The Country School Over Again

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THE thanks of all readers are due to the gentle Contributor who, in a recent number of The Atlantic, so daintily set forth the charms the old-fashioned country school. It may not be unwelcome news to her and many others that the educational world is now going through a most wholesome reaction favor of precisely the principles which underlay that venerable institution. Not that any one in those days thought much about, principles in education, — far from The old “ district school ” and “ academy ” were not built upon theories. They were the simple expression of the will of sturdy community to give its boys and girls a chance, — as good a chance as the community could afford to pay for. They sought their teachers where these could best be found, in the ranks of vigorous youth who were earning their way through the colleges of New England. They took in all the pupils who cared to come, of all ages and at all stages of progress, and sorted them out as best they could, in a terribly unscientific but thoroughly effective fashion.

They had no curriculum, no notions of time allotments ” and “ harmonious development ” and “logical sequence” and the rest of it, but only a simple and direct way of getting children to read, write, and cipher at a very early age, and to be ashamed if they did it badly. Then — and here was the great unconscious principle that the country school was demonstrating — wherever any pupil had a point of individuality to work upon, some taste or some talent, there the teacher found his opportunity. The college youth, himself just waking up to the charm of literature or the fascination of scientific experiment, was led instinctively to pass on to his inquiring pupil some spark of the divine fire of original study. The close personality of the relation gave a power to the teaching which no mechanical system could ever attain. It was the method which the experience of the world, from Socrates down, has shown to be the only effective one, — the method of direct impact of one mind on another.

Under this system, which was no system, the mind of the pupil blossomed out into the most vigorous growth of which it was capable. It never got the ruinous notion that a machine was going to do its work for it ; there was no machine. If the teacher had anything in him, it was called out by the fresh, unspoiled enthusiasm of the scholar. There was no such thing as “ getting through ” the country school. The pupil went there term after term, year after year, Simply demanding, as did the pupils of ancient Greece and those of the fair early days of the mediæval universities, whatever new the teacher of the moment had to give. There was no “ course,” because there were no limitations of subject or of time. In that procession of active youth coming from the larger life of the college there was sure to be, sooner or later, some representative of every subject of study. The strain on the personality of the teacher was immense, — no reader of Elsie Vernier can forget that, — and it produced a response. Individual answered to individual, and out of this give-and-take came originality.

Then there was a change. All this was found to he unscientific. The method must be made conscious of itself. M. Jourdaiu must be made to sec that lie had been speaking prose all liis life, and to realize wliat a fine thing it was to speak prose. Thei’e arose a being whose shadow has since darkened all the land, the “ educator.” To he simply a teacher was no longer enough ; we must have educators, and that quickly. This hodge-podge of pupils of different ages must he broken up into “grades.” Every pupil belonged in a grade, and there he must go and stay ; if at the given time there were no grade into which he precisely fitted, so much the worse for him ; away with him into the outer darkness !

The graded school became the idol of the educator. It commended itself to all that race of men who are captivated by organization, and to whom a system is a precious tiling. Give us only a system good enough, and enough of it, and the individual may be swallowed up in it without fear of harm. No matter whether teacher or pupil has anything particular in him; the system will do the business, bo for a generation we have had the graded school in all its beautiful symmetry, and what is the result ? Our community wakes up suddenly to the conviction that the youth of to-day, the product of the educational mill, is not better than his fathers. He has heard of more things, but be is no better able to take hold of a tiling and do it than his grandfathers were. There is no intelligent college professor to-day who would not rather have to do with a rough-finished, sturdy lad, who had tumbled up somehow by his own wit and energy in the irregular give-and-take of a country academy, than with a youth of equal natural parts who has been taught to rely upon the machine to give him what he is to have.

Let any one study the recommendations of conventions and committees for remedying present educational ills, and he will see that they are all in the line of a return to the methods of the country school. Halfyearly promotions, liberty to “ skip a class,” some freedom in the choice of studies, the widening of the roads leading to college, more time to be given to the individual pupil, a chance for the teacher to take a year off for further study, less unreasoning repetition of work already done, that dull pupils may be pulled along while brighter ones are kept back, — all these things remind us precisely of the conditions of the country academy a generation ago. Another sign is the rapid growth of private schools, where the similarity is often still greater, and whither boys are sent in the hope that they may escape the mechanical process of the city public school. Everywhere we are meeting the demand for a more general recognition of the individual. The institution, it is being seen, will not do the work. After all, it is the teacher who affects the pupil, and we are coining more and more to learn that the teacher, like every other artist, is born, not made, — least of all, made by machinery. Let us give the old country school its full share of credit in bringing about this healthier tone, for it lives still, and long life to it !