Prof. Barbour, of Yale College, says, “Our schools are suffering from congestion of the brain: too much thought and too little putting it in practice.”
An English observer of our public schools says, “They teach apparently for information, almost regardless of development. This system develops no special individuality or power, forms few habits of observation, benefits little except the memory, and herein lies its great weakness.”
The late Mr. Wendell Phillips said, “Our system stops too short, and as a justice to boys and girls as well as to society it should see to it that those whose life is to be one of manual labor should be better trained for it.”
Mr. Wickersham, late Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Pennsylvania, says, “It is high time that something should be done to enable our youth to learn trades and to form industrious habits and a taste for work.”
Dr. Runkle, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says, “Public education should touch practical life in a larger number of points; it should better fit all for that sphere in life in which they are destined to find their highest happiness and well-being.”
Opinions of this character might be multiplied almost indefinitely. They reflect the general sentiment that, as an industrial agency, the public school is a failure; but its value as an enlightening and civilizing agency is not therefore underestimated. It was not established as an industrial agency; it was established as a bulwark of liberty, and nobly did it fulfil its mission. The colonial fathers had a horror of ignorance, and as a barrier against it they raised the public school. But they were without industrial interests in the higher departments of skilled labor, and without commerce in a large way. Lord Sheffield said that the American colonies were founded with the sole view of securing to England a monopoly of their trade, and Lord Chatham declared that they had no right to manufacture even a nail or a horseshoe. Even after the Revolution, in 1784, the commerce of the country was so insignificant that eight bales of cotton shipped from South Carolina were seized by the customs authorities of England on the ground that so large a quantity could not have been produced in the United States!
These humble conditions no longer exist, and to object to the expansion of the public-school system to meet the requirements of new exigencies is to ignore the logic and march of events. The nations are running an industrial race, and the nation that applies to labor the most thought, the most intelligence, will rise highest in the scale of civilization, will gain most in wealth, will most surely survive the shocks of time, will live longest in history. In the race for industrial supremacy we are not at the front. It is a fact to be pondered that we are exchanging the products of unskilled for skilled labor with the nations of Europe. In the course of a year, for example, England exports of raw material and food only about $150,000,000 in value, while her exports of manufactures aggregate about $850,000,000 in value. On the other hand, our exports consist almost entirely of raw material and food, their annual value being about $800,000,000, while of manufactures we export only a beggarly $75,000,000 worth, and our imports of manufactures are of the annual value of about $250,000,000. In crude, uneducated, unskilled labor capacity, we have grown much more rapidly than in the departments of educated, skilled labor; and in the exact ratio of this growth of unskilled over skilled labor, we are behind the age. We are industrially ill-balanced. We are selling brawn and buying thought—cunning, invention, genius; exhausting our physical manhood and impoverishing a virgin soil. We are suffering from a paucity of skilled labor, and we hesitate to apply the needed and obviously adequate remedy—the training of the youth of the country in the elements of the useful arts, in the public schools.
A final and conclusive evidence of the verity of the charge that prevailing methods of education are automatic, and hence superficial in their character, is found in an examination test recently made in one of the public schools in a large American city, in the department of mathematics. The superintendent begins to distrust his own system of abstract instruction, and resolves to test the acquirements of certain classes of pupils ranging from ten to twelve years of age. He submits a series of questions in number, which are promptly solved either orally or in chalk on the black-board, showing a complete mastery of the subject from the abstract side, or point of view. To test the practical value of the knowledge thus exhibited the superintendent repeats his series of questions, applying them to things. For example: He passes six cards to a pupil, and requests that one-half of them be returned. This question having been promptly and correctly answered by the return of three of them, and the six cards being again placed in the hands of the pupil, the second question is propounded, namely, “Please give me one-third of one-half of the cards in your hand.” The pupil is puzzled; he fumbles the cards nervously, blushes, and returns a wrong number or becomes entirely helpless and “gives it up.” This question, or some other question of similar general import, is submitted to each member of the class with a like unfavorable result in eight or nine cases in a total of ten cases. The superintendent is astonished; he is more than astonished, he is deeply chagrined; for he knows that the kindergarten child of six or seven years of age, with the blocks, would answer his series of questions correctly eight or nine times in a total of ten.
It is impossible to conceive of a more striking illustration of the prime defects of automatic education than is afforded by the foregoing described experiment. It sustains and justifies the severe criticism of the schools by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in his magazine article of 1880, in the course of which he says,
“From one point of view children are regarded as automatons; from another, as india-rubber bags; from a third, as so much raw material. They must move in step and exactly alike. They must receive the same mental nutriment in equal quantities and at fixed times. Its assimilation is wholly immaterial, but the motions must be gone through with. Finally, as raw material, they are emptied in at the primaries, and marched out at the grammar grades—and it is well!”[48]