The meaning of education, and other essays and addresses

Front matter

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Introduction

The essays and addresses brought together in this volume give expression to ocnvictions and opinions on the subject of education that have been presented during the past fifteen years, in one form or another, to hundreds of audiences, mainly of teachers, in almost every state of the Union. The belief that controls them all is threefold : first, that education, in the broad sense in which I use the term, is the most important of human interests, since it deals with the preservation of the culture and efficiency that we have inherited and with their extension and development ; second, that this human interest can and should be studied in a scientific spirit and by a scientific method ; and, third, that in a democracy at least an education is a failure that does not relate itself to the duties and opportunities of citizenship, vii yiii INTRODUCTION

Education is sharply distinguished, therefore, from the far narrower field of instruction, as that in turn is broader than the field of school-life. To give to education its rightful place in our thinking involves relating it to the laws of life in general, and especially to those laws as viewed from the standpoint of the doctrine of evolution. This I have aimed to do by proposing an extension of the commonly received doctrine of infancy, which though as old as early Greek philosophy, 1 owes its definite statement and exemplification to Mr. John Fiske. In this way the theory of education is given what it has hitherto lacked, a distinct relationship to the facts of organic and social evolution.

A standard must next be sought by which the value of educational processes and influences may be judged. I find this standard in the conclusion, common, I am confident, to the best philosophy and to the soundest science

1 Butler, " Anaximander on the prolongation of infancy in man," in Classical Studies in Honor of Henry Drisler (New York: The Macmillan Co. for the Columbia University Press, 1894).

INTRODUCTION ix

alike, that the facts of nature must be explained, in the last resort, in terms of energy, and that energy in turn can be conceived only in terms of will, which is the fundamental form of the life of mind or spirit.

I offer these two conclusions as the basis for an educational philosophy. With them in mind I have discussed a number of concrete problems that are of present importance not to teachers alone, but to thoughtful parents and to conscientious citizens.

It is sometimes hastily objected that the attempt to formulate a scientific study of education is impossible. This objection rests upon a misunderstanding as to what a science is. Science is wholly a matter of method ; it is knowledge classified, and nothing more. The knowledge so classified may be knowledge of plants, or of heavenly bodies, or of the human body, or of forms of government, or of education. Only the sciences based upon mathematics are exact or lay claim to exactness ; all others are descriptive only, and wider experience or further observation may modify their conclusions at any time. A science of

X. INTRODUCTION

education is analogous to a science of medicine. Both are built upon a group of ancillary sciences, and both arrive at conclusions that are only working hypotheses. With normal children, as with normal patients, these hypotheses, based as they are upon wide experience, require little or no modification ; in abnormal cases, however, they must be modified or sometimes even abandoned. Neither medicine nor education makes any pretense to exactness.

It is highly important for the study of education that a consistent nomenclature be adopted and used, though for a variety of reasons this is a difficult task to accomplish. Bearing in mind this need, I have endeavored to mark off the several types or grades of educational institutions from each other, and to give to each its appropriate name. Many American educational problems that appear very complex, would become much simpler if the various institutions giving systematic instruction were always called each by its right name.

To the teachers of the United States, especially to those who are members of the Na-

INTRODUCTION XI

tional Educational Association, I am under the deepest obligations for the encouragement and sympathy that have led to the publication of these essays and addresses. To the patient criticism and the kindly suggestion of my friends and colleagues, Brander Matthews and George Rice Carpenter, I owe many improvements in the form in which the papers

now appear.

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER

Columbia University, New York March, 1898.

An Address

delivered before the Liberal Club of Buffalo, New York

November 19, 1896

Those who have an acquaintance, however curs r j, with the history of human thought

oil remember how bitter and how persistent have been the controversies of philosophers and metaphysicians in respect to terms of everyday use. Discussions on such familiar words as "substance," "cause," "idea," and "matter" have shaken the schools for ages. It seems to be a fact that when a term is somewhat unusual and remote from our experience and our interest, we are apt readily to be able to assign to it a definite significance and a concrete meaning ; but when it is a term with which we are familiar in our everyday experience and conversation, we often feel its significance and its import, and yet find great difficulty in defining it accurately in logical or in scientific terms.

4 THE MEANING OE EDUCATION

I shall discuss the meaning of Infancy and Education just because the terms are familiar, because the ideas are commonplace, and because, as it seems to me, we so often fail to grasp their profound and far-reaching significance. The point of view from which I shall speak of them is the one given us by that remarkable generalization which has come to be known as the doctrine of evolution, a theory which we all associate with the nineteenth century, but which, nevertheless, was seen by the thinkers of the ancient world, by the lightning flashes of their genius, in what is after all very much the form in which the clear sunlight of modern scientific demonstration presents it to us. The doctrine of evolution has illuminated every problem of human thought and human action. It is a mere truism to say that it has revolutionized our thinking ; but it is equally true that we have in very many cases failed to accept the consequences of the revolution and to understand them in all their important applications. It seems to me that in no department of our interest and activity is this failure more complete, speaking generally, than in that which relates to the great human institution of education.

The two chief contributions that light up this doctrine from the point of view that I wish to occupy are those that were made by Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace and by Mr. John Fiske. It was Mr. Wallace who pointed out, forty odd years ago, that the theory of evolution as applied to man could sustain itself only if it were acknowledged and admitted that there came a time in the history of animal types and forms when natural selection seized upon psychical or mental peculiarities and advantages and perpetuated them rather than merely physical peculiarities and advantages. That is the first, and in a sense, perhaps, the greater of these contributions, for it has enabled us to understand the place of man in the order of the cosmos. Then, in less than a generation, the remarkable insight of Mr. John Fiske explained for us on physiological and psychological grounds the part played by the lengthening period of infancy in the animal species. It is from that doctrine of Mr. Fiske that I take my point of departure in the present argument.

We have come to understand that evolution regards us all as individual centres of activity, influenced by our surroundings and reacting upon them. We have come to understand that our physical, our mental, and our moral life is the gradual growth or development of what may be conceived of as a point travelling through an ever-widening series of circles, until, in this ripe and cultivated age, the point has come to include within the circumference that it traces, all that we call the knowledge or acquirement or culture of the educated man.

The doctrine of infancy, as it has been explained to us, relates itself directly to that figure and to that method of explanation. If we contrast or compare the lower orders of animal life with the higher, and particularly with the human species, we are at once struck by the fact that in the lower orders of existence there is no such thing as infancy. We observe that the young are brought into the world able to take care of themselves, to react upon their environment at the mere contact of air or food, to breathe, to digest, and to live an individual existence. We are further struck by the fact, on examining the structure of animals of that kind, that there is no nervous system or organization present, except such as is necessary to carry on what are called reflex actions. There is no central storage warehouse ; there is nothing corresponding to the human brain ; and there is no action possible for animals of that type in which any considerable time can elapse between the impulse which comes in from the world without, and the responding or reacting movement or action on the part of the animal itself. Each of those animals lives the life of its parents. Each of those animals, young and old alike, performs certain reflex actions with accuracy, with sureness, with despatch ; no one of those animals progresses, and none develops or has a history. When we pass to animals of a higher order, however, there comes a time when our attention is attracted by those that act in an entirely different way. Their actions are more complex, more numerous, more subtile, more sustained ; and on turning again to the organism that accompanies this and makes it possible, we see at once that there is an increased complexity of structure which accompanies this increasing complexity of function. We find, as we study more highly organized types of animal existence, that, sooner or later, there comes a time when the offspring of a given animal comes into the world unable to perform many of the functions that become possible for it later. It brings with it a host of developed reflex actions, but it also brings with it many undeveloped potentialities. Its organization is not complete at the moment of birth ; and a period of helplessness or infancy, longer or shorter, must result. In passing from the highest of the lower animals to man, we reach a most important stage in the development of infancy. In man we find the increasing bulk, and more than that, the increasing complexity, of the brain and central nervous system which accompany the complex adjustments and actions that make up life, But though the human animal is born into the world complete as to certain series of reflex actions, its lungs able to breathe, its heart to beat, its blood vessels to contract, its glands to secrete, an immense series of adjustments remains to be made. While those adjustments are being made, there is a more or less prolonged period of helplessness or infancy.

The meaning of that period of helplessness or infancy lies, as I see it, at the bottom of any scientific and philosophical understanding of the part played by education in human life. ' Infancy is a period of plasticity ; it is a period -of adjustment ; it is a period of fitting the organism to its environment : first, physical adjustment, and then adjustment on a far larger and broader scale. This fitting of the organism to its environment on the larger and broader scale is the field of education. In other words, nature and heredity have so organized one side of animal life that it is complete at the time of birth. A large series of adjustments to the world around us, the series of adjustments that in the case of man make up the life that is really worth living, constitutes the life of the mind or spirit. At birth, those adjustments are not yet made and they have to be slowly and carefully acquired. We are even born into the world with our senses, "the windows of the soul," locked, uncoordinated, unadjusted, unable to perform what is eventually to be their function. It is a familiar fact that sight, hearing, and touch all have to be developed and trained and coeducated, taught to act together, before the infant can appreciate and understand the world of three dimensions in which adults live, and which they have supposed to be the only world known to the human consciousness. While that period of plasticity or adjustment lasts, there is naturally and necessarily a vast influence exerted, not only on the child but by the child.

I think Mr. Fiske is undeniably correct in saying that the prolonged period of infancy which is necessary to bring about these adjustments, lies at the foundation of the human family, and therefore at the foundation of society and of institutional life. The factor in history that has changed the human being from a gregarious animal to a man living in a monogamic family is, if anthropology and psychology teach us anything, unquestionably the child. During this long period of helplessness and dependence, the parents of the child are kept together by a common centre of interest; and the bonds of affection and interdependence that are eventually to constitute the family are then permanently and closely knit. That period of mutual association and dependence of the parents extends at first over only eight, ten, or twelve years. If two, three, or four children are born to the same parents, it may extend over a period much longer ; it may last during one-third or even one-half of the average life of man. Out of that centre of dependence and helplessness, the family, as we know it, has grown ; and it has been constituted, so far as we can explain it at all, by the lengthening period of infancy in the animal kingdom and in the human race. I might cite fact after fact in illustration of this, from the history of science and from natural history, were it not wholly unnecessary. It is one of the most profound generalizations of our modern science; and it has enabled us to see to the very bottom of the meaning of education and to understand the biological significance of one of the most striking and imposing of social phenomena.

This lengthening period of infancy is a period of plasticity. No animal that has not a period of infancy needs to be educated. Every animal that has a period of infancy can and must be educated. The longer the period of infancy the more education is possible for it ; and as our civilization has become more complex, as its products have become more numerous, richer, deeper, and more far-reaching, the longer we have extended that period of tutelage, until now, while the physiological period of adolescence is reached in perhaps fourteen or fifteen years, the educational period of dependence is almost twice as long. That is to say, the length of time that it takes for the human child in this generation so to adapt himself to his surroundings as to be able to succeed in them, to conquer them, and to make them his own, is almost, if not quite thirty years. The education in the kindergarten, the elementary school, the secondary school, the college, the professional school, the period of apprenticeship in the profession before independent practice can be entered upon, is in not a few cases, now twenty-five, twenty-six, twentyeight, or even thirty years.

The rich suggestion that this doctrine of Mr. Fiske and this conception of modern science have for us, seems to me to be this: — The entire educational period after the physical adjustment has been made, after the child can walk alone, can feed itself, can use its hands, and has therefore acquired physical and bodily independence, is an adjustment to what may be called our spiritual environment. After the physical adjustment is reasonably complete, there remains yet to be accomplished the building of harmonious and reciprocal relations with those great acquisitions of the race that constitute civilization ; and therefore the lengthening period of infancy simply means that we are spending nearly half of the life of each generation in order to develop in the young some conception of the vast acquirements of the historic past and some mastery of the conditions of the immediate present.

In other words, the doctrine of evolution teaches us to look upon the world around us

— our art, our science, our literature, our institutions, and our religious life — as an integral part, indeed as the essential part, of our environment ; and it teaches us to look upon education as the plastic period of adapting and adjusting our self -active organism to this vast series of hereditary acquisitions. So that while the child's first right and first duty is to adjust himself physiologically to his environment, to learn to walk, to use his hands and to feed himself, to be physically independent, there still remains the great outer circle of education or culture, without contact with which no human being is really either man or woman. The child receives first, and in a short series of }^ears, his animal inheritance ; it then remains for us in the period of education to see to it that he comes into his human inheritance. When we compare the life of the lower animal, acting solely and entirely by reflex action and instinct, with the periods of infancy and of self-determined activity of the human being, developing by reflex action, instinct, and intelligence, we get some conception of the vast difference there is between what Descartes called the animal mechanism and what we may truly look upon as the activity of the human mind.

This period of adjustment constitutes, then, the period of education ; and this period of adjustment must, as it seems to me, give us the basis for all educational theory and all educational practice. It must be the point of departure in that theory and that practice, and it must at the same time provide us with our ideals. When we hear it sometimes said, "All education must start from the child," we must add, " Yes, and lead into human civilization " ; and when we hear it said, on the other hand, that all education must start from the traditional past, we must add, " Yes, and be adapted to the child." We shall then understand how the great educational temple of modern times into which every civilized nation is pouring out its strength and its treasure, rests upon the two corner-stones of the physical and psychical nature of the child and the traditional and hereditary civilization of the race ; and how it is that the problem of the family, of the school, and of the home, is to unite those two elements so that each shall possess the other. We shall then have a conception of education which is in accord with the doctrine of evolution and which is in accord with the teachings of modern science and of modern philosophy.

After the child comes into the enjoyment of his physical inheritance, he must be led by the family, the school, and the state into his intellectual or spiritual inheritance. ''The moment that fact is stated in those terms it becomes absolutely impossible for us ever again to identify education with mere instruction. It becomes absolutely impossible for us any longer to identify education with mere acquisition of learning ; and we begin to look upon it as really the vestibule of the highest and the richest type of living. < It was the great thought of Plato, that inspired every word he ever wrote and that constitutes an important portion of his legacy to future ages, that flife and philosophy are identical^ but he used the word philosophy in a sense which was familiar to him and to his time, and for which we might very well substitute, under some of its phases at least, the word education. Life and education are identical, because the period to which we traditionally confine the latter term is merely the period of more formal, definite, determinate adjustment ; yet, just so long as life lasts and our impressionability and plasticity remain, we are always adapting ourselves to this environment, gaining power, like Antaeus of old, each time we touch the Mother Earth from which civilization springs.

If education cannot be identified with mere instruction, what is it ? What does the term mean? I answer, it must mean a gradual adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race. Those possessions may be variously classified, but they certainly are at least fivefold. The child is entitled to his scientific inheritance, to his literary inheritance, to his ] aesthetic inheritance, to his institutional inheritance, and to his religious inheritance. Without them he cannot become a truly educated or a cultivated man.

He is entitled to his scientific inheritance. In other words, he is entitled to go out into o nature, to love it, to come to know it, to understand it ; and he is entitled to go out into it, not only as the early Greek and Oriental thinkers went, with fear and trembling and worship, but he is entitled to go out into it armed with all the resources of modern scientific method and all the facts acquired by modern research. He is entitled to know how it was that we have passed from the world known to the heroes of the Iliad to the world as we know it to-day. He is entitled to know how the heavens have declared their glory to man, and how the worlds of plant and animal and rock have all come to unfold the story of the past and to enrich us with the thought and the suggestion of the intelligence, the design, the order that they manifest. \There can be no sound and liberal education that is not based in part upon the scientific inheritance of the race"^ The learning of the multiplication table, the learning of the necessary preliminary definitions, the learning of the necessary methods of research and practice — all these are the lower steps of the ladder, the needful steps by which we must mount ; and yet they are the steps from which how often we fall back without having gained any vision whatever of the land to which they are supposed to lead ! a/The scientific^ inheritance is one of the very first elements of a modern liberal education, because it is that element which presents itself earliest to the senses of the child. It is the element with which he comes in immediate sense-contact ; to which he can be first led ; from which he may be made to understand and draw lessons of the deepest significance for his life and for that adaptation which is his education.

Next there is the vast literary inheritance, the phase of the past that mankind has during twenty-five hundred years most loved to dwell upon. It is the side that has captivated the imagination, enshrined itself in language, and brought itself closest to the heart of cultivated man, — going back to the earliest attempts at mythology and coming down to the great poetry and the great prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in modern tongues. We have gone so far as to call this aspect of civilization the "humanities," because most of all it seems to bear upon its surface the significance of that fine old word humanitas which was once the ideal of liberal education. " Humanities " these studies undoubtedly are, but humanitas is a broader term still, and in its full significance must be made to include all our inheritance, scientific, aesthetic, institutional, and religious, as well as literary. Just as scientific method is the gate to the scientific inheritance and therefore must in essence at least be mastered, so language is the gate to the literary inheritance and must be mastered at the earliest opportunity. We are accustomed, as a rule, to estimate and weigh power and culture in terms of language. The mastery of various languages, the mastery even of the mother tongue, is often taken as the sole test of culture. That is our tribute to its great importance. We see how easily the mastery of a language, or of more than one, lends itself to this conception of education as an adaptation, as an adjustment, to the spiritual environment of the race.

Language is the crystallized thought of the past. It contains in itself, in its products and its forms, in its delicate discriminations, its powers of comparison and abstraction, a record of the progress of the thought of the race. When we are plodding through dreary details of grammar and of rhetoric we are again on the lower rungs of the ladder, the multiplication table of the literary inheritance, the steps that must be taken if we are to come to understand what the great worldpoets and seers have revealed to us. Therefore it is that we are to-day putting the literary inheritance side by side with the scientific in the very earliest years of the education of the child. "Tn the education that is sometimes called " new," it will be found that the early linguistic exercises are almost always based upon something that is really worth knowing for its own sake./ Our literatures the world over, ancient and modern, are so rich, so full of thought and feeling and action, that there is no time to waste in the merely formal exercises of grammatical drill upon lifeless material, when we may be occupying ourselves, in those same exercises and for the same purpose of discipline, with material that enriches the human mind and touches and refines the human heart. Modern education in its adjustments is bringing the child into his literary inheritance in a new spirit. That inheritance has always been before mankind. In the Middle Ages, in early modern education, in European education to-day, the study of language and literature is and has been the main element in instruction. It must always hold a prominent place in education, for it admits of no substitute. Yet it is mere narrowness to say that this study alone is sufficient, and that it excludes everything else. It should come side by side with the scientific inheritance in the early life of the child, during the period of plasticity or education.

The third element in education is the aesthetic inheritance, that feeling for the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime that has always been so great a part of human life, that contributes so much to human pleasure and accentuates so much of human pain and suffering. The ancient Greeks understood and used it, but a false and narrowing philosophy thrust it out of life and education for centuries because it was supposed to antagonize the spiritual or religious life. It was believed that the spirit could be chastened only by privation and by pain, by tearing it away from one whole side of human civilization, and by insisting that the human heart should suppress its feeling, its longing for the ideal in the realm of feeling and of beauty. The closet philosophers could accomplish their end in education for a time, but they were utterly unable to suppress the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the Italian painters of the Renaissance, and they have been unable to suppress the artistic element in human life. To-day we find it coming back to occupy its appropriate place. We should no longer think of applying the word cultivated to a man or woman who had no aesthetic sense, no feeling for the beautiful, no appreciation of the sublime, because we should be justified in saying, on all psychological grounds, that that nature was deficient and defective. This great aspect of civilization, this great tide of feeling that ebbs and flows in every human breast, which makes even the dull and inappreciative peasant uncover his head as he passes through the wonderful galleries of the Vatican or the Louvre — this, too, is a necessary factor in adjusting ourselves to the full richness of human conquest and human acquisition. Unless we are to be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, we should see to it that the aesthetic inheritance is placed side by side with the scientific and the literary in the education of the human child. To-day we find art creeping into the schoolroom ; instruction in color, in form, in expression is being given. The growing child is surrounded with representations of the classic in art, and so, unconsciously and by imitation, he is being taught to adapt and adjust himself to this once forgotten and now recovered element in human civilization; an element that certainly is, like the scientific and literary elements, an integral part of the child's inheritance.

Then there is also the wonderful institutional inheritance, most wonderful of all, because it brings us into immediate contact with the human race itself. This is the element of civilization before which we must, for the moment, sink differences of scientific opinion, differences of literary appreciation, differences of aesthetic judgment, and in which we look upon individual man as but a member of a larger whole, in order to understand what human civilization really means. We have always had before us, in the history of civilization, two extreme types of thought and opinion as to human institutions. We have had the view typified in modern philosophy by Rousseau, and wrought out in the streets of Paris from 1789 to 1794. This is, substantially, the view that every individual is sufficient unto himself. It is the view of the ancient Sophists, once combated by Socrates in the streets of Athens, that there are as many truths as there are men to perceive truth, and that each individual is the sole arbiter of his own fortunes. This is what I may call the atomic view of human society, which would blow all of our institutional life into millions of atoms and deify each. That view has failed to work itself out successfully in history ; when it has had a momentary victory it has simply been because it came as a reaction against the tyranny of the opposite extreme. We have had the other extreme also. We have had the view which insists that no individual is of any consequence or importance in the presence of the mass ; the view that all individual peculiarity, all individual poAver or acquisition, must be pressed down and trampled under foot for the advantage of the whole. We have seen it in the civilization of China in the interest of ancestor worship ; we have seen it in the civilization of India in the interest of the caste system ; we have seen it in the civilization of Egypt in the interest of the priestly class ; and we have seen those three civilizations wither and die.