Associations aimed directly at the Improvement of Schools
A social organization which is of special importance to the schools is the parent-teachers’ association, which is coming to be a common adjunct of every school. Such an association often helps the school to secure equipment which it needs, and furnishes a useful avenue for the dissemination of ideas with regard to school policies. Sometimes the school officer finds that the proper relation of the association to school administration needs definition. He then falls back with satisfaction on the words of a recent writer in the Atlantic:
Running a school or a class is a technical or expert job. It cannot as a rule be done by an untrained person; and untrained people, seeking to break in, are likely to do more harm than good. The school situation, indeed, resembles the situation in medicine fifty years ago. The practice of medicine at that time was atrocious; but it had to be improved, and it was improved by doctors, not by laymen. I shall not spare the schools; but schools must be improved by schoolmen—and they will be.
We have then reached this point. Intelligent parents wish to have a say in the education of their children. But schools must be conducted by trained persons. The training of these persons is, however, largely antiquated. Are we not deadlocked?
I think not. Parents cannot tell teachers what to do or how to do it. But what they can do is to ask questions. They can, like the man from Missouri, require “to be shown.” At first blush, this may not look like very much. But if my readers will bear with me for a moment, perhaps they will see that the right and the duty of asking “to be shown,” of asking persistently and continuously “Why?” “Why?” gives parents all the leverage they need or can use in making over the education of their children.
Our schools could not be perfect. I won’t even stop to argue that they can all at a bound make themselves much better than they are. Parents cannot possibly make many practicable suggestions by way of improving them. But just because we all know so little, just because schoolmasters are so hampered by tradition and organization, just because parents are so helpless in making practicable suggestions, for these very reasons the complacent following of traditions is the most inexcusable of attitudes. The schools which are now too conventional, too complacent, too free from deep-seated and unhappy doubts, should be tentative, inquiring, investigating, skeptical in their point of view. They will be assisted in becoming tentative, inquiring, skeptical, and experimental if parents will, year after year, make them tell why, make them show why. For when people are called on to show why, they begin to look into what they are doing, and out of this critical scrutiny will come doubt, invention, and finally something living in place of something long since dead.[52]