Part 14

That period which was characterized by the most serious search for knowledge in America came during the poorer days of our people. The educational facilities of that period were meager. The highest diploma then given represented a degree of learning which almost anyone may easily obtain now. Yet those were days when young people endured the most severe sacrifice in order to obtain a measure of educational advantage for themselves. From the modern educational viewpoint, the little red school house at the cross roads may look like a rather poor affair, but it housed some tremendously earnest spirits. Some of our most distinguished public servants were there prepared for usefulness to their times.

In those days, poverty threw some severe limitations around the young person seeking an education. At the same time, it provided a great incentive to go forward, and it placed behind the obtaining of an education a motive that was of great credit and value. Many young people defeated the limitations of poverty by winning scholarships. This within itself was of great value because it required a high standard of studentship. Its advantage is unknown in the institution which caters to rich men’s sons.

We have been through our periods of poverty that pinched boys and girls into preparing themselves for better things. We have also had our periods of economic independence. We have just emerged from one of actual prodigality. Its unfavorable effect upon education cannot escape our eyes.

Conditions incident to the war write a few entries on the credit side of the ledger. It put many soldier boys into schools for technical training. It helped to awaken the country to its weakness along these lines. These things, however, were overshadowed by the way in which the recent period of swollen incomes made against learning.

The high wages of the war period and of the time immediately following it lured from the schools a vast number who would otherwise have remained. The economic incentive to getting an education was removed. It was a time when a boy could obtain high wages without learning. In many cases he could go into the shops and get better pay than his instructors were receiving for work that demanded thorough preparation and intense application.

Statistics showing how much more money the educated man could make had lost their meaning. The time had come when brawn possessed greater earning capacity than brain. School men all over the country had hard work to keep their schools from going to pieces because of the depletion in attendance which they suffered.

It was only natural that this situation should make teachers restless. Their pay had never been adequate, and now they saw it dwindling to a still smaller figure in comparison with that of a day laborer. The morale of the teaching force was disturbed everywhere. Many teachers found other work. The American school faced a crisis. That crisis seems now to be passing, partly because teachers are being better compensated and partly because the abnormal production, the prodigal buying, and the inflated wages of the war period are over.

The same disturbance showed itself on college faculties. One state university lost twenty-three men in a single year because the whole country was growing rich and leaving them poorer than they were before. One prominent member of a certain university faculty resigned to enter the employ of a firm headed by one of his former students.

Technical schools had the same trouble. During 1919 when the country was literally rolling in wealth, there was very little increase in the amount of money placed at the disposal of agricultural schools in America. Meanwhile, the various industries with their offers of better salaries had taken many of the best teachers from these institutions. The Secretary of Agriculture hoisted the danger signal by declaring that our nation must have a well-balanced program of research and that the most capable staffs possible must be secured and maintained.

One of the chief troubles with a great commercial period is its preoccupation with material things. Minds become cloyed; hearts grow dull; and souls grow no wings with which to lift themselves above the mire and the clay. When a generation gets too busy to read books, hear music, and encourage learning, it is an easy thing for its sons to assume that a job is better than an education.

Education and Production (1921)

A few years ago so great an emphasis on manual training and industrial arts was evident in our school work that some feared a decline in the cultural ideal in the educational process. The trend was bringing its benefits, to be sure, but there seemed ground for fear that the end might be a generation educated in hand and seriously lacking in educated mind and personality.

It has not worked out as many expected it would. The result has rather been the contrary one. We face today an unexpected situation at the close of a war that has tried the powers and resources of the earth. We have an abundance of people who are willing to work at seemingly dignified and necessarily high-salaried tasks. We have a shortage of men willing to do the manual labor necessary to make the world go round.

The difficulty does not lie in any lack of training for manual tasks. We have never had so many people with hands trained to construct buildings and machinery, to set type, and to till soil to the best advantage. The schools have been training people for this kind of work long enough so that several graduating classes have been emptied out into the arena of the world’s life. The number is constantly increasing. Yet the shortage seems to grow.

The trouble seems to root in a certain mistaken attitude toward labor. Our people do not find it easy to get over the notion that gentlemen do not labor with their hands. The idea persists, in spite of all the wealth of our philosophy to the contrary, that a certain aristocracy inheres in idleness. People are ashamed to be seen in their working clothes, and if anyone comes upon them when they are engaged in some manual task, they are prone to make excuses. They seem to feel that they have been overtaken in a fault.

Parents, trained in the ways mentioned, are partially responsible. Many of them go on in the path of error, despite the fact that they realize their mistaken attitude. Their solicitude for their children impels them, and it often impels them to courses that are not best for the children themselves.

Just the other day I heard a mother say that she realized the need of the world for workers, and that she realized the benefits of work to the individual. Yet she could not bring herself to feel willing that her two sons should spend their lives working with their hands.

“I cannot help wanting them to prepare for some line of work that will be easy and dignified,” she said.

So the story has been through the years. So long as this is the motive from which parents send their sons and daughters to school we can hardly expect any great change in the situation.

A certain notion persists that education and work are incompatible. The assumption is that something is wrong when an educated man is seen employed at something involving physical exertion.

The other day a friend told me that he had just learned a strange thing. In a certain nearby city, he said, a graduate of the state university and of a well-known law school was working as a motorman on a street car.

Perhaps something had gone wrong in the case of this man. The wages now paid to street car motormen compare so poorly with the money made by a successful lawyer that one is naturally led to this suspicion. At the same time, however, there is no reason why educated men should despise such work as that of a motorman. Neither is there any reason why the position of a motorman should not be made attractive to men of the highest grade.

The day is coming when low grade men will not be desired for any kind of work on earth. If there is real truth in the old saying that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, we shall gradually learn that we must set men at all our work who are capable of doing it well. It is a great question whether cheap labor is really cheap after all. The chances are that the most capable labor obtainable in any line is the highest economy.

In a recent short story, one colored man is made to remark to another that work is not to be expected from a gentleman of brains like himself. “Brains,” he went on to say, “is to keep you from wukkin’.”

This has too long been the general notion about intellectual ability. Training, both real and fancied, has too often been made the excuse for parasitism. The purpose of education is not to qualify one for getting through life on a minimum of toil. It is rather calculated to enable one to perform a maximum of work with a minimum of friction and waste. In other words, education at its best is not a means to idleness but to efficiency.

The most representative products of our best schools are sufficient proofs of the productive element in the highest educational ideal. They are not idlers, but workers. Their work does not consist of mere fuss and parade. It brings forth the fruit of achievement. The idler is either a product of no school at all, a product of a school with a mistaken educational ideal, or a mutation from the really cultured type.

In this regard, our notion of education is essentially different from the European one. In the Old World, the prevailing idea of an educational institution was that its work was the preparation of young people to be polished aristocrats. The desired product was the graceful and courtly gentleman or lady. That conception may have been somewhat changed by the war, but such was what it was before the world was so largely made over in that great crucible of death.

Our idea of the aim of education is much the same here, except that our schools and teachers try to foster a somewhat different idea of what it takes to make an aristocrat. They do not proceed upon the theory that an idler is an aristocrat. The accepted canon in educational circles is that a man is not trained at all unless trained to be good for something, and that he must prove his culture by bringing forth fruits meet for it.

In their efforts to establish the productive ideal in the thinking of the public as well as in the work of the school itself, our educational system has many handicaps to overcome. One of them is the fact that idleness has been so long and so well glorified in fiction and on the moving picture screen. Too many characters that walk before the eyes of our people, especially the boys and girls, are rich without working for their wealth. They live in palatial houses. They wear the finest of clothing. They indulge in the most expensive pleasures. Yet they toil not, neither do they spin.

This sort of thing has soaked into the public mind pretty deeply. It has exerted its effect upon the life of this generation. The number who would like to live without much exertion are a more or less direct result of it. It is one of the things that must be overcome. Some day it will begin to right itself, for the public will realize the mistaken assumption underlying it. Then a reaction will set in, but we dare not wait for the reaction. We must be trying to stem the current for the sake of those who need to be shown the light now. Just now we are probably at the crest of the billow.

It is to the credit of the public school system that it has always glorified work. We have never needed work and workers so much as we do now. Our armies have torn the world to pieces. We must now have workers to rebuild it into a finer and grander thing than it was before. Therefore, the person who expects to take up room on it and live from it must produce. The life of society is co-operative. Each must do his share. The test of learning is service.

The School as a Reform Agency (1921)

In the little red school house that stood on the hillside thirty years ago some crude things were done. At the same time, some very important and helpful things were done. Even some of the crude things now seem to have had an indispensable value. The years teach us that the only test of the correctness of any educational method is its result in terms of life.

In those days a great deal of moralizing was done. A moral was drawn from everything. The great bulk of the teaching was didactic. Each lesson in the old-fashioned reader had its definite ethical point. Often the moral was stated in so many words at the end. Patriotism, thrift, industry, the fact that there is always room at the top—all these things came in for their share of attention. The result was a patriotic, thrifty, industrious, and ambitious generation of people. We owe that generation and its work largely to the teacher who did not fear to frankly face the moral implications of things. He may have moralized a little too much, but his work had its effects for good.

The history of the world is largely made up of actions and reactions. The reaction against all this came on in due time. We witnessed the development of a great dislike for all stories with apparent morals and of a distinct resentment against all didactic teaching. We still make some effort at character-building, but that effort is usually veiled and often neglected altogether.

Certain things will help to show whether we have gained or lost by this change in our educational policy. Let us take, for instance, the matter of patriotism. The Spanish-American War of 1898 came on before the old order ended. Every youth wanted to go because the country was aflame with zeal for the American cause. The recent world war came after a new generation of school boys had grown up. The necessities incident to that conflict disclosed the fact that American loyalty was partly asleep. It took very serious efforts to wholly awaken it.

Take the question of thrift. The successful business man of today, that loyal public servant who carries the economic responsibilities of the country so capably, is a product of the times when some new lesson in thrift and industry came in each day of the public school course. Many a man who has succeeded would testify now that his first impulse to try came from the reading of the sayings of Poor Richard or some similar material. Since such things have been largely dropped, we have on our hands a growing race of spendthrifts.

All this is not merely comparing the present unfavorably with the past. Everyone knows that we cannot properly do so. Taken as a whole, the public school is now far in advance of what it was in the days of the little red school house. The present purpose is to point out to the educator the really incomparable power and opportunity that are his. Whatever the future contains, the school teacher holds the key to it. The possession of great power is at once an opportunity and a peril, but the teacher certainly possesses that power. It is a wonderful thing to mould the world’s life into right patterns. It is a fearful thing to mould it wrongly, or to fail to mould it when one might. The teacher can do any one of these.

Bismarck once said: “Whatever you would put into the state you must first put into the schools.” The truth of his statement was well proven in the subsequent history of the empire of which he was then chancellor. A whole people was led astray by being fed upon the false philosophy of Nietzsche and others. The Teuton mind and heart could not have been so completely shackled by any other means than the processes of popular education.

When the Ottoman Empire was first founded, its fiercest military organization, the Janizaries, was recruited wholly from the children of Christian parents, taken from their homes in battle or exacted from their towns as tribute. They made the fiercest of soldiers, the most loyal of Turks, and the most fanatical of Mohammedans. This is but an example of what education will do.

When Germany took Alsace-Lorraine from France in 1870, her first task was the Teutonizing of the people. She began by introducing the German language in the schools and the press—both educational agencies. When the Young Turks wrested his empire from Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid II, in 1909, they began making it over according to their own fanciful dreams by introducing their ideals into the school system.

Certainly the school can be made as potent a force for good as for evil. In fact, it has been made such a force in certain instances. Prohibition of the liquor traffic was a long time coming in America, but it came as soon as we adopted the best means of establishing a better order of things. A careful analyst of social influences could have told almost the year it would arrive. He would have taken the date when Scientific Temperance became a public school subject and then have reckoned how long it would take the boys and girls of that period to come into control of the country. When that time arrived America went dry. Bismarck was right.

There are plenty of reasons why it happens this way. One is the general fact that people do about as well as they know. Most evils remain only because people do not realize that there is a better way. When the facts are laid before them, they generally act accordingly.

Another is the fact that ideals and truths can be built into the lives of growing boys and girls more readily and more firmly than in those of older people. A child can learn a foreign language more readily than can an adult. It is the same with an ethical ideal. The growing life most easily adapts itself to newly discovered fact.

Another is the natural position of authority occupied by the teacher. His words are taken as those of an oracle. Children who refuse to heed the instructions of their parents take those of their teachers as final.

Still another is the amount of time the child is surrounded by school influences. No other institution has any such chance at him as does the public school. He spends as many waking hours there as he does at home, or more.

Knowledge alone does not constitute education. The etymology of the word education is sufficient to indicate a very much wider scope. Education has to do with the whole life. Its measure is not merely how many questions one can answer, but how well he can realize upon himself in the actual affairs of life. Therefore, the school has for its work the making of men and women, and the person who builds manhood and womanhood may well remember that in doing so he is building the future. We can never have a world that is anything more or less than it is made by the people who live in it.

The highest grade of manhood and womanhood cannot be built without a considerable amount of ethical teaching. No matter what we do now, the action and reaction law of history will ultimately sweep us back again to the moralizing days. Then we shall carry didacticism to the same extreme that we are now carrying the lack of it. A better way is to have a reasonable amount of it all the while.

Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby had a clear conception of the ethical phases of the highest educational ideal. He once said that he did not merely seek to turn out young men trained to take first in the schools, but “thoughtful, manly-minded men, conscious of duty and obligation.” Such is the largest service the school can render to the world, because it constantly sweeps us in the direction of a better order of things.

The Same Face (1915)

Along our years motherhood has planted three pictures that are so good for us to see that love and memory should always keep them bright. Pictures of sentiment they may be. Call them so if you will. But they are, nevertheless, the anchors that have held many a soul from sinking in the mire of life’s way.

The first is the picture of the young face that bent above us when we were babes—a face wistfully tender and wonderfully touched with the glow of parenthood’s first self-consciousness. The lips move. They never knew the name of love so well until they had trembled in the midst of dismal floods for love’s own sake. They never knew the voice of prayer so well until the burden of creation came to be shared by the heart behind them. We did not suspect the love that throbbed in that heart above us and gave strength to the arms that held us. We know something of it now—and appreciate the debt that never can be paid.

The next is the airy and elusive picture of our own futures which her fond hopes painted on the shadowed walls of the old room at home or in the air above our beds as we slept. Those pictures were too perfect, of course, for the hope and love were perfect that imaged them. She thought us better than we were and had more faith in us than we ever had in ourselves. But, what a garden this world would be if we refrained from violating at least the spirit of the dreams that thronged her mind when we were still wrapped in the unconsciousness of the years before the awakenings came.

The last picture is seen not by looking backward but by looking forward. The other two are memories. This is an anticipation. They sadden us. This fills us with a wondrous joy. Many times we have seen her waiting face and her hand upon the gate at evening time. If we look, we can see her yonder now—ahead of us. The face that bent above the way’s beginning looms also at its close. It is older and gentler and touched with a perfect light. But it is the same face—and her hand is on the gate.

The Will (1915)

I used to pass daily a very pretty and well-formed tree. I admired it so much and saw it so often that, at length, I came to feel toward it as though it were a friend. I often reflected that the reason why it was so lovely a thing was the fact that it had not possessed the power to refuse to obey the bidding of its Maker.

I thought that if a man were will-less, as is a tree or a flower, his life would be as harmonious and as beautiful as theirs. But there is within him that voice which so often speaks against the divine command that he is robbed of much that is godlike within him. I thought that the dictates of that stubborn and willful voice had spoiled so many of God’s plans and man’s prospects that we might all be better without it.