School systems, where there are any, seem designed for the special purpose of making the school a machine which should do credit to the individuals who run it. This would be excusable with an actual machine made of wood and metal, but children are not tough enough to be put to such use. Besides, there is better use for them. It is not odd that teachers should look out for themselves and for their own records in the management of schools. If they don’t look out for Number One they will be an exception to all the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, compared with the children, the teachers’ number one as about one to fifty, and their importance should be judged from this standpoint of comparison.
School systems of study seem based on the capacity of the stupidest pupils. All the others must crawl because the stupid ones cannot walk.
This isn’t right. If armies were trained in that way we never would have any soldiers. Let schools, like regiments, have their awkward squads to be specially trained, so that they may catch up with those who are proficient.
What are the branches in which the common schools give elementary instructions? Spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and grammar. The farther from the large city, the surer the student is of getting any instruction beyond those branches during the first six or seven years of a common-school course. He may be qualified by home reading to go into the natural sciences or into mathematics at an early age, but that isn’t part of the system. It seldom pleases the teacher of a graded school to be told of such acquirements of a new pupil. The school exists not to improve the intelligence of the pupil from the standpoint at which the teacher finds it, but to give him such instruction as the teacher is already detailed and instructed by law to give. A boy may forget all he knows of natural science, or algebra, or geometry, in the many years in which he is drilled in elementary studies leading up to the branches which he already understands.
In the country districts boys are often fit to pass rigid examinations for matriculation at college at the age of fifteen years. But the boy who does not begin to go to school until he is eight years of age finds himself at fifteen, in a city, merely fit to enter a high-school, and not a very high school either. Some of the most noted men in our country’s history graduated from college at sixteen or seventeen years. The curriculum of a college in those days was not as high as now. Nevertheless, the graduates certainly gave a very good account of themselves from their earliest entrance into public life. One of them was Alexander Hamilton, who graduated at seventeen, and who elaborated a system of financial management which a whole century of successive Secretaries of the Treasury have not considered themselves competent to improve upon. A very long list of men of similar prominence might be given, but such illustrations are not necessary. Any intelligent man who has been to school knows that a great deal of his class-room time has been entirely at his own disposal, for the lessons were easily memorized; and therefore his hands were idle and Satan found something for them to do. The worst boys in school can often be found among the scholars who stand highest in the classes, and for the very natural reason that there is nothing to occupy their minds during a large portion of the school time.
Seriously, what is there about the elementary branches, as taught in our common schools almost anywhere, that should consume such an immense amount of time? In the Southern States a number of the despised blacks, children of slaves who themselves could date back their ancestors from generations of slaves, became quite proficient in elementary branches during a year or two, lounging about military camps in the capacity of servants. Special schools were founded, as soon as the war ended, by missionary societies, which prepared courses of study which they considered within the comprehension of the Anglo-African mind. Of course there were a great many stupid blacks; but, while some of these stupid children were making faces at text-books and drawing inartistic pictures on slates, their old fathers and mothers were learning from
