The following case shows how, out of a bad family situation, real educational capital was made for a headstrong, irresponsible girl of fourteen who hated school and thought she wished to go to work to help her family. Knowing the reaction of the home situation on the girl’s school life, the visiting teacher worked out a special plan with the family agency to which she had referred the family. She advised that the money required for the family budget be paid in the form of a weekly scholarship to the girl. The conditions stipulated were that she attend school regularly and keep a budget. She was transferred to a special class and given a special course providing an unusual amount of household training—the one school subject which seemed to her to serve any useful purpose. The personal interest of the domestic science teacher was enlisted in the girl’s home situation, and she not only advised about the budget but encouraged the girl to make the most of her scanty home furnishings. A tutor was provided to help with the academic subjects. Through this weekly-payment plan the girl was made a partner in the family situation, and her sense of responsibility developed. Her budget book served as the most effective arithmetic text book she had ever used. Incidentally, she learned much about food values and purchasing.[[103]]
But while in the present condition of society there is no point at which the prevention of delinquency and the socialization of the family can be undertaken so successfully as in the school, the school itself has very grave defects of character, and the question of its adaptation to the welfare of the child involves at the same time the question of change and reform in the school itself. Many educators will agree that if we attempt to measure the influence of the school with reference to its efficiency as a factor in personality development we are confronted at once with the following conditions:
1. The average school, like the old community, works on the assumption of uniformity of personality and presents the same materials and plans in the same order to all. The assumption is that children react in the same way to the same influences regardless of their personal traits or their social past, and that it is therefore possible to provoke identical behavior by identical means. “Nature,” says Doctor Jennings, “has expended all her energy in making our little flock of children as diverse as she possibly can; in concealing within it unlimited possibilities which no one can define or predict. It sometimes seems as if we parents in our process of educating them were attempting to root out all of these diversities, to reduce our flock to a uniform mass.... The only way in which appreciable progress can be made in the attempt is by cutting off, stunting, preventing the development of the special and distinctive qualities of the individuals. Unfortunately this can be done to a certain extent, but only by a process which may be rightly compared with the taking of human life.”[[104]]
2. The creative or plan-forming interest of the child is an expression of the phase of new experience which is based on curiosity and appears very early in the child. The child expresses his energy and secures his recognition, favorable or unfavorable, mainly along this line. Response and security do not mean so much to him as yet. The fact that the school work is detached from activity and not related to the plan-forming and creative faculty explains its failure to interest the child. An investigator took five hundred children out of twenty factories in Chicago and asked them this question: “If your father had a good job and you did not have to work, which would you rather do, go to school or work in a factory?” Of the five hundred children, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, 412 said they would rather work in a factory.[[105]]
In 1920 the White-Williams counselors in the Junior Employment Service of the Board of Public Education interviewed 908 of the 10,674 children who came that year to the Board of Public Education for general working certificates. Forty-seven per cent of these did not want to go on with their school work. They gave as reasons: “I was ‘left down’”; “I didn’t like arithmetic”; “I was too tall for the other girls in the room”, etc. Many of these difficulties might have been adjusted if some one could have made plans with the children while they were still in school.[[106]]
3. There is therefore a question whether as a device for plan-forming by presenting the right material and definitions at the right moment, the school is not inferior to the world at large, at least when its influences are protracted. The school presents indispensable information, a technic for handling problems, such as reading, writing, and ciphering, and presents the solution of the innumerable problems which are already solved and which it is unnecessary to solve again. But the school works injuriously on personality development and creative tendencies. By presenting the whole body of cultural values in a planless way, planless so far as schemes of personal development are concerned, it tends to thwart and delay the expression of the plan-making tendency of children until physiological maturity approaches and the energetic, plan-forming, creative period is passed. The lives of creative men show that they began their work early and did it by hook or by crook sometimes by evading the schools, often by being the worst pupils. The chemist Ostwald in his interesting book “Grosse Männer” has pointed out that the precocity of such men as Leibnitz and Sir William Thomson would have done them no good if the schools had been “better” in their time.
In measuring the influence of the school we must recognize two types of success in the adaptation of the individual to life, the one based on his assertion and realization of wide and original claims, the other on contentment with limited claims. If he is contented with claims which are more limited than his powers justify, his adaptation is success through relative failure. To the degree that the school treats children as identical it produces a maximum number of relative failures. To some extent the genius is regarded as a prodigy because so much spontaneity is repressed by the school.
4. Clinicists and case workers who handle successfully difficult children taken from the schools report that the schools tend to accentuate rather than obviate the difficult features. Some of them feel that where unsocial and neurotic tendencies have begun to appear through bad family conditions the school is an additional influence for evil to be overcome.
The school reaches practically every child and does its part in deepening or lessening the neurotic tendencies. At present we are safe in assuming that for the most part it deepens these tendencies. It drives the neurotic child into truancy, vagrancy, anarchy, invalidism and every form of delinquency or hardens its emotional reactions into permanent moods, and it does all of this without in the least being aware of it....
If our public schools really educated, if they understood that education involves a training of the instinctive and emotional life as well as of the intellect, if they saw that they cannot even develop intellect as long as they ignore desire, we should have an agency for adjusting the neurotic girl and boy second only to the home in its power. There is proof for this statement. Enlightenment is coming into education in spots. There are visiting teachers who work on the problem children in a school and get wonderful results. There are experimental schools whose methods are based on an understanding of the new psychology as it applies to educational theory. These schools are able to deal with the able but neurotic child who cannot get along in the public school. Those of us who work with difficult children are defeated constantly, not so much by the impossibility of the cases, as by the impossibility of finding any public school that understands or has time to act on its understanding. I am constantly trying to straighten out the children the public school can’t handle. Our school is not primarily educational but is a place to observe and get acquainted with difficult, dependent, or destitute children whom the various children’s agencies of Philadelphia are trying to place satisfactorily in homes. They are children who do not get along anywhere. Nobody wants them because they are so hard to manage. The thing that constantly surprises us is how easy it is to manage their behavior. They are not set like adults and a little understanding, a little insight, and patience, a mere approach to real educational methods gives immediate results that are almost like magic.[[107]]