Part 8

In the second place, the plan solves most of the problems of vocational and industrial training which now confront the public school. It catches the child’s curiosity and skill on the upstroke. It makes no separation of manual from intellectual work, and avoids that sinister caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement. And from the point of view of economy again, the scheme of devoting industrial work to actual care of the school-plant enables the school to provide a great variety of occupations almost without additional cost to the community.

In the third place, the plan provides a large measure of individual instruction. It is a school for every kind of a child. The flexibility of schedules, the coöperation of outside agencies like the churches, the varied activities, give opportunity for the fullest development of differing interests and capacities.

In the fourth place, the plan carries out throughout the school life the educational truth that learning can only come through doing. The habits and attitudes of careful scientific observation, or purposeful interesting activity which is neither work nor play, the social, democratic, and coöperative background which such a school cultivates, are exactly the qualities we need for our younger generation in American society.

Such a school carries out the best ideals of American democracy, as I see them, in an extremely effective way. Its philosophy is American, its democratic organization is American. It is one of the institutions that our American culture should be proudest of. Perhaps professional educators, accustomed to other concepts and military methods and administrative illusions, will not welcome this kind of school. But teachers hampered by drill and routine will want it, and so will parents and children.

XVIII

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL

A recent article in the “New York Times” (Oct. 17, 1915) by Dr. Thomas S. Baker, Headmaster of the Tome School, contains an able pedagogical criticism of the Gary school which is typical of the general attitude towards the Gary idea on the part of conservative schoolmen. Nothing could bring out more clearly the difference in educational values between this professional teaching opinion and the broad social vision of Superintendent Wirt. Dr. Baker admits the impressive social effectiveness of the plan. It is “the last development in socializing the schools.” Mr. Wirt is “not only an educator, but also a social reformer, a city worker.” But Dr. Baker’s argument is really the specialized pedagogical one against the social. Where Mr. Wirt sees the school as a community center, a children’s world, Dr. Baker sees it as an educational factory. “The social value of the Gary schools,” he says, “is beyond question. Its pedagogic excellence has still to be determined.” From his point of view, a school is not so much a place to train effective citizens as to make “thorough scholars.” He questions whether “these side issues in the scheme of child-training”--the gymnasia, shops, laboratories, which the Gary school contains--“are really essential in mental development.” He is afraid that the young citizens of Gary learn more from their industrial shops and science laboratories than from their books.

Dr. Baker’s guarded argument is really a glorification of “intellectual discipline” as against an intelligent capacity to lead an organic life in a modern society which needs above all things resourceful adaptation and social appreciations. It is a question of ideals, and no more important issue was ever put to a people than this one of how we want our next generation trained. The school is not only the one institution which assimilates all the people, but it is the most easily modifiable. It is not only the easiest lever of social progress but the most effective, for it deals with relatively plastic human material. To decide what kind of a school we want is almost to decide what kind of a society we want.

If we only want that kind of a school which would “make hard-working and accurate scholars and produce thoughtful men,” we must resign ourselves to a progressive softening of the fiber and capacity of the mass of our people. The average educator acts as if he thought of his child-world as a level plain of capacities. There is the mass of unskilled, unawakened minds; here is the level of scholarship, knowledge, civic virtue, appreciations. Education is to him the process of lifting up the mass from their primitive level to the higher one. The public school is the elevator into which all are to be shoveled and transported to the upper story. And the American public school in the last fifty years has been faithfully following this ideal.

The truth is, of course, that mental aptitude is not any such level desert, but rather a series of inclined planes. When we try to educate all the children of all the people, we are not dealing with a homogeneous mass, but with sliding scales of capacity. A mental test of the school-children of a state would reveal an incline extending in orderly gradation from the genius down to the imbecile. A physical test would give us a different slant, a test for artistic or mechanical capacity another. Stand at the center of divine average and try to lever any of these slopes into a horizontal position and you find half of your society squatting heavily at the lower end. You may ascribe it to race capacity, personal heredity, social environment, malnutrition, defective nervous organization or anything you please, but the fact remains that the greater part of the human raw material will be permanently resistive to or only dully appreciative of any attempts to elevate them to a level. This is true of any capacity you may choose. The outstanding truth of society seems to be the heterogeneous distribution of capacities. And the irony of it is that after artistic capacity true intellectual capacity is probably the rarest. For the public school to try to make intellectualists of all its children is a sheer defiance of sociological reality.

Some educators, while they recognize this diversity, yet insist on uniform standards, uniform curricula, uniform discipline, on the ground that social order in a democracy is imperiled unless the highest degree of like-mindedness prevails. Such a democracy would be the stagnant democracy of China. The result of these attempts at standardization have been the automatic centrifugal flinging off into space of the children whose interests were not intellectual, who were no more capable of being made into “accurate scholars” than they were into artists and poets. And from those who did not get quite flung off, but clung on with their teeth, we get most of our prevailing pseudo-culture. To keep on trying to “develop the mind” and produce “thorough scholarship” in those whom we force to submit to educational processes, means simply to go on creating a nerveless and semi-helpless mass of boys and girls who will never take their effective and interested place in the world because they have no mental tools which they can wield. Such a course is coming to be generally recognized as a kind of slow national suicide, a slow suffocation of industrial and social progress.

The schools do change, but the schoolmen yield grudgingly. Nothing could be more naïve than the test which Dr. Baker proposes for evaluating the Gary plan. Submit, he says, the highest class in the Gary schools to an examination by the College Examining Board. If the students pass, the Gary system will be justified of its children. Was ever a more patent assertion of the professional bias? Let the children drop out of the lower grades untrained except in the rudiments, but if the small minority in the highest class passes its Vergil and algebra and English literature and German with marks as high as the graduates of the Tome School, then the Gary system will cease to be considered a “mere experiment.” If this is what the critics of the Gary plan mean when they plead for an “evaluation of this novel experiment,” we may well hope that it will escape the peril.

Such a conception of educational values cannot become too speedily obsolete. A public school is a mockery unless it educates the public. It cannot make the rarefied and strained product at the top the test of its effectiveness. And the public is not ideally educated unless its individuals--all of them--are intelligent, informed, skilled, resourceful, up to the limit of their respective capacities. Life itself can no longer be trusted to provide this education; the school must substitute. The Gary school deliberately sets such an ideal. Democracy does not mean uniformity, but it does mean equality of opportunity. A democratic school would be one where every child had the chance to discover and develop aptitude. The Gary school, with its harmonious activities of intellectual, manual, artistic and scientific work, physical education and play, gives just this chance. Democratic education does not mean the provision of separate schools for different kinds of children, or even separate courses in the same school, as the movement for industrial education is now threatening to bring. This is to create at once invidious distinctions, and fasten class education upon us. To say that children are different does not mean that some are fitted to be scholars and others to be manual workers, some to be artists and some to be scientists. The differences are differences of focus and not of quality.

To most children will appear in the course of school life some dominant interest, and it is upon the cultivation of that interest that the child’s chance of being more than a nerveless mediocrity will depend. It is upon that training that his chance of being absorbed out of the school into the social and industrial world will depend. At the same time, without a common background with his fellows he will be alien and adrift in the world. Interest and skill in one’s work, whether it be making automobiles or teaching Greek, an acquaintance with the contemporary world, an alert intelligence which is always seeking to diminish the area of things human that are alien to one--a man or woman with this would be truly educated in any society. But both focus and background are supremely necessary. The present educational system does not really set itself to provide either. Only in a school organized on some such plan as the Gary plan will such education be possible.

This does not mean that every child is to marvelously blossom into ideally alert and skilled intelligence. But we can be sure that a school which gives opportunity for the development of the most varied aptitudes in the free play of a child-community life will have done all that it could. No one pretends that the Gary education is the intrinsically ideal education for all time. But we can say that, given the best social demands of America to-day, this school will make for the most robust, effective, intelligent citizenship of which we are at present capable.

XIX

THE TRAINED MIND

How much longer are we to expect the headmasters of our private secondary schools to view with anything but alarm the current radical tendencies in education? In the November “Atlantic,” Dr. Alfred E. Stearns of Phillips-Andover is stirred to wrath against the fallacies of the modern school as expounded by Mr. Flexner and others. The paper contributes little new to the well-worn theory of mental discipline upon which upper-class education has so long been based. But it is highly significant as a pattern of the “trained” mind as it works in the exposure of fallacies. Dr. Stearns is presumably an immensely successful product of the old idealistic and linguistic education, gained by strenuous effort and vigorous thinking. It is worth while to examine how such a mind argues, what it considers as clinching evidence, how it hopes to convince the alert intellectual of to-day.

The “fallacies” in modern education which Dr. Stearns is exposing are the materialistic and utilitarian ideal, the belief in the non-transferability of mental power from one field to another, the cultivation of interest rather than discipline, of play rather than drudgery, the scientific rather than the cultural emphasis. He wishes to persuade the reader that all these tendencies make for the perversion of the child’s character, the weakening of his mental grasp, the materializing of his soul. One waits eagerly for proofs of such very serious menaces. The student of education to-day is rapidly acquiring a belief in objective evidence, in statistical or at least analytic experiment, in scientific formulation. The kind of evidence that appeals to the alert student to-day is the kind that comes out of the psychological laboratory of Clark University, or Columbia or Chicago, out of the great city school surveys, like Portland or Cleveland or New York, out of the experimental schools in different parts of the country. These are the arenas where educational problems will, he believes, ultimately be solved. And to him the so-called “fallacies” in modern education are not “dogmas” or “assumptions” at all, but rather hopeful hypotheses which are now being tested in dozens of American schools.

Is this the sort of evidence to which Dr. Stearns’ trained mind appeals when he wishes to discredit the “new” education? Not at all. He does not even so much as show that he is acquainted with the existence of the great mass of literature which would throw light on the success or failure of the radical theories which he deplores. Educational journals, school surveys, reports of intelligence tests, descriptions of play schools,--none of these seem to have come into contact with his training. For the benefit of the philosophically-minded, he does not even refer to the writings of Dewey or Hall, or the other radical writers on education. All this writing and doing which represents the new education at work, he lumps into “the pedagogical expert,” upon whom he lavishes his anxious scorn. The only concrete data he offers is the record of the College Examination Board, which Dr. Flexner, whom he is criticizing, had cited in his “Modern School.” Dr. Flexner had argued against Latin and mathematics in the secondary school on the ground that the majority of even the picked students failed in them. Dr. Stearns succeeds in showing that a majority of college candidates fail not only in Latin and Algebra but in all other subjects as well. The normal mind, untrained by the old dispensation, would consider these statistics very damaging to Dr. Stearns’ cause. The inexorable conclusion would be not that Latin and algebra should be retained in the secondary school curriculum, but that the entire curriculum should undergo a radical reorganization in teaching methods and educational philosophy.

Dr. Stearns, like most of the critics of the “new” education, makes the fundamental error of confusing the narrow business man, who sees no “use” for his son’s taking Latin or algebra in school, with the “new” educator who would give these subjects a new orientation in the curriculum. The “practical” business man is as much anathema to the “modern school” as he is to the cultural school. The “modern school” would not refuse any subject to minds that fed upon it and fused it into vital experience. But it would not force it on minds that could not digest it. And Dr. Stearns’ own figures show how generally indigestible, with all the drudgery and mental discipline in the world, is the entire conventional secondary school curriculum. The pseudo-modern high school where science and manual arts have been added, only to be taught in the same unilluminated way, is as objectionable to the “new” educator as it is to Dr. Stearns.

Since the latter’s only use of objective evidence proves a boomerang, what considerations does he think will be persuasive in his attack on the “new” education? It is easy to see. His reliance is entirely on authority, upon personal belief. Several very successful business men of his acquaintance attribute their success to the training of the old education. The majority of schoolmasters are not yet ready to abandon the doctrine of mental discipline. The sons of Mr. Hill go to college to get something which their father, for all his success, recognizes that he missed. It is a serious question in the minds of many observers whether Dr. Eliot’s advocacy of “observational” training is sound. Always the reference to personal authority, to prestige, to anything but objective standards on which both sides may agree! Always the naïve appeal to schoolmasters and successful business men, the pillars of his world! Dr. Stearns deplores the materialistic trend of the age, but he does not consider how powerfully his own innocent use of the verdict of successful business men as scientific evidence is likely to glorify material success in the minds of his students.

Dr. Stearns’ logic is as unconvincing as his evidence. A doctrine is monstrous. Therefore, he implies, it is untrue. Intelligent children are usually bright in all their school subjects. Therefore, if you force a child to learn through drudgery, you automatically endow him with general intelligence. The interest of boys in wireless telegraphy and automobiles, he thinks, is the best argument for keeping all these things out of a school where one must learn to work. At the same time, Dr. Stearns objects to scientific schools because students so soon lose interest in their work. But, according to the gospel of drudgery, why would not this make science the ideal “mental discipline”?

Such a paper as this shows the technique of a thoroughly obsolete mind. Such “mental discipline” as this old education gave is evidently of little use in handling a world of facts, of experiment, of recorded tests. Criticism does not make such thinkers critical. It only makes them belligerent. They do not analyze, they repel. They are more interested in a moral justification for the structure of their craft and their practices than in the truth. Dr. Stearns’ paper is the best evidence of how little relevant is the old linguistic and idealistic education to the intellectual demands of to-day. The critical, analytic, impersonal, experimental approach is wholly lacking in his paper. His evidence is personal authority, his logic is special pleading. Parents with sons in private schools might well view with grave concern the kind of “trained mind” which is likely to be developed under such masters of the old education. They might ask how likely a boy, taught to use his mind the way Dr. Stearns uses his, is to analyze and grasp the complex facts of the world into which he will come.

XX

CLASS AND SCHOOL

The proposed experimental school which the General Education Board is to found in conjunction with Teachers’ College in New York has sent a shiver through the conservative schoolmen of America. It is assumed that the policy of the new school will follow Dr. Flexner’s manifesto of the “Modern School,” that adroit and uncompromising crystallization of the radical philosophy of our new American education. Dr. Flexner has proved himself to be an admirable agitator, for he has succeeded, with doctrines that public-school educators have been discussing for ten years and which experimental schools all through the country have been testing out, in rousing the slumberous camp of private secondary schoolmasters to a sense of what is going on in the educational world. The private secondary school is the last stronghold of educational conservatism. Enlightenment has to proceed upward through thick layers of prejudice and smugness. Dr. Flexner’s voice seems to have broken in the walls and gotten a hearing for the new education even in the walls of the traditional New England academy. It is for these people that the “Modern School” was written, for only those will find its proposals “revolutionary and dangerous” who have never read a line of Dewey or G. Stanley Hall, never read a copy of an educational journal, never visited an experimental school, or even the newer plants of the best public schools in American cities. There is irony in the location of the new school at Teachers’ College. For the latter has been one of the most persistently experimental educational centers in the country. If its “model” schools have felt in the course of time the blighting touch of conventionality, at least in the Speyer course of industrial arts there has been developed a method of permanent value. There is no more accurate application of Dr. Flexner’s demand that “children should begin by getting acquainted with objects,” “follow the life-cycles of plants and animals,” “the observation and execution of industrial and commercial processes,” and so forth. In this industrial arts course the children are concerned from the beginning with food-products and clothing and building and the way different peoples make their living. Out of this handling of homely things grow the geography and science and history and mathematics. It seems only a question of time before there will be scarcely an elementary school untouched by this practical approach to knowledge through objects and projects and concrete facts.

Dr. Flexner’s tilting is not against our rapidly improving public elementary school so much as it is against the private secondary school, with its sub-college, classical, formal curriculum, and its obsolete educational theory of formal discipline and salvation through drudgery. It is as an object-lesson for this branch of American education that the new school will have permanent value. It will be the heaviest assault which has yet had to be met by that vested educational interest which we know as the private secondary school. The private school has made it its function to prepare the sons and daughters of the well-to-do for college, and so keep up the tradition of leisured and cultured wealth. This is the ideal at the bottom of the hearts of the conservative schoolmen. A knowledge which is useless, like the formal classics and mathematics, is only a sharpened tool of exclusiveness, for only the younger generation of a ruling class can afford to give its time to it. In a growing industrial society such an education becomes ever more and more a dividing line between classes. That the public high school has been largely controlled by the same ideals does not mean at all that this kind of education has been democratized, but merely that the unthinking and clambering middle classes have been hypnotized by vague aspirations of “culture” and “intellectual training” into imitation of the traditional ruling-class education. Some of the strongest opposition to vocational education in the public schools comes even from the ranks of the ambitious wage-earners who “want their children to have the educational advantages they were denied.” They resent what they misinterpret as an attempt to keep their younger generation in a subordinate labor class. What they do not see is that the traditional education which they admire is no real education for the modern world. We find the industrious proletarian and the exclusive Tory joining hands in opposing the new democratic education which is meant to have the effects of freeing both classes and making them fit together to administer a free society. The Tory wants to keep for his children his privileged status; the wage-earner wants to obtain for his children this privileged status. “Book” education, innocent of practicality and use, is still an accepted mark of this geniality. Neither class has any real sense yet of a democratic attitude that finds both the “utilitarian” and the “cultural” irrelevant terms, and demands only effective activity and imaginative understanding from every citizen up to the limit of his capacity.