Teaching is a noble work if only it is directed toward worthy goals. Nothing in the way of human endeavor can be more inspiring than the work of striving to integrate boys and girls. The mere droning over geography, and history, and grammar is petty by comparison. And yet all these studies and many others may be found essential factors in the work and they will be learned with greater thoroughness as means to a great end than as ends in themselves. The supply stations take on a new meaning to the boy who is yearning to reach the flag at the top. But it needs to be said here that the traditional superintendent and teacher will greet this entire plan with a supercilious smile. They will call it visionary, unpractical, and idealistic—then return to their seventy-five per cent regime with the utmost complacency and self-satisfaction. It is ever so with the traditional teacher. He seeks to be let alone, that he may go on his complacent way without hindrance. To him every innovation is an interference, if not a positive impertinence. But, in spite of the traditional teacher, the school is destined to rise to a higher level and enter upon a more rational procedure. And we must look to the dynamic teacher to usher in the renaissance—the teacher who has the vitality and the courage to break away from tradition and write integrity into the course of study as one of the big goals and think all the while toward integrity, physical, mental, and moral.
[Chapter Five]
Appreciation
Education may be defined as the process of raising the level of appreciation. This definition will stand the ultimate test. Here is bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation as a goal in every rational system of education. Appreciation has been defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. It must be so or civilization cannot be. Without appreciation there can be no distinction between the coarse and the fine, none between the high and the low, none between the beautiful and the ugly, none between the sublime and the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir. Hence, appreciation is inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the courage to proclaim it or not. Just why it has not been written into the course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the educational process. It is far from clear why the superintendent permits teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that arithmetic is their final destination, or why he fails to take the tax-payers into his confidence and explain to them that appreciation is one of the lode-stars toward which the schools are advancing. In his heart he hopes that the schools may achieve appreciation, and it would be the part of frankness and fairness for him to reveal this hope to his teachers and to all others concerned.
It is common knowledge that business affairs do not require more than ten pages of arithmetic and it would seem only fair that the study of the other pages should be justified. These other pages must serve some useful purpose in the thinking of those who retain them, and, certainly, no harm would ensue from a revelation of this purpose. If they are studied as a means to some high end, they will prove no less important after this fact has been explained. We may need more arithmetic than we have, but it is our due to be informed why we need it; to what use it is to be put. These things we have a right to know, and no superintendent, who is charged with the responsibility of making the course of study, has a right to withhold the information. If he does not know the explanation of the course of study he has devised, he ought to make known that fact and throw himself “on the mercy of the court.”
In these days of conservation and elimination of waste every subject that seeks admission to the course of study should be challenged at the door and be made to show what useful purpose it is to serve. Nor should any subject be admitted on any specious pretext. If there are subjects that are better adapted to the high purposes of education than the ones we are now using, then, by all means, let us give them a hearty welcome.
Above all, we should be careful not to retain a subject unless it has a more valid passport than old age to justify its retention. If Chinese will help us win the goal of appreciation more effectively than Latin, then, by all means, we should make the substitution. But, in doing so, we must exercise care not to be carried away by a yearning for novelty. Least of all should any subject be admitted to the course of study that does not have behind it something more substantial and enduring than whim or caprice.