Some mistakes.—Our procedure has often come but little short of an inquisition. We have followed our own predilections and prejudices instead of being docile at the feet of Nature and asking her what to do. We have applied opprobrious epithets and resorted to ostracism. We have been freely dispensing suspensions and expulsions in a vain effort to prove that the school is both omniscient and omnipotent. We have tried to transform a poet into a mechanic, a blacksmith into an artist, and an astronomer into a ditcher. And our complacency in the presence of the misfits of the school is the saddest tragedy of all. We have taken counsel with tradition rather than with the nature of the pupil, the while rejoicing in our own infallibility.
Native dispositions.—Society needs only a limited number of chemists and only such as have the native tendencies that will make chemistry most effective in the activities of society. But we have been proceeding upon the agreeable assumption that every pupil has such native tendencies. Such an assumption absolves the school, of course, from the necessity of discovering what pupils are susceptible to chemistry and of devising ways and means of making this important discovery. Because we do not know how to make this discovery we find solace in the assumption that it cannot or need not be made. We then proceed to apply the Procrustean bed principle with the very acme of sang froid. Here is work for the efficiency expert. When children are sitting at the table of life, the home and the school in combination ought to be able to discover what food they crave and not insist upon their eating olives when they really crave oatmeal.
The ideal of the school.—We shall not have attained to right conditions until such time as the stream of life that issues from the school shall combine the agencies, in right proportions and relations, that will conserve the best interests of society and administer its activities with the maximum of efficiency. This is the ideal that the school must hold up before itself as the determining plan in its every movement. But this ideal presupposes no misfits in society. If there are such, then it will decline in some degree from the plane of highest efficiency. If there are some members of society who are straining at the leash which Nature provided for them and are trying to do work for which they have neither inclination nor aptitude, they cannot render the best service, and society suffers in consequence.
Misfits.—The books teem with examples of people who are striving to find themselves by finding their work. But nothing has been said of society in this same strain. We have only to think of society as composed of all the people to realize that only by finding its work can society find itself. And so long as there is even one member of society who has not found himself, so long must we look upon this one exception as a discordant note in the general harmony. If one man is working at the forge who by nature is fitted for a place at the desk, then neither this man nor society is at its best. And a large measure of the responsibility for such discord and misfits in society must be laid at the door of the school because of its inability to discover native tendencies.
Common interests.—There are many interests that all children have in common when they enter the school in the morning, and these interests may well become the starting points in the day’s work. The conversations at breakfast tables and the morning paper beget and stimulate many of these interests and the school does violence to the children, the community, and itself if it attempts to taboo these interests. Its work is to rectify and not to suppress. When the children return to their homes in the evening they should have clearer and larger conceptions of the things that animated them in the morning. If they come into the school all aglow with interest in the great snowstorm of the night before, the teacher does well to hold the lesson in decimals in abeyance until she has led around to the subject by means of readings or stories that have to do with snowstorms. The paramount and common interest of the children in the morning is snow and, therefore, the day should hold snow in the foreground in their thinking, so that, at the close of the day, their horizon in the snow-world may be extended, and so that they may thus be able to make contributions to the home on the subject of snow.
Real interests.—In the morning the pupils had objective snow in which they rollicked and gamboled in glee. All day long they had subjective snow in which the teacher with fine technique caused them to revel; and, in the evening, their concept of snow was so much enlarged that they experienced a fresh access of delight. And that day was their snow epiphany. On that day there was no break in the stream of life at the schoolhouse door. There was no supplanting of the real interests of the morning with fictitious interests of the school, to be endured with ill grace until the real interests of the morning could be resumed in the evening. On the contrary, by some magic that only the vitalized teacher knows, every exercise of the day seemed to have snow as its center. Snow seemed to be the major in the reading, in the spelling, in the geography, and in the history.
On that day they became acquainted with Hannibal and his struggles through the snow of the Alps. On that day they learned of the avalanche, its origin, its devastating power, and, of course, its spelling. On that day they read “Snow Bound” and the snow poems of Longfellow and Lowell. Thus the stream of life was clarified, rectified, and amplified as it passed through the school, and, incidentally, the teacher and the school were glorified in their thoughts.
Circus day.—But snow is merely typical. On other days other interests are paramount. On circus day the children, again, have a common interest which affords the teacher a supreme opportunity. The day has been anticipated by the teacher, and the pupils have cause to wonder how and whence she ever accumulated such a wealth of pictures of animal life. All day long they are regaled with a subjective menagerie, and when they attend the circus in the evening they astonish their parents by the extent and accuracy of their information. They know the animals by name, their habitat, their habits, their food, and their uses. In short, they seemed to have compassed a working knowledge of the animal kingdom in a single day through the skill of the teacher who knows how to make the school reënforce their life interests.
The quality of life.—If we now extend the scope of common interests that belong in the category with the snow and the animals, we shall readily see that the analogy of the filtration-plant holds good in the entire régime of the vitalized school. But we must never lose sight of the additional fact that the quality of life that issues from the school is far better because of its passage through the school. The volume may be less, through unfortunate leakage, but the quality is so much better that its value to society is enhanced a hundred- or a thousand-fold. The people who pass through the school have learned a common language, have been imbued with a common purpose, have learned how to live and work in hearty accord, have come to revere a common flag, and have become citizens of a common country.