- What may the school do to give helpful direction and needed modifications to the instinct of acquisition?
- The ultimate ends of education are more efficient production and more intelligent consumption. How and by what means may the school bring about a more intelligent choice of tangible and intangible things?
- What hint may the teacher of geography receive from the brief description of London’s points of interest?
- Compare a vitalized school with the panorama of London.
- To what extent must individual differences be recognized by the teacher in the recitation? in discipline?
- Suggest means whereby pupils may be induced to spend their evenings with Dickens, Eliot, Macaulay, or Irving in preference to the “movies.”
CHAPTER VII
DEMOCRACY
A conflict.—There was a fight on a railway train—a terrific fight. The conductor and two other Americans were battling against ten or more foreigners. These foreigners had come aboard the train at a mining town en route to the city for a holiday. The train had hardly got under way, after the stop, when the fight was on. The battle raged back and forth from one car to the other across the platform amid the shouts and cursing of men and the screams of women. Bloody faces attested the intensity of the conflict. One foreigner was knocked from the train, but no account was taken of him. The train sped on and the fight continued. Nor did its violence abate until the train reached the next station, where the conductor summoned reënforcements and invoked the majesty of the law in the form of an officer. The affray, from first to last, was most depressing and gave to the unwilling witness a feeling that civilization is something of a misnomer and that men are inherently ferocious.
Misconceptions.—More mature reflection, however, served to modify this judgment, and the application of some philosophy resolved the distressing combat into a relatively simple proposition. The conductor and his assistants were fighting for their conception of order, and their opponents were fighting for their conception of manhood. Reduced to its primal elements, the fight was the result of a dual misconception. The conductor was battling to vindicate his conception of order; the foreigners were battling to vindicate their conception of the rights of men in a democracy. Neither party to the contest understood the other, and each one felt himself to be on the defensive. Neither one would have confessed himself the aggressor, and yet each one was invading the supposed rights of the other. Judicial consideration could readily have averted the whole distressing affair.
Foreign concept of democracy.—The foreigners had come to our country with roseate dreams of democracy. To their conception, this is the land where every man is the equal of every other man; where equal rights and privileges are vouchsafed to all men without regard to nationality, position, or possessions; where there is no faintest hint of the caste system; and where there are no possible lines of demarcation. Their disillusionment on that train was swift and severe, and the observer could not but wonder what was their conception of a democracy as they walked about the streets of the city or gave attention to their bruised faces. Their dreams of freedom and equal rights must have seemed a mockery. They must have felt that they had been lured into a trap by some agency of cruelty and injustice. After such an experience they must have been unspeakably homesick for their native land.
“Melting pot.”—Their primary trouble arose from the fact that they had not yet achieved democracy, but had only a hazy theoretical conception of its true meaning. Nor did the conductor give them any assistance. On the contrary he pushed them farther away into the realm of theory, and rendered them less susceptible to the influence of the feeling for democracy. Before these foreigners can become thoroughly assimilated they must know this feeling by experience; and until this experience is theirs they cannot live comfortably or harmoniously in our democracy. To do this effectively is one of the large tasks that confront the American school and society as a whole. If we fail here, the glory of democracy will be dimmed. All Americans share equally in the responsibility of this task. The school, of course, must assume its full share of this responsibility if it would fully deserve the name of melting pot.
Learning democracy.—Meeting this responsibility worthily is not the simple thing that many seem to conceive it to be. If it were, then any discussion appertaining to the teaching of democracy would be superfluous. This subject of democracy is, in fact, the most difficult subject with which the school has to do, and by far the most important. Its supreme importance is due to the fact that all the pupils expect to live in a democracy, and, unless they learn democracy, life cannot attain to its maximum of agreeableness for them nor can they make the largest possible contributions to the well-being of society. It has been said that the seventeenth century saw Versailles; the eighteenth century saw the Earth; and the nineteenth century saw Humanity. Then the very pertinent question is asked, “Which century will see Life?” We who love our country and our form of government fondly hope that we may be the first to see Life, and, if this privilege falls to our lot, we must come to see life through the medium of democracy.