Part 8
Nobody doubts that all our Tonys, rich and poor, lawless and law-abiding, would much prefer a school that is not a school at all, “but just one big game”; nobody doubts that a great deal of desultory information may be acquired from films. But desultory information is not, and never can be, a substitute for education; and habits of play cannot be trusted to develop habits of work. Our efforts to protect the child from doing what he does not want to do, because he does not want to do it, are kind, but unintelligent. Life is not a vapid thing. “The world,” says Emerson, “is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality.” No pleasure it can give, from the time we are seven until the time we are seventy, is comparable to the pleasure of achievement.
Dr. Münsterberg, observing with dismay the “pedagogical unrest” which pervades our communities, expresses a naïve surprise that so much sound advice, and so much sound instruction, should leave the teacher without inspiration or enthusiasm. “The pile of interesting facts which the sciences heap up for the teacher’s use grows larger and larger, but the teacher seems to stare at it with growing hopelessness.”
I should think so. A pile of heterogeneous facts--segments of segments of subjects--reduces any sane teacher to hopelessness, because he, at least, is well aware that his pupils cannot possibly absorb or digest a tithe of the material pressed upon their acceptance. Experience has taught him something which his counsellors never learn,--the need of limit, the “feasibility of performance.” Hear what one teacher, both sane and experienced, has to say concerning the riot of facts and theories, of art and nature, of science and sentiment, which the school is expected to reduce into an orderly, consistent, and practical system of education.
“It is not enough that the child should be taught to handle skilfully the tools of all learning,--reading, writing, and arithmetic. His sense of form and his æsthetic nature must be developed by drawing; his hand must be trained by manual work; his musical nature must be awakened by song; he must be brought into harmony with his external environment by means of nature lessons and the study of science; his patriotic impulses must be roused by American history and by flag-drills; temperance must be instilled into him by lessons in physiology, with special reference to the effects of alcohol on the human system; his imagination must be cultivated by the help of Greek and Norse mythology; he must gain some knowledge of the great heroes and events of general history; he must acquire a love for and an appreciation of the best literature through the plentiful reading of masterpieces, while at the same time his mind should be stocked with choice gems of prose and verse, which will be a solace to him throughout his later life.
“It might be well if, by displacing a little arithmetic or geography, he could gain some knowledge of the elements of Latin or of a modern language; in some manner there must be roused in him a love for trees, a respect for birds, an antipathy to cigarettes, and an ambition for clean streets; and somewhere, somewhere in this mad chaos he must learn to spell! Do you wonder that teachers in progressive schools confide to us that they fear their pupils are slightly bewildered? Do you wonder that pupils do not gain the habit and the power of concentrated, consecutive work?”[1]
[1] _The Existing Relations between School and College_, by Wilson Farrand.
And this irrational, irrelevant medley, this educational vaudeville, must be absorbed unconsciously, and without effort, by children roused to interest by the sustained enthusiasm of their teachers, whom may Heaven help! If the programme is not full enough, it can be varied by lectures on sex-hygiene, lessons in woodcraft (with reference to boy scouts), and pictures illustrating the domestic habits of the house-fly. These, with plenty of gymnastics, and a little barefoot dancing for girls, may bring a school measurably near the ideal proposed by Judge Lindsey,--a place where “there is something moving, something doing all the time,” and which finds its closest counterpart in the rushing of engines on their tracks.
The theory that school work must appeal to a child’s fluctuating tastes, must attract a child’s involuntary attention, does grievous wrong to the rising generation; yet it is upheld in high places, and forms the subject-matter of many addresses vouchsafed year after year to long-suffering educators. They should bring to bear the “energizing force of interest,” they should magnetize their pupils into work. Even Dr. Eliot reminds them with just a hint of reproach that, if a child is interested, he will not be disorderly; and this reiterated statement appears to be the crux of the whole difficult situation. Let us boldly suppose that a child is not interested,--and he may conceivably weary even of films,--is it then optional with him to be, or not to be, disorderly, and what is the effect of his disorder on other children whose tastes may differ from his own?
The Right Reverend Mandell Creighton, who appears to have made more addresses to the teachers of England than any other ecclesiastic of his day, repeatedly warned them that they should not attempt to teach any subject without first making clear to children why this subject should command attention. If they failed to do so, said the bishop triumphantly, the children would not attend. He was of the opinion that little pupils must not only be rationally convinced that what they are asked to do is worth their doing, but that they must enjoy every step of their progress. A teacher who could not make a child feel that it is “just as agreeable” to be in school as at play, had not begun his, or her, pedagogical career.
This is a hard saying and a false one. Every normal child prefers play to work, and the precise value of work lies in its call for renunciation. Nor has any knowledge ever been acquired and retained without endeavour. What heroic pains were taken by Montaigne’s father to spare his little son the harsh tasks of the school-boy! At what trouble and cost to the household was the child taught “the pure Latin tongue” in infancy, “without bookes, rules, or grammar, without whipping or whining”! Greek was also imparted to him in kindly fashion, “by way of sporte and recreation.” “We did tosse our declinations and conjugations to and fro, as they doe, who, by means of a certaine game at tables, learne both Arithmeticke and Geometrie.” Assuredly the elder Montaigne was a man born out of date. In our happier age he would have been a great and honoured upholder of educational novelties, experimenting with the school-rooms of the world. In the sixteenth century he was only a country gentleman, experimenting with his son,--a son who bluntly confesses that, of the Greek thus pleasantly trifled with, he had “but small understanding,” and that the Latin which had been his mother tongue was speedily “corrupted by discontinuance.”
All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the saving of labour was that he “overskipped” the lower forms in school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his “prescript lessons,” which he seems to have disliked as heartily as any student of Guienne. Neither loss nor gain mattered much to a man of original parts. The principal result of his father’s scheme was the lingering of certain Latin words among the simple folk of Perigord, who, having painfully acquired these strange terms in order to rescue their little master from his schoolbooks, retained and made use of them all their lives.
An emphatic note of protest against our well-meant but enfeebling educational methods was struck by Professor William James in his “Talks to Teachers,” published in 1899. The phrase “Economy of Effort,” so dear to the kindly hearts of Froebel’s followers, had no meaning for Dr. James. The ingenious system by which the child’s tasks, as well as the child’s responsibilities, are shifted to the shoulders of the teacher, made no appeal to his incisive intelligence. He stoutly asserted that effort is oxygen to the lungs of youth, and that it is sheer nonsense to suppose that every step of education can possibly be made interesting. The child, like the man, must meet his difficulties, and master them. There is no lesson worth learning, no game worth playing, which does not call for exertion. Rousseau, it will be remembered, would not permit Émile to know what rivalry meant. That harassed child never even ran a race, lest the base spirit of competition should penetrate his nerveless little being. But Professor James, deaf to social sentimentalities, averred that rivalry is the spur of action, and the impelling force of civilization. “There is a noble and generous kind of rivalry as well as a spiteful and greedy kind,” he wrote truthfully, “and the noble and generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity.”
I am aware that it is a dangerous thing to call kindness sentimental; but our feeling that children have a right to happiness, and our sincere effort to protect them from any approach to pain, have led imperceptibly to the elimination from their lives of many strength-giving influences. A recent volume on “Child Culture” (a phrase every whit as reprehensible as “child-material”) speaks always of naughty children as “patients,” implying that their unfortunate condition is involuntary, and must be cured from without, not from within. The “rights of children” include the doubtful privilege of freedom from restraint, and the doubtful boon of shelter from obligation. It seems sweet and kind to teach a child high principles and steadfastness of purpose by means of symbolic games rather than by any open exaction. Unconscious obedience, like indirect taxation, is supposed to be paid without strain. Our feverish fear lest we offend against the helplessness of childhood, our feverish concern lest it should be denied its full measure of content, drive us, burdened as we are with good intentions, past the border-line of wisdom. If we were
“Less winning soft, less amiably mild,”
we might see more clearly the value of standards.
Two years ago I had sent me several numbers of a Los Angeles newspaper. They contained a spirited and sympathetic account of a woman who had been arrested for stealing a child’s outfit, and who pleaded in court that she wanted the garments for her daughter, the little girl having refused to go to school, because other children had laughed at her shabby clothes. The effect of this pathetic disclosure was instantaneous and overwhelming. The woman was released, and kind-hearted people hastened to send “nicey” frocks by the “wagon-load” to the ill-used child. A picture of the heroic mother in a large plumed hat, and another of little Ellen in curls and hair-ribbons, occupied prominent places in the paper. The public mind was set at rest concerning the quality of the goods donated. “Ellen is going to school to-day,” wrote the jubilant reporter. “She is going to wear a fluffy new dress with lace, and hair-ribbons to match. And if any rude boy so far forgets himself as to tear that wondrous creation, there will be others at home to replace it. Happy, oh, so happy was the little miss, as she shook her curls over the dainty dress to-day. And the mother? Well, a faith in the inherent goodness of mankind has been rekindled in her bosom.”
Now the interesting thing about this journalistic eloquence, and the public sentiment it represented, is that while shabbiness was admittedly a burden too heavy for a child to bear, theft carried with it no shadow of disgrace. Children might jeer at a little girl in a worn frock, but a little girl in “lace and hair-ribbons” was manifestly above reproach. Her mother’s transgression had covered her with glory, not with shame. There seems to be some confusion of standards in such a verdict, some deviation from the paths of rectitude and honour. It is hard for a child to be more poorly dressed than her companions; but to convince her that dishonesty is the best policy and brings its own reward, is but a dubious kindness. Nor is it impossible to so stiffen her moral fibre that her poor dress may be worn, if not with pride, at least with sturdy self-control.
On this point I know whereof I speak, for, when I was a little girl, my convent school sheltered a number of Southern children, reduced to poverty by the Civil War, and educated (though of this no one was aware) by the boundless charity of the nuns. These children were shabby, with a pathetic shabbiness which fell far below our very moderate requirements. Their dresses (in my prehistoric days, school uniforms were worn only on Thursdays and Sundays) were strangely antiquated, as though cut down from the garments of mothers and grandmothers, their shoes were scuffed, their hats were hopeless. But the unquenchable pride with which they bore themselves invested such hardships with distinction. Their poverty was the honourable outcome of war; and this fact, added to their simple and sincere conviction that a girl born below the Mason and Dixon line must necessarily be better than a girl born above it, carried them unscathed through the valley of humiliation. Looking back now with an unbiassed mind, I am disposed to consider their claim to superiority unfounded; but, at the time, their single-mindedness carried conviction. The standards they imposed were preeminently false, but they were less ignoble than the standards imposed by wealth. No little American boy or girl can know to-day what it means to have the character set in childhood by history, by the vividness of early years lived under strange and violent conditions, by the sufferings, the triumphs, the high and sad emotions of war.
There is a story told by Sir Francis Doyle which illustrates, after the rude fashion of our forebears, the value of endurance as an element of education. Dr. Keate, the terrible head-master of Eton, encountered one winter morning a small boy crying miserably, and asked him what was the matter. The child replied that he was cold. “Cold!” roared Keate. “You must put up with cold, sir! You are not at a girls’ school.”
It is a horrid anecdote, and I am kind-hearted enough to wish that Dr. Keate, who was not without his genial moods, had taken the lad to some generous fire (presuming such a thing was to be found), and had warmed his frozen hands and feet. But it so chanced that in that little snivelling boy there lurked a spark of pride and a spark of fun, and both ignited at the rough touch of the master. He probably stopped crying, and he certainly remembered the sharp appeal to manhood. Fifteen years later he charged with the Third Dragoons at the strongly entrenched Sikhs (thirty thousand of the best fighting men of the Khalsa) on the curving banks of the Sutlej. When the word was given, he turned to his superior officer, a fellow Etonian who was scanning the stout walls and the belching guns. “As old Keate would say, this is no girls’ school,” he chuckled; and rode to his death on the battlefield of Sobraon, which gave Lahore to England.
Contemplating which incident, and many like it, we become aware that ease is not the only good in a world consecrated to the heroic business of living and of dying.
The Modest Immigrant
It is now nearly fifty years since Mr. Lowell wrote his famous essay, “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners”; an essay in which justifiable irritation prompted the telling of plain truths, and an irrepressible sense of humour made these truths amusing. It was well for Mr. Lowell that he was seldom too angry to laugh, and he knew, as only a man of the world can know, the saving grace of laughter. Therefore, though confessedly unable to understand why foreigners should be persuaded that “by doing this country the favour of coming to it, they have laid every native thereof under an obligation,” he was willing in certain light-minded moods to acquit himself honourably of the debt. When a genteel German mendicant presented a letter, “professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman,” and certifying that the bearer thereof had long “sofered with rheumatic paints in his limps,” Mr. Lowell rightly considered that a composition so rich in the naïveté common to all Teuton mendacities was worth the money asked. When a French traveller assured him, with delightful _bon-homie_, that Englishmen became Americanized so rapidly that “they even begin to talk through their noses, just like you do,” the only comment of our representative American was that he felt ravished by this testimony to the assimilating powers of democracy.
Nevertheless, it is well in these years of grace to reread Mr. Lowell’s essay, partly because of its sturdy and dignified Americanism, and partly because we can then compare his limited experiences with our own. We can also speculate pleasantly upon his frame of mind could he have lived to hear Mrs. Amadeus Grabau (Mary Antin) say, “Lowell would agree with me,”--the point of agreement being the relative virtues of the Pilgrim Fathers and the average immigrant of to-day. When the dead are quoted in this fashion and nothing happens, then we know that, despite the assurances of Sir Oliver Lodge, the seal of silence is unbroken. Were the proud souls who have left us, able and willing to return, it would not be to reveal the whereabouts of a lost penknife, but to give the lie to the words which are spoken in their name.
The condescension which Mr. Lowell observed and analyzed was in his day the shining quality of foreigners who visit our shores. Immigrants were then less aggressive and less profoundly self-conscious than they are now, and it is the immigrant who counts. It is his arrogance, not the misapprehension of the tourist, or the innocent pride of the lecturer, which constitutes a peril to our republic. We can all of us afford to smile with Mr. Lowell at the men and women who, while accepting our hospitality, “make no secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in return for their cackle.” That they should not hesitate to come without equipment, without experience, without even a fitness for their task, seems to us perfectly natural. Perhaps they have written books which none of us have read, or edited periodicals which none of us have seen. Perhaps they have known celebrities of whom few of us have heard. It does not matter in the least. From the days when Miss Rose Kingsley came to tell us the worth of French art (does not the ocean roll between New York and Paris?), to the days when Mrs. Pankhurst came to tell us the worth of womanhood (does not the ocean roll between Boston Common and Hyde Park?), we have listened patiently, and paid generously, and received scant courtesy for our pains. “I find it so strange,” said an Englishman to me three years ago, “to see my wife lecturing over the United States. It is a thing she would not dream of doing at home. In fact, nobody would go to hear her, you know.”
But lectures are transient things, forgiven as soon as forgotten. Even the books which are written about us make no painful bid for immortality. And though our visitors patronize us, they seldom fail to throw us a kind word now and then. Sometimes a sweet-tempered and very hurried traveller, like Mr. Arnold Bennett, is good enough to praise everything he thinks he has seen. Before August, 1914, it was not the habit of our guests to scold or threaten us. That privilege had hitherto been reserved for the alien, who, having done us the honour of accepting citizenship, wields his vote as a cudgel, bidding us beware the weapon we have amiably placed in his hands.
Signor Ferrero, an acute and friendly critic, pronounces Americans to be the mystics of the modern world, because they sacrifice their welfare to a sentiment; because they believe in the miracle of the melting-pot, which, like Medea’s magic cauldron, will turn the old and decrepit races of Europe into a young and vigorous people, new-born in soul and body. No other nation cherishes this illusion. An Englishman knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years, or in twenty-five years, become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman. Our immigrants may be as good as we are. Sometimes we are told they are better, that we might “learn a lesson” from the least promising among them. But no one can deny that they are different; in many instances, radically and permanently different. And to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse is just as difficult as the reverse operation. Mr. Horace Kallen has put the case into a few clear conclusive words when he says, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit, and not abstractly, can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a national life.”
To look for “inward unanimity” among the seething mass of immigrants who have nothing more in common with one another than they have with us, is to tax credulity too far. The utmost we can hope is that their mutual antagonisms will neutralize their voting power, and keep our necks free from an alien yoke. Those of us who have lived more than half a century have seen strange fluctuations in the fortunes of the foreign-born. In 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge was finished, the Irishmen of New York made a formal protest against its being opened on Queen Victoria’s birthday, lest this chance occurrence should be misconstrued into a compliment to England. In 1915, a band in Saint Patrick’s parade was halted, and forbidden to play “Tipperary” before Cardinal Farley’s residence, lest these cheerful strains should be misconstrued into an insult to Germany. The Reverend Thomas Thornton, speaking to the Knights of Columbus, prophesied mournfully that the time was at hand when Catholic voters in the United States would be “reduced to the condition of tribute-paying aliens.” Men smiled when they heard this, reflecting that the Irish officeholder had not yet been consigned to oblivion; but the speaker had seen with a clear eye the marshalling of strange forces, destined to drive the first comer from authority. Some weeks later, the “Jewish Tribune” boasted that the angry protest voiced by Catholics against the sending of Signor Ernesto Nathan as commissioner to the San Francisco Fair had been “checked in its infancy” by the power of the Jewish press.
It is all very lively and interesting, but where does the American come in? What place is reserved for him in the commonwealth which his heroic toil and heroic sacrifices moulded into what Washington proudly called a “respectable nation”? The truth is contemptuously flung at us by Mary Antin, when she says that the descendants of the men who made America are not numerous enough to “swing a presidential election.” And if a negligible factor now, what depths of insignificance will be their portion in the future? I heard told with glee--the glee which expresses pure American unconcern--a story of a public school in one of our large eastern cities. A visitor of an investigating turn of mind asked the pupils of various nationalities, Germans, Polacks, Russian Jews, Italians, Armenians and Greeks, to stand up in turn. When the long list was seemingly exhausted, he bethought himself of a nation he had overlooked, and said, “Now let the American children arise!” Whereupon one lone, lorn little black boy stood up to represent the native-born.