XITHE PORTLAND SCHOOL SURVEY
If we are to have better schools in our cities we must know what kind of schools we have now. In an attempt to tell us, the school survey has in the last few years been developed with an admirable technique, and the passion for being surveyed has spread to cities large and small. No more illuminating document has come out of this effort than the recently published study of the school system of Portland, Oregon. It stirs enthusiasm because it shows the progress that has been made in clarifying the current problems and the ideals which must be realized if the public school is to prepare the child of to-day for intelligent participation in the society of which he will form a part. Compared with the investigations in New York City and Springfield, Illinois, this Portland survey, under the direction of Professor Cubberley of Stanford University, represents a new achievement in educational thinking. Those surveys contented themselves witha criticism of details, or, at best, with a vague groping for constructive plan. The Portland survey represents a definite break with the tradition. It is characterized by a clear idea not only of how the system fails to meet the modern demands, but of how these demands can be met.
The investigators cannot, of course, explain how it is that one of the wealthiest and most comfortable of American cities, a city at once entirely modern and homogeneously American, should have the most mechanical and formalistic school system these educators had ever seen. One gets the sense of how without leadership the school may become a little backwater in a community. In Portland, a city of 250,000 people, commercial and residential center for the great Northwest, these investigators found the “maintenance unchanged of a rigidly prescribed mechanical system poorly adapted to the needs either of children or community.” “Universal practice,” they say, “is enlisted in the maintenance of a rigid, minutely and mechanically prescribed system of instruction, organization, administration, supervision, examination and inspection. Any change in this elaborate mechanism meets with resistance,positive as well as negative. So far as this system is adapted at any point to the actual needs of the individual children and youth that come under it, so far as it is adapted to the needs of the communities for adequately trained recruits to serve the community, the adaptation is accidental, not the result of intelligence now operative at that point.”
This is a criticism of an American institution, and Portland might be any large American city which has not had an educational awakening. The survey is significant because it shows the machinery and motives of public school education in this country for the last generation not only in Portland but in a city like New York, whose militaristic, mechanical system is now being thrown into convulsions by the sudden challenge of the new type of school embodied in the Gary plan. Indeed this Portland survey is a much better survey of New York school conditions than the elaborate Hanus inquiry which was made a few years ago.
The viciousnesses which the investigators found in the Portland system are those which are familiar to all who feel the defects of their own schooling, or have set about to examine the reasons for the poor quality of the schooloutput. On the administrative side there are all the evils that come from retaining a scheme of amateur control in a system which has of necessity become professionalized. A board which is directing a village school must keep all school matters under its supervision. But when that village has become a vast city, a school board which keeps the strings in its own hands is simply manufacturing wastefulness and inefficiency. A lay board which employs highly paid and highly trained principals, supervisors, etc., and then insists on directing all business—from the engaging of janitors and the personal selection of teachers to the suspension of by-laws whereby a schoolroom may be leased for an evening lecture or a teacher excused to attend the funeral of her grandmother—labels itself as archaic and unfit. It is one of the cardinal principles of modern political and industrial organization that it is a waste of money to pay salaries large enough to buy judgment, discretion and expert skill and then not permit them to be used.
This refusal to delegate responsibility, the investigators found, paralyzed initiative all through the school system. Nothing could be done without reference to an untrained body oflaymen who, however conscientious they might be, must usually decide spasmodically and without any definite educational policy. Indeed their conscientiousness is often a positive vice. Shiftlessness on their part would have permitted initiative on the parts of principals and teachers. Under present conditions the distinction between good teachers and bad fades out. The concern of every one becomes to keep the machinery going, not to criticize the work and keep it adapted to the individual aptitudes of the children.
This administrative lifelessness has its counterpart in a pedagogical routine the focus of which is the “course of study.” The curriculum is uniform for all children. It is “vivisected into fifty-four dead pieces,” laid down in pages in certain adopted textbooks. “The only thought devoted to the formulation of the course of study,” say the investigators, “was the simple mathematical thought necessary to parcel out the pages of the books.” The teacher’s duty is to haul the pupil through the course of study. This is done by means of the formal recitation, where “pupils answer hollow word-questions with memorized hollow word-statements.” Term examinations discover howmany of these word-statements are left in the pupils’ minds. An elaborate system of inspection and supervision exists to check up and grade both teachers and principals and ensure that the hallowed “course of study” is fully being carried out. Many of the teachers are trained in the local schools and turned back into the system to perpetuate these methods. A state tenure-of-office act keeps all teachers in their places.
The effect upon the children is logical. The school becomes an automatic process of elimination. Those who can be hauled through the course of study are hauled. Those whose talents do not lie in the capacity to memorize printed pages pass out of the school or become hopelessly mired in the lower grades. “If the sixteen-year-old child has not yet transferred to his memory Parts 37 to 54, inclusive, of the dead and comminuted curriculum, the chief constituents of which are abstract arithmetic and technical grammar, then he must begin with Part 37 and appropriate that and each of the succeeding 17 Parts in order, before he can even be associated with youth of approximately his own age, and before he can engage in study suited to his age and condition—study and exercisesthat will be of immediate and practical value to him in the effort he must shortly make to serve society for the sake of his own livelihood.” And this system, formulated and approved twenty years ago by high educational authorities, the survey stigmatizes as valuable only in its “cheapness and facility of administration, and the relief that it affords educational officers and teachers from all responsibility of knowing and of meeting the individual needs of their pupils.”
This type of public school, so bald and grotesque in the sober pages of the Portland survey that it seems more like the ritual of some primitive tribe than the deliberate educational activity of an enlightened American community, is yet the type that still prevails in the majority of our cities. This is the fact that we must face. Yet a community that asks to be surveyed is a community dissatisfied with itself. Other communities are likely to stir uneasily, and ask themselves why, if Los Angeles and Indianapolis and Gary can have modern and fruitful public school systems, other cities should not. We may even hope that it is the last of the old system and the promise of the school of to-morrow.