The Philosophy of Teaching / The Teacher, The Pupil, The School

by Nathaniel Sands

These ends we shall no doubt all agree to be—first: that any of the youth of this city possessed of special talents, but lacking means for their cultivation, may have placed within their reach an education the best possible for the development of their powers for the benefit of themselves and of the community; and, second, to provide for the comparatively well-to-do the means of pursuing useful studies in compensation for compelling them to provide for the instruction of their less fortunate citizens.

As it is self-evident that whatever course of studies will tend to secure the first of these ends will tend also to secure the second and less important, we are spared the necessity of a two-fold investigation.

A very few statistics suffice to show that neither of these ends has been hitherto attained by the College of the City of New York.

It is immaterial what year we select for examination, the numbers which follow will be found to bear about the same relative proportions in every year. I quote from the Trustees’ Report for 1866 merely because it is the latest document at hand which furnishes the numbers in the different classes and of the graduates; from this report I find, that while there were three hundred and eighty-one students in the introductory class, only twenty-five graduated in that year. The number of graduates in 1867 was thirty, and twenty-nine in July, 1868. Of the three hundred and eighty-one who composed the introductory class in 1866, one hundred and fifty-one left the College during the year, and doubtless the two hundred and thirty who remained will have dwindled to about twenty-five or thirty by the year 1871.

Without doubt some proportion of the three hundred and eighty-one leave the College because of the necessity they are under of obtaining, by their labor, the means of subsistence; but when it is remembered that these three hundred and eighty-one are the picked youth from the many thousands attending the public schools, and when the sacrifices and privations which men and youth imbued with a love of learning will make and undergo for the acquirement of knowledge are borne in mind, we must look to something in the constitution of the College itself to account for this result. In short, we can but come to the conclusion that the main cause of this falling off is to be found in the feeling which grows upon the pupils and their guardians, of the comparative uselessness of the studies to which they are consigned.

Let us examine the course of studies, as given from pages 8 to 14 of the Report of the Board of Trustees for the year 1866, or from pages 24 to 28 of the Manual of the College.

The first observation which must strike the mind of every thinker is the fact that the primary analysis—the main classification which has been adopted of studies which ought to be framed to fit the students for “complete living”—is one of “words,” i. e., the tools of knowledge, instead of knowledge itself. Or in the words of the Report: “There are two courses of studies—ancient and modern—differing only in the languages studied.”

On examining the course for the introductory and freshman classes, a feeling of astonishment must fill the mind at the marked want of wisdom by which it was dictated, but which at the same time affords a sufficient explanation for the abandonment of the College by its students.

Even if “words” ought to be the real object of education, it would be supposed that English words would be more useful to a people whose mother-tongue is English, than the words of any other language; yet the students of the introductory and freshman classes of the ancient course receive instruction five hours a week through both terms in Latin and Greek, and one lesson per week during one term in the English language. The students of the modern course substitute for Latin and Greek the French and Spanish languages.

I purposely abstain from saying any thing as to the method of instruction, which is the converse of that adopted by nature, and as a consequence signally fails. This has been so forcibly put by President Barnard, of Columbia College, that I need only refer the members of our Committee to his essay on “Early Mental Training, and the Studies best fitted for it.”