VIII
From time to time the “educational” methods of our philistine teachers are brought to light. A girl is forced by a schoolma’am of one of our large cities to stay in a corner for hours, because she unintentionally transgressed against the barrack-discipline of the school-regulations. When the parents became afraid of the girl’s health and naturally took her out of school, the little girl was dragged before the court by the truant officer. Fortunately “the judge turned to the truant officer and asked him how the girl could be a truant, if she had been suspended. He didn’t believe in breaking children’s wills.”
In another city a pupil of genius was excluded from school because “he did not fall in with the system” laid out by the “very able business-superintendent.” A schoolmistress conceives the happy idea of converting two of her refractory pupils into pin-cushions for the edification of her class. An “educational” administrative superintendent of a large, prosperous community told a lady who brought to him her son, an extraordinarily able boy, “I shall not take your boy into my high-school, in spite of his knowledge.” When the mother asked him to listen to her, he lost patience and told her with all the force of his school-authority, “Madam, put a rope around his neck, weigh him well down with bricks!”
A principal of a high school in one of the prominent New England towns dismisses a highly talented pupil because, to quote verbatim from the original school document, “He is not amenable to the discipline of the school, as his school life has been too short to establish him in the habit of obedience.” “His intellect,” the principal’s official letter goes on to say, “remains a marvel to us, but we do not feel, and in this I think I speak for all, that he is in the right place.” In other words, in the opinion of those remarkable pedagogues, educators and teachers, the school is not the right place for talent and genius!
A superintendent of schools in lecturing before an audience of “subordinate teachers” told them emphatically that there was no place for genius in our schools. Dear old fogies, one can well understand your indignation! Here we have worked out some fine methods, clever rules, beautiful systems and then comes genius and upsets the whole structure! It is a shame! Genius cannot fit into the pigeon-holes of the office desk. Choke genius, and things will move smoothly in the school and the office.
Not long ago we were informed by one of those successful college-mandarins, lionized by office-clerks, superintendents and tradesmen, that he could measure education by the foot-rule! Our Regents are supposed to raise the level of education by a vicious system of examination and coaching, a system which Professor James, in a private conversation with me, has aptly characterized as “idiotic.”
Our schools brand their pupils by a system of marks, while our foremost colleges measure the knowledge and education of their students by the number of “points” passed. The student may pass either in Logic or Blacksmithing. It does not matter which, provided he makes up a certain number of “points”!
College-committees refuse admission to young students of genius, because “it is against the policy and the principles of the university.” College-professors expel promising students from the lecture-room for “the good of the class as a whole,” because the students “happen to handle their hats in the middle of a lecture.” This, you see, interferes with class discipline. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus. Let genius perish, provided the system lives. Why not suppress all genius, as a disturbing element, for “the good of the classes,” for the weal of the commonwealth? Education of man and cultivation of genius, indeed! This is not school policy.
We school and drill our children and youth in schoolma’am mannerism, school master mind-ankylosis, school-superintendent stiff-joint ceremonialism, factory regulations and office-discipline. We give our pupils and students artisan-inspiration and business-spirituality. Originality is suppressed. Individuality is crushed. Mediocrity is at a premium. That is why our country has such clever business men, such cunning artisans, such resourceful politicians, such adroit leaders of new cults, but no scientists, no artists, no philosophers, no statesmen, no genuine talent and no true genius.
School-teachers have in all ages been mediocre in intellect and incompetent. Leibnitz is regarded as a dullard and Newton is considered as a blockhead. Never, however, in the history of mankind have school teachers fallen to such a low level of mediocrity as in our times and in our country. For it is not the amount of knowledge that counts in true education, but originality and independence of thought that are of importance in education. But independence and originality of thought are just the very elements that are suppressed by our modern barrack-system of education. No wonder that military men claim that the best “education” is given in military schools.
We are not aware that the incubus of officialdom, and the succubus of bureaucracy have taken possession of our schools. The red tape of officialdom, like a poisonous weed, grows luxuriantly in our schools and chokes the life of our young generation. Instead of growing into a people of great independent thinkers, the nation is in danger of fast becoming a crowd of well-drilled, well-disciplined, commonplace individuals, with strong philistine habits and notions of hopeless mediocrity.
In levelling education to mediocrity we imagine that we uphold the democratic spirit of our institutions. Our American sensibilities are shocked when the president of one of our leading colleges dares to recommend to his college that it should cease catering to the average student. We think it un-American, rank treason to our democratic spirit when a college president has the courage to proclaim the principle that “To form the mind and character of one man of marked talent, not to say genius, would be worth more to the community which he would serve than the routine training of hundreds of undergraduates.”
We are optimistic, we believe in the pernicious superstition that genius needs no help, that talent will take care of itself. Our kitchen clocks and dollar timepieces need careful handling, but our chronometers and astronomical clocks can run by themselves.
The truth is, however, that the purpose of the school and the college is not to create an intellectual aristocracy, but to educate, to bring out the individuality, the originality, the latent powers of talent and genius present in what we unfortunately regard as “the average student.” Follow Mill’s advice. Instead of aiming at athletics, social connections, vocations and generally at the professional art of money-making, “Aim at something noble. Make your system such that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be a manhood in your little men, of which you do not dream.”
Awaken in early childhood the critical spirit of man; awaken, early in the child’s life, love of knowledge, love of truth, of art and literature for their own sake, and you arouse man’s genius. We have average mediocre students, because we have mediocre teachers, department-store superintendents, clerkly principals and deans with bookkeepers’ souls, because our schools and colleges deliberately aim at mediocrity.
Ribot in describing the degenerated Byzantine Greeks tells us that their leaders were mediocrities and their great men commonplace personalities. Is the American nation drifting in the same direction? It was the system of cultivation of independent thought that awakened the Greek mind to its highest achievements in arts, science and philosophy; it was the deadly Byzantine bureaucratic red tape with its cut-and-dried theological discipline that dried up the sources of Greek genius. We are in danger of building up a Byzantine empire with large institutions and big corporations, but with small minds and dwarfed individualities. Like the Byzantines we begin to value administration above individuality and official, red-tape ceremonialism above originality.
We wish even to turn our schools into practical school-shops. We shall in time become a nation of well-trained clerks and clever artisans. The time is at hand when we shall be justified in writing over the gates of our school-shops “mediocrity made here!”