Education and Happiness: A Defense of Progressive Schools

I

THIS fall we placed our little daughter, aged nine, in a school of the type which, for better or worse, has come to be dubbed ‘ progressive.’ All education, like life itself, is an experiment, and it is far too soon for final judgments. Perhaps those will arrive in twenty years — more likely never. But one effect is strikingly evident. The child is happy. It shows in the zest with which she scrambles from bed in the morning, devours her breakfast, and trots off for the day. It shines in her face. It influences her health. It permeates all her attitudes toward life. There is no doubt about it.

Certainly this seems a very good thing. But what does it all really amount to? How important is it? What is the probable tale of profit and loss? Is she missing something she ought to have? Is some tonic not being administered, some vitamin lacking in her spiritual diet? Will her growth toward the full stature of humanity be warped or stunted ? Will the future years reveal some fatal flaw? Will she, in her maturity, have reason to reproach us for our decision? How genuinely significant is this happiness which her school is bringing her?

Something more than a personal interest prompts me to ask these questions. Professor Carl Joachim Friedrich, in his article, ‘This Progressive Education,’ which appeared in the October Atlantic, raised just such questions, and in their most general form. I think he has done a notable service. He has brought to a focus those diffused yet urgent misgivings felt by so many intelligent people over the spectacle of ‘ progressive education.’ Such misgivings are not to be treated lightly. They have, indeed, the profoundest implications. All too rarely, however, do they come to clear and considered statement. The progressives are vocal. Their critics usually offer little save rather inarticulate dubiety; and until such doubts — doubts widely held, please observe — are codified, to combat them is like trying to fight a fog.

Here, then, is an opportunity far too good to miss. Professor Friedrich has given inchoate questionings a definite shape. From being an irritating nuisance, they become extremely valuable. One is able critically to examine them, and to find out how deeply they cut into the texture of a profoundly different philosophy of education. When such Brocken mists coalesce into a spectre, the moment for action has arrived.

II

I say, ‘My little girl is happy in her school. That seems to me excellent prima facie evidence that it is a good school, and that her education is going as it should.’ Professor Friedrich, and those who think as he does, all of them people whose opinions I must respect, would probably reply somewhat as follows: —

‘Happiness is a most deceitful guide. The great gift of a good school should be competence, solid mastery. This is what life demands. Your daughter will perhaps have to earn her living, presumably as a professional woman — a physician, let us say. She will have to meet intense competition. If she fails to meet it, she will go down. To be equipped for such a battle she must have exact knowledge, refined skill. It is no matter of choice. She must learn these things whether she likes it or not. And to gain them she must pay the price of hard work and long drudgery. Teach her to follow happiness, and you are setting her eyes upon a will-o’-the-wisp which may lead her into disastrous morasses.‘

What can I say to this? A great deal. I begin by admitting the force of much of the argument. If she wishes to be a physician she must know anatomy. If she wishes to be an engineer (which God forbid!) she must know mathematics. All undeniably true. Indeed, there is a still more telling illustration. That process of moving one’s eyes over a page of print which we call reading is not, per se, amusing or entertaining. And yet not even Rousseau himself, wildest of all ‘progressive educators,’ denied that it is a useful and important trick for a civilized human being.

And yet my contention remains virgin and intact. Is hard work incompatible with happiness? The opposite is true, at least in my experience. Did Karl Marx spend twenty years of misery in the Library of the British Museum? Certainly he believed that there were a thousand thousand things which he must know, and he subjected himself to the enormous toil of learning them. But I suspect that in so toiling he achieved a deep and satisfying content with which few men have been blessed. Who can read the noble epilogue to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall without perceiving happiness and drudgery to be what they truly are — twin sisters?

There is a magic which unites hard work and happiness. It is the magic called purpose. Let my daughter desire urgently to be a physician, and she will have an appetite for all the stern intellectual fare she must digest. Let her desire urgently to be a musician, and technical drill will be a fascination, not a curse. Nothing worthy is ever achieved without toil. But the value does not lie in the toil. It lies in the achievement. The purpose makes the toil yield dividends, and converts it into a means of the highest happiness.

Moreover this magic called purpose is an absolutely necessary magic. Psychological investigation has shown again and again that mere routine, mere repetition, mere hard work, does not issue in effective learning. This is a matter, not of opinion, but of ascertained fact. Forty years ago it was conclusively shown that no perceptible difference can be found between the spelling of children whose schools drill them ten minutes a day on the subject and that of children whose schools drill them forty to fifty minutes a day. Mere quantitative grind as such profited nothing. The will to learn, the purpose to achieve, is what makes toil rich with value.

Professor Friedrich seems to suppose that the ‘progressive schools’ achieve less in the way of solid mastery than the conventional schools. Here again we are confronting not opinions but facts. The very reverse is true. Competent and sufficient investigation unquestionably reveals that progressive methods produce not only happiness, but also more effective learning.

Why this is so I can show by a very simple illustration. My little daughter happens to be weak in her multiplication tables. Her school has very skillfully created situations which lead her to desire to be able to multiply. And she is learning her tables, and learning them well. If she had been placed under some stupid martinet, some fanatic for meaningless hard work whose educational alpha and omega was the daily stint, what would have happened? I know; beyond a doubt I know. Misery, futility, a lifelong aversion. She would have quickly developed that shocking phobia mathematica, that intellectual disease for the propagation of which our conventional schools are so greatly to blame. As it is, she is learning her tables well, and learning them well because she is learning them happily.

Let me say with particular care that I do not regard happiness as a sufficient condition of educational excellence. But emphatically I do regard it as a necessary condition. Assuredly the quality, the nature, the sources of happiness need to be examined. To say that my child should be allowed to do whatever she likes just because it happens to please her is the veriest rubbish. Yet we hear this idiotic misinterpretation of progressive ideas parroted again and again by people who ought to know better. There are many, many things which she must learn, and which will not be easily mastered. It is necessary that she learn them. It is just as necessary that she desire to learn them or she will not learn them well.

III

But Professor Friedrich advances yet another point which I am bound to consider before I can be reasonably satisfied that in placing my child in a school environment where she is happy I am doing the best thing for her. And here again he puts in clear language a host of those vague, widely felt misgivings of which I have spoken.

‘Your child is happy in her school,’ he might say. ‘But does not this suggest that the school lacks one most important element, the element of discipline? Moral and intellectual discipline is essential for any kind of effectiveness. It is achieved by the performance of uncongenial tasks under stern imperatives. An education which flowers in a perpetual happiness will inevitably deprive your daughter of such experiences, to her very great harm.’ Certainly this is no warning to be shrugged away. And there is no doubt that many would agree with him in offering it.

About no problem in education is there a greater whirl of muddled thinking than this one of discipline. A great many parents and teachers entertain ideas about it which seem to me quite fantastically wrong. And nowhere do fallacious ideas lead more immediately to futile and destructive practices. So I am especially grateful to Professor Friedrich for the opportunity to meet the issue head-on.

What exactly do we mean when we talk about a person as disciplined? Concrete examples will serve us best. The physician who turns down an invitation to go duck hunting because he must look after his patients; the teacher who resists the lure of the golf links so that papers may be marked on time; the musician who labors for a year with the uttermost pains and particularity to perfect his mastery of a composition; the scholar who digs in and acquires a new language or a new set of mathematical techniques for the sake of his research — all these show the quiddity of what we call discipline. As a negative instance consider the young men described by Priestley in his English Journey, who had never known employment, who had no sense of responsibility, who could not be relied on to keep an appointment, who resented any kind of control, who lived planless yet not discontented lives.

To comprehend what discipline is is to recognize its supreme importance. If her school is not in the way of developing this quality in my daughter, the sooner I take her out of it the better. So I must ask, and anxiously ask, under what conditions discipline is acquired. To anyone responsible for the direction of a child, that question is very far from academic.

I think I know the reply which Professor Friedrich and many others would make. The essence of discipline, they would say, is the willingness to perform uncongenial tasks — to wash the dishes, to learn the language, to mark the papers, to practise the scales. Like all other behavior patterns, it is acquired by use. Very well, then, the school ought to impose uncongenial tasks, and require that they be done willy-nilly. Cube root, solid geometry, Latin grammar — such things possess a tonic value. They are little inevitabilities, and in submitting to them my child learns to submit to the greater inevitabilities which later she must face. When we make education enjoyable, we emasculate it. The school should be a place of compelling imperatives, not of happiness.

I believe that this is all wrong. The argument is buttressed by appeals to ‘modern psychology,’ and to the alleged ‘conditioning’ of various behavior patterns. The concept of ‘conditioning,’ however, is a piece of pseudo-scientific patter very similar to the older patter about faculties and instincts, and just about as valid. And modem psychology speaks with many voices. To say that it authoritatively and unequivocally ‘teaches’ any such propositions as those just stated is simply not true.

Discipline depends upon purpose. Uncongenial tasks, hard work, selfsacrifice, have in and of themselves no scintilla of value. To say they have is just like thinking medicine beneficial because it is nasty. They become valuable when they are recognized and accepted as necessary to the achievement of worthy and significant purposes. They become so precisely because they teach us the meaning and the cost of achievement. But it is the attainment, the result, — not the effort, however necessary, — that is worth while. Here quite literally the end justifies the means. There is no tonic value in toil as such. There is enormous tonic value in toil for a desirable and admirable goal. If I could write like a Flaubert, or play like a Horowitz, or experiment like a Compton, without any training or effort at all, should I lose anything? I cannot see that I should. On the contrary, I think I should be immensely the gainer. But this is not possible. Discipline arises out of the very conditions of achievement in life. And it begins only when we set before ourselves some intelligible aim, and muster our resources to attain it, and subject ourselves to the necessary labor.

I know a great junior high school managed on progressive lines. The principal told me that for an experiment all the teachers walked out of the building without notice, and stayed away a solid hour. And the work of the school went right on. When my daughter’s teacher leaves the room, the class remains orderly, occupied, responsible. I know many and many a conventional school where no teacher dare step outside her room, because instant riot and bedlam would break loose. Where do we find the more effective disciplinary influence?

This is why I firmly believe that an education whose soul and centre is the imposition of alien tasks falsifies the very condition of all discipline. The ideal educative process is simply the achievement, in spite of difficulties, of a significant purpose. The perfect school would be an institution where children were constantly aroused and stimulated to such significant purposes, and where the whole of their education consisted in achieving those purposes. The nearer any school comes to this (schools, like all human institutions, are imperfect, and none goes all the way), the more effectively it disciplines. Also — and here I come back to my main thesis — the concomitant of such a disciplinary process is happiness. Toil becomes radiant, thrilling, fascinat ing, when it is integrated with effective achievement.

How do I learn to think? By being given lessons in geometry because of its logical structure, or being forced to study Latin because of ‘the rigidity of its grammar’? Ridiculous! Sheer superstition and argument by analogy! Sheer belief in psychological miracles! I learn to think by being made aware of cogent, impelling problems, and then setting to work to acquire the knowledge, the precision, the insight, the resourcefulness necessary to solve them. How do I learn to concentrate? By being told to sit still for fifty minutes, and read my book, and not utter a sound? This is much more apt to teach me only boredom, distaste, bewilderment. I learn to concentrate by having set before me some significant achievement — the writing of a paper, the performance of a composition, the carrying out of an experiment — and then being helped to see the crucial elements in the situation to which I must attend if I am to get anywhere. I learn to concentrate by mastering the technique of achievement. How do I learn self-sacrifice? By being forced to give up what I want just because I want it? No; rather by learning to give up what I want for the sake of what I want still more.

The process of discipline is gradual. It cannot be imposed complete at the start. It is the very process of mental growth. The child gains discipline through his childish purposes, and through the organization and integration of his life for their achievement. He does not and cannot gain it by having stamped upon him a set of adult behavior patterns. Along that line is educational futility, educational misery. An education which truly disciplines will bring to the child the happiness of increasing power, increasing mastery, an increasing sense of significant purposes, and an increasing ability to achieve them.

IV

But what of the future? Here once more Professor Friedrich poses me a question which I must try to answer. Again let me venture to put words into his mouth.

‘A permanent characteristic of our civilization,’ he says to me, ‘is the large-scale organization of life. And large institutions require a certain degree of bureaucratic management. We find it in Harvard University, the Bell Telephone Company, the United States Geodetic Survey, everywhere. Hence one of the attitudes necessary in civilized persons is a submission to such control, the attitude of the good soldier who takes orders without cavil. Your progressive school, aiming at and producing happiness, does not engender such attitudes in your daughter. And to this degree it unfits her for life and compromises her future.’

Here too I am unable to agree. I doubt very much whether the most characteristic virtue, the àpϵtη, of a professor in Harvard University is a willingness to submit to orders from a bureaucracy! Such a willingness, of course, is desirable, and is a part of his professional competence. But surely it ought to be a reasoned willingness, dependent on his perceiving that here is a necessary condition for the creative activities of teacher and scholar.

may be an ethic appropriate to soldiers on the field of battle, but surely not to civilized men engaged in enterprises whose whole value lies in their individual quality. As a matter of fact, in modern war this very ethic is rapidly becoming outmoded, and the soldier is more and more required to show initiative and personal resource.

Certainly I do not want my daughter to grow up a wild and unhappy radical, forever kicking against pricks and battering her head on stone walls. But neither do I wish her to be a submissive creature, worshiping authority, unable to move without orders from above. I think she has the best chance for an effective life if she becomes intelligently and not uncritically cooperative with the social controls which surround her, rather than blindly docile or blindly refractory. Bureaucratic controls exist for one reason only, the maximum release of individual capacity and individual purpose. They are the conditions of maximum freedom within the social scheme. They have in themselves no kind of virtue. They are means, not ends, and should be accepted as such. If her school can teach her the high art of following and realizing her own purposes in the nexus of her social relationships, with all the adjustments this implies, it has taught her the art of social living. The process of learning this art should and may be a happy and releasing, not a stultifying, repressing, misery-breeding process; and its attainment is about the finest guarantee I know of a life that is happy through effectiveness.

V

If this paper has seemed unduly polemical I apologize to Professor Friedrich and to all who may read it. Such has not been my intention. I have far too keen a sense of the magnitude and dubiousness of all these issues to wish to advance rashly, uttering war cries and clashing sword and shield. In education as nowhere else we see the concrete application to the practical problems of life of philosophic concepts.

Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago a troubled father came to Socrates with the question: ‘ What shall I do about the education of my two boys ?‘ Our own answer to that question will depend, and immediately depend, upon our understanding of human destiny, and of the meanings of our intellectual, spiritual, and social life. Some of those meanings and their applications I have tried, most ineffectually, to expose.

It is because I have in the interpretations here suggested a faith sufficient to stake upon them my little daughter’s well-being that I venture to close with a plea. Its essence is this. Progressive education should command the support, never uncritical, but always loyal and sympathetic, of all earnest-minded men and women who desire human life to go on to better things in the persons of their children.