\cf.^..,%^ ^^ ^ ^3;::;*.^^,^ ^0^ - ^ ^^ ^ ^, V ^^"*«^,% - .d ^ ^iS^ ^^ f^^^^^: ^^ r^^S^ ^^.-..^^ : ' -\iM/)% :v"S'-/ <^^ - t^m^ ^ WVv//.^, "<^^ 0- .^ ^^ m.1 Xp\ %'"^^o^. ^,\ -^ao^ .^^IP'/^ ^^o^ *• ^ .^°'-- »'%;; v^^^ %„ A ^^ s^' ^^ m-^ ^ «-> ^ ^K ,^^-w-^^^ ^^<}.^ ^^ -,, \y ,*^ V ^' ""/■, -% -;-^/ ^^'^^^/ ^,''^^v^ ^<:'«-> >°^:;*;>fV cP^.:-;:/'\. oo\^-;.v .< ^^^^. ^ #^ ^ ./■> T"^^" ^c :^^ "t. ^ ^ *^ °^ V 1^^ "'. "%• :.S >^ 0^ : f" '•-^ r «.>o^ - t.- if' ^' H cu - ■SN:: H - ^i> q^ .^^ \ ^<^ ;^;s,\: ^'^^ •X ■v'^C^.^^N ai '^-.^^ .^ NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION BY JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE President (jqio-ii). National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education; Chairman^ Massachusetts Commission for the Blind; Chairman, Com- mittee on Education, Boston Chamber of Commerce; Secretary of the Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Author, " The Educational Ideal"; Editor, Walker's *' Discussions in Education.'* Garden City New York DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1912 J\*^1 Att RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COFYEIGHT, ZgX2, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COUPANY COUNTRY LITE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. gaA319365 PREFACE THE fundamental demand in education, as in everything else, is for efficiency — • physical efficiency, mental efficiency, moral efficiency. The boys and girls in school are the greatest of all national resources, infinitely more important than those natural resources of which so much is heard; and the province of education is to conserve these most valuable of assets. The potential economic worth of each school pupil, to say nothing of his moral value as a house- holder and as a citizen, is enormous, provided he be so educated, by his family, by his environment, and by his schools, as to become an efficient member of society. And to be an efficient member of society the pupil must have a sound body, trained senses, a clear mind, and, above all, a well-balanced character. Therefore the supreme aim of education, acting through homes, schools, and the community in gen- eral, should be to foster sound and capable bodies, i\ vi PREFACE to develop well-trained minds, and to build up strong, self-reliant characters. How is education going to do this? By putting fifty or sixty children into uncomfortable desks in an ill-ventilated schoolroom and then bombarding them with facts? Far from it. To make those fifty or sixty children really efiicient we must treat each one of them as an individual problem, ascertaining his vulnerable points physically, and remedying them; finding out what kind of a mind he has and develop- ing it; getting at his strong and weak points morally and building out of them a sound and well-rounded personality. The first of the new demands in education, there- fore, Is for small classes, so that the teacher may really know each one of her pupils and may give him a true education suited to his special needs. The second of the new demands is that we shall take much greater account than we now do of the health of the child, by seeing that his eyes, ears, lungs, and all the other parts of his physical machinery are sound, or are made sound, and that he has extensive playground, an abundance of fresh air, and plenty of the right sort of games and plays. The third of the new demands is that we shall pro- ' vide genuine, educative exercise for the mind of the child by giving it interesting and stimulating work PREFACE vii to do, and that we shall not clog and deaden it with unrelated, uninteresting, and unimportant facts. The fourth of the new demands is that we shall really train all the senses of the pupil so that he is actually able to use his eyes for seeing, his ears for hearing, and his hands for making things that are a credit to the maker. Too many pupils in the schools seem to have no connection between their eyes, their ears, their hands, and their brains; so that, as far as efficiency goes, they might just as well be blind, deaf, and crippled. The fifth of the new demands is that education shall put its chief emphasis upon character: that the pupil shall be trained, in school and out of school, to-day and to-morrow and all the time, toward self- reliance, self-control, self-respect, and self-denial. The sixth demand is that the main emphasis of schooling shall be placed on the social side, on pre- paring the boy and girl, that is, for effective living as a member of the community of which he finds himself a constituent part. The seventh demand is that when the pupil gets to be fourteen years old, to that age when, if he so choose, he may leave school, there shall be some one right at his elbow, some one who knows and whom the boy respects, to advise him what to do next. And lastly it is demanded that from that four- viii PREFACE teenth year up to manhood and womanhood each and every pupil shall have a wide variety of oppor- tunity for making himself (or herself) into the most intelligent, the most efficient, and therefore the happiest, citizen that it is possible for him to be. Upon these theses the arguments of all the follow- ing chapters rest. Where there is repetition, it is for the sake of presenting the theme in some new light; where there is criticism, it is of what is not bad, but outworn; where there is exhortation, it is that we may rouse ourselves to the needless waste and loss of that greatest of human resources, that possession out of which civilization has come and for the development of which civilization exists — the moral energy latent and easy to be stimulated in every boy and girl. Acknowledgment is due to the Educational Review, the WorWs Work, the Popular Science Monthly and the Technology Review for permission to use, in some of the chapters, material which has already ap- peared in those magazines. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. The Grievance of the Average Boy Against the Average School 3 II. The Common School ', . 26 III. Education as Prevention 42 IV. The Demand for Efficient Administration . . 57 V. The Demand for a True Profession of Teaching 70 VI. The Demand for Vocational Training ... 85 VII. The Pressing Need for Industrial Education . 109 VIII. The Demands of Business 125 IX. The Need for Real Patriotism 140 X. The Demand for Trained Citizens . . . . 156 XI. The Demand for Discipline 172 XII. The Demand for a Citizen's High School . .186 XIII. How the Colleges Ruin the High Schools . . 202 XIV. The Donning of Long Trousers . . . . . 214 XV. The Mechanic Arts 237 XVI. The Educational Bearings of Manual Training 245 XVII. The Russian System of Manual Training . . 264 CONTENTS XVIII. The Demand for Breadth 271 XIX. What Is Demanded of the Young Engineer . 281 XX. The Genesis of These New Demands . . 290 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION CHAPTER I THE GRIEVANCE OF THE AVERAGE BOY AGAINST THE AVERAGE SCHOOL I HAVE seen recently a high school in a large industrial city — a city absolutely dependent upon the quality of its manufactures — in which the course of study, the teaching, and the whole atmosphere are determined, not by the real requirements of its five hundred pupils, not by the paramount need of that city for industrially trained young men, but almost solely by the special demands of about ten pupils who are going some day to be examined for entrance to some college or uni- versity. Moreover, I have seen those ten pupils studying, and studying hard, not for the sake of education, but simply that they may pass wholly artificial sets of questions in an entirely arbitrary list of topics established by men who know little of the mental needs of youth and absolutely nothing of the genuine educational demands of that indus- trial city. Yet, should this high school fail to get that tiny minority into college, its teachers would 3 4 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION be condemned by the whole body of their fellow- citizens. Meanwhile the manufacturers of that city are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to give the youth in their employ, directly or indirectly, the fundamental training in accuracy, initiative, re- sourcefulness, "handiness," sense of responsibility, self-reliance, and "gumption" in which they should have been thoroughly grounded in the public schools. More than this, not only are the families of those youth denying themselves many comforts, if not necessities, of life which might have been theirs, through higher wages, had the boys been genuinely educated before going to work, but the scale of liv- ing for the whole community is being proportionately reduced. And, most serious of all, the economic future of that city is actually threatened because its workmen are mentally and manually untrained. Yet for this colossal failure the school receives little or no blame. Custom expects a high school to meet the unreal demands of the college, but does not ex- pect it to prepare for the real and pressing require- ments of daily life. With these anc«nalous facts in mind, let us con- sider the case of the average schoolboy, a type repre- senting two thirds or three fourths of the seventeen or eighteen millions enrolled in the public schools. THE AVERAGE BOY 5 This boy is born into a family which absolutely de- pends upon wages received by one or more of its members as workers in some modern industry. The family is certainly not rich, but neither is it poor. It is industrious, self-respecting, and anxious to give its children the best possible preparation for a useful and comfortable life. Such families are the bone and sinew of America, and it is toward their needs and their strengthening that the main energies of public education should first and always be di- rected. If this average boy happens to be born into a family of farmers, his education will be given to him largely at home — in the house through "chores," and on the farm through planting, reaping, and the care of animals. As a rule, this training will meet so well his fundamental needs — provided he re- mains a farmer — that the fact of his being inade- quately taught in a rural school by a woman re- ceiving less than three hundred dollars a year does not very much matter. His schooling will be poor, but his education will be fairly good. Should this boy be born, however, into a family depending, directly or indirectly, upon manufac- turing for its living — and it is with this fast- multiplying type that modern life is most concerned — he must look for almost his entire education, as 6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION well as for his mere instruction, to the teaching of the public school. Therefore it is vital to him, vital to industry, above all vital to society, that the education which he receives in that school should prepare him to make the most of his subsequent life as a worker, as a citizen, and as a man. This com- prehensive preparation the average school does not give; and because it does not we are not only squan- dering our chief industrial and civic resources, we are stunting and wasting innumerable human lives. Our "national ash-heap" represents the burning each year of almost as many buildings as we erect. Ignorant and careless forestry is using up our trees faster than nature can create them. But these and other well-recognized wastes, colossal as they are, count for little in comparison with the needless squandering of our greatest resource: human energy. Society, in one way or another, has spent at least ^4,000 on every child who reaches the age of eighteen years. Taking the annual increase of population as one million, this means a potential increment each year in our working capital, from this single source, of four billion dollars. What do we do, however, with this stupendous human asset worth, if rightly trained, at least twice this four thousand million dollars.'* A considerable proportion of it we kill off, before THE AVERAGE BOY 7 it reaches twenty-five years, by accidents, half of which, by mechanical safeguards and by education, are easily avoidable. A much larger percentage we destroy by diseases, two thirds of which, by right training in simple hygiene, are preventable. A portion difficult to measure, but obviously large, is permitted to go to waste through intemperance, vice and crime, the result, in most instances, of ignorance or mal-education. And from the balance of this human capital we secure really effective service, economic, social and political, in the case of only a most pitiful minority. The United States spent upon public education in 1909 (the latest year for which figures are available) ^401,000,000, and for hospitals, reformatories, asy- lums, poorhouses, etc., it undoubtedly paid a sum almost as vast. With this immense outlay, however, two things were wrong: The millions lavished upon prisons and refuges ought to have been almost wholly available for education, and they would have been available had the millions spent upon education been handled in a wise and businesslike way. What is the matter with our school expenditure? In the first place, large as it is, it is not nearly suffi- cient to accomplish what public education ought to do. Any manufacturer knows that to be niggardly in providing machinery and brains is the most 8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION foolish of policies; and that many an establishment which, by expending fifty thousand a year, invites bankruptcy, would, if it paid out twice that amount, command prosperity. In the second place, this expenditure is in the hands not of experts but of amateurs — of school boards whose members know little or nothing concerning this stupendous enter- prise over which they have autocratic control; of teachers a majority of whom are untrained and who regard their occupation merely as a makeshift; and, in too many cases, of corrupt politicians who look upon the schools as so much added loot in their sacking of the modern Babylons. Think of it! A business capitalized at nearly eight billions of dollars, in which, therefore, every man, woman, and child has one hundred dollars at stake; a business, moreover, having branches in every city and town and in almost every hamlet of the United States, is carried on — with many no- table exceptions which but emphasize the general inadequacy — by boards of directors who know practically nothing about it, and by agents who are largely untrained, underpaid, and temporary. The business, moreover, is so unsafeguarded as to be at the mercy of any unscrupulous men who may desire to use it as a means to their own political fortunes or as a quarry for their "honest graft. " This would THE AVERAGE BOY 9 be bad enough were it a business having to do with mere things; how infinitely worse is it when the enter- prise deals with the bodies, minds, and souls of boys and girls! Even the best school boards are composed of business men confessedly unacquainted with edu- cation since their schoolboy days, while the worst are made up of "heelers" with eyes glued upon the funds available for graft or bribery. Yet school boards, be they good or bad, have full power over school officers and teachers, the provisions for teaching, and the courses of study. They deter- mine absolutely, therefore, the education of every public-school child. Is it to be wondered at that school superintendents, even where they exist at all, are most successful when they are most politic; that teachers have little genuine interest in a pro- fession dominated by the untrained or worse; and that there are not a few cities in which are to be found some school teachers whom no decent girl or boy should know.^ The confessions of experienced school superin- tendents would make disheartening reading. They would be stories, mainly, of dealing with petty despots, ignorant of education, but eager to exer- cise their absolute authority — stories, therefore, of intrigue, of the flattering of pomposity, of catering 10 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION to personal weaknesses, of wearing away unreason- ing prejudices, of yielding to improper pressure from those having life-and-death power over one's career, of sacrificing the children to save the teachers and to save one's self. The confessions of teachers would be mainly of high ideals giving way under the pres- sure of dry routine, of petty tyrannies from superiors themselves the victims of a higher tyranny, of indig- nities (if the teacher be a woman) proffered by al- leged gentlemen screened from exposure by their vested power, or (if he be a man) of false but dam- ning charges brought by mischief-making or per- verted girls. This atmosphere of repression, of petty despot- ism, of intrigue, of frequent humiliation is the very last in which to develop initiative in teaching, bold- ness of experimentation, readiness to meet the de- mands of modern life. Where even the daily rou- tine is full of quicksands, neither superintendent nor teacher can be expected to go very far afield. The margin between the daily wage and starvation is too narrow. When a man has only thin bread and scanty butter he is least likely, as the phrase is, to quarrel with it by showing independence or seeking grounds for strife. Yet there is not a community, not an industry, scarcely a family, which is not suffering grievously for want of what right educa- THE AVERAGE BOY ii tion alone can give. And that right education will not come until teachers are so broadly trained, so professionally in earnest, so freed from ignorant or improper dictation, so confident of public support and commendation that they will be true leaders getting youth really ready to meet the new demands of to-morrow, instead of being timid conservatives holding back civilization by loading it down with hordes of incompetents, ill-taught, untrained, and to all intents and purposes totally uneducated. Relief can come, moreover, only through the school; for this business of public education is one of the completest of monopolies. The state, through its sovereign power, seizes the average boy when he is five or six and holds him until he is fourteen or, in some instances, sixteen. It preempts him, there- fore, during his most formative years, and declares that it alone shall determine how he is to be pre- pared for life. This is as it should be, for to leave education in private hands would be fatal to democ- racy. Since, however, the state thus exercises a giant's strength, it is morally bound to use that power wisely, and to give every boy and girl, as far as possible, just the kind and amount of education which that particular child ought specially to have. Does the city or town (through which the state acts) commonly do this? Far from it. On the contrary, 12 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION it puts the average child through a routine of in- struction which has little if any relation to his real needs, and which, in too many cases, leaves him at fourteen just as helpless and almost as ignorant of the essential things of life as when the school took hold of him at five. When the child enters the primary school, theo- retically he begins a course of training which is to develop his mind, his body, his aptitudes, and his powers, so that each year will find him a considerable stage farther on his journey toward the true goal of public education — that of self-respecting, self- reliant, capable, intelligent American citizenship. As a matter of fact, however, the boy enters at five or six years of age the first roller of a sort of gigantic squeeze-press, which will endeavor, during the next eight or nine years, to stamp certain more or less useless facts upon his unwilling, because uninter- ested, memory, and to mold his sacred personality into the same pattern as that of a hundred thousand other little products of the pedagogical machine. The boy wants to ask questions; but in a "well- regulated" school it is the teacher who asks ques- tions, and the child's part is to give the answers set down in the text-books furnished by those publishers who happen just then to "control," directly or in- directly, the school policies. The story is credibly THE AVERAGE BOY 13 told of a primary teacher who declared that kinder- garten children are a great nuisance when they first come to the primary grades, because they ask so many questions. "But," she triumphantly con- cluded, "I soon cure them!" The boy wants to exercise his rapidly growing muscles; but, since movement upsets order, he must learn to curb his nature and to diminish his vitality by sitting still in a hard wooden seat before a desk that holds him like the stocks. He wants to make something, to see some tangible result from all these weary hours in school; but the teacher has no idea how to make things, the text-books say nothing about it, and young people who make things are apt to be exuberant, eager, full of questioning. There- fore all that power for good which might come out of the child's natural desire to plan, to shape, and to build is allowed to go to waste, and the constructive, creative instinct, which is the mainspring of edu- cation, is permitted to wither away. If the pupil, thus thwarted, fails to perceive the use of those things which he is permitted to do, the teacher as- sures him that he will see by and by. When that far-off time arrives, however, if it ever does, the useless things have been utterly forgotten. The average boy wants to work, as well as to play, with the other boys, to learn how to get along 14 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION with them, to exercise his powers of leadership: in short, to practise democracy. Instead of this, he is kept isolated at a separate desk, there to do by him- self a task simultaneously allotted to all the class; and cooperation in this task is not only forbidden, but punished as a crime. He wants to organize a miniature society, to learn how to behave himself in the world of boys and men. "But, my dear child, this is school, and school, you know, is a very dif- ferent place from the street." Consequently he loves the street, because it is so different, and hates the school. A child who amounts to anything wants to exer- cise his initiative, to make individual plans. That, however, would upset the lesson schedule, would make it hard to railroad the whole fifty children forward into the next grade, would preclude treat- ing the school-body as a miniature army. Therefore it cannot be allowed. In fact, almost everything is done in the average school to repress the pupil, instead of to expand him, and to substitute the teacher's will — and an extremely nervous and er- ' ratic will it sometimes Is — for the boy's will. Con- sequently the school which, theoretically, exists to develop a youth and to teach him how to discipline himself, succeeds, in a year or two. In destroying the poor boy's individuality and In killing, through THE AVERAGE BOY 15 a process of subjugation, his very will itself. He asks for exercise, mental, moral, and physical, and we put him in a strait-jacket; he asks for experience of life, and we feed him on predigested — and neverthe- less still indigestible — facts; he asks to do something, and we tell him that the place to do things is else- where, yet censure him for exploding, out of school, into mischief, petty crime, and worse. Who has built up this educational machine which so often succeeds in defeating all the proper ends of education? The school boards and the school- masters, in order to meet the problem of dealing cheaply with enormous crowds. But who forces this economy? The taxpayers, who will not under- stand that the thorough education of the whole child for real life can be carried on only In small classes, by professionally trained teachers, under expert supervision; and that this is tremendously expensive in the paying out of money, but enor- mously economical in the saving of human life and energy. But what forces the schoolmasters not simply to treat the school children as an army, but to keep that army locking step and marking time? The examination system. And who force the school- masters to make examinations the supreme end, in- stead of a very subordinate means, in the educational process? The colleges. It suggests the familiar i6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION nursery rhyme of the old woman and her balky pig. The college begins to beat the high school, the high school begins to beat the grammar school, the gram- mar school begins to beat the primary school, and all together they metaphorically beat and push the unwilling pupil for eight or nine years, while the law holds him fast. And all this memorizing, rote- work, problem-solving, and gerund-grinding mainly in order that ten pupils out of every five hundred may progress to college! The average pupil does not want to go to college. In nine cases out of ten he ought not to go. Cer- tainly, however, neither he nor any other youth should be sent there by way of a stupid routine of text-book studies devised as a preparation for passing, when eighteen or nineteen years old, an assortment of foolish examination papers prepared by men who, most of them, know as little of the needs and capacities of the average boy as they do of the inhabitants of Mars. From the moment he enters the primary school all his teachers should be anxious to send the boy to college; but they should really find out whether or not he is fitted to go there, through a process of studying and expanding him, of giving full play to his individuality, of permitting him to prove that he is worth the highest intellectual training which can THE AVERAGE BOY 17 be secured. And even then the goal should not be college, but life — his life, real life, the life of the good citizen and efficient worker. Every boy must be given, of course, certain basic acquirements, like reading and writing; he must be put in possession of certain common tools, like the multiplication table and the outlines of geography; and he must be subjected to so much military disci- pline and hard routine as will make him orderly and obedient. But what that boy goes to school for, primarily, is to be developed; and never yet did development result from continual repression. He should be taught to see with his brain as well as with his eyes. He should be trained to hear with his mind as well as with his ears. He should be encouraged to do anything and everything, within reason, with his hands. Above all, he should be really educated through training him to coordinate all his senses and powers so that they will work ac- curately, unflaggingly, and intelligently, so that each will reinforce and strengthen all the others. What the community wants in that boy at the end of his nine years of schooling is efficiency: ability to do whatever he can do and does do thoroughly, intelligently, enthusiastically, and well. Every school child should have, therefore, mind training and book learning, but he should have also, i8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION and all the time, body training, sense training, manual training, and industrial training. He should be taught not a trade, but the fundamentals which lie at the basis of all industries. He should not be made a skilled workman, but should be so far de- veloped that, within a reasonable time after leaving school, he may become capable and eifective in whatever line of activity he undertakes. Genuine in- dustrial training should begin at the first and should not end until the last day of the boy's school life. It should be, moreover, a gradually enlarging and expanding exercise of the entire boy. Such train- ing provides for the pupil that physical activity which is absolutely essential; it places before him those tangible results of effort which the child must absolutely see; it permits him to exercise and to develop power of initiative; it teaches him how to work with other boys; best of all, it gives the child in school some positive and definite aim. As it is now, unless he has before him those remote college examinations, he can see absolutely no educational goal; and, since no man can do effective work with- out an aim, why should the child be expected to show enthusiasm in walking a treadmill, merely for the sake of exercise? With industrial training, the boy can understand how the school is preparing him to be a worker, to take his place in the great THE AVERAGE BOY 19 order of society, to reach the goal of effective and honorable citizenship. It is a social crime to set a boy adrift at fourteen or sixteen without having given him those fundamental powers which will permit him to become at majority, not only self- supporting, but able to marry and to rear, In decency, a family. The average boy has, therefore, a serious griev- ance, not against his teachers, but against society, which forces mechanical teaching upon the schools by requiring ill-paid teachers to instruct twice as many children as can be controlled by any except military methods. He has an added grievance against the colleges, which largely determine what those children shall study from their very first en- trance into school. And he has a further griev- ance against the industries which, knowing that 90 per cent, of all youth trained in the public schools are to enter their ranks, stupidly acquiesce in a sys- tem that, If It prepares for any life-work at all, fits only the petty salesman and the clerk. These grievances, moreover, are shared by every citizen, for, sooner or later, all of us must pay the costs of this colossal and needless waste of human energy. If we do not spend money for the right kind of education for the average boy, we must spend much larger sums on jails, prisons, asylums, hospitals. 20 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION and almshouses, since hundreds of thousands of those average boys become incompetent, diseased, or vicious men. These larger sums, if we chose to take the trouble, we could count, for we would find them in our tax-bills; but they are as nothing com- pared with the sums which we cannot count and which we lose through the industrial inefficiency of untrained, unambitious, lazy, half-sick, maimed, or stunted workers in every type of work. What is to be done? What every modern busi- ness does when it finds Itself confronted with possi- ble bankruptcy through preventable wastes, losses, and inferiority of output. It calls in engineering and commercial experts to locate causes and to suggest reforms. We need "educational engineers" to study this huge business of preparing youth for life, to find out where it is good, where it is wasteful, where it is out of touch with modern requirements, where and why its output fails ; and to make report in such form and with such weight of evidence that the most conventional teacher and the most in- different citizen must pay heed. Such engineers would make a thorough study of (i) the pupils, who constitute the raw material of the business of education; (2) the buildings and other facilities for teaching, which make up the plant; (3) the school boards and teaching staff, who cor- THE AVERAGE BOY 21 respond to the directorate and the working force; (4) the means and methods of instruction and de- velopment; (5) the demands of society in general and of industry in particular upon boys and girls — this corresponding to the problem of markets; and (6) the question of costs, which is almost purely a business problem. Even to suggest what such a report would be is presumptuous. We know only that it would be voluminous and that, if fearlessly made, it would shatter many illusions as to the scope and effec- tiveness of the average public school. It is not im- proper, however, to anticipate some of the main findings of such a report, for those findings are common knowledge among students of education. Under the first division, that of raw material, the soundness of which is fundamental to the whole industry of effective education, the experts would find among the pupils, most of whom were born healthy, an enormous proportion of physical im- perfection, such as stuntedness, rickets, malnutrition, impaired sight or hearing, adenoids, hypertrophied tonsils, decayed teeth, tuberculosis, scrofula, and other organic disease, together with an appalling array of nervous disorders or of tendencies thereto; and they would find a large proportion of these to have been induced through pure ignorance, which 22 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION it should have been the fundamental business of public education to combat. Under the second division, that of plant, the experts would find two leading types of defect. They would meet, on the one hand, with buildings so badly placed, lighted, ventilated, and equipped as to be unfit for habitation or for teaching; while they would find, on the other hand, buildings so magnificent and so elaborately furnished as to have made the citizens and the school authorities forget that the main essential in education is not the house and the apparatus, but the teaching staff. Under the third division, that of personnel, the educational engineers would find, as has already been indicated, inadequate salaries, incompetence, lack of professional spirit, and a general disorganization due to the fact that those who are not expert in the profession of education have autocratic power over those who are. Under the fourth and fifth sections, those of methods and of markets, the experts would note, as has also been already indicated, a wide divergence be- tween what education is doing and what its products are called upon to do. Here they would find, proba- bly, the largest field for reform in bringing the work of the common schools up to the genuine needs of modern life and of its complex demands. THE AVERAGE BOY 23 Under the final heading, that of costs, they would discover, of course, much waste and graft (genuine and "honest"), much petty saving in vital matters and much foolish spending in non-essential things. They would discover, in short, most, if not all, of the leakages and inefficiencies seemingly in- separable, at present, from enterprises conducted by the people through agents chosen by political processes. Were one to venture to forecast the main recom- mendations for reform in the common schools that would be made by these "educational engineers," they would certainly be found to include: Much larger school appropriations, together with better systems of business management; Much smaller classes (not to exceed twenty-five) ; Higher salaries to competent teachers; Better training for teachers; A reorganization of most normal schools in order to bring about that better training; The organization of the teaching profession (like that of law, of medicine, and of engineering) for the purpose of promoting higher professional standards; Limitation of the authority of school boards to matters non-educational; 24 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION Establishing of school "faculties" with authority, under the superintendent, over all educational questions; Development of a rational and diversified school program to meet the life-needs of the average pupil, not the artificial examination standards of the colleges; School buildings simply planned and furnished, but properly ventilated, heated, and lighted; Ample provision for physical training and for health teaching; Education of each child as an individual, with due regard to his present aptitudes and future prospects; "Social education" — that is, the training of the child to live usefully and happily with and for his fellows; and Wise development of manual and industrial edu- cation, leading to vocational training. Every one of these recommendations could be carried out without any dislocation of the present social order; and, were they heeded and put in practice, the mental and industrial efficiency of every average boy and girl would be markedly in- creased, the percentage of life-failures would be immensely decreased, and the proportion of those THE AVERAGE BOY 25 who really accomplish something toward the ad- vancing of civilization would grow by leaps and bounds. We would then conserve what we now so scandalously waste: the most valuable of earthly assets, human energy. CHAPTER II THE COMMON SCHOOL < IN THAT interesting book, the "Life of Edward Thring," the mobilizing school- master who led Uppingham school out of such Egyptian darkness of trustee incompetence and hygienic sloth as seems incredible, are given a number of letters frankly expressing his opinion of the American public school. Thring was a Con- servative in politics, a Classicist in education, a great mind exasperated by English beadledom. He is a biased judge, therefore, when he declares that "... providing teaching for all the poor out of the taxes paid by those who can pay, which is mis- called free education ... is dishonest . . . is a mistake ... is deadly. Free education," he continues, " is nothing more nor less than ' free beer' for the vicious, paid for by a payment of the good citizens which is not free. If the tax is taken without unanimous consent, then it is sheer robbery . . . if it is given by unanimous consent, it is simply the old fallacy over again of the rich man 26 THE COMMON SCHOOL 27 preferring to breed beggars by giving shillings to beggars rather than to bear the inconvenience of listening to their whining, meeting their violence, or investigating and correcting the cause of the evil. . . . Rescuing the pauper child from moral death is an utterly different thing from pauperizing the poor and rich by maintaining children whose parents can and ought to do it." Thring believed free education to be dishonest because it allows parents to shirk parental account- ability; to be a mistake because it tends to put amateurs in control of education; to be deadly be- cause it replaces private enterprise, which would be interested and progressive for its own sake, by an irregular, fickle, and timid public responsibility. He acknowledged that the common school can give instruction — indeed, he advocated free schools for teaching the elements to the very poor — but he maintained, rightly, that education is a much more complicated, delicate, elaborate process than is involved in learning to read, write, and cipher; and, in his belief, this true education is beyond the power of any present democratic state to give. Challenged by such a man as he, it becomes us to see if he be right, and to inquire if our free schools are providing not simply good instruction but a real and superior education. If these public schools 28 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION of ours are not doing this, if they are not giving to every child, or, at least, to a majority of them, the completest training for life that any other prac- ticable system could furnish, then, even at the sur- render of our most cherished sentiments, the free school should give place to a fair trial of private education. It is indeed difficult logically to justify free pub- lic schooling. But so it is to defend many other schemes of social cooperation adopted, and, most fortunately, by modern statesmen. Government, defying economic rules, is largely a question of high expediency. We hold by our free schools, not be- cause we perceive an abstract justice in taxing a childless man to train the many children of his neighbor, but because public education seems to us to compass two desirable ends: it gives (in theory at least) every child that fair chance which many parents either cannot or will not provide; it makes the Republic safer by placing it in the hands of men who have shared a common schooling rather than in the hands of those the inequality of whose for- tunes has been vastly emphasized by unequal op- portunities for getting an education. Quite as much for our sakes as for theirs we re- quire all children' of certain ages to attend school and, directly or indirectly, tax ourselves to pay for THE COMMON SCHOOL 29 this free teaching. But In paying taxes and in vot- ing for a school board — supposing even that we do the first cheerfully and the second with some shadow of knowledge of the candidates — we are fulfilling but a small part of our duty to youth and to our- selves. There are at least two other obligations. The first of these — since we compel the child to go — is to make sure that his schooling is the best obtainable; the second — since we contribute so much to the cause of education — is to make cer- tain that we secure the equivalent of this money in the quality of citizenship which the schools pro- duce. If we acknowledge the wisdom of educating every child, and if, not simply recognizing it, we actually compel it and set up a system against which private enterprise is powerless to compete, it would seem but plain duty to make this com- pulsory education humanly perfect. Even failing, however, to recognize this moral obligation, it still remains extraordinary that a nation so shrewd as ours, lavishing millions upon free education, should not look more closely to it that industrial capacity, mental and physical strength, and effective citizen- ship result. The simpler duty of the public school, that of instruction, has been always understood. Indeed, for many years it was recognized as the only func- 30 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION tion of free education; and there are still many- citizens who have no idea of it beyond this limita- tion. Those among them who have given any thought to the matter probably will maintain that everything beyond bare instruction belongs to the home and to the church. Truly, to these two agencies does attach a work of ethical and religious training which none other can do; but the child's life cannot be parceled out among the several agencies of its development, one to promote its physical, another its intellectual, a third its ethical growth. The boy's education on all sides is and must be continuous. The all-round development of the child demands that every force which is to have any permanent and valuable effect upon him must be all-round too. The good, or the harm, of the parental influence comes mainly through the informal, unperceived effect of the daily life of the home. The enormous influence of the streets (and of more hidden byways) is also unconscious, not being recognized as educational at all. The school work alone has been called education, because it is tangible and confined mainly to examinable in- struction. But, for this very reason, it has been narrow and of limited value. To increase in worth, to become of real interest and use to the pupil, the school must take a lesson from the home, from the THE COMMON SCHOOL 31 street, from the daily, passing show of the child's life; must make its interests as broad as those, as susceptible of various and special assimilation as those, as interesting as those, and, as far as is possible under its necessary limitations, as unconscious as those. So long as it does its full duty to the whole child in this broad way the school need not ,'ask jif it be usurping the prerogatives of the home and the church; for, if they do their full duty, they too will trench equally upon its territory. Failing to have regard for any but his intellectual progress, the school will have little interest for the pupil, will produce almost no effect upon him, will make no vital contribution to his real education. Either must one deny altogether the principle of free schools, or he must agree with Thring that they are meant only for paupers, or he must acknowledge that their responsibility goes far beyond the teaching of the three R's. A man's real success In life is determined by two things: the degree of development of his faculties and his conduct as a member of society. It follows, therefore, that the two main ends to be sought by a public school are to give the boy command over him- self and to teach him how to be a useful citizen. That is to say, public education exists in order to develop human power, and the kinds to be developed 32 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION by a school are two: social power and personal power. The school must do the most it can to per- fect every one of its pupils in the ability to play the largest part possible to him in the life of the com- munity; it must help him, also, to make the most of himself. Of course these two ends of education intertwine. One cannot make a boy a good citizen without making him, at the same time, a better man; neither can one make him a good man without pro- ducing, concurrently, a better citizen. To make a boy perform his due part in society he must be taught the arts of social life : how to read, write, and cipher, how to comport himself, how to maintain pleasant relations with his kind. Moreover, this body of upgrowing youths must be trained and ac- customed to act together, to feel their interde- pendence, to see the interrelations of the vast social structure, perfection in which has made modern civilization possible. But, more than this, the school must, so far as it can, train, foster, and direct the physical and moral forces of every individual child toward his highest individual development. The boys who enter a counting-house or factory, the girls who take service in a shop or kitchen, the citizens who, in uncounted ways, maintain their communities and support the sovereign state, must, as a rule, know how to read, write, and cipher. To THE COMMON SCHOOL 33 do these things well counts greatly In their favor. That so many do not do them well Is a serious charge against the public school. These, however, are not the fundamental qualities which employers seek and which communities require. They demand health, character, honesty, truth- telling, clean living; they demand willingness to work, readiness to com- prehend, quickness of adaptation, fertility of re- source, vision; they demand alertness, vigor, self- command, dexterity, and muscular control. These things, which result, not from set lessons, but from self-discipline, self-reliance, self-knowledge, deter- mine the success of a boy or girl in life, and these qualities the public school must seek to develop through every means and every force at Its command. Most schools give the child in a reasonable time the power to read ; but do they make reading a power in his life? Do they show him what there is to read, how to get at this enormous store of knowledge and recreation, how to absorb the author's thought by that mental grasping of the sentence the outward evidence of which is an ability to read aloud ? Now that the flourished, slanting penmanship is being abandoned, writing as an art seems on the way to resurrection; but do the schools enable the pupil to do anything with this art beyond inditing a clumsy letter or making a formless bill.'* Is there, after the 34 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION ordinary grammar-school course, ready under- standing between the brain and the pen-holding muscles ? or is it true that to most men and women of ordinary education writing is real mental pain? And those weary years of arithmetic: do they result in the ability to use the four processes readily and exactly, do they enable the youth even to keep a cash account with ease? And, as to the logical faculty that these often involved processes are said to stimulate, do we see its results in the eagerness with which thousands of our fellow-citizens will embrace any fallacy, be it only preached by their party newspaper or expounded by some glib-tongued rogue? What effect does formal English grammar have in preventing that hideous perversion of his beautiful mother-tongue in which the average man apparently delights? Does our school geography dissuade that same average man from scorning all other nations, their thoughts and customs, as foreign and therefore foolish? And do we teach history in such wise as to breed real patriots: not shouting swashbucklers, but men who feel a deep sense of responsibility toward their country, who will not let its cities be the prey of bosses, its legislatures the harvest of cheap politicians, its higher places the spoil of those who have millions with which to pur- chase them ? The simple studies of the elementary THE COMMON SCHOOL 35 school could be so taught as to give this grasp of literature, of expression, of reasoning, of number; they could be made to yield a real knowledge of the world, and a genuine patriotism. More than this, they have been made to yield these things over and over again in individual schools, both public and private. But the instruction given in the usual public school does not so result. Granting, however, that every year shows an In- crease in the number of public schools that do rightly teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, using them, with their attendant minor studies, as a means of education; asserting, as I am ready to do, that in time all schools will reach this standard of efficiency; they will even then fulfil but the lesser part of their duty to the state. "What is the education of a majority of the world?" asks Edmund Burke. "Reading a parcel of books? No! Restraint and discipline, examples of virtue and justice, these are what form the education of the world." Self- restraint and self-discipline are what public edu- cation must instil if it would rightly preface and forestall the work of that greater school, the world. Without these the furnishing of mere book-learning will be like giving dynamite to children and gatling guns to war-thirsty savages. These virtues which the employer of young men 36 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION is always seeking and so seldom finds, for which mu- nicipal life is crying out, without which the nation will perish, does one get them, as a rule, because of, or in spite of, the public school training ? Does the setting of uniform tasks, with penalties for their neglect, either uniform or gauged by the passing temper of the teacher, develop an eagerness to work and a delight in labor? Do wholesale lessons ex- plained by wholesale to sixty children, each one of whom has a different mind-content, a different means of apprehension, each of whom needs, there- fore, special leading over every new difficulty — do these tend to promote readiness, quickness, and alert- ness? Nothing, on the contrary, could be better calculated to dry up that intense eagerness to know, that grasping after new ideas, which most children come to school with and which, alas! so many go away without. Do desiccated text-books, rote-work, graded lessons, the whole abominable system of yearly promotion, result in that quickness of adap- tation, that fertility of resource, which are the very soul of civilization? Is honesty encouraged by the usual school discipline and methods? Does truth-telling always plainly get its reward? Is purity fostered by the promiscuous herding of hun- dreds of children, old and young, corrupt and inno- cent, in the same building, under teachers whose THE COMMON SCHOOL 37 time must be given to mint, anise, and cummin rather than to these weightier matters of the Eternal Law? Says M. de Coubertin: "Not ignorance and sloth of mind threaten our younger generation so much as moral inertia and atrophy of the will. The supreme problem is to cure these." This moral inertia can be overcome, this will of the child can be developed and trained, only by treating each pupil as a special problem to be worked out with knowl- edge, with sympathy, with tact, with enthusiasm, by every teacher under whose control the child is brought. The bottom fallacy of much of the acknowledged inefficiency of public education is that equality implies uniformity. We are to give all youth an equal chance; therefore let us put it through one common course of study, therefore let us give it a discipline of the barracks. But this is not to secure to children an equal opportunity at all. Whose omniscience devised this uniform course which is so to act upon the antipodal natures of John and of Patrick, of Marie and of Tessa as to give them an equal chance to develop into their very best? Who found this universal solvent of all the oddities, stupidities, and personalities of a townful of child nature? A uniform course is the very embodiment of inequality, making the weak weaker, the dull 38 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION duller, the cross-grained more out of touch with the rest of mankind. Such a course may suit three children out of every twenty, but the remaining seventeen are mainly stupefied by it, learning oily to associate what is most disagreeable, what is most useless, what is most quickly to be forgotten with those school years during which it was vainly at- tempted to fit their tender and growing individ- ualities to an arbitrary mold. The only way in which to give every child an equal chance with every other is to provide for each the atmosphere and in- centives suited to his particular needs and nature. Then that nature will respond and grow, revealing powers and aptitudes inconceivable under the blight of uniformity. There is no such thing as an "average child." He is a fiction as absurd as the passionless man of the old political economy. As well might one talk of an average vegetable and sub- ject all plants to an unchanging regimen. The fundamental principle of the '*new education" — which is as old as India and Greece — is to de- velop and strengthen individuality. All men are born free: you shall not make them slaves to a fictitious average. All men are born equal before the law: you shall not make them unequal before the law by forcing upon them a common training which t gives those few whom the course happens to fit an THE COMMON SCHOOL 39 enormous advantage, leaving the rest substantially untouched by the real forces of education. So much of the military, disciplinary side of the school as promotes solidarity, makes children feel them- selves to be social units, favors the impulse to activ- ity arising from mere mass, is vital to the state. The marching together, singing together, playing together (provided the play be judiciously organ- ized) is a splendid stimulus to social and civic life, impossible to be done away with. Along with this, however, and all the more strongly because of this, the individuality of the child must be nourished, promoted, and developed by every rational means. Within the range of his powers all health, virtue, and capacity are within him as the germ is within the seed. The teacher's business is to stimulate, to encourage, and also to prune, these elemental forces. This cannot be done by instruction given by whole- sale, but only through genuine education acting directly upon the individual child. No startling changes are necessary in the free school system. Its general plan is admirably suited to American conditions. It needs but to be altered in this detail and in that, in the expansion of this principle and in the suppression of that practice. We must, however, do away with the curse of uni- formity, allowing, instead, full play to individuality; 40 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION we must, furthermore, fit the means and methods of the school to the real needs of the future worker and citizen; and we must, in addition, make the profession of teaching self-respecting by releasing it from its present bondage to amateurs: to well- intentioned but inexpert school boards who are jauntily settling pedagogical problems that appall trained experts. The teachers, if they are to teach from themselves instead of from prescribed text- books, must have a larger share in the control and development of schools, and must be so trained and stimulated as to be fit to assume that larger share. Not elaborate buildings, or reformed courses of study, or wiser supervision, will, of themselves, make the new education succeed — it will be the teachers ; and if this vast responsibilit}'' rests upon them, with them must rest also power and initiative, in them must appear professional pride far beyond what they possess to-day. These fine, great schoolhouses, with all modern devices — provided their ventilating systems work, their floors are kept clean, and their rooms are not overcrowded — are admirable; but they do not in themselves educate. The complicated apparatus, the works of art, the libraries, with which many of these schoolhouses are filled, again are admirable; but in themselves they are mere sticks and stones. THE COMMON SCHOOL 41 The subdivision of labor among teachers, the call- ing in of specialists, the elaboration of methods of teaching are — sometimes — excellent; but they are but the husks of real education. Psychological laboratories, child-study, the heaping up of great masses of pedagogical data are also, when backed by real knowledge, excellent; but they are only minor helps to a real education. Pile buildings, apparatus, methods, psychological subtleties high as Ossa on Pelion and there will result no better education than was given in the ancient district school unless behind this complexity of educational machinery are real teachers knowing how to teach and with time to do true, individual teaching. The more we elaborate education, the more time we spend on pedagogical minutiae, the more we load ourselves down with apparatus, the more plainly it appears that the sole essential for real education is the educated teacher who knows how to teach. Upon his, or her, personal fitness rests the future of the country; with him, or with her, not in systems and apparatus, lies the solution of this vexed ques- tion of the public school. The regeneration of man- kind will be brought about, so far as the common school can effect it, by the direct, human influence of the individual teacher upon the individual pupil. CHAPTER III EDUCATION AS PREVENTION THE Story Is told of a somnolent parson who prayed, with that singsong drone which used to be inseparable from true piety, that "Gawd would make the intemperate, temper- ate, the incontinent, continent, and the industrious, dustrious." With equal lack of thought, we have added that treacherous syllable and have made our systems of education not processes of formation but processes of ^formation. Education should be superlatively a growth in morals; yet, largely through our sectarian wranglings, we have reduced it, in too many instances, to the lowest terms of unmorality. The most important business of society is the moral education of the boy and girl. And the watch- word of that moral education should be prevention — the prevention of disease by building a healthy body obedient to hygienic laws; the prevention of crime by confirming the innate morality of every boy and girl; the prevention of poverty by ed- ucation for efficiency; the prevention of insanity, 42 EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 43 feeble-mindedness, blindness, and all the rest of those preventable scourges, by breaking the pru- rient silence which surrounds the greatest function of organic life; the prevention of heathenism by applying genuine religion to the experiences of every day. In doing these things, moreover, it must be real- ized that the problems of our sons and daughters are not those of their great-grandfathers, are not even those we faced. Young Americans are now not only of the great world of nations, they are of a world that thinks in millions, that avails itself of strange new forces, that finds the air too dull a medium for intercommunication and seeks to use in place of it the subtler ethers. We cannot wrestle with satan as our fathers did. Rather, like the frontiersman, must we carry the pistol of decision at half-cock, grateful if the devil's eye and aim do not forestall ours. Morality is the eternal and unchanging arsenal of God; but the ethical weapons of a youth to-day must differ widely from those of a more leisurely, post-chaise time, when the mere fulmination of the blunderbuss was not uncommonly eflFective. The modern youth must have a nimbleness of judgment resting upon a solid fund of wisdom, an instant bravery backed by steady courage, an adaptability, a resilience of 44 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION temper, a faith in self — together with a knowledge of self-limitations — scarcely imaginable in the older days. To know anything he must go right to the heart of it; to decide upon anything he must focus all his faculties upon it; at every moment he must have himself in hand ready to concentrate his forces upon the next difficult problem that life is certain to present. The splendid haste of modern life involves, there- fore, enormous new strains — physical, mental, and moral. It requires, as a consequence, new tem- perings of the springs of thought and action, new lubricants for the continually increasing friction of existence. These we are gaining; but through such a tearing away of old conventions, such an opening up of new problems and difficulties, that the very life of society seems in jeopardy. The proph- ets of impending disaster speak to willing and bewildered ears. "The sanctity of the anciently accredited ministers and forms of good is disappear- ing," they cry; "God Himself at last will be cast out and we shall be beasts again! The storm, the lightning, and the whirlwind are upon us; surely the hot ashes of divine wrath will soon begin to fall!" So shouted Carlyle, clamoring for the stern virtues of the Cromwell days; so to the end of time will every pessimist lament, terrified by the light- EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 45 ning and the whirlwind, heedless of the everlasting, still, small Voice. Fifty years ago we were predominantly an ag- ricultural people, of fairly uniform stock, self- contained commercially, and living in small com- munities which were patriarchal, simple, genuinely democratic, and trained in that flower of political schools, the New England town-meeting. To-day our cities, our towns, even our farms, are purely industrial; we are of every race, creed, and previous political experience; we have been launched com- mercially into the seething markets of the world; the family has been largely superseded by the fac- tory; and the town-meeting, for our vast city pop- ulations, is a thing unknown. Half a century ago the church and the home, directly or indirectly, gave that moral background and ethical discipline which every child and youth must absolutely have. To-day the church gets even less hold than the school upon thousands of young people, and the houses of many rich, no less than the tenements of many poor, are mockeries of home. To the middle of the nineteenth century the old relations between master and apprentice still survived, and the small, simple industries were manned by alert New England youth. To-day, with insignificant exceptions, a boy must pick up 46 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION his trade education as best he may, and our huge industrial establishments are transmuting poten- tial citizens into replaceable parts of an unthinking machine. Before the Civil War our people was a fairly homogeneous one. To-day hundreds of thou- sands are pouring in from every corner of the globe, many of them hostile to all forms of govern- ment and knowing no distinction between liberty and license, most of them needing to be painfully taught the very elements of responsible citizenship. Fifty years ago every farm and every household gave the child daily training in manual dexterity, ingenuity, self-reliance, and hard work. To-day no city and few country households give any oppor- tunity whatever for this fundamental education so vital to the child's physical and moral health. Most significant of all, the development of ma- chinery, with its attendant cooperation and com- bination of interests, its resulting wealth, luxury, rapid intercommunication, social congestion, and complexity, has so bound society together that the moral ruin of the meanest youth or the failure to assimilate the humblest immigrant affects, as never before, the whole civic body. The world was never so rich in material wealth, in energy, in altruism, in widespread righteousness as it is at this very moment. But the forces of growth EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 47 and uplift seem to stand half paralyzed by the rush and complexity of modern life. The educational authorities are In a whirl of doubt and experi- mentation, uncertain how to act. They cannot act alone. The solution of the complex problems of modern democracy lies, not in academic education, but in more democracy, and in education for de- mocracy. All good forces — the church, the home, the school, the entire body of citizens, high and low, informed and ignorant — must work unitedly along this fundamental line of advance, this social, moral, really common schooling of the people; and these should be a few of their common aims: to preserve health by abolishing slums, corruption and quack- ery; to develop well-balanced efficiency by training the body, mind, and hand of every one; to make each and every youth self-supporting and self-respecting by preparing him to earn a useful living; to fit him for true citizenship by steeping him in social rights and social obligations; to prepare him for intelligent parenthood by preserving and strengthening sound family relations; to make him a good neighbor, a ripe human being, a complete man (or woman) by leading him through the humbler and the higher virtues to a knowledge of, love for, and obedience toward God. To this facing of the facts and therefore. of the 48 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION real needs in twentieth-century education has the scientific habit of thought brought us; but modern science has taught us more than this: it has taught us how fundamental to all social advance and to all true social education is absolute honesty. It has made us understand that, just as the man of science who juggles with facts is a fool, so any individual or group of organizations whose existence is founded upon lies, whether those lies be conscious or uncon- scious, inherited or newly concocted, is doomed. A main evil at the root of modern life is the same as in the days of Seneca — the evil that crime needs but to be successful to be called virtue and to be held up for emulation by the young. The badness in our politics (so far as there is badness, for much of it is highly exaggerated), the corruption in busi- ness (so far as there is corruption, for an enormous majority of business men are honest), the scandals of society (and it is never to be forgotten that the ten vicious get into the newspapers while the ten thousand virtuous do not) : all are due to elemental vices, to stealing and lying and lust, which corrupt the social body, to hypocrisy which tries to twist these ugly private sins into a kind of public sanctity, and to moral cowardice which fears to call a jewelled spade a spade. A pressing social and educational problem is, EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 49 therefore, that of moral discipline. Although we have outgrown the old compulsions of a personal and wrathful God, we must have some categorical im- perative with which to galvanize our sluggish wills. That categorical imperative is found in the pregnant phrase; "Obey the law." Be the law God-made or man-made, every social, political, and industrial evil is the direct result of some infraction of the law. By an appeal to this fundamental morality of law we reduce every problem in life to its lowest terms and make its fallacies or its solution as definite as the rule of three. Fortunately, too, the children of the present generation are ready to respond to this kind of argument more quickly than to any other. They have drifted wholly away from the Puritan moorings, so that an appeal not merely to revealed religion, but to any form of supernatural authority, has with them little or no weight. The only awakening appeal to-day is to natural causes and logical ef- fects. For the whole spirit of modern thought and the very atmosphere, no matter how limited, in which modern children live, are dominated by science, are alive with the consciousness of phys- ical, social, mental, and spiritual evolution. And the first rule of science, the absolute foundation of all evolutionary doctrine, is obedience to law. If 50 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION it were not certain that a law of nature Is the same for all things under all like circumstances, if there were ever In any chemical reaction or any physical manifestation the slightest failure of any basic laws, then the world of science would go utterly to pieces, no railroad would dare to run a train, no chemist venture to prepare a drug, no physician presume to treat a dangerous disease. Train the child, then, from his earliest years in obedience, not to your will or to mine, but to the will of natural and moral law as shown in history, In government, and in the world of science, and you give him for his whole subse- quent career an ethical foundation, a moral touch- stone, and a genuine spine. Three lines of activity, then, are being pointed out to us by modern science — activities fundamen- tal to all physical, mental, and spiritual advance. They are: (i) The prevention, through effective education, of Inefficiency, poverty, disease, defectiveness, and crime; (2) The overthrow, through moral training, of social, commercial, political, and religious sham; and (3) The building up and exercise of unquestion- ing obedience to physical and moral law. EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 51 But these, it will be said, are not new activities; the battle against poverty and disease, against cor- ruption and sham, has been waging from time im- memorial, and with what comparatively dishearten- ing success! True; but never till now have we had an army with which to wage this war. Never till this twentieth century have we been willing to use, or have we known how to use, on a large scale, the forces of true democracy. If society hopes to ad- vance toward right education, real moral courage and genuine obedience to law, it can make that advance only through those who are to receive that education, who are to exercise moral courage, and who are to obey the law. If we are to overcome poverty, disease, and crime through preventive education, whom must we educate? The people. If we are to overthrow sham, who must be trained to know the false from the true? The people. If the laws of God and of man are to be kept, who must be taught willing obedience ? The people. An autocracy can pal- liate crime and poverty and disease by building prisons, almshouses, and hospitals; but only a democracy can cure those evils by drying up their sources. An autocracy can abolish one hypocrisy by setting up another; but only a democracy can get down to the fundamental realities of things. An 52 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION autocracy can enforce obedience through guns and jails; but only a democracy can voluntarily obey. The hope to-day, therefore, of real social advance is through a wise, widespread, sympathetic, and real use of the potential power of democracy. It is a power so stupendous that only a few great souls like Jesus and Abraham Lincoln have dared to invoke it. The demagogue uses it, of course, for his per- sonal and selfish ends; but only fitfully and very partially, because the demos does not really respond except to great moral calls. But these lines which I have tried to indicate are superlatively moral issues. Not one of them but has in it a fundamental appeal not inferior to that of primitive Christianity or of negro emancipation. Incompetence, poverty, disease, defectiveness, crime — all these are house- fellows with the common man and he will fight to the death if he can be shown a way really to con- quer them. And if that way involve, as it does, moral courage and submission to physical and ethical laws, he has them both, born of sufi'ering, born of patient doing of his duty, born of centuries of en- forced obedience. That is a splendid phrase of Theodore Parker's: "The people are always true to a good man who truly trusts them." And its wisdom has been demonstrated over and over again. Just as it is EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 53 being proved by medical studies that practically every child, even in the filthiest slum and of the foulest parents, is born healthy, so it will be proved — when we have really tried democracy — that every citizen 'is sound in his social instincts. He wants to be decent and useful and self-reliant; he wants to be his own master politically; he wants to be educated and to have his children trained; he wants to live in clean, beautiful and uplifting sur- roundings; but he does not know how. In his ignorance he falls a prey to his environment which has been created, not by himself, but by society — by us, that is, who have arrogated to ourselves, because of a little more money or education or in- herited power, the regulation of all terrestrial and of many spiritual things. Moreover, if we really utilize, as we are timidly beginning to do, the latent powers of democracy, we shall eventually free, not simply the so-called "masses" of the people; we shall free ourselves. We may not suffer the actual hunger and disease and hopelessness of the proletariat; but we are co-suf- ferers with it in the products of those evils of the slum. Therefore, just as the South, through the emancipation of the black man, achieved its own economic as well as moral freedom; just as England, through the compulsory granting of autonomy to 54 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION the American colonies, gained her own political liberty; so the exercise in the United States of real democracy will give true democratic freedom to us all. What is the essence of real democracy? Simply getting together. The wars (whether civil, economic, or religious) which have devastated the world have been wars of mutual ignorance, survivals of the time when each cave man fought with every other, when the single fact of unacquaintance made one an implacable enemy. Growth in civilization has al- ways been parallel with progress in mutual under- standing. The leader in this process ofjgetting together has always been trade; and to-day the close and involved relations of commerce are the most hopeful guarantees of international peace. Business knows no political boundaries; and it is business that is leading the way, not only out of that worst relic of the old devil-beliefs, war, but into those forms of social cooperation which shall bring to the intangible affairs of men some such astonish- ing gains as have been secured, through mercantile cooperation, for their material interests. The newspapers, the magazines, the ten thousand clubs of amateur reformers are filled with lamen- tations over the evils of politics, the corruption of cities, the moral dangers swarming around the EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 55 young. They are filled, too, with social remedies, with moral panaceas; at the least, with palliatives. But the single cure striking at the very root of all this evil will be found only when every man under- stands that he as an individual is responsible, and that through the combined efforts of all citizens, not through laws and ordinances, can these wrongs be righted. The affairs of this vast social partner- ship will be disentangled only when its members awaken to the fact that they must be neither silent nor sleeping partners, but that every one of them must do his share. So long as the college man feels himself too well trained to use his powers in helping to govern the city, so long as the merchant thinks his time too valuable to be spent in developing good citizens, so long as the man of leisure, of refinement, of brains, is content to shirk his share in carrying out this social partnership, just so long will all those persons, together with millions of lesser individuals, suffer from the waste and extravagance, the cor- ruption and demoralization, which make democracy still an experiment, its progress fluctuating, and its issue yet in doubt. To get together, then, is the first step in the proc- ess of genuine and permanent reform. We have always seen the advantage of organization for politi- cal ends and, too often, have become slaves to the S6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION perfection of our partisan machinery. In the last thirty years we have learned the advantages of business organization; and here again we have be- come, in conspicuous instances, the victims of what, if properly regulated, is one of the greatest blessings to society. Only to-day, however, are we beginning to see the even greater importance of social organiza- tion if we are to develop mental and moral stamina great enough to stand the strains of our political and material advance. We cannot organize democracy into a single political party, freed from the evils of partisanship, because seemingly there will always be fundamental differences of political opinion. We cannot organize democracy into a great communistic trust for the production and distribution of goods, because apparently there must always be differences of what our forefathers used to call individual *^ faculty." But we can, if we choose, organize democracy into a great social whole, working for the real welfare of society; for the fundamental questions of society are moral questions; and on those, when we get right down to basic problems, there can be and there are no genuine diiferences. CHAPTER IV THE DEMAND FOR EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION THE great work of the nineteenth century was in establishing the machinery of education. Vast and efficient as that machinery is, however, It suffers, and suffers incalculably, from the same evils that afflict most of our civic machinery. Every school has upon its staff magnificent, self- sacrificing teachers whose lives are a blessing to their pupils; but perhaps in the next rooms to those are teachers who, by reason of natural incapacity, of ill-preparation, of age, or of chronic ill-health, are totally unfit to have children for one moment in their charge. Some schools are better, others worse, than the average; some school buildings are really fit for the housing of children, others are worse than unfit; in some cities the evils of the present system are glaringly obtrusive; in others the personality of the teachers, the interest of the parents, or the qualifications of the committee members may have largely overcome the defects of the machinery. Any criticism that may be made must be general 57 58 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION and, like all generalizations, may not apply in specific instances. But, broadly, it is safe and fair to say that the public schools of most American cities are diseased, and that the disease which has fastened itself upon them is the pestiferous and far-reaching one of petty politics. Members of school boards are chosen, not because they know anything about the difficult problems of education, not even be- cause they are notable men of affairs, but simply because they belong to a certain party, because they want office, and because they have done political work that calls for reward: and how reward them more cheaply and easily than at the expense of the taxpayers ? A school board constituted as are those in most of the cities of the United States is an anachronism in these days of sociological knowledge and of busi- ness organization. It is a monstrous outgrowth of the old town school committee, an excellent thing in its place and generation, but as ill-suited to the conditions of modern city life as the town pump and the beadle. The external management of the public schools is a business problem, like that of running a bank, a railroad or a factory; only, since its raw material is boys and girls, the right running of it is vastly more important than is the conduct of any of these other things. EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 59 It Is repeatedly declared by the advocates of ex- isting conditions that machinery is not everything; but there must be machinery to carry on a business so vast as that of the public schools; and since there must be machinery, in the name of helpless child- hood let It be simple, let it be easily run, let it be understood of all men and women, let it at least be modern and effective. Let It be, in short, a machine for the training of every boy and girl into the best citizenship; let it not be a huge, cumbersome politi- cal mangle In the intricacies of which too many little human souls are injured or forever lost. It is declared, also, that it is better men and women that are needed In school boards, not better machinery. True again; no man or woman in any city Is too good or too learned for the important work of governing the schools; but can one examine any great enterprise without seeing that the good- ness and knowledge of the Individual are almost annulled by a lack of system? Were the great English railroads manned by angels, and had not their thorough system, how long would their passen- gers be safe ? Were the great mills of New England to have absolutely perfect employees and yet no business methods, no placing of responsibility, how long would they continue to turn out salable prod- ucts? And has not every American painfully in 6o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION mind the experiences of the Spanish War, where the bravest and most virile soldiers the world has ever seen came close to utter defeat at Santiago and re- turned to their country human wrecks because the machinery of the War Department was utterly unfit for the task of waging war? If we would have bet- ter schools we must have a more businesslike sys- tem of carrying them on, a system in harmony with the needs and conditions of to-day, not with those of a century ago. What is the fundamental problem before a com- munity? It is not to secure the teaching of this or that subject; it is not to maintain a great educational system, as a system, at enormous expense. It is to devise the simplest means of reaching every indi- vidual child, of keeping him for a proper length of time under the most invigorating educational in- fluences, of making him into the best possible citizen that he is capable of becoming. Let this be em- phasized, for it lies at the root of the whole matter. The public school should seek the best and simplest way, not merely of teaching, but of really educat- ing, not masses of children, but the individual child, so that he may become, not simply instructed, but ready to take his proper place as an active, pro- ductive citizen. As the people have equal rights in the public n EFFICIENT ADMINISTR.\TION 6i schools and as the people pay the bills, it is plain that they must be given adequate representation in school government. But these representatives of theirs, being but trustees of the people's money, should have an eye single to the judicious expendi- ture of that large sum, should be directly in touch with the citizens who have chosen them, should act only on such large questions of policy as are within their knowledge; should, in short, be simply legis- lators, to put in motion and to regulate the ma- chinery by which the objects of the public school shall be effected. A school board, then, should be chosen largely for its administrative fitness, entirely without regard to its political affiliations; should be small, so that its plain and comparatively simple duties of legislation may always be carried on in open daylight. In committee of the whole; should be fairly permanent, so that it may pursue a steady policy; should be dignified and not harassed by trivialities, so that men of the highest ability may not shrink from service upon it; should be chosen not so much for what Its members know (or think they know) about education, still less for any deep familiarity with city politics, but because they are persons of good judgment, of wide knowledge of affairs, of deep Interest In the city's welfare, and of incorruptible integrity. Given such a school com- 62 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION mittee of not more than seven members, representing the whole municipality (not greedy sections of it), and the education of the people would be car- ried on in the interest of the people, the city's money would be spent, every cent, for the up- building of the city, and the administration of public education in America would be something for which Americans would not be obliged, too often, to apologize. In an enterprise so vast and affecting so many interests as do the public schools, the prime con- dition of success is that there should be always and everywhere direct responsibility. The school board itself, with simple and easily understood duties, should be directly responsible to the people who elect it. This committee, in turn, should place all the administrative and executive duties connected with public education in the hands of experts di- rectly responsible to it. There are two markedly different and clearly de- fined sides to school administration : the educational side and the business side. As, obviously, no one man could supervise them both, it is plain at once that there must be two experts, equally responsible to the board, equally to be called to account for any deficiency in the matters under his control. These experts should be a superintendent of education and EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 63 a superintendent of business affairs, or more simply, a business agent. There is little need to dwell upon the duties of the business agent; it is enough to say that he should be a clear-headed, shrewd, honest man of affairs; that he should be paid an adequate salary, and that his whole time should be given to the care and maintenance of school buildings, to the coiKrol of the janitors and engineers, to the purchase and care of supplies, to the supervision of the erection of new school buildings. This involves large powers, but necessary ones if we would exact large responsi- bility; and it is only by holding one man to direct account that w^e can get the school buildings kept in proper condition, can secure adequate janitorial service, can relieve the school board from the har- assing and corrupting work of buying school supplies. Upon the superintendent, thus freed of all busi- ness detail, should rest entire responsibility for the educational efficiency of the schools, including the appointment and dismissal of teachers and the determination of courses of study. Such a superin- tendent must be an expert in the science and art of education, must be a man of broad culture and wide views of life, must be a person of boundless zeal, ready tact and unflinching moral courage. More- over, he should have powers as nearly autocratic as 64 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION it is wise to give where abuse would entail far- spreading mischief; should be assured of tenure of office during good service; should have an active part, though not a vote, in all meetings of the school board; and should have supreme control of and final responsibility for all disciplinary measures, including the important educational question of truancy. A formidable task for one man to assume; but no larger than that of many administrative officers in other lines of effort, and not too large if the superintendent be relieved of all petty matters of business detail, and be permitted to devote his whole time and thought to those great questions of education, of administration, of morale, that now are given partly to him, partly to the school board, and mainly to no one at all. The superintendent should have, of course, as- sistants to be eyes and ears for him; but these inspectors and reporters of the schools must be di- rectly answerable to him, must have such powers only as he delegates, and, however freely he may seek their advice, must leave him responsible for the final decision of all matters of importance. Furthermore, in contemplating these enlarged duties of the superintendent, it should not be for- gotten that there are forces, now scarcely utilized, which he might use much to his own assistance and EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 65 vastly to the benefit of the schools. Among these are the teachers themselves, the truant officers, and that more intelligent portion of the public which takes an interest in matters of education. Perhaps there is no greater waste in the working of the present public-school system than of the in- tellectual force and enthusiasm of the good teachers. Whatever their professional training, whatever their zeal, whatever their knowledge gained by years of experience with children, they must still teach, in practically stereotyped ways, what is laid down to be taught In each particular grade. And they must teach this matter out of text-books chosen, as a rule, with regard only to that thing which does not exist — the average child. A teacher's life must be spent in trying to mold a heterogeneous collection of pupils Into one pattern in time to send them along to the next teacher who, in turn, must repeat the process. If any teacher, maddened by such a wrong, impossible task, rebels, she Is In danger of being supplanted; if she expresses dissent to the superintendent or the rare committeeman, she is viewed with suspicion as a faddist; if she confides her woes to her fellow-teachers, they usually counsel her to a prudent acquiescence in the things that be. As a consequence the process of teaching in the pub- lic schools, instead of making a woman wiser and 66 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION broader and more Influential, tends to harden her, along with her poor pupils, into a narrower and narrower routine. What a frightful waste of energy this is, and how opposed to all true principles of teaching. Suppose, for example, that the courses of work and the books to be used in a college were to be prescribed by the governing board, and that all originality of teaching were resolutely discouraged; does it seem likely that such a college would se- cure able professors ? There should be, therefore, a school faculty, similar to a college faculty, wherein courses of study, methods of teaching, text-books, and the thousand questions of pedagogics should have free discussion; wherein every new idea should have encouragement; wherein all fair criticism of methods or books should have respectful hearing. Similarly with the truancy system. It is now a part of the great police machine; what an immense force for good it would be were it put into the hands of the superintendent and made a part of education. As it is now in most cities, the main result, if not the chief purpose, of the truancy laws is to punish the child, instead of to reform him. In a majority of cases, truancy is the fault not of the pupil, but of his surroundings; yet little or nothing is done to improve them or him; after a number of warnings, he either drifts out of sight or is sent to a reforming EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 67 institution of doubtful efficacy. Yet it is from these truants that the criminal class largely is recruited, and upon their proper treatment rests, in no small degree, the solution of the question of criminal reform. The public school has splendid opportu- nities to catch these wayward children at the very inception of their careers and to make of them decent citizens; but we are so accustomed to disregard the individual child, we are so filled with the notion of the pupil conforming to the system instead of the system adapting itself to the child, that we almost deliberately create a public process for the manu- facturing of criminals. Finally, were the public school system made homogeneous and professional, were its determina- tion to shun politics and seek diligently the things of real education made clear, how many intelligent men and women would the superintendent have at his command, to help in such and so many ways as he might indicate; how many parents, now seeking stumblingly and often in vain to secure a real edu- cation for their children, could he count upon as friends and allies; how increasingly he might reckon upon the enthusiastic cooperation of the pupils themselves, these children who, now dragged un- willingly to a school literally for the masses (since its pupils are treated only in the mass) would then 68 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION run gladly to and help eagerly in that school for individuals which, through better teachers, better methods, smaller classes, more intelligent super- vision, would have become, in our cities, the rule instead of the exception. No city, however, can begin to reach such standards in education until it reforms its methods of school government, until it places school administration upon that le^^el which the best railroads, the most successful mercantile enterprises, the most progressive colleges, long ago reached. This, then, Is the whole framework of the needed reforms in the administration of our city schools. Such an enlightened administration must have a small school board chosen intelligently, and solely on the ground of fitness. That committee must con- fine its efforts to general questions of legislation (with which alone it is wise enough to deal) and must delegate all matters of business detail and of educational administration to expert subordinates whom it must hold to strict and direct account. These experts, in turn, must appoint their subor- dinates with such care that the best service shall be assured, and must hold them to such accounta- bility as shall cause that service never to be neglected. Finally, the whole machinery of the vast school system must be so simple in arrangement, so auto- EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 69 matic in its checks and balances, so complete in its utilization of every possible good force, that there shall never be anything hidden, never any fault overlooked in the multiplicity of detail, never any child, no matter how humble, either kept out of the best education that he is capable of assimi- lating, or treated in any other way than as a sacred individuality in which lies the infinite promise of a human soul. CHAPTER V THE DEMAND FOR A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING THEORETICALLY, free public education should be the supreme force in every community; practically, it is not. Theo- retically, the extension of such education should be followed by a higher political morality, a deeper sense of social responsibility; practically, it is not. Theoretically, the teacher — spiritual or temporal — should be honored above all other men; practically, he is not. Who is to blame? Mainly the parent, to whom, as a rule, any of his affairs is of more im- portance than the building of his children's char- acter. In a measure, also, the community, which gives grudgingly to Its schools, holds them in little esteem, underpays the teacher, and then despises him for being poor. But responsibility lies also, in no small measure, with the teachers themselves for failing to regard themselves and to exact regard as members of the most honorable and important of professions. Teaching, except as limited to colleges and uni- 70 A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 71 versities, is not yet even a real profession. The ordinary schoolmaster has little of the personal weight, of the sense of professional responsibility, of what may be called the corporate self-respect, of the lawyer, the physician, or the engineer. The traditions of the teaching guild do not yet demand a wide education, a slow and laborious preparation, a careful and humble apprenticeship, such as is re- quired for entrance into a really learned profes- sion. A broad education and the poise of mind which follows it are the vital needs of a great major- ity of the public school teachers of to-day. They are ceaselessly complaining of a condition of things which is indeed grievous, but which is largely of their own creation. They demand high place with- out qualifying themselves to hold high place; they rebel at a not uncommon attitude of contempt or of contemptuous toleration on the part of the public, but do not purge themselves of the elements which excite that contempt; they accuse the parents and the public of indifference toward their work, but do little to render that work of such quality as to forbid indifference. There is no reason — except in negligent custom, in which the majority of teachers acquiesce — why the man or woman who has charge of the mental growth of the child should be satisfied with a train- 72 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION ing less thorough than that of the physician who cares for his body, the lawyer who manages his property, or the clergyman who ministers to his soul. It is idle to claim, as is sometimes done, that there is no profession for the teacher to study, that the art of teaching comes by nature, and that if there be a sort of science of education it will filter out from the mistakes and successes of experience. The body of the law is but a record of human experiments and mistakes in social order; medicine itself is but the crystallized result of centuries of empiricism, often disastrous, upon the human constitution; engineering, founded though it be upon a science so exact as mathematics, is the net result of an infinite series of blundering attempts to solve the innumerable problems of matter and motion. But the fact that these professions and the sciences on which they rest are always undergoing change, that, often, the accepted truth of to-day is the proved fallacy of to-morrow, does not lessen their dignity, does not discourage their followers from long years of preparation for them, does not justify the men of these professions in working by rule-of-thumb methods and haphazard guesses when it is possible, through study, experimentation, and mutual en- lightenment, for them to work by known laws, in orderly sequence, toward well-defined ends. There A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 73 is abundant foundation for a science and art of education as elaborate and dignified as that of medicine; but that science and that art will not rightly develop so long as it is regarded — above all by the teachers themselves — as possible and natural to admit half-taught girls and youths, who follow teaching only as a makeshift or a temporary means of livelihood, to full fellowship and equal honor with the completely educated, laboriously trained professional teacher. Were there, however, no science and art of teach- ing, as such, there would still be abundant reason why the primary and secondary teacher, quite as much as the college professor, should be soundly and broadly educated, should follow a range of study and thought far outside and beyond the subjects that he teaches. It is the personality of the man, the breadth of his grasp of life, the atmosphere which he creates and maintains in his schoolroom, that, more than anything else, secure his success in teach- ing and really develop his pupils. These qualities can be secured, in general, only by a sound and extensive education. No teacher has a right to lament the blindness of the public toward the value of his work who has not fitted himself in the highest measure really to be a teacher. No body of teachers may honestly *'re- 74 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION solve" for greater recognition and consideration from others unless they are themselves doing yeoman work toward raising the standards of preparation and attainment within their own, so-called, pro- fession. So long as low ideals of school work, routine instruction, machine-like lesson-hearing, haphazard and aimless methods, to say nothing of sycophancy and petty politics, are tolerated by the teachers themselves, the schools and those who con- duct them will fail of due honor and support, will fall far short of their possible efficiency, will not take their rightful place as the supreme uplift- ing force of every democratic community. If It be deemed necessary that that profession, the law, which governs our social relations, that profes- sion, engineering, which builds our structures and machines, that profession, medicine, which takes care of our perishable bodies, should be governed by the strictest rules, should frame elaborate codes of ethics, should have only the highest and purest aims, purging themselves of all shysters, jerry-builders, and quacks, how infinitely more im- portant that this profession, teaching, whose work is greater, higher, nobler than any of these others, should be regarded and should regard itself as a sacred guild into which no traffickers or triflers be allowed to come, regarding whose work no one but A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 75 him who knows should have aught to say, whose sole aim should be to make of every individual child of the millions under its care the very most that can be made. Nothing less than this highest standard of pro- fessionalism should be thought of in teaching work; nothing less than this will keep the public schools of America at that high point of efficiency which the very existence of democracy demands. Citizens, parents, intelligent school boards may help the teachers, fight for them, applaud them; but the teaching profession itself must wage the battle which is now on and which is to make that in fact and in public estimation the greatest of professions. And these teachers will fight this battle, not by intriguing for higher salaries and easier positions, not by depending upon favoritism for preferment, not by giving up the true principles of teaching at the behest of laymen, not by shielding incompe- tent fellow-teachers, not by regarding their work as a mere means of livelihood; but they will make their profession great only by making themselves and their work great; by regarding every child placed under their care as a special problem sent by Providence; by studying and thinking and ex- perimenting as the lawyer, the physician, the engineer study and ponder and experiment; by 76 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION holding unflinchingly to what they know to be right methods; by refusing to countenance any teaching that is bad, any ways that are not straight- forward; by looking upon their profession as one too sacred, too vital, to claim anything less than the whole mind and heart and soul. When the teach- ers of America, or a majority of them, shall regard their work in such a light as this, then, indeed, teach- ing will be what it ought to be, the greatest of pro- fessions; then will the rewards of money, of fame, of public honor come as a matter of course. The physician, the lawyer, the engineer, have won their high place by years of hard work, by establishing standards below which no honorable member of their professions is allowed to fall. By like hard work and the establishing of like standards, and in that way alone, can the teacher, too, make his pro- fession great. There are certain stock arguments always brought forward against the possibility of such high pro- fessional standards. The pitifully poor rewards, the uncertainty of tenure, the often anomalous social position of the teacher — all these and many similar disadvantages are advanced as reasons why it is not worth while to attempt to raise the present standards of attainment. The hosts of glib pretenders, the arrogance of ignorant school com- A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 77 mittees, a cheap and noisy commercialism are, It Is said, insurmountable obstacles to the creation of a generally high, fine conception of teaching such as exists among a few devoted, really • educated schoolmasters. A man who adopts the work of teaching must have, we are told, something of the martyr-spirit, for this profession has In It an ele- ment of self-sacrifice which the other high vo- cations do not demand. Truly the work of the teacher does involve much sacrifice of self; but it meets with immediate and tangible reward, in the uplifted lives of the children for whom the sacrifice Is made. This is a return which even the profes- sion of the clergy rarely sees. Moreover, were the majority of those who follow the profession of teach- ing broadly educated men and women, were there an esprit de corps among them such as Is found in every other profession, the petty things of teaching which now so often overshadow the great things would disappear; and the rewards, both material and Insubstantial, would be inimitably Increased. Rights and privileges would then be eagerly off'ered where now they are clamored for In vain. The education of the teacher — whether he is to deal with infants or with collegians — should be as nearly as possible like the best training given to the young physician. He should have, in the first 78 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION place, a general education so broad, so well-balanced, so strengthening to the mind, that he is able to deal wisely, as a physician is called upon to deal, with those problems of character, those perversions of mind and morals, those subtle diseases of the will that no medicine and no surgeon's knife can reach. Having made himself thus a wise man, a proper counsellor, the young teacher must next, as the medical student does, become familiar with the technical details of his profession, learn what is known of the mental growth and reactive processes of children, study the laws of mental health, the modes of its preservation, the methods of stimula- ting mind and soul, the effects, good and bad, of association: what one might call, in short, the pathology of childhood and adolescence. More than this, he should make himself, as far as can be done theoretically,master of the details of the school- room. Next, just as the medical student takes his course in the hospitals, the teacher must secure practice — real, hard, actual practice — in teach- ing, with pupils of every sort and age. And, finally, throughout his whole professional preparation, he must make a careful analytical and philosophical study of the history of education. What, beyond anatomy and physiology and laboratory work, is the three or four years' course A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 79 of the medical student except a study, under guid- ance, of the history of medicine, of the record of human experience concerning the treatment of disease, concerning the preservation of health? When a young worker in the hospitals meets new symptoms, does he guess at the disease which they denote, does he experiment first with one drug and then with another in the hope that he may hit upon something suited to the emergency? Absurd supposition! Yet that is what teachers are doing every day. A new child comes to them whose moral habits and intellectual reaction indicate disease — or lack of normal educability. Immediately the average teacher runs through his small record of experience to ascertain if he has had a pupil of such kind before. Finding in his memory a case having somewhat similar features, he at once decides that the disease is due to such and such abnormalities, and must be treated thus and so. If, after a few weeks' trial, it is evident that the treatment is not successful, he tries another moral and intellectual medicine or, more probably, gives the case up and subjects the pupil to the general routine discipline and diet which, in a rule-of-thumb fashion, he has prepared for the average, normal, ought-to-be boy or girl. As a result his patient dies, not, unfor- tunately, in the flesh, but, what is worse, in the 8o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION spirit; and one more victim is added to those slain, with the best intentions, by pedagogical malprac- tice. When the physician, on the contrary, meets ob- scure symptoms he goes at once to his record of other men's experieilce, to his authoritative books, his latest medical journals, his older and wiser colleagues. With their help he makes diagnosis of the disease and learns the manner of treatment approved by experience and analogy. Or, if the patient is in good health and desires to perpetuate that happy state, the physician, having made a careful study of the diet and exercise suited to that man's condition, gives him proper advice. In the manner of the doctor the good teacher should regard every pupil as a patient; either as a well one, to be kept in health and to be helped to grow to hi-s fullest stature and greatest strength, or as a sick one, to be physicked and nursed back, if possible, to mental and moral well-being. Every well-trained teacher ought, as a matter of course, thus to individualize and treat his pupils; his professional instinct should impel him to it; he should find his delight, as the physician does, in the mere act of healing, in the power and influence that his skill has given him. Such a schoolmaster, provided he have the teaching enthusiasm, just as the successful medical man A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 8i must liave the healing fervor, will never question the wisdom of his choice of a profession, for he will know that he is doing the best and most enduring work that It Is in the power of any man to do. It is impossible, of course, for many teachers to secure such a rounded education as this, based upon the training of the physician; but every teacher can strive toward it, and every year his striving, happily, Is made less laborious. A college education, essential as It Is to the highest usefulness, does not, It cannot be too often reiter- ated, make a teacher. The bachelor's degree is but the "articles of apprenticeship"; the real test and trial of work only then begins. Doubtless a college graduate can lay out and superintend a course of study, and can inspire his pupils with enthusiasm in the following of such a course, pro- vided it be work In science, In mathematics, or In literature, in which he purposes, more and more deeply, himself to study. But one is not a real teacher, as a doctor is a real physician, until he can go into a primary or grammar school, plan a course of work within the narrow and somewhat arbitrary lines which custom has laid down, fit that work to the forty different needs of forty pupils, each pupil with a distinct and more or less diseased Individuality, every one suspicious, every one ready to take ad- 82 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION vantage of faults and errors, every one certain to keep himself, until forced open, tight shut within a shell of reserve, of shyness, of boyish defiance, that completely hides his individuality. No one is really a teacher until he is able, in the year or less during which he has control of these forty children, to arouse in them the same enthusiasm for their reading, arithmetic, and geography that, probably, he is perfectly well able to inspire in a special class of picked and nearly mature students of biology or chemistry or higher mathematics. Any young teacher, therefore, who goes im- mediately into collegiate work, or even into high- school teaching, without serving an apprenticeship in the elementary schools, loses a part of his training without which his teaching can never be as effective as it ought. For in the college or high school he will deal only with one phase of mental and moral growth, the adolescent; he will see only picked pupils; he will deal only with minds mature enough to be at least partially self-active and receptive. Moreover, he will be always ignorant of the past mental and moral history, not only of his own pupils, but of all such boys and girls. He will know nothing of that shaping process by which, following the analogy of educational history, the scattered and unformed and ill-disciplined mind of A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING S3 the first primary child is educated into the rudi- ments of learning, by which are unlocked for it, first, the secrets of the printed page; next, the truths and phenomena of science and of history. He will see nothing of the development of the child's social instinct, of the process of instilling into him the minor morals which shall regulate his social intercourse. And he will be ignorant, wofully ignorant, of that storm and stress period of early adolescence, that period in which character is put to the severest test, that period in which the teacher has such power for good that it fills one with indignation to see how lit- tle and how seldom that power is exerted. The teacher in the high school and the college takes the boy after all the battles which decide his character have been fought; and busies himself, too late, in trying to correct faults and heal wounds that have grown too great for correction and too wide for healing. And even his efforts at correction will be, often, foolish and mistaken, because he will have failed to acquire that fundamental knowledge which every teacher ought to possess, a knowledge of the growth of childhood from its very first entrance into the region of school life. If every college man and woman, before entering upon the work of teaching, would submit to this apprenticeship, and if, in following it, would seri- 84 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION ously examine into and build up the character of every pupil coming under his or her control; if, at the same time, the young teachers would profoundly study the history of education, would attend con- ferences, would seek authoritative counsel, just as the doctor studies his authorities and keeps abreast with current discovery and thought, they would not only strengthen themselves incalculably as teachers of the higher subjects, they would leave such an impression upon primary teaching as to hasten immensely the coming of that golden era in teaching when there shall be no child without the opportunity for a full development of his in- dividuality, no child who may not obtain a real edu- cation given by true teachers. CHAPTER VI THE DEMAND FOR VOCATIONAL TRAINING MR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON points an admirable moral in the story of a boy set to plow a field and told to run his first furrow toward a white horse grazing on the other side. The yokel, however, aiming his plow all day long at the same unstable mark, the field at night was a maze of furrows wandering toward every compass-point. Foolish as this young plowman was, he at least grasped the fundamental notion that a furrow must aim somewhere; while to most children in school and youths in college comes never a glimpse of the fact that education has any purpose or object other than that of imparting some useful and much useless information. Only at the two extremes of school life — in the kindergarten and in the professional school — is teaching deliberately given a definite aim; atxd we stand amazed at the zeal and enthusiasni which result. We see, on the one hand, infants exuber- antly willing to work in making things for the father 85 86 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION and mother or for use in the group play; we see, on the other hand, idle and indifferent youth con- verted into omniverous learners and indefatigable workers when, in the professional school, they come in sight of a definite, bread-and-butter goal. Yet we fail to draw the obvious conclusion that motive is a tremendously important, if not, indeed, an essential, factor in all education. From the kinder- garten to the professioanl school, through the ele- mentary and secondary grades and the college of arts, is a long and weary road; but it is made need- lessly difficult for the teacher, while the taught fall out in disastrous number, because there is ceaseless emphasis upon the details of the marching rather than upon the efficiency and power toward which the marching leads. If one protests against this aimlessness of schools and colleges he will be informed that education is to strengthen and broaden generally, not to train specifically, and that to give it an aim would make it narrow, sordid, and material. To prove this position will be cited our parent system of edu- cation, that of the English public school and uni- versity, which has produced a thoughtful and dominant race. But the main reason why that education has been successful is because it had a very definite aim: that of preserving a ruling class VOCATIONAL TRAINING 87 of gentlemen. It matters little what such a body studies provided its system of education maintains an exclusive atmosphere and upholds accepted tra- ditions of gentlemanly honor. But to take, as we have, such an essentially aristocratic system and the principles upon which it rests as models for the wholesale training of a democratic population is, to say the least, a curious anomaly. More singular still, it is only in these modern days, when we most need definiteness in American education, that it has exhibited such thorough- going aimlessness. The early New England train- ing had a very definite goal: that of rearing all chil- dren in godliness and of selecting, out of this widely pious population, the most promising for a collegiate training. The early college, in turn, had the definite purpose of training either ministers to men's souls or magistrates over their bodies. With the multi- plication of sects, however, the religious aim has been gradually eliminated, and with the spread of real democracy every man has become a potential magistrate. Nevertheless, we still cling to the type of education which had those vanished aims, and, to justify ourselves, maintain that education should seek breadth and culture and should therefore be kept remote from the alleged narrow and sordid needs of daily life. &S NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION What are some of the wastes and losses which follow from conservative clinging to this wavering shadow years after the pedagogical substance of it has faded away? Through this false notion of keeping daily education remote from daily living we are perpetuating the wrong idea that education is an aristocratic privilege, not a democratic right; we are accentuating the snobbish contention that v/ork is vulgar instead of being (as it is) the most blessed gift of God; we are making the schooling of children a secondary, and often hated, incident In their formative years; we are losing by the wayside a large proportion of pupils who would greatly profit by the right kind of education; we are graduating from our educational institutions thousands and tens of thousands quite unfitted to grapple with the con- ditions of industrial, civic, and family life; and we are spending enormous sums in directions where they are bringing in no commensurate return in good citizenship and effective workmanship. There are, however, even more direct industrial and moral (for they are inextricably mingled) losses resulting from this aimlessness in education, from this false belief that if a child and youth be given a wide range of general information he will be able to focus it, v/hen necessary, upon the specific needs of his definite life work. An early product is the VOCATIONAL TRAINING 89 restless parent who, seeing no reason except a galling law for keeping his child in school, fills that boy with rebellion against what old and young re- gard as a foolish sacrifice of valuable working-time. This plants in pupils the idea — a seed which finds ready ground — that school is something to be taken as a medicine and to be escaped as often and as early as may be. A second result is that boys and girls, as soon as they are released from school, rush into the first thing which offers, often blighting, by so doing, their whole career. It is deplorable how many lives are spoiled, industrially and morally, because the youth, being able to do little more than read and write, and having no outlook upon real life, applies for work at the first sign of "Boy wanted," takes a position as office or errand boy, learns very little between his fourteenth and seven- teenth years except idleness, shirking and vice, and arrives at the time when he might begin to do a man's work, not only unfitted to take up such labor, but actually — to use a vulgar though expressive phrase — industrially rotten before he has become industrially ripe. A third product of aimlessness is the youth or girl who would much better be at work, but who is kept uselessly at school because of the false notion that even secondary schooling gives a certain social prestige, that, in other words, the 90 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION longer a child is kept from being a useful member of society the higher is his place in the social scale. Another result of our indefinite education is that the industrial world is clamoring for youth who, while having no special skill, possess the ability to become skilled, without finding, in a vast number of the boys turned out from our schools, this needed power. There follow from this, of course, the overcrowding of the unskilled occupations, or those requiring only clerical ability, an upsetting of the industrial balance, and a tremendous waste and loss of human energy. A final result which naturally follows from the others is a widespread distrust of the value of education and, consequently, a lukewarm support of it, finan- cially and morally, by the community. Two things to emphasize with every child from his first dawning of understanding are that he should be a useful worker and a good citizen. The two things, therefore, which should be emphasized in connection with the public schools are that they must produce efficient workers and enlightened citizens. Those aims, however, are to the public rather vague and to the child are, of course, meaningless, unless the school makes them clear and definite through the kind of instruction which it undertakes to give. Premising that the school should do what it can to keep the child healthy and physically whole, it VOCATIONAL TRAINING 91 should give him, first, as essential tools of social living, reading, writing, and number-work, using them — since even a child will appreciate their importance — as a means of sound and solid edu- cational drill. The next things to teach a child are how to use his faculties effectively: his eye so that he may see with his brain, his ears so that he may hear with his mind, his hands so that they may be supple, nimble, and variedly efhcient. Such instruction, of course, must be unconsciously imparted through sub- jects and exercises which call into play those faculties and demand this kind of efficiency — observational studies, sense training, manual development, etc. Education like this, however, can be given ef- fectively only through subjects which really interest the child; and such interest can be aroused, as long centuries of experience have shown, only through work of which the child sees the immediate aim or the ultimate result. Not that the pupil should be entertained or amused: on the contrary, he will and should be made to do much harder work under the incentive of interest than he would dream of doing under the lash of compulsion. But his work should be made vital to the pupil by being of such a nature that he can see daily, definite re- sults or, at least, some clear goal toward which he is every week plainly progressing. 92 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION This requires that every child should be trained as an individual, the fundamental defect in public education being that it tries to deal with masses of children instead of with the individual child. From this follow those mechanical methods of schooling which stunt or pervert every child who does not happen — as very few children do — to fit into the pedagogical machine. To secure individual instruc- tion for each child it is essential to reduce the num- ber of pupils to each teacher. We shall never get a public education which amounts to much as a social force until we are willing to appropriate sufficient money to give at least one teacher to twenty-five pupils and to secure teachers, in all cases, competent to train the child as an individual instead of as part of a huge machine. So long as we try to get a public education that can be given by one teacher to forty, fifty, or even sixty children at once, the moral and economic waste of our present regime cannot be repaired. Supposing that the public should become suffi- ciently aroused to its true interests to appropriate such adequate sums and to spend them upon thoroughly trained teachers, what are some of the ways of giving education, under those conditions, a more definite aim? The first business of the teacher, thus given time to do so, would Be to study VOCATIONAL TRAINING 93 every child in her class, not as an isolated being or as a unit in a school group, but as a member of a family and of a neighborhood; for it is from his family and his neighborhood that he receives the greater part of his general education, and it is as a member of a family and as a citizen of some community that his education is to be put to use. Having acquainted herself v/ith his circumstances, it will be her next duty to adapt her teaching, within reasonable limits, to each child's needs, strengthening those sides of his nature which, because of environment, are weak, filling out those deficiencies which his family and neighborhood cannot supply, giving him those fun- damental forms of training which it is obvious he will most need in after life, and leading him, as far as may seem possible and best, toward that economic path in which he seems most likely to succeed. The next duty of such a teacher, thus given opportunity really to educate, would be to enlist all those family and neighborhood forces on her side. As a rule, those forces now are either in- *different or antagonistic to the school, giving the teacher the double burden of counteracting both a hostile atmosphere outside the school and a stupid and indifferent one within. With an understand- ing of the pupil and with a plain determination to 94 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION help that child to make the most of himself in every way, it will be easy enough to make this great inert or hostile mass which flows around and too often swamps the school into a great flood of enthusiasm and activity to lift the teacher and her pupils up to the highest level of possible efficiency. It is not until the high-school age, however, that definite vocational training can properly begin; and it is in the high-school period that the greatest waste of fine human material now takes place. A vast majority of the youth of that age are flung out into industrial life without proper preparation for, or guidance in, that life; while to the comparatively few who enter the secondary school its courses are of little or no essential benefit. The high schools, as a rule, have thus far wronged the public, not simply in giving their best service to only a small fraction of the community; they have offended even more grievously in belittling the real uses and possibilities of secondary edu- cation. Ignoring the fact that to nine out of ten pupils the high school is the last stage of formal training, its courses have been planned, not to round out that education, but to leave it unfinished, unintelligible, and in large measure barren to those graduates who do not go to college. What wonder, then, that the attendance upon high schools is, VOCATIONAL TRAINING 95 relatively, so insignificant, and that the average parent hesitates to send his children to institutions which, as a rule, do little toward making them into good citizens and workers, and which do much toward leaving them intellectually suspended be- tween the unambitious earth of the grammar school and the unattainable heaven of the university. The first step for public secondary education to take, then, if it would provide the completest prepa- ration for after-life, is to assert and to secure ab- solute independence of the colleges — independence, that is, in matters of curriculum. This being done, there will be possible in the high school that breadth of thought and variety of teaching essential to a complete and impartial preparation for all vo- cations. Freedom and breadth once secured to secondary education, the colleges will quickly adapt themselves to the new order, and will establish better standards for admission: not arbitrary ones, based upon their own supposed needs, but rational ones inciting to the best and widest attainments on the part of the public school, and so flexible that, no matter what may have been his original goal, the pupil who has successfully completed any good secondary course may, at the last moment, deflect himself, without delay or additional labor, into the college doors. 96 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION Agreeing that the public high school should preserve equality toward all possible vocations; that it should give no advantage or encouragement to the future physician over the future shopkeeper, to the shopkeeper over the mechanic, or to the me- chanic over the professional man, how shall this equipoise be maintained? Only by rigorously ex- cluding from the secondary course all that is special to any profession or peculiar to any trade, and by adding every suitable topic and means of teach- ing which has general educational value. Such a process would not reduce the high school to a single uniform course of study; on the contrary, it would at once necessitate wide opportunity for selection on the part of the pupil; creating, thereby, as an inseparable accompaniment of secondary work, an extensive system of elective study. Judiciously supervised, the permission of choice is, in itself, of immense value at the high-school age. Moreover, such permission makes possible, with- out disobedience to the requirement that special vocations shall not be favored, direct vocational preparation. For if the secondary course extend over at least four years, if it be in the hands of fit teachers, the aptitudes of a large proportion of the pupils can be readily discerned. The future of others v/IU be determined by their family or social VOCATIONAL TR.\INING 97 relations. With both these classes it is practicable early to differentiate their work and to lay especial stress, without sacrifice of breadth, upon those high- school topics which bear most directly upon their clearly indicated ultimate vocations. Furthermore, elective studies in the high school foster the growth and development of individuality in its pupils. Our public-school methods have been brought, in many instances, to such perfection that the pupils are in danger of being destroyed in the admired machinery. Some — I fear many — schoolrooms are such excellent pieces of clockwork that the children have been transformed into clock wheels, into mere bits of filed metal, mentally useless except in their school places and quite hope- less dunces if they refuse to permit themselves to be filed at all! Such a result is a mockery of edu- cation, as little related to human needs and pur- poses as is a wax automaton to a flesh-and-blood man. Almost better no teaching than such saw- dust stuff as this! The soul of a man is bound up in his individuality; and were we dealing with primary education it would be easy to grow hot over a system that puts fifty or even sixty of these in- dividual souls into the keeping of a single teacher who, in order to get through her day's work at all, must grind and file and squeeze these little in- 98 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION dividualities into a dulling and deadening uni- formity. Fortunately, or unfortunately, those who get as far as the high school are so few in number that, as a rule, the proportion of pupils to teachers is much smaller than in the lower schools, and individuality can receive some thought and consideration. But there, again, system, that delight of the pedagogue, would, with increasing numbers, assume control were it not that, coincident with an increase in attendance, is growing up an understanding of and a belief in choice of studies. The elective prin- ciple in secondary education, rightly developed and v/isely extended, will do much to hasten the coming of that ideal time when the man and his vocation will be in closer harmony, for it will promote those things which put a man in sympathy with his voca- tion, impel him to seek a congenial work in life, and give him strength to make that work an expression, as all good work should be, of himself. It will pro- mote, in short, his individuality. There are three great classes of workers to whom a high-school course not only is possible but should be made equally beneficial: the professional class, the commercial class, the industrial class. It might be profitable to consider how perfectly the usual secondary course meets the needs of professional VOCATIONAL TRAINING 99 preparation; but since, as has been shown, the strength of the ordinary high-school curriculum — whether well or ill planned — is now expended upon preparation for the professions, that minority of persons may be passed by, in order to consider the vocational training provided by the secondary school for that immense majority of skilled workers, the followers of commerce and the industrial arts. The question is best approached from the other direction, by inquiring what are the qualities that the merchant, the manufacturer, the railroad official, the foreman of a shop, seek in boys who come into their employ to earn eventual promotion to positions of responsibility. They do not demand technical knowledge; that is to be gained only by experience behind the counter, at the desk, upon the road, with the machine or tool. Such technical knowledge cannot be given — ought not to be given if it could — in the school; scarcely can it be im- parted in any establishment other than that to which the boy is to be attached, so peculiar to each office or shop is the skill required to sell its goods, to keep its books, to handle its machinery. In that direction, therefore, the 'prentice mind is preferably smoothed wax whereon the better to Impress the methods, the ideas, the atmosphere individual to each establishment. loo NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION Without demanding specialized knowledge, there- fore, there are many things which the employer of a high-school graduate does want very much; and be- cause he cannot often secure them he complains loudly of education. Not seldom he maintains that the less schooling an apprentice has the better. Truly, as regards schooling of a certain kind he is not far wrong. There is a sort of teaching which destroys the mother-wit and dulls the ambition of the brightest and most eager boy; though, happily, schools of that ill character are increasingly more rare. What are these qualities which every employer of unskilled boy-power — to be transformed along cer- tain lines into skilled man-power — wants .^ First: good morals. The lad must be trustworthy, honest, truth-telling, not easily tempted, sturdy to with- stand the moral ordeal which life holds for every one. Secondly: good health. The teaching and train- ing which, whether he will or not, the employer must give to his employees is, from his standpoint, an Investment of capital; and he is bound to secure such sound flesh-and-blood Into which to put this capital that there will be little risk of physical bankruptcy, just as he and his employee begin to reap, from the technical knowledge and proved faithfulness of the latter, large dividends upon the original investment. VOCATIONAL TRAINING loi Thirdly: gumption. No better than this homely word can be found to express that combination of alertness, keen observation, ready wit, power to seize opportunities and to surmount difficulties, which, next to good health and morals, is most essential to a man's success. Fourthly: power of concentration. That is, abil- ity to work hard and long and intensely, shutting out all other thoughts and interests and reaching by the quickest path the largest measure of result. Fifthly: manual power. Not mere skill in hand- work, but excellence in "handiness." This im- plies an understanding between the brain and hand so perfect that, no matter how new or seemingly difficult the manual task, it is no sooner understood by the mind than the willing muscles instantly respond. Finally, the employer, especially in commercial pursuits, asks, almost despairingly, that the ap- prentice shall have familiarity with and power over the tools of social communication: over reading, writing, spelling, speech, composition, expression, and the use of numbers. How simple this require- ment! Yet how rare the secondary, or even the col- lege, graduate who can so wield the tool of writing that what he writes is both mechanically legible and handsome and intellectually clear and forcible; I02 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION who has such command over the tool of speech that he does not offend by errors, does not mislead others, does not misrepresent himself; who so ap- perceives the printed word that it is a real inter- preter, not a barrier, between his understanding and the writer's thought; who can use the tool of num- bers rapidly, easily, and v/ithout question of the result. Given a boy with good morals and sound health, who can read understandingly, speak clearly, write legibly, grammatically and forcefully, and cipher correctly; let him have, besides, tact (which comes by nature), gumption, handiness, and the power of working both hard and effectively — the business and industrial world is his to choose from, for his worth will have but few competitors. Thorough command of these three R's is secured to the pupil only by eternal vigilance. No oc- casional practise of them will at all suffice. Alike in the secondary and in the elementary school, during every moment of the sessions, writing, spell- ing, speaking, composition, expression, ciphering must be under sleepless inspection. Every exercise, every recitation, every laboratory report should be a double test: of the pupil's knowledge of the topic itself, of his skill with the tools by which he makes that knowledge evident. Hardly a skilled career VOCATIONAL TRAINING 103 can be imagined in which such early vigilance will not be repaid a thousandfold. Rightly or wrongly, the world pays immense re- gard to the forms of things. Call this attitude, if you please, superficial, rail at form as a thing un- essential to true worth and usefulness, the fact re- mains that, as a rule, it is the way in which a man brings himself before the world quite as much as what he brings that assures his success. Man- ners do make the man, because they are the only sign visible to the world of the inward worth. Let the boy or girl possess every virtue and much knowledge, the way of advancement will be difficult or impossible unless he or she can transmute those virtues and that knowledge into the only current coin of social intercourse, the coin of ready and excellent speech and writing, the coin of absolute command of those human tools with which alone the elaborate fabric of civilization has been con- structed and can be carried higher. Concentration, the power of hard and effective work, is a habit that can be formed only in youth. Most high schools are much too lenient in this matter of concentration. Their sessions are too short, thoroughness in everything that the pupil does is not sufficiently insisted upon, the proportion of women teachers (for boys) is too large, manly 104 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION standards are not strongly enough maintained, and the study-time is not so sharply supervised as are the recitation periods. If a boy at fourteen seeks employment, he must, fortunately for him, work hard for many hours a day. If he remains in the high school until his eighteenth year, long hours of labor are still in store for him. What an immense advantage for that boy if those four intervening years could be spent in laborious and exacting exercises performed, not for an indifferent em- ployer, but under the wise and discriminating su- pervision of trained teachers. Seven hours a day during five days a week and at least three hours on Saturday would not be too many for the high- school pupil: provided, of course, that these ex- tended sessions were not spent in a treadmill of brain worry, but were properly divided among recitations, laboratory work, manual and vocational training, drawing, and gymnastics, and that during these sessions, not afterward, the greater part of the pupil's studying should be done. The worst, and one of the commonest, of habits is that of dawdling. Few things contribute more to foster it than home study, where the average boy or girl, without method or definiteness, with no acquired power of concentration, only half understanding and totally indifferent, yawns the evening away in an VOCATIONAL TRAINING 105 attempt to learn lessons which, under intelligent supervision, might be acquired, and acquired pleas- urably, within an hour. Half the task of the schools should be to teach youth how to learn; for the popular ignorance and indifference regarding social and political questions vital to the Republic are due, in great measure, to the fact that the people, at school, have never learned how to bring their minds to bear upon new problems. Any necessity of thought or of in- ductive reasoning fills them with dismay. If the scope of the high school could be so broadened as to attract a far larger proportion of youth, if its day could be lengthened and filled with a variety of systematic and carefully correlated exercises tending to develop, among other things, the power of concentration, the vocations would find a new race seeking admission to them, a race able to develop old and to acquire new ideas, a race not only know- ing how to work, but not afraid to work, a race regarding whom no employer would think of assert- ing that it had been spoiled by schooling. Unhappily, one cannot establish courses in gump- tion, but one can put into the high school many subjects that promote its growth. Foremost among these will be mathematics, the sciences, and sound manual training: anything, indeed, suited to high- io6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION school age, which compels a youth to do his own studying and thinking and to use, In the highest pos- sible measure, the inductive method. How com- pletely the stereotyped secondary course of but a few years ago failed to promote sharpness of the faculties, exactness of observation, quickness of thought, readiness of inference! Yet what voca- tion in these electric days does not demand, above all else, those qualities? Manual power, handiness, arises from the same sources and methods of teaching as does gump- tion, for the two are in close relation. The stupid, unalert mind and the awkward hand have their root equally in a sluggish nervous system, un- aroused interest, unstirred ambition. Find studies that will supply these deficiencies and the boy will be transformed. Some pupils will need one stimu- lus, some another; but the readiest way to find what is required is through the laboratory and the work- shop, where, as In no other place, the wise teacher can read the Inmost workings of the pupil's nature and determine, almost without fail, what stimulus must be supplied to arouse the dormant faculties. Good health may not lend itself to examination by the colleges; yet the high-school authorities have no greater duty than to preserve and foster it. However wicked it may seem to spend the people's VOCATIONAL TRAINING 107 money upon gymnasiums rather than upon "book- learning,'' their taxes cannot be put at any more profitable usury. The money loss to the country through preventable illness, untimely death, and disease-induced crime is appalling. Even greater, if possible, is the loss through the mental and physi- cal inefficiency of workers kept in a low state of health by bad food, lack of proper exercise, and other non-hygienic conditions. Therefore, not only should gymnastic exercise be made as serious as any other study of the high school; the sound, sensible, and complete teaching and practice of hygiene should extend throughout the course. No foolish maundering about alcohol and tobacco, but a thorough training in right physical living that will fortify against intemperance of every kind. With high-school courses aiming to preserve sound bodies, to develop quickness of observation, clear- ness of thought, readiness of reasoning; with its lengthened day distributed judiciously over a wide range of mental, manual, and gymnastic exercises; with the powers of its pupils thus educated in the highest degree — self-understanding, self-respect, self-government, except in born degenerates, will follow almost as a matter of course. And upon these depend good morals. Secure, therefore, a rational, flexible, real secondary education main- loS NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION tained by professional, not amateur, teachers of the highest personal ideals, and the good morals of those who receive it will be practically assured. Without this, or, indeed, with it, didactic morality is wholly ineffectual. CHAPTER VII THE PRESSING NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR present purposes industrial education may be divided into (i) technological education, through vrhich, after graduation from a secondary school or college, a youth is prepared for a profession other than that of divinity or law; (2) technical education, by which is meant that special training through which a youth is fitted to become a foreman, manager or superintendent of a particular industry or group of industries; (3) trade education, through which a boy or girl is prepared to enter an industry or group of industries at a stage not far below that of journeyman; and (4) manual training, under which are included those school exercises that train the hands — and also the eye — not primarily for the industrial but mainly for the educational result. Making a cleavage in the other plane, all these types of education divide themselves, broadly, into day schools, night schools, and part-time schools: into schools where the pupIFs first business is education; into those which are 109 no NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION merely supplementary to the daily, gainful occupa- tion; and into those where the vocation and the school work go forward hand in hand. Additional to these and rivaling, in point of numbers, all the others put together, are the correspondence schools, which at least show how great must be the need of and the desire for technical training since so many tens of thousands of men and women will pay con- siderable sums to secure instruction through the unsatisfactory medium of the post-ofhce. We may, however, ignore these correspondence schools, for confessedly they occupy only a temporary void which must eventually be filled by regular school agencies. We may neglect, also, the higher insti- tutions, since the education given by such colleges is professional rather than merely technical. Let us then consider the opportunities for true industrial education, under the direction of a teacher and in buildings designed for school purposes, for boys and girls from ten to twenty years of age. I set this somewhat narrow limit because, despite the fact that apprenticeship is substantially dead, there is still a good deal of apprentice-teaching of one kind and another, in a wide range of trades and industries and under every sort of good and bad condition. These opportunities within the indus- tries are, however, so scattered, so incomplete, in NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION iii many cases still so much in the experimental stage, that it would hardly be worth while, even were it possible, to consider and compare them. Turning first to technical education proper, we find the manufacturing regions rich in opportunities for youth to fit themselves for executive positions in the trades and industries, to fit themselves, that is, for the duties of foreman, superintendent, etc., from which positions it is easy, in this country, to rise into industrial and economic power. The fellow who wants to get on in the world appeals strongly to all Americans and especially to those of wealth who are themselves self-made men. Therefore we find in almost every city, day schools, night schools, ''continuation" schools, special classes, lectures, model shops and museums giving opportunity for a youth who is or has been industrially employed to fit himself for positions of greater scope and respon- sibility. This is the origin of those endowed in- stitutions of which the Cooper Union in New York, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, and the Lowell Free School for Industrial Foremen in Boston are typical examples. Most of such institutions conduct day classes, with definite curricula; but the bulk of their instruction is given in evening classes crowded with eager students who, notwithstanding they have already 112 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION performed a hard day's work, come evening after evening, applying themselves with that zeal and thoroughness which only an immediate and pressing motive can induce. Besides these, we have such classes as those of the Young Men's Christian Association, and of various other semi-philanthropic agencies — secular, religious, and semi-religious — which use technical education primarily to uplift their young men and women, but also as a means of attaching them to the institutions of which this work is but one of the activities. And, finally, we have a few institutions, like the Williamson School, in the suburbs of Phila- delphia, which take possession of the young man for some years and give him a thorough training, mentally and technically, for foremanship in a trade, making him work out with his own hands substan- tially every type of problem, whether in building, masonry, ironwork, plumbing, electricity or mech- anism, which is likely ever to be presented to him. Speaking generally, all such auxiliary modes of education give a good body of academic training specialized more or less to meet the needs of in- dustrial occupations, and they provide, beyond that, such technical training in physics, chemistry, draw- ing, mechanics, architecture, etc., as will enable the graduate to nil an executive position, of greater or NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 113 less responsibility, in one or more of the many and rapidly multiplying trades, industries, and technical professions. Most of them give, moreover, such preliminary instruction as seems feasible for the various lines of mercantile employment. The courses and the efficiency of these many agencies differ exceedingly; but the aim of all of them is to ascertain the intellectual and technical demands for advancement and eventual leadership in the several industries and to encourage youth employed in those or in other occupations to prepare themselves to fulfil them. Technological schools and technical schools, how- ever, exist superlatively, if not solely, for training the officers of the industrial army. In both types there is given every opportunity for young men and women of energy, industry, and determination to get an education and to make that education the stepping-stone to the highest industrial and intel- lectual achievement. And, as has already been said, the giving of this opportunity so appeals to us Americans that we need never fear a dearth of in- stitutions in which every youth who wants to do so may secure — even though it be through much hardship and privation — an education for leader- ship in the industrial army. But what of the rank and file of that enormous 114 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION industrial host? It was the royal army of Hawaii, I believe, that boasted hundreds of officers and not a single private; but are we not, also, paying too much attention to the training of officers, too little to the men and women who do the fighting in this ceaseless struggle to subdue nature to the service of mankind? To secure and maintain industrial power, we need not more and better officers, we need not more and better machinery, we need higher skilled and better disciplined privates behind those tools and machines. To-day, it seems to me, we find ourselves confronted with the evil results of this over-concern for the development of the in- dustrial superstructure, of this under-attention to the strengthening of the foundations upon which that structure has to rest. We find everywhere, that is, a dearth of men of skill, men who think about their work, men who take pride in a good job, men who are striving, as are the German workmen, to put the entire nation in the industrial forefront. The industrial leaders of Germany say — and I think with reason — that they have no fear of our competition in manufactures, so many years behind are we in the training for his work of the average workingman. Yet in native ingenuity we are ahead of the Germans, while in highly educated industrial executives we are fast overtaking her. NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 115 Our backwardness — which must be patent to every one who has to do with industries — is partly due, of course, to the fact that we have only lately entered the world's markets and realized the demands made by international competition. It is due, how- ever, in far greater measure to what seem to me false notions respecting education. We have been so fearful lest we should not give every boy and girl an equal chance that we have ended by cheating a great proportion of them out of any chance what- ever. We have been so afraid of establishing a caste system that we have developed the most wretched caste of all, a caste of men and women with no definite trade or occupation and with no chance to acquire one. On the ground that all children should have equal opportunity, we have established an elementary school course practically the same for every pupil whether he is to go out as a day laborer at fourteen or is eventually to graduate from a professional school at twenty-five. More than this, the only test of this elementary education lies in examina- tions which, however remote from the college, are really dictated indirectly by the university's de- mands. The result is that, instead of giving a democratic training, we really have established a very special kind of education which, if it ceases — ii6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION as for most children it does — at fourteen, fits a child only (and that most imperfectly) for some clerical vocation. In addition to thus giving in the elementary public schools what is actually a limited class education, we also create the mischievous im- pression that to be honorable and genteel one must work with the head, rather than with the hands, thus desperately overcrowding the most poorly paid occupations while failing to supply in any adequate measure those skilled trades which offer a com- paratively high reward. Furthermore, though seek- ing to avoid caste distinctions, we actually create a real proletariat through economic conditions which make it impossible for the vast majority of boys and girls to go to school after the fourteenth year, and thus to take advantage of the special opportunities which are provided, at public cost, for those children whose economic status does per- mit of their attending the high school. It may be said in answer that, in ever-increasing measure, we arc providing manual training in the schools. Did this training reach, as it does not, any more than a small fraction of the children who need industrial development, it still has, con- fessedly, serious deficiencies as a form of technical training. Founded, as it generally is, upon the so-called Russian system, it is limited in scope and NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 117 hangs in pedagogical air between unrelated earlier studies and an unconnected later vocation. Being devised for classes rather than for the individual, it allows, on the one hand, little play for individual- ity, and, on the other, almost none of that working together which is fundamental to a right industrial spirit. Worst of all, it repudiates economic utility and — with great loss to the pupil — emphasizes the fact that its purpose is educational, not indus- trial. Regarded simply from the pedagogical stand- point, manual training should begin the moment a child enters school and should progress by rational stages to a shop-work which, while being exact and thorough, should permit of spontaneity and inventiveness, should emphasize group work and the constructional side and, above all, whether or not the pupil is to go into industrial life, should connect itself in the closest possible way with the industries of the neighborhood and of the city or town wherein the child resides. Far more should manual training do these things from the industrial standpoint; and because it does not, it cannot yet be considered an important factor in solving this pressing problem of technical training for the rank and file. The first thing to be done, it seems to me, is frankly to acknowledge that an overwhelming ii8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION majority of public-school children are obliged, by- unchangeable economic necessity, to leave school at fourteen — or as early as the law allows — and to enter, for the rest of their lives, some industrial occupation. That being so, it is the duty of the community to fit them for that inevitable vocation just as the college and school of technology fit for the higher vocations, not by teaching the knacks and tricks of any special trade, but by training those senses, aptitudes, and general powers which lie at the foundation of industrial efficiency. There are certain fundamental studies which every child must, of course, take up. There are, moreover, certain virtues, such as honesty, diligence, patriot- ism, which every school should endeavor to instil. But in addition to those, the course of every ele- mentary school should develop in the highest degree possible to every child his powers of seeing clearly, hearing intelligently, and using his hands skilfully, and should teach him how to work. Moreover, school courses should be so elastic and adaptable to the individual as to meet the special requirements of the neighborhood or of the town in which the school is placed, and to give every child at least the root principles of that trade in which he is most likely to find ready and profitable employment. Even this, however, would meet in but very small NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 119 degree the pressing needs of the industrial situation. There should further be provided on a large and generous scale, in both the mechanic and agricultural arts, not only a definite industrial training for the young men and women of push and ambition who seek the higher places, but also a real bread and- butter education for the infinitely greater number who desire, of course, a decent wage and a steady job, but who have neither the brains nor the am- bition to take advantage of the opportunities which, as I have tried to show, are being provided with perhaps needless liberality. I may best indicate the general type of opportunity which these over- whelming numbers of our boys and girls ought to have by describing briefly two schools: the Man- hattan Trade School for Girls and the Baron de Hirsch Trade School, both in New York City. The first-named school, troubling itself little about theories of a rounded education or of an out- raged democracy, undertook to meet a definite con- dition: that of girls leaving school at fourteen unable to get a living wage, and finding it almost impossible to fit themselves to earn that wage, a condition even more serious in its moral than in its economic aspects. The school meets the problem by finding out what industrial opportunities there are for trained girls of fifteen or sixteen and by educating I20 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION those girls strictly and solely to meet those oppor- tunities. The pupils receive, of course, some train- ing in writing, number work, etc., but even that is designed for business; while no girl is taught the whole of a trade in all its developments and rami- fications. She is prepared in only so much of it as a girl of sixteen can enter, it being clear that if she once gets a foothold as a trained assistant, she can, if she will, rise by industry to the highest positions which that trade may oifer. In millinery, for example, this school wastes no time in teaching a child to trim hats, for there is no possibility of her doing that kind of work for a number of years. In dressmaking, again, the school trains neither fitters nor finishers, for such positions are out of the reach of girls of sixteen; while there is a strong and steady dem.and for such girls in those simple branches of dressmaking in which this school gives the pupils a thorough and practical training under the supervision of genuine forewomen and under the very best conditions of the actual shop. The result is that after a compara- tively short time (varying, of course, with the in- dividual) the girl is in demand at five dollars a week (without the training she could command not over three dollars) and rapidly rises to a much higher rate of pay. Boston has a similar Trade School for Girls on Massachusetts Avenue. . NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 121 The Baron de Hirsch Trade School takes Russian Jews at sixteen or seventeen — pedlers, errand boys, casual workers of all kinds — and in five and a half months of hard training under shop conditions fits them to be helpers in the carpentering, metal working, plumbing, and other trades at an average wage, immediately upon graduation, of over seven dollars per week, rising rapidly to two and three times that sum. Without training, these boys would hardly earn five dollars a week and would have, more- over, no outlook except to be always "casuals." Facing, as such schools as these have done, facts and not theories, we must, it seems to me, find some way of establishing, on a comprehensive scale, real trade schools which shall take substantially every child whom necessity drives into work at the end of the legal age and fit him for some occupation for which he is suited and in which there is an economic demand. Whether or not this shall be done at public cost, it is not yet time to say, though I be- lieve that it would be more just to spend the common revenues in this way than upon high-school pupils whose parents are perfectly able to pay a tuition fee. But for the starting of such schools there is an abundance of private funds, provided the givers or the trustees can be made to see that the need for training the rank and file is so much greater than for 122 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION developing officers in the industrial army. The chief obstacles are not, however, financial; they are those of prejudice: the prejudice of the educator who sees danger to the ancient theories of *^ culture," *^ breadth" and all their satellites; the prejudice of the citizen who fears the development of caste and the destruction of the sacred first clause of the Dec- laration; and the prejudice of the labor organiza- tions, who cannot yet be made to understand that the good of one worker is the good of the whole, and that the greatest enemy to Labor is the industrial ignorance of its rank and file. Therefore, the most pressing business of education, it seems to me, is to educate away these diverse and deep-seated prejudices. It must persuade its own followers that the only truly educated man is he who has been developed to his fullest powers, and that those powers can be best matured by activities related to the child's present life and future in- terests. It must persuade the public that to develop a good citizen one must first make a good earner, and that no man is industrially efficient whose train- ing for making a living has been left wholly to chance. It must persuade — for it is impossible to defy — the labor unions that just as educated physicians, lawyers, and engineers have raised not only the standing but also the standards of compensation in NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 123 those professions, so training in the industries will elevate not only the quality but also the value of the skilled laborer's work. There is at present so much loss and waste, and therefore so much risk in all industry through ignorance and lack of skill, that capital has to insure itself by taking a larger profit (when there is one) than, under the immensely improved conditions which would follow a wide- spread trade education, it would need, or would be permitted, to receive. Meeting the pupil, then, at the end of the legal school age, and finding him, it is to be hoped, with senses and understanding already rightly educated by a comprehensive general and judicious special training, the technical school of the future, in close working cooperation with the manufacturers, will give those two or three years up to seventeen — now of little value industrially but of immense impor- tance morally — to the work of preparing that pupil for some definite trade, industry or occupation. In doing this it will have regard to the native capacity of the child, to the circumstances in which he is placed, and to the industrial needs of his town or neighborhood. Whether or not the graduate from such a school follows the line of his training is of little consequence; the very fact that he has a trade gives him a power and manliness unknown to the 124 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION helpless "casual'* whom, under present methods, the school now sets adrift at fourteen. And that he has a trade by no means fetters him to a special industry or to any industrial stratum; if he has ability and push he will rise and find his true voca- tion just as rapidly as he can now progress with an alleged all-round education. Indeed, he will go for- ward far more easily, for he will be able, through the fact of having a trade, to secure that first foot- hold which, with "self-made" men, is the most difficult and disheartening step. The effect of such technical schools upon the general welfare of the community: the direct eflfect in increasing industrial efficiency and prosperity and the indirect influence in diminishing the number of incompetents, unfor- tunates, and other social wrecks and burdens, will be, unquestionably, so great as literally to re-form our industrial and social structure; while their reactive effect upon elementary education in giving its proc- esses a clear aim, thus invigorating and vitalizing them through and through, will be no less salutary. CHAPTER VIII THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS IN THE early years of the present century, Prince Henry of Prussia visited the United States as the personal representative of the German Emperor. As is our habit with royalty, our adula- tions were even deeper and sillier than in countries where they are used to kings. The culmination of our foolishness was in a dinner given to him in New York, to which were invited only the so-called "Captains of Industry." These were about a hundred in number and included steel, oil, and rail- way magnates, insurance company presidents, and other millionaires and multi-millionaires. This bringing of the lions together for exhibition to the royal representative of Germany was harmless in itself; the mischief came through the newspapers and magazines which for weeks and months there- after were filled with glorifications of these wonder- ful leaders, with implications that their ability was of superhuman character, and with exhortations to young men to make their lives worthy to be men- 125 126 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION tioned In the same category with those of the em- perors of modern life. Within less than a year, however, the bubble of money worship burst. The son of a dead captain fell foul of some of the living captains, and from one revelation to another the sickening story went on of conspiracy, cheating, misuse of funds, and common thievery, through which not a few of these magnates had risen to their financial eminence. It was mainly a story of bribery of legislation, of employment of trust funds for private speculation, of building up private fortunes through the wholesale corruption of public morals. The worst of it, however, was this : that although many newspaper representatives, and therefore many newspaper editors, had been familiar with the main facts of this rottenness for twenty years, they had all joined in the adulation of these Captains of Industry and in the exhortations to young men to take these magnates as models for a really noteworthy career. Had the balloon not burst, the painting of black as white would seemingly have gone on indefinitely. That period of moral readjustment was a crucial one in the history of the United States, in com- parison with which other crises, like those of the Revolution, the adoption of the Constitution, and the election of i860, are comparatively small. Had the THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 127 Captains-of-Industry bubble not been pricked, had those exalted thieves been worshipped for a few years longer, such corruption would have been in- stilled into the body politic, such widespread con- fusion of right and wrong would have ensued, that the country would almost certainly have gone, like perverted Rome, to a deserved decay. Fortunately the corruptors of public morals quarreled, the sound ethical sense of the people revolted at the exposed financial nastiness, and the federal and state govern- ments lent powerful aid in bringing back the true meanings of commercial right and wrong. Mr. Roosevelt, like all ardent and impulsive men, made not a few mistakes; but this country owes him an everlasting debt for his downrightness of speech and action at that critical time. The business world, since the life insurance cata- clysm, is not, of course, a community of saints. It is still an aggregation of men, with all the faults and weaknesses of human nature. But, since the down- fall of the Captains-of-Industry worship, the moral vision of the so-called man-in-the-street has been changed and clarified. There is still plenty of cheating, stealing, falsifying, and "knifing" (to use an expressive word) in business, but these things are no longer legitimate and praiseworthy. There has come back into the commercial world the old-time 128 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION respect for sound industry and solid worth; there has been restored a genuine belief that "honesty is the best policy"; and it is now possible to tell a young man, without an ironical wink, that the surest road to abiding success is through hard work and unfalter- ing probity. Tinsel and paste are still admired and run after in the business, as in the marriage market; but they are no longer accepted, in the long run, as a substitute for the genuine article. Every profession, even the ministry, is infested with rogues and swindlers; and, in these better days, if business seems still to show more than its share, it is largely because the opportunities are greater, the total number in the profession is larger, and because money evils are easier to see. Since these things touch one's pocket rather than one's mind or soul, they get talked about to a degree in which no similar wickedness, even in the clerical profession, reaches the public ear. The learned professions, however, are rapidly raising their standards and increasing their moral demands. The profession of business, no less, must not only elevate its ideals, it must hold its members to stricter moral account if it is to keep pace with the progress of the world. Were one attempting a counsel of perfection, he would doubtless advocate, as an ideal preparation THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 129 for business, two years of college, then one or two years of hard work in some manufacturing or mer- cantile establishment, then a return for graduation (with carefully chosen specialties) at college, then two years in that professional school of science, law, or commerce which bears most closely upon the chosen business, and finally at least one year's travel through the United States and in countries abroad. To most young men this long program is, of course, impossible; and with many it might have the dis- astrous result seen in the case of some medical students, who spend so much time in the schools and hospitals that when finally, at about thirty years of age, they are ready to practise, they find that the spring and ambition of youth are practically gone and, with them, all hope of a great professional career. Let us limit ourselves, then, to that still com- paratively very small class of men who can spend four years at college in preparation for a business life. And let us start out with the conviction that unless he absolutely idles away those four years, the youth who takes a college course thereby secures an intel- lectual and moral advantage over those who go directly into business from the elementary or secondary school, which the latter can seldom, if ever, overcome. For a college education means, or I30 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION should mean, culture, and culture is the cream of life, is the fruit of the tree, is the supreme end and test of civilization. Because, however, culture has been so much prated about by intellectual snobs, because, in homely phrase, it has been thought to be related more to the dessert than to the solid bread and meat of life, it has acquired rather an ill name, a reputation not improved by newspaper jokes over Matthew Arnold's sugar-candy phrase of "sweetness and light." But, far from being a frill and luxury of life, culture is one of the first essentials to real success and, in its true meaning, not in the restricted sense of dilettantism to which we too often limit it, the only really successful man is he who possesses culture. For to have true culture means that a man has a mind furnished with many things beyond and above the matters which concern his livelihood; that he has breadth of view, knowledge of the world, skill in dealing with men, ability to foresee and intelli- gence to grapple with the complex problems which meet one every day. This true culture the college graduate should have, and, having it, he possesses a lifelong advantage which nothing can take away. College men who are going into business may be roughly divided into two classes : those who, by early definition of choice or by family opportunity, are looking forward to some particular occupation, and THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 131 those who are going into ^^just business,'^ this latter class being wholly at sea as to whether that business is to be manufacturing, transportation, or whole- sale or retail trade. Each should acquire, as a fundamental tool, a good working knowledge of the principles of mercantile exchange, of what may be called the alphabet of business — familiarity, that is, with the essentials of accounting, with the nature of checks, notes, stocks, bonds, etc., and with the writing of a business letter couched in the phraseology of the work-a-day world. There is an astounding ignorance on the part of the average college graduate regarding these simple questions, and to that ig- norance is due in no small degree the widespread impression that a college career is of little use in mercantile affairs. Just as bad spelling makes an unfavorable impression far in excess of its real importance, so this type of ignorance produces an effect upon employers way beyond its actual significance. Secondly, the young business man must be both able and willing to do a lot of hard work, not by occa- sional spurts of energy, but of the steady, grinding kind through which alone he can master the infinite details of whatever industry he may enter, can over- come the daily difficulties and discouragements which he is sure to meet, and can rise above the clerical ^ 132 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION rank and file into those positions of responsibility wherein alone he can have a fair chance to show what he is able to do. In order, however, to do the kind of steady, hard labor which a successful career demands, a young man must possess a body which is a well-tempered and well-trained machine. The essential thing, therefore, is to conserve his health, not undermining it by bad eating, bad air, lack of exercise, smoking, drinking, and other excesses; not jeopardizing it by overexertion in either study or athletics; and not making too frequent drafts, for social pleasures, upon the great reserve fund which, at college age, most persons have. On the other hand, he must de- liberately train body and mind, in the exceptional opportunity offered by the college environment, to work together, so that each shall help the other in keeping sound, in becoming efficient, and in accom- plishing an enormous amount of really telling work. Beyond the ability to perform hard work, however, there should be the constant readiness and willing- ness to do it; and one of the genuine grievances of the business world against the college is that so many of its graduates, likely in body and in brain, amount to nothing because, in the college course, they have got into the habit of doing just as little as possible, instead of into the habit of doing just as much as THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 133 possible. The employer wants men coming from college to be in that state of mind where they abhor idleness, regard waste of time as a good deal worse than waste of money, and look upon promptness, efficiency, accuracy, and thoroughness as essential to everything they undertake. Thirdly, the young business man should have good judgment (so much, that is, as is possible with- out wide experience of men and affairs), quickness of apprehension, fertility of resource, readiness to adapt himself to new conditions, and willingness to learn. He should have, in short, those qualifications which are admirably summed up in the good Yankee word *' gumption." Hard work alone will seldom achieve success beyond that of the faithful, plodding understrapper. "Slickness" (to use another ex- pressive Yankee word), if it achieve apparent success, does so at the sacrifice of everything else. But *' gumption" and all that it implies, when combined with the spirit of honesty and the ability and willing- ness to work, is absolutely certain (provided a fellow has sound health) to win for him genuine and en- during success. Finally and superlatively, the business man must know how to deal with men. Just as actual gold and silver play very little part in actual business transactions, their place being taken by that in- 134 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION tangible yet most real thing called credit, so the mechanical processes of production, distribution, and exchange are almost insignificant in business in com- parison with the intellectual and moral processes of meeting, influencing, and commanding men. The merchant has to study men, to understand them, to put himself, hourly, in right relations with them if he hopes to succeed, not only as a man of business but as a citizen. And this kaleidoscopic problem of human intercourse divides itself roughly into four main groups: into the men above one, the men below one, the men on a level with one, and, by no means least, that most important man, one's self. Granted that a man's daily work is well and faithfully done, his business reputation will come from his study of and efforts with these four classes of human beings, greater and smaller in number, who fill in the entire circle of his daily world. As to a man's dealings with those above him, he will be concerned chiefly with two classes: those who employ him and those other older persons who may have it in their power to help or to hinder. What should be one's attitude toward these men? It should invariably be that of respectful self-respect. Diffidence or cringing humility on the one hand is as much to be avoided as "freshness" or obtrusiveness on the other; but, while always deferential to the THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 135 experience of these older men, while always mindful that one's ''boss" has a powxr which, in a moment of dyspepsia or of irritation toward some one else, he may arbitrarily and unjustly exercise upon you, no one should be awed by the mere fact of age. The difference in real feeling (except with an occasional curmudgeon) between the elder and the younger man is very slight; deep down in his heart the middle- aged man, notwithstanding his years of experience, is rarely very confident of himself, and, not seldom, is about as afraid of the youth as the youth is of him. Moreover, there is almost always a soft spot, half- compassionate, half-regretful, in every old man's heart for youth. ^^ Si jeunesse savait; si vieillesse pouvaitJ^ And it is by tactful dealings with the particular manifestations of these common attri- butes in his special "boss" that many a man of ambition makes his way to-day. By this manifest eagerness to learn; by a willing- ness, too, to do anything within reason and within honesty that one's employer calls upon him to do; by a disposition, moreover, to do it as he likes to have it done; above al^., by a readiness to go ahead and do the thing immediately, quickly and thoroughly, without any ifs, ands, or buts, finding out for himself how the job is to be undertaken, and throwing him- self heart and soul into that particular task until it 136 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION is done and done right — by these things, not by toadying or intercession of relatives or running down of rivals, will the young employee get the notice and the promotion that, eventually, are to make him master of his own career. Next in importance to his relations with those above him is the question of a man's ability in han- dling those placed under him. The marked char- acteristic of a leader of men is that he not only can do things himself but can get them properly done by his subordinates. This executive ability, eminence in which is the master key to success in this age of gigantic enterprises, is based, first, on the power to judge the capabilities of one's subordinates accurately; secondly, on the ability to make one's explanations and to give one's orders so clearly that these subordinates will produce just the results for which one is looking; and, thirdly, on knowing just how to drive the underlings so that they may be kept at the highest pressure consistent with the doing of good work, but may not feel themselves in any degree aggrieved or forced. All this means that one must give his subordinates the best possible conditions under which to work, must always be ready to work with them — but never to the point where any of them shall lose his feeling of personal responsibility for his particular share of the under- THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 137 taking — must always be fair and gentlemanly (the word is used advisedly, for no man can ever afford not to be a gentleman) in one's dealings with them, and must exhibit unfailing readiness to work and buoy- ancy in working. The third group of persons with whom a man must deal will be those, so to speak, on a level with him. This includes, of course, his friends, his ordinary business associates, and his social acquaintances. A young man w ho hopes to get on simpl)^ because he is worthy of promotion will probably remain fixed like a sea-anemone till the end of time; but give him firm friends whom he has legitimately won by virtue of sterling qualities, and his merits will not long be unheralded and not much longer unappre- ciated. Not that even firm friends are always to be depended upon; competition is too keen and human nature is too uncertain for a man's friends always to hold by him. Nevertheless, if a young man makes a business of securing the right sort of acquaintances, and if, from these, he makes a deliberate effort to cultivate the friendship of those who not only are decent fellows but who, in all probability, will sooner or later make a mark in the world, he has then sur- rounded himself, like a feudal baron, with an army of unpaid retainers who, in one way or another way, in less degree or in greater measure, will protect and 138 NEW DEIMANDS IN EDUCATION help and further him along that hard and dangerous road toward success which every one of us is trying to travel. And last, but in importance first, a man has every ^ minute in the day to deal with one unescapable per- son, himself. His chief work with this toughest problem of all will be to strengthen that mainspring of all success, his will. Acknowledging, as every one must, that the road to good fortune, no matter whether it be in business, in poetry, or in politics, is thickly strewn with disagreeable tasks, and that, as a rule, the greater the prize the more unpleasant and apparently thankless the preliminary labor, it is plain that a man, if he is to amount to anything, must have his will in such training that it will bend his body and his mind to the doing of the worst drudgery, to the facing of the most unpleasant odds, to the accomplishing of what they set out to do, no matter how many lions stand roaring and clawing in the path. If a man hopes to succeed in literature, he must tear up dozens of manuscripts and burn gal- lons of midnight oil before the public will even know that he exists; if he would be a leader in public life, he must begin at the bottom and creep up, step by step, kicked, hustled, and misunderstood, till the leaders ahead of him are forced to see his worth; if he would be a great surgeon or a successful lawyer, he .THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS I39 must long be patient-less and brief-less, must swal- low many an insult and work many a day for nothing before he can secure even the merest edge of a foot- ing in these overfilled professions; if he would be a really great merchant or manufacturer, a young man must put his pride in his pocket for many a long week, must do work that is merest drudgery for many a weary month, and, given the chance to show what he can do, must spend many a sleepless night studying and planning, lest through failure at this crucial moment his reputation be forever ruined. All this bitterness of spirit and all this drudgery can be borne only by a man of such will that he never loses sight of his determination to succeed, of such control over his will that it never flags in keeping up his courage, of such steadiness of will that it holds his thoughts and curbs his passions and directs his inclinations to the one end of achiev- ing real, enduring success. CHAPTER IX THE NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM HE WHO is nourished by the state owes him- self to the state — that is the creed alike of ancient Sparta and of modern socialism. In a modified form it should be the social religion of every citizen. For, from the point of view of the community, what frightful debtors we all are. Look at the balance-sheet of most of us when, at legal majority, we start upon our active careers. On the one side — the debit side — stand the myriad bene- fits of civilization, benefits won through ages of struggle and accumulation by millions of unknown men and women, each one adding something to the sum of civilization, not one taking anything into the world beyond. On that same debit side should be placed the nurture and the teaching which from parents, from friends, from that body of individuals called the state, we have, up to the time when we can go alone, freely received. Again, on that debit side stand the opportunities which are ours, under law and order and personal safety, to make careers 140 NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 141 for ourselves, to earn a livelihood, to find happiness, to found homes, to live unharried by the terrors of the wilderness, the horrors of invasion, the discom- forts and dangers of a mediaeval or a pioneer life. And on the other side of this account, the credit side, what do we find? What part of this capital which the advancing civilization of centuries, the republican institutions of a hundred years, the devotion and self-denial of relatives and friends, have laid up for him, has any youth just entering upon active life paid in? Not one penny. Yet before his life shall have been ripened and ended, unless it has been lived in vain, his vast debt to the past must have been more than repaid and in its place must be found a balance of achievement to be added to that huge capital called civilization, which was his to draw upon when he set out in life and which, greatly augmented by his eff"orts and those of millions of his contemporaries, will be no less freely at the com- mand of his successors. It is untrue, then, that the world owes every man a living. On the contrary, the world pays in its capital in advance, and with most of us who have arrived at mature manhood or womanhood it is we who owe. To the majority has been given without stint a fund of health, of physical and mental power, of civilized environment, of unlimited opportunity; 142 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION and, whether we like the arrangement or not, our lives, if they are to amount to an3^thing, must be devoted to the repayment of this social obligation. A fool in his heart may say: "I will live for myself alone, make money for myself, spend it upon me and mine, take all these benefits that the state gives to me, that civilization has provided for me, and do nothing in return; then indeed shall I overreach Providence and get much for nothing." But sooner or later, in his day, in that of his children, or of his children's children, the accumulated reckoning will be presented, and the debt will be exacted to its uttermost farthing, with bitterness and shame and suffering. Similarly, a nation or a commonwealth may say: "We have had great and splendid ancestors who built us a country and a government out of the wilderness, bought freedom for us with their sweat and blood, founded great industries and institutions of government, established schools and colleges; these ancestors of ours have made it possible for us, with comparative ease, to enrich ourselves; their inventions have opened to us a thousand ways of enjoyment of which they did not dream; therefore will we give ourselves up wholly to money getting and money spending, leaving such dry-as-dust questions as the civil service, municipal government, NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 143 education, to those cranks, the political economists, and those low rascals, the professional politicians; therefore will we eat, drink, and be merry, turning over the state and the country to the tender mercies of the bosses. If they trouble us we will buy them off; if they shame us, we will go to Europe; if they bring the Republic to the brink of ruin, we will help to set up a dictator who will relieve us of all further thought about these tiresome questions of self- government." But to a commonwealth or a nation that banks upon the virtues and the self-denial of the forefathers, eating up its inherited capital of manliness, spending without investing, reaping without sowing, comes always the inevitable result, the result which has come over and over again to states and kingdoms — absolute decay and that oblivion which mercifully hides all dead and useless things. That ours may not be such a fate as this is one of the main reasons for the compulsory free school. That institution exists, ultimately, for the promo- tion and stimulation of active patriotism. There- fore we see the flag daily floating over almost every schoolhouse; therefore we find text-books in history exalting the national prowess and belittling all foreign peoples; therefore we find the pupils sing- ing, in a shouting fervor, doggerel verses fitted to 144 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION ill tunes; therefore in many other ways we behold the emotions of the child-at-school kept at a fever- heat — all in the sacred name of patriotism. But even the hurried teacher, steeped in this loud love of country, must sometimes ask herself if the result is what it should be, if this patriotic "revivalism" is in harmony with the best methods in education, if it would be attempted to develop any other virtue in the perfervid ways through which custom and the temper of the times compel her artificially to stimu- late the pupil's love of country. To such self-questioning the answer could scarce- ly fail to be that while knowledge — if not always practice — in other directions in education has grown far out of emotionalism and crude sym- bolism, in this most important direction, this direc- tion of patriotism, the standards are still those of the ancient Fourth of July, when ardor was meas- ured wholly in terms of noise and extravagance of boasting. Like the fireworks which typified that day, the fervor of the child too often is exhausted in a blinding, spectacular outburst of flag-waving and song-singing, and there is left in later life but an empty stick, incapable of giving or sustaining any really loyal glow. This flag-raising and flag-waving, this singing of songs, these exaltations of national heroes, will be NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 145 worse than futile, will be frightfully pernicious, unless the pupils understand their real significance, unless they clearly see that these are but symbols of and incentives to real patriotism, to a genuine activity in the upbuilding of that great Country into which the youth is fortunately born. Custom will for many years compel the teacher to cling to outward shows of patriotism; but unless she can make them mean something to the pupil, these so-called loyal exercises can scarcely fail to be a source of lasting damage rather than of help to future citizenship. Hypocrisy, unhappily, is very common in the world; but nowhere is there more of hypocrisy than in matters involving love of country. There is much mental confusion regarding all abstract ideas; but in nothing is there more confusion of mind than in regard to what constitutes real patriotism. Moral cowardice is the chief hindrance to most men's spiritual growth; and nowhere is moral cov/ardice and its prototype, moral laziness, more conspicuous than in questions of real loyalty. Because of this hypocrisy, this haziness of ideas, this moral weakness, there are always present in a republic two distinct kinds of patriotism, both claiming that sacred name, but as opposed to one another as are light and dark- ness. Discrimination between them is fundamental to sound citizenship. In common with all other 146 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION abstract virtues, patriotism cannot be defined; but like a complicated mathematical problem, it may be reduced to its lowest terms, in some such way as this: The United States, as its name expresses, is a family of states inhabited by persons of like general ideas and bound together forever, each state inde- pendent, and yet giving up certain rights that it might have were it alone, in exchange for infinitely greater rights and blessings as part of a powerful nation. And what is a state but a family of cities, towns, and villages, each in a way independent, and yet each surrendering some of its independence in return for the far greater privileges that come to it as a member of the state? And what are those cities, towns, and villages but collections of families, each living its family life, but each giving up some part of its freedom in return for the common bene- fits received at the hands of the city or the town? And what, finally, is a family but a gathering of souls, each living its own life, absolutely required to work out its own destiny, but each getting in- finite help from every other and each giving up something of its individuality and freedom in order to secure that love, that mutual helpfulness, which make true home life above all things blessed? Therefore my country is nothing but my home on a vast scale, and the virtues of the home, making al- NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 147 lowance for difference of degree, are the virtues of patriotism. What is right to do for the family is right to do for my country; what is wrong to do in the family is wrong to do in the nation. This simplifies the matter very greatly, and helps to clear up many confused points in this much-discussed and much-abused idea of patriotism. It makes clear, too, that he who does not carry the home virtues into public life, or who tries to sub- stitute certain other qualities that in private life would be called vices, but which he would try to persuade us become in public life virtues, is not a true patriot, no matter how loudly he may bluster about the flag and the honor of the nation. There is no national honor which is not based upon the honor of the individual; there are no patriotic virtues which are not also private virtues. Officials, therefore, who under pretence of serv- ing their country commit acts or help to pass laws contrary to private right and justice, or repugnant to the plain teachings of Christianity, are false patriots; and those who condone them or who sim- ply laugh at them, as well as those who applaud and reelect them, are parties with them in a crime against their country. There cannot be two stand- ards of morality, one for private life and another for public life. The moral law cannot be twisted so 148 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION that what Is wrong for the individual becomes right for the elected representative of a number of in- dividuals, so that what is immoral for one man to do becomes not only moral but even praiseworthy when done by those collections of men known as cities, states, and nations. Right Is right and wrong Is wrong; but too many Americans, blameless in their private lives, think and act as though there were different standards of virtue for their public acts and duties. These may be called the chronic false patriots; against them the true patriots have to carry on a continuous and oftentimes disheartening struggle. But times of war or of lesser foreign complications bring forward, in addition, a great number of what may be called Intermittent false patriots; and one of the most dreadful accompaniments of any war Is the swelling of the ordinary ranks of corruption, greed, and hypocrisy by this new and clamorous body, made up of knaves and empty-headed per- sons who, under ordinary conditions, are kept, by public opinion, quiescent and comparatively harm- less. These intermittent false patriots always require an occasion for display of their windy loyalty; there must be a Fourth of July or an exciting election or a complication with some foreign power before they NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISxM 149 can explode their patriotic fervor. The true pa- triot, however, does not have to wait for these ex- traordinary crises; he finds opportunity to work for his country every day in the week and every hour in the day. The windy patriot is always trying to stir up fights and complications in order that he may have a chance to brag and bluster; the true patriot is always endeavoring to keep matters peaceful and orderly, knowing that only under peace and order can really good government exist. There is no phrase more true than the old Latin one: "In time of war the laws are silent." During the crisis of war the machinery of good government has to stop, and through that stopping great national scandals — scandals of jobbery, peculation, and contract-swindling — are able to arise and grow. It is during such crises that the false patriots fasten upon the Government and fatten themselves upon the nobility, the generosity, the self-sacrifice of that true patriotism whose sacred name they have stolen as a cover for their crimes. What, now, does the humdrum, real patriot, need- ing no spur of loud occasions, do every day to show his patriotism? Simply his whole duty, as an in- dividual and as a citizen, knowing this to be the sum and substance of true love of country. Such a man understands the first duty of a patriot to be 150 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION the leading of an honest, upright, thrifty, useful life. He knows that the next, and perhaps the greatest, duty of a patriot is toward his family: as a son, to honor and help his parents; as a brother, to live in closest union with his brothers and sisters; as a husband, to provide for the comfort and happiness of his wife; above all, as a father, to see that his children are properly cared for and rightly educated, physically, mentally, and morally. A great number of men, however, who scrupulously fulfil these first two demands are yet not good citizens and are, therefore, not true patriots ; for they are so absorbed in living their own lives and are so devoted to their families that they cannot perceive what very im- portant and essential duties still lie beyond. They forget, that is, the strictly civic duties growing out of a man's relations to others as a member of society. These civic duties, while wider in range, are dis- tinctly the same in character as a man's obligations to his family. It behooves him, as the head of a house, to live within his means, to pay his debts, to be scrupulously honest in all his transactions. In the same way it is his duty as a citizen to see that the town is well ordered, is economically administered, that all its officers — for whose acts he as a voter is directly responsible — are scrupulously honest, straightforward, just. It is a man's business, as a NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 151 father, to make certain that his children are prop- erly reared, educated, and kept out of evil in- fluences. Similarly it is his duty as a citizen to see that the children of his own town or city are rightly educated; that due provision is made for the care of the poor, aged, and sick; that the town is kept as free as possible from temptations to idleness and vice. And through a long list of duties runs this paral- lelism, making close the relationship between family life and civic life and making even clearer that a man's obligations to his larger household, the mu- nicipality, are second only to his duties to that im- mediate household which is bounded by his own four walls. The duties of a citizen toward the state and to- ward the nation, seemingly less immediate and press- ing, are of such importance that, unless properly and fully performed, the state and nation must soon go to pieces. It may seem a perfunctory act, this voting for political representatives; but is it a light thing, a thing to be neglected, this giving to men one's power of attorney as a citizen, this giving them the right to say that their acts, no matter how wrong, are your acts.? Is it a small thing to choose men who shall have the power not only to regulate your life in a thousand ways, but even, in crises like those of war, to demand that life itself .f^ If the 152 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION Republic of the United States — which is yet but an experiment — prove in the end a failure, it will be because of two things : the indifference of a great body of citizens toward the quality of their political representatives, and the hidebound partisanship of other great numbers of citizens, of men who place the success of party above the welfare of their country, men who, as has been often said, would vote for Beelzebub himself were he the regular nominee. This parallelism between the family, the town, the state, and the nation is no fanciful use of terms. The life of the family, of the town, of the state, and of the nation Is a vast. Intertwined, mutually depend- ent life. No national existence is sound which does not rest upon a pure and stable family life; family life, on the other hand, is impossible without the protection of the state and nation. Every one of the functions which each of these social bodies per- form Is absolutely essential to the existence of the other three. What hurts one injures the others; what corrupts one corrupts the others; what exalts one raises all the others. Therefore the false pa- triot is he who neglects any one of his four duties or who magnifies any one of them at the expense of the others. The man who is wholly absorbed in the care of NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 155 his family, in money making, in the pleasures of his little circle, may be a model husband and father, but he falls far short of being a true patriot; and were such men in a majority, there would be no country wherein his pleasant, selfish little existence could find protection. The man, again, who, ab- sorbed in the petty struggles of his township, never looks up from the narrow valley of local affairs to the great hills of national and human interests, is no true patriot and would be almost equally useful to the world were he living in some isolated hut-village of the African jungle. Again, the man who, keen in the game of party politics, takes no thought for the good conduct of his city or his town, giving its control into the hands of the first set of rogues who choose to fasten themselves upon it, is a foolish and mischievous false patriot, for he is striving to build the superstructure of political life upon a rotten foundation. Finally, the man who, filled with the splendid idea of nationality, drunk with the swell- ing liquor of manifest destiny, believes that the nation is everything, that since it is big it must be made bigger, since it has strength it must show that strength as prize fighters do, is no true patriot unless he can show that the foreign complications which must be the outcome of aggressive national dis- play are of such character that the damage which 154 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION war inevitably brings is less than the resulting good. Our Civil War, having as its objects the real union of a nation that had been but nominally welded and the doing away of a great moral wrong sapping the national character, was amply justified; yet we have not to this day recovered from the demoralization which that war entailed. Before a nation plunges into any war, be it ever so sacred in its object, be- fore the people of that nation begin madly to ap- plaud the extravagance and glitter and excitement of the show, let them count up a few of the evil things which follow in the train of war : the breaking up of families, with all the suffering and sorrow which that brings; the death or demoralization worse than death of great numbers of young men; the arousing of the worst and most savage passions — hatred, revenge, blood thirstiness; the setting aside of the ways and methods of good government under stress of the sudden, urgent demands of national peril; and, not least, the distortion of men's minds so that they come to believe that this alone, this hurrah and excitement, this blood and hate and vengeance, is patriotism, and that ordinary faithfulness to the humdrum duties of everyday life is not real love of country. Dreadful as are all the other damages of war, there is perhaps none worse than this; wicked as are most of the excuses for this relic of savagery, NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 155 there is none wickeder than the statement that war is needed to put iron in our blood, to save us from becoming milksops. The courage of the battlefield is glorious, but it is paid for in the dearest coin that the world possesses. And there is an equal courage: the doing for a lifetime of a man's whole duty in every possible direction. Moreover, this latter courage, far from costing the country anything, brings in a wonderful revenue of increasing civiliza- tion, of high achievements and ever higher ideals, of, in the broadest sense, Christianity. We Amer- icans do indeed need iron in our blood, but it is iron that shall make us do our dull, plodding, tiresome, patriotic duties day after day. This alone is the patriotism to be taught in schools; and unless these ideals of duty toward one's country are made vital in the school-life, the flag salutes, the singing, the national self-glorification will result in a nation of swashbucklers, not one of patriots. CHAPTER X THE DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS THE old philosophy, curiously jumbled with necromancy and alchemy, sought, among others, two things: a philosopher's stone to transmute base metals; a master- word to solve the riddle of the universe. Dearly bought experi- ence has taught the futility of both these questions, though it is still easy to find intelligent investors in sea-water gold and well-educated believers in persons claiming supernatural powers. Men who speak and write are still tempted, however, to seek a master-word, especially in the domain of history. With earlier historians that master-word was King or Dynasty; later it was Hero; while to-day it may be said to be The Citizen. And when one thinks what part citizenship has played in history; when one remembers the significance of the Roman citi- zen, of the mediaeval burgher, of the freeman of our colonial history, of le citoyen in and after the French Revolution, and how intimate has been the 156 DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 157 connection between modern progress and the in- creasing rights and duties of the citizen, it really seems as if Citizenship might be the master-word of human history. However this may be, the free public school could not for a moment justify itself excepting as a training-ground for citizenship. Hard as it may be to do so, the teacher must see through the inertia, the dulness, the semi-brutishness of her worst pupils the vision of the ideal citizen and must strive to carry even them to what is plainly an impossible goal. The late Doctor Runkle once declared that the Russians had solved the problem of manual training as a culture study by putting youth not into construction but into instruction shops. This is entirely true from the point of view of the shop; but from the point of view of the boy, a good school is not an xTzstruction, it is a construction shop; and the article to be constructed out of the materials, good or bad, which God has furnished is the charac- ter, as a social being, of each and every pupil in that school. The mode of construction signifies little; the kind of citizenship constructed means the life or the ultimate death of the community. Training for citizenship is as inseparable from public education as morality is indivisible from religion. As church teaching is barren unless it XS8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION have regard to the moral life, so secular instruction is fruitless unless it have as its goal the life of the individual citizen and of that human aggregation which we call society. Instruction in so-called civics, the singing of patriotic songs, and the saluting of the flag con- stitute, however, only a small fraction of that training for citizenship which it is the school's duty to give. For there are three aspects of citizenship, and of these civics and patriotism (in the narrower sense) relate only to the least important. Those three aspects, named in the order of their increasing significance, are political citizenship, economic citi- zenship, and social citizenship. It is, of course, material that a young man should recognize and understand his duties as a voter and a politician; but it is of still more consequence that he should appreciate his duty, and should be trained to per- form his full share, as a producer, as a doer of work that is useful economically, as an earner of that livelihood which, while immediately benefiting him and his family, promotes at the same time the com- mon weal. And it is most important of all that he should understand and should be fitly prepared for service as a social citizen: for his duties, that is, as a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a neigh- bor, and a friend. DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 159 The school, of course, cannot directly teach a boy how to be a citizen any more than it can teach him to be an electrician or a bank clerk; it cannot prepare him for the responsibilities of life any far- ther than the college can fit its students to be bank presidents or to be organizers of trusts that will (and do) hold water. In all such things experience must be the real and final teacher; but experience can do no teaching, or she can do it only at enormous and unnecessary cost, unless the right traits, habits, qualities, and states of mind are there In the youth for experience to work with and upon; unless the man who Is to learn through experience Is possessed of certain fundamental and essential tools. In the hands of a true teacher, training for polit- ical citizenship Is comparatively simple. To teach civics is easy, because it connects so readily with the boy's life and surroundings; to inspire patriotism is not difficult, because one can appeal to the emo- tions, can enlist music and poetry, can make use of the chlvalric, hero-worshipping side of the youth, can illustrate with splendid concrete instances. It should not be impossible for any and every school to give, by the end of the grammar-school course, or early in the high-school period, a good knowl- edge of the machinery of government, of the Imme- diate duties of a voter, of the history of the United i6o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION States, of the principles at the basis of its develop- ment, together with that general feeling of loyal aspiration and devotion which is meant by pa- triotism. Preparation for economic and social citizenship, however, is a far more serious task, because of the immense range of industrial and social life and of the intangibility of the qualities to be instilled. As Boston is shrewdly said to be not so much a place as a state of mind, so to educate for economic and social citizenship by teaching specific trades and occupations, or to prepare for social citizenship by giving lectures on parental duty, would be as idle as it would be wrong. What has to be done is, first, to determine those qualities which lie at the foundation of sound economic and social citizenship, and then to develop those qualities in the high- est degree possible to each individual child. The important thing is to have one's vision fixed, not on what one is teaching, but on what one is teaching for. The present squirming boy is such a large and irritating fact that he is apt to eclipse the vision of him as, twenty years hence, a useful man; the arithmetic and spelling lessons look so large as often to shut out the splendid ends to which they are the very commonplace and tiresome means. What, then, is the ideal citizen, the vision of whom DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS i6i no teacher must for a moment lose? It Is he who is healthy in body and in mind, who takes life seriously but joyously, who does his duty not as a penance but as a privilege. It is he who does not shirk political activity, who votes from knowledge, not from prejudice; who does not seek ofHce but who, if the office seek him, serves without fear or favor. It is he who loves his country so well that, not wait- ing bravely to die for her, he is willing nobly to live for her. It is he who, fearing no kind or amount of work, labors not by compulsion but by choice. It is he who, without bemoaning his condition, seeks always to improve it, ambitious to make every moment and every faculty tell. It Is he whose morals are as clean as his body, whose mind and eye alike are clear, who respects himself too much to descend to mean actions and low thoughts. It is he whose brain is active, whose hands are skilled, who can fix the mind absolutely on what he is doing and can hold mind and hand down to the present task till it be thoroughly done. It Is he who, meeting an obstacle, does not sit down de- spairingly before it, but exerts every faculty to find a way over or under or around that obstacle. It is he who lives In real democratic relations with his kind, having due regard for their rights, yet careful of his own, having good manners to attract men, i62 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION tact to lead men, integrity to hold men, and power to command men. It is he who in due time marries, devoting himself to his family but not allowing home life to absorb all his interests. It is he, finally, who, in seeking a good living, seeks also, and more eagerly, the good and useful life. Such a man is like a perfectly constructed machine of which the mind and soul are in complete, intel- ligent command; a beneficent machine, moreover, working at one and the same time for its own good, its neighbor's good, and the bettering of all man- kind. Citizenship like this means both personal power and a strong sense of human kinship. Power to do and power to work together should be, there- fore, the broad aims of public-school endeavor and of community endeavor. The school and the town must do their utmost to arouse and strengthen in every boy and girl the ability to play the largest part possible in the life of the community. To do this the school must furnish the child with certain fundamental arts essential to the social life. The boy or girl must be taught, that is, to read, to write, to spell, to cipher; he must be made ac- quainted with the configuration, the products, the nations of the earth, and must be given some general knowledge of the history of those nations. Moreover, he must be trained in the customs of DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 163 society (that is, in good manners) and in the arts necessary to useful intercourse with men. Further- more, these bodies of growing youth met together in the schoolroom must be accustomed to acting in concert, led to feel their dependence upon one another, made to see the great and multiply- ing interrelations of all human society. Even more than this, however, the school ought, so far as it can, to train, foster, and direct the moral, mental, and physical powers of each individual child toward his highest individual development. How is this to be done? First, and most impor- tant, by the creation of a schoolroom atmosphere, of a town atmosphere, of a home atmosphere charged with high purpose, with unflinching morality, with the desire for mutual helpfulness, with lofty personal and social ideals. To create such an atmosphere in the school the teacher will conduct all his exer- cises not because they are set down in a printed curriculum, but because they are stepping-stones to a broad and useful life. A whimsical school board can prescribe no course of study so foolish I that a teacher who sees clearly the purpose of his leaching may not use this unscientific curriculum m a scientific way. Were this not so, committee- ipiade courses of study, machine-made text-books. i64 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION and intemperate temperance propaganda would long ago have swamped the schools. Here, then, on the one hand, we have the con- ventional school topics, well or ill arranged, and with prescribed text-books good, or mostly bad. On the other hand, we have the twenty-five pupils — and I say twenty-five because a teacher with more than that number is a policeman, not an educator. Between them stands the schoolmaster appointed to carry the pupils by means of the course of study as far as may be toward good citizenship. It is not for any one except that teacher to say exactly how this is to be done. But it is for all educated teachers, it is for all thoughtful citizens outside the teaching profession, to say and to insist that to train citizens is what that teacher is in that school- room for. If he (or she), even with the poorest human material to work upon, cannot do this, if he cannot, that is, carry his pupils during the year a little farther on toward the ideal of true citizenship, then he is no fit teacher, and neither normal school diploma nor college degree can persuade us that he is. Just at present the public is more ready to de- mand and to encourage fine buildings than fine teachers. The lofty schoolhouses make a civic show; the high-aiming teachers do not. This is DEMAND FOR TIL\INED CITIZENS 165 a tendency to be steadily fought against, for it leads directly toward that materialism which it should be the business of education to counteract. Well housed, healthfully housed, the schools should of course be; but every dollar spent on needless elaboration is money filched from the real work of education. No city or town has any business to put up elaborate school buildings so long as its teaching staff is undermanned, underpaid, or under- educated. We must beware, also, of too much pedagogical furniture in those already overcrowded schoolrooms. Elaborate organization is alluring; experimentation is dangerously easy. But they tempt the teacher, not seldom, into a fatal depend- ence upon formalism, into a facile mechanizing of education, into unwise conclusions based upon un- certain facts. The true teacher, or, rather, a succession of fit teachers, with vision fixed on the ideal citizen, will make the conventional subjects of the elementary school serve a double purpose. Considering the topics as ends in themselves, those successive good teachers will make the pupil into a good reader, able to penetrate and visualize the meaning when he reads to himself, able to express that meaning by the modulations of his voice when he reads aloud. They will make him a good speller, sure of the pre- i66 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION cedence of wayward letters; a good writer, com- petent to make a clear and handsome page; a ready cipherer, able to differentiate addition from multiplication and confident of the final results of his neatly arranged columns. And this the good teacher will do because he appreciates the vast importance of these little arts in economic and in social life. But, farther than this, and using these same arts as means, the genuine educator will employ them to develop and perfect that clearness of thinking, that concentration of mind, that ac- curacy of statement, that faithfulness in the doing of little things, that readiness of resource, which are the foundation and the capstone of success. As to the other usual studies of the common school, this teacher will employ them, first, to promote those qualities already named, and, sec- ondly, to build up other virtues essential to useful citizenship. Geography will be availed of, for example, to give breadth of view, tolerance of others' ideas, a sense of the mutual dependence of mankind; history will be used to build up courage, civic devotion, belief in the ultimate triumph of the right; manual training will be employed to coordinate the hand and head, to inspire respect for the labor of the hands; together with sci- ence study, shop-work will be used to develop keen DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 167 common sense, readiness of resource, adaptability to new conditions; music and drawing will be availed of to train the eye and the ear, and to cultivate aesthetic appreciation. And, in season and out of season, the good teacher will instil the principles of healthful living, of physical care, of temperance in the true meaning, not in the distorted text-book sense, of that much abused word. Those who have had to do with commercial life appreciate what enormous and unnecessary waste, what needless friction and sticking of the economic machinery, come from preventable sickness, and still more from inefficiency due to bad diet, un- sanitary conditions, and ignorance of the simplest principles of health; they know under what dis- advantages all business and manufacturing are carried on because the workmen, the clerks, and, indeed, the partners and proprietors are wanting in power to use their minds, are clumsy with their hands, or, if not clumsy manually, seem to have no pathway between mind and hand. They will have seen many a man fail of success and of that comfort which should have been his because he had not been taught to reason, to concentrate his thoughts, to persevere; because he lacked tact, breadth of view, adaptability, "gumption." We spare no pains to train the blind, the deaf, the dumb; yet i68 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION we send out from our schools thousands and tens of thousands who, having eyes, see not, having ears, hear not, having tongues, are powerless to speak to their fellowmen except in a meaningless tittle- tattle as futile as the chattering of apes. To reduce the number of these mental and moral defectives is one of the most important functions of the school. If emphasis seems to have been laid upon the economic rather than upon the social side of citizen- ship, it is because that in cultivating economic and civic virtues the moral virtues will be at the same time, and perhaps even more fully, stimulated. In getting command of his mind and body, the youth Avill become sovereign also of his will; and moral living Is simply the reward of a disciplined and educated will. Nevertheless, in some way, greater emphasis must be laid, in the school, upon morals; deliberate effort must be made to prepare boys and girls for that parental duty and responsibility which, with most of them, is to be the really important business of their uneventful lives. Moral discipline was the sole original purpose of Christian education. The advance — and it is immense — which has come from taking religious teaching out of the common schools has not been all gain. For, in shunning sectarianism, we have too often lost sight of the DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 169 fact that the object of all education should be the moral life. Somehow, without precipitating the child into the whirlpool of religious controversy, it must be made evident to him that moral living is the supreme end of life, that what he learns, what he does, what he accomplishes is to the sole purpose of upbuilding society, of bettering the world, of attaining genuine salvation. This may appear to be an impossible goal, this work may seem to be the church's, not the school's, it may savor of the visionary and Utopian, but it should be, I am con- vinced, the aspiration of all high-minded teachers; it must sooner or later be the ultimate purpose of all public education if this nation is not to disappear, as so many earlier ones have been swallowed up, in rank materialism. To teach boys and girls and to ignore that in them which alone is permanent, is indeed to try to make bricks without straw, is indeed to attempt to train for citizenship without knowledge of what citizenship means. This, then, is the problem which every one, whether a professor In a university, a teacher In the schools, or simply a plain citizen, has always before him for solution. Some boys and girls may be carried very far, some can be dragged only a dis- couragingly short way, along the weary road to ideal citizenship. But there is no normal child born I70 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION who may not be taken some distance along the true way, provided, of course, that the school, the city, and the home conditions permit of giving him a genuine education. These conditions essential to real education are, broadly speaking: proper, health- ful, moral surroundings, freedom from political cor- ruption, small classes in the schools, well-educated and enthusiastic teachers, and genuine interest and support from that public to which the public schools belong. It is an impressive allegory — that of the army of the children, that mighty army of boys and girls knocking at the gates of our city, seeking to possess what we have, striving to rule that kingdom which is now ours. That irresistible army of the children — for, whether we oppose them or whether we wel- come them, in thirty years, in forty years, in fifty years, they will have conquered us, they will have taken the places of us who lie dead upon the battle- field. That army of the children, however, can make the city which was once ours more beautiful, more influential, more worth while to live in; or, on the other hand, can give itself up to rioting, to pillage, to the physical and moral destruction of this city, no longer ours, but irrevocably theirs. Whether they shall build up or whether they shall pull down it is for us to determine; for in our DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 171 hands lies the training of that army for its work. To-day we are, to-morrow they will be, the citizens ; and whether or not they are to be true and efficient citizens rests entirely with us. It is our business to see to it, therefore, that the atmosphere and the educative influences of this vast present-day city of civilization are the very best, the very most efficient, the very most uplifting to boys and girls that it is possible for them to be. CHAPTER XI THE DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE IN THAT fountain of truth, of philosophy, of inspiration, as well as of pure English, for lack of acquaintance with which modern children are suffering irreparable damage: in the King James version of the Bible, it is asserted that "He that spareth his rod hateth his son." This sentiment, variously phrased and modified, appears many times in the Scriptures and, in the popular form of "Spare the rod and spoil the child," has had incal- culable effect upon methods of education. How many millions of little backs have smarted, how many millions of little minds have been tormented by the too literal application of this, in its right inter- pretation, most excellent text. A careful consid- eration of the various phases of what is commonly called modern education will show that almost every step in it, almost every argument used in its behalf, has had foundation in a rebellion against this old biblical assertion; and those who have doubts con- cerning these elaborate new systems found them 172 DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 173 upon a fear lest the revolt against the rod of dis- cipline may be carried too far and that, at the very hands of those who would save him from the wrongs of the old education, the child may be spoiled by equal errors and follies in the new. Physical fibre, mental fibre, moral fibre are what education exists to develop in the child; and this fibre can be built up, toughened, and made good for something only by a judicious, daily application of the rod. Not, of course, by the actual birch of the proverbial pedagogue, but by the subtle, invisible, though none the less efficacious, rod of hard work, real, persistent effort, and steady discipline. The old education, with its sound thrashings and unsound psychology, with its Latin grammar and more Latin grammar and still more Latin grammar, produced a hard-headed, hard-fisted, hard-hearted race, but it was, in the main, a race sound physically, mentally, and morally. Many of the new methods, on the other hand, methods of gentle cooing toward the child's inclinations, of timidly placing a chair for him before a disordered banquet of heterogeneous studies, may produce ladylike persons, but they will not produce men. And when these modern methods go so far as to compel the teacher to divide this intel- lectual cake and pudding into convenient morsels and to spoon-feed them to the child, partly in obedi- 174 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION cnce to his schoolboy cravings, partly in conformity to a pedagogical diet-list dictated by the latest out- givings of physiological psychology, then the result is sure to be mental and moral dyspepsia in a race of milksops. We have learned much — are learning more every day — about questions of educational diet, we are devising ever better methods of cooking and serving that diet in the schools ; but in our zeal we are for- getting that, above all else, a child must be taught to feed himself, and must be fed upon material of such robust quality that his mental teeth will be compelled to masticate, that his apperceptive stomach will have to digest, that his whole moral system will be obliged to keep itself steadily and healthily at work. It is needless to recount the horrors of the old regime, when the rod, not a mere symbol, was an ever-present fact of education. So far as relates to teaching, those were slave days and the schoolmaster was a slave-driver, scantily paid to whip children into the doing of hard and hateful tasks. Neither needs one to expatiate upon the blessings of the present day, when the child, all unconscious that he is accomplishing anything disagreeable, is smilingly led, by devious and often extraordinary ways, into the doing of tasks which really must be done, but DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 175 which the pupil must on no account know that he is doing lest he take offence at the very thought of having done them. But in this change from driving to coaxing is there not being created a new slave, the teacher, and a new slave-driver, the pampered child? And in freeing the child from the visible ills of hard, disagreeable tasks is he not being de- livered into the hands of that worst enemy of man- kind, an undisciplined will? Moreover, how are these modern slave-drivers, the children, when they in turn shall become teachers, to be brought to bend their backs in pedagogical slavery? And how, when the time comes for them to mold the lives of the next generation, are they to do this if they are themselves ignorant as to the ruling of their own lives ? It is the tritest of sayings that there is no royal road to learning; but too many of the modern school methods ignore this truism, or, rather, seem to be- lieve that the road can be travelled vicariously by the teacher, who, working to the uttermost edge of her nerves, must perform prodigious intellectual journeys in order to spare a few steps of wholesome drudgery to the unwisely cosseted pupil. Observation of the child himself ought to explode the notion that drudgery and steady application, provided they be wisely supervised, are bad for him. 176 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATIOxN Nobody else in the world works harder than a baby and none other accomplishes more in the same period of time. The infant, it is true, has the several great advantages that his relatives do not appreciate how hard he is laboring, that he would not understand them even were they to commiserate him, and that he is compelled by nature to do one thing — at most, a very few things — at a time, devoting himself heart and soul to just those tasks, without any distractions from outside. But, under these admirable educational conditions, the baby tutors himself thoroughly and excellently up to that point where adult outsiders begin to interfere, and to force upon him methods, wise and unwise, of formal education. Unless one has watched a baby from day to day, he would scarcely believe how many times the child tries to coordinate his muscles, to use his hands rightly, to balance himself, before he arrives at any sort of automatic action. It is astonishing how fre- quently he practises each word, often whispering it over and over to himself, before he acquires that small vocabulary which makes all later learning pos- sible. It is extraordinary how much power of con- centration and observation is necessary to accomplish the stupendous task of learning to control his body and to use its senses. Doubtless the process Is DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 177 fun to the child because of the new sensations and the stimulation of his daily progress. Nevertheless, in the first three or four years of his life the infant achieves marvels, and he accomplishes these won- ders by concentration, by untiring repetition, by complete absorption in what he is doing, by prodig- ious exercise of memory, by great skill in observation, and by quite mature use of induction and deduction. All these powers are essential to the thorough learning of anything; yet some of these faculties, so fostered by the old education, are shamefully neg- lected by the new. Habit through repetition, for example, strengthening of the memory, power of con- centration, fearlessness of disagreeable work, were most wisely cultivated by the ancient processes; and the new education will make a fatal mistake if, in its zeal to develop the individuality of the child, his powers of observation, of Induction, of deduction, it overlooks the equally Important educational factors of concentration, of memorizing, of habit, of doing a thing simply for the exercise of doing it: if it overlooks, in short, the fact that drudgery Is one of the greatest of moral and educational forces. But this hard-working baby, even in the grimmest Puritan days, was surrounded by an atmosphere of mother-love and helpfulness — at the worst, by a wintrv sunshine extracted from the doctrine of 178 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION infant damnation by the alchemy of a baby's smile. As soon, however, as the Puritan child could be made conscious of original sin, the rod began its work, and thereafter parent and pedagogue vied with one another in birching sin out and the Latin grammar in. The long, hard lesson which, since those days, education itself has had to learn is that sym- pathy, that encouragement, that interest in him as an individual are as essential to the child and youth as to the baby; and, as the best result of this lesson, there has been substituted, in teaching, the power of helpfulness for the force of compulsion. In banishing from the schools, however, almost eveiy kind of hardship and compulsion, there is danger of overlooking the good principles which lay behind the bad practices of whipping. It is, of course, very wrong to chastise a child for breaking petty rules devised by our unwisdom; but it is equally wrong not to give his conscience such a thorough and hard discipline that it will whip him soundly every time that he disobeys wise laws which he is capable of understanding. It is cruel and inhuman to force a pupil to the doing of mo- notonous tasks just for the sake of keeping him at work; but it is equally cruel never to teach him how to do a hard task and how to stick to it against his strongest inclinations. One is now considered to DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 179 be frightfully behind the times if he attempts to teach a child the multiplication table and similar things seemingly fundamental to ordinary knowl- edge; but is one quite right in sparing him these disagreeable things now if, in doing so, one is laying up for him a store of trouble in the future through his ignorance of these memorized facts? And is it quite unpedagogical to believe that since the baby, in order to train himself, will make the same monot- onous movement or repeat the same tiresome word day after day, without seeming fatigue, therefore early childhood, even up to the tenth or twelfth year, is the time for that drudgery in memorizing and in systematizing which, sooner or later, ought to be gone through with? And while none would dare to ask a modern teacher to drive a child through the Latin grammar, is one quite justified in telling her to spare him every kind of disagreeable task? For is one giving the child, by thus smoothing every pebble from his path, the proper preliminary train- ing for a world that, even under the best conditions, bristles with disagreeable duties? As has been said, the business of education is to make sound physical, mental, and moral fibre; and human fibre of any kind is built up only by constant and judicious exercise. Therefore common sense would dictate tliat where there is any physical weak- iSo NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION ness, this less strong part of the body should be carefully, but still thoroughly, exercised to equal strength with the rest; that where there is mental slowness or blankness, this deficient part of the brain should be put, by careful development, on a par with the rest; that where there is moral flabbiness, these halting portions of the character should be strengthened, in the only way they can be trained, by wisely repeated exercise. So far as relates to his physical nature, the play instinct, where conditions are right, will take care of the child, developing and exercising his muscles just as they may need. To reason, however, that be- cause the play instinct, when given proper scope, will care for the children's bodies, therefore a kindred instinct will train their minds and morals, on con- dition only that there be offered to their minds a widely elective course and to their morals a sunny atmosphere, is the falsest of analogies. Yet in the desire to keep the child in sympathetic surroundings, in the wish to spare him even a suggestion of the rod, the new education is in serious danger of pro- viding too much atmosphere and too little training, of taking the pupil forward along lines of least mental resistance, and of expecting that, contrary to the experience of mankind since the beginning of history, well-disciplined minds will result although there DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE iSi has been no formal discipline, that a moral habit will be established even though few opportunities for the exercise of the virtues have ever been afforded. The fundamental error in much that passes for good education is in providing for too much surface and too little depth. Education is made an end rather than a means. It is not what we teach, it is how we teach, that is essential. In attempting to improve the public schools the mistake has been made of increasing the curriculum instead of the teaching force. Given the tools of reading, writing, and figuring, the good teacher will make one further study, if need be, serve every purpose of primary education. The mental vice of these newspaper days is superficiality; this vice the schools are doing much to encourage. Make the child accurate, thor- ough, persistent, and logical, and let mere infor- mation take a second place. If he has acquired these qualities, he has learned how to study; in teaching him how to study the school has done a large share of its proper work. Beyond giving him the tools of knowledge, the primary teaching can do little toward increasing the child's stock of infor- mation; that will come to him outside the school- room. It cannot be too often repeated that the school is a gymnasium for making the child acquisitive, i82 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION receptive, strong. The teaching of many subjects does not conduce to this. The immature brain is naturally restless and roving; it is for the school to give it the power of concentration. A child's mind is impatient and easily diverted; it is for the school to teach it patience and perseverance. A hasty clutching at many things is easier and pleasanter, to both teacher and pupil, than thorough mastery of any one thing; but the child who has really con- quered one subject is he who, in manhood, will win the knowledge of a thousand. Thanks to the ferment of modern ideas, it is now generally appreciated by teachers that twice as much — nay, ten times as much — can be done with a pupil through sympathy as through com- pulsion; it is now understood that interest plays an incalculable part in education; that a child learns twice as quickly and twice as well if he be led to what he likes than if he be driven to what he hates. It is seldom now, therefore, that a child is made to study a subject simply because he happens to dislike it. Likewise the uniform, Procrustean course is giving way to the elastic curriculum, in which the pupil is allowed some liberty of intelligent choice. More- ' over, the new education has discovered that to exercise the mind without also using the muscles is such torture to a child as adults can neither remembe/ DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 183 nor imagine. Therefore the rod of rigid discipline in the schoolroom is being abandoned, and manual training, as well as ordered play, is giving needed scope to active muscles, and is arousing, at the same time, many a dormant mind. All this makes for a freer development of the child and for the strengthening of faculties and powers that the old education crushed or atrophied. But the new educa- tion, in its joy at these discoveries, in its zeal to put them in practice to the highest possible degree, runs, as is the nature of humanity, to the opposite extreme; and much that was good in the rod, much that was salutary, much that is absolutely essential to the moral fibre of the race, has been cast aside too. Hence many a youth to-day, expensively educated in an extreme of newness, has no tenacity of memory, no vigor of mind, no power of concentration, no ability to do real work. He may have skimmed over many topics, but he knows no one subject; he may exhibit a pretty facility and grace, but no depth or power of mind; he may possess a certain shielded innocence, but no deep-seated morality. Such a youth is a child at twenty, at that age when to be a child is to be the prey of every earthly evil. Were this to be the general result of new methods in education, were this weakening of his fibre in- separable from the training of a child under modern i84 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION conditions, one ought, in the cant phrase of the politician, to "view with alarm" the present situ- ation. But these shortcomings, serious though they may be, are only temporary, incident to a time of transition and readjustment. It is but natural for the new education to exalt its own newness and to decry the old-fashion of the former ways. No change of fashion, however, can alter eternal prin- ciples; and what was good, what was fundamental, in the ancient methods will endure, will prove itself indispensable, will eventually retake in all schools that place which in the best schools it has never lost. Teaching will never return to the use of the rod; doubtless it will never go back to the Latin grammar and to the sort of instruction which that grammar typifies; but, in one form or another, the new ideas will, as they adjust themselves, devise means to secure to the pupil that steady discipline and that wholesome drudgery essential to the development of sound mental and moral fibre. Meanwhile, through the ferment and often the wild license of this so- called new education will have been secured to every child his birthright of individual development, of self-expression, of sympathetic understanding and helpfulness from others. These could not have been attained without a reaction, often an excessive DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 185 reaction, against the old methods of compulsion symbolized by the rod; but the final result will be such, it seems almost certain, as to justify even that present extravagance of laissez-faire and that foolish mollycoddling which bring many things in modern teaching into deserved contempt. CHAPTER XII THE DEMAND FOR A CITIZENS* HIGH SCHOOL THE free high school, in most of the States, is an accomplished fact. The public has decreed it, the teachers have accepted it, the whole educational scheme is based upon its permanency. Earnestly desiring to give every child a fair chance, fearful that without such oppor- tunity the world may lose talents which only the common secondary school can develop, jealous of an aristocracy of learning, and believing that a com- mon high school will break down such an aristocracy, the sovereign people, wisely or unwisely, have, in most of the leading centres of the country, decided that there shall be public high schools. In accept- ing the accomplished fact, however, we are not thereby bound to acquiesce in the common under- standing of what that free high school should be. It is not unjust to assert that in the usual con- ception of the high school it is one of two things: it is the upper part of the ladder — to use a hackneyed phrase — by which the poorest as well as the richest i86 DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 187 may go straight from the cradle to the university, or it is itself the "people's college." Under the first conception the free high school tends to become, mainly, a fitting school for its neighboring colleges ; under the second it degenerates into a cheap edition, in paper covers and with popular illustrations, of that edition de luxe, the university. In the first case the school will probably offer a good course of study (viewed from the standpoint of book-learning), but one far too narrow; in the second it is sure to present courses whose range is exceeded only by their shallowness. Both these conceptions of what the secondary school should be and do are wrong. Any high school which acts upon them is misusing the people's money and taking the straight way to deserved ob- livion. The only justification for a common high school supported by the citizens is that it should develop a better citizenship. Only that high school has any right to live which has as its sole object the real education of its boys and girls into their fullest usefulness. This, of itself, should admit these boys and girls to any and every college; this, of itself, will so admit them when the high schools devote themselves to and accomplish this sole aim; this, moreover, if it be fully done and thoroughly availed of, will give these boys and girls i88 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION an ample university training for that profession which every decent American should follow — the profession of good citizenship. Let it keep steadily before itself this aim toward citizenship, and the high school becomes a tre- mendous social force, justifying almost unlimited expenditures. Even though but a small fraction of the youth of the town attend it, the influence, direct and indirect, of such a school will make it the wisest of investments, will bring in ample re- turns to the community in the social uplift, in the impulse toward good government, given to all the town. f But such a high school will not be merely a place for hearing lessons, for imparting certain con- ventional information, or for preparing boys and girls for college examinations. Its first purpose, its last purpose, its sole purpose will be develop- ment: will be the wisest possible bridging-over of the important period between childhood and man- hood, will be the turning of the irresponsible child into the responsible citizen. It will then always be a question, in the high school, not what the pupil learns, but what he becomes; not how he passes his examinations, but how he strengthens his character. The never-obscured aim of the rightly conducted high school should be wisely to confirm the in- DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 189 dividuality and the will of its pupils and thoroughly to establish a sense of social duty. Fortunately, there is no easier time in which to strengthen char- acter and to arouse a sense of social responsibility than in the very period of life with which the high school has to deal. Adolescence means tumult; but it means, also, that the social instinct is active, that altruism is marked, that attempts at personal perfection are readily stimulated. All the forces most needed in the making of a good citizen are at this age nearest the surface, most tractable, most teachable, if but right methods are taken to en- courage and to develop them. To utilize, however, these forces, to form character, to create out of the raw material of adolescence the fine flower of manhood and womanhood, demands a remodeling of the high school within and an awakening of the citizen without. It demands that this secondary school should be, in the eyes both of teachers and of citizens, the supreme social force of the town. This the high school, except in rarest instances, to-day is not; and because it is not the centre and fountain-head of citizenship, because, as a rule, it is simply a fitting school for college or a polishing school for a few boys and for many girls who, not needing to work, wish a genteel smatter- ing of culture, the attendance upon it is com- 190 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION paratively so small and, in the eyes of many thought- ful persons, its results are so incommensurate with the large share of the public moneys which it ab- sorbs. Were the high school made a guiding force in the whole life of the town, were it to prove it- self an almost necessary agent in making boys and girls, not only into real citizens, but into effective workers, the attendance upon it would amazingly increase, and its action for individual good upon the pupils, its reaction for general good upon the citi- zens and the lower schools, would be far beyond the present. It is easy to deal in general statements and to draw from them equally vague conclusions; only those theories which can be translated into action are worth consideration. Therefore let us take up the three aspects of the case and determine what the high school should demand from the lower schools, from its own pupils, and from the citizens; and, in return, what influences for good it should exert upon those lower schools, upon those pupils of its own, and upon the community in which it is established. The high school which does its full duty to its town should set the educational standards for that town. Therefore it should rigorously exact from the lower schools pupils with the qualities and knowl- edge fundamental to good citizenship; it should de- DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 191 mand, that is, that the graduates of the elementary come to the high school able to read with fluency and understanding, able to write a clear, legible, handsome hand, able to speak or write their thoughts plainly and in order, thoroughly familiar with the four arithmetical processes and the principles of algebra, and with such an understanding of form and such a knowledge of its relations as are given by really educative work in plane geometry and in mechanical and freehand drawing. More than this, the high schools ought to demand from the ele- mentary schools pupils who are alert, active, quick, resourceful, with their powers of observation keenly alive, their desire to learn most eager, their mem- ories retentive and sure, their spirits daunted by no press of work, provided the work be fitted to their capacities and needs. The high schools have a right to demand all these things because they are the activities natural to children, activities which, if not discouraged or repressed, will continue far beyond school life. Therefore, if the child comes to the high school without these important qualities, it is, in the great majority of cases, not his fault, but that of the lower schools or of the home, upon which, jointly, rests the responsibility of preserving the normal child in that blessed state of eager, ac- quisitive growth in which the good God created him. 192 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION The first step, then, in the improvement of the high school is to make the lower schools better by taking them out of politics, by putting experts in control of them, by requiring a professional educa- tion of and stimulating a professional pride in the teachers, by increasing the proportion of teachers to pupils, by abolishing the grading system, and, having done these things, by demanding then that there shall no longer be a waste of from one to three years in the school life of every average elementary pupil. For the sake of argument, however, let it be sup- posed that all its pupils, or a great majority of them, come to the high school either at an earlier age than now, or with most of the work of the first two high- school years already done. Suppose them, more- over, fuUy equipped with the tools of social life and possessing still that fund of inquisitiveness and ac* quisitiveness with which they were born. What has the high school a right to require from them in order that this school may do its full duty to the community and may justify its existence as a free institution.'* It has a right to demand that these pupils shall give themselves almost wholly to the school work, that this work shall be supreme, that it shall not be done and thought of only at such intervals as the pupils may snatch from DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 193 parties, theatres, and other distracting interests. The high school is a final opportunity given by the whole body of citizens to a certain few of its younger members to achieve a better citizen- ship; and it is a violation of a distinct obligation for these favored youth not to avail themselves to the full of this special privilege. Attentiveness, honest work, the major share of his thought and interest are all that the high school can demand from the pupil; but until it exacts and receives this it will not become, as it should, an effective social force. The second step in the im- provement of the high school, then, is to make it, to paraphrase an epigram of President Walker's, a place for young men and young women to work, not for boys and girls to play. The high-school day should be longer, the outlook of the school upon life should be more serious, its standards of attain- ment heightened, its scope broadened, its purpose deepened. Then would no longer be seen the ex- traordinary spectacle of the American people, with the best average mental endowment of all modern nations, exhibiting in many of its high-school graduates an immaturity of thought and a feeble- ness of purpose in marked contrast to the youth of like age in the British, German, and other Northern peoples, an immaturity and feebleness most in- 194 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION imical to useful citizenship, and wholly unnecessary did the parents and schools but do their educational duty. In the third place, the high school ought to ask certain things from the citizens and to make it clear that its success depends upon their fulfilment of these conditions. It has a right to ask from parents that they shall act in harmony with the teachers, shall uphold them in every way, shall regard school- ing as a serious matter, and shall supplement in the home the scheme of education for citizenship which the school is following. It has a right to demand from the citizens in general that they shall em- phasize the importance of rightly conducted high- school work, shall further it in every way, shall encourage fit boys and girls to attend the school and to submit to its proper discipline, and shall deal as liberally with it as the means of the community and the not-to-be-neglected needs of the lower schools permit. And it has a right to demand from the voters that they shall select as their school representatives well-educated, fair-minded, broad- spirited men and women, who understand their duties to be mainly supervisory, and who will not try, therefore, to dictate in matters of education, where they are but ignorant amateurs and the teachers are, or ought to be, trained experts. The , DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 195 third step in the improvement of the high school is, then, to educate the public to regard it as a train- ing school for citizenship, to realize that the right education of a citizen is a business as important and as difficult as is the right education of a physician, to be willing to put that education wholly into the hands of experts, and to "back" those experts with parental authority, social support, and money. This ideal high school, having secured from the lower schools pupils who are properly trained in the mechanics of social intercourse, and from whom the freshness and bloom of eager, untiring youth have not been rubbed away; having persuaded those pupils and, more especially, their parents, that the high-school work is first, and not sixth or seventh, in importance in the daily life; having, furthermore, aroused the citizens in general to the true and limited functions of a school committee — what ought the community to expect from a high school so favored ? What, to reverse the inquiry that we have been making, ought the high school to do for the lower schools, for its own pupils, and for the citizens in general? To the lower schools such a perfected high school should be a guide and an inspiration. The forward impulse of education which is to keep it abreast with advancing civilization should come from the 196 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION high school, that school leading the lower ones as the college ought to inspire it. As yet the high schools, far from appreciating the problems of the primary and grammar school, scarcely realize that such questions exist. They deal with their own pupils and courses as though the former had no past and the latter no foundations, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the problems of the high schools are bound up in those of the elementary schools and cannot be solved except as those of the primary and grammar schools are settled. And those earlier problems can be solved only by the aid of that knowledge of the older pupils and of their general aims and capacities which the high-school teacher alone can have. But the initiative in this cooperation must come from the high schools. They must realize (what the colleges are just beginning to appreciate) that every higher institution of learning must, for its own safety and right development, thoroughly understand and actively promote the work of all those below it. In much of the 'work of the elementary schools the high-school teachers, much to their own profit, might take direct part, by actual teaching, by showing how the preliminary lead to the higher studies, by making available there the books and apparatus with which every high school should be equipped. DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 197 But, more than this, the high-school teachers should advise with and learn from those of the ele- mentary schools, all grades of teachers regarding the public-school course as a connected whole, all meeting together for real discussion and mutual enlightenment, each one of them anxious to deal with every boy and girl, not piecemeal — not as a third-grade pupil or as a high-school freshman — but as an individual human being who during ten or twelve years is to be steadily and systematically developed by successive instructors, each of whom, as she takes that boy, is fully conversant with the work that he has done and with the work that he is going to do. Through this real cooperation of the teachers, not only would the high school immensely stimulate the entire public-school system, but it would, by making the pupils of the elementary schools see the coherence of all educational work, add largely to the number of children entering the high school. With such mutual understanding and cordial work- ing together, the high school would in time become the heart of the public-school system, instead of being, as it now too often is, an extraneous thing, little thought of by the average parent, little sought by the average pupil, and regarded with misgiving by many thoughtful citizens. For its own pupils the high school must do much iqs new demands in education more than to give them a smattering of a conven- tional list of languages, literature, mathematics, and the sciences. It must profoundly affect their life and stimulate their ideals. It takes them at a time when the social instinct is newly awakened, when, therefore, it is strong and undismayed by experience, when it is most easily guided and fixed in right directions. The sphere of the high school is pre- eminently one of social relationships and all its work must be emphasized In that direction. Moreover, in the four years of the high school the bent of the boy. If he have one, will be clearly shown to those who have eyes to see; and it Is the most extravagant waste of human forces if every effort is not made to perfect that boy as far as possible in the way toward which his nature points. Not only should he be made to understand and to feel, to the highest extent that his natural aptitudes permit, his privileges and his duties as a citizen of the State; not only should his physical, intellectual, and moral nature be pre- pared to the highest degree that any school can do it for the immense and solemn task which he has to undertake; but he should be helped in every possible way to make that task of right living an easy and a happy one, by having his education guided in the paths to which his aptitudes point, by giving him resources for his leisure and his elder years, by DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 199 grounding him in the eternal truths which alone make life worth the having. Therefore the work of the high school should be, as far as possible, individual; and in order that it may be individual it must be diversified. Almost every boy or girl who comes to the school is self- conscious, reserved, "offish," but is at the same time receptive to what is rightly given, docile when skil- fully led, eager for hero worship, whether the hero be found in the schoolroom or in books. Moreover, almost any youth, no matter how shy or indifferent, has some side of his nature that can be awakened, stimulated, and made a means to arouse the whole of him to the influence of education. Of these facts — for they are facts of psychology as well as of common experience — the good high-school teacher will avail himself; and, having, from his own observation as well as from consultation with the boy's earlier teachers, grasped the pupil's nature, will lead him, directly or indirectly, to those sub- jects which will most readily and fully arouse and stimulate. A foolish notion prevails that those who advocate election of studies in the high school mean that the boy shall choose haphazard; and the argument follows that he will, of course, choose what is easiest. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The I 200 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION teacher, not the pupil, is really to make election, and the subjects chosen for the boy will not be those which are easiest to him, but those which meet the peculiar needs of his nature, those which answer — as certain foods best supply certain physical wants — the purposes of his fullest development. It is not at all essential that the graduate of a high school should have been taught a conventional list of topics; but it is vital, if he is to amount to anything as a man and as a citizen, that he shall have been really educated in the high school in such a way that he values knowledge, wishes to acquire more knowledge, realizes that education is power, and appreciates that the possession even of only a high-school education lays upon him peculiar ob- ligations of citizenship which he has no right to shirk. Finally, in the life of the community the secondary free school, if it is to justify itself by being a train- ing ground for citizenship, must become a much more vital factor than, in most cases, it now is. In conjunction with the public library it should be the town's intellectual centre. Its work and its lessons should by no means be confined to the pupils in attendance, but should reach out, first, as has been already stated, to the elementary schools, and then to all the people in the community. It should DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 201 carry on work analogous to that of university ex- tension by providing courses of lectures, by organiz- ing classes for adults, by encouraging its teachers to lead in everything which makes for the best social and intellectual progress of the town. Not at all satisfied with giving lessons for Hve hours a day to a comparatively few young men and women, it should carry on its teachings, directly or indirectly, through the whole of every day of the week, 'encouraging, stimulating, and leading the entire community to a higher mental and social life. CHAPTER XIII HOW THE COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS IT SEEMS superfluous to argue that the average high school is, in large degree, a failure. It is a lamentable fact to be acknowledged and faced, a fact demonstrated by the small number of grad- uates, by the preponderance of girls among those graduates, and by the present widespread and well- founded agitation to stop the economic and moral waste of youth between fourteen and eighteen years of age. I have no wish, however, to add my jeremiad to the already loud chorus that the high schools are not doing their work, such as it is, in a satisfactory way. Within their limits these schools are producing better and more lasting results than ever before. What I do purpose to criticise is those limits themselves; and in doing that I find fault, not with the high-school masters, but with the public and with the univer- sities. The high school fails because, having been created to give intellectual, moral, and industrial sustenance COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 203 to the people, it has been commandeered to feed the colleges; it fails because, having been established as the crown of the common school, it has become the tail of the university kite; it fails because, having been subsidized to solve the complex educational problems of adolescence, it has, in large part, wasted its energies upon cramming a few pupils for the artificial, and often outrageous, demands of college- entrance papers. The people would not sanction the relatively enormous expense of high schools did they not be- lieve that, by making secondary education free, they are giving every boy and girl the best possible guidance through the critical years of early adoles- cence. They *' sense" the fact that, could these years be rightly treated educationally, the saving to the State in money, the gain to the world in lives and characters, would far outweigh the cost. In not meeting this expectation, in neglecting years ago to grapple with the most vital of all school problems — that of holding a majority of youth in school in order to prepare them for their highest usefulness as citi- zens and workers — the high school has failed to meet the most urgent need of every American com- munity. The creating of free high schools killed, in most instances, the old academies. Thus were cut off 204 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION the main feeders of the colleges, the chief places in which the children of the doctor, the lawyer, and the other leading citizens might fit. These leading citizens, as a rule, were elected to the school com- mittees; and, when the colleges demanded, by their examinations, certain standards and methods of teaching, it followed naturally, and without any shadow of conspiracy on the part of any one, that the high schools became, and in most instances have remained, fitting schools for the nearest university. As most communities are too poor to provide more than one course of study, that one governed by the cramming needs of half a dozen college-preparatory pupils was made to determine the educational atmosphere and fix the mental boundaries for the hundred others who have no faintest notion of entering a college. Moreover, in thus crystallizing along university-made lines, the high school really prescribes college-preparatory work and methods for the grammar and primary schools; for, through the successive elementary years, the eighth or ninth grade child must have acquired just that cut-and- dried information, just that type of examinable mind, which shall admit, first to the high school and then to the university. All this has been done, and is being done, in face of the fact that only about lo per cent, (to put the figure high) of a community's COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 205 children graduate from the high school, and that only 2 or 3 per cent, ever go to the colleges which thus overshadow the whole public-school system. I say "overshadow" advisedly, for under the very same conditions it would have been easily possible for the colleges — had they viewed education broadly Instead of narrowly, democratically instead of aristocratically — to flood the whole school course with educational sunshine by exacting only such standards of achievement as would be truly educa- tive, really developing, and ceaselessly stimulating to the pupils of the grammar and high schools. As it is, however, shadow is too mild a word; the col- lege-entrance examination is an incubus which stunts the lives and limits the careers of hundreds of thou- sands of children, and which keeps teachers at educational stone-breaking when they ought to be, and when so many of them would like to be, mold- ing, and expanding, and Illuminating human lives. But from this obsession schools and teachers cannot escape so long as the public finds its satisfaction — as most communities do — in boasting, not how much Its high school Is doing for the ninety-seven children to whom that is the end and crown of their school work, but how well it fits three pupils for Harvard, Yale, or Smith. The high school fails, then, to serve the com- 2o6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION munity needs because, thus far, it has hardly tried to meet the real requirements of more than a thirtieth of its rightful constituency, and because it has not given even to that collegiate 3 per cent, what it is good for them, intellectually and morally, to have. The adolescent needs hard work (provided it be not exclusively head work) and strong discipline; but in the collegiate shadow which is more and more creeping over the secondary school, aided by the foolishness of parents in encouraging the notion that school work is unimportant as compared with home demands, social life, fraternities, or athletics, the high-school youth has much leisure, much irregu- larity of supervision, much time to roam the streets, and no definite pressure as to when and how he shall perform his work. The adolescent needs much physical steadying and many interesting and absorbing occupations to counteract the clamorings of newly awakened interests and passions; but, under the sedentary lecture and recitation system made necessary, if he is to be duly fattened for the college-examination shambles, the physical side of his education — unless it be through interscholastic games which, by send- ing promising athletic material to the colleges, give the preparatory school an enviable reputation — is practically neglected; and, as for interest and variety, COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 207 what could taboo and destroy both more effectually than the rigid and rigorous demands of a formal set of examinations prepared, as a rule, by pedantic specialists who know practically nothing of the fun- damental problems and needs of the high school? The adolescent, just on the threshold of society, ought to prepare for social living, to try his powers on a small scale, to develop his individuality, to learn how to get on with others, to foresee and foreknow the demands of that social and industrial world which is to be the medium of his whole subsequent career. But this kind of education, not being examinable, is substantially ruled out. Most of this essential training could be given through the present high-school studies were those not taught almost solely for examination ends. How much real discipline and education, for example, a boy might derive from Greek and Latin were they presented as a revelation of Greek and Roman life; but how less than nothing the youth does get out of that potential well-spring when his daily work is ground down to the grammar, to the intricacies of indirect discourse, to the bad English of prose translations and the worse Latin of alleged versification! How much good the high-school pupil might imbibe from history were it made a living picture of the progress and aims of human society, of the splendid upward 2oS NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION sweep of civilization; but how little he does derive from either ancient or modern history when the teacher knows, and he knows, that what he will be examined upon is the biography of this king, the plan of that battle, and the chronology of certain outward events which are but the merest froth upon the deep, wide stream of human development! How much the secondary-school youth might learn from the elementary sciences were they made, as they can be made, a revelation of the power and wisdom of nature, of the correlation of forces, and of the laws of evolution; but how futile is the mind-stuff that comes from performing a series of mummified experiments in two or three apparently unrelated sciences ! How splendidly at sixteen and eighteen years of age the great English heritage of romantic, poetic, dramatic, and historic literature might be used to inspire visions of noble achievement, to stimulate the innate aspirations of adolescence toward high and fine ideals; and how absolutely all these lofty things of life, these precious dreams of early youth, are destroyed by doling out, solely for examination purposes, such literary sawdust as Burke's "Speech on Conciliation" and the "Ancient Mariner!" The adolescent needs to believe, if he is to submit to formal education at all, that what he is doing in the high school is of some ultimate service, that he COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 209 is getting ready to take his place as an active worker and a real factor in the world. He feels his budding powers and he wants to exercise them; he begins to apprehend the meaning of citizenship, and he wants to be getting ready to be a citizen; he begins to com- prehend money, and desires to shape his powers toward earning for himself and for that family which is to be. All these motives are natural and right, and should be ceaselessly availed of in the secondary school. But one cannot persuade a youth that the subjects in the college catalogue, desiccated for examination purposes, are leading toward these proper and interesting ends. One cannot honestly persuade himself that these things, thus taught, will really be of lasting educational use. The formal dis- cipline involved has, of course, its value, but it is only one of the smallest factors in the real develop- ment and training of the adolescent youth. Can we successfully maintain that, beyond formal dis- cipline, the painful groping into the meanings of Caesar, the committing to memory of the rules and exceptions of an utterly dead language, the rehears- ing of the strategy of barbaric battles, the working out of surds and simultaneous equations, the hunt- ing down of Macaulay's pedantic allusions, the doing, substantially by rote, of a few meagre experiments in chemistry and physics, really prepare a boy to go 2IO NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION out at eighteen intellectually, physically, and morally ready to make the most of himself in the social and industrial world? The high school fails because it treats the living organism of the real boy and girl, the living organism of the school society, as a dead machine to be handled by mechanical means. It fails because, like the Chinese, it bows down to the sacred things of tradi- tion as embodied in the wooden tests, stupidly — and, I venture to say, ignorantly — imposed by col- lege authorities w^ho, desiring some kind of sieve through which to strain their applicants, have not in the least concerned themselves with the effects of that straining process upon the whole develop- ment of education, and, therefore, upon the very existence of modern society. The high schools will continue to fail just so long as they are particeps criminis in this needless slaugh- ter of the adolescent. Every high-school boy is a problem by himself; and the business of the high school is to develop him, as an individual, to his highest possible usefulness as a man and as a citizen. To be so developed, he must, in the first place, be disciplined by hard, serious, steady work; to do that hard work he must be interested in it; and, to be interested in it, he must himself see that it Is going to be of use. A boy will care for and develop his COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 211 body eagerly if he be permitted to do so naturally through gymnastics, manual and industrial work, through making things and building things in free companionship with other boys. He will suffer gladly even such fools as he regards the Greeks and Trojans if he be made to see that they were real people who once lived and with whom our modern problems are all Intertwined. He will rejoice in, instead of hating, literature, if he be permitted to plunge into it as into a splendid bath of inspiration, instead of being required to dig Into it, as with a muck-rake, for the worthless odds and ends of a pedantic examination. He will find nature the great storehouse of inspiration that she is if he be allowed to investigate through this science and through that, instead of being compelled to perform forty set ex- periments in fifteen weeks. He v/ill like. Instead of hating, mathematics if, all the time, he is being shown how its divisions fit into one another and into daily life and work. And he will perform almost any kind of necessary drudgery provided he be con- vinced that, by doing this drudgery well, he is laying the lasting foundations of his future career. For their ov/n sakes and for that of the helpless children under them, the great body of secondary teachers should say to the colleges : "For these many years v/e have adapted our 212 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION standards and our courses to your entrance require- ments, set with no knowledge and with no thought of what we could or ought to accomplish. Although we have tried to carry on special courses for those pupils who were not to go to college, your demands have really set the pace and created the atmosphere for all our schools. Our boys and girls have had to be single-molded to your arbitrary standards; in future, your standards must be many-molded to our boys and girls. We propose to develop every pupil in the way that is best for him alone; your work, like ours, must be diversified and humanized to carry along the same process of development; therefore your examinations — or, better still, your standards of achievement to be determined otherwise than through examinations — must be made wide in range and flexible in combination so that our boys and girls may keep their thoughts solely upon our re- quirements, not mainly upon yours." Not until they have thrown oflp the incubus of the present absurd college requirements will the high schools be able to begin to work out the problem — ' the hardest in education — which is especially theirs. That problem is how to educate children to be true citizens and effective workers; for, in the four years of the high-school course, the great development out of irresponsibility into responsi- COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 213 bility ought to have taken place; and the child, sub- ject to others' wills and swayed by others' thoughts, should have grown, during those four years, into the young man with his own will active, his own thoughts busy, his own powers disciplined, ready and eager for the splendid fight of life. Until the high schools have begun to make themselves a powerful social force instead of a mill for examination grinding, they will continue to fail to meet the real and crying needs of the community. CHAPTER XIV THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS MOST savage races surround the physical coming of age of their young men with elab- orate and striking ceremonies. Through solemn rites and severe tests of his endurance the youth is transferred from the tutelage of women to that of men, and is by them inducted into virile ways. The Greeks, the Romans, and the Feudal peoples, inheriting these primitive ceremonies, softened them in form, but left them practically unchanged in substance. Our ancestors, from that composite of actualities, the typical savage, to that poetic myth, King Arthur, properly regarded puberty as a great event and adolescence as a time for solemn teaching by those highest in spiritual rank. We, however, with a physical and moral life far more complex than that of our savage or mediaeval forebears, leave this tremendous physiological change and its mental and moral sequelae to the blind guid- ance of chance, viewing with indifference or even with ribaldry this "second birth" of the child, and 214 THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 215 abandoning the nascent man, at the best to the tui- tion of unmarried women, and at the worst to the teaching of foul-minded loafers. Comparing the elaborate moral training of the feudal page or even of the youthful savage (remem- bering, of course, that ethical standards are always relative and always in flux) with the almost purely memoriter teaching of the modern high-school boy, one is inclined to ask if we have not forsaken the substance for the shadow in educational things. In many, if not in most, schoolrooms have we not for- gotten — what even the aborigines knew — that the most immediate and serious of school problems Is that of moral discipline? Have we not overlooked the plain fact that the main energies of society, so far as they relate to the high-school boy, should be concentred, not on preparing him for a set of college examinations, not on getting him ready to earn his living, but on carrying him safely through the most serious and far-reaching evolution of his entire life? The donning of long trousers, viewed as a symbol of physiological and moral change, is really the most significant event in life. To the mere hearer of lessons all schoolboys — except for their physiognomies or their degrees of cleanliness — are substantially alike. And it is true that the average boy, ranging from the incorrigible 2i6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION "dig" to the incorrigible mischief-maker, does ex- hibit certain fundamental qualities common to the entire adolescent tribe. During the whole or a part of the period betv/een thirteen and twenty all normal, healthy boys present, in greater or less degree, the folio v/ing characteristics : (i) Great physical activity, alternating with periods of marked physical lassitude, misnamed "laziness." (2) Unusual physical and mental restlessness. (3) A marked spirit of self-assertion, of combat- iveness, of "contrariness." (4) A sudden increase in the social instinct, developing into what has well been called the "gang-spirit," the herding of boys into predatory or mischief-making "gangs." (5) An intense curiosity, combined with an extraordinary reserve; a bluffness of manner that conceals, however, an unusual secretiveness. (6) A rapid awakening of the consciousness of individuality, a sudden realization of the Ego, which sometimes results in intense selfishness and almost always manifests itself In heedlessness and self- absorption, and (7) As a result of all these other things, a notable phase, greater or less in duration, of religious ecstasy. THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 217 These common and basic characteristics, howeverj appear in such differing degrees and in such a variety of combinations that they cannot be dealt with in the mass or by preordained methods and rules. Each boy is a problem by himself; and the chief business of any community is, through its parents, its teachers, and its citizens in general, to bring to a fortunate solution the particular equation of each separate youth. Taking up these fundamental phases in detail, the first characteristic — great physical activity — is made necessary, of course, by the rapid development of the youth, a growth that demands much food, that creates much waste, and that necessitates ex- traordinary physical exertion in order for the food to be assimilated and the wastes to be throv/n off. All this, however, means nervous strain, nervous ex- haustion, and, in too many cases, nervous derange- ment if the lassitude which Indicates diminution of nervous vitality is treated as mere laziness. To meet these conditions the boy must have an abundance of the right sort of exercise, in the open air; but this exercise must be so regulated that, in his youthful exuberance, he does not permanently exhaust his nervous force. And as brain exhaustion is even more dangerous, we must be ever on the lookout to see if schoolboy laziness be not the danger-signal put out 2i8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION by a tired brain to warn against overpressure in the school. Were girls under consideration, there would be need of even more emphatic warning. This question of nervous strain and nervous ex- haustion is, of course, intimately connected with what I have called the second characteristic of the growing boy, that physical and mental restlessness (mark the distinction between restlessness and ac- tivity) which is due, in great measure, to sexual development. The results of this restlessness, in peevishness, in Impertinence, In inattention. In the not-seldom appalling obscenity of schoolboys, and in physical acts which sometimes do lasting damage, constitute one of the most serious problems with which teachers and parents are called upon to deal. It Is a pathological phenomenon for which one must be always on the watch, and against which one must be ever guarding by giving the boy a wide variety of absorbing interests, by seeing to it that his idle hours are few and far between, by making him so soundly tired every night that he goes to sleep In- stantly and stays asleep till he Is dragged from his pillow; above all, by keeping his stomach well filled with digestible, not overstlmulating, food, and his heart and brain well nurtured with moral ideals and lofty aspirations. The third characteristic — the spirit of self- THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 219 assertion, of desire to be a man — shows itself in well-known forms. Physically it exhibits itself in punching other boys' heads, in sparring, wrestling, and a general puppyishness that often stretches one's patience to the breaking point. Mentally it shows itself in covert or open defiance of parental and school authority, In a variety of "larks" and petty rebellions needing careful handling, and in the setting up of an ethical code that may or may not be like ours, but which the average boy will obey even though he incur severe punishment for doing so. Another form of this self-assertion is the assumption of the so-called manly habits of swearing, smoking, drinking, etc. But this self-assertiveness, this setting-up 01 a moral code of his own, this assuming of a manliness that is new and strange to him, would be impossible to the ordinary boy If he had to do it individually. The only way In which he can bolster up his courage is to lean on other boys like-minded with himself. Hence arises the "gang," the herding of boys to- gether under one or more leaders, the strengthening, through this mutual support, of whatever good, and also of whatever evil. Instincts each of the Individuals may have. In this connection every one having to do with youth ought to make use of that force so potent for good and evil in the world, the spirit of the crowd. 220 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION A fifth characteristic of the growing boy is intense curiosity united with extraordinary reserve, a show of bluntness that is really a mask for great secretive- ness. Especially is he curious about questions of life and human relationship, for he dimly feels that these are soon vitally to concern him. I am convinced that the boy of even ordinary intellect and imagina- tion is continually speculating about life in his own queer, ignorant way; and, since his experience is limited, he is free to build up, and does build up, the most extraordinary explanations of the simplest phenomena. Having seen so many (to him) miracu- lous things in his short career, he has no difficulty in imagining other even more marvellous happenings. Like those Europeans, when the rest of the world was practically unknown, who found no trouble in be- lieving accounts of monsters and of "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," this boy is unastonished by almost any wonder. As a result many youths entertain, even up to manhood, the most outlandish explanations of the most common- place affairs. A word would have set them right; but, unfortunately, it is very seldom that the en- lightening word happens to be spoken. So, not being sure of themselves, and having found out, through bitter experience, that their elders are only too ready to laugh at their mistakes and to ridicule THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 221 their most innocent questions; filled, moreover, with the desire to appear as experienced men of the world, these boys keep their remarkable speculations to themselves and assume, generally with great suc- cess, an air of supreme Indifference to matters about v/hich, In fact, they are consumed with curiosity. Another reason, It seems to me, for the secretive- ness of boys Is their extreme, often their abnormal, modesty. To those who have had much to do with boys, it may seem paradoxical to call the average foul-speaking urchin modest; nevertheless, I believe that — of course with many exceptions — the aver- age boy, because of his greater Immaturity, because of his Inherent chivalry, is more modest, more sensi- tive, more horror-struck at real indecency than Is the average young girl. After having asserted that this high-school period is characterized by the gang spirit, it seems like a contradiction to speak of It also as a time of indi- viduality and of self-realization. The contradiction, however. Is only apparent. There is no clear cogni- tion of the Ego In childhood until the development of the conscious will; as this time usually just pre- cedes the high-school period, it is clear that there must be a strong development then of the sense of individuality. The "gang" arises because that Ego wishes to strengthen Itself by associating with other 222 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION Individualities at a similar stage of development; and this awakening of the Ego is the golden hour for making something out of the boy, for setting him straight on whatever may be the best road toward his highest usefulness. Having, then, this self-realization, this nervous restlessness, this curiosity, this love of the mysterious, this readiness to accept the miraculous, this tingling of his whole being from the tremendous changes go- ing on within; possessing, moreover, this gang spirit which makes the boy yearn for the support of others, it follows that there must come to most youth, as Indeed there does at this time, some form of moral ecstasy. This usually takes the shape of a so-called religious experience in that church with which, through his parents or friends, the boy may be brought into association. This phase Is so generally looked for that churches make their preparations for bringing young men and women within their In- fluence just at this time; and most fortunate It Is that there stand at the gate, as the boy goes from childhood to manhood, these priests and ministers eager to meet him and lead him within the shelter and influence of organized morality. If this religious phase in youth prove genuine and permanent. It Is the most fortunate experience through which he could have gone. Even though transient, It may do THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 223 real and lasting good. There is danger, however, as with all deep emotions, that reaction will follow and that the youth will be left emotionally sated, and disgusted, therefore, for the rest of his life with religion and all that it implies. It is clear, then, that in this transition period we have the boy, physically, mentally and morally, in the most susceptible and most impressionable, the most teachable, and consequently in the most mo- mentous, era of his entire life. Unfortunately, how- ever, he is almost as susceptible to evil as to good, and bad examples make just as strong impressions as good ones. Teaching, therefore, if it be wrongly done, will hurt this teachable boy far more than it will help. At this time, more than ever before or after in his life, the boy needs help and explanation, needs sympathy and understanding, needs, as the Greeks so wisely saw, the firm, kind guidance of an older man. Ignorant, weak, bewildered by the vast life which is opening before him, the boy may be swept off his feet and engulfed in immorality and sin almost before he knows what sin and immorality are; cer- tainly before he has any conception of their awful and inevitable punishment. To make no provision, therefore, for moral training at this crucial time is to commit an unpardonable sin against humanity. Having examined the first part of our problem, 224 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION the boy himself, let us look at the second element, the boy's environment. That part of the problem has three factors — society in general, the limited society called home, and the artificial society called school. As to society In general, a glance back into our own lives is sufficient to indicate what a be- wildering impression its moral and social aspects make upon the growing boy. It is an eft'ect just as confusing to him as are physical phenomena to the newborn child. The Infant has to learn the leading facts of physical existence slowly and carefully, under the protection and leading of his mother or nurse. In very much the same way the boy has to learn the facts and truths of moral existence; and there is just as much need here, as in the other case, of guidance. For the social order is carried on for men and women, not for boys and girls; and if the latter get contamination from It, the fault lies with those around them, not Math society itself. The churches, the Sunday schools, the Christian asso- ciations established for the purpose of helping these helpless learners in the school of life, do, of course, much good work; but society, in its ordinary course, is not managed by these moral agencies. When one speaks of society he means the streets, the shops, the newspapers, the theatres, the thousand social forces which appeal to the boy, not simply on Sun- THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 225 day, not alone on the lecture evening of the Y. M. C. A., not merely when some zealous man gets hold of him and gives him an hour of good advice — they are forces that appeal to him, that mightily interest him, that rapidly educate him during every waking hour of the full seven days. None can remake society In a year or even In a generation. It must be taken about as one finds It, and, as an educational agency, one finds It, as a rule, pretty bad. Certainly the newspapers, which are, cry out against them as v/e may, a fairly just mirror of society, do not give any great moral uplift. Certainly the streets of a city after dark are not model schools of ethics. And there are few more conspicuous perverters of youth than the average country store. Indeed, mutatis mutandis, a rural community is a more dangerous place for a growing boy than Is a city street. These aspects of social life are so familiar to adults that we no longer really see them; having long ago learned their littleness and folly in comparison with what Is worth while in life, they have almost no in- fluence upon us, we have acquired, through ex- perience, such a nice sense of ethical values that this flaunting of nastiness and vice leaves us substantially untouched. But how is it with the developing boy who Is as Ignorant of real moral values as the new- born infant is of true physical relations? How 226 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION puzzling, how morally topsy-turvy, how suggestive of all manner of queer conclusions this Vanity Fair around the boy must be! How strange to him it is we cannot know, excepting as we may be able to grope back into our own memories; and how he Inter- prets it he never will tell. Knowing, however, the general characteristics of this time of life, we may make an attempt to guess. Physically exuberant as the average healthy boy is, the accounts in the news- papers of prize fights, of those larger prize fights called battles, of everything that concerns the so- called strenuous life, v/ill interest him immensely; and, under some sort of guidance as to what is manly and what is not, it is very well that he should be so interested. But that searching restlessness of his, that strange pruriency of his time of life, will find other things in those papers, will hear other things in men's conversation, will seek out things in classic literature that his ignorance (or his worse than igno- rance picked up from dirty-minded companions) will turn and twist and magnify and speculate upon until there may spring up in his mind, like some horrid fungus, such a mass of vague obscenity as will gradually drive out all better thoughts. This garbage of social existence means so little to us that it is difficult to realize how Its stench may fill the nostrils and stupefy the morals of those silent boys THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 227 who seem to us so innocent and so indifferent to evil happenings. It Is evident, then, that not much good education for the boy — in the real meaning of education — can be expected from the community at large. It is true that society, by its demands upon him, teaches him, in a rough and ready fashion, social manners; by knocking him about. It gives him self-reliance, ready wit, and a kind of savoir faire. Of moral education, however, it will give him very little indeed; lucky for him if he does not get from it, in- stead, an m-moral education. For his ethical train- ing the boy must look to his home, to his school and, if he have one, to his church. So we come to the second factor of the second element of our problem — the boy's home. Of the uplift of the atmosphere of a good home one cannot say too much in eulogy; but how large a proportion of homes, even in that great middle-class which is the heart and soul of the country, can be called, in that sense, good homes? And in how many, even of the good homes, are the peculiar wants of the growing lad in any great degree met? The boy needs, as has been said, much outdoor exercise, judiciously supervised in order that he may not over- tax his nervous system; but what parent knows much, if anything, about the son's sports and games ? 2 28 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION The father will probably encourage, the mother will sighingly acquiesce in, football, baseball, swimming, and kindred exercises; but how and with whom the son follows those sports, whether he is developing his body rightly or wrongly, whether or not he even knows how to play so that sport will be one of the best parts of his education, the mother wots little and the father less. Again, the physical and mental restlessness of a pubescent boy needs to be stilled by giving him a host of different interests that will divert his mind and absorb his attention; but do many fathers and mothers sec In the collecting mania, in the printing- press mania, in the trading mania, in the forty other manias of this period of life anything but another instance of boyish foolishness and fondness for mak- ing a "clutter?" Collecting, however, and all the rest of the supposedly useless channels Into which a growing boy's interests run are plainly beneficent provisions of an all-wise Providence. Furthermore, how does the average parent — even the good one — deal with the assertlveness, the bumptiousness, the "contrariness" of the pubescent boy, all of these attributes being the clearest signals of his struggle out of childhood Into manhood.^ It Is to be feared that to most households the boy's noise, his muddy boots, his hectoring manner, his THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 229 tendency to fall over himself and everything else, his heedlessness, his self-absorption, are so painfully conspicuous that the real, loving, yearning, shrinking boy-soul behind It all is but seldom recognized. Therefore, most families breathe a sigh of relief when, after silently gulping his food or loudly tormenting his sisters, the poor, misunderstood hobbledehoy slams the front door and goes to join his own par- ticular gang, there to be led, by some more masterful youth. Into simple mischief or into serious evil. As to the intense curiosity of the developing boy, not simply In regard to those topics foolishly called forbidden, but also concerning all the great funda- mental facts of life, how fully do even conscientious fathers and mothers do their duty along these im- portant lines? Half the misery and sin in the world comes from parental Ignorance, parental reticence, parental cowardice in regard to matters of infinitely more moment than all the Latin and history and al- gebra lessons in the boy's whole curriculum. It is difficult to talk with a boy about these intimate questions; It is impossible to do so unless for long years one has been getting that boy's confidence and winning his close comradeship. To keep aloof from a boy for fourteen years and then to talk to him about such matters Is simply to disgust him. One must have begun to prepare for that conversation 23© NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION at least twelve years before. But it is better to run the risk even of misunderstanding than to play that cowardly part which it is to be feared most parents take of letting the boy learn from the streets, of let- ting him painfully and distortedly puzzle out from his own observation, or of letting him remain in a sort of prurient ignorance v/hich they are pleased to regard as innocence. The religious crisis of this transition period is a difhcult and obscure problem. The churches are trying to solve it; of late years their efforts seem to have been wiser and, therefore, more successful. But they will not accomplish all they can until they find means of inducing stronger men to take up theology and until they can devise ways of giving their teachers of youth, whether in the pulpit or in the Sunday school, as complete a training in the principles and practices of education as is given to the very best teachers in the secular schools. It is a difficult science and art, this teaching of algebra and history; how vastly more difficult is the teaching, with any hope of results, of the eternal truths of righteous living. It would appear, then, that of the three agencies most nearly concerned in the education of the high- school boy, the community can do little good, and may do very much bad, teaching. It would seem, THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 231 too, that until parents have grown wiser and more conscientious, they cannot or will not do a hundredth part of what they might and ought toward helping the boy rightly over this most difficult period of a man's whole life. Therefore, as usual, it devolves upon the already overburdened school to do what it can to solve this most important problem of human education. One cannot begin the moral training of boys in the high school if that training has not been properly started far down in the lower schools. If a boy have not sound instincts and tolerably clear notions of right and wrong at fourteen, it is hopeless for the secondary school to try then to get much hold upon him. It will be agreed, too, that the high-school teacher can do little or nothing in this direction unless the number of pupils whom he is to influence is so small that he can know every boy way down to the bottom of that pupil's soul. Moreover, since the streets are not good places in which to obtain moral education, since the boy's home, as a rule, is only a little more efficient than the streets, it follows that the school should hold him as long and as steadily as it possibly can. For that reason I would advocate all-day sessions for the high school with at least a half-day's work on Saturday. In this lengthened day, however, there should be many recesses; its 232 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION afternoons should be given up to manual work, drawing, gymnastics, and similar kinds of education; and in school, not at home, the boy should each day learn his lessons for the next. There is no better training for the growing will than the right learning of a hard lesson; there is no more harmful influence, physically, mentally and morally, upon a boy than that which comes from sitting late into the evening over a task that he does not understand, that he has not the slightest idea how to attack, and that arouses in him all the evil forces of rebellion, of a wandering mind, of an unhappy solitude. Let the school be the main business of the boy's life; but, like every wise business man, let him leave his cares behind him when he shuts his desk. Let us now return to the main characteristics of the growing boy and see what suggestions they may hold toward the solution of this problem of moral education in the secondary school. First, there was a boy's great physical activity. This means that we must have pure air in the schoolroom and plenty of it; that we must have frequent recesses, each long enough for the boy to get out of doors and run; that we may find it to be the teacher's duty (since parents will not assume it) to advise concerning and In a I measure to oversee the pupils' games. It certainly means that we must make sure that every boy among THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 233 them exercises just as hard and just as much as his individual constitution may permit. As to the lassi- tude characteristic of this time of life, It should be carefully watched so that, if there be nerve strain, the cause of it may be discovered and, If possible, removed. Secondly, as to the restlessness of the growing boy, this restlessness which is due not so much to growing muscles as to dawning puberty: does its presence not suggest several things? First, that we deal cautiously with inattention, with irritability, with the "fidgets"; secondly, that we do everything in our power to give every boy many and wide inter- ests, both In and out of school; and, thirdly, does not this need of absorption In things outside himself point straight toward the elective system in the high school, a system that will permit each boy, within supervised limits, to follow those topics in which he is really Interested? Such a system, right- ly carried on, is one of the greatest of moral safe- guards. .Next, as to those extremely disagreeable qualities in youth — his self-assertiveness, his arrogance, his scorn of his teacher and of everybody else, his "can- tankerousness." These sharp-cornered stones of his character which we builders would so like to reject, may be made, on the contrary, the very head 234 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION of the corner In the boy's education. For it is these qualities which will most quickly respond to any moral appeal. If that appeal be wrongly made, these qualities will all rise up in rebellion against it; if it be rightly made, every one will be a stout ally to make the work of the teacher fruitful and endur- ing. If the boy show the self-assertion which he calls manliness, then let him prove himself a man by cultivating really manly qualities. If he love argument, argue with him, but in the Socratic man- ner, so that he may prove out of his own mouth the truth. If he would be masterful, overbearing, pugnacious, put him in charge of weaker or smaller boys, making him responsible for their safety and right doing. Unknown to him those wards of his will protect him far more then he will them.^ As to moral teaching in the narrower sense in which it is generally used, much more can be done than would at first appear. The reading of passages from the Bible, if wisely selected, can do something; the utilization of history lessons, literature lessons, Latin, Greek, and French lessons for skilful comment (not preaching comment, but healthy, manly talk) can do very much; and, especially in the later years of the secondary school, the master can find many occasions for a serious word on questions of morals with this boy alone, with that group of three or four, THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 235 or with a whole class which has been put into solemn mood by some local or national calamity. But how can teachers, with their thousand other duties, get at boys so as to have any such influence upon them as has been suggested ? With schools of such size and with classes of such numbers as the modern school presents, how can a teacher exert a personal influence upon every pupil? Fortunately that is just what he has no need to do. The ''gang'* spirit, the tendency of boys of that age to set up a moral code of their own which they will obey almost to the very death, gives to the teacher a means of dealing with youth which manifolds his resources. The only essentials are that a master should have so few boys as to be able to know them all, and that he should know how to fathom^, as far as possible, each boy's character. That knowledge gained, he can then devote himself mainly to influencing the "gang" leaders. These may be a dozen; they are more likely to be only four or five; often there will be but one. Whether one or ten, let the teacher get those leaders attached to him with hooks of steel, let him fill them with the spirit that he wants the school to have, let him lay out for them, without their per- ceiving it, the code of morals which he wants the school to obey, and the gang leaders are almost certain to do the rest. They have a power over the 236 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION other boys that no teacher can ever hope to gain, they have a sway which makes the Czar of Russia but a feeble potentate, they will and can lead their minions to the jaws of death. Having such power, these gang leaders are bound to lead, the rest of the boys are certain to be led. It is for the teacher to determine whether they shall be led up or down. Atmosphere counts for almost everything in a school, and it is these leaders who create that atmosphere; but the good teacher, by a little finesse^ a great deal of human charity, and a genuine love and under- standing of boys, can make himself the Richelieu behind these puppet kings. T CHAPTER XV THE MECHANIC ARTS HE radical, John Ball, back in the fourteenth centuiy, used to stir the people with a rhyme that was older still: " When Adam dolve and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?" And to this very hour every one of us lives or makes his living by digging or by spinning — that is, by agriculture or the mechanic arts. We are accus- tomed, it is true, to divide the occupations of men, roughly, into agriculture, the mechanic arts, busi- ness, commerce, and the professions; but to-day agriculture is substantially dependent upon the mechanic arts, business and commerce are merely the processes of moving and exchanging the products of those fundamental divisions of industry, and, with insignificant exceptions, the professions rest upon agriculture or upon manufacturing. Without ag- riculture, the billions of the world would starve with- in a week; were there no mechanic arts, mankind 237 238 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION would still be dwelling in caves and subsisting upon roots and the flesh of such creatures as, with sticks and stones, he might manage to destroy. What man is to-day, physically, is due to the fact that primeval man (personified as Adam) built up the science and art of agriculture; what he is to-day, mentally, morally, and aesthetically, is due to the fact that Eve and her descendants (for in primitive times the mechanic arts were wholly in the hands of women) have supplemented the bounty of nature and the strength of the human hand by the cunning of tools and the tireless energy of machinery. The mechanic arts divide themselves, fundamen- tally, into two great classes: craftsmanship and man- ufacturing. In the former a man fashions things primarily with his hands; in the second he is but a link in a great chain of persons and machines needed to convert raw material into finished goods. In the first class the product is counted by dozens; in the other by hundreds of thousands of dozens. Crafts- manship, of course, dates from the very beginning of mankind and was the main thing differentiating men from animals. A spider can fashion a wonder- ful web and a bird can build a perfect nest, but In all the centuries they have not learned to do any- thing else or in any new way. Man, beginning with a forked stick to scratch the ground and a stone to THE MECHANIC ARTS 239 pound grain, went on until he produced all the com- forts and luxuries of modern civilization. As already said, in primitive days the women were the craftsmen, and the females of the household made with their hands or with rude implements all that was needed by the entire family. As intelli- gence progressed, however, labor became diver- sified, for a woman who devoted herself to one form of handicraft could become, of course, more expert, turning out better things and more of them in a given time. Gradually, as life grew to be more settled, craftsmanship became no longer a family affair, but a matter of the community, men as well as v/omen took a share in it, and there arose distinct trades and occupations. Thence followed the idea of teaching a trade; and at last rose trade monopoly, only those who had been adopted and taught by a group of craftsmen being allowed to ply that par- ticular craft. Out of this came the great trade guilds of the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, when the mechanic arts were in the hands of power- ful, organized societies which limited their members, educated only a picked number of youth, and finally monopolized practically all the manufacturing and commerce of the then civilized world. These, like other monopolies, finally broke down by their ov/n weight; but, bad as many of their features were, they 240 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION did at least four things: they began free government; they proved that any art, however humble, may be made a great art; they founded schools for the education of their apprentices, out of which modern education has very largely come; and they estab- lished a system of apprenticeship which endured until far into the eighteenth century and for which all educators are eagerly seeking a modern substitute. Late in that eighteenth century, however, it was discovered that steam could take the place of human strength, and out of that simple discovery developed modern machinery with its revolutionary influence upon all modern history. The huge mill is not a place where things can be done in the same way as in the shop of the old craftsman; the problems of a factory are not those of a one-room shop; and be- cause we are still trying to fit old ways to new con- ditions do we find ourselves in what is called industrial warfare, but which would better be named industrial adjustment. We are prone to talk, moreover, as though handi- crafts had wholly disappeared and as if machinery had turned the men and women who manipulate it into soulless machines themselves. We forget, however, that no machinery can take the place of the vast body of house-craftsmen or of artist-crafts- men — of carpenters, masons, plumbers, stone- THE MECHANIC ARTS 241 cutters, wood-carvers, etc. — and we forget, too, that almost any machine calls for more skill and brains, though at the same time for less artistic power, in its handling than did many of the outworn crafts. The blessing of machinery is, of course, that by turn- ing out many more things at a much less price it is enabling a continually increasing proportion of man- kind to have more comfort and more happiness and to be of more use in the world. What remains to be done with machinery is, firsts to adjust it more perfectly to the social welfare, and then to make it produce more beautiful and more solid results. Beauty, however, was not all that disappeared, temporarily, with the overthrow of the old handi- crafts. The apprentice system went too; and the crying question of to-day is how properly to educate a boy for the mechanic arts and industries. If he is brought up in the country he gets his training for agriculture as he goes along; if he seeks a profession he finds the colleges and schools of technology all ready to prepare him; if he thinks of going into business he will discover that his public school has given him a fairly good training, for most of those schools lay out their courses as if every pupil were going into either a college or a counting room. If, however, a boy wants to follow a trade or to take up manufacturing, he will find it difficult, in the first 242 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION place, to get in at all, and, after he gets In, all the education he acquires must be picked up, with rare exceptions, haphazard and by observation, a most wasteful and discouraging way in which to learn. This is doublyunfortunate, for it overloads commerce with boys who might do better work in a trade, and it deprives the crafts of young men who would honor them and of whom those crafts are in direst need. There is little danger of our going too far. It seems to me, in influencing young men to take up trades and manufacturing rather than a mercantile career. The hard and regular physical work, the opportunity for using all his powers, the chances for bettering himself, the consciousness that he is creating a good and useful thing: these are ten times better for a youth than anything which he can gen- erally get in an average counting room or shop. Whatever the life-work, the main qualities which make for success are honesty, moral courage, re-« sourcefulness, faithfulness, ambition. As a rule, there is much more to encourage those virtues and there is much more opportunity to exhibit them in a trade or in manufacturing than is usually afforded by any species of mercantile life. As has been pointed out, the first difficulty which meets a boy in trying to take up any of the mechanic THE MECHANIC ARTS 243 arts as a profession is that of getting a proper edu- cation. A second problem will confront him not only when he tries to enter a trade but also after he gets in: the problem of the trade union. And if a young man joins a trade union let him take an ac- tive part in what it does. The unions have done many foolish and wrong things; but the principle of trade unionism is sound, and what is right in prin- ciple is bound eventually to come out right in practice. It is right that men in a craft should com- bine to secure decent and equitable conditions, proper homes, fair wages, that esprit de corps which is the soul and strength of every profession and every craft as well. It is wrong for the unions — as many of them do — to oppose trade schools; it is wrong for them to limit the number of apprentices, except- ing as a profession limits its membership by keeping out the dishonest and the ignorant; from every point of view it is wrong for them to discourage any member from doing just as much and just as good work as he possibly can. But these are the mistakes of social adjustment and of inexperience; they arise largely from the fact that the strongest craftsmen have held aloof and have let the weaker and more radical rule. But under strong, wise management the unions have it in their power not only to solve the difficult problems of modern industry, but 244 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION also to be, just as were the guilds of four centu- ries ago, the best schools and training-grounds for a sane and enduring democracy, the best bulwarks, therefore, of a free and enlightened popular govern- ment. CHAPTER XVI THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF MANUAL TRAINING MANUAL training, when properly understood and rightly carried on, bears directly and deeply upon coordination, creativeness, culture, and character. Upon these educational foundations, manual training can stand "four- square to all the winds of heaven," maintaining itself triumphantly against the cold north wind of blind opposition, the chilling east wind of snob- bish "culture," the soft south wind of educational sentimentality, and the healthful west wind of intelligent conservatism. Even the conservatives in matters of schooling are now agreed that coordination of the physical, mental, and spiritual powers is at the basis of all real education. From the wild waving of the infant's arms and the ghastly rolling of his un- tutored eyeballs up to the skill and self-poise of a greatest leader of mankind the educational process is mainly one of coordination, of adjusting this 245 I 246 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION marvellous human mechanism, of training the will to take intelligent command of the ph3^sical, mental, and moral powers. But complete coordination can- not be brought about so long as that side of the physical, of the mental, and — let us not hesitate to say — of the spiritual nature reached, and reached only, by manual labor is left out of account. It is self-evident that there must be lines and areas of coordination which can be completed in no other way. It is of no moment that I cannot make a shipshape box or forge a respectable hammer; but it is of serious consequence to me that in my education the coordinative processes involved in the making of the box and hammer were left wholly out of account. Hand training would not simply have given me manual skill; it would have opened for me new channels of intercommunication; it would have unsealed for me mental and moral avenues now doubtless forever closed; it would have strength- ened markedly my poise and power of will. From the block-building of the kindergarten to the highest development of the fine arts every manual process not purely automatic, every manual proc- ess which requires cooperation of mind and muscle, is an important step forward in that general co- ordination which is the main end, and in which lies the chief use, of all human education. Therefore, MANUAL TRAINING 247 simply as an aid to coordination, manual training would justify itself, were that the sole point of its educational bearing. As a matter of fact, however, this is its most elementary utility. It serves much higher uses in bringing out individuality, in awaken- ing desire for learning, in stimulating the will to take complete and wise command. It is an observation as old as time that to arouse interest one must promote activity, that "to do is to know." It was not Froebel who discovered, but it was he who most clearly insisted, that the way to learn is to learn by doing. Out of this doctrine have grown those laboratory methods of teaching which, starting in the kindergartens and the technological schools, have invaded even the most hidebound col- leges, and are sweeping up through the elementary and down through the secondary into that last stronghold of conservatism, the grammar schools. If, in teaching a child, one can make him actually do something himself, can lead him to create some- thing really his ov/n, then one has found a means surer than any other for arousing dormant and holding vagrant faculties, has opened a clear path to whatever capabilities the child may have, has established at least one point of contact between the trained individuality of the teacher and the, as yet, nebulous individuality of the growing child. But 248 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION what opportunity did the old-fashioned curricula offer for this important business of creativeness? They presented, as a rule, but one avenue — and that the least likely for the child to follow — the avenue of literary creation. Literary creation, however, is the most difficult of all arts, it presupposes the widest ac- quaintance with civilization and with life, it is one in which the child soonest meets insurmountable obsta- cles. Nevertheless, the old courses of study, feeling dimly the necessity for creativeness in education, set pupils at the work of creating, and, as a result, we had in schools those worse than futile "composi- tions" on Faith, Hope, or Charity; we had in col- leges that abomination of educational desolation, the writing of Latin verse. In both exercises the creative element was about as genuine as in the con- versation of a garrulous parrot. If teased by fond parents to admire those compositions or those verses, because of their inherent difficulty, one felt like making rude Sam Johnson's reply to the mother who asked him to admire her daughter's harpsichord playing because of the difficulty of the performance: "Difficult, madam? Would God it were impos- sible!" With manual training, however — using the phrase so broadly as to include the feeblest "oc- cupation" of the youngest flower in the kinder- MANUAL TRAINING 249 garten — the immature faculties are not forced out of their normal path, the child is not compelled to lie to you and to himself by pretending to a literary power which he cannot have. One simply employs the natural instinct of the child to use its hands, one merely seizes upon that passion of most children to make something, one but leads into regulated channels the brimming enthusiasm of healthy youth for the bending and shaping of inan- imate things. One might show, of course, many directions in which the creative instinct stimulated by manual training serves, as no other educational process can, in the development of many a boy and girl; but perhaps the most far-reaching use is in unlocking and then in forming and strengthening individuality. The most pressing educational question is how to save the child's individuality, how to keep him from becoming a mere cog in the colossal social ma- chine. In our pride at giving free education to millions of children, in our delight at the smoothness with which the day's program glides by, at the precision with which, so to speak, the pupils present arms to us, their officers, we are falling into an easy but most dangerous uniformity, we are securing a quiet in our schoolrooms that is too often the death- quiet of spiritual collapse. Such phalanx-teaching 250 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION IS not education: It is pedagogical militarism. Real education forbids such uniformity, and de- mands instead that every boy and girl during every school-day be brought within the personal view and understanding, within the sphere of direct, humaniz- ing influence of the human man or woman who is, or ought to be, the child's teacher. The first step toward this real education is, of course, to secure smaller classes in the schools, and over those smaller classes to place, in every instance, teachers who know how to teach. But a second step (and it will go far) is to infuse into our school programs, from the very first to the very last year of school, much manual training of many kinds. For manual training, of whatever type, cannot be done by battalions: it must be performed by individuals. Handwork cannot be slurred over in chorus: it must really be done, each piece and process, under the teacher's eye. A class in handicraft cannot be kept by any person with a voice harsh enough and an eye piercing enough to maintain cowed silence among seventy children: it must be supervised by some one who knows how, who can stand the tangible test of his pupils' handiwork, and who, since he must per- sonally watch every child's task, cannot in the very nature of things be insulted by being told to educate — save the mark ! — a crreater number of human MANUAL TRAINING 251 beings than is usually given of young pigs to a swineherd's custody. Manual training, then, makes for the intensive development of the individual under the vigilant eye and the really educating mind of the individual teacher. But education should be extensive as well as intensive. It should first, of course, develop the individual along the H'^s^ of his individuality; but, having done that, it ought next to broaden that individual along the lines of human civilization. In other words, having brought the child to a knowl- edge of himself, it should lead him next to know the human race. From the cultivation of the single boy or girl, it should widen out to the culture of humanity. Therefore, the third educational bearing of manual training is upon the culture side. To join culture — a fetish word as blessed to the conservatives as *' Mesopotamia" was to the old lady — to manual training is to scandalize the tories in education, is to amuse that lessening class of men who blandly assert that no useful study can be cultural. Nevertheless, to culture in its true mean- ing manual training has a most important relation. For to have culture is not merely to be learned in the classics and in literature: it is to have a mind fur- nished with many, and many different, things; it is to have breadth of view, knowledge of the world, 252 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION skill in dealing with men, ability to foresee and intel- ligence to grapple with the complex problems which meet one every day; it is to possess an agreeable, an equable, a tolerant personality; it implies tact; it means, above all, power to understand and to deal with men. But how is one to be really broad, how is one to be able to meet all kinds of men, how is one to know life as the really cultured man ought to understand it, if that whole side of his experience which should look toward industrialism, toward that manual labor which lies at the foundation of all arts and livelihood and life itself, is little better than a blank wall? It is not to be maintained, of course, that skill in carpentry will unravel for a man the labor question or enable him to deal wisely with the problems of the industrial world; but he whose hands as well as his memory and judgment have been trained, he who has actually labored and has had experience, on however small a scale, of what the industrial processes involve — he is a far broader man, is a far more liberal man, is a far more all- round man, than one who has simply been delving, no matter how deeply, into literature, philosophy and abstract ethics. The former may possess less knowledge than the latter of the humanities, but he will know more of humanity; and culture, in the modern understanding of it, is the science and art MANUAL TRAINING 253 of living wisely and nobly with and for one's fellow- men. Fourthly, manual training bears strongly and with excellent effect upon that goal of all education — character. This follows naturally from its lesser function as a coordinative force. To educate is to coordinate; and to coordinate is to put the powers of the body and mind more and more under the com- mand of an intelligent, a purposeful, an upward- striving will. What, indeed, is a formed character but one in which all the functions, all the thoughts, all the motives, all the desires, are marshalled, ruled and inspired by a strong and well-balanced will ? To have taken a piece of wood and compelled it to the shape that lay in one's mind or upon one's paper — is not that an exercise in will-strengthening of the highest educative value ? To forge the iron, to carve the wood, to mold the clay, to draw the design, to conceive and to impress the pattern — is not each one of these a healthful, really educational development of will-power, accompanied by that sense of pleasure which comes from the act of construction, by that still higher delight arising from the contemplation of one's own finished work? And let us note, in pass- ing, the tremendous advantage of manual training as an educator of the will, in that its results do not have to be explained or accepted upon faith or 2S4 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION looked forward to in some far future of postponed rewards. With the work of one's hands the effort, often hard and disagreeable, is followed immediately by its result, good if that effort has been earnest and genuine, bad if that effort has not been sustained and real. Every piece of handwork preaches to the child, in tones which he cannot fail to understand, the awful law of cause and effect, the immutable law that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." These, I maintain then, are the four chief bear- ings of manual training upon education. Rightly conceived and carried on, it promotes coordination, it develops creativeness, it broadens culture, it strengthens character. What are some things es- sential, however, in order that it may do its perfect educational work in these four directions? In order to further coordination, manual training in some form (and its forms are protean) must have an integral place and an uninterrupted sequence in the curriculum from the earliest kindergarten to and through the university. Coordination is not a process to be taken up to-day and dropped to- morrow; and, if manual training is to play a vital part in coordination, it must not be chopped up and scattered about to suit fanciful program- mongers. It must be built up logically and de- MANUAL TRAINING 255 veloped wisely, to serve the needs of a real, organic education. Next, to fulfil its function as a stimulus to crea- tiveness, manual training must really create some- thing: it must produce things of use, things of beauty. The child or the youth, when set to work with tools, is not satisfied merely to learn an abstract principle: he seeks to do something tangible; and it is educationally right that this craving should be gratified. His teachers must make certain only that this tangible creation of his is really useful and is truly beautiful with that genuine beauty which grows out of the fitness of an object to Its purposes. Thirdly, to fulfil its culture function, manual training must be representative of the life of the child's house and of Its neighborhood, of the atmos- phere of his town or city, of the larger genius of his nation and his race. It must identify the child closely with the general industries of his people, with the special industries of his community. It must connect him, hardly less closely, with the industrial and social history of mankind, with that age-long history of which his own developing life is the incon- ceivably rapid epitome. Above all, his training on this side must be toward genuine craftsmanship, toward the making of true things solidly, of solid things beautifully. The use of what he makes, the 256 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION beauty of what he makes, must ever be clearly before him; and use and beauty must be made to dwell, inseparable, in his thoughts and his ideals. In this way will he come, better than in any other, to a real conception, to a genuine appreciation, to a true understanding of aesthetics, and of the close inter- dependence of the aesthetic and the ethical. As to the fourth bearing of manual training, its bearing upon character, I have already dwelt upon it. We cannot do good handwork without sticking to honesty and truth; we cannot, in manual training, hide or equivocate or slide over. The good work we do is there, the bad work we do is there, plain for all the world to see. And every eifort made in such train- ing is a discipline of the will, every success is a strength- ening and stimulus of that will, every failure, if the child be good for anything, is a trumpet-call to the re- newal of that light in which, if good character is to re- sult, the will must gain the mastery. The splendid opportunity of the manual trainer is that he may by his teaching prove what Browning said, that " It is the glory and the good of art That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth." What, then, are some of the things which manual training must work for and must secure if it would MANUAL TRAINING 257 take Its rightful place among the great educational agencies of modern civilization? As was said In the beginning, even the conservatives acknowledge co- ordination to be at the foundation of all education; and a very little effort ought to persuade them of the value of manual training as a coordlnatlve force. Therefore, the first thing to demand would seem to be continuity in manual training throughout the whole school life. What have we now? Excellent manual training In the kindergarten (provided It be carried on for the reason that It Is good for the child to create, and not In deference to some far- fetched symbolism). We have excellent manual training in some secondary schools. In the years between we find some coherent, much Incoherent, drawing; we find here some sloyd, there some cook- ing, elsewhere some sewing, and, scattered hither and yon, various more or less mad experimentations of sundry cranks and school committees. Most of these experiments are tried one year and are aban- doned the next, are hotly pursued by one committee and are roundly denounced by its successor. But in this Is neither cohesion of plan nor coordination of results. Secondary-school men may lay out good courses; but, as a rule, they are superstructures without foundations, hanging In educational air. Those courses ought, however, to be the culmination 2S8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION of eight years of wisely planned, steadily pursued, widely varied manual training exercises. The pupils coming to a high school should not there first meet with tools; these children should have been uninterruptedly using their hands to create, just as they have been using their tongues to speak, from their earliest day at school. Manual training can- not promote coordination until that training itself is made coordinate. Furthermore, it seems to me, manual training ought to stop apologizing and ought, if it must, to come out and fight. It was perhaps necessary, away back in the seventies, for this new kind of study, like the genius imprisoned in Sindbad's bottle, to speak low and make fair promises; for it was indeed corked up tight by that then master of the educational situation, the nine-centuries-old monastic curriculum. It was probably the part of wisdom for manual training at that time to swear that it had no thought of being useful, that it did not dream of connecting itself with vulgar trades, that it would deal with principles, not with practices, that it would teach the driving of nails, but not the making of a living. That probation period, however, has gone by. The bottle has been uncorked, the genius of manual training, or, rather, of laboratory methods, has come out, and has expanded to enormous pro- MANUAL TRAINING 259 portions; while before It kneels the old curriculum, in its turn apologizing for existence, in its turn beg- ging for the right to live. The *^humanties" may not like manual training any better than they did thirty years ago; but their dislike now is the hate of fear, not of supercilious arrogance. Being, then, practically masters of the educational field, why longer maintain the fiction of academic uselessness, why longer declare that manual train- ing intends to be only disciplinary, not economically serviceable? Its use, as I have tried to show, is superlatively in the direction of physical, mental, and moral discipline; but its power In those directions will be infinitely greater if it allies itself with life, with industry, with bread-and-butter getting. For, after all, every one of us must get his bread and butter, the great majority must earn it by their own two hands. No school education, praise Heaven, can be so bad as to defraud us of the lifelong school- ing of our dally toil. But during all these centuries (thanks mainly to its monastic origin) education has been acting as though it could stand apart from life and livelihood, has been holding itself aloof from the boy's and girl's real interests, has been covertly sneering at manual labor, has been filling thousands and tens of thousands of honest youth with a vague notion that the educated man can be a 26o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION sort of lily of the field which, having arrayed itself in Greek and Latin, need neither toil nor spin. Therefore, we see such a host of starveling clerks, pettifogging lawyers, and political hangers-on; therefore we find it well-nigh impossible to get a good mechanic; therefore we observe the tendency of craftsmanship — once jealous of its skill and rep- utation — to seek short hours and shoddy ways of work. The present curse of this country is glue. With it we stick senseless jig-saw work upon our furniture, foolish gewgaws on our "Crazy-Jane" houses, hideous passementerie on our slop-shop gowns, demoralizing smatterings of false culture upon our boys and girls. Manual training, if it will, can carry on a crusade of the noblest kind, a crusade against this spirit of veneer, sham, hypocrisy; a crusade against any ornamentation, culture, or virtue that is only stuck on; a crusade for that real beauty, whether in craftsmanship, in art, in archi- tecture,, in literature, in social and political life, which grows out of the honest dedication of any- thing, no matter how homely or common, to a noble use; a crusade against false, monastic, anti- social, self-centred culture; a crusade for real cul- ture, which, as I have already said, is the science and art of living wisely and nobly with and for one's fellowmen. MANUAL TRAINING 261 To these ends, it seems to me, manual training must go into every school; and it must go, not as a fixed plan of study, but as a special means of meet- ing the particular needs of that school's children. What, it should ask, is the prevailing industry of this city, what the peculiar craft of this neighbourhood, what are these particular boys and girls almost certain to be and do? Having ascertained these facts, manual training can then perform an educa- tional work such as has scarcely yet been dreamed of in ennobling those industries, in uplifting those children's ideals, in marrying education to life, in wedding true culture to genuine industry. To perform this great work, however, manual training has still another fight to wage, a fight against the absurd distinction between the arts called use- ful and the arts called fine. There is' and should be no such discrimination. No art is fine which does not, through its beauty as through an enhancing veil, exhibit its fundamental use. No art is useful which does not, even in its simplest forms, mount into the empyrean of the fine. Beauty and truth are one and the same, and every exercise in manual training should emphasize both. The great fields of ethics and aesthetics can be reached through other avenues than Greek and Latin; but we have scarcely yet surveyed these avenues, while we have allowed 262 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION the old classical paths to be overgrown with gram- matical and philological weeds. One of the broadest of the modern avenues to ethics and aesthetics is through manual training, whose possibilities as a true culture study are, in my opinion, almost wholly undeveloped. For in most instances the manual trainers have avoided use lest they offend the edu- cational tories, have failed of beauty because, first, there cannot be beauty without use, and, secondly, because aesthetics has been terra incognita to the well-meaning mechanic-teacher, who, given a task to which he was unequal, has been as ignorant of child training as of true manual art. This brings us to the final, and what all educators know to be the crucial, problem of the manual training question: how to get teachers fit for the splendid work that they might do. In the beginning resort had to be, of course, to the ranks of the skilled mechanics: sincere men, well-intentioned men, men seeking to do the best they could. But they were not trained teachers; they were hampered by the absurd restrictions against usefulness in manual training; they were obliged to build for the high- school pupils whom they taught a superstructure without educational foundations. So there resulted something which was w^ell called shop-work; for it was little other than the 'prentice work of any shop, : MANUAL TRAINING 263 interesting, somewhat stimulating, better than noth- ing. But it was not and is not manual training in the sense in which we see its higher possibilities; it could not, in very great measure, aid in co- ordination, stimulate creativeness, promote culture, or build up character. For that true work of manual training the schools must have broadly educated, completely trained, highly inspired men and women, who see the many bearings of manual training upon life and character, who are wise in art, in ethics, and in that offspring of art and ethics which men call aesthetics. There are many such teachers now. When such are in the majority, manual training will surely be extended into all its many educative forms, will be then made continuous throughout the whole school life, will be then up- lifted to its rightful place as one of the strong teaching forces of modern times. CHAPTER XVII THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM OF MANUAL TRAINING THE Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, in 1876, was an epoch In the history of the United States, for the exhibits there shown made us realize, as we had not before, our weak as well as our strong points as a nascent indus- trial nation. Though far smaller than subsequent "World's Fairs," such as that at Chicago, the Philadelphia Exposition was much more efficient as a means of education; and the people who came to it really regarded it seriously as such. This, together with the fact that it was held just at the beginning of an extraordinary era of national ex- pansion, gives It for all time a high place among the agencies which have carried this country to the front among the powers of the world. Especially did the exhibits of such countries as France, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and Norway make us realize how deficient we were in the applied arts and how much we had to learn in the direction of uniting beauty with use in the industrial processes. 264 THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM 265 Those having to do with teaching, especially in the field of science and the arts, were above all aroused to the necessity of training the manual powers (with all which that involves) if we were to give an educa- tion suited to the increasingly urgent demands of the industrial world. This being the case, such men studied most eagerly the exhibit of the Im- perial Technical School at Moscow and believed they had found in the system which that exem- plified the surest means of training young Americans to understanding and power in the direction of manual training and industrial art. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology main- tained at Philadelphia, for several weeks during that summer, a student camp which gave its under- graduates the double benefit of military discipline and of seeing the "Centennial" thoroughly and cheaply. Dr. John D. Runkle, then president of the Institute, had, of course, general oversight of this educational excursion; and he was so struck with the Russian manual training exhibit that almost immediately upon his return from Philadelphia he called the attention of the Corporation of the Institute formally to this system of education and urged the establishment at the Boston school of shops modeled upon those of Moscow. Such shops were built in 1876, were opened to secondary- school 266 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION pupils under the name of a " School of Mechanic Arts" in 1877, and since the taking over of that form of training by the city of Boston, about 1884, have been maintained and greatly developed as the "Mechanical Laboratories" of the Institute. Mean- while Prof. C. M. Woodward had established (in 1877) similar opportunities for training in St. Louis; and from those two enterprises have grown all the manual-training high schools and like institutions in the United States. As mechanical laboratories in connection with technological education, shops conducted upon the so-called Russian system are admirable educational agencies, for they give young men who are to be leaders in the great industrial enterprises that general knowledge of the fundamentals of manual and shop processes which it is essential for them to have; but as a means for the education of youth of secondary-school age the system has grave defects which are daily becoming, I think, more evident. In justice to the Russian originators, it should be said that these deficiencies are due mainly to the fact that we adopted but half their method; for their instniction shops, in which young men were to learn the principles of wood-working, forging, metal- turning, etc., are followed by construction shops in which those same youth apply their more general THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM 267 knowledge and skill in the actual building of struc- tures and machines. We took over the first type without also establishing, as the Russians do, a complementary type of shop without which the first has, so to speak, no educational outlet. Some of the defects of the system of manual training based, in a general way, upon the trun- cated Russian system which we adopted appear to be : (i) The fact that the exercises are such as to be beyond the powers of boys below the secondary- school age. This confines the work of the manual training school substantially to the years between fourteen and eighteen, putting it beyond the reach of a vast majority of the youth who most need it, and hanging it, moreover, in pedagogical air, be- tween those unrelated, purely mental exercises that have preceded it and those unrelated subsequent vocations into which, as a rule, its pupils go. Man- ual training should not be a course thrust into the school; it should be a steady process of develop- ment from the time the child enters school, and should be gradually differentiated to meet, on the one hand, the individual powers of the pupil, and to prepare him in some degree, on the other hand, for the vocation which it is most probable that he can successfully pursue. 268 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION (2) The fact — upon which much emphasis was laid in the beginning — that the same exercise can be given to thirty or forty pupils at one time. While this lessens the expense of teaching, it de- feats what should be the main purpose of manual training — the discovery and development , of each child's individuality. (3) The fact that, because each pupil has his own set of tools and follows a prescribed course, the work in manual training is a solitary, instead of being a gregarious exercise. Next to determining and de- veloping individuality, the manual exercises should serve their greatest use in developing the spirit of "together," of mutual dependence, and of mutual helpfulness. Therefore, the exercises should em- body, to the highest degree possible, the element of building some structure or machine to which every pupil contributes his part, the structure being use- less without that part, and the part, on the other hand, serving no purpose except as an element of the whole. No better means than this can be devised of imbuing children with the understand- ing and spirit of social service and, therefore, of genuine democracy. This service the Russian system, as we use it, almost wholly fails to render. (4) The fact that this type of manual training is so purely an exercise rather than an achievement, THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM 269 thus losing a large part of the value that It ought to have as a stimulus to useful and effective living. In order that hand education might enter into com- petition (so to speak) with mind education, it was obliged, in the beginning, to lay stress upon its educative purpose and to maintain that it had no aim other than that of the more orthodox school topics. Therefore it held itself aloof from industry, and, except in a general way, refused to let its pupils see any connection between the manual training exercises and those great trades and industries In which the majority of public-school children event- ually make their living. That time, however, has long passed; and a manual training which does not identify Itself with Industry in general, and above all with the special Industries of the city or neigh- borhood in which the training is given. Is an educational anachronism and does little more ser- vice In developing and strengthening (mentally and morally) the child than did the now-discarded processes of learning by rote long lists of meaning- less words and still longer pages of unintelligible rules. To have Its greatest value, the school edu- cation must come as close as possible to the child's life and must broaden and uplift that life. To most public-school pupils life means some form of manual or mechanical Industry. Therefore the 270 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION school exercises which can come closest to the pupil and can do most to uplift him are those which are put under the head of manual training. To do this, however, they must identify themselves with that working life by frankly recognizing what the boy or girl is likely to be and by helping him or her just as much as it can to secure industrial efficiency and economic breadth. CHAPTER XVIIl THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH SPECIALISM is the order of the day. From the professor of Greek down to the "pro- fessor" who shines one's shoes, that man is in demand who is disposed to concentrate all his energies upon the learning or the doing of one thing. Even our households have become infected, for therein is now to be found the very apotheosis of specialization. Even so late as the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, one maid would do substantially all the work of the house; whereas, to-day, the lady who condescends to burn one's beefsteak and to parboil one's potatoes will not enter the laundry or the dining-room, while the other maid (or maids) would join the family in gen- eral starvation before so far forgetting her "place" as to cook a single meal. But what can be expected of the rank and file of the modern world when the leaders of American life, men in the professions and in those higher institu- tions which prepare for the professions, have seem- 271 272 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION ingly gone mad upon the question of specialization ? Like the gypsy-moth, the specialist was imported from Europe, either directly or through young men who went there for medical, linguistic or other higher studies; and many a green tree of scholarship, many a fair, broad field of general culture has been converted by this importation into a naked waste of narrow pedantry. Of course, the time has long gone by when any man, no matter how brilliant, can, in Bacon's words, *'take all learning for his province." But that does not justify the running to an opposite extreme, does not excuse the digging of a hole in the side of a small mound of erudition, getting into the farthest end of it, and maintaining that the tiny patch of sky framed by the mouth of the hole is all of the universe worth while. It is probably necessary that some man should spend his whole life grubbing at a certain obstinate Greek root; but why call him learned, when he is simply industrious.^ Why reward him with titles and emoluments, and give no scholastic encouragement to the far less erudite man who is nevertheless sending intellectual and moral roots over a wide area of human thought and life.'* The curse of American scholarship and of Ameri- can education is the Ph.D. For in exalting this decoration of the specialist we are repeating the THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 273 error of the Schoolmen, who confounded erudition, which dries up the soul, with real wisdom, which expands man into almost the very image of the All- Wise. Yet this hallmark of erudition is to-day practically essential as a key to a faculty position; and it is so, not because there seems any valid educational reason for it, but largely because it is required in Germany and looks well in the pros- pectus. As a result, hundreds of young fellows are starving themselves and impoverishing their parents in order to secure this decoration. To get it they are pursuing so-called special investigations, by count- ing the number of adverbial clauses in Shakespeare, or by sending out questionnaires regarding the proportion of children who twiddle their thumbs. Having scraped together this fatuous information, they are spending much time and money in having it printed, in order that another doctorial disserta- tion may be added to the dustiest shelves of the college library. And these most precious years of a man's life, these years in which the youth ought to be learning how to broaden his mind and capacities, how to deal with men, how to handle his faculties, his tongue and himself — these the poor fellow is selling for this mess of pottage with which to feed the trustees of some lesser or greater university. Having been admitted to the teaching staff of the 274 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION university, the fledgling Ph.D., if he is to hold his place, must produce something, and that quickly. But since his days, as a subordinate teacher, are mainly taken up with such intellect-killing work as correcting thousands of themes or counting the ap- paratus in the laboratory, how is he to get that breadth, experience, and wisdom which alone can make what he is expected to produce of any value to the world? Half-starved physically and wholly starved intellectually and socially, his only alter- native is to specialize still more, digging, like a wood- pecker, into some worm hole of erudition, in the hope of extracting from it a maggot large enough to placate the learned university public accustomed thus to be fed by young doctors of philosophy. This dig- ging is politely called research; but it is the sorriest counterfeit of the genuine thing, being but perfunc- tory and profitless grubbing. True research must be founded upon wide scholarship, upon profound knowledge of men, and upon extensive acquaintance with the world of letters and of things. To compel such callow men as these to specialize is to condemn them to intellectual suicide and, in so doing, to kill true scholarship. In this hard-hearted world it would not very much matter that these poor aspirants should waste their intellectual powers in this way did it affect only them THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 275 and their long-suffering wives. But it is these men, as a rule, who become professors and heads of de- partments, it is they who determine the atmosphere and the trend of the colleges, it is this type of spe- cialist who Is setting the standards of learning and of scholarship for America. As a result we have our college populations sharply divided into grinds and drones; we have our professions filled with men who can do much within the little cell of their specialty, but who are wholly Ineffectual In the great world of human interests; we have a rich and powerful civ- ilization that is breeding pitifully few great leaders of human thought. There are only two kinds of simon-pure specialists allowable: the genius who has such a volume of treasure to bestow that every minute of his life should be devoted to dispensing it, and the man who is given the power of concentrated digging and who is vouchsafed no other ability. The latter will grub out the absolutely essential minutiae without which learning cannot advance. The former will call down from heaven those divine fires which are to keep civilization aflame. The number of these specialists, however, is. In comparison with the university pop- ulation. Infinitesimal; and the great mass of educated men need, not concentration, but expansion, an in- tellectual highway, not a groove. Of course, every 276 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION man who hopes to amount to anything must specialize in some degree. He must have a vocation and must strive toward the highest achievement in that spe- cialty. But he must have, in addition, avocations to broaden and harmonize and sweeten him; and even his vocation must be founded upon such a knowledge of men and of life that, at least before his fortieth year, he could take up any other vocation and succeed in that. We specialize our grammar-school children in bank discount and leave them to lifelong ignorance of what mathematics really means. We specialize our high-school youth in battles and sieges and per- mit them to remain ignorant of the great historic development, through industry and commerce, of mankind. We specialize our college youth in hap- hazard electives, each taught by a specialist and most of them unrelated to all the others, and turn that youth out of college a veritable ignoramus in regard to himself and to those other selves with whom his whole subsequent life will be concerned. We send out from our schools of applied science many a man competent to put up a bridge, but not competent to put up a good front among his equals, wise in the handling of formulae, but ignorant in the handling of men, full of little knacks and methods of calcula- tion, but empty of that tact and that intellectual THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 277 skill which are absolutely essential to professional success. The college teaching of literature, for example, is being dried and mummified by specialists until the study of human thought has become a sort of subterranean, philological treadmill, with never a glimpse into the wide, high, lasting things to which literature should lead. College philosophy Is, as a rule, but a comparative anatomy of dead and gone systems, never, as it should be, an inspiration to wisdom, leading to the love of and the search for truth. And how seldom is the teaching of science a real search into fundamental principles and an ex- position of all-embracing truths! "Facts," said Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, "facts alone are wanted in life"; and facts — the more minute the better — are the goal and joy of the specialist. But man Is not an examinable fact; he Is a veritable kaleidoscope of elusive impulses, impressions, ideals, fictions; and it is with man that the whole life of the educated man is to be lived. In our schools and colleges (and especially In our professional schools) we need to get back to the humanities — not to the humanities of Greece and Rome as expounded in Oxford and diluted In America — but to the humanities of the twentieth century. For the study of the real humanities Implies a working 278 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION knowledge of humankind, of men. We have been so overwhelmed with facts and discoveries and theories and inventions and names and classifications that we are forgetting that the main fact in life is you and I. We have been so busy stuffing our chil- dren and our students with these facts and these classifications that we are forgetting that the main things which they, as men, must know are men. Therefore give a boy and give a student all the facts and all the practice that he can get in school and college, provided you do not fail to give him, at the same time, a broad outlook upon history, upon liter- ature, upon human experience and human life. Whether he is to start in a store, in an office, or as a "drummer"; whether he is to be a minister, a lawyer, an engineer, or a doctor, his success in life depends enormously upon his ability to get on with and to handle men. He cannot have that success unless he is broad, catholic, tolerant, tactful, and philosoph- ical; and he cannot be those things unless he has been trained, not as a specialist, but as a man. By success is not meant, of course, mere financial and professional success — though in nine cases out of ten those are most likely to be achieved by the broadest man — but that highest success which comes through the widest social usefulness and through the consciousness that one has got out of THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 279 life that which has made the pains of living really- worth while. It may be an exaggeration to say that American scholarship is in a deplorable condition; but every American must acknowledge that we do not produce our due proportion of great men. There are, of course, many excuses which may properly be offered; but one of the fundamental reasons is that we permit our promising youth to specialize too soon. Con- sequently their scholarship, to paraphrase Bacon, is that of boys, who can talk but who cannot generate. To produce men with the intellectual loins from which will spring great contributions to human thought and action we must gradually make over our whole system of elementary education so that a youth, instead of being put through vast machines for imparting facts, shall be put into small classes under intellectually strong women, and especially under intellectually and morally strong men, who shall really develop that boy's mind and character. We must then persuade the college authorities not to turn callow undergraduates into a jungle of courses taught by specialists, but to lay out for those boys really developing and strengthening, coherent work which shall make them acquainted, as far as they can learn at that time of life, with men, society, philoso- phy, and genuine wisdom. As to professional train- 28o NEW DEJVIANDS IN EDUCATION ing, the physicians are getting most nearly at the heart of the problem by means of their clinics, their hospital and "externe" training, through which the embryo physician studies not simply medicine, but human nature and human life. Supposing a youth to be really educated in school and college and to be genuinely trained in his pro- fessional school, he ought not to specialize until he shall have had a number of years of wide experience in his work, until, if possible, he shall have traveled, until he shall have taken a thorough graduate course in the university of the world. Then he will have breadth and wisdom and true learning; then he will know real scholarship from false; then he will be humble, reverent, and eager to know the truth; and only when a man arrives at this mental and spiritual condition is he fit to be a specialist. Even then, as has already been said, no man except a genius or a "grubber" is justified in being an out- and-out specialist. All others must have at least one avocation with which to temper and to put in proper perspective their chosen specialties. CHAPTER XIX WHAT IS DEMANDED OF THE YOUNG ENGINEER A MAJOR reason for the ineffectiveness of much of our public schooling is that teachers and pupils have their eyes and thoughts fixed, not upon the real purpose of education, but upon the examination of next week or the promotion of next June. The school and its processes become to them, therefore, ends in themselves. The petty- lessons which they teach and learn obscure the broad objects of teaching and of learning, and the walls of the schoolroom limit their educational horizon. To neither such teachers nor such pupils is it ever re- vealed that schooling is but a minor means to the true end of education, which is, of course, physical, mental, moral, and therefore social, efficiency. The students in a school of applied science have a wider view than this; but in most cases it is an out- look far too narrow. They are aiming, it is true, toward the goal of a professional career; but they usually see in that future profession, not an oppor- tunity for social usefulness, not the happiness which 281 282 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION is reached through efficiency, not the unselfish de- votion of (for example) the "born" physician: they anticipate, on the contrary, merely the power, the money, and the ultimate ease which professional suc- cess may bring. Therefore, few undergraduates study the subjects in the curriculum because they care for them or because they grasp the relation between those topics and the social organism. They pursue them simply because the subjects must be overleaped — like obstacles in a hurdle-race — by an irksome process called examination, in order to secure a degree. The degree itself they look upon as an end worth working for, since its possession means, usually, a remunerative *'job," which will lead to others, bringing in, eventually, an income adequate to the multitudinous expenditures of modern life. Were this the attitude of mind of technological students alone, it might justify — or at least ex- plain — the sometimes supercilious attitude of the college of "liberal arts," and might support its con- tention that its atmosphere is broadly cultural, while that of the college of science is narrowly utilitarian. Under modern conditions, however, the outlook of all collegians is practically the same; for, however fondly the older institutions may cling to outworn forms and terms, however prominently the "human- ities " may stand out in their prospectuses, they also THE YOUNG ENGINEER 283 are, in truth, colleges of modern science and of the application of science to commercial and industrial life. The cloistered student wrapped in love of ancient learning is still to be found; but he is en- gulfed in the host of youth who, when they do not go to college simply for sociability and prestige, regard higher education as a kind of trump card in the game of money-making. More or less unconsciously, colleges of arts and colleges of science alike foster this student attitude of mind by devoting an undue share of the academic year to examinations, by overloading the curriculum with examinable subjects, and by permitting the several schools or departments to emphasize the utilitarian by specializing and intensifying too much. As a result, the secondary purpose of a college — that of instilling information — too often bulks largest in the eyes of all concerned, and obscures or even eclipses the leading aims of all collegiate education. Those major aims should be, in the order of their importance: (i) to develop manhood out of boy- hood; (2) to make the men thus developed broad- gauged, mentally quick and receptive, intellectually catholic, tolerant, and modest; (3) to train good citizens, in the fullest meaning of that term; and (4) to equip for industrial and professional efficiency. 284 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION To accomplish the last is what the technological school is paid especially to do; but, unless that pro- fessional training is given in such a way as to supple- ment and strengthen in the highest degree all the other social forces which are making for manhood, breadth, and citizenship, the school has defrauded the undergraduate, has failed of its duty as a social agent, and has sealed its own doom. Even though they be nineteen or twenty years of age, most youth come to a college mere boys in their childish attitude of mind, their undeveloped sense of personal responsibility, their hazy outlook upon life and their distorted perspective of them- selves in the community. They ought to be gradu- ated, however, with their minds ripened and their vision cleared. Indeed, the years of their college life will have been largely wasted unless, in those years, they have acquired a mental and moral se- riousness far greater than that of the less well- educated man. Limiting ourselves to the school of applied science, perhaps its paramount duty and opportunity is to impress upon a youth as he enters manhood the fact that living, instead of being a game of pleasure or of chance, or a haphazard acceptance of what comes along, is an actual profession — is, indeed, the lead- ing vocation of every man — a profession to be THE YOUNG ENGINEER 285 studied, perfected and strategically planned with interested thoroughness and far-seeing care. This right view of life can be instilled, not only by giving the college youth ever wider choice of work, initia- tive in working, and responsibility for the quality of his work (while holding him to a rational and ordered sequence of development), but also by teaching him such things and in such a way as to make him in- creasingly aware of a man's power over circum- stance, and of the multiform opportunity which every individual has to shape his own career. Another chief use of the education given in a scientific school should be to expand a young man's vision, to teach him the difference between the small and the great things of life, to train him to see the world from a clear mountain peak of intellectual tolerance rather than from a foggy valley of personal prejudices. This breadth and catholicity can be inspired by building all his professional and technical training upon basic truths and principles; by fram- ing his courses of study upon those fundamental historical, philosophical and linguistic subjects which (quite too exclusively) made up the college course of half a century ago; and, most of all, by seeking every opportunity to impress upon each student the fact that what makes for leadership and power in pro- fessional life is not familiarity with technical details 286 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION and an extraordinary memory for formulae, but ability to view questions in a large way, to deal with new problems, to handle subordinates easily and justly, to meet equals and superiors tactfully and upon the broad platform of many human as well as professional interests. A student will not have secured seriousness and breadth, however, if on graduation he believes that his professional training is to be used wholly to satisfy his personal — and very proper — ambition for power and for wealth. He must also have been made to realize that, being an extraordinary debtor to society, he owes an immense debt of future service to the community. He should also have learned that the main business of an educated man is to grow into wide usefulness by practising the "gre- garious" virtues, by placing his abilities as far as possible at the service of his neighborhood and state, by increasing the five talents of his collegiate training into the many times ten talents of personal and social power. To this end his technical and his non-technical teaching should have emphasized those subtle, unselfish, moral qualities which lie at the foundation of professional ethics, engineering honor and true devotion to the good of the State. Whatever may be the sequence of studies, the ramification of ^^electives," or the emphasis upon THE YOUNG ENGINEER 287 this detail or upon that, the student should never be allowed to become so confused by these minutiae as to lose sight of what he goes to a school of applied science for. In the student's own mind he goes primarily to obtain certain information, a measure of technical skill and a scientific jargon which will enable him to secure and to hold some remunerative professional position. If this mental attitude is not rectified, or is encouraged by the placing of too much emphasis upon technical information, "knacks," formulae, and phrases, the youth will devote himself zealously, even enthusiastically — but none the less fatally — to things which, without the higher aims, are but the chaff of education. The strongest evidence of a freshman's lack of education is that he does not know how to appraise those tasks which he must or may do, that he does not understand what the world is going to demand of him as the price of real professional success. To educate him, therefore — in the right meaning of education — the school of applied science must not content itself with giving him that technical information which, to his untrained vision, is all that he requires; it must hold before him and must teach him to understand the value and importance of those higher standards by which his work as a man and as an engineer will be judged by his 288 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION future employers, by his associates and by the world at large. He cannot foresee, therefore he must deliberately be made to appreciate, that behind and underneath his technical information and scientific skill he should possess at least three other things: seriousness of view, breadth of mind and a sense of civic responsibility. With the first he will learn how to measure and control his own life; with the second he will learn how to weigh the lives of others; with the third he will learn how to place himself and all he does in right perspective with the whole order of society; and with all three together he will be ready to meet and conquer practically every one of those problems, moral, social, or technical, with which his life is certain to be filled. To keep these large purposes and true aims of education before themselves and their students is extremely difficult for the teaching staff, engrossed as they must necessarily be in the thousand details of teaching and discipline, and hounded as they are from without and within to equip their students (like automobiles) with every latest device for technical speed and eflftciency. That the faculties of most schools of technology have been able to preserve the wider view is cause for wonder and con- gratulation. With the greater specialization and haste of modern life, however, they will find this to THE YOUNG ENGINEER 289 be increasingly difficult unless they receive organized and unflagging help from those who stand far enough from the details of instruction to see that teaching in proper perspective and to measure its real results. The two bodies near enough to the school of applied science to understand its internal methods and aims, and yet far enough away from it to gauge its final influence upon young men and its ultimate effect upon the industrial and social struct- ure, are, of course, the trustees and the alumni. In every way possible they should identify themselves with their college and its undergraduates; and, while refraining from interference with the details of courses or of teaching, should keep clearly before the students those real aims and ends of all higher education which their experience of life should have made them clearly see. Just how they are to do this is not within the present scope even to suggest. Moreover, no two colleges of science would ap- proach the problem in the same way. But that these high standards must be held before the under- graduates of all such colleges, and that the trustees and alumni must give conspicuous help in doing so, are, I think, self-evident truths in higher education. CHAPTER XX THE GENESIS OF THESE NEW DEMANDS THE New Englander who can boast seven generations of native forebears — and this number is a rare possession — is inclined to speak with some disdain of "New Americans.'' Many immigrants who have arrived more recently than he certainly do need much Americanizing; but so did the Old Americans from whom he sprang. Moreover, that process occupied, in the case of those earlier comers, at least one hundred and fifty-five years — from 1620 until 1775. Things m.ove faster now than then; therefore the present New Americans will doubtless learn their lesson far more rapidly. Moreover, certain special causes modified and to a degree retarded the democ- ratization of the first generations of immigrants, keeping the New England ancestry, as has been aptly said, not merely provincial but painfully parochial. Potent among those influences was that.satan-inspired invention of some early Puritan — New England Pie. 290 THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 291 The thing itself is to-day but a reminiscence. Pie still exists, but its estate is fallen. From the hands of the housemother it has passed to the machines of the syndicated bakery, from the break- fast table of Emerson it has descended to the quick-lunch counter. No longer may one find three kinds of pie served three times a day; no longer may one see at Thanksgiving pantry shelves groaning with pies in military array: artillery squads of brilliant cranberry, cavalry squads of yellow pump- kin, and solid infantry of apple and mince. For generations, however, pie was the fundamental diet of the New Englander, as rice was that of the Japanese, and it had a profound physiological and moral effect. Deficient in nutriment, it bred a lean and hungry race, "cantankerous" and hair-splitting. A fertile and progressive source of dyspepsia, it established the gloom of Calvinism and fomented those schisms with which most New England villages have been ceaselessly rent. A difficult dish rightly to prepare, it established social cleavage between those who could and those who could not produce light pie-crust; and it actually made or marred the married state. Moreover, it named society itself, the term "upper crust" connoting surface show and crumbling flakiness as contrasted with the soggy dulness of that under crust upon 292 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION which, however, the whole stability, not only of pie, but of society depends. Singularly, however, the pie metaphor did not extend itself farther. It did not occur to our an- cestors to apply the pie form to their daily living. Not one of those early New Englanders realized that, just as the rich juiciness of the pie gathers at the centre, so the houses of those pioneers should have all been located in a central village, with farms radiating therefrom in pie-shaped wedges. It is true that our forebears usually established a stockade for physical refuge against the occasional Indian and a meeting-house for spiritual refuge against omnipresent satan; and it is true, too, that around these grew up a few stores, taverns, and dwellings. But the great bulk of those early people lived on widely scattered farms separated one from another by long spaces of wilderness, difficult and dangerous to cross. And on their scattered farms those Old Ameri- cans ate their pie in gloomy and censorious iso- lation, ruining their digestions, inflaming their con- sciences, and developing the family idiosyncrasies until the chronicles of some New England towns read like the records of a hospital for the mildly insane! It is easy to see why the original settlers took THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 293 this step so fatal to themselves and so momentous to their descendants. Most of them came from England, where the sign of aristocracy and wealth was the possession of land. The first idea, therefore, of every one of those early immigrants, immediately upon landing, was to procure by grant, by alleged purchase from the Indians, or by simple squatting, as much land as he possibly could seize, and then to seat himself in the middle of that vast acreage as far away as possible from other squatters themselves obsessed by the same foolish idea. It is idle to speculate upon what might have been; but think what a diiference it would have made in all our history had those Old Americans taken to heart the simple lesson taught not only by their own beloved pie, but even by the barbaric Russian, and had gathered themselves into close-built vil- lages, with the farms extending out therefrom as far as the Indians would let them. Not only would most of the dreadful massacres of colonial days have been averted, not only would their meeting-houses have been more cheerful and their schools far better than when worshippers and pupils were compelled to come together from long distances through dangerous wildernesses; but the daily contact of village life would have wonderfully rubbed off Puritanical sharp corners, brightened dour Calvin- 294 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION istic faces, modified the extraordinary idiosyncrasies of the Yankees, and made them, perhaps, regard more charitably the rest of the human race. That there was a period of decline, almost of degradation, in the history of American schools, we are apt to forget or to conceal. With justifiable pride we of Massachusetts point to those great educational events of the early Puritan days: (i) the opening of the Latin School in 1635; (2) the founding of Harvard College in 1638; and (3) the enacting of the general school law of 1647; but we fail to remark that the development of education in the United States has not been a steady growth out of those magnificent beginnings. That the American school should not have gone through its '^Dark Ages" period would have been to ask a miracle. A people which had to conquer a wilderness, to wage war with savages and beasts, to beat back the French, to separate itself politically from the mother coun- try, and, finally, to put into shape and into practice the political and social ideals evolved from a cen- tury and a half of transplanted Puritanism, could not keep education, in the narrower sense of school- ing, upon a very high plane. Those builders of a nation were too busy acquiring the rough, but enduring, tuition given by the very forces I have named, to spend much thought upon such trifles THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 295 as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Their edu- cation into nationality was more vital to them than national education, and before the strenuousness of the former the latter, perforce, gave way. There- fore it is not surprising that, while in 1650 almost every leader in New England life was college-bred, and many a youth was conversant with Latin and with Greek, one hundred and twenty-five years later the little learning that survived had shrunk away into the studies of ministers, lawyers, and the oc- casional physician. Outside those professions, he (and especially she) who could read and write was the exception rather than the rule. This widespread illiteracy was due not wholly to the fight against the wilderness, not wholly to the fact that the grandsons and great-grandsons of the first settlers had, through isolation, lost touch with things intellectual. It was due mainly to that early spirit of exaggerated local independence. Those early Yankee communities were disastrously centrifugal. No town was too feeble or too sparsely settled in colonial days for its town-meeting to pass stringent laws excluding newcomers; and the grants and purchases of those first settlers were pathetically huge. The tendency of all this, of course, was to divide and subdivide townships into little hostile groups, and to foment ceaseless 296 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION war between the centre where the church was and the outlying districts where the church was not. Very early in the eighteenth century this feeling began to color the school laws, and by the be- ginning of the nineteenth century the tendency had gone so far that in most towns the meagre sum raised by taxation for the support of the schools was parceled out in pitiful fragments among so-called school districts, each fragment to be expended by a separate and local prudential committee. Mr. Martin, in his "Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System," gives an instance where the sum to support a district school for an entire year was ^5.60. Feeble as such an educational system as this must have been, that love of learning which was as a beacon light to the early New Englanders had been kept burning in the colleges and in a few academies like Dummer, and had been fanned by those real political leaders of New England, its autocratic ministry. As order began to come out of the political chaos following the Revolution, those ministers, the other college men, and the more thoughtful among persons of less education realized that something must be done to revive popular education, that some bridge must be made between the feeble '*deestrict" schools and the only less THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 297 feeble colleges. Academies, founded, as a rule, by private beneficence and supported by the fees of their pupils, sprang up in many widely separated towns and were as oases in the desert to hundreds and thousands of ambitious boys and girls. But, of course, as private academies flourished the already starving public schools languished still more, and in many instances practically died. Therefore, while ultimately the academy proved to be the leaven in the educational lump, its immediate effect, too often, was to increase the ignorance of the mass of the people and to emphasize class distinctions al- ready growing dangerous. Yet the work of the academies was not only good, it was indispensable. For almost all advance in public education in Amer- ica has to be made through three slow processes: first, private enterprise must be enlisted to set up a model school, or to inaugurate, at private charge, some new method of teaching; secondly, the public authorities must be coaxed to recognize this in- novation as good and to give it countenance; thirdly, the great public itself must be stimulated to force those authorities to adopt, as a public enterprise, what was in the beginning a suspiciously regarded educational experiment. Following this slow road of development, the better way of edu- cation was pointed out by those private enterprises, 298 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION the old academies; next the state gave them semi- sanction by occasional aid and official recognition; finally the state adopted them, either by converting them directly into public high schools, or by erect- ing such high schools alongside them in order to kill them by a process of gradual absorption. And it is greatly to their credit that those academies, having performed their essential part in the educational work, knew when they were dead. Of course many survived; but they have gone back to what was the original function of the academy — that of preparing boys for entrance into certain affiliated colleges. With the passing of the academies, however, was severed almost the last link between English and American methods of education. Our New Eng- land educational glory of the seventeenth century was predominantly English. Our colleges of that early day were Cambridge University transplanted; our Latin schools were the familiar grammar schools still flourishing in England to the despair of the educational reformer; our general school law of 1647 was simply the school law that England might have had two hundred and fifty years earlier than she did secure it, had she remained really Puritan. But the glory of that educational Renaissance of ours which began in the second quarter of the THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 299 nineteenth century and which is but just ending was a glory not of England, but of Germany. Our whole free-school system in modern days has been created, consciously or unconsciously, upon Conti- nental, not upon English, models. To-day, how- ever, we are beginning to construct a new and dis- tinctively American educational ideal, an ideal that has taken, or will take, all that is best from Germany, from France, from Scandinavia, from the Netherlands, from Great Britain, and, vivifying this with our truest American aspirations, will evolve a really national education adapted to our distinctive political ideas, to our unique moral standards, to our virile, cosmopolitan race. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, there is no question that Massachusetts, Connecti- cut and New York were ia the van of educational advance, and that among those three Massachusetts stood first. And what a difficult advance it was! To-day we can hardly realize the long, slow, ex- asperating fight required to secure the adoption of what seem now fundamental principles of schooling. The fight meant legislation, it meant education of those who were to educate, it meant — hardest of all — the arousing of the people to the need and importance of educational reform. Such work as this can be done only by tireless, fearless, infinitely 300 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION patient leaders; and splendid champions of that type appeared in James G. Carter and Horace Mann of Massachusetts, and in Henry Barnard of Con- necticut. The special work of Carter was in per- suading the Massachusetts Legislature to create a Board of Education and to give sanction to state normal schools. The special work of Horace Mann, as first secretary of that State Board of Education, was in exhibiting by figures and through startling illustrations, the educational poverty of his state, in making the people appreciate their school short- comings, and in issuing reports that were direct appeals to those people, reports that are smd always will be classics in education. The special work of Henry Barnard was in doing for Connecticut and Rhode Island what Mann did for Massachusetts, and also in bringing before Americans, through his monumental "Journal of Education," the best pedagogical thought and experience of Europe. How those men and others like them labored, it is difficult for us to-day to appreciate. The apathy, the niggardliness, the conservatism they had to meet were appalling. They had, first, to destroy the district system which was killing the already feeble public schools; and in opposing that they had to fight one of the dearest traditions of the American people. They had to persuade legislatures, and THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 301 that, many of us know, Is heartbreaking work. They had to convince teachers of their ignorance of the true science and art of teaching; and that was — and Is — no easy task. Most of all, they had to educate the people to understand the value of free public education conducted by persons who are fit to teach. Mr. Mann found, when he entered upon his duties, that 42,000 children In Massachusetts did not attend school at all, and that of those who did, the average attendance was only seventeen weeks. He found those children housed In school buildings scarcely fit for swine. He discovered most school committees to be Ignorant and slothful, most teach- ers to be Ill-trained and worse paid. There was little but chaos in the curricula and more than chaos in the methods and means of teaching. He found the schools rent by sectarian jealousies, and, most serious of all, he found the towns divided Into hos- tile camps, each district spending its pittance as it pleased, choosing its teachers by methods worse than haphazard, and opposing all change and im- provement with the fanatic fierceness of a puffed-up ignorance. To all these evils and to many more he devoted his annual reports as secretary, supple- menting them by lectures, by teachers' gatherings, by appeals of every kind which his zeal and knowl- 302 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION edge could devise. The good work thus started was carried on by equally active successors in the Board of Education, and by others Interested In the schools, until, little by little, the State of Massa- chusetts had established compulsory education and child labor laws; had secured truancy laws and parental schools to make compulsion effective; had founded normal schools to educate the teachers; had achieved free high schools and manual training schools; had compelled expert supervision; and — greatest achievement of all — had aroused public opinion in the towns and cities to the point where the people house their schools well, pay their teach- ers better than they used, demand educated super- vision and modern methods of teaching, and, for all these things, pay ten times as much, fifty times as much, In some cases more than a hundred times as much, as they did half a century ago. Although there are, of course, great differences among the many towns of the Commonwealth, it Is now at least nominally required that every child in Massa- chusetts shall attend school until his fourteenth year; shall be schooled In a building having a pre- scribed minimum of space, light, and air; shall be taught by persons having at least some fitness for the work of instruction; and that the work of those teachers shall be supervised by men or women who THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 303 have made of education a real profession. More- over, the laws require communities to maintain high schools, and to provide free text-books; they compel large towns and cities to establish manual training and evening schools; they foster and sub- sidize industrial education; and in many other directions the state, by statute and by penalties, acknowledges the high importance to the commu- nity of free public education rightly carried on. But the best of it is that public sentiment and public generosity are running ahead of the laws themselves, so that, to quote from Mr. Martin, writing a num- ber of years ago, *' while the compulsory law re- quires towns to raise ^3 for each child of school age, they voluntarily raise an average of $24.67. While they must keep their schools open six months, they do voluntarily keep them open eight and a half months." I have dealt solely with Massachusetts because on her sterile hills has been enacted practically the whole drama of American educational progress. To-day, however, most of the Northern and Western States have school laws comparable with those of Massachusetts; and many of the states of the rich, "hustling" Middle West have gone far beyond her in spending money upon education, in making schooling free to the very end of the university, in 304 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION adopting methods of administration, means of instruction, and opportunities for the thorough edu- cation of teachers far beyond what the old Bay State has done. Stupendous and far-reaching, however, as was the progress of Northern and Western schools in the fifty years folio v/ing 1840, that growth estab- lished only what one may call the machinery of free public education. And like most of our machinery at that time, much of this educational mechanism was made abroad. Moreover, a great deal of it, as has been said, was "made in Germany" by a people of a wholly different temperament and quality of mind from ours. So, while it was es- sential that our American schools should be thus organized, while it was inevitable that we should copy, more or less closely, the aims and methods of German and other foreign schools, it is clear that in many ways this alien machinery does not fit our needs, does not do and cannot do for us what free public education can and should accomplish. As the Commissioner of Education said, only a few years ago: "The transformation of an illiterate population Into one that reads the dally newspaper, and perforce thinks on national and International interests, is thus far the greatest good accomplished by the free public-school system of the United THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 305 States. " But that is not enough for it ultimately to do. The new education, therefore, instead of turning back or looking abroad for guidance, is studying into the real purposes and ends of the teaching of to-day and here. It is striving to learn the laws of or- ganic education: the laws, that is, of mental devel- opment, of sense coordination, of psychical interest; the laws of physical, mental, and moral health; above all, it is endeavoring to find out the social needs of the times and to develop types of education which shall meet those needs. Upon these, not upon custom and prejudice, the new education is developing its methods; by these, not by outworn, conventional standards, it is measuring its teaching results. The best modern education aims above all things to help the child put himself into harmony with eternal law; and it does this by training him in the care of his body, in the development and use of his senses, in the control of his intellectual and moral will. In the light of the new education, we teach him, not as a pupil, but as a human being; we use as the spur of education, not compulsion, but in- terest and sympathy; we strive not to mold the child from without, but to develop him from within; we spend less time in laying out courses of study, 3o6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION we spend more time in creating an educative at- mosphere. We are perceiving, in short, that edu- cation is a process of evolution different for each individual pupil, and that the business of the school is to direct and to bring to the highest possible point for every child this individual process of development. So we are beginning to agree, I think, upon the following main truths in education: (i) that we must educate individuals, not masses; (2) that we must educate by sympathy, not by compulsion; (3) that we must reckon with and must enlist all the social forces — of which the school is but one — that are molding the child's life; (4) that we must strive for "balance" — that is, for a simultaneous, harmonious development of body, mind and soul; (5) that we must ever keep in view, as the supreme goal of education, the child's social and moral life. The corollaries of these main propositions are, of course, obvious. If we are to educate individuals, not masses, we must have small classes; if we are to educate by sympathy, we must have teachers trained to understand and to practise this higher way of teaching; if we are to take into account all the social forces that surround the child, we must educate those forces — the family, the community, the church — to understand and to perform their THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 307 share in education; if we are to aim for balance in education, we must reform our curricula, must enlarge the uses of the schoolhouse, must spend three and four and ten times as much upon our schools as we to-day provide. If we are to make morality the supreme end of education, we must ourselves live better lives, we must make our cities and our towns more decent places in which to rear a child. Broadly speaking, then, the conditions essential to a real education are: stimulating, healthful, moral surroundings for the child everywhere and every day; less of politics and meddling, more of the true science and art of education in the average school; small classes, in which each child may be really educated as an individual human being; well-educated teachers in every grade, and a strong professional spirit in the whole teaching staff; genuine and unflagging cooperation on the part of the fathers and the mothers; and much more generous support from the public to whom the public schools belong. To secure these things and to build from them the new American education is to be the absorbing work of the twentieth century. It is a stupendous task to perform; but whether it be done or whether it be not done means life or death to these United States. And hopeless as it 3o8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION may now appear, the task will have been accom- plished if the end of the twentieth century sees education as far ahead of to-day as to-day's best standards are in advance of the crude and feeble schooling of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. THE END INDEX Academies, 203, 296 Adolescence, 82, 189, 203, 206, 210, 214 Agricultural vs. industrial edu- cation, 45, 237 Aimlessness in education, 86, 91, 94 Apprenticeship, 45, no, 240 Aristocratic education, 87 Arithmetic, 34, loi, 166 Arts, fine vs. useful, 261 Average child, 38, 65, 79, 215 Avocation, necessity for, 276 Bacon, Francis (quoted), 272, 279 Ball, John, 237 Barnard, Henry, 300 Baron de Hirsch Trade School, 119 Boston Trade School, lao Bread and butter education, 119 Browning, Robert (quoted), 256 Buildings, 22, 24, 40, 57, 164, 301 Business agent, 63 Business organization, 54, 56, 59, 63 "Captains of Industry," 125 Carlyle (quoted), 44 Carter, James G., 300 Caste system, 115 Centennial Exposition, 264 Child-study, 41, 93 Church education, 30, 45, 224 Citizenship, 158, 160, 168, 171, 209 Citizenship, education for, 12, 31, 40, 47, 59, 9o,;i22, 157, 164, 169, 187, 210, 283 Civic duties, 150, 155, 288 Collecting mania, 228 College entrance requirements, 3, 16, 203, 212 College graduates, 81 College influence on education, 15, 19, 95, "5, 189, 203, 283, 289 Concentration, loi, 166, 176 Conservation of human power, 6, 107, 124, 198 Continuation schools, in Cooper Union, in Coordination, 245, 254 Correctional institutions, 19 Correspondence schools, no Cost of education, 7 Courage, true, 155 Craftsmanship, 238, 250, 255 Creativeness, 247, 255 Criminals, manufacturing of, 67 Ctdture, 87, 122, 130, 251 Curiosity, 216, 220, 229 Defectives, 168 Democracy, 47, 5i» 54 Development the aim of education, 17, 163, 188, 210, 283, 306 Discipline, 13, 172, 178, 184, 194, 209 Disease, 21, 79, 167 District schools, 296 Drexel Institute, in Education, aimlessness in, 86, 91, 94 Education, college influence on, IS, 19, 95, "5, 189, 203, 283, 289 309 3IO INDEX Education, cost of, 7 Education, efficiency in, 7, 17, 22, 29, 42, 47, 63, 281 Education for citizenship, 12, 31, 40, 47, 59, 90, 122, 157, 164, 169, 187, 210, 283 Education, free, 26, 70, 143, 302 Education, health, 18, 42, 47, 50, 100, 106, 132, 167 Education, machinery of, 57, 59, 68 Education vs. instruction, 27, 29, 42, 6s, 157, 278, 283 Educational engineers, 20 Efficiency in education, 7, 17, 22, 29, 42, 47, 63, 281 Elective principle, 96, 182, 199 Engineering, profession of, 72 English public schools, 86, 298 Equality, 37 Erudition, 273 Evolution, dominance of, 49, 306 Examination system, 15, 115, 205, 283 Experts, 68 Faculties for schools, 24, 66 Family, the, 93, 150 Farm education, 5 Feeble-mindedness, 43 Formal discipline, 209 Free education, 26, 70, 143, 302 Friends, 137 "Gang-spirit," 216, 219, 235 Geography, 34, 166 German efficiency, 114 Goal in education, 18, 86, 91, 158, 306 Graft, 8, 23 Grammar, 34 Gumption, 4, loi, 105, 133, 167 Habit, 177 Health education, 18, 42, 47, 50, 100, 106, 132, 167 Henry of Prussia, Prince, 125 High school courses, 3, 94, 103, 107, 118, 215 High schools, 186, 191, 202 History, 34, 166, 208 History of education, 78, 84 Home study, 104, 232 Home training, 5, 30, 45, 194, 227 Human intercourse, 134, 250, 278, 286 Illiteracy in New England, 295 Irmnigration, 46 Individuality, 14, 32, 39, 69, 75, , 80, 84, 92, 97, 189, 197, 216,1 221, 249, 306 Industrial training, 18, 24, 109, 119, 123, 242, 259, 269 Industries and education, 19, 116 Inefficiency, 167 Infant, the 176 Instruction vs. education, 27, 29, 42, 6s, 157, 278, 283 Johnson, Samuel (quoted), 248 ** Journal of Education," 300 Kindergarten, the, 85 Labor unions, 122 Laboratory methods, 247 Latin grammar, 173 Law, obedience to, 49 Law, profession of, 72 Lincoln, Abraham, 52 Lowell Free School, in Machinery of education, 57, 59, 68 Manhattan Trade School, 119 Mann, Horace, 300, Manners, 103 Manual training, 18, 24, 91, loi, 106, 109, 116, 166, 245, 2S3, 257, 267 Manual training, Russian sys- tem of, 266, Manufacturing, 238 Martin, George H. (quoted), 296, 303 Mechanical methods, 97, 249, 281 INDEX 3" Mechanic arts, 238, 266 Medicine, profession of, 72, 77, 280 Moral cowardice, 48 Moral education, 42, 45, 49, 83, 100, 148, 163, 16S, 215, 223, 231, 253 Neighborhood, the, 93 Nervous strain, 217 New Education, the, 38, 95, 173, 180, 305 New England education, 87, 292 Normal schools, 23 Parental responsibility, 27, 194 Parenthood, education for, 47, 229 Parker, Theodore (quoted), 52 Partnership, social, 55 Patriotism, 34, 140, i49, 15°, ^55 Patriots, false, 147, 152 Personality, 73 Philosophy, Doctor of, 272 Physical training, 18, 42, 90, 107, ^32,, 217 . . , Physician, training of, 77, 280 Pie, effects of, 291 Politics, 58, 61, 67, 74 Pratt Institute, iii Prevention, education as, 42, 50 Private education, 28, 297 Professional education, 99, 12S Professional organization, 23, 70 Professional schools, 86 Reading, 33, loi, 165 Religious ecstasy, 216, 222, 230 Repetition, 177, 180 Research, 274 Responsibility, 55) 62 Revivalism, patriotic, 144 Roosevelt, Theodore, 127 Runkle, Dr. John D., 157, 265^ Russian system of manual train- ing, 116, 266 Salaries, 10, 22 Scholarship, American, 279 School boards, 8, 15, 23, 40, 58, 61, 68, 104 School buildings, 22, 40, 57, 165, 301 School superintendents, 9, 63 Scientific thought, influence cf, 48 Self-assertion, 216, 219, 229, 233 Self-control, 31, 35, 138 Sense training, 18, 91 Sexual development, 218 Sickness in schools, 21 Small classes, 23, 68, 92, 164, 170, 250, 307 Social education, 14, 24, 32, 56, 134, 160, 189, 198, 207, 268, 286, 306 Society, influence of, 224 Spanish War, 60 Specialists, 41, 271, 276 State and individual, 140, 151 State control of education, 11, 302 Strains of modem life, 44 Street training, 14, 3o> 225 Superficiality, 181 Superintendents, 9, 63 Swashbucklers, 34, i55 Taxation, school, 29 Teachers, competency of, 10, 57, 65, 92 Teachers, responsibility of, 40, Teachers, training of, 11, 23, 68, 71, 76, 82, 262, 306 Teaching profession, 23, 67, 70, 74, 307 , Technical education, 109, in, 124 Technical knowledge, 99 Technological education, 109, 266, 281, 287 Text-books, 36, 65 Three R's, 17, 31, Qi, loi, 1^2, 181, 191 Thring, Edward, 26 Town meeting, 45 Trade education, 46, 109, 118, 241, 259, 269 312 INDEX Trade guilds, 239 Trade unions, 243 Training of teachers, 11, 23, 68, 82, 306 Truancy, 64, 66 Uniformity, 37, 39, 182 United States, meaning of, 146 Uppingham School, 26 Vocational education, 24, 94, 118 Walker, F. A. (quoted), 193 War, evils of, 154 Washington, Booker T., 85 Will, training of, 138, 213, 232, Williamson School, 112 253 Woodward, Prof. C. M., 266 Writing, 33, loi, 166 Young Men's Christian Asso- ciation, 112 AUG 15 1912 d \^^'' /^a^^/' .V ^ %j"^^'^;#' V ^ ^ * « A -^ r^/A v^-e ^AO^ '= 'Vd' .*^lft'= .^^d< /°'^o/^:^«!^V' .' ^^^■°- .<> :! %, •'= V.# ; .^ ^- ^Xi ^ r^ C <^ •>■ ^^^4 ^'^" -^^c^ ^* <^ -^ •, -\,*^ o . -^^ :%: \> ^ ^ * o ^^^ ^AO^ 'q. ^^^^- V ». o.