Craftsmanship in Teaching

by William C. Bagley

Now what was the secret of the efficiency of this school? Not merely the fact that it had introduced certain types of content such as drawing, manual training, domestic science, dramatization, story work,—but also that it had not lost sight of the fundamental purpose of elementary education, but had so organized all of its studies that each played into the hands of the others, and that everything that was done had some definite and tangible relation to everything else. The manual training exercises and the mechanical drawing were exercises in arithmetic, but, let me remind you, there were other lessons, and formal lessons, in arithmetic as well. But the one exercise enlightened and made more meaningful the other. In the same way the story and dramatization were intimately related to the reading and the language, but there were formal lessons in reading and formal lessons in language. The geography illustrated nature study and employed language and arithmetic and drawing in its exercises. And so the whole structure was organized and coherent and unified, and what was taught in one class was utilized in another. There was no needless duplication, no needless or meaningless repetition. But repetition there was, over and over again, but always it was effective in still more firmly fixing the habits.

One would be an ingrate, indeed, if one failed to recognize the great good that an extreme reform movement may do. Some very precious increments of progress have resulted even from the most extreme and ridiculous reactions against the drill and formalism of the older schools. Let me briefly summarize these really substantial gains as I conceive them.

In the first place, we have come to recognize distinctly the importance of enlisting in the service of habit building the native instincts of the child. Up to a certain point nature provides for the fixing of useful responses, and we should be unwise not to make use of these tendencies. In the spontaneous activities of play, certain fundamental reactions are continually repeated until they reach the plane of absolute mechanism. In imitating the actions of others, adjustments are learned and made into habits without effort; in fact, the process of imitation, so far as it is instinctive, is a source of pure delight to the young child. Finally, closely related to these two instincts, is the native tendency to repetition,—nature's primary provision for drill. You have often heard little children repeat their new words over and over again. Frequently they have no conception of the meanings of these words. Nature seems to be untroubled by a question that has bothered teachers; namely, Should a child ever be asked to drill on something the purpose of which he does not understand? Nature sees to it that certain essential responses become automatic long before the child is conscious of their meaning. Just because nature does this is, of course, no reason why we should imitate her. But the fact is an interesting commentary upon the extreme to which we sometimes carry our principle of rationalizing everything before permitting it to be mastered.

I repeat that the reform movement has done excellent service in extending the recognition in education of these fundamental and inborn adaptive instincts,—play, imitation, and rhythmic repetition. It has erred when it has insisted that we could depend upon these alone, for nature has adapted man, not to the complicated conditions of our modern highly organized social life, but rather to primitive conditions. Left to themselves, these instinctive forces would take the child up to a certain point, but they would still leave him on a primitive plane. I know of one good authority on the teaching of reading who maintains that the normal child would learn to read without formal teaching if he were placed in the right environment,—an environment of books. This may be possible with some exceptional children, but even an environment reasonably replete with books does not effect this miracle in the case of certain children whom I know very well and whom I like to think of as perfectly normal. These children learned to talk by imitation and instinctive repetition. But nature has not yet gone so far as to provide the average child with spontaneous impulses that will lead him to learn to read. Reading is a much more complicated and highly organized process. And so it is with a vast number of the activities that our pupils must master.

Another increment of progress that the reform movement has given to educational practice is a recognition of the fact that we have been requiring pupils to acquire unnecessary habits, under the impression, that even if the habits were not useful, something of value was gained in their acquisition. As a result, we have passed all of our grain through the same mill, unmindful of the fact that different life activities required different types of grist. To-day we are seeing the need for carefully selecting the types of habit and skill that should be developed in all children. We are recognizing that there are many phases of the educative process that it is not well to reduce to an automatic basis. When I was in the elementary school I memorized Barnes's History of the United States and Harper's Geography from cover to cover. I have never greatly regretted this automatic mastery; but I have often thought that I might have memorized something rather more important, for history and geography could have been mastered just as effectively in another way.

In the third place, and most important of all, we have been led to analyze this complex process of habit building,—to find out the factors that operate in learning. We have now a goodly body of principles that may even be characterized by the adjective "scientific." We know that in habit building, it is fundamentally essential to get the pupil started in the right way. A recent writer states that two thirds of the difficulty that the teacher meets fixing habits is due to the neglect of this principle. Inadequate and inefficient habits get started and must be continually combated while the desirable habit is being formed. How important this is in the initial presentation of material that is to be memorized or made automatic we are just now beginning to appreciate. One writer insists that faulty work in the first grade is responsible for a large part of the retardation which is bothering us so much to-day. The wrong kind of a start is made, and whenever a faulty habit is formed, it much more than doubles the difficulty of getting the right one well under way. We are slowly coming to appreciate how much time is wasted in drill processes by inadequate methods. Technique is being improved and the time thus saved is being given to the newer content subjects that are demanding admission to the schools.

Again, we are coming to appreciate as never before the importance of motivating our drill work,—of not only reading into it purpose and meaning so that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also of engendering in him the desire to form the habits,—to undergo the discipline that is essential for mastery. Here again the reform movement has been helpful, showing us the waste of time and energy that results from attempting to fix habits that are only weakly motivated.

All this is a vastly different matter from sugar-coating the drill processes, under the mistaken notion that something that is worth while may be acquired without effort. I think that educators are generally agreed that such a policy is thoroughly bad,—for it subverts a basic principle of human life the operation of which neither education nor any other force can alter or reverse. To teach the child that the things in life that are worth doing are easy to do, or that they are always or even often intrinsically pleasant or agreeable, is to teach him a lie. Human history gives us no examples of worthy achievements that have not been made at the price of struggle and effort,—at the price of doing things that men did not want to do. Every great truth has had to struggle upward from defeat. Every man who has really found himself in the work of life has paid the price of sacrifice for his success. And whenever we attempt to give our pupils a mastery of the complicated arts and skills that have lifted civilized man above the plane of his savage ancestors, we must expect from them struggle and effort and self-denial.

Let me quote a paragraph from the report of a recent investigation in the psychology of learning. The habit that was being learned in this experiment was skill in the use of the typewriter. The writer describes the process in the following words:

"In the early stages of learning, our subjects were all very much interested in the work. Their whole mind seemed to be spontaneously held by the writing. They were always anxious to take up the work anew each day. Their general attitude and the resultant sensations constituted a pleasant feeling tone, which had a helpful reactionary effect upon the work. Continued practice, however, brought a change. In place of the spontaneous, rapt attention of the beginning stages, attention tended, at certain definite stages of advancement, to wander away from the work. A general feeling of monotony, which at times assumed the form of utter disgust, took the place of the former pleasant sensations and feelings. The writing became a disagreeable task. The unpleasant feelings now present in consciousness exerted an ever-restraining effect on the work. As an expert skill was approached, however, the learners' attitude and mood changed again. They again took a keen interest in the work. Their whole feeling tone once more became favorable, and the movements delightful and pleasant. The expert typist ... so thoroughly enjoyed the writing that it was as pleasant as the spontaneous play activities of a child. But in the course of developing this permanent interest in the work, there were many periods in nearly every test, many days, as well as stages in the practice as a whole, when the work was much disliked, periods when the learning assumed the rôle of a very monotonous task. Our records showed that at such times as these no progress was made. Rapid progress in learning typewriting was made only when the learners were feeling good and had an attitude of interest toward the work."[18]