Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

It might perhaps be thought that these magnificent opportunities in education were provided [{329}] only for the higher classes, or concerned only book learning and the liberal and professional studies. Far from any such exclusiveness as this, their schools were thoroughly rounded and gave instruction in the arts and crafts and recognized the value of manual training. We have only come to appreciate in the last few decades how much we have lost in education in America by neglecting these features of education for the masses. While Germany has manual training for over fifty per cent. of the children who go to her schools, here in the United States we provide it for something less than one per cent, of our children. They made no such mistake as this in the Spanish-American countries. Indeed, Professor Bourne's paragraph on this subject is perhaps the most interesting feature of what he has to say with regard to education in Spanish America. The objective methods of education, as he depicts them, the thoroughly practical content of education, and the fact that the Church was one of the main factors in bringing about this well-rounded education, is of itself a startling commentary on the curiously perverted notions that have been held in the past with regard to the comparative value of education in Spanish and in English America and the attitude of the Church toward these educational questions:

"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater [{330}] scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters."

If there was all this of progress in education in Spanish-American countries in advance of what we had in the United States, people will be prone to ask where, then, are the products of the Spanish-American education? This is only a fair question, and if the products cannot be shown, their education, however pretentious, must have been merely superficial or hollow, and must have meant nothing for the culture of their people. We are sure that most people would consider the question itself quite sufficient for argument, for it would be supposed to be unanswerable.

Such has been the state of mind created by history as it is written for English-speaking people, that we are not at all prepared to think that there [{331}] can possibly be in existence certain great products of Spanish-American education that show very clearly how much better educational systems were developed in Spanish than in English America. The fact that we do not know them, however, is only another evidence of the one-sidedness of American education in the North, even at the present time. Our whole attitude toward the South American people, our complacent self-sufficiency from which we look down on them, our thoroughgoing condescension for their ignorance and backwardness, is all founded on our lack of real knowledge with regard to them.

The most striking product of South American education was the architectural structures which the Spanish-American people erected as ornaments of their towns, memorials of their culture and evidences of their education. The cathedrals in the Spanish towns of South America and Mexico are structures, as a rule, fairly comparable with the ecclesiastical buildings erected by towns of the same size in Europe. As a rule, they were planned at least in the sixteenth century, and most of them were finished in the seventeenth century. Their cathedrals are handsome architectural structures worthy of their faith and enduring evidence of their taste and love of beauty. The ecclesiastical buildings, the houses of their bishops and archbishops and their monasteries were worthy of their cathedrals and churches. Most of them are beautiful, all of them are dignified, all of them had [{332}] a permanent character that has made them endure down to our day and has made them an unfailing ornament of the towns in which they are. Their municipal buildings partook of this same type. Some of them are very handsome structures. Of their universities we have already heard that they were imposing buildings from without, handsomely decorated within.

It must not be forgotten that the Spanish Americans practically invented the new style of architecture. How effective that style is, we had abundant opportunity to see when it was employed for the building of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. That style is essentially American. It is the only new thing that America has contributed to construction since its settlement. How thoroughly suitable it was for the climate for which it was invented, those who have had experience of it in the new hotels erected in Florida, in the last decade or so, can judge very well. Many of its effects are an adaptation of classical formulae to buildings for the warm, yet uncertain climate of many parts of South America. Some of the old monasteries constructed after this style are beautiful examples of architecture in every sense of the word. If the Spanish-American monks had done nothing else but leave us this handsome new model in architecture they would not have lived in vain, nor would their influence in American life have been without its enduring effects. This is a typical [{333}] product of the higher culture of the South Spanish-American people.

With regard to the churches, it may be said that the spirit of the Puritans was entirely opposed to anything like the ornamentation of their churches, and that, indeed, these were not churches in the usual sense of the word, but were merely meeting houses. Hence there was not the same impulse to make them beautiful as lifted the Spanish Americans into their magnificent expressions of architectural beauty. On the other hand, there are other buildings in regard to which, if there had been any real culture in the minds of the English Americans, we have a right to expect some beauty as well as usefulness. If we contrast for a moment the hospitals of English and Spanish America the difference is so striking as to show the lack of some important quality in the minds of the builders at the north. Spanish-American hospitals are among the beautiful structures with which they began to adorn their towns early, and some of them remain at the present day as examples of the architectural taste of their builders. They were usually low, often of but one story in height, with a courtyard and with ample porticos for convalescents, and thick walls to defend them from the heat of the climate. In many features they surpass many hospitals that have been built in America until very recent years. They were modelled on the old mediaeval hospitals, some of which are very beautiful [{334}] examples of how to build places for the care of the ailing.

Contrast for a moment with this the state of affairs that has existed with regard to our church buildings and our public structures of all kinds in North America, down to the latter half of the nineteenth century. We have no buildings dating from before the nineteenth century that have any pretension to architectural beauty. They were built merely for utility. Some of them still have an interest for us because of historical associations, but they are a standing evidence of the lack of taste of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The English poet, Yeats, said at a little dinner given to him just before he left this country ten years ago, that no nation can pretend to being cultured until the very utensils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as useful. What is to be said, then, of a nation that erects public buildings that are to be merely useful? As a matter of fact, most of them were barracks. The American people woke up somewhat in the nineteenth century, but the awakening was very slow. A few handsome structures were erected, but it is not until the last decade or two that we have been able to awaken public taste to the necessity for having all our public buildings beautiful as well as useful.

The effect of this taste for structural beauty on the appearance of the streets of their towns was an important element in making them very different from our cramped and narrow pathways. [{335}] The late Mr. Ernest Crosby once expressed this very emphatically in an after-dinner speech, by detailing his experience with regard to Havana. He had visited the Cuban capital some twenty years ago, and found it very picturesque in its old Spanish ways. It is true the streets were dirty and the death-rate was somewhat high, but the vista that you saw when you came around the corner of a street, was not the same that you had seen around every other corner for twenty miles; it was different. It was largely a city of homes, with some thought of life being made happy, rather than merely being laborious. It was a place to live in and enjoy life while it lasted, and not merely a place to exist in and make money. He came north by land. The first town that he struck on the mainland, he said, reminded him of Hoboken. Every other town that he struck in the North reminded him more and more of Hoboken, until he came to the immortal Hoboken itself. The American end of the Anglo-Saxon idea seemed to him to make all the towns like Hoboken as far as possible. There is only one town in this country that is not like Hoboken, and that is Washington; and whenever we let the politicians work their wills on that--witness the Pension Building--it has a tendency to grow more and more like Hoboken. Perhaps we shall be able to save it. As for Havana, he said he understood that the death-rate had been cut in two, and that yellow fever was no longer [{336}] epidemic there, but he understood also that the town was growing more and more like Hoboken, so that he scarcely dared go back to see it.

The parable has a lesson that is well worth driving home for our people, for it emphasizes a notable lack of culture among the American people, which did not exist among the Spanish Americans, a lack which we did not realize until the last decade or two, though it is an important index of true culture. The hideous buildings that we have allowed ourselves to live in in America, and, above all, that we have erected as representing the dignity of city, and only too often even of state, together with the awful evidence of graft, whenever an attempt has been made to correct this false taste and erect something worthy of us, the graft usually spoiling to a very great extent our best purposes, proclaim an absence of culture in American life that amounts to a conviction of failure of our education to be liberal in the true sense of the word.