CHAPTER VI
FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY
The reader has undoubtedly been struck by the fact that in all of the work described, pupils must have been allowed a greater amount of freedom than is usually thought compatible with the necessary discipline of a schoolroom. To the great majority of teachers and parents the very word school is synonymous with “discipline,” with quiet, with rows of children sitting still at desks and listening to the teacher, speaking only when they are spoken to. Therefore a school where these fundamental characteristics are lacking must of necessity be a poor school; one where pupils do not learn anything, where they do just as they please, quite regardless of what they please, even though it be harmful to the child himself or disagreeable to his classmates and the teacher.
There is a certain accumulation of facts that every child must acquire or else grow up to be illiterate. These facts relate principally to adult life; therefore it is not surprising that the pupil is not interested in them, while it is the duty of the school to see that he knows them nevertheless. How is this to be done? Obviously by seating the children in rows, far enough apart so that they cannot easily talk to each other, and hiring the most efficient person available to teach the facts; to tell them to the child, and have him repeat them often enough so that he can reasonably be expected to remember them, at least until after he is “promoted.”
Again, children should be taught to obey; efficiency in doing as one is told is a useful accomplishment, just as the doing of distasteful and uninteresting tasks is a character builder. The pupil should be taught to “respect” his teacher and learning in general; and how can he be taught this lesson if he does not sit quietly and receptively in the face of both? But if he will not be receptive, he must at least be quiet, so that the teacher can teach him anyway. The very fact that the pupil so often is lawless, destructive, rude and noisy as soon as restraint is removed proves, according to the advocates of “discipline” by authority, that this is the only way of dealing with the child, since without such restraint the child would behave all day long as he does when it is removed for a few uncertain minutes.
If this statement of the disciplinarian’s case sounds harsh and unadorned, think for a moment of the things that visitors to “queer schools” say after the visit is over; and consider whether they do not force the unprejudiced observer to the conclusion that their idea of schools and schooling is just such a harsh and unadorned affair. The discussion of freedom versus authoritative discipline in schools resolves itself after all into a question of the conception of education which is entertained. Are we to believe, with the strict disciplinarian, that education is the process of making a little savage into a little man, that there are many virtues as well as facts that have to be taught to all children so that they may as nearly as possible approach the adult standard? Or are we to believe, with Rousseau, that education is the process of making up the discrepancy between the child at his birth and the man as he will need to be, “that childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling,” and that the method of training these ways to what a man will need is to let the child test them upon the world about him?
The phrase, “authoritative discipline,” is used purposely, for discipline and freedom are not contradictory ideas. The following quotation from Rousseau shows very plainly what a heavy taskmaster even his freedom was, a freedom so often taken to mean mere lawlessness and license. “Give him [the pupil] no orders at all, absolutely none. Do not even let him think that you claim any authority over him. Let him know only that he is weak and you are strong, that his condition and yours puts him at your mercy; let this be perceived, learned and felt. Let him early find upon his proud neck the heavy yoke which nature has imposed upon us, the heavy yoke of necessity, under which every finite being must bow. Let him find the necessity in things, not in the caprices of man; let the curb be the force of conditions, not authority.”
Surely no discipline could be more severe, more apt to develop character and reasonableness, nor less apt to develop disorder and laziness. In fact the real reason for the feeling against freedom in schools seems to come from a misunderstanding. The critic confuses physical liberty with moral and intellectual liberty. Because the pupils are moving about, or sitting on the floor, or have their chairs scattered about instead of in a straight line, because they are using their hands and tongues, the visitor thinks that their minds must be relaxed as well; that they must be simply fooling, with no more restraint for their minds and morals than appears for their bodies. Learning in school has been so long associated with a docile or passive mind that because that useful organ does not squirm or talk in its operations, observers have come to think that none of the child should do so, or it will interfere with learning.