VII. THE PROBABLE REWARDS OF INDIVIDUALIZING EDUCATION
Even the money returns from scientifically differentiated education would probably be great, aside from the increase in children’s happiness, in teachers’ enjoyment, and in adults’ satisfaction. The tangible values of individualized training might be nearly as great as its intangible values.
When we reflect closely upon the source of wealth, we see that it comes from the attack of intellect upon the environment. Apes have no wealth. Man has wealth only in so far as he acts upon selective thinking in regard to his environment. A society gains wealth only in so far as it permits and encourages the use of innate capacities for attack upon the environment, which lie unequally distributed throughout the juvenile population. Any theory of wealth that fails to ground itself upon this fact will but destroy those who seek to practice it.
No nation has ever yet shown what the full reward might be of adapting education to individual differences. Such a demonstration has been impossible hitherto, if for no other reason than that there was no known method of gauging children’s abilities scientifically.
In the older social orders, where education was or is caste-bound, it is highly probable that on the whole education was and is more fairly adapted to individual differences than it is with us. Those barbarians who had much capacity for abstract thinking achieved by trial and success high-caste status, of which they ultimately became conscious. The aristocracy of older countries was not established by forces outside of human nature. The nobles were in the first place those who rose to power because they were stronger, more enduring, and more capable of thinking than average men. Caste grew out of human nature itself. The majority of the nobles’ children were capable by heredity of abstract thinking, and of acquiring the education, which came finally through centuries to be provided for them. The majority of those who failed to achieve high-caste status before it became recognized as such were doubtless chiefly individuals who produced descendants, on the average ill adapted to profit from the kind of education established for the children of the higher castes.
In Great Britain, for example, where social organization was and is frankly based in theory and practice on caste (upper-caste status being, however, constantly kept open to adults of unusual achievement), Burt found that boys of upper-caste family, attending an exclusive high-class school, surpassed in all respects, in mental tests, sons of middle-class parents, of equal age, attending common schools. It is necessary, though outrageous to our prejudices, to face the fact that, in our own country (where caste is despised in theory and to some extent in practice), the median capacity of pupils in expensive private schools is well above the average of the juvenile population at large.
Caste-bound education in older civilizations recognizes innate individual differences to a considerable extent. Its injustice is that it does not recognize them completely. Caste takes account of individual differences due to heredity, but it does not regard those due to variation. Caste neglects to provide for the overlapping which occurs among the children of parents of different achievement levels. In a society founded formally on caste, there is no way provided for the appropriate education of gifted variants who occur in the lower castes, and for those of inferior ability born into the higher castes. Artificial barriers to natural achievement have arisen, because the consciousness of superior status was accompanied by jealousy of it as well. Revolt against this injustice to the minority (not recognized, however, as minority by the rebels) led to the opposite injustice, which we see practiced in the schools of our own democracy.
In the United States the theory was adopted that all men are created equal. All children must, therefore, be required to take the same education. Such a system violates individuality even more painfully and wastefully than the despised caste system of the older countries does.
As scientific psychology improves the methods of testing for individual differences in children, it will become possible to educate each one according to his capacity for learning. It will be possible to conserve and develop the special aptitudes of every child, regardless of race, sex, or circumstance. The humiliation and despair of chronic failure at prescribed tasks unsuited to capacity may be spared every child.
Thus we come again to consider tests of innate educability in The Republic: “We must watch them from their youth upwards, and make them perform actions in which they are most likely to forget or to be deceived, and he who remembers and is not deceived is to be selected.” That will be the way.