Part 1

Chapter 13,848 wordsPublic domain

EDUCATION AND LIVING

RANDOLPH BOURNE

AUTHOR OF “YOUTH AND LIFE,” “THE GARY SCHOOLS”

NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1917

_Published, April, 1917_

PREFACE

These papers, reprinted with slight additions from the pages of the “New Republic,” through the courtesy of the editors, do not pretend to be anything more than glimpses and paraphrases of new tendencies in the American school and college. The public school is the most interesting and the most hopeful of our American social enterprises during these days of sluggishness for us and dreary horror for the rest of the world. It is becoming one of the few rational and one of the few democratic things we have, and science and hope are laying a foundation upon which a really self-conscious society could build almost anything it chose. The school fascinates me because there is almost no sociological, administrative or psychological truth that cannot be drawn out of its manifold life. It is the laboratory for human nature, and the only one that is simple enough to study with any prospect of quick enlightenment. Experiment in education has come to stay, and this means that we have it in our hands to approach ever more closely our ideal of education as living. We can make the school ever more and more nearly that child-community life towards which our best endeavor points.

The point-of-view of these papers will be recognized as the product of an enthusiasm for the educational philosophy of John Dewey. But what is a good philosophy for except to paraphrase? The discovery of truisms means merely that my enthusiasms are being communicated to an unappreciative reader. Certainly the most recent educational sensation indicates that there are still crowds of professional educators and parents to whom such ideas are not truisms. To see education, not as a preparation for life or as a process segregated from other activities, but as identical with living, takes more imagination than most teachers have yet acquired. If the school is a place where children live intensively and expressively, it will be a place where they will learn. The ideal educational system would continue with the adult all through his or her active life, sharpening skill, interpreting experience, providing intellectual tools with which to express and enjoy. Just as education and play should be scarcely separable for the little child, so education and work should be scarcely separable for the adult. By closing off the school and boxing up learning we have really smothered education. We are only just beginning to revive. We have first to make over the school into a real child-community, filled with activities which stimulate the child and focus his interest towards some constructive work, and then we have to teach the teacher how to expose the child to the various activities and guide his interest so that it will be purposeful. The school can thus become a sifter where children unconsciously as they live along from day to day are choosing the ways in which they can best serve both themselves and their community as workers and citizens in the great scheme.

The papers on the Gary schools are reprinted not because I wish to exploit the system or its superintendent, but because of the usefulness of a concrete example to hang wandering theory to. The schools of Mr. Wirt’s conception, in spite of many inadequacies of realization, still seem to me the happiest framework I have yet found in the American public school for the fulfillment of the new educational ideals. No one can deny that in the actual schools much of the old unconsciousness and regimentation still stick their unwelcome head through, but my somewhat naïve impressions do reflect, I am sure, a spirit which is there, and a possibility that is very near for the American community to catch. To praise one thing, however, is not to damn everything else, and it would be false to pretend that almost every city in our country has not latent within its system the embryo of the modern school. Some are simply more conscious than others. Some actually envisage education as living.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I EDUCATION AND LIVING 3

II THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL 11

III THE WASTED YEARS 18

IV PUZZLE--EDUCATION 26

V LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL 32

VI IN A SCHOOLROOM 41

VII THE CULT OF THE BEST 49

VIII EDUCATION IN TASTE 57

IX UNIVERSAL SERVICE AND EDUCATION 66

X THE SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE 77

XI THE PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY 84

XII WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION? 91

XIII THE ORGANIC SCHOOL 100

XIV COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN 104

XV REALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 116

XVI APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL 127

XVII THE NATURAL SCHOOL 136

XVIII THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL 146

XIX THE TRAINED MIND 154

XX CLASS AND SCHOOL 161

XXI A POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 173

XXII AN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 182

XXIII ORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION 189

XXIV EDUCATION FOR WORK 197

XXV CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 206

XXVI WHO OWNS THE UNIVERSITIES 215

XXVII THE UNDERGRADUATE 222

XXVIII MEDIEVALISM IN THE COLLEGES 230

EDUCATION AND LIVING

What is the current broadening of the public school--the bringing in of gymnasiums and pools, shops and gardens, dramatics and organized play--but a new effort to realize the school as more a life and less an institution? Are we not getting a little restless over the resemblance of our schools to penitentiaries, reformatories, orphan asylums, rather than to free and joyous communities? A school system whose object was little more than to abolish illiteracy and prepare the more fortunate for college was bound to fall an easy prey to the mechanical organizer. Education in this country has been one-sidedly professionalized. The machinery was developed before the moving ideals were worked out. Professional educators have worked too much for a logical system rather than for an experimental adjustment to the life needs of individual children. We have achieved a democratic education in the sense that common schooling is practically within the reach of every one. But a democratic education in the sense of giving equal opportunities to each child of finding in the school that life and training which he peculiarly needs, has still to be generally worked for. The problem of American education is now to transform an institution into a life.

Let us not deny the value of that emphasis on administration. The slow progress from the diffuse district school to the well organized state system represents the welding of a powerful instrument for a future democracy to use. Centralized and efficient administration is indispensable for insuring educational benefits to all. But there is a danger that we shall create capable administrators faster than we create imaginative educators. It is so easy to forget that this tightening of the machinery is only in order that the product may be finer and richer. Unless it does so result in more creative life it will be a detriment rather than a good. For it is too easy to make the running of the machine, the juggling with schedules and promotions and curricula and courses and credits, the end. To institutionalize a social function is always the line of least resistance.

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

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

To become that she will have to think of the school as a place where children spend their time living not as artificially segregated minds but as human things. She would have to judge their activities in terms of an interesting life. And that involves good health, play, sport, constructive work, talk, questioning, exercise, friendship, personal expression, as well as reading and learning. A place where children really lived would be a place that gave opportunities for all these activities to just the extent that children were individually capable of expressing themselves. Children want to be busy together, they want to try their hand at tools and materials, they want to find out what older people do and watch them at it. They have to flounder about and have all sorts of experiences before they touch their spring of interest and face their real direction. All their education is really acquired in the same random way that the baby learns to control his movements and respond to his environment. No matter how the school tries to organize their learning, and feed it to them in graduated doses, this way of trial and error is really the one by which they will learn. You have no way of guaranteeing that they will learn what you think you are teaching them. What you can do is to put them in a controlled environment where they will most frequently strike the electric contact of curiosity and response, and get experiences that thrill with meaning for them.

Life in its lowest terms is a matter of passing the time. It would be well if educators would more often remember this. If they did, would they not examine more carefully the life which they provide for growing youth? College and high school life is reasonably antiseptic, it is not oppressive, it is not particularly arbitrary or shabby. But compared abstractly with what might be a good life, given the interests and outlook and needed training of youth, would it not seem a little sorry? Is it not a travesty, except for the few, on a really stimulating and creative way of spending time? Suppose educators seriously measured their schools by this standard of the good life. Suppose we really tried to carry out the principle that the secret of life is to pass time worthily.

Most of this current educational interest is another stab at the age-long problem of making education synonymous with living. We are rediscovering the fact that we learn only as we desire, as we seek to understand or as we are busy. We are trying to make the school a place where children cannot escape doing these things. We see now that education has grown up in this country in a separate institutional compartment, jealously apart from the rest of the community life. It has developed its own technique, its own professional spirit. Its outlines are cold and logical. It is far the best ordered of our institutions. Its morale is the nearest thing we have to compulsory military service. There is something remote and antiseptic about even our best schools. They contrast strangely with the color and confusion of the rest of our American life. The bare class-rooms, the stiff seats, the austere absence of beauty, suggest a hospital where painful if necessary intellectual operations are going on. Additions of gymnasiums and shops and studios to such a school will do little to set the current of life flowing again. The whole school must be loosened up, the stiff forms made flexible, children thought of as individuals and not as “classes.” Thus new activities must be woven into a genuine child-community life. These things must be the contacts with experience that waken and focus children’s interests. They must be opportunities for spontaneous living.

The school constantly encroaches on the home. It provides play and work opportunities that even well-to-do homes cannot provide. It must take over too the free and comradely atmosphere of the homes and the streets where children play. Let teachers face the fact that they cannot teach masses of children anything with the assurance that they will really assimilate it. What they can do is to fill the school with all kinds of typical experiences, and see that children are exposed to them. They can see that children have a chance to dabble in them, touch tools and growing things, read books, draw, swim, play and sing. Let the teacher cleverly supervise and coördinate, see that the children’s interests are drawn out, and that what they do contributes toward their growth. In the last analysis, each child will have to educate himself up to his capacity. He can only educate himself by living. The school will be the place where he lives most worthily.

Our best American public schools are already in sight of such an ideal. Americans need more than anything to learn how to live. This is the first business of education.

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS SCHOOL

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

The free public school, therefore, became the place where children took into themselves such automatically usable knowledge as would be important for them in the remote future of their active adulthood. Since book-knowledge had acquired honorific distinction as the badge of a leisure class--and did not every democratic parent wish his child to “rise in the world”?--and since it was of all knowledge the most easily negotiable in the form of simple processes and facts, this type of knowledge became the stock of the school. Then at some time a not unintelligent attempt was supposedly made to compare this current stock of intellectual paper money with the specie circulating outside in the community at large, to see whether the school reserve was accurate and sufficient. This attention lapsed, however, and the curriculum became a closed system, handed down to the uncritical and unconscious child with the authority of prestige and the sanctions of school discipline.

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

The fine technique of the unconscious school as worked out by educators in normal schools and teachers’ colleges in the last forty years can be read in any current school survey. Here the coincidence of work and study with the child’s interests is accidental. Indeed, many parents and teachers are still opposed to making too large a part of the curriculum appeal to the child’s ephemeral interests. Discipline is still thought of not as willed skill, which it is, but as the ability to do painful things. A world where children do joyfully and well what interests them, instead of what is “good” for them (because unpleasant), still excites the envious mistrust of an older generation.

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

The discovery is not new that all the skill necessary to live an effective life in America to-day is not contained in a few readers, arithmetics, abridged histories and geographies, an elementary algebra and plane geometry, a Latin, Greek, or German grammar, with cullings from the works of Cæsar, Virgil, Xenophon, Cicero and Homer. When educators found that adult life overflowed these narrow limits, they introduced manual training, gymnastics, drawing and music; but the child became no more self-conscious, for these were merely additional “subjects.” The radical discovery of to-day is that the adult world is not primarily engaged in turning information into power. The adult rarely has a historical or a geographical or an arithmetical thought unconnected with experience. What he does is to work very concretely at a myriad of occupations, intellectual and mechanical, concerned with making a living, bringing up a family, dealing with people, casting a vote, reading newspapers. He has a great diversity of horizons, and the most effective people are those who react most intelligently to their experience as a whole. Power and information increase together, not one at a time. The effective adult is a self-conscious personality. The only school which can be a genuine preparation for life is a self-conscious school. The child must learn to live in the same kind of world that his elders live in. The school must be the community in which his child-life develops. His play and work must be, first of all, interesting activity.

Fortunately the modern movement to make the school self-conscious has begun at the bottom. The four earlier years of the public school as taught by recently trained teachers are now generally filled, even in conservative city systems, with this new vivid consciousness. Dramatization, the learning of reading and writing and arithmetic through play, group-games and folk-dancing, gardening, constructive wood-working--all this is a sign of the growing self-consciousness of the school. In the more advanced schools, shop and science work, community excursions, illustrative drawing and design, fertilize the life of the older children. The most complete self-consciousness is realized in a school of the Wirt type, where all the varied activities are arranged to contribute to the upkeep or enrichment of the school plant and the school community. For the older children the expanding community becomes an extension of the school, and they learn the operation of the adult world by going out to see the institutions of their community and asking questions about them. In the self-conscious school the child’s own curiosity sets the cue, and the school’s work is to provide manifold opportunities for the satisfaction of that curiosity.

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

III

THE WASTED YEARS

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