What do people in the outside world do when they want to learn something? They go to somebody who knows about it, and ask him. They do not go to somebody who is reputed to know about everything—except, when they are very young, to their parents: and they speedily become disillusioned about that variety of omniscience. They go to somebody who might reasonably be expected to know about the particular thing they are interested in. When a man buys a motor-car, he does not say to himself: “Where can I find somebody who can teach me how to run a motor-car and dance the tango and predict a rise on the stock-market?” He does not look in the telephone directory under T. He just gets an experienced driver to teach him. And when the driver tells him that this is the self-starter, and proceeds to start the car with it, a confidence is established which makes him inclined to believe all he can understand of what he is presently told about the mysterious functions of the carburetor. He does not even inquire if the man has taken vows of celibacy. He just pays attention and asks questions and tries to do the thing himself, until he learns.
But this case, of course, assumes an interest of the pupil in the subject, a willingness and even a desire to learn about it, a feeling that the matter is of some importance to himself. And come to think of it, these motives are generally present in the learning that goes on in the outside world. It is only in School that the pupil is expected to be unwilling to learn.
When you were a child, and passed the door of the village blacksmith shop, and looked in, day after day, you saw the blacksmith heating a piece of iron red hot in the furnace, or twisting it deftly with his pincers, or dropping it sizzling into a tub of water, or paring a horse’s hoofs, or hammering in the silvery nails with swift blows; you admired his skill, and stood in awe of his strength; and if he had offered to let you blow the bellows for him and shown you how to twist a red-hot penny, that would have been a proud moment. It would also have been an educational one. But suppose there had been a new shop set up in the town, and when you looked in at the open door you saw a man at work painting a picture; and suppose a bell rang just then, and the man stopped painting right in the middle of a brush-stroke, and commenced to read aloud “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”; and suppose when he was half way through, the bell rang again, and he said, “We will go on with that tomorrow,” and commenced to chisel the surface of a piece of marble; and then, after a little, somewhat exhaustedly, started in to play “The Rock of Ages” on a flute, interrupting the tune to order you to stand up straight and not whisper to the little boy beside you. There’s no doubt what you would think of him; you would know perfectly well that he was crazy; people don’t do things in that way anywhere in the world, except in school. And even if he had assured you that painting and poetry, sculpture and music, were later in your life going to be matters of the deepest importance and interest, and that you should start in now with the determination of becoming proficient in the arts, it would not have helped much. Not very much.
It’s nonsense that children do not want to learn. Everybody wants to learn. And everybody wants to teach. And the process is going on all the time. All that is necessary is to put a person who knows something—really knows it—within the curiosity-range of some one who doesn’t know it: the process commences at once. It is almost irresistible. In the interest of previous engagements one has to tear one’s self away from all sorts of opportunities to learn things which may never be of the slightest use but which nevertheless are alluring precisely because one does not know them.
People talk about children being hard to teach, and in the next breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the “vices.” That seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic States? And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day.
I think that if there were no teachers—no hastily and superficially trained Vestals who were supposed to know everything—but just ordinary human beings who knew passionately and thoroughly one thing (but you’d be surprised to find what a lot of other knowledge that would incidentally comprise!) and who had the patience to show little boys and girls how to do that thing—we might get along without Immaculate Omniscience pretty well. Of course, we’d have to pay them more, because they could get other jobs out in the larger world; and besides, you couldn’t expect to get somebody who knows how to do something, for the price you are accustomed to pay those who only know how to teach everything.
Nor need the change necessarily be abrupt. It could probably be effected with considerable success by firing all the teachers at the beginning of the summer vacations, and engaging their services as human beings for the next year. Many of them would find no difficulty at all in readjusting themselves....