THE late lamented Sam Weller once spoke of a schoolboy, who, having learned the alphabet, wondered whether it was worth going through so much to learn so little. The same reflection has come to millions of Americans as they thought of how much time they had spent in schooling and how little they knew when they got out.
There are parts of our vast country where the people are lucky enough to have teachers who know so little about the theories of teaching that they impart to their pupils more information than the law demands. But in the cities and large towns where teaching has been elevated, or more properly speaking, reduced to a science, where the most money is spent on the schools and where the school terms are longest, the prevalence of “how not to do it” is simply appalling.
The country boy who goes to school only four or five months in the year knows quite as much as his city cousin who annually has nine or ten months of schooling. What does the city pupil get for the double outlay of time, bad air, back-ache and discipline?
As he cannot make any subsequent use of his accumulation of bad air and back-ache, his entire gain over the country boy would seem to be in discipline. What does this discipline do for him in the adult life for which school life is a preparation?
Does it make him a better business man? No. If it does, why is it that the majority of business men in our large cities are from the rural districts? A few months ago I happened to be a guest at a dinner party at which more than a dozen men prominent in New York business and professional life came together. A question being asked about a social custom of thirty years before, it gradually transpired that not one of the party had been born or brought up in the city of New York, a city of which all now were permanent citizens.
I have told this story to prominent citizens of Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati, and in return received long lists of the great men of those cities who came from the country. With some fear and trembling I tried the same story in Boston at a large public dinner, but the man to whom I told it—he was a man who seemed to know everybody’s antecedents—replied that not more than one in ten of Boston’s Brahmans or live business men were born at the Hub.
Congress is fairly a representative body, but if you will look at the book which gives biographical sketches of all the members, you will be astonished to find how few cities and large towns are represented by men born in them. Nearly all the members were born and brought up in the country. Occasionally you will find that some representative or senator was born in Philadelphia or New York, but if you look at the head of the page you will discover that he is representing a rural district of some State other than his own.
You will find it the same way in the learned professions. In law, medicine and theology, art, literature and science, the men who are most prominent at all the great centres of education and intelligence date back to some farmhouse and country school. Most of these men went to college in the course of time, but whenever you find one of them and talk with him so long that he feels inclined to unbosom himself to you, you discover that the amount of schooling he had at his birthplace was very small. As most of these men have passed the period of their boyhood by at least a quarter of a century, it is not surprising to hear them tell of school years consisting of only three or four months, and of school-room exercises where the number of text-books were so few that many of the lessons were delivered orally by the teacher, and boys and girls took turns with one another’s books.
If discipline, school discipline, counts for anything, these professions should be full of city-bred men. But they are not, except at the bottom—way down at the bottom. City schools graduate an immense number of young men who enter seminaries and especially departments of colleges, to gain a special education, but somehow these are not the men who are prominent in the new blood of their respective professions.
If discipline, so called, does not make the city-schooled youth superior to his country cousin, what is it good for? Well, it is good to keep the school-room in order. The larger the school the more necessary it is for a teacher to maintain order. In a building containing two or three thousand children, as many school-buildings in the larger cities do, rigid discipline is absolutely necessary to this end. But, to come back to original facts, why does it take seven or eight years to impart a common, a very common, school course which any bright boy or girl of fifteen years could master alone and unaided in a quarter of the time?