Part 1

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Were You Ever a Child?

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

MOON-CALF, a NOVEL THE BRIARY-BUSH, a NOVEL

Were You Ever a Child?

by

Floyd Dell

Second Edition, with a New Preface

New York Alfred · A · Knopf 1921

COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1921, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE SCHOOL TEACHERS OF MY CHILDHOOD IN TOKEN OF FORGIVENESS

Preface

This book is intended as an explanation of the new educational ideals and methods now being fostered and developed, under great difficulties, by courageous educators, in various schools for the most part outside the public school system. These schools are “experimental” in the sense that they are demonstrating upon a small scale the vast possibilities of a modern kind of education. The importance of these schools consists not so much in the advantages which they are now able to give to a few of our children, but rather in the prophetic vision they afford of all youth growing up with the same advantages.

Before that can happen, the public must discover what the new education signifies, and why the old educational system is unable to keep up with the demands of modern civilization.

This book attempts only a small part of such a tremendous task of enlightenment. But it does undertake a brief review of the educational situation in the light of our present scientific knowledge of human nature--and more especially, of the human nature of the child.

Education may be said to be, essentially, an adjustment between the child and the age in which he lives. That adjustment can be a painless and happy one; at present it is a sort of civil war. This book deals precisely with the special problems involved in the difficult process of reconciling the nature of the child with the nature of our twentieth-century machine-culture.

The method chosen in these pages for the exposition of this situation is one which many readers will consider unduly flippant, particularly in those passages which deal with the failure of the old educational system. But one might as well laugh at that failure as cry over it; for it is a ridiculous as well as a pathetic failure. The important thing is to recognize that it is a failure, and to lend a hand if we can in the creating of a better kind of education.

F. D.

Contents

I The Child 13

II The School Building 22

III The Teacher 27

IV The Book 36

V The Magic Theory of Education 47

VI The Caste System of Education 53

VII The Canonization of Book-Magic 58

VIII The Conquest of Culture in America 63

IX Smith, Jones and Robinson 69

X Employer vs. Trade Unionist 74

XI The Goose-Step 77

XII The Gary Plan 80

XIII Learning to Work 83

XIV Learning to Play 90

XV First and Last Things 96

XVI The Child as Artist 100

XVII The Artist as a Child 115

XVIII The Drama of Education 124

XIX The Drama of Life 132

XX Curiosity 137

XXI The Right to be Wrong 149

XXII Enterprise 157

XXIII Democracy 167

XXIV Responsibility 173

XXV Love 180

XXVI Education in 1947 A. D. 190

Were You Ever a Child?

Were You Ever a Child?

Were you ever a child?...

I ask out of no indecent curiosity as to your past. But I wish to address only those who would naturally be interested in the subject of Education. Those who haven’t been children themselves are in many respects fortunate beings; but they lack the background of bitter experience which makes this, to the rest of us, an acutely interesting theme--and they might just as well stop reading right here. I pause to allow them to put the book aside....

With my remaining audience, fit though few, I feel that I can get down at once to the brass tacks of the situation. _We have all been educated_--and just look at us!

We ourselves, as products of an educational system, are sufficiently damning evidence against it. If we think of what we happily might have been, and then of what we are, we cannot but concede the total failure or the helpless inadequacy of our education to educe those possibilities of ours into actuality.

Looking back on those years upon years which we spent in school, we know that something was wrong. In this respect our adult convictions find impressive support in our earlier views on the subject. If we will remember, we did not, at the time, exactly approve of the school system. Many of us, in fact, went in for I. W. W. tactics--especially sabotage. Our favourite brand of sabotage was the “withdrawal of efficiency”--in our case a kind of instinctive passive resistance. Amiable onlookers, such as our parents or the board of education, might have thought that we were learning something all the while; but that’s just where we fooled ’em! There were, of course, a few of us who really learned and remembered everything--who could state off-hand, right now, if anybody asked us, in what year Norman the Conqueror landed in England. But the trouble is that so few people ask us!

There was one bit of candour in our schooling--at its very end. They called that ending a Commencement. And so indeed we found it. Bewildered, unprepared, out of touch with the realities, we commenced then and there to learn what life is like. We found it discouraging or inspiriting in a thousand ways; but the thing which struck us at the time most forcibly was that it was in every respect quite unlike school. The values which had obtained there, did not exist outside. One could not cram for a job as if it were an examination; one could not get in the good graces of a machine as if it were a teacher; the docility which won high “marks” in school was called lack of enterprise in the business world, dulness in social life, stupidity in the realm of love. The values of real life were new and different. We had been quite carefully prepared to go on studying and attending classes and taking examinations; but the real world was not like that. It was full of adventure and agony and beauty; its politics were not in the least like the pages of the Civics Text-Book; its journalism and literature had purposes and methods undreamed of by the professor who compiled (from other text-books compiled by other professors) the English Composition Book; going on the road for a wholesale house was a geographical emprise into whose fearful darknesses even the Advanced Geography Course threw no assisting light; the economics of courtship and marriage and parenthood had somehow been overlooked by the man who Lectured upon that Subject.

Whether we had studied our lessons or not; whether we had passed our examinations triumphantly, or just got through by the skin of our teeth--what difference did it make, to us or to the world? And what to us now are those triumphs and humiliations, the failure or success of school, except a matter of occasional humorous reminiscence?

What would we think of a long and painful and expensive surgical operation of which it could be said afterward that it made not the slightest difference to the patient whether it succeeded or failed? Yet, judged by results in later life, the difference between failing and succeeding in school is merely the difference between a railroad collision and a steamboat explosion, as described by Uncle Tom:

“If you’s in a railroad smash-up, why--thar yo’ is! But if yo’s in a steamboat bus’-up, why--whar is yo’?”

It is our task, however, to investigate this confused catastrophe, and fix the responsibility for its casualties.

I. The Child

Education, as popularly conceived, includes as its chief ingredients a Child, a Building, Text-Books, and a Teacher. Obviously, one of them must be to blame for its going wrong. Let us see if it is the Child. We will put him on the witness stand:

Q. Who are you?

A. I am a foreigner in a strange land.

Q. What!

A. Please, sir, that’s what everybody says. Sometimes they call me a little angel; the poet Wordsworth says that I come trailing clouds of glory from Heaven which is my home. On the other hand, I am often called a little devil; and when you see the sort of things I do in the comic supplements, you will perhaps be inclined to accept that description. I really don’t know which is right, but both opinions seem to agree that I am an immigrant.

Q. Speak up so that the jury can hear. Have you any friends in this country?

A. No, sir--not exactly. But there are two people, a woman and a man, natives of this land, who for some reason take an interest in me. It was they who taught me to speak the language. They also taught me many of the customs of the country, which at first I could not understand. For instance, my preoccupation with certain natural--[the rest of the sentence stricken from the record].

Q. You need not go into such matters. I fear you still have many things to learn about the customs of the country. One of them is not to allude to that side of life in public.

A. Yes, sir; so those two people tell me. I’m sure I don’t see why. It seems to me a very interesting and important--

Q. That will do. Now as to those people who are looking after you: Are your relations with them agreeable?

A. Nominally, yes. But I must say that they have treated me in a very peculiar way, which has aroused in me a deep resentment. You see, at first they treated me like a king--in fact, like a Kaiser. I had only to wave my hand and they came running to know what it was I wanted. I uttered certain magic syllables in my own language, and they prostrated themselves before me, offering me gifts. When they brought the wrong gifts, I doubled up my fists and twisted my face, and gave vent to loud cries--and they became still more abject, until at last I was placated.

Q. That is what is called parental love. What then?

A. I naturally regarded them as my slaves. But presently they rebelled. One of them, of whom I had been particularly fond, commenced to make me drink milk from a bottle instead of from--

Q. Yes, yes, we understand. And you resented that?

A. I withdrew the light of my favour from her for a long time. I expressed my disappointment in her. I offered freely to pardon her delinquency if she would acknowledge her fault and resume her familiar duties. But perhaps I did not succeed in conveying my meaning clearly, for at this time I had no command of her language. At any rate, my efforts were useless. And her reprehensible conduct was only the first of a series of what seemed to me indignities and insults. I was no longer a king. I was compelled to obey my own slaves. In vain I made the old magic gestures, uttered the old talismanic commands--in vain even my doubling up of fists and twisting of face and loud outcries; the power was gone from these things. Yet not quite all the power--for my crying was at least a sort of punishment to them, and as such I often inflicted it upon them.

Q. You were a naughty child.

A. So they told me. But I only felt aggrieved at my new helplessness, and wished to recover somewhat of my old sense of power over them. But as I gradually acquired new powers I lost in part my feeling of helplessness. I also found that there were other beings like myself, and we conducted magic ceremonies together in which we transformed ourselves and our surroundings at will. These delightful enterprises were continually being interrupted by those other people, our parents, who insisted on our learning ever more and more of their own customs. They wished us to be interested in their activities, and they were pleased when we asked questions about things we did not understand. Yet there were some questions which they would not answer, or which they rebuked us for asking, or to which they returned replies that, after consultation among ourselves, we decided were fabulous. So we were compelled to form our own theories about these things. We asked, for instance--

Q. Please confine your answers to the questions. That is another matter not spoken of in public; though to be quite frank with you, public taste seems to be changing somewhat in this respect.

A. I am very glad to hear it. I would like to know--

Q. Not now, not now.--You say you have learned by this time many of the customs of the country?

A. Oh, yes, sir! I can dress myself, and wash my face (though perhaps not in a manner quite above criticism), count the change which the grocer gives me, tell the time by a clock, say “Yes, ma’am” and “Thank you”--and I am beginning to be adept in the great national game of baseball.

Q. Have you decided what you would do if you were permitted to take part in our adult activities?

A. I would like to be a truck-driver.

Q. Why?

A. Because he can whip the big horses.

Q. Do you know anything about machinery?

A. No, sir; I knew a boy who had a steam-engine, but he moved away before I got a chance to see how it worked.

Q. You spoke of truck-driving just now. Do you know where the truck-driver is going with his load?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you know where he came from?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you know what a factory is?

A. Yes, sir; Jim’s father got three fingers cut off in a factory.

Q. Do you know where the sun rises and sets?

A. It rises in the East and sets in the West.

Q. How does it get from the West back to the East during the night?

A. It goes under the earth.

Q. How?

A. It digs a tunnel!

Q. What does it dig the tunnel with?

A. With its claws.

Q. Who was George Washington?

A. He was the Father of his country, and he never told a lie.

Q. Would you like to be a soldier?

A. Yes.

Q. If we let you take part in the government of our country, what ticket would you vote?

A. The Republican ticket. My father is a Republican.

Q. What would you do if you had ten cents?

A. I’d go to see Charley Chaplin in the moving-picture show.

Q. Thank you. You can step down.

A. Yes, sir. Where is my ten cents?

And now, gentlemen, you have heard the witness. He has told the truth--and nothing but the truth--and he would have told the whole truth if I had not been vigilant in defence of your modesty. He is, as he says, a foreigner, incompletely naturalized. In certain directions his development has proceeded rapidly. He shows a patriotism and a sense of political principles which are quite as mature as most of ours. But in other directions there is much to be desired. He does not know what kind of world it is he lives in, nor has he any knowledge of how he could best take his place, with the most satisfaction to himself and his fellow-men, in that world--whether as farmer or engineer, poet or policeman, or in the humbler but none the less necessary capacities of dustman or dramatic critic.

It would be idle for us to pretend that we think it will be easy for him to learn all this. But without this knowledge he is going to be a nuisance--not without a certain charm (indeed, I know several individuals who have remained children all their lives, and they are the most delightful of companions for an idle hour), but still, by reason of incapacity and irresponsibility, an undesirable burden upon the community: unable to support himself, and simply not to be trusted in the responsible relations of marriage and parenthood. We simply can’t let him remain in his present state of ignorance.

And yet, how is he ever going to be taught? You have seen just about how far private enterprise is likely to help him. That man and woman of whom he told us have other things to do besides teach him. And if he is turned over to special private institutions, we have no guarantee that they will not take advantage of his helplessness, keep him under their control and rob him of freedom of movement for a long term of years, set him to learning a mass of fabulous or irrelevant information, instil in him a fictitious sense of its value by a system of prizes and punishments, and finally turn him out into our world no better prepared to take his proper part in it than he was before; and thus, having wasted his own time, he would have to waste ours by compelling us to teach him all over again.

In fact, the difficulty of dealing with him appears so great that I am moved to make the statesmanlike proposal--never before, I believe, presented to the public--of passing a law which will prevent this kind of undesirable immigration altogether.

Shall we abolish the Child?

The only other reasonable alternative is for us to undertake this difficult and delicate business of education ourselves--assume as a public responsibility the provision of a full opportunity for this helpless, wistful, stubborn little barbarian to find out about the world and about himself. Well, shall we do that?

Let us not allow any false sentimentality to affect our decision....

The vote seems to be in favour of giving him his chance. Very well!

II. The School Building

It is clear that what is most of all the matter with the child is his sense of helplessness.... He told us how he lost inevitably his position of King in the magic realm of infancy--a kingship only to be recovered fragmentarily in dreams and in the fantasies of play--how he discovered himself to be little and weak and clumsy and ignorant of the ways of the strange real world. It is clear too that the chief difference which separates us from childhood is the acquisition of a few powers, physical and intellectual, which make us feel to some extent masters of our world.

Does not education, then, first of all consist in giving to children a progressive sense of power, through a physical and intellectual mastery of their environment? And would not the acquisition of an adequately increasing mastership deprive the child of any need for those outbursts of rage and malice and mischief which are today the most characteristic trait of childhood, and which are only his attempt to deny his shameful helplessness? Shall we not try at the outset to make the child feel that he is a useful and important part of our world?

The answer to these questions being “Yes,” we now turn to the building in which what now passes for education is conducted, and inquire whether it answers this primary requirement.

But first of all, let us free our minds from any lingering superstitions we may cherish with reference to school buildings. Let us get over the notion that school-buildings are sacrosanct, like churches. I am inclined to think that we have transferred to the school building some of our traditional respect for churches. We feel that it is a desecration to allow dances and political meetings to be held there. We seem to regard with jealous pride the utter emptiness and uselessness of our school buildings after hours; it is a kind of ceremonial wastefulness which appeals to some deep-seated ridiculous barbaric sense of religious taboo in us. Well, we must get over it if we are to give the children a square deal. If it should turn out that the school building is wrong, we must be prepared to abolish it.

And we must get over our notion that a school building is necessary in order for a school to exist. The most famous school in the world had no building at all--only a stretch of outdoors, with some grass and a few plane trees. Of course, the Greeks were fonder of the open air than we are, and their winters were less severe. And then, too, the Greek idea of education was simpler than ours. It comprised simply athletics and philosophy and one or two other aristocratic subjects which I forget at the moment--art being regarded as manual labour, just as the drama was considered a religious function, and government a kind of communal festivity! And, of course, the Persian theory of education--to be able to ride, shoot, and tell the truth--could be carried out under the open sky better than anywhere else. But our aims are more elaborate, and it may very well be true--in fact, I have been convinced of it all along--that much of our educational process should be carried on indoors.

But let us not be too hasty in conceding the School Building’s right to existence. There is another side to the question.

The trouble is, once you give a School Building permission to exist, it straightway commences to put on semi-sacerdotal airs--as if it were a kind of outcast but repentant church. It arranges itself into dingy little secular chapels, with a kind of furtive pulpit in front for the teacher, and a lot of individual pews for the mourners. It makes the chemistry laboratory, which it regards as a profane intruder, feel cramped and uncomfortable; it puts inconveniences in the way of the gymnasium; and it is dreadfully afraid some one will think that the assembly hall will look like a theatre; while as for carpentry and printing shops, ateliers for sculpture groups, and a furnace for the pottery class, it feels that it has lost caste utterly if it is forced to admit them; nor will it condescend to acknowledge such a thing as a kitchen-garden in its back yard as having any relation to itself. You can well understand that if it has these familiar adjuncts of everyday life, it will seem just like part of the ordinary world; and so it tries its hardest to keep them out, and generally succeeds pretty well.

But since what we started out to do was to teach children what the world of reality is like, it is necessary that they should be in and of the real world. And since the real world outside is not, unfortunately, fully available for educational purposes, it is necessary to provide them with the real world on a smaller scale--a world in which they can, without danger, familiarize themselves with their environment in its essential aspects--a world which is theirs to observe, touch, handle, take apart and put back together again, play with, work with, and become master of; a world in which they have no cause to feel helpless or weak or useless or unimportant; a world from which they can go into the great world outside without any abrupt transition--a world, in short, in which they can learn to be efficient and happy human beings.

The School Building, imposing upon our credulity and pretending to be too sacred for these purposes, needs to be taken down from its pedestal. It may be permitted to have a share in the education of our youth if it will but remember that it is no more important in that process than a garden, a swimming tank, a playground, the library around the corner, the woods where the botany class goes, or the sky overhead that exhibits its constellations gladly at the request of the science teacher. Let it humble itself while there is yet time, and not expect its little guests to keep silence within its walls as if they were in a church, for it may even yet be overthrown--and replaced by a combination theatre-gymnasium-studio-office-and-model-factory building. And _then_ it will be sorry!

III. The Teacher

Shall the Teacher be abolished?...

What’s that you say?--Oh, but surely not before she has had a hearing!--the worst criminal deserves that much consideration. I beg of you to let me speak one moment in her behalf.--Ah, thank you, my friends.

(Sister, you had a tight squeak just then! If it hadn’t been for my presence of mind and my habitual coolness in the presence of infuriated mobs, I hate to think what would have happened.--And now let me see: what _can_ I say in your behalf? H’m.... H’m....)