Education
I
ONCE before, many years ago, I sat down at my desk and wrote the caption Education large at the head of my page. I was then sixteen years old, and I should probably have called that humble sheet of paper my “virgin page” had I found it necessary to give it a local habitation and a name.
The master spirit who was at that time directing the trials and experiences of the Hallowell High School had the kindly habit of furnishing as a gift the subjects for our fortnightly “compositions;” delightfully easy, obvious subjects such as “The Pleasures of Memory,” “The Advantages of History,” and kindred topics suited to the capacity of youthful minds. At sixteen one naturally knows a good deal about the pleasures of memory; the advantages of history unfold themselves to the most casual observer, and Education — with a large E — has already begun to rasp itself in indelible lines upon the tender imagination.
I am pleased to know, by reference to the battered old “composition book” which lies open before me, that even at that period of soaring ambition, that halcyon period when I “woke in the morning with an appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake,” there was something about the all-pervading and all-comprehending nature of this latter topic which made me hesitate.
“Education is a boundless subject,” thus the theme opens, “and so wide is the field which spreads itself before me, that I hardly know where to begin.” Once started, however, all obstacles were triumphantly swept away and the whole question brought to such a triumphant conclusion that I have never, until this fateful morning, felt it necessary to tackle it again. Alas, I know beforehand just how lamely, illogically, and inconsistently I am going to conduct this second excursion into that spreading field!
My past reticence, fortunately, has not been shared by other writers, better qualified to pursue the problems of education into their fastnesses than I can ever hope to be, and I have read their pregnant and instructive pages with deep and evergrowing interest. The meaning of the word ; the methods of interpreting that meaning; who shall be educated; when, where, how, and why it shall be done; the question of discrimination between sexes, between classes, between tweedledum and tweedledee, — all these, variously and eloquently and interminably set forth, have passed in an endless phantasmagoria before my mental vision, only to leave my stubborn mind set like a rock on one conclusion: the wisdom of educating every living creature, man, woman, child, fish, flesh, fowl, to the limit of individual capacity; and to this conclusion I should add the conviction that there is no danger whatever that any creature will ever know — really and absolutely know — too much.
It is true that I have not yet removed the beam from my own eye, but I am still able to discover the mote which obscures my brother’s vision. I realize — or I dimly dream that I realize — the deficiencies of my own education, but much more plainly I perceive that my cook would be benefited by a knowledge of the higher mathematics, classical literature, and the philosophy of history. It may be argued that if she possessed these acquirements my kitchen would not contain her; but even if the scheme of universal education were carried out, there must still be cooks, and what sane, sanitary, hygienic, æsthetic, reasoning and reasonable possibilities might be looked for from a race of enlightened queens of the kitchen, — central suns, around which the whole domestic system must revolve.
The typical cook of the average New England town lives, moves, and has her being entrenched behind one axiom of precedent: the thing which, in her experience, has been done, can be done again. After this, the deluge.
It may be, for instance, that the domestic goddess in question served her first apprenticeship in a family of ten. For the consumption of such a family she was in the daily habit of preparing twenty potatoes in one or another form. When, during her subsequent peregrinations, she condescends to minister to my modest home circle of three persons, I sometimes assure myself that if to a knowledge of elementary arithmetic she could add a thorough understanding of higher algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and then superadd some slight acquaintance with differential and integral calculus, she might in time be able to discover that if ten persons require twenty potatoes, by the same ratio of allotment three persons might be satisfied with six.
In the present fragmentary state of domestic education, however, the situation is a hopeless one. It is in vain that I present myself periodically before the dispenser of vegetables to suggest that but three consumers of potatoes sit at our festal board, that no one of the three is afflicted with an inordinate appetite for that starch-laden esculent, that a wise economy prohibits waste. Arithmetic and political economy are alike thrown away upon one who has but a single formula, unchangeable as the decrees of the Medes and Persians, by which to regulate the conduct of life.
I suggest six potatoes, a modest and satisfying half dozen. The arbiter of fate replies, “You see, ma’am, I’ve always been accustomed to cookin’ twenty” — and twenty it is!
Hence it comes that there have been few periods during my housekeeping career when I have not been provided with a sufficient number of cold potatoes to answer any sudden demand upon hospitality. No friend ever needed to pass potatoless from my door.
Yet if it fell to my lot to prepare a civil service examination for aspiring domestics there is only one point on which I should insist. I would not require any candidate to know beyond a peradventure why Bedreddin Hassan did or did not put pepper in his cream tarts, but on him whose comprehending soul could grasp the idea that the problem of satisfactorily adding pepper to cream tarts need not be an insoluble one, I would without hesitation confer a degree.
Pepper tarts do not appeal to me, but the instinctive realization that to genius all things are possible does appeal. It opens flowery visions of a domestic possessing no fixed standards on the subject of potatoes, an “expedientful” person to whom the mixing of a cake with three eggs when the recipe calls for four would not present insurmountable difficulties.
It is true that no amount of education will cause wings to sprout on those who are born absolutely wingless, but the most unpromising grub may conceal within its ugly breast the possibility of transformation, and surely no harm can result from seeking everywhere the hidden spark of divinity. Imagination helps to season the soup and decorate the salad, and one may weave the banquets of Lucullus, Nero’s roses dropping from the ceiling, the magic pitcher from which Baucis and Philemon drew their neverfailing fount, John the Baptist’s locusts and wild honey, Charles Lamb’s roast pig, the red wine which Omar’s nightingale cries unto the rose, and that draught of clear water from the well of Bethlehem for which David thirsted, into a background that expands the narrowest kitchen wall into a vista of memory and romance.
II
We have become so accustomed to shouting at the top of our lungs the assertion that this is an age of progress that most of us have come to an unquestioning belief in the reality of what we announce. It is, indeed, true that there never were so many schools, so many colleges, so many facilities for doing special work, such opportunities for learning made easy as exist in our day; but the test of what any system of education is doing for its age lies rather in what it has accomplished for the mass than for the individual.
If the progress of the last century has given us better domestic service, better mechanics, better teachers, more thorough and practical scholars, better and wiser all-round men and women than those who played their part in former generations, if the trend of the race has been genuinely upward, then it must be acknowledged that we can with clear consciences continue to vociferate our claims to advancement.
I hope I am neither a pessimist nor a cynic in regard to the achievements of latter-day civilization; I am ready, as a rule, to hurrah for my own side, but I am not prepared to profess an unqualified surety that the progress of the last century has been wholly in the right direction.
In this matter of domestic service, for example, it would not be a difficult business to collect a sheaf of testimonies from housekeepers who are able to remember the changes of the last fifty years, certifying that the thrifty, capable, and reliable “hired girl,” with whose virtues and usefulness so many New England households have in former days been happily familiar, no longer exists except in infrequent and sporadic instances.
The younger class of girls who, under the old régime, went out to service, now employ themselves in the shops, factories, and similar establishments where their time, after working hours, is their own. Like Yankee Doodle they have “ put feathers in their caps,” and to this adornment have added whatever stands, in the vogue of the day, for the “rings on their fingers and bells on their toes " of Mother Goose memory. They know the sweets of independence and the proud, if imaginary, satisfaction of being “just as good as anybody.” The domestic ranks in the New England towns of to-day are largely recruited from a wandering tribe of more mature women who vary the serial of matrimony by divergences into the field of “working out.” Some of them belong to the variety known as “grass widows,”some of them have either just “got a bill ” or are just about to get a bill from their husbands, some have husbands who appear spasmodically and then pass once more into obscuration. During the intervals of these interrupted romances the heroines of them bestow a somewhat intermittent and perfunctory attention on households whose need is so urgent that the members therefore are willing to suffer and be strong.
“I don’t need to work out,” one of these culinary heroines was wont to murmur pensively; “ever since I parted from William there’s been plenty o’ men willin’ to marry me any mornin’ before breakfast,” — and this statement represents the strongest kind of willingness, since many a man who could easily be beguiled into wedding after supper would in the clearness of morning judgment hesitate about delivering himself over to the chains of Hymen !
The old-fashioned semi-patriarchal system, which permitted the “help” to become an integral part of the family, presents many objectionable features,yet the natural and logical result of such relations between employer and employed was to secure a better and more intelligent class of service.
There was a certain neat, spare, gauntly decorous, middle-aged woman who, during my girlhood, always spent a part of each year “helping out” in our crowded household, whose memory retains for me an abiding fascination. She exemplified a type which had in those days many representatives, a type of woman strong both in mind and body, with an untutored intelligence born of necessity and experience. These women were apt to be sharp-cornered, full of individuality, incisive of speech and act, — a surface ungraciousness which did not long conceal a repressed sweetness of nature, often the outgrowth of deep and conscientious religious feeling. It was always a gala day to me when “Aunt Sophia" came to abide with us. It meant that there would be things doing, fresh interests added to life, interests more or less piquantly flavored with the newcomer’s individuality. Aunt Sophia’s sharp sayings, her idiomatic stories gathered from experiences in many households, the very unexpectedness of her standpoints, all helped to flavor the commonplaceness of daily living; and though I have spoken of her and her class as creatures of untutored intelligence, in comparison with many of the flippant and shallow beings who inhabit our kitchens to-day, these old-fashioned domestics were admirably educated. Sophia drew her intellectual sustenance from a fount of classical English, pure and richly varied literature, and deep spiritual information. She read her Bible as eagerly as her prototype of to-day reads Bertha M. Clay’s novels, and from it she gained the knowledge of those mysteries which God has hidden “from ages and generations,” but makes manifest unto his saints.
It often seems to me that the world of my girlhood was a simpler, more dignified, more genuine world than that to which our age of progress has advanced us today. It was a striving world then as now, a faulty, narrow-minded world, yet many of its common people were less radically common than the same class of the present generation, simply because they were more diligent students of the Bible, because they built and founded themselves more broadly on the influences and inspirations of that wonderful classic.
It may be that in my recollections I somewhat idealize the virtues of that former generation, but I do not idealize the simple homes which made no pretense of being what they were not, the homes where a narrow income was not a thing to be ashamed of, where thrift and economy were held as praiseworthy virtues, where a good many daily joys were somehow compatible with a rather strenuous notion that life was duty.
I have said, and I repeat, that I would be willing to educate every human and inhuman creature up to the limit of what is to be known; but if a man cannot know all about Confucius and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Darwin, the Zend Avesta and the Nibelungenlied, if his literary and ethical study is to be limited to the assimilation of the contents of one volume, I would place in his hands that one which in Scotland used piously to be referred to as “the Book " and feel that, after all, I had given him material fora liberal education. He might search its pages for the building up of creeds, for the confirmation of prejudice, for the foundation of dogma; but if he continued to search with any rightminded desire to discover the truth of things, in spite of creeds, in spite of prejudices, in spite of dogmas, he would find himself broadening and sweetening, and breathing the air of purer horizons.
It is rather the fashion nowadays to pride one’s self on knowing little about the Bible, just as it is the fashion for men to shake their heads with dissimulated pride while they aver that they do not profess to be religious. Many people seem to feel that to disclaim all pretensions to the knowledge of any but the material side of life serves in some mysterious fashion to rid them of moral responsibility. There are some men who apparently have the idea that to mention the name of God, except by way of oath or adjuration, is an uncalled-for exhibition of pious priggishness; yet the most untutored pagan, however primitive his creed may be, who is so far from being ashamed of his religion that he would rather be ashamed of not possessing one, has a deeper hold on the foundation structure of all education than such men as these. He at least recognizes something which binds him morally, however mistaken his conception of morals may be, and the recognition of moral boundaries is the corner stone of the highest civilization.
III
A group of bright young fellows discussed in my presence not long ago the accepted standpoint, according to twentieth-century ideals, from which a man should pursue his chosen profession. From this conversation it appeared that the aim in view was to secure the largest possible income in the shortest possible time.
Talent, application, strenuous work, all had their value in the struggle, as enabling the aspirant more speedily to obtain recognition in an up-to-date generation which gives prizes only to the concrete.
As I listened I learned that a political career is a mistake because, unless a man gets hold of, and is willing to profit by, a graft of some description, his honors bring him more outlay than income. The judge’s bench is tabooed for the truly ambitious because of the straitened salary which restricts its emolument. To accept a position, however flattering, in any branch of the teaching profession, is to limit one’s chances for making money. To enter the ministry is an absurd proposition fora man who is capable of gaining a competency in any other profession, since the best-paid clergyman cannot, according to modern standards of wealth, hope to become a rich man.
I confess that it surprised me to find these clean, well-balanced, carefully trained youths turning their backs so doughtily on the record of past values as estimated by what the ages have found vital enough to preserve, to seek the choicest rewards of life in things that perish with the using. They were young, these prematurely wise boys; I doubt if any one of their number wholly meant what he said, and some of them, I am very sure, cherish in their hearts higher ideals than their careless speech revealed. The significance of their talk lies in its expression of the spirit of the age, a spirit which one finds only too frequently embodied in both the speech and act of older and riper men who have, it would seem, lived long enough and deeply enough to know something about what life can take away, as well as what it can give.
Religion and patriotism and good sense and good government and final profit are all against this sort of thinking which makes only for ultimate rottenness. A cloud of witnesses, giants of the past, who have known alike the life of soul and sense, protest against it. As an expression of the spirit of a century which claims to have opened the doors of enlightenment to rich and poor alike, such standards are utterly trivial and uneducated.
I found last year in an old chest, which had been long hidden away in my father’s attic, a bundle of letters written to a young man who entered upon student life in Bowdoin College about the year 1830. The young scholar was evidently an open-hearted and versatile-minded fellow, of a temperament which opened to him a large circle of friends. These friends all wrote letters, and as they lived in a day when transportation was difficult and postage high, their epistles were generally lengthy ones. Although the student himself was a struggling youth whose college career was prolonged by the necessity of earning money to pay his expenses, he represented a prominent family, well known and much respected throughout the county which is now thickly sown with descendants from its various branches.
I know from household tradition something about the circle of young friends whose faded letters made up the treasuretrove of the old chest. They, too, were scions of eminently worthy families in a day when hard work and struggle were regarded as a necessary and to-be-expected portion of every-day life, and when it was no disgrace to acknowledge an habitual scarcity of available cash.
The Bowdoin student was the only college man in his circle, much envied and much felicitated for his position and opportunities. It was universally expected that he would, as a result of much learning, rise to a lofty rank in life; but when his companions set before him examples for his emulation, they most frequently selected the triumphs of Webster and Clay, or suggested the name of some eminent divine. To urge him on in mere money-making was far from their thoughts.
The young men whose letters were thus preserved represented varying occupations. One, according to his own definition, was “a wielder of the yardstick,” two were post-office clerks, several were teachers of country schools, one a farmer lad who during the winter helped his father to manufacture shingles. The young women also taught school, did sewing, or even, in emergency, assisted in housework.
After the fashion of their century the young creatures poured forth their sentiments, their reflections, their aspirations, without stint. They described sunsets and moonrises ; they philosophized regarding everything that pertained to life; they referred darkly to hidden griefs; quoted from Byron, Moore, and kindred poets; analyzed the passion of love from depths of profound experience; gave synopses of sermons and political addresses; and by and by, when these mighty topics had been exhausted, devoted a page or two to local gossip and the discussion of social functions. It was a humble epistle indeed that did not glitter with classical allusions. But through all their commonplaces and crudenesses, these letters revealed in strong light the standpoint of aspiration held by the youth of that period, a standpoint based on the conviction that knowledge is power.
In the evenings, in the odd moments between other avocations, they were all taking courses of study. The young man of the yardstick was translating Cicero and Sallust and studying astronomy; the post-office clerks were writing lyceum lectures on abstruse topics; one of the teaching young men was studying moral philosophy and different systems of theology, “not with any idea of entering the ministry, but because he had a natural bent for such pursuits;” the farmer lad was dividing his leisure between church-going, village festivities, “back-lot dances,” and reading the English poets and essayists during otherwise unoccupied winter evenings.
He tells his correspondent that “making shingles in the sunny corner of the old workshop is an occupation that lends itself readily to the weaving of many dreams,” and as one reads the faded sentences one feels how the tides and the yearnings of youth flooded that sunny workshop corner. I remember this writer, the intimate picture of whose daily life is an especially graphic one, as a tall old man of stern face and erect military bearing. As a child I often visited in his home, but I never dreamed of him as capable of such a record of ardent young manhood as his letters reveal.
The girls were studying too; going to school at the “Academy” between periods of teaching; “keeping up their Latin” while the teaching was going on. The sewing girl “went on with French whenever she could borrow a dictionary,” and rejoiced greatly at unexpectedly securing several odd volumes of Shakespeare.
In the same paper-covered chest I found also the records of The Franklin Debating Society, formed in 1822 by the printers’ boys of a New England town. The membership of this society was later augmented by the addition of a number of clerks and mechanics.
One of the debaters, who shared in the benefits of this club, says of it in relating the story of his life: —
“We got leave to occupy the second story of the Old South schoolhouse. We furnished our own wood and lights. We wrote compositions, we declaimed, debated questions of importance, and enacted dialogues. Our compositions were corrected by an educated man. This society, with a succession of members, continued for four or five years, meeting once a week. With two or three exceptions all of us have closed our earthly career, but if none of us ever rose to be great men, not one became vicious or dissipated.”
The society records, kept in an eminently neat and businesslike manner, give account of one hundred and eighteen meetings, with debates, addresses, essays, and reports of committees on all sorts of topics, civil, religious, literary, etc.
I copy a few of the questions for discussion to show what these youths, hardly past the age of boyhood, were voluntarily thinking and talking about: —
What are the advantages of a free republic over a hereditary kingdom ?
Should deistical and atheistical writings be prohibited by law? Answer: No.
Should imprisonment for debt be abolished? Answer: No.
Which is most essential in the representative of a free people, integrity or talents? Discussion continued during two meetings; final answer: Integrity.
Can any measure be taken to rid America of slaves ? Majority vote: Yes.
It is interesting to note that the reply to the question: In what capacity is a woman useful? was indefinitely postponed, also that the votes were divided about evenly in answering the inquiry: Should the sexes receive education in common?
The eleventh chapter of the first book of Chronicles is one which I often read because of its epic flavor. It is, indeed, an epic and a lyric in one, this story of David’s “mighty men.” Thirty of them there were, all captains, all doers of deeds; but twenty-seven of these heroes, although they had honorable mention among the thirty, “attained not to the first three.”
Some of these second-rank men were rather capable fellows, — Abishai the brother of Joab, for instance, who lifted up his spear against three hundred and slew them; Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, too, who slew two lionlike men of Moab: also he went down and slew a lion in a pit in a snowy day.
“And he slew an Egyptian, a man of great stature, five cubits high; and in the Egyptian’s hand was a spear like a weaver’s beam.”
Benaiah and Abishai were evidently men of aspirations, and so also were those “ valiant men of the armies” whose names follow in the list. If their deeds differed from those of the “three mighties” it was rather in kind than in degree of prowess.
We have vaunted a “ Big Four” in the history of our own country, and their deeds differed from those of David’s First Three in kind and degree also. For this was the story of the three mighty captains: —
“Now three of the thirty captains went down to the rock to David, into the cave of Adullam; and the host of the Philistines encamped in the valley of Rephaim.
“And David was then in the hold, and the Philistines’ garrison was then at Bethlehem.
“And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Beth-lehem, that is at the gate!
“And the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew water out of the well of Beth-lehem, that was by the gate, and brought it to David : but David would not drink of it, but poured it out to the Lord,
“And said, My God forbid it me, that I should do this thing: shall I drink the blood of these men that have put their lives in jeopardy? for with the jeopardy of their lives they brought it. Therefore he would not drink it. These things did these three mightiest.”
According to latter-day standards this episode was very foolishly managed. David was a king, and a rich man. He had flocks and herds, gold, silver, and jewels. He was perfectly well able to pay the three captains “big money” for risking their lives to gratify his longings, and if, knowing the peril, they still chose to jeopardize themselves, that was their own affair. When the adventure was safely ended, the three captains could perhaps have retired on their earnings and purchased for themselves purple and fine linen and horses and chariots and the like, just as we moderns buy changes of raiment and automobiles and steam yachts with the blood money for which we put ourselves in jeopardy.
As for David, he could have enjoyed his cooling draught with a clear conscience. Why not, since he had made a business contract and “delivered the goods”? There was doubtless water to be had nearer at hand than that of the well of Beth-lehem, but if a man has an especial kind of thirst, he does have it; and having paid for its gratification, to waste the liquor is senseless deprivation.
It was the Puritan conscience, we are told, which “put rock foundations under this republic;” in the minds of some oldfashioned people the belief still obtains that courage and loyalty and self-control and self-sacrifice lie at the foundation of both national and individual character, and that the nation or the individual who forsakes these ideals will, in spite of all the opportunities and training of schools and colleges and universities, remain radically uneducated.