Craftsmanship in Teaching

by William C. Bagley

Now education, from the very earliest times, has recognized the necessity of building up these automatic responses,—of fixing these essential habits in all individuals. This recognition has often been short-sighted and sometimes even blind; but it has served to hold education rather tenaciously to a process that all must admit to be essential.

Drill or training, however, is unfortunate in one important particular. It invariably involves repetition; and conscious, explicit repetition tends to become monotonous. We must hold attention to the drill process, and yet attention abhors monotony as nature abhors a vacuum. Consequently no small part of the tedium and irksomeness of school work has been due to its emphasis of drill. The formalism of the older schools has been described, criticized, and lampooned in professional literature, and even in the pages of fiction. The disastrous results that follow from engendering in pupils a disgust for school and all that it represents have been eloquently portrayed. Along with the tendency toward ease and comfort in other departments of human life has gone a parallel tendency to relieve the school of this odious burden of formal, lifeless, repetitive work.

This "reform movement," as I shall call it, represents our first plunge into the wilderness. We would get away from the entanglements of drill and into the clearings of pleasurable, spontaneous activities. A new sun of hope dawned upon the educational world.

You are all familiar with some of the more spectacular results of this movement. You have heard of the schools that eliminated drill processes altogether, and depended upon clear initial development to fix the facts and formulæ and reactions that every one needs. You have heard and perhaps seen some of the schools that were based entirely upon the doctrine of spontaneity, governing their work by the principle that the child should never do anything that he did not wish to do at the moment of doing,—although the advocates of this theory generally qualified their principle by insisting that the skillful teacher would have the child wish to do the right thing all the time.

Let me describe to you a school of this type that I once visited. I learned of it through a resident of the city in which it was located. He was delivering an address before an educational gathering on the problems of modern education. He told the audience that, in the schools of this enlightened city, the antiquated notions that were so pernicious had been entirely dispensed with. He said that pupils in these schools were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line passing, static posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves, through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been eliminated; that corporal punishment was never even mentioned, much less practiced; that all was harmony, and love, and freedom, and spontaneity.

I listened to this speaker with intense interest, and, as his picture unfolded, I became more and more convinced that this city had at last solved the problem. I took the earliest opportunity to visit its schools. When I reached the city I went to the superintendent's office. I asked to be directed to the best school. "Our schools are all 'best,'" the secretary told me with an intonation that denoted commendable pride, and which certainly made me feel extremely humble, for here even the laws of logic and of formal grammar had been transcended. I made bold to apologize, however, and amended my request to make it apparent that I wished to see the largest school. I was directed to take a certain car and, in due time, found myself at the school. I inferred that recess was in progress when I reached the building, and that the recess was being celebrated within doors. After some time spent in dodging about the corridors, I at last located the principal.

I introduced myself and asked if I could visit his school after recess was over. "We have no recesses here," he replied (I could just catch his voice above the din of the corridors); "this is a relaxation period for some of the classes." He led the way to the office, and I spent a few moments in getting the "lay of the land." I asked him, first, whether he agreed with the doctrines that the system represented, and he told me that he believed in them implicitly. Did he follow them out consistently in the operation of his school? Yes, he followed them out to the letter.

We then went to several classrooms, where I saw children realizing themselves, I thought, very effectively. There were three groups at work in each room. One recited to the teacher, another studied at the seats, a third did construction work at the tables. I inquired about the mechanics of this rather elaborate organization, but I was told that mechanics had been eliminated from this school. Mechanical organization of the classroom, it seems, crushes the child's spontaneity, represses his self-activity, prevents the effective operation of the principle of self-realization. How, then, did these three groups exchange places, for I felt that the doctrine of self-realization would not permit them to remain in the same employment during the entire session. "Oh," the principal replied, "when they get ready to change, they change, that's all."

I saw that a change was coming directly, so I waited to watch it. The group had been working with what I should call a great deal of noise and confusion. All at once this increased tenfold. Pupils jumped over seats, ran into each other in the aisles, scurried and scampered from this place to that, while the teacher stood in the front of the room wildly waving her arms. The performance lasted several minutes. "There's spontaneity for you," the principal shouted above the roar of the storm. I acquiesced by a nod of the head,—my lungs, through lack of training, being unequal to the emergency.

We passed to another room. The same group system was in evidence. I noticed pupils who had been working at their seats suddenly put away their books and papers and skip over to the construction table. I asked concerning the nature of the construction work. "We use it," the principal told me, "as a reward for good work in the book subjects. You see arithmetic is dead and dry. You must give pupils an incentive to master it. We make the privileges of the construction table the incentive." "What do they make at this table?" I asked. "Whatever their fancy dictates," he replied. I was a little curious, however, to know how it all come out. I saw one child start to work on a basket, work at it a few minutes, then take up something else, continue a little time, go back to the basket, and finally throw both down for a third object of self-realization. I called the principal's attention to this phenomenon. "How do you get the beautiful results that you exhibit?" I asked. "For those," he said, "we just keep the pupils working on one thing until it is finished." "But," I objected, "is that consistent with the doctrine of spontaneity?" His answer was lost in the din of a change of groups, and I did not follow the investigation further.