Education, a first book

Preface

This book furnishes an introduction to the study of education. It is, as entitled, a beginner's book. It will, I hope, prepare students in colleges and normal schools to see the significance of their more specialized studies in educational psychology and sociology, methods of teaching and class management, the history of educational theory and practice, and the applications of philosophy and ethics to education. It will also be of service to those whose study of the general facts and principles of education must be restricted to a brief course.

Ideally, a student of education should first know many facts of biology, psychology, sociology, ethics and the other sciences of man. But he also needs to know something about education in order to make his studies in these sciences theoretically and practically fruitful. So it seems desirable to have some brief, simple, untechnical account of the aims, means, methods and results of education, of the conditions set by the laws of human nature, and of the part that school education plays in American life. The account given in the present volume is necessarily very limited, but nowhere, I trust, inaccurate or misleading.

Teachers College, Columbia University, March, 1912.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Meaning and Value of Education . . i § I. The Meaning of Education § 2. The Need of Education

II. The Aims of Education 9

chapter ii The Aims of Education

§ 3. The Values of Life

The value of any change in things or men is its value to somebody, its satisfaction of somebody's AU values want. Things are not good and bad depend on for no reason. Better and worse, worthy and harmful, right and wrong, have meaning only in reference to conscious beings whose lives can be made more satisfying or more bearable.

A thing or event or act or condition is not, in the last analysis, desirable because it is valuable. It is valuable because it is desirable, — because it satisfies a want or craving or impulse of some man or other conscious being. Suppose, for instance, that all creatures had been, and now and in the future were to be, blind. The most beautiful painting would be no better than the ugliest ; for it could have made or make no difference to anybody. Suppose that all beings, past, present and future, existed equally well and equally happily without as with food — that no one wanted food or drink. Temperance would be no longer a virtue, and gluttony no longer a sin. They would simply be accidental qualities like the color of one's eyes. For the temperate man would satisfy no want of his own or any one else's, nor would the glutton's acts imply deprivation for anybody else.

The values of Value or worth or the good means human acts, power to satisfy wants. One thing or act is more valuable or more worthy or better than another because it satisfies more wants or causes less privation. To discover the cause of, and a preventive of, cancer would thus be a very worthy act because it would add so much to and subtract so little from the world's sum of satisfaction and would abolish so many thwartings and deprivations.

Some acts, like the discovery of new truth about the world, or the production of a noble poem, are almost wholly good, since they are of enormous benefit to the world at large and need involve no sacrifice on the part of the one who does them. Some acts, like cruelty, useless worry or selfish idleness, are almost wholly bad, since they give little satisfaction to the one who commits them and none to any one else, and cause enormous amounts of misery.

Many changes in things and men possess elements both good and harmful, because, as the world is arranged, whatever is done in any given situation can hardly be best for everybody — a perfect satisfier for all. Even the mother's love for her child may make some unloved child, who

IMPROVING AND SATISFYING WANTS II

witnesses it, unhappier. If I work, there is probably somebody who would be more content if I remained idle with him. If I remain idle, somebody will have to go without what my labor would have produced.

§ 4. Improving and Satisfying Human Wants

Human life would be most successful if men and women wanted only what was good and had all their wants satisfied. The aim of existence should be to make our wants better and to satisfy them. If by education we could abolish the craving to tyrannize and oppress, so that no living being would feel it, replacing it by the craving to see others happy, the world would be richer ; for we should have got rid of a want whose satisfaction was always at the expense of others, in favor of a want whose satisfaction came as a free gift from the satisfaction of others. When education gives a child the power to read, it in so far enriches the world by making that child's craving for knowledge more satisfiable.

The aims of education should then be : to make men want the right things, and to make them better able so to control all the forces of nature and themselves that they can satisfy these wants. We have to make use of nature, to cooperate with each other, and to improve ourselves.

The first great element in making human wants better is to increase the good will — the disposition to care for others' welfare as well as for one's own — the desire to see the good wants of Increasing Others satisfied. To wish the welfare goodwiu of all men is one of the best of wants, owar men. £^^ ^^ -^ ^ want which every satisfier

of all will satisfy.

The second gfreat means of makinsf Increasing the . ,

impersonal human wants better is to cultivate the unselfish impersonal pleasures. Some satisfac-

pleasures. .

tions, such as the enjoyment of productive labor, health, good reading and study, are impersonal in the sense that for one to have the pleasure does not prevent anybody else from having it. They are unlike the pleasures of eating or owning or wearing things, where the pleasure of one man usually uses up a possible means of satisfying some other man. One of the most nearly perfect of all impulses is the impulse to advance knowledge of ourselves and the world in which we are to live. For this impulse is impersonal—all men may profit by the truth. It enriches everybody else's possibilities of satisfying the same want — the more knowledge man has, the easier it is to get more. It predisposes men against unsatisfiable wants — to know what the world really is prevents us from wanting what it cannot give. It leads to the satisfaction of all good wants — knowledge is power.

The third great means of making human wants better is the elimination of wants which must in ■ the nature of things bring about a surplus of dis-

IMPROVING AND SATISFYING WANTS 1 3

satisfaction. Such, for instance, are the wants represented by superstition. To want the help of -. . _ . ^^ the fairies, or the power to command

Dimmishing the ...

useless and evil Spirits, or not to begin a journey hannfui wants, ^j^ Friday, would be harmful because such wants are desires to prevent injury from, or be helped by, things which do not exist. Only those wants which the universe as it is may somehow satisfy are worth keeping.

The chief aims of education with respect to the improvement of our wants are, then, to cultivate good will to men and the higher or impersonal or unselfish pleasures, and to get rid of irrational wants — wants not fitted to the world in which we live.

Having taught himself to want the

The means . .° °

of satisfying right things, man has to teach himself wants. hovTto secure them. Knowledge of

the world of things and men, skill in managing its forces, habits and ideals of perseverance, thoroughness, accuracy, self-control, open-mindedness, and the like, with bodily and mental health, are the chief elements which human nature has to cultivate in itself to this end. Men must either master the world in which they live or adapt themselves to it. To get on with it— that is, to satisfy their wants in and by it— they have to know it. They must also know themselves — the laws of their own nature — so as to cooperate to avoid waste and frustration. Moreover, just as one man singly must be patient, careful, ready to learn and reasonable if he is to get the best for himself out of life, so all men together cannot get what they want merely by claiming it, but must train themselves in the intellectual virtues which give knowledge and power. Health they must have not only for its own sake as one of man's surest satisfiers, but also because it is so commonly a prerequisite to effective management of oneself, other men and the forces of nature. „ , No one is compelled by any inner

Narrow and , ^ ...

unjust aims necessity to accept as his aim in edufor education. ^^^:^^^ himself or his fellow-men, the

improvement and satisfaction of human wants — the cultivation of a good will, impersonal pleasures, knowledge of things and men, habits of open-mindedness, and physical and mental efficiency. And only the best individuals do accept these aims. Fagin tried to debase Oliver's wants and to satisfy his own at the cost of every one else's. Manufacturers may try to fit the children of a community to be nothing save efficient workmen. Baptists may plan their schools in utter defiance of Methodist or Presbyterian wants. A parent may count the satisfaction of his child's vanity above the satisfaction of a hundred other children's rights.

Social pressure is required to prevent folly and injustice in education as elsewhere. Fagin can, if he likes, consider no wants save his own, but all men acting together can, if they like, hang him therefor. Parents may, if they like, consider no

IMPROVING AND SATISFYING WANTS 1 5 wants saye their child's, but other famihes can have mat child expelled from the school, or the parents from the community. Manufacturers can vote to take money from high schools for trade-schools, but others vote also. The state can suppress sectarian schools altogether if it thinks that an unfair discrimination amongst wants is made by them.

The aims which the schools of the present serve thus represent a conflict of wants, some of them very bad wants. A father can get almost the worst possible education for his son by paying enough for it ! Some school-masters use their pupils habitually as objects for futile domineering. Some trade and professional schools outrage common honesty in their pretensions. We all tend to wish our pupils to do us credit more than strict justice would allow. It is only in proportion as all men together learn the wisdom of cooperating to make the best out of the world for all men that the improvement of wants will be a general aim in practice, or the satisfaction of the wants of the various classes of men will be equitable.

The reader himself may choose, if he will, to educate children so that they will be better able to get ahead of others in struggles for power and gross sensory pleasures, or so that they will gratify selfish parental pride. And if the world at large is foolish enough to permit him to do so and pay him therefor, he may be in a sense exl6 THE AIMS OF EDUCATION

cusable. But in so far as his own life is ruled by reason and the good will, he will choose rather to give the world, so far as he can, what reason and justice would decree for its total satisfaction.

§ 5. Ultimate and Proximate Aims

The attainment of the ultimate,

The need of , . . , ,. • ,.

particularized general aims of education implies

aims in often the attainment of numerous

particularized aims. Thus the cultivation of the higher or impersonal pleasures comprises the cultivation of habits of good reading, rational curiosity, experimentation with natural phenomena, the appreciation of the fine arts, and the like. These ultimate aims also imply the prior attainment of subsidiary aims. Thus, to secure the impersonal pleasure of good reading, the ability to read and knowledge of what is good reading must be secured. To take another illustration, the ultimate aim in teaching chemistry to high-school pupils should be to cultivate various intellectual pleasures and to fit the students to control nature in the service of human welfare. But the immediate or proximate aim may well be to get them to know just this particular body of facts and to acquire just this particular set of habits of thinking. A teacher of chemistry who thought vaguely of the general end of the teaching of science might well be doing far less to attain it than one who thought of the direct

ULTIMATE AND PROXIMATE AIMS 1/

purpose of teaching fifty sets of facts and forming a score of simple habits.

The proximate or direct or pre- Their variety. ... . ,

requisite aims of education are practically infinite in number and of very great variety. The particular changes to be made in an orphan boy, of thirteen, blind, in New York City, in order most to improve and satisfy human wants will not be the same as those to be made in a girl of eighteen, without any sense defects, living in a good home in Japan. To attain the ultimate aims best, the immediate aims may need to be varied to suit differences in sex, race, age, previous training and circumstances. To lead this boy to read Scott's novels instead of Old Sleuth's stories ; to teach this girl how to sew ; to root out the habit of bullying from John's make-up ; to prepare this class to study medicine — these are samples of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the concrete work of education.*

A complete theory of education would give an account of every single item of all the countless changes and conditions involved in the progress from what people now are to what we wish to make them — beings with good wants which life

* It is of no consequence whether we call these changes, which are the intermediate steps between people as we find them and the desired condition of a world of people with noble wants all being satisfied, ends or means, except for the convenience of our thinking. When we think of one of them in and of itself, we shall think of it as desirable, that is, as an end or aim ; when we think of it as productive of something else, we shall think of it as a means.

l8 THE AIMS OF EDUCATION

is satisfying for them all. It would tell just what to aim at in each stage of the education of every individual.

Such an account obviously cannot be given here. But certain of the aims that have been ranked as the most important prerequisites to the improvement and satisfaction of human wants, or even as themselves the ultimate ends of education, need at least some consideration. These are, especially, Happiness, Utility, Service, Morality, Complete Living or the Perfection of All of Each Man's Powers, Natural Development, Knowledge, Discipline, Culture and Skill. It is useful to consider the worth of each of these proposed aims as it would be judged by an impartial thinker in the light of its effect in improving and satisfying the wants of all men. For, by doing so, one can escape from any inadequate and unjust opinions which he may have absorbed from unreasoned customs, and can practice himself for testing other proposed aims rigidly by their probable effects upon the world's welfare.

CHAPTER III The Aims of Education (concluded)

§ 6. Happiness

It is a paradox in educational theory that although everybody admits that the happiness of the

^ . . world is an important ultimate aim,

Prejudices ^

against attempts to make schools minister at

happiness. ^|| directly to the happiness of scholars are often decried as undignified, 'soft pedagogy,' trifling with the serious work of education. To give them habits that will make them happy when they are forty, is allowable, even desirable, but to make them happy while they are in school is treated as a sentimental weakness.

But certainly if the direct present happiness of children does not conflict with the ultimate ends of education, it is wholly desirable, and even if it does conflict somewhat, it has a right to be put in the balance against future goods and chosen if it outweighs them. It would be the acme of wicked folly if we denied little children happiness for no purpose. And it would be a brutal consequence of adult control of education if we failed to give children their kind of happiness merely because, as adults, we did not ourselves value it as highly as their happiness when old. Yet, just this folly and this brutal inability to appreciate values which we do not ourselves enjoy, have in the past had vast influence in deciding the character of school work, and even now are at work in many homes and class-rooms.

Happiness may be given at too great a cost, and immediate happiness alone would be a wretched substitute for a well-balanced educational aim. But immediate happiness should be one fraction of that aim. Happiness is not a fiend to be exorcised. The thwarting of every natural impulse and the deprivation of every cherished joy are not necessary means of grace. In fact, if we free ourselves from our adult tendency to think of what is good for us as adults, and consider how cheaply innocent happiness can be given to the young, and consider also that frequently (not always, of course) the childish likes and dislikes are as good guides to later welfare as our artificial prescriptions are, we shall make happiness at the time by no means a small fraction of the aim of school education.

Misunder- One's own happiness is often best

standings. attained by not seeking it; happiness for others in the long run is often best attained by denying them some tempting opportunity of the moment ; some causes of individual happiness are very dangerous to the happiness of all. Overimpressed by these three facts, some stern souls have declared it cheap and ignoble to emphasize

HAPPINESS 21

happiness as an aim of education. But what they are really objecting to is selfishness in overweighting one's own claims to happiness and stupidity in the means taken to get happiness for all. They object to emphasizing happiness because they believe that by belittling it, mankind will get more of it.

In the days of our forefathers, when the miseries of war, famine, injury and pestilence seemed irremediable and inevitable, even the wisest men could not hope for much happiness for mankind in this world. So they urged the importance of educating man to despise happiness.

Their very spirit, however, under present conditions, makes the wise man despise an idle resignation to causes of unhappiness which modern science can control. Since victory over disease, pain and deprivation is possible by knowledge, the thing to despise is ignorance.

The apparent disagreements about happiness as an aim, then, in the main reduce to conflicts about the chances of attaining it and the relative value of present and deferred happiness. As an ultimate aim in one form or another it is accepted by all, provided it is possible of attainment.

§7. Utility

Another aim which has been often treated unjustly by educational theories and practices is Utility. It has been unfashionable, !l°taip'er"ect particularly in high schools and colmeasure of leges, to teach anything because it has a sure utility to the world measured by a money-price. 'Bread and butter studies' is the contemptuous name which such have received.

It is true that the money-price which an act or quality of mind or body brings in the world is not a right measure of its real value to the world. For instance, the discovery of truth and the bearing of worthy children, the two things most essential to the world's welfare, are, as a rule, not paid for at all. A writer of advertisements is paid more than a poet; and a crafty trader in soap more than the best physician. But it is also true that in many cases the money-price paid is a symptom and a partir' neasare of real worth. The graduate who has learned nothing for which the world will pay may in a .few rare cases be a great scientist or poet or social reformer, but he will far more often be a mere incompetent.

Any practical issue involving the choice or rejection of some feature of education because of its utility will be settled properly if the principles stated in the rest of this section are kept in mind.

UTILITY / 23

The mere fact that the world pays a money-price for a quahty is nothing against that quahty.

„ ^ ^ The abihty to make a really valuable

But not ... .

opposed to invention is not less worthy of culti-

reai value. vation, now that there are patentlaws allowing the inventor to reap the profit, than it was when the profits fell to others. Milton's Paradise Lost would be the same if he had been paid ninety thousand dollars instead of ninety.

It is only because people in general are stupid, and because the great benefactors of mankind do not drive hard bargains, that the really valuable service is ill paid. It is because society at large does not know what is good for it and because scientific men do not extort what they might for their wares that society pays the inventor and advertiser of a patent medicine a hundred times more than the discoverers of the cause and prevention of yellow fever. The more rational human beings become, the more will the money-price approximate the real value, in cases where the thing can be bo'Jgh^ and sold at all. utiutyand ^ cdntra^. s also often drawn be-

cuiture. tween the 'bread and butter' studies

and those which ;ive culture and refinement. This is unjust to both sides. Culture and refinement are not good because they are the marks of an idler — of one who does not share in the world's productive labor. They have a far different warrant from that. Much less are the bread and butter studies bad because they are for the great majority, the toilers, those whose talents and opportunities do not suffice to win them an easy or bountiful living. It is just because the bread and butter studies make the struggle for bare existence less intense and exacting and dull that their value is real and great. It is, moreover, precisely by their aid that those who would otherwise be unskilled slaves to daily necessity are given some chance for culture and refinement.

Another unwise contrast is that between certain forms of education commonly called utilitarian, such as instruction in agriculture, in trades and industries or in the technical and scientific professions, on the one hand, and certain forms of education commonly called non-utilitarian or cultural, such as the study of the classical and modern languages in high schools, or the courses in art, music and manners in girls' boardingschools. To call a thing utilitarian or non-utilitarian does not make it so. The study of agriculture may demand and foster as intellectual interests as does the study of poetry. That the individual earns his living by it may be a minor matter. The scientific professions need be no more subdued to dollars and cents than the profession of literary man or painter. The languages of the high school are very often out-andout utilitarian, namely, in cases where the method of earning a livelihood — for instance, teaching — demands a high-school graduation. The art and music and manners of the finishing school are in-

UTILITY 25

tended precisely to get the girl such a livelihood as her social class requires by getting her a husband. y The best arguments alleged for sus-

X The proper . . . . , , .

meaning of picion of money-paid results from

utmtyas education are: — First, people may be

an aim.

more or less trusted to get without special care from schools that which will bring a money-price ; consequently the schools may better give their energy to other aims. Second, the things done for a money-price are not so good as those done for certain other motives.

There is a truth at the basis of each of these arguments. A school should do more than give the world what the majority of men already want and are ready to pay for. It should improve as well as satisfy their wants, and should be more far-sighted and unerring in its opinions of what will satisfy their wants than men in general are. In the case of the first argument, however, it must be noted that experience has again and again proved that what is left to private enterprise in education will be done for somebody's private advantage rather than for the public weal. People may be trusted to try to get what education they need to secure a money reward, but they may also be trusted to blunder, to be cheated and to pursue short-sighted policies, in many such cases. Boys and girls need the help of schools to be taught even in cases where it is to their selfish pecuniary advantage to learn.

Of the other reason for suspicion, it may be said that it is a reason for suspicion only, not for rejection. What is needed is discrimination. We would not teach clever methods of adulteration in a trade-school for grocers' clerks : we would teach methods of keeping food-stuffs fresh and free from dirt. In both cases the knowledge would bring a money-price. In the latter it would also be of real value to the world at large.

The one best reason for a frank acceptance of training for wage-earning as an aim of the schools is that for a large number of children the possibility of being a great benefactor of humanity, as teacher, physician, moral leader, or the like, is nil. The kinds of work which they can do are limited to the kinds for which the world does pay. If one restricted their education to preparation for the loftier vocations, where the money-price is not the motive or the measure of the service, one would be giving them an education unfitted to their capacities and to what the world needs of them.

To sum up the whole matter of education for wage-earning, one might say, *'The aim of education is not to fit people to get a living, but to fit them to live. Fitting them to get a living is, however, one part of fitting them to live. For many pupils it is a large part."

SERVICE 27

§ 8. Service

It is a shame that the word utility should have been so constantly used as a synonym for 'useful in the common sense/ 'exchangeable of useful for a money-price.' For in its other

service. sense, as the opposite of uselessness,

it describes one of the most important aims of school education. The word now used instead of utility to give this meaning of 'not wasteful/ 'giving somebody something he needs/ is Service. When we mean that education should aim to make people useful in this wide sense, we nowadays say that education 'should fit them for service.'

The worst error that is at all commonly made about the aim of education is to regard it as a means of putting one in a position where others have to work for him, and he not for others. That in the past 'the better classes' should have been in many mouths a name for those who do little and receive much is a sad commentary on the lack of rationality and justice in human life. The parent to whom the school is primarily a means of giving his children an advantage over others from whom their superior training enables them to exact service without equal return, absolutely misconceives the aim of public education. What we ought to master is the forces of nature, not our fellow-men. With them we should cooperate.

We should make use of nature and be useful to men. The ideal life is one of work and recreation both enjoyed ; the successful man is happy in his work and wants it. Only an immoral and perverse education puts anybody above labor. Varieties of What service people shall be edu-

service. cated to perform is a less easy ques-

tion. What seems to be of service may, in the long run, be a waste. What seems like indulgence may turn out to be of the utmost value. Joseph Henry's experimenting with electric currents probably seemed to many of the hardheaded men of his day a display of useless scholarship, or even a self-indulgence in intellectual play; but the results of his intellectual play are now every day replacing the manual labor of hundreds of thousands of men. Education for service makes one think of teaching pupils to work and to be expert in some profession or trade ; but perhaps the best education of children for service would be healthy play in the open air, and the practice of right habits of eating, sleeping and avoiding weakening diseases. Teaching girls to build a fire will seem highly serviceable to most of my readers, but if we should all come to use only electric stoves, it might be as purely academic a feat as parsing Latin sentences !