The Preparatory School
THE preparatory school is the embodied answer of practical education to the college entrance requirements. The colleges set up an arbitrary and external test for admission. They tell the teacher that his candidate must achieve within a specified number of minutes a minimum percentage in certain definitely defined areas of knowledge. “Very well,” says Expediency, “it is not for me to question the terms upon which you open your gates, — still less to defy them. I shall comply,” and the preparatory school results.
The mere fact that annual conferences between colleges and secondary schools are held for the consideration of matters of mutual interest does not radically alter the relation in which they stand to one another. The terms of admission to college are prescribed from above, and are more or less meekly accepted below. Similarly, the most effective ways of meeting them have been worked out by the preparatory machinery without serious question on the part of the higher authorities. Neither institution has properly conceived its relation to the other; neither institution has yet learned to subordinate itself to a large and inclusive conception of education. For while the colleges have been freely, even recklessly, experimenting with educational novelties in their own field, they have simultaneously tightened the screws on the secondary schools.
An occasional protest the latter have indeed made; but without, I believe, ever going to the fundamental merits of the question. On the whole, they accept uncritically the task of equipping their students along prescribed lines and for prescribed tests. The concessions extorted in recent years have not essentially altered the nature of this process. It remains without Greek what it was with Greek. The educational chasm is still bridged, not structurally united. New subjects, new opportunities, conform to the methods and conditions that largely devitalized the old.
Thus, whatever the changes or reforms, they have, as administered, tended to emphasize the particular function of the preparatory school rather than general educational continuity. Considerable elective range in the secondary school has, indeed, been instituted; simultaneously, increased stringency of examination has been enforced: with what result ? The machine, already strained, is still further taxed. Not that our precollegiate educational performance is excessive; it is, in my judgment, even yet inadequate. But a mistaken theory of the relations of the college to previous educational effort compels the concentration of the augmented burden within the relatively brief and already overcrowded period just preceding the final tests; whereas, a sound total conception would maintain a rich and varied inspiration throughout the whole process.
Properly, the blame rests upon both college and preparatory school: pure educational motive and enthusiasm have not recently been very strong in either. The college professor is primarily a specialist, interested in learning rather than in boys; he has suffered himself to follow a tradition with the details of which he has, at best, cautiously tinkered, without once venturing to doubt the principle at bottom. Reforms have, therefore, not touched fundamental theory. The abolition of Greek, for instance, is sensible and humane; but the real educational advantage of the substitution of French, German, or History is the next moment largely sacrificed, when the supposed demands of “discipline” require the new subject to be made as obnoxious as was the old. Surely, that is pouring new wine into old bottles with a vengeance! On the other hand, the docility of the secondary schoolman has invited very explicit direction. He has conceded to the college a higher dignity; in some cases, perhaps, the college glamour may still blind the eyes of the young graduate, who looks upon his few years’ exile in preparatory work as an almost inevitable penance, preliminary to a graduate course and a collegiate position!
The preparatory school has thus been developed by the logic of a needless situation. The accepted college entrance scheme is an arbitrary combination of tradition and caprice. The preparatory school has sprung up mechanically to enforce it. Now, education, properly considered, is an organic development, rightly measurable only in terms of power, expansion, purpose. But on such terms, the preparatory school is forbidden to exploit the individual. Despite its elective range, it is confined to literal performance in substantially similar fields of activity, subject to substantially identical standards and tests. No ingenuity in the arrangement of its curriculum, no lavishness in its proffer of elective opportunities, can obscure the inorganic and isolated position which it is thus forced to occupy. I question, therefore, whether, in a true sense, the preparatory school is an educational institution at all. It is unrelated to what has gone or should go before; it cannot treat its own material vitally; it is in no organic relation to what comes after. Despite its trappings and social distinction, it must probably be classed, educationally, with the cramming machines that dexterously and almost infallibly prepare their grist for the Civil Service, West Point, or Annapolis. These admirable engines hardly aspire to the title of educational institution; their training is too narrowly conceived. Is the case essentially different with the preparatory school ? Do the elements of an ancient language, a miserly sprinkling of modern classics, and the rigid outlines of a single science confer the liberal spirit upon a process that, without reference to individual history, development, or capacity, devotes itself for uniform periods to literal fulfillment of an all but universal prescription ?
I speak of education as an organic conception. I mean thus to emphasize its inner, developmental aspect. The preparatory school offends this conception, in the first place, by ignoring the early years. At this day it is superfluous to point out the educational value of childhood. But the preparatory school does not depend for its effectiveness upon turning this period to account. The successful achievement of its ultimate object is not conditioned on educational continuity. Upon such sand as it finds, it begins at once to build its conventional edifice. The best known preparatory schools in the land seek pupils who, at thirteen to fifteen years of age, are asked to demonstrate a most limited acquaintance with their native tongue, a meagre knowledge of arithmetic and geography, and perhaps the ability to rattle through the Latin declensions. Your son’s fourteen years need show no more (and may show less!) than this pitiful inventory demands, and he will be welcomed into the typical preparatory school, and started expeditiously on the designated grind warranted to carry him safely into the college for which he is labeled. Educationally, these requirements are absolutely without significance. There is nothing in them calculated to reveal the lad’s mental and moral assets, — his development, his outlook; on the one real educational concern — the child’s “buried life”— they shed no light. They come down to us sanctioned only by the convenient tradition that made the three R’s the common educational staple of all mankind. Genuine inner activity they neither attend, require, nor promote. In complacently accepting half - grown boys on these terms, the preparatory school does something worse than detach itself from sound elementary training,— it becomes a source of actual demoralization. It makes no demand upon the elementary school; neither does it furnish the elementary school any inspiration. It does not presuppose sound elementary training; it does not pretend to continue it. Hence, why trouble one’s self about it! Habits may form or not; aptitudes live or die; neglect and conventionality combine in blighting the rich promise and variety of child life. Fifteen years are thus suffered to elapse without an effort to discover or to employ power, after which four years of grinding routine complete the effacement of individuality!
I urge, also, that the preparatory school does not handle its material vitally. I understand by vital handling such discipline and inspiration as discover bent, develop taste and enthusiasm, endow with purpose. The child’s social bearing, his intellectual attitude, his spiritual responsiveness show, under vital handling, increased flexibility, spontaneity, purpose. At such results not only does the preparatory routine fail to aim: it is but too often at war with them!
Education is essentially and really a matter of the spirit; the preparatory routine is essentially and really a matter of the letter. There lies the hopeless incongruity! The test of life designates as educated the man resourceful, purposeful, intelligent, appreciative; the test of the schools stamps as educated the boy, who, while his own resources, purposes, intelligence, and taste sleep, can make at least sixty per cent in each of a variety of subjects selected without reference to his endowment or environment, and pursued by methods that look, not to inner nutrition, but to outer display. Consciously or unconsciously, the preparatory school devotes its energy to the production of the latter type. It advertises preparation according to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton standards; the next step accepts the results of the entrance examinations as conclusive, whether of success or failure. For the main business of education, an incident, a more or less insignificant incident, is thus insidiously substituted.
Scrutinize more closely the preparatory process. It ends with the passing of the entrance examinations: where does any other motive actually enter ? The catalogue, in stock phrase, may suggest larger purposes, but the fact stands out boldly in relief that a preliminary certificate from Yale or Harvard admits the bearer to the senior class “and no questions asked!” I have pointed out the lack of continuity between elementary and secondary education; why, the preparatory school does not even insist upon continuity in its own limited field! It can break in anywhere; at no time does it decide procedure upon genuine educational grounds. It accepts the candidate as he presents himself, provided only he approximate a specified performance. His uncle, some other boy, a football score, — these are the determining factors that capture in advance the lad’s preference. And to the preparatory school that preference is final. Nothing else matters. He is to go to Harvard! The die is cast! To that let him be reduced! Into that let him be stretched! One grand initial, too often capricious choice between science and classics, and then, a truce to your individuality! Of what avail are bent, power, limitation ? There are your four years for preparation; there, the letter of the law. At your peril, should your candidate fail! In some such spirit the process goes merrily on: grind! grind! grind! What the pupil cannot or will not achieve will be taken care of by classroom drill, — an efficacious device, by which, in the absence of the student’s effort or interest, the instructor can do the boy’s work as well as his own!
Assuming, for the moment, that the preparatory school curriculum is as important to the boy as it pretends to be, it still remains true that its various subjects are not presented to him in ways calculated to develop latent power. The spectre of a long series of examinations, culminating in the college entrance tour de force, determines the school’s whole spirit and procedure. Assimilation is thus the key to the situation. Accordingly, the process honors the “learner,” the monster of assimilative and retentive capacity,— heedless of the ease with which assimilation degenerates into the merest wordmongering! Now, there are doubtless some things that must be “learned,” things that it is important to know, and that can be known only in the schoolmaster’s way. But, fortunately for mankind, they are fewer than was once supposed. Most things belong to another category, and must be regarded as of variable value; so that, confining ourselves still to the subjects represented in the school curriculum, I maintain that their successful mastery, according to the tests employed, indicates nothing but a stupendous process of more or less genuine assimilation under pressure; that, only indirectly, has educational ordering and stimulation gone on; while in most cases, the activity of the pupil has been limited to verbal manipulations of very slight real value.
Among the immediate and most vicious consequences of assimilation so practiced is the total obliteration of natural distinctions. To the assimilating prodigy a subject is a subject: he aspires to the same sort of mastery in all; as far as his rope stretches, he browses every field identically. The fallacy is obvious enough; in mathematics, for instance, clear appreciation and statement of principle, absolute exactitude in operations, are indispensable: they are of the very essence of the subject. The foundation of all the exact sciences is, in so far, uniform, and must needs be literally and absolutely insisted on. But a method that is quite sound in the domain of mathematics is wholly unfit in other regions, — history, literature, or science. In none of these is there a body of necessary, fundamental truth, even remotely resembling, in its universality or fixity, the foundations of mathematical knowledge. A method that is eminently proper in the one case will probably be utterly inapplicable in all the others.
Take the case of English literature. The requirements demand such minute knowledge of certain arbitrarily selected texts as only the “mathematical” drill can be relied on to furnish at the appointed crisis. It cannot be seriously maintained that the texts chosen have either special or general significance. But the form and spirit of the expected examination have largely determined the form of instruction, forcing upon a fluid subject, like literature, a method entirely alien to it.
Vital teaching of English literature, as I conceive it, would take as its start, as its raw material, the provincial and immature tastes and preferences of the beginner. It would endeavor to convert this provinciality into cultivated and active taste. Such a process would not begin with Lycidas; nor, perhaps, would it end with the common diet of novels and newspapers! The effort needs time, patience, wide reading, guidance, sympathy, enthusiasm, and is satisfied if it succeeds in building up in each student a taste, more or less refined and effective, according to individual limitations. As it recognizes in literature nothing at all analogous to the propositions of Euclid, it refuses to stand over the child with the examination club, insisting on the expression of orthodox critical views: to that extent, at least, it avoids an insincere imitation that humbugs every one but its victims. To the microscopical study of a few “gems” it attaches no importance. Such an inappropriate drill — imported under pressure from the mathematical field — is not only powerless to awaken or develop interest; it is almost sure to breed distaste. The mere knowledge acquired is trivial; the supposed training in accuracy is better abandoned to the really exact subject.
The fate that has overtaken English literature in the preparatory school may be cited to substantiate the contention that I have already made to the effect that college preparation is not teaching — that the more expert it becomes, the farther it drifts away from sound teaching. The college entrance English requirement is formulated in very explicit terms; and the preparatory schools have so nicely adjusted their courses to these stipulations that in certain well-known schools the classes are divided according to the colleges which the candidates propose to enter. In making these arrangements, the school asks not, “What have you read ? What do you read ? What can reading do for you ?” but, “Do you want to go to Yale or Harvard?” and the answer decides whether the student shall get two or three hours of English weekly! This is pedagogical dovetailing, rather than training! The boy passes, of course. For the moment, he knows his Lycidas, Macbeth, or Burke’s Speech. But has the level of his taste risen ? Has his horizon widened ? What does he seek when left to his own resources ?
History occupies much the same position. Such historical knowledge as boys and girls can be compelled to retain for a time in portable form is of slight permanent value as compared with the benefit to be ultimately derived from the creation and stimulation of interest in the subject. Educational method must choose between these two mutually repellent ends: mathematical rigor and accountability within a narrow field, along with the knack of superficially comparing and philosophizing, — a trick quite capable of being mechanically learned, — and a vaguer, admittedly uncritical, but really effective interest in the subject in its large lines, cultivated, not so much for the purpose of meeting the exigencies of an impending examination, as to awaken imagination and interest. Absolute truth, I dare say, is imparted neither way; but that is because of the nature of the boy and the complications of the subject. The point to be noted is that in electing the former, the preparatory school fails to attach the boy to the subject in the only manner in which his lasting interest can possibly be enlisted; its efforts, whatever their immediate impressiveness, are in the end barren. The hard-conned facts drop from memory; the cleverly simulated insight that traveled so nimbly in the comparison of utterly irrelevant phenomena quickly and forever loses its spring. The most frequent and enduring outcome of the historical drill is a marked repugnance to the whole subject. Men and women, who know and love history, are, for the most part, those who had no drill in history at school. Their case might perhaps be still better, had they been wisely taught; it would certainly be much worse, had they been caught in the historical grinding-mill.
The same absence of vital handling, the same fondness for the tabloid form, is characteristic of preparatory science. In this citified age, the proper object of scientific teaching in childhood and youth is the active cultivation of the perceptive faculties. Through observation and experiment the pupil’s curiosity is to be pleasurably awakened, his senses stimulated, his judgment sharpened. At this period nothing is to be gained through mechanically verifying or displaying formulæ that neither warm the imagination nor penetrate the understanding. To the child, to the boy, nature must appeal with living power. The thing called nature, that is tardily presented to him in the laboratory, between the covers of his textbook, is a skeleton! Education must seek inner activity rather than formal objective completeness. There comes a time, indeed, when the minutest and most highly technical details — whether in literature, history, or science — appeal to the mature intellect with poetic power; but these minutiæ have no such inspiring value in youth; nor is their importance as mere knowledge great. At that stage they are the leaves that hide the forest.
Observe, again, the isolation of the preparatory school. In the matter of sense-training it makes no demand upon the elementary school; nor does it perceive that a strictly defined course in chemistry or physics, in which “forty experiments” must be performed, is not only powerless to stimulate general senseactivity, but bestows no lasting or genuine insight into scientific method. There is, as I have urged, a proper time for rigorous and systematic experimentation; but it must follow the establishment of the perceptive faculty. Birds, trees, flowers, all the objective phenomena of land, water, and sky, must first smite with eager joy the child’s opened eyes and ears. Preparatory school science is simply indifferent as to this; it makes no pretense of either furnishing, requiring, or reposing on it; it offers unconditionally a close, mathematical drill in a pitifully narrow section arbitrarily blocked off. And it gets for its pains neither scientific interest, scientific insight, scientific method, nor even permanent scientific knowledge of its chosen area. For its products have, as every teacher of science knows to his cost, neither eyes to see nor ears to hear. But they know Avogadro’s law on examination day, — the last one of them !
It has remained for these same latterday pedagogues to discover for language a function nobler than the expression of thought: speech is not the fluid and elastic vehicle of communication among men, but a highly organized and intricate grammatical maze, the threading of which forms a wholesome intellectual exercise for boys! The substitution of French and German for Greek has made an astonishingly slight difference in result for this very reason; for they are all approached from their grammar side and largely for their grammar’s sake. The beginning of the study is postponed to so late a day that it is impossible to aim at the cultivation of Sprachgefühl; while the college entrance examinations require the student’s knowledge to be of the same definite, mathematical quality demanded in other parts of the curriculum. It was hoped that the introduction of sight tests might suggest a more normal end and method to teachers of language. But these tests have usually been so fragmentary, so full of grammatical and syntactical pitfalls, and administered under conditions so different from those that obtain in dealing with a living tongue under practical circumstances, that their actual effect in rationalizing method has been inconsiderable.
The schools will probably object to my treating the ancient and modern languages in one category, on the ground that they are pursued for different ends. But they fare no better, if tried on separate indictments. The modern theory of Latin and Greek as engines of intellectual discipline seems to me the refuge of men who are perhaps not quite easy in their classics, and who know full well the feeble and uncertain hold of their pupils. However, I demolish a man of straw; for, though the fact is blinked in every preparatory school and college in the land, honest work in the study of Latin and Greek is nowadays almost unknown. The use of cribs, — and in absolutely unintelligent fashion, — with no object but the fraudulent one of escaping the very discipline for which the subject is avowedly taught, has destroyed even the thin foundation on which the study rests. The lofty phrases in which the æsthetic and intellectual value of these languages is extolled become the merest rhetoric when confronted with the plain truth that as objects of genuine study they hardly exist for the student at all. Not only does he not master them; he does not honestly attack them. How, then, can it be supposed that four years of parsing, syntaxing, and cribbing will finally eventuate in an exquisite sensitiveness to Virgil’s subtlety in the choice of words or the use of moods, and in tender solicitude for the properly shaded English equivalent thereof ?
As for German and French, the preparatory school has so far signally failed to achieve their mastery. The start has been too long put off; the end is not. sufficiently real. One hears them ominously championed as equaling the classics in “mental discipline!” The unraveling of linguistic knots on examination day thus becomes their justification, too. Now, the ability to interpret a disconnected and a more or less involved selection from Heine or Racine is, educationally, of no greater importance than the ability to perform the same “ stunt” with a selection from Homer or Plato. The quality of the training has not been transformed by the mere substitution of a modern for an ancient victim. The student keeps both at arm’s length, preserving the detached attitude of the linguistic anatomist.
If I may venture once more to use the term, — the vital teaching of a language requires that it be taught with a view to its active and pleasurable use as a medium of ideas under conditions governing its use and appreciation as a native tongue. It insists that a language incapable or unworthy of being so taught and appreciated has no proper place in the instruction of children. Whatever be the best method for reaching this end, the grammar mooring must be cut as quickly as possible; it must not be coiled more and more intricately around the subject until the very life has been utterly choked out.
At the risk of being tedious, I have now pointed out, subject by subject, the distinctly “academic” character of preparatory school subjects and methods. The boy on whom its system of mental therapeutics will produce the calculated effect does not exist outside a schoolmaster’s fancy. The real boy, obscure and complicated, may detach a part of himself for “preparatory” purposes; but the centre of his being is elsewhere, — untouched, untamed. To that centre, the most expert phrase-drilling is powerless to penetrate; and phrase-drilling the preparatory process remains, despite the presence of a German text, a test tube, and a battery!
We thus approach my final ground of objection to the preparatory school, in that it leads nowhither. It does not equip the student to attack intelligently, purposefully, the very first problem that will confront him. The elective system, now all but universally adopted by the American college, throws upon the student the whole responsibility for the last stages of his education: what has the preparatory school done to prepare him to pick his way wisely through the bewildering tropical garden of collegiate solicitation?
The preparatory school is built on lines laid down at a time when the American college was committed to the disciplinary theory of culture; to the theory that a more or less passive student subjected to a systematic and protracted routine of scholastic discipline will emerge more or less cultivated, — the degree depending somewhat upon the completeness with which the student has submitted himself to the process. But the college has changed front. All pretense of culture through discipline has been dropped in order to pursue to its logical outcome the hope of culture through use. The monopoly once enjoyed by Latin and Greek is irretrievably broken up; indeed, the very doctrine of a culture monopoly is discredited; not even the natural sciences are permitted to hold the dangerous eminence toward which they aspired during the bitter contest in which the classics were finally dislodged. I do not mean that the colleges postpone culture to utility. They identify them. They hold that the scholar’s largeness of view must somehow be a by-product in every mental workshop; that there is no royal road to culture. “ Give us purpose,” says the elective system,— “thence come order, intelligence; and the spirit of the pursuit must mean culture.” But to this radical change of spirit, the preparatory schools have not yet accommodated themselves,— they are neither encouraged nor permitted to accommodate themselves. In the name of conservatism they work on in the isolation in which they begin. They know the boy only as an abstraction, — a non-existent type, made up of superficial traits, supposedly responding to superficial appliances: the individual, who is everything in college, in life they do not recognize. For four years they patiently seek to confine, in conventional channels, the fretting, restless, unsatisfied soul that is sniffing the air tingling with life. And then suddenly every barrier is knocked away, and the eager youth bursts unexpectedly into the freedom toward which his training has never once looked. “Give us purpose,” demands the elective system. Does the preparatory school give it? What has it done to sound the individual ? To discover his line? To enlist his powers in the active way that the elective system at its very start requires ? Let the helplessness of the average Freshman answer that!
I do not forget that the school curriculum is not the whole school. Indeed, in the breakdown of scholarly tastes and enthusiasms, it has come to be the fashion to discover in athletic and social developments the real benefit of higher education. I grant quite willingly that the sentiment of loyalty is genuinely expansive, and, in so far, educative. But does it make no difference what one is loyal to ? Fraternization without aspiration, companionship without ideas, lead nowhere — or worse. For association originating within, through community of idea and purpose, the preparatory school substitutes a common external goal, — the college. In consequence every phase of college life, fraternal and athletic, is anticipated and imitated: socially, the preparatory school becomes a miniature college; often enough, the combinations that dominate class politics in college are reported to have been perfected in and carried over from the “fitting school.” In this one aspect, at least, preparatory school and college are continuous. They have found as yet no common spiritual tie, no common intellectual activity: as to these, they are still at cross-purposes. But on the lower level they meet; and into it they throw all their unemployed energy. The main sources of demoralization in both are therefore identical; and the completeness with which the student has been captured by them contrasts significantly with the failure of mental and spiritual occupations to maintain even a respectable competition!
It must, I think, now be clear that the preparatory school owes its existence to our lack of a coherent educational system. Until education is dominated by such a conception, which will weld the disconnected stages into an organic unity, it must remain a thing of shreds and patches. That day may be far distant, but, meanwhile, it is something to realize that amelioration is within easy reach: especially in the matter of college entrance, the adoption of rational methods will free the secondary teacher from the constraint which now compels him to treat all subjects alike: it will leave him room to develop each subject on its own lines, with some regard to the pupil before him. Doubtless a larger view of secondary education will follow hard upon the adoption of methods which even in a limited way permit the boy to reveal himself; and ultimately perhaps the preparatory school will seek to connect itself with the elementary school in something like the way in which I am supposing the college to be connected with the secondary school. Such a state of things, infinitely better than the relations now existing, would mark the limit of educational development on the lines we now follow. The theory of instruction by subjects — the separatist view I may call it —that maps out certain realms of knowledge as inherently important, and exacts a fair acquaintance with them as the price upon which alone it bestows its conventional distinctions, can go no farther.
I make bold to say, however, that to no such conception does the future of education belong. The school of the future, unless I err greatly, will discard utterly our mechanical stages. The idea of culture through use, which the American college is now feebly and ineffectually endeavoring to apply, and which can never be effectually until universally applied, will be made the foundation and not the capstone of the educational structure. The child’s school life will be coextensive with his whole life, — seeking to enlist his total physical, moral, mental powers, to coöperate intimately with his domestic and spiritual interests; the school will not be content to appeal to a mere fragment of his capacity, — to drill and discipline that, apart from the rest of him. Subjectively, education will be genuinely individualistic; studying individual bent, capacity, endowment, aiming to evoke the largest and freest individual response; objectively, it will regard the actual content of our civilization, — industrial, artistic, spiritual, as the means and end in education. To fit the child in the largest and fullest way to attack and enter upon his necessary relations will become the school’s duty. The school is thus no longer remote from life: it is life; it is no longer a clog upon the child’s eager spirit, but the congenial field in which all his activities can be naturally and productively utilized. All that is now hateful and noxious in school life — its unreal discipline, its meaningless honors, its repellent tasks, its demoralizing recreations — will be, not transformed nor softened, but eliminated, by an institution that aims to employ energy, and believes that every necessary attitude can be procured, when appropriate employment is provided. For the discipline of the presentday school is the inevitable product of its artificiality: it has no organic fitness or value.
To the school I have thus inadequately sketched, two objections will be at once raised: one, that such a programme does not look toward culture, has been already disposed of by President Eliot in his recent definition of the cultivated man. I have pointed out how the elective system at college involves the rejection of the old notion of culture; and shorn of the collegiate finish, the classics are a pathetically futile make-believe. Now, the traditional idea of culture has been lost in the college, because it has been lost in life. I urge, therefore, that we let the same logic work its way through the entire system: a truly genuine culture is possible through the skillful interpretation of this idea. If the teachers in the new school see and rise to their opportunity, breadth of view and sympathy have nothing to fear.
The second objection will deplore the loss of the rigid and exacting discipline of hard and unattractive subjects. I have already pointed out the fact that this discipline is almost wholly imaginary; it loses sight of the really important consideration, that is, whether the occupation in question tends to excite a desirable activity in a way that is likely to continue and promote itself. The painful unraveling of Gordian knots is not education; neither is the dexterous administration of sugar-coated mental pellets. The growing child does not love an appropriate task because it is easy, nor shrink from it because it is hard. In an educational scheme, concerned with real, not conventional, ends, valuing genuine and not merely formal achievement, there is no likelihood that what Professor James calls the “pugnacious instinct” of the pupil will be too rarely invoked. Indeed, the more interesting the teacher, the more freely and severely may he appeal to the pupil’s effort. The remoteness and unreality of ordinary school material tend to throw the whole weight upon the teacher; effort may be invited; in a prolonged or general way it is rarely gotten. But when “academic” tasks are replaced by real tasks, “academic” standards and methods by real ones, then the effort which the child will put forth is limited only by the fundamental limitations of his endowment. He may or may not call such work “hard.” But if hard work means not merely overcoming natural repugnance, nor yet merely fanning a borrowed glow into a doubtful flame, but rather the summoning of one’s total energy, as nearly as may be, and its concentration upon a rational end,— then there can be no question that the more real the issue, the larger, the more persistent, the more forcible the student’s response.
The new school will from the first keep in close touch with experience, but it will at no point be meanly utilitarian. It will use the activities of daily life, but with ideal interpretation. What we call science, industry, manual work, will thus enter abundantly; but no less will art, music, literature. The sole test of a proposed occupation will be its reality, its actuality: what is merely traditional, pedantic, isolated, will be rejected. It is impossible to anticipate what a difference such a school will make in the child’s happiness and efficiency. But the experiment when made must be made de novo. It cannot begin in freedom, only to deflect gradually until it leads to a college portal. It must be free at the end, as at the beginning, from the coercive necessity of dovetailing with the existing system.