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{411} 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.{412}
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{413} 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?
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{414} 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{415} 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{416} 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{417}
Image not available: TRANSPORTATION BUILDING.
TRANSPORTATION BUILDING.
the same children’s text-books more rapidly than the best children in the public schools of the North are allowed to learn.
Sir John Lubbock complains that “A thousand hours in the most precious seed-time of life of millions of children spent in learning that i must follow e in conceive, and precede it in believe; that two e’s must, no one knows why, come together in proceed and exceed, and be separated in precede and accede; that uncle must be spelled with a c, but ankle with a k,—while lessons in health and thrift, sewing and cooking, which should make the life of the poor tolerable, and elementary singing and drawing which should make it pleasant, and push out lower and degrading amusements, are in many cases almost vainly trying to gain admission.”
Take the course all through, and what is there about it that should require any great consumption of time? Reading certainly is not hard to acquire. Children out of school learn it in spite of any efforts to hold them back. Spelling is learned more effectually through reading than from any text-book. Writing requires only a model of which copies may be made, for there is no business man in New York or in any other large city who writes a copy-book hand. If he did, he would be considered incompetent for whatever position he may occupy. The first thing that a boy must learn on leaving school is to unlearn{418} his writing-lessons. Arithmetic undoubtedly requires considerable practice to make the pupil perfect and quick in computations, but as it consists entirely of applications of the first four rules, why is it that so much time is spent over the text-books and very abstract propositions and problems? Text-books of arithmetic seem to be skilfully designed for the purpose of keeping the child from practical knowledge on the subject as long as possible. Examples that are called practical are given in many of these books, but only after a large amount of figuring, the purpose of which the pupil is not allowed to clearly understand. A man whose education in figures has been obtained on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk will cypher more accurately and quickly any problem of ordinary nature that may be given him than his own son or daughter who has been several years in school, because he understands the relations and purposes of the factors, which never seem to be impressed upon the child.
General F. A. Walker, once superintendent of the census and now president of the Boston Institute of Technology, says: “The old-fashioned readiness and correctness of cyphering have been to a large degree sacrificed by the methods which it is now proposed to reform. A false arithmetic has grown up and has largely crowded{419} out of place that true arithmetic, which is nothing but the art of numbers.”
Geography is so largely a matter of memory of the eye that no man who was denied the privilege of studying this science while he was at school ever thinks it necessary to spend a great amount of time over it afterward, even if his business requires him to have a practical knowledge of the subject. It is simply a question of sight and of memory, just as is the case with knowledge of localities which he may visit either to a great or small extent, yet geography in the public schools is divided into two, three, and sometimes five different books, by the use of which the pupil goes again and again over the same lessons, obtaining in the end no more information than that he would get by a few days’ deliberate study of an atlas or a set of maps.
Prof. Geikie, a recognized authority on this subject, says: “Every question of geography should be one which requires for its answer that the children have actually seen something with their own eyes and taken note of it.” This is reasonable; it would also be practicable if globes and large maps were in the class-rooms, but generally they are conspicuous only by their absence.
It is quite true that grammar must occupy considerable of the pupils’ time. For all the persons who have studied it, there seem very few of any age at the present time who are able{420} to apply the principles of this science in such a manner that they habitually write and speak correctly. But this isn’t so much the fault of the pupil and of the teacher as of the text-books from which the science shall be studied. Good example, from which adults learn grammar more correctly and rapidly than in any other way, seems to be considered too good for children, so they are given text-books with definitions utterly beyond their comprehension—definitions so subdivided that there is nothing which the intel............