Education as Mental Discipline

I

WHEN doubts are suggested as to the value of certain time-honored subjects included in the elementary and secondary curriculum, one is told that the subjects in question are valuable because they ‘train the mind.’ ‘Training the mind’ is therefore a phrase which expresses a definite educational theory — the theory, namely, that the most important function of the school is to discipline the mental faculties so that in after life they will be serviceable instruments ready for effective use. The faculties to be thus trained are memory, reason, imagination, observation. People who believe in ‘training the mind,’ or in ‘formal discipline,’ which is the same thing technically expressed, almost invariably hold that the timehonored subjects—Latin, algebra, geometry, and so on — best serve this purpose. They believe that subjects which will themselves probably never be used furnish the most effective mental gymnastic, to use another favorite expression; that memory developed by learning Latin grammar, observation practiced in distinguishing moods and tenses, reason practiced in algebraic or geometrical operations, are so many weapons, in fighting trim, ready to be put to such uses as arise out in the world subsequently. The theory of mental discipline or formal discipline is therefore the bulwark of conventional or traditional education.

The opposing conception may be described as education on the basis of content. Education on the basis of content endeavors to equip the pupil with a varied body of properly-ordered material, which will serve his purposes, stimulate his interests, and engage his growing powers. It selects things to teach, not primarily for the purpose of training the mind, but because the things are in themselves useful, satisfying, or inspiring — because, in a word, they serve some purpose which is valued either by society or by the individual, be the purpose material, utilitarian, artistic, spiritual, or what not. Education by content docs not deny that there is such a thing as training. Indeed, having once chosen a particular subject or content, it insists that this content should be so presented as to develop the maximum power and interest. But it entirely disbelieves in the training of general faculties — a general memory faculty, a general reasoning faculty, a general faculty of observation — on which the theory of formal discipline sets such great store. It holds that really no such faculties exist, and hence that they cannot be trained. There are instead — so content-education believes — many kinds of memory, many kinds of reasoning power, many kinds of observing faculty; and all we know of training is that these various abilities are within limits improvable through exercise. Content-education holds, therefore, that, if the mind is to deal with varied, yet definite and specific experiences, problems, and activities, education or training should concern itself with such experiences, problems, and activities —not with totally different and very limited problems and activities. Hence the emphasis on a content which is in range and quality fairly representative of the world as a whole and of the mind in all its varied interests and capacities.¹

American education is, on the whole, dominated by the former of the two conceptions I have briefly characterized — that is, by the theory of formal discipline. Children study most of their present subjects, not because they serve essential purposes or represent significant experiences, but because they are supposed to ‘train the mind.’ From time to time in recent years, to be sure, content-studies have crept in or been forced in. But it would be a mistake to suppose that this indicates a deliberate abandonment of the disciplinary line. On the contrary, the new content-studies have largely shared the fate of the rest of the curriculum — they have been taught so as to ‘train the mind.’ Their presence does not therefore indicate that the contenttheory is crowding out the theory of mental discipline.

The frankest and most unqualified embodiment of the disciplinary conception of education is the preparatory school. I single it out in this discussion because, particularly in the East, it represents the kind of training given those who qualify for admission to college — those, that is, who want to get a higher education. It is true that increasing numbers enter college, in the East as in other sections, from public and private high schools which do not describe themselves as preparatory schools. Nevertheless, high schools preparing students for college have been directly and indirectly compelled to approximate the preparatory school in the course of study and in the way in which the course of study is handled. Thus the influence of the American college works strongly in the direction of fastening on the secondary school the disciplinary conception of education. I propose in this paper to consider this procedure; in a subsequent one I shall try to convince college authorities that they ought to promote an experiment with the alternative conception.

The preparatory school devotes itself, then, to mental discipline. It seeks to train the mind by forcing it to do intellectual tasks mostly of little inherent interest, but of gradually increasing difficulty. Some pupils do, indeed, get interested; at times the personality of the teacher will irradiate the instruction; at times the study takes on the character of a game which minds of a certain type like to puzzle out. Again, it happens that in every class certain pupils do with ease and almost intuitively the tasks that are defended because of the deliberate intellectual effort that they are supposed to require and to train. I have never heard any believer in mental discipline explain what becomes of the theory in the case of such students — the students, I mean, who see through the thing in this rather effortless fashion. We need not, however, worry about them; for the number of those who succeed easily because of interest in the game or because of native capacity is not large enough to upset the contention that most pupils find intellectual tasks of the type employed difficult and unappealing. To consider what sort of training — intellectual and moral — these pupils get out of their hard and dull tasks, is the main purpose of this paper.

The preparatory school curriculum is made up of languages, abstract mathematics, history, and a bit of science. On its face, it is predominantly a thing of words and symbols. The mind that it trains is therefore necessarily the wordmind — the mind that has to do with words, the mind that can be reached through words, and only in so far as it has to do with words or can be reached through words. If there be people — as there surely are — who think more or less in materials, in colors, in sounds, in images, in action, the word-discipline of the preparatory school is not for them, in so far as they think or act in those media. Now, of course, no education is going to dispense with words and symbols, and the best possible education is going to make a large use of them. But words and symbols are not used in the preparatory school discipline as they are used in daily life. In daily life words are used to suggest meanings or ideas. The preparatory school, on the contrary, uses words and symbols, not primarily to transmit a meaning, but, without emphasis upon meaning, as a method of disciplining the will, the reason, the power of analysis. The other type of school I mentioned — the content type — would employ words and symbols as keys to living subjects, as ways of summarizing experience, as stimuli and challenges to action. Not so the preparatory school. The preparatory school employs words and symbols as formal instruments for disciplinary exercise. And, as we shall see, it treats pretty much all subjects in pretty much the same fashion.

Let me make sure that I am understood when I say that the preparatory school curriculum or the college-entrance programme— call it which you please—is overwhelmingly a thing of words and symbols taught for formal ends. Note in the first place the prominence of language studies and the objects which the language studies subserve. Over one half the subjects offered are languages; much more than one half the time of pupils in school and out of school goes to the study of languages — to the study of languages, furthermore, which pupils do not learn and are not expected to learn. I say the languages are not learned; no one expects them to be learned. They are taught, not for the sake of their meanings, not to be used in suggesting ideas, but as a means of discipline.

Now consider what happens when a child studies, without learning, Latin and Greek. He commits to memory paradigms, conjugations, and vocabulary. What is the process? A mechanical remembering and identifying of arbitrary correspondences between mere words. Each particular ending in Latin equals something, or one of several somethings, in English; each word in Latin equals something, or one of several somethings, in English. There is a list of cases with meaningless names to be arbitrarily accepted; it is astonishing how glibly children learn to employ this incomprehensible terminology. It is no part of the child’s business to ask why; it is, in the main, his business to take the thing on faith and to commit it to memory. Thus, a whole series of declensions is memorized: in the first declension, a long a is a symbol to be mechanically identified with what is called ablative singular, drum a symbol to be mechanically identified with genitive plural, and so on. Subsequently things called moods, voices, gerunds are accepted on the combined assurance of the printed page and of a teacher who treats this printed page with convincing gravity. Intelligence — on the child’s part — is rarely involved ; there is rarely anything for him to understand; there is rarely any stimulus to his wit or interest. It is,

I repeat, a mechanical process which some children do readily and some do not — and there is an end of the matter.

An enormous mass of such arbitrary material has to be taken aboard like so much lifeless freight — declensions, conjugations, regular, irregular, with no end of equally arbitrary exceptions. Nor does arbitrariness end when the grammar forms are learned; for the syntax is from the pupil’s point of view, generally speaking, just as arbitrary, just as much a matter of faith. He is told that ut means ‘that,’ — ‘in order that,’ or ‘so that’; that when it means ‘ in order that’ the negative is ne; when it means ‘so that,’the negative is non; once more, a mechanical set of correspondences, to be mechanically memorized and mechanically applied. So far as he is concerned, it might as well be the other way round or any old way round. No reaction which he can feel or perceive would follow the reversal. Where alternatives are open, the pupil usually fumbles or guesses; some hapless children have a diabolical tendency to guess wrong — just as Mrs. Wiggs’s children were carried irresistibly into an open rain-barrel, when with the slightest good fortune they might have avoided it. In such instances the teacher’s displeasure, evinced by a low mark, not some untoward experience with the rain-barrel, is the pupil’s only way of knowing right from wrong.

I do not, of course, mean to deny that now and then Latin and Greek can be made, and indeed are made, to convey a distinction in meaning which the child may be brought to see is genuine — as, for example when the prepositions in and ad are distinguished. But even if such opportunities were much more abundant than they are, they would not give to classical study the disciplinary virtue asserted for it. The content learned and the method by which it is learned go together; the child cannot acquire a method in vacuo with power to apply it afterwards to other situations that may arise. The child who learns to make a verbal distinction learns just that —and that is practically an end of the matter; he is not acquiring a generally applicable analytical skill. If the teacher happens to possess a wider interest in his classics and if in consequence his teaching is more or less vitalized thereby, the pupils profit by just so much. The subject is made just so much more real; its stimulating, engaging, or, if you prefer, disciplinary effect is increased by so much, and no more. The disciplinary theory, however, tends strongly to restrict the teacher’s opportunity to develop his subject on these side lines. In any case, the scope of meaning or reality in operating with dead languages is as a pinpoint compared with vast arid stretches of formality or arbitrariness. For the most part, teacher and pupil operate, or, better, attempt to operate analytically on intellectual lines with empty, unreal symbols devoid of the breath of life.

II

One half the subjects of a curriculum based on the old-fashioned college-entrance requirements can thus be criticized for many pupils as mere juggling with words and symbols — a juggling which does not in the end hope or intend to be familiar enough with them to become unconscious of mechanism and conscious of the ideas which languages are meant to communicate. Nor is this failure to learn the language as language regarded by the preparatory school as a fair criticism; for learning the language is not what the school aims at — so far, at least, as the avowed theory of the preparatory school goes. The school aims at mental discipline — and the reader is now in a position to judge how much and what kind of discipline most pupils get from the preparatory school language studies. Moreover, whatever they get, there is no reason whatever to suppose that as discipline it. goes beyond the particular abilities called into action by it. In this respect, the discipline got from learning Latin resembles the discipline got from playing chess. You train what you train.

Mathematics is another formal subject, taught, mainly, not for the sake of imparting knowledge that is or can be used to serve some purpose or other, but taught, once more, because it is supposed to discipline a certain faculty — primarily the reason. In practice, if only teachers observed what happens, it might be perceived that algebra is learned, not as a rule by the exercise of anything that can be properly called reason, but passively, mechanically, just as Latin grammar and Latin syntax are for the most part learned. And just, as the Latin student is reputed to be successful if he can reproduce what he has taken in, so the algebra student succeeds when he can mechanically perform the operations that the teacher or the book performs. He is told that a2 X a3 = a5, while 2a X 3a = 6a2; and, more or less precariously, he comes to do the same thing himself. When negative or fractional exponents are reached, he is — as they say — ‘drilled ’ until hazily and doubtfully he can carry out the same operation. A bit later, and in the same imitative fashion, he learns to apply the binomial theorem or to solve quadratics involving two unknown quantities in this way or that, according as they resemble this type or that. But throughout he is dealing with words and symbols through which he does not penetrate to the realities represented.

Nor is the study illuminated by being brought to bear. Formal discipline does not require that; as I pointed out in discussing Latin, the tendency is in the opposite direction. The disciplinary purpose narrows and impoverishes. Hence the preparatory school curriculum offers nothing in the way of science or industry which might relieve the teaching of mathematics of its uncompromisingly abstract character, or might tend to mitigate formality by means of an occasional touch of reality. In consequence, save in rare instances, the student, goes through a mechanical exercise to which he remains spiritually indifferent — an exercise which does not tap his interest or power, and which for that reason leaves him very much the person that it found him. Highly typical is the girl who made 83 per cent in algebra in the latest collegeentrance examinations, after being ‘ prepared ’ in one of the most successful preparatory schools in the East. Just before entering the examination, she ran through with her father all the common quadratic types, glibly explaining the appropriate solution of each. It was a perfect performance — mechanically considered; but when it was finished and the subject dismissed, she suddenly broke out, ‘ Oh, by the way, father, what is a quadratic anyway?’ Which reminds me of a keen little fellow who recently explained to his mother: ‘You are not expected to understand algebra — only to do it.’ Algebra then, like Latin and Greek, means the mechanical handling of symbols, in close imitation of set models. As a discipline it would at most train children to operate imitatively with formulas whose origin and function they do not appreciate.

The theory of formal discipline is so pervasive that it has subdued other subjects which, it might be supposed, have and can have only content-value. How, for example, does the preparatory school teach history? In the first instance, the history selected is usually Greek and Homan, not modern — a choice which sacrifices at once the powerful motivation of the student’s environment. Ancient history has, to be sure, its proper place in education, but ordinary schools have thought little as to what that place is. The choice of Greek and Roman history is, therefore, not a choice dictated by a sense of the value of content; still less is the treatment calculated to bring out content-value. The subject is presented just about as formally as can beThe unit or symbol is larger, a paragraph, instead of a case or tense or formula; but words and symbols still. There is a textbook of Roman history in which things are boiled down to the form in which the pupil must absorb them with a view to their subsequent reproduction. Of the realities which these feeble paragraphs vainly attempt to portray, few obtain any grasp whatsoever. For the time being, a capable fellow can tell you the main features of the laws of Solon or the Licinian rogations. But the subject-matter was not chosen because of intrinsic interest and importance; and the teacher aims, not at cultivation of historic or civic interest, but at a neat and presentable formal achievement. One may well be puzzled as to what faculty is trained by this kind of exercise; a recent authority tells us that it is ‘memory, imagination, and social reasoning! ’

I mentioned science. In the last school-year, or the last but one, boys and girls whose faculties have for some eight to ten years been disciplined on case-endings, moods, rides of syntax, algebraic formula?, Euclidian demonstrations, Roman constitutions, and the like, are permitted to get a year of a chosen science — physics, or chemistry, or physiology. Well, tardily, to be sure, — but. let us not be ungrateful, — the eager boy, itching by this time for a contact with real problems, his curiosity deadened, but not yet wholly dead, — here at last, he will have done with words and symbols; he will come face to face with content, with phenomena. Not so, however. Preparatory school science, like preparatory school language, preparatory school mathematics, preparatory school history, is intellectual in aspect, meagre in content, disciplinary in purpose. The child’s normal scientific interest and activity arc derived from the world of phenomena and objects in which he lives. In reference to that world, he is, as has been said, ‘an animated interrogation point,’: he wants knowledge of that world; he strives to understand it and to do something with it. The content-teaching of science would heed these strong instincts; and discipline, if we may use the term, would come because of the reality and variety of the efforts made.

This would be science taught from the standpoint of content. The preparatory school, interested in discipline, selects a single science,—physics or chemistry,—presented in strictly logical or intellectual fashion, in a systematic, even if elementary, form; and thereupon, the pupil studies bookishly described phenomena, experiments, and laws, with the same strong emphasis on memory, mechanism, and faith that is characteristic of his study of Latin and algebra. He gets in his physics and chemistry as little sense of the real phenomenal world as he gets sense of meanings when he studies Latin, or sense of uses when he studies algebra or geometry. And what faculties are disciplined? Why, the faculties of ‘observation and concrete reasoning’!

Thus, our children study science, our children study history, just as they study German and French and Latin — not to gain insight or mastery or understanding, not because the subject-matter is a selected portion of their present or prospective experience which in one way or another is going to make a difference to them, but for the purpose of disciplining faculties that do not exist, by means of exercises, the real disciplinary outcome of which remains uninvestigated. They do not study languages as a way of getting at and conveying ideas. They do not study history as a way of arousing and satisfying social curiosity. They do not study science because they wonder at the world about them, or want to be able, so far as may be, to understand or control it. School science, is, therefore, as Dr. Wickliffe Rose once remarked, apt to be ‘ Latin under another name.’

III

I am at a loss to say just what the preparatory school English course — or the college-entrance English requirements, which is the same thing — aims to accomplish. It may, perhaps, be fairly regarded as an attempted discipline in taste and expression. As such, it is, of all the features that constitute the preparatory school programme, the most dismal failure. For the futility of conventional English teaching, in respect to both taste and expression, is precisely the point that strikes any observer, who, not being responsible for the teaching, is compelled to deal subsequently with the pupils who have passed through it. A university law school professor recently deplored, in conversation with me, the meagre vocabulary, feeble style, and paucity of ideas characteristic of the ‘picked’ students to whom his first, professional courses were addressed. How could it be otherwise? The art of expression develops where there is something to say; but the preparatory school curriculum, and, most of all, the English course, disdains any content such as would give the pupil something to say, and, instead, devotes itself, as consistently as it can, to a ‘discipline,’ which bleaches out all subjects to a uniform deadly pallor. As for taste — taste is something to be developed, not something to be summarily forced upon the pupil. Why should the long-drawnout analysis of dull, unsympathetic, and ill-adapted ‘classics’ like Comus, develop an ordinary pupil’s taste? and why should a man or woman who teaches English for twenty years be compelled every year to dawdle for days overL’Allegro, IlPenseroso, and Burke’s speech? In the thing itself there surely resides no sovereign virtue whatsoever

— only infinite boredom for pupil and teacher alike.

In fact, however, the English course — like the Latin course and the history course and the mathematics course and the science course — was devised by persons who never took into consideration such factors as boy-nature, girlnature, what is left of teacher-nature, or the realities of life and the universe; and it is carried out implicitly by teachers who do not compare what actually happens with what the theory of mental discipline assumes is happening. For, just as soon as the product is tested, — tested as to knowledge of the subjects studied, or tested as to the power thereby developed, — at that moment the whole structure will collapse like the house of cards that it is.

Mental discipline thus effaces the natural distinctions between different subjects; it makes Latin, history, mathematics, science, and English as nearly as possible the same. It empties the subjects of content in order the more effectively to utilize them for intellectual discipline. I repeat what I have already said: this discipline trains what it trains, — not general faculties, but specialized abilities, — the degree of specialization depending on the relative breadth or narrowness of the presentation; on the extent, that, is, to which discipline forgets itself and for the time being becomes content. Dr. Rose very aptly compares the champions of mental discipline to the Egyptian priests who planted rows of dead sticks which, for disciplinary purposes, they watered regularly; had they planted corn, they would have got the same discipline, and something more: the corn, for example, and everything directly and indirectly involved therein.

The champions of mental discipline do not usually try to prove their case by testing the faculties supposed to have been trained. From time to time a business man avers that his classical training lay at the bottom of his commercial success; and some engineers are credibly reported to have expressed the same sentiment. But retrospection is, to say the least, unreliable. I do not forget, of course, the examinations — the preparatory school examinations and the college-entrance examinations. But these examinations do not test the faculties which mental discipline claims to have trained; they are not tests of memory-power, reasoning-power, observation-power, imagination. They test only whether the candidate remembers the things by means of which the faculties in question arc said to have been trained. If a boy is required to learn

in order to train his memory, you do not prove his memory to have been trained by requiring him to repeat the lines (especially if, as is usually the case, he has forgotten most of them). Nor do you prove that a long succession of geometrical propositions has trained his reasoning power, because he can reproduce the simpler ones, after hard drilling on them. You merely prove that a person who lias done a thing often enough can sometimes do the same thing again — more particularly if he has been warned in advance as to just when he may be called on to do it. Meanwhile, certain types of memory and reasoning power and observation might really be tested; but, to prove the preparatory school contention, these powers would have to be tried on material that is both fresh and varied. This is not done.

A much more limited test might however have its uses — namely, a test of the power of pupils in the very subjects with which they have been working. The school tests and the college-entrance tests are not sufficiently objective; besides, the results have not been studied in a way to throw light on the fundamental questions involved. Latin is taught — we are told — so as to train the mind. Very well; let us find out in the first place, how well it is taught. A certain state superintendent of education has recently asked every fourth-year high-school Latin pupil in his state to tell in writing the meaning of a piece of simple Latin prose. On the basis of the performance he makes a preliminary estimate of the efficiency of Latin teaching in his state as between 10 and 15 per cent. This result and other results not a whit more encouraging ought to suggest to believers in mental discipline a series of problems. If Latin is taught to train the mind, how successfully must it be taught in order to train the mind? Is any kind of result better than none at all? Is an inferior result — failure in greater or less degree — capable of harming the mind or character? What does an efficiency of 15 per cent signify? Does it guarantee training, or may it indicate damage? If it should be decided that 15 per cent efficiency is not helpfully disciplinary, then just where shall the line be drawn? Suppose we tentatively assume that an efficiency of 60 or 75 per cent indicates a trained mind, can an efficiency of 15 per cent, objectively measured, be raised to an efficiency of 60 or 75 per cent, similarly measured, and if so, how? Is success in this possible? If possible, what would it cost in time, effort, and money? Would it be worth what it cost to all, or only to those who can achieve it with a moderate expenditure? If a low final grade indicates damage, what shall be done for those who cannot be brought above it? Obviously the same questions can and should be raised as to the other subjects in the disciplinary curriculum. And when the disciplinarians begin to study education in a scientific spirit, they will entertain such questions and patiently seek the answers to them.

Before leaving the subject, I must touch on one other point. Mental discipline is sometimes, as I have said, called a ‘gymnastic,’ and it is held to be justified by the bodily analogy. I do not want to be entangled in a discussion based on metaphors; the metaphors are too apt to come between the disputants and their subject. But so much I may say: the physical gymnasium may or may not train the muscles for other uses; at any rate, it makes only a limited demand daily on the time and energy of the boy; it leaves him free to cultivate other forms of physical expression and urges the wholesomeness of so doing. Not so the mental disciplinarians. Their procedure — meagre and one-sided though it be — tends, by mere pressure, if not otherwise, to exclude other forms of mental and spiritual activity. At a time when pupils are being formally disciplined and mentally trained by means of six subjects all presented in the same fashion, one might suppose that teachers, supposed to be students and observers of the adolescent mind and soul, would be aware of other potential interests and capacities that must be given a chance. Not at all.

Children with a turn for the woods, for animals, for poetry, for music, for modeling, for drawing, or with the possibility of such a turn, have no right to be heard as against the sure intellectual and moral salvation promised by a mental discipline, which has never been subjected by its votaries to a critical examination! If the grind destroys or starves out their possibilities — well, their ‘faculties’ have been trained!

IV

When I say that American schools generally are committed to the theory of formal discipline, I do not mean that other claims are not from time to time also advanced. Latin and Greek are occasionally defended on the ground of their culture-value. The champions of formal discipline appear not to realize that the culture argument flatly contradicts the disciplinary theory, and really accepts the content view of education. In any event, the methods pursued and the results obtained belie the culture argument. Latin and Greek have culture-value only for those who learn the languages and read the literatures. But so few of those who study Latin and Greek learn them, read their literatures, or take any interest in their literatures, that the culture claim cannot be taken seriously as a ground for general and enforced study of Latin or Greek. If, of course, any one desires to learn Latin or Greek as he would undertake to learn French or German, and for the same kind of reason, no objection could be urged, for such study would be calculated to realize culturevalue — which is a real and not a format end. But an argument for the classics based on the assumption that they are to be mastered and appreciated cannot possibly serve as an argument for a study that does not result in mastery or appreciation, and is not expected to result in either. It is a tactical blunder for believers in classical culture to make common cause with the mental disciplinarians, for classical culture can thus only be involved in the ruin which has overtaken mental discipline.

Precisely the same must be said of any argument for Latin or Greek on the ground that higher education must transmit the inheritance of the race. The transmission of culture in the shape of literature, art, history, philosophy — this is content-education, not disciplinary education. Transmission can be effected either through the original language, or through translation, or through both. But if through the original, then the language must be learned, just as French is learned, as a medium for the communication of ideas. The disciplinary purpose is once more a contradiction. Persons who really believe in the culture argument or the transmission argument cannot too soon extricate themselves from their present educational company; they belong on the content side. Instead of defending education of the disciplinary type, they ought to be raising the question as to how in this busy modern world the content of ancient culture can be conserved and transmitted. Whatever the way, it will not be through schools organized and conducted on the theory of mental discipline.

The situation in respect to the theory of formal discipline is, indeed, a curious one. It dominates American education generally; it receives in the preparatory school a clean-cut, unqualified embodiment. Our educational administrators thus accept it, believe in it, practice it. Meanwhile, among students of the science and art of education, — that is, among those who are concerned with the study of educational processes and results, — the theory of formal discipline has, nowadays, no standing whatever. It is as though the students of disease believed, let us say, in the germ theory, while the practitioners of medicine took no stock in it at all. As a matter of fact, practitioners of medicine listen to the student s of disease; but educational administrators are still wary of psychologists and such folk!

For our present purpose, I need not argue the case against formal discipline further. It is clear that its psychology is seriously at fault; for the faculties —memory, reason, etc. — which formal discipline thinks to train in such wise that they can afterwards be used to deal with any problem or emergency that arises, simply do not exist in separate form. Memory, reason, imagination are not single entities which can be disciplined once for all. There are all sorts of ways of remembering, reasoning, and imagining; so that, from the standpoint of training, not a monotonous, verbal, and intellectual set of exercises is needed, but rather all kinds of physical and intellectual experience. Further, formal discipline errs in belittling the possibilities of interest, in ignoring the urgency of knowledge and power adapted to practical needs, social and personal, and, finally, in overlooking the significance and importance of individual capacity. It is at once false in its psychology and too narrow in its outlook.

V

A school that concerned itself with content would begin by asking what children naturally do and are capable of doing; what tasks life imposes; what accomplishments are of inherent value; what different sorts of ability can be profitably and happily employed. It would set out to guide and to develop the interests and abilities of children; it would select from the objective world significant objects — languages, literature, art, civics, industry, physical phenomena — in the hope of making them objects of genuine and significant concern to growing boys and girls. It would not bother with discipline in the abstract; but it would endeavor so to do its work that habits and attitudes of the right kind would tend to become the ways in which the individual expressed himself. In a content school such as I am describing one would study languages in order to underst and them, to use them, to have access to the ideas stored up in them, to satisfy one’s curiosity, if one will, about their history, structure, and so forth. But always one’s aim would be involved in the language, not in some supposed medication of one’s mental faculties through it. Again, one would study science, not to discipline the mind, but to serve a purpose through knowing the subject; the same would be true of history and literature. Science, literature, history, modern languages, industrial processes, would be taught because they answer the questions which live people ask and can be led to ask, or because they in their substance minister to our needs, capacities, or aspirations, — taught, that is, because they serve purposes and in order that they may serve purposes.

Some of the purposes will be what some people might, perhaps, call low; some of the purposes will be what they might be pleased to call high. We can afford, however, to be less concerned with the topography of the purposes than with the reality or genuineness of the results. If literature can be taught so that there is a vital connection between school and home reading; if history can be taught so that it supplies the child with answers to his problems and raises more problems still; if languages can be taught so that they can be used; if science can be taught so that the world about us is either intelligible or intelligently unintelligible; if industry can be so utilized that the child can understand and sympathize, it is immaterial by what adjective either the effort or the result is described. Is it not clear that this way of studying restores to every subject its proper individuality and thereby engages the mind in various ways? There could indeed be no greater absurdity than to divorce training from content, even were it possible; all the advantage lies the other way. In other words, the purpose for which subjects are taught lies, not in the pupil’s mind, but in the subjectmatter and its relations to existence and life; and the more varied and appealing and trying, if you will, the subjectmatter, the better for the boy, whether the result be viewed from the standpoint of discipline so-called, or from the standpoint of knowledge, interest, and power. The purposes inherent in subject-matter and its world-relations are infinite in variety. Some are utilitarian; some spiritual. Some are mediate — that is, lead elsewhere; some end with their own attainment. But they are always and invariably real, not formal; and discipline comes — if it comes at all — through exercise and experience with various realities.

At heart, intelligent teachers of the classics must know this just as well as we do; they must in their candid moments admit to themselves that they hold on to the theory of mental discipline because their present subjects are not successfully taught as content. They defend Latin and Greek as instruments of mental discipline; but they know perfectly well that that is not why Latin and Greek came into education. Latin and Greek came into education as real subjects, not as formal subjects; they came into education because they embodied more valuable thoughts than other languages, and because except through learning Latin and Greek the thoughts were not accessible. Suppose even to-day someone invented a way to teach Latin, — a way to teach it so that preparatory school pupils could speak it, read it, care for its literature, — would not the preparatory schools jump at it and never mention mental discipline again? Do they not really know that there is more good of one kind or another to be got out of knowing a language than out of the discipline acquired through failure to learn it?

Consider the question from another angle. I know a family of children whose father reads, writes, and speaks Latin. It is to him a language in the same sense and for the same purpose as English and French. His children are acquiring Latin as they are acquiring English and French. There is no question of grammar or syntax, of formal or of informal discipline. They are absorbing Latin through their pores. Is this a bad thing or a good thing? Are those children acquiring a language at the expense of a discipline? Are they getting culture by sacrificing mental training, and, perhaps, moral training, too? Are we to say that, if Latin could be learned as children grow up, because it is spoken in the household, the loss to intellectual training would be utterly disastrous? Of course, no one believes this. Everybody knows that the value of Latin is in knowing Latin, as the value of French is in knowing French, and the value of botany is in knowing botany, and in using it to solve problems and serve purposes; and that thorough and varied knowledge in this sense is effective as training because it involves wide, varied, stimulating, and resourceful employment of one’s capacities. If, then, Latin is to remain in the curriculum, it remains in order to be learned; and if it goes out, it goes out because it is not learned, or because other languages or other subjects are better worth while.

In conclusion, a word by way of quieting the apprehensions of those who fear that real studies will weaken character through appealing solely to spontaneous interest and through following slavishly its vicissitudes. I observe here once more indications that the disciplinarians have not exerted themselves to understand the opposing theory, and have not carefully reflected upon their own practice. When, for example, they discover a teacher of Greek who interests his pupils and arouses their enthusiasm, they do not discharge him. They do not tell him to make the work disciplinary by making it dull; they raise his salary. If interest — whether native or derived — is salutary in respect to Greek, why is it dangerous in connection with a modern subject or activity? Now let me say that in my judgment every teacher, every parent, every business man, every person responsible for any kind of result, will do well to enlist the most vigorous possible interest on the part of those with whom he is trying to work. That only means that the workers are active, assertive, that their powers are mobilized — the very attitude that a good teacher or effective leader aims to procure.

I do sincerely hope that every teacher in a modern school will have enough common sense to do this. The preparatory schools themselves do it when they can, and are right in so doing. Interest, whether native or derived, is indeed the most direct, though not the only, path to moral, intellectual, and economic salvation. So far from being a source of possible demoralization, it is the most certain means of preventing just that.

Perhaps it may be said in reply that it is not so much interest that is to be dreaded, as the heeding of variable and inconstant interests. But this is a manufactured bogey. The modernist does not propose to follow up every interest: he proposes to select and to develop significant interests. Nor does he propose to heed only the child’s native interests and to drop activities as soon as interest flags. Subjects and activities will be selected because they serve purposes. Many of them will be interesting, if teachers are fairly competent — the more, the better. But they will be taught because they serve purposes, not because they tickle the palate, and they will be taught thoroughly enough to serve their purposes, whether they cease or continue to interest. Difficult things will be done— some with zest, let us hope, others by hard pulling against the stream. In both cases — as in all cases — the effort will lead somewhere, and it will be supported by the consciousness that it does lead somewhere. Meanwhile, such effort involves no surrender of the principle that interest, derived as well as native, forms a legitimate and powerful motive. I should work it to the limit; I feel sure that far more can be done with it than is commonly done; but it is, after all, only one aspect of a complicated problem, and no well-informed person has ever made it the sole criterion of educational value.