind that ought to be con­cerned with the work of ed­uca­tion. I some­times think that one of the ad­van­tages of a prac­tice school lies in the fact that the teach­ers who have di­rect charge of the pupils--what­ev­er may be their lim­ita­tions--have at least the virtue of youth, the virtue of be­ing young. If they could on­ly learn from my hero the art of keep­ing young, of keep­ing the mind fresh and vig­or­ous and open to what­ev­er is good and true, no mat­ter how nov­el a form it may take, they might, like him, pre­serve their youth in­def­inite­ly. And I think that his life gives us one clew to the se­cret,--to keep as close as we can to na­ture, for na­ture is al­ways young; to sing and to whis­tle when we would rather weep; to cheer and com­fort when we would rather crush and dis­heart­en; of­ten to dare some­thing just for the sake of dar­ing, for to be young is to dare; and al­ways to won­der, for that is the prime symp­tom of youth, and when a man ceas­es to won­der, age and de­crepi­tude are wait­ing for him around the next cor­ner.

It is the priv­ilege of the teach­ing craft to rep­re­sent more ad­equate­ly than any oth­er call­ing the con­di­tions for re­main­ing young. There is time for liv­ing out-​of-​doors, which some of us, alas! do not do. And youth, with its high hope and lofty am­bi­tion, with its res­olute dar­ing and its naive won­der, sur­rounds us on ev­ery side. And yet how rapid­ly some of us age! How quick­ly life seems to lose its zest! How com­plete­ly are we blind to the op­por­tu­ni­ties that are on ev­ery hand!

And close­ly re­lat­ed to this virtue of be­ing al­ways young, in fact grow­ing out of it, the ide­al teach­er will have, as my hero had, the gift of glad­ness,--that joy of liv­ing which takes life for grant­ed and pro­pos­es to make the most of ev­ery mo­ment of con­scious­ness that it brings.

And fi­nal­ly, to bal­ance these qual­ities, to keep them in leash, the ide­al teach­er should pos­sess that spir­it of ser­vice, that con­vic­tion that the life of ser­vice is the on­ly life worth while--that con­vic­tion for which my hero strug­gled so long and against such tremen­dous odds. The spir­it of ser­vice must al­ways be the cor­ner­stone of the teach­ing craft. To know that any life which does not pro­vide the op­por­tu­ni­ties for ser­vice is not worth the liv­ing, and that any life, how­ev­er hum­ble, that does pro­vide these op­por­tu­ni­ties is rich be­yond the reach of earth­ly re­wards,--this is the first les­son that the ty­ro in school­craft must learn, be he six­teen or six­ty-​five.

And just as youth and hope and the gift of glad­ness are the eter­nal ver­ities on one side of the pic­ture, so the spir­it of ser­vice, the spir­it of sac­ri­fice, is the eter­nal ver­ity that forms their true com­ple­ment; with­out whose com­pen­sa­tion, hope were but idle dream­ing, and laugh­ter a hol­low mock­ery. And self-​de­nial, which is the keynote of ser­vice, is the great sober­ing, jus­ti­fy­ing, eter­nal fac­tor that sym­bol­izes hu­man­ity more per­fect­ly than any­thing else. In the in­tro­duc­tion to _Ro­mo­la_, George Eliot pic­tures a spir­it of the past who re­turns to earth four hun­dred years af­ter his death, and looks down up­on his na­tive city of Flo­rence. And I can con­clude with no bet­ter words than those in which George Eliot voic­es her ad­vice to that shade:

“Go not down, good Spir­it: for the changes are great and the speech of the Flo­ren­tines would sound as a rid­dle in your ears. Or, if you go, min­gle with no politi­cians on the mar­mi, or else­where; ask no ques­tions about trade in Cal­imara; con­fuse your­self with no in­quiries in­to schol­ar­ship, of­fi­cial or monas­tic. On­ly look at the sun­light and shad­ows on the grand walls that were built solid­ly and have en­dured in their grandeur; look at the faces of the lit­tle chil­dren, mak­ing an­oth­er sun­light amid the shad­ows of age; look, if you will, in­to the church­es and hear the same chants, see the same im­ages as of old--the im­ages of will­ing an­guish for a great end, of benef­icent love and as­cend­ing glo­ry, see up­turned liv­ing faces, and lips mov­ing to the old prayers for help. These things have not changed. The sun­light and the shad­ows bring their old beau­ty and wak­en the old heart-​strains at morn­ing, noon, and even-​tide; the lit­tle chil­dren are still the sym­bol of the eter­nal mar­riage be­tween love and du­ty; and men still yearn for the reign of peace and righ­teous­ness--still own that life to be the best which is a con­scious vol­un­tary sac­ri­fice.”

FOOT­NOTES:

[Foot­note 19: An ad­dress to the grad­uat­ing class of the Os­wego, New York, State Nor­mal School, Febru­ary, 1908.]

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