XTHE SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE
To persons directing any complicated organization, criticism from outsiders always seems either futile or irrelevant. Conscious of the difficulty that has been met in creating the existing machinery, they resent the debonair and nonchalant proposals tossed in upon them by people who have only an amateurish or philosophical interest in their work. There are very few able administrators in any work who do not honestly believe they are doing their best with the material that is given them.
To this resentment the educational world seems particularly prone. The teacher finds it intolerable that the classroom should be judged from any vantage-point but the teacher’s desk; the superintendent is annoyed if you arraign his system in the light of the product turned out. A public service which enlists so much conscientiousness as does our public school system is naturally sensitive to publiccriticism. Its very sensitiveness makes it difficult for it to distinguish between criticism of motives and criticism of policies and philosophies.
This resentment to amateur criticism is offset by an almost pathetic trust in expert overhauling. Letters from school principals to those in charge of recent investigations into city school systems imply that the expert has some kind of magical power not possessed by the ordinary teacher or administrator. When we learn, however, that the defects discovered are usually of so elementary and obvious a character that few interested laymen could have ignored them, we suspect that the magic is not so much a matter of the expert as it is of the outsider. The thing is to get a new point-of-view, a new interpretation, which shall not be so obsessed with the inside workings of the machinery that the drift of policy and the value of the human product is ignored.
Educators, it is true, “welcome fair criticism,” and they have a fond belief that they get it from one another in the educational press. But in this mass of books and journals, crowded with exposition and discussion of current educational conceptions and technical methods, thewhole setting, language, philosophy, are professional. The very bases and premises which the lay critic wishes to criticize are taken for granted. Educators decry “destructive” criticism, but in a sense all criticism is destructive, for it is essentially an examination. It requires a stripping away of the wrappings of routine and jargon, the turning of the idea about on all sides, the placing of it in a light where it may be clearly observed. There is another reason why amateur criticism is likely to be pertinent in education. The whole business of teaching and learning is a matter of personal psychology, and, in spite of current cant, there is no science so elusive and so unformulated as psychology. If the scientists will no longer deal with the problems of the personal, conscious life, it is left for the amateur philosophers to examine the psychological backgrounds of the teaching world, and attempt newer and more personal interpretations.
Much of the public criticism of the school is no doubt unintelligent, but what are we to say of that blanket defense we hear so often from the educator, that the niggardliness of the public prevents his providing the best schools and the best teachers? Now a country that attemptsalmost universally to provide free secondary school education—something provided in no European country—is certainly not thus guilty. The prestige of education in America is extraordinarily high. It is quite too late in the day to pretend that anyone still regards public schools as a charity, or that ridicule of teaching methods would only serve to discredit the schools and reduce the already small appropriations. There is no more fear—though some of our educators would have us believe it—that free criticism of the school will leave us school-less than there is that denunciation of the New York police resulted in leaving that city without police protection. The public schools in this country have the standing of all other public services.
It is not a question of more money, but of more intelligent use of present resources. The inexpert public cannot be expected to spend its money wisely. It has an incorrigible itch for objective results. It likes to see its money go into handsome buildings with expensive equipments. Large sums are spent in emulative waste. If one town boasts a seventy-five thousand dollar high school, its neighbor must have a hundred thousand dollar one. It is obviousthat money which goes into costly ventilating systems and the adoption of uncriticized fads, does not go into teachers’ salaries. But it is the function of the educators to offset this public childishness with their own wisdom, and see that the public money is profitably spent. If they believe that we could have better teachers if we paid more for them, they should see that the money goes to the teachers and not into fussy mechanical details.
The trend of educational activity has been to encourage this objective standard. More of the intellectual energy of the educational world has gone into technique and organization than into psychology. It has been more interested in seeing that the American child had enough cubic feet of air, a hygienic desk, and a fire-proof building, than that he acquired an alert and curious outlook on the modern world, and an expressive personality. France, with public school buildings, even in Paris, that you would scarcely perhaps stable your horse in, somehow, by making expression the insistent motive of education, turns out intellectual products strikingly superior to our own.
European experience tends, too, to challenge the common assumption of American educatorsthat quality of teaching is proportional to salaries paid. American salaries are certainly as high as those paid in European countries. There is no violent contrast, moreover, between the intellectual and educational background of a primary teacher with seven hundred a year and a principal with twenty-five hundred. They would both subscribe to the same philosophy of life; they might easily have come from the same training-school. The difference would be one of age or executive capacity, or of “experience,” which generally means nothing more than greater expertness with routine and a longer setting of the intellectual cement.
It is this background, spirit, philosophy, behind the educational mind that the critical public is becoming more and more restless about. It does not challenge details of mechanical and administrative organization. These have been worked out with an ingenuity and a completeness all too thorough. The public is demanding now a similar attention to the conscious and spiritual side of learning and teaching. The ideal of the school as an embryonic community life, of the child as a growing personality to whom the activity of the school must have intense reality, of education as the training of expression,creation—this has hardly begun to be generally felt. The faults discovered by the Springfield and Portland school surveys arose largely from a careless and mechanical philosophy of life, an educational philosophy that had not sufficiently emphasized these ideals. The investigators were able, for instance, to tell on the moment whether a teacher had come from a certain training-school by her method and attitudes.
The responsibility cannot be dodged by the professional educators. They are responsible for primitive and mechanical attitudes which make so much of the orthodox public school teaching a mere marking of time rather than an education. Millions of the public’s money would not effect this change in the background of the teaching world. That background could be changed without its costing the public a cent. The difficulty, huge, it is true, like any other attempt to change the obscure and uncriticized assumptions that lie at the bottom of any theory or practice, is psychological, not mechanical. It involves only the substitution, for certain undemocratic, ultra-logical ideas, of ideas more congenial to the time and social situation in which we live.