Education and living

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EDUCATION AND LIVING

EDUCATION AND LIVING

BY

RANDOLPH BOURNE

Author of "Youth and Life," **The
Gary Schools"

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1917

'l-v\^

Copyright, 1917, by
^ The Century Co.

Copyright, 1915, 1916, 1917. by
The Republic Publishing Co.

Published, April, 1917

.S V \ ^

PREFACE

Thesepapers, reprinted with slight additions^
from thepages of the ^^ New Eepublie,'' through ^
the courtesy of the editors, do not pretend to
be anything more than glimpses and para-
^rases of new tendencies in the American
school and college. The public school is the^
most interesting and the most hopeful of our
American social enterprises during these days
of sluggishness for us and dreary horror for the
rest of the world. It is becoming one of the few
rational and one of the few democratic things
we have, and science and hope are laying a
foundation upon which a really self-conscious
society could build almost anything it chose.
The school fascinates me because there is al-'
most no sociological, administrative or psycho- 1
logical truth that cannot be drawn out of its!
manifold life. It is the laboratory for human
nature, and the only one that is simple enough
to study with any prospect of quick enlighten- !>
ment. Experiment in education has come to \

370029

L

vi PREFACE

stay, and this means that we have it in our
hands to approach ever more closely our ideal
of education as living. We can make the school
ever more and more nearly that child-commun-
ity life towards which our best endeavor points.
The point-of-view of these papers will be rec-
ognized as the product of an enthusiasm for the
educational philosophy of John Dewey. But
what is a good philosophy for except to para-
phrase? The discovery of truisms means
merely that my enthusiasms are being communi-
cated to an unappreciative reader. Certainly
the most recent educational sensation indicates
that there are still crowds of professional edu-
cators and parents to whom such ideas are not
truisms. To see education, not as a prepara-
tion for life or as a process segregated from
other activities, but as identical with living,
takes more imagination than most teachers have
yet acquired. If the school is a place where
children live intensively and expressively, it will
be a place where they will learn. The ideal
educational system would continue with the
adult all through his or her active life, sharpen-
ing skill, interpreting experience, providing
intellectual tools with which to express and
enjoy. Just as education and play should

PREFACE vii

be scarcely separable for the little child, so^
education and work should be scarcely separ-
able for the adult. By closing off the school
and boxing up learning we have really smoth-
ered education. We are only just beginning
to revive. We have first to make over the
school into a real child-community, filled with
activities which stimulate the child and focus
his interest towards some constructive work,
and then we have to teach the teacher how to
expose the child to the various activities and
guide his interest so that it will be purposeful.
The school can thus become a_sifter where chil-
dren unconsciously as they live along from day
to day are choosing the ways in which they can
best serve both themselves and their community
as workers and citizens in the great scheme.

The papers on the Gary schools are reprinted
not because I wish to exploit the system or its
superintendent, but because of the usefulness
of a concrete example to hang wandering theory
to. The schools of Mr. Wirt's conception, in
spite of many inadequacies of realization, still
seem to me the happiest framework I have yet
found in the American public school for the ful-
fillment of the new educational ideals. No one
can deny that in the actual schools much of the

viii PEEFACE

old unconsciousness and regimentation still stick
their unwelcome head through, but my some-
what naive impressions do reflect, I am sure, a
spirit which is there, and a possibility that is
very near for the American community to catch.
To praise one thing, however, is not to damn
everything else, and it would be false to pre-
tend that almost every city in our country has
not latent within its system the embryo of the
modern school. Some are simply more con-
scious than others. Some actually envisage
education as living.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I Education and Living 3

II The Self-Conscious School ... 11

III The Wasted Years 18 ,

IV PuzzuE — Education 26

V Learning Out of School .... 32 *

VI In a Schoolroom 41

VII The Cult of the Best 49

VIII Education in Taste 57

IX Universal Service and Education . 66

X The Schools from the Outside . . 77

XI The Portland School Survey . . 84

XII What Is Experimental Education? 91

XIII The Organic School 100

XIV Communities for Children . . . 104
XV Keally Public Schools .... 116

XVI Apprentices to the School . . . 127

CONTENTS ^

PAGE

XVII The Natural School 136

XVIII The Democratic School .... 146

XIX The Trained Mind 154

XX CiAss AND School 161

i

XXI A Policy in Vocational Education . 173

J

XXII An Issue in Vocational Education . 182

XXIII Organized Labor on Education . . 189

XXIV Education for Work . . . . .197
XXV Continuation Schools 206

XXVI Who Owns the Universities . . . 215

XXVII The Undergraduate 222

• XXVIII Medievalism in the Colleges . . . 230

EDUCATION AND LIVING

EDUCATION AND LIVING

EDUCATION AND LIVING

WHAT is the current broadening of the
public school — the bringing in of gym-
nasiums and pools, shops and gardens, dra-
matics and organized play — ^but a new effort to
realize the school as more a life and less an insti-
tution? Are we not getting a little restless over
the resemblance of our schools to penitentiaries,
reformatories, orphan asylums, rather than to
free and joyous communities? A school sys-
tem whose object was little more than to abol-
ish illiteracy and prepare the more fortunate
for college was bound to fall an easy prey to
the mechanical organi2?er. Education in this
country has been one-sidedly professionalized.
The machinery was developed before the mov-
ing ideals were worked out. Professional edu-
cators have worked too much for a logical sys-

3

4 LDVCATiON AND LIVING

tern rather than for an experimental adjustment
to the life needs of individual children. We
have achieved a democratic education in the
sense that common schooling is practically
within the reach of every one. But a demo-
cratic education in the sense of giving equal
opportunities to each child of finding in the
school that life and training which he peculiarly
needs, has still to be generally worked for. The
problem of American education is now to trans-
form an institution into a life.

Let us not deny the value of that emphasis
on administration. The slow progress from the
diffuse district school to the well organized state
system represents the welding of a powerful
instrument for a future democracy to use. Cen-
tralized and efficient administration is indis-
pensable for insuring educational benefits to all.
But there is a danger that we shall create
capable administrators faster than we create
imaginative educators. It is so easy to forget
that this tightening of the machinery is only in
order that the product may be finer and richer.
Unless it does so result in more creative life
it will be a detriment rather than a good. For
it is too easy to make the running of the ma-
chine, the juggling with schedules and promo-

EDUCATION AND LIVING 5

tions and curricula and courses and credits, the
end. To institutionalize a social function is al-
ways the line of least resistance.

We are becoming used to the impressive
schoolhouses that tower over the unkempt and
fragile houses of our American towns. The
school already overshadows the church. If this ,
means that the school is the most important
place in the community, then it is a hopeful sign.
But if its slightly forbidding bulk means simply
that there is another institution to put people
through a uniform process, or indeed through
any kind of process, then we are no further
along. The educators of the last generation,
whether from false ideas of democracy or from
administrative convenience or necessity, im-
posed deadly uniformities of subject matter and
method on the children in the schools. They
assumed that a uniform process would give uni-
form results. But children are infinitely varied
in temperament and capacity and interests. So
the uniform process gave the most wildly hetero-
geneous results. And the present unrest arises"
from our amazed dissatisfaction that so ad-
mirable and long-continued a public-school edu-
cation should have left the masses of children
so little stimulated and trained.

6 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

The pseudo-science of education under which
most of us were brought up assumed that chil-
dren were empty vessels to be filled by knowl-
edge. Teachers and parents still feel that to
cut down an arithmetic hour to forty-five min-
utes is to deprive the child of a fourth of his
education. But children are not empty vessels,
nor are they automatic machines which can be
wound up and set running on a track by the
teacher. They are pushing wills and desires and
curiosities. They are living, growing things,
and they need nothing so much as a place where
they can grow. They live as wholes far more
than older people do, and they cannot be made
to become minds and minds alone for four or
five hours a day — that is, without stultification.
The school forgets that we are only accidentally
intellectual, that our other impulses are far
more imperious. Because a teacher can secure
outward order, it does not mean that she has
harmonized the child's personality. She has
not the least clue to the riot or apathy or de-
lusion that may be going on inside him. She
may easily become a drill-sergeant, but she must
not think that she has thereby become an educa-
tional scientist.

To become that she will have to think of the

EDUCATION AND LIVING 7

school as a place where children spend their
time living not as artificially segregated minds
but as human things. She would have to judge
their activities in terms of an interesting life.^
And that involves good health, play, sport,
constructive work, talk, questioning, exercise,
friendship, personal expression, as well as read-
ing and learning. A place where children
really lived would be a place that gave oppor-
tunities for all these activities to just the ex-
tent that children were individually capable of
expressing themselves. Children want to be
busy together, they want to try their hand at
tools and materials, they waiit to find out what
older people do and watch them at it. They
have to flounder about and have all sorts of
experiences before they touch their spring of
interest and face their real direction. All their
education is really acquired in the same ran-
dom way that the^feaby learns to control his
movements and r^lpond to his environment.
No matter how the school tries to organize their
learning, and feed it to them in graduated doses,
this way of trial and error is really the one by
which they will learn. You have no way of
guaranteeing that they will learn what you think
you are teaching them. What you can do is

8 EDUCATION AND LIVING

to put them in a controlled environment where
they will most frequently strike the electric con-
tact of curiosity and response, and get experi-
ences that thrill with meaning for them.
■■ Life in its lowest terms is a matter of pass-
ing the time. It would be wejl if educators
would more often remember this. If they did,
would they not examine more carefully the life*
which they provide for growing youth? Col-
lege and high school life is reasonably antisep-
tic, it is not oppressive, it is not particularly
arbitrary or shabby. But compared abstractly
with what might be a good life, given the in-
terests and outlook and needed training of
youth, would it not seem a little sorry? Is it
not a travesty, except for the few, on a really
stimulating and creative way of spending time?
Suppose educators seriously measured their
^ schools by this standard of the good life. Sup-
pose we really tried to carry out the principle
that the secret of life is to*^pass time worthily.
Most of this current educational interest is
another stab at the age-long problem of making
education synonymous with living. We are re-
discovering the fact that we learn only as we
desire, as we seek to understand or as we are
busy. We are trying to make the school a place

EDUCATION AND LIVING 9

where children cannot escape doing these things.
We see now that education has grown up in this
country in a separate institutional compartment,
jealously apart from the rest of the community
life. It has developed its own technique, its own
professional spirit.^ Its outlines are cold and
logical. It is far the best ordered of our in-
stitutions. Its morale is the nearest thing we
have to compulsory military service. There is
something remote and antiseptic about even our
best schools. They contrast strangely with the
color and confusion of the rest of our American
life. The bare class-rooms, the stiff seats, the
austere absence of beauty, suggest a hospital
where painful if necessary intellectual opera-
tions are going on. Additions of gymnasiums
and shops and studios to such a school will do
little to set the current of life flowing again.
The whole school must be loosened up, the stiff
forms made flexible, children thought of as in-
dividuals and not as ^^ classes.'' Thus new ac-
tivities must be woven into a genuine child-
community life. These things must be the con-
tacts with experience that waken and focus chil-
dren's interests. They must be opportunities
for spontaneous living.
The school constantly encroaches on the home.

10 EDUCATION AND LIVING

It provides play and work opportunities that
even well-to-do homes cannot provide. It must
take over too the free and comradely atmos-
phere of the homes and the streets where chil- 1|.
dren play. Let teachers face the fact that they
cannot teach masses of children anything with
the assurance that they will really assimilate it.
What they can do is to fill the school with all
kinds of typical experiences, and see that chil-
dren are exposed to them. They can see that
children have a chance to dabble in them, touch
tools and growing things, read books, draw,
sw^im, play and sing. Let the teacher cleverly
supervise and coordinate, see that the children's
interests are drawn out, and that what they do
contributes toward their growth. In the last
analysis, each child will have to educate him-
self up to his capacity. He can only educate
himself by living. The school will be the place
where he lives most worthily.
( Our best American public schools are already
in sight of such an ideal. Americans need more
than anything to learn how to live. This is the
first business of education.

I-

I

n

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL

IN the educational excitement of to-day we
scarcely realize how far the modern school
is passing out of that era when the program
for work and study was carefully constructed
with a view to the child 's ' 'preparation for life. ' '
Educators saw the world as divided into two
radically different classes, adults and school-
children. The adults were functioning in a def-
inite sphere, using a certain self-contained and
common body of knowledge to do their work
and make their way in the world. The children,
on the other hand, were waiting like the little
unborn souls in ''The Blue Bird," to take their
places in that active world. If their parents
were using knowledge as a current intellectual
coin with which experience could be bought and
social exchange effected, the child who had any
chance of succeeding as an adult would have
to be put in possession of as much of this cur-
rent coin as he could hold, quite regardless of

11

12 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

his own enthusiasm for it or his own conscious-
ness of what it was all about.

The free public school, therefore, became the
place where children took into themselves such
automatically usable knowledge as would be im-
portant for them in the remote future of their
active adulthood. Since book-knowledge had
acquired honorific distinction as the badge of a
leisure class — and did not every democratic par-
ent wish his child to ^^rise in the world"? — and
since it was of all knowledge the most easily
negotiable in the form of simple processes and
facts, this type of knowledge became the stock
of the school. Then at some time a not un-
intelligent attempt was supposedly made to com-
pare this current stock of intellectual paper
money with the specie circulating outside in the
community at large, to see whether the school
reserve was accurate and sufficient. This atten-
tion lapsed, however, and the curriculum be-
came a closed system, handed down to the un-
critical and unconscious child with the authority
of prestige and the sanctions of school disci-
pline.

In this unconscious school, knowledge was
presented to us not as acquaintance with things
but with * * subjects. ' ' Text-books were given us

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL 13

holding the golden lore, and education became
the slow nibbling away at their facts for six to
twelve years. We came to think of ourselves
as cupboards in which were laboriously stored
bundles of knowledge. We knew dimly the
shape of the articles and the distinction of the
materials within. But we never expected to see
the contents until we were grown, when we
would joyfully open our packages and use them
to the infinite glory of our worldly success and
happiness. But it was a slow child who did
not begin to suspect, long before his shelves
were full, that most of his adult friends had
lost no time, when their schooldays were over,
in locking their cupboards and leaving their
bundles to the dust and worms.

The fine technique of the unconscious school
as worked out by educators in normal schools
and teachers' colleges in the last forty years
can be read in any current school survey.
Here the coincidence of work and study with
the child's interests is accidental. Indeed,
many parents and teachers are still opposed to
making too large a part of the curriculum ap-
peal to the child's ephemeral interests. Dis-
cipline is still thought of not as willed skill,
which it is, but as the ability to do painful things.

14 EDUCATION AND LIVING

A world where children do joyfully and well
what interests them, instead of what is **good"
for them (because unpleasant), still excites the
envious mistrust of an older generation.

Yet the transformation.from the unconscious
school to the self-conscious school is the very
kernel of the present educational excitement.
The new schools which arouse enthusiasm are
those in which the child is learning what has
meaning to him as a child. He no longer does
things because it is the ^^ teacher's way." That
old perverted honor of the teacher never to ad-
mit that she is wrong lest the child's confidence
be disturbed and he become conscious and crit-
ical of the methods and materials of his ed-
ucation, is breaking down. We are learning
that in the unconscious school the prizes go
to the docile and unquestioning, not to those
of initiative and skill. The school that
keeps children in ignorance of what they are
doing trains them for an uncritical life in so-
ciety.

The discovery is not new that all the skill
necessary to live an effective life in America to-
day is not contained in a few readers, arithme-
tics, abridged histories and geographies, an ele-
mentary algebra and plane geometry, a Latin,

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL 15

Greek, or German grammar, with cuUings from
the works of Caesar, Virgil, Xenophon, Cicero
and Homer. When educators found that adult
life overflowed these narrow limits, they intro-
duced manual training, gymnastics, drawing and
music; but the child became no more self-con-
scious, for these were merely additional '^sub-
jects." The radical discovery of to-day is that
the adult world is not primarily engaged in
turning information into power. The adult
rarely has a historical or a geographical or an
arithmetical thought unconnected with experi-
ence. What he does is to work very concretely
at a myriad of occupations, intellectual and me-
chanical, concerned with making a living,
bringing up a family, dealing with people, cast-
ing a vote, reading newspapers. He has a
great diversity of horizons, and the most effec-
tive people are those who react most intelli-
gently to their experience as a whole. Power
and information increase together, not one at
a time. The effective adult is a self-conscious
personality. The only school which can be a
genuine preparation for life is a self-conscious
school. The child must learn to live in the same
kind of world that his elders live in. The school
must be the community in which his child-life

16 EDUCATION AND LIVING

develops. His play and work must be, first of
all, interesting activity.

Fortunately the modern movement to make
the school self-conscious has begun at the bot-
tom. The four earlier years of the public
school as taught by recently trained teachers are
now generally filled, even in conservative city
systems, with this new vivid consciousness.
Dramatization, the learning of reading and writ-
ing and arithmetic through play, group-games
and folk-dancing, gardening, constructive wood-
working— all this is a sign of the growing self-
consciousness of the school. In the more ad-
vanced schools, shop and science work, commu-
nity excursions, illustrative drawing and de-
sign, fertilize the life of the older children.
The most complete self-consciousness is realized
in a school of the Wirt type, where all the
varied activities are arranged to contribute to
the upkeep or enrichment of the school plant
and the school community. For the older chil-
dren the expanding community becomes an ex-
tension of the school, and they learn the opera-
tion of the adult world by going out to see the
institutions of their community and asking ques-
tions about them. In the self-conscious school
the child's own curiosity sets the cue, and the

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL 17

school's work is to provide manifold opportuni-
ties for the satisfaction of that curiosity.

As this self -consciousness spreads up through
the school system, we should get a new type of
intelligence. Children will get a sense of means
used for ends, and this sense is the most im-
perative discipline that we need. A revolution-
ary reorganization of the curriculum will be
effected. Already unapplied mathematics and
unrelated classics are passing. Yet those years
which should most closely approximate in func-
tion and appreciation and in intellectual attitude
the adult world remain unregenerated. Little
seems to have been done to alter the old high
school, still regarded principally as the gateway
to the largely unconscious college. As a com-
munity of adolescent life, meeting sex-interests,
new idealisms and new assertions, it is a failure.
But as the older pedagogy fades out, and the
younger children trained in the self-conscious
school advance, we may expect a new orienta-
tion for the older years. Meanwhile our most
valuable criterion for any school, public or pri-
vate, city or rural, is, **How far towards self-
consciousness, as expressed in the individual
child and in the school community as a whol^
has the school progressed? '^

m

THE WASTED YEAES

ONLY one child out of fourteen in our school
system ever reaches the high school;
whatever education ninety per cent, of Ameri-
can children are to have they must acquire
before they are fourteen years old. So ele-
mentary a fact as this, it would seem, should be
at the background of every discussion and criti-
cism of the public schools. Yet the most cur-
sory inspection of the average city public school
shows that its significance has only recently and
very dimly been realized.

Indeed, as the average city public school is at
present organized, there is every reason to
believe that most of the children get practically
all their education before their tenth year.
Limited as this schooling is, they do not by any
means get the full advantage of what is sup-
posed to be given them. One can hardly come
from a study of the everyday classroom work of
the average city school without a conviction that

18

THE WASTED YEARS 19

there is disastrous intellectual leakage which
has been strangely ignored by educators.

This leakage is not in the primary school and
the high school. For the teaching of ^Hhe three
E's" American normal schools and training
colleges in recent years have worked out many
admirable techniques, which seem to have been
generally adopted. The younger generation of
teachers is doing efficiently its work of giving
the child a mastery of these essentials of civ-
ilized intercourse. The present primary school
on its intellectual side is an efficient institution.

Similarly the high school has had a large
amount of attention and skill lavished upon it.
Its administrative peculiar problems have been
studied and met. The best high schools have
been made to approximate elementary colleges,
with well-rounded courses of languages and
sciences, of artistic, manual and physical work.
For the highly selected group which reaches the
high school it provides an excellent purely in-
tellectual curriculum, both for higher study and
for social orientation.

Between the primary school and the high,
school, however, there lies a desert waste of
four years, the significance and possibilities of
which seem to have been scarcely considered.

20 EDUCATION AND LIVING

They are the most urgent years of all, for in
them the educator must give compensation to
the children who are forced to leave school for
the opportunities they are to miss. Yet these
middle years of what used to be called the
^* grammar school" are now left not only un-
motivated, but without any genuine educational
function. Instead of being prophetic of the
future they merely drag along the relics of the
past. Some schools, it is true, have timidly
brought down the beginning of high school
studies into the lower grades, but in general the
^^ grammar school" merely continues the inter-
ests of the primary school on substantially the
same lines.

Fifteen years ago, when I went to school,
there may have been some excuse for this sys-
tem. Teachers may have been correct in their
belief that it took the average child eight years
to learn arithmetic, reading, writing, spelling,
and a smattering of history and geography.
To-day such an assumption is ridiculous. I
have seen children in large classes in an ordi-
nary city school system learn all the elements
of *'the three E's" in less than six months.
The clear writing and accurate reading of lit-
tle children in the first grade who have only

THE WASTED YEARS 21

been going to school for a few months is aston-
ishing. It suggests that Mme. Montessori could
scarcely have known of the excellence of ele-
mentary methods in this country when she
urged her ideas as revolutionary. For these
small children, as for the Montessori child, the
competitive number- work, the writing from dic-
tation, the oral reading, the spelling, seemed not
drudgery but interesting activity. Astonish-
ing, too, was the uniform excellence of the re-
sults.

Now it is little more than a truism to say that
^^the three E's" have not really been learned
until they have become automatic, that reading,
writing and arithmetic are not ends in them-
selves but merely the tools for work. To give
command of the tools is the peculiar task of the
primary school, and of the primary school only.
If children can be given an acquaintance with
^^the three R's" in six months, it does not seem
too much to expect them to acquire this auto-
matic command in two or three years. It is in-
credible that the child should have to study
eight years for this. Yet our elementary
schools continue to assume that every child is
thus mentally backward. In the higher grades
we find the same subjects, formal reading les-

22 EDUCATION AND LIVING

sons, formal penmanship lessons, formal arith-
metic and spelling. But something has hap-
pened to these children. They are distinctly
less interested, less interesting, and even less
capable than the smaller children. It is de-
pressing to realize that the elementary school
has existed only to turn first-grade children into
seyenth-grade children, and to realize that most
of the latter are nearing the end of their school-
days and will pass out into the world with
that intellectual listlessness and lack of com-
mand.

Let me suggest what has happened to these
children. Formal work, the learning of any
technique, is apt to be pleasurable as long
as we can feel ourselves gradually acquiring a
command over our instrument. But after we
have acquired the technique and can rely upon
our skill, there is no gain in continuing formal
exercises. There is only gain in using our skill
in real work, the work for which we have stud-
ied. If we have studied a language, we do not
keep mulling over rules of grammar and vocab-
ularies, but we try as soon as possible to read.
The means now gives way to the end.

We can understand one cause for that situa-
tion of which employers complain when children

THE WASTED YEARS 23

come to them from the public schools unpre-
pared in the very elements of education. In the
bad memories, flimsy information, inability to
write or spell or figure accurately, is found the
very common indictment of the public school.
The criticism is usually that the groundwork
has been poor, that the children have not been
trained in the fundamentals. If my thesis is
correct, the groundwork has not been poor. Of
recent years, it has, on the contrary, been un-
usually excellent and thorough. The leakage
has come in the middle years, which have sim-
ply disintegrated the foundations. The school
has sharpened the mind, and then, by providing
only a repetition of formal work instead of
practical opportunity for use of the acquired
technique, has proceeded to dull it. Grammar
has been studied, literature in a curiously
desiccated fashion, political history, esoteric
branches of arithmetic. Subjects like these
have filled the time that might have been given
to copious individual reading, to writing about
what is read or experienced, to practical num-
ber-work in simple statistics or accounting.
Time which might have been given, through use
of pictures and newspapers, to the cultivation
of an imaginative historical and geographical

24 EDUCATION AND LIVING

background, has gone into aimless memorizing,
or into a glib use of words and phrases.

This situation is all the more preposterous
because both the high school and college are full
of studies that could be begun by the intelligent
child as soon as a technical proficiency in ''the
three E's" was once obtained. What psycho-
logical law declares that before fourteen a hu-
man being is incapable of learning languages,
the sciences, or even the sociological studies, but
that after fourteen he is capable of learning all
these things? As a matter of fact, most of
these ^^ higher" studies could be much more
easily assimilated by the quick and curious mind
of the younger child than by the older. And
for the worker in any field, acquaintance with
elementary science and the organization of so-
ciety is so emphatically important that we can-
not afford to let the vast majority of our citi-
zens remain all their lives ignorant of their
very terms. In the four years of the *' gram-
mar school" an intelligent interest could be
awakened in these fields, and the main outlines
grasped. This would not mean the addition of
many new subjects to an already crowded cur-
riculum. It would merely mean the dropping
of *Hhe three E's" back into their rightful place

THE WASTED YEARS 25

in the primary school. It would lighten rather
than overburden the school. We should then
have a fair division of labor and function be-
tween the schools, to the profit of both.

If there is one criticism of the public school
system on its intellectual side that can justly be
made general, it is this of the wasted years.
The school has found itself in this paradoxical
situation, that the more excellent became its pri-
mary methods the poorer became the product
at the end of the system. This paradox is ex-
plained. Educators have simply failed to rec-
ognize that the sharper they made the elemen-
tary tools and the better the facilities of obtain-
ing skill in their use, the more varied and im-
mediate should be the work upon which the tools
are to be exercised. They have failed to pro-
vide this work. They have left a leakage iuv
public education which has almost defeated its
own ends.

IV

PUZZLE-EDUCATION

HOW righteously indignant did our teach-
ers use to be if we ever precociously ob-
jected to learning our mathematics and gram-
mar in school on the ground that if we were
going to be doctors or policemen we should
never have any use when we grew up for that
kind of knowledge ! Were we not entirely too
young to know at all what kind of knowledge we
should need when we did grow up I Did not our
teachers impress upon us that in some mysteri-
ous way all was grist that came to our intel-
lectual mill ? Did we wish to know merely what
we could use in the daily grubbing of bread and
butter? Was not the fine flower of education
knowledge learned for its own sake? We could
thus be assured, as we cubed our roots or dia-
grammed our sentences, that all this work was
'^ training the mind,'' so that we could almost
feel our mental muscles growing in strength
and elasticity. We were top young to see it

26

PUZZLE-EDUCATION 27

then, but some day we should be heartily grate-
ful to our painstaking teachers. Some day,
when we were successful men, we should come
to appreciate the superior wisdom of this edu-
cational system against which our rational lit-
tle wills so smolderingly rebelled.

In those days, would we not have given our
young chances of promotion to see ranged up
before the teacher a group of great grown men,
the successful ones of the earth, to be put
through the paces at which we kicked? Would
it not have tickled us to see a class consist-
ing of a state senator, a former lieutenant-
governor, a manufacturer, a city official, a
banker, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, an
editor, an engineer and a clergyman, trying to
spell daguerreotype and paradigm, reconnais-
sance and erysipelas, guessing at the distance
in degrees from Portugal to the Ural Moun-
tains, locating the desert of Atacama and the
Pamir Plateau, expressing 150° Cent, in terms
of Fahrenheit, and finding the area of the base
of a cylindrical 1 gal. can, 10 ins. high? If it
was true that we should all find this knowledge
useful some day, then it would be preeminently
these men who were finding it useful now.

Let the news go forth to all the children of

28 EDUCATION AND LIVING

the land who are questioning the why and
wherefore of what they are learning, that this
thing has actually been done. The eleven men
have been assembled in Springfield, 111., and
have had put to them these questions and oth-
ers, all taken from the prescribed work of the
local public schools. The class constituted one
of those inquiries conducted with the deadly
accuracy of a laboratory experiment by the
Eussell Sage Foundation. The results, it need
hardly be said, were a complete demonstration
of the intuition of our childish precocity. Not
one of these eleven successful and intelligent
gentlemen made so much as a passing mark in
any subject. In the spelling-match the best
record was six words out of ten, while one man,
probably the editor, failed in every word.
Only one of the pupils knew the capital of Mon-
tenegro, while neither he nor any of the others
had the faintest reaction to Atacama or the
Pamir Plateau, much less to the length of South
America or the distance in degrees from Portu-
gal to the Ural Mountains. Only one of the
eleven could do the thermometer problem — he
must have been in Paris once in January — and
not one knew the specific gravity of alcohol
when 2 liters weigh 1.58 kgms. As for the ten

PUZZLE-EDUCATION 29

historical dates selected from ninety-one, the
only date that as many as ten men knew was the
attack on Sumter. Only one identified the date
of the Mexican "War, only one the surrender of
Cornwallis.

It must have seemed very curious to the
eleven to be presented with these questions, and
then have the answers labeled ^* knowledge."
How many of them drew the conclusion that our
public schools were little more in the higher
reaches than a glorified puzzle-party, where
recitation is often more like a guessing of rid-
dles, or trying to discover the answer from the
teacher's tone, or the putting together of a
puzzle-picture? Look at the average school
text-book, with its neat and logical divisions,
and see if you can't hear the dry crackle of the
author's wit as he has worked out his ingenious
riddles, pieced his cunning examples together,
hunted the dictionary for words to spell, dis-
sected his history, carved up a continent. The
intellect feeds on syllogisms. Syllogisms are
so much easier than appreciations. And really
it is far easier to reason than to interpret. In
the first you have merely to follow the beaten
track, in the other you must break new paths
and put the thing in your own new language.

30 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

Yet this whirling around of the mental engine
with the belting off is represented to us as a
process of '^training the mind." You might as
well say that an athlete could best train his legs
by standing on his head and waving them.

It is this scheme of puzzle-education which
this Springfield inquiry — a characteristic flash,
we take it, of American genius — has so tellingly
shown up. And this riddle-curriculum tends to
get worse instead of better as the science of
text-bookmaking waxes and the machinery of
scientific pedagogy accumulates. The avowed
aim of teachers and training-colleges in recent
years has been to discover pedagogical methods
that would -do the work regardless of the per-
sonality of the teacher. The riotous absurdi-
ties of this scheme are being revealed by such
inquiries as these in Springfield. They sug-
gest that the policy of having our next genera-
tion's mental attitudes, stock of information,
personal qualities, and moral biases cultivated
by unimaginative teachers whose intellectual
capacity has been just sufficient to acquire a few
routine methods of *^ conducting" a class and
keeping order in a group of restless children,
may have become antiquated. Our genuine edu-
cation— that is, a familiarity with the world we

PUZZLE-EDUCATION 31

live in — must wait until we get out of school.
That may partly explain why most children are
so anxious to leave.

Some people might find in this inquiry not so
much an evidence of the inefficiency of our pub-
lic schools as of how little intellectual baggage
one needs to become successful and eminent in/
these United States. But this is in reality only
to make a heavier indictment. It is still pri-
marily the schools that have Failed to make the
intellectual baggage important to the minds of
their pupils, that have left uncultivated their
tastes and horizons. It is for this reason that
our American intellectual background is so
relatively thin.

LEARNIlSrG OUT OF SCHOOL

AEECENT correspondent of the *^New Ee-
public '' columns declares that the real
puzzle in education is as to content. She asks
us to outline the facts we have found of value,
so that she may be sure, as she confesses she is
not now sure, what children should know when
they leave school.

I search the memory of my nine years in the
public schools, and wonder what I really learned
there. I must have learned to read and write
and spell and work sums, for I can do all those
things now; but I came out with no connected
sense of my country's history or that of any
other, and if I had any geographical grasp, it
came only from a certain abnormal delight I
took in poring over maps by myself. Algebra,
geometry and physics I recall to have passed
before my attention. I was a very dutiful
child, and it was my moral rather than my
intellectual sense which enabled me to get

LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL 33

'^marks'' in these subjects. I cannot say that
they were ^^ learned," in the sense of being
woven into experience in any way. Latin
rather appealed to me, chiefly because of its
elegance of form, which I remember to have
been curiously reinforced by the aesthetic
format of the Collar and Daniell's text-book we
used. Certain English classics appeared like
dim ghosts on my horizon. At no time could
I have given an intelligent account of the plot
or argument of any of the books we read in
Latin, Greek or German. The French and
Italian which I picked up later I can read more
easily than the German upon which I spent
three school years. Imagined geographical
wanderings, the disentangling of some verses
of Vergil, certain neat algebraic solutions, are :
all of my ^^ learning" that excited my interest
or enthusiasm. Nine years seems an uncon-
scionable time to spend learning these simple
things.

I conclude that there is not much use teaching
children things that they will not assimilate
with their own curiosity, and connect with what
they consider worth while in their world. In
my own case this curiosity rarely worked in
school. I cannot defend its algebraic and

34 EDUCATION AND LIVINO

Vergilian workings except as springing from
some embryo aesthetic sense. But the geo-
graphical enthusiasm is perfectly intelligible.
It is connected with that intellectual education
which I was pursuing parallel to my school
work, and which merged with it only occasion-
ally. This unofficial education, begun at a very
early age, came through the medium of the
newspaper. The ^'New York Tribune," lying
freshly on our doorstep every morning, was
gathered in like intellectual manna by my small
and grateful self. It told me daily of a wide,
fascinating and important world, and to it I
reacted with never failing curiosity. On the
political events, personalities, foreign wars,
riots, strikes, plays, books, and music that
streamed disorganizedly through its columns,
no school subject threw any light except
geography, which at least enabled me to place
things on the map. History, which might have
helped, was taught, not backwards, in the order
that one's curiosity naturally approaches it,
but forwards, so that at no time did we get
within hailing distance of the present.

My real education, as I look back on it, con-
sisted in making some sort of order out of
this journalistic chaos. I got some help in the

LEAENING OUT OF SCHOOL 35

debates on current events which a radical su-
perintendent introduced into our high school.
I remember pulverizing, at the age of thirteen,
my opponents in debate, with proofs that a
ruthless dictatorship was the only form of
government possible in the primitive state of
Santo Domingo. Our household, however, w^s
innocent of current discussion. The public
library had not been born. I had to plot out
this larger world by myself. Indeed, the
grown-up people whom I sought seemed on the
whole less familiar than I with the bearings
of my curiosity. I cannot say that there was
anything subtle or complicated or critical in
my acceptance of the newspaper. It was all I
could do to get the world mapped out, and be-
come familiar with the names that I read. I
remember following the Greco-Turkish War
with a great deal of satisfaction, though the
issues involved and the real military operations
never meant anything at all. I got only the
pleasant familiarity with this wider social
world that one would get in meeting the same
faces constantly in the street, without knowing
the names of the people or speaking to them.

Whatever familiarity with the trend of
events and the wider interests of men and

36 EDUCATION AND LXVING

women I had when I left school was obtained
in this way. The school had been practically
valueless in giving me the background of the
intellectual world in which I was henceforth to
live. My framework was bony enough and the
content flimsy, but the outlines of my interests
were there, and curiosity enough to keep me
ceaselessly at filling in that content. Nothing
has occurred since that time to show me,
through various vicissitudes, that it was not
the most useful I could have. That its founda-
tions had to be laid outside the school seems to
me a sheer waste of educational energy on the
school's part.

Boldly then, and in true egocentric fashion,
I say that the child when he leaves school ought
to have the foundations of interest in the events
and issues in which people generally are inter-
ested. These practically all come within the
attention of the metropolitan newspaper. The
child should be equipped to get some kind of
intelligent reaction to what he reads there
about political and sociological events and
issues, personalities, art and literature. No
one could accuse a curriculum based on the
newspaper of being aristocratic, esoteric, or
ultra-cultural. The newspaper is the one com-

LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL 37 -

mon intellectual food of all classes and types
in the community. Many persons, it is true,
may react only to certain specialized depart-
ments, and yet even into the most rudimentary
journals filter most of these larger issues and
events. To use this stock as clues and work;
out the historical, geographical, and cultural
ramifications in the school curriculum would
provide this broad familiarity with the world
the child is to live in which I suggest. I would
not make the horrifying proposal that the news-
paper be used as a school text-book. I am too
well aware of that cardinal tenet of current
educational morality which banishes the news-
paper entirely from the school. There is some-
thing rather symbolic about that tenet, by the
way. But to use a sort of generalized news-
paper as the nucleus and basis of a curriculum
would be a different matter. It would be using
the actual current life of society as the guiding
thread of what the child is to know. As far
as the purely intellectual content of the school
is concerned, it would do what so many edu-
cators desire, connect the school with life.

This ideal may be incredible, but it is not
necessarily impossible. Take the child at its
lowest terms, as a troublesome little person

38 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

whom its parents send to school to get it out
of the way of the crowded home until it is old
enough to go to work. Then take the present
curriculum, a medley of equally emphasized
cultural, scientific and manual studies. Now
the child certainly should have a command of
the three E's before he is ten years old. Sup-
pose then we transfer the mathematical and
scientific studies to a place subsidiary to the
vocational and manual work that is being so
rapidly developed. They would be taken up,
that is, only as the theoretical basis for this
practical work. This would leave four or five
years for the study of the history, geography,
literature, language, and civics, before the mini-
mum age at which the child in the more ad-
vanced states is allowed to leave school. There
seems to be no inherent reason why a great
deal could not be done in that time to prepare
this imaginative background for the world we
live in.

If ^^cultivating the imagination" means any-
thing it means ensuring that what one experi-
ences in daily life will call up interesting and
significant images and ideas. The public school
sometimes attempts to cultivate a sort of
literary and mythological imagination, but as

LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL 39

for ensuring that those references to places,
persons, books, political institutions, ideas,
which occur in the papers and weekly journals,
shall call up to the mind prompt, accurate, and
stimulating images and meanings, it has been
a dead failure. An exploration of the current
imagination of the average person would be a
curious and profitable enterprise for a psychol-
ogist to undertake. For the cultivation of this
imagery, we are all left, as the child is left,
to the chance provision of the contemporary
news-provider, the illustrated paper and ^^ Sun-
day magazine." Here is where we get our
notions of things as they look and act.

Beyond all else the child should leave school
with a wide and reliable imagination — not with
facts or theories so much as pictures, sympa-
thies, apprehensions, what we call '^the feeling
for the thing." Thus equipped, his curiosity
will provide him with all the facts and theories
he needs. The custom of teaching by subjects
is as artificial and absurd as could be imagined.
We do not think in terms of history or geog-
raphy or language. If I read a foreign news-
paper, all these are merged into one imagina-
tive impression. We think in terms of situa-
tions, which have settings in time and place, and

40 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

all sorts of fringes and implications. Unless
the child is taught in this spirit, the isolated
subjects will have no meaning. Without the
imaginative background that fuses and vitalizes
his studies, he will go out from school untaught
and unknowing.

VI

IN A SCHOOLKOOM

THE other day I amused myself by slipping
into a recitation at the suburban high
school where I had once studied as a boy. The
teacher let me sit, like one of the pupils, at an
empty desk in the back of the room, and for an
hour I had before my eyes the interesting
drama of the American school as it unfolds it-
self day after day in how many thousands of
classrooms throughout the land. I had gone
primarily to study the teacher, but I soon found
that the pupils, after they had forgotten my
presence, demanded most of my attention.

Their attitude towards the teacher, a young
man just out of college and amazingly conscien-
tious and persevering, was that good-humored
tolerance which has to take the place of enthusi-
astic interest in many of our American schools.
They seemed to like the teacher and recognize
fully his good intentions, but their attitude was
a delightful one of all making the best of a bad

41

42 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

bargain, and cooperating loyally with him in
slowly putting the hour out of its agony. This
good-natured acceptance of the inevitable, this
perfunctory going through by its devotees of the
ritual of education, was my first striking im-
pression, and the key to the reflections that I
began to weave.

As I sank down to my seat I felt all that
queer sense of depression, still familiar after
ten years, that sensation, in coming into the
schoolroom, of suddenly passing into a helpless,
impersonal world, where expression could be
achieved and curiosity asserted only in the most
formal and difficult way. And the class began
immediately to divide itself for me, as I looked
around it, into the artificially depressed like
myself, commonly called the ^^good" children,
and the artificially stimulated, commonly known
as the **bad,'' and the envy and despair of
every '^good'^ child. For to these ^^bad'' chil-
dren, who are, of course, simply those with
more self-assertion and initiative than the rest,
all the careful network of discipline and order
is simply a direct and irresistible challenge. I
remembered the fearful awe with which I used
to watch the exhaustless ingenuity of the *^bad"
boys of my class to disrupt the peacefully drag-

IN A SCHOOLROOM 43

ging recitation; and behold, I found myself
watching intently, along with all the children in
my immediate neighborhood, the patient activ-
ity of a boy who spent his entire hour in so
completely sharpening a lead-pencil that there
was nothing left at the end but the lead. Now
what normal boy would do so silly a thing or
who would look at him in real life? But here,
in this artificial atmosphere, his action had a
sort of symbolic quality; it was assertion
against a stupid authority, a sort of blind re-
sistance against the attempt of the schoolroom
to impersonalize him. The most trivial inci-
dent assumed importance; the chiming of the
town-clock, the passing automobile, a slip of the
tongue, a passing footstep in the hall, would
polarize the wandering attention of the entire
class like an electric shock. Indeed, a large
part of the teacher's business seemed to be to
demagnetize, by some little ingenious touch, his
little flock into their original inert and static
elements.

For the whole machinery of the classroom
was dependent evidently upon this segregation.
Here were these thirty children, all more or less
acquainted, and so congenial and sympathetic
that the slightest touch threw them all together

44 EDUCATION AND LIVING

into a solid mass of attention and feeling. Yet
they were forced, in accordance with some prin-
ciple of order, to sit at these stiff little desks,
equidistantly apart, and prevented under pen-
alty from communicating with each other. All
the lines between them were supposed to be
broken. Each existed for the teacher alone.
In this incorrigibly social atmosphere, with all
the personal influences playing around, they
were supposed to be, not a network or a group,
but a collection of things, in relation only with
the teacher.

These children were spending the sunniest
hours of their whole lives, five days a week, in
preparing themselves, I assume by the acquisi-
tion of knowledge, to take their places in a mod-
ern world of industry, ideas and business.
What institution, I asked myself, in this grown-
up world bore resemblance to this so carefully
segregated classroom? I smiled, indeed, when
it occurred to me that the only possible thing
I could think of was a State Legislature. Was
not the teacher a sort of Speaker putting
through the business of the session, enforcing
a sublimated parliamentary order, forcing his
members to address only the chair and avoid
any but a formal recognition of their col-

IN A SCHOOLKOOM 45

leagues? How amused, I thought, would Soc-
rates have been to come upon these thousands
of little training-schools for incipient legisla-
tors! He might have recognized what admir-
ably experienced and docile Congressmen such
a discipline as this would make, if there were
the least chance of any of these pupils ever
reaching the House, but he might have won-
dered what earthly connection it had with the
atmosphere and business of workshop and fac-
tory and office and store and home into which
all these children would so obviously be going.
He might almost have convinced himself that
the business of adult American life was actually
run according to the rules of parliamentary or-
der, instead of on the plane of personal inter-
course, of quick interchange of ideas, the un-
derstanding and the grasping of concrete social
situations.

It is the merest platitude, of course, that
those people succeed who can best manipulate
personal intercourse, who can best express
themselves, whose minds are most flexible and
most responsive to others, and that those people
would deserve to succeed in any form of society.
But has there ever been devised a more ingen-
ious enemy of personal intercourse than the

46 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

modem classroom, catching, as it does, the child
in his most impressionable years? The two
great enemies of intercourse are bumptiousness
and diffidence, and the classroom is perhaps the
most successful instrument yet devised for cul-
tivating both of them.

As I sat and watched these interesting chil-
dren struggling with these enemies, I reflected
that even with the best of people, thinking can-
not be done without talking. For thinking is
primarily a social faculty ; it requires the stimu-
lus of other minds to excite curiosity, to arouse
some emotion. Even private thinking is only
a conversation with one's self. Yet in the
classroom the child is evidently expected to
think without being able to talk. In such a
rigid and silent atmosphere, how could any
thinking he done, where there is no stimulus, no
personal expression?

While these reflections were running through
my head, the hour dragged to its close. As
the bell rang for dismissal, a sort of thrill of
rejuvenation ran through the building. The
**good" children straightened up, threw off
their depression and took back their self-
respect, the ^^bad" sobered up, threw off their
swollen egotism, and prepared to leave behind

IN A SCHOOLROOM . 47

them their mischievousness in the room that
had created it. Everything suddenly became
human again. The brakes were off, and life,
with all its fascinations of intrigue and amuse-
ment, was flowing once more. The school
streamed away in personal and intensely inter-
ested little groups. The real world of business
and stimulations and rebounds was thick again
here.

If I had been a teacher and watched my chil-
dren going away, arms around each other, all
aglow with talk, I should have been very wistful
for the injection of a little of that animation
into the dull and halting lessons of the class-
room. Was I a horrible ^intellectual," to feel
sorry that all this animation and verve of life
should be perpetually poured out upon the
ephemeral, while thinking is made as difficult as
possible, and the expressive and intellectual
child made to seem a sort of monstrous pariah?

Now I know all about the logic of the class-
room, the economies of time, money, and man-
agement that have to be met. I recognize that
in the cities the masses that come to the schools
require some sort of rigid machinery for their
governance. Hand-educated children have had
to go the way of hand-made buttons. Children

48 EDUCATION AND LIVING

have had to be massed together into a school-
room just as cotton looms have had to be
massed together into a factory. The difficulty
is that, unlike cottom looms, massed children
make a social group, and that the mind and per-
sonality can only be developed by the freely
inter-stimulating play of minds in a group. Is
it not very curious that we spend so much time
on the practice and methods of teaching, and
never criticize the very framework itself? Call
this thing that goes on in the modern school-
room schooling, if you like. Only don't call it
education.

VII

THE CULT OF THE BEST

A VALUABLE inventory of onr American
ideals of taste and culture should result
from the request of the American Federation of
Arts that the Carnegie Foundation undertake
an investigation of the teaching of art in this
country. "We have devoted much attention to
importing aesthetic values and works of art
from Europe, and to providing museums, libra-
ries and art courses for the public. But we
have scarcely asked ourselves what is to come
of it all. A survey of what is being done ^'in
the schools and colleges and universities as well
as in the professional art schools of the country
to promote the knowledge, appreciation and
production of art in America" will be of little
value, however, if it is to concern itself merely
with discovering how many art schools and how
many students there are ; how many courses on
art are given in the colleges, and the credits
which each course counts towards the degree.

49

50 EDUCATION AND LIVING

What we need to know is the direction of the
studies. We must not feel relieved in spirit if
we find there is *^ enough," and correspondingly-
depressed if we find there is ^'not enough" be-
ing done for art in America. We must clear up
our ideas as to what a genuine art education
would be for the layman, and then ask whether
the present emphases are the ones to produce it.
Artistic appreciation in this country has been
understood chiefly as the acquiring of a famil-
iarity with ^'good works of art," and with the
historical fields of the different arts, rather
than as the cultivating of spontaneous taste.
The millionaire with his magnificent collections
has only been doing objectively what the anx-
ious college student is doing who takes courses
in the history and appreciation of art, music or
literature, or the women's clubs that follow
standard manuals of criticism and patronize
bureaus of university travel. Everywhere the
emphasis is on acquisition. A great machinery
for the extension of culture has grown up
around us in the last generation, devoted to the
collection, objectively or imaginatively, of mas-
terpieces. The zealous friends of art in and out
of the schools have been engaged in bringing
before an ever-widening public a roster of the

THE CULT OF THE BEST 51

'^best." Art education has been almost en-
tirely a learning about what is ^^good." ^'Cul-
ture" has come to mean the jacking-up of one's
appreciations a notch at a time until they have
reached a certain standard level. To be cul-
tured has meant to like masterpieces.

Art education has, in other words, become al-
most a branch of moral education. We are
scarcely out of that period when it was a moral
obligation upon every child to learn to play the
piano. There is still a thoughtful striving
after righteousness in our attendance at the
opera. And this moral obligation is supported
by quasi-ecclesiastical sanctions. Each art, as
taught in our schools and colleges, has its truly
formidable canon of the ^^best," and its insist-
ent discrimination between the sanctified and
the apocryphal scriptures. The teaching of
English literature in the colleges is a pure ex-
ample of this orthodoxy. Criticism and ex-
pression are neglected in favor of absorption
and reverence of the classics. The student en-
ters college on a ritual of examination in them.
He remains only through his susceptibility to
their influence. Examine what passes for cul-
tural education in other fields, and you will find
that it is historical, lexicographical, encyclopae-

52 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

die, and neither utilitarian nor aesthetic. It is
prompted by the scholarly ideal rather than by
an ideal of taste. The prize goes to those who
can acquire the most of these goods. No one is
challenged to spontaneous taste any more than
the monk is asked to create his own dogmas.

To me this conception of culture is unpleas-
antly undemocratic. I am not denying the su-
perlative beauty of what has come to be of-
ficially labeled ^Hhe best that has been thought
and done in the world." But I do object to its
being made the universal norm. For if you
educate people in this way, you only really edu-
cate those whose tastes run to the classics.
You leave the rest of the world floundering in a
fog of cant, largely unconscious perhaps, try-
ing sincerely to squeeze their appreciations
through the needle's eye. You get as a result
hypocrites or * lowbrows," with culture re-
served only for a few. All the rest of us are
left without guides, without encouragement,
and tainted with original sin.

An education in art appreciation will be
valueless if it does not devote itself to clarify-
ing and integrating natural taste. The empha-
sis must be always on what you do like, not on
what you ought to like. We have never had a

THE CULT OF THE BEST 53

real test of whether bad taste is positive or
merely a lack of consciousness. We have never
tried to discover strong spontaneous lines of
diversified taste. To the tyranny of the ' ^besf
which Arnold's persuasive power imposed upon
this most inquisitive, eager and rich American
generation, can be laid, I think, our failure to
develop the distinctive styles and indigenous
art spirit which the soil should have brought
forth abundantly. For as long as you humbly
follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital.
If you are using your energy to cajole your ap-
preciations, you have none left for unforced
aesthetic emotion. If your training has been to
learn and appreciate the best that has been
thought and done in the world, it has not
been to discriminate between the significant and
the irrelevant that the experience of every day
is flinging up in your face. Civilized life is
really one aesthetic challenge after another, and
no training in appreciation of art is worth any-
thing unless one has become able to react to
forms and settings. The mere callousness with
which we confront our ragbag city streets is evi-*
dence enough of the futility of the Arnold ideal.
To have learned to appreciate a Mantegna and
a Japanese print, and Dante and Debussy, and

54 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

not to have learned nausea at Main street,
means an art education which is not merely
worthless but destructive.

I know that such complaints are met by the
plea that the fight has been so hard in this
country to get any art education at all that it
is idle to talk of cultivating public taste until
this battle is won. Mr. Edward Dickinson
still pleads in a recent book the cause of music
to the stony educationists of the land. Let us
get a foothold in the colleges with our music
courses, these defenders seem to say, and your
taste will evolve from them. But the way to
reach a goal is not to start off in the opposite di-
rection, and my thesis is that education in the ap-
preciation of art has been moving exactly in this
wrong direction. Widespread artistic taste
would have had a better chance to develop in
this country if we had not been so much con-
cerned with knowing what we ought to know and
liking what we ought to like. The movement
has caught those whose taste happened to co-
incide with the canons. It has perverted a
much larger host who have tried to pretend that
their taste coincided. And it has left untouched
the joyous masses who might easily, as in other

THE CULT OF THE BEST 55

countries, have evolved a folk-culture if they
had not been outlawed by this ideal.

The ideal still dominates, although it becomes
every day more evident that its effect has been
disastrous. A younger generation of archi-
tects has filled our cities with sepulchral neo-
classicism and imitative debris of all the ages.
We get its apotheosis in the fantasy of Wash-
ington, where French chateaux snuggle up close
to colonial mansions, and the great lines of the
city are slashed by cheap and tawdry blocks.
All this has been done with the best will in the
world, by men curious and skilful, well in-
structed in the *^best" of all time. It has been
a conscientious following of an ideal of beauty.
We are just beginning to discover uneasily how
false that ideal is. Art to most of us has come
to mean painting instead of the decoration and
design and social setting that would make sig-
nificant our objective life. Our moral sense
has made us mad for artistic ^ brightness."
What we have got out of it is something much
worse than imitation. It is worship.

This effort to follow the best, which even our
revolutionists engage in, has the effect of either
closing the appreciation to new styles or leav- j

56 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

ing it open to passing winds of fashion. That
we are fashion-ridden is the direct result of an
education which has made acquisition and not
discrimination the motive. The cult of the best
is harmless only if it has been superimposed on
the broadest basis of personal discrimination,
begun in earliest years. Let us admit that the
appreciations of the Brahmins marvelously co-
incide with what Matthew Arnold has stamped
as right. But perhaps for most of us there has
not been the environment to produce that happy
coincidence. Our education has forced us all
to be self-made men in artistic appreciation.
Our tastes suffer from hiatuses and crotchi-
nesses and color-blindnesses because no effort
has been made to integrate our sincere likes and
dislikes and focus and sharpen our reactions.
Until the present ideal is overthrown, we have
no chance of getting a sincere and general pub-
lic taste. We can have only the mechanics of
art education. I do not mean that America has
been unique in this. We have only been a little
worse than other countries because we have
been more conscientious.

VIII

EDUCATION IN TASTE

THEEE is a naively systematic way of teach-
ing artistic appreciation to the students of
many of our city schools. To each class is al-
lotted a famous painter. The class is then
taken en masse to the art museum, and, under
the guidance of one of the official show- women,
confronted with the masterpieces of its pro-
prietary genius. The children hear the dates
of the painter's life, details of his career, the
significance of his pictures, the particular beau-
ties of his styles, and any other loose fragments
of knowledge that may appeal to their guide.
After they have been exposed long enough to
the pictures to give confidence that appreciation
has taken place in them, they are allowed to
exchange painters with another class, and in
rigid platoon proceed to appreciate their new
idol in the same way. Presumably their appre-
ciation finally flows over the entire museum,
and they take their places among the cultivated
of the land.

67

58 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

The other day in a New Jersey school I was
shown some wall-paper designs that had just
been made in a class of the youngest children.
A simple figure had been given them with which
to cover a sheet of paper in any pattern they
chose. The thirty papers presented the most
astonishing variety. They ranged from mere
blotches to orderly and regular patterns. Some
children had merely reproduced the figure in
parallel lines across the paper. Others had al-
ternated their lines and made a more pleasing
scheme. Here was a living demonstration of
the variety of artistic skill, but I was more in-
terested in the appreciation. The teacher told
me that she had pinned all the designs on the
wall, and without any suggestion to the children
had asked them to choose which they liked best.
There had been a large consensus of liking for
the alternate lines, the pattern which was obvi-
ously the most regular and the most pleasing.

In that museum system of class-painters who
were to be duly *^ appreciated" I had a perfect
example of the old unregenerate cult of the
best. But my New Jersey school convinced me
that these vestal virgins of the museums were
guarding a decaying fane. The young teacher
in the classroom had the beginnings of what

EDUCATION IN TASTE 59

would be a genuine education in taste. If that
same critical and discriminating spirit could be
carried forward with these littlest children all
through their schooling, most of them would get
a robust sense of values that would be spon-
taneous, that would never have to be cajoled,
and that could not be threatened. Might not
this process of refining taste be woven into our
elementary education? Already we have its
embryo in these kindergartens and lower grades.
It is a question of emphasis, of making the
teachers see that the constant challenge to taste
is one of the most important functions of the
school. Types of school such as the Play-School
make expression and selection the basis of their
life. The most valuable feature of the Montes-
sori school is the training of the senses, the
quickening of response to sounds and colors and
forms. Suppose a child were brought up from
his earliest years in everyday contact with forms
and colors, without its ever being hinted to him
that some were ^^good" and others '^bad."
Suppose the child were urged to choose and to
express his likes and dislikes, not giving his
reasons but merely telling as he could what he
saw or heard. Suppose this attempt were made
through the course of his school life to clarify

60 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

his appeals and repugnances, not by rationaliz-
ing them but by synthesizing them. Would not
something like taste evolve out of it all?

Emphasis on what the pupil likes instead of
what he ought to like would change the tone
of school or college. The average mediocre
student under our present regime gets an al-
most uncanny desire to do things *^ right.''
Since success in school depends on doing what
the teacher thinks is right, education becomes on
the child's part a technique of accurate guess-
ing. Anyone who has spent much time in high
schools knows how eagerly children will pounce
on any official judgment concerning a book or
person or picture or idea. The study of Eng-
lish classics in most schools becomes a festering
bed of hypocrisy. And it is often the intrinsi-
cally amenable who are the most conscientious
and who therefore most hopelessly overlay their
own reactions with other people's judgments.
The modern school recitation has degenerated
into a skilful guessing on the part of the child
of what the teacher ^'wants'' him to say. And
this is a symbol of the general attitude, in
school and out, towards cultural things.

A laudable attempt has been made in the col-
leges to teach the student to think, but I wonder

EDUCATION IN TASTE 61

sometimes whether it has proceeded very fai?,
beyond encouraging him to find reasons for
ideas and attitudes which he is persuaded he
ought to have. For most colkge students it is
already too late. Expression and discrimina-
tion are the last things which the primary and
secondary schools have been emphasizing. The
boy and girl come to college with no background
of taste or selection, and the old docility, the
old unconscious hypocrisy, must dog them all
through their course. I would make a larger,
part of the process of thinking in school and
college the discovery of what one likes and
wants, the control and direction of desire. Al-
most the whole object of education should be
to know what one truly and wholeheartedly likes
and wants.

Yet the modem school is just the place where
this critical, discriminating attitude has a
chance of being cultivated. The secret of all
the current tendencies towards the ^^ school of
to-morrow '^ is the increasing participation of
the children in th^ work of their own school.
The Wirt plan, where the children help the me-
chanics decorate the rooms, and dramatize their
school-life in auditorium exercises, perhaps
carries this cooperation farthest, but in number-

62 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

less schools that have shopwork, gardens, dra-
matizations, etc., the same evolution is apparent.
Now every touch of dramatic, artistic and
literary expression made by the children in the
school affords material for education in taste.
Expression and criticism play into each other's
hands. Any expression which passes without
a reaction from some part of this little school
public is expression wasted. If the child does
not learn in the school to observe and reflect
upon and react to the expressive life that flows
around him in the school, he will never react
intelligently to anything outside the school.
His childish criticism will of course be as ele-
mentary as the expression is elementary. But
the emphasis of teachers should be there.
Taste must flow naturally and spontaneously
out of the experiences of everyday life.

Such an effort in the education of taste has
a much better chance of success than has our
traditional guidance. To impose canons on a
younger generation, to make students appre-
ciate the best in the arts, we need hosts of
teachers who are finely tuned to these appreci-
ations themselves, teachers whose tastes natur-
ally coincide with what has been consecrated by
time, and who can communicate their admira-

EDUCATION IN TASTE 63

tions. Experience has proved that we shall
never have those hosts of teachers. We should
never have enough Matthew Arnolds to go
round. What art education suffers from in this
country is teachers who have only the mechanics
of appreciation without the inner glow. And it
is futile to expect that we shall ever have enough
with the classic inner glow. In this new direc-
tion, however, the teacher need not be mentor,
but guide and provocative. Never being called
upon to impart judgments or appreciations to
the student, what he requires most is not judg-
ments and appreciations of his own but curiosity
as to the student's reactions. He need only be^
saying constantly to the student, what do you
like and how does it compare with something
else that you like? He need provide only the
paraphernalia of art, the materials and proc-
esses, for the student to do his own work. If
the teacher is of sound original taste, he can
give the student criticism and aid him in his
analysis and comparison. If he is not, he is at
least prevented from making the student's taste
hypocritical.

If this attitude became general in our
aesthetic education, it would not be long before
results became noticeable. We should get a

64 EDUCATION AND LIVING

variety of tastes — some of them traditional,
some of them strange and new, but most of them
at least spontaneous, indigenous. At present
we have no way of knowing whether any par-
ticular manifestation of public taste is conven-
tional, fashion-induced, imitative, or sincerely
felt. Much spontaneous taste might turn out
to be traditional. The majority of children
trained in discrimination might prove to be in-
cipient Brahmins. On the other hand we might
get strange and vigorous expressions like the
contemporary architecture and sculpture of
Germany. I am assuming that taste and cre-
ation will fertilize each other. For this fer-
tilization we must have a liberation of taste
from the sterile control of the ^^best.'' This
does not mean that every person would become
endowed with original taste, but that we should
have a chance to find original taste out. We
should have done all within human power to
create public taste, as our present ideal does
everything to prevent it. As a result we should
have a chance of some kind of integrated cul-
ture. In each art we might find several very
strongly marked directions of style and taste
which should appeal to different people. It
would then be the task of criticism not to choose

EDUCATION IN TASTE 65

between them but to discover their sincerity and
significance. Style is a matter of right rela-
tions. Things have style when their parts make
each other and the whole significant. Indigen-
ous style is the only art that really means any-
thing. Out of an education in taste will grow
creative art as a flower from rich soil.

IX

UNIVERSAL SERVICE AND EDUCATION

THE current agitation for preparedness has
set hosts of Americans to thinking out for
the first time what a real national strength and
readiness would mean. We suddenly realize
that if we are to defeat that militaristic trend
which we loathe we shall have to offer some kind
of action more stirring and more creative. The
call now upon every citizen is to be not nebu-
lously patriotic, but clear and lucid as to Amer-
ica 's aims, so that our natural energy shall not
be squandered and misused. There looms up as
a crucial need that ^^ moral equivalent for war''
with which William James first roused our
imaginations. It seems no longer so academic
a proposal. Confronted with the crisis, we see
that he analyzed the situation with consummate
accuracy.

All around us we see a very genuine craving
for unity of sentiment, for service, for some new
national lift and broadening which shall keep

66

UNIVERSAL SERVICE 67

us out of the uneasy pettiness into which the
American conscience has threatened to fall. In
our hearts we know that to crystallize this de-
sire into a meaningless sentiment, or into a
piling-up of armaments or a proscribing of alien
cultures, would not satisfy us. We want ac-
tion, but we do not want military action. Even
the wildest patriots know that America would
have to go through the most pernicious and
revolutionary changes to accept the universal
military service which they advocate. We wish
to advance from where we stand. We begin to
suspect that military service, flag-reverence,
patriotic swagger, are too much the weary old
deep-dug channels into which national feeling
always runs and is lost. The flooding river fills
again its archaic and forsaken paths. Our
present confusion expresses the dilemma we
find ourselves in, when our instincts impel us
into courses that our intelligence tells us we
ought not to follow.

Our American danger is not so much that we
become militarists as that we grope along, fret-
ting and harrying each other into a unity which
is delusive, and expressing our ^^Americanism''
in activities that are not creative. The best will
in America at the present time seems to crave

68 EDUCATION AND LIVING

some kind of national service but it veers off
from military service. Until we satisfy that
craving, we shall run at half -power, and suffer
all the dissatisfaction and self-despising that
comes from repressed energy. The question
which all are asking, in the varied and disguised
forms, is: How can we all together serve
America by really enhancing her life ?

To more and more of us the clue has come
through James's conception of a productive
army of youth, warring against nature and not
against men, finding in drudgery and toil and
danger the values that war and preparation for
war have given. Ten years ago such an army
seemed Utopian. We had neither the desire
nor the technique. It seemed a project not to
be realized without a reorganization of our life
so radical as to make the army itself unneces-
sary. To-day, however, a host of new atti-
tudes seem to give us the raw material out of
which such a national service could be created.
We hear much of universal military service as
*^ education." The Plattsburgs are sugar-
coated as ^* civic-training camps," '* schools for
citizenship." Universal service no longer
stands on its old ground of mere preparation
for war. It is frankly trying to get itself

UNIVERSAL SERVICE 69

recognized as an indispensable mode of educa-
tion. The next pertinent step is evidently to
ask why, if universal service is valuable be-
cause it is educational, it should not be con-
structed on a strict educational foundation.

James's proposal sounded Utopian because it
would require an entirely new and colossal na-
tional organization to put it into action. Uni-
versal military service in this country would
certainly mean such a task. But if our national
service is to be educational, we already have the
organization in existence. The rapidly consoli-
dating public school systems in the states pro-
vide the machinery for such an organization.
As the public schools becoihe better places for
children to spend their time in, we are growing
less tolerant of the forms of schooling outside
of the public system. The tendency is towards
the inclusion of all children in the public school.
And the progressive states are requiring school-
ing up to the full age of sixteen years. We are
rapidly creating a public school system, effec-
tively administered by the states, which gives
us the one universally national compulsory
service which we possess or are ever likely to
consent to.

Education is the only form of ** conscription"

70 EDUCATION AND LIVING

to which Americans have ever given consent.
Compulsory military service would require de-
cades of Napoleonic political evangelism to in-
troduce. Compulsory education is universally
accepted. For a national service which shall
be educational you would have to convert no-
body. The field is sown. No one denies the
right of the state to conscript the child for
education. But coupled with this assent is the
insistence that the education shall be the freest,
fullest and most stimulating that we know how
to give. The current educational interest arises
largely from the indignant demand that a state
which takes all the children must meet the needs
of every child. The very recent enthusiasm for
^Vocational education" means that we want a
schooling that shall issue in capacity for fruit-
ful occupation. A national educational service
could give training for work at the same time
that it gave opportunity for service.

It is only a national service of this kind that
would really be universal. Military service is
a sham universality. It omits the feminine half
of the nation's youth. And of the masculine
half it uses only the physically best. France
is the only country where the actual levy on men
for military service has approximated the num-

UNIVERSAL SERVICE 71

ber liable. But worst of all, military service
irons out all differences of talent and ability. It
does not even tap the resources it enlists. It
makes out of an infinitely varied group a mere
machine of uniform, obeying units. The per-
sonal qualities, the individual powers of the
youth it trains, are of no relevance whatever.
Men are valuable exactly to the degree that they
crush out these differences.

A national service for education would not
be a sham. It would actually enlist the co-
operation of every youth and girl. It would
aim at stimulation, not obedience. It would call
out capacity and not submerge it. It would
organize varied tasks adapted to the capacities
and strengths of its young citizenry. It would
be universal, but it would be compulsory only
in the sense that it called every one to the serv-
ice. The tasks would not be enforced drudgery,
but work that enlisted the will and toned up the
aspirations.

Such a national service would be the logical
outgrowth of our public school system. Sup-
pose the state said: All children shall remain
in school till the age of sixteen years. Between
the ages of sixteen and twenty-one they shall
spend two years in national service. This serv-

72 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

ice shall be organized and administered by the
state educational administrations, but super-
vised and subsidized by the national govern-
ment. The service would be performed as na-
tional service, but its work would be construc-
tive and communal in its purposes and not
military. Special military training could be
given as a branch of this service to those who
were best fitted for it. But defense would be
but an incident in our constructive life, and not
the sinew of our effort.

The tasks for such a national service would
evidently be different from those contemplated
by James. He thought of turning his army of
youth into the drudgery of the world, where
they might win in heroic toil and self-sacrifice
the moral rewards which war had formerly
given. But if our service is to be universal, it
cannot be mere unskilled labor in mines and
farms and forests. A large proportion of our
youth would be disqualified. Furthermore, a
service which made such frontal attack on in-
dustry would be bitterly resisted by those with
whom its work competed. We are not pre-
pared for a service which clashes too suddenly
and harshly with the industrial system. What
we need is a service which shall not so much do

UNIVERSAL SERVICE 73

the old work of the world as create new de-
mands and satisfy them. This national service
could do the things which need to be done,
but which are not now being done. It could
have for its aim the improvement of the quality
of our living. Our appalling slovenliness, the
ignorance of great masses in city and country
as to the elementary technique of daily life —
this should be the enemy of the army of youth.
I have a picture of a host of eager young mis-
sionaries swarming over the land, spreading
the health knowledge, the knowledge of domestic
science, of gardening, of tastefulness, that they
have learned in school.

Such a service would provide apprentices for
communal services in town and country, as
many schools and colleges are already actually
providing. Food inspection, factory inspection,
organized relief, the care of dependents, play-
ground service, nursing in hospitals — all this
would be a field for such an educational service.
On a larger scale, tree-planting, the care and re-
pair of roads, work on conservation projects,
the care of model farms, would be tasks for this
army. As I was burning caterpillars' nests the
other day in New Jersey and saw the trees
sinister with gray webs, I thought of the de-

74 EDUCATION AND LIVING

stroying army of youth that should be invading
the land clearing it of all insect pests. We
might even come to the forcible rebuilding of
the slovenly fences and outhouses which strew
our landscape, and to an imposition of clean-
ness upon our American countryside. With an
army of youth we could perform all those serv-
ices of neatness and mercy and intelligence
which our communities now know how to per-
form and mean to perform, but have not the
weapons to wield.

The army could be organized in flying squad-
rons, so that its youth could travel widely and
see and serve all kinds of men and communi-
ties. For its direction we would need that new
type of teacher-engineer-community-worker
that our best school systems are already pro-
ducing. Scientific schools, schools of philan-
thropy, are turning out men and women who
could step into their places as non-commissioned
officers for such an army. The service could
be entirely flexible. Boys and girls could
learn the rudiments of their trade or profession
in actual service with the army. Book studies
could be carried on, and college learning could
come to its own as the intellectual fertilizer of
a wholesome and stimulating life. Athletics

UNIVERSAL SERVICE 75

and sports would be an integral part of the two
years ' service. There would be long periods of
camping in the national parks or upon ocean
beaches. The Boy Scouts and Camp-Fire Girls
already give the clue to such an enterprise.

If objection is made that this national educa-
tional service would fail to bring out the sterner
qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice, and
would not be a genuine moral equivalent for
war, the answer is that the best kind of a moral
equivalent is a moral sublimation. We want to
turn the energies of youth away from their
squandering in mere defense or mere drudgery.
Our need is to learn how to live rather than
die ; to be teachers and creators, not engines of
destruction; to be inventors and pioneers, not
mere defenders. Our cities and isolated- farms
alike are mute witnesses that Americans have
never learned how to live. Suppose we had a
national service which was making a determined
assault for the enhancement of living. Would
its standards and discipline be less rigorous?
Rather would the ingenuity and imagination
have to be of the finest.

Some such conception of national service is
the only one which will give us that thrill of
unity and vigor which we seek. An educational

76 EDUCATION AND LIVING

service built on the public school system puts
the opportunity in our hands. The raw mate-
rial in attitudes and desires is here. Every
task that an army of youth might perform is
already being done in some school or college or
communal service. All we need to do is to co-
ordinate and make universal what is now hap-
hazard and isolated. An army of youth which
focused school work would provide just that
purpose that educators seek. The advocates of
*^ preparedness" are willing to spend billions on
a universal military service which is neither
universal nor educational nor productive.
Cannot we begin to organize a true national
service which will let all serve creatively
towards the toning up of American life?

THE SCHOOLS FEOM THE OUTSIDE

TO persons directing any complicated or-
ganization, criticism from outsiders al-
ways seems either futile or irrelevant. Con-
scious of the difficulty that has been met in cre-
ating the existing machinery, they resent the
debonair and nonchalant proposals tossed in
upon them by people who have only an amateur-
ish or philosophical interest in their work.
There are very few able administrators in any
work who do not honestly believe they are doing
their best with the material that is given them.
To this resentment the educational world
seems particularly prone. The teacher finds
it intolerable that the classroom should be
judged from any vantage-point but the teacher's
desk; the superintendent is annoyed if you ar-
raign his system in the light of the product
turned out. A public service which enlists so
much conscientiousness as does our public
school system is naturally sensitive to public

77

78 EDUCATION AND LIVING

criticism. Its very sensitiveness makes it diffi-
cult for it to distinguisli between criticism of
motives and criticism of policies and philoso-
phies.

This resentment to amateur criticism is offset
by an almost pathetic trust in expert overhaul-
ing. Letters from school principals to those
in charge of recent investigations into city
school systems imply that the expert has some
kind of magical power not possessed by the
ordinary teacher or administrator. When we
learn, however, that the defects discovered are
usually of so elementary and obvious a char-
acter that few interested laymen could have
ignored them, we suspect that the magic is not
so much a matter of the expert as it is of the
outsider. The thing is to get a new point-of-
view, a new interpretation, which shall not be so
obsessed with the inside workings of the ma-
chinery that the drift of policy and the value
of the human product is ignored.

Educators, it is true, ^* welcome fair criti-
cism," and they have a fond belief that they
get it from one another in the educational press.
But in this mass of books and journals, crowded
with exposition and discussion of current edu-
cational conceptions and technical methods, the

SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE 79

whole setting, language, philosophy, are pro-
fessional. The very bases and premises which
the lay critic wishes to criticize are taken for
granted. Educators decry ^^destructive" criti-
cism, but in a sense all criticism is destructive,
for it is essentially an examination. It requires
a stripping away of the wrappings of routine
and jargon, the turning of the idea about on all
sides, the placing of it in a light where it may
be clearly observed. There is another reason
why amateur criticism is likely to be pertinent
in education. The whole business of teaching
and learning is a matter of personal psychology,
and, in spite of current cant, there is no science
so elusive and so unformulated as psychology.
If the scientists will no longer deal with the
problems of the personal, conscious life, it is
left for the amateur philosophers to examine the
psychological backgrounds of the teaching
world, and attempt newer and more personal
interpretations.

Much of the public criticism of the school is
no doubt unintelligent, but what are we to say
of that blanket defense we hear so often from
the educator, that the niggardliness of the pub-
lic prevents his providing the best schools and
the best teachers? Now a country that at-

80 EDUCATION AND LIVING

tempts almost universally to provide free sec-
ondary school education — something provided
in no European country — is certainly not thus
guilty. The prestige of education in America
is extraordinarily high. It is quite too late in
the day to pretend that anyone still regards
public schools as a charity, or that ridicule of
teaching methods would only serve to discredit
the schools and reduce the already small appro-
priations. There is no more fear — though
some of our educators would have us believe
it — ^that free criticism of the school will leave
us school-less than there is that denunciation
of the New York police resulted in leaving that
city without police protection. The public
schools in this country have the standing of all
other public services.

It is not a question of more money, but of
more intelligent use of present resources. The
inexpert public cannot be expected to spend its
money wisely. It has an incorrigible itch for
objective results. It likes to see its money go
into handsome buildings with expensive equip-
ments. Large sums are spent in emulative
waste. If one town boasts a seventy-five thou-
sand dollar high school, its neighbor must have
a hundred thousand dollar one. It is obvious

SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE 81

that money which goes into costly venti-
lating systems and the adoption of uncriti-
cized fads, does not go into teachers'
salaries. But it is the function of the educa-
tors to offset this public childishness with their
own wisdom, and see that the public money is
profitably spent. If they believe that we could
have better teachers if we paid more for them,
they should see that the money goes to the
teachers and not into fussy mechanical details.

The trend of educational activity has been to
encourage this objective standard. More of
the intellectual energy of the educational world
has gone into technique and organization than
into psychology. It has been more interested
in seeing that the American child had enough
cubic feet of air, a hygienic desk, and a fire-
proof building, than that he acquired an alert
and curious outlook on the modern world, and
an expressive personality. France, with pub-
lic school buildings, even in Paris, that you
would scarcely perhaps stable your horse in,
somehow, by making expression the insistent
motive of education, turns out intellectual pro-
ducts strikingly superior to our own.

European experience tends, too, to challenge
the common assumption of American educators

82 EDUCATION AND LIVING

that quality of teaching is proportional to sal-
aries paid. American salaries are certainly as
high as those paid in European countries.
There is no violent contrast, moreover, between
the intellectual and educational background of
a primary teacher with seven hundred a year
and a principal with twenty-five hundred. They
would both subscribe to the same philosophy of
life ; they might easily have come from the same
training-school. The difference would be one
of age or executive capacity, or of ^^experi-
ence,'' which generally means nothing more
than greater expertness with routine and a
longer setting of the intellectual cement.

It is this background, spirit, philosophy, be-
hind the educational mind that the critical pub-
lic is becoming more and more restless about.
It does not challenge details of mechanical and
administrative organization. These have been
worked out with an ingenuity and a complete-
ness all too thorough. The public is demanding
now a similar attention to the conscious and
spiritual side of learning and teaching. The
ideal of the school as an embryonic community
life, of the child as a growing personality to
whom the activity of the school must have in-
tense reality, of education as the training of ex-

SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE 83

pression, creation — this has hardly begun to be
generally felt. The faults discovered by the
Springfield and Portland school surveys arose
largely from a careless and mechanical philoso-
phy of life, an educational philosophy that had
not sufficiently emphasized these ideals. The
investigators were able, for instance, to tell on
the moment whether a teacher had come from
a certain training-school by her method and
attitudes.

The responsibility cannot be dodged by the
professional educators. They are responsible
for primitive and mechanical attitudes which
make so much of the orthodox public school
teaching a mere marking of time rather than
an education. Millions of the public's money
would not effect this change in the background
of the teaching world. That background could
be changed without its costing the public a cent.
The difficulty, huge, it is true, like any other at-
tempt to change the obscure and uncriticized
assumptions that lie at the bottom of any theory
or practice, is psychological, not mechanical.
It involves only the substitution, for certain un-
democratic, ultra-logical ideas, of ideas more
congenial to the time and social situation in
which we live.

XI

THE PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY

IF we are to have better schools in our cities
we must know what kind of schools we have
now. In an attempt to tell us, the school sur-
vey has in the last few years been developed
with an admirable technique, and the passion
for being surveyed has spread to cities large
and small. No more illuminating document
has come out of this effort than the recently
published study of the school system of Port-
land, Oregon. It stirs enthusiasm because it
shows the progress that has been made in clari-
fying the current problems and the ideals which
must be realized if the public school is to pre-
pare the child of to-day for intelligent partici-
pation in the society of which he will form a
part. Compared with the investigations in
New York City and Springfield, Illinois, this
Portland survey, under the direction of Pro-
fessor Cubberley of Stanford University, repre-
sents a new achievement in educational think-
ing. Those surveys contented themselves with

84

PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY 85

a criticism of details, or, at best, with a vague
groping for constructive plan. The Portland
survey represents a definite break with the
tradition. It is characterized by a clear idea
not only of how the system fails to meet the
modern demands, but of how these demands can
be met.

The investigators cannot, of course, explain
how it is that one of the wealthiest and most
comfortable of American cities, a city at once
entirely modern and homogeneously American,
should have the most mechanical and form-
alistic school system these educators had ever
seen. One gets the sense of how without
leadership the school may become a little back-
water in a community. In Portland, a city of
250,000 people, commercial and residential
center for the great Northwest, these investiga-
tors found the ^^maintenance unchanged of a
rigidly prescribed mechanical system poorly
adapted to the needs either of children or com-
munity.'' ^'Universal practice," they say, **is
enlisted in the maintenance of a rigid, minutely
and mechanically prescribed system of instruc-
tion, organization, administration, supervision,
examination and inspection. Any change in
this elaborate mechanism meets with resistance.

86 EDUCATION AND LIVING

positive as well as negative. So far as this
system is adapted at any point to the actual
needs of the individual children and youth that
come under it, so far as it is adapted to the
needs of the communities for adequately trained
recruits to serve the community, the adaptation
is accidental, not the result of intelligence now
operative at that point."

This is a criticism of an American institution,
and Portland might be any large American city
which has not had an educational awakening.
The survey is significant because it shows the
machinery and motives of public school educa-
tion in this country for the last generation not
only in Portland but in a city like New York,
whose militaristic, mechanical system is now
being thrown into convulsions by the sudden
challenge of the new type of school embodied
in the Gary plan. Indeed this Portland survey
is a much better survey of New York school
conditions than the elaborate Hanus inquiry
which was made a few years ago.

The viciousnesses which the investigators
found in the Portland system are those which
are familiar to all who feel the defects of their
own schooling, or have set about to examine the
reasons for the poor quality of the school

PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY 87

output. On the administrative side there are
all the evils that come from retaining a scheme
of amateur control in a system which has of
necessity become professionalized. A board
which is directing a village school must keep
all school matters under its supervision. But
when that village has become a vast city, a
school board which keeps the strings in its own
hands is simply manufacturing wastefulness
and inefficiency. A lay board which employs
highly paid and highly trained principals, su-
pervisors, etc., and then insists on directing all
business — from the engaging of janitors and
the personal selection of teachers to the suspen-
sion of by-laws whereby a schoolroom may be
leased for an evening lecture or a teacher ex-
cused to attend the funeral of her grandmother
— labels itself as archaic and unfit. It is one
of the cardinal principles of modern political
and industrial organization that it is a waste of
money to pay salaries large enough to buy judg-
ment, discretion and expert skill and then not
permit them to be used.

This refusal to delegate responsibility, the
investigators found, paralyzed initiative all
through the school system. Nothing could be
done without reference to an untrained body of

88 EDUCATION AND LIVING

laymen who, however conscientious they might
be, must usually decide spasmodically and with-
out any definite educational policy. Indeed
their conscientiousness is often a positive vice.
Shiftlessness on their part would have permit-
ted initiative on the parts of principals and
teachers. Under present conditions the dis-
tinction between good teachers and bad fades
out. The concern of every one becomes to
keep the machinery going, not to criticize the
work and keep it adapted to the individual apti-
tudes of the children.

This administrative lifelessness has its coun-
terpart in a pedagogical routine the focus of
which is the '^course of study.'' The curricu-
lum is uniform for all children. It is ^Vivi-
sected into fifty-four dead pieces," laid down
in pages in certain adopted textbooks. ^'The
only thought devoted to the formulation of the
course of study,'' say the investigators, ^^was
the simple mathematical thought necessary to
parcel out the pages of the books." The teach-
• er's duty is to haul the pupil through the course
of study. This is done by means of the formal
recitation, where *' pupils answer hollow word-
questions with memorized hollow word-state-
ments." Term examinations discover how

POETLAND SCHOOL SURVEY 89

many of these word-statements are left in the
pupils ' minds. An elaborate system of inspec-
tion and supervision exists to check up and
grade both teachers and principals and ensure
that the hallowed '^course of study" is fully
being carried out. Many of the teachers are
trained in the local schools and turned back into
the system to perpetuate these methods. A
state tenure-of-oflSce act keeps all teachers in
their places.

The effect upon the children is logical. The
school becomes an automatic process of elimina-
tion. Those who can be hauled through the
course of study are hauled. Those whose tal-
ents do not lie in the capacity to memorize
printed pages pass out of the school or become
hopelessly mired in the lower grades. ^^If the
sixteen-year-old child has not yet transferred to
his memory Parts 37 to 54, inclusive, of the
dead and comminuted curriculum, the chief con-
stituents of which are abstract arithmetic and
technical grammar, then he must begin with
Part 37 and appropriate that and each of the
succeeding 17 Parts in order, before he can even
be associated with youth of approximately his
own age, and before he can engage in study
suited to his age and condition — study and ex-

90 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

ercises that will be of immediate and practical
value to him. in the effort he must shortly make
to serve society for the sake of his own liveli-
hood." And this system, formulated and ap-
proved twenty years ago by high educational
authorities, the survey stigmatizes as valuable
only in its ^^ cheapness and facility of adminis-
tration, and the relief that it affords educa-
tional officers and teachers from all responsibil-
ity of knowing and of meeting the individual
needs of their pupils."

This type of public school, so bald and gro-
tesque in the sober pages of the Portland sur-
vey that it seems more like the ritual of some
primitive tribe than the deliberate educational
activity of an enlightened American commu-
nity, is yet the type that still prevails in the
majority of our cities. This is the fact that
we must face. Yet a community that asks to be
surveyed is a community dissatisfied with itself.
Other communities are likely to stir uneasily,
and ask themselves why, if Los Angeles and
Indianapolis and Gary can have modern and
fruitful public school systems, other cities
should not. We may even hope that it is the
last of the old system and the promise of the
school of to-morrow.

XII

WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION?

AT a time when more people are thinking
intelligently about American education
than ever before, it is unfortunate that there
should be any confusion between the widely di-
verse trails that experimentation is opening up
to the modern school. It is becoming increas-
ingly evident that the * ' experimentaP ' in edu-
cation does not at all mean the same thing to
educational administrators as it does to edu-
cational idealists. ^^Experimental education"
has not yet been pitted in competition against
the * ^ experimental school," but it is not un-
likely that the different techniques which they
suggest may come to seem hostile to each other,
and so the real values of both be lost. At pres-
ent the two seem to be developing in a fairly
complete disregard of each other. It would be
dangerous for American education to tangle it-
self in the dilemma of choosing between them.
On the other hand, it would be even more dis-

91

92 EDUCATION AND LIVING

astrous to confuse them. If we attempt to
apply the quantitative standards of the new
*^ experimental education'^ to the life of the
^^experimental school," or to infuse the quali-
tative ideals of the ^^experimental school" into
the technique of ^'experimental education," we
run the risk of spoiling that modern and so-
cially-adjusted school towards which we are all
feeling our way.

When the inventive school superintendent or
professor of education speaks of '* experimental
education," he is thinking, not of the ''model
school," but of the new standard tests in the
fundamental subjects by which the work of
large masses of public school children is being
regularly measured and compared. The city
school survey has elaborated a technique of in-
tellectual measurements which is giving us very
rapidly a genuine quantitative science of educa-
tion. A report like Pro|fesor Judd's in the
''Cleveland Survey" — "Measuring the Work
of the Public Schools" — ^is a storehouse of sug-
gestiveness for all who like to see how mathe-
matics can be fruitfully applied to living.
These statistical studies measure accurately the
performance of children in the different grades
and at different ages in the specific literate

EXPEEIMENTAL EDUCATION 93

skills which everybody needs even to start
fairly in the race of opportunity. The stand-
ard tests have been worked out experimentally
with great numbers of school-children so that
average norms of accomplishment can be set
for any class or any individual. Eates of speed
and quality of handwriting, and their relation to
each other; ability to spell common words; rate
and capacity of accurate figuring; rate and
quality of silent and oral reading; — ^these are
the aptitudes that are rigidly measured by the
tests. The children are treated as segregated
arithmetical minds, reading minds, spelling
minds, as units of intellectual behavior. The
tests are not ^^examinations," for they do not
aim to show any absolute attainment of ^^knowl-
edge." Their value is in the comparison they
afford of individual skill, and of deviations
from a norm of effectiveness. In the mass of
scores you have an intellectual relief map of
your class, your school, your city system.

Now nothing could apparently be more deadly
and mechanical than this treating of living chil-
dren as if they were narrowly isolated minds.
In this ^'experimental education" we are evi-
dently in another world from the '^ experimental
school." Yet out of these tests emerge the

94 EDUCATION AND LIVING

most important implications for modern educa-
tion. Out of this ' ' experimental education ' ' we
at last get a scientific basis for the *^ modern
school." For we have irrefutable proof of the
enormous diversity of minds and aptitudes.
We have a demonstration of the utter foolish-
ness of subjecting children to a uniform edu-
cational process. We have accurate proof of
the fallacy of the ^^ average" in education.
These tests are added proof of the unscientific
character of the typical public school on that
very technical and administrative side which
has been most carefully developed. The graded
school was a brilliant invention for its time, but
the bases of classification are shown by these
new tests to be absurd. Children are now clas-
sified, for purposes of education, largely by age
and average standing. The tests show that
neither category has the slightest relevance
for effective learning. We classify things for
the purpose of doing something to them. Any
classification which does not assist manipulation
is worse than useless. But mere numerical age
is no clue whatsoever to mental or even physio-
logical age, and minds with the same average
may plot out very differently for every individ-
ual one of the various skills and interests that

EXPEEIMENTAL EDUCATION 95

elementary training involves. Our educational
grading has been as sentimental and sterile as
the ancient philosophers' classification of mat-
ter into earth, water, fire, air. Such a concep-
tion of the world was interesting, but there was
nothing you could do with it. All the school has
done with its classifying has been to get the chil-
dren into groups where they could be dosed with
an orderly sequence of lessons. There has been
no handle by which their heterogeneous minds
and wills could be taken hold of and directed.
The rule of the classroom is necessarily mili-
tary, because such diverse people could only be
unified in the most objective and external and
coercive way. No internal control would be
possible. So the teacher must devote a large
part of her educational energy to the mere busi-
ness of policing. When she actually ^^ taught,"
it was only the average child that she could
really address — the fairly bright mediocrity.
The other pupils wasted their time almost in
direct proportion to their deviation above or
below that average. Children passed up
through their educational life on the basis of an
^* average mark," which represented nothing
whatever but a number. The standard tests
have shown repeatedly that ability is so un-

96 EDUCATION AND LIVING

evenly distributed that the brightest fourth-
year children overlap the poorest eighth-year
children. However children may average,
scarcely two children in the same class will ever
be found to have the identical capacity in the
different subjects. The tests reveal not only
that children differ, but just how curiously and
widely they do differ.

The traditional classification is enough to
wreck any educational system, even without the
deadness of the curriculum. With the pro-
gressive congestion of the public schools, teach-
ing has become more and more impossible. The
traditional system of grading has successfully
resisted most improvement in teaching, and vi-
tiated the newer values that have been brought
into the school. If children, clearly not de-
fective, cannot learn arithmetic, read slowly and
unintelligently, spell chaotically and write a
slovenly hand, question the grading system.
Never have there been such admirable tech-
niques for teaching these fundamental things.
But the classification defies them. The ^^ class"
gives the teacher no leverage for improving the
children's skill. An unscientific grading is as
much a barrier to altering minds as it is to
changing materials.

EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION 97

These truths seem elementary and obvious,
yet we had to wait for this *^ experimental edu-
cation'^ to shake complacency in the ^^ graded
school/' Now if we accept these tests we have
to conclude that it is useless to grade children
for education unless those ^* grades" correspond
accurately and specifically to the capacities of
the children. Work must be done in each spe-
cific subject with — and only with — those who
have approximately the same capacity. The
'^average'' is totally unknown in that ^^real
life" which we are constantly forced to set up
in antithesis to the school. In no function of
life is any one going to be judged by a compos-
ite ability to read, write, spell, figure. One suc-
ceeds not through any average skill or average
information, but through the ability to throw
all one's skill and all one's intelligence where it
is demanded. A measurement of intelligence
by averages will always produce just that inef-
fectiveness and vagueness for which the prod-
ucts of the public school are censured at pres-
ent.

The fallacy of the educational ^^ average" in-
volves another fallacy, equally obvious but
equally prevalent. This is the fallacy of the
*^ partially perfect." The school ranks the sev-

98 EDUCATION AND LIVING

enty per cent, child equal to the hundred per
cent, child. Children pass to more difficult
work on an admitted basis of imperfect accom-
plishment. But for any real effectiveness in
the world it is not enough to be habitually only
seventy per cent, right. Whenever you need to
be literate, the world demands that you be ac-
tually literate. If you have information, you
are either useless or dangerous unless your in-
formation is accurate. It is better not to know
arithmetic at all than persistently to make only
seven hits out of ten. For all practical pur-
poses your child is as much a failure at seventy
per cent, as he is at zero per cent. It will avail
him little to be able to read and write and figure
at a rate and an excellence only seventy per
cent, of the standard. In any situation which
requires these elementary skills he will be al-
most as much handicapped as if he were entirely
illiterate. It is time that the school faced the
bitter truth that life demands an approximate
perfection in whatever one tries to do. Educa-
tion must shape all its technique towards this
approximate perfection. It is not necessary
that all should do the same thing. But it is
necessary that what one pretends to do one
should succeed gradually in doing. The indi-

EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION 99

vidual who is allowed to persist continuously on
a level of imperfect acomplishnaent is not being
educated. For him education is a failure. He
should either drop his technique, or ways should
be found to improve him towards mastery.
What children are learning at any one time
they should be learning with a sense of con-
trol. The more difficult should not be con-
fronted till the less difficult has been absorbed.
And this controlled progress will be possible
only in a school where children work with their
equals. Classification in education should be
based only on specific proficiency.

The new ^^experimental education^' is en-
gaged in making dramatic in the schools these
truths. It is a force even more revolutionary
than the idealism of the *' experimental school."
The situation suggested by the ^' curve of dis-
tribution" is one of the most momentous facts
to be reckoned with by us of to-day. It is mak-
ing over our theories of democracy, social re-
form and social progress. To work out its
manifold implications in the school is to touch
the very nerve of our democratic future.

XIII

THE ORGANIC SCHOOL

THE Fairhope Summer School, which has
just closed its season (Sept., 1915), at
Greenwich, Connecticut, has given to Northern
people an opportunity to see at work Mrs. Mari-
etta Johnson's widely known ideal of ^^ organic
education. '^ Just as the Gary plan has shown
how the city school may give a varied training
to great masses of children with a freedom and
flexibility never believed possible, so Mrs. John-
son has demonstrated how the small commu-
nity, or even household, by using the natural
environment and the natural needs as labora-
tory and workshop, may adjust the child to life
far more accurately than any formal school.
No school carries out more carefully Professor
Dewey's dictum that the child can only be edu-
cated by concerning himself with what has
meaning to him as a child, and not what is to
have meaning to him later as an adult.
In the organic school, children grow up nat-

100

THE ORGANIC SCiHtiOL lOl

urally and healthfully, playing out-of-doors, fol-
lowing their curiosities, learning as their life
makes demands upon them. The teacher is
there to answer their questions, to sharpen their
wits, to name for them and analyze the flowers
and soil and trees, to show how to plant vege-
tables and build little coops or houses. In their
winter school at the single-tax colony of Fair-
hope, Alabama, on the shores of Mobile Bay,
the children can be out in the open air almost
every day. The land is a complete geological,
botanical, and physical laboratory, and the
household a natural classroom where they learn
to live. The school grew, in fact, quite natur-
ally out of the household, and the necessity for
some sort of school in a community where there
was none. Mrs. Johnson, with her teacher's
genius, simply sharpened and arranged her in-
tercourse with the children around her, and
presently had a school which has become one of
the most interesting in the country.

Its very informality is its charm and success.
The hundred or more children are not classified
in grades, but in ^4ife-classes," which corre-
spond roughly to those three periods in child
life — the first seven years of growth, the years
to adolescence, and early adolescence. The

J9:^ EDUC^ATiON AND LIVING

first class is really an outgrowth of the nursery.
In the cool rooms of the Fairhope Summer
School one comes upon little farmhouses and
villages and doll-houses of building-blocks,
which form the basis for getting acquainted
with the village the children lived in. The next
group is characterized by a tough practicality,
a capacity for drill and persistence, and this
*4ife-class'' was found in the wood-working
shop and garden. Literary studies are taken
up very late by the third class, whose recita-
tions are rather informal discussions in an out-
door cluster around the teacher. Only when a
broad background of acquaintance with real
things is obtained, practical powers of observa-
tion acquired, and an actual need felt for learn-
ing what books can tell, are the conventional
school studies begun. In the organic school
there is thus some chance left to the children
for getting real meanings and not mere words
and phrases which they may glibly repeat.
Reading and writing are not taught by drill, but
are picked up by the child from the teacher or
the other children, in the Eousseauan fashion,
whenever he finds that he is missing something
very important and interesting in not having
this skill.

THE OEGANIC SCHOOL 103

Learning in this kind of school becomes as
natural as eating. One learns when one is hun-
gry to understand what is going on in the world.
Such schools, it will be said, are all very well
as an ideal, but where can teachers be found to
direct them? Certainly many of Mrs. John-
son's children could teach others in the way
they have learned themselves. The way to get
teachers for this free organic education in the
'^schools of to-morrow'' is clearly to teach more
children in the same way.

XIV

COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN

ME. WIET'S schools at Gary are gexmine
public schools, in the sense that they pro-
vide for every kind of child in the community
and draw into themselves the main aspects of
the community life. They are not artificial
training-schools for vocations or for life; they
are a life itself. ^^The public school is still
merely the old private school publicly sup-
ported," he says. The change of support
has not really made it a different kind
of a school. It has not really grown up
to urban demands. School-boards usually act
as if they were handling private property.
They gravely discuss ^^ wider use of the school
plant" as if this were some gracious extension
of privilege. The public does not yet feel that
the schools are its own. Organization, admin-
istration, instruction, are highly authoritative,
doctrinaire. The ideal has been uniformity in
methods and product. The educational system

104

COMMUNITIES FOE CHILDEEN 105

has become as autocratic and military as the in-
dustrial. As for content, the curriculum is the
old medieval one, not transformed, but patched
up, in the good old Anglo-Saxon way, as in-
terests which had been the concern of the few
were gradually demanded by the many. Art
study, nature study, physical education, science,
organized play, manual training, have been
added to the public school work. But these new
interests and activities have become simply ad-
ditional ^* subjects,*' taught in much the same
spirit as the old. The problem of the educator
has been, not how may the new activity vitalize
and transform the others, but how can it be in-
troduced with the least disturbance to what is
already there. The present discussion of pro-
fessional educators about vocational training
shows the same mechanical effort to introduce
an alien activity into the traditional curriculum
in such manner that the latter may remain in-
tact.

Mr. Wirt's own school is not a tinkering-up
of the present school system. He is not an
^ * educational reformer ' ' making something
over. He has plowed up the educational
ground. He actually has a new kind of a school.
It is not a ^^ school of unspecialized vocational

106 EDUCATION AND LIVING

training," or ^^a school founded on play," or
an ** efficiency school," or any of the other terms
with which it has been designated. It is hard
to describe because it defies classification in the
old terms. Nothing is more delightful about
the Gary schools than the absence of cant.
Most of the current educational problems, the
books and ideas on pedagogy, educational psy-
chology, supervision, administration, teaching-
methods, classroom management, discipline, etc.,
which fill the attention of the current educa-
tional world are here as if they were not. It
is a school built up outside the influence of the
professors of education, the teachers' colleges,
and the normal school of the land. It is true
that there is probably not a single idea oper-
ative that is original with Mr. Wirt. Probably
there is not a single idea that is not being ap-
plied in some school in the country. The nov-
elty is the synthesis, and the democratic spirit
that motivates it.

Here is provided for the first time a genuine
public school, a school which does reflect all the
healthy interests of the community, and where
the child does become familiar with its life and
with his own interests and vocational opportuni-
ties through practical doing of work. The

COMMUNITIES FOE CHILDREN 107

school becomes ^'a clearing-house for com-
munity life." To enter the Emerson or Froe-
bel School in Gary — the two superb new build-
ings constructed by Mr. Wirt — is like coming
into a well-ordered city where each citizen is
going about his proper business. There is none
of that slightly depressing atmosphere of the
mild if excellent prison for half-day involuntary
labor which is too often the ordinary school.
Classes do not seem to be neatly immured in
rooms, or to be moving about in lock-step. You
are dealing with interested individuals who,
singly or in spontaneous groups, are utilizing
all the facilities of a lavishly equipped and stim-
ulating community. The tone is of a glorified
democratic club, where members avail them-
selves of privileges which they know are theirs.
The schools are public in the same broad sense
that the streets and parks are public. The
school is the children's institution. They un-
affectedly own it and use it as a mechanic uses
his workshop or an artist his studio. To go to
the schools in the evening and see the children
running and playing in the great broad halls —
incomparable playrooms — running in now and
then to speak to their parents who are studying
in the evening school, is to get a new emotional

108 EDUCATION AND LIVING

sense of what a school may be. The children do
not seem to be there because education is ^^com-
pulsory," or because the parents send them
there to get rid of them, but because what can
be done there is so interesting that they cannot
stay away.

I am unable otherwise to account for their
streaming back in such numbers to the volun-
tary Saturday schools, voluntary for the teach-
ers, too, who are paid extra for their work.
Saturday is a glorified pay-day, where one may
do anything one likes, from making swords in
the wood-shop to studying back work in the
classroom. I spent a fascinating hour watch-
ing the thronged wood-shop where little boys
were fussing with the scraps left from the regu-
lar work of the week. It occurred to me then
how little real difference there was between the
well-to-do home and the very poorest in the way
of interesting activities for children. How
many homes of the comfortably enlightened
classes were fit places to bring up a child?
How many even pretend to supply the books
and the wood-work and tools and plants and
music with which these wonderful buildings
were running over? Without interesting ac-
tivities for children, city homes, both rich and

COMMUNITIES FOE CHILDREN 109

poor, can provide only schools for loafing. As
between the street, to which the less well-to-do
child emerges for interest, and the vaudeville,
the ^^ movie" and the current fads to which the
well-to-do child escapes, I think the street is
probably the less demoralizing.

This Saturday workshop was a little study in
spontaneous discipline. Although the children
were unwatched, they worked on their own little
jobs as indefatigably as if they were under a
drill-master. If any little boy became weary
and was moved to interfere with another little
boy, he was apt to be brushed off as though he
were an irritating fly. Could it be that mis-
chievousness, supposed to be an integral part
of child-nature, was simply a product of re-
pression or idleness? Could it be that school
discipline was largely an attempt to solve prob-
lems which artificial rules were directly manu-
facturing? Visiting superintendents, appalled
at the freedom in the Gary schools, tip-toe about
looking for signs of depredation. They do not
seem to report any. I decided that these
schools had actually acquired the ^'public"
sense. It seemed really true that children, un-
less they were challenged to inventive wicked-
ness by teachers' rules and precepts, were no

110 EDUCATION AND LIVING

more likely to spoil their school than a lawyer
is likely to deface the panels in the library of
his club. This children's community seemed to
be enjoying its busy life in the same spirit that
the wider public uses its streets and libraries
and museums and railroad trains.

This supremely democratic public sense is the
motive of Mr. Wirt's genius. All this richness
of opportunity — the playgrounds, gymnasia,
swimming-pools, gardens, science laboratories,
work-shops, libraries, conservatories — which
this school provides so lavishly, is possible to
the public of a small and relatively poor city like
Gary, exactly because the schools are managed
like any other public service. The modern edu-
cational ideal, ^'to provide a desk and seat for
every child," is as absurd as would be one to
provide a seat in the park for every inhabitant.
No public service is used by more than a frac-
tion of the people at any one time. Mr. Wirt
provides the coveted ^^desk and seat'' for about
one-quarter of the children. While they are
studying the traditional three E's, etc., the rest
of the school is distributed in shop and play-
grounds, gymnasium and studio, or at home.
By an ingenious redistribution of the groups
throughout the course of an eight-hour day, Mr.

COMMUNITIES FOE CHILDREN 111

Wirt is able not only to give every cMld the
opportunity of the varied facilities every day,
but he is able to accommodate in one school
building twice the ordinary number of children.
The insoluble ^^ part-time" problems of city
schools disappear. The Gary school has two
complete schools, each with its set of teachers,
functioning together in the same building all
day long. In the lower grades the child spends
two hours daily in the classroom, an hour in
laboratory or shop, half-an-hour in studio, and
half-an-hour in gymnasium, an hour in audi-
torium, and the rest of the day in study, play
or outside activity. The older child has three
hours for formal instruction, and two hours for
more intensive shop or studio work. Children
are passing back and forth constantly between
home and school, each with his or her own
scheme of work, and all the school is being used
all the time.

The amount of money thus saved in school
buildings alone is so large that even a town like
Gary, with relatively meager school revenues,
can afford not only the varied equipment, but
also luxuries like special school physicians and
nurses, and special teachers for special sub-
jects. Mr. Wirt has been accused of ^^ business

112 EDUCATION AND LIVINa

efficiency," but this is scarcely the term for so
artistically elegant a scheme of economy.
When you reflect that it is just because the tra-
ditional classrooms are provided for only a
proportion of the children that all of them have
the varied daily opportunities of many-sided
work and play, you are likely to call this * * econ-
omy,'^ in the old golden Greek sense of the wise
management of household resources, so that
every member may share alike in the activity
and the wealth. Such economy is creative; it
enriches, not impoverishes. I have said that
Mr. Wirt thought in terms of the rural com-
munity, but it is of the rural community and its
creative economy, expanded to fill and reor-
ganize the life of the modern city. The school
trains the child by letting him do the things
the city does. His education is an acclimatiza-
tion to the wider social life.

A truly public school would let nothing com-
munal remain alien to itself. In the chemistry
class at the Emerson School I actually found the
children helping in the necessary chemical work
for the city. The class was simply an extension
of the municipal laboratory. Gary, of course,
has the good fortune or the good sense to have
as chemistry teacher the municipal chemist.

COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN 113

The older children act as his assistants. With
him the class tests the city water, the various
milk supplies of the town. Under the inspector,
they visit dairies, workshops, bakeries and food-
stores. Last year they published a milk bulle-
tin containing general information and reports
of their tests. I could not see that it was es-
sentially inferior in quality to one that an agri-
cultural school might have issued. When I
came upon this class it was testing sugars and
candies, from the different shops of the town,
for purity and for use of coloring matter. An-
other class was experimenting with soft drinks,
studying questions of solution, suspension and
crystallization, with ramifications, I was told,
towards the physiological effect of certain pro-
ducts. The children were practically deputy
food inspectors, and made reports on the official
blanks. The chemist assured me that he had
not lost a case in prosecuting for violation of
the pure food laws. In East Chicago, where
school-children were ostensibly not trained as
a vigilance committee in scientific investiga-
tions, the chemist could not get a single con-
viction.

The children also test the materials supplied
to the school, the coal, cement, etc., to see

114 EDUCATION AND LIVING

whether they come up to specifications. I saw
a group trying to make soap for the use of the
school. The chemist assured me — college-
trained ignoramus that I was amidst this youth-
ful expertness — ^that there was scarcely a prin-
ciple of the science, theoretical or practical, that
he could not develop from this work, all so di-
rectly motivated by the daily life around the
children. I wish I could convey the fine cali-
ber of this young chemist as he stood in his
laboratory with the children working around
him, his clear poise between the theoretical and
the practical making him for me the ideal sym-
bol of science working ceaselessly at the world
around to make it cleaner and healthier and
more livable.

That chemistry class in Grary has a high and
momentous significance to me. It was dis-
tinctly not play, as all other laboratory work in
school or college that I have seen has been
play. I was surprised to find how completely
the doing of real work banished the amateur
atmosphere and at the same time made the work
infinitely more interesting. Mr. Wirt says the
child is a natural scientist, indefatigably curious
and resourceful, quick and accurate. The little
children actually seem to achieve less breakage

COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN 115

than the older. What kind of a commnnity we
are going to have when any large proportion
of the children grow up to observe and test the
physical conditions under which they live —
when they get the scientific-deputy-inspector
habit, so to say — and what would happen to
some forms of political jugglery if a younger
generation got used to thinking in terms of
qualitative and quantitative tests, I leave to the
imagination. But it seemed to me that that
chemistry class was one of the most important
activities in the United States to-day.

XV

EEALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

CHAEACTEEISTIC of the ^^public sense''
of the Gary schools is the class in history
and geography, which I found at work getting
an imaginative background of the larger social
world. To the news-board in the hall they
brought clippings that seemed important. The
history room was smothered in maps and charts,
most of them made by the children themselves.
There was a great red Indiana ballot, a chart of
the State Senate, a diagram of State admini-
stration, a table showing the evolution of Ameri-
can political parties, war-maps and pictures.
The place was a workshop, with broad tables
for map drawings, and a fine spread of maga-
zines and papers. ** Laboratory'' work in his-
tory, tried so timorously in some of our most
daring colleges, was in full swing in a Gary high
school class.

When I visited the room the class was con-
cerning itself with reports on ^^The city as a

116

EEALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 117

healthful place to live in,'' with special em-
phasis on parks, because the town had been wag-
ing its campaign for the new water-front park.
Little outlines on Greek and Eoman cities,
medieval and modern cities, had been worked
up in the school library — ^bountifully equipped
as a branch of the city public library. I had
walked into a true course on town-planning,
at once the most fascinating and significant of
current social interests and the study that packs
into itself more historical, sociological and geo-
graphical stimulation than almost any I know.
A class that had gone through those reports
would have the materials for exactly the social
background that our current imaginations need ;
and, moreover, all those materials would be
firmly placed in the community setting.

There is a charming communal self-conscious-
ness about Gary, and this sort of history is the
thing that feeds it. One class had been working
on a comparison of Athenian and Spartan edu-
cation with Gary education. This struck me as
peculiarly delightful. Such social introspec-
tion we rather badly lack in America, yet it is
the only soil in which intellectual virtue can
ever grow. The ancient history class has for
its purpose : **to improve its members as Ameri-

118 EDUCATION AND LIVING

can citizens by a study of the experiences of the
ancient peoples." This class, after some class-
room turbulence, formed a voluntary society
which is duly opened and conducted by the
president, while the instructor lingers in a
leisurely fashion outside. I know of no more
admirable reason for historical study than this
phrase, the natural expression of the Gary child
who wrote the constitution for this class.

They do not seem to know whether they are
studying *^ Civics'' or not. They are too busy
soaking in from real events a familiarity with
history as it is lived and the community as it
works. I throw in here an advertisement for
the ^^ Literary Digest" and the ^^Independent,"
which the pupils regularly read. They study
history backward, so that it explains what is
happening to-day. They repeatedly dramatize
remote times. They are talking of cooperating
with the State historical pageant. It seemed to
me that these children were actually learning
their social world in the spontaneous natural
way that the intelligent child learns it from
newspapers and books and from the slow, un-
conscious widening of horizon for which he must
usually look quite outside the school.

If other community institutions have anything

EEALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 119

educational to offer outside the school, or if
parents and children think they have, Mr.
Wirt's school lets the children go to these out
of their auditorium or play hour. The churches
may have them for religious instruction — there
is no Bible-reading or prayer in the Gary
schools — and thus avoid the imagined necessity
for a special kind of church day-school. Al-
ready a Polish parochial school in Gary has
lost its reason for being and vanished. Y. M.
C. A's, neighborhood houses, special music-
teachers, etc., may also act as extensipns of the
school. It will be interesting to sedljiow suc-
cessfully some of these institutions which pur-
port to form the child's morals and care for his
soul's destiny prove their supplementary value,
and how far they are not simply having joy-
fully extended to them a long rope by which
they may hang themselves.

To Mr. Wirt the school is not more a com-
munity than the community is a school. He
believes that parks and playgrounds should fol-
low the schools, and in Gary he demands twenty
acres for every school plant. He does not rely
upon public playgrounds, to which, as experi-
ence shows, only a proportion of children can
be enticed from the streets, but his playground

120 EDUCATION AND LIVING

is a part of the school on equal terms with the
other activities. Otherwise these very expen-
sive grounds which cities are providing are
apt to be futile. Mr. Wirt's policy is to make
it as easy as possible for the community to use
the schools. He does not force people to the op-
portunities, but he puts them where the people
cannot easily evade them. He does not drive
children to the public library, but he has a
branch put in each school. The Gary schools
are open night and day, practically every day
in the year. The Indiana law — ^protector from
tyranny — forbids more than ten months of
school a year, but allows vacation schools.
Sunday sees popular lectures. The Gary
schools seem almost as public as the streets.

If the school is to be not only a community
embryonic of current society but also a school-
community of itself, it must have some forum
or theater where everything that is peculiarly
interesting in any part of the school may be
brought dramatically to the attention of the
rest of the school. This Mr. Wirt provides in
the auditorium hour, so drearily used in the or-
dinary school for religious exercises, ^* speaking
pieces," and moral homilies. In Gary every
child goes to ^^ auditorium" for an hour each

EEALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 121

day, but he listens there to talks by the special
teachers about their work, lantern-lectures and
dramatic dialogues written by the children
themselves from their history or literature
work. There may be moving-pictures, instru-
mental music, gymnastic exhibitions. The in-
itiative and responsibility are left to the teach-
ers. There seems to be no limit to the interest
and the possibility of what may go on in this
free little secular theater except what the imagi-
nation of teachers and children can suggest.
There is always singing, and of a most excellent
tone. ** Auditorium '^ is one of Mr. Wirt's
novel ideas. It seems to make unreal the old
categories of *^ entertainment" and ^^edifica-
tion,'' just as the rest of the school seems to
damage the conceptions of ^^work" and ^^play."
There was a pleasant informality about things,
with the girls sewing at the back of the theater,
and the young audience breaking into whistling
as they marched out to the music of the piano.
*' Auditorium" ought to be quite as important
as Mr. Wirt thinks it is. What school-work
might become, lived always in the possible light
of its intelligent presentation to the school audi-
ence in dramatic form, we do not know, because
educators have never been dramatists. The

122 EDUCATION AND LIVING

Gary schools have special teachers for expres-
sion, but the American spirit is in many ways
so inexpressive that the idea can thus far be
only a frank and delightful experiment.

I liked particularly in the '^auditoriums" I
visited the intermingling of children of all ages.
This is one of the many ways by which the
Gary school breaks down the snobbery of age
which causes so much unhappiness in childhood,
and fixes the adult mind with so many delusions.
I came across a significant editorial in the
Emerson School paper which showed me how
useful this intermingling was in smashing caste
lines that were already forming. The editor
acknowledged that the expected objectionable-
ness of the ^'youngsters" had not asserted it-
self. One got a real sense of a new sympathy
breaking upon these already sophisticating
minds of high-school children.

I mention this because it is typical of Mr.
Wirt's genius to obliterate artificial lines and
avoid mechanical groupings. His ideal school
is one like the Emerson in Gary, a complete
school, from kindergarten to college, in the same
building, with all the varied facilities used by
all classes. The grading is of the utmost flexi-
bility. The traditional twelve grades are fol-

REALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 123

lowed, but classes work in *^ rapid," ^^ average,"
or *^slow" groups, according as the various
children give promise of completing the State-
prescribed curriculum in ten, twelve or four-
teen years. The child may pass from group to
group or from grade to grade at any time on
the examination of the supervisor of instruction.
The child himself has no sense of being
*^ graded" or even ** marked." Eeport-cards
are rather a concession to parents' weaknesses.
If the child needs additional help, there is the
parallel school, so that he may have a double
lesson the same day. And the Saturday school
offers another opportunity.

All studying is supposed to be done in school
hours. The fearful bogey of ^^ home-work" is
laid. In this free interchange of groups the
child acquires a sense of individuality. Each
has practically an individual schedule of work,
for the organization of which the executive
principal, who devotes all his time to such mat-
ters, is responsible. Except in the youngest
classes, the children seem to move about indi-
vidually to their different rooms and shops.
By this drastic carrying down of college
methods through the grades Mr. Wirt has ex-
ploded another hoary superstition that great

124 EDUCATION AND LIVING

masses of children in city schools can only be
handled by uniform and machine methods, in a
lump. Froebel School in Gary has twenty-five
hundred children, most of them very small alien
immigrants. Yet the same flexible and free
methods are used there, apparently with suc-
cess. These children, because of the immensely
varied equipment, and the possibility of small
classes in the shops, are getting something re-
sembling individual instruction. I picked up at
random the card of an older girl at Emerson.
It read: *^ Printing, History, Gymnasium,
French, Music, Botany, Auditorium, English."
The very shock of that bold ^'Printing" gives
you a realization of the modern school you are
in. And this is a girl besides.

Now a program like this, and all this free elec-
tion and flexibility, would seem wilful and an-
archical were it not for the fact that in the
Gary school these schedules are the result of a
natural and very careful process of selection,
made by the child. What the child shall study,
outside of the regular classroom work, is
neither forced upon it nor aimlessly selected.
Take the Emerson School, a beautiful building
with laboratories and studios, gymnasia and
shops, and put your child into its kindergarten

EEALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 125

or first grade. He runs about the halls. The
shops and studies and laboratories are not seg-
regated, but distributed over the building so as
to convey the impression that they are equally
significant, and to give every child an opportu-
nity of becoming familiar with them. All the
rooms have big glass doors or windows. The
child's own unaided curiosity makes him look
in and wonder about what the older children
are doing there. One could see children of all
ages peering into the foundry or machine-shop
or printery.

When the child has reached the third or
fourth grade he has a certain idea of what ac-
tivity interests him, and he is allowed to go
into shop or laboratory as observer or helper
to the older child. He watches and asks ques-
tions, and the older boy learns by teaching him.
If the child finds that the work does not actually
interest him he still has the chance to change.
When he takes up the work in the higher grades
he has served his apprenticeship and is already
familiar with the apparatus and the technique.
The teacher does not have to break in a new
class each year. It is almost a self-perpetu-
ating and self -instructing class. The child has
been assimilated to the work as new members

126 EDUCATION AND LIVING

in any profession or trade in society are as-
similated. When the child is exposed from his
earliest years to the various vocational activi-
ties, is allowed to come into them just as his
curiosity ripens, you have as perfect a ^^ choice
of a vocation" as could be imagined. Only this
sort of opportunity can really be called '^voca-
tional training.'' The usual vocation school
work takes the child too late, when his curiosity
is likely to be dulled ; it puts him into the work
without any previous familiarity. It can
scarcely be anything but drudgery. If '^ capa-
cities are to be developed," Mr. Wirt's scheme
gives the surest means of developing them. It
solves the grave problems of '* vocational" and
^^pre-vocational" training, which are so sorely
vexing the professional educational world, a
large part of whose business in life seems to be
to create and have problems.

XVI

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL

VOCATIONAL training in the schools of
Gary means that whatever work is nec-
essary in the way of repairing, conserving,
bealitifying or enhancing the facilities, is done
by the school itself. These large, lavishly
equipped modern school-bnildings require a
force of mechanics to keep them in repair.
Their shops are the industrial and manual shops
for the school. The children work in them with
skilled union workmen, who are employed not
primarily as ^'manual training" teachers, but
as assistants to the building superintendent.
The mechanics teach by allowing the children
to help them as apprentices. They earn their
salaries by repair and construction work, while
the children who desire it get an incomparable
vocational training at practically no cost to the
town. Where the ordinary trade-school must
have large classes to make the enterprise pay,
the Gary vocational work may be done with the

127

128 EDUCATION AND LIVING

smallest groups, for the shops are paying for
themselves anyway.

Manual training takes on quite a new mean-
ing as you move about, watching the boys in the
carpenter-shop making desks or tables, or cabi-
nets for the botany collections, or book-racks
for the library, sending them on to the paint-
shop when they have finished ; boys in the sheet-
metal shop hammering zinc for the roof ; young
electricians repairing bells ; a couple of plumb-
ers tinkering with pipes ; little groups of serious
and absorbedly interested boys in foundry and
forge and pattern-making shop, all cooperating
like the parts of a well-ordered factory. There
was obviously enough real work to keep busy
for his hour a day every child who desired
training in a trade. Where school and work-
shop are thus fused, the need for ^' continua-
tion" and '^ cooperative" courses — ^where the
boy alternates between shop or factory and
school — disappears. The child has the advan-
tages of both.

The ordinary school, and even the specialized
vocational school, is rarely doing more in its
industrial, manual, or domestic science work
than playing a rather dreary game with toys.
There could scarcely be a greater contrast be-

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL 129

tween the real shops of the Gary schools and
those ordinary ^^ shops" and kitchens with their
dozens of little machines at which at a given
time the entire class does its little stereotyped
^* stunt." In Gary the domestic science room
is a real kitchen in which the daily luncheon
is prepared and served at cost to the teachers
and pupils who desire it. The cook is a real
cook, and the girls come in as observers, help-
ers or workers, just as the boys go into the
shops. The nearest approach to a luxury is
the pottery shop, but this is itself perhaps the
best symbol of that fusion of the artistic and
the practical that is the Wirt genius. What
are you to say when you walk into the art studio
and find a dozen girls and boys high on a scaf-
folding painting a frieze which they have them--
selves designed, while others are at work on
stained-glass designs to go in varnished paper
on the panels of the door?

There is a genial, joyous quality about all the
work that gives every room a charm — the foun-
dry with its deep shadows, the smooth gray
pottery shop with its turning wheels and bright
glazed jugs, the botany room with its mass of
greenery. Even the history room at Emerson
School had the atmosphere which comes from

130 EDUCATION AND LIVING

concentrated interest and the slow accretion of
significant material. Emerson itself is a spa-
cious and dignified building with innumerable
little touches of taste that one usually associ-
ates only with the high schools of exceptionally
wealthy and cultivated suburban communities.
It is a delightful paradox that so beautiful a life
should appear to be lived where every activity
seems to be motivated by direct utilitarian ap-
plication. I said that you have to plow your
mind up to understand this kind of a school.
Certainly I have never seen a place which more
nearly permitted to seem real that old ideal of
the joy of work which we imagine must have
existed back in guild days. It may be left to
the imagination what children trained in such
a school are likely to have to say to the indus-
trial society in which we live.

The practical work of the school is only lim-
ited by local school needs, but the shoeless con-
dition of some of the Frcebel children inspired
the starting of a shoe shop where old shoes were
made over. Both Emerson and Frcebel have a
printery from which come all the blanks, re-
ports, programs, etc., used in the school, as well
as the bulletins and papers by which the various
classes are tempted to preserve the good things

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL 131

they write. The commercial pupils have charge
of all the accounting and bookkeeping as well
as the supplies. The children who work in the
shops are paid in checks, which are calculated
on the basis of prevailing union wages for the
working-time. This provides opportunities for
a banking system, which is also in charge of the
commercial class. In the Jefferson School the
boiler-room is an integral part of the machine-
shop.

The botany class was responsible for the
beautiful and elaborate conservatory at the en-
trance of the Emerson School, and for the win-
dow hothouse in the botany room, where prac-
tical experiments are made. The botanists also
have charge of the shrubs and trees on the
grounds, and the vegetable gardens which they
work communistically all through the summer.
Their study of food and textile products rami-
fied into the domestic science work, just as the
zoology study was fused with physiology. This
latter class had a playground zoo, with foxes
and coyotes, raccoons and prairie-dogs, about
whose habits and adventures they were prepar-
ing a brochure, which was already in press at
the printery. When I stepped into the zoology
laboratory itself, I found that I was in an even

132 EDUCATION AND LIVING

more animated zoo. Crows, chickens and
pigeons in cages at the back of the room were
lusty with vociferous greeting. The imper-
turbability of the children amidst this racket
showed me how well aware they were that this
was the way a zoology room ought to behave.

Such a school, where the child works almost
unconsciously into a vocation which appeals
to him as neither play nor drudgery, is far more
^^ vocational" than even the specialized school.
The child, beginning so young in shop or labora-
tory, and assimilating the work very gradually,
is able to lay deep foundations of interest and
skill. The Gary school is distinctly unspe-
cialized. In a sense it gives a completely '^lib-
eral education." The child emerges a skilful
amateur. The industrial and scientific work no
more ^* train" him to take a definite place in the
industrial world than the cultural work trains
him to be a college professor. But he should
leave school well equipped to cope with a
dynamic, rapidly changing industrial society
which demands above all things versatility, and
which scraps methods and machines as ruth-
lessly as it does men. Only the man of rounded
training and resourcefulness who can turn his
hand quickly to a variety of occupations has

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL 133

much chance of success. Our public school, in
spite of its fancied ^ liberal '^ curriculum, has
really been turning out only very low-grade
specialists. It has made no effort to produce
the type of mind most needed to-day — ^the ver-
satile machinist, the practical engineer, the
mind that adapts and masters mechanism.
This is probably the best intellectual type our y
society produces. This exactness, resourceful-
ness, inventiveness, pragmatic judgment of a
mechanism by its product, the sense of ma-
chinery as a means, not an end, are exactly the
qualities that society demands in every profes-
sion or trade.

The Gary school is the first I havQ seen that \
promises to cultivate this kind of intelligence./
It frankly accepts the machine not in the usual
sense of the vocational schools, as an exacting
master that the child is to learn docilely to obey,
but as the basis of our modern life, by whose
means we must make whatever progress we may
will. The machine seems to be a thing to which
society is irrevocably pledged. It is time the
school recognized it. In Gary it is with the
child from his earliest years. It is the motive
of his scientific study. The physics teacher at
the Emerson School told me that he thought the

134 EDUCATION AND LIVING

fascinating and irresponsible automobile had
done more to educate the younger generation
than most of the public schools. Tinkering
with an automobile was a whole scientific train-
ing.

I dropped into his physics class, and found a
dozen twelve-year-old girls and their nine-year-
old ^^ helpers" studying the motor-cycle. With
that fine disregard for boundaries which char-
acterizes Gary education, the hour began with
a spelling lesson of the names of the parts and
processes of the machine. After the words
were learned, the mechanism was explained to
them as they pored over it, and their memory
of vaporization, evaporation, etc., called into
play. The motor-cycle was set going, the girls
described its action, and the lesson was over,
as perfect a piece of teaching as I have ever
heard. The intense animation of that little
group was all the more piquant for having as
a background the astounded disapprobation of
three grave school superintendents from the
East.

To these physics classes the ventilating, heat-
ing and electric systems in the schools are all
text-books. The climate is studied. The shops
provide many physics problems. There was a

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL 135

class of boys having explained to them the phys-
ical principles of various types of machines.
The impetuous rush of those little boys as they
were sent into the machine-shop to take apart
a lawn-mower, a bicycle, and a cream-separator,
and the look of elation on their faces, would
alone make Gary unforgettable to me. It was
evident that this was indeed a different kind of
school.

XVII

THE NATUBAL SCHOOL

ASUEPEISINGLY small amount of ad-
ministrative machinery for so varied a
system is required by the schools of Gary. Mr.
Wirt is the City Superintendent of Schools.
Under him each of the five school buildings has
an executive principal. Two supervisors of
instruction look after the pedagogical work of
the system. The director of industrial work
has charge of building repair, and supervises
the shops where the children work under the
mechanic-teachers. There is no attempt to seg-
regate the vocational work. Manual, physical,
artistic and academic activities are admin-
istered on an equal footing.

For the teacher the Gary school should be al-
most as liberating as it is to the pupil. In the
details of courses much initiative is left to the
teacher. It is really an inductive school where
courses are worked out by supervisors consult-
ing together on the basis of classroom experi-

13G

THE NATURAL SCHOOL 137

ence. Teachers are encouraged to experiment
and develop their own ideas. Here is the first
public school I have ever seen that resolutely
sets itself against uniformity of method or pro-
duct, that recognizes differences of individu-
ality.

The working-day of the teacher may be
longer, but she is relieved of the burdensome
home-work. The nervous strain is lessened also
by the freer method of discipline. There can-
not be unruly children unless children are ruled,
and in the Gary school there is apparently no
artificial repression. One found in the class-
room as much talking as there would be in a
concert audience, with the same natural motives,
freed of ^^ rules of order," for quiet. The fre-
quent change of room and activity in the Gary
school prevents, too, that nervous restiveness
which must inevitably come to the child kept
long at his desk. The point is that only in a
free and varied school like this can one talk of
effective discipline. When school activities are
as attractive as they are here, deprivation be-
comes punishment. There is at hand an instru-
ment for inculcating reason into refractoriness
which is as powerful as the stoutest disciplina-
rian could wish. The ordinary school tries to

138 EDUCATION AND LIVING

keep up a military system of control, without
any means, now that corporal punishment is
generally abolished, of punishing infractions.
In a Gary school ^^ being sent home" for mis-
behavior usually means being sent to a place
infinitely less interesting. But there is little
talk about ^'mischievous and unruly boys."
Those children who, in spite of everything, ''are
not adapted to our kind of school," may go to
the school farm in the country to work. But
this farm is not in any sense a "reform" school.
Delicate children may also be sent there, and
other classes go for a holiday. As to the per-
sonal manners prevailing in such a free school
as this, with its absence of moral homily, and
effort to "train character" through obedience
and discipline, I can only repeat the words of an
Italian boy who had recently come from ortho-
dox schools elsewhere: "But they're so po-
lite!"

I was glad to see that there was no nonsense
at Gary about schemes of "self-government,"
which can be little more than a humiliating pre-
tension in any school. A kindly judge did once
institute "Boyville" in a Gary school, with a
parody of municipal functions, but its unreality
soon relegated it to limbo. Spontaneous or-

THE NATURAL SCHOOL 139

ganization there is, but it grows out of real
work. The boys ' ninth grade English class, for
instance, has organized itself as the Emerson
Improvement Association, and its work re-
volves around the speaking and writing neces-
sary in conducting the affairs of the organiza-
tion. There seem to be no ^^extra-curricular*'
activities, which create so many problems else-
where. Athletic teams and sports are con-
nected with the gymnasium work. Other socie-
ties spring up naturally out of the school inter-
ests. Problems of ^* fraternities*' and the
control of athletics which confront so many
high schools are thus naturally avoided.

The Gary school not only lightens this strain
of discipline for the teacher and cultivates her
initiative, but serves as a kind of training-
school for the teachers themselves. The new-
coming teacher learns by acting as helper or
^^ apprentice" to the older teacher, just as the
children in shop or laboratory learn from one
another. The result is an uncommon and ap-
pealing equality between teachers and children,
without imposed authority on one side or sub-
servience on the other. Beside Mr. Wirt Mme.
Montessori seems almost a beginner, so dar-
ingly has he carried the principles of self-

140 EDUCATION AND LIVING

instruction up through the higher grades.
Even visiting teachers and superintendents who
wish to learn the theory and practice of the
Gary school must learn in the same way. Mr.
Wirt does not lecture to them. He allows them
also to come into the school for a few months
as helpers to teacher or principal. Everybody
who has anything to do with a Gary school must
evidently learn by doing the real work itself.
Nothing shows more clearly the whole-knit fiber
of Mr. Wirt's philosophy than this new kind of
'^ normal'^ school for visiting teachers.

I was pleased with the absence of self-
display. Advertising has come from the out-
side. The teachers seem innocent of the great
number of things they are doing which a large
part of the orthodox educational world believes
to be impossible. You are talked with frankly
and genially, but nothing is done to impress
you. You are left to interpret it all for your-
self. Those who miss the spirit will find weak-
nesses. Professional educators hold up hands
of horror at the ^^ looseness" of the teaching.
They miss the dramatic effect of the ^* well-
conducted recitation" — the drawing-out of the
pupil's memory, or the appeals to glib guesses
at what the teacher wants. They judge by the

THE NATURAL SCHOOL 141

old-fashioned standard of how the teacher is
teaching rather than the new one of what the
child is learning. My complaint wonld be
rather that there was still too much teaching
that is conventional, particularly in the lower
grades. And I have an animus against the
deadly desks and seats which are still in use in
too many of the classrooms. But the signifi-
cant thing is that this kind of a school is not
static or completed, but a constantly growing
organism. The only limit to which it may grow
lies in the imagination and initiative of teachers
and pupils. And the school cannot be judged
in cross-section. Even when it starts with so
admirable an equipment, its life has just begun.
For the mechanical and artistic, manual work
and intellectual study, are all directed towards
enriching the physical body and the spiritual
life and atmosphere of the school. This inten-
sive cultivation of resources produces that ''em-
bryonic community life" which is Professor
Dewey's ideal, where in actual work the child
senses the occupations and interests of the
larger society into which he is to enter.

Mr. Wirt's schools would be unworthy of dis-
cussion were they not capable of imitation gen-
erally in American towns and cities. Already

142 EDUCATION AND LIVING

a number of communities have copied the essen-
tial features, and Mr. Wirt is at present occu-
pied in remodeling a few of the New York City
schools, successfully, too, in spite of the fact
that New York, on account of its rapid growth,
its great alien population, and its political cross-
currents, presents perhaps the most formidable
school problems in the country. The only sub-
stantial difficulty in remodeling schools accord-
ing to the Gary scheme is the matter of play-
grounds. Even this is surmountable, for most
cities have parks or usable vacant lots within
reach of the school. Mr. Wirt's great triumph
in Gary is the old Jefferson School which he
found when he came to the town. This was an
orthodox ten-room building built by the city
fathers to accommodate Gary children for
many generations. By turning the spacious
attic into a gymnasium, transforming five of the
classrooms into music and art studios and
nature-study laboratories, by building a jack-of-
all-trades workshop around the engine-room in
the cellar, a domestic-science kitchen in an un-
used comer, and by appropriating a nearby
park space, he transformed a perfectly ordinary
school building, whose prototype may be found
in every town in the land, into a full-fledged.

THE NATURAL SCHOOL 143

varied and smoothly-functioning Wirt school.
Through the ^^ rotation of crops'' system, this
school, built for three hundred and sixty chil-
dren, actually accommodates over eight hun-
dred, and gives them every facility, if less elab-
orately, of the specially designed new schools.

Perhaps I may here recapitulate. The mere
prosaic business economy of the Wirt scheme is
enough to recommend it. No school board can
afford to neglect a plan which not only saves
money to the taxpayers, but provides better fa-
cilities, more varied equipment and better edu-
cational opportunities than even well-to-do com-
munities can at present afford. The Wirt
school solves the vexing *' part-time" problem.
Gary is the only city I know that has room
(March, 1915) in its present buildings for at
least one-third more children than there now are
to go to school.

In the second place, the plan solves most of
the problems of vocational and industrial train-
ing which now confront the public school. It
catches the child's curiosity and skill on the up-
stroke. It makes no separation of manual from
intellectual work, and avoids that sinister caste-
feeling which seems to be creeping into the vo-
cational movement. And from the point of

144 EDUCATION AND LIVING

view of economy again, the scheme of devoting
industrial work to actual care of the school-
plant enables the school to provide a great va-
riety of occupations almost without additional
cost to the community.

In the third place, the plan provides a large
measure of individual instruction. It is a
school for every kind of a child. The flexibility
of schedules, the cooperation of outside agen-
cies like the churches, the varied activities, give
opportunity for the fullest development of dif-
fering interests and capacities

In the fourth place, the plan carries out
throughout the school life the educational truth
that learning can only come through doing.
The habits and attitudes of careful scientific ob-
servation, or purposeful interesting activity
which is neither work nor play, the social, demo-
cratic, and cooperative background which such
a school cultivates, are exactly the qualities we
need for our younger generation in American
society.

Such a school carries out the best ideals of
American democracy, as I see them, in an ex-
tremely effective way. Its philosophy is Amer-
ican, its democratic organization is American.
It is one of the institutions that our American

THE NATURAL SCHOOL 145

culture should be proudest of. Perhaps pro-
fessional educators, accustomed to other con-
cepts and military methods and administrative
illusions, will not welcome this kind of school.
But teachers hampered by drill and routine will
want it, and so will parents and children.

xvni

THE DEMOCEATIC SCHOOL

A RECENT article in the ^^New York
Times'' (Oct. 17, 1915) by Dr. Thomas
S. Baker, Headmaster of the Tome School, con-
tains an able pedagogical criticism of the Gary
school which is typical of the general attitude
towards the Gary idea on the part of conserva-
tive schoolmen. Nothing could bring out more
clearly the difference in educational values be-
tween this professional teaching opinion and
the broad social vision of Superintendent Wirt.
Dr. Baker admits the impressive social effec-
tiveness of the plan. It is ^'the last develop-
ment in socializing the schools.'' Mr. Wirt is
^^not only an educator, but also a social re-
former, a city worker." But Dr. Baker's
argument is really the specialized pedagogical
one against the social. Where Mr. Wirt sees
the school as a community center, a children's
world, Dr. Baker sees it as an educational
factory. ^^The social value of the Gary
schools," he says, *4s beyond question. Its

146

THE DEMOCEATIC SCHOOL 147

pedagogic excellence has still to be deter-
mined/' From his point of view, a school is
not so much a place to train effective citizens
as to make ^ thorough scholars." He questions
whether ^Hhese side issues in the scheme of
child-training" — the gymnasia, shops, labora-
tories, which the Gary school contains — ^^are
really essential in mental development." He
is afraid that the young citizens of Gary learn
more from their industrial shops and science
laboratories than from their books.

Dr. Baker's guarded argument is really a
glorification of ^intellectual discipline" as
against an intelligent capacity to lead an or-
ganic life in a modern society which needs
above all things resourceful adaptation and
social appreciations. It is a question of ideals,
and no more important issue was ever put to
a people than this one of how we want our
next generation trained. The school is not
only the one institution which assimilates all
the people, but it is the most easily modifiable.
It is not only the easiest lever of social prog-
ress but the most effective, for it deals with
relatively plastic human material. To decide
what kind of a school we want is almost to de-
cide what kind of a society we want.

148 EDUCATION AND LIVING

If we only want that kind of a school which
would ^^make hard-working and accurate
scholars and produce thoughtful men," we
must resign ourselves to a progressive soften-
ing of the fiber and capacity of the mass of our
people. The average educator acts as if he
thought of his child-world as a level plain of
capacities. There is the mass of unskilled,
unawakened minds ; here is the level of scholar-
ship, knowledge, civic virtue, appreciations.
Education is to him the process of lifting up
the mass from their primitive level to the
higher one. The public school is the elevator
into which all are to be shoveled and trans-
ported to the upper story. And the American
public school in the last fifty years has been
faithfully following this ideal.

The truth is, of course, that mental aptitude
is not any such level desert, but rather a series
of inclined planes. When we try to educate
all the children of all the people, w^e are not
dealing with a homogeneous mass, but with slid-
ing scales of capacity. A mental test of the
school-children of a state would reveal an in-
cline extending in orderly gradation from the
genius down to the imbecile. A physical test
would give us a different slant, a test for ar-

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL 149

tistic or mechanical capacity another. Stand
at the center of divine average and try to lever
any of these slopes into a horizontal position
and you find half of your society squatting
heavily at the lower end. You may ascribe it
to race capacity, personal heredity, social en-
vironment, malnutrition, defective nervous or-
ganization or anything you please, but the fact
remains that the greater part of the human raw
material will be permanently resistive to or
only dully appreciative of any attempts to ele-
vate them to a level. This is true of any ca-
pacity you may choose. The outstanding truth
of society seems to be the heterogeneous distri-
bution of capacities. And the irony of it is
that after artistic capacity true intellectual
capacity is probably the rarest. For the public
school to try to make intellectualists of all its
children is a sheer defiance of sociological
reality.

Some educators, while they recognize this di-
versity, yet insist on uniform standards, uni-
form curricula, uniform discipline, on the
ground that social order in a democracy is im-
periled unless the highest degree of like-mind-
edness prevails. Such a democracy would be
the stagnant democracy of China. The result

150 EDUCATION AND LIVING

of tl^ese attempts at standardization have been
the automatic centrifugal flinging off into space
of the children whose interests were not intel-
lectual, who were no more capable of being
made into ^* accurate scholars" than they were
into artists and poets. And from those who
did not get quite flung off, but clung on with
their teeth, we get most of our prevailing
pseudo-culture. To keep on trying to ^* de-
velop the mind" and produce ^^ thorough schol-
arship" in those whom we force to submit to
educational processes, means simply to go on
creating a nerveless and semi-helpless mass of
boys and girls who will never take their ef-
fective and interested place in the world be-
cause they have no mental tools which they can
wield. Such a course is coming to be generally
recognized as a kind of slow national suicide, a
slow suffocation of industrial and social
progress.

The schools do change, but the schoolmen
yield grudgingly. Nothing could be more
naive than the test which Dr. Baker proposes
for evaluating the Gary plan. Submit, he says,
the highest class in the Gary schools to an
examination by the College Examining Board.
If the students pass, the Gary system will be

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL 151

justified of its children. Was ever a more pa-
tent assertion of the professional bias? Let
the children drop out of the lower grades un-
trained except in the rudiments, but if the small
minority in the highest class passes its Vergil
and algebra and English literature and German
with marks as high as the graduates of the
Tome School, then the Gary system will cease
to be considered a ^^mere experiment." If this
is what the critics of the Gary plan mean when
they plead for an ^devaluation of this novel ex-
periment," we may well hope that it will escape
the peril.

Such a conception of educational values can-
not become too speedily obsolete. A public
school is a mockery unless it educates the pub-
lic. It cannot make the rarefied and strained
product at the top the test of its effectiveness.
And the public is not ideally educated unless its
individuals — all of them — are intelligent, in-
formed, skilled, resourceful, up to the limit of
their respective capacities. Life itself can no
longer be trusted to provide this education ; the
school must substitute. The Gary school de-
liberately sets such an ideal. Democracy does
not mean uniformity, but it does mean equality
of opportunity. A democratic school would be

152 EDUCATION AND LIVING

one where every child had the chance to dis-
cover and develop aptitude. The Gary school,
with its harmonious activities of intellectual,
manual, artistic and scientific work, physical
education and play, gives just this chance.
Democratic education does not mean the pro-
vision of separate schools for different kinds of
children, or even separate courses in the same
school, as the movement for industrial educa-
tion is now threatening to bring. This is to
create at once invidious distinctions, and fasten
class education upon us. To say that children
are different does not mean that some are fitted
to be scholars and others to be manual workers,
some to be artists and some to be scientists.
The differences are differences of focus and not
of quality.

To most children will appear in the course of
school life some dominant interest, and it is
upon the cultivation of that interest that the
child's chance of being more than a nerveless
mediocrity will depend. It is upon that train-
ing that his chance of being absorbed out of the
school into the social and industrial world will
depend. At the same time, without a common
background with his fellows he will be alien and
adrift in the world. Interest and skill in one's

THE DEMOCEATIC SCHOOL 153

work, whether it be making automobiles or
teaching Greek, an acquaintance with the con-
temporary world, an alert intelligence which is
always seeking to diminish the area of things
human that are alien to one — a man or woman
with this would be truly educated in any society.
But both focus and background are supremely
necessary. The present educational system
does not really set itself to provide either.
Only in a school organized on some such plan
as the Gary plan will such education be possible.
This does not mean that every child is to mar-
velously blossom into ideally alert and skilled
intelligence. But we can be sure that a school
which gives opportunity for the development of
the most varied aptitudes in the free play of
a child-community life will have done all that
it could. No one pretends that the Gary edu-
cation is the intrinsically ideal education for
all time. But we can say that, given the best
social demands of America to-day, this school
will make for the most robust, effective, intelli-
gent citizenship of which we are at present
capable.

XIX

THE TKAIIS^ED MIND

HOW much longer are we to expect the
headmasters of our private secondary
schools to view with anything but alarm the cur-
rent radical tendencies in education? In the
November ^^ Atlantic," Dr. Alfred E. Stearns
of Phillips-Andover is stirred to wrath against
the fallacies of the modern school as expounded
by Mr. Flexner and others. The paper con-
tributes little new to the well-worn theory of
mental discipline upon which upper-class edu-
cation has so long been based. But it is highly
significant as a pattern of the '^trained" mind
as it works in the exposure of fallacies. Dr.
Stearns is presumably an immensely successful
product of the old idealistic and linguistic edu-
cation, gained by strenuous effort and vigorous
thinking. It is worth while to examine how
such a mind argues, what it considers as clinch-
ing evidence, how it hopes to convince the alert
intellectual of to-day.

154

THE TRAINED MIND 155

The *4allacies" in modern education which
Dr. Stearns is exposing are the materialistic
and utilitarian ideal, the belief in the non-trans-
f erability of mental power from one field to an-
other, the cultivation of interest rather than
discipline, of play rather than drudgery, the
scientific rather than the cultural emphasis.
He wishes to persuade the reader that all these
tendencies make for the perversion of the
child's character, the weakening of his mental
grasp, the materializing of his soul. One waits
eagerly for proofs of such very serious menaces.
The student of education to-day is rapidly ac-
quiring a belief in objective evidence, in sta-
tistical or at least analytic experiment, in scien-
tific formulation. The kind of evidence that
appeals to the alert student to-day is the kind
that comes out of the psychological laboratory
of Clark University, or Columbia or Chicago,
out of the great city school surveys, like Port-
land or Cleveland or New York, out of the
experimental schools in different parts of the
country. These are the arenas where educa-
tional problems will, he believes, ultimately be
solved. And to him the so-called * 'fallacies"
in modern education are not ^'dogmas" or
'^ assumptions" at all, but rather hopeful hy-

156 EDUCATION AND LIVING

potheses which are now being tested in dozens
of American schools.

Is this the sort of evidence to which Dr.
Stearns' trained mind appeals when he wishes
to discredit the ^^new" education? Not at all.
He does not even so much as show that he is
acquainted with the existence of the great mass
of literature which would throw light on the
success or failure of the radical theories which
he deplores. Educational journals, school sur-
veys, reports of intelligence tests, descriptions
of play schools, — none of these seem to have
come into contact with his training. For the
benefit of the philosophically-minded, he does
not even refer to the writings of Dewey or Hall,
or the other radical writers on education. All
this writing and doing which represents the new
education at work, he lumps into 'the pedagog-
ical expert, '^ upon whom he lavishes his anxious
scorn. The only concrete data he offers is the
record of the College Examination Board, which
Dr. Flexner, whom he is criticizing, had cited in
his ' * Modern School. ' ' Dr. Flexner had argued
against Latin and mathematics in the second-
ary school on the ground that the majority of
even the picked students failed in them. Dr.
Stearns succeeds in showing that a majority of

THE TEAINED MIND 157

college candidates fail not only in Latin and
Algebra but in all other subjects as well. The
normal mind, untrained by the old dispensation,
would consider these statistics very damaging
to Dr. Stearns' cause. The inexorable con-
clusion would be not that Latin and algebra
should be retained in the secondary school cur-
riculum, but that the entire curriculum should
undergo a radical reorganization in teaching
methods and educational philosophy.

Dr. Stearns, like most of the critics of the
^^new" education, makes the fundamental error
of confusing the narrow business man, who sees
no ^^use'' for his son's taking Latin or algebra
in school, with the ^*new" educator who would
give these subjects a new orientation in the
curriculum. The ^^ practical" business man is
as much anathema to the *^ modern school" as
he is to the cultural school. The ^^ modern
school" would not refuse any subject to minds
that fed upon it and fused it into vital ex-
perience. But it would not force it on minds
that could not digest it. And Dr. Stearns ' own
figures show how generally indigestible, with
all the drudgery and mental discipline in the
world, is the entire conventional secondary
school curriculum. The pseudo-modern high

158 EDUCATION AND LIVING

school where science and manual arts have been
added, only to be taught in the same unillumi-
nated way, is as objectionable to the *^new"
educator as it is to Dr. Steams.

Since the latter 's only use of objective evi-
dence proves a boomerang, what considerations
does he think will be persuasive in his attack
on the *^new'^ education? It is easy to see.
His reliance is entirely on authority, upon per-
sonal belief. Several very successful business
men of his acquaintance attribute their success
to the training of the old education. The ma-
jority of schoolmasters are not yet ready to
abandon the doctrine of mental discipline. The
sons of Mr. Hill go to college to get something
which their father, for all his success, recog-
nizes that he missed. It is a serious question
in the minds of many observers whether Dr.
Eliot's advocacy of ^ * observational' ' training
is sound. Always the reference to personal
authority, to prestige, to anything but objective
standards on which both sides may agree ! Al-
ways the naive appeal to schoolmasters and suc-
cessful business men, the pillars of his world!
Dr. Steams deplores the materialistic trend of
the age, but he does not consider how power-
fully his own innocent use of the verdict of sue-

THE TRAINED MIND 159

cessful business men as scientific evidence is
likely to glorify material success in the minds of
his students.

Dr. Stearns' logic is as unconvincing as his
evidence. A doctrine is monstrous. There-
fore, he implies, it is untrue. Intelligent chil-
dren are usually bright in all their school sub-
jects. Therefore, if you force a child to learn
through drudgery, you automatically endow him
with general intelligence. The interest of boys
in wireless telegraphy and automobiles, he
thinks, is the best argument for keeping all
these things out of a school where one must
learn to work. At the same time. Dr. Stearns
objects to scientific schools because students
so soon lose interest in their work. But, ac-
cording to the gospel of drudgery, why would
not this make science the ideal *' mental disci-
pline ' ' ?

Such a paper as this shows the technique of
a thoroughly obsolete mind. Such ^^ mental
discipline'' as this old education gave is evi-
dently of little use in handling a world of facts,
of experiment, of recorded tests. Criticism
does not make such thinkers critical. It only
makes them belligerent. They do not analyze,
they repel. They are more interested in a

160 EDUCATION AND LIVING

moral justification for the structure of their
craft and their practices than in the truth. Dr.
Stearns ' paper is the best evidence of how little
relevant is the old linguistic and idealistic edu-
cation to the intellectual demands of to-day.
The critical, analytic, impersonal, experimental
approach is wholly lacking in his paper. His
evidence is personal authority, his logic is spe-
cial pleading. Parents with sons in private
schools might well view with grave concern the
kind of 'drained mind" which is likely to be
developed under such masters of the old edu-
cation. They might ask how likely a boy,
taught to use his mind the way Dr. Stearns
uses his, is to analyze and grasp the complex
facts of the world into which he will come.

CLASS AND SCHOOL

THE proposed experimental school which
the General Education Board is to found
in conjunction with Teachers' College in New
York has sent a shiver through the conservative
schoolmen of America. It is assumed that the
policy of the new school will follow Dr. Flex-
ner's manifesto of the ^'Modern School," that
adroit and uncompromising crystallization of
the radical philosophy of our new American
education. Dr. Flexner has proved himself to
be an admirable agitator, for he has succeeded,
with doctrines that public-school educators have
been discussing for ten years and which experi-
mental schools all through the country have
been testing out, in rousing the slumberous
camp of private secondary schoolmasters to a
sense of what is going on in the educational
world. The private secondary school is the last
stronghold of educational conservatism. En-
lightenment has to proceed upward through

161

162 EDUCATION AND LIVING

thick layers of prejudice and smugness. Dr.
Flexner's voice seems to have broken in the
walls and gotten a hearing for the new educa-
tion even in the walls of the traditional New
England academy. It is for these people that
the ''Modern '^ School" was written, for only
those will find its proposals '^ revolutionary and
dangerous'' who have never read a line of
Dewey or G. Stanley Hall, never read a copy of
an educational journal, never visited an experi-
mental school, or even the newer plants of the
best public schools in American cities. There
is irony in the location of the new school at
Teachers' College. For the latter has been one
of the most persistently experimental educa-
tional centers in the country. If its ''model"
schools have felt in the course of time the
blighting touch of conventionality, at least in
the Speyer course of industrial arts there has
been developed a method of permanent value.
There is no more accurate application of Dr.
Flexner's demand that ''children should begin
by getting acquainted with objects," "follow the
life-cycles of plants and animals," "the ob-
servation and execution of industrial and com-
mercial processes," and so forth. In this in.
dustrial arts course the children are concerned

CLASS AND SCHOOL 163

from the beginning with food-products and
clothing and building and the way different
peoples make their living. Out of this handling
of homely things grow the geography and
science and history and mathematics. It seems
only a question of time before there will be
scarcely an elementary school untouched by this
practical approach to knowledge through ob-
jects and projects and concrete facts.

Dr. Flexner's tilting is not against our rap-
idly improving public elementary school so
much as it is against the private secondary
school, with its sub-college, classical, formal
curriculum, and its obsolete educational theory
of formal discipline and salvation through
drudgery. It is as an object-lesson for this
branch of American education that the new
school will have permanent value. It will be
the heaviest assault which has yet had to be
met by that vested educational interest which
we know as the private secondary school. The
private school has made it its function to pre-
pare the sons and daughters of the well-to-do
for college, and so keep up the tradition of lei-
sured and cultured wealth. This is the ideal
at the bottom of the hearts of the conservative
schoolmen. A knowledge which is useless, like

164 EDUCATION AND LIVING

the formal classics and mathemathics, is only
a sharpened tool of exclusiveness, for only the
younger generation of a ruling class can afford
to give its time to it. In a growing industrial
society such an education becomes ever more
and more a dividing line between classes. That
the public high school has been largely con-
trolled by the same ideals does not mean at all
that this kind of education has been democra-
tized, but merely that the unthinking and clam-
bering middle classes have been hypnotized by
vague aspirations of ^'culture" and ^intellec-
tual training" into imitation of the traditional
ruling-class education. Some of the strongest
opposition to vocational education in the pub-
lic schools comes even from the ranks of the am-
bitious wage-earners who ^'want their children
to have the educational advantages they were
denied." They resent what they misinterpret
as an attempt to keep their younger generation
in a subordinate labor class. What they do not
see is that the traditional education which they
admire is no real education for the modern
world. We find the industrious proletarian and
the exclusive Tory joining hands in opposing
the new democratic education which is meant
to have the effects of freeing both classes and

CLASS AND SCHOOL 165

making them fit together to administer a free
society. The Tory wants to keep for his chil-
dren his privileged status; the wage-earner
wants to obtain for his children this privileged
status. ^^Book" education, innocent of prac-
ticality and use, is still an accepted mark of
this geniality. Neither class has any real sense
yet of a democratic attitude that finds both the
^^ utilitarian'^ and the '^cultural" irrelevant
terms, and demands only effective activity and
imaginative understanding from every citizen
up to the limit of his capacity.

The *^old" education then is a class-educa-
tion, and therefore has no place in a society
which is trying to become democratic. How
much class-feeling is behind the current alle-
giance to the education of discipline and
drudgery is shown in a paper by Miss Edith
Hamilton of the Bryn Mawr School in the ^ ' New
Eepublic" for February 10, 1917. She pleads
for the ^^old" education in behalf of her girls.
But when she says ^ ^school'' she has in the back
of her mind an institution for the training of the
well-to-do classes. Her argument against a
change in education seems to be based on the
idea that change would be prejudicial to the
life which she accepts as worthiest for those

166 EDUCATION AND LIVING

fortunate classes with which she is best ac-
quainted. Her argument is that life will make
no stern demands upon the sheltered, econom-
ically endowed leisure which most of her girls
will enjoy. Without external standards their
fiber must deteriorate unless they have learned
the joy of work by the doing of things because
they are hard. Without impersonal intellectual
interests, their personal energy, she says, will
waste away in futility or in a meddlesome con-
trol of their own daughters. The boy is har-
nessed into some kind of self-discipline by the
exigencies of business life. But for the girl,
the substitution in the '* modern school" of do-
mestic science for ^^ elegant accomplishments"
is only an illusory discipline. Not only are
these arts of housekeeping too easy to provide
discipline, but they will never be demanded
from the upper-class girl. Only the traditional
curriculum, therefore, impersonal, cultural, la-
borious, will give her the needed stimulus to
play her leisured role worthily.

At first sight nothing could be more ironic
than this gospel of strenuous effort preached in
the name of a sheltered class. Why should a
girl be disciplined, trained to do things '^be-
cause they are hard," for a life which becomes

CLASS AND SCHOOL 167

^^ easier and easier," unless her teachers wish
to provide her with some kind of moral and
intellectual justification for her social role?
The ^^old" education combines uselessness and
effort, and it is just this combination which
would maintain leisure-class functions and yet
leave the individuals morally justified. The
uselessness makes you exclusive and the effort
satisfies your moral sense. It is a little curious
to find Miss Hamilton using the ^' utilitarian"
argument against domestic science, that is, that
it will never be used by her girls. Yet she
wishes them to acquire * impersonal intellectual
interests," which they can never use except in
not very real ^^ cultural" dabblings and social
work.

Miss Hamilton's argument for tradition is
the orthodox one that is now being repeated by
all those who oppose the new Eockefeller school.
^*The old education is superior to any training
which makes interest not discipline, efficiency
not knowledge, the standard." Now this point
at issue between interest and discipline has been
so thoroughly discussed by John Dewey in his
^^ Interest as Belated to Will" and other writ-
ings, that one is surprised at this late day to
find responsible educators who are willing to

168 EDUCATION AND LIVING

give the impression that they are unacquainted
'^with Dewey's arguments. Even if disciples like
Dr. Flexner and myself in our enthusiasm un-
consciously caricature him, the philosophy is
there in its classic form in Dewey for all to read.
The curious notion of the ''old" educator that
interest makes work ''easy," instead of intensi-
fying, the effort, is only possible, of course, to
minds soaked in a Puritan tradition. Dewey
"shows that interest and discipline are not antag-
onistic to efficiency and knowledge, but that
knowledge is merely information effectively
used and manipulated, and discipline is willed
and focused interest. Each has an element of
the other. It is meaningless to talk of interest
vs. discipline when all real interest has an or-
ganizing effect on one's activity, and any real
discipline is built up on a foundation of in-
terest. Indeed in one of my articles to which
Miss Hamilton takes exception, I define disci-
pline as "willed skill," which is as far from any
conception of "making things easy," of "smat-
tering and superficiality," as could well be
imagined. It is a superstition, of course, as
Miss Hamilton says, to suppose that all chil-
dren bum with a hard gem-like flame of curios-
ity to know, but it is equally a superstition

CLASS AND SCHOOL 169

to suppose that with all children strenuous
drudgery flowers into the immense joy of work
and creation, or that effort taken consistently
against the grain of interest can suddenly be
transmuted into spontaneous activity. A cer-
tain habit, a mechanical routine spirit, may be
evolved by drudgery, but not imaginative skill.
All true discipline comes from overcoming ob-
stacles beyond which one is conscious of a goal
in itself worth while. It is only a feeble spirit
which can be drugged by effort in and for itself.
In those admired cases where facility comes
after conscientious but uninteresting effort, let
the old-fashioned educator ask herself whether
the child gained the satisfaction of accomplish-
ment because he went through the discipline,
or whether it was not only because he liked the
satisfaction of accomplishment that he was
willing to go through the drudgery. If you ad-
mit the latter, then you have admitted the case !
for the new education. Temperaments, im-
pulses, interests — or, if you like, the lack of in- \
terests — ^will insist on dominating, on determin-
ing the way each child takes his experience.
All education can ever do is to provide the ex-
perience, and stimulate, guide, organize inter-
ests. Anything else may produce, at its best,

170 EDUCATION AND LIVING

a trained animal. It will not be education, and
it will not produce men and women.

The task of the democratic school is to pro-
vide just this general experience and stimula-
tion. Miss Hamilton's paper shows that such
a school would be a challenge to the kind of in-
stitution she has in mind when she speaks of
education. "When leisure-class functions and
leisure-class education clasp in a perfect circle,
a new sociological and industrial emphasis, such
as the *' Modern School" suggests, might make
the leisure-class pupils uneasy, restless, ques-
tioning. If you began emphasizing interest in-
stead of drudgery, you might find yourself
calling into question the sincerity of those
^ impersonal intellectual interests." If you
emphasized efficiency instead of knowledge, you
might make uncomfortably evident the unreality
of much of what passes for culture in society
to-day. You would be making insecure the
moral and intellectual justifications of caste.
But that is exactly the critical and undermin-
ing work which a democratic education is de-
signed to stimulate.

These new educators are seeking a type of
school which shall provide for children as hu-
man beings and not as members of any one so-

CLASS AND SCHOOL 171

cial class. They want a school which creates a
common sympathy, a common intimacy with the
various activities and expressions of the modern
well-rounded personality, just so far as each in-
dividual is capable, with his endowments and
intelligence, of acquiring such an intimacy.
The *^ Modern School" would turn the child's
attention to the projects, objects, processes,
facts, of the active world about him, not because
they are good in themselves, but because they
are the common stock of all classes. The de-
velopment of communal functions and services
forces every family more or less into touch with
the active world out of which the ** Modern
School's" curriculum grows. It is in the study '
of these '^real things," rather than in the log-
ical systems of text-books, the predigested
ideals of literature or a leisured class, the tech-
nical manipulation of dead languages and offi-
cial science, that common interest and the sense
of common possession will arise. The expecta-
tion is that interpretations and ideals which
grow out of such a study will be more vital and
sound because they will have come out of the
child's own experience, and not have been
merely shoveled into his memory. It is ex-
pected that the ^^ strenuous effort" of the past.

172 EDUCATION AND LIVING

which was so much an effort of memory and
routine, will become, in a curriculum harnessed
to occupational life, an effort of interest and in-
telligent enthusiasm. Out of such a spirit and
such a school should issue the self-sustained dis-
cipline by which all good work is done in the
world.

XXI

A POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

NOW that the passage of the Smith-Hughes
bill is assured, interest moves to the dis-
tribution of this federal subsidy for vocational
continuation and part-time schools. For the
actual sums appropriated, even the maximum
which will be available in nine years, are too
small to be of constructive significance. Indeed
there is something grotesque about the solemn
and arduous study which went into the passage
of this timid educational bill by a Congress
which could appropriate a full third of a billion
for armaments. The Smith-Hughes bill has all
the aspect of a pious wish rather than the be-
ginning of a thorough national policy in educa-
tion. There was nothing revolutionary in this
principle of federal aid. The principle was es-
tablished by the Morrill act of 1862 and recently
confirmed by the Smith-Lever bill for agricul-
tural education. The halting character of this
new legislation must be explained partly by the

173

174 EDUCATION AND LIVING

novelty of vocational training in America and
by the extremely confused condition of mind
about it.

We scarcely know yet how to institute a voca-
tional education that will make out of our youth
effective workers and at the same time free and
initiating citizens. The hopeless lack of co-
ordination between industry and our educa-
tional system blocks and bewilders our efforts.
In working towards a solution we meet two very
real perils. When we attempt a coordination
we run the risk of turning the public school into
a mere preparatory school for factory, store and
workshop, producing helpless workers riveted
by their very training to a rigid and arbitrary
industrial life. The better trained they are, or
at least the more intense their specialization,
the greater will be their subjection. Organized
labor fears, and not unjustly, that a public vo-
cational education might be the means of over-
crowding the labor market and thereby '^fur-
nishing strike-breakers to industry." This is
always the danger when we attempt to adjust
our training too tightly to existing industrial
conditions. On the other hand, if we try to
evade this danger and make the young worker's
training more general, so that a number of fields

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 175

of industrial opportunity will be open to him,
we may leave him more helpless than ever, for
he has no assurance of being fit for the very
concrete demands of skill that paying industry
will make upon him.

This is the dilemma. If the organization of
vocational training is left in charge of the rep-
resentatives of the employers, educators fear,
and fear rightly, that the first result will ensue.
If it is left exclusively in the hands of educa-
tors, the employers fear the other danger. Vo-
cational education in this country has, there-
fore, run its uncertain course through experi-
ments in continuation schools, ^^pre-vocational"
courses in the regular schools, trade courses,
'* cooperative" courses, until a certain skepti-
cism has been aroused in the minds of profes-
sional educators and the interested public
whether we can institute a workable system at
all in our present public school. Skepticism
has meant hesitation. In spite of the propa-
ganda and survey work of an influential society
of educators, employers and labor men — ^the
National Society for the Promotion of Indus-
trial Education — progress has been very slow.
Only eight states have provided for the encour-
agement of vocational education and in only one

176 EDUCATION AND LIVING

is continuation schooling compulsory. The
whole movement has needed some very definite
concentrated stimulus and some new, clear fo-
cusing of the issues.

This is the real value of the new federal bill.
If it is negligible in its actual power for aid, its
indirect effects should be of great importance
in the way of stimulus. It will undoubtedly
suggest to the majority of states the immediate
establishment of a comprehensive system of
continuation schools. The grants will be just
large enough to make it seem possible. They
are not nearly large enough to exempt the states
from local appropriations. According to the
federal bill these must duplicate the federal
grants. The latter will therefore mean actual
additional resources, an increment to local and
state appropriations. If the states are wise,
and appropriate this increment to the payment
and training of teachers, then these small sums
may be made to mean just the difference be-
tween the present hardly attained mediocrity of
vocational teaching and a new and effective type
of artisan-instructors.

The bill puts the distribution of the funds in
the hands of such state boards as the legisla-
tures shall designate. The latter may desig-

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 177

nate the regular state board of education, or a
special board of industrial education working
under the direction of the regular board, or it
may create a new and independent board to
handle these funds. No state is likely to trifle
with this now thoroughly discredited ^^dual"
system originally sponsored in Illinois under
the form of separate boards controlled wholly
by employing interests. The practical choice
will lie between the purely ** educational" con-
trol and the mixed educational, industrial and
labor control, such as exists in Wisconsin. The
objection to the former grows persistently on
the ground that the new vocational methods and
work tend infallibly in the hands of the pro-
fessional educator to drift back to the academic.
Educators have too often shown a willingness
either to divorce the ^^pre-vocational" work en-
tirely from the regular school, or else to emas-
culate it of its realistic potency. Instead of
seeing the new practical emphasis infusing and
reinvigorating the regular primary and second-
ary school, the enthusiast for the ^^new'' edu-
cation has too often had to watch merely the
slow reduction of the vocational work to the old
unimaginative level of ^^ manual training.'^
The question of control, therefore, which the

178 EDUCATION AND LIVING

new bill puts indirectly to the states is of the
greatest moment, both to the traditional type of
school and to the new activities. The board
that distributes the funds will in the last analy-
sis control the policy. Certainly the conserva-
tism of the professional educator is far less to
be feared than the narrowness and self-interest
of employers' associations. In following the
provisions of the federal bill that the aided
schools shall be below college grade, for chil-
dren over fourteen, the state board will control
the standards of the individual schools. Which-
ever form of control is adopted, the trend to-
wards state centralization of the school system
is likely to be greatly strengthened.

In this development the states will be influ-
enced largely by the experience of Wisconsin
and Massachusetts, where the continuation
schools, part-time schools, apprentice classes,
which the bill encourages, have been longest in
operation. The Wisconsin experience will be
found particularly instructive. The state sub-
sidizes its vocational schools by duplicating the
funds raised by the community under an obliga-
tory half -mill tax. The local schools are under
the control of a special board of industrial edu-
cation appointed by the local board of educa-

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 179

tion, and consisting of the superintendent of
schools with two labor representatives and two
employers. The distribution of the state funds,
is in the hands of the regular state educational
administration. There is an advisory industrial
board of similar-composition to the local boards.
At present the situation is much confused owing
to the reluctance of this state board of industrial
education to remain merely advisory. A ** de-
veloper" has been appointed as its secretary,
an expert in the field, but without administra-
tive power over the schools. His attempts at
acceleration have produced their inevitable and
intense resentment among the regular school of-
ficials. Obviously such a system, with two
boards contending for mastery, creates an im-
possible situation. With the exception of this
— and the actual effect of this very largely per-
sonal and political feud upon the local develop-
ment seems to have been negligible — the Wis-
consin system seems to be based on sound
principles. The local industrial boards have
worked with effectiveness and responsibility.
In Milwaukee a remarkable system of continua-\
tion schools has been built up, which provides )
for no less than eight thousand children between
the ages of fourteen and seventeen, children

180 EDUCATION AND LIVING

whom the pubUc and parochial schools have
sloughed off into *' blind-alley '^ work, and at
whose education and guidance the city makes a
la?it stab in the four-hour-a-week continuation
school. One definite principle these Milwaukee
schools seem to have established — ^that educa-
tion must not be ^^preparatory'' to work, that
there is no real place for the merely **pre-voca-
tional," but that education should accompany
work and do that just as long as there is any-
thing to learn. The ideal vocational education
will be a liberal ^^ part-time" education, in which
the school furnishes the background and the
constant opening of new suggestions and possi-
bilities, and the shop or trade or office provides
the arena for acting skilfully on what is learned.
The Wisconsin system is particularly sugges-
tive. For the local boards constitute one of our
first American attempts at representation by
interest instead of political parties or arbi-
trary geographical divisions. Their success is
largely ascribed in Wisconsin to this fact, that
they do accurately represent just the three
classes most concerned in this form of education
— organized labor, the employers, and the pro-
fessional schoolman. The labor representatives
are on the board to see that the policy does not

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 181

sA^ing over to narrow employing interests, the
employers are on the board to see that the
school is kept in touch with the practical de-
mands of industry. The professional educator
holds the balance of power between these two
interests. With this administrative develop-
ment to build on, with the improvement in teach-
ing caliber that the new federal grants should
bring, with the state centralization of the school
system to which the new bill will give impetus,
the future is good for a national system of edu-
cation for work and with work, a free and demo-
cratic vocational training.

XXII

AN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

NOTHINGr is more significant of the new
spirit in public education than our use of
the term ^^ vocational training.'' It strikes out
at a blow the old antithesis between the cul-
tural and the utilitarian. For a genuine voca-
tion implies neither a life devoted to thought,
nor a dull mechanical job to which personal and
artistic and intellectual interests are mere trim-
mings— recreations which can be easily omitted
by those who cannot afford to pay for them. A
vocation is rather a nucleus of any kind of in-
teresting activity by which one earns one 's
living, and around which whatever else comes
to one's experience clusters to enhance its value
and interest. It is not fantastic to hope that
the very demands of modern industrial
technique will make of most trades just such
nuclei. When we justify trade-schools and in-
dustrial courses by the existence of law and
medical and engineering schools, we are imply-

182

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 183

ing that the skilled worker in modern industry-
can and should lead a life as genuinely ^* pro-
fessional" as the lawyer and doctor and en-
gineer.

New York City has at the present time (June,
1915) a unique opportunity to meet these im-
portant issues. In no other city has the ques-
tion been so squarely presented. New York has
to choose between what is called the Ettinger
plan, put into operation by a local superintend-
ent to solve '^part-time" and vocational training
problems, and the Gary plan, as worked out by
William Wirt and now on trial under his per-
sonal direction in several of the New York
schools. In that choice may be indicated the
tendencies and purposes of industrial education
in this country.

The Ettinger plan emphasizes in the sharpest
way the difference between *' cultural" and ^^in-
dustrial" work. The child chooses between
them in his sixth or seventh year of school. If
economic pressure is going to force him into'
manual work, he is allowed to try a number of
different trades in the school industrial shops
in order to discover what he is best fitted for.
This hasty experimentation has received the
schoolman's label of ^^prevocational." Hav-

184 EDUCATION AND LIVING

ing chosen his trade, the young worker spe-
cializes in the shop, under conditions as nearly
as possible like the trade, continuing in trade-
school or technical high school, or in the in-
dustry under a cooperative scheme, as in the
German schools. His academic studies, as far
as they are continued, are of a severely practi-
cal character, theory and science being used
merely to explain the industrial processes which
he is learning. The ideal is a specialized
school, gradually breaking off from the tradi-
tional one and developing radically different
methods and interests. The object of the in-
dustrial course is to turn out a competent work-
man who has escaped the blind occupations of
those who leave school at the minimum age.

The school under this plan may give the child
an elementary industrial training, with an in-
tellectual orientation better than he could get
under any system of apprenticeship, but it can
scarcely be said to give a vocational training.
The Ettinger plan treats the child solely as a
potential workman who is to be absorbed as a
permanent subordinate in one specialized trade
of a rigidly organized industrial system. It
makes of the school a mere downward extension
of the staple trades and machine industries, a

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 185

sort of kmdergarten where the employer gets
his workmen trained, free of cost to himself.
It quite ignores any other roles the young
worker may be called upon to play in society —
as citizen or as member of an economic class.
It makes an undemocratic class-division in the
public school, and by divorcing the academic
from the industrial work gives to both the wrong
setting.

The Gary plan, on the other hand, prepares
for a genuinely vocational life. It views the
world outside the school not as a collection of
trades but as a community, a network of occu-
pations and interests, of interweaving services,
intellectual, administrative, manual. It sees
the individual as a citizen who contributes his
share to the community and pays for the things
he enjoys. The school itself is organized as
a community, self-supporting industrially and
as varied in its work, study and play as is thd
larger community. The industrial work is
made an indispensable part of the maintenance
and enhancement of this school community life.
The Gary child begins in his third or fourth
school year as helper in a shop or laboratory
that interests him. If he is to work at a trade
after he leaves school, he gets a long and thor-

186 EDUCATION AND LIVING

ough training under real workmen in the school
shops engaged in the repair and maintenance
of the school-plant. He is at no time called
upon to choose between the ^'academic" and
the ^ industrial.'' His work is a focusing of
all the interests of the school, and the attitudes
developed in the school are bound to be carried
into productive life and to give a new setting
to the business of making a livelihood. Science,
apart from the light it throws upon the arti-
san's trade, is bound to mean something to
him, for in the Gary school it has answered his
questions about the physical world around him.
History and geography and sociology and eco-
nomics are likely to mean something because
they have answered questions about the social
institutions and the relations of men. Art and
music will continue to interest him because they
have been an integral part of the school life.
The Gary plan would tend to produce not only
a skilled workman but a critical citizen, ready,
like the energetic professional man, to affect the
standards and endeavors of his profession and
the community life.

The Ettinger plan is as economically unsound
as it is pedagogically unsound. It requires

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 187

special teachers, and expensive shops which are
unproductive. Without state or federal sub-
sidies, the cost of any extensive or even ade-
quate industrial training in trade-school or ele-
mentary school will continue to be prohibitive.
The Gary plan, which connects the school shops
directly with the repair and maintenance of the
school-plant, demands and can afford a much
greater variety of shops than the ordinary
school. And since the workmen-teachers earn
their salaries by their work, the children get
their industrial training practically without cost
to the community. By the Gary plan the voca-
tional training features are only practicable if
all the other liberally varied '* cultural' ' fea-
tures are put into operation at the same time.
This effectually prevents that '^exploitation"
of the children which its opponents fear because
the young workers get their training as ** ap-
prentices" in the school shops.

Many who admit the superior social aims of
the Gary plan are inclined to feel that the prac-
tical results of the two plans will not be radi-
cally different. But the Gary plan and the
Ettinger plan are not merely two different ways
of reaching the same end. They not only in-

188 EDUCATION AND LIVING

volve different conceptions of the school and of
industrial society, but they are bound to turn
out different kinds of people.
/ The Ettinger plan is dangerous because it is
typical of most schemes now being put for-
ward by the advocates of industrial education.
These plans are concerned neither with genu-
ine educational interests nor with genuine in-
dustrial interests, but only with the interest of
the employer. No person who feels that the
public schools should train critical citizens who
will have something to say to the industrial
system into which they go, and not mere docile
workers, counting socially no more than their
tools, will fail to realize the vast importance
that the Gary plan should prevail over all these
schemes.

XXIII

OEGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION

AT a recent labor conference in New York
City, May, 1916, called to present a pro-
gram for the local public schools, Mr. Gompers
expressed himself as open-minded towards the
Gary plan which is about to be extended to
thirty-five more New York schools. This open-
mindedness of Mr. Gompers is in welcome and
significant contrast to the attitude taken by some
of the smaller leaders in the city, who have ap-
parently tried to line up organized labor with a
personal political machine and with reactionary
schoolmen in obstructing the reorganization of
the elementary schools. But organized-Jabor
has better business than opposing educatipniil
reform, and Mr. Gompers 's remarks, made with
full responsibility and in direct opposition to
the thinly-veiled partisan spirit of the confer-
ence, suggest that the responsible leaders of
labor are willing to take a more enlightened
stand in this important movement.

189

190 EDUCATION AND LIVING

Organized labor has repeatedly gone on rec-
ord in favor of a public school system which
will train a labor citizenry so versatile and in-
telligent as to be able to protect itself from ex-
ploitation and the hazards of our social shift-
lessness. It has demanded that vocational
teaching be kept intimately related to life, so
that children come out from the school neither
helpless unskilled workers nor narrow machine-
tenders, but potential citizens acquainted with
the backgrounds of their crafts, with the sig-
nificance of the labor movement and the insti-
tutions and movements of the world about them.
Labor above all classes has a vital interest in
an education for all children which acknowl-
edges the full intellectual and social meanings
of industrial processes and occupations. The
education that labor desires is one which will
give, particualarly to those who engage in in-
dustrial callings, the desire and ability to share
in social control, and to become masters of their
industrial fate.

Now organized labor must be rapidly com-
ing to see that this demand will never be satis-
fied by the conventional type of city public
school. A traditional school founded on the
bookish education of a leisure class can never

OEGANIZED LABOR 191

be made into a pre-voeational school that will
give power and dignity to labor, without a
fundamental transformation of the present
spirit, subject-matter and teaching methods.
An elementary school which gives its children
no more than narrow drill in the three E's plus
a little remote and unreal text-book information
in history and geography, with what little half-
hearted music and drawing and nature-study
can be squeezed in, will never provide the foun-
dation that the trained worker will need. No
system of trade-training or vocational educa-
tion superimposed upon such an elementary
school will remedy the evils. Children who
have been listlessly and ineffectively drilled in
book-work will have acquired attitudes that are
likely to be carried over into vocational work.
Except for the few, industrial training will seem
sheer drudgery, for it will have its roots in no
interests and powers developed in earlier years.
Pre-vocational education must mean something
more than a mere sop to the motor-minded boys
and girls who are restless with their books and
are on the verge of leaving school for work.
Such training, if it is to mean anything, must
be woven in as an organic part of the school
course. The entire elementary school could be

192 EDUCATION AND LIVING

a general, free, spontaneous, amateur pre-voca-
tional school, where in direct contact with ma-
chines and industrial processes as well as books,
with gardens and gymnasiums as well as labora-
tories and kitchens, with tools and print and
pottery shops and drawing and music studios,
children might have their imaginations stirred,
try out their busy hands on things, and gradu-
ally sift out of the variety the interests that
they can lay hold on with some promise of cre-
ative use. The school might be a place where
play passed insensibly into work, and aimless
experiment into purposeful construction.

Most of the current criticism of the public
schools arises from the rapidly growing convic-
tion that only in such a school will the modern
city child have a chance to be educated in any
way which will meet the demands in industrial
or commercial life that will be made upon him.
There is danger in current educational experi-
ments that we become too easily satisfied with
the mere addition of desirable courses, without
at the same time transforming the school so that
the new work is organically assimilated. Labor
I cannot be content with the school reform which
many cities are adopting in the introduction of
vocational courses merely in the upper grades.

ORGANIZED LABOR 193

Such a postponement means an invidions class-
distinction in those grades between the children
who are going on to academic work and those
who are going on to industrial work. It broad-
ens the gulf between labor and leisure rather
than diminishes it. Labor should be the first to
protest against these ^^pre-vocational courses,"
^^ junior high school plans," as they are vari-
ously called. A school which consists merely
of six years of bookish schooling with trade-
learning and athletics tacked on at the top would
merely intensify the evils under which labor
now suffers. It would produce mechanical
drudges. It would almost guarantee that in-
dustrially exploitable horde of young workers
the creation of which organized labor so much
fears.

In advocating such a system the lesser labor
chiefs in New York have been very badly ad-
vised. The program of ^ ' immediate demands, ' '
put forth under Mr. Gompers's nose with a
great flourish of the rights of labor, is not only i
unprogressive but actually reactionary. It is*
exactly the kind of specious program that the
narrow-minded employer might demand who
wished a docile but intelligent labor force
trained at the public expense. In whose in-

194 EDUCATION AND LIVING

terest does labor demand the ** immediate elimi-
nation from the course of study of any activity
which takes away from the essentials and funda-
mentals of education in the elementary
schools?'^ To eliminate organized play, audi-
torium dramatics, shopwork, gardening, danc-
ing, etc., is surely the best way to drive children
out of school, or to train them into mere ap-
pendages to machines. "What labor needs is the
most varied kind of work-study-and-play school,
where imagination and interest are awakened.
Yet here we find a conference on organized
labor and education demanding simply more of
the old kind of traditional schools ! What good
will it do to have more school buildings, more
teachers, more pay for teachers, even more
night-schools and playgrounds, if the schools
merely pursue the old limited grind? Labor
needs a school enriched in opportunity and
vitalized with the modern spirit of *^ learning
by doing," yet all it can think of to demand is
I * ^ a seat for every child ' ' ! And to ram home to
the public a sense of its straitened vision,
this conference records its ^^ emphatic protest
against any further extension of the Gary
plan. ' '
Now opposition to the Gary plan may be a

ORGANIZED LABOR 195

useful attitude for the lesser labor leaders who
are playing for political stakes, but we cannot
believe that this is the attitude of the intelligent
elements in the labor movement. For what the
Gary plan does is exactly to make possible for
the first time on a large public scale this greatly
enriched ' elementary school which labor needs
for the realization of its own expressed educa-
tional ideals. The broad curriculum, the flexi-
bility which adapts the school to the needs of
every child, the interweaving work, study and
play, transform the traditional school into a kind
of child-community, where children throughout
the course are laying the rudiments of their
vocations. They have a chance from the early
years, by trial and error, by experiment and
realization, to find out what they can do and
what they cannot do. To quote Superintendent
Wirt, the Gary school is educating them just as
the home, shop and school teacher educated the
children of earlier American days. No formal
pre-vocational course begun in the seventh or
eighth year can do what this simple intimate
contact with things and processes does. In a
sense, industrial education may begin in the
Gary school as soon as the small child is inter-
ested in going into the school-shops or labora-

196 EDUCATION AND LIVING

tories as helper or observer. All the activities
may be tested in the same way. The school is
thoroughly democratic because the opportuni-
ties, bookish, manual, artistic, are open on equal
terms to all the children. For labor to oppose
the Gary plan means that labor is suicidally
opposing the very kind of school that holds out
the most opportunity for an enriched educa-
tion for its children.

Mr. Gompers and the other responsible lead-
ers of organized labor could do nothing more
important than make an immediate and thor-
ough study of the educational promise of the
Gary school. If organized labor were to put
itself enthusiastically behind the Gary plan, it
would have at once an enlightened policy on
elementary education which would effectively
prevent any insidious exploitation of the move-
ment. It would be well if the responsible lead-
ers would repudiate these lesser labor chiefs
who manipulate education for political pur-
poses. The time has come for a bold and pro-
gressive stand.

XXIV

EDUCATION FOB WORK

THE urgency of vocational education in this
country has been immensely reinforced
during the past few years by the rapidly grow-
ing social solicitude for child welfare. Child-
labor laws, compulsory education, minimum
wage, children's courts, welfare bureaus, de-
vised primarily as mere protective agencies
for the weaker and less self-defensible mem-
bers of the community, are now suddenly seen
to involve a host of positive social responsi-
bilities. We are recognizing that the state has
a duty not only to save the younger generation
from exploitation, premature labor and de-
moralizing environments, but also to give it
every possible opportunity to be trained for an
effective vocation. In particular, the recent
raising of the age limit for child labor in many
of the states, by keeping in school thousands of
children who would otherwise have passed out
to work, has put a great strain upon the public

197

198 EDUCATION AND LIVING

school. The challenge so far has done little
else than make evident an alarming inadequacy
of the present type of school to train children
for the work which they will shortly be called
upon to do. The school systems of the large
northern cities are having thrust upon them
great numbers of children for whose education,
in this new sense of the word, they are unpre-
pared. And the burden and urgency is one that
" will increase rather than diminish.

This is one of the lessons of a document like
the recent admirable report of the Minneapolis
Survey for Vocational Education, made last
year under the auspices of the National Society
for the Promotion of Industrial Education. It
would be difficult to advise reading more im-
portant for educator, employer and employee
than this cross-section of the skilled-labor life of
a great American city, looked at with a view to
vocational guidance. In Minneapolis all the
conditions were at their best for such a social
laboratory experiment. The rapid growth of
manufacturing and the unusually high propor-
tion of skilled industries make the demand for
the training of workers paramount. The strin-
gent state laws require attendance at the school
until the age of sixteen or the completion of the

EDUCATION FOR WORK 199

entire elementary course. The city has a school
system of high traditional excellence. Clearly
all the factors that would stimulate a campaign
for vocational education are here in their most
exacting form.

The analysis here given of the training which
the manufacturing and mechanical industries
require for their various skilled positions, the
training which public schools and special schools
are purporting to give, the increase in resources
which school and shop will have to make to meet
the social demands made upon them — all this
will be found typical in greater or less degree
throughout the country. The most general im-
pression one gets from the Survey is of indus-
trial unpreparedness. The public school is seen
not with its usual fault as an institution of gen-
eral education which has ignored pre-vocational
needs, but as a pre-vocational school of narrow
and exclusive type, for the vocational training
of the classes in the community whose actual
need was least. For above the earlier years of
rudimentary schooling there has been superim-
posed a bookish school which is really a pre-
vocational school for the professions or for
domestic leisure. The boys and girls whose
futures were to be professional and domestic

200 EDUCATION AND LIVING

had the benefit of the public school. The vast
majority, the motor-minded and those whose
aptitudes were not intellectual, very properly
and automatically left this bookish school as soon
as they had obtained their rudimentary gen-
eral education. When the state suddenly re-
fuses to allow these children to leave the
school until they have finished the ele-
mentary course, the school system is faced
with the necessity of broadening itself from
a narrow pre-vocational school for the pro-
fessions into a pre-vocational school for
all the industries and arts of the modern
community. The smatterings of wood-working
and domestic science which the city schools have
introduced are shown not to have broadened
the school in the least. Even the technical
courses in the high schools have quite failed to
meet the problem. Of the recent graduates
from these courses in the Minneapolis schools
it is shown that one-half went directly to col-
lege, only one-tenth passing into occupations for
which the course could in any way be regarded
as preparatory. Most of these students, more-
over, went into drafting rooms. It may be said
therefore that to the training of the great arti-
san class of such a modern and progressive

EDUCATION FOR WORK 201

city the public schools have contributed practi-
cally nothing. A typically American progres-
sive school system with all its technical and
manual accessories is shown functioning at its
v.ery highest limit as a pre-vocational school, not
for skilled labor, but for the professions and
what the Survey suggestively calls the ^^com-
missioned officers of industry."

The industries themselves, however, are
found to be no more adequately engaged than
the school in training their own workers. Ap-
prenticeship has all but died out, and among
neither employers nor employees is there any
enthusiasm for its return. Yet, although all
the trades require a constant supply of trained
workers, no substitute has yet been found for
apprenticeship. The movement for industrial
education has at times seemed like an attempt
of employers to get their skilled workers trained
at public expense. The effort to establish
separate boards in the cities for industrial edu-
cation threatened to limit such training to the
narrow skill which each industry would demand
and to supply employers with apprentices at no
cost to the industry itself. Fortunately the
Minneapolis Survey warns against this narrow
and sinister conception of vocational education.

202 EDUCATION AND LIVING

Industrial interests cannot shirk the responsi-
bility for the special training of their workers.
The rapid growth of '^ corporation schools"
shows that at least the most prosperous
and highly skilled shops and factories are ac-
cepting this responsibility. All the employer
has a right to demand is that the school give
the young worker a general pre-vocational
training which will introduce him to the special
trade work. The graduate of the elementary
school should have been through a well rounded
course which not only cultivated a general in-
telligence, but discovered, by submitting him
to many different kinds of activity, his parti-
cular flair or knack, and thus enlisted his in-
terest in further training for a particular vo-
cation.

The elementary school should, in other words,
be a general pre-vocational school, where the
boy or girl could get a bearing towards every
type of vocation. The Survey strikingly con-
firms the far-sighted vision of William Wirt
and his unspecialized and varied Gary school
in which the children from their earliest years
are testing out their powers in shop and foun-
dry and laboratory and studio and classroom.
^'What is needed," it says, '4s not a course in

EDUCATION FOE WORK 203

special woodworking — the extent of manual
work in most elementary schools of the present
time — 'but rather organized training in practi-
cal arts which will include a variety of experi-
ences fundamental to the life of the community.
Woodwork, metal work, printing and bookbind-
ing, clay modeling, concrete and electrical
work, are some of the industries which give an
opportunity for experience in certain funda-
mental processes which are most valuable to
boys without respect to the occupation in which
they may later engage.''

In the last year of the elementary school, or
in the years of the junior high school, more
specialized technical courses could be intro-
duced. For the advanced work, more and more
responsibility should be thrown on the shop,
the school providing the background of theory,
the shop the practical application, and the stu-
dent alternating between shop and school as in
the so-called cooperative course. For the work- *
ers already engaged, part-time continuation
classes are advised, with '* dull-season classes,"
and evening trade-extension courses. For
these the various special schools in the city,
commercial and technical, could cooperate. In
this correlation of shop and school a new form

204 EDUCATION AND LIVING

of apprenticeship would grow up. The Survey
reports trade agreements already worked out
in several trades which provide that after two
years of high-school instruction in practical,
technical and academic subjects, the worker will
be placed in the occupation at wages equal to
those of a third-year apprentice. The agree-
ments require the approval of the union, and
the employers agree to use the school as the
first source of supply in engaging new workers.
On some such constructive lines as are sug-
gested in this Minneapolis Survey will the prob-
lems of vocational education be worked out.
In its discussion of such topics as home gar-
dening, office work, art education, domestic
service, the Survey suggests the breadth of the
field to be covered. An ideal system of voca-
tional training would not only give every boy
and girl in the school an opportunity to find an
aptitude and cultivate some skill but it would
make possible the training of *^ non-commis-
sioned officers" in the industrial army. The
education of such leaders will really be the goal
of organized vocational education. As the in-
dustries, trades and occupations become more
technical and more scientifically managed, the
demand for administrative, supervisory, direc-

EDUCATION FOE WOEK 205

tive and planning officers taken from the ranks
is constantly widening. Efficient management
is becoming recognized as almost the most im-
portant factor in production, and management
will be the reward for intelligence and skill.
Until we have an educational system which m\
cooperation with shop and factory gives fullest \
opportunities for each child in the schools to
work towards qualifying as such a ^^non-com-
missioned officer" in some occupation of the ,
social army, we shall not have our democratic ■
school or our framework for the future demo-
cratization of industry. Nor shall we be able
to attack those mountainous problems of un-
skilled labor which no system of vocational
training can touch.

XXV

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS

THE movement for vocational education
has done nothing more valuable than to
show us how far we are still from realizing the
public school as a child-community, first of all
as a quickening life and only secondarily as an
educational institution. The rapidly extending
^^continuation school'' is perhaps the most obvi-
ous symptom of this failure. The term itself is
unfortunate, for it drags along with it the old
separation of education from living. It sug-
gests something in the way of a surplus, of ex-
tension schooling beyond an allotted time, as
if its pupils were getting an educational largess
out of some great social bounty. Actually the
'^continuation school" represents educational
deficit; the necessity for it registers our fail-
ure to provide an earlier school-community life
for children which would have kept them out of
industry. Also it registers our failure to pro-

206

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 207

vide child-labor laws which would have pro-
tected them.

The continuation school is officially a ^^ school
for employed minors fourteen to sixteen years
of age, ' ' and is intended to hold, by the tenuous
thread of four to six hours a week school at-
tendance, those boys and girls who have gotten
their employment certificates at the earliest
legal age and are floundering about in low-paid
occupations, mostly unskilled. New York City
alone has 58,000 such children, fourteen and
fifteen years of age, two-thirds of whom have
never completed the elementary school. Stores,
offices, shops, domestic service, messenger serv-
ice absorb these boys and girls, untrained and
unfocused, and the truly formidable burden is
placed upon them of making their skilful way
in the world. Popular tradition tries to make
us glow with the belief that this world is a
ladder up which virtue and industry will auto-
matically ascend. But unfortunately the lad-
der of opportunity rarely reaches down so far.
The lowest rung is beyond their reach. The
gap between it and the ground is often too great
even for initiative and character to bridge.
The ^^ employed minors fourteen to sixteen
years of age" become the nucleus for that

208 EDUCATION AND LIVING

partly employed, sodden and anemic mass of
drifters which drags down labor everywhere
and clogs social progress.

The education which these children have had
has in most cases barely fitted them to remain
upright on the ground, not to speak of reaching
for the ladder. The acquirement of literacy,
a more or less uncertain skill in figuring, the
exposure to some miscellaneous historical and
geographical information — ^this has been the
real substance of their five or six years' school-
ing. To most of these children it is probable
that the world of printed symbols will never
mean very much. A real school would have
striven to awaken their concrete and construc-
tive intelligence, given play to all the non-
intellectual impulses. It is just the tedium and
artificiality of the old school which has sen-
tenced them now to stand at the bottom of the
occupational scale. Without class-prestige,
economic advantages, manners, extraordinary
initiative or intelligence, most of these children
are handicapped from the start. Literate, they
are perhaps fitted to compete on equal terms
with each other for work. But for the passing
into better-paid, more interesting, more re-
sponsible and skilful activity, their schooling,

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 209

though it came at the most plastic and active
time of childhood, has done nothing whatever.

We try, therefore, through the ^^continuation
school" to make up bravely to these children
what they have lost. We try to lift them so
that they can clutch at the lowest rung of the
ladder. We find it easier to make stabs at re-
pairing the damage than to reorganize the ele-
mentary school so as to prevent it. In Wis-
consin cities a boy or girl leaving school at
fourteen to go to work is required to attend day
continuation school four or five hours a week for
three years. In Boston the children must attend
for four hours a week for two years. In Penn-
sylvania cities they must attend eight hours a
week for two years. Continuation schools for
20,000 children are in process of formation by
the New York City Board of Education. Wis-
consin's forty-five industrial and continuation
schools are compulsory, while in the other states
which have permissive laws the schools may be
made locally compulsory. Employers are re-
quired to dismiss their child employees on work-
ing days and within working hours, the school
time being reckoned as part of the time that
minors are permitted by law to work.

Such laws obviously follow the line of least

210 EDUCATION AND LIVING

resistance. They add to the school system
without revitalizing it. At the same time, a
scheme like the Massachusetts plan suggests
that the continuation school may be developed
into a real stimulus of incentive. This plan
provides for three kinds of classes. For those
^* employed minors'' who are already in semi-
skilled work, it provides some training and
background for the trade or occupation chosen.
There are also trade preparatory classes for
pupils who have definitely chosen the trade
for which they wish training, but have not yet
found placement in the trade. Then there are
^^pre-vocational" classes for those who are am-
bitious to make some intelligent choice of an oc-
cupation. These pupils are given varied shop-
work, visits to shops and factories, and personal
consultation with teachers and employers.
Classes are small, and intensive work can be
done. The other pupils, employed in unskilled
labor and without definite vocational leanings,
go into ^'general improvement courses,'' where
half the time is spent in regular school subjects
continuing the elementary school work ; a quar-
ter of the time is devoted to ^'the discovery
and development of dominant interests and
powers," and the rest of the time to what is

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 211

quaintly called ^^ civics, hygiene, recreation and
culture." In this latter activity one-quarter
of the time of the ^'pre-vocationaP' and trade
courses is similarly spent. Pupils may trans-
fer from one class to another when they are
ready. If the purpose of the continuation
school is to bridge that gap between the ground
and the level where opportunity can at all begin
to mean anything, this Massachusetts plan
would seem to do it in an easily graduated and
flexible way. The untrained and unfocused
worker has at least a chance to have his imagi-
nation stimulated and to learn the rudiments
of some better work.

The sanguine advocates of the continuation
school, however, are apt to assume that this
chance is equivalent to an effective vocational
training. They forget that of the 10,000 or
more children whom Wisconsin provides with
compulsory continuation schooling a majority
must necessarily remain in the general im-
provement classes or else get only a rudimen-
tary training. And five hours a week for edu-
cation against fifty for routine labor is not
likely to make over the boys and girls who are
pulled into the school for a brief respite from
the department stores, messenger and domestic

212 EDUCATION AND LIVING

service, mills and factories, millinery and dress-
making shops. Even in the stimulating Massa-
chusetts atmosphere one hour a week for ^^ civ-
ics, hygiene, recreation and culture" seems
hardly availing. In the light of the kind of
school-community life which every progress-
ive state now knows enough to provide and
could afford to provide, the continuation school
seems a pathetic if necessary palliative for our
educational sins. Already loud complaints are
heard against ^^ allowing the public school to
pass on its failures for some one else to bury."
The first lesson of the continuation school is
that it should not be needed. Even employers
repeatedly declare that to industry children un-
der sixteen are of no real value as workers.
The states are one after another jacking up
their child-labor limit to sixteen years. We are
rapidly coming to the public conviction that the
school should care for all children's activity
up to that age. What the continuation school
does now for four hours a week, we are insist-
ing that the regular school shall do for thirty
or even forty hours a week.

But this means that we shall have to have a
reinvigorated school. It must not be a prison
where children are kept when they long for the

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 213

freedom of outside work. It must be a place
where full opportunity for expression is pro-
vided for each child in a varied life of study
and work and play. It must be an organic life
and not an institution. No system of industrial
and continuation schools piled on at the top
will effect this. The evening school has largely
failed because it demanded an impossible con-
centration and perseverance from the over-
fatigued and excitement-craving worker. The
continuation school, dealing with restless and
unintegrated children, will be ineffective for the
same reason. The vocational movement goes
blundering on in amazing disregard of the
psychology of the worker. Even the docile
German child, it is said, must be coerced into
his admirable continuation school where he gets
a thorough orientation in his relations to his
work, the community and his comrades. What
are admirable trades and studies going to mean
to boys and girls who are doing the most rudi-
mentary work, their impulses undirected, their
minds filled with sex-fantasy, personal mirages,
and all the cheap and feeble excitements of the
city streets ? The groping and desiring spirit )^
of youth is going indomitably to resist your
most thoughtful schemes until you have a school

214 EDUCATION AND LIVING

which from the earliest years, by its freedom,
its expressive life, its broad communal and per-
sonal excitements, its contact with real things,
provides a child-life which meets these inner
needs. Our best American public schools al-
ready begin to show that such a child-commu-
nity life is not at all impossible. Until we
achieve it generally, our continuation school
will be one of the stop-gaps, and a lusty warn-
ing of what we have failed to achieve.

XXVI

WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES

THE marked and immediate reaction of the
thinking public to the Scott Nearing case
shows a growing conviction that all is not
well within the conventional forms of university
control. It implies a sense that universities,
whether supported by the state or privately,
are becoming too vitally institutions of public
service to be much longer directed on the plan
of a private corporation. University trustees
are generally men of affairs, and as men of
affairs they naturally tend to hold the same
attitude towards the university that they do to
the other institutions — ^the churches and rail-
roads and corporations — they may direct. The
university officers whom they appoint seem to
have exactly the same duties of upholding the
credit of the institution, of securing funds to
meet its pressing needs, of organizing the ad-
ministrative machinery, which their corporation

officers would have. Professors are engaged by

215

216 EDUCATION AND LIVING

contract as any highly-skilled superintendent
would be engaged in a factory. If a well-paid
subordinate of a mining corporation could not
get along with his colleagues and his men, or
if he consorted with the I. W. W. or made revo-
lutionary speeches in the streets, his services
would be dispensed with as readily as the Penn-
sylvania trustees rid themselves of the un-
pleasantness of Professor Nearing. Trustees
may respect a professor more than they do in-
trinsically a fourth vice-president. They may
tend to err, as Chancellor Day has suggested,
on the side of ^^ merciful consideration.'' But
they cannot see that the amenities of the case
materially alter the professor's status.

This would be the case of university trustees
stated in its rawest terms. That they tend so
often to act as if they were a mere board of
directors of a private corporation gives rise to
endless suspicion that they consult their own
interests and the interests of the donors of the
vested wealth they represent as trustees of the
university, just as they would protect, as faith-
ful corporation directors, the interests of the
shareholders of the company. It is just this
attitude which the thinking public is no longer
inclined to tolerate. We are acquiring a new

WHO OWNS THE UNIVEESITIES 217

view of the place of the university in the com-
munity. When the American college was no
more than an advanced boys' academy, there
may have been some excuse for this form of
control by self-perpetuating and irresponsible
boards of trustees. But many things have
changed since Harvard and Yale, Princeton,
Pennsylvania and Columbia, were founded.

Now this determined autocracy may not have
worked so badly when most of the trustees and
practically all of the instructors were ministers
of the Gospel, although even in those days
faculties sometimes complained that their care-
ful plans were overridden by men ignorant of
collegiate business and little interested in edu-
cational policy. The demand that trustees'
functions should be limited to the management
of funds, leaving the faculties to regulate ad-
ministration and control appointments is a
hoary one. But with the passing of control
from the ghostly to the moneyed element, the
gulf between trustee and professor has become
extreme. Professors have fallen into a more
and more subordinate place, and the president,
who used to be their representative, has now
become almost entirely the executive agent of
the trustees, far removed in power and purse

218 EDUCATION AND LIVING

and public distinction from the professor. The
university president in this country has become
a convenient symbol for autocratic power, but
even when he has become a ^^ mayor of the
palace" and professors may not approach their
governors except through him, the real auto-
cracy still lies in the external board behind him.
This absentee and amateur form of university
control is being constantly ratified by our Amer-
ican notions of democracy, and that folkway,
which runs so omnipresently through our insti-
tutional life, of giving the plain ultimate citi-
zen control, in order that we may be protected
from the tyranny of the bureaucrat. The
newer state universities are controlled in
exactly the same spirit. Eegents, elected by
legislatures, have shown themselves quite as
capable as the most private trustees of repre-
senting vested political interests. Nor has
democracy been achieved by the cautious admis-
sion, in recent years, of alumni trustees, as in
the case of Columbia, or, as in the case of Har-
vard and Yale, by the substitution of alumni
for the former state officials. Self-perpetu-
ating boards will always propagate their own
kind, and even if alumni trustees were ever in-
clined to be anything but docile, their minority

I

WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES 219

representation would always be ineffective for
democracy.

The issues of the modern university are not
those of private property but of public welfare.
Irresponsible control by a board of amateur
notables is no longer adequate for the effective
scientific and sociological laboratories for the
community that the universities are becoming.
The protests in the most recent case imply a
growing realization that a professor who has
a dynamic and not a purely academic interest
in social movements is an asset for the whole
community. The latest controversy between
trustee and professors seems to have been very
definitely an issue between interested policy and
accurate, technical fact. It seems to have been
clearly a case of old tradition against new
science, the prejudiced guesses of corporation
oflScials against the data of a scientific student
of economics. Any form of university control
which gives the prejudiced guess the power over
the scientific research is thus a direct blow at
our own social knowledge and effectiveness.
The public simply cannot afford to run this risk
of having the steady forging ahead of social
and economic research curtailed and hampered.
We cannot afford to depend wholly on the tern-

220 EDUCATION AND LIVING

pering of trustees by the fear of the clamor of
public opinion. It is wholly undesirable that
trustees should be detained only by *^ merciful
consideration '* from discharging professors
whom they find uncongenial or who they feel are
spreading unsound doctrine. Make university
trustees directors of a private corporation and
you give them the traditional right of termi-
nating contracts with their employees without
giving reasons or any form of trial. But if the
university is not to be a mere degree-manufac-
tory, or a pre-vocational school representing
the narrow interests of a specialized economic
class, but is to be that public intellectual and
scientific service that we all want it to be, the
governance must be different from that of a
mining company, and the status of the professor
different from that of a railroad employee.
Professors should have some security of office.
An interested public which feels this way
will demand that the faculties be represented
strongly in the determination of all university
policy and in the selection and dismissal of the
instructors. It may even demand that the com-
munity itself be represented. Trustees who
really envisage the modern university as a pub-
lic service, as a body of scientific and sociologi-

WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES 221

cal experts, will gladly share their power. If
they do not, they will demonstrate how radi-
cally their own conception of a university
differs from the general one, and it will be the
duty of professors to assert their rights by all
those forms of collective organization whereby
controlled classes from the beginning of time
have made their desires effective.

XXVII

THE UNDEKGRADUATE

IN these days of academic self-analysis, the
intellectual caliber of the American under-
graduate finds few admirers or defenders. Pro-
fessors speak resignedly of the poverty of his
background and imagination. Even the under-
graduate himself in college editorials confesses
that the student soul vibrates reluctantly to the
larger intellectual and social issues of the day.
The absorption in petty gossip, sports, class
politics, fraternity life, suggests that too many
undergraduates regard their college in the light
of a glorified preparatory school where the ac-
tivities of their boyhood may be worked out on
a grandiose scale. They do not act as if they
thought of the college as a new intellectual so-
ciety in which one acquired certain rather defi-
nite scientific and professional attitudes, and
learned new interpretations which threw experi-
ence and information into new terms and new

222

THE UNDERGRADUATE 223

lights. The average undergraduate tends to
meet studies like philosophy, psychology, eco-
nomics, general history, with a frankly puzzled
wonder. A whole new world seems to dawn
upon him, in its setting and vocabulary alien to
anything in his previous life. Every teacher
knows this baffling resistance of the under-
graduate mind.

It is not so much that the student resists
facts and details. He will absorb trusts and
labor unions, municipal government and direct
primaries, the poems of Matthew Arnold, and
James's theory of the emotions. There is no
unkindliness of his mind towards fairly concrete
material. What he is more or less impervious
to is points-of-view, interpretations. He seems
to lack philosophy. The college has to let too
many undergraduates pass out into professional
and business life, not only without the germ of
a philosophy, but without any desire for an
interpretative clue through the maze. In this
respect the American undergraduate presents
a distinct contrast to the European. For the
latter does seem to get a certain intellectual
setting for his ideas which makes him intel-
ligible, and gives journalism and the ordinary
expression of life a certain tang which we lack

224 EDUCATION AND LIVING

here. Few of our undergraduates get from the
college any such intellectual impress.

The explanation is probably not that the stu-
dent has no philosophy, but that he comes to
college with an unconscious philosophy so tena-
cious that the four years of the college in its
present technique can do little to disintegrate
it. The cultural background of the well-to-do
American home with its ^'nice'^ people, its
sentimental fiction and popular music, its
amiable religiosity and vague moral optimism,
is far more alien to the stern secular realism of
modern university teaching than most people
are willing to admit. The college world would
find itself less frustrated by the undergradu-
ate's secret hostility if it would more frankly
recognize what a challenge its own attitudes
are to our homely American ways of thinking
and feeling. Since the college has not felt this
dramatic contrast, or at least has not felt a
holy mission to assail our American mushiness
of thought through the undergraduate, it has
rather let the latter run away with the college.

It is a trite complaint that the undergradu-
ate takes his extra-curricular activities more
seriously than his studies. But he does this
because his homely latent philosophy is essen-

THE UNDEEGEADUATE 225

tially a sporting philosophy, the good old Anglo-
Saxon conviction that life is essentially a game
whose significance lies in terms of winning or
losing. The passion of the American niider-
graduate for intercollegiate athletics is merely
a symbol of a general interpretation for all the
activities that come to his attention. If he is in-
terested in politics, it is in election campaigns,
in the contests of parties and personalities. His
parades and cheerings are the encouragement
of a racer for the goal. After election, his en-
thusiasm collapses. His spiritual energy goes
into class politics, fraternity and club emula-
tion, athletics, every activity which is translata-
ble into terms of winning and losing. In Conti-
nental universities this energy would go rather
into a turbulence for causes and ideas, a mili-
tant radicalism or even a more militant conserv-
atism that would send Paris students out into
the streets with a ^*Cail-laux as-sas-sin!" or
tie up an Italian town for the sake of Italia Ir-
redenta. Even the war, though it has called out\
a fund of anti-militarist sentiment in the Ameri-
can colleges, still tends to be spoken of in terms ;
of an international sporting event. **Who will
win?'' is the question here.
Now this sporting philosophy by which the

226 EDUCATION AND LIVING

American undergraduate lives, and which he
seems to bring with him from his home, may
be a very good philosophy for an American. It
is of the same stuff with our good-humored
contempt for introspection, our dread of the
*^ morbid," our dislike of conflicting issues and
insoluble problems. The sporting attitude is
a grateful and easy one. Issues are decided
cleanly. No irritating fringes are left over.
\^ The game is won or lost. Analysis and specu-
lation seem superfluous. The point is that such
a philosophy is as different as possible from
that which motivates the intellectual world of
the modern college, with its searchings, its hy-
potheses and interpretations and revisions, its
flexibility and openness of mind. In the scien-
tific world of the instructor, things are not won
or lost. His attitude is not a sporting one.

Yet the college has allowed some of these
sporting attitudes to be imposed upon it. The
undergraduates' gladiatorial contests proceed
under faculty supervision and patronage.
Alumni contribute their support to screwing up
athletic competition to the highest semi-profes-
sional pitch. They lend their hallowing pa-
tronage to fraternity life and other college in-
stitutions which tend to emphasize social

THE UNDERGEADUATE 227

distinction. And the college administration, in
contrast to the European scheme, has turned
the college course into a sort of race with a
prize at the goal. The degree has become a
sort of honorific badge for all classes of society,
and the colleges have been forced to give it this
quasi-athletic setting and fix the elaborate rules
of the game by which it may be won — rules
which shall be easy enough to get all classes
competing for it, and hard enough to make it a
sufficient prize to keep them all in the race. An
intricate system of points and courses and ex-
aminations sets the student working for marks
and the completion of schedules rather than for
a new orientation in important fields of human
interest.

The undergraduate can scarcely be blamed
for responding to a system which so strongly
resembles his sports, or for bending his energies
to playing the game right, rather than assim-
ilating the intellectual background of his teach-
ers. So strongly has this sporting technique
been acquired by the college that even when
the undergraduate lacks the sporting instinct
and does become interested in ideas, he is apt to
find that he has only drawn attention to his own
precocity and won amused notice rather than

228 EDUCATION AND LIVING

respect. In spite of the desire of instructors
to get themselves over to their students, in spite
of a real effort to break down the ^^class-con-
sciousness" of teacher and student, the gulf
between their attitudes is too fundamental to
be easily bridged. Unless it is bridged, how-
ever, the undergraduate is left in a sort of
Peter Pan condition, looking back to his school-
boy life and carrying along his schoolboy in-
terests with him, instead of anticipating his
graduate or professional study or his active
life. What should be an introduction to pro-

/ fessional or business life in a world of urgent
political and social issues, and the acquiring of
intellectual tools with which to meet their de-
mands, becomes a sort of sequestered retreat
out of which to jump from boyhood into a badly-
prepared middle age.

[^/ The college will not really get the under-
graduate until it becomes more conscious of the
contrast of its own philosophy with his sport-
ing philosophy, and tackles his boyish Ameri-
canisms less mercifully, or until it makes col-
lege life less like that of an undergraduate
country club, and more of an intellectual work-
shop where men and women in the fire of their

THE UNDEEGEADUATE 229

youth, with conflicts and idealisms, questions
and ambitions and desire for expression, come
to serve an apprenticeship under the masters of
the time.

r

XXVIII

MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES

'F the American college is to have a part in
that new educational movement which is
beginning to make the school not merely a
preparation for life but life itself, interested in
what has meaning to the student at his parti-
cular age and situation, it will have to recast
some of its most cherished practices and ideals.
The large university to-day represent all stages
in the adjustment of intellectual activity to
social demands, from the intensely practical -
schools of engineering, correlating with the
technical progress of industry, back to the de-
partments of literary scholarship — perhaps as
pure an anachronism as we have in the intel-
w lectual world to-day. The demands for techni-
cal knowledge have pulled the university along,
as it were, by the nose, and strung it through
the ages, so that a ^^ professor" to-day may be
an electrical expert fresh from Westinghouse,
or an archaic delver into forgotten poetry.

The technical departments of the universi-

230

MEDIEVALISM IN COLLEGES 231

ties have kept bravely up with the work of
^^ learning by doing." Laboratory and shop-
work, practical cooperation with industry, con-
tact with technical experts, have made the newer
departments what they should be — energetic
workshops where theory and practice constantly
fertilize each other, and where the student
comes out a competent technician in his craft.
But the place of the college in this scheme be-
comes more and more anomalous. Devoted to
the traditional studies — the literatures, mathe-
matics, philosophy, history — it is still strangely
reminiscent of old musty folkways of the school-
man and theologian. Every professor knows
the desire of the average student to finish his
college course and grapple with his professional
studies. Every professor is aware of the sharp
quickening of interest which comes on entrance
to the professional schools. Though part of
this feeling may be due to impatience to get out
into the world, much of it certainly arises from
a realization that at last one has come into a
sphere where thinking means action. The col-
lege, with its light and unexacting labor, is
cheerfully exchanged for the grind of the pro-
fessional school, because the latter touches a
real world.

232 EDUCATION AND LIVING

Whereas the higher schools give the student
active work to do, almost all the methods of the
college teaching conspire to force him into an
attitude of passivity. The lecture system is the
most impressive example of this attitude, and
the lecture system seems actually to get a
tightening grip upon the modern college. As
standard forms have become worked out, it is
customary now actually to measure the stu-
dent's course by the number of hours he ex-
poses himself to lectures. For the college
course to be organized on a basis of lectures
suggests that nothing has happened since Abe-
lard spoke in Paris to twelfth-century bookless
men. It is as if the magic word had still to
be communicated by word of mouth, like the
poems of Homer of old. The emphasis is con-
tinually upon the oral presentation of material
which the professor has often himself written
in a text-book, or which could be conveyed with
much greater exactness and fullness from books.
V/ These books the student knows only as ^^col-
lateral reading." Nothing is left undone to
impress him with the idea that the books and
reviews and atlases are mere subsidiaries to
the thin but precious trickle of the professor's
voice.

MEDIEVALISM IN COLLEGES 233

Now there may be some excuse for the lec-
ture in a Continental university, where the
professor is a personality, is not compelled to j
lecture, and may make of his delivery a kind
of intellectual ceremony. But American pro-
fessors are not only likely to be atrocious
lecturers, but to hate such compulsory talking
as the sheerest drudgery. Too often their own
palpable derision at the artificiality of it makes
the lecture an effective barrier between the
student's curiosity and its satisfaction. This is
not to deny that the lecture might be made into
a broad interpretative survey, which would
give the student the clues he needs through the
maze of books. This is exactly what the best
college courses tend to become. But for this
the college will need interpreters, and not the
humdrum recorders and collators that it has a
weakness for.

The continuance of the lecture system is only
symptomatic of the refusal of the college to see
clearly the changing ideals of scholarship. If
the student has to think chiefly about exposing
himself to the required numbers of lectures,
and then to examinations which test his powers
of receptivity, he will be forced into an atti-
tude which we are discovering is the worst pos-

V

V.

234 EDUCATION AND LIVING

sible for any genuine learning. This passivity
may have been all very well when education was
looked upon as an amassing of the ^ ' symbols of
learning," or the acquiring of invidious social
distinction. The old college education was for
a limited and homogeneous class. It presup-
posed social and intellectual backgrounds which
the great majority of college students to-day
do not possess. The idea of studying things
^^for their own sake,'' without utilitarian bear-
ings, is seductive, but it implies a society where
the ground had been prepared in childhood and
youth through family and environmental in-
fluences. When higher education was confined
almost entirely to a professional intellectual
class, the youth was accustomed to see intellect
in action around him. He did not come to col-
lege ignorant even of the very terms and setting
of the philosophy and history and sociology
studied there. Now, when all classes come to
college, the college must give that active, posi-
tive background which in former generations
was prepared for it outside. It must create
the intellectual stomach as well as present the
food.

We are learning that this can only be done
by putting ideas to work, by treating the matter

MEDIEVALISM IN COLLEGES 235

taught in the college as indispensable for any
understanding or improvement of our modern
world. In the technical schools, ideas and proc-
esses become immediately effective, but noth-
ing in the college is really ^^used"; ideas are
not put to work. Professors anxiously desire
to ^Heach students to think, '^ but they do not
give them opportunities for that hard exercise
which alone can produce trained thought. The
college organs of expression, the debating clubs,
literary magazines, newspapers, speaking con-
tests, dramatic societies, etc., are usually ama-
teurish, spasmodic, unreal. The flimsy back-
ground of the undergraduate is not to be won-
dered at where undergraduate expression in
any channel is left by the college authorities
unorganized and childish. And his low state
must inevitably continue until ideas are not
merely collected, with some vague idea of gild-
ing the interior of his soul, but resolutely put
to work. One reason for the overmastering
devotion to athletics in the modern college is
exactly its activity. In that field the student
can do something. Here, thank God, he says,
is a place where one can act !

To make intellectual expression and not re-
ceptivity the keynote of the college does not

236 EDUCATION AND LIVING

mean to turn it into an intellectual engineering
school or to make it severely utilitarian. It
should remain unspecialized, the field for work-
ing out a background for the contemporary
social world. The paradox is that only by this
practical exercise can any real cultural or
scholarly power be attained. As long as the
student can speak of ^'taking courses '* the re-
ceptive and slightly medicinal character of col-
lege learning will be emphasized. Moreover, as
the schools both above and below the college ad-
just themselves to the new conceptions of learn-
ing, the archaic forms of college will cause it
to lag in the race. The reason for their per-
sistence is, of course, that whereas the technical
demands of industry and the keen emulation in
the professions have sharpened the higher
schools and forced a revision of ideals and
methods, the practical application of the cul-
tural studies of the college has not seemed so
urgent. The turning of these cultural studies
into power is to be the exact measure of our
growing conviction that ideas and knowledge
about social relations and human institutions
are to count as urgently in our struggle with
the future as any mathematical or mechanical
formulas did in the development of our present.

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