CHAPTER X
WORDS AND THEIR CONTENT
Initial statement.—Life and words are so closely interwoven that we have only to study words with care in order to achieve an apprehension of life. Indeed, education may be defined as the process of enlarging the content of words. No two of us speak the same language even though we use the same words. The schoolboy and the savant speak of education, using the same word, but the boy has only the faintest conception of the meaning of the word as used by the savant. We must know the content of the words that are used before we can understand one another, either in speaking or in writing. For one man, a word is big with meaning; for another, the same word is so small as to be well-nigh meaningless. To the ignorant boor, the word “education” means far less than the three R’s, while to the scholar the word includes languages, ancient and modern, mathematics through many volumes, sciences that analyze the dewdrop, determine the weight of the earth and the distances and movements of the planets, history from the Rosetta Stone to the latest presidential election, and philosophy from Plato to the scholar of to-day.
The word “education.”—And yet both these men spell and pronounce the word alike. The ignorant man has only the faintest glimmering of the scholar’s meaning of the word when he speaks or writes it. Still the word is in common use, and people who use it are wont to think that their conception of its meaning is universal. If the boor could follow the expansion of the word as it is invested with greater and greater content, he would, in time, understand Aristotle, Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Max Müller. And, understanding these men, he would come to know philosophy, literature, and language, and so would come to appreciate more fully what education really is. In contemplating the expansion of the word, one might easily visualize the ever widening circle produced by throwing a pebble into a pool; but a better conception would be the expansion of a balloon when it is being inflated. This comparison enables one to realize that education enlarges as a sphere rather than as a circle.
The scholar’s concept of the sea.—The six-year-old can give the correct spelling of the word sea as readily as the sage, but the sage has spent a lifetime in putting content into the word. For him, the word epitomizes his life history. Through its magic leading he retraces his journeys through physiography and geology, watching the sea wear away two thousand feet of the Appalachian Mountains and spread the detritus over vast areas, making the great fertile corn and wheat belt of our country. He knows that this section produces, annually, such a quantity of corn as would require for transportation a procession of teams that would encircle the earth nine times, at the equator, and he interprets all this as sea. The word leads him, also, through the mazes and mysteries of meteorology, revealing to him the origin of the rain, the snow, the dew, and the frost, with all the wonders of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
Further illustration.—He can discern the sea in every blade of grass, in every leaf, and in every flower. In the composition of his own body, he finds that ninety per cent of it is sea. He finds his heart pumping the sea through his veins and arteries as a vital part of the life process; and through the power of capillary attraction, the sea is coursing through every hair of his head. In the food upon his table, the meat, the bread, the milk, the vegetables, and the fruits, he finds the sea. Not his poetry, but his science follows the raindrop from the roof to the rivulet, on to the river, then to the ocean, then into vapor and on into rain down into the earth, then up into the tree, out into the orange, until it finally reappears as a drop of juice upon the rosy lip of his little six-year-old.
The child’s conception.—Whether the child ever wins the large conception of the sea that her father has depends, in part, upon the father himself, but, in a still larger degree, upon her teacher. If the teacher thinks of the sea merely as a word to be spelled, or defined, or parsed, that she may inscribe marks in a grade book or on report cards, then the child will never know the sea as her father knows it, unless this knowledge comes to her from sources outside the school. Instead of becoming a living thing and the source of life, her sea will be a desert without oasis, or grass, or tree, or bird, or bubbling spring to refresh and inspire. It would seem a sad commentary upon our teaching if the child is compelled to gain a right conception of the sea outside the school and in spite of the school, rather than through and by means of the school.
The quest of teacher and child.—The vitalized teacher knows the sea as the sage knows it, and can infuse her conception into the consciousness of the child. She feels it to be her high privilege to lead the child on in quest of the sea and to find, in this quest, pulsating life. In this alluring quest, she is putting content into the word, and thus discovering, by experience, what life is. This is education. This is the inviting vista that stretches out before the eyes of the child under the spell and leadership of such a teacher. In their quest for the meaning of the sea, these companions, the child and the teacher, will come upon the fields of grain, the orchards, the flocks and herds, the ships, the trains, and the whole intricate world of commerce. They will find commerce to be a manifestation of the sea and moreover a big factor in life. It will mean far more than mere cars to be counted or cargoes to be estimated in the form of problems for the class in arithmetic. The cargoes of grain that they see leaving the port mean food for the hungry in other lands, and the joy and vigor that only food can give.