A valiant woman; a contribution to the educational problem

Front matter

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VALIANT WOMAN

A CONTRIBUTION TO

Introduction

4fT -s HERE are, on the face of the earth, imaginations without number which pass through life in like manner as the deaf and dumb, and are, for all that, none the less beautiful. They are like the flowers which we see in the distant south. There was a great probability that no eye should ever see them. I am sure that, likewise, there are hidden lives which are charming." So wrote Ximenes Doudan, the charm of whose own life has rescued it from obscurity; and the following pages are written in a loving and reverent desire to lift into the light another of those beautiful, obscure lives which persist in the memory of those who have known them as a source of pure delight and high aspiration.

I am not at liberty to give the name of the valiant woman whose memory persists with me, nor to give any biographical details which might lead to her recognition. I can only give the pure spirit of her — distill, as it were, the perfume from the flower whose name and form and color are to remain unknown. But it is the perfume that gave persistent value to the flower, and having that, we need concern ourselves

vii viii INTRODUCTION

but little with the soil in which it grew, or the culture it received at foreign hands.

It is true, as Balzac says, that " the multitude generally prefers the abnormal force which bursts its bounds to the balanced force which persists, having neither the time nor the patience to verify the immense power concealed under a uniform appearance " ; but it is not the multitude for whom this book is written. It is written for those to whom life puts serious questions; for whom seeming and being are not necessarily the same, and whose keen insight can make them feel how a life which in its bare simplicity would seem to most men and women absolutely bereft of charm, because wanting the consolations of vanity, may stand, nevertheless, for the solution of life's greatest problem, — How shall I make life worth living by preserving in myself the freshness of the heart, and increasing its power of unselfish love?

But the book is especially written for those to whom the care of children and the young has been confided — to mothers and teachers. It is they who will find in it a spring of living water in the thoughts and feelings of one who was a mother in the highest sense, a mother of souls, and a teacher all her life, because the gift to teach was her birthright which she never bartered for any mess of pottage. Unfortunately I have been obliged to illustrate her life-

INTRODUCTION ix

work by a detailed account of our educational system, because it was so constant a subject of her thought; and I fear that I have submerged her in this account, instead of making it subordinate to her, as I most sincerely- would have preferred to do. For this reason I have given the book the sub-title, A Contribution to the Educational Problem.

The word " contribution " shows that I have no intention of implying that the problems have been solved. It simply means that the book contains a frank and sincere discussion of the many questions that vex us in the schoolroom, and that they have been as profusely illustrated by valuable quotations from original sources as the scope of the book would allow; for I believe with Jean Paul that not a single good observation or rule on the subject should be lost, because it happens to lie imprisoned in a huge volume or flutters about in a pamphlet of one leaf. I have approached these questions, not through the avenues of psychology, pedagogy, and philosophy, but through the well-trodden paths of experience and observation, so that the book can be read without a dictionary of technical terms. It can be understood without torturing new meanings into old, well-known words, and it is not afraid to criticise where to praise would be cowardice. It does not seek applause, nor does it fear condemnation. It wishes simply to find x INTRODUCTION

its own, to cheer the solitary thinker in the hours when he feels most solitary, by the image of one who peopled solitude with kindness and thought; and it would speak the language of sincerity to the ears that can recognize it.

I have wished to say of the exquisite woman whose lifelong friendship it was my privilege to enjoy: You must know my friend as I knew her. You must hear her talk, you must feel the wholesome influence of her presence and enrich your life with a rare and lasting friendship ; for such women as she do not wholly die. They leave traces of themselves wherever they have been, — a subtle perfume of character that sweetens the air like the odor of violets.

Yet she was the last woman in the world to think that there was anything extraordinary in herself, or to feel that her individual utterances of her opinions were worth preserving; and the only infidelity to her of which I have been guilty is that of preserving her letters when she wished them destroyed. But she had a firm belief in her convictions on many subjects relating to the education of the young, and would have been glad to see them generally accepted. And since she expressed these convictions in a simple, forcible language entirely her own, I have felt it no injustice to her memory to transcribe them as she wrote them, taking it upon myself to develop the

INTRODUCTION xi

ideas in the direction which she indicated. Conscious that these extracts from her letters are to a great extent impersonal, and that where they are not, they can only reflect credit upon her, and enhance the value of her teaching by showing that she lived what she taught, I have forgiven myself for the infidelity, knowing well that she would have been generous enough to forgive me, too.

The world has nothing to lose and everything to gain by the preservation to its memory of its noblest characters, whether they live and die in a blaze of glory, or live and die in quiet obscurity illuminating no other circle than the limited one in which they daily moved. And it seems to me that of the two, the lives of our mute, inglorious great are a more valuable stimulus than those of the illustrious, because it is not given to us all to follow the flight of the winged souls, but we may all walk side by side with the strong and faithful, who, on the broad and dusty highway, have found life sweet and helped to make it so.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Teacher 1

II. The English Question 35

Chapter I

1%/TARCUS AURELIUS thanked the gods that he had not frequented public schools, but had had good teachers at home, and that when he had a mind to look into philosophy, he met neither with a pedant nor a knave to instruct him, and did not spend too much time in voluminous reading, chopping logic, or natural philosophy.

I, too, in my humble station, can thank the gods that though I went to the public schools, I had at the most impressionable age of childhood my instruction from a woman of rare superiority, whose friendship, continuing through my youth and maturity, has been the chief ornament and delight of my life. The greatest thing that can happen to any human soul is to have felt the presence of excellence, to have seen incorporated the highest virtues and to have loved them passionately. It is to be made rich for all time with an imperishable wealth. It is to be preserved from loneliness in the most perfect solitude.

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It is to have touched reality and to be preserved from the doubt that belittles and scorns humanity. It is to remain fixed in moral values when the winds of diverse doctrines blow all the tattered faiths of mankind into shreds. It is to keep alive an exquisite hope in the future of the human race, climbing along its rugged path of progress with so many stumbles, yet showing us here and there a vigorous soul that can walk upright and unaided. It is to have known one of the choristers of that choir invisible who have made undying music in the world, and to carry in the memory some of that music's sweetest strains.

I remember but indistinctly any teacher that I ever had before or after I became the pupil of this valiant woman, but I have only to shut my eyes, and the little room in which she taught rises as distinctly before me as if I had seen it yesterday. Yonder are the numerous rows of narrow wooden desks scarred and marked by many a careless knife and thoughtless pencil ; the chalk-covered blackboards ; the grimy paper and the smoke-darkened ceiling; the small, raised platform in front designed for the teacher's desk and chair; the huge rusty cannon-stove in the middle of the room; at the back, the long, low, narrow wooden bench on which the daily recitations took place, and, turning all the dinginess and bareness of the room into cheerful brightness, the teacher who presided over it, — the perfect teacher, the center of light and love, the soul that lived in realities and not in the shams of things.

Of medium height, with an admirable figure which fashion had never deformed, holding herself erect without stiffness, looking you frankly in the face with bright gray eyes whose keenness never excluded kindness, she seemed to radiate an atmosphere of good will and high purpose. Her dark brown hair was brushed smoothly back from her temples and coiled in a loose knot at the back of her head. Her dress of dark cotton in summer, in winter of plain gray or black wool, was made with extreme simplicity, always in the same manner, and its only ornament was a cameo brooch at the throat. To have wished in any way to attract attention by her dress or ornament was as much beneath her noble dignity as it would have been openly to demand it.

I have called her the perfect teacher; by that, I mean that she was first of all a strong personality, a woman who had placed no interpreter between herself and life, but had drawn from it directly her conclusions and opinions. And I mean great flexibility, — the power to yield one's self without losing one's self; the power to confront new situations without surprise or embarrassment. I mean that intuitive human sympathy which understands without asking questions; that keen sense of humor which is not shocked at the crude and the absurd, but with smiling recognition can help laugh it into the finished and the fitting. I mean the gift of those " whose only joy in having is to impart/ 5 not in an ostentatious way to display one's own mental riches, but in the only serviceable way which sometimes lies very close to drudgery, — the teaching of the young. But it is the joy in it which is the chief thing, the joy in another's growth. This gift includes immense patience with honest dullness, — not vicious, idle dullness, but the dullness that struggles and works and to which hope is not denied. I mean, too, polished manners, — that indescribable something which gives charm to human intercourse, which veils homeliness of feature and meanness of stature, and makes it possible to say and do even disagreeable and painful things in that acceptable manner that made some one say of Chesterfield, " He kicked me downstairs with such exquisite grace that I thought he was helping me up."

And last of all, I mean health of body and health of mind, — the exquisite poise of equal humor, the cheerful outlook on life, the strength that is not consumed in the schoolroom, but leaves a broad margin for individual growth.

The union of these gifts in one person is so rare that it may almost be called genius; yet they were united in a remarkable degree in this valiant woman whom no one could ever forget who had once known her. There was in her a certain youthfulness of a perennial type, a wonderful clean-heartedness, a power of deep feeling accompanied by the most tranquil expression of it, and a great natural bias towards truth and beauty.

She came to us in the full strength of early maturity. We were ordinary children in an ordinary little river town of the Middle West. We had no public library, no museum, no traditions of culture. Our intellectual horizon was bounded by the town limits, and having never had an opportunity to compare these limits with anything outside, we thought them extremely wide, and that nothing of much importance could lie beyond them. To be sure, we had our village castes. Wherever the poor and the well-to-do are gathered together, invisible but well-recognized barriers are set up, separating those who have from those who have not. The banker's son does not meet his washwoman's daughter at the village ball, and even Santa Claus has a remarkable sense of these distinctions in his distribution of gifts at the Sundayschool Christmas-tree, and to those who have is liberally given> and to those who have not fall an orange and a small net stocking full of cheap candy. If childish envy or childish heartbreak results, all unconscious that family gifts are placed on the tree, who knows anything about it? Children think many things of which they are ashamed to speak, and who thinks it of any importance whether the ideal of life awakened by observation be, or be not, to break these social barriers and to get and to have in one's turn? This is where we were when she came, and she was to teach us that there is not only more of the world than that which we saw from our back yard, but that it stretched far over the other side of the garden and beyond the minister's neld 9 — a wonderful world with echoes that could reach us in music and pictures and stirring verse, and thoughts that rouse like a trumpet-note. And she was to teach us that getting and having are the poorest uses of life, unless it be the getting and having of the invisible wealth of heart and brain. She came to say to us, " I know no classes, only individuals, and rank everybody by character," and to teach us that a lily may spring from a muck heap and a nettle grow in a palace yard. She came to lift the lowly, and to humble the haughty by showing us the incalculable value of an enlightened mind. She came to teach us what Montaigne calls the greatest thing in the world, namely, how to belong to one's self, — to have freedom and strength and resourcefulness within us.

And how did she do it? That is an important question, — the most important we can ask just now, for to put it in an impersonal form, it runs: What must we do to educate the young in the very best way?

Remember that she had absolutely no external advantages in the way of laboratories, models, pictures, books, and all the varied and rich equipment of the modern schoolroom. She had the four bare walls, and the scarred benches crowded with some forty or fifty children, varying in age from eleven to twenty. She had one assistant ; and she was expected to teach reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography, history, the rudiments of the natural sciences, and Latin, if there was a demand for it. She had taken upon herself the care of a motherless niece, and the Latin class consisted of this niece and a tall lad who walked in from the country every morning to attend the village school, and to whom Latin seemed a brevet of distinction. But she had one immense thing in her favor. She was hampered neither by a set program, a cut-and-dried scholastic course which she must follow, nor by an officious supervision, ignorant of conditions, which dictated what and how she must teach. She was given absolute liberty. There were the children and a place to meet them, and given hours for their meeting, and she was to answer their needs as best she could.

She began as every live teacher does, by finding oat what these needs were. She was not content with the children's assertion that they had gone as far as page 150 with the preceding teacher and were quite prepared to go on with the subject. She wished to find out how much of the subject had gone on within them, had been assimilated and become a part of their mental equipment. Pushing her inquiry to tests, she discovered that the greater part if not all of it had either simply been eliminated undigested, — so much waste material thrown out of the system, — or it had persisted unused, a clog and hindrance that must be got rid of.

I shall never forget the dismay of some of the older pupils working at advanced problems in arithmetic, who were turned back to the multiplication table. It was in vain that they protested that it had been so long since they studied the tables that they really shouldn't be expected to know them. Their teacher, to whom an ounce of accurate knowledge was worth a pound of uncertain information, told them that just as they could not learn to dance before learning to walk, so they could not accurately solve intricate problems without using in every step the elements of arithmetic, and must know them perfectlj. She showed them that multiplication is only a shorter form of addition, and division a shorter form of subtraction. She taught them how to make their tables, and drilled them faithfully till quickness and accuracy were assured; then proceeded to fractions, teaching by objects until the fundamental idea no longer needed the concrete form to support it clearly, and could be safely treated in the abstract, never advancing until the path was clear behind them. They covered less ground in a given time, but the ground was weeded out, plowed over, and sown with living seeds. It was not left waste ground encumbered with stones in which nothing could grow.

In the same thorough way she took up the subject of grammar, rinding the children's memories clogged with half -under stood definitions. Her first task was to put full meaning into them by vivid illustration. She showed us that a transitive verb is one whose action affects or passes over some other thing, that we could sweep a floor, bake a loaf of bread, scour a kettle, but we could not is a floor, become a loaf of bread, or go a kettle, and that such verbs as these represent a condition or a form of action or being that ends with the subject. The relation which a preposition shows between two words was illustrated by holding a book or pencil near, by, over, under, above, or on a table or chair. She io A VALIANT WOMAN

set a child to describing a ball, or an apple, or a flower, and then said that all these words which say something about the form, color, taste, smell, or size of the object described, name some quality of it, and are called adjectives; and, therefore, that we cannot say properly that anything smells badly, any more than we can say it tastes sweetly; nor must we say that we " feel badly " for the same reason that we are not describing the action of feeling, but our own condition of health. She hunted down by unrelenting correction every ungrammatical or awkward expression we used, so that every recitation, no matter on what subject, was also a recitation in English grammar; and by clearing our language of ambiguity and incorrectness, she helped us to understand other subjects.

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that half the difficulties which pupils have in mathematics may be set down to their incorrect use of language or their incorrect interpretation of it. To feel clearly the force of every word we use is one of the highest ends of education; for nothing definite or accurate can persist in the mind without this condition. It is a great temptation to omit this vigilance in correction, especially when listening to a mathematical explanation requiring close attention to logical deduction. To interrupt the child is to di-

THE TEACHER n

vert his train of thought ; but I believe that though the immediate result may often be disastrous, so far as the problem is concerned, the larger end most assuredly justifies the correction. I have heard a child allowed to speak of the " two angles respectfully," and am sure that it is much more important that he should know the distinction between respectfully and respectively than that he should know the relation between the two angles, because it is with words and not with angles that he will be most concerned all his life, and he ought never to be allowed to associate wrong ideas with any one of them. The use of the adjective real as an adverb has become so common for lack of correction, that even teachers constantly so misuse it, thus spreading the error; while, at the same time, in their efforts to be correct, they censure many a fine old English idiom like " have got" for example, evidently ignorant of the fact that every English author whom they put as models into their pupils' hands makes use of it.

The fact is that no one can have a fine sense of the value of words in any language, who is not well read in it; and in the multiplication of things to be learned and the multifarious distractions of modern social life, there are very few who have the leisure to read extensively. Our teacher was one of the few. Along with an unusual critical sense of excellence, she had an active curiosity which led her into all departments of literature and science.

" Of all the magazines," she wrote me once, " I like best the Popular Science Monthly. President Eliot of Harvard says that there are three pregnant results of the scientific study of nature:

" ' First, it has engendered a peculiar kind of human mind, — the searching, open, humble mind, that, knowing that it cannot attain to all truth, or even much new truth, is yet enthusiastically devoted to the pursuit of such little truth as is within its grasp, having no other aim than to learn, prizing above all things accuracy, thoroughness, and candor in research.

" ' Within the last four hundred years, this typical scientific mind has gradually come to be the only kind of mind, except the poetic, which commands the respect of scholars, whatever their department in learning. The substitution in the esteem of reasonable men of the receptive, far-reaching mind for the dogmatic, overbearing, closed mind, which assumes that it already possesses all essential truth and is entitled to the essential interpretation of it, is a most beneficent result of the study of natural history and physics. It is an achievement of the highest promise for the future of our race.

" ' The second result is the stupendous doctrine of hereditary transmission. Finally, modern science has discovered the magnificent idea of the continuity of creation.' "

This valiant woman herself possessed this searching, open, humble mind, fearlessly accepting what seemed to her truth, whether it flattered humanity or not, dreading nothing more than the fixed deadness of dogma. Her opinions were her own, having grown out of her experience, and she lived them without forcing them upon other people, though silently propagating them by the happy contagion of example. She had grown slowly, symmetrically; she had sloughed many old faiths painlessly, and therefore felt no rancor against them or hatred for them. They fitted her no longer, but they had once belonged to her, — that was all. Why quarrel with those who still clung to them? Besides, it is dangerous to strip them off, before the shivering naked soul has something better in which to clothe itself.

At that time it was the custom to open school in the morning with Bible reading, prayer, and song. To her, this was an expression of human aspiration towards the infinite and the unknown, and I remember with what quiet reverence it was done. The portion to be read was selected from the Psalms, the Proverbs, or sometimes it was the Sermon on the Mount. It was never historical or condemnatorv, and no comments were made, and no parade of piety appeared. She liked particularly to read the Twenty-third Psalm, which Henry Ward Beecher called " the nightingale of the psalms, small, of homely feather, singing shyly out of obscurity, but filling the air of the whole world with melodious joy "; and the prayer we daily heard was the prayer Christ taught, " Our Father which art in heaven."

It was a quiet pause before the heat of the day's work. It was a reminder that there is something above us to reverence, something beyond the tangible to love and to hope for, and I think we were better for it. One of the great problems of modern education is how to supply this aspiration, this long, intent look upward, this consciousness of a power and excellence that is not ours, to which we owe submission and reverence. It is in vain to hope that culture will ever be widespread enough to do it. Culture has always been and will always be the privilege of the few, not because opportunities for culture are not general enough, but because the capacity for it is rare. The fact is summed up in the homely proverb, " You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Be very sure that you can't. All you can hope to do is to rub the hair off and make a pigskin purse, and modern education does not even do that. It leaves all the hair on, bristling with importance and impertinence. The Goethean recipe to hear a little song, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words every day, is valuable and effective only in him who has an inborn love of these things, and to whom they are therefore in some sort necessary. But to him who has not this love, but who has heard that there is a sort of distinction in culture and is resolved to have it by going through a set form of mental gymnastics, real culture will always be wanting.

This idea is admirably expressed by Hugo Miinsterberg in his book on the Americans. Speaking of the result of the frequent attendance of popular lectures in America, and the importance of the natural attitude of the mind to what is really excellent, he says : " It may be, indeed, that the village population under the influence of the last lecture course is talking about Cromwell and Elizabeth instead of about the last vih lage scandal, but if the way in which it talks has not been modified, one cannot say that a change of topic signifies any elevation of standard. And if, indeed, the village is still to gossip, it will seem to many more modest and more amiable if it gossips about some indifferent neighbor, and not about Cromwell."

Culture, then, is not knowledge, it is not familiarity with beautiful, rare, or costly things. It is the harmony of the soul with what is excellent. It is being at home with the beautiful. It is to be rich without .the possession of things. A pseudo-culture, the result of indiscriminate cramming, is marked by two chief characteristics, — confusion of ideas, and confident ignorance. Now, pure ignorance, wholly untampered with, accompanied by humility, and the power of reverence, does not offend us ; on the contrary, it often attracts and rests us, as children do ; but ignorance pretending to knowledge and boastful of it, is the most offensive thing in the world, and in attempting to give culture to everybody, our educational system destroys ignorance in its beautiful, complete, white form, and substitutes this nauseous vanity for it.

A child born and brought up in a part of the Orient, where he had never seen snow or winter fogs, when for the first time he saw the misty vapor of a wintry morning all white and dim, asked, as his little face took on an expression of wondering awe, " Mamma, is it God? "

This is what I mean by beautiful white ignorance, full of reverence and wonder in the presence of what it does not understand ; and this is an ignorance which, thanks to a system that aims at omniscience and hits superficiality, cannot anywhere be found in all the length and breadth of our broad, beautiful land. But we have abundance of the other sort, the ignoranee that thinks it knows all about a subject, because it has heard the name of it; and it is this ignorance which makes us ridiculous in the eyes of the world. As a nation we have a great deal of restless curiosity which passes for intelligence. We want to see the wheels go round in everything ; we are capable of dissecting a mite to see how his cheese agrees with him ; but when it comes to reverence for what is above us, or to that exquisite delicacy which enables us to distinguish what is really fine from what is coarse and showy, we are, in general, as absolutely wanting as the painted Indian of our prairies, and we merit the scathing rebuke which Ruskin gave us, in one of his admirable letters to the workmen of England.