The Vitalized School Part 12

=An a.n.a.logy.=--If we may win a concept of the a.n.a.logy between the vitalized school and a filtration-plant, we shall, perhaps, gain a clearer notion of the purpose of the school and come upon a juster estimate of its processes. The purpose of the filtration-plant is to purify, clarify, and render more conducive to life the stream that pa.s.ses through, and the function of the school may be stated in the same terms. The stream that enters the plant is murky and deeply impregnated with impurities; the same stream when it issues from the plant is clear, free from impurities, and, therefore, better in respect to nutritive qualities. The stream of life that flows into the school is composed of many heterogeneous elements; the stream that issues from the school is far more h.o.m.ogeneous, clearer, more nearly free from impurities, and, therefore, more conducive to the life and health of the community. The stream of life that flows into the school is composed of elements from all countries, languages, and conditions. In this are Greeks and barbarians, Jews and Gentiles, saints and sinners, the washed and the unwashed, the ignorant, the high, the low, the depraved, the weak, and the strong.

=Life-giving properties.=--The stream that issues from the school is the very ant.i.thesis of all this. Instead of all these heterogeneous elements, the stream when it comes from the school is composed wholly of Americans. A hundred flags may be seen in the stream that enters the school, but the stream that flows out from the school bears only the American flag. The school has often been called the melting-pot, in which the many nationalities are fused; but it is far more than that.

True, somehow and somewhere in the school process these elements have been made to coalesce, but that is not the only change that is wrought.

The volume of life that issues from the school is the same as that which enters, barring the leakage, but the resultant stream is far more potent in life-giving properties because of its pa.s.sage through the school.

=Changes wrought.=--When we see the stream entering the filtration-plant polluted with impurities and then coming forth clear and wholesome, we know that something happened to that stream in transit. Similarly, when we see the stream of life entering the school as a mere aggregation of more or less discordant elements and then coming forth in a virtually unified h.o.m.ogeny, we know that something has happened to that stream in its progress through the school. To determine just what happens in either case is a task for experts and a task, moreover, that is well worth while. In either case we may well inquire whether the things that happen are the very best things that could possibly be made to happen; and, if not, what improvements are possible and desirable.

=Another misconception.=--The a.n.a.logy between the plant and the school will not hold if we still retain in the parlance of school procedure the expression "getting an education." The act of getting implies material substance. Education is not a substance but a process, and it is palpably impossible to get a process. So there can be no such thing as getting an education, in spite of the tenacity of the expression. Even to state the fact would seem altogether trite, were we not confronted every day with the fact that teachers and parents are either unable or unwilling to subst.i.tute some right expression for this wrong one.

Education is not the process of getting but, rather, the process of becoming, and the difference is as wide as the difference between the true and the false.

Just how long it will require to eradicate this conception from the school and society no one can well conjecture. Its presence in our nomenclature reveals, in a marked way, the strength of habit. Many teachers will give willing a.s.sent to the fact and then use the expression again in their next sentence. Certainly we shall not even apprehend the true function and procedure of the vitalized school until we have eliminated this expression. If we admit the validity of the contention as to this expression, then we may profitably resume the consideration of our a.n.a.logy, for, in that case, we shall find in this a.n.a.logy no inept.i.tude.

=The validity of the a.n.a.logy.=--We cause the stream of water to pa.s.s through the filtration-plant that it may become rectified; we cause the stream of life to pa.s.s through the school that it may become rectified.

When the stream of water becomes rectified, bodily disease is averted; when the stream of life is rectified, mental and spiritual disease is averted. The a.n.a.logy, therefore, holds good whether we consider the process itself or its effect. We have only to state the case thus to have opened up for us a wide field for profitable speculation. The diseases of mind and spirit that invade society are the causes that lie back of our police courts, our prisons, and, very often, our almshouses.

Hence, if the stream of life could be absolutely rectified, these undesirable inst.i.tutions would disappear, and life for the entire community would be far more agreeable by reason of their absence.

=Function of the school.=--The school, then, is established and administered to carry on this process of rectification. By means of this process ignorance becomes intelligence, coa.r.s.eness becomes culture, strife becomes peace, impurity becomes purity, disease becomes health, and darkness becomes light. The child comes into the school not to get something but to have something done to and for him that he may become something that he was not before, and, therefore, that he may the better execute his functions as a member of society. In short, he comes into the school that he may pa.s.s through the process of rectification. In this process he loses neither his name, his extraction, his ident.i.ty, nor his individuality. On the contrary, all these attributes are so acted upon by the process that they become a.s.sets of the community.

=Language.=--In order to lead to a greater degree of clarity it may be well to be even more specific in explaining this process of rectification. Language is fundamental in all the operations of society.

It is indispensable to the grocer, the farmer, the lawyer, the physician, the manufacturer, the housewife, and the legislator. It is the means by which members of society communicate with one another, and without communication, in some form, there can be no social intercourse, and, therefore, no society. People are all interdependent, and language is the bond of union. They must use the same language, of course, and the words must be invested with the same meaning in order to be intelligible.

=Language a social study.=--Just here great care must be exercised or we shall go astray in depicting the work of the school in dealing with this subject of language. The child comes into the school with language of a sort, but it needs rectification in order to render it readily available for the purposes of society. Herein lies the crux of the whole matter.

If this child were not to become a member of society, it would matter little what sort of language he uses or whether he uses any language. If he were to be banished to some island there to dwell alone, language would be unnecessary. Hence, his study of language in the school is, primarily, for the well-being of society and not for himself. Language is so essential to the life processes that, without it, society would be thrown out of balance. The needs of society are paramount, and hence language as it concerns the child relates to him chiefly if not wholly as a member of society.

=Grammar.=--Grammar is nothing else than language reduced to a system of common terms that have been agreed upon in the interests of society.

People have entered into a linguistic compact, an agreement that certain words and combinations of words shall be understood to mean certain things. The tradesman must understand the purchaser or there can be no exchange. The ticket-agent must understand the prospective traveler or the latter cannot take the journey and reach his destination. Hence, grammar, with all that the term implies, is a means of facilitating the activities of society and pertains to the individual only in his relation to society.

=Needs of society.=--True, the individual will find life more agreeable in society if he understands the common language, just as the traveler is more comfortable in a foreign country if he understands its language.

But we need emphasis upon the statement that we have grammar in the school because it is one of the needs of society. The individual may not need chemistry, but society does need it, and the school must somehow provide it because of this need. Hence we place chemistry in the school as one of the ingredients of the solvent which we employ in the process of rectification. Those who are susceptible to the influences of this ingredient will become inoculated with it and bear it forth into the uses of society.

=Caution.=--But just here we find the most delicate and difficult task of the school. Here we encounter some of the fundamental principles of psychology as explained and emphasized by James, McDougall, and Strayer.

Here we must begin our quest for the native tendencies that condition successful teaching. We must discover what pupils are susceptible to chemistry before we can proceed with the work of inoculation. This has been the scene and source of many tragedies. We have been wont to ask whether chemistry will be good for the boy instead of making an effort to discover whether the boy will be good for chemistry--whether his native tendencies render him susceptible to chemistry.

=Some mistakes.=--Our procedure has often come but little short of an inquisition. We have followed our own predilections and prejudices instead of being docile at the feet of Nature and asking her what to do.

We have applied opprobrious epithets and resorted to ostracism. We have been freely dispensing suspensions and expulsions in a vain effort to prove that the school is both omniscient and omnipotent. We have tried to transform a poet into a mechanic, a blacksmith into an artist, and an astronomer into a ditcher. And our complacency in the presence of the misfits of the school is the saddest tragedy of all. We have taken counsel with tradition rather than with the nature of the pupil, the while rejoicing in our own infallibility.

=Native dispositions.=--Society needs only a limited number of chemists and only such as have the native tendencies that will make chemistry most effective in the activities of society. But we have been proceeding upon the agreeable a.s.sumption that every pupil has such native tendencies. Such an a.s.sumption absolves the school, of course, from the necessity of discovering what pupils are susceptible to chemistry and of devising ways and means of making this important discovery. Because we do not know how to make this discovery we find solace in the a.s.sumption that it cannot or need not be made. We then proceed to apply the Procrustean bed principle with the very acme of _sang froid_. Here is work for the efficiency expert. When children are sitting at the table of life, the home and the school in combination ought to be able to discover what food they crave and not insist upon their eating olives when they really crave oatmeal.

=The ideal of the school.=--We shall not have attained to right conditions until such time as the stream of life that issues from the school shall combine the agencies, in right proportions and relations, that will conserve the best interests of society and administer its activities with the maximum of efficiency. This is the ideal that the school must hold up before itself as the determining plan in its every movement. But this ideal presupposes no misfits in society. If there are such, then it will decline in some degree from the plane of highest efficiency. If there are some members of society who are straining at the leash which Nature provided for them and are trying to do work for which they have neither inclination nor apt.i.tude, they cannot render the best service, and society suffers in consequence.

=Misfits.=--The books teem with examples of people who are striving to find themselves by finding their work. But nothing has been said of society in this same strain. We have only to think of society as composed of all the people to realize that only by finding its work can society find itself. And so long as there is even one member of society who has not found himself, so long must we look upon this one exception as a discordant note in the general harmony. If one man is working at the forge who by nature is fitted for a place at the desk, then neither this man nor society is at its best. And a large measure of the responsibility for such discord and misfits in society must be laid at the door of the school because of its inability to discover native tendencies.

=Common interests.=--There are many interests that all children have in common when they enter the school in the morning, and these interests may well become the starting points in the day's work. The conversations at breakfast tables and the morning paper beget and stimulate many of these interests and the school does violence to the children, the community, and itself if it attempts to taboo these interests. Its work is to rectify and not to suppress. When the children return to their homes in the evening they should have clearer and larger conceptions of the things that animated them in the morning. If they come into the school all aglow with interest in the great snowstorm of the night before, the teacher does well to hold the lesson in decimals in abeyance until she has led around to the subject by means of readings or stories that have to do with snowstorms. The paramount and common interest of the children in the morning is snow and, therefore, the day should hold snow in the foreground in their thinking, so that, at the close of the day, their horizon in the snow-world may be extended, and so that they may thus be able to make contributions to the home on the subject of snow.

=Real interests.=--In the morning the pupils had objective snow in which they rollicked and gamboled in glee. All day long they had subjective snow in which the teacher with fine technique caused them to revel; and, in the evening, their concept of snow was so much enlarged that they experienced a fresh access of delight. And that day was their snow epiphany. On that day there was no break in the stream of life at the schoolhouse door. There was no supplanting of the real interests of the morning with fict.i.tious interests of the school, to be endured with ill grace until the real interests of the morning could be resumed in the evening. On the contrary, by some magic that only the vitalized teacher knows, every exercise of the day seemed to have snow as its center. Snow seemed to be the major in the reading, in the spelling, in the geography, and in the history.

On that day they became acquainted with Hannibal and his struggles through the snow of the Alps. On that day they learned of the avalanche, its origin, its devastating power, and, of course, its spelling. On that day they read "Snow Bound" and the snow poems of Longfellow and Lowell.

Thus the stream of life was clarified, rectified, and amplified as it pa.s.sed through the school, and, incidentally, the teacher and the school were glorified in their thoughts.

=Circus day.=--But snow is merely typical. On other days other interests are paramount. On circus day the children, again, have a common interest which affords the teacher a supreme opportunity. The day has been antic.i.p.ated by the teacher, and the pupils have cause to wonder how and whence she ever acc.u.mulated such a wealth of pictures of animal life.

All day long they are regaled with a subjective menagerie, and when they attend the circus in the evening they astonish their parents by the extent and accuracy of their information. They know the animals by name, their habitat, their habits, their food, and their uses. In short, they seemed to have compa.s.sed a working knowledge of the animal kingdom in a single day through the skill of the teacher who knows how to make the school reenforce their life interests.

=The quality of life.=--If we now extend the scope of common interests that belong in the category with the snow and the animals, we shall readily see that the a.n.a.logy of the filtration-plant holds good in the entire regime of the vitalized school. But we must never lose sight of the additional fact that the quality of life that issues from the school is far better because of its pa.s.sage through the school. The volume may be less, through unfortunate leakage, but the quality is so much better that its value to society is enhanced a hundred- or a thousand-fold. The people who pa.s.s through the school have learned a common language, have been imbued with a common purpose, have learned how to live and work in hearty accord, have come to revere a common flag, and have become citizens of a common country.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What is the general function of the school?

2. What is meant by the school's being the "melting-pot"?

3. What objection is there to the expression "getting an education"?

What would be a better expression to indicate the purpose of attending school?

4. What diseases that invade society would be checked if in school the stream of life were rectified?

5. Why is it desirable that pupils shall not lose their individuality in pa.s.sing through school?

6. What is the primary purpose of each school study, for instance, language?

7. What is the true purpose of grammar?

8. What do these functions of the school and of its studies teach us regarding the adaptation of subjects and methods to the individual?

9. Tell something of the work done in vocational guidance in Boston.

10. Tell something of the methods employed by some corporations in choosing employees naturally fitted for the work.

11. Tell something of the psychological tests for vocations devised by Professor Munsterberg. (Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, Hugo Munsterberg, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913.)

12. What do you think is the practicable way of helping the pupils in your school to develop along the lines of their natural endowment?

13. What is the effect on society when a man does work for which he is not fitted?

14. Show some ways in which the interests of the school as a whole may be fostered and a natural development of the cla.s.s as a whole be secured.

15. There has been a big fire in town. Show how the interest in this event may be used in the day's work.

16. In what ways is one who has had private instruction likely to be a poorer citizen than one who has attended school?

17. What conditions might cause some of those who go through school to be polluted instead of rectified? Whose fault would it be?

18. What questions should we ask ourselves about the things that are being done in our schools?

CHAPTER XVIII