New demands in education

Front matter

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Preface

THE fundamental demand in education, as in everything else, is for efficiency — • physical efficiency, mental efficiency, moral efficiency.

The boys and girls in school are the greatest of all national resources, infinitely more important than those natural resources of which so much is heard; and the province of education is to conserve these most valuable of assets.

The potential economic worth of each school pupil, to say nothing of his moral value as a householder and as a citizen, is enormous, provided he be so educated, by his family, by his environment, and by his schools, as to become an efficient member of society. And to be an efficient member of society the pupil must have a sound body, trained senses, a clear mind, and, above all, a well-balanced character.

Therefore the supreme aim of education, acting through homes, schools, and the community in general, should be to foster sound and capable bodies, i\ vi PREFACE

to develop well-trained minds, and to build up strong, self-reliant characters.

How is education going to do this? By putting fifty or sixty children into uncomfortable desks in an ill-ventilated schoolroom and then bombarding them with facts? Far from it. To make those fifty or sixty children really efiicient we must treat each one of them as an individual problem, ascertaining his vulnerable points physically, and remedying them; finding out what kind of a mind he has and developing it; getting at his strong and weak points morally and building out of them a sound and well-rounded personality.

The first of the new demands in education, therefore, Is for small classes, so that the teacher may really know each one of her pupils and may give him a true education suited to his special needs.

The second of the new demands is that we shall take much greater account than we now do of the health of the child, by seeing that his eyes, ears, lungs, and all the other parts of his physical machinery are sound, or are made sound, and that he has extensive playground, an abundance of fresh air, and plenty of the right sort of games and plays.

The third of the new demands is that we shall pro- ' vide genuine, educative exercise for the mind of the child by giving it interesting and stimulating work

PREFACE vii

to do, and that we shall not clog and deaden it with unrelated, uninteresting, and unimportant facts.

The fourth of the new demands is that we shall really train all the senses of the pupil so that he is actually able to use his eyes for seeing, his ears for hearing, and his hands for making things that are a credit to the maker. Too many pupils in the schools seem to have no connection between their eyes, their ears, their hands, and their brains; so that, as far as efficiency goes, they might just as well be blind, deaf, and crippled.

The fifth of the new demands is that education shall put its chief emphasis upon character: that the pupil shall be trained, in school and out of school, to-day and to-morrow and all the time, toward self-reliance, self-control, self-respect, and self-denial.

The sixth demand is that the main emphasis of schooling shall be placed on the social side, on preparing the boy and girl, that is, for effective living as a member of the community of which he finds himself a constituent part.

The seventh demand is that when the pupil gets to be fourteen years old, to that age when, if he so choose, he may leave school, there shall be some one right at his elbow, some one who knows and whom the boy respects, to advise him what to do next.

And lastly it is demanded that from that fourviii PREFACE

teenth year up to manhood and womanhood each and every pupil shall have a wide variety of opportunity for making himself (or herself) into the most intelligent, the most efficient, and therefore the happiest, citizen that it is possible for him to be.

Upon these theses the arguments of all the following chapters rest. Where there is repetition, it is for the sake of presenting the theme in some new light; where there is criticism, it is of what is not bad, but outworn; where there is exhortation, it is that we may rouse ourselves to the needless waste and loss of that greatest of human resources, that possession out of which civilization has come and for the development of which civilization exists — the moral energy latent and easy to be stimulated in every boy and girl.

Acknowledgment is due to the Educational Review, the WorWs Work, the Popular Science Monthly and the Technology Review for permission to use, in some of the chapters, material which has already appeared in those magazines.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Grievance of the Average Boy Against the

Average School 3

Chapter I The Grievance Of The Average Boy Against The Average School

I HAVE seen recently a high school in a large industrial city — a city absolutely dependent upon the quality of its manufactures — in which the course of study, the teaching, and the whole atmosphere are determined, not by the real requirements of its five hundred pupils, not by the paramount need of that city for industrially trained young men, but almost solely by the special demands of about ten pupils who are going some day to be examined for entrance to some college or university. Moreover, I have seen those ten pupils studying, and studying hard, not for the sake of education, but simply that they may pass wholly artificial sets of questions in an entirely arbitrary list of topics established by men who know little of the mental needs of youth and absolutely nothing of the genuine educational demands of that industrial city. Yet, should this high school fail to get that tiny minority into college, its teachers would be condemned by the whole body of their fellow-citizens.

Meanwhile the manufacturers of that city are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to give the youth in their employ, directly or indirectly, the fundamental training in accuracy, initiative, resourcefulness, "handiness," sense of responsibility, self-reliance, and "gumption" in which they should have been thoroughly grounded in the public schools. More than this, not only are the families of those youth denying themselves many comforts, if not necessities, of life which might have been theirs, through higher wages, had the boys been genuinely educated before going to work, but the scale of living for the whole community is being proportionately reduced. And, most serious of all, the economic future of that city is actually threatened because its workmen are mentally and manually untrained. Yet for this colossal failure the school receives little or no blame. Custom expects a high school to meet the unreal demands of the college, but does not expect it to prepare for the real and pressing requirements of daily life.

With these anc«nalous facts in mind, let us consider the case of the average schoolboy, a type representing two thirds or three fourths of the seventeen or eighteen millions enrolled in the public schools.

This boy is born into a family which absolutely depends upon wages received by one or more of its members as workers in some modern industry. The family is certainly not rich, but neither is it poor. It is industrious, self-respecting, and anxious to give its children the best possible preparation for a useful and comfortable life. Such families are the bone and sinew of America, and it is toward their needs and their strengthening that the main energies of public education should first and always be directed.

If this average boy happens to be born into a family of farmers, his education will be given to him largely at home — in the house through "chores," and on the farm through planting, reaping, and the care of animals. As a rule, this training will meet so well his fundamental needs — provided he remains a farmer — that the fact of his being inadequately taught in a rural school by a woman receiving less than three hundred dollars a year does not very much matter. His schooling will be poor, but his education will be fairly good.

Should this boy be born, however, into a family depending, directly or indirectly, upon manufacturing for its living — and it is with this fastmultiplying type that modern life is most concerned — he must look for almost his entire education, as well as for his mere instruction, to the teaching of the public school. Therefore it is vital to him, vital to industry, above all vital to society, that the education which he receives in that school should prepare him to make the most of his subsequent life as a worker, as a citizen, and as a man. This comprehensive preparation the average school does not give; and because it does not we are not only squandering our chief industrial and civic resources, we are stunting and wasting innumerable human lives.

Our "national ash-heap" represents the burning each year of almost as many buildings as we erect. Ignorant and careless forestry is using up our trees faster than nature can create them. But these and other well-recognized wastes, colossal as they are, count for little in comparison with the needless squandering of our greatest resource: human energy. Society, in one way or another, has spent at least ^4,000 on every child who reaches the age of eighteen years. Taking the annual increase of population as one million, this means a potential increment each year in our working capital, from this single source, of four billion dollars. What do we do, however, with this stupendous human asset worth, if rightly trained, at least twice this four thousand million dollars.'*

A considerable proportion of it we kill off, before it reaches twenty-five years, by accidents, half of which, by mechanical safeguards and by education, are easily avoidable. A much larger percentage we destroy by diseases, two thirds of which, by right training in simple hygiene, are preventable. A portion difficult to measure, but obviously large, is permitted to go to waste through intemperance, vice and crime, the result, in most instances, of ignorance or mal-education. And from the balance of this human capital we secure really effective service, economic, social and political, in the case of only a most pitiful minority.

The United States spent upon public education in 1909 (the latest year for which figures are available) ^401,000,000, and for hospitals, reformatories, asylums, poorhouses, etc., it undoubtedly paid a sum almost as vast. With this immense outlay, however, two things were wrong: The millions lavished upon prisons and refuges ought to have been almost wholly available for education, and they would have been available had the millions spent upon education been handled in a wise and businesslike way.

What is the matter with our school expenditure? In the first place, large as it is, it is not nearly sufficient to accomplish what public education ought to do. Any manufacturer knows that to be niggardly in providing machinery and brains is the most foolish of policies; and that many an establishment which, by expending fifty thousand a year, invites bankruptcy, would, if it paid out twice that amount, command prosperity. In the second place, this expenditure is in the hands not of experts but of amateurs — of school boards whose members know little or nothing concerning this stupendous enterprise over which they have autocratic control; of teachers a majority of whom are untrained and who regard their occupation merely as a makeshift; and, in too many cases, of corrupt politicians who look upon the schools as so much added loot in their sacking of the modern Babylons.

Think of it! A business capitalized at nearly eight billions of dollars, in which, therefore, every man, woman, and child has one hundred dollars at stake; a business, moreover, having branches in every city and town and in almost every hamlet of the United States, is carried on — with many notable exceptions which but emphasize the general inadequacy — by boards of directors who know practically nothing about it, and by agents who are largely untrained, underpaid, and temporary. The business, moreover, is so unsafeguarded as to be at the mercy of any unscrupulous men who may desire to use it as a means to their own political fortunes or as a quarry for their "honest graft. " This would be bad enough were it a business having to do with mere things; how infinitely worse is it when the enterprise deals with the bodies, minds, and souls of boys and girls!

Even the best school boards are composed of business men confessedly unacquainted with education since their schoolboy days, while the worst are made up of "heelers" with eyes glued upon the funds available for graft or bribery. Yet school boards, be they good or bad, have full power over school officers and teachers, the provisions for teaching, and the courses of study. They determine absolutely, therefore, the education of every public-school child. Is it to be wondered at that school superintendents, even where they exist at all, are most successful when they are most politic; that teachers have little genuine interest in a profession dominated by the untrained or worse; and that there are not a few cities in which are to be found some school teachers whom no decent girl or boy should know.^

The confessions of experienced school superintendents would make disheartening reading. They would be stories, mainly, of dealing with petty despots, ignorant of education, but eager to exercise their absolute authority — stories, therefore, of intrigue, of the flattering of pomposity, of catering to personal weaknesses, of wearing away unreasoning prejudices, of yielding to improper pressure from those having life-and-death power over one's career, of sacrificing the children to save the teachers and to save one's self. The confessions of teachers would be mainly of high ideals giving way under the pressure of dry routine, of petty tyrannies from superiors themselves the victims of a higher tyranny, of indignities (if the teacher be a woman) proffered by alleged gentlemen screened from exposure by their vested power, or (if he be a man) of false but damning charges brought by mischief-making or perverted girls.

This atmosphere of repression, of petty despotism, of intrigue, of frequent humiliation is the very last in which to develop initiative in teaching, boldness of experimentation, readiness to meet the demands of modern life. Where even the daily routine is full of quicksands, neither superintendent nor teacher can be expected to go very far afield. The margin between the daily wage and starvation is too narrow. When a man has only thin bread and scanty butter he is least likely, as the phrase is, to quarrel with it by showing independence or seeking grounds for strife. Yet there is not a community, not an industry, scarcely a family, which is not suffering grievously for want of what right educa-

THE AVERAGE BOY ii

tion alone can give. And that right education will not come until teachers are so broadly trained, so professionally in earnest, so freed from ignorant or improper dictation, so confident of public support and commendation that they will be true leaders getting youth really ready to meet the new demands of to-morrow, instead of being timid conservatives holding back civilization by loading it down with hordes of incompetents, ill-taught, untrained, and to all intents and purposes totally uneducated.

Relief can come, moreover, only through the school; for this business of public education is one of the completest of monopolies. The state, through its sovereign power, seizes the average boy when he is five or six and holds him until he is fourteen or, in some instances, sixteen. It preempts him, therefore, during his most formative years, and declares that it alone shall determine how he is to be prepared for life. This is as it should be, for to leave education in private hands would be fatal to democracy. Since, however, the state thus exercises a giant's strength, it is morally bound to use that power wisely, and to give every boy and girl, as far as possible, just the kind and amount of education which that particular child ought specially to have. Does the city or town (through which the state acts) commonly do this? Far from it. On the contrary, it puts the average child through a routine of instruction which has little if any relation to his real needs, and which, in too many cases, leaves him at fourteen just as helpless and almost as ignorant of the essential things of life as when the school took hold of him at five.

When the child enters the primary school, theoretically he begins a course of training which is to develop his mind, his body, his aptitudes, and his powers, so that each year will find him a considerable stage farther on his journey toward the true goal of public education — that of self-respecting, self-reliant, capable, intelligent American citizenship. As a matter of fact, however, the boy enters at five or six years of age the first roller of a sort of gigantic squeeze-press, which will endeavor, during the next eight or nine years, to stamp certain more or less useless facts upon his unwilling, because uninterested, memory, and to mold his sacred personality into the same pattern as that of a hundred thousand other little products of the pedagogical machine. The boy wants to ask questions; but in a "wellregulated" school it is the teacher who asks questions, and the child's part is to give the answers set down in the text-books furnished by those publishers who happen just then to "control," directly or indirectly, the school policies. The story is credibly told of a primary teacher who declared that kindergarten children are a great nuisance when they first come to the primary grades, because they ask so many questions. "But," she triumphantly concluded, "I soon cure them!"

The boy wants to exercise his rapidly growing muscles; but, since movement upsets order, he must learn to curb his nature and to diminish his vitality by sitting still in a hard wooden seat before a desk that holds him like the stocks. He wants to make something, to see some tangible result from all these weary hours in school; but the teacher has no idea how to make things, the text-books say nothing about it, and young people who make things are apt to be exuberant, eager, full of questioning. Therefore all that power for good which might come out of the child's natural desire to plan, to shape, and to build is allowed to go to waste, and the constructive, creative instinct, which is the mainspring of education, is permitted to wither away. If the pupil, thus thwarted, fails to perceive the use of those things which he is permitted to do, the teacher assures him that he will see by and by. When that far-off time arrives, however, if it ever does, the useless things have been utterly forgotten.

The average boy wants to work, as well as to play, with the other boys, to learn how to get along with them, to exercise his powers of leadership: in short, to practise democracy. Instead of this, he is kept isolated at a separate desk, there to do by himself a task simultaneously allotted to all the class; and cooperation in this task is not only forbidden, but punished as a crime. He wants to organize a miniature society, to learn how to behave himself in the world of boys and men. "But, my dear child, this is school, and school, you know, is a very different place from the street." Consequently he loves the street, because it is so different, and hates the school.

A child who amounts to anything wants to exercise his initiative, to make individual plans. That, however, would upset the lesson schedule, would make it hard to railroad the whole fifty children forward into the next grade, would preclude treating the school-body as a miniature army. Therefore it cannot be allowed. In fact, almost everything is done in the average school to repress the pupil, instead of to expand him, and to substitute the teacher's will — and an extremely nervous and er- ' ratic will it sometimes Is — for the boy's will. Consequently the school which, theoretically, exists to develop a youth and to teach him how to discipline himself, succeeds, in a year or two. In destroying the poor boy's individuality and In killing, through a process of subjugation, his very will itself. He asks for exercise, mental, moral, and physical, and we put him in a strait-jacket; he asks for experience of life, and we feed him on predigested — and nevertheless still indigestible — facts; he asks to do something, and we tell him that the place to do things is elsewhere, yet censure him for exploding, out of school, into mischief, petty crime, and worse.

Who has built up this educational machine which so often succeeds in defeating all the proper ends of education? The school boards and the schoolmasters, in order to meet the problem of dealing cheaply with enormous crowds. But who forces this economy? The taxpayers, who will not understand that the thorough education of the whole child for real life can be carried on only In small classes, by professionally trained teachers, under expert supervision; and that this is tremendously expensive in the paying out of money, but enormously economical in the saving of human life and energy. But what forces the schoolmasters not simply to treat the school children as an army, but to keep that army locking step and marking time? The examination system. And who force the schoolmasters to make examinations the supreme end, instead of a very subordinate means, in the educational process? The colleges. It suggests the familiar nursery rhyme of the old woman and her balky pig. The college begins to beat the high school, the high school begins to beat the grammar school, the grammar school begins to beat the primary school, and all together they metaphorically beat and push the unwilling pupil for eight or nine years, while the law holds him fast. And all this memorizing, rote-work, problem-solving, and gerund-grinding mainly in order that ten pupils out of every five hundred may progress to college!

The average pupil does not want to go to college. In nine cases out of ten he ought not to go. Certainly, however, neither he nor any other youth should be sent there by way of a stupid routine of text-book studies devised as a preparation for passing, when eighteen or nineteen years old, an assortment of foolish examination papers prepared by men who, most of them, know as little of the needs and capacities of the average boy as they do of the inhabitants of Mars.

From the moment he enters the primary school all his teachers should be anxious to send the boy to college; but they should really find out whether or not he is fitted to go there, through a process of studying and expanding him, of giving full play to his individuality, of permitting him to prove that he is worth the highest intellectual training which can be secured. And even then the goal should not be college, but life — his life, real life, the life of the good citizen and efficient worker.

Every boy must be given, of course, certain basic acquirements, like reading and writing; he must be put in possession of certain common tools, like the multiplication table and the outlines of geography; and he must be subjected to so much military discipline and hard routine as will make him orderly and obedient. But what that boy goes to school for, primarily, is to be developed; and never yet did development result from continual repression. He should be taught to see with his brain as well as with his eyes. He should be trained to hear with his mind as well as with his ears. He should be encouraged to do anything and everything, within reason, with his hands. Above all, he should be really educated through training him to coordinate all his senses and powers so that they will work accurately, unflaggingly, and intelligently, so that each will reinforce and strengthen all the others. What the community wants in that boy at the end of his nine years of schooling is efficiency: ability to do whatever he can do and does do thoroughly, intelligently, enthusiastically, and well.

Every school child should have, therefore, mind training and book learning, but he should have also, and all the time, body training, sense training, manual training, and industrial training. He should be taught not a trade, but the fundamentals which lie at the basis of all industries. He should not be made a skilled workman, but should be so far developed that, within a reasonable time after leaving school, he may become capable and eifective in whatever line of activity he undertakes. Genuine industrial training should begin at the first and should not end until the last day of the boy's school life. It should be, moreover, a gradually enlarging and expanding exercise of the entire boy. Such training provides for the pupil that physical activity which is absolutely essential; it places before him those tangible results of effort which the child must absolutely see; it permits him to exercise and to develop power of initiative; it teaches him how to work with other boys; best of all, it gives the child in school some positive and definite aim. As it is now, unless he has before him those remote college examinations, he can see absolutely no educational goal; and, since no man can do effective work without an aim, why should the child be expected to show enthusiasm in walking a treadmill, merely for the sake of exercise? With industrial training, the boy can understand how the school is preparing him to be a worker, to take his place in the great order of society, to reach the goal of effective and honorable citizenship. It is a social crime to set a boy adrift at fourteen or sixteen without having given him those fundamental powers which will permit him to become at majority, not only self-supporting, but able to marry and to rear, In decency, a family.

The average boy has, therefore, a serious grievance, not against his teachers, but against society, which forces mechanical teaching upon the schools by requiring ill-paid teachers to instruct twice as many children as can be controlled by any except military methods. He has an added grievance against the colleges, which largely determine what those children shall study from their very first entrance into school. And he has a further grievance against the industries which, knowing that 90 per cent, of all youth trained in the public schools are to enter their ranks, stupidly acquiesce in a system that, If It prepares for any life-work at all, fits only the petty salesman and the clerk.

These grievances, moreover, are shared by every citizen, for, sooner or later, all of us must pay the costs of this colossal and needless waste of human energy. If we do not spend money for the right kind of education for the average boy, we must spend much larger sums on jails, prisons, asylums, hospitals.

and almshouses, since hundreds of thousands of those average boys become incompetent, diseased, or vicious men. These larger sums, if we chose to take the trouble, we could count, for we would find them in our tax-bills; but they are as nothing compared with the sums which we cannot count and which we lose through the industrial inefficiency of untrained, unambitious, lazy, half-sick, maimed, or stunted workers in every type of work.

What is to be done? What every modern business does when it finds Itself confronted with possible bankruptcy through preventable wastes, losses, and inferiority of output. It calls in engineering and commercial experts to locate causes and to suggest reforms. We need "educational engineers" to study this huge business of preparing youth for life, to find out where it is good, where it is wasteful, where it is out of touch with modern requirements, where and why its output fails ; and to make report in such form and with such weight of evidence that the most conventional teacher and the most indifferent citizen must pay heed.

Such engineers would make a thorough study of (i) the pupils, who constitute the raw material of the business of education; (2) the buildings and other facilities for teaching, which make up the plant; (3) the school boards and teaching staff, who correspond to the directorate and the working force; (4) the means and methods of instruction and development; (5) the demands of society in general and of industry in particular upon boys and girls — this corresponding to the problem of markets; and (6) the question of costs, which is almost purely a business problem.

Even to suggest what such a report would be is presumptuous. We know only that it would be voluminous and that, if fearlessly made, it would shatter many illusions as to the scope and effectiveness of the average public school. It is not improper, however, to anticipate some of the main findings of such a report, for those findings are common knowledge among students of education. Under the first division, that of raw material, the soundness of which is fundamental to the whole industry of effective education, the experts would find among the pupils, most of whom were born healthy, an enormous proportion of physical imperfection, such as stuntedness, rickets, malnutrition, impaired sight or hearing, adenoids, hypertrophied tonsils, decayed teeth, tuberculosis, scrofula, and other organic disease, together with an appalling array of nervous disorders or of tendencies thereto; and they would find a large proportion of these to have been induced through pure ignorance, which it should have been the fundamental business of public education to combat.