Painless Education
I
AMONG the patrons of the public schools there has grown up a conviction that something is vitally wrong with our system of education. This feeling at times breaks into verbal expression as a vague dissatisfaction, and again as a more localized faultfinding with some particular phase of education, such as spelling, arithmetic, or handwriting. Seldom does it go deep enough to touch the vital core of the malady.
The American system of education ought to be the best in the world. It is universal. Every child not only may attend school, but is required to do so. The state does not discontinue free education at the end of the elementary period, but permits attendance in taxsupported schools, colleges, and universities up to any age. In buildings and material equipment our schools are not equaled by any in the world. We have the most elaborate and expensive system of public training schools for teachers. We pay our teachers, not enough, but certainly more than teachers are paid in other countries.
But, with physical conditions as nearly ideal as we have them, the parents and the taxpaying public are not satisfied with the results we get. This dissatisfaction is not limited to critics who stand outside the organization and look on. It is shared by many of the most thoughtful teachers working within the system. They often see the faults more clearly than the parents, the taxpayers, and the newspaper critics can see them. And thousands of teachers are willing and anxious to do something about these shortcomings.
If you visit a model pottery, you do not judge it by the building in which it is housed, by the cleanliness of the workers and their surroundings, by the contentment that seems to prevail, nor by any such things as these alone. Those items are important and very much to be desired; but if they exist in full measure and the one essential thing is missing, you are obliged to admit that the enterprise is a failure, or only a lame and partial success. That essential is an output excellent in quality and sufficient in quantity to justify the operation of the plant.
The products by which we must judge the schools are the children who come out of them at the age of fourteen, or eighteen, or twenty-two, labeled by the system as educated young people. One of the fundamental considerations offered to justify universal free education in a republic is that it creates thinking, law-abiding, and morally clear-seeing citizens. A self-governing state cannot continue without such a body of citizens. Do our schools succeed in turning out men and women of this kind? By the thousands, yes. But by the millions, no.
A great many school executives and teachers regard this sort of education for citizenship as their job, and work conscientiously, intelligently, and with great patience to send out of their schools young people who have acquired skill in the use of the tools of education, who have learned to use leisure wisely, and who have habits of thinking and patterns of acting that will make them desirable members of society.
Another large section of the teaching guild assume that they fulfill their obligation to the public, that they return value to the state which pays their salaries, when they assist their pupils in learning to read, to write, to do their sums, and to accomplish the other things that are included in the catalogue of accepted physical and mental tasks of the modern school.
Perhaps the largest section of all are entirely indifferent to such matters. For them ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ They are not professional teachers. They are ‘trippers.’ Teaching, for doubtless as many as one third of the eight hundred and seventy-five thousand men and women who ‘keep schools,’is still a temporary occupation. There are still many men every year who take up teaching as a financial steppingstone to law, medicine, engineering, or some other profession, business, or trade. Thousands of girls every year graduate from teachers’ colleges, or otherwise become certificated teachers, who have no intention to teach except as an interim job between college graduation and matrimony. Many of these are good teachers, but the great majority of them have no care beyond ‘giving satisfaction’ and being reëmployed as long as they need the jobs, a need which they hope will end when they hear the words of the marriage ceremony.
These young people who become teachers are drawn from all the levels of society and all kinds of homes and surroundings. Some of them come from home influences which have indelibly stamped them with the marks of intelligence and the instincts of good taste, refinement of speech and manners, and an inescapable sense of duty. These become the real and invaluable body of teachers who shape the lives of the children whom they teach.
II
There is another picture in sharp contrast to that. Consider a thousand high-school graduates in any one of the states. The average intelligence of those who decide to enter the teachers’ college is not in the highest bracket, as you would wish and expect. The intelligence level of prospective teachers is not alarmingly low, but it is perceptibly lower than that of university students who expect to enter some of the other callings, — engineering and law, for example, — though higher than the intelligence rating of students in schools of dentistry and agriculture.
There are exceptions, of course. These statements apply to averages; there are exceptions in both directions. Out of the imaginary thousand, teaching would attract a few of the most brilliant — and a few of the very dullest. Each of the other professions named would have similar luck. But when a moron wears his way through a school of dentistry or law it is not so tragic as when he graduates as a doctor or a teacher. The first enters into competitive practice on his own and sinks or swims. The doctor suffers the same fate, but, like the teacher, he is dealing with human life. Failure due to limited intelligence, bad training, bad judgment, lack of information, and so forth, means more than his personal failure. It involves the lives of his patients.
The teacher is in a class by himself. His ignorance and stupidity do not often deprive him of his job and thus remove him from the possibility of doing further harm. It is exceedingly difficult to measure the success or failure of a teacher. One who prevents the children from breaking out in chaotic disorder, who keeps them happy and satisfied in school and sends them home with good reports and high grades, is pretty generally regarded as a good teacher whether the children actually learn anything or not. The poor teacher moves from one district to another, but not out of the teaching business. The good teacher is often induced to enter other callings.
Like the physician, the teacher is dealing with human material every day of his life — the doctor with body and mind, mainly body, the teacher with mind and body, mind first. The teacher’s successes contribute to the permanent well-being and happiness of the children — and to the permanent advantage of society. The coroner and the undertaker often dispose of the doctor’s mistakes; but the mistakes of the teacher are projected into society as permanent liabilities or menaces. And so subtle and insubstantial is the influence, or lack of it, of the individual teacher that responsibility for failure, or credit for a great success, can seldom be ascribed to any one man or woman.
If the teachers’ influence upon the lives of the young in their schools is as important as all this, it would seem that common prudence would require the teachers’ colleges to survey the present needs of the schools of a state, to estimate the immediate future needs, and so admit to the colleges, to be trained for the teaching profession, only enough to fill the vacancies likely to occur naturally during the years when these students are to be graduated, making due allowance for emergency vacancies and vacancies caused by the removal of many incompetents. And, having given authority thus to limit the number of students in preparation for teaching, it would seem that the state would not only permit these colleges to select only the most intelligent and those most promising in character and personality for this high service, but would strictly require them to make their selections of students on the basis of those specifications.
Teachers’ colleges and schools of education do not get their students that way. In most states, the taxsupported university and colleges are required by law or custom to admit the graduates of any standard high school in the state. It is assumed that the unfit will be unable to pass the courses they enroll for in the college, and will voluntarily withdraw, or be required to withdraw, on account of failures. Local pressure has compelled the ‘prudent’ teachers in the high schools to pass and graduate all students, good, bad, and indifferent, who have persisted in attending those schools four years. The teachers’ colleges are subject to the same pressure, only a little more distant. Practically all who are persistent enough graduate in the long run.
In a freshman class of four hundred in a teachers’ college it is conservative to say that less than a hundred are endowed with those qualities that make the all-round good teachers of the country. Great teachers are exceedingly rare — maybe one in a thousand. Two hundred out of the four hundred would probably make acceptable teachers. But let any college send home a half, or even a fourth, of its freshmen during the year or at the end of the year, and the repercussions that would arise from the home towns and counties would be so violent and so threatening to the income of the college that even the staunchest college president would tremble before the uproar. If he persisted in being staunch and rockribbed, he would have to be so somewhere else, for his job would skid out from under his feet.
The practical result of the condition is that at the end of two, or three, or four years every student who has been stubbornly persistent is given the blessing of a reluctant Alma Mater and a certificate to teach in the public schools of the state. Persistence is one of the characteristics of the mentally slow. Well, thank God for that. It’s a comfort to an employer who sets a dull laborer at a hard and disagreeable job to know that he will keep stubbornly at it till it is done. This same tenacity and slow patience will keep the dull student at the job of getting a teacher’s certificate till her instructors, out of sympathy and admiration, ‘pass’ her, and she is at last graduated as a half-baked, half-educated, and temperamentally wholly unfit teacher. And this applies, of course, to boys as well as girls.
Now begins anew the vicious circle of painless education in the tax-supported schools of America. First, think of eight hundred and seventy-five thousand public-school teachers. No one knows how many of this number are wholly unfit to teach, how many are half-qualified, and how many excellent. Looking upon the results of public-school education, one is inclined to be generous and say that a fifth belong to the impossible class, three fifths to the ‘fair,’ or pretty good, and one fifth to the superior. The lowest fifth cannot teach successfully, no matter how hard they try; the middle three fifths could do pretty well if the present dominating philosophy of education and educational practice would permit effective teaching; the superior class succeed in spite of all discouraging hindrances.
III
Our system of education has developed a restless hierarchy of supervisors and executives who so harass the teachers with the changing machinery of education that they cannot give their time and calm attention to the children, for whom the schools exist. Learn to do by doing is followed by apperception, and we suddenly learn to proceed from the known to the unknown; apperception gives way to recapitulation, recapitulation to the five or seven primary objectives; objectives are succeeded by purposive motivations; these by activity leading to further activity; then we find ourselves suddenly in a child-centred school; and just at the moment when we think the ship is swinging easily at her moorings for at least a temporary rest in a quiet harbor to take on fuel and cargo, we are dismayed to find her dragging anchor and in the outbound current of progressive education. Woven through this tangled warp of terms we find a mysterious woof of objective standardized tests, grading on a curve, a sinister, if not diabolical, sigma accompanied by knowledges and skills (both in the plural number), by modes, averages, means, standard deviations, coefficients of reliability, researches, proximate and ultimate aims and ends, and frames of reference.
The teacher who knows that her job is to assist some children to learn to read, to write, to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, to tell the truth, to keep clean and well, to respect the rights and property of others, to live usefully, peaceably, and happily in a complex social organization, and a few other simple things like these, finds herself hopelessly enmeshed in the pedagogical jargon. And late some night when she has a moment of comparative calm to look at her job dispassionately she will be comforted by discovering that the essential part of all that tangle of terms is just one or two things masquerading under a succession of names through several generations, and that she has always been progressive and effective in her teaching when she was let alone and permitted to do her work with children, rather than with machinery and ‘statistical data,’ and that through the years she has conducted a progressive, childcentred school.
Ambitious administrators mistake activity, restlessness, for progress. The engineer on an ocean liner is not forever fussing with his machinery, moving it about, juggling it. When the ship is moving easily at a satisfactory speed, on an economical allowance of fuel, oil, water, and so forth, the wise chief sits down in his office, reads a magazine, smokes a cigar, or takes a bit of a nap. Maybe he dresses in his best uniform and takes a stroll around the decks. He lets his subordinates give their attention to the one main business of running a ship with the greatest possible efficiency. Wise school superintendents and supervisors might follow his example.
Don’t misunderstand me. The captain and the chief engineer are very valuable, indispensable officers on a ship. But if they should ever get to dancing around nervously, trying this valve, pulling this lever, and turning this wheel or that switch until they got the ship running at top speed in a circle under the impression that that was progressive navigation, they would become worse than useless.
The demands of the public are the next obstacle in the way of effective teaching. Any experienced teacher knows that she has to please the parents. She knows too that they will be displeased if the tasks of the school are hard, if the children find the table of sevens a drudgery, if home study has to be carried on to keep up with the class, if painstaking accuracy is required, if pressure is resorted to to compel unruly children to live in harmony in the little social state we call a school, if report cards show low grades, and if children fail to ‘pass’ and thus become ‘retarded.’
IV
A capable teacher realizes that she must, first of all, govern her little state so that all its citizens may live together in harmony, dealing justly with each other, none allowed to bully or dominate the rest, and each permitted to learn all he is capable of acquiring without being molested by others whose wishes and temperaments are different from his own. This schoolroom condition is the first necessity, but it is only a setting for the principal business of the school. Parents send children to school to learn. Seventyfive years ago children went to school only to acquire skill in using the tools of learning. These were reading, writing, and arithmetic — hammer and saw and square. In the twentieth century we recognize these tools for what they are — merely tools to be used in building up the real structure of education. That real structure consists of all the kinds of knowledge, the skills, the arts, the manners, the tastes, the principles of action, and the like, that the children can acquire to aid themselves in living most completely the fullest life each is capable of living in the society into which the circumstances of life have thrown him.
A lot of items called ‘educational frills’ are covered up in the language of that last sentence. But I maintain that those frills are important items in the catalogue of the things we live by — more important than the tools. Even so, the tools come first. We can’t erect a beautiful and complex structure without tools and rough materials. It would seem, then, that after organizing her school into an orderly little state where each child may work and play without undue molestation, the teacher should next see to it that the children acquire a working mastery of those elementary tools. But they don’t.
They do not even learn to read. I take a class of forty singing freshmen — or singing seniors, for that matter. A third of them hate literature. They don’t get anything out of history. Science bores them. Sociology and economics are the bunk. Ath-e-letics (that’s the way they spell and pronounce it) are the college’s only excuse for being. I put them through a diagnostic clinic to try to find out what’s ailing. I ask them to read aloud a page of literary prose or poetry, a page of history, science, economics, or sociology. Then I know. They can’t read. They can pronounce some of the words, maybe ninety out of a hundred. They know the meanings of most of them, perhaps seventy-five or eighty out of a hundred. But the ten they can’t pronounce, and the next five, ten, or fifteen that have no meaning for them, or the wrong meanings, ruin the whole paragraph or page.
That lower third has not been taught how to look up the pronunciation of words in a dictionary. A few are unable even to find a word in a dictionary, to determine how to spell it, or to understand the meanings listed there. Many do not recognize a sentence. In writing they cannot distinguish a sentence from a nonsentence. They do not know how to place phrase and clause modifiers. The vocabularies they use in written English are very limited, and in spoken English even more so. In dealing with numbers this lower third is inaccurate even in the simplest operations in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
These statements are not guesses. Any teacher who works with highschool or college students knows that they are the sad truth. The many tests given to thousands of college students all over the nation verify these observations. If our elementary schools do not succeed in teaching these fundamental skills, how can we expect the young people to use them with intelligence and accuracy in the higher schools?
Students without a mastery of these skills go on into the high schools, then into the liberal arts and teachers’ colleges; then they are graduated and begin to teach the next generation. Under our present educational practice with the best of teachers, a few of the duller children go through the schools in the manner indicated. What happens when the teacher is one of the uneducated persons? Not only a few dull children will fail to get any kind of acceptable education, but in fact the majority of the children of all grades of intelligence will have that experience, and the condition will become worse and worse with each lap of the vicious circle.
V
What can be done about it? First, we shall have to abandon our approval of painless education. Parents must not insist upon passing grades for their children unless the children actually learn. Being happy in school and liking the teacher are not enough.
Second, only real teachers should be permitted to continue in the profession. These are they who govern their schools satisfactorily; who inspire children to put forth their best efforts; who succeed in keeping children happy and satisfied even in the midst of patient drudgery when necessary; who teach all but the imbecile the mastery of the essential tools of learning; who succeed in helping the abler children and the brilliant to a mastery of those forms of knowledge and those skills that have either individual or social significance, each in proportion to his ability to learn; and who implant in the mental and emotional nature of children a compelling wish for order, respect for law, respect for truth, disapproval of lying, cheating, stealing, greed, and all unsocial action that injures others. (When you consider the ever-mounting record of crime chargeable to young men and women ‘educated’ in the public schools of this country, you know that a whole article or a book should be written to lay that situation before the American people. There is no space or time for it here.) We do not have to guess who the real teachers are. We can examine the children whom they have taught. If at the end of a year the children have made no progress, then, conditions for teaching having been satisfactory through the year, the teacher has been a poor teacher, even though she may have been ‘very sweet’ and the children ‘very happy. ’
Third, we shall have to remove those pressures from the supervisors, principals, superintendents, even college presidents, that keep them dancing around in spirals and making believe that movement in any direction is necessarily progress. Require performance and results of them, and not the attention-compelling waving of banners, shouting of slogans, blowing of trumpets, and ringing of bells now used in the frantic efforts of school executives to ’sell’ the schools to the public. Make it possible for them to give their attention to the quality of the output of the plant rather than to the noise of the machinery.
Fourth, and last, let the whole state — taxpayers, parents, school boards, school executives, teachers, and children — join in a campaign of selfeducation against the insidious current belief that everything worth while can be attained without work. Help us, O God, to free our minds and souls of the moonstruck folly of the philosophy of painless education, and implant in us a spirit of willingness to go down into our pockets and find the money to give every child the fullest and most effective education he or she is able to take, each one according to his capacity and no more.