IVPUZZLE-EDUCATION
How righteously indignant did our teachers use to be if we ever precociously objected to learning our mathematics and grammar in school on the ground that if we were going to be doctors or policemen we should never have any use when we grew up for that kind of knowledge! Were we not entirely too young to know at all what kind of knowledge we should need when we did grow up? Did not our teachers impress upon us that in some mysterious way all was grist that came to our intellectual mill? Did we wish to know merely what we could use in the daily grubbing of bread and butter? Was not the fine flower of education knowledge learned for its own sake? We could thus be assured, as we cubed our roots or diagrammed our sentences, that all this work was “training the mind,” so that we could almost feel our mental muscles growing in strength and elasticity. We were too young to see itthen, but some day we should be heartily grateful to our painstaking teachers. Some day, when we were successful men, we should come to appreciate the superior wisdom of this educational system against which our rational little wills so smolderingly rebelled.
In those days, would we not have given our young chances of promotion to see ranged up before the teacher a group of great grown men, the successful ones of the earth, to be put through the paces at which we kicked? Would it not have tickled us to see a class consisting of a state senator, a former lieutenant-governor, a manufacturer, a city official, a banker, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, an editor, an engineer and a clergyman, trying to spell daguerreotype and paradigm, reconnaissance and erysipelas, guessing at the distance in degrees from Portugal to the Ural Mountains, locating the desert of Atacama and the Pamir Plateau, expressing 150° Cent. in terms of Fahrenheit, and finding the area of the base of a cylindrical 1 gal. can, 10 ins. high? If it was true that we should all find this knowledge useful some day, then it would be preëminently these men who were finding it useful now.
Let the news go forth to all the children ofthe land who are questioning the why and wherefore of what they are learning, that this thing has actually been done. The eleven men have been assembled in Springfield,Ill., and have had put to them these questions and others, all taken from the prescribed work of the local public schools. The class constituted one of those inquiries conducted with the deadly accuracy of a laboratory experiment by the Russell Sage Foundation. The results, it need hardly be said, were a complete demonstration of the intuition of our childish precocity. Not one of these eleven successful and intelligent gentlemen made so much as a passing mark in any subject. In the spelling-match the best record was six words out of ten, while one man, probably the editor, failed in every word. Only one of the pupils knew the capital of Montenegro, while neither he nor any of the others had the faintest reaction to Atacama or the Pamir Plateau, much less to the length of South America or the distance in degrees from Portugal to the Ural Mountains. Only one of the eleven could do the thermometer problem—he must have been in Paris once in January—and not one knew the specific gravity of alcohol when 2 liters weigh 1.58 kgms. As for the tenhistorical dates selected from ninety-one, the only date that as many as ten men knew was the attack on Sumter. Only one identified the date of the Mexican War, only one the surrender of Cornwallis.
It must have seemed very curious to the eleven to be presented with these questions, and then have the answers labeled “knowledge.” How many of them drew the conclusion that our public schools were little more in the higher reaches than a glorified puzzle-party, where recitation is often more like a guessing of riddles, or trying to discover the answer from the teacher’s tone, or the putting together of a puzzle-picture? Look at the average school text-book, with its neat and logical divisions, and see if you can’t hear the dry crackle of the author’s wit as he has worked out his ingenious riddles, pieced his cunning examples together, hunted the dictionary for words to spell, dissected his history, carved up a continent. The intellect feeds on syllogisms. Syllogisms are so much easier than appreciations. And really it is far easier to reason than to interpret. In the first you have merely to follow the beaten track, in the other you must break new paths and put the thing in your own new language.Yet this whirling around of the mental engine with the belting off is represented to us as a process of “training the mind.” You might as well say that an athlete could best train his legs by standing on his head and waving them.
It is this scheme of puzzle-education which this Springfield inquiry—a characteristic flash, we take it, of American genius—has so tellingly shown up. And this riddle-curriculum tends to get worse instead of better as the science of text-bookmaking waxes and the machinery of scientific pedagogy accumulates. The avowed aim of teachers and training-colleges in recent years has been to discover pedagogical methods that would do the work regardless of the personality of the teacher. The riotous absurdities of this scheme are being revealed by such inquiries as these in Springfield. They suggest that the policy of having our next generation’s mental attitudes, stock of information, personal qualities, and moral biases cultivated by unimaginative teachers whose intellectual capacity has been just sufficient to acquire a few routine methods of “conducting” a class and keeping order in a group of restless children, may have become antiquated. Our genuine education—that is, a familiarity with the world welive in—must wait until we get out of school. That may partly explain why most children are so anxious to leave.
Some people might find in this inquiry not so much an evidence of the inefficiency of our public schools as of how little intellectual baggage one needs to become successful and eminent in these United States. But this is in reality only to make a heavier indictment. It is still primarily the schools that have failed to make the intellectual baggage important to the minds of their pupils, that have left uncultivated their tastes and horizons. It is for this reason that our American intellectual background is so relatively thin.