Any one who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. The latter finds an impassable thicket of folly, prejudice, and mistakes, where each point is open to attack, but where each attack fails because of the inadequate means at the reformer's command.
The modern school has succeeded in doing something which, according to the law of physics, is impossible: the annihilation of once existent matter. The desire for knowledge, the capacity for acting by oneself, the gift of observation, all qualities children bring with them to school, have, as a rule, at the close of the school period disappeared. They have not been transformed into actual knowledge or interests. This is the result of children spending almost the whole of their life from the sixth to the eighteenth year at the school[Pg 204] desk, hour by hour, month by month, term by term; taking doses of knowledge, first in teaspoonfuls, then in dessert-spoonfuls, and finally in tablespoonfuls, absorbing mixtures which the teacher often has compounded from fourth- or fifth-hand recipes.
After the school, there often comes a further period of study in which the only distinction in method is, that the mixture is administered by the ladleful.
When young people have escaped from this régime, their mental appetite and mental digestion are so destroyed that they for ever lack capacity for taking real nourishment. Some, indeed, save themselves from all these unrealities by getting in contact with realities; they throw their books in the corner and devote themselves to some sphere of practical life. In both cases the student years are practically squandered. Those who go further acquire knowledge ordinarily at the cost of their personality, at the price of such qualities as assimilation, reflection, observation, and imagination. If any one succeeds in escaping these results, it happens generally with a loss of thoroughness in knowledge. A lower grade of intelligence, a lower capacity for work, or a lower degree of assimilation, than that be[Pg 205]stowed upon the scholar by nature, is ordinarily the result of ten or twelve school years. There is much common-sense in the French humourist's remark. "You say that you have never gone to school and yet you are such an idiot."
The cases in which school studies are not injurious, but partially useful, are those where no regular school period has been passed through. In place of this there was a long period of rest, or times of private instruction, or absolutely no instruction at all, simply study by oneself. Nearly every eminent woman in the last fifty years has had such self-instruction, or was an irregularly instructed girl. Knowledge so acquired, therefore, has many serious gaps, but it has much more freshness and breadth. One can study with far greater scope and apply what one studies.
Yet it is still true to-day that, however vehemently families complain about schools, they do not see that their demands in general education must change, before a reasonable school system, a school system in all respects different from the prevailing one, can come into existence. The private schools, few in number, that differ to a certain extent from the ordinary system are swallows that are very far from making a summer. Rather they have[Pg 206] met the fate of birds who have come too early on the scene.
As long as schools represent an idea, stand for an abstract conception, like the family and the state, so long will they, just as the family and the state, oppress the individuals who belong to them. The school no more than the family and the state represents a higher idea or something greater than just the number of individuals out of which it is formed. It, like the family and the state, has no other duty, right, or purpose than to give to each separate individual as much development and happiness as possible. To recognise these principles is to introduce reason into the school question. The school should be nothing but the mental dining-room in which parents and teachers prepare intellectual bills-of-fare suitable for every child. The school must have the right to determine what it can place on its bill-of-fare, but the parents have the right to choose, from the mental nourishment supplied by it, the food adapted to their children. The phantom of general culture must be driven from school curricula and parents' brains; the training of the individual must be a reality substituted in its place; otherwise reform plans will be drawn up in vain.[Pg 207]
But just as certain simple chemical elements are contained in all nourishment, there are certain simple elements of knowledge that make up the foundation of all higher forms of learning. Reading and writing one's own language, the elements of numbers, geography, natural science, and history, must be required by the schools, as the obligatory basis for advanced independent study.
The elementary school beginning with the age of nine to ten years, I regard as the real general school. The system of instruction must assume that the children have breadth, repose, comprehensiveness, and capacity for individual action. All these qualities are destroyed by the present "hare and hound" system and by its endless abstractions. Such are the results of course readings, multiplicity of subjects, and formalism, all defects that have passed from the boys' schools into the girls' schools, from the elementary schools into the people's schools. They too are burdened by all these faults, which, though deplored by most people, can only be cured by radical reform.
The instruction must be arranged in groups, certain subjects placed among the earlier stages of study while others are put aside for[Pg 208] a later period. And in this connection it is not sufficient to consider the psychological development of the child. Certain subjects must be assigned to certain times of the year.
The courses in these schools must come to an end at about the age of fifteen or sixteen. From them our young people can pass either into practical life, or go on to schools of continuation and application. It would be desirable to adopt the plan recommended by Grundtvig, that one or more vacation years should follow, before studies are taken up again. Girls, especially, would then come back to their studies with strengthened bodily powers and an increased desire for knowledge. It is now a common experience that the desire to learn, even in the case of talented young people, becomes quiescent, if they go on continuously with their studies, as they often do, from the sixth to the twentieth year and longer.
To mark out the courses of such a school would offer tremendous difficulties. But these difficulties will not be found insuperable, after people have agreed that the souls of children require more consideration than a school programme.
Among objections coming from parents,[Pg 209] may be heard the following: That while the state refuses to take initiative in school reform, no one would dare to embark on a road which makes the future of their children so uncertain. In the meantime children must be allowed to learn what all others learn. When the state has taken the first step, the parents would be willing they say to follow with remarkable eagerness.
What, I ask, has been always the right way to carry out reforms? There must be first an active revolt against existing evils. This particular revolt is yet not sufficiently supported, especially on the part of parents. The children themselves have begun to feel the need of protest, and, if not earlier, I hope that when the present generation of school children become fathers, mothers, and teachers, a reform will come about.
No one can expect a system to be changed, until those who disapprove of it show that they are in earnest, show that they are taking upon themselves the sacrifices necessary to protect themselves from the unhappy results of the system. Families complain of the excessive aggregation of subjects, and yet they constantly burden the school with new subjects, even when these subjects are things the fam[Pg 210]ily can undertake itself. While families complain of overstrain, but make no use of the elective system in schools, where it has been introduced, while parents are willing to risk nothing to realise their principles, we cannot wonder that the state does not embark on reforms of any kind.
There is an old pedagogical maxim, "Man learns for life not for school." While, for a great part of their time, the sexes are separated from one another, boys studying by themselves and the girls by themselves, the training for their future life is a bad one—a life in which the common work and co-operation between man and woman is, according to nature's ordinance, the normal thing. So long as the general school is a school for a special class, and not for everybody, it is no general school in the high sense of the word, and besides no school in which people learn for life.
I have therefore always warmly held that the school should be no boys', no girls' school, no elementary and no people's school, but should be a real general or public school as in America, where both sexes, the children of all grades of society, will learn that mutual confidence, respect, understanding, by which their efficient co-operation in the family and state[Pg 211] may be made possible. The common school, so arranged, is perhaps the most important means to solve definitely the problem of morality, the woman question, the marriage question, the labour question, in less one-sided and more human ways. From this point of view the establishment of the common school is much more than a pedagogical question; it is the vital question of our social order.
Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides of a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to be done is to break the wall down. The school, as described above, is the first breach in this wall.
A school like this would be like leaven. The many never reform the few; it is the few who gradually introduce reforms for the many. Because the few have strong enough dissatisfaction with present defects, courage great enough to show their disgust, a belief in the new truths real enough, they are ready to prepare the ground for the future.
Such a school must be guided by the same principle which has humanised morality and law in other spheres. It must consider individual peculiarities. Personal freedom will thus have as few hindrances as possible to ob[Pg 212]struct it. The rights of others must not be approached too close. The limits, where the rights of others can be affected, must be maintained, even enlarged.
This humanising process will be introduced into the schools, when scholars are no longer regarded as classes, but each individual for himself. The schools will then commence to fulfil one of the many conditions necessary to give young people real nourishment and so develop them and make them happy.
Such a school life will make its first aim to discover in early years uncommon talent, to direct such talent to special studies.
Secondly, for those who lack definite talent, a plan of study will be arranged, in which their individuality too can be developed, and their intellectual tension increased. This condition is, if possible, more important than the first, for unusual talents are accompanied by greater power of self-conservation. Ordinary or lesser talented people, i.e., the larger majority, are rather confused by a plurality of studies and are much easier impaired, as personalities, by the uniformity of the prevailing system.
The rights of unusually gifted people, and those of other classes too, can be considered when, as mentioned above, the school curricu[Pg 213]lum is so arranged, that certain subjects are studied during part of the school year, another class of subjects during another part. Moreover, certain subjects are to be studied at different times, not finished once for all.
The instruction must be so arranged that real independent study, under the direction of the teacher, will be the ordinary method. The presentation of the subject by the teacher will be the exception, a treat for holidays, not for every day.
The instruction too must take the scholar to the real thing, as far as possible, not direct him to report about the thing. Such a school must break up absolutely the whole system of lecturing, arranged in concentric circles. In certain cases, it must return to the methods of the old-fashioned school, which concentrated its attention on humanistic study. But dead languages should not be the subjects around which its studies should centre.
Early specialisation must be allowed, where there are distinct individual tendencies for such work;
Concentration on certain subjects at certain points of time;
Independent work during the whole period of school;[Pg 214]
Contact with reality in the whole school curriculum;—these must be the four corner-stones of the new school.
But the time is far distant still, when government schools will begin to build on this basis. What follows is meant, therefore, to apply, not to the great revolutions of school systems indicated above, but deals with improvements to take place at present.
Learning lessons should be assigned to school hours as in France. Children should have an entirely free day in the week; study at home should be confined to the reading of literary works, tales of travel, and the like, which teachers can recommend in combination with the studies pursued at school.
Tasks done at home are inconvenient; they do not increase the independence of the scholar; they are prepared as a rule with excessively free and often unwise help from the parents. At school such work would be done as a rule without help; besides, it is individual and quickly finished.
In the school, time can be taken for study selected at the scholar's free choice. It can be arranged for in the following way. Take a class of about twelve scholars; in larger classes no reasonable or personal method of[Pg 215] instruction is possible. There may be three scholars with distinct tastes, one for history, one for languages, one for mathematics. There may be two without any distinct talent for mathematics or languages. The other seven may have ordinary capacities. The first three must, during the whole term, apply themselves specially in certain hours, set aside for independent study, each in his chosen subject. The first will read some historical work on the periods taken up in the history class; the second will devote this time to mathematics; the third will read the books in foreign languages, mentioned in the language course. The other seven with ordinary gifts can devote this time to ordinary reading and handwork. In this way all will get some portion of history, mathematics, and languages, but those who are specially interested will have the opportunity of going deeper into the subject. If one of the three gifted scholars shows a great inclination for and a ready comprehension of all three subjects, he should study by himself at home, provided the more thorough study of one subject does not impair work on the other. The two who have special difficulty in mathematics or languages could either substitute one subject wholly for the other, or in those periods[Pg 216] remain away from school, or, finally, the hours used by gifted scholars for individual study beyond the requirements of the common course could be devoted by these to work, under the teacher's supervision, in the course common to the whole class.
To carry out this plan, there is need of such concentration of subjects as I have mentioned; there should be never more than one or at most two main subjects—history, geography, natural science—studied at once. Moreover no more than one language should be studied at the same time; practice in those already learnt is to be acquired by literary readings, written résumés, and conversation.
Another kind of concentration is necessary. Not every subject should be split up into subdivisions but history should be made to include literary history, church history, etc. In geography at the early stage, a part of natural science should be included, and the history of art combined with both. Another not less important method implied in concentration is in all general courses to direct one's attention to the main questions, and to sacrifice the mass of details. Detailed work should not have been incorporated, as indispensable for general culture (from generation to generation), dur[Pg 217]ing the constant growth of the contents of knowledge.
In regard to instruction, methods now popular should be forced out of the field. The two obligatory features, the careful hearing of lessons by the teacher, and the equally careful preparation of the next lesson, must be changed for other methods according to the age of the scholar, the special character of the subject, and of the scholar himself; or according to the particular stage of the subject. At one time the teacher should give an attractive, comprehensive account of a period, a character, a land, a natural phenomenon. Another time it will be enough to give a simple, introductory reference to the reading of one or more works on the subject, best of all an original authority. Sometimes he should require an oral account of what he has said, or what has been read; sometimes this should be done in writing. When the lesson is filled with many facts the scholar should write them down in the hour; another time he should summarise them from memory. An assigned amount too can be gone through along with the teacher's explanation; on another occasion, the assignment need not be gone over at all, but the scholars could show their capacity to under[Pg 218]stand it and comprehend it without assistance. Occasionally the task might be done in a short time from one day to another, sometimes it might take a longer period.
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