The majority of my pupils’ parents being from New England and North America, they brought and carried into effect all their North American ideas of education. The California summer heat is, I think, unfit for educational purposes. It is too hot to herd sixty restless children together six hours a day. They proved this in several cases. Some fell sick suddenly. Some fainted. But this made no difference. The school went on in all its misery. I sent a fainting child home one day, and the father returned with it an hour afterward. He was fierce, and said he wanted his child kept in school when he sent it to school.
This was in California’s early days. My scholars were the children of the Argonauts, and in some cases had come out with them. There was then no regular system of text-books. Publishers had not commenced making fortunes by getting out a new school-book system every three years.
My scholars came, bringing a great variety of school-books. They brought “Pike’s Arithmetic,” which had come over the plains, and “Smith’s Geography,” which had sailed around Cape Horn. Seldom were two alike. But the greatest variety lay in grammars. There was a regular museum of English grammars, whose authors fought each other with different rules and called the various parts of speech by different names. I accounted for the great variety of grammars on the supposition that it is or was the ambition of a large proportion of schoolmasters to write a work on grammar before they died and say: “I have left another grammar to bless and confuse posterity.”
Besides bringing grammars, most of the boys brought dogs. Dogs of many breeds and sizes hovered around the school-house. They wanted frequently to come in, and did often come in, to sneak under the seats and lay themselves at their masters’ feet. I had frequently to kick or order them out, and I noticed that whenever a dog was chased out he would take the longest road to get out and under as many seats as possible, in order to receive as many kicks as possible from the youthful owners of the other dogs.
I could not so organize a battalion of ten different grammars as to act in concert on my grammar class of twenty pupils. So I put them all on the retired list and tried to teach this so-called “science” orally. I chalked the rules on the blackboard, as well as the names of the different parts of speech. I made my scholars commit these to memory, standing, although I will not argue that memory takes any stronger grip on a thing while the pupil stands. At last I taught a few with good memories to “parse.” I worked hard with that grammar class, and was very proud of their proficiency until I found that after months of this drilling they neither spoke nor wrote any better English than before. However, I lost nothing by this experience, for it helped me to the conviction I have held to ever since, that the entire grammar system and method does very little to make one habitually use correct language, and that a taste for reading and constant association with correct English-speaking people does a great deal. As for spending time in “parsing,” I think it would be better to use that force in learning the boy to shoe horses and the girl to make bread, or let the girl shoe the horses if she wants to and the boy make the bread.
The labor of teaching the alphabet to ten infants, calling them up once an hour “to say their letters,” is, in my estimation, greater than that of swinging a pick in the surface gold “diggings.” I have tried both, and infinitely prefer the pick. It is not so much work when you are employed with them as when you are occupied with the other pupils. Then these poor little alphabetical cherubs can do nothing but squirm on their low benches, catch flies, pinch each other, make and project spit-balls and hold up their hands for another drink of water. I could not let them out of doors to play in the sand, where they should have been, because the North American parent would have considered himself as defrauded of a part of his infant’s schooling were they not imprisoned the whole six hours.
Neither can you set a child to studying A or M or any other letter. There is not an idea in A or B. During the two years of my administration I wrought with one child who never could get successfully beyond F. Her parents questioned my ability as a teacher. Some days she would repeat the whole alphabet correctly. I would go home with a load off my mind. The next day her mind would relapse into an alphabetical blank after F. She grew to be an eyesore to me. The sight of her at last made me sick.
I held public examinations every six months, and was careful to do all the examining myself. An interloper among the audience I invited did me great damage on one of these memorized performances by asking a simple arithmetical question of the show-off geographical boy. The urchin was brilliant in dealing with boundary lines, capes, and islands, but his head was one that mathematics could not readily be injected into. On the other hand, my specimen grammarian was as likely to describe an island as a body of land surrounded—by land as by water. I had no heart to find fault with this poor barefooted urchin who, when in class, was always trying to stand on one leg like a crane, and sending his right big toe on exploring scratching expeditions up his left trouser. He had been born and brought up in an inland country, where no body of water was to be seen save an occasional fleeting mud puddle; and what earthly conception could he form of the ocean and its islands?
But the parents who attended these exhibitions of stuffed memories were struck at the proficiency of the progeny, and retired with the impression that their children knew a great deal because they had parroted off so much that was all Greek to them; and after I had been in this occupation a year I would sit in my empty theological school-house when they had gone and try and convict myself as a profound humbug, and one, too, compelled, in order to get a living, to encourage and foster a system which had so much humbug in it.
The California schools were not then “graded.” They were conducted on the “go-as-you-please” plan, sometimes going as the teachers pleased, sometimes as the parents pleased, sometimes as the pupils pleased. The parents of the youthful brains I was trying to develop into future statesmen and presidents wanted me to teach many things. One father wished his son taught Latin. It is bringing extremes pretty near each other to teach Latin and A B C’s. But I “taught” the young man Latin as I was “taught” many things at school. I started him committing to memory the Latin declensions and conjugations, and then heard him “say his lesson.” If he got anything out of it I didn’t know what it was, except tough work. He never reached any translations of the classics, for several reasons.