Part 5

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

It is this background, spirit, philosophy, behind the educational mind that the critical public is becoming more and more restless about. It does not challenge details of mechanical and administrative organization. These have been worked out with an ingenuity and a completeness all too thorough. The public is demanding now a similar attention to the conscious and spiritual side of learning and teaching. The ideal of the school as an embryonic community life, of the child as a growing personality to whom the activity of the school must have intense reality, of education as the training of expression, creation--this has hardly begun to be generally felt. The faults discovered by the Springfield and Portland school surveys arose largely from a careless and mechanical philosophy of life, an educational philosophy that had not sufficiently emphasized these ideals. The investigators were able, for instance, to tell on the moment whether a teacher had come from a certain training-school by her method and attitudes.

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

XI

THE PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY

If we are to have better schools in our cities we must know what kind of schools we have now. In an attempt to tell us, the school survey has in the last few years been developed with an admirable technique, and the passion for being surveyed has spread to cities large and small. No more illuminating document has come out of this effort than the recently published study of the school system of Portland, Oregon. It stirs enthusiasm because it shows the progress that has been made in clarifying the current problems and the ideals which must be realized if the public school is to prepare the child of to-day for intelligent participation in the society of which he will form a part. Compared with the investigations in New York City and Springfield, Illinois, this Portland survey, under the direction of Professor Cubberley of Stanford University, represents a new achievement in educational thinking. Those surveys contented themselves with a criticism of details, or, at best, with a vague groping for constructive plan. The Portland survey represents a definite break with the tradition. It is characterized by a clear idea not only of how the system fails to meet the modern demands, but of how these demands can be met.

The investigators cannot, of course, explain how it is that one of the wealthiest and most comfortable of American cities, a city at once entirely modern and homogeneously American, should have the most mechanical and formalistic school system these educators had ever seen. One gets the sense of how without leadership the school may become a little backwater in a community. In Portland, a city of 250,000 people, commercial and residential center for the great Northwest, these investigators found the “maintenance unchanged of a rigidly prescribed mechanical system poorly adapted to the needs either of children or community.” “Universal practice,” they say, “is enlisted in the maintenance of a rigid, minutely and mechanically prescribed system of instruction, organization, administration, supervision, examination and inspection. Any change in this elaborate mechanism meets with resistance, positive as well as negative. So far as this system is adapted at any point to the actual needs of the individual children and youth that come under it, so far as it is adapted to the needs of the communities for adequately trained recruits to serve the community, the adaptation is accidental, not the result of intelligence now operative at that point.”

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

The viciousnesses which the investigators found in the Portland system are those which are familiar to all who feel the defects of their own schooling, or have set about to examine the reasons for the poor quality of the school output. On the administrative side there are all the evils that come from retaining a scheme of amateur control in a system which has of necessity become professionalized. A board which is directing a village school must keep all school matters under its supervision. But when that village has become a vast city, a school board which keeps the strings in its own hands is simply manufacturing wastefulness and inefficiency. A lay board which employs highly paid and highly trained principals, supervisors, etc., and then insists on directing all business--from the engaging of janitors and the personal selection of teachers to the suspension of by-laws whereby a schoolroom may be leased for an evening lecture or a teacher excused to attend the funeral of her grandmother--labels itself as archaic and unfit. It is one of the cardinal principles of modern political and industrial organization that it is a waste of money to pay salaries large enough to buy judgment, discretion and expert skill and then not permit them to be used.

This refusal to delegate responsibility, the investigators found, paralyzed initiative all through the school system. Nothing could be done without reference to an untrained body of laymen who, however conscientious they might be, must usually decide spasmodically and without any definite educational policy. Indeed their conscientiousness is often a positive vice. Shiftlessness on their part would have permitted initiative on the parts of principals and teachers. Under present conditions the distinction between good teachers and bad fades out. The concern of every one becomes to keep the machinery going, not to criticize the work and keep it adapted to the individual aptitudes of the children.

This administrative lifelessness has its counterpart in a pedagogical routine the focus of which is the “course of study.” The curriculum is uniform for all children. It is “vivisected into fifty-four dead pieces,” laid down in pages in certain adopted textbooks. “The only thought devoted to the formulation of the course of study,” say the investigators, “was the simple mathematical thought necessary to parcel out the pages of the books.” The teacher’s duty is to haul the pupil through the course of study. This is done by means of the formal recitation, where “pupils answer hollow word-questions with memorized hollow word-statements.” Term examinations discover how many of these word-statements are left in the pupils’ minds. An elaborate system of inspection and supervision exists to check up and grade both teachers and principals and ensure that the hallowed “course of study” is fully being carried out. Many of the teachers are trained in the local schools and turned back into the system to perpetuate these methods. A state tenure-of-office act keeps all teachers in their places.

The effect upon the children is logical. The school becomes an automatic process of elimination. Those who can be hauled through the course of study are hauled. Those whose talents do not lie in the capacity to memorize printed pages pass out of the school or become hopelessly mired in the lower grades. “If the sixteen-year-old child has not yet transferred to his memory Parts 37 to 54, inclusive, of the dead and comminuted curriculum, the chief constituents of which are abstract arithmetic and technical grammar, then he must begin with Part 37 and appropriate that and each of the succeeding 17 Parts in order, before he can even be associated with youth of approximately his own age, and before he can engage in study suited to his age and condition--study and exercises that will be of immediate and practical value to him in the effort he must shortly make to serve society for the sake of his own livelihood.” And this system, formulated and approved twenty years ago by high educational authorities, the survey stigmatizes as valuable only in its “cheapness and facility of administration, and the relief that it affords educational officers and teachers from all responsibility of knowing and of meeting the individual needs of their pupils.”

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

XII

WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION?

At a time when more people are thinking intelligently about American education than ever before, it is unfortunate that there should be any confusion between the widely diverse trails that experimentation is opening up to the modern school. It is becoming increasingly evident that the “experimental” in education does not at all mean the same thing to educational administrators as it does to educational idealists. “Experimental education” has not yet been pitted in competition against the “experimental school,” but it is not unlikely that the different techniques which they suggest may come to seem hostile to each other, and so the real values of both be lost. At present the two seem to be developing in a fairly complete disregard of each other. It would be dangerous for American education to tangle itself in the dilemma of choosing between them. On the other hand, it would be even more disastrous to confuse them. If we attempt to apply the quantitative standards of the new “experimental education” to the life of the “experimental school,” or to infuse the qualitative ideals of the “experimental school” into the technique of “experimental education,” we run the risk of spoiling that modern and socially-adjusted school towards which we are all feeling our way.

When the inventive school superintendent or professor of education speaks of “experimental education,” he is thinking, not of the “model school,” but of the new standard tests in the fundamental subjects by which the work of large masses of public school children is being regularly measured and compared. The city school survey has elaborated a technique of intellectual measurements which is giving us very rapidly a genuine quantitative science of education. A report like Professor Judd’s in the “Cleveland Survey”--“Measuring the Work of the Public Schools”--is a storehouse of suggestiveness for all who like to see how mathematics can be fruitfully applied to living. These statistical studies measure accurately the performance of children in the different grades and at different ages in the specific literate skills which everybody needs even to start fairly in the race of opportunity. The standard tests have been worked out experimentally with great numbers of school-children so that average norms of accomplishment can be set for any class or any individual. Rates of speed and quality of handwriting, and their relation to each other; ability to spell common words; rate and capacity of accurate figuring; rate and quality of silent and oral reading;--these are the aptitudes that are rigidly measured by the tests. The children are treated as segregated arithmetical minds, reading minds, spelling minds, as units of intellectual behavior. The tests are not “examinations,” for they do not aim to show any absolute attainment of “knowledge.” Their value is in the comparison they afford of individual skill, and of deviations from a norm of effectiveness. In the mass of scores you have an intellectual relief map of your class, your school, your city system.

Now nothing could apparently be more deadly and mechanical than this treating of living children as if they were narrowly isolated minds. In this “experimental education” we are evidently in another world from the “experimental school.” Yet out of these tests emerge the most important implications for modern education. Out of this “experimental education” we at last get a scientific basis for the “modern school.” For we have irrefutable proof of the enormous diversity of minds and aptitudes. We have a demonstration of the utter foolishness of subjecting children to a uniform educational process. We have accurate proof of the fallacy of the “average” in education. These tests are added proof of the unscientific character of the typical public school on that very technical and administrative side which has been most carefully developed. The graded school was a brilliant invention for its time, but the bases of classification are shown by these new tests to be absurd. Children are now classified, for purposes of education, largely by age and average standing. The tests show that neither category has the slightest relevance for effective learning. We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless. But mere numerical age is no clue whatsoever to mental or even physiological age, and minds with the same average may plot out very differently for every individual one of the various skills and interests that elementary training involves. Our educational grading has been as sentimental and sterile as the ancient philosophers’ classification of matter into earth, water, fire, air. Such a conception of the world was interesting, but there was nothing you could do with it. All the school has done with its classifying has been to get the children into groups where they could be dosed with an orderly sequence of lessons. There has been no handle by which their heterogeneous minds and wills could be taken hold of and directed. The rule of the classroom is necessarily military, because such diverse people could only be unified in the most objective and external and coercive way. No internal control would be possible. So the teacher must devote a large part of her educational energy to the mere business of policing. When she actually “taught,” it was only the average child that she could really address--the fairly bright mediocrity. The other pupils wasted their time almost in direct proportion to their deviation above or below that average. Children passed up through their educational life on the basis of an “average mark,” which represented nothing whatever but a number. The standard tests have shown repeatedly that ability is so unevenly distributed that the brightest fourth-year children overlap the poorest eighth-year children. However children may average, scarcely two children in the same class will ever be found to have the identical capacity in the different subjects. The tests reveal not only that children differ, but just how curiously and widely they do differ.

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

These truths seem elementary and obvious, yet we had to wait for this “experimental education” to shake complacency in the “graded school.” Now if we accept these tests we have to conclude that it is useless to grade children for education unless those “grades” correspond accurately and specifically to the capacities of the children. Work must be done in each specific subject with--and only with--those who have approximately the same capacity. The “average” is totally unknown in that “real life” which we are constantly forced to set up in antithesis to the school. In no function of life is any one going to be judged by a composite ability to read, write, spell, figure. One succeeds not through any average skill or average information, but through the ability to throw all one’s skill and all one’s intelligence where it is demanded. A measurement of intelligence by averages will always produce just that ineffectiveness and vagueness for which the products of the public school are censured at present.

The fallacy of the educational “average” involves another fallacy, equally obvious but equally prevalent. This is the fallacy of the “partially perfect.” The school ranks the seventy per cent. child equal to the hundred per cent. child. Children pass to more difficult work on an admitted basis of imperfect accomplishment. But for any real effectiveness in the world it is not enough to be habitually only seventy per cent. right. Whenever you need to be literate, the world demands that you be actually literate. If you have information, you are either useless or dangerous unless your information is accurate. It is better not to know arithmetic at all than persistently to make only seven hits out of ten. For all practical purposes your child is as much a failure at seventy per cent. as he is at zero per cent. It will avail him little to be able to read and write and figure at a rate and an excellence only seventy per cent. of the standard. In any situation which requires these elementary skills he will be almost as much handicapped as if he were entirely illiterate. It is time that the school faced the bitter truth that life demands an approximate perfection in whatever one tries to do. Education must shape all its technique towards this approximate perfection. It is not necessary that all should do the same thing. But it is necessary that what one pretends to do one should succeed gradually in doing. The individual who is allowed to persist continuously on a level of imperfect accomplishment is not being educated. For him education is a failure. He should either drop his technique, or ways should be found to improve him towards mastery. What children are learning at any one time they should be learning with a sense of control. The more difficult should not be confronted till the less difficult has been absorbed. And this controlled progress will be possible only in a school where children work with their equals. Classification in education should be based only on specific proficiency.

The new “experimental education” is engaged in making dramatic in the schools these truths. It is a force even more revolutionary than the idealism of the “experimental school.” The situation suggested by the “curve of distribution” is one of the most momentous facts to be reckoned with by us of to-day. It is making over our theories of democracy, social reform and social progress. To work out its manifold implications in the school is to touch the very nerve of our democratic future.

XIII

THE ORGANIC SCHOOL

The Fairhope Summer School, which has just closed its season (Sept., 1915), at Greenwich, Connecticut, has given to Northern people an opportunity to see at work Mrs. Marietta Johnson’s widely known ideal of “organic education.” Just as the Gary plan has shown how the city school may give a varied training to great masses of children with a freedom and flexibility never believed possible, so Mrs. Johnson has demonstrated how the small community, or even household, by using the natural environment and the natural needs as laboratory and workshop, may adjust the child to life far more accurately than any formal school. No school carries out more carefully Professor Dewey’s dictum that the child can only be educated by concerning himself with what has meaning to him as a child, and not what is to have meaning to him later as an adult.

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