XIXTHE TRAINED MIND
How much longer are we to expect the headmasters of our private secondary schools to view with anything but alarm the current radical tendencies in education? In the November “Atlantic,”Dr.Alfred E. Stearns of Phillips-Andover is stirred to wrath against the fallacies of the modern school as expounded byMr.Flexner and others. The paper contributes little new to the well-worn theory of mental discipline upon which upper-class education has so long been based. But it is highly significant as a pattern of the “trained” mind as it works in the exposure of fallacies.Dr.Stearns is presumably an immensely successful product of the old idealistic and linguistic education, gained by strenuous effort and vigorous thinking. It is worth while to examine how such a mind argues, what it considers as clinching evidence, how it hopes to convince the alert intellectual of to-day.
The “fallacies” in modern education whichDr.Stearns is exposing are the materialistic and utilitarian ideal, the belief in the non-transferability of mental power from one field to another, the cultivation of interest rather than discipline, of play rather than drudgery, the scientific rather than the cultural emphasis. He wishes to persuade the reader that all these tendencies make for the perversion of the child’s character, the weakening of his mental grasp, the materializing of his soul. One waits eagerly for proofs of such very serious menaces. The student of education to-day is rapidly acquiring a belief in objective evidence, in statistical or at least analytic experiment, in scientific formulation. The kind of evidence that appeals to the alert student to-day is the kind that comes out of the psychological laboratory of Clark University, or Columbia or Chicago, out of the great city school surveys, like Portland or Cleveland or New York, out of the experimental schools in different parts of the country. These are the arenas where educational problems will, he believes, ultimately be solved. And to him the so-called “fallacies” in modern education are not “dogmas” or “assumptions” at all, but rather hopeful hypotheseswhich are now being tested in dozens of American schools.
Is this the sort of evidence to whichDr.Stearns’ trained mind appeals when he wishes to discredit the “new” education? Not at all. He does not even so much as show that he is acquainted with the existence of the great mass of literature which would throw light on the success or failure of the radical theories which he deplores. Educational journals, school surveys, reports of intelligence tests, descriptions of play schools,—none of these seem to have come into contact with his training. For the benefit of the philosophically-minded, he does not even refer to the writings of Dewey or Hall, or the other radical writers on education. All this writing and doing which represents the new education at work, he lumps into “the pedagogical expert,” upon whom he lavishes his anxious scorn. The only concrete data he offers is the record of the College Examination Board, whichDr.Flexner, whom he is criticizing, had cited in his “Modern School.”Dr.Flexner had argued against Latin and mathematics in the secondary school on the ground that the majority of even the picked students failed in them.Dr.Stearns succeeds in showing that a majority ofcollege candidates fail not only in Latin and Algebra but in all other subjects as well. The normal mind, untrained by the old dispensation, would consider these statistics very damaging toDr.Stearns’ cause. The inexorable conclusion would be not that Latin and algebra should be retained in the secondary school curriculum, but that the entire curriculum should undergo a radical reorganization in teaching methods and educational philosophy.
Dr.Stearns, like most of the critics of the “new” education, makes the fundamental error of confusing the narrow business man, who sees no “use” for his son’s taking Latin or algebra in school, with the “new” educator who would give these subjects a new orientation in the curriculum. The “practical” business man is as much anathema to the “modern school” as he is to the cultural school. The “modern school” would not refuse any subject to minds that fed upon it and fused it into vital experience. But it would not force it on minds that could not digest it. AndDr.Stearns’ own figures show how generally indigestible, with all the drudgery and mental discipline in the world, is the entire conventional secondary school curriculum. The pseudo-modern highschool where science and manual arts have been added, only to be taught in the same unilluminated way, is as objectionable to the “new” educator as it is toDr.Stearns.
Since the latter’s only use of objective evidence proves a boomerang, what considerations does he think will be persuasive in his attack on the “new” education? It is easy to see. His reliance is entirely on authority, upon personal belief. Several very successful business men of his acquaintance attribute their success to the training of the old education. The majority of schoolmasters are not yet ready to abandon the doctrine of mental discipline. The sons ofMr.Hill go to college to get something which their father, for all his success, recognizes that he missed. It is a serious question in the minds of many observers whetherDr.Eliot’s advocacy of “observational” training is sound. Always the reference to personal authority, to prestige, to anything but objective standards on which both sides may agree! Always the naïve appeal to schoolmasters and successful business men, the pillars of his world!Dr.Stearns deplores the materialistic trend of the age, but he does not consider how powerfully his own innocent use of the verdict of successfulbusiness men as scientific evidence is likely to glorify material success in the minds of his students.
Dr.Stearns’ logic is as unconvincing as his evidence. A doctrine is monstrous. Therefore, he implies, it is untrue. Intelligent children are usually bright in all their school subjects. Therefore, if you force a child to learn through drudgery, you automatically endow him with general intelligence. The interest of boys in wireless telegraphy and automobiles, he thinks, is the best argument for keeping all these things out of a school where one must learn to work. At the same time,Dr.Stearns objects to scientific schools because students so soon lose interest in their work. But, according to the gospel of drudgery, why would not this make science the ideal “mental discipline”?
Such a paper as this shows the technique of a thoroughly obsolete mind. Such “mental discipline” as this old education gave is evidently of little use in handling a world of facts, of experiment, of recorded tests. Criticism does not make such thinkers critical. It only makes them belligerent. They do not analyze, they repel. They are more interested in amoral justification for the structure of their craft and their practices than in the truth.Dr.Stearns’ paper is the best evidence of how little relevant is the old linguistic and idealistic education to the intellectual demands of to-day. The critical, analytic, impersonal, experimental approach is wholly lacking in his paper. His evidence is personal authority, his logic is special pleading. Parents with sons in private schools might well view with grave concern the kind of “trained mind” which is likely to be developed under such masters of the old education. They might ask how likely a boy, taught to use his mind the wayDr.Stearns uses his, is to analyze and grasp the complex facts of the world into which he will come.