3. As a result of this indoor scholastic life, we content ourselves by teaching our children from books,—which at best are but embalmed knowledge, canned information, the dry bones of knowledge, words about things,—instead of bringing them in contact (as far as is possible and practicable) with the things themselves. I believe in books; I believe in education; I believe in schools, in colleges, in universities, in teachers, professors, and doctors of learning; but I do not believe in them as most of the white race seem to do, viz., as good in themselves. They are good only as they are instruments for good to the children committed to their care. The proper education of one child is worth more to the world than all the schools, colleges, and universities that were ever built. One Michael Angelo, one Savonarola, one Francis of Assisi, one Luther, one Agassiz, one Audubon, is worth more to the world than all the schools that ever were or ever will be. And if, by our present imperfect and unhealthful school methods, we kill off, in childhood, one such great soul, we do the human race irreparable injury. Let us relegate the school to its right place, and that is secondary to its primary,—the child. The school exists for the child, not the child for the school. As it now is, we put the plastic material of which our nation is to be formed into the mould of our schools, and regardless of consequences, indifferent to the personal equation in each child, overlooking all individuality and personality, the machine works on, stamping this soul and mind material with one same stamp, moulding it in one same mould, hardening it in the fire to one same pattern, so that it comes forth just as bricks come forth from a furnace, uniform, regular, alike, perhaps pretty to the unseeing eye, but ruined, spoiled, damned, as far as active, personal, individualistic life and work are concerned. The only human bricks that ever amount to anything when our educational mill has turned them out are those made of refractory clay,—the incomplete ones, the broken ones, the twisted ones, those that would not or could not be moulded into the established pattern.
This is why I am so opposed to our present methods. Let us have fewer lessons from books, and more knowledge gained by personal observation; less reading and cramming, and more reflective thinking; fewer pages of books read, and more results and deductions gained from personal experiences with things high and low, animate and inanimate, that catch the eye and mind out of doors; and above all the total cessation of all mental labor when the body is not at its best. The crowding of sick and ailing children is more cruel and brutal than Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and so utterly needless and useless that fools couldn’t do worse. What is the use of education to a sick person, and especially when the sickness is the result of the educational process. God save us from any more such education!
Doubtless I shall be told that my ideas are impracticable. I know they are and ever will be to those who value “the system” more than the child. Granted that in cold and wet weather students can’t get out of doors much. Then open all the doors and all the windows and give up the time to marching, to physical exercises, to deep breathing, to anything,—romping even,—rather than to cramming and studying a set number of pages, while the air breathed is impure, unwholesome, actively poisonous. When our educational methods thus interfere with the health of the child, I am forever and unalterably opposed to them. We had far rather have a nation of healthy and happy children, growing up into healthy and happy manhood and womanhood, even though devoid of much book knowledge, than a bloodless, anæmic, unhappy nation though filled with all the lore of the ages. Give me, for me and mine, every time, physical and mental health and happiness, even though we have never parsed a single sentence, determined the family and Latin name of a single flower, or found out the solution of one solitary problem of algebra.
4. My fourth proposition is, that as the result of this indoor book-teaching our children are not taught to think for themselves, but are expected and required to accept the ideas of the authors,—often, indeed, they must memorize the exact words of the books. This is, in itself, enough to condemn the whole system. We could better afford to have absolutely no schools, no colleges, no books even, than a nation professedly educated, yet the members of which have not learned to do their own thinking.
5. As a conclusion, therefore, I am forced to recognize that, in a much larger measure than we are ready to admit, our educational system is superficial, is a cramming process instead of a drawing-out—educere, educational—process, and no education so-called can be really effective, really helpful, that thus inverts the natural requirements of the mind. And that, when our system ignores the physical health of the student, no matter what his age, it is a criminal, a wicked, a wasteful system that had better speedily be reformed or abolished.
All these ideas are practically the result of my association with the Indian and watching his methods of instruction. His life and that of his family out of doors color all that he and they learn. I think it was John Brisbane Walker who once wrote a story, when he edited and owned the Cosmopolitan, about some college men, thoroughly educated in the academic sense, who were shipwrecked at sea. He showed the helplessness and hopelessness of their case because of their inability to take hold and do things. The Indian can turn his hand to anything. When out of doors few things can feaze him. He knows how to build a fire in the rain, where to sleep in a storm, how to track a runaway animal, how to trap fish, flesh, or fowl, where to look for seeds, nuts, berries, or roots, how to hobble a horse when he has no rope,—that is, how to make a rope from cactus thongs, how to picket a horse where there is no tree, bush, fence, bowlder, nor anything to which to tie it. What college man knows how to picket a horse to a hole in the ground? Yet I have seen an Indian do it, and have done it myself several times.[3] He knows how to find water when there is none in sight and the educated white man is perishing for want of it, and he knows a thousand and one things that a white man never knows.
[3] See “Indians of the Painted Desert Region,” Little, Brown, & Company, p. 15.
As I shall show in the chapter on the Indian and art work, the Indian basket-weaver far surpasses the white woman of college education in invention of art-form, artistic design, variety of stitch or weave, color harmonies, and digital dexterity, or ability to compel the fingers and hands to obey the dictates of the brain.
Education is by no means a matter of book-learning. It is a discipline of the eye, the hand, the muscles, the nerves, the whole body, to obey the dictates of the highest judgment, to the end that the best life, the happiest, the healthiest, and the most useful, may be attained, and if this definition be at all a true one I am fully satisfied that if we injected into our methods of civilized education a solution of three-fifths of Indian methods we should give to our race an immeasurably greater happiness, greater health, and greater usefulness.