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Craftsmanship in Teaching

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Title: Craftsmanship in Teaching

Author: William C. Bagley


        
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                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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CRAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING

by

WILLIAM CHANDLER BAGLEY

Author Of "The Educative Process," "Classroom Management," "Educational
Values," Etc.







New York
The MacMillan Company
1912
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1911, by the MacMillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1911. Reprinted June, October,
1911; May, 1912.
Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.





TO MY PARENTS





PREFACE


The following papers are published chiefly because they treat in a
concrete and personal manner some of the principles which the writer has
developed in two previously published books, _The Educative Process_ and
_Classroom Management_, and in a forthcoming volume, _Educational
Values_. It is hoped that the more informal discussions presented in the
following pages will, in some slight measure, supplement the theoretical
and systematic treatment which necessarily characterizes the other
books. In this connection, it should be stated that the materials of the
first paper here presented were drawn upon in writing Chapter XVIII of
_Classroom Management_, and that the second paper simply states in a
different form the conclusions reached in Chapter I of _The Educative
Process_.

The writer is indebted to his colleague, Professor L.F. Anderson, for
many criticisms and suggestions and to Miss Bernice Harrison for
invaluable aid in editing the papers for publication. But his heaviest
debt, here as elsewhere, is to his wife, to whose encouraging sympathy
and inspiration whatever may be valuable in this or in his other books
must be largely attributed.

  URBANA, ILLINOIS,
  March 1, 1911




  CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                                             PAGE

  I. CRAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING                                          1

  II. OPTIMISM IN TEACHING                                             23

  III. HOW MAY WE PROMOTE THE EFFICIENCY OF THE TEACHING FORCE?        43

  IV. THE TEST OF EFFICIENCY IN SUPERVISION                            63

  V. THE SUPERVISOR AND THE TEACHER                                    77

  VI. EDUCATION AND UTILITY                                            96

  VII. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN EDUCATION                             123

  VIII. THE POSSIBILITY OF TRAINING CHILDREN TO STUDY                 144

  IX. A PLEA FOR THE DEFINITE IN EDUCATION                            164

  X. SCIENCE AS RELATED TO THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE                 191

  XI. THE NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD DRILL                                   204

  XII. THE IDEAL TEACHER                                              229




CRAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING

~I~

CRAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING[1]

I

     "In the laboratory of life, each newcomer repeats the old
     experiments, and laughs and weeps for himself. We will be
     explorers, though all the highways have their guideposts and every
     bypath is mapped. Helen of Troy will not deter us, nor the wounds
     of Cæsar frighten, nor the voice of the king crying 'Vanity!' from
     his throne dismay. What wonder that the stars that once sang for
     joy are dumb and the constellations go down in
     silence."--ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY: _The Wind of Destiny_.


We tend, I think, to look upon the advice that we give to young people
as something that shall disillusionize them. The cynic of forty sneers
at what he terms the platitudes of commencement addresses. He knows
life. He has been behind the curtains. He has looked upon the other side
of the scenery,--the side that is just framework and bare canvas. He has
seen the ugly machinery that shifts the stage setting--the stage setting
which appears so impressive when viewed from the front. He has seen the
rouge on the cheeks that seem to blush with the bloom of youth and
beauty and innocence, and has caught the cold glint in the eyes that,
from the distance, seem to languish with tenderness and love. Why, he
asks, should we create an illusion that must thus be rudely dispelled?
Why revamp and refurbish the old platitudes and dole them out each
succeeding year? Why not tell these young people the truth and let them
be prepared for the fate that must come sooner or later?

But the cynic forgets that there are some people who never lose their
illusions,--some men and women who are always young,--and, whatever may
be the type of men and women that other callings and professions desire
to enroll in their service, this is the type that education needs. The
great problem of the teacher is to keep himself in this class, to keep
himself young, to preserve the very things that the cynic pleases to
call the illusions of his youth. And so much do I desire to impress
these novitiates into our calling with the necessity for preserving
their ideals that I shall ask them this evening to consider with me some
things which would, I fear, strike the cynic as most illusionary and
impractical. The initiation ceremonies that admitted the young man to
the privileges and duties of knighthood included the taking of certain
vows, the making of certain pledges of devotion and fidelity to the
fundamental principles for which chivalry stood. And I should like this
evening to imagine that these graduates are undergoing an analogous
initiation into the privileges and duties of schoolcraft, and that
these vows which I shall enumerate, embody some of the ideals that
govern the work of that craft.


II

And the first of these vows I shall call, for want of a better term, the
vow of "artistry,"--the pledge that the initiate takes to do the work
that his hand finds to do in the best possible manner, without reference
to the effort that it may cost or to the reward that it may or may not
bring.

I call this the vow of artistry because it represents the essential
attitude of the artist toward his work. The cynic tells us that ideals
are illusions of youth, and yet, the other day I saw expressed in a
middle-aged working-man a type of idealism that is not at all uncommon
in this world. He was a house painter; his task was simply the prosaic
job of painting a door; and yet, from the pains which he took with that
work, an observer would have concluded that it was, to the painter, the
most important task in the world. And that, after all, is the true test
of craft artistry: to the true craftsman the work that he is doing must
be the most important thing that can be done. One of the best teachers
that I know is that kind of a craftsman in education. A student was once
sent to observe his work. He was giving a lesson upon the "attribute
complement" to an eighth-grade grammar class. I asked the student
afterward what she had got from her visit. "Why," she replied, "that man
taught as if the very greatest achievement in life would be to get his
pupils to understand the attribute complement,--and when he had
finished, they did understand it."

In a narrower sense, this vow of artistry carries with it an
appreciation of the value of technique. From the very fact of their
normal school training, these graduates already possess a certain
measure of skill, a certain mastery of the technique of their craft.
This initial mastery has been gained in actual contact with the problems
of school work in their practice teaching. They have learned some of the
rudiments; they have met and mastered some of the rougher, cruder
difficulties. The finer skill, the delicate and intangible points of
technique, they must acquire, as all beginners must acquire them,
through the strenuous processes of self-discipline in the actual work of
the years that are to come. This is a process that takes time, energy,
constant and persistent application. All that this school or any school
can do for its students in this respect is to start them upon the right
track in the acquisition of skill. But do not make the mistake of
assuming that this is a small and unimportant matter. If this school did
nothing more than this, it would still repay tenfold the cost of its
establishment and maintenance. Three fourths of the failures in a world
that sometimes seems full of failures are due to nothing more nor less
than a wrong start. In spite of the growth of professional training for
teachers within the past fifty years, many of our lower schools are
still filled with raw recruits, fresh from the high schools and even
from the grades, who must learn every practical lesson of teaching
through the medium of their own mistakes. Even if this were all, the
process would involve a tremendous and uncalled-for waste. But this is
not all; for, out of this multitude of untrained teachers, only a small
proportion ever recognize the mistakes that they make and try to correct
them.

To you who are beginning the work of life, the mastery of technique may
seem a comparatively unimportant matter. You recognize its necessity, of
course, but you think of it as something of a mechanical nature,--an
integral part of the day's work, but uninviting in itself,--something to
be reduced as rapidly as possible to the plane of automatism and
dismissed from the mind. I believe that you will outgrow this notion. As
you go on with your work, as you increase in skill, ever and ever the
fascination of its technique will take a stronger and stronger hold upon
you. This is the great saving principle of our workaday life. This is
the factor that keeps the toiler free from the deadening effects of
mechanical routine. It is the factor that keeps the farmer at his plow,
the artisan at his bench, the lawyer at his desk, the artist at his
palette.

I once worked for a man who had accumulated a large fortune. At the age
of seventy-five he divided this fortune among his children, intending to
retire; but he could find pleasure and comfort only in the routine of
business. In six months he was back in his office. He borrowed
twenty-five thousand dollars on his past reputation and started in to
have some fun. I was his only employee at the time, and I sat across the
big double desk from him, writing his letters and keeping his accounts.
He would sit for hours, planning for the establishment of some industry
or running out the lines that would entangle some old adversary. I did
not stay with him very long, but before I left, he had a half-dozen
thriving industries on his hands, and when he died three years later he
had accumulated another fortune of over a million dollars.

That is an example of what I mean by the fascination that the technique
of one's craft may come to possess. It is the joy of doing well the work
that you know how to do. The finer points of technique,--those little
things that seem so trivial in themselves and yet which mean everything
to skill and efficiency,--what pride the competent artisan or the master
artist takes in these! How he delights to revel in the jargon of his
craft! How he prides himself in possessing the knowledge and the
technical skill that are denied the layman!

I am aware that I am somewhat unorthodox in urging this view of your
work upon you. Teachers have been encouraged to believe that details are
not only unimportant but stultifying,--that teaching ability is a
function of personality, and not a product of a technique that must be
acquired through the strenuous discipline of experience. One of the most
skillful teachers of my acquaintance is a woman down in the grades. I
have watched her work for days at a time, striving to learn its secret.
I can find nothing there that is due to genius,--unless we accept George
Eliot's definition of genius as an infinite capacity for receiving
discipline. That teacher's success, by her own statement, is due to a
mastery of technique, gained through successive years of growth checked
by a rigid responsibility for results. She has found out by repeated
trial how to do her work in the best way; she has discovered the
attitude toward her pupils that will get the best work from them,--the
clearest methods of presenting subject matter; the most effective ways
in which to drill; how to use text-books and make study periods issue in
something besides mischief; and, more than all else, how to do these
things without losing sight of the true end of education. Very
frequently I have taken visiting school men to see this teacher's work.
Invariably after leaving her room they have turned to me with such
expressions as these: "A born teacher!" "What interest!" "What a
personality!" "What a voice!"--everything, in fact, except this,--which
would have been the truth: "What a tribute to years of effort and
struggle and self-discipline!"

I have a theory which I have never exploited very seriously, but I will
give it to you for what it is worth. It is this: elementary education
especially needs a literary interpretation. It needs a literary artist
who will portray to the public in the form of fiction the real life of
the elementary school,--who will idealize the technique of teaching as
Kipling idealized the technique of the marine engineer, as Balzac
idealized the technique of the journalist, as Du Maurier and a hundred
other novelists have idealized the technique of the artist. We need some
one to exploit our shop-talk on the reading public, and to show up our
work as you and I know it, not as you and I have been told by laymen
that it ought to be,--a literature of the elementary school with the
cant and the platitudes and the goody-goodyism left out, and in their
place something of the virility, of the serious study, of the manful
effort to solve difficult problems, of the real and vital achievements
that are characteristic of thousands of elementary schools throughout
the country to-day.

At first you will be fascinated by the novelty of your work. But that
soon passes away. Then comes the struggle,--then comes the period, be it
long or short, when you will work with your eyes upon the clock, when
you will count the weeks, the days, the hours, the minutes that lie
between you and vacation time. Then will be the need for all the
strength and all the energy that you can summon to your aid. Fail here,
and your fate is decided once and for all. If, in your work, you never
get beyond this stage, you will never become the true craftsman. You
will never taste the joy that is vouchsafed the expert, the efficient
craftsman.

The length of this period varies with different individuals. Some
teachers "find themselves" quickly. They seem to settle at once into the
teaching attitude. With others is a long, uphill fight. But it is safe
to say that if, at the end of three years, your eyes still habitually
seek the clock,--if, at the end of that time, your chief reward is the
check that comes at the end of every fourth week,--then your doom is
sealed.


III

And the second vow that I should urge these graduates to take is the vow
of fidelity to the spirit of their calling. We have heard a great deal
in recent years about making education a profession. I do not like that
term myself. Education is not a profession in the sense that medicine
and law are professions. It is rather a craft, for its duty is to
produce, to mold, to fashion, to transform a certain raw material into a
useful product. And, like all crafts, education must possess the craft
spirit. It must have a certain code of craft ethics; it must have
certain standards of craft excellence and efficiency. And in these the
normal school must instruct its students, and to these it should secure
their pledge of loyalty and fidelity and devotion.

A true conception of this craft spirit in education is one of the most
priceless possessions of the young teacher, for it will fortify him
against every criticism to which his calling is subjected. It is
revealing no secret to tell you that the teacher's work is not held in
the highest regard by the vast majority of men and women in other walks
of life. I shall not stop to inquire why this is so, but the fact cannot
be doubted, and every now and again some incident of life, trifling
perhaps in itself, will bring it to your notice; but most of all,
perhaps you will be vexed and incensed by the very thing that is meant
to put you at your ease--the patronizing attitude which your friends in
other walks of life will assume toward you and toward your work.

When will the good public cease to insult the teacher's calling with
empty flattery? When will men who would never for a moment encourage
their own sons to enter the work of the public schools, cease to tell us
that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings?
Education does not need these compliments. The teacher does not need
them. If he is a master of his craft, he knows what education means,--he
knows this far better than any layman can tell him. And what boots it to
him, if, with all this cant and hypocrisy about the dignity and worth of
his calling, he can sometimes hold his position only at the sacrifice of
his self-respect?

But what is the relation of the craft spirit to these facts? Simply
this: the true craftsman, by the very fact that he is a true craftsman,
is immune to these influences. What does the true artist care for the
plaudits or the sneers of the crowd? True, he seeks commendation and
welcomes applause, for your real artist is usually extremely human; but
he seeks this commendation from another source--from a source that metes
it out less lavishly and yet with unconditioned candor. He seeks the
commendation of his fellow-workmen, the applause of "those who know, and
always will know, and always will understand." He plays to the pit and
not to the gallery, for he knows that when the pit really approves the
gallery will often echo and reëcho the applause, albeit it has not the
slightest conception of what the whole thing is about.

What education stands in need of to-day is just this: a stimulating and
pervasive craft spirit. If a human calling would win the world's
respect, it must first respect itself; and the more thoroughly it
respects itself, the greater will be the measure of homage that the
world accords it. In one of the educational journals a few years ago,
the editors ran a series of articles under the general caption, "Why I
am a teacher." It reminded me of the spirited discussion that one of the
Sunday papers started some years since on the world-old query, "Is
marriage a failure?" And some of the articles were fully as sickening in
their harrowing details as were some of the whining matrimonial
confessions of the latter series. But the point that I wish to make is
this: your true craftsman in education never stops to ask himself such
questions. There are some men to whom schoolcraft is a mistress. They
love it, and their devotion is no make-believe, fashioned out of
sentiment, and donned for the purpose of hiding inefficiency or native
indolence. They love it as some men love Art, and others Business, and
others War. They do not stop to ask the reason why, to count the cost,
or to care a fig what people think. They are properly jealous of their
special knowledge, gained through years of special study; they are
justly jealous of their special skill gained through years of discipline
and training. They resent the interference of laymen in matters purely
professional. They resent such interference as would a reputable
physician, a reputable lawyer, a reputable engineer. They resent
officious patronage and "fussy" meddling. They resent all these things
manfully, vigorously. But your true craftsman will not whine. If the
conditions under which he works do not suit him, he will fight for their
betterment, but he will not whine.


IV

And yet this vow of fidelity and devotion to the spirit of schoolcraft
would be an empty form without the two complementary vows that give it
worth and meaning. These are the vow of poverty and the vow of service.
It is through these that the true craft spirit must find its most
vigorous expression and its only justification. The very corner stone of
schoolcraft is service, and one fundamental lesson that the tyro in
schoolcraft must learn, especially in this materialistic age, is that
the value of service is not to be measured in dollars and cents. In this
respect, teaching resembles art, music, literature, discovery,
invention, and pure science; for, if all the workers in all of these
branches of human activity got together and demanded of the world the
real fruits of their self-sacrifice and labor,--if they demanded all the
riches and comforts and amenities of life that have flowed directly or
indirectly from their efforts,--there would be little left for the rest
of mankind. Each of these activities is represented by a craft spirit
that recognizes this great truth. The artist or the scientist who has an
itching palm, who prostitutes his craft for the sake of worldly gain, is
quickly relegated to the oblivion that he deserves. He loses caste, and
the caste of craft is more precious to your true craftsman than all the
gold of the modern Midas.

You may think that this is all very well to talk about, but that it
bears little agreement to the real conditions. Let me tell you that you
are mistaken. Go ask Röntgen why he did not keep the X-rays a secret to
be exploited for his own personal gain. Ask the shade of the great
Helmholtz why he did not patent the ophthalmoscope. Go to the University
of Wisconsin and ask Professor Babcock why he gave to the world without
money and without price the Babcock test--an invention which is
estimated to mean more than one million dollars every year to the
farmers and dairymen of that state alone. Ask the men on the geological
survey who laid bare the great gold deposits of Alaska why they did not
leave a thankless and ill-paid service to acquire the wealth that lay at
their feet. Because commercialized ideals govern the world that we know,
we think that all men's eyes are jaundiced, and that all men's vision is
circumscribed by the milled rim of the almighty dollar. But we are
sadly, miserably mistaken.

Do you think that these ideals of service from which every taint of
self-seeking and commercialism have been eliminated--do you think that
these are mere figments of the impractical imagination? Go ask Perry
Holden out in Iowa. Go ask Luther Burbank out in California. Go to any
agricultural college in this broad land and ask the scientists who are
doing more than all other forces combined to increase the wealth of the
people. Go to the scientific departments at Washington where men of
genius are toiling for a pittance. Ask them how much of the wealth for
which they are responsible they propose to put into their own pockets.
What will be their answer? They will tell you that all they ask is a
living wage, a chance to work, and the just recognition of their
services by those who know and appreciate and understand.

But let me hasten to add that these men claim no especial merit for
their altruism and unselfishness. They do not pose before the world as
philanthropists. They do not strut about and preen themselves as who
would say: "See what a noble man am I! See how I sacrifice myself for
the welfare of society!" The attitude of cant and pose is entirely alien
to the spirit of true service. Their delight is in doing, in serving, in
producing. But beyond this, they have the faults and frailties of their
kind,--save one,--the sin of covetousness. And again, all that they ask
of the world is a living wage, and the privilege to serve.

And that is all that the true craftsman in education asks. The man or
woman with the itching palm has no place in the schoolroom,--no place in
any craft whose keynote is service. It is true that the teacher does not
receive to-day, in all parts of our country, a living wage; and it is
equally true that society at large is the greatest sufferer because of
its penurious policy in this regard. I should applaud and support every
movement that has for its purpose the raising of teachers' salaries to
the level of those paid in other branches of professional service.
Society should do this for its own benefit and in its own defense, not
as a matter of charity to the men and women who, among all public
servants, should be the last to be accused of feeding gratuitously at
the public crib. I should approve all honest efforts of school men and
school women toward this much-desired end. But whenever men and women
enter schoolcraft because of the material rewards that it offers, the
virtue will have gone out of our calling,--just as the virtue went out
of the Church when, during the Middle Ages, the Church attracted men,
not because of the opportunities that it offered for social service, but
because of the opportunities that it offered for the acquisition of
wealth and temporal power,--just as the virtue has gone out of certain
other once-noble professions that have commercialized their standards
and tarnished their ideals.

This is not to say that one condemns the man who devotes his life to the
accumulation of property. The tremendous strides that our country has
made in material civilization have been conditioned in part by this type
of genius. Creative genius must always compel our admiration and our
respect. It may create a world epic, a matchless symphony of tones or
pigments, a scientific theory of tremendous grasp and limitless scope;
or it may create a vast industrial system, a commercial enterprise of
gigantic proportions, a powerful organization of capital. Genius is
pretty much the same wherever we find it, and everywhere we of the
common clay must recognize its worth.

The grave defect in our American life is not that we are hero
worshipers, but rather that we worship but one type of hero; we
recognize but one type of achievement; we see but one sort of genius.
For two generations our youth have been led to believe that there is
only one ambition that is worth while,--the ambition of property.
Success at any price is the ideal that has been held up before our boys
and girls. And to-day we are reaping the rewards of this distorted and
unjust view of life.

I recently met a man who had lived for some years in the neighborhood of
St. Paul and Minneapolis,--a section that is peopled, as you know, very
largely by Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants. This man told
me that he had been particularly impressed by the high idealism of the
Norwegian people. His business brought him in contact with Norwegian
immigrants in what are called the lower walks of life,--with workingmen
and servant girls,--and he made it a point to ask each of these young
men and young women the same question. "Tell me," he would say, "who are
the great men of your country? Who are the men toward whom the youth of
your land are led to look for inspiration? Who are the men whom your
boys are led to imitate and emulate and admire?" And he said that he
almost always received the same answer to this question: the great names
of the Norwegian nation that had been burned upon the minds even of
these workingmen and servant girls were just four in number: Ole Bull,
Björnson, Ibsen, Nansen. Over and over again he asked that same
question; over and over again he received the same answer: Ole Bull,
Björnson, Ibsen, Nansen. A great musician, a great novelist, a great
dramatist, a great scientist.

And I conjectured as I heard of this incident, What would be the answer
if the youth of our land were asked that question: "Who are the great
men of _your_ country? What type of achievement have you been led to
imitate and emulate and admire?" How many of our boys and girls have
even heard of our great men in the world of culture,--unless, indeed,
such men lived a half century ago and have got into the school readers
by this time? How many of our boys and girls have ever heard of
MacDowell, or James, or Whistler, or Sargent?

I have said that the teacher must take the vow of service. What does
this imply except that the opportunity for service, the privilege of
serving, should be the opportunity that one seeks, and that the
achievements toward which one aspires should be the achievements of
serving? The keynote of service lies in self-sacrifice,--in
self-forgetfulness, rather,--in merging one's own life in the lives of
others. The attitude of the true teacher in this respect is very similar
to the attitude of the true parent. In so far as the parent feels
himself responsible for the character of his children, in so far as he
holds himself culpable for their shortcomings and instrumental in
shaping their virtues, he loses himself in his children. What we term
parental affection is, I believe, in part an outgrowth of this feeling
of responsibility. The situation is precisely the same with the
teacher. It is when the teacher begins to feel himself responsible for
the growth and development of his pupils that he begins to find himself
in the work of teaching. It is then that the effective devotion to his
pupils has its birth. The affection that comes prior to this is, I
think, very likely to be of the sentimental and transitory sort.

In education, as in life, we play altogether too carelessly with the
word "love." The test of true devotion is self-forgetfulness. Until the
teacher reaches that point, he is conscious of two distinct elements in
his work,--himself and his pupils. When that time comes, his own _ego_
drops from view, and he lives in and for his pupils. The young teacher's
tendency is always to ask himself, "Do my pupils like me?" Let me say
that this is beside the question. It is not, from his standpoint, a
matter of the pupils liking their teacher, but of the teacher liking his
pupils. That, I take it, must be constantly the point of view. If you
ask the other question first, you will be tempted to gain your end by
means that are almost certain to prove fatal,--to bribe and pet and
cajole and flatter, to resort to the dangerous expedient of playing to
the gallery; but the liking that you get in this way is not worth the
price that you pay for it. I should caution young teachers against the
short-sighted educational theories that are in the air to-day, and that
definitely recommend this attitude. They may sound sweet, but they are
soft and sticky in practice. Better be guided by instinct than by
"half-baked" theory. I have no disposition to criticize the attempts
that have been made to rationalize educational practice, but a great
deal of contemporary theory starts at the wrong end. It has failed to go
to the sources of actual experience for its data. I know a father and
mother who have brought up ten children successfully, and I may say that
you could learn more about managing boys and girls from observing their
methods than from a half-dozen prominent books on educational theory
that I could name.

And so I repeat that the true test of the teacher's fidelity to this vow
of service is the degree in which he loses himself in his pupils,--the
degree in which he lives and toils and sacrifices for them just for the
pure joy that it brings him. Once you have tasted this joy, no carping
sneer of the cynic can cause you to lose faith in your calling. Material
rewards sink into insignificance. You no longer work with your eyes upon
the clock. The hours are all too short for the work that you would do.
You are as light-hearted and as happy as a child,--for you have lost
yourself to find yourself, and you have found yourself to lose yourself.




V

And the final vow that I would have these graduates take is the vow of
idealism,--the pledge of fidelity and devotion to certain fundamental
principles of life which it is the business of education carefully to
cherish and nourish and transmit untarnished to each succeeding
generation. These but formulate in another way what the vows that I have
already discussed mean by implication. One is the ideal of social
service, upon which education must, in the last analysis, rest its case.
The second is the ideal of science,--the pledge of devotion to that
persistent unwearying search after truth, of loyalty to the great
principles of unbiased observation and unprejudiced experiment, of
willingness to accept the truth and be governed by it, no matter how
disagreeable it may be, no matter how roughly it may trample down our
pet doctrines and our preconceived theories. The nineteenth century left
us a glorious heritage in the great discoveries and inventions that
science has established. These must not be lost to posterity; but far
better lose them than lose the spirit of free inquiry, the spirit of
untrammeled investigation, the noble devotion to truth for its own sake
that made these discoveries and inventions possible.

It is these ideals that education must perpetuate, and if education is
successfully to perpetuate them, the teacher must himself be filled with
a spirit of devotion to the things that they represent. Science has
triumphed over superstition and fraud and error. It is the teacher's
duty to see to it that this triumph is permanent, that mankind does not
again fall back into the black pit of ignorance and superstition.

And so it is the teacher's province to hold aloft the torch, to stand
against the materialistic tendencies that would reduce all human
standards to the common denominator of the dollar, to insist at all
times and at all places that this nation of ours was founded upon
idealism, and that, whatever may be the prevailing tendencies of the
time, its children shall still learn to live "among the sunlit peaks."
And if the teacher is imbued with this idealism, although his work may
take him very close to Mother Earth, he may still lift his head above
the fog and look the morning sun squarely in the face.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: An address to the graduating class of the Oswego, New York,
State Normal School, February, 1907.]




~II~

OPTIMISM IN TEACHING[2]


Although the month is March and not November, it is never unseasonable
to count up the blessings for which it is well to be thankful. In fact,
from the standpoint of education, the spring is perhaps the appropriate
time to perform this very pleasant function. As if still further to
emphasize the fact that education, like civilization, is an artificial
thing, we have reversed the operations of Mother Nature: we sow our seed
in the fall and cultivate our crops during the winter and reap our
harvests in the spring. I may be pardoned, therefore, for making the
theme of my discussion a brief review of the elements of growth and
victory for which the educator of to-day may justly be grateful, with,
perhaps, a few suggestions of what the next few years may reasonably be
expected to bring forth.

And this course is all the more necessary because, I believe, the
teaching profession is unduly prone to pessimism. One might think at
first glance that the contrary would be true. We are surrounded on every
side by youth. Youth is the material with which we constantly deal.
Youth is buoyant, hopeful, exuberant; and yet, with this material
constantly surrounding us, we frequently find the task wearisome and
apparently hopeless. The reason is not far to seek. Youth is not only
buoyant, it is unsophisticated, it is inexperienced, in many important
particulars it is crude. Some of its tastes must necessarily, in our
judgment, hark back to the primitive, to the barbaric. Ours is
continually the task to civilize, to sophisticate, to refine this raw
material. But, unfortunately for us, the effort that we put forth does
not always bring results that we can see and weigh and measure. The
hopefulness of our material is overshadowed not infrequently by its
crudeness. We take each generation as it comes to us. We strive to lift
it to the plane that civilized society has reached. We do our best and
pass it on, mindful of the many inadequacies, perhaps of the many
failures, in our work. We turn to the new generation that takes its
place. We hope for better materials, but we find no improvement.

And so you and I reflect in our occasional moments of pessimism that
generic situation which inheres in the very work that we do. The
constantly accelerated progress of civilization lays constantly
increasing burdens upon us. In some way or another we must accomplish
the task. In some way or another we must lift the child to the level of
society, and, as society is reaching a continually higher and higher
level, so the distance through which the child must be raised is ever
increased. We would like to think that all this progress in the race
would come to mean that we should be able to take the child at a higher
level; but you who deal with children know from experience the principle
for which the biologist Weismann stands sponsor--the principle, namely,
that acquired characteristics are not inherited; that whatever changes
may be wrought during life in the brains and nerves and muscles of the
present generation cannot be passed on to its successor save through the
same laborious process of acquisition and training; that, however far
the civilization of the race may progress, education, whose duty it is
to conserve and transmit this civilization, must always begin with the
"same old child."

This, I take it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster's
pessimism. In our work we are constantly struggling against that same
inertia which held the race in bondage for how many millenniums only the
evolutionist can approximate a guess,--that inertia of the primitive,
untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which,
for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man
possessed. This inertia has been conquered at various times in the
course of recorded history,--in Egypt and China and India, in Chaldea
and Assyria, in Greece and Rome,--conquered only again to reassert
itself and drive man back into barbarism. Now we of the Western world
have conquered it, let us hope, for all time; for we of the Western
world have discovered an effective method of holding it in abeyance, and
this method is universal public education.

Let Germany close her public schools, and in two generations she will
lapse back into the semi-darkness of medievalism; let her close both her
public schools and her universities, and three generations will fetch
her face to face with the Dark Ages; let her destroy her libraries and
break into ruin all of her works of art, all of her existing triumphs of
technical knowledge and skill, from which a few, self-tutored, might
glean the wisdom that is every one's to-day, and Germany will soon
become the home of a savage race, as it was in the days of Tacitus and
Cæsar. Let Italy close her public schools, and Italy will become the
same discordant jumble of petty states that it was a century ago,--again
to await, this time perhaps for centuries or millenniums, another
Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel to work her regeneration. Let Japan close
her public schools, and Japan in two generations will be a barbaric
kingdom of the Shoguns, shorn of every vestige of power and
prestige,--the easy victim of the machinations of Western diplomats. Let
our country cease in its work of education, and these United States must
needs pass through the reverse stages of their growth until another race
of savages shall roam through the unbroken forest, now and then to reach
the shores of ocean and gaze through the centuries, eastward, to catch
a glimpse of the new Columbus. Like the moving pictures of the
kinetoscope when the reels are reversed, is the picture that imagination
can unroll if we grant the possibility of a lapse from civilization to
savagery.

And so when we take the broader view, we quickly see that, in spite of
our pessimism, we are doing something in the world. We are part of that
machine which civilization has invented and is slowly perfecting to
preserve itself. We may be a very small part, but, so long as the
responsibility for a single child rests upon us, we are not an
unimportant part. Society must reckon with you and me perhaps in an
infinitesimal degree, but it must reckon with the institution which we
represent as it reckons with no other institution that it has reared to
subserve its needs.

In a certain sense these statements are platitudes. We have repeated
them over and over again until the words have lost their tremendous
significance. And it behooves us now and again to revive the old
substance in a new form,--to come afresh to a self-consciousness of our
function. It is not good for any man to hold a debased and inferior
opinion of himself or of his work, and in the field of schoolcraft it is
easy to fall into this self-depreciating habit of thought. We cannot
hope that the general public will ever come to view our work in the true
perspective that I have very briefly outlined. It would probably not be
wise to promulgate publicly so pronounced an affirmation of our
function and of our worth. The popular mind must think in concrete
details rather than in comprehensive principles, when the subject of
thought is a specialized vocation. You and I have crude ideas, no doubt,
of the lawyer's function, of the physician's function, of the
clergyman's function. Not less crude are their ideas of our function.
Even when they patronize us by saying that our work is the noblest that
any man or woman would engage in, they have but a vague and shadowy
perception of its real significance. I doubt not that, with the majority
of those who thus pat us verbally upon the back, the words that they use
are words only. They do not envy us our privileges,--unless it is our
summer vacations,--nor do they encourage their sons to enter service in
our craft. The popular mind--the nontechnical mind,--must work in the
concrete;--it must have visible evidences of power and influence before
it pays homage to a man or to an institution.

Throughout the German empire the traveler is brought constantly face to
face with the memorials that have been erected by a grateful people to
the genius of the Iron Chancellor. Bismarck richly deserves the tribute
that is paid to his memory, but a man to be honored in this way must
exert a tangible and an obvious influence.

And yet, in a broader sense, the preëminence of Germany is due in far
greater measure to two men whose names are not so frequently to be
found inscribed upon towers and monuments. In the very midst of the
havoc and devastation wrought by the Napoleon wars,--at the very moment
when the German people seemed hopelessly crushed and defeated,--an
intellect more penetrating than that of Bismarck grasped the logic of
the situation. With the inspiration that comes with true insight, the
philosopher Fichte issued his famous Addresses to the German people.
With clear-cut argument couched in white-hot words, he drove home the
great principle that lies at the basis of United Germany and upon the
results of which Bismarck and Von Moltke and the first Emperor erected
the splendid structure that to-day commands the admiration of the world.
Fichte told the German people that their only hope lay in universal,
public education. And the kingdom of Prussia--impoverished, bankrupt,
war-ridden, and war-devastated--heard the plea. A great scheme that
comprehended such an education was already at hand. It had fallen almost
stillborn from the only kind of a mind that could have produced it,--a
mind that was suffused with an overwhelming love for humanity and
incomparably rich with the practical experiences of a primary
schoolmaster. It had fallen from the mind of Pestalozzi, the Swiss
reformer, who thus stands with Fichte as one of the vital factors in the
development of Germany's educational supremacy.

The people's schools of Prussia, imbued with the enthusiasm of Fichte
and Pestalozzi,[3] gave to Germany the tremendous advantage that enabled
it so easily to overcome its hereditary foe, when, two generations
later, the Franco-Prussian War was fought; for the _Volksschule_ gave to
Germany something that no other nation of that time possessed; namely,
an educated proletariat, an intelligent common people. Bismarck knew
this when he laid his cunning plans for the unification of German states
that was to crown the brilliant series of victories beginning at Sedan
and ending within the walls of Paris. William of Prussia knew it when,
in the royal palace at Versailles, he accepted the crown that made him
the first Emperor of United Germany. Von Moltke knew it when, at the
capitulation of Paris, he was asked to whom the credit of the victory
was due, and he replied, in the frank simplicity of the true soldier and
the true hero, "The schoolmaster did it."

And yet Bismarck and Von Moltke and the Emperor are the heroes of
Germany, and if Fichte and Pestalozzi are not forgotten, at least their
memories are not cherished as are the memories of the more tangible and
obvious heroes. Instinct lies deeply embedded in human nature and it is
instinctive to think in the concrete. And so I repeat that we cannot
expect the general public to share in the respect and veneration which
you and I feel for our calling, for you and I are technicians in
education, and we can see the process as a comprehensive whole. But our
fellow men and women have their own interests and their own departments
of technical knowledge and skill; they see the schoolhouse and the
pupils' desks and the books and other various material symbols of our
work,--they see these things and call them education; just as we see a
freight train thundering across the viaduct or a steamer swinging out in
the lake and call these things commerce. In both cases, the nontechnical
mind associates the word with something concrete and tangible; in both
cases, the technical mind associates the same word with an abstract
process, comprehending a movement of vast proportions.

To compress such a movement--whether it be commerce or government or
education--in a single conception requires a multitude of experiences
involving actual adjustments with the materials involved; involving
constant reflection upon hidden meanings, painful investigations into
hidden causes, and mastery of a vast body of specialized knowledge which
it takes years of study to digest and assimilate.

It is not every stevedore upon the docks, nor every stoker upon the
steamers, nor every brakeman upon the railroads, who comprehends what
commerce really means. It is not every banker's clerk who knows the
meaning of business. It is not every petty holder of public office who
knows what government really means. But this, at least, is true: in
proportion as the worker knows the meaning of the work that he does,--in
proportion as he sees it in its largest relations to society and to
life,--his work is no longer the drudgery of routine toil. It becomes
instead an intelligent process directed toward a definite goal. It has
acquired that touch of artistry which, so far as human testimony goes,
is the only pure and uncontaminated source of human happiness.

And the chief blessing for which you and I should be thankful to-day is
that this larger view of our calling has been vouchsafed to us as it has
been vouchsafed no former generation of teachers. Education as the
conventional prerogative of the rich,--as the garment which separated
the higher from the lower classes of society,--this could scarcely be
looked upon as a fascinating and uplifting ideal from which to derive
hope and inspiration in the day's work; and yet this was the commonly
accepted function of education for thousands of years, and the teachers
who did the actual work of instruction could not but reflect in their
attitude and bearing the servile character of the task that they
performed. Education to fit the child to earn a better living, to
command a higher wage,--this myopic view of the function of the school
could do but little to make the work of teaching anything but drudgery;
and yet it is this narrow and materialistic view that has dominated our
educational system to within a comparatively few years.

So silently and yet so insistently have our craft ideals been
transformed in the last two decades that you and I are scarcely aware
that our point of view has been changed and that we are looking upon our
work from a much higher point of vantage and in a light entirely new.
And yet this is the change that has been wrought. That education, in its
widest meaning, is the sole conservator and transmitter of civilization
to successive generations found expression as far back as Aristotle and
Plato, and has been vaguely voiced at intervals down through the
centuries; but its complete establishment came only as an indirect issue
of the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, and its
application to the problems of practical schoolcraft and its
dissemination through the rank and file of teachers awaited the dawn of
the twentieth century. To-day we see expressions and indications of the
new outlook upon every hand, in the greatly increased professional zeal
that animates the teacher's calling; in the widespread movement among
all civilized countries to raise the standards of teachers, to eliminate
those candidates for service who have not subjected themselves to the
discipline of special preparation; in the increased endowments and
appropriations for schools and seminaries that prepare teachers; and,
perhaps most strikingly at the present moment, in that concerted
movement to organize into institutions of formal education, all of those
branches of training which have, for years, been left to the chance
operation of economic needs working through the crude and unorganized
though often effective apprentice system. The contemporary fervor for
industrial education is only one expression of this new view that, in
the last analysis, the school must stand sponsor for the conservation
and transmission of every valuable item of experience, every usable fact
or principle, every tiniest perfected bit of technical skill, every
significant ideal or prejudice, that the race has acquired at the cost
of so much struggle and suffering and effort.

I repeat that this new vantage point from which to gain a comprehensive
view of our calling has been attained only as an indirect result of the
scientific investigations of the nineteenth century. We are wont to
study the history of education from the work and writings of a few great
reformers, and it is true that much that is valuable in our present
educational system can be understood and appreciated only when viewed in
the perspective of such sources. Aristotle and Quintilian, Abelard and
St. Thomas Aquinas, Sturm and Philip Melanchthon, Comenius, Pestalozzi,
Rousseau, Herbart, and Froebel still live in the schools of to-day.
Their genius speaks to us through the organization of subject-matter,
through the art of questioning, through the developmental methods of
teaching, through the use of pictures, through objective instruction,
and in a thousand other forms. But this dominant ideal of education to
which I have referred and which is so rapidly transforming our outlook
and vitalizing our organization and inspiring us to new efforts, is not
to be drawn from these sources. The new histories of education must
account for this new ideal, and to do this they must turn to the masters
in science who made the middle part of the nineteenth century the period
of the most profound changes that the history of human thought
records.[4]

With the illuminating principle of evolution came a new and generously
rich conception of human growth and development. The panorama of
evolution carried man back far beyond the limits of recorded human
history and indicated an origin as lowly as the succeeding uplift has
been sublime. The old depressing and fatalistic notion that the human
race was on the downward path, and that the march of civilization must
sooner or later end in a cul-de-sac (a view which found frequent
expression in the French writers of the eighteenth century and which
dominated the skepticism of the dark hours preceding the
Revolution)--this fatalistic view met its death-blow in the principle of
evolution. A vista of hope entirely undreamed of stretched out before
the race. If the tremendous leverage of the untold millenniums of brute
and savage ancestry could be overcome, even in slight measure, by a few
short centuries of intelligence and reason, what might not happen in a
few more centuries of constantly increasing light? In short, the
principle of evolution supplied the perspective that was necessary to an
adequate evaluation of human progress.

But this inspiriting outlook which was perhaps the most comprehensive
result of Darwin's work had indirect consequences that were vitally
significant to education. It is with mental and not with physical
development that education is primarily concerned, and yet mental
development is now known to depend fundamentally upon physical forces.
The same decade that witnessed the publication of the _Origin of
Species_ also witnessed the birth of another great book, little known
except to the specialist, and yet destined to achieve immortality. This
book is the _Elements of Psychophysics_, the work of the German
scientist Fechner. The intimate relation between mental life and
physical and physiological forces was here first clearly demonstrated,
and the way was open for a science of psychology which should cast aside
the old and threadbare raiment of mystery and speculation and
metaphysic, and stand forth naked and unashamed.

But all this was only preparatory to the epoch-making discoveries that
have had so much to do with our present attitude toward education. The
Darwinian hypothesis led to violent controversy, not only between the
opponents and supporters of the theory, but also among the various camps
of the evolutionists themselves. Among these controversies was that
which concerned itself with the inheritance of acquired characteristics,
and the outcome of that conflict has a direct significance to present
educational theory. The principle, now almost conclusively
established,[5] that the characteristics acquired by an organism during
its lifetime are not transmitted by physical heredity to its offspring,
must certainly stand as the basic principle of education; for everything
that we identify as human as contrasted with that which is brutal must
look to education for its preservation and support. It has been stated
by competent authorities that, during the past ten thousand years, there
has been no significant change in man's physical constitution. This
simply means that Nature finished her work as far as man is concerned
far beyond the remotest period that human history records; that, for all
that we can say to-day, there must have existed in the very distant past
human beings who were just as well adapted by nature to the lives that
we are leading as we are to-day adapted; that what they lacked and what
we possess is simply a mass of traditions, of habits, of ideals, and
prejudices which have been slowly accumulated through the ages and which
are passed on from generation to generation by imitation and instruction
and training and discipline; and that the child of to-day, left to his
own devices and operated upon in no way by the products of
civilization, would develop into a savage undistinguishable in all
significant qualities from other savages.

The possibilities that follow from such a conception are almost
overwhelming even at first glance, and yet the theory is borne out by
adequate experiments. The transformation of the Japanese people through
two generations of education in Western civilization is a complete
upsetting of the old theory that as far as race is concerned, there is
anything significantly important in blood, and confirms the view that
all that is racially significant depends upon the influences that
surround the young of the race during the formative years. The complete
assimilation of foreign ingredients into our own national stock through
the instrumentality of the public school is another demonstration that
the factors which form the significant characteristics in the lower
animals possess but a minimum of significance to man,--that color, race,
stature, and even brain weight and the shape of the cranium, have very
little to do with human worth or human efficiency save in extremely
abnormal cases.

And so we have at last a fundamental principle with which to illumine
the field of our work and from which to derive not only light but
inspiration. Unite this with John Fiske's penetrating induction that the
possibilities of progress through education are correlated directly with
the length of the period of growth or immaturity,--that is, that the
races having the longest growth before maturity are capable of the
highest degree of civilization,--and we have a pair of principles the
influence of which we see reflected all about us in the great activity
for education and especially in the increased sense of pride and
responsibility and respect for his calling that is animating the modern
teacher.

And what will be the result of this new point of view? First and
foremost, an increased general respect for the work. Until a profession
respects itself, it cannot very well ask for the world's respect, and
until it can respect itself on the basis of scientific principles
indubitably established, its respect for itself will be little more than
the irritating self-esteem of the goody-goody order which is so often
associated with our craft.

With our own respect for our calling, based upon this incontrovertible
principle, will come, sooner or later, increased compensation for the
work and increased prestige in the community. I repeat that these things
can only come after we have established a true craft spirit. If we are
ashamed of our calling, if we regret openly and publicly that we are not
lawyers or physicians or dentists or bricklayers or farmers or anything
rather than teachers, the public will have little respect for the
teacher's calling. As long as we criticize each other before laymen and
make light of each other's honest efforts, the public will question our
professional standing on the ground that we have no organized code of
professional ethics,--a prerequisite for any profession.

I started out to tell you something that we ought to be thankful
for,--something that ought to counteract in a measure the inevitable
tendencies toward pessimism and discouragement. The hopeful thing about
our present status is that we have an established principle upon which
to work. A writer in a recent periodical stoutly maintained that
education was in the position just now that medicine was in during the
Middle Ages. The statement is hardly fair, either to medicine or to
education. If one were to attempt a parallel, one might say that
education stands to-day where medicine stood about the middle of the
nineteenth century. The analogy might be more closely drawn by comparing
our present conception of education with the conception of medicine just
prior to the application of the experimental method to a solution of its
problems. Education has still a long road to travel before it reaches
the point of development that medicine has to-day attained. It has still
to develop principles that are comparable to the doctrine of lymph
therapy or to that latest triumph of investigation in the field of
medicine,--the theory of opsonins,--which almost makes one believe that
in a few years violent accident and old age will be the only sources of
death in the human race.

Education, we admit, has a long road to travel before it reaches so
advanced a point of development. But there is no immediate cause for
pessimism or despair. We need especially, now that the purpose of
education is adequately defined, an adequate doctrine of educational
values and a rich and vital infusion of the spirit of experimental
science. For efficiency in the work of instruction and training, we need
to know the influence of different types of experience in controlling
human conduct,--we need to know just what degree of efficiency is
exerted by our arithmetic and literature, our geography and history, our
drawing and manual training, our Latin and Greek, our ethics and
psychology. It is the lack of definite ideas and criteria in these
fields that constitutes the greatest single source of waste in our
educational system to-day.

And yet even here the outlook is extremely hopeful. The new movement
toward industrial education is placing greater and greater emphasis upon
those subjects of instruction and those types of methods whose
efficiency can be tested and determined in an accurate fashion. The
intimate relation between the classroom, on the one hand, and the
machine shop, the experimental farm, the hospital ward and operating
room, and the practice school, on the other hand, indicates a source of
accurate knowledge with regard to the way in which our teachings really
affect the conduct and adjustment of our pupils that cannot fail within
a short time to serve as the basis for some illuminating principle of
educational values. This, I believe, will be the next great step in the
development of our profession.

There has been no intention in what I have said to minimize the
disadvantages and discouragements under which we are to-day doing our
work. My only plea is for the hopeful and optimistic outlook which, I
maintain, is richly justified by the progress that has already been made
and by the virile character of the forces that are operating in the
present situation.

On the whole, I can see no reason why I should not encourage young men
to enter the service of schoolcraft. I cannot say to them that they will
attain to great wealth, but I can safely promise them that, if they give
to the work of preparation the same attention and time that they would
give to their education and training for medicine or law or engineering,
their services will be in large demand and their rewards not to be
sneered at. Their incomes will not enable them to compete with the
captains of industry, but they will permit as full an enjoyment of the
comforts of life as it is good for any young man to command. But the
ambitious teacher must pay the price to reap these rewards,--the price
of time and energy and labor,--the price that he would have to pay for
success in any other human calling. What I cannot promise him in
education is the opportunity for wide popular adulation, but this, after
all, is a matter of taste. Some men crave it and they should go into
those vocations that will give it to them. Others are better satisfied
with the discriminating recognition and praise of their own
fellow-craftsmen.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: An address before the Oswego, New York, County Council of
Education, March 28, 1908.]

[Footnote 3: It should be added that the movement toward universal
education in Germany owed much to the work of pre-Pestalozzian
reformers,--especially Francke and Basedow.]

[Footnote 4: While the years from 1840 to 1870 mark the period of
intellectual revolution, it should not be inferred that the education of
this period reflected these fundamental changes of outlook. On the
contrary, these years were in general marked by educational stagnation.]

[Footnote 5: The writer here accepts the conclusions of J.A. Thomson
(_Heredity_ New York, 1908, ch. vii).]




~III~

HOW MAY WE PROMOTE THE EFFICIENCY OF THE TEACHING FORCE?[6]


I

Efficiency seems to be a word to conjure with in these days. Popular
speech has taken it in its present connotation from the technical
vocabulary of engineering, and the term has brought with it a very
refreshing sense of accuracy and practicality. It suggests blueprints
and T-squares and mathematical formulæ. A faint and rather pleasant odor
of lubricating oil and cotton waste seems to hover about it. The
efficiency of a steam engine or a dynamo is a definitely determinable
and measurable factor, and when we use the term "efficiency" in popular
speech we convey through the word somewhat of this quality of certainty
and exactitude.

An efficient man, very obviously, is a man who "makes good," who
surmounts obstacles, overcomes difficulties, and "gets results." Rowan,
the man who achieved immortality on account of a certain message that he
carried to Garcia, is the contemporary standard of human efficiency. He
was given a task to do, and he did it. He did not stop to inquire
whether it was interesting, or whether it was easy, or whether it would
be remunerative, or whether Garcia was a pleasant man to meet. He simply
took the message and brought back the answer. Here we have efficiency in
human endeavor reduced to its lowest terms: to take a message and to
bring back an answer; to do the work that is laid out for one to do
without shirking or "soldiering" or whining; and to "make good," to get
results.

Now if we are to improve the efficiency of the teacher, the first thing
to do is to see that the conditions of efficiency are fulfilled as far
as possible at the outset. In other words, efficiency is impossible
unless one is set a certain task to accomplish. Rowan was told to carry
a message to Garcia. He was to carry it to Garcia, not to Queen Victoria
or Li Hung Chang or J. Pierpont Morgan, or any one else whom he may have
felt inclined to choose as its recipient. And that is just where Rowan
had a decided advantage over many teachers who have every ambition to be
just as efficient as he was. To expect a young teacher not only to get
results, but also to determine the results that should be obtained,
multiplies his chances of failure, not by two, as one might assume at
first thought, but almost by infinity.

Let me give an example of what I mean. A young man graduated from
college during the hard times of the middle nineties. It was imperative
that he secure some sort of a remunerative employment, but places were
very scarce and he had to seek a long time before he found anything to
which he could turn his hand. The position that he finally secured was
that of teacher in an ungraded school in a remote settlement.
School-teaching was far from his thoughts and still farther from his
ambitions, but forty dollars a month looked too good to be true,
especially as he had come to the point where his allowance of food
consisted of one plate of soup each day, with the small supply of
crackers that went with it. He accepted the position most gratefully.

He taught this school for two years. He had no supervision. He read
various books on the science and art of teaching and upon a certain
subject that went by the name of psychology, but he could see no
connection between what these books told him and the tasks that he had
to face. Finally he bought a book that was advertised as indispensable
to young teachers. The first words of the opening paragraph were these:
"Teacher, if you know it all, don't read this book." The young man threw
the volume in the fire. He had no desire to profit by the teaching of an
author who began his instruction with an insult. From that time until he
left the school, he never opened a book on educational theory.

His first year passed off with what appeared to be the most encouraging
success. He talked to his pupils on science and literature and history.
They were very good children, and they listened attentively. When he
tired of talking, he set the pupils to writing in their copy books,
while he thought of more things to talk about. He covered a great deal
of ground that first year. Scarcely a field of human knowledge was left
untouched. His pupils were duly informed about the plants and rocks and
trees, about the planets and constellations, about atoms and molecules
and the laws of motion, about digestion and respiration and the wonders
of the nervous system, about Shakespeare and Dickens and George Eliot.
And his pupils were very much interested in it all. Their faces had that
glow of interest, that look of wonderment and absorption, that you get
sometimes when you tell a little four-year-old the story of the three
bears. He never had any troubles of discipline, because he never asked
his pupils to do anything that they did not wish to do. There were six
pupils in his "chart class." They were anxious to learn to read, and
three of them did learn. Their mothers taught them at home. The other
three were still learning at the end of the second year. He concluded
that they had been "born short," but he liked them and they liked him.
He did not teach his pupils spelling or writing. If they learned these
things they learned them without his aid, and it is safe to say that
they did not learn them in any significant measure. He did not like
arithmetic, and so he just touched on it now and then for the sake of
appearances.

This teacher was elected for the following year at a handsome increase
of salary. He took this to mean a hearty indorsement of his methods;
consequently he followed the same general plan the next year. He had
told his pupils about everything that he knew, so he started over again,
much to their delight. He left at the close of the year, amidst general
lamentation. School-teaching was a delightful occupation, but he had
mastered the art, and now he wished to attack something that was really
difficult. He would study law. It is no part of the story that he did
not. Neither is it part of the story that his successor had a very hard
time getting that school straightened out; in fact, I believe it
required three or four successive successors to make even an impression.

Now that man's work was a failure, and the saddest kind of a failure,
for he did not realize that he had failed until years afterward. He
failed, not because he lacked ambition and enthusiasm; he had a large
measure of both these indispensable qualities. He failed, not because he
lacked education and a certain measure of what the world calls culture;
from the standpoint of education, he was better qualified than most
teachers in schools of that type. He failed, not because he lacked
social spirit and the ability to coöperate with the church and the home;
he mingled with the other members of the community, lived their life and
thought their thoughts and enjoyed their social diversions. The
community liked him and respected him. His pupils liked him and
respected him; and yet what he fears most of all to-day is that he may
come suddenly face to face with one of those pupils and be forced to
listen to a first-hand account of his sins of omission.

This man failed simply because he did not do what the elementary teacher
must do if he is to be efficient as an elementary teacher. He did not
train his pupils in the habits that are essential to one who is to live
the social life. He gave them a miscellaneous lot of interesting
information which held their attention while it lasted, but which was
never mastered in any real sense of the term, and which could have but
the most superficial influence upon their future conduct. But, worst of
all, he permitted bad and inadequate habits to be developed at the most
critical and plastic period of life. His pupils had followed the lines
of least effort, just as he had followed the lines of least effort. The
result was a well-established prejudice against everything that was not
superficially attractive and intrinsically interesting.

Now this man's teaching fell short simply because he did not know what
results he ought to obtain. He had been given a message to deliver, but
he did not know to whom he should deliver it. Consequently he brought
the answer, not from Garcia, but from a host of other personages with
whom he was better acquainted, whose language he could speak and
understand, and from whom he was certain of a warm welcome. In other
words, having no definite results for which he would be held
responsible, he did the kind of teaching that he liked to do. That
might, under certain conditions, have been the best kind of teaching
for his pupils. But these conditions did not happen to operate at that
time. The answer that he brought did not happen to be the answer that
was needed. That it pleased his employers does not in the least mitigate
the failure. That a teacher pleases the community in which he works is
not always evidence of his success. It is dangerous to make a statement
like this, for some are sure to jump to the opposite conclusion and
assume that one who is unpopular in the community is the most
successful. Needless to say, the reasoning is fallacious. The matter of
popularity is a secondary criterion, not a primary criterion of the
efficiency of teaching. One may be successful and popular or successful
and unpopular; unsuccessful and popular or unsuccessful and unpopular.
The question of popularity is beside the question of efficiency,
although it may enter into specific cases as a factor.


II

And so the first step to take in getting more efficient work from young
teachers, and especially from inexperienced and untrained teachers fresh
from the high school or the college, is to make sure that they know what
is expected of them. Now this looks to be a very simple precaution that
no one would be unwise enough to omit. As a matter of fact, a great many
superintendents and principals are not explicit and definite about the
results that they desire. Very frequently all that is asked of a
teacher is that he or she keep things running smoothly, keep pupils and
parents good-natured. Let me assert again that this ought to be done,
but that it is no measure of a teacher's efficiency, simply because it
can be done and often is done by means that defeat the purpose of the
school. As a young principal in a city system, I learned some vital
lessons in supervision from a very skillful teacher. She would come to
me week after week with this statement: "Tell me what you want done, and
I will do it." It took me some time to realize that that was just what I
was being paid to do,--telling teachers what should be accomplished and
then seeing that they accomplished the task that was set. When I finally
awoke to my duties, I found myself utterly at a loss to make
prescriptions. I then learned that there was a certain document known as
the course of study, which mapped out the general line of work and
indicated the minimal requirements. I had seen this course of study, but
its function had never impressed itself upon me. I had thought that it
was one of those documents that officials publish as a matter of form
but which no one is ever expected to read. But I soon discovered that a
principal had something to do besides passing from room to room, looking
wisely at the work going on, and patting little boys and girls on the
head.

Now a definite course of study is very hard to construct,--a course that
will tell explicitly what the pupils of each grade should acquire each
term or half-term in the way of habits, knowledge, ideals, attitudes,
and prejudices. But such a course of study is the first requisite to
efficiency in teaching. The system that goes by hit or miss, letting
each teacher work out his own salvation in any way that he may see fit,
is just an aggregation of such schools as that which I have described.

It is true that reformers have very strenuously criticized the policy of
restricting teachers to a definite course of study. They have maintained
that it curtails individual initiative and crushes enthusiasm. It does
this in a certain measure. Every prescription is in a sense a
restriction. The fact that the steamship captain must head his ship for
Liverpool instead of wherever he may choose to go is a restriction, and
the captain's individuality is doubtless crushed and his initiative
limited. But this result seems to be inevitable and he generally manages
to survive the blow. The course of study must be to the teacher what the
sailing orders are to the captain of the ship, what the stated course is
to the wheelsman and the officer on the bridge, what the time-table is
to the locomotive engineer, what Garcia and the message and the answer
were to Rowan. One may decry organization and prescription in our
educational system. One may say that these things tend inevitably toward
mechanism and formalism and the stultifying of initiative. But the fact
remains that, whenever prescription is abandoned, efficiency in general
is at an end.

And so I maintain that every teacher has a right to know what he is to
be held responsible for, what is expected of him, and that this
information be just as definite and unequivocal as it can be made. It is
under the stress of definite responsibility that growth is most rapid
and certain. The more uncertain and intangible the end to be gained, the
less keenly will one feel the responsibility for gaining that end.
Unhappily we cannot say to a teacher: "Here is a message. Take it to
Garcia. Bring the answer." But we may make our work far more definite
and tangible than it is now. The courses of study are becoming more and
more explicit each year. Vague and general prescriptions are giving
place to definite and specific prescriptions. The teachers know what
they are expected to do, and knowing this, they have some measure for
testing the efficiency of their own efforts.


III

But to make more definite requirements is, after all, only the first
step in improving efficiency. It is not sufficient that one know what
results are wanted; one must also know how these results may be
obtained. Improvement in method means improvement in efficiency, and a
crying need in education to-day is a scientific investigation of methods
of teaching. Teachers should be made acquainted with the methods that
are most economical and efficient. As a matter of fact, whatever is done
in that direction at the present time must be almost entirely confined
to suggestions and hints.

Our discussions of methods of teaching may be divided into three
classes: (1) Dogmatic assertions that such and such a method is right
and that all others are wrong--assertions based entirely upon _a priori_
reasoning. For example, the assertion that children must never be
permitted to learn their lessons "by heart" is based upon the general
principle that words are only symbols of ideas and that, if one has
ideas, one can find words of his own in which to formulate them. (2) A
second class of discussions of method comprises descriptions of devices
that have proved successful in certain instances and with certain
teachers. (3) Of a third class of discussions there are very few
representative examples. I refer to methods that have been established
on the basis of experiments in which irrelevant factors have been
eliminated. In fact, I know of no clearly defined report or discussion
of this sort. An approach to a scientific solution of a definite problem
of method is to be found in Browne's monograph, _The Psychology of
Simple Arithmetical Processes_. Another example is represented by the
experiments of Miss Steffens, Marx Lobsien, and others, regarding the
best methods of memorizing, and proving beyond much doubt that the
complete repetition is more economical than the partial repetition. But
these conclusions have, of course, only a limited field of application
to practical teaching. We stand in great need of a definite experimental
investigation of the detailed problems of teaching upon which there is
wide divergence of opinion. A very good illustration is the controversy
between the how and the why in primary arithmetic. In this case, there
is a vast amount of "opinion," but there are no clearly defined
conclusions drawn from accurate tests. It would seem possible to do work
of this sort concerning the details of method in the teaching of
arithmetic, spelling, grammar, penmanship, and geography.


IV

Lacking this accurate type of data regarding methods, the next recourse
is to the actual teaching of those teachers who are recognized as
efficient. Wherever such a teacher may be found, his or her work is well
worth the most careful sort of study. Success, of course, may be due to
other factors than the methods employed,--to personality, for example.
But, in every case of recognized efficiency in teaching that I have
observed, I have found that the methods employed have, in the main, been
productive of good results when used by others. The experienced teacher
comes, through a process of trial and error, to select, perhaps
unconsciously, the methods that work best. Sometimes these are not
always to be identified with the methods that theoretical pedagogy had
worked out from _a priori_ bases. For example, the type of lesson which
I call the "deductive development" lesson[7] is one that is not included
in the older discussions of method; yet it accurately describes one of
the methods employed by a very successful teacher whose work I
observed.

One way, then, to improve the efficiency of young teachers, in so far as
improvement in methods leads to improved efficiency, is to encourage the
observation of expert teaching. The plan of giving teachers visiting
days often brings excellent results, especially if the teacher looks
upon the privilege in the proper light. The hyper-critical spirit is
fatal to growth under any condition. Whenever a teacher has come to the
conclusion that he or she has nothing to learn from studying the work of
others, anabolism has ceased and katabolism has set in. The
self-sufficiency of our craft is one of its weakest characteristics. It
is the factor that more than any other discounts it in the minds of
laymen. Fortunately it is less frequently a professional characteristic
than in former years, but it still persists in some quarters. I recently
met a "pedagogue" who impressed me as the most "knowing" individual that
it had ever been my privilege to become acquainted with. An enthusiastic
friend of his, in dilating upon this man's virtues, used these words:
"When you propose a subject of conversation in whatever field you may
choose, you will find that he has mastered it to bed rock. He will go
over it once and you think that he is wise. He starts at the beginning
and goes over it again, and you realize that he is deep. Once more he
traverses the same ground, but he is so far down now that you cannot
follow him, and then you are aware that he is profound." That sort of
profundity is still not rare in the field of general education. The
person who has all possible knowledge pigeonholed and classified is
still in our midst. The pedant still does the cause of education
incalculable injury.

Of the use to which reading circles may be put in improving the
efficiency of teaching, it is necessary to say but little. Such
organizations, under wise leadership, may doubtless be made to serve a
good purpose in promoting professional enthusiasm. The difficulty with
using them to promote immediate and direct efficiency lies in the
paucity of the literature that is at our disposal. Most of our
present-day works upon education are very general in their nature. They
are not without their value, but this value is general and indirect
rather than immediate and specific. A book like Miss Winterburn's
_Methods of Teaching_, or Chubb's _Teaching of English_[8] is especially
valuable for young teachers who are looking for first-hand helps. But
books like this are all too rare in our literature.

On the whole, I think that the improvement of teachers in the matter of
methods is the most unsatisfactory part of our problem.[9] All that one
can say is that the work of the best teachers should be observed
carefully and faithfully, that the methods upon which there is little or
no dispute should be given and accepted as standard, but that one should
be very careful about giving young teachers an idea that there is any
single form under which all teaching can be subsumed. I know of no term
that is more thoroughly a misnomer in our technical vocabulary than the
term "general method." I teach a subject that often goes by that name,
but I always take care to explain that the name does not mean, in my
class, what the words seem to signify. There are certain broad and
general principles which describe very crudely and roughly and
inadequately certain phases of certain processes that mind undergoes in
organizing experience--perception, apperception, conception, induction,
deduction, inference, generalization, and the like. But these terms have
only a vague and general connotation; or, if their connotation is
specific and definite, it has been made so by an artificial process of
definition in which counsel is darkened by words without meaning. The
only full-fledged law that I know of in the educative process is the law
of habit building--(1) focalization, (2) attentive repetition at
intervals of increasing length, (3) permitting no exception--and I am
often told that this "law" is fallacious. It has differed from some
other so-called laws, however, in this respect: it always works.
Whenever a complex habit is adduced that has not been formed through the
operation of this law, I am willing to give it up.


V

A third general method of improving the efficiency of teaching is to
build up the notion of responsibility for results. The teacher must not
only take the message and deliver it to Garcia, or to some other
individual as definite and tangible, but he must also bring the answer.
So far as I know there is no other way to insure a maximum of efficiency
than to demand certain results and to hold the individual responsible
for gaining these results. The present standards of the teaching craft
are less rigorous than they should be in this respect. We need a craft
spirit that will judge every man impartially by his work, not by
secondary criteria. You remember Finlayson in Kipling's _Bridge
Builders_, and the agony with which he watched the waters of the Ganges
tearing away at the caissons of his new bridge. A vital question of
Finlayson's life was to be answered by the success or failure of those
caissons to resist the flood. If they should yield, it meant not only
the wreck of the bridge, but the wreck of his career; for, as Kipling
says, "Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge
him by his bridge as that stood or fell."

President Hall has said that one of the last sentiments to be developed
in human nature is "the sense of responsibility, which is one of the
highest and most complex psychic qualities." How to develop this
sentiment of responsibility is one of the most pressing problems of
education. And the problem is especially pressing in those departments
of education that train for social service. To engender in the young
teacher an effective prejudice against scamped work, against the making
of excuses, against the seductive allurements of ease and comfort and
the lines of least resistance is one of the most important duties that
is laid upon the normal school, the training school, and the teachers'
college. To do well the work that has been set for him to do should be
the highest ambition of every worker, the ambition to which all other
ambitions and desires are secondary and subordinate. Pride in the
mastery of the technique of one's calling is the most wholesome and
helpful sort of pride that a man can indulge in. The joy of doing each
day's work in the best possible manner is the keenest joy of life. But
this pride and this joy do not come at the outset. Like all other good
things of life, they come only as the result of effort and struggle and
strenuous self-discipline and dogged perseverance. The emotional
coloring which gives these things their subjective worth is a matter
very largely of contrast. Success must stand out against a background of
struggle, or the chief virtue of success--the consciousness of
conquest--will be entirely missed. That sort of success means strength;
for strength of mind is nothing more than the ability to "hew to the
line," to follow a given course of effort to a successful conclusion, no
matter how long and how tedious be the road that one must travel, no
matter how disagreeable are the tasks involved, no matter how tempting
are the insidious siren songs of momentary fancy.

What teachers need--what all workers need--is to be inspired with those
ideals and prejudices that will enable them to work steadfastly and
unremittingly toward the attainment of a stated end. What inspired Rowan
with those ideals of efficiency that enabled him to carry his message
and bring back the answer, I do not know, but if he was a soldier, I do
not hesitate to hazard an opinion. Our regular army stands as the
clearest type of efficient service which is available for our study and
emulation. The work of Colonel Goethals on the Panama Canal bids fair to
be the finest fruit of the training that we give to the officers of our
army. If we wish to learn the fundamental virtues of that training, it
is not sufficient to study the curriculum of the Military Academy.
Technical knowledge and skill are essential to such results, but they
are not the prime essentials. If you wish to know what the prime
essentials are, let me refer you to a series of papers, entitled _The
Spirit of Old West Point_, which ran through a recent volume of the
_Atlantic Monthly_ and which has since been published in book form.
They constitute, to my mind, one of the most important educational
documents of the present decade. The army service is efficient because
it is inspired with effective ideals of service,--ideals in which every
other desire and ambition is totally and completely subordinated to the
ideal of duty. To those who maintain that close organization and
definite prescription kill initiative and curtail efficiency, the record
of West Point and the army service should be a silencing argument.

And yet education is more important than war; more important, even, than
the building of the Panama Canal. We believe, and rightly, that no
training is too good for our military and naval officers; that no
discipline which will produce the appropriate habits and ideals and
prejudices is too strenuous; that no individual sacrifice of comfort or
ease is too costly. Equal or even commensurable efficiency in education
can come only through a like process. From the times of the ancient
Egyptians to the present day, one vital truth has been revealed in every
forward movement; the homely truth that you cannot make bricks without
straw; you cannot win success without effort; you cannot attain
efficiency without undergoing the processes of discipline; and
discipline means only this: doing things that you do not want to do, for
the sake of reaching some end that ought to be attained.

The normal schools and the training schools and the teachers' colleges
must be the nurseries of craft ideals and standards. The instruction
that they offer must be upon a plane that will command respect. The
intolerable pedantry and the hypocritical goody-goodyism must be
banished forever. The crass sentimentalism by which we attempt to cover
our paucity of craft ideals must also be eliminated. Those who are most
strongly imbued with ideals are not those who cheapen the value of
ideals by constant verbal reiteration. Ideals do not often come through
explicitly imparted precepts. They come through more impalpable and
hidden channels,--now through stately buildings with vine-covered towers
from which the past speaks in the silence of great halls and cloistered
retreats; now through the unwritten and scarcely spoken traditions that
are expressed in the very bearing and attitude of those to whom youth
looks for inspiration and guidance; now through a dominant and powerful
personality, sometimes rough and crude, sometimes warm-hearted and
lovable, but always sincere. Traditions and ideals are the most
priceless part of a school's equipment, and the school that can give
these things to its students in richest measure will have the greatest
influence on the succeeding generations.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: A paper read before the Normal and Training Teachers'
Conference of the New York State Teachers' Association, December 27,
1907.]

[Footnote 7: See _Educative Process_, New York, 1910, Chapter XX.]

[Footnote 8: Rowe's _Habit Formation_ (New York, 1909), Briggs and
Coffman's _Reading in Public Schools_ (Chicago, 1908), Foght's _The
American Rural School_, Adams's _Exposition and Illustration in Class
Teaching_ (New York, 1910), and Perry's _Problems of Elementary
Education_ (New York, 1910) should certainly be added to this list.]

[Footnote 9: "It seems to me one of the most pressing problems in
pedagogy to-day is that of method.... It is the subject in which
teachers of pedagogy in Colleges and Universities are weakest to-day. Of
what practical value is all our study of educational psychology or the
history of education, our child study, our experimental pedagogy, if it
does not finally result in the devising of better methods of teaching,
and make the teacher more skillful and effective in his work."--T.M.
BALLIET: "Undergraduate Instruction in Pedagogy," _Pedagogical
Seminary_, vol. xvii, 1910, p. 67.]




~IV~

THE TEST OF EFFICIENCY IN SUPERVISION[10]


I

I know of no way in which I can better introduce my subject than to
describe very briefly the work of a superintendent who once furnished me
with an example of a definite and effective method of supervision. This
man was a "long range" superintendent. It was impossible for him to
visit his schools very frequently, and so he did the next best thing: he
had the schools brought to him. When I first saw him he was poring over
a pile of papers that had just come in from one of his schools. I soon
discovered that these papers were arranged in sets, each set being made
up of samples taken each week from the work of the pupils in the schools
under his supervision. The papers of each pupil were arranged in
chronological order, and by looking through the set, he could note the
growth that the pupil in question had made since the beginning of the
term. Upon these papers, the superintendent recorded his judgment of the
amount of improvement shown both in form and in content.

I was particularly impressed by the character of his criticisms. There
was nothing vague or intangible about them. Every annotation was clear
and definite. If penmanship happened to be the point at issue, he would
note that the lines were too close together; that the letters did not
have sufficient individuality; that the spaces between the words were
not sufficiently wide; that the indentation was inadequate; that the
writing was cramped, showing that the pen had not been held properly;
that the margin needed correction. If the papers were defective from the
standpoint of language, the criticisms were equally clear and definite.
One pupil had misspelled the same word in three successive papers. "Be
sure that this word appears in the next spelling list," was the comment
of the superintendent. Another pupil habitually used a bit of false
syntax: "Place this upon the list of errors to be taken up and
corrected." Still others were uncertain about paragraphing: "Devote a
language lesson to the paragraph before the next written exercise." On
the covers of each bundle of class papers, he wrote directions and
suggestions of a more general nature; for example: "Improvement is not
sufficiently marked; try for better results next time"; or: "I note that
the pupils draw rather than write; look out for free movement." Often,
too, there were words of well-merited praise: "I like the way in which
your pupils have responded to their drill. This is good. Keep it up."
And not infrequently suggestions were made as to content: "Tell this
story in greater detail next time, and have it reproduced again"; or:
"The form of these papers is good, but the nature study is poor; don't
sacrifice thought to form."

In similar fashion, the other written work was gone over and annotated.
Every pupil in this system of schools had a sample of his written work
examined at regular and frequent intervals by the superintendent. Every
teacher knew just what her chief demanded in the way of results, and did
her best to gain the results demanded. I am not taking the position that
the results that were demanded represented the highest ideals of what
the elementary school should accomplish. Good penmanship and good
spelling and good language, in the light of contemporary educational
thought, seem to be something like happiness--you get them in larger
measure the less you think about getting them. But this possible
objection aside, the superintendent in question had developed a system
which kept him in very close touch with the work that was being done in
widely separated schools.

He told me further that, on the infrequent occasions when he could visit
his classrooms, he gave most of his time and attention to the matters
that could not be supervised at "long range." He found out how the
pupils were improving in their reading, and especially in oral
expression, in its syntax, its freedom from errors of construction, its
clearness and fluency. He listed the common errors, directing his
teachers to take them up in a systematic manner and eradicate them, and
he did not fail to note at his next visit how much progress had been
made. He noted the condition of the blackboard work, and kept a list of
the improvements that he suggested. He tested for rapidity in
arithmetical processes, for the papers sent to his office gave him only
an index of accuracy. He noted the habits of personal cleanliness that
were being developed or neglected. In fact, he had a long list of
specific standards that he kept continually in mind, the progress toward
which he constantly watched. And last, but by no means least, he carried
with him wherever he went an atmosphere of breezy good nature and
cheerfulness, for he had mastered the first principle in the art of both
supervision and teaching; he had learned that the best way to promote
growth in either pupils or teachers is neither to let them do as they
please nor to force them to do as you please, but to get them to please
to do what you please to have them do.

I instance this superintendent as one type of efficiency in supervision.
He was efficient, not simply because he had a system that scrutinized
every least detail of his pupils' growth, but because that scrutiny
really insured growth. He obtained the results that he desired, and he
obtained uniformly good results from a large number of young, untrained
teachers. We have all heard of the superintendent who boasted that he
could tell by looking at his watch just what any pupil in any classroom
was doing at just that moment. Surely here system was not lacking. But
the boast did not strike the vital point. It is not what the pupil is
doing that is fundamentally important, but what he is gaining from his
activity or inactivity; what he is gaining in the way of habits, in the
way of knowledge, in the way of standards and ideals and prejudices, all
of which are to govern his future conduct. The superintendent whom I
have described had the qualities of balance and perspective that enabled
him to see both the woods and the trees. And let me add that he taught
regularly in his own central high school, and that practically all of
his supervision was accomplished after school hours and on Saturdays.

But my chief reason for choosing his work as a type is that it
represents a successful effort to supervise that part of school work
which is most difficult and irksome to supervise; namely, the formation
of habits. Whatever one's ideals of education may be, it still remains
true that habit building is the most important duty of the elementary
school, and that the efficiency of habit building can be tested in no
other way than by the means that he employed; namely, the careful
comparison of results at successive stages of the process.


II

The essence of a true habit is its purely automatic character. Reaction
must follow upon the stimulus instantaneously, without thought,
reflection, or judgment. One has not taught spelling efficiently until
spelling is automatic, until the correct form flows from the pen without
the intervention of mind. The real test of the pupil's training in
spelling is his ability to spell the word correctly when he is thinking,
not about spelling, but about the content of the sentence that he is
writing. Consequently the test of efficiency in spelling is not an
examination in spelling, although this may be valuable as a means to an
end, but rather the infrequency with which misspelled words appear in
the composition work, letter writing, and other written work of the
pupil. Similarly in language and grammar, it is not sufficient to
instruct in rules of syntax. This is but the initial process.
Grammatical rules function effectively only when they function
automatically. So long as one must think and judge and reflect upon the
form of one's expression, the expression is necessarily awkward and
inadequate.

The same rule holds in respect of the fundamental processes of
arithmetic. It holds in penmanship, in articulation and enunciation, in
word recognition, in moral conduct and good manners; in fact, in all of
the basic work for which the elementary school must stand sponsor. And
one source of danger in the newer methods of education lies in the
tendency to overlook the importance of carrying habit-building processes
through to a successful issue. The reaction against drill, against
formal work of all sorts, is a healthful reaction in many ways. It bids
fair to break up the mechanical lock step of the elementary grades, and
to introduce some welcome life, and vigor, and wholesomeness. But it
will sadly defeat its own purpose if it underrates the necessity of
habit building as the basic activity of early education.

What is needed, now that we have got away from the lock step, now that
we are happily emancipated from the meaningless thralldom of mechanical
repetition and the worship of drill for its own sake--what is needed now
is not less drill, but better drill. And this should be the net result
of the recent reforms in elementary education. In our first enthusiasm,
we threw away the spelling book, poked fun at the multiplication tables,
decried basal reading, and relieved ourselves of much wit and sarcasm at
the expense of formal grammar. But now we are swinging back to the
adequate recognition of the true purpose of drill. And in the wake of
this newer conception, we are learning that its drudgery may be
lightened and its efficiency heightened by the introduction of a richer
content that shall provide a greater variety in the repetitions, insure
an adequate motive for effort, and relieve the dead monotony that
frequently rendered the older methods so futile. I look forward to the
time when to be an efficient drillmaster in this newer sense of the term
will be to have reached one of the pinnacles of professional skill.


III

But there is another side of teaching that must be supervised. Although
habit is responsible for nine tenths of conduct, the remaining tenth
must not be neglected. In situations where habit is not adequate to
adjustment, judgment and reflection must come to the rescue, or should
come to the rescue. This means that, instead of acting without thought,
as in the case of habit, one analyzes the situation and tries to solve
it by the application of some fact or principle that has been gained
either from one's own experience or from the experience of others. This
is the field in which knowledge comes to its own; and a very important
task of education is to fix in the pupils' minds a number of facts and
principles that will be available for application to the situations of
later life.

How, then, is the efficiency of instruction (as distinguished from
training or habit building) to be tested? Needless to say, an adequate
test is impossible from the very nature of the situation. The efficiency
of imparting knowledge can be tested only by the effect that this
knowledge has upon later conduct; and this, it will be agreed, cannot be
accurately determined until the pupil has left the school and is face to
face with the problems of real life.

In practice, however, we adopt a more or less effective substitute for
the real test--the substitute called the examination. We all know that
the ultimate purpose of instruction is not primarily to enable pupils
successfully to pass examinations. And yet as long as we teach as though
this were the main purpose we might as well believe it to be. Now the
examination may be made a very valuable test of the efficiency of
instruction if its limitations are fully recognized and if it does not
obscure the true purpose of instruction. And if we remember that the
true purpose is to impart facts in such a manner that they may not only
"stick" in the pupil's mind, but that they may also be amenable to
recall and practical application, and if we set our examination
questions with some reference to this requirement, then I believe that
we shall find the examination a dependable test.

One important point is likely to be overlooked in the consideration of
examinations,--the fact, namely, that the form and content of the
questions have a very powerful influence in determining the content and
methods of instruction. Is it not pertinent, then, to inquire whether
examination questions cannot be so framed as radically to improve
instruction rather than to encourage, as is often the case, methods that
are pedagogically unsound? Granted that it is well for the child to
memorize verbatim certain unrelated facts, even to memorize some facts
that have no immediate bearing upon his life, granted that this is
valuable (and I think that a little of it is), is it necessary that an
entire year or half-year be given over almost entirely to "cramming up"
on old questions? Would it not be possible so to frame examination
questions that the "cramming" process would be practically valueless?

What the pupil should get from geography, for instance, is not only a
knowledge of geographical facts, but also, and more fundamentally, the
power to see the relation of these facts to his own life; in other
words, the ability to apply his knowledge to the improvement of
adjustment. Now this power is very closely associated with the ability
to grasp fundamental principles, to see the relation of cause and effect
working below the surface of diverse phenomena. Geography, to be
practical, must impress not only the fact, but also the principle that
rationalizes or explains the fact. It must emphasize the "why" as well
as the "what." For example: it is well for the pupil to know that New
York is the largest city in the United States; it is better that he
should know why New York has become the largest city in the United
States. It is well to know that South America extends very much farther
to the east than does North America, but it is better to know that this
fact has had an important bearing in determining the commercial
relations that exist between South America and Europe. Questions that
have reference to these larger relations of cause and effect may be so
framed that no amount of "cramming" will alone insure correct answers.
They may be so framed that the pupil will be forced to do some thinking
for himself, will be forced to solve an imaginary situation very much as
he would solve a real situation.

Examination questions of this type would react beneficially upon the
methods of instruction. They would tend to place a premium upon that
type of instruction that develops initiative in solving problems,
instead of encouraging the memoriter methods that tend to crush whatever
germs of initiative the pupil may possess. This does not mean that the
memoriter work should be excluded. A solid basis of fact is essential to
the mastery of principles. Personally I believe that the work of the
intermediate grades should be planned to give the pupil this factual
basis. This would leave the upper grades free for the more rational
work. In any case, I believe that the efficiency of examinations may be
greatly increased by giving one or two questions that must be answered
by a reasoning process for every question that may be answered by verbal
memory alone.


IV

Thus far it seems clear that an absolute standard is available for
testing the efficiency of training or habit building, and that a fairly
accurate standard may be developed for testing the efficiency of
instruction. Both training and instruction, however, are subject to the
modifying influence of a third factor of which too little account has
hitherto been taken in educational discussions. Training results in
habits, and yet a certain sort of training may not only result in a
certain type of habit, but it may also result in the development of
something which will quite negate the habit that has been developed. In
the process of developing habits of neatness, for example, one may
employ methods that result in prejudicing the child against neatness as
a general virtue. In this event, although the little specific habits of
neatness may function in the situations in which they have been
developed, the prejudice will effectually prevent their extension to
other fields. In other words, the general emotional effect of training
must be considered as well as the specific results of the training. The
same stricture applies with equal force to instruction. Instruction
imparts knowledge; but if a man knows and fails to feel, his knowledge
has little influence upon his conduct.

This factor that controls conduct when habit fails, this factor that may
even negate an otherwise efficient habit, is the great indeterminate in
the work of teaching. To know that one has trained an effective habit or
imparted a practical principle is one thing; to know that in doing this,
one has not engendered in the pupil's mind a prejudice against the very
thing taught is quite another matter.

That phase of teaching which is concerned with the development of these
intangible forces may be termed "inspiration"; and it is the lack of an
adequate test for the efficiency of inspiration that makes the task of
supervision so difficult and the results so often unsatisfactory.

Nevertheless, even here the outlook is not entirely hopeless. One may be
tolerably certain of at least two things. In the first place, the great
"emotionalized prejudices" that must come predominantly from school
influences are the love of truth, the love of work, respect for law and
order, and a spirit of coöperation. These factors undoubtedly have their
basis in specific habits of honesty, industry, obedience, and regard for
the rights and feelings of others; and these habits may be developed and
tested just as thoroughly and just as accurately as habits of good
spelling and correct syntax. Without the solid basis of habit, ideals
and prejudices will be of but little service. The one caution must be
taken that the methods of training do not defeat their own purpose by
engendering prejudices and ideals that negate the habits. It is here
that the personality of the teacher becomes the all-important factor,
and the task of the supervisor is to determine whether the influence of
the personality is good or evil. Most supervisors come to judge of this
influence by an undefined factor that is best termed the "spirit of the
classroom."

The second hopeful feature of the task of supervision in respect of
inspiration is that this "spirit" is an extremely contagious and
pervasive thing. In other words, the principal or the superintendent may
dominate every classroom under his supervision, almost without regard to
the limitations of the individual teachers. Typical schools in every
city system bear compelling testimony to this fact. The principal _is_
the school.

And if I were to sum up the essential characteristics of the ideal
supervisor, I could not neglect this point. After all, the two great
dangers that beset him are, first, the danger of sloth--the old Adam of
laziness--which will tempt him to avoid the details, to shirk the
drudgery, to escape the close and wearisome scrutiny of little things;
and, secondly, the sin of triviality--the inertia which holds him to
details and never permits him to take the broader view and see the true
ends toward which details are but the means. The proper combination of
these two factors is all too rare, but it is in this combination that
the ideal supervisor is to be found.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: A paper read before the fifty-second annual meeting of the
New York State Association of School Commissioners and Superintendents,
November 8, 1907.]




~V~

THE SUPERVISOR AND THE TEACHER


I

It is difficult not to be depressed by the irrational radicalism of
contemporary educational theory. It would seem that the workers in the
higher ranges of educational activity should, of all men, preserve a
balanced judgment and a sane outlook, and yet there is probably no other
human calling that presents the strange phenomenon of men who are called
experts throwing overboard everything that the past has sanctioned, and
embarking without chart or compass upon any new venture that happens to
catch popular fancy. The non-professional character of education is
nowhere more painfully apparent than in the expression of this tendency.
The literature of teaching that is written directly out of
experience--out of actual adjustment to the teaching situation--is
almost laughed out of court in some educational circles. But if one
wishes to win the applause of the multitude one may do it easily enough
by proclaiming some new and untried plan. At our educational gatherings
you notice above everything else a straining for spectacular and bizarre
effects. It is the novel that catches attention; and it sometimes seems
to me that those who know the least about the educational situation in
the way of direct contact often receive the largest share of attention
and have the largest influence.

It is in the attitude of the public and of a certain proportion of
school men toward elementary teaching and the elementary teacher that
this destructive criticism finds its most pronounced expression.
Throughout the length and breadth of the land, the efficiency of the
public school and the sincerity and intelligence of those who are giving
their lives to its work are being called into question. It is
discouraging to think that years of service in a calling do not qualify
one to speak authoritatively upon the problems of that calling, and
especially upon technique. And yet it is precisely upon that point of
technique that the criticisms of elementary education are most drastic.

Our educational system is sometimes branded as a failure, and yet this
same educational system with all its weaknesses has accomplished the
task of assimilating to American institutions and ideals and standards
the most heterogeneous infusion of alien stocks that ever went to the
making of a united people. The elementary teacher is criticized for all
the sins of omission that the calendar enumerates, and yet this same
elementary teacher is daily lifting millions of children to a plane of
civilization and culture that no other people in history have even
thought possible. I am willing to admit the deficiencies of American
education, but I also maintain that the teachers of our lower schools do
not deserve the opprobrium that has been heaped upon them. I believe
that in education, as in business, it would be a good thing if we saw
more of the doughnut and less of the hole. When I hear a prominent
educator say that we must discard everything that we have produced thus
far and begin anew in the realm of educational materials and methods, I
confess that I am discouraged, especially when that same authority is
extremely obscure as to the materials and methods that we should
substitute for those that we are now employing. I heard that statement
at a recent meeting of the Department of Superintendence, and I heard
other things of like tenor,--for example, that normal schools were
perpetuating types of skill in teaching that were unworthy of
perpetuation, that the observation of teaching was valueless in the
training of teachers because there was nothing that was being done at
the present time that was worthy of imitation, that practice teaching in
the training of young teachers is a farce, a delusion, and a snare.
Those very words were employed by one man of high position to express
his opinion of contemporary practices. You cannot pick up an educational
journal of the better sort, nor open a new educational book, without
being brought face to face with this destructive criticism.

I protest against this, not only in the name of justice, but in the name
of common sense. It cannot be possible that generations of dealing with
immature minds should have left no residuum of effective practice. The
very principle of progress by trial and error will inevitably mean that
certain practices that are possible and helpful and effective are
perpetuated, and that certain other processes that are ineffective and
wasteful are eliminated. To repudiate all this is the height of folly.
If the history of progress shows us anything, it shows us that progress
is not made by repudiating the lessons of experience. Theory is the last
word, not the first. Theory should explain: it should take successful
practice and find out what principles condition its efficiency; and if
these principles are inconsistent with those heretofore held, it is the
theory that should be modified to suit the facts, not the facts to suit
the theory.

My opponents may point to medicine as a possible example of the opposite
procedure. And yet if there is anything that the history of medical
science demonstrates, it is that the first cues to new discoveries were
made in the field of practice. Lymph therapy, which is one of the
triumphs of modern medicine, was discovered empirically. It was an
accident of practice, a blind procedure of trial and success that led to
Jenner's discovery of the virtues of vaccination. A century passed
before theory adequately explained the phenomenon, and opened the way to
those wider applications of the principle that have done so much to
reduce the ravages of disease.

The value of theory, I repeat, is to explain successful practice and to
generalize experience in broad and comprehensive principles which can be
easily held in mind, and from which inferences for further new and
effective practices may be derived. We have a small body of sound
principles in education to-day,--a body of principles that are
thoroughly consistent with successful practice. But the sort of
principles that are put forth as the last words of educational theory
are often far from sound. Personally I firmly believe that a vast amount
of damage is being done to children by the application of fallacious
principles which, because they emanate from high authority, obtain an
artificial validity in the minds of teachers in service.

I cannot understand why, when an educational experiment fails
lamentably, it is not rejected as a failure. And yet you and I know a
number of instances where certain educational experiments that have
undeniably reversed the hypotheses of those who initiated them are
excused on the ground that conditions were not favorable. That, it seems
to me, should tell the whole story, for precisely what we need in
educational practice is a body of doctrine that will work where
conditions _are_ unfavorable. We are told that the successful
application of mooted theories depends upon the proper kind of teachers.
I maintain that the most effective sort of theory is the sort that
brings results with such teachers as we must employ in our work. It
would be a poor recommendation for a theory of medicine to say that it
worked all right when people are healthy but failed to help the sick.
Nor is it true that good teachers can get good results by following bad
theory. They often obtain the results by evading the theory, and when
they live up to it, the results faithfully reflect the theory, no matter
how skillful the teaching.


II

Statements like these are very apt to be misconstrued or misinterpreted
unless one is very careful to define one's position; and, after what I
have said, I should do myself an injustice if I did not make certain
that my position is clear. I believe in experimentation in education. I
believe in experimental schools. But I should wish these schools to be
interpreted as experiments and not as models, and I should wish that the
failure of an experiment be accepted with good, scientific grace, and
not with the unscientific attitude of making excuses. The trouble with
an experimental school is that, in the eyes of the great mass of
teachers, it becomes a model school, and the principles that it
represents are applied _ad libitum_ by thousands of teachers who assume
that they have heard the last word in educational theory.

No one is more favorably disposed toward the rights of children than I
am, and yet I am thoroughly convinced that soft-heartedness accompanied
by soft-headedness is weakening the mental and moral fiber of hundreds
of thousands of boys and girls throughout this country. No one admires
more than I admire the sagacity and far-sightedness of Judge Lindsey,
and yet when Judge Lindsey's methods are proposed as models for school
government, I cannot lose sight, as so many people seem to lose sight,
of the contingent factor; namely, that Judge Lindsey's leniency is based
upon authority, and that if Judge Lindsey or anybody else attempted to
be lenient when he had no power to be otherwise than lenient, his
"bluff" would be called in short order. If you will give to teachers and
principals the same power that you give to the police judge, you may
well expect them to be lenient. The great trouble in the school is
simply this: that just in the proportion that leniency is demanded,
authority is taken away from the teacher.

And I should perhaps say a qualifying word with regard to my attitude
toward educational theory. I have every feeling of affection for the
science of psychology. I have every faith in the value of psychological
principles in the interpretation of educational phenomena. But I also
recognize that the science of psychology is a very young science, and
that its data are not yet so well organized that it is safe to draw from
them anything more than tentative hypotheses which must meet their final
test in the crucible of practice. Some day, if we work hard enough,
psychology will become a predictive science, just as mathematics and
physics and chemistry and, to a certain extent, biology, are predictive
sciences to-day. Meantime psychology is of inestimable value in giving
us a point of view, in clarifying our ideas, and in rationalizing the
truths that empirical practice discovers. A very few psychological
principles are strongly enough established even now to form the basis of
prediction. Among the most important of these are the laws of habit
building, some laws of memory, and the larger principles of attention.
Successful educational practice is and must be in accord with these
indisputable tenets. But the bane of education to-day is in the
pseudo-science, the "half-baked" psychology, that is lauded from the
house-tops by untrained enthusiasts, turned from the presses by
irresponsible publishing houses, and foisted upon the hungry teaching
public through the ever-present medium of the reading circle, the
teachers' institute, the summer school, and I am very sorry to admit
(for I think that I represent both institutions in a way) sometimes by
the normal schools and universities.

Most of the doctrines that are turning our practice topsy-turvy have
absolutely no support from competent psychologists. The doctrine of
spontaneity and its attendant _laissez-faire_ dogma of school government
is thoroughly inconsistent with good psychology. The radical extreme to
which some educators would push the doctrine of interest when they
maintain that the child should never be asked to do anything for which
he fails to find a need in his own life,--this doctrine can find no
support in good psychology. The doctrine that the preadolescent child
should understand thoroughly every process that he is expected to reduce
to habit before that process is made automatic is utterly at variance
with long-established principles which were well understood by the
Greeks and the Hebrews twenty-five hundred years ago, and to which
Mother Nature herself gives the lie in the instincts of imitation and
repetition. It is conceivable that these radical doctrines were
justified as means of reform, especially in secondary and higher
education, but, even granting this, their function is fulfilled when the
reform that they exploited has been accomplished. That time has come
and, as palpable untruths, they should either be modified to meet the
facts, or be relegated to oblivion.


III

It is safe to say that formalism is no longer a characteristic feature
of the typical American school. It is so long since I have heard any
rote learning in a schoolroom that I am wondering if it is not almost
time for some one to show that a little rote learning would not be at
all a bad thing in preadolescent education. We ridicule the memoriter
methods of Chinese education and yet we sometimes forget that Chinese
education has done something that no other system of education, however
well planned, has even begun to do in the same degree. It has kept the
Chinese empire a unit through a period of time compared with which the
entire history of Greece and Rome is but an episode. We may ridicule the
formalism of Hebrew education, and yet the schools of rabbis have
preserved intact the racial integrity of the Jewish people during the
two thousand years that have elapsed since their geographical unity was
destroyed. I am not justifying the methods of Chinese or Hebrew
education. I am quite willing to admit that, in China at any rate, the
game may not have been worth the candle; but I am still far from
convinced that it is not a good thing for children to reduce to verbal
form a good many things that are now never learned in such a way as to
make any lasting impression upon the memory; and our criticism of
oriental formalism is not so much concerned with the method of learning
as with the content of learning,--not so much with learning by heart as
with the character of the material that was thus memorized.

But, although formalism is no longer a distinctive feature of American
education, formalism is the point from which education is most
frequently attacked,--and this is the chief source of my dissatisfaction
with the present-day critics of our elementary schools. In a great many
cases, they have set up a man of straw and demolished him completely.
And in demolishing him, they have incidentally knocked the props from
under the feet of many a good teacher, leaving him dazed and uncertain
of his bearings, stung with the conviction that what he has been doing
for his pupils is entirely without value, that his life of service has
been a failure, that the lessons of his own experience are not to be
trusted, nor the verdicts of his own intelligence respected. Go to any
of the great summer schools and you will meet, among the attending
teachers, hundreds of faithful, conscientious men and women who could
tell you if they would (and some of them will) of the muddle in which
their minds are left after some of the lectures to which they have
listened. Why should they fail to be depressed? The whole weight of
academic authority seems to be against them. The entire machinery of
educational administration is wheeling them with relentless force into
paths that seem to them hopelessly intricate and bewildering. If it is
true, as I think it is, that some of the proposals of modern education
are an attempt to square the circle, it is certainly true that the
classroom teacher is standing at the pressure points in this procedure.

We hear expressed on every side a great deal of sympathy for the child
as the victim of our educational system. Sympathy for childhood is the
most natural thing in the world. It is one of the basic human instincts,
and its expressions are among the finest things in human life. But why
limit our sympathy to the child, especially to-day when he is about as
happy and as fortunate an individual as anybody has ever been in all
history. Why not let a little of it go out to the teacher of this child?
Why not plan a little for her comfort and welfare and encouragement? It
is her skill that is assimilating the children of our alien population.
It is her strength that is lifting bodily each generation to the
ever-advancing race levels. Her work must be the main source of the
inspiration that will impel the race to further advancement. And yet
when these half-million teachers who mean so much to this country gather
at their institutes, when they attend the summer schools, when they take
up their professional journals, what do they hear and read? Criticisms
of their work. Denunciations of their methods. Serious doubts of their
intelligence. Aspersions cast upon their sincerity, their patience, and
their loyalty to their superiors. This, mingled with some mawkish
sentimentalism that passes under the name of inspiration. Only
occasionally a word of downright commendation, a sign of honest and
heartfelt appreciation, a note of sympathy or encouragement.

Carnegie gives fifteen million dollars to provide pensions for
superannuated college professors; but the elementary teacher who is not
fortunate enough to die in harness must look forward to the almshouse.
The people tax themselves for magnificent buildings and luxurious
furnishings, but not one cent do they offer for teachers' pensions.
What a blot upon Western civilization is this treatment of the teachers
in our lower schools. These people are doing the work that even the
savage races universally consider to be of the highest type. Benighted
China places her teachers second only to the literati themselves in the
place of honor. The Hindus made the teaching profession the highest
caste in the social scale. The Jews intrusted the education of their
children to their Rabbis, the most learned and the most honored of their
race. It is only Western civilization--it is almost only our much-lauded
Anglo-Saxon civilization--that denies to the teacher a station in life
befitting his importance as a social servant.


IV

But what has all this to do with school supervision? As I view it, the
supervisor of schools as the overseer and director of the educational
process, is just now confronted with two great problems. The first of
these is to keep a clear head in the present muddled condition of
educational theory. From the very fact of his position, the supervisor
must be a leader, whether he will or not. It is a maxim of our
profession that the principal is the school. In our city systems the
supervising principal is given almost absolute authority over the school
of which he has charge. In him is vested the ultimate responsibility for
instruction, for discipline, for the care and condition of the material
property. He may be a despot if he wishes, benevolent or otherwise.
With this power goes a corresponding opportunity. His school can stand
for something,--perhaps for something new and strange which will bring
him into the limelight to-day, no matter what its character; perhaps for
something solid and enduring, something that will last long after his
own name has been forgotten. The temptation was never so strong as it is
to-day for the supervisor to seek the former kind of glory. The need was
never more acute than it is to-day for the supervisor who is content
with the impersonal glory of the latter type.

I admit that it is a somewhat thankless task to do things in a
straightforward, effective way, without fuss or feathers, and I suppose
that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause
of the pit. But nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause
of education a vast amount of harm. I know a principal who won ephemeral
fame by introducing into his school a form of the Japanese jiu-jitsu
physical exercises. When I visited that school, I was led to believe
that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the American people. Whole
classes of girls and boys were marched to the large basement to be put
through their paces for the delectation of visitors. The newspapers took
it up and heralded it as another indication that the formalism of the
public school was gradually breaking down. Visitors came by the
hundreds, and my friend basked in the limelight of public adulation
while his colleagues turned green with envy and set themselves to
devising some means for turning attention in their direction.

And yet, there are some principals who move on in the even tenor of
their ways, year after year, while all these currents and
countercurrents are seething and eddying around them. They hold fast to
that which they know is good until that which they know is better can be
found. They believe in the things that they do, so the chances are
greatly increased that they will do them well. They refuse to be bullied
or sneered at or laughed out of court because they do not take up with
every fancy that catches the popular mind. They have their own
professional standards as to what constitutes competent
schoolmanship,--their own standards gained from their own specialized
experience. And somehow I cannot help thinking that just now that is the
type of supervisor that we need and the type that ought to be
encouraged. If I were talking to Chinese teachers, I might preach
another sort of gospel, but American education to-day needs less
turmoil, less distraction, fewer sweeping changes. It needs to settle
itself, and look around, and find out where it is and what it is trying
to do. And it needs, above all, to rise to a consciousness of itself as
an institution manned by intelligent individuals who are perfectly
competent themselves to set up craft standard and ideals.


IV
   [Transcriber's note: This is a typographical error in
   the original, and should read "V"]

But in whatever way the supervisor may utilize the opportunity that his
position presents, his second great problem will come up for solution.
The supervisor is the captain of the teaching corps. Directly under his
control are the mainsprings of the school's life and activity,--the
classroom teachers. It is coming to be a maxim in the city systems that
the supervisor has not only the power to mold the school to the form of
his own ideals, but that he can, if he is skillful, turn weak teachers
into strong teachers and make out of most unpromising material, an
efficient, homogeneous school staff. I believe that this is coming to be
considered the prime criterion of effective school supervision,--not
what skill the supervisor may show in testing results, or in keeping his
pupils up to a given standard, or in choosing his teachers skillfully,
but rather the success with which he is able to take the teaching
material that is at his hand, and train it into efficiency.

A former Commissioner of Education for one of our new insular
possessions once told me that he had come to divide supervisors into two
classes,--(1) those who knew good teaching when they saw it, and (2)
those who could make poor teachers into good teachers. Of these two
types, he said, the latter were infinitely more valuable to pioneer work
in education than the former, and he named two or three city systems
from which he had selected the supervisors who could do this sort of
thing,--for there is no limit to this process of training, and the
superintendent who can train supervisors is just as important as the
supervisor who can train teachers.

It would take a volume adequately to treat the various problems that
this conception of the supervisor's function involves. I can do no more
at present than indicate what seems to me the most pressing present need
in this direction. I have found that sometimes the supervisors who
insist most strenuously that their teachers secure the coöperation of
their pupils are among the very last to secure for themselves the
coöperation of their teachers.

And to this important end, it seems to me that we have an important
suggestion in the present condition of the classroom teacher as I have
attempted to describe it. As a type, the classroom teacher needs just
now some adequate appreciation and recognition of the work that she is
doing. If the lay public is unable adequately to judge the teacher's
work, there is all the more reason that she should look to her
supervisor for that recognition of technical skill, for that
commendation of good work, which can come only from a fellow-craftsman,
but which, when it does come, is worth more in the way of real
inspiration than the loudest applause of the crowd.

Upon the whole, I believe that the outlook in this direction is
encouraging. While the teacher may miss in her institutes and in the
summer school that sort of encouragement, she is, I believe, finding it
in larger and larger measure in the local teachers' meetings and in her
consultations with her supervisors. And when all has been said, that is
the place from which she should look for inspiration. The teachers'
meeting must be the nursery of professional ideals. It must be a place
where the real first-hand workers in education get that sanity of
outlook, that professional point of view, which shall fortify them
effectively against the rising tide of unprofessional interference and
dictation which, as I have tried to indicate, constitutes the most
serious menace to our educational welfare.

And it is in the encouragement of this craft spirit, in this lifting of
the teacher's calling to the plane of craft consciousness, it is in this
that the supervisor must, I believe, find the true and lasting reward
for his work. It is through this factor that he can, just now, work the
greatest good for the schools that he supervises and the community that
he serves. The most effective way to reach his pupils is through the
medium of their teachers, and he can help these pupils in no better way
than to give their teachers a justifiable pride in the work that they
are doing through his own recognition of its worth and its value,
through his own respect for the significance of the lessons that
experience teaches them, through his own suggestive help in making that
experience profitable and suggestive. And just at the present moment, he
can make no better start than by assuring them of the truth that Emerson
expresses when he defines the true scholar as the man who remains firm
in his belief that a popgun is only a popgun although the ancient and
honored of earth may solemnly affirm it to be the crack of doom.




~VI~

EDUCATION AND UTILITY[11]

I


I wish to discuss with you some phases of the problem that is perhaps
foremost in the minds of the teaching public to-day: the problem,
namely, of making education bear more directly and more effectively upon
the work of practical, everyday life. I have no doubt that some of you
feel, when this problem is suggested, very much as I felt when I first
suggested to myself the possibility of discussing it with you. You have
doubtless heard some phases of this problem discussed at every meeting
of this association for the past ten years--if you have been a member so
long as that. Certain it is that we all grow weary of the reiteration of
even the best of truths, but certain it is also that some problems are
always before us, and until they are solved satisfactorily they will
always stimulate men to devise means for their solution.

I should say at the outset, however, that I shall not attempt to justify
to this audience the introduction of vocational subjects into the
elementary and secondary curriculums. I shall take it for granted that
you have already made up your minds upon this matter. I shall not take
your time in an attempt to persuade you that agriculture ought to be
taught in the rural schools, or manual training and domestic science in
all schools. I am personally convinced of the value of such work and I
shall take it for granted that you are likewise convinced.

My task to-day, then, is of another type. I wish to discuss with you
some of the implications of this matter of utility in respect of the
work that every elementary school is doing and always must do, no matter
how much hand work or vocational material it may introduce. My problem,
in other words, concerns the ordinary subject-matter of the
curriculum,--reading and writing and arithmetic, geography and grammar
and history,--those things which, like the poor, are always with us, but
which we seem a little ashamed to talk about in public. Truly, from
reading the educational journals and hearing educational discussion
to-day, the layman might well infer that what we term the "useful"
education and the education that is now offered by the average school
are as far apart as the two poles. We are all familiar with the
statement that the elementary curriculum is eminently adapted to produce
clerks and accountants, but very poorly adapted to furnish recruits for
any other department of life. The high school is criticized on the
ground that it prepares for college and consequently for the
professions, but that it is totally inadequate to the needs of the
average citizen. Now it would be futile to deny that there is some truth
in both these assertions, but I do not hesitate to affirm that both are
grossly exaggerated, and that the curriculum of to-day, with all its
imperfections, does not justify so sweeping a denunciation. I wish to
point out some of the respects in which these charges are fallacious,
and, in so doing, perhaps, to suggest some possible remedies for the
defects that every one will acknowledge.


II

In the first place, let me make myself perfectly clear upon what I mean
by the word "useful." What, after all, is the "useful" study in our
schools? What do men find to be the useful thing in their lives? The
most natural answer to this question is that the useful things are those
that enable us to meet effectively the conditions of life,--or, to use a
phrase that is perfectly clear to us all, the things that help us in
getting a living. The vast majority of men and women in this world
measure all values by this standard, for most of us are, to use the
expressive slang of the day, "up against" this problem, and "up against"
it so hard and so constantly that we interpret everything in the greatly
foreshortened perspective of immediate necessity. Most of us in this
room are confronting this problem of making a living. At any rate, I am
confronting it, and consequently I may lay claim to some of the
authority that comes from experience.

And since I have made this personal reference, may I violate the canons
of good taste and make still another? I was face to face with this
problem of getting a living a good many years ago, when the opportunity
came to me to take a college course. I could see nothing ahead after
that except another struggle with this same vital issue. So I decided to
take a college course which would, in all probability, help me to solve
the problem. Scientific agriculture was not developed in those days as
it has been since that time, but a start had been made, and the various
agricultural colleges were offering what seemed to be very practical
courses. I had had some early experience on the farm, and I decided to
become a scientific farmer. I took the course of four years and secured
my degree. The course was as useful from the standpoint of practical
agriculture as any that could have been devised at the time. But when I
graduated, what did I find? The same old problem of getting a living
still confronted me as I had expected that it would; and alas! I had got
my education in a profession that demanded capital. I was a landless
farmer. Times were hard and work of all kinds was very scarce. The
farmers of those days were inclined to scoff at scientific agriculture.
I could have worked for my board and a little more, and I should have
done so had I been able to find a job. But while I was looking for the
place, a chance came to teach school, and I took the opportunity as a
means of keeping the wolf from the door. I have been engaged in the work
of teaching ever since. When I was able to buy land, I did so, and I
have to-day a farm of which I am very proud. It does not pay large
dividends, but I keep it up for the fun I get out of it,--and I like to
think, also, that if I should lose my job as a teacher, I could go back
to the farm and show the natives how to make money. This is doubtless an
illusion, but it is a source of solid comfort just the same.

Now the point of this experience is simply this: I secured an education
that seemed to me to promise the acme of utility. In one way, it has
fulfilled that promise far beyond my wildest expectations, but that way
was very different from the one that I had anticipated. The technical
knowledge that I gained during those four strenuous years, I apply now
only as a means of recreation. So far as enabling me directly to get a
living, this technical knowledge does not pay one per cent on the
investment of time and money. And yet I count the training that I got
from its mastery as, perhaps, the most useful product of my education.

Now what was the secret of its utility? As I analyze my experience, I
find it summed up very largely in two factors. In the first place, I
studied a set of subjects for which I had at the outset very little
taste. In studying agriculture, I had to master a certain amount of
chemistry, physics, botany, and zoölogy, for each and every one of which
I felt, at the outset, a distinct aversion and dislike. A mastery of
these subjects was essential to a realization of the purpose that I had
in mind. I was sure that I should never like them, and yet, as I kept at
work, I gradually found myself losing that initial distaste. First one
and then another opened out its vista of truth and revelation before me,
and almost before I was aware of it, I was enthusiastic over science. It
was a long time before I generalized that experience and drew its
lesson, but the lesson, once learned, has helped me more even in the
specific task of getting a living than anything else that came out of my
school training. That experience taught me, not only the necessity for
doing disagreeable tasks,--for attacking them hopefully and
cheerfully,--but it also taught me that disagreeable tasks, if attacked
in the right way, and persisted in with patience, often become
attractive in themselves. Over and over again in meeting the situations
of real life, I have been confronted with tasks that were initially
distasteful. Sometimes I have surrendered before them; but sometimes,
too, that lesson has come back to me, and has inspired me to struggle
on, and at no time has it disappointed me by the outcome. I repeat that
there is no technical knowledge that I have gained that compares for a
moment with that ideal of patience and persistence. When it comes to
real, downright utility, measured by this inexorable standard of getting
a living, let me commend to you the ideal of persistent effort. All the
knowledge that we can learn or teach will come to very little if this
element is lacking.

Now this is very far from saying that the pursuit of really useful
knowledge may not give this ideal just as effectively as the pursuit of
knowledge that will never be used. My point is simply this: that beyond
the immediate utility of the facts that we teach,--indeed, basic and
fundamental to this utility,--is the utility of the ideals and standards
that are derived from our school work. Whatever we teach, these
essential factors can be made to stand out in our work, and if our
pupils acquire these we shall have done the basic and important thing in
helping them to solve the problems of real life,--and if our pupils do
not acquire these, it will make little difference how intrinsically
valuable may be the content of our instruction. I feel like emphasizing
this matter to-day, because there is in the air a notion that utility
depends entirely upon the content of the curriculum. Certainly the
curriculum must be improved from this standpoint, but we are just now
losing sight of the other equally important factor,--that, after all,
while both are essential, it is the spirit of teaching rather than the
content of teaching that is basic and fundamental.

Nor have I much sympathy with that extreme view of this matter which
asserts that we must go out of our way to provide distasteful tasks for
the pupil in order to develop this ideal of persistence. I believe that
such a policy will always tend to defeat its own purpose. I know a
teacher who holds this belief. He goes out of his way to make tasks
difficult. He refuses to help pupils over hard places. He does not
believe in careful assignments of lessons, because, he maintains, the
pupil ought to learn to overcome difficulties for himself, and how can
he learn unless real difficulties are presented?

The great trouble with this teacher is that his policy does not work out
in practice. A small minority of his pupils are strengthened by it; the
majority are weakened. He is right when he says that a pupil gains
strength only by overcoming difficulties, but he neglects a very
important qualification of this rule, namely, that a pupil gains no
strength out of obstacles that he fails to overcome. It is the conquest
that comes after effort,--this is the factor that gives one strength and
confidence. But when defeat follows defeat and failure follows failure,
it is weakness that is being engendered--not strength. And that is the
trouble with this teacher's pupils. The majority leave him with all
confidence in their own ability shaken out of them and some of them
never recover from the experience.

And so while I insist strenuously that the most useful lesson we can
teach our pupils is how to do disagreeable tasks cheerfully and
willingly, please do not understand me to mean that we should go out of
our way to provide disagreeable tasks. After all, I rejoice that my own
children are learning how to read and write and cipher much more easily,
much more quickly, and withal much more pleasantly than I learned those
useful arts. The more quickly they get to the plane that their elders
have reached, the more quickly they can get beyond this plane and on to
the next level.

To argue against improved methods in teaching on the ground that they
make things too easy for the pupil is, to my mind, a grievous error. It
is as fallacious as to argue that the introduction of machinery is a
curse because it has diminished in some measure the necessity for human
drudgery. But if machinery left mankind to rest upon its oars, if it
discouraged further progress and further effortful achievement, it
_would_ be a curse: and if the easier and quicker methods of instruction
simply bring my children to my own level and then fail to stimulate them
to get beyond my level, then they are a curse and not a blessing.

I do not decry that educational policy of to-day which insists that
school work should be made as simple and attractive as possible. I do
decry that misinterpretation of this policy which looks at the matter
from the other side, and asserts so vehemently that the child should
never be asked or urged to do something that is not easy and attractive.
It is only because there is so much in the world to be done that, for
the sake of economizing time and strength, we should raise the child as
quickly and as rapidly and as pleasantly as possible to the plane that
the race has reached. But among all the lessons of race experience that
we must teach him there is none so fundamental and important as the
lesson of achievement itself,--the supreme lesson wrung from human
experience,--the lesson, namely, that every advance that the world has
made, every step that it has taken forward, every increment that has
been added to the sum total of progress has been attained at the price
of self-sacrifice and effort and struggle,--at the price of doing things
that one does not want to do. And unless a man is willing to pay that
price, he is bound to be the worst kind of a social parasite, for he is
simply living on the experience of others, and adding to this capital
nothing of his own.

It is sometimes said that universal education is essential in order that
the great mass of humanity may live in greater comfort and enjoy the
luxuries that in the past have been vouchsafed only to the few.
Personally I think that this is all right so far as it goes, but it
fails to reach an ultimate goal. Material comfort is justified only
because it enables mankind to live more effectively on the lower planes
of life and give greater strength and greater energy to the solution of
new problems upon the higher planes of life. The end of life can never
be adequately formulated in terms of comfort and ease, nor even in
terms of culture and intellectual enjoyment; the end of life is
achievement, and no matter how far we go, achievement is possible only
to those who are willing to pay the price. When the race stops investing
its capital of experience in further achievement, when it settles down
to take life easily, it will not take it very long to eat up its capital
and revert to the plane of the brute.


III

But I am getting away, from my text. You will remember that I said that
the most useful thing that we can teach the child is to attack
strenuously and resolutely any problem that confronts him whether it
pleases him or not, and I wanted to be certain that you did not
misinterpret me to mean that we should, for this reason, make our school
tasks unnecessarily difficult and laborious. After all, while our
attitude should always be one of interesting our pupils, their attitude
should always be one of effortful attention,--of willingness to do the
task that we think it best for them to do. You see it is a sort of a
double-headed policy, and how to carry it out is a perplexing problem.
Of so much I am certain, however, at the outset: if the pupil takes the
attitude that we are there to interest and entertain him, we shall make
a sorry fiasco of the whole matter, and inasmuch as this very tendency
is in the air at the present time, I feel justified in at least
referring to its danger.

Now if this ideal of persistent effort is the most useful thing that
can come out of education, what is the next most useful? Again, as I
analyze what I obtained from my own education, it seems to me that, next
to learning that disagreeable tasks are often well worth doing, the
factor that has helped me most in getting a living has been the method
of solving the situations that confronted me. After all, if we simply
have the ideal of resolute and aggressive and persistent attack, we may
struggle indefinitely without much result. All problems of life involve
certain common factors. The essential difference between the educated
and the uneducated man, if we grant each an equal measure of pluck,
persistence, and endurance, lies in the superior ability of the educated
man to analyze his problem effectively and to proceed intelligently
rather than blindly to its solution. I maintain that education should
give a man this ideal of attacking any problem; furthermore I maintain
that the education of the present day, in spite of the anathemas that
are hurled against it, is doing this in richer measure than it has ever
been done before. But there is no reason why we should not do it in
still greater measure.

I once knew two men who were in the business of raising fruit for
commercial purposes. Each had a large orchard which he operated
according to conventional methods and which netted him a comfortable
income. One of these men was a man of narrow education: the other a man
of liberal education, although his training had not been directed in
any way toward the problems of horticulture. The orchards had borne
exceptionally well for several years, but one season, when the fruit
looked especially promising, a period of wet, muggy weather came along
just before the picking season, and one morning both these men went out
into their orchards, to find the fruit very badly "specked." Now the
conventional thing to do in such cases was well known to both men. Each
had picked up a good deal of technical information about caring for
fruit, and each did the same thing in meeting this situation. He got out
his spraying outfit, prepared some Bordeaux mixture, and set vigorously
at work with his pumps. So far as persistence and enterprise went, both
men stood on an equal footing. But it happened that this was an unusual
and not a conventional situation. The spraying did not alleviate the
condition. The corruption spread through the trees like wildfire, and
seemed to thrive on copper sulphate rather than succumb to its corrosive
influence.

Now this was where the difference in training showed itself. The
orchardist who worked by rule of thumb, when he found that his rule did
not work, gave up the fight and spent his time sitting on his front
porch bemoaning his luck. The other set diligently at work to analyze
the situation. His education had not taught him anything about the
characteristics of parasitic fungi, for parasitic fungi were not very
well understood when he was in school. But his education had left with
him a general method of procedure for just such cases, and that method
he at once applied. It had taught him how to find the information that
he needed, provided that such information was available. It had taught
him that human experience is crystallized in books, and that, when a
discovery is made in any field of science,--no matter how specialized
the field and no matter how trivial the finding,--the discovery is
recorded in printer's ink and placed at the disposal of those who have
the intelligence to find it and apply it. And so he set out to read up
on the subject,--to see what other men had learned about this peculiar
kind of apple rot. He obtained all that had been written about it and
began to master it. He told his friend about this material and suggested
that the latter follow the same course, but the man of narrow education
soon found himself utterly at sea in a maze of technical terms. The
terms were new to the other too, but he took down his dictionary and
worked them out. He knew how to use indices and tables of contents and
various other devices that facilitate the gathering of information, and
while his uneducated friend was storming over the pedantry of men who
use big words, the other was making rapid progress through the material.
In a short time he learned everything that had been found out about this
specific disease. He learned that its spores are encased in a gelatinous
sac which resisted the entrance of the chemicals. He found how the
spores were reproduced, how they wintered, how they germinated in the
following season; and, although he did not save much of his crop that
year, he did better the next. Nor were the evidences of his superiority
limited to this very useful result. He found that, after all, very
little was known about this disease, so he set himself to find out more
about it. To do this, he started where other investigators had left off,
and then he applied a principle he had learned from his education;
namely, that the only valid methods of obtaining new truths are the
methods of close observation and controlled experiment.

Now I maintain that the education which was given that man was effective
in a degree that ought to make his experience an object lesson for us
who teach. What he had found most useful at a very critical juncture of
his business life was, primarily, not the technical knowledge that he
had gained either in school or in actual experience. His superiority lay
in the fact that he knew how to get hold of knowledge when he needed it,
how to master it once he had obtained it, how to apply it once he had
mastered it, and finally how to go about to discover facts that had been
undetected by previous investigators. I care not whether he got this
knowledge in the elementary school or in the high school or in the
college. He might have secured it in any one of the three types of
institution, but he had to learn it somewhere, and I shall go further
and say that the average man has to learn it in some school and under an
explicit and conscious method of instruction.


IV

But perhaps you would maintain that this statement of the case, while in
general true, does not help us out in practice. After all, how are we to
impress pupils with this ideal of persistence and with these ideals of
getting and applying information, and with this ideal of investigation?
I maintain that these important useful ideals may be effectively
impressed almost from the very outset of school life. The teaching of
every subject affords innumerable opportunities to force home their
lessons. In fact, it must be a very gradual process--a process in which
the concrete instances are numerous and rich and impressive. From these
concrete instances, the general truth may in time emerge. Certainly the
chances that it will emerge are greatly multiplied if we ourselves
recognize its worth and importance, and lead our pupils to see in each
concrete case the operation of the general principle. After all, the
chief reason why so much of our education miscarries, why so few pupils
gain the strength and the power that we expect all to gain, lies in the
inability of the average individual to draw a general conclusion from
concrete cases--to see the general in the particular. We have insisted
so strenuously upon concrete instruction that we have perhaps failed
also to insist that fact without law is blind, and that observation
without induction is stupidity gone to seed.

Let me give a concrete instance of what I mean. Not long ago, I visited
an eighth-grade class during a geography period. It was at the time when
the discovery of the Pole had just set the whole civilized world by the
ears, and the teacher was doing something that many good teachers do on
occasions of this sort: she was turning the vivid interest of the moment
to educative purposes. The pupils had read Peary's account of his trip
and they were discussing its details in class. Now that exercise was
vastly more than an interesting information lesson, for Peary's
achievement became, under the skillful touch of that teacher, a type of
all human achievement. I wish that I could reproduce that lesson for
you--how vividly she pictured the situation that confronted the
explorer,--the bitter cold, the shifting ice, the treacherous open
leads, the lack of game or other sources of food supply, the long
marches on scant rations, the short hours and the uncomfortable
conditions of sleep; and how from these that fundamental lesson of pluck
and endurance and courage came forth naturally without preaching the
moral or indulging in sentimental "goody-goodyism." And then the other
and equally important part of the lesson,--how pluck and courage in
themselves could never have solved the problem; how knowledge was
essential, and how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the
experience of early explorers,--how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to
build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes;
and some from the Eskimos,--how to live in that barren region, and how
to travel with dogs and sledges;--and some, too, from Peary's own early
experiences,--how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal,
and had added this experience to that until finally the prize was his.
We may differ as to the value of Peary's deed, but that it stands as a
type of what success in any undertaking means, no one can deny. And this
was the lesson that these eighth-grade pupils were absorbing,--the
world-old lesson before which all others fade into insignificance,--the
lesson, namely, that achievement can be gained only by those who are
willing to pay the price.

And I imagine that when that class is studying the continent of Africa
in their geography work, they will learn something more than the names
of rivers and mountains and boundaries and products,--I imagine that
they will link these facts with the names and deeds of the men who gave
them to the world. And when they study history, it will be vastly more
than a bare recital of dates and events,--it will be alive with these
great lessons of struggle and triumph,--for history, after all, is only
the record of human achievement. And if those pupils do not find these
same lessons coming out of their own little conquests,--if the problems
of arithmetic do not furnish an opportunity to conquer the pressure
ridges of partial payments or the Polar night of bank discount, or if
the intricacies of formal grammar do not resolve themselves into the
North Pole of correct expression,--I have misjudged that teacher's
capacities; for the great triumph of teaching is to get our pupils to
see the fundamental and the eternal in things that are seemingly trivial
and transitory. We are fond of dividing school studies into the cultural
and the practical, into the humanities and the sciences. Believe me,
there is no study worth the teaching that is not practical at basis, and
there is no practical study that has not its human interest and its
humanizing influence--if only we go to some pains to search them out.


V

I have said that the most useful thing that education can do is to imbue
the pupil with the ideal of effortful achievement which will lead him to
do cheerfully and effectively the disagreeable tasks that fall to his
lot. I have said that the next most useful thing that it can do is to
give him a general method of solving the problems that he meets. Is
there any other useful outcome of a general nature that we may rank in
importance with these two? I believe that there is, and I can perhaps
tell you what I mean by another reference to a concrete case. I know a
man who lacks this third factor, although he possesses the other two in
a very generous measure. He is full of ambition, persistence, and
courage. He is master of the rational method of solving the problems
that beset him. He does his work intelligently and effectively. And yet
he has failed to make a good living. Why? Simply because of his standard
of what constitutes a good living. Measured by my standard, he is doing
excellently well. Measured by his own standard, he is a miserable
failure. He is depressed and gloomy and out of harmony with the world,
simply because he has no other standard for a good living than a
financial one. He is by profession a civil engineer. His work is much
more remunerative than is that of many other callings. He has it in him
to attain to professional distinction in that work. But to this
opportunity he is blind. In the great industrial center in which he
works, he is constantly irritated by the evidences of wealth and luxury
beyond what he himself enjoys. The millionaire captain of industry is
his hero, and because he is not numbered among this class, he looks at
the world through the bluest kind of spectacles.

Now, to my mind that man's education failed somewhere, and its failure
lay in the fact that it did not develop in him ideals of success that
would have made him immune to these irritating factors. We have often
heard it said that education should rid the mind of the incubus of
superstition, and one very important effect of universal education is
that it does offer to all men an explanation of the phenomena that
formerly weighted down the mind with fear and dread, and opened an easy
ingress to the forces of superstition and fraud and error. Education has
accomplished this function, I think, passably well with respect to the
more obvious sources of superstition. Necromancy and magic, demonism and
witchcraft, have long since been relegated to the limbo of exposed
fraud. Their conquest has been one of the most significant advances that
man has made above the savage. The truths of science have at last
triumphed, and, as education has diffused these truths among the masses,
the triumph has become almost universal.

But there are other forms of superstition besides those I have
mentioned,--other instances of a false perspective, of distorted values,
of inadequate standards. If belief in witchcraft or in magic is bad
because it falls short of an adequate interpretation of nature,--if it
is false because it is inconsistent with human experience,--then the
worship of Mammon that my engineer friend represents is tenfold worse
than witchcraft, measured by the same standards. If there is any lesson
that human history teaches with compelling force, it is surely this:
Every race which has yielded to the demon of individualism and the lust
for gold and self-gratification has gone down the swift and certain road
to national decay. Every race that, through unusual material prosperity,
has lost its grip on the eternal verities of self-sacrifice and
self-denial has left the lesson of its downfall written large upon the
pages of history. I repeat that if superstition consists in believing
something that is inconsistent with rational human experience, then our
present worship of the golden calf is by far the most dangerous form of
superstition that has ever befuddled the human intellect.

But, you ask, what can education do to alleviate a condition of this
sort? How may the weak influence of the school make itself felt in an
environment that has crystallized on every hand this unfortunate
standard? Individualism is in the air. It is the dominant spirit of the
times. It is reënforced upon every side by the unmistakable evidences of
national prosperity. It is easy to preach the simple life, but who will
live it unless he has to? It is easy to say that man should have social
and not individual standards of success and achievement, but what effect
will your puerile assertion have upon the situation that confronts us?

Yes; it is easier to be a pessimist than an optimist. It is far easier
to lie back and let things run their course than it is to strike out
into midstream and make what must be for the pioneer a fatal effort to
stem the current. But is the situation absolutely hopeless? If the
forces of education can lift the Japanese people from barbarism to
enlightenment in two generations; if education can in a single century
transform Germany from the weakest to the strongest power on the
continent of Europe; if five short years of a certain type of education
can change the course of destiny in China;--are we warranted in our
assumption that we hold a weak weapon in this fight against Mammon?

I have intimated that the attitude of my engineer friend toward life is
the result of twisted ideals. A good many young men are going out into
life with a similar defect in their education. They gain their ideals,
not from the great wellsprings of human experience as represented in
history and literature, in religion and art, but from the environment
around them, and consequently they become victims of this superstition
from the outset. As a trainer of teachers, I hold it to be one important
part of my duty to fortify my students as strongly as I can against this
false standard of which my engineer friend is the victim. It is just as
much a part of my duty to give my students effective and consistent
standards of what a good living consists in as it is to give them the
technical knowledge and skill that will enable them to make a good
living. If my students who are to become teachers have standards of
living and standards of success that are inconsistent with the great
ideal of social service for which teaching stands, then I have fallen
far short of success in my work. If they are constantly irritated by the
evidences of luxury beyond their means, if this irritation sours their
dispositions and checks their spontaneity, their efficiency as teachers
is greatly lessened or perhaps entirely negated. And if my engineer
friend places worldly emoluments upon a higher plane than professional
efficiency, I dread for the safety of the bridges that he builds. His
education as an engineer should have fortified him against just such a
contingency. It should have left him with the ideal of craftsmanship
supreme in his life. And if his technical education failed to do this,
his general education ought, at least, to have given him a bias in the
right direction.

I believe that all forms of vocational and professional education are
not so strong in this respect as they should be. Again you say to me,
What can education do when the spirit of the times speaks so strongly on
the other side? But what is education for if it is not to preserve midst
the chaos and confusion of troublous times the great truths that the
race has wrung from its experience? How different might have been the
fate of Rome, if Rome had possessed an educational system touching every
child in the Empire, and if, during the years that witnessed her decay
and downfall, those schools could have kept steadily, persistently at
work, impressing upon every member of each successive generation the
virtues that made the old Romans strong and virile--the virtues that
enabled them to lay the foundations of an empire that crumbled in ruins
once these truths were forgotten. Is it not the specific task of
education to represent in each generation the human experiences that
have been tried and tested and found to work,--to represent these in the
face of opposition if need be,--to be faithful to the trusteeship of the
most priceless legacy that the past has left to the present and to the
future? If this is not our function in the scheme of things, then what
is our function? Is it to stand with bated breath to catch the first
whisper that will usher in the next change? Is it to surrender all
initiative and simply allow ourselves to be tossed hither and yon by the
waves and cross-waves of a fickle public opinion? Is it to cower in
dread of a criticism that is not only unjust but often ill-advised of
the real conditions under which we are doing our work?

I take it that none of us is ready to answer these questions in the
affirmative. Deep down in our hearts we know that we have a useful work
to do, and we know that we are doing it passably well. We also know our
defects and shortcomings at least as well as one who has never faced our
problems and tried to solve them. And it is from this latter type that
most of the drastic criticism, especially of the elementary and
secondary school, emanates. I confess that my gorge rises within me when
I read or hear the invectives that are being hurled against teaching as
a profession (and against the work of the elementary and secondary
school in particular) by men who know nothing of this work at first
hand. This is the greatest handicap under which the profession of
teaching labors. In every other important field of human activity a man
must present his credentials before he takes his seat at the council
table, and even then he must sit and listen respectfully to his elders
for a while before he ventures a criticism or even a suggestion. This
plan may have its defects. It may keep things on too conservative a
basis; but it avoids the danger into which we as a profession have
fallen,--the danger of "half-baked" theories and unmatured policies.
To-day the only man that can get a respectable hearing at our great
national educational meetings is the man who has something new and
bizarre to propose. And the more startling the proposal, the greater is
the measure of adulation that he receives. The result of this is a
continual straining for effect, an enormous annual crop of fads and
fancies, which, though most of them are happily short-lived, keep us in
a state of continual turmoil and confusion.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now, it goes without saying that there are many ways of making education
hit the mark of utility in addition to those that I have mentioned. The
teachers down in the lower grades who are teaching little children the
arts of reading and writing and computation are doing vastly more in a
practical direction than they are ever given credit for doing; for
reading and writing and the manipulation of numbers are, next to oral
speech itself, the prime necessities in the social and industrial world.
These arts are being taught to-day better than they have ever been
taught before,--and the technique of their teaching is undergoing
constant refinement and improvement.

The school can do and is doing other useful things. Some schools are
training their pupils to be well mannered and courteous and considerate
of the rights of others. They are teaching children one of the most
basic and fundamental laws of human life; namely, that there are some
things that a gentleman cannot do and some things that society will not
stand. How many a painful experience in solving this very problem of
getting a living could be avoided if one had only learned this lesson
passing well! What a pity it is that some schools that stand to-day for
what we call educational progress are failing in just this
particular--are sending out into the world an annual crop of boys and
girls who must learn the great lesson of self-control and a proper
respect for the rights of others in the bitter school of experience,--a
school in which the rod will never be spared, but whose chastening
scourge comes sometimes, alas, too late!

There is no feature of school life which has not its almost infinite
possibilities of utility. But after all, are not the basic and
fundamental things these ideals that I have named? And should not we who
teach stand for idealism in its widest sense? Should we not ourselves
subscribe an undying fidelity to those great ideals for which teaching
must stand,--to the ideal of social service which lies at the basis of
our craft, to the ideals of effort and discipline that make a nation
great and its children strong, to the ideal of science that dissipates
the black night of ignorance and superstition, to the ideal of culture
that humanizes mankind?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 11: An address before the Eastern Illinois Teachers'
Association, October 15, 1909. Published as a Bulletin of the Eastern
Illinois Normal School, October, 1909.]




~VII~

THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN EDUCATION[12]

I


I know that I do not need to plead with this audience for a recognition
of the scientific spirit in the solution of educational problems. The
long life and the enviable record of this Society of Pedagogy testify in
themselves to that spirit of free inquiry, to the calm and dispassionate
search for the truth which lies at the basis of the scientific method.
You have gathered here, fortnight after fortnight, to discuss
educational problems in the light of your experience. You have reported
your experience and listened to the results that others have gleaned in
the course of their daily work. And experience is the corner stone of
science.

Some of the most stimulating and clarifying discussions of educational
problems that I have ever heard have been made in the sessions of this
Society. You have been scientific in your attitude toward education, and
I may add that I first learned the lessons of the real science of
education in the St. Louis schools, and under the inspiration that was
furnished by the men who were members of this Society. What I knew of
the science of education before I came to this city ten years ago, was
gleaned largely from books. It was deductive, _a priori_, in its nature.
What I learned here was the induction from actual experience.

My very first introduction to my colleagues among the school men of this
city was a lesson in the science of education. I had brought with me a
letter to one of your principals. He was in the office down on Locust
Street the first Saturday that I spent in the city. I presented my
letter to him, and, with that true Southern hospitality which has always
characterized your corps, he took me immediately under his wing and
carried me out to luncheon with him.

We sat for hours in a little restaurant down on Sixth Street,--he was my
teacher and I was his pupil. And gradually, as the afternoon wore on, I
realized that I had met a master craftsman in the art of education. At
first I talked glibly enough of what I intended to do, and he listened
sympathetically and helpfully, with a little quizzical smile in his eyes
as I outlined my ambitious plans. And when I had run the gamut of my
dreams, he took his turn, and, in true Socratic fashion, yet without
making me feel in the least that I was only a dreamer after all, he
refashioned my theories. One by one the little card houses that I had
built up were deftly, smoothly, gently, but completely demolished. I did
not know the ABC of schoolcraft--but he did not tell me that I did not.
He went at the task of instruction from the positive point of view. He
proved to me, by reminiscence and example, how different are actual and
ideal conditions. And finally he wound up with a single question that
opened a new world to me. "What," he asked, "is the dominant
characteristic of the child's mind?" I thought at first that I was on
safe ground--for had I not taken a course in child study, and had I not
measured some hundreds of school children while working out a university
thesis? So I began with my list. But, at each characteristic that I
mentioned he shook his head. "No," he said, "no; that is not right." And
when finally I had exhausted my list, he said to me, "The dominant
characteristic of the child's mind is its _seriousness_. The child is
the most _serious_ creature in the world."

The answer staggered me for a moment. Like ninety-nine per cent of the
adult population of this globe, the seriousness of the child had never
appealed to me. In spite of the theoretical basis of my training, that
single, dominant element of child life had escaped me. I had gained my
notion of the child from books, and, I also fear, from the Sunday
supplements. To me, deep down in my heart, the child was an animated
joke. I was immersed in unscientific preconceptions. But the master
craftsman had gained his conception of child life from intimate,
empirical acquaintance with the genus boy. He had gleaned from his
experience that fundamental truth: "The child is the most serious
creature in the world."

Sometime I hope that I may make some fitting acknowledgment of the debt
of gratitude that I owe to that man. The opportunities that I had to
talk with him were all too few, but I did make a memorable visit to his
school, and studied at first hand the great work that he was doing for
the pupils of the Columbia district. He died the next year, and I shall
never forget the words that stood beneath his picture that night in one
of the daily papers: "Charles Howard: Architect of Character."


II

The essence of the scientific spirit is to view experience without
prejudice, and that was the lesson that I learned from the school system
of St. Louis.

The difference between the ideal child and the real child,--the
difference between what fancy pictures a schoolroom to be and what
actual first-hand acquaintance shows that it is, the difference between
a preconceived notion and an actual stubborn fact of experience,--these
were among the lessons that I learned in these schools. But, at the same
time, there was no crass materialism accompanying this teaching. There
was no loss of the broader point of view. A fact is a fact, and we
cannot get around it,--and this is what scientific method has insisted
upon from its inception. But always beyond the fact is its significance,
its meaning. That the St. Louis schools have for the last fifty years
stood for the larger view; that they have never, so far as I know,
exploited the new and the bizarre simply because it was new and
strange,--this is due, I believe, to the insight and inspiration of the
man[13] who first fashioned the framework of this system, and breathed
into it as a system the vitalizing element of idealism. Personally, I
have not always been in sympathy with the teachings of the Hegelian
philosophy,--I have not always understood them,--but no man could
witness the silent, steady, unchecked growth of the St. Louis schools
without being firmly and indelibly impressed with dynamic value of a
richly conceived and rigidly wrought system of fundamental principles.
The cause of education has suffered much from the failure of educators
to break loose from the shackles of the past. But it has, in some
places, suffered still more from the tendency of the human mind to
confuse fundamental principles with the shackles of tradition. The rage
for the new and the untried, simply because it is new and untried,--this
has been, and is to-day, the rock upon which real educational progress
is most likely to be wrecked. This is a rock, I believe, that St. Louis
has so far escaped, and I have no doubt that its escape has been due, in
large measure, to the careful, rigid, laborious, and yet illuminating
manner in which that great captain charted out its course.


III

Fundamentally, there is, I believe, no discrepancy, no inconsistency,
between the scientific spirit in education and what may be called the
philosophical spirit. As I have suggested, there are always two dangers
that must be avoided: the danger, in the first place, of thinking of the
old as essentially bad; and, on the other hand, the danger of thinking
of the new and strange and unknown as essentially bad; the danger of
confusing a sound conservatism with a blind worship of established
custom; and the danger of confusing a sound radicalism with the blind
worship of the new and the bizarre.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. There is a rather bitter
controversy at present between two factions of science teachers. One
faction insists that physics and chemistry and biology should be taught
in the high school from the economic point of view,--that the economic
applications of these sciences to great human arts, such as engineering
and agriculture, should be emphasized at every point,--that a great deal
of the material now taught in these sciences is both useless and
unattractive to the average high-school pupil. The other faction
maintains that such a course would mean the destruction of science as an
integral part of the secondary culture course,--that science to be
cultural must be pure science,--must be viewed apart from its economic
applications,--apart from its relations to the bread-and-butter problem.

Now many of the advocates of the first point of view--many of the people
that would emphasize the economic side--are animated by the spirit of
change and unrest which dominates our latter-day civilization. They wish
to follow the popular demand. "Down with scholasticism!" is their cry;
"Down with this blind worship of custom and tradition! Let us do the
thing that gives the greatest immediate benefit to our pupils. Let us
discard the elements in our courses that are hard and dry and barren of
practical results." Now these men, I believe, are basing their argument
upon the fallacy of immediate expediency. The old is bad, the new is
good. That is their argument. They have no sheet anchor out to windward.
They are willing to drift with the gale.

Many of the advocates of the second point of view--many of the people
who hold to the old line, pure-science teaching--are, on the other hand,
animated by a spirit of irrational conservatism. "Down with radicalism!"
they shout; "Down with the innovators! Things that are hard and dry are
good mental discipline. They made our fathers strong. They can make our
children strong. What was good enough for the great minds of the past is
good enough for us."

Now these men, I believe, have gone to the other extreme. They have
confused custom and tradition with fundamental and eternal principles.
They have thought that, just because a thing is old, it is good, just as
their antagonists have thought that just because a thing is new it is
good.

In both cases, obviously, the scientific spirit is lacking. The most
fundamental of all principles is the principle of truth. And yet these
men who are teachers of science are--both classes of them--ruled
themselves by dogma. And meantime the sciences are in danger of losing
their place in secondary education. The rich promise that was held out a
generation ago has not been fulfilled. Within the last decade, the
enrollment in the science courses has not increased in proportion to the
total enrollment, while the enrollment in Latin (which fifteen years ago
was about to be cast upon the educational scrap heap) has grown by leaps
and bounds.

Now this is a type of a great many controversies in education. We talk
and theorize, but very seldom do we try to find out the actual facts in
the case by any adequate tests.

It was the lack of such tests that led us at the University of Illinois
to enter upon a series of impartial investigations to see whether we
could not take some of these mooted questions out of the realm of
eternal controversy, and provide some definite solutions. We chose among
others this controversy between the economic scientists and the pure
scientists. We took a high-school class and divided it into two
sections. We tried to place in each section an equal number of bright
and mediocre and dull pupils, so that the conditions would be equalized.
Then we chose an excellent teacher, a man who could approach the problem
with an open mind, without prejudice or favor. During the present year
he has been teaching these parallel sections. In one section he has
emphasized economic applications; in the other he has taught the class
upon the customary pure-science basis. He has kept a careful record of
his work, and at stated intervals he has given both sections the same
tests. We propose to carry on this investigation year after year with
different classes, different teachers, and in different schools. We are
not in a hurry to reach conclusions.

Now I said that the safeguard in all work of this sort is to keep our
grip firm and fast on the eternal truths. In this work that I mention we
are not trying to prove that either pure science or applied science
interests our pupils the more or helps them the more in meeting
immediate economic situations. We do not propose to measure the success
of either method by its effect upon the bread-winning power of the
pupil. What we believe that science teaching should insure, is a grip on
the scientific method and an illuminating insight into the forces of
nature, and we are simply attempting to see whether the economic
applications will make this grip firmer or weaker, and this insight
clearer or more obscure. I trust that this point is plain, for it
illustrates what I have just said regarding the danger of following a
popular demand. We need no experiment to prove that economic science is
more useful in the narrow sense than is pure science. What we wish to
determine is whether a judicious mixture of the two sorts of teaching
will or will not enable us to realize this rich cultural value much more
effectively than a traditional purely cultural course.

Now that illustrates what I think is the real and important application
of the scientific spirit to the solution of educational problems. You
will readily see that it does not do away necessarily with our ideals.
It is not necessarily materialistic. It is not necessarily idealistic.
Either side may utilize it. It is a quite impersonal factor. But it does
promise to take some of our educational problems out of the field of
useless and wasteful controversy, and it does promise to get men of
conflicting views together,--for, in the case that I have just cited, if
we prove that the right admixture of methods may enable us to realize
both a cultural and a utilitarian value, there is no reason why the
culturists and the utilitarians should not get together, cease their
quarreling, take off their coats, and go to work. Few people will deny
that bread and butter is a rather essential thing in this life of ours;
very few will deny that material prosperity in temperate amounts is good
for all of us; and very few also will deny that far more fundamental
than bread and butter--far more important than material prosperity--are
the great fundamental and eternal truths which man has wrought out of
his experience and which are most effectively crystallized in the
creations of pure art, the masterpieces of pure literature, and the
discoveries of pure science.

Certainly if we of the twentieth century can agree upon any one thing,
it is this: That life without toil is a crime, and that any one who
enjoys leisure and comfort and the luxuries of living without paying the
price of toil is a social parasite. I believe that it is an important
function of public education to impress upon each generation the highest
ideals of living as well as the arts that are essential to the making of
a livelihood, but I wish to protest against the doctrine that these two
factors stand over against one another as the positive and negative
poles of human existence. In other words, I protest against the notion,
that the study of the practical everyday problems of human life is
without what we are pleased to call a culture value,--that in the proper
study of those problems one is not able to see the operation of
fundamental and eternal principles.

I shall readily agree that there is always a grave danger that the
trivial and temporary objects of everyday life may be viewed and studied
without reference to these fundamental principles. But this danger is
certainly no greater than that the permanent and eternal truths be
studied without reference to the actual, concrete, workaday world in
which we live. I have seen exercises in manual training that had for
their purpose the perfection of the pupil in some little art of joinery
for which he would, in all probability, have not the slightest use in
his later life. But even if he should find use for it, the process was
not being taught in the proper way. He was being made conscious only of
the little trivial thing, and no part of his instruction was directed
toward the much more important, fundamental lesson,--the lesson, namely,
that "a little thing may be perfect, but that perfection itself is not a
little thing."

I say that I have witnessed such an exercise in the very practical field
of manual training. I may add that I went through several such exercises
myself, and emerged with a disgust that always recurs to me when I am
told that every boy will respond to the stimulus of the hammer and the
jack plane. But I should hasten to add that I have also seen what we
call the humanities so taught that the pupil has emerged from them with
a supreme contempt for the life of labor and a feeling of disgust at the
petty and trivial problems of human life which every one must face. I
have seen art and literature so taught as to leave their students not
with the high purpose to mold their lives in accordance with the high
ideals that art and literature represent, not the firm resolution to do
what they could to relieve the ugliness of the world where they found
it ugly, or to do what they could to ennoble life when they found it
vile; but rather with an attitude of calm superiority, as if they were
in some way privileged to the delights of æsthetic enjoyment, leaving
the baser born to do the world's drudgery.

I have seen the principles of agriculture so taught as to leave with the
student the impression that he could raise more corn than his neighbor
and sell it at a higher price if he mastered the principles of
nitrification; and all without one single reference to the basic
principle of conservation upon which the welfare of the human race for
all time to come must inevitably depend,--without a single reference to
the moral iniquity of waste and sloth and ignorance. But I have also
seen men who have mastered the scientific method,--the method of
controlled observation, and unprejudiced induction and inference,--in
the laboratories of pure science; and who have gained so overweening and
hypertrophied a regard for this method that they have considered it too
holy to be contaminated by application to practical problems,--who have
sneered contemptuously when some adventurer has proposed, for example,
to subject the teaching of science itself to the searchlight of
scientific method.

I trust that these examples have made my point clear, for it is
certainly simple enough. If vocational education means simply that the
arts and skills of industrial life are to be transmitted safely from
generation to generation, a minimum of educational machinery is all that
is necessary, and we do not need to worry much about it. If vocational
education means simply this, it need not trouble us much; for economic
conditions will sooner or later provide for an effective means of
transmission, just as economic conditions will sooner or later perfect,
through a blind and empirical process of elimination, the most effective
methods of agriculture, as in the case of China and other overpopulated
nations of the Orient.

But I take it that we mean by vocational education something more than
this, just as we mean by cultural education something more than a veneer
of language, history, pure science, and the fine arts. In the former
case, the practical problems of life are to be lifted to the plane of
fundamental principles; in the latter case, fundamental principles are
to be brought down to the plane of present, everyday life. I can see no
discrepancy here. To my mind there is no cultural subject that has not
its practical outcome, and there is no practical subject that has not
its humanizing influence if only we go to some pains to seek it out. I
do not object to a subject of instruction that promises to put dollars
into the pockets of those that study it. I do object to the mode of
teaching that subject which fails to use this effective economic appeal
in stimulating a glimpse of the broader vision. I do not object to the
subject that appeals to the pupil's curiosity because it informs him of
the wonderful deeds that men have done in the past. I do object to that
mode of teaching this subject which simply arouses interest in a
spectacular deed, and then fails to use this interest in the
interpretation of present problems. I do not contend that in either case
there must be an explicit 

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