Chapter 13

Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. We may assume that every boy who goes out of the high school should appreciate the meaning and worth of self-sacrifice as this is revealed (not expounded) in Dickens's delineation of the character of Sidney Carton. There is our problem,--but what a host of subordinate problems at once confront us! Where shall we introduce _The Tale of Two Cities_? Will it be in the second year, or the third, or the fourth? Will it be best preceded by the course in general history which will give the pupil a time perspective upon the crimson background of the French Revolution against which Dickens projected his master character? Or shall we put _The Tale of Two Cities_ first for the sake of the heightened interest which the art of the novelist may lend to the facts of the historian? Again, how may the story be best presented? What part shall the pupils read in class? What part shall they read at home? What part, if any, shall we read to them? What questions are necessary to insure appreciation? How many of the allusions need be run down in order to give the maximal effect of the masterpiece? How may the necessarily discontinuous discussions of the class--one period each day for several days--be so counteracted as to insure the cumulative emotional effect which the appreciation of all art presupposes? Should the story be sketched through first, and then read in some detail, or will one reading suffice?

These are problems, I repeat, that stand to the chief problem as means stand to end. Now some of these questions must be solved by every teacher for himself, but that does not prevent each teacher from solving them scientifically. Others, it is clear, might be solved once and for all by the right kind of an investigation,--might result in permanent and universal laws which any one could apply.

There are, of course, several ways in which answers for these questions may be secured. One way is that of _a priori_ reasoning,--the deductive procedure. This method may be thoroughly scientific, depending of course upon the validity of our general principles as applied to the specific problem. Ordinarily this validity can be determined only by trial; consequently these _a priori_ inferences should be looked upon as hypotheses to be tested by trial under standard conditions. For example, I might argue that _The Tale of Two Cities_ should be placed in the third year because the emotional ferment of adolescence is then most favorable for the engendering of the ideal. But in the first place, this assumed principle would itself be subject to grave question and it would also have to be determined whether there is so little variation among the pupils in respect of physiological age as to permit the application to all of a generalization that might conceivably apply only to the average child. In other words, all of our generalizations applying to average pupils must be applied with a knowledge of the extent and range of variation from the average. Some people say that there is no such thing as an average child, but, for all practical purposes, the average child is a very real reality,--he is, in fact, more numerous than any other single class; but this does not mean that there may be not enough variations from the average to make unwise the application of our principle.

I refer to this hypothetical case to show the extreme difficulty of reaching anything more than hypotheses by _a priori_ reasoning. We have a certain number of fairly well established general principles in secondary education. Perhaps those most frequently employed are our generalizations regarding adolescence and its influences upon the mental and especially the emotional life of high-school pupils. Stanley Hall's work in this field is wonderfully stimulating and suggestive, and yet we should not forget that most of his generalizations are, after all, only plausible hypotheses to be acted upon as tentative guides for practice and to be tested carefully under controlled conditions, rather than to be accepted as immutable and unchangeable laws. We sometimes assume that all high-school pupils are adolescents, when the likelihood is that an appreciable proportion of pupils in the first two years have not yet reached this important node of their development.

I say this not to minimize in any way the importance that attaches to adolescent characteristics, but rather to suggest that you who are daily dealing with these pupils can in the aggregate add immeasurably to the knowledge that we now have concerning this period. A tremendous waste is constantly going on in that most precious of all our possible resources,--namely, human experience. How many problems that are well solved have to be solved again and again because the experience has not been crystallized in a well-tested fact or principle; how many experiences that might be well worth the effort that they cost are quite worthless because, in undergoing them, we have neglected some one or another of the rules that govern inexorably the validity of our inferences and conclusions. That is all that the scientific method means in the last analysis: it is a system of principles that enable us to make our experience worth while in meeting later situations. We all have the opportunity of contributing to the sum total of human knowledge, if only we know the rules of the game.

I said that one way of solving these subordinate problems that arise in the realization of our chief aims in teaching is the _a priori_ method of applying general principles to the problems. Another method is to imitate the way in which we have seen some one else handle the situation. Now this may be the most effective way possible. In fact, if a sufficient number of generations of teachers keep on blindly plunging in and floundering about in solving their problems, the most effective methods will ultimately be evolved through what we call the process of trial and error. The teaching of the very oldest subjects in the curriculum is almost always the best and most effective teaching, for the very reason that the blundering process has at last resulted in an effective procedure. But the scientific method of solving problems has its very function in preventing the tremendous waste that this process involves. English literature is a comparatively recent addition to the secondary curriculum. Its possibilities of service are almost unlimited. Shall we wait for ten or fifteen generations of teachers to blunder out the most effective means of teaching it, or shall we avail ourselves of these simple principles which will enable us to concentrate this experience within one or two generations?

I should like to emphasize one further point. No one has greater respect than I have for what we term experience in teaching. But let me say that a great deal of what we may term "crude" experience--that is, experience that has not been refined by the application of scientific method--is most untrustworthy,--unless, indeed, it has been garnered and winnowed and sifted through the ages. Let me give you an example of some accepted dictums of educational experience that controlled investigations have shown to be untrustworthy.

It is a general impression among teachers that specific habits may be generalized; that habits of neatness and accuracy developed in one line of work, for example, will inevitably make one neater and more accurate in other things. It has been definitely proved that this transfer of training does not take place inevitably, but in reality demands the fulfillment of certain conditions of which education has become fully conscious only within a comparatively short time, and as a result of careful, systematic, controlled experimentation. The meaning of this in the prevention of waste through inadequate teaching is fully apparent.

Again, it has been supposed by many teachers that the home environment is a large factor in the success or failure of a pupil in school. In every accurate and controlled investigation that has been conducted so far it has been shown that this factor in such subjects as arithmetic and spelling at least is so small as to be absolutely negligible in practice.

Some people still believe that a teacher is born and not made, and yet a careful investigation of the efficiency of elementary teachers shows that, when such teachers were ranked by competent judges, specialized training stood out as the most important factor in general efficiency. In this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,--for twenty-eight per cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against forty-four per cent of the college graduates. These investigations, I may add, were made by university professors, and I am giving them here in a university classroom and as a university representative. And of course I shall hasten to add that general scholarship is one important essential. Our mistake has been in assuming sometimes that it is the only essential.

Very frequently the controlled experience of scientific investigation confirms a principle that has been derived from crude experience. Most teachers will agree, for example, that a certain amount of drill and repetition is absolutely essential in the mastery of any subject. Every time that scientific investigation has touched this problem it has unmistakably confirmed this belief. Some very recent investigations made by Mr. Brown at the Charleston Normal School show conclusively that five-minute drill periods preceding every lesson in arithmetic place pupils who undergo such periods far in advance of others who spend this time in non-drill arithmetical work, and that this improvement holds not only in the number habits, but also in the reasoning processes.

Other similar cases could be cited, but I have probably said enough to make my point, and my point is this: that crude experience is an unsafe guide for practice; that experience may be refined in two ways--first by the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of trial and error could not encompass in a millennium.

The teaching of English merits treatment by this method. I recommend strongly that you give the plan a trial. You may not get immediate results. You may not get valuable results. But in any case, if you carefully respect the scientific proprieties, your experience will be worth vastly more than ten times the amount of crude experience; and, whether you get results or not, you will undergo a valuable discipline from which may emerge the ideals of science if you are not already imbued with them. I always tell my students that, even in the study of science itself, it is the ideals of science,--the ideals of patient, thoughtful work, the ideals of open-mindedness and caution in reaching conclusions, the ideals of unprejudiced observation from which selfishness and personal desire are eliminated,--it is these ideals that are vastly more important than the facts of science as such,--and these latter are significant enough to have made possible our present progress and our present amenities of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: A paper read before the English Section of the University of Illinois High School Conference, November 17, 1910.]

~XI~

THE NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD DRILL[17]

Wandering about in a circle through a thick forest is perhaps an overdrawn analogy to our activity in attempting to construct educational theories; and yet there is a resemblance. We push out hopefully--and often boastfully--into the unknown wilderness, absolutely certain that we are pioneering a trail that will later become the royal highway to learning. We struggle on, ruthlessly using the hatchet and the ax to clear the road before us. And all too often we come back to our starting point, having unwittingly described a perfect circle, instead of the straight line that we had anticipated.

But I am not a pessimist, and I like to believe that, although our course frequently resembles a circle, it is much better to characterize it as a spiral, and that, although we do get back to a point that we recognize, it is not, after all, our old starting point; it is an homologous point on a higher plane. We have at least climbed a little, even if we have not traveled in a straight line.

Now in a figurative way this explains how we have come to take our present attitude toward the problem of drill or training in the process of education. Drill means the repetition of a process until it has become mechanical or automatic. It means the kind of discipline that the recruit undergoes in the army,--the making of a series of complicated movements so thoroughly automatic that they will be gone through with accurately and precisely, at the word of command. It means the sort of discipline that makes certain activities machine-like in their operation,--so that we do not have to think about which one comes next. Thus the mind is relieved of the burden of looking after the innumerable details and may use its precious energy for a more important purpose.

In every adult life, a large number of these mechanized responses are absolutely essential to efficiency. Modern civilized life is so highly organized that it demands a multitude of reactions and adjustments which primitive life did not demand. It goes without saying that there are innumerable little details of our daily work that must be reduced to the plane of unvarying habit. These details vary with the trade or profession of the individual; hence general education cannot hope to supply the individual with all of the automatic responses that he will need. But, in addition to these specialized responses, there is a large mass of responses that are common to every member of the social group. We must all be able to communicate with one another, both through the medium of speech, and through the medium of written and printed symbols. We live in a society that is founded upon the principle of the division of labor. We must exchange the products of our labor for the necessities of life that we do not ourselves produce, and hence arises the necessity for the short cuts to counting and measurement which we call arithmetic. And finally we must all live together in something at least approaching harmony; hence the thousand and one little responses that mean courtesy and good manners must be made thoroughly automatic.

Now education, from the very earliest times, has recognized the necessity of building up these automatic responses,--of fixing these essential habits in all individuals. This recognition has often been short-sighted and sometimes even blind; but it has served to hold education rather tenaciously to a process that all must admit to be essential.

Drill or training, however, is unfortunate in one important particular. It invariably involves repetition; and conscious, explicit repetition tends to become monotonous. We must hold attention to the drill process, and yet attention abhors monotony as nature abhors a vacuum. Consequently no small part of the tedium and irksomeness of school work has been due to its emphasis of drill. The formalism of the older schools has been described, criticized, and lampooned in professional literature, and even in the pages of fiction. The disastrous results that follow from engendering in pupils a disgust for school and all that it represents have been eloquently portrayed. Along with the tendency toward ease and comfort in other departments of human life has gone a parallel tendency to relieve the school of this odious burden of formal, lifeless, repetitive work.

This "reform movement," as I shall call it, represents our first plunge into the wilderness. We would get away from the entanglements of drill and into the clearings of pleasurable, spontaneous activities. A new sun of hope dawned upon the educational world.

You are all familiar with some of the more spectacular results of this movement. You have heard of the schools that eliminated drill processes altogether, and depended upon clear initial development to fix the facts and formulæ and reactions that every one needs. You have heard and perhaps seen some of the schools that were based entirely upon the doctrine of spontaneity, governing their work by the principle that the child should never do anything that he did not wish to do at the moment of doing,--although the advocates of this theory generally qualified their principle by insisting that the skillful teacher would have the child wish to do the right thing all the time.

Let me describe to you a school of this type that I once visited. I learned of it through a resident of the city in which it was located. He was delivering an address before an educational gathering on the problems of modern education. He told the audience that, in the schools of this enlightened city, the antiquated notions that were so pernicious had been entirely dispensed with. He said that pupils in these schools were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line passing, static posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves, through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been eliminated; that corporal punishment was never even mentioned, much less practiced; that all was harmony, and love, and freedom, and spontaneity.

I listened to this speaker with intense interest, and, as his picture unfolded, I became more and more convinced that this city had at last solved the problem. I took the earliest opportunity to visit its schools. When I reached the city I went to the superintendent's office. I asked to be directed to the best school. "Our schools are all 'best,'" the secretary told me with an intonation that denoted commendable pride, and which certainly made me feel extremely humble, for here even the laws of logic and of formal grammar had been transcended. I made bold to apologize, however, and amended my request to make it apparent that I wished to see the largest school. I was directed to take a certain car and, in due time, found myself at the school. I inferred that recess was in progress when I reached the building, and that the recess was being celebrated within doors. After some time spent in dodging about the corridors, I at last located the principal.

I introduced myself and asked if I could visit his school after recess was over. "We have no recesses here," he replied (I could just catch his voice above the din of the corridors); "this is a relaxation period for some of the classes." He led the way to the office, and I spent a few moments in getting the "lay of the land." I asked him, first, whether he agreed with the doctrines that the system represented, and he told me that he believed in them implicitly. Did he follow them out consistently in the operation of his school? Yes, he followed them out to the letter.

We then went to several classrooms, where I saw children realizing themselves, I thought, very effectively. There were three groups at work in each room. One recited to the teacher, another studied at the seats, a third did construction work at the tables. I inquired about the mechanics of this rather elaborate organization, but I was told that mechanics had been eliminated from this school. Mechanical organization of the classroom, it seems, crushes the child's spontaneity, represses his self-activity, prevents the effective operation of the principle of self-realization. How, then, did these three groups exchange places, for I felt that the doctrine of self-realization would not permit them to remain in the same employment during the entire session. "Oh," the principal replied, "when they get ready to change, they change, that's all."

I saw that a change was coming directly, so I waited to watch it. The group had been working with what I should call a great deal of noise and confusion. All at once this increased tenfold. Pupils jumped over seats, ran into each other in the aisles, scurried and scampered from this place to that, while the teacher stood in the front of the room wildly waving her arms. The performance lasted several minutes. "There's spontaneity for you," the principal shouted above the roar of the storm. I acquiesced by a nod of the head,--my lungs, through lack of training, being unequal to the emergency.

We passed to another room. The same group system was in evidence. I noticed pupils who had been working at their seats suddenly put away their books and papers and skip over to the construction table. I asked concerning the nature of the construction work. "We use it," the principal told me, "as a reward for good work in the book subjects. You see arithmetic is dead and dry. You must give pupils an incentive to master it. We make the privileges of the construction table the incentive." "What do they make at this table?" I asked. "Whatever their fancy dictates," he replied. I was a little curious, however, to know how it all come out. I saw one child start to work on a basket, work at it a few minutes, then take up something else, continue a little time, go back to the basket, and finally throw both down for a third object of self-realization. I called the principal's attention to this phenomenon. "How do you get the beautiful results that you exhibit?" I asked. "For those," he said, "we just keep the pupils working on one thing until it is finished." "But," I objected, "is that consistent with the doctrine of spontaneity?" His answer was lost in the din of a change of groups, and I did not follow the investigation further.

Noon dismissal was due when I went into the corridor. Lines are forbidden in that school. At the stroke of the bell, the classroom doors burst open and bedlam was let loose. I had anticipated what was coming, and hurriedly betook myself to an alcove. I saw more spontaneity in two minutes than I had ever seen before in my life. Some boys tore through the corridors at breakneck speed and down the stairways, three steps at a time. Others sauntered along, realizing various propensities by pushing and shoving each other, snatching caps out of others' hands, slapping each other over the head with books, and various other expressions of exuberant spirits. One group stopped in front of my alcove, and showed commendable curiosity about the visitor in their midst. After exhausting his static possibilities, they tempted him to dynamic reaction by making faces; but this proving to be of no avail, they went on their way,--in the hope, doubtless, of realizing themselves elsewhere.