Letters to teachers, and other papers of the hour

Preface

IT is, doubtless, needless to say that the papers here collected are frankly journalistic, frankly propaganda. They were written during wartime, and while directed to the internal condition rather than the external affairs of our nation, they are influenced and inspired by the omnipresent fact of the international catastrophe. The problem with which they deal is the problem of reconstruction where it is most fundamental, and that is in the education of the American citizen; for the economic and social difficulties which today we face can find no lasting solution except it be in a state of mind, a national state of mind, which shall unite our citizenship in a unified purpose ; and this it is the business of education to define and achieve. The issue is sufficiently important to demand journalism, to justify propaganda.

Most of the papers here reprinted were originally addressed to the people of Nebraska, but they deal with problems which are local and national in the same sense, so that their particular context ought not to prevent their general consideration. The title series was first published in the Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln), April- July, 1918, under the heading, "Letters to Nebraska Teachers." Other

PREFACE VI papers in the collection appeared in the Mid-West Quarterly, in School and Society, and in The Nation. The paper entitled "The Ballot" has not previously been published.

Lincoln, Nebr., April 9, 1919.

Contents

Page I LETTERS TO TEACHERS

i Life's Adventure 3

ii The School and the Commonwealth 13

Letter I Life's Adventure

I WHO write this am Nebraska born. Most of my education, too, was given me by Nebraska, where I attended grade and high schools and finally the state university, in which I have now passed ten years of my mature life as a teacher. The public schools of Nebraska, grade and high and collegiate, form a single system, having for their purpose the education of the up-growing citizens of the state. It is of these schools and of this education that I propose to write, addressing the public school teachers of the state, the great majority of whom are, like myself, native born and educated in Nebraska; and I trust that what I shall have to say will be of interest, also, to teachers whose work falls in other parts of the nation, w^here the problems of life, and of education as a part of life, do not, it appears to me, radically differ from those which I perceive in my own environment. I shall hope also to reach citizens who are not teachers by profession; for I am sure that all good citizens realize that the object of public education is to so train its youth that they will live honorably and well, and make the commonwealth pleasanter and more habitable for mankind; and I am sure that so great a concern as this cannot fail of their attention. In the long run, citizen and teacher and youth have one common aim — to make and keep human life wholesome and sane and in the highest sense happy.

I should like to speak first of all of those things in Nebraska that I cherish. I have reached that age when a man begins to realize that memories are as rich in life's portion as are hopes, and that what is dear out of the past must color and warm all that is to be dear in the future. Life is, to be sure, a kind of adventure, and our best prayer for each is that his life may prove to be a beautiful adventure ; yet we should not forget that this adventure of living has an end, even as it had a beginning, and that the value of a life is to be found in what it is as a whole, not merely in the expectations and desires which happen to engross its present hours. As men grow into maturity they begin to realize that the true gold which they have amassed is their treasured memories; and realizing this they become the more solicitous for their children, knowing that the only fortune which no change can take from their heirs will be the memories that live on into the after years.

The main part of the years of my boyhood were spent in a country village of southeastern Nebraska — just such a village as scores of others which today dot the map of the state. My earliest recollection of it is of a place bare and windswept, open alike

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to the unrelenting suns of summer and the unremitting gales of winter; and there seemed (so my memory reports) something quite audacious in the group of crude frame buildings, standing unrelieved and nude in the midst of miles of almost treeless prairie. Today, this village is nearly hidden in summertime by the luxuriant green of its leafage, and the country round about is one continuous chequer of hedgerow and field and grove; nor can winter at its whitest take away the impression of snug comfort that has changed the whole face of nature.

It was with this change from a raw pioneer town to the snug trading hamlet of a well-seated farming community that I grew up; and the Nebraska I know best of all is, I suspect, the Nebraska of the transformation from virgin prairies into cultivated farms — a Nebraska of some hardships, but of a great adventure done once for all; for the prairies which I knew as a boy were just such as they had been, for century upon century, since the great ice had melted away to the north, leaving on them the strewn gravel in which I used to find onyx and agate; and the farms as they are now are surely much what will be through as many centuries more, perhaps, until a new age of ice comes again to drive away their summers. The transformation was surely a very wonderful period, and I am glad that I have lived in that good time.

Of course I did not realize all this, as a boy — what boy could? But I felt its stir, none the less. There was always a thrill in seeing the prairie broken, the horses even in double team tugging and sweating, and the long ribbons of sod turning in neat parallels. There was beauty, too, in the fires that swept through the dried grass of autumns, tanged with danger, and illuminating the hills at night for miles around. Then there were treeplantings and house-raisings and auctions and busy market days — all occasions when folk gathered to the enterprise with a hearty vacation spirit, naturally attractive to boys; while, from another angle, there were old-timers with stories of freighting days and Indian fights. Nor was the "wild west" so far remote; every year cowboy traders came through with droves of half-broken mustang and broncho ponies, and not a few exhibitions of hardy horsemanship; while hardly a season passed without at least one encampment of Indians journeying on their endless tribal visits from reservation to reservation. But most affecting of all to the imagination were the prairie-schooners of the new settlers — • streams of them, spring and autumn, drifting westward, westward, into their land of promise.

With other boys I used to explore the country; wandering up and down the banks of the wooded Nemaha; playing at Indian with bows of ash, arrows of reed, and spears of dried sunflower stalks; searching for occasional arrowheads and flints in the gravel beds; or gathering treasures from the

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limestone quarries, abundant with fossil relics of the time when as yet this land was not and where Nebraska is was the teeming life of old Devonian seas. With other boys, too, I went to the village schools — old-fashioned, I suspect the teachers of our day would call them, or perhaps old fogy; certainly, as I recall, grammar and arithmetic were regarded by the pupils as the real tests of their mettle, while spelling-down appealed to our sporting instincts. I learned a trade, too, as did many of the others, and planned and hoped with them for the great day when — like the movers in the prairie schooners — I should set out to discover the wide world beyond the prairie horizon and make unclaimed lands my own.

Most of the boys who were my companions grew up to fulfill their hope of adventuring out into untried frontiers or strange lands, and today they are scattered in many a far place. I, also, departed, and for a decade dwelt in distant cities; but unlike many, I returned again to my native soil, and with I believe a new veneration for what is beautiful in Nebraska. For I have discovered that those beauties which most endure in human experience are not to be found in the novel and spectacular moments of the traveler, but in familiar and intimate things, and especially in those impressions which come to childhood and youth, when the mind is eager with curiosity and fresh with hope. To me the prairies of Nebraska are wonderfully beautiful, with their broad curves and modulating distances. I love, too, the animation of the cornfields, stirred by cruising winds; the sudden thunderstorm with its avalanche of lightning and the impetuous rain sweeping up after the great billow of cloud is the very raiment of majesty; and I think I have never seen such stars as ours, over the whole dome of heaven, of a winter's night. Nor can I ever forget that once-seen sunset sky, gold and burnished copper from circumference to circumference, which will be for me forever the image of the sublimities of the judgment day.

My eight-year-old, like his father, was born in Nebraska, and in the same city. It gives me a certain satisfaction to recognize this continuity of generations, and to hope that it may go on in the future. I hear his shout of joy at play; I watch him trudge off to school ; and I think of him — as I suppose other parents think of their children — as gathering day by day that store of vivid impressions which are one day to come home to him as a precious treasure. It is pleasant to know that a part of the kinship with his father which he will some time realize will be that deepest of all comradeships which rests upon a common understanding of the same earth and sky with all the companioning changes of nature. It is out of such common understanding that love of home and love of country grow to mean so much to men.

Of course I recognize that the Nebraska he will

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know cannot be quite the Nebraska that I have known. For instance, where I as a boy, was interested in ponies and mover's wagons, he is interested in automobiles and railroad trains; and I have discovered from his chance comments that the schoolroom for him has a color and tone different from those which cling to mine out of the old days. But more than all, I am sure that he will never know the exuberance and adventurous hopefulness which belonged to the pioneer days, when everything was to be done, and nothing was complete, and the whole face of nature was to be changed to suit men's new needs. That was a great enterprise which our fathers took in hand; and they performed it well, and once for all ; so that what Nebraska now is many generations will continue to see it. Nor could so great a deed have been achieved without inspiration in the souls of them that did it, and a kind of glory enveloping their lives.

* What will take its place — have you never asked the question — what will take the place of the great adventure of the pioneers, to put in the souls of their children the old fire and the old enthusiasm that seem so precious to us as we look back? It was good, we can see, for them to be building a pleasant habitation for their heirs in the land ; they lived creative lives, stalwart and honorable, but is it so good for their children's children? Are these simply to inhabit the pleasant house, making no addition? Could such a life be a good life, inheriting all, creating nothing? Or are there still such tasks to perform, here in Nebraska, as shall test the mettle of the best of them, and give them all that buoyancy of soul which comes but when life is touched with the noble generosity of fine deeds to do? To the minds of all citizens such questions must come at times; but most of all they will occur and recur to teachers and parents, for it is teachers and parents who most fully realize that the one true heritage which a passing generation can leave to its youth is a noble task. I have no qualms as to this with respect to my boy. My life has been cast in a great generation; but his, if he be spared, will be lived in a greater. Its achievement will not, I believe, be of the character of those which have made my generation great ; marvels of physical achievement, such as the mastery of earth and sea and air by machines, the uniting of the seas by great canals, the discovery of Earth's two poles, and here the transformation of the great North American wilderness into civilized states, uniting in amity men of all nations. But the next generation will have set for it tasks more stupendous than these, pertaining not to mechanical and physical but to human and spiritual problems. The most terrible of all wars began in 1914 and at this writing is not yet ended. This war has shaken human civilization to its foundations ; it has destroyed cities and devastated nations; but of more lasting significance are the deeper destructions of men's political and economic institutions and the

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more harrowing devastations of men's souls. The secret of sane living must be rediscovered by the next generation, the world must be reorganized for a better and purer and nobler race of men; nor is there a phase of social or intellectual life that will not have to be renewed and reillumined by the men and women of the future.

I watch my son trudge off to school, here in Nebraska, and I am glad in the hope that he may play a man's part in that great task. I have a feeling, no doubt partly a bias for my native soil, that the sons and daughters of this great west, so lately virgin sod and still shining with the generous glamour of the spirit of the pioneers, should be well qualified for a great part in the great task. I realize, of course, that this qualification cannot be merely one of natural advantages or of inherited spirit; that in addition there must be the soundest and most genuine education which state and parents can afford, or by thought and care find out. I am convinced, too, that our schools and the whole commonwealth whose ideals they reflect have not yet risen to the measure of this opportunity or of the hour and of the duty which is theirs. Further, I believe that the surest means of reaching not merely the schools, but even more the public of the commonwealth, who must be reached if a true conception of education is to be attained, is through the teachers in these schools — the teachers of Nebraska, of all America. Therefore I am addressing to them these letters in the hope that what I have to say may seem worth consideration and inspire discussion and lead — in some better form than I can suggest — to action. For it is to action that we are called; even as our fathers were called to the great task of redeeming a wilderness, even as our children must be called anew to regenerate the nations, so we, in our day, are summoned to prepare the way for them, training their bodies and opening their minds to vision, — our part in the eternal deed of human progress, O Adventurers !

Letter II

THE States of the American union have each their own sovereignty. No doubt the twentieth century American, with his strong sense of the central nation, has grown away from the intense state patriotism of the earlier years of the republic. To a considerable degree he has even lost his feeling for the federal nature of our constitution. Particularly

in the newer commonwealths, with their migrant populations and uncertainty of tradition, it is, easy for the citizen to focus his attention upon the national aspects of his citizenship — upon the flag and the imperial grandeur of our domain and upon the high statecraft of Congress and the White House — rather than to permit it to become absorbed in the less showy manifestations of his local sovereignty. And yet each commonwealth of the United States is a sovereign, and exercises sovereign rights, and in a sovereign manner determines the destinies of its citizens. Nor is there another single feature in which this sovereignty is exerted with so much force and significance for human life as in the schools — those free public schools which are the mainstay of all free human society. Assuredly, in the support of such an institution the citizen of any commonwealth may feel that he is furthering the ends of the truest statecraft and manifesting the most enduring patriotism.

In democracies the sovereign is the people. But a people can be sovereign only when it understands the nature and duties of sovereignty. It is the first principle of public education that it shall secure this understanding; and the free schools of the commonwealth are, therefore, the final fortification of its democratic rights. The two great institutions upon which Americanism rests are the ballot and the public schools, and the latter are the true preparation for the former. When, therefore, in the ordering of American institutions, the organization and conduct of the schools are left in the hands of the several states, this is the truest recognition not only of their proper sovereignties, but also of the fact that the sovereign power of the nation as a w^hole is the creation and summation of these state sovereignties. It is also a pledge of confidence of the states in one another that each may be relied upon to broaden and preserve the conceptions of liberty and justice and human right which form the bond and cement of our national unity — and the proud soul of our Americanism.

By far the largest single item in Nebraska's annual budget (and doubtless this is true of most of our commonwealths) is the educational expenditure. This is as it should be, but it should be so primarity for the reason that the schools of Nebraska are the safeguards of her democratic institutions, and hence of the free Hfe of the whole community. The schools exist for the betterment of the life of the state as a whole, and therefore of the United States as a whole — this is the first principle upon which, in a truly American education, all other educational principles must rest. The tax which the school system imposes upon the community is justified by the returns which the schools make in the preservation of the community and in its .betterment, and by nothing else. In brief, the first aim of public education is to train qualified citizens.

This principle must not be applied in a narrowly political sense, as teachers are sometimes inclined to apply it. It does not mean an intensive concentration upon, say, American history and civics, important as these are. Rather, it means the cultivation of a true liberalism as the core of all our schooling — grade, high school, and college — and the dissemination of this liberalism among the greatest possible number of our youth. Liberalism is the one essential qualification for the citizen of a democracy; and what we mean by democratic equality is the opportunity — nay, the duty — of every citizen to share in this essential. Free education must first of all be liberal education; that is the starting-point of our philosophy.

In later letters (indeed, it shall be my central theme) I shall endeavor to explain in detail what I regard as the proper schooling of a democratic liberal. Here I shall but seek to give a broad conception of what qualities in the man a liberal education must cultivate. And these, I should say, are a love and understanding of truth and virtue and beauty. Love of truth means honesty with one's self as well as frankness with one's fellow — "to thine own self be true . . . thou canst not then be false to any man" — and it means this for the sake, most of all, of the great gain that comes from free human intercourse. The value of free speech and of the free press about which we say so much is directly dependent upon the honesty and truth-loving spirit of society; without this spirt, there is no freedom. Love of virtue — the second quality named — means the power of self-control. The Greeks meant this when they made the first rules of conduct ''Know thyself" and ''Temperance in all things" ; for knowledge of self is the first step in self-control, just as temperance, self-restraint, is its achievement. Human conduct is ordered by two great forces, our instincts and our virtues; and if you will reflect upon the nature of the virtues (courage which overcomes fear, temperance which conquers appetite, industry which outfaces sloth) you will perceive, I am sure, that the virtues are in the nature of curbs and reins upon the instincts; the instincts are given us by nature, it is the virtues that can be trained. Nor is self-control less essentiol to freedom and to a society of equals than is love of truth; for it is the practice of a free society to be able to give as well as to take — to abide by the rule of the majority, for example, and take one's turn for the expression of opinion or the execution of a policy rather than to rush into revolution or tyranny. The third factor in a liberal education is love of beauty. This is not less essential to an enduring society than is either of the others; for love of beauty means an ability to idealize and to imagine better things, and hence to be inventive and creative, and therefore interested in the work which men find to do. Without this idealizing power men sink naturally back into an animal indifference to all save material comforts; they become swinish, and willing to fatten at any trough ; and for such a state of mind all democracy is illusion. Love of beauty is, in truth, the final and completed salvation of the state.

Now there is one characteristic which these traits have in common, and it is the one characteristic which makes them truly liberal. Love of truth and love of virtue and love of beauty are all unselfish and impersonal. Not one of them is based upon self-seeking and self -gratification in any narrow mode. Indeed, they move in quite the opposite direction. Love of truth, for example, is closely allied to humility; it implies a willingness to be taught, and absence of that conceit which is the customary mark of ignorance. Love of virtue comes only from a self -under standing, and that means from a full appreciation of what temptation signifies in human life, and of human weaknesses, and especially of one's own weaknesses. Love of beauty is most of all a native generosity of soul, implying sympathy and an ability to enter into other lives than one's own, under standingly and without envy. Thus each of the three means a kind of liberation from what is selfish and animal in one's nature and a willingness to find the good of life in what is universal and humane. It is in such liberations that true liberalism is to be found, and especially the liberalism that makes possible democratic states; for it is in democracies, where men must get along together by mutual agreement and free self -surrenders, that willingness to learn and understanding of men's weaknesses and a generous sympathy are most indispensable.

There is a very important inference to be drawn from the nature of liberal education so defined — an inference thrice important in our own day when so much stress is laid upon what is called vocational training (and really is technical and mechanical training) . For clearly, if the end of free schools is primarily the liberal education of citizens who can, through understanding and love of it, preserve the state, it cannot be the first purpose of these schools to give the scholar training in particular crafts for the sake of his individual career. The vocation is something that pertains to the private rather than the public life of the man; it represents what he does for himself or what his parents or family do for him rather than what the state should be called upon to do. There is, to be sure, a good coming to the state from the fact that it possesses citizens highly trained in special crafts; modern society is complex and cannot continue without specialists and technicians. But, on the other hand, a community composed of men who are specialists and technicians without first being liberally trained citizens cannot continue as a democracy; inevitably it will develop into a society of classes, castes, unions, federations, mutually hostile and exclusive. Vocational education, by itself, is purely aristocratic. The first duty of a democracy is to remain a democracy; and the only schooling it can tolerate, therefore, is one which first of all secures to all its citizens such a heart and constitution of liberalism as shall insure the maintenance of democratic freedom amid all the complexities of technical human pursuits. This is a matter of huge importance, which no teacher (even of the most special subject) can ever afford to forget. Undoubtedly there is room in our schools for technical and vocational training; but it is equally undoubted that no true patriot can ever allow such training to infringe in the slightest upon the needs of a broad and fundamental liberalism.

In the interests of that liberalism the school-child, from his primary years, should have it impressed upon his mind that his public schooling, while a free gift from the state, is not given without expectation of return. He should have it impressed upon his mind that his privileges imply responsibilties, and that the first and last of his duties is to bring to the service of the state and the community such an understanding of human life as only an impersonal outlook can give. It is altogether a mistake to permit young children even to think too seriously of their own careers in the world. They should rather be concerned with mastering its history and problems, and in acquiring such an understanding of human nature as shall make them judges of the general good. \Mthout such an attitude of mind the liberties of society cannot be safeguarded, while it is hardly conceivable that all the time and effort devoted to its cultivation will react otherwise upon our technical and industrial life than for greater intelligence of direction and fruitfulness of achievement.

There is, of course (and this is in the nature of a caution), possible misdirection of devotion to others. Youth is naturally eager and generous and quick with desire to serve. "Social service," indeed, has become a perilous term nowadays, our danger being that we shall get too many servants and too little that is worthy of service. It is essential, therefore, that the lesson of modesty be learned well, and this can best be achieved by the truest liberalism. Say to the young, 'Tf you would best serve the state and best serve mankind, this will be most fullv accomplished and to the height of your abihties by a cultivated interest in the best and soHdest in human thought and the noblest in human nature; such an interest you can obtain by study, without thought of self, which in making you an intelligent human being will thereby make of you a true guardian of the social good." Service of mankind is, after all, not best realized in alms to individuals, apart from their deserts, but in devotion to the best that human nature is capable of; and this can be known only through study of what men have thought and done.

Liberal education is not a cheap thing, either for the generation w^hich gives it or for the generation which receives it. The one must make sacrifices of material comforts for the sake of the upbringing of its young; and it should endeavor, for the sake of that progress, which means social health, to pass to its youth something more in the way of opportunity than it had received from its own fathers. The other must give hard and unselfish effort to the work which sound schooling always implies; for neither understanding of truth nor of virtue nor of beauty comes without some toil. Fortunately, deep in human nature is a generous devotion of parents to the good of their children and a generous devotion of youth to all that appeals to what is noblest in man's soul. It but remains for the teachers, first, to understand the spirit of liberalism, and second, to be able so to make its needs manifest, to parents and children alike, that through understanding they will desire it and will devote their efforts wholeheartedly to its attainment.