Education and living

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

In those days, would we not have given our young chances of promotion to see ranged up before the teacher a group of great grown men, the successful ones of the earth, to be put through the paces at which we kicked? Would it not have tickled us to see a class consisting of a state senator, a former lieutenant-governor, a manufacturer, a city official, a banker, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, an editor, an engineer and a clergyman, trying to spell daguerreotype and paradigm, reconnaissance and erysipelas, guessing at the distance in degrees from Portugal to the Ural Mountains, locating the desert of Atacama and the Pamir Plateau, expressing 150° Cent. in terms of Fahrenheit, and finding the area of the base of a cylindrical 1 gal. can, 10 ins. high? If it was true that we should all find this knowledge useful some day, then it would be preëminently these men who were finding it useful now.

Let the news go forth to all the children of the land who are questioning the why and wherefore of what they are learning, that this thing has actually been done. The eleven men have been assembled in Springfield, Ill., and have had put to them these questions and others, all taken from the prescribed work of the local public schools. The class constituted one of those inquiries conducted with the deadly accuracy of a laboratory experiment by the Russell Sage Foundation. The results, it need hardly be said, were a complete demonstration of the intuition of our childish precocity. Not one of these eleven successful and intelligent gentlemen made so much as a passing mark in any subject. In the spelling-match the best record was six words out of ten, while one man, probably the editor, failed in every word. Only one of the pupils knew the capital of Montenegro, while neither he nor any of the others had the faintest reaction to Atacama or the Pamir Plateau, much less to the length of South America or the distance in degrees from Portugal to the Ural Mountains. Only one of the eleven could do the thermometer problem—he must have been in Paris once in January—and not one knew the specific gravity of alcohol when 2 liters weigh 1.58 kgms. As for the ten historical dates selected from ninety-one, the only date that as many as ten men knew was the attack on Sumter. Only one identified the date of the Mexican War, only one the surrender of Cornwallis.

It must have seemed very curious to the eleven to be presented with these questions, and then have the answers labeled “knowledge.” How many of them drew the conclusion that our public schools were little more in the higher reaches than a glorified puzzle-party, where recitation is often more like a guessing of riddles, or trying to discover the answer from the teacher’s tone, or the putting together of a puzzle-picture? Look at the average school text-book, with its neat and logical divisions, and see if you can’t hear the dry crackle of the author’s wit as he has worked out his ingenious riddles, pieced his cunning examples together, hunted the dictionary for words to spell, dissected his history, carved up a continent. The intellect feeds on syllogisms. Syllogisms are so much easier than appreciations. And really it is far easier to reason than to interpret. In the first you have merely to follow the beaten track, in the other you must break new paths and put the thing in your own new language. Yet this whirling around of the mental engine with the belting off is represented to us as a process of “training the mind.” You might as well say that an athlete could best train his legs by standing on his head and waving them.

It is this scheme of puzzle-education which this Springfield inquiry—a characteristic flash, we take it, of American genius—has so tellingly shown up. And this riddle-curriculum tends to get worse instead of better as the science of text-bookmaking waxes and the machinery of scientific pedagogy accumulates. The avowed aim of teachers and training-colleges in recent years has been to discover pedagogical methods that would do the work regardless of the personality of the teacher. The riotous absurdities of this scheme are being revealed by such inquiries as these in Springfield. They suggest that the policy of having our next generation’s mental attitudes, stock of information, personal qualities, and moral biases cultivated by unimaginative teachers whose intellectual capacity has been just sufficient to acquire a few routine methods of “conducting” a class and keeping order in a group of restless children, may have become antiquated. Our genuine education—that is, a familiarity with the world we live in—must wait until we get out of school. That may partly explain why most children are so anxious to leave.

Some people might find in this inquiry not so much an evidence of the inefficiency of our public schools as of how little intellectual baggage one needs to become successful and eminent in these United States. But this is in reality only to make a heavier indictment. It is still primarily the schools that have failed to make the intellectual baggage important to the minds of their pupils, that have left uncultivated their tastes and horizons. It is for this reason that our American intellectual background is so relatively thin.

V
LEARNING OUT OF SCHOOL

A recent correspondent of the “New Republic” columns declares that the real puzzle in education is as to content. She asks us to outline the facts we have found of value, so that she may be sure, as she confesses she is not now sure, what children should know when they leave school.

I search the memory of my nine years in the public schools, and wonder what I really learned there. I must have learned to read and write and spell and work sums, for I can do all those things now; but I came out with no connected sense of my country’s history or that of any other, and if I had any geographical grasp, it came only from a certain abnormal delight I took in poring over maps by myself. Algebra, geometry and physics I recall to have passed before my attention. I was a very dutiful child, and it was my moral rather than my intellectual sense which enabled me to get “marks” in these subjects. I cannot say that they were “learned,” in the sense of being woven into experience in any way. Latin rather appealed to me, chiefly because of its elegance of form, which I remember to have been curiously reinforced by the æsthetic format of the Collar and Daniell’s text-book we used. Certain English classics appeared like dim ghosts on my horizon. At no time could I have given an intelligent account of the plot or argument of any of the books we read in Latin, Greek or German. The French and Italian which I picked up later I can read more easily than the German upon which I spent three school years. Imagined geographical wanderings, the disentangling of some verses of Vergil, certain neat algebraic solutions, are all of my “learning” that excited my interest or enthusiasm. Nine years seems an unconscionable time to spend learning these simple things.

I conclude that there is not much use teaching children things that they will not assimilate with their own curiosity, and connect with what they consider worth while in their world. In my own case this curiosity rarely worked in school. I cannot defend its algebraic and Vergilian workings except as springing from some embryo æsthetic sense. But the geographical enthusiasm is perfectly intelligible. It is connected with that intellectual education which I was pursuing parallel to my school work, and which merged with it only occasionally. This unofficial education, begun at a very early age, came through the medium of the newspaper. The “New York Tribune,” lying freshly on our doorstep every morning, was gathered in like intellectual manna by my small and grateful self. It told me daily of a wide, fascinating and important world, and to it I reacted with never failing curiosity. On the political events, personalities, foreign wars, riots, strikes, plays, books, and music that streamed disorganizedly through its columns, no school subject threw any light except geography, which at least enabled me to place things on the map. History, which might have helped, was taught, not backwards, in the order that one’s curiosity naturally approaches it, but forwards, so that at no time did we get within hailing distance of the present.

My real education, as I look back on it, consisted in making some sort of order out of this journalistic chaos. I got some help in the debates on current events which a radical superintendent introduced into our high school. I remember pulverizing, at the age of thirteen, my opponents in debate, with proofs that a ruthless dictatorship was the only form of government possible in the primitive state of Santo Domingo. Our household, however, was innocent of current discussion. The public library had not been born. I had to plot out this larger world by myself. Indeed, the grown-up people whom I sought seemed on the whole less familiar than I with the bearings of my curiosity. I cannot say that there was anything subtle or complicated or critical in my acceptance of the newspaper. It was all I could do to get the world mapped out, and become familiar with the names that I read. I remember following the Greco-Turkish War with a great deal of satisfaction, though the issues involved and the real military operations never meant anything at all. I got only the pleasant familiarity with this wider social world that one would get in meeting the same faces constantly in the street, without knowing the names of the people or speaking to them.