Whatever familiarity with the trend of events and the wider interests of men and women I had when I left school was obtained in this way. The school had been practically valueless in giving me the background of the intellectual world in which I was henceforth to live. My framework was bony enough and the content flimsy, but the outlines of my interests were there, and curiosity enough to keep me ceaselessly at filling in that content. Nothing has occurred since that time to show me, through various vicissitudes, that it was not the most useful I could have. That its foundations had to be laid outside the school seems to me a sheer waste of educational energy on the school’s part.
Boldly then, and in true egocentric fashion, I say that the child when he leaves school ought to have the foundations of interest in the events and issues in which people generally are interested. These practically all come within the attention of the metropolitan newspaper. The child should be equipped to get some kind of intelligent reaction to what he reads there about political and sociological events and issues, personalities, art and literature. No one could accuse a curriculum based on the newspaper of being aristocratic, esoteric, or ultra-cultural. The newspaper is the one common intellectual food of all classes and types in the community. Many persons, it is true, may react only to certain specialized departments, and yet even into the most rudimentary journals filter most of these larger issues and events. To use this stock as clues and work out the historical, geographical, and cultural ramifications in the school curriculum would provide this broad familiarity with the world the child is to live in which I suggest. I would not make the horrifying proposal that the newspaper be used as a school text-book. I am too well aware of that cardinal tenet of current educational morality which banishes the newspaper entirely from the school. There is something rather symbolic about that tenet, by the way. But to use a sort of generalized newspaper as the nucleus and basis of a curriculum would be a different matter. It would be using the actual current life of society as the guiding thread of what the child is to know. As far as the purely intellectual content of the school is concerned, it would do what so many educators desire, connect the school with life.
This ideal may be incredible, but it is not necessarily impossible. Take the child at its lowest terms, as a troublesome little person whom its parents send to school to get it out of the way of the crowded home until it is old enough to go to work. Then take the present curriculum, a medley of equally emphasized cultural, scientific and manual studies. Now the child certainly should have a command of the three R’s before he is ten years old. Suppose then we transfer the mathematical and scientific studies to a place subsidiary to the vocational and manual work that is being so rapidly developed. They would be taken up, that is, only as the theoretical basis for this practical work. This would leave four or five years for the study of the history, geography, literature, language, and civics, before the minimum age at which the child in the more advanced states is allowed to leave school. There seems to be no inherent reason why a great deal could not be done in that time to prepare this imaginative background for the world we live in.
If “cultivating the imagination” means anything it means ensuring that what one experiences in daily life will call up interesting and significant images and ideas. The public school sometimes attempts to cultivate a sort of literary and mythological imagination, but as for ensuring that those references to places, persons, books, political institutions, ideas, which occur in the papers and weekly journals, shall call up to the mind prompt, accurate, and stimulating images and meanings, it has been a dead failure. An exploration of the current imagination of the average person would be a curious and profitable enterprise for a psychologist to undertake. For the cultivation of this imagery, we are all left, as the child is left, to the chance provision of the contemporary news-provider, the illustrated paper and “Sunday magazine.” Here is where we get our notions of things as they look and act.
Beyond all else the child should leave school with a wide and reliable imagination—not with facts or theories so much as pictures, sympathies, apprehensions, what we call “the feeling for the thing.” Thus equipped, his curiosity will provide him with all the facts and theories he needs. The custom of teaching by subjects is as artificial and absurd as could be imagined. We do not think in terms of history or geography or language. If I read a foreign newspaper, all these are merged into one imaginative impression. We think in terms of situations, which have settings in time and place, and all sorts of fringes and implications. Unless the child is taught in this spirit, the isolated subjects will have no meaning. Without the imaginative background that fuses and vitalizes his studies, he will go out from school untaught and unknowing.
VI
IN A SCHOOLROOM
The other day I amused myself by slipping into a recitation at the suburban high school where I had once studied as a boy. The teacher let me sit, like one of the pupils, at an empty desk in the back of the room, and for an hour I had before my eyes the interesting drama of the American school as it unfolds itself day after day in how many thousands of classrooms throughout the land. I had gone primarily to study the teacher, but I soon found that the pupils, after they had forgotten my presence, demanded most of my attention.
Their attitude towards the teacher, a young man just out of college and amazingly conscientious and persevering, was that good-humored tolerance which has to take the place of enthusiastic interest in many of our American schools. They seemed to like the teacher and recognize fully his good intentions, but their attitude was a delightful one of all making the best of a bad bargain, and coöperating loyally with him in slowly putting the hour out of its agony. This good-natured acceptance of the inevitable, this perfunctory going through by its devotees of the ritual of education, was my first striking impression, and the key to the reflections that I began to weave.
As I sank down to my seat I felt all that queer sense of depression, still familiar after ten years, that sensation, in coming into the schoolroom, of suddenly passing into a helpless, impersonal world, where expression could be achieved and curiosity asserted only in the most formal and difficult way. And the class began immediately to divide itself for me, as I looked around it, into the artificially depressed like myself, commonly called the “good” children, and the artificially stimulated, commonly known as the “bad,” and the envy and despair of every “good” child. For to these “bad” children, who are, of course, simply those with more self-assertion and initiative than the rest, all the careful network of discipline and order is simply a direct and irresistible challenge. I remembered the fearful awe with which I used to watch the exhaustless ingenuity of the “bad” boys of my class to disrupt the peacefully dragging recitation; and behold, I found myself watching intently, along with all the children in my immediate neighborhood, the patient activity of a boy who spent his entire hour in so completely sharpening a lead-pencil that there was nothing left at the end but the lead. Now what normal boy would do so silly a thing or who would look at him in real life? But here, in this artificial atmosphere, his action had a sort of symbolic quality; it was assertion against a stupid authority, a sort of blind resistance against the attempt of the schoolroom to impersonalize him. The most trivial incident assumed importance; the chiming of the town-clock, the passing automobile, a slip of the tongue, a passing footstep in the hall, would polarize the wandering attention of the entire class like an electric shock. Indeed, a large part of the teacher’s business seemed to be to demagnetize, by some little ingenious touch, his little flock into their original inert and static elements.
For the whole machinery of the classroom was dependent evidently upon this segregation. Here were these thirty children, all more or less acquainted, and so congenial and sympathetic that the slightest touch threw them all together into a solid mass of attention and feeling. Yet they were forced, in accordance with some principle of order, to sit at these stiff little desks, equidistantly apart, and prevented under penalty from communicating with each other. All the lines between them were supposed to be broken. Each existed for the teacher alone. In this incorrigibly social atmosphere, with all the personal influences playing around, they were supposed to be, not a network or a group, but a collection of things, in relation only with the teacher.