A detailed picture of this routine in one school is given in a paper, “Should English Teachers Teach?” by Edwin M. Hopkins, professor of English at the University of Kansas, and editor of the “English Journal.” Professor Hopkins complains that English teachers do not have time to teach English, because of the other kinds of work piled upon them by those who run the great educational factories. Many teachers, it appears, have to do janitor work, because the schools have no janitor and divide such work among the teachers. Practically all teachers have to do “school bookkeeping.” In one school the supervisor has provided printed forms with finely divided blanks, in which the teachers have to fill in information concerning no fewer than sixty items. These printed forms vary in size, from ordinary cards to sheets fifteen by twenty inches; there are “quarantine cards, record cards for office and superintendent, record of transfer to other schools, registration cards, three forms of attendance reports, inventories, seating charts, duplicate schedules”; records must be kept of “absence excuses, term record sheets, duplicate attendance slips, library cards and library service, correspondence duty, telephone duty, patrol duty, meeting parents, care of lockers and keys, returning lost books to pupils.”
A single item, the filling out of a library or text-book card for each pupil, occupies seven full hours of the teacher’s time for the pupils of a single section; and this principal makes six sections, of from fifty to sixty-five pupils each, the regular assignment of his English teachers. Other details include the filling in of from forty to a hundred separate items on each of the room cards; also the making of more than seventy entries of each pupil’s full name and room number, on the seat-charts of every recitation-room, for each recitation-hour and subject—there being fifteen or twenty of these for each teacher. Then there are “schedule cards,” handled by a special committee of three members assisted by ten or twelve volunteers. This takes two or three weeks of each semester, and the classes have to wait, doing no work while this is going on. Then there is the “checking of assembly-room slips,” an average of eight slips per pupil in a section of forty pupils. Each of these three hundred and twenty must be checked in its proper compartment on the individual pupil’s room card, which is ruled for fifty compartments. “For this item of duty no time allowance whatever is made.”
And if you trace all this back to its source, you will find it runs in a straight line, through Professor George D. Strayer and President Nicholas Murray Butler, to J. P. Morgan, the elder. I have mentioned that Strayer himself is the author of an elaborate series of card-systems, which are sold in quantities to teachers; and you will find that the young men and women who come out from Strayer’s mill are never happy till they get settled at some job of “scoring.” Thus one Columbia man is marking a city map with a red dot for every high school student in each city block. Another writes to a book publisher, asking for one hundred free copies of six different text-books—he is testing out text-books, a thousand different volumes, using one hundred copies of each. Two other Columbia men, with the highest degrees, have been “scoring” history topics; they have marked subjects mentioned in seventeen leading magazines for five years, a total of 92,000 references, showing how many times Columbus is named, and Magellan, and Theodore Roosevelt! They publish this in the “Journal of Educational Research,” of which Strayer is co-editor.
And every teacher’s college throughout the United States becomes a little Columbia, with some little “Nicholas Miraculous” at its head. I have a friend who was brought up within the shadow of such a place, and writes me what is going on. Listen:
The education of the future high school teachers in Nebraska is largely in control of the teachers’ college of the state university. And the teachers’ college has a compact, steam-roller organization run by a group from Columbia University, who are known to the irate professors in the other colleges of the university as “the Columbia ring.” They direct very nearly the whole course of the candidates for the teachers’ certificates, and you who know Columbia can easily imagine how they direct it. There is wild war between the “Columbia ring” and the more liberal professors in the arts and science college, but the dear little teachers-to-be never hear anything about it. They go out to their various schools with their life’s ideas supplied to them ready made, and with the fine “morale”—in the building of which the teachers’ college prides itself—to safeguard them against getting any new ideas.
This young lady goes on to explain that so far as she knows, the Columbia ring are “perfectly sincere and earnest gentlemen,” and no one has ever heard of the financial powers taking a hand in the matter. I am advising this correspondent to consult “The Goose-step,” and see who it was that paid for the costly education of these Nebraska educators. All the contributors are Wall Street gentlemen who never contributed a dollar in their lives without being certain that they got two dollars’ worth; and if they can train great educators to serve their interests sincerely and earnestly—and without knowing it—is not that exactly the way the driver of a dray-horse likes the horse to be?
CHAPTER LXXVII
THE EDUCATIONAL MILLS
The “little red school-house” may of course be anything, depending on the individual teacher. In our two hundred thousand “one-teacher” schools, there are many which are jolly and human, and many which are efficient, and many which are places of irritability and oppression. But the characteristic product of our modern system is the big school, the great educational mill, run by efficiency experts on a quantity production basis. These huge machines are but little influenced by individual personalities; they acquire momentum of their own, and grind up everything which gets in their way. These are the institutions in which our modern “great educators” specialize; the science of running them is what you get from experts such as Professor Strayer, head of the Department of Educational Administration of Columbia University.
From the state of Pennsylvania survey of the schools of Philadelphia, I take this picture of a well disciplined school:
The teachers in charge watched very carefully and jotted down notes of the slightest transgressions. All pupils raising their eyes from their books were liable to punishment. The principal believed that the amount of study done by pupils in the study hall depended upon the man in charge. The strictest policing would produce the best results. The practice was clearly one of coercion and pressure.