LB 875 
 .C2 
 Copy 1 
 
 national Saturation 
 
 By BRUCE CALVERT 
 
 PRICE FIFTY CENTS 
 
 • • • • 
 
Books by Bruce Calvert. 
 
 1. Emma Goldman and the Police - $ .10 
 
 One of the most powerful and stirring appeals 
 ever written for the right of free speech. 
 
 2. Socialism and Progress - - .10 
 
 A scientific analysis and a broad view of just 
 what Socialism means to the world. 
 
 3. Marriage and Divorce - - .10 
 
 A clear exposition of the origin and meaning of 
 Institutional Marriage, and a plea for unrestrict- 
 ed Divorce. 
 
 4. Woman and Her Sex Rights - .10 
 
 A plea for woman's freedom and her right to 
 her own body. 
 
 5. Rational Education — Paper 50c; Boards 1.00 
 
 The keynote of our future educational system. 
 The education that liberates, not enslaves. 
 
 6. Science and Health - - .25 
 
 Secrets of Eddyism laid bare. Being the first 
 and only scientific and rational explanation of 
 the failures as well as the cures of Christian 
 Science, and all other Systems of Healing now 
 before the world. 
 
 For sale by all book and news dealer* or order direct. 
 
 THE OPEN ROAD 
 
 GRIFFITH (LAKE COUNTY) INDIANA 
 
 R . F. D. NO. 1. PlQEON-ROOST-IN-THE-WOODS 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION 
 
 The Keynote of the Rational School. 
 Education that liberates, not enslaves. 
 
 □ CZD □ 
 
 By 
 
 BRUCE CALVERT 
 
 Director of The Rational School Center, Chicago, Illinois. 
 
 □ i 1 □ 
 
 Published by 
 
 THE OPEN ROAD PRESS 
 
 Griffith, (Lake County) Indiana. 
 R. F. D. No. 1 . Pigeon - Roost - in - the -Woods. 
 
u 
 
 #%» 
 
 Copyright 1911 
 
 by 
 Bruce Calvert. 
 
 'CI.A309126 
 
BRUCE CALVERT 
 
Introduction. 
 
 "M ATURE has wisely provided but one sin- 
 gle means whereby man may grow, at- 
 tain, evolve, progress — and that is thru 
 labor. Activity, endeavor, exercise is the 
 basic law of hunian unfoldment. Work 
 with body and mind. With hand and bcrain. 
 Exercise of all the faculties of mind, 
 of soul, of spirit; of all the muscles of the 
 body. There is no other way. 
 
 Man comes into this life a mere bundle 
 of latent possibilities. When he has been 
 delivered from the maternal matrix and 
 when thru his first breath he has made his 
 own contact with this sense world, nature 
 had done all that she can do for him. Here 
 he is left to himself. His life is his own. 
 Henceforth all progress, all expansion, all 
 development, must come thru his own exer- 
 tions. Man is master of his own destiny. 
 
 To be born or thrust into a position where 
 work is not required or permitted is a terri- 
 
 7 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ble handicap. The individual so hampered 
 hias no chance. Shut out from the moving 
 currents of life he will rust and rot in aim- 
 less eddies of stagnation. Deprived of the 
 opportunity or desire for exertion the hu- 
 man animal lives and dies in darkness. 
 Never unfolds. Never rises above the plane 
 of possibilities. Activity is life. Rest is 
 death. <* <* <& 
 
 Work is the law of life. When we know 
 this law we see that we must love our work 
 as we love life itself. Our very existence 
 depends upon it. It is the bone and marrow 
 of human life. Loveless work means a love- 
 less, hopeless, dharacterless life. 
 
 <4 •* V 
 
 He who works only because compelled to 
 do so for food and shelter, and 'he who takes 
 no part in the world's work because he is 
 physically beyond the necessity for it, are 
 alike miserable unfortunates. The earth is 
 our workshop. The universe is our exercise 
 ground. Life is our opportunity. 
 
 As to attainment there is no end, so to 
 effort there can be no ceasing. Each new 
 
 8 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 step upward on tihe heights, but brings 
 larger and more difficult fields of endeavor 
 into view. The reward of accomplishment 
 is not rest, but harder things to accomplish. 
 That old dream of an eternal rest with 
 folded hands belongs to the babyhood of the 
 race. That Eabbinical tale of labor being 
 visited upon men as a punishment belongs to 
 an age when idleness was a virtue and labor 
 ignoble. An age of priest and prophet. 
 * <* <f 
 
 We know today that labor is the supreme 
 virtue. Sacred and fundamental as life it- 
 self is the right to labor in freedom and joy. 
 That a very large mass of mankind are not 
 now permitted to do this is the severest in- 
 dictment of our civilization. It shows in 
 fact that we haven't yet begun to be civ- 
 ilized, but are still deep in the shadows of 
 barbarism. We must and we will right this 
 terrible wrong. That will be humanity's 
 next great step. To provide a society where 
 all men may (have as William Morris said, 
 the opportunity of doing work that is worth 
 doing and not of itself unpleasant to do, and 
 
 9 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 under conditions in which the work shall be 
 neither overburdensome nor overwearisome. 
 
 What man's unfoldment in freedom 
 would be like we can scarcely conceive. 
 What a child brought up under the influ- 
 ences of the Rational school where were no 
 ihibitions of fear, superstition or conven- 
 tion, no false social restrictions, and no re- 
 pressions of authority, would be like we can 
 hardly imagine. The experiment remains 
 yet to be tried. The world is getting ready 
 to make the trial, tho. 
 
 That the spirit will flower in beauty, and 
 that the child so happily placed will ap- 
 proach the superman is my faith, and to 
 
 see the experiment tried is my dream. 
 
 f* <* * 
 
 We've had enough of the authoritarian 
 method. Enough of education by force. 
 We must now come back to the great 
 simple truths that love is the law of life. 
 That we learn only in moments of joy. That 
 the pupil will accept only that which his 
 nature craves. 
 
 10 
 
Rational Education. 
 
 Chapter I. 
 
 Education and Life. 
 
 THE most important thing in the life of 
 every human being is education. It be- 
 gins with the first breath, and it covers the 
 whole of life, ending only with the last 
 breath. All that man has ever accomplished 
 in his long evolution from nakedness and 
 savagery to his present estate, has been 
 through education. 
 
 Surely I do not need to prove that a ra- 
 tional, or reasonable, sane or natural educa- 
 tional method is a constructive process that 
 will foster and hasten man's development; 
 while an irrational or unnatural method is 
 a destructive force, retarding his progress 
 and inhibiting his growth. 
 
 In the last few centuries the educational 
 machinery all over the world has crystallized 
 into a set system of pedagogics centering 
 in schools or institutions of learning. Thus, 
 
 11 
 
RATIQNAL EDUCATION. 
 
 the educational life of the race has become 
 institutionalized. And, like every other in- 
 stitution of man — as religion, government, 
 economics — has become rotten and ineffi- 
 cient. It has suffered the fate of all insti- 
 tutions. It has become narrow, intolerant, 
 inflexible. It now enslaves, instead of free- 
 ing man. 
 
 This condition of things is not strange, 
 nor to be wondered at. It is the law of na- 
 ture. The moment man seizes a truth and 
 attempts to bind it to a rigid formula, or 
 puts his spiritual life into a moral code, or 
 his social or economic ideals into a set pro- 
 gram governed by an institution, he signs 
 his intellectual death warrant and invites 
 spiritual dissolution. 
 
 Man must be fluid. Must be able to 
 change. Institutions are not fluid. They 
 never change until forced to do so, and then 
 they flght to the death to maintain their 
 dogmas. 
 
 There are no institutions in nature. Na- 
 ture is everywhere plastic, fluid. Man alone 
 creates institutions, and then suffers the 
 
 12 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 awful price of slavery to the dragons of his 
 
 own creation. 
 
 * <* <4 
 
 Thus in education the institution has now 
 become the important thing. Man himself 
 is lost sight of. Subordinated to the ma- 
 chine he has created. Submerged in the edu- 
 cational system. As administered in our 
 schools and colleges, education has lost its 
 soul. Its spirit has fled. It is a lifeless shell, 
 having the letter, but not the substance. 
 Teaching is everywhere now but a mechan- 
 ical maintenance of discipline. 
 
 The original purpose of the school and 
 the teacher, as seen in those noble schools 
 of Plato and Socrates, was to train the mind 
 to grasp the facts of nature and organize 
 them into an individual working concep- 
 tion of the cosmos. It was to free the stu- 
 dent from obsession and superstition. To 
 throw him upon the integrity of his own 
 thought. To make his own soul the su- 
 preme center of his universe. 
 
 And that is what Rational Education 
 must be. Also that is what it never will be 
 
 13 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 so long as present dogmatic methods con- 
 tinue. 
 
 Starting with the heroic Grecian period, 
 what happened? Educational systems grad- 
 ually became dogmatic, corrupt. Like 
 ehurches and governments, the system no 
 longer looking for the truth, but degenerat- 
 ing into an organized tyranny, to force the 
 acceptance of recognized creeds and author- 
 ities, however repugnant to the thought of 
 the individual. For more than 2,000 years 
 teaching has been an intellectual tyranny 
 compelling uniformity. The effort has been 
 to systematize and standardize the thought 
 processes of man. Where are the splendid 
 intellects of Plato's day? Alas, the world 
 knows them not! Since the rational schools 
 which were the glory of intellectual Athens, 
 the race has only produced six or seven men 
 of intellect. A few great and noble spirits 
 who nourished in spite of educational sys- 
 tems. The balance of humanity's millions are 
 all scrubs. There is no intellectual liberty 
 today in all the earth. I The school system 
 
 14 V. 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 in all countries is a tyranny, forcing accept- 
 ance of its decrees with iron hand. 
 
 <* <* <4 
 
 The crime lies in the fact that the educa- 
 tional system exerts its malevolent influence 
 upon the plastic mind of youth. Upon the 
 helpless child before it is able to protect 
 itself. It is difficult to state in temperate 
 language the terrible wrong the school sys- 
 tem thus perpetrates upon helpless, inno- 
 cent childhood. 
 
 It is bad enough to take a man of de- 
 veloped mind and force him with the whips 
 of starvation and social ostracism into con- 
 formity. Yet he can at least suffer and find 
 the holy joy of the martyr in his immolation. 
 But to take a child and lock the clamps 
 and fetters of conformity upon that little 
 brain is so monstrous a wrong that there 
 are no words to measure it. Civilization is 
 paying, and will pay a terrible price in mis- 
 ery, blood and tears, for this wrong. 
 
 It is positively true there is no place in 
 our modern educational system for initiative, 
 
 15 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 for originality. The child is denied the poor 
 right to construct his own universe. With 
 the mailed fist of authority, a cut-and-dried 
 system of morals, economics, religion and 
 government is thrust down his throat. His 
 mind and his reasoning faculties are so para- 
 lyzed that he does not attempt to think. Not 
 one in a million, I believe, of the human 
 family today is capable of using his brains. 
 The power to think has almost disappeared 
 from among us. A man must pay the price 
 of independent thought almost with his life. 
 Surely at the cost of his comfort, social 
 standing, financial independence and about 
 everything else the hysterical world of to- 
 day holds as desirable. Everywhere our 
 system is built upon repression. Repression 
 is death. Expression alone, full and free, is 
 life. 
 
 Whoever heard of any teacher, from the 
 district school to the university, asking a 
 student: "What do you think about this?" 
 Never! It's always: "What does Hibrow 
 the great authority, say about it?" The only 
 important thing, the only sacred thing — 
 
 16 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 what the learner himself thinks — is utterly 
 lost sight of. If you are not free to look the 
 facts of life in the face, to draw your own 
 conclusions, make your own estimates of 
 men and measures, express freely the 
 thought of your own soul without coercion, 
 you never can be a man. You will be but a 
 thing, an imitator. You still belong to the 
 monkey race. 
 
 <i * <§ 
 
 Any one with a rudimentary brain could 
 see the truth of what I have said if we 
 were not all scared too stiff to think for 
 ourselves. / We are intellectual cowards, 
 made so by the false educational system 
 that has cursed us. We are afraid of the 
 unconventional. We bow and cringe and 
 fawn before the authorities. (Our modern 
 educational system all over the 'world turns 
 out a race of intellectual lick-spittles. We 
 dare not think. We are afraid to think. 
 Afraid of our own minds. We have to wait 
 to see what the "Evening Swill Barrel" 
 says. What some borborygmic doctor, pul- 
 pit-pounder, or sickly college professor has 
 
 17 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 to offer before we form or express an 
 opinion of our own. 
 
 This is so awfully, ghastly true that we 
 cannot smile. The average man is so utterly 
 under the spell of this idiotic worship of 
 titles that he dare not raise his head. Is it 
 not so? Answer me. Bring up any ques- 
 tion before the next man you meet, and he 
 will quote you what some doctor, or pro- 
 fessor, or some Hon. dirty grafting politi- 
 cian says, and that settles the matter. Try 
 it. 
 
 One original pupil asserting his inalien- 
 able right to think for himself would upset 
 any school or college in America. There is 
 no place for the fearless independent think- 
 er, no provision for him at all. All are 
 hacked to fit the Procrustean bed. Our 
 schools, colleges, and universities are organ- 
 ized exactly like shoe factories. Turning 
 out products all alike, all molded upon the 
 same inflexible last, exhibiting the same 
 dullness, mediocrity and incompetency. 
 18 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 The master minds of all the ages have been 
 those who never enjoyed any " educational' * 
 advantages. They learned in the school of 
 hard knocks, from mother nature. The sys- 
 tem never got in its deadly work upon them. 
 Who taught Socrates? Who trained Gali- 
 leo? What academy graduated Copernicus? 
 Who tutored Shakespeare, Darwin, Spencer, 
 Whitman and all the rest of the mighty 
 host? What college taught Edison to illu- 
 minate the world with the electric spark? 
 And the towering Lincoln, majestic giant, 
 the deep waters of whose inner life were 
 never troubled by the meddling fingers of 
 Pedagogy, who taught him? From what 
 college did he take his degree of common 
 sense? Could a Lincoln possibly survive 
 the Grammar and High School course of 
 today? 
 
 College men who have made anything of * 
 
 themselves have done so in spite of their 
 education. They will all tell you so. They 
 have only contempt for the intellectual mill 
 through which they passed. Thoreau would 
 
 19 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 not pay $5 for his diploma from Harvard. 
 Emerson, the master mind of the American 
 Renaissance, was given the hemlock by 
 "Dean Old Hahvad, don't you know." 
 
 Have I overstated the case? I do not 
 think so. In every class-room in the world 
 today authorities are taught and referred to 
 on every subject. Yet every authority so 
 blindly worshipped and bitterly enforced 
 must be partly or wholly wrong. Why? Be- 
 cause it is not given to any man or work of 
 man to be wholly right. Perfection is not 
 a human attribute. Can we by legislation 
 enforce a wrong over a right? Never! The 
 wrong must and will fall. Eight and truth 
 needs no defenders. Hands off! All errors 
 have in themselves the seeds of their own 
 downfall. Do not try to bolster up any 
 theory or dogma. Just take away your hands, 
 and if it falls it deserves to. You cannot 
 hold the wrong in place anyway very long. 
 Gravitation is after you. It works while 
 you sleep. In the end you will only be 
 crushed by the fall thereof. Better stand 
 from under. 
 20 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 Because the majority of the people be- 
 lieve a thing is no evidence of its truth. 
 On the contrary, it is just when we are most 
 cock-sure about things that we make the 
 biggest fools of ourselves. "The mass has 
 always been wrong upon every question," 
 says Matthew Arnold. For our own sakes 
 we dare not accept any human judgment as 
 right and final so long as there's one dis- 
 senting voice in all the world. "Only what 
 nobody denies is so," says Old Walt. 
 
 * <4 ti 
 
 Our youth are chained to the dead hands 
 of the past. Our educational system is a 
 festering charnel house of dead men's bones.) 
 Have not the living a better title to this 
 earth than the dead? If we are fettered to 
 a regime established by men long moldering 
 in their graves, then indeed the dead live 
 and the living are dead. Away with the 
 corpses of the past! Off with the shrouds 
 of the dead ! Make way for man, living, 
 plastic, ever-changing man! 
 
 It is my purpose in these papers to arouse 
 
 21 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 my readers to the menace of what we so 
 blindly worship as our Free School System. 
 Free indeed ! Heaven save the irony ! Slave 
 School System we would better say. 
 
 From the fact that little or no effort has 
 been made to better things, and that no- 
 body seems even to question the Tightness 
 or infallibility of our school system, I am 
 sorrowfully led to believe that there are 
 few, almost none, of our vast population 
 who have in any degree appreciated the 
 dangers or wrongs in the system. 
 
 22 
 
Ideal Teaching. 
 
 Chapter II. 
 
 WHETHER it will avail to present a con- 
 structive outline of the new education 
 to a people who do not know that there is 
 anything wrong with the present system, I 
 do not know. But there is a well corre- 
 lated program of the Rational School. .Ra- 
 tional education is no idle dream. Although 
 such a school does not yet exist in the Wes- 
 tern hemisphere, it is coming. And that, 
 too, as a part of the evolutionary process of 
 nature by which man is swept along toward 
 higher things, however much he may, by his 
 foolishness, hinder the onward movement. 
 He may embarrass but cannot stop this 
 mighty force. We are pushed upward in 
 spite of our stupidity. Else there would be 
 hope in nature. No chance for man. 
 V tf <* 
 
 Briefly, then, the Rational School will be 
 organized to preserve the intellectual free- 
 dom of the child. To develop his initiative 
 and spontaneity in every direction. The 
 
 23 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 teacher must be absolutely free. There will 
 be no set standard to which he must con- 
 form. If he wishes to spend a day in the 
 woods, with the children, that will be his 
 business. All instruction must be individ- 
 ual. No teacher should have more than six 
 to ten pupils in his charge. Text-books and 
 authorities must be relegated to second 
 place. The sanctity of the child's mind must 
 never be invaded. Nothing must be taught 
 as final. Courses of study, as in the present 
 educational mill, must be thrown overboard. 
 A set program for teaching must always be 
 a failure. A course of study must always be 
 wrong, because the teacher must meet the 
 issues of the moment as he finds them. You 
 are dealing with the human mind. You can 
 not lay out a program today that will apply 
 to a living human soul tomorrow. 
 
 All courses of study, all fixed-in-advance 
 plans of teaching must be failures. They 
 cannot be anything else. Ideal teaching is 
 spontaneous, adapting itself to the need of 
 the moment. Ever flexible, elastic, fluid. 
 
 Every school house must be in the middle 
 24 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 of a 20 or 30-acre lot, where all the various 
 agricultural and horticultural operations of 
 the climate are carried on through all the 
 seasons of the year. Association with do- 
 mestic animals must be constant, that their 
 care may teach sympathy, responsibility and 
 understanding. 0, yes, we have much to 
 learn from our friends whom we patronize 
 as the " lower animals." 
 
 The Rational School will not train the 
 child to act as a cog in the great commercial 
 machine, but will train him to become an in- 
 dividual, a thinker, a unit, a center of light 
 and life and spiritual power. Modern indus- 
 trial activities will be taught for their cultu- 
 ral advantages only. 
 
 Health and the ability to take care of 
 oneself, to understand and make the most of 
 one's body, is the fundamental need of 
 every human being, and that will be the 
 first thing taught in the Rational School. If 
 we, as a race, were capable of thinking at all, 
 if we were not still in the monkey stage in- 
 
 25 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 tellectually, the utter idiocy and absurdity 
 of one man going to another when he is sick 
 to find out what is the matter with him, and 
 what can be done for him, would make us 
 ashamed of ourselves. The doctor and the 
 practice of medicine, like the preacher, the 
 sky-pilot of the heavens, is the joke of the 
 universe. 
 
 Our pupils today spend long hours in 
 the overheated, poisoned air of the school 
 rooms, humped over their books reading 
 about the benefit of fresh air and exercise. 
 They rush home at intermission, grab a 
 vicious lunch that a dog would refuse to 
 eat and bolt it in order to hurry back to 
 the school room to be taught about food 
 chemistry, mastication and digestion. With- 
 in ten minutes' walk of nature's wealth of 
 flora and fauna they sit and read books and 
 look at engravings on botany and zoology. 
 
 <4 * ■* 
 
 And the kindergarten. Ye gods! If 
 Friedrich Froebel could see as I see the 
 cruelties practiced upon the babies in his 
 name in every city in our land! 
 26 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 A little child is as full of intuition and 
 spontaneity as an egg is of meat. A rest- 
 less little human dynamo, with senses alert, 
 forever reaching out, grasping at the great 
 world about him, if you will only let him 
 alone — even he, the poor helpless infant, 
 must be standardized. I never feel so much 
 like committing homicide or suicide as when 
 I visit a kindergarten (Child's Garden) ! 
 God save the mark ! To see the little fellows 
 all put through the mill, as a horse is trained 
 for the circus, all taking the same dinky 
 little exercises, and playing the same woozy 
 little sissy games. Taught, taught, eternally 
 taught to death. 
 
 The worthy ladies who, with whip in 
 hand, act as ring masters in these daily 
 performances of the babies, for all the world 
 as the animals are trained in Hagenback's, 
 are just like children who would pull up 
 the tender plant by the roots to see how it 
 is growing. And yet we think our kinder- 
 garten system is the one solar sun on which 
 there are no spots. I want to tell you it 
 is the most dangerous, because it operates 
 
 27 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 at the most helpless stage of life. With 
 every succeeding year the child becomes a 
 little more able to help himself, but in the 
 kindergarten stage he is absolutely at the 
 mercy of the Lady of Lions who puts him 
 through his paces. 
 
 <* (« <4 
 
 The average teacher holds himself as a 
 model, and he takes a just pride if the pupils 
 copy him or her. Indeed, this is just what 
 happens. (The personality of the teacher is 
 everywhere impressed upon the pupil so 
 that he rarely recovers from it. This is not 
 education. It is damnation. \ 
 
 The ideal educator — one worthy of the 
 name of teacher at all — will seek to efface 
 himself absolutely. Will refrain from influ- 
 encing the child in any way whaetver, but 
 will leave it absolutely free, without bias 
 from himself, to flower in beauty as it will. 
 That is the true task of the teacher. To dis- 
 appear, to make himself useless and needless 
 to the student. I fancy I see you smile 
 when you look around among the teachers 
 28 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 who touched your lives, and ask yourselves 
 if you have ever known any of that kind. 
 
 Perhaps I have said enough now to give 
 a hint as to the method of the Rational 
 School. In a word, then, what should ra- 
 tional education do? 
 
 This: Provide the child with the proper 
 environment in which to grow. See to it 
 that his energies are conserved and added to, 
 and not depleted. Give him the opportunity 
 for exercising all of his faculties, mental, 
 physical, spiritual, and then — hands off ! Let 
 him alone ! Leave him to develop according 
 to the law of his own being under which 
 he came into the world. More than this, no 
 teacher, no man, no woman, no god can do. 
 
 tg <* <* 
 
 I think I hear the economist saying that 
 all this will cost a good deal of money. 
 And in an already overburdened, overtaxed, 
 monopoly-ridden country how are we going 
 to get the funds? 
 
 I will tell you one way. The cost of our 
 army and navy — a useless and ridiculous in- 
 
 29 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 stitution devoted to professional violence 
 and murder — for one year, would reconstruct 
 the school system of the whole United 
 States upon a rational basis. The cost of 
 one Dreadnaught would establish a Rational 
 School in every county in the state of Indi- 
 ana. That is true. Three-fourths of our en- 
 tire national revenue spent annually upon 
 war or preparation for war. 
 
 Wouldn't you as soon carry a teacher of 
 the Rational School on your back as to carry 
 a soldier and a sailor as every one of you 
 now do? 
 
 <* <* <* 
 
 Yes, I will admit that I am and have been 
 for a good many years devoting some of the 
 hardest study of my life to the problem of 
 rational education and right living. I be- 
 lieve I have the conception, the ideal of the 
 Rational School, fairly worked out. There 
 is at present no school in America 
 which comes up to the mark. I do not know 
 that there are any abroad. There were some 
 sixty to a hundred rational schools in Spain, 
 30 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 established by Francisco Ferrer, the great- 
 est educator of modern times. But the Chris- 
 tian Church in Spain murdered Ferrer in 
 cold blood, because his ideal was too far 
 ahead of his times. They confiscated his 
 property and destroyed his schools. 
 
 You may kill the man, but you can not 
 kill his thought. Tyranny is powerless be- 
 fore the advancing waves of rationalism. 
 Today the blood of Ferrer cries out from 
 the soil to every right thinker in the world 
 and in time to come we shall see the answer. 
 
 But as nearly as I can understand it, a 
 school something after the model of Ferrer's 
 on the intellectual and spiritual side, and 
 Booker Washington's school at Tuskegee, 
 Ala., on the physical and industrial side, 
 would be an approach to what I think ra- 
 tional education should be. Tuskegee is 
 well organized on the physical side, but 
 it is an orthodox institution, in the dark 
 ages spiritually. 
 
 31 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 I hope yet to be one of the instruments 
 of the great rationalistic upheaval of our 
 times in making a rational school possible. 
 I am proud to stand with the great and 
 splendid souls working on the problem. I 
 have given but a hint of what there is to 
 do. May I hope some of the seeds shall 
 fall upon ready soil? 
 
 The present school system is rotten, cor- 
 rupt beyond reformation.) At least that was 
 the conclusion of Ferrer, who gave up all 
 hope of improving the system, believing that 
 our only success must lie in establishing 
 new schools where rational methods will be 
 applied. I think this is true. 
 
 So far as I am concerned, I have no hope 
 from any teacher or educator that I can 
 now see projecting above the horizon. There 
 are millions of teachers, but few of them 
 will live long enough to be free. They are 
 too well educated. The system has done 
 its work. They know so much that is not 
 so. They are so busy defending authorities 
 that they have no time to defend themselves. 
 32 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 We must endeavor then to found a new 
 school or schools on the rational plan. And 
 we shall have to develop an entirely new 
 type of the ideal teacher. That is what I 
 want to see accomplished. 
 
 Woman must have her place, a very emi- 
 nent and important place in the new edu- 
 cation. We have given too little heed in 
 the past to woman's thot. She is by nature 
 a humanitarian. Her heart is in the race. 
 -' With reproduction organs," says Emerson, 
 11 which take hold upon eternity," she is 
 the natural educator and conservator of the 
 race, while man has come to be the exploiter. 
 He has sold his soul to Mammon. Un- 
 til woman's intuition is married to man's 
 intellect, in very truth as well as in pre- 
 tence we shall grope in darkness. And 
 so side by side the emancipation of woman, 
 her deliverance from bondage, her restora- 
 tion to herself, and the rational education 
 of the children of men shall proceed. 
 
 I regard this as the greatest work con- 
 
 33 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 fronting humanity today. The rational ed- 
 ucation of the young. There is little to hope 
 for from grown ups. They have passed 
 thru the educational rollers and are flattened 
 to standard shapes and sizes. The school 
 has done its deadly work upon them. They 
 cannot change. They have no intellectual 
 vitality left. No brain vigor to readjust 
 themselves to new mental foci. 
 
 The average individual has almost no ca- 
 pacity whatever for independent thought. 
 When he does make a pretense of thinking, 
 he merely looks wise and tunes his fiddle to 
 the clamor around him.: If you think you 
 are a thinker, you want to stand off a little 
 and get a good look at yourself. If you're 
 honest and can face the truth without flinch- 
 ing you 11 probably be dumbfounded to dis- 
 cover that you yourself are not doing any 
 independent cerebrating at all, but like all 
 the rest are taking your mental pabulum cut 
 and dried, your conclusions and opinions 
 ready made from your boss, or your fellow 
 employees, or your wife's relations. I know. 
 I've tried it. 
 34 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 People who do not think, and do not even 
 make any effort to think, cannot be expected 
 to send their children to the rational school. 
 
 The proletarian cannot spare his chil- 
 dren — he is so close to the bread problem 
 that he is compelled to send his babes into 
 the factories, mines and shops in order to 
 keep the whole family from starvation and 
 want. 
 
 The smug bourgeoisie with true reac- 
 tionary fatuity will never abandon their 
 idols. 
 
 So long as water runs down hill and cold 
 freezes, we surely never can expect the rul- 
 ing classes to be interested in anything ra- 
 tional, least of all, education. 
 
 The revolutionary element — which is at 
 present the only one in full sympathy with 
 the rational school — is yet too weak in Amer- 
 ica to afford a foundation for the new sys- 
 tem. 
 
 What is left, then? Well, that leaves us 
 only the waifs and outcasts of society. The 
 orphans and foundlings. The human flotsam 
 and jetsam cast up by the slums. 
 
 35 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 And that is just where I want to begin. 
 That is where the Rational School can do its 
 noblest work. 
 
 I assure you that under the regime of the 
 Rational School, such as I have briefly out- 
 lined, we can take these little human out- 
 casts from society's dumping ground and in 
 a few years transform them into supermen 
 and superwomen. They are the finest mate- 
 rials we could have. The stones which the 
 builders have rejected will truly become the 
 head of the corner. "With this material, poor 
 and unpromising as you might think it, we 
 can by rational training, erect a society that 
 will be purer, cleaner, sweeter, nobler, more 
 efficient, greater in every way than any civ- 
 ilization that has ever existed upon this 
 earth. 
 
 36 
 
The Rights of the Child in the 
 Rational School. 
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 |7 VERY child born into this world is abso- 
 lutely original, unique and individual in 
 all its characteristics; and I believe that 
 every child born under natural conditions, 
 and not interfered with by unwise educa- 
 tional methods is also a genius. 
 
 Nature never duplicates. I am looking 
 out from my cabin window upon a world of 
 beauty. Every bud and blossom, flower and 
 blade of grass is absolutely original. Nature 
 is so rich in resources that she never uses the 
 same mold twice. Altho the process of crea- 
 tion has been going on for unnumbered mil- 
 lions of years, and altho nature's forms are 
 far beyond the power of numbers even to 
 compute, yet no two creations in this world 
 have ever been identical. 
 
 The lesson is here. Why should we seek 
 to compel a dead level of uniformity among 
 human beings, when variation is the one con- 
 stant and unchanging characteristic of all 
 
 37 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 other forms of life? Shall man, the very 
 highest form of creation that we know of 
 now, be limited in his originality? Must he 
 be filed and hammered, and pressed and 
 pounded to a standard pattern of shapes and 
 sizes ? 
 
 I say, no! Give man the greatest free- 
 dom of all of nature's products, because here 
 alone individuality and peculiarity should 
 express themselves in the very highest 
 
 forms. 
 
 <* <* <* 
 
 If you take a group of children quite 
 young, and before they have been standard- 
 ized by the barbarous training in the public 
 schools, you will find them to be wholly 
 unique and original. But, alas, as the child 
 grows in years, and the pressure of conven- 
 tions and educational methods become 
 stronger, the variation grows less. They con- 
 stantly approach more nearly to a standard 
 type. Whereas, under a rational, humane 
 system of education the peculiarities and in- 
 dividual traits should rather increase with 
 the years. But you will not find it so. 
 38 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 You cannot possibly tell what a group of 
 natural children will do. But you can tell 
 almost to a dead certainty what a bunch of 
 men and women will do under any condition 
 you can imagine them in. You can foretell 
 almost to a mathematical closeness exactly 
 what twenty-five people selected at random 
 will do and say under any given conditions 
 or circumstances. I defy you to do that 
 with a flock of children who have not been 
 
 spoiled. 
 
 I reproduce here a couple of letters, one 
 written by a boy eight years old, and the 
 other by a girl of nine. These children are 
 classed as "sub-normals," being completely 
 deaf. They are, therefore, very much less 
 advanced at their age than the normal child 
 should be. They have been trained under 
 the deaf oral method by which mutes are 
 taught to articulate, in fact to speak, using 
 the voice. Of course these children can never 
 equal normal children in their development. 
 Nature has denied them that possibility. The 
 natural handicap under which they struggle 
 will always keep them back. 
 
 39 
 
f 
 
 RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 But the particular two that I refer to 
 have had the advantage of training, not 
 wholly, but to a very limited extent only, 
 under the rational method which I would 
 inaugurate in every school in the land. I 
 simply reproduce the letters to show how 
 entirely unique, original and beautiful are 
 the mental processes of an unspoiled child. 
 By that I mean a child in charge of a teach- 
 er who is big enough and great enough to 
 understand the nature of mind action. The 
 teacher who can keep hands off and allow 
 the little one to unfold according to the law 
 of its own being. And I want to tell you 
 that this is the hardest thing in all the world 
 to do. That is, to do nothing; to stand by; 
 to keep hands off and let nature take its 
 course. Any half-baked academic bread- 
 and-butter miss can keep school; wield the 
 ferrule; pound the multiplication table into 
 the heads of her pupils with a mallet. But 
 it takes a rare genius to know when to do 
 nothing; to let the child alone, and not ruin 
 its individuality, tear down its originality; 
 not blunt and dwarf its initiative by tutor- 
 
 40 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 ing, teaching, pestering and filling the little 
 mind with suggesed ideas. 
 * <* <• 
 
 I say the natural child, left uninterfered 
 with, allowed to grow in beauty and free- 
 dom is quite capable of making its own con- 
 clusions; of reaching out into the great 
 world of fact and phenomena, and seizing 
 upon the things its own nature demands for 
 its growth. 
 
 Does the bean, the raddish seed, the rose 
 bush, know the elements it needs to take out 
 of the soil for its own growth, development 
 and beauty? Does it have to be instructed, 
 and taught, and fed predigested food? 
 Will the plant ever make the mistake of 
 taking the wrong substance out of the soil 
 or out of the air ? Never ! 
 
 Do you tell me then that the mind, that 
 the human plant is not infinitely more capa- 
 ble of making its own selection of soul 
 food if allowed to grow under rational con- 
 ditions 1 
 
 Observe, then, this letter of Clifford, aged 
 
 41 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 eight, is entirely a voluntary composition on 
 his part. He was not instructed what to 
 write, nor how to write it. He was not told 
 what to do. But he was given the opportu- 
 nity to express himself in any way he 
 choose, absolutely no conditions being im- 
 posed upon him. 
 
 THE GLASS. 
 
 Once there was a very old man. He had no 
 glass on his windows. He was very cold because 
 he had no glass on his windows. He found some 
 sand and a dime. He bought some soda. First 
 he put the sand in a pot with the soda. He put 
 the pot on a big fire. The sand and soda were 
 changed into glass. He found an iron pipe. He 
 blew into it and made many glass things. He 
 got a hammer. He made the glass flat. He put 
 the flat glass in the windows. He had a fine 
 house. It was warm in there. 
 
 CLIFFORD. 
 
 Note the result. I defy any teacher, any 
 college professor, or any literary man to 
 equal the effort. I claim this composition to 
 be a mark of unbridled genius. I have had 
 some experience as a writing man. Not only 
 that, but I have worked for years at the 
 42 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 daily grind of advertisement writing. This 
 is a mill where words, and even syllables are 
 weighed; the saving of one or two words 
 may often mean several hundred or even 
 thousands of dollars to the advertiser. And 
 yet I could not eliminate a word and tell 
 this story as the poor, unpractised, deaf boy 
 has done. Try it yourself. It ranks with 
 the Sermon on the Mount for clean cut clar- 
 ity and directness. 
 
 The other composition, by Ethel, aged 
 nine, reveals a corresponding mental flexi- 
 bility. Here is a child telling its own story 
 in its own way out of the experience that has 
 come within its mental scope, and mind you, 
 that the sense of hearing is entirely absent. 
 What a charming figure is her thot about 
 the flowers waking up and smiling. I would 
 be proud of that myself. 
 
 SPRING TIME. 
 
 Today is spring. Soon the people will make 
 gardens. They will plant flower seeds, vegetable 
 seeds and fluii sccus in xntrr». The men will be- 
 gin to prune the trees. They will mow the grass 
 
 43 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 to make it pretty and very smooth. The leaves, 
 flowers, vegetables, grass, fruits and everything 
 will grow very fast. The moths and birds will 
 come because spring is here. Some of the pussy- 
 willow buds are open now. The robins are here. 
 They will make nests pretty soon. They like 
 spring. Many children are playing outdoors now. 
 After a while the flowers will wake up and smile. 
 The water wagons are sprinkling the water on 
 the street because the wind blows the dust. In 
 spring many children like to play all the time. 
 In spring it is always beautiful. 
 
 ETHEL. 
 
 Now, if sub-normal children, physically 
 below par, and mentally hedged in by the 
 loss of that most educative sense — hearing — 
 can do such remarkable things as these, do I 
 have to prove what normal children can and 
 will do under better advantages of freedom 
 and teaching? 
 
 I tell you that what we ought to do is to 
 install the children in the teacher's place; 
 let our fat-headed academic teachers go to 
 school to the children and learn a few 
 things. 
 44 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 But the average teacher is as scared to 
 death of originality or spontaneity as she 
 would be if the devil himself poked his head 
 in the school room. She cannot understand 
 originality or genius — which is the same 
 thing — and what she cannot understand she 
 fears. She reduces her pupils to the com- 
 mon dead level of mediocrity which comes 
 within the scope of her little two-by-four or- 
 thodox mentality. Otherwise she is in 
 strange waters, and she does not know what 
 to do. , 
 
 In place of a genius appearing in about 
 one of several hundred million human beings, 
 we all ought to be geniuses. The inapt, the 
 incompetent and incapable mentality ought 
 to be as rare as the Whitmans, Darwins, 
 Haeckels, Ingersolls and Lincolns. 
 
 I wonder how many look forward to the 
 day when this shall be possible? I do, and 
 I am trying to bring it about. Don't think it 
 is so far away. I am sure if I could make 
 the experiment for the next ten years upon a 
 
 45 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 group of homeless, outcast, foundling chil- 
 dren, I could prove absolutely the truth and 
 reasonableness of my hopes. 
 
 <* <* « 
 
 I say foundlings, because in this age, un- 
 der the social conditions which confront us, 
 it is hardly possible that any other children 
 would be permitted to grow in a natural un- 
 spoiled way. Parents demand that their 
 children be like themselves. This means 
 reproducing the stupidity, the brutalities 
 and the ignorance which sets itself up as 
 the standard from age to age. And so the 
 only class from which I see anything to 
 hope for at the beginning, at least, is among 
 those who have no one to care for them ; no 
 parents to insist upon reproducing their own 
 limitations. 
 
 But in a few years the teachers and a 
 few other people would begin to see the 
 possibilities in rational education. And then 
 we should have men and women, thinkers 
 and near-thinkers coming to the rational 
 school to study our methods, and to learn — 
 not from us — but from the children, who 
 would be their teachers and ours as well. 
 
 46 
 
The Teacher and the School of 
 the Future. 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 1 WONDER if our educators will ever 
 wake up to the fact that the personality 
 of the teacher in the school room is worth 
 far more than all the cut and dried pro- 
 grams, schemes, outlines and mechanical 
 methods of teaching, so much in vogue in 
 all schools. 
 
 Programs are for those who cannot do 
 without them, a crutch for the incompetent 
 to lean upon. But your true teacher is above 
 all these. She is alert, keen, sensitive to 
 the needs of the moment and equal to every 
 emergency. She makes her programs anew 
 every hour out of the materials in her hands 
 and the demands that meet her. 
 
 * <4 <4 
 
 The teacher's example, her attitude to- 
 ward work, life itself, her personality, soul 
 qualities, and general atmosphere of health, 
 saneness, sweetness and wholesomeness can 
 
 47 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 never be replaced by any academic qualifi- 
 cations, however great or satisfactory, or by 
 any cut-and-dried curriculum. 
 
 But the sad part of it is that these quali- 
 ties, which alone make a teacher valuable 
 
 are in fact never sought for. They are 
 not considered as a part of the equip- 
 ment in the selection of teachers as a 
 rule. Those into whose hands we commit 
 the education of our children are examined 
 and get their certificates upon their ability 
 to repeat a certain senseless formula of aca- 
 demical sawdust, which has very little more 
 of the real relation to life than the designs 
 on the cover of the text book have to the 
 science of mathematics. I know, for I've 
 been a teacher myself- 
 
 This satisfies the requirements and we 
 do not look for that intangible thing, soul 
 quality, which is the most lasting and beau- 
 tiful influence in all the child's school-life 
 — the thing which sticks to him through all 
 his years, which often sets his key and de- 
 termines the direction in which his life force 
 shall be spent. 
 
 48 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 Facts or chunks of unrelated informa- 
 tion are worth very little. They may of 
 course afford the material upon which a 
 most elaborate artificial and senseless sys- 
 tem of edueaion, so-called, may be spun out, 
 but from which real development can never 
 come. It is strength and health, mental 
 freedom, intellectual honesty, fearlessness, 
 and soul stuff that education should give. 
 First of all health. 
 
 In truth, our schools seem to turn out 
 about everything else. Products of the 
 school system exhibit shattered nerves, ru- 
 ined digestions, weak eyes, hunched shoul- 
 ders, crooked spines, dwarfed and crippled 
 souls, monkey or parrot inability to reason, 
 mental incompetence, wishy-washy man- 
 hood, frivolous, anaemic womanhood. 
 
 As I have previously remarked in these 
 articles, finalities of judgments as to human 
 institutions must not be taught in the Ra- 
 tional School. Dogmas, hypotheses, customs, 
 traditions, public opinion, the voices of 
 
 49 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 church, state, or individuals must never be 
 permitted to assume the authority and 
 weight of truth. 
 
 The soul of man should be as mercury 
 in response to truth, yielding to the slight- 
 est promptings of the spirit, yet always vi- 
 brating to its own level at the last. 
 
 <# Ci 9f 
 
 What a satisfaction there is in being 
 able to look at the great movements of the 
 day — religious, philosophical, social or eco- 
 nomic — free from personal bias or inherited 
 prejudice. I marvel every day at the stunt- 
 ing, dwarfing effects of preconceived judg- 
 ments. 
 
 We shut ourselves out from so much that 
 is beautiful and good when we allow preju- 
 dice to tinge our viewpoint, either in weigh- 
 ing people or the great world questions. 
 
 I suppose everything has its purpose and 
 is good in its place, but I wish I could see 
 the reason for the intolerance which seems 
 50 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 to me a particularly malevolent form of hu- 
 man cussedness that is holding us forever 
 in the leash — keeping us down. 
 
 The trouble is that the shell which we 
 secrete around our minds becomes so hard- 
 ened that we are shut in. We limit our- 
 selves. We shunt the currents of divine 
 truth away from us, and generate dark 
 spots in our souls. 
 
 We must actually free ourselves from 
 any form of bias if we are to make head. 
 We must be willing to revise our deductions 
 every day, to tear down to the last stone 
 the walls of prejudice and preconceived no- 
 tions we have built around us, get rid of 
 our shells, and face the world naked and 
 unabashed, if necessary, to arrive at the 
 truth. 
 
 We dare not crystallize. We must re- 
 main fluid, sensitive to the waves of truth 
 from whatever source and in whatever form 
 they may come. We must be like the spirit 
 in the carpenter's level, responsive as the 
 
 51 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 instrument is tipped this way or that, and 
 yet always returning to our own center. 
 
 When, then, I charge the educational 
 systems of all the world today with being 
 crystallized mixtures of error and truth, in- 
 tolerance and ignorance, adroitly fostered 
 by organized meanness, I but state a simple 
 truth, which anyone with a rudimentary 
 brain could see were not the eyes blinded 
 by ignorance or interest. 
 
 ^ <* <« 
 
 Yet we must not, dare not, yield to dis- 
 couragement. This is a universe of law. 
 There is a reason for everything. We are 
 not floating aimlessly across the trackless 
 wastes of time. We are not a rudderless 
 derelict buffeted and beaten by the tides of 
 chance. But we are actually moving swift- 
 ly, surely, toward our goal. 
 
 Where should we be now if Nature, 
 when she had gotten as far along as the Go- 
 rilla, had stopped to think about the im- 
 measurable distance between him and Tol- 
 52 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 stoy or Earnest Haeckel — would not she 
 have become discouraged and given up the 
 work in despair? 
 
 * ^ <4 
 
 The race moves on. The spirit may grow 
 sad and the heart be wrung at the injustice, 
 greed, misery and intolerance in the world, 
 but yet we know that for every heartache 
 there must be a balm, for every moan of 
 anguish there must be a sigh of peace. 
 Every wrong must be righted. Every debt 
 must be paid. There are no bankrupt courts 
 nor exemption laws in Nature. The Law 
 of Compensation rests not nor sleeps. 
 
 All is wise and all is good in its place. 
 All is well. All is as it must be just at this 
 moment. The new day is gestating, and out 
 of the womb of present conditions will be 
 born future betterment. 
 
 Let the spirit rejoice ! Brighter days are 
 coming. We have the same laws today, yes- 
 terday and forever. Nature has no revised 
 statutes. Evolution holds no constitutional 
 
 53 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 conventions. As it was in the beginning, is 
 now, and ever shall be, world without end, 
 etc. The race moves forward. We can 
 prove it by looking backward. 
 
 Allons. 
 
 54 
 
Memory and Memorizing. 
 
 Chapter V. 
 
 THE trouble with our present system of 
 ethics and education is that we are try- 
 ing to graft the moral sense onto the mind 
 only, forgetting as we do in this age of over- 
 balanced mentality, that there must be a 
 brain and a body, backed up by vigorous 
 health to make the teaching effective. When 
 we begin to graft our moral training on the 
 physical as well as the mental — in other 
 words, when we begin to live our code of 
 ethics in place of talking it only, then we 
 shall begin to see results, and I am afraid 
 not before. 
 
 See how our educators flounder in their 
 attempt to teach morals in the school room. 
 
 Class room and Sunday School ethics do 
 not travel very far in the Open Road of 
 life. The moral sense must go deeper. It 
 must be woven into the very blood and bone 
 and fiber of the body. All teaching and all 
 moral training which does not find its ulti- 
 
 55 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 mate expression in a clean, healthy, vigor- 
 ous, well-poised body is reactionary — dead 
 
 wood. 
 
 <* <* <* 
 
 I have in the course of these papers 
 made some very severe strictures upon our 
 educational machinery. Some may think 
 certain of the charges to be overdrawn or 
 intemperate. I assure you such is not the 
 case — indeed, far from it. If you will can- 
 didly and honestly study the matter, visit 
 the schools as I do, you will speedily see 
 that I have not really made my indictments 
 strong enough. Actual conditions are really 
 worse than anything I have depicted. 
 * <* >s 
 
 Our antiquated school system is still 
 blindly following the fetishes of the past; 
 still gauging mental acquirement by the 
 verbal memory. Gradgrind nourishes today 
 as never before. We meet him in every 
 school room. 
 
 All the average teacher wants to know 
 is "how much do you remember," not "how 
 
 56 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 much do you understand" And poor Har- 
 old and Mamie struggle to recall the words 
 the teacher wants to hear, but without an 
 idea in their dear little heads. 
 
 Memory is not memorizing. It is some- 
 thing very different. The two faculties are 
 in fact scarcely related. 
 
 Read the last paragraph to any teacher, 
 college or primary, and I wager you will 
 find it disputed instantly. Yet the under- 
 standing of this statement would actually 
 revolutionize the school system of America. 
 You may cultivate a phenomenal capacity 
 for memorizing and yet have little or no 
 memory. Some of the greatest memorizers 
 of the world have been subnormals. 
 
 MEMORY is the very crown and seat of 
 all the human faculties. Memory is under- 
 standing. It is soul expansion, being. Mem- 
 ory can be cultivated, too, but not by mem- 
 orizing. No system of mnemonics is of any 
 aid to memory. Indeed all such mechanical 
 methods are open to the suspicion of being 
 actually hurtful to mental growth. 
 
 57 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 Who that ever heard the famous pianist 
 Blind Tom attempt to repeat a difficult mu- 
 sical composition from hearing it played 
 once would envy the poor idiot his marvel- 
 ous memory? 
 
 Understanding does not depend upon 
 memorizing. On the contrary, the effort to 
 memorize defeats the understanding. Thus 
 if we concentrate all our faculties we may 
 actually assimilate a lecture so well, that 
 while we may not be able to repeat a sin- 
 gle word of it, yet it has all become incor- 
 porated in us, a part of ourselves, as food 
 that is perfectly digested passes directly 
 into circulation, while incompatible foods 
 will decompose and make their presence 
 known by flatulence and regurgitation. To 
 be able to repeat your words, your form 
 of expression, is of no value to me, but to 
 assimilate your thought perfectly and trans- 
 mute it into my own language is under- 
 standing. Most of the training in the pub- 
 lic schools today is but intellectual regur- 
 gitation. 
 58 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 We remember too much now. What we 
 need is a good system of forgettery in place 
 of mnemonics. Give us less memorizing, 
 more memory, more understanding, more 
 light, is our prayer- 
 
 59 
 
 /^ 
 
Intuition and Its Place in the New 
 Education. 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 
 MATERIALISTIC science in its investi- 
 gations has always given too little 
 credit to that higher faculty of the soul, 
 Intuition. And yet, strangely, it is precisely 
 to this sense that man owes his progress. 
 
 Where physical science halts helpless 
 against the dead wall of the impenetrable, 
 Intuition steps in and beckons the searcher 
 onward. Where logic could go no further, 
 and reason could not see, Intuition has dim- 
 ly perceived the truth there in that shadowy 
 land of the unknown. 
 
 When science retires baffled and beaten 
 in its task, Intuition would carry the light 
 still further if only men would trust her. 
 This is proven over and over. 
 
 The Intuition of both Darwin and Spen- 
 cer was nearer the truth than their reason- 
 ing, but, mighty intellects tho they were, 
 they could not admit its findings into their 
 philosophy. That they both caught the glint 
 
 60 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 of deeper truths in this higher sphere, even 
 against their wills, is almost certain. Had 
 they but had the confidence to follow that 
 light, who knows how much nearer the goal 
 they might have carried the ark? But they 
 could not do it. 
 
 <4 f* <* 
 
 And yet Intuition is but the instant focus- 
 ing of all the faculties of the mind into a judg- 
 ment, which reflects the highest thot force of 
 the individual. It's simply a leaping over the 
 intervening steps of testimony, argument 
 and reasoning and arriving at the conclu- 
 sion without conscious adjustments. It's a 
 perfectly natural faculty and is neither to 
 be feared nor mistrusted. It is the natural 
 language of the soul. Why may we not 
 trust our own souls, our own inner lights? 
 Of course Intuition can rise no higher than 
 the limitations of its instrument, the indi- 
 vidual. But thru this sense man seems to 
 come nearer to the heart of the Infinite than 
 thru any other power of the mind. Its work- 
 ing is beautifully exemplified in Walt Whit- 
 
 61 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 man, who leaped at once all the barriers of 
 class room science, seeing what Darwin and 
 Spencer and Haeckel saw, and seeing still 
 deeper into the Cosmic scheme where they 
 faltered at the end of their scientific tether. 
 <* <* t* 
 
 Just now physical science seems again 
 to have reached a dead wall. It has used 
 all of its terms, reached the limit of its equa- 
 tion, exhausted all of its paraphernalia, and 
 must shift its ground, learn to think in dif- 
 ferent terms before it can proceed much 
 further. 
 
 <• <4 <* 
 
 We are still in the dark. The answer to 
 the teasing riddle of existence is not yet. 
 That ages-old question, * ' What is Truth, and 
 where shall the place of Wisdom be found V 
 still remains to vex the human heart. No 
 system of philosophy, science or religion past 
 or present offers a wholly satisfactory solu- 
 tion to the problem of life. Amid all the find- 
 ings of all the systems, life itself still re- 
 mains unexplainable. 
 62 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 Albeit the tendency of our times appears 
 to be toward a broader view. Old landmarks 
 are being swept away. Obstructions are 
 breaking down. Physical science and its ma- 
 terialism, voiced by the brilliant host of mod- 
 ern giants, from Wallace to Haeckel and 
 Miinsterberg is slowly yielding its defenses. 
 Reluctantly giving way to the real^n*^*, 
 that the true explanation of the Universe, 
 with the origin and destiny of man, must be 
 found partly or wholly in a realm quite out- 
 side of the laboratory, in a field hitherto ig- 
 nored by science. 
 
 Some call this realm the spiritual world. 
 Call it what we may, science now stands 
 halting and confused, compelled to admit 
 that no fact in nature can be explained or 
 even understood by the light of physical 
 laws and mechanical principles alone. 
 
 What is man's place in nature? Which 
 way will science turn? Is the curtain now 
 about to be drawn aside? Is the answer to 
 the riddle of the ages to come in these our 
 times? We do not yet know. But it looks 
 now as if we were coming into a higher and 
 
 63 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 nobler consciousness of the meaning of life, 
 approaching closer to an understanding of 
 things than ever before in the history of 
 man. Perhaps, indeed, the veil is about to 
 be lifted. Perhaps we are in this day to 
 see man come into his own. 
 
 But a crisis is at hand. A new cycle has 
 already begun. The future belongs to man, 
 and the new science may well heed the call 
 of Intuition as one of the keys to unlock the 
 doors of that supra-physical world we are 
 about to invade. 
 
 * <* ti 
 
 PLEASE do not get the idea that I am 
 blaming the teachers for all the evils in 
 our educational mill. I do not by any means 
 hold them responsible. They are mostly but 
 helpless puppets at the mercy of forces they 
 do not suspect nor understand. I feel only 
 sorrow and sympathy for them. 
 
 In gloomy noisome school rooms I see the 
 pale anaemic teachers, poisoned with their 
 daily inhalations of bad air, most of them 
 64 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 utterly fagged out, but doing the best they 
 can in an artificial, lifeless system of teach- 
 ing miscalled education. I see thp^ fr-vincf 
 to mold the plastic soul stuff under their 
 hands into the stereotyped nonentities after 
 the patterns submitted by boards of educa- 
 tion (Heaven forgive the irony). And my 
 heart goes out to them. They too are help- 
 less victims of the false and vicious social 
 system we have allowed to encircle us. 
 
 Teachers, of all people, ought to be filled 
 with the divine fire of health, joy and crea- 
 tivity, instead of the poor stupid automatons 
 they are. No Rational School can ever be 
 located in cities as now constructed. But if 
 schools must be in cities, I know that if the 
 teachers spent every other week in the coun- 
 try amid the green fields, or could get cut 
 with their classes and enjoy outdoor work a 
 part of each da} 7 , they would remain young 
 and be every day at their best. 
 
 As it is the teachers lack any outside in- 
 terest to keep the heart young. They lack 
 even the elementary knowledge of the care 
 of their own bodies. While the courses of 
 
 65 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 study, programs and examinations imposed 
 upon them by the directors take all spontan- 
 eity out of teaching, kill all initiative, re- 
 ducing their work to the most deadening of 
 slavery. 
 
 <g <* <* 
 
 Teaching, which ought to be the most 
 broadening profession among men, is really 
 the most narrowing. The average teacher I 
 meet is a mere husk with the life blood 
 sucked out of her, like an old horse wearily 
 plodding the treadmill of daily grind. 
 
 There are a few teachers — how many I do 
 not know — who are awakened to the great 
 light now spreading over the world. They 
 
 see the pathos and futility of the educational 
 system and with their awakened conscious- 
 ness they find their positions now almost un- 
 endurable. I have received a great many 
 letters like those I here present. I have 
 not asked permission from any of the 
 writers to print their letters so for pruden- 
 tial reasons I omit names and addresses. 
 66 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 From a Professor in a Technical College : 
 "I am. with you in your crusade for Rational 
 
 Education. I want to help when the Rational 
 
 School is established." 
 
 From a Teacher in the High Schools of 
 Cleveland : 
 
 "I would welcome the chance to join the 
 Rational School as a release from the intolerable 
 slavery of work in the public schools under the 
 system. 
 
 "But I must get out soon, or the last shred 
 of initiative and spontaneity will be crushed out 
 of me, Eighteen years in this grind! I have 
 paid a terrible price for daring to think. The 
 fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is indeed bitter! 
 I sometimes envy the poor creatures who do 
 not think but simply obey orders and draw their 
 salaries. They at least are spared the spectres 
 that haunt me." 
 
 From the Superintendent of Schools in 
 a large Pennsylvania city; 20 years in the 
 business. Cannot stand it any longer. 
 
 "After having spent 20 years in high schools 
 teaching or supervising, I am now about to leave 
 the work. I have not been able to see how a 
 man can do good and be a part of this system. 
 It may be cowardly, but I cannot endure it 
 
 67 
 
 * ' 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 longer. I prefer now to let someone else take 
 my work and continue the abominable business. 
 I think you will be glad to know that you do 
 not stand alone on the school question. All you 
 say of the system is true, and it is even worse 
 than you charge." 
 
 Prom a well known teacher in Atlanta, 
 Ga. 
 
 "I spent the best years of my life in the school 
 room. I tried to be the ideal teacher. But each 
 year found the exactions of overseers more tyr- 
 annical, the system more narrowing and soul- 
 crushing. My heart bleeds for the little ones. 
 But I had to get away from it or die." 
 
 (0 <3 V 
 
 Well, Comrades, do you suppose the dear 
 somnolent stupid public will ever get its 
 eyes open to the dangers that are poisoning 
 life and its very fount — our honored and 
 much loved educational system? 
 
 It was in the hope of awakening some one 
 that these papers have been written. Have I 
 succeeded. Who can tell ? The future must 
 bring the answer. But a day of reckoning 
 must come. If not today — then tomorrow. 
 68 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 Justice and reason are not mocked forever. 
 The Rational School will yet be here to bless 
 the world. I may see it and I may not. But 
 I will at least have had something to do with 
 casting the shadows that went before. 
 
 69 
 
The Rational School and Society. 
 Looking Forward. 
 
 Chapter VII. 
 
 THE Rational School must be the corner 
 stone of the new free society. The prob- 
 lems that beset human life, must be solved 
 by men and women. In order to grapple 
 intelligently and effectively with any ques- 
 tion, we must face it with free, unbiased 
 minds and without prejudice. 
 
 That is where society fails today. We do 
 not face life with free minds. Our educa- 
 tional system sees to it, that the millions 
 who pass thru its machinery come out with 
 closed minds. It stultifies mental operations 
 and almost totally inhibits intellectual 
 growth by imposing upon the plastic mind 
 of youth its preconceived programs and for- 
 mulas; its cut and dried dogmas, supersti- 
 tions and errors; its outgrown religions, 
 philosophies and laws. 
 
 That is why we move so slowly, painfully, 
 tooertainly toward a saner life; toward 
 70 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 a more human society. Against the solid 
 mass of sodden, stupid, inert reactionary 
 units turned loose upon the world by our 
 schools and colleges, we have to oppose it 
 only the few clean, brave, clear-seeing spir- 
 its who have somehow — heaven only knows 
 how — managed to evade the soul-killing 
 clutches of the system. 
 
 <* fit fit 
 
 The function of the Rational School then 
 is to contribute to society a new race of free, 
 clear-thinking individuals — not shoe pegs — 
 but live, (resilient men and women who can 
 and will approach our social problems sane- 
 ly, sweetly, bravely, without fear and with- 
 out prejudice. In this way only can we ever 
 reach a sane and just civilization. No en- 
 slaved mind can ever bring the light of 
 truth to bear upon any question. Because 
 such a mind is closed against truth. Only 
 free minds can hope to grasp great and noble 
 truths. Only in freedom can man ever work 
 
 out his salvation. 
 
 71 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 I do not have to prove this. No body has 
 ever denied it. Its truth is as patent as the 
 force of gravitation. The world has always 
 known it, but has never applied it. We 
 are getting ready to do so now. And the 
 first step as I now see it, is to inaugurate 
 Rational Schools that will give us rational 
 minds to deal with human problems ration- 
 ally. 
 
 Let friends of the new education rejoice 
 over this fact ; — the Rational School will not 
 have the slightest difficulty with the child. 
 He takes as naturally to rational methods 
 as a duck to the water. He is indeed our 
 director and our teacher. You will get more 
 of the true science of pedagogy by asso- 
 ciating with and observing a child than 
 you'll find in all text books on school psy- 
 chology ever printed. 
 
 The child himself tells us just what to do, 
 as his needs demand it. 
 
 <* <i * 
 
 All our trouble will be with teachers 
 72 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 and parents. We must, as I have said, evolve 
 an entirely new type of teacher, and break 
 down the stupid conservatism of parents. 
 That's where the real difficulty will be met. 
 Never with the child. He will respond to 
 rational teaching as a flower responds to 
 sunshine and the gentle dews of night. 
 
 * <* <* 
 
 If this were not true, I should indeed be 
 doubtful of my own ground. But the child 
 is a natural being. He proves the wisdom 
 of our method by responding so beauti- 
 fully. 
 
 Look around you. See every school day, 
 troops of children going with laggard, un- 
 willing steps to their daily slave tasks in 
 the school rooms of every city, town and 
 village of America. See them in the school 
 houses, with tired faces and lack-lustre 
 eyes. 
 
 Then see them released from captivity at 
 4 o'clock, leaping and shouting with joy, on 
 their homeward ways. Have we grown-ups 
 
 73 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 no imagination? Are we so spiritually 
 dense that we cannot see these things ? G-et 
 the confidence of the next schoolboy you 
 meet, get his honest opinion — not for pub- 
 lication — of the school. It will be an eye- 
 opener to you. 
 
 Our whole attitude toward the child must 
 dhange. The school of the future must be 
 for the Child, and not for the teacher's 
 comfort as at present. The science of ped- 
 agogy as today practiced in the public 
 schools is solely for the ease and conveni- 
 ence of teachers. The child and his needs 
 are not considered. Ideal teaching is a tre- 
 mendous task, and a grave responsibility. 
 What seems easiest and best to the teacher 
 is nearly always the most difficult for tJhe 
 child. 
 
 Trust the child. He knows best what he 
 needs. I'll back him against all the peda- 
 gogical and theological bigwigs of the 
 world. 
 74 
 
THE RATIONAL SCHOOL CENTER. 
 
 QN the 13th of October, 1911— Anniver- 
 sary of the death of Francisco Ferrer, 
 martyr to the cause of Rational education — 
 the Rational School center was opened in 
 Chicago at 3118 Lake Park Avenue. 
 
 I propose to give there a series of lectures 
 on Rational Education and other topics 
 which seem to co-ordinate with a rational 
 life. The proceeds to be used as a nucleus 
 for the Rational School. 
 
 The supreme question of the hour at this 
 time is the Rational Education of Children. 
 The child is the hope of the future. Society 
 of tomorrow will be what the education of 
 today makes it. 
 
 Our educational machinery as now opera- 
 ting in all schools and colleges thruout the 
 world is breaking down at every point. It 
 is out of touch with life. We now know 
 that our vast pedagogical structure is based 
 upon error. The system is fundamentally 
 wrong and is a failure. 
 
 Shall man himself or the System survive? 
 Both cannot. One or the other must give 
 
 75 
 
RATIONAL EDUCATION. 
 
 way. The issue is momentous. The best 
 miinds of all countries are earnestly grap- 
 pling with the problem. 
 
 The Eational School Center is organized 
 to develop and if possible crystallize a sen- 
 timent looking toward definite action in the 
 establishing of the rational school. The time 
 is now ripe for the experiment. If the plan 
 which is to be outlined in these meetings re- 
 ceives sufficient encouragement and support 
 I hope to be able to start a branch of the 
 Rational School in or near Chicago. 
 
 Friends of Education who wish to aid in 
 this greatest movement of modern times, are 
 invited to confer with us as to our plans 
 and needs. 
 
 BRUCE CALVERT, 
 
 Director. 
 
 76 
 
SHORTER COUR SE 
 
 THE HARMONIC SCHOOL 
 OF RATIONAL EDUCATION 
 
 I have been asked to condense the Eighteen Lesson 
 course on Right Living into six lectures which can be 
 given in one week. I accordingly offer this new program : 
 
 1. Rational Education. 
 
 2. Right Living-The New Gospel of Health. 
 
 3. Breathing. The Science, Philosophy and 
 
 Practice. 
 
 4. Food Selection, Rational Dietary. 
 
 5. Sex Ethics. Eugenics. 
 
 6. Harmonics of Nature. 
 
 Part or all of this series will be given anywhere on mo«t 
 reasonable terms. Dates now being made for the coming 
 
 season. BRUCE CALVERT, Inslrudtor. 
 
 Address — Lecture Bureau. 
 
 THE OPEN ROAD 
 
 GRIFFITH (Lake County) INDIANA 
 
 R. F. D. No. 1 Pigeon-Roost-in-the-Woods 
 
Take a 12 Months' Tramp Along 
 
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 A Sane Sweet Toned Magazinelet of Faith 
 
 (Not Everybody's Magazine) 
 
 Devoted to 
 The Philosophy of Joy 
 
 and 
 
 The Religion of Right Living 
 Journal of the Universal Brotherhood of Man 
 
 Published at 
 
 Pigeon-Roost-in-the- Woods 
 
 INDIANA 
 
 A red hot little monthly regular for Mental 
 Dyspepsia and Brain Fag. Recommended by Regular 
 and Irregular Physicians, Christian Psychologists and 
 the Pulpit Pounders Union. One Dose every Thirty 
 Days for Twelve Months, $1.00 
 
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 "We have no cemetery, not even a graveyard at Pigeon- 
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 nearest doctor, thank God, is seven miles away. Why 
 shouldn't we be happy?" 
 
 Close to the Soil. The Songs of Happy Birds 
 and the Scent of the Wild Roses in its Pages. 
 
 $1.00 a Year. Trial Trip, Three Months, 25 Cents, with 
 
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 BRUCE CALVERT, Editor and Publisher 
 Post Office Address: 
 
 GRIFFITH, (Lake Co.) INDIANA 
 
 R. F. D. No. 1. 
 
 Pigeon-Roost-in-the- Woods 
 
JOIN THE SOCIETY OF 
 
 OPEN ROADERS 
 
 (The Universal Brotherhood of Man) 
 
 An Organization without Organizers. A Society without Props 
 
 and Stays. An Institution Founded on and Perpetuated 
 
 by the Dear Love of Man for his Comrade. 
 
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 Membership fee $1.00 a year: less than two cents a week, 
 including subscription to the OPEN ROAD, the official organ 
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 (Note. — You don't have to subscribe to the maga- 
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 better if you do, and so will the editor.) 
 Eligibility — All men and all women who feel their kinship to 
 the race are invited. 
 
 Initiation — Greet the next traveler you meet on the Open 
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 official Journal. 
 
 Grip— The warm, healthy grasp of true friendship. 
 Password and Countersign — "Howd'y, Comrade," and a 
 sweet smile of kindly, human interest. 
 
 Creed— Kind Thought, Kind Word, Kind Deed. 
 
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 it cheerfully, kindly. Living our lives sanely and sweetly. 
 
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 tops. 
 
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 own business (most of the time). Recognize the Divine in 
 every man and woman you meet. Smile and be kind. 
 
 Punishments and Penalties — We punish ourselves only. If 
 you feel that you have conducted yourself as unbecoming a 
 
'/> 
 
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 for the best in your neighbor, or if in a moment of weakness 
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 Purpose — To encourage the sentiment for right living, and 
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 love for one another, which is to solve all human problems 
 bringing about peace on earth and good will to all men. 
 
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 with your name and address for membership card and subscrip- 
 tion to the OPEN ROAD for one year. - 
 
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 Done at Pigeon-Roost-in-the-Woods, Indiana. 
 
 Headquarters and Shrine of the Universal Brotherhood of 
 Man, in the Northwest Quarter of Section 32, Township 36, 
 Range 8 West of the Principal Meridian. 
 
 By BRUCE CALVERT, Keeper of the Shrine. 
 
 Attest: ANANIAS. 
 
 E NEED YOU. Come with us in our tramp along 
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