School Vacations

THE division of social labor which includes all our educational work differs from other classes of occupation in that it is not continuous. The soil tiller, the artisan, and in most cases the professional man not engaged in teaching are accustomed to continuous toil; society demands of them the term of their day’s work, with most brief intervals for the refreshment of their strength. With the teacher it is different: about one third of his year is spent in rest, or in ways not immediately connected with his occupation ; when employed, his day is shorter than that of other laborers. Even if we include in the comparison only the group of intellectual occupations, we find that the teacher appears singularly favored in the demand made upon him. The lawyer, the physician, and the commercial man are generally held to continuous attention to their work for at least eight hours each secular day; the teacher, on the other hand, is rarely occupied for more than six hours in each of the first five days of the laboring week ; above the level of the elementary schools, he rarely practices his art for more than twenty hours in each seven days.

If this peculiar condition of labor among the teaching body were limited to one country or to one time, we might seek to explain it by some exceptional social state. When I first began to consider the matter, it appeared to me likely that it was in part due to the fact that school work was originally connected with religious labor ; the priest was the school-master, and his occupation as a teacher was in a way subordinate to his other duties. Although the original association of the priestly function with the task of teaching has left its mark on our educational system, and may not have been without influence on the organization of the school year, yet the fact that in all countries where the schools have taken shape we find the work of teaching limited to a part of the day in about nine months of the year is good evidence of some fundamental necessity requiring a common limitation in the time devoted to the work of teachers and pupils.

The school-masters of Europe as well as those of America, of all grades, from the primary schools to the universities, have, after manifold experiments, arrived at the conclusion that not more than nine months of each year shall be devoted to pedagogue work. A similar limitation appears to exist in the teaching work of other than Christian countries: the schools of Mohammedan lands and those of China have their vacations arranged in substantially the same manner as those of our own civilization. There appears, moreover, to be a general tendency to increase the period devoted to refreshment of the school labor. It is true that in the rural districts, where of old, on account of scant means, the school term was limited to three or four months each year, the gain in wealth and the increased interest in education have led to a lengthening of the teaching term ; but in all highly organized establishments, at least in this country, there is a general movement towards longer periods of rest for pupils and teachers alike. Of recent years, Harvard College has made several efforts to consolidate and lengthen the terms of instruction. At one time there was no break between the Christmas recess and the close of the colleges in June : it was found, however, that both students and teachers suffered from continuous application to work during a term of five and a half months, and that it was necessary to introduce a recess of seven days in the month of April. In the same way, the common schools of our cities have been induced by experience to shorten the school-days and lengthen the vacations, until they are in session annually for not more than thirty-eight or forty weeks ; and the total number of hours which a student devotes to his tasks, counting work done at home as well as that at school, does not on the average exceed twelve hundred a year. Youths of like age employed in factories are occupied for almost three thousand hours in each year. The case of teachers, especially those of the higher grade, is even more striking. In our secondary schools they are usually employed for not more than twenty-five hours per week in the work of the classroom, or for one thousand hours a year ; the college instructors do not generally give more than five hundred hours to a year’s work, and the older men in these institutions are called on for even less labor.

This singular contrast between the conditions of scholastic and those of mechanical labor in our social system is doubtless to be explained by the peculiar burden which intellectual occupation puts upon teachers and pupils alike. The weight of the load which brain-work, even of a relatively simple kind, imposes on all who do it is hardly appreciated by those who labor with their minds, and is utterly misconceived by the hand workman. Rightly to apprehend the difference between these two classes of labor, that of the body and the mind, we should consider the difference in the daily round of a vigorous artisan and that of an equally strong man who is employed in some simple form of literary work. I have in mind several good specimens of these two diverse classes of laborers, whose histories I can trace from youth to age. The difference in the capacity of these men to pursue their allotted tasks is remarkable. The man who labors to the utmost with his body, but whose mind has been schooled to rest, may begin his life’s toil at twelve years of age, and, if he be a sober man, continue his work, with rare intervals of illness, for sixty years. During this period he may labor on the average of each year for about three thousand hours, or in his lifetime for, say, one hundred and eighty thousand. I have known a number of men who have done manual labor of a rather taxing sort for something like this term of toil: it may indeed be assumed that the healthy laborer who lives out his allotted days does at least one hundred and fifty thousand hours of work. Some of these men exceed two hundred thousand hours of labor in their lifetime, and most women of the agricultural districts who survive until their eightieth year fill up this measure of toil.

From a somewhat careful study of the ways in which authors have pursued their work, I am inclined to think that the most vigorous of them have not, on the average, been able to occupy themselves with the pen for more than four hours each day, and that only in rare instances has this measure of production been maintained for over one half of each year. If we allow to the busiest, longest-lived, and most productive authors, men like Goethe and Voltaire, a period of sixty years of authorship, and reckon their labor at an average of three hours per day for six days in the week, we have a total of about fifty thousand hours for a lifetime’s work. It seems to me doubtful if any writer has maintained this rate of productive labor for any such period as sixty years : he too has his vacations, and they are often of long continuance. I am well satisfied that the average duration of the pen-work of our most laborious and productive literary men has not exceeded thirty thousand hours, or about one sixth that of the equally assiduous man who works with his muscles, with only as much brain, certainly, as may guide his movements.

It must not be supposed that the difference in the time devoted to productive labor by men who work with their hands and those who work with their heads is due to the difference in the motive which moves them to do their tasks. The man of the hand craft has the spur of immediate necessity; he does his day’s labor for his daily bread; but the stimulus of ambition, the inner spur to action, which moves the literary man to production even when the body is borne down by illness supplies a yet more powerful motive than that which prompts his humbler brother to his work.

It is true that a certain sort of intellectual labor, reading, simple collation, and other forms of endeavor which call for only a moderate occupation of the mind, may be pursued by ordinary persons of a sedentary habit with something like the continuity with which the artisan follows his trade ; but such work, as all who have done both kinds of labor know full well, is relatively easy as compared with the task of literary production. When the mind is strained to the limits of its endurance, fatigue comes quickly, and the exhaustion is of a nature to require much repose of both mind and body. A writer may allow his mind quietly and with no more compulsion than the mechanism itself supplies to meditate on work to be done ; he may gather his store of facts or fancies in the same half-active way, and all this with little fatigue. After six hours of such moderate occupation, he may feel no more discomfort than that which comes from the natural desire of his muscles for their time of play ; but let him, even in the freshness of his mornings, apply the whip to his mind and set out for the goals he has been contemplating, and he will find, unless he be indeed a giant in his prime, that three or four hours of such labor leave him utterly weary and in sore need of refreshment. My point, in a word, is this : all intellectual labor which calls for the utmost exercise of the faculties is vastly more wearying than that required in any of the ordinary vocations of men; between that labor and the quiet accustomed employment of the mind there is the difference which exists between walking and running, or perhaps between the instinctive movements of breathing and the vigorous exercise of blowing a fire.

It does not matter whether the intellectual toil be of a really great nature or not; so that it call for the utmost capacity of the laborer the effect is equally exhausting. The savage or the child endeavoring to grasp the primary mysteries of the multiplication process in arithmetic may be as much wearied by the mental work as Professor Caley by his discussion concerning the " attraction of a point in space.” The barbarian who composes a rude chant may perform a feat for him as laborious as is the production of a symphony to a Beethoven. In a word, all labor, physical or mental, which transcends the limit of the habitual exercise of the body or the mind, calling for strength which custom does not make it easy to afford, is peculiarly wearing to men of all intellectual grades.

We see the reason for this peculiar stress which thought of an unaccustomed sort puts upon us when we consider the history of the growth of the human faculty. Slowly, through inconceivably long ages of life in our brute ancestors and of lower man, our bodies and minds have been habituated to a certain measure of labor; our physical and mental capacities have, in the course of thousands of generations, been brought to their ordinary powers by inherited habit. At each stage in the process of development there has been a frontier or border land in the field of human action, where activity has been difficult because of its novelty. Only the masterful spirits, those afterwards to be celebrated as heroes or demigods, have succeeded in forcing their way into these wildernesses of unaccustomed action. Inherited habit and the awakening influence of example have made it easier for each succeeding generation to accomplish the difficult feats of the generation which has gone before. In olden days the path-hreaking labors of the leaders of men were of a simple sort: they had to conquer fear, learn the tasks of government, and invent the ruder arts. In our later time the frontier land of civilization has widened, and the difficulties of winning new fields for culture have vastly increased. To fit men to pass beyond the centre of attained culture, so that they may advance the conquests of their kind, demands educative work, — work which strains their faculties to the utmost.

Humdrum labor, occupations which are carried on by mind or body with a measure of exertion which lies well within the exerting powers of the being, do not develop; the exercise must be carried beyond the limits of the commonplace, and up to the utmost possibilities of activity, if new capacities are to be won. The athlete grows in strength by doing each day feats which were impossible for him to do the day before; the child gains in intellectual development by a like process of pressing his mental activity up to the limits of the growing capacity. By a small daily addition to the load, Winship. originally a slight, weak man, grew so strong that he could lift fifteen hundred pounds with his hands, and could with one arm overcome the most powerful mechanics, men who in their vocations expended many times the muscular force which he applied to his training. The difference between the muscular education of the men lay in the fact that the mechanic’s labor was always well within the limits of his natural power, while Winship’s exercise was always pressed to the bounds of his growing strength. The mechanic repeated the same motions of the body through his day of toil, while Winship could at most undergo his developing labor for a few minutes each day.

It is thus made plain to us that the class of work which we may term the unaccustomed labor of men is in its nature very unlike that which a natural habit or individual experience has made familiar to men. It is also evident that all schooling, for the reason that it necessarily consists in doing things not done before, deeds in which habit cannot make action easy, belongs in the group of activities which are peculiarly exhausting to the vital powers. The youth wrestling with the elements of language or mathematics is engaged in the same class of exhausting labor as the author or the athlete; we cannot expect of him — woe to us if we demand of him — the persistent toil which he could well give to mechanical employments which lie within the common inheritances of the race. Few of our children inherit even for two or three generations the intellectual habit; school work is the creation of yesterday, while the normal energies of body and mind have been transmitted to us from the geologic ages. In time, it may be that the difficult tasks which now strain the minds of youths will become fixed by inheritance, and so made the easier,— they may, indeed, become as familiar as sports; but in our schools we are dealing with minds and bodies which have, perhaps happily, a vastly greater inheritance from brute and savage than from civilized life. The simplest intellectual tasks are to these children as remote from the accustomed paths of thought as are the problems of the higher mathematics from the minds of most men. The work they do must be done under the same general conditions as those which limit the path-breaking work of our greatest authors; it must be carried on for but brief periods in the year; it must be interspersed with vacations, in which both mind and body may have a chance for rest.

Although the needs of the pupil control the duration of our school terms, the necessities of the teacher’s work are also of a nature to demand much in the way of refreshment. The true teacher, he who goes forth to his pupils, who enters into their spirit, so that he conceives their intellectual state and helps them from near by, is called upon for duties which to the inexperienced appear simple and easily performed, but are indeed of a perplexing and exhausting nature. All sympathetic action is taxing to the strength of men. When we go forth to another, making his life our own, we attain our end by ways of exceeding perplexity, by paths which are not beaten, which can be discovered only by patient ingenuity. The teacher must clearly understand the nature of his pupil; he attains this end, if he reaches it at all, by vigilant and unceasing attention to every sign which may direct his endeavors. No guide who seeks to bring his charge up the most difficult mountain need be so watchful of his actions as the teacher. He gives away his life to perform his task, if he be true to his calling. None but those who have done the teacher’s work know the cost of this free giving of the spirit.

The work which the teacher does is, it is true, but a more continuous part of the sympathetic action on which all social uplifting depends. The physician and the clergyman, in their place, are called on to do equally difficult tasks in penetrating to the nature of their fellow-men; but their cares, though serious, are not so continuous as those of the instructor. They have them as incidents of their life ; he finds them not daily nor hourly, but at each moment of his work. Few instructors can maintain a vivid sense of this duty; with all of them the exercise of their sympathetic powers becomes, like all other labor, automatic ; their load is borne, as are the burdens of other men, in a more or less commonplace way. There is a risk that their work may descend into the state of mere routine labor, that the element of lively sympathy on which the real value of the service depends be lost. There is but one way to avoid this danger, and this is by the resource which vacations afford. The teachers must frequently be turned away from their calling for the refreshment which they need.

Although, for reasons based on the character of the work done by pupils and teachers, it is necessary to break the school year with vacations, it cannot be gainsaid that these interruptions bring about certain evils which greatly trouble the plans of the educator. These evils affect both instructors and students ; they are, however, most serious in the case of the latter. Because the work of the student is of a nature to obtain little help from inherited usage, it is always difficult, if he be a wholesome creature, to breed in him habits of study. After each break in his schooling he returns to his work with a mind disused to the tasks of the school-room. Nearly half the year is spent in securing strength by a return to the primitive desultory life of the savage or half-civilized state. Inheritance has made this half-intellectual existence so natural that indulgence in it soon destroys the habits of study which it has cost so much pains to inculcate. The youth’s mind has to be broken into the ways of work after each vacation. Even with college students, when long training has served to fix the customs of intellectual labor, the first month after the summer period has to be spent in a subjugating process, by which mind and body are once again bowed to the yoke. In a less degree, the teachers, particularly if they have the spirit of youth in them, find a return to harness a perplexing task. In my own case, a quarter of a century of practice has not been sufficient to overcome the dissipating effect of a few months’ absence from the class-room; each autumn the lost ground has to be re-won and the teaching habit renewed.

In the matter of our teaching system, as in many other of our social problems, we seem to be always “ between the devil and the deep sea.” On the one hand we have the savage and barbaric man, whose lusty strength and simple nature we need to keep alive, but whose clumsy, unthinking ways we must mend; on the other hand, the supercivilized, bloodless, half-human creature which over-schooling breeds. Our work is to make a middle kind of man, who shall retain the good of savage and of scholar alike. It is harder for the educator to find and keep this middle way than it is for any other officer of society. The legislator may blunder away with his laws, — at worst they usually hamper grown men alone ; but the teacher finds his mistakes in youths deprived of the rights of body or of mind with which nature endowed them. Blunders in the methods of training young men and women are built into the race, and propagate the evils from generation to generation.

Accepting our vacation system as a necessary feature in the present condition of our school method, the question is whether by some modification of that system we can, in a wholesome way, avoid any part of the evils which these breaks in the process of education bring about. This problem has been in my mind for more than twenty years, and I have made several essays towards its solution, one of which, from experience, appears to promise useful results. As this promise is based upon much experiment, I shall, in the sequel, ask the reader’s attention to it. Let me, however, premise the statement concerning the method of diminishing the evil of vacations with a brief consideration of certain features of our modern education which make it desirable to recast our school system.

It is a well-recognized fact that natural science demands a place in education which it has not yet received. We have excellent technical schools, where the applications of this branch of learning to economic arts are well taught. Some of our literary colleges permit a system of education by which the student may indulge a taste for such study in the later stage of his schooling; but despite the vast progress of natural knowledge and the general confession of its utility in the training of youth, no substantial progress is being made in the introduction of science in our general school system. Now and then school-masters endeavor to transplant a little twig of this learning amid the sturdy and overshadowing growth of the ancient trees of knowledge, but it has at best a feeble life, and rarely is it worth the ground it occupies. The fact is that the methods of science training so far differ from those pursued, indeed from those which must be followed, in the oldest humanities that the two forms of culture cannot flourish together. School-masters of the old dispensation appear to have the notion that they may with profit plant science in the same field with other forms of training, much as the New England farmer sows pumpkins in his crop of maize. My own conviction is that literary and scientific training can no more develop in the same field at the same time than crops of wheat and cotton can be grown together. The same mind can, I am convinced, find profit from both these educative agents, but the considerations are so diverse, the methods of instruction necessarily so different, that it is a waste of time, tending to mere smattering, to attempt to pursue both classes of study in the same term of school time. A well-trained youth in college may, with much advantage, devote a small part of the year he consecrates to literary studies to some easy course in natural science; or in case his devotion is to science, he may find refreshment in incidentally following an elective in music or metaphysics ; but the effort at once to combine the intellectual profit afforded by literary and experimental knowledge leads almost inevitably to failure. This failure is even more assured when the plan is tried with the undeveloped youths of our primary and secondary schools.

These considerations, which were impressed upon me at the beginning of my career as a teacher, which indeed became clear to me from my experience as a student, when I tried in a stumbling way to carry on the two kinds of training at once, led me to essay the use of the vacation period for educating youths in the methods of scientific work. Years of experience in this system have served to convince me that we may find an intellectual and physical gain in the use of vacations for instruction, and at the same time a secure footing for science training which cannot be found in the term time of our ordinary schools. Summer schools of natural science, as well as those devoted to natural language or purely literary matters, were first formally begun at Harvard College about 1868, and have since gained a singular extension in this country. Though in many cases they are rather desultory in their methods, their rapid growth and popularity show a desire to make avail of the long summer vacation, and a sense that certain kinds of intellectual work can better be done in such periods than in school terms.

One of the most important results served by the well-organized vacation schools is found in the fact that the student is called on to pursue for one or two months a single subject of study, to which he gives his entire attention. In the ordinary curriculum of our schools, even those of professional grade, the scholar is required to subdivide his time ; rarely can he give the whole of his attention for even a single day to one department of work. Generally, it is nine to ten grammar, ten to eleven geometry, eleven to twelve history, etc. There is no chance for connected thought; indeed, the system appears as if designed to make all orderly and vigorous inquiry impossible. The youth learns from it alacrity, the power of swiftly changing from one line of thought to another, which may be worth something as a preparation for the hurly-burly of the outer world ; but it fails to give him the far more precious training in the habit of patient devotion to one appointed task. The result is that the most of our college graduates have never done a single piece of thoroughly consecutive work, such as they will be called on to perform in the walks of life to which they must betake themselves.

The profit of scientific training cannot be had through work done in the scattered hours which in a way suffice for the other forms of training. The work the student has to do in natural science must be done in the laboratory or the field ; it must be done continuously, all day and from week to week, before the student can attain to the profit which awaits the true naturalist. To all who adequately conceive the need of such work, the hour-here-and-there system for any other than purely informational purposes is preposterous. The student may gain a measure of information concerning botany, geology, or other branches of natural science from occasional lectures or laboratory exercises, but the training he receives is not worth anything. The elder Agassiz was used to say that the student of natural science must take time to “ let the facts soak into him,” and he considered a month a short time for even a small body of facts to penetrate in this manner into the student’s mind : all teachers of such learning will agree with that master in this opinion. The only chance for this consolidated work which our school system affords to the new education is found in the vacation periods. By making avail of those parts of the year which cannot be made to serve the needs of the humanities, science may hope to win a firmer place in education than can be obtained in any other way.

It may well be asked how the student, weary of his school term, can be expected to devote a large part of his holiday time to this other form of schooling. How can we avoid the evils of overtasking the pupil, if we put a large share of his labor into the time we have found to be required for refreshment? Experience affords a very satisfactory answer to this question, for it shows us that the character of true scientific work so far differs from the labor done in the school-room that the pupil finds a large measure of diversion in the changes in the nature of his employment. In the ordinary school-room, the memory bears the principal part of the intellectual burden ; the constructive faculties play but a moderate part in the work. In the laboratory or the open field of nature, the memory is no more taxed than in the usual occupations of men, but the constructive imagination, which is generally unemployed in the tasks of term time, is actively aroused. There is, moreover, a wide difference in the attitude of the student towards his work in the two kinds of schooling. In the class-room tasks his lessons are generally learned from books, he is tied to print; in laboratory work he deals with natural objects, and finds in his contact with them the quickening of spirit which to be conceived needs to be felt. My own experience with vacation schools shows me that ordinary students may, without suffering any tax upon their vitality from the increase in their intellectual labor, year after year devote six weeks of the summer vacation to hard work in natural science schools. I do not think that it would be profitable to most youths to give this additional time to the study of subjects which they pursue in their ordinary term-time work ; the vacation tasks should be in another part of the intellectual field. The student who devotes the body of his time to literary works should resort to summer schools of science ; he who is engaged in science study during term time may profitably engage in literary work during a part of his vacation.

As soon as our vacation schools become generally as well organized as they now are at Harvard College, men and women will have an opportunity which has not yet been afforded them for continuous training of a literary and scientific kind. Except at Harvard the summer schools are of a scattered and incomplete character, there being no effort to bring the various departments into satisfactory accord. In that institution summer schools originated, and have gradually taken the shape which indicates their place in our system of education. Twenty years of experience and experiment have resulted in the following scheme of vacation teaching in that institution. The summer schools are not under the charge of any faculty ; each department, generally each instructor, being responsible for the conduct of the teaching in the particular school. A committee appointed by the corporation has a general oversight of the work ; it determines what schools shall be taught and chooses the instructors. Schools have been begun in eight departments of study : in the natural sciences, botany, chemistry, geology, physics, topography, and physical training ; in French, German, and Old Norse. In the departments of chemistry, geology, and topography the instruction is divided into elementary and advanced classes. The total number of courses which may be pursued, each requiring the whole time of the student for the term of teaching, is thirteen. In all of these studies except the languages, the student pursues his work in the laboratory or the field under the immediate supervision of the instructor; he does no ordinary class work, but follows his inquiries in an individual way. The work continues throughout the day, without interruption except for the noonday meal. The result is a good “ soaking,” to use Agassiz’s word, in the class of thoughts which belong to his particular study, and an intimate acquaintance with the teachers with whom his work is done. At the end of four or six weeks of such continuous labor, the pupil is generally fairly well imbued with the elementary methods of the science to which he has given his attention.

So far the most general resort to these classes has been on the part of teachers and students who purpose to become instructors. For teachers such schools afford peculiar opportunities for advancement ; by attendance on them they secure some contact with the conditions of a university. Although it is the vacation period of the college, the libraries and museums are kept open during the session of the summer schools ; moreover, there are lectures, open to members of all the schools, in which the teachers of the several departments set forth their views concerning the methods of education which should be pursued in their several specialties. Thus, though the relation of these summer students to the university is slight and temporary, it is not without value to discerning teachers who desire to know the range of their art. These vacation schools also afford valuable opportunities to the students of the smaller colleges, who may desire to obtain some knowledge of the larger schools of academic grade. It is an evil in our American collegiate system that young men who resort to the higher institutions of learning spend the whole of their college time in one school, and become thoroughly acquainted with but one set of instructors, and know only one of the many diverse motives which prevail in these academic systems. In the present condition of our colleges, we cannot hope to create the habit of passing from one seat of learning to another, which is so common in Germany, and has such a beneficial effect on the university students of that country. If that habit of migration is ever developed in our college students, it will probably be due to the opportunity for its development which summer schools afford.

Another valuable result arising from the extensive resort of students to vacation schools consists in the opportunity they afford the student to shorten the period of his academic preparation for the more serious tasks of professional study. The most of our teachers who have attentively considered the problems of the higher education are convinced that the four years’ course of our colleges is too long for those who propose, after its completion, to pursue a training for any professional career. The result of this double system of higher education in colleges and professional schools is that our young men come to their life-work at the age of at least twenty-five years to find that their more scantily equipped but younger competitors have the precedence. They need a portion of their youth for the struggle which awaits them in their battle with life ; they cannot afford to give too much of that hopeful time to the task of equipping themselves for the combat.

As much as we may regret the delay of taking up the work of the world which our long academic training forces upon us, it is not easy to see how the quantity of the instruction required of the college student can be reduced without a decided lowering in the standard of intellectual culture, by no means too high, to which we now bring young men. The only evident way of gaining time in the academic course is by the use of the vacation classes for those studies which can be pursued in those periods. Harvard College is, in a tentative way, trying the experiment of allowing study in the vacation time in lieu of term-time work : in its scientific school the student is allowed to reduce the curriculum of four years to three by a proper use of the instruction given in the summer schools, and in the college the summer field courses in geology are reckoned in with the term work.

The rapid development of summer students in this country shows us that our educators are seeking to meet the evils incident to our long school vacations. It is an evidence of their good sense that they have not sought to better our school system by decreasing the vacations usually allotted to pupils and teachers, but have endeavored to find another and safer method of obtaining the desired result.

N. S. Shaler.