What is education?

Front matter

WHAT IS

M OORE

ICibrarg

Preface

This volume owes its inception to my efforts to teach college students and teachers how to study. As I have attempted year after year to discuss with my classes the ways and means of performing the student's work, the conviction has grown upon me that one of the greatest needs both of teachers and of students at present is an elementary knowledge of the philosophy of education. Two conclusions have shaped themselves from this conviction, which stand out above all the rest. The first is that education is one and the same process in all grades of schools, and that the activities which we learn to perform with the help and guidance of teachers are the very activities which we shall have to continue to perform until we die. The second is that the confusion as to the nature of their undertaking, which hangs like a thick cloud about the efforts of teachers and students, cannot be dissipated save by an attempt to answer the question, What is knowledge ? The theory of knowledge has long been the battle ground of contending philosophical armies. It was the vital question of the great apostles of education, Socrates and Plato, before it became the private property of highly technical philosophical schools. It must once more, I believe, become one of the chief concerns of educators.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

This book, therefore, is an attempt to discuss some of the fundamental presuppositions of education. It is a series of essays, somewhat closely related, upon a few of the subjects which I believe that we who follow the profession of teaching must perpetually keep turning over in our minds in order that clear ideas upon them may shape and control our work.

I have attempted not only to set forth my own views upon these problems, but, when opportunity offered, to reenforce them by the statements of other men. " Have you ever observed that we pay more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author ? " writes Hamerton. I have felt that I had a duty to attempt to secure for some wise passages which bear very immediately upon the theory of education as much attention as I can.

The notions of education which I have attempted to outline I have learned chiefly from Socrates and Plato. My indebtedness to two living teachers, Professor John Dewey and Professor Frank McMuriy, I gratefully acknowledge ; it will be apparent to everyone who may do me the honor to turn the leaves of this book.

ERNEST C. MOORE Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. What is Education? i

II. What is Knowledge? 30

Chapter I What Is Education?

Years ago, while a student in New York City, I attended a meeting of the Graduate Club of Columbia, which was addressed by some three or four of the leading professors of the University upon the subject, "How I came to choose the work which I am now doing," I remember that on that occasion Professor Brander Matthews told us how, as a student living in a garret in Paris, he made the acquaintance of the French drama; and Professor Franklin Giddings, how he came to devote his life to sociology; and that Professor, now President, Nicholas Murray Butler gave an account somewhat like this, of how he came to study education. He said : " I was a junior in Columbia College when one day, as I was passing President Barnard's door, he called me into his ofifice and said, ' Butler, what do you mean to do when you get out of college ? ' I replied : ' Mr. President, I have not decided, but I shall probably study law.' Then President Barnard

-WHAT IS EDUCATION?

replied : ' Butler, do not do it. There are plenty of lawyers already. Study education. In this country it is an unbroken field. There is no subject which \ so much merits study or which will yield larger return in point of opportunities for service to him who makes himself an authority in it than this subject of education.' I replied, in a more or less vague way, that I did not know what he meant by education in that sense. He replied by giving me Ludwig Wiese's ' German Letters on English Education,' and asked me to read it, and after I had read it to come back and talk it over with him. I did read this book and became greatly interested in the whole field of reflection and study which it opened up. As a result, I read under President Barnard's guidance, during my next summer holiday, Karl von Raumer's ' Geschichte der Padagogik.' He pointed out that I must be sure to study philosophy in order to have a basis upon which to build any genuine knowledge of educational theory and practice. With this, I was launched on what proved to be my professional career."

The advice which President Barnard gave is not often given by university men to their students, yet his reasons for giving it are as sound to-day as when ^ he uttered them. There is no subject which so much deserves study, or which offers larger opportunities for service to mankind than this.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

Education is one of the major concerns of the race. The chiefs of the philosophers have regarded it as the one thing needful for the perfecting of states and the improving of lives. Civilized nations have taken its claims so seriously that giving instruction and attending upon instruction is now the occupation in which the largest numbers of their people are engaged. What was formerly the privilege of the few is now compulsory for all. The very magnitude of this undertaking puts it above the plane of indifference. The seriousness of the issues involved is such as to give the most unimaginative person who for a moment contemplates them a sense of responsibility almost too great for mortals to bear. Other occupations work with things or with human interests taken singly. This occupation assumes a guardianship over the generations which affects all that they do. The directors of schools, the makers of courses of study, and the teachers of the young are engaged in " choosing experiences for people," not for a day or an hour but for life. The study of education is the effort to put intelligence into that high task. " Nothing is worth doing, which is not worth thinking about." The world, even the educated world, is quick to see that education is worth doing, but slow to admit that it is worth thinking about. Gradually it is being won over from its reliance upon the customary and the traditional, and

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

hesitatingly it begins to examine the life which it prescribes for the young. The first fruits of intelligence applied to education are better laws and administrative devices. These produce a better teaching personnel. Yet this is but a beginning of reforms. Those who teach must think about the experiences which they choose for those who are taught.

One of the earliest books written in this country upon the work of the teacher begins with the question, " Why is it that there is such a * singular contrariety of opinion in regard to the pleasantness of the business of teaching ? ' " Some teachers regard their daily task as intolerable drudgery, others never cease to think and to talk of " their delightful labors." The answer is that " every mind is so constituted as to take a positive pleasure in the exercise of ingenuity, in adapting means to an end, and in watching their operation.'! ^ Those who do this find pleasure in their work, those who do not, regard it as drudgery. This continuous adapting of means to ends is not only the sole expedient for vitalizing the teacher, it is the sole method of vitalizing the school and of vitalizing education itself. This is the thinking which is enjoined upon all who work at anything which is worth doing. Theory and practice must go hand in hand, for theory is nothing but thinking about practice, and

^ Jacob Abbott, The Teacher. Boston, 1834.

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the practice which is worth while must be thought about, that is, must grow out of theory. The notion that theory and practice should work together in education is older even than Socrates, for the first of the culture teachers of the Greeks, the great Protagoras, left the world these two conclusions from his reflection upon education: the first, "teaching requires natural disposition and exercise, and must be begun in youth " ; the second, " neither theory without practice nor practice without theory avails at all." ^

Some uses of theory. Without theory, practice must be a blind doing of what somebody else — tradition, authority, or accident — has directed. Rational purpose is lacking, there is no selecting of aims, no turning over of plans to decide which is best, and little checking up to find out the real worth of what has been accomplished. The individual situation is slighted. The authorities do the thinking, if indeed any is done. Other members of the undertaking are only hands to carry out their orders. " Tell us exactly what should be done in a high school, and we will go and do it," say our students sometimes to us. The teacher can no more maintain himself on such a basis than the physician can. The principles of medicine are not rule-ofthumb recipes which tell him exactly what to do in

1 Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, i-p. 441. [5]

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

every given case. They are laws and rules which he must use to interpret his patients' needs. No one can fit the rules to the given case who does not know them and their advisory character. They are not guide-board directions; instead they call for application, since they always take the h)qpothetical form: if, in your practice, you find these conditions, it is best to proceed thus or thus. (To attempt to work out the details of the procedure of education, apart from its concrete situations, results only in mechanizing instruction.

The kind of practice which has value. Teachers when seeking a situation, frequently offer their long experience as an inducement to prospective employers to engage them. V^ut it is not quantity of practice but quality of practice which determines expertness.") Practice which has not led to reflection or been thought about atrophies intelligence. The merest beginner who brings his mind to his work is incalculably superior to such a routine instructor. A wholesome doubt as to the sufficiency of what we are doing makes improvement possible. The race has not yet found out how to educate its children, though it has been trying for many years. Let us have theories, plenty of theories, the more the better, since we can hardly have too many minds at work upon this most difficult and urgent of problems. None but the mind saturated

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

with knowledge and well stocked with visions of the possibilities of education can detect the shortcomings of its procedure. None but the theorist can discriminate its strength from its weakness, or actually see what is being done. None but the theorist can introduce experiments, devise standards, suggest alternatives, or predict the probable outcome of a given course of action. "It is highly probable," writes Professor Baldwin, " that two in every three children are more or less damaged or hindered in their mental and moral development in the school ; but," he adds, " I am not at all sure that they would fare any better if they stayed at home ! " There are plenty of problems to be solved.

The wisely practical educator and the practical theorist are the only persons who can solve them; the mere theorist, or the mere taker of orders, is as useless in education as he is everywhere else.

Three grades of knowledge. There are three grades of knowledge which one may have of any given subject matter. They are usually distinguished as ordinary, or common-sense, knowledge, scientific knowledge, and philosophic knowledge. Each of Ihese grades of knowledge is due to a grouping, or clarification, of experiences, and in each of them A^^ke a present or a past experience as the sigiWf a future one which we seek to bring inl^Jpeing or to escape from. These

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

three grades of knowledge deal with the same phenomena, but from different standpoints. They are throughout one in kind. Difference of subject matter to which they apply is not the mark which distinguishes them. It is commonly believed that ordinary knowledge does not enable one to predict, whereas scientific knowledge does. Yet every boy who drops a stone into the water knows beforehand that it will sink, as certainly as the scientist does. And every time one strikes a match, discharges a gun, or puts fire beneath water, seeds into the ground, or food on the table, he does so because he predicts that certain results will happen. Human action of the most ordinary kind is based upon this power to predict. Wherein, then, does the superiority of scientific knowledge to common-sense knowledge lie ? The boy cannot tell how fast the stone will fall. The scientist can. The man who discharges the gun cannot follow the series of changes which drive the bullet forward, or trace its course, or calculate the force of its impact. /Science consists in the minuter examination of experience. It seeks quantitative precision, where common sense reckons with a vague mor4-or-less. It coordinates remote happenings^|d traces relations among them which common ^^Be had not suspected, as between the fall oWm apple and the movement of a world, the death^^a man from

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

yellow fever and the prevalence of a certain insect, etc. Common-sense knowledge tends to be personal. Its facts are conceived in relation to a self, while science strives to be impersonal and to relate its facts to the body of facts which surround them. In order to trace relations between wide ranges of facts, science disengages the identities, which it traces, from the particularities which attend them, and states its results as abstract laws and systems of laws. Rub a board with a bit of sandpaper, or a piece of brass with a rag. The board or the piece of brass becomes hot. The common-sense fact is that this board, when rubbed, became hot. Science omits the details of the experience and fixes its attention upon the relations, " Friction produces heat " is the fact which it gathers.

" If you want to know anything about education in the United States, ask the first man you meet on the street " is the advice which Superintendent McClymonds gave to Professor John Adams when he visited America. [There is, however, a difference between common-sense knowledge of education and scientific knowledge of it, j though the man in the street may not recognize it. There is a scientific knowledge of school legislation, of the way to build a schoolhouse, of school administration, of selecting the subjects for a course of study, and a scientific knowledge of cljiildren and of the procedure which

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

must be employed in instructing them. This knowledge, though by no means as exact as it is certain to become, is very considerable in extent and significant in value. Though as yet it is only to a slight degree quantitative in character, it is nevertheless definitely scientific, in the same sense that comparative anatomy is scientific. School administration is a branch of government. It has been studied rather more intensively than most of the problems of government. Comparative methods have been employed, and conclusions of great directive value have been reached. It does not detract in the slightest degree from the worth and validity of these systematized conclusions that they are not commonly consulted when plans for administering school systems are being devised, just as it does not detract from the reality of a science of medicine for one who is sick to consult a quack rather than a scientific physician. The fact remains that in both cases minute and careful study has developed a body of knowledge more thoroughgoing and reliable than uncritical experience provides, which stands ready for use by anyone who will use it.

Genetic psychology likewise offers parents and teachers the rich results of its tireless researches into the nature and growth of the child. General psychology outlines the principles which govern

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WHAT IS EDUCATION?

the behavior of mind. Ethics, sociology, biology, and medicine contribute their quota of principles to be reduced to practice. The history of education outlines the experiments which the race has made in preparing the young for their life work, and the suflticiency or insufficiency of the social aims and methods which directed that preparation. The languages, literatures, and sciences which provide the subject matter of instruction have been reduced to teachable form. The comparative study of the provisions for education which progressive nations have made furnishes a systematized knowledge of educational practice throughout the civilized world.

Though education is among the last of human institutions to invoke the aid of scientific method, it will thus be seen that scientific method has entered it, and that no one engaged in it is limited to rule-of-thumb knowledge. There is a science of education whose rich resources are available to anyone who will use them.

Philosophic knowledge versus scientific knowledge. The science of education, like every other science, deals only with the coexistences and sequences of its particular field of facts. It is one among many sciences, each of which studies the world from its own standpoint. As yet it has made only a beginning, but even if it succeeds in tilling its field, like the other sciences it will possess only a

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

fragment of knowledge. Ask the astronomer what the universe is, and he will describe it in terms of astronomy. Ask the geologist, and he will answer in terms of geology. Ask the student of politics, and he will describe it in terms of organizations of government. And ask the educator, and he will answer in terms of schools and teaching. Is there no form of knowledge which relates all these different sciences together, which can answer such a question in terms common to them all — no science of things in general which can give us a picture of the universe as it is? Education must become one of the sciences. Is there no science of sciences to unify its work with theirs, to correlate its truths with the whole body of truth? That function belongs to philosophy. Its work begins where science leaves off. It concerns itself with a critical examination of the hypotheses and assumptions which the sciences make in order to solve their problems. It examines their foundation principles, criticizes their concepts, and pieces together their systematizations. It is an unusually persistent effort to think matters down to their roots and out to their conclusions. While, in its criticism of the categories and systematization of the results of other forms of knowledge, it does not add to the facts which the sciences amass, it does endeavor to determine their meaning, and the knowledge which

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it supplies is knowledge rendered more exact and usable through consistency of interpretation.

One frequently hears the statement that philosophy is of little worth. Quite recently it has been pointed out that, since it is theoretical, the practical business man has no need for it — unless he is a very practical man. The strangest thing about it is that no one can get along without it. As soon as we begin to think at all, each one of us sets about making a philosophy for himself, and never leaves off the work of constructing it until he dies. The difference between a common-sense philosophy and a critical and systematic one is somewhat analogous to the difference between common-sense knowledge and scientific knowledge; that is, the latter is more thorough than the former, is made more carefully, its parts articulate better, it gives us a larger world which has more depth and steadfastness in it.

Whether one's philosophy is homemade or academically constructed, we must agree with Mr. Chesterton that the view of the universe which he keeps is the most practical and important thing about him. "We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's ' [13]

WHAT Is EDUCATION?

numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them." ^ And to us it seems that by far the most important thing about a teacher is the kind of philosophy of education which he carries about with him. How one couples up his notions of education with the scheme of things seems to us to be the most illuminating item that can be known about him. Indeed, so thoroughly do basic conceptions determine conduct that if he will tell us definitely and clearly what he thinks education is, we, on our part, will undertake to tell what methods he uses and what success attends his work. Can a teacher who has a wrong notion of what education is be a good teacher? Not if teaching is a conscious process. Can a teacher who has worked out a sound philosophy of education be a poor teacher? Not if ideas shape and determine practice. On the other hand, it seems to us that the teacher who lacks a sound philosophy of education is like a ship without a compass; he may pursue any course, or go anywhere, for he has no means of determining where he is or in what direction he is moving. What is education? seems to us, therefore, to be the most fundamental of all the questions which

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

condition the teacher's work. It cannot be answered dogmatically. A merely verbal reply to it, committed for purposes of ready reference, will not do. Out of the fullness of his own inner conviction each one must answer it in terms of his philosophy of life, and, like the other features of our philosophy of life, it is one of the fundamental problems which we should carry about with us and be constantly turning over in mind in an unceasing effort to allow no opportunity of revising our knowledge of it to escape us. There is no other way to work out a philosophy of education.

Two typical definitions of education. There are a great many definitions which profess to tell us what education is. Let us consider two of them which are somewhat typical. The first is that education is the imparting of knowledge. While education undoubtedly has something to do with knowledge, it is hardly its function to impart it. It is not good form to say, " I learned him geometry - or reading." The verb to learn will not bear that meaning. I may teach him geometry or reading, but he must do his learning of them for himself. Is it not just as wrong to use the verb teach in the sense in which we are forbidden to use the verb learn, and to say, " I taught him geometry or reading," meaning by that, " I imparted them to him " ? I may keep a confectioner's shop and hand out candy

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to you when you come to buy, or a coal yard and shovel coal into your cellar when you give me an order, but I cannot hand out knowledge or shovel it into the minds of students, no matter how willing they may be to get it in that fashion. Knowledge is not that sort of thing, and whatever schools may be, they are not knowledge shops.

There is another sort of definition of education which, in attempting to escape the crudities of the one just given, involves itself in an even greater absurdity. The >ipholders of this view reason somewhat like this : ([^inds are very imperfect things at birth. If left to themselves, they grow up quite incomplete. It is the business of education to complete them. Its object is not to supply knowledge to them, for that indeed it cannot do, but it must discipline them, exercise them, build them up, draw them out, and form them. A mind which has not been drawn out will never come out of itself. No one should think of using so crude and dull an instrument as mind is before it is sharpened. It is t-the business of education to perfect the mind."

I am profoundly convinced that, whatever else the teacher must do, he is never called upon to get inside the mind and do any burnishing or repair work there. We use a figure of speech when we talk of the gardener causing the plant to grow, and surely we use a figure of speech, and a very

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

misleading one, when we speak of education as the process of molding, sharpening, forming, or perfecting minds. Much as it may contribute to our pride to think of ourselves as performing such a service, the thing is inconceivable. We have no such creative power. In the Harvard Club in Boston there is one room set apart for the use of the graduates of the Medical School, and over the fireplace in that room there is an inscription, a motto, which states in a sentence the philosophy of the medical profession. It reads, " We dress the wound, God heals it." If a devoted student of education should attempt to construct a similar motto which would in like manner set forth the object of his profession, what form ought it to take ? This, I think : " We feed the mind, God makes it."

What is education? When we teach we do not " learn " our students anything ; they must do that for themselves. The notion that language conveys thought or vehicles thought is the root of the error that education exists to impart thought. And when we teach we do not make minds or strengthen minds or draw them out. The mistake of deriving the word education from the wrong Latin root was, from the point of view of its consequences, one of the most serious mistakes that the race has yet made. What do we do? Let us see. When a feeble-minded child comes to school, the wise

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

teacher does not attempt to supply him with the regulation stock of knowledge, and she does not attempt to make his mind over. Neither of these things is possible. But there are certain things which even a feeble-minded child can learn to do that are socially useful and individually profitable. The wise teacher gives him a chance to do these things; that is, to use his mind, not to exercise it merely, and not to take knowledge, but, by comprehending what he can comprehend, to make knowledge. The pathological case supplies the insight we require concerning the normal one. Education must everywhere proceed in the same fashion. From the standpoint of the learner, it is the process of using one's own mind in socially profitable ways in the making of knowledge. From the standpoint of the school, it is the process of providing the conditions which necessitate the child's using his own mind in socially profitable ways in the making of knowledge. The teacher cannot supply knowledge and cannot make, mind ; his function is to provide the environment — to direct the child to the facts and methods of handling them which have been found to be socially useful, and to leave the rest to him.

Three kinds of schools. There are three kinds of schools which grow out of these three conceptions of education. According to the first kind, the great

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

thing is knowledge. It is stored up in books, in courses of study, and in the minds of teachers and other learned folks. Schools exist to retail it to young people, to pass it on from the places where it is to the places where it is not. That it may be passed on easily, it must be prepared in little carefully molded cubes or accurately weighed doses. That is the work of textbook makers and of manufacturers of methods. Teaching, according to this view, consists in seeing to it that the learner takes the proper number of pellets of knowledge each day, and the object of the recitation is to find out whether or not he has done so. Since what he has taken is knowledge in its essential form, he must retain it in the form in which he took it. To see that he has done this and is continuing to do it, there must be periodical inspections of his stock of knowledge. These are called examinations. They occur at regular intervals, since the amassing of a fixed amount of knowledge and the retention of it in its original condition is thought to be necessary before one can safely amass further knowledge.

The object of education according to this view is knowledge. The business of teaching is to put it where it is not. Textbooks are to provide it. Recitations are to find out whether or not it has been taken. Memory must retain it, and examinations must be given to test the .knowledge state of