IIITHE WASTED YEARS
Only one child out of fourteen in our school system ever reaches the high school; whatever education ninety per cent. of American children are to have they must acquire before they are fourteen years old. So elementary a fact as this, it would seem, should be at the background of every discussion and criticism of the public schools. Yet the most cursory inspection of the average city public school shows that its significance has only recently and very dimly been realized.
Indeed, as the average city public school is at present organized, there is every reason to believe that most of the children get practically all their education before their tenth year. Limited as this schooling is, they do not by any means get the full advantage of what is supposed to be given them. One can hardly come from a study of the everyday classroom work of the average city school without a conviction thatthere is disastrous intellectual leakage which has been strangely ignored by educators.
This leakage is not in the primary school and the high school. For the teaching of “the three R’s” American normal schools and training colleges in recent years have worked out many admirable techniques, which seem to have been generally adopted. The younger generation of teachers is doing efficiently its work of giving the child a mastery of these essentials of civilized intercourse. The present primary school on its intellectual side is an efficient institution.
Similarly the high school has had a large amount of attention and skill lavished upon it. Its administrative peculiar problems have been studied and met. The best high schools have been made to approximate elementary colleges, with well-rounded courses of languages and sciences, of artistic, manual and physical work. For the highly selected group which reaches the high school it provides an excellent purely intellectual curriculum, both for higher study and for social orientation.
Between the primary school and the high school, however, there lies a desert waste of four years, the significance and possibilities of which seem to have been scarcely considered.They are the most urgent years of all, for in them the educator must give compensation to the children who are forced to leave school for the opportunities they are to miss. Yet these middle years of what used to be called the “grammar school” are now left not only unmotivated, but without any genuine educational function. Instead of being prophetic of the future they merely drag along the relics of the past. Some schools, it is true, have timidly brought down the beginning of high school studies into the lower grades, but in general the “grammar school” merely continues the interests of the primary school on substantially the same lines.
Fifteen years ago, when I went to school, there may have been some excuse for this system. Teachers may have been correct in their belief that it took the average child eight years to learn arithmetic, reading, writing, spelling, and a smattering of history and geography. To-day such an assumption is ridiculous. I have seen children in large classes in an ordinary city school system learn all the elements of “the three R’s” in less than six months. The clear writing and accurate reading of little children in the first grade who have onlybeen going to school for a few months is astonishing. It suggests thatMme.Montessori could scarcely have known of the excellence of elementary methods in this country when she urged her ideas as revolutionary. For these small children, as for the Montessori child, the competitive number-work, the writing from dictation, the oral reading, the spelling, seemed not drudgery but interesting activity. Astonishing, too, was the uniform excellence of the results.
Now it is little more than a truism to say that “the three R’s” have not really been learned until they have become automatic, that reading, writing and arithmetic are not ends in themselves but merely the tools for work. To give command of the tools is the peculiar task of the primary school, and of the primary school only. If children can be given an acquaintance with “the three R’s” in six months, it does not seem too much to expect them to acquire this automatic command in two or three years. It is incredible that the child should have to study eight years for this. Yet our elementary schools continue to assume that every child is thus mentally backward. In the higher grades we find the same subjects, formal reading lessons,formal penmanship lessons, formal arithmetic and spelling. But something has happened to these children. They are distinctly less interested, less interesting, and even less capable than the smaller children. It is depressing to realize that the elementary school has existed only to turn first-grade children into seventh-grade children, and to realize that most of the latter are nearing the end of their schooldays and will pass out into the world with that intellectual listlessness and lack of command.
Let me suggest what has happened to these children. Formal work, the learning of any technique, is apt to be pleasurable as long as we can feel ourselves gradually acquiring a command over our instrument. But after we have acquired the technique and can rely upon our skill, there is no gain in continuing formal exercises. There is only gain in using our skill in real work, the work for which we have studied. If we have studied a language, we do not keep mulling over rules of grammar and vocabularies, but we try as soon as possible to read. The means now gives way to the end.
We can understand one cause for that situation of which employers complain when childrencome to them from the public schools unprepared in the very elements of education. In the bad memories, flimsy information, inability to write or spell or figure accurately, is found the very common indictment of the public school. The criticism is usually that the groundwork has been poor, that the children have not been trained in the fundamentals. If my thesis is correct, the groundwork has not been poor. Of recent years, it has, on the contrary, been unusually excellent and thorough. The leakage has come in the middle years, which have simply disintegrated the foundations. The school has sharpened the mind, and then, by providing only a repetition of formal work instead of practical opportunity for use of the acquired technique, has proceeded to dull it. Grammar has been studied, literature in a curiously desiccated fashion, political history, esoteric branches of arithmetic. Subjects like these have filled the time that might have been given to copious individual reading, to writing about what is read or experienced, to practical number-work in simple statistics or accounting. Time which might have been given, through use of pictures and newspapers, to the cultivation of an imaginative historical and geographicalbackground, has gone into aimless memorizing, or into a glib use of words and phrases.
This situation is all the more preposterous because both the high school and college are full of studies that could be begun by the intelligent child as soon as a technical proficiency in “the three R’s” was once obtained. What psychological law declares that before fourteen a human being is incapable of learning languages, the sciences, or even the sociological studies, but that after fourteen he is capable of learning all these things? As a matter of fact, most of these “higher” studies could be much more easily assimilated by the quick and curious mind of the younger child than by the older. And for the worker in any field, acquaintance with elementary science and the organization of society is so emphatically important that we cannot afford to let the vast majority of our citizens remain all their lives ignorant of their very terms. In the four years of the “grammar school” an intelligent interest could be awakened in these fields, and the main outlines grasped. This would not mean the addition of many new subjects to an already crowded curriculum. It would merely mean the dropping of “the three R’s” back into their rightful placein the primary school. It would lighten rather than overburden the school. We should then have a fair division of labor and function between the schools, to the profit of both.
If there is one criticism of the public school system on its intellectual side that can justly be made general, it is this of the wasted years. The school has found itself in this paradoxical situation, that the more excellent became its primary methods the poorer became the product at the end of the system. This paradox is explained. Educators have simply failed to recognize that the sharper they made the elementary tools and the better the facilities of obtaining skill in their use, the more varied and immediate should be the work upon which the tools are to be exercised. They have failed to provide this work. They have left a leakage in public education which has almost defeated its own ends.