School Conformity

I

IT is too easy to write with some fervor on educational matters, and to promote your own ideas based on your own inherited quality of mind and endeavor, thereby to assist in establishing a certain philosophy of education, and even a method of education, which shall stand against the attrition of present and future criticism.

What you do, of course, is particularly to express yourself, and perhaps impress and reassure others who are more or less like you. What you do not do is to convince a great multitude who are not like you, who have a very different origin and habit of life.

From a biological point of view, it does seem rather strange that, with a common ancestry merged into a dense conglomerate extending under water like a coral reef a million years old, there should be such divergence of ideas in the apex, the very small part that is living in the foam and sunlight of the present day.

The animal mind, the greatly preponderating element, is the same; the infantile mind —using Dr. Robinson’s divisions— is somewhat the same; the imitative mind is less the same; and the constructive mind not at all the same.

And it is the constructive mind to which we wish to commit our educational fortunes.

It is a constructive mind necessarily founded upon these preceding minds, and so the thing called Fate has a great deal to do with the working of it. It is not free. It has a certain radius, a tether of a rather definite length, which confines the individual to a rather definite area.

Predestination is no longer a popular word, but let no one suppose it to have lost its meaning and retired from business.

The mistake the old religionists made was in thinking that anyone could plot the curve of predestination for anybody else, and observe its terminus in Heaven or in Hell.

Intolerance we profess not to understand any more, simply because it is usually repressed by social consent and by economic necessity. As the world becomes more crowded, certainly the most intolerable thing is intolerance. When people could get away from each other more easily, when there was more frontier, and you could move off and establish your special kind of intolerance in a new country, why, of course, things did not really have to come to the stony eye, the exasperating word, the murderous hand, and the more murderous heart.

Do you remember the scene in the Valkyrie when Hunding comes home amid the thunder and scream of the forest storm, strides in with his spear and dark countenance, and finds Siegmund lying by his hearth?

In the long survey that these two elemental antagonists make of each other, while the orchestra surges with their emotions and destinies, you feel the tension, the irrepressible conflict between Realism and Idealism, between Rationalism and Faith, between Law and Grace. In modern literature Nietzsche and Dostoievsky represent these extremes, the one excluding all but the masterful, the determined; the other — hopeth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things, knowing that even the things that are not shall bring to nought the things that are.

Intolerance is still the threatening phenomenon, and only a few years ago broke out again, with all its tormentsimmensely multiplied. The inquisitor was abroad in the land, and the auto-da-fé blazed in Flanders and France.

The crust is thin yet, and one must be careful not to start cracks in it by inconsiderate ways of talking and of acting.

Well, of course, the intolerance in the intellectual world, if you want to call the school-world that, is a very gentlemanly and ladylike sort of thing, for which we must be duly thankful. For these schools are derived — and recently derived, too — from religious institutions and even from military institutions, and we are doing very well to have got so far from these sources of ferment, where people forgot so easily that what they had in common was to what they differed in as one thousand is to one.

But if you listen to school-talk, if you listen to the leaders of school-thought and of school-programme to-day, you are struck very much by the difficulties that exist to agreement, to what Mr. Wilson so often referred to as ‘accommodation’; and you are confronted again with these deep cleavages, the insulations, which people prefer to foster, to increase, and even to advertise.

To be sure, it all goes to increase the interest of the composition, so to speak, by introducing those dissonances — those clashings of tones and that dramatic element without which life would be insipid. What would there be for so many of us to write about then, or to declaim about before the women’s clubs?

How we do enjoy robing ourselves in the sombre cloak of denunciation and of prophesy, securing for a moment a fleeting attention, before we make our exit into yesterday’s seven thousand years, quite alone and unattended, comforting ourselves as we may, but certainly with no assurance of having ‘ held a hand uplifted over Fate.’

From your own circumscribed area, then, with its preoccupations, with its passers-by in rags, tags, and velvet gowns, each making a passing gesture and condescending a passing glance as they proceed from nowhere to nowhere — you look and listen.

And among many other things you may notice this — that people get the habit of seeing their own kind far too much. That is a by-product of intolerance, and also a self-preservative instinct. But what we need is more crossfertilization, and school-people need it very much indeed — almost as much as business men or engineers, for instance. Adventure is another word for it.

If you are a typical business man, what you need most is to stop making business men your constant companions. You need to stop going to that round table at the club for lunch. You get poisoned by the exhalations of the same sentiment in an unventilated place, namely, in a business career. What you need is to see more people, —and get on intimate terms with them, too, — who have very different interests: poets, painters, and craftsmen, who do things for the love of doing them, for the thing and not for its selling-price, or its duplicate production possibilities. Among these people you will find, here and there, one who shall blow away the webs of your timidities and inhibitions and intolerances, and make your spiritual house a more habitable place.

And if you are attached to the school army, of seven hundred thousand or more, that marches almost daily to the attack on childhood, what you need is less pedagogical regimentation, and more walking with the children themselves, with the onlookers, not the living only but the dead, as they still live in their prose and poetry and music.

II

The great figure of the Puritan, with his face hardened in the rigidities of dogma, with the Book he felt that he alone understood, with his staff for correction and his square-toed shoes beating a ruthless path through the New World — the Puritan’s shadow was on all schools and his substance usually in the President’s Chair.

Then came two cataclysmic forces, — Darwin and the ‘Iron Man,’ and together they distilled a very strong antidote for Puritanism and ecclesiasticism in general; and behold, out of a sea of religious psychology, with all its beautiful and its terrible moods, its consolations and its devastations, we get a sea of repressed materialism, becoming more and more expressed as time goes on, filled with the luminosities of pure science, and the vivid gyrations of applied science, and particularly filled with a pelagic species called ‘business men,’ from whales to minnows.

This water surrounds educational institutions everywhere, and has risen inside to the level outside — or is rising.

And with the water come the fish; and there you see them, as plain as day, around the tables of the Boards of Education and of Trustees, fantastic creatures, so many of them, who plainly are equipped only with gills, and breathe freely only in water, and whose whole effort must be to increase the submergence of education in the business ocean and to exclude the air, the wind, the freedom of that Spiritus — that great Roman word in the passion of the cry, Veni Creator Spiritus!

Now these water-breathers are very valuable people; I would not disparage them at all if they did not keep coming up too often with that large gaze — the gaze of the successful person; and with the feeling that success in one medium justifies intrusion in another; and with that habitual determination, which made them effective enough to become important, and important enough to be feared.

Whole communities respect them inordinately, and listen too willingly when they speak of things about which they know nothing.

Although as regards schools and colleges they make some gestures and grimaces of compliance with air-breathing, so to speak, it is plain that to them schools and colleges are primarily to enable their children and all children ‘in the various levels of social life in which it has pleased God in his wisdom to place them,’ to do better and faster and more tirelessly the things society is now engaged in doing, and to increase the proportion of children who can win out — on the survival theory — in water.

And when you ask them to compromise; when you, in your most conciliatory mood, and in your most ingratiating manner, and with your most embarrassing arguments, ask them to admit the propriety of some of your claims, you may be treated respectfully; but, after you have gone, the remarks are paternalistic— you are interesting, decorative, amiable, but hardly to be taken seriously.

III

And now the reader can see plainly where this argument goes, and how simply and inevitably the principle of conformity, which has always controlled educational matters, operates here to promote what we may call ‘Industrial psychology’ among teachers.

Teachers and the teachers of teachers have been captured by it without much resistance, for the following reasons — aside from the ‘peaceful penetration’ alluded to. First, because teachers of spirit resent their traditional status as outsiders, as a group relegated to the unrealities, to the immature, by that part of society which is dealing in ponderables — in real estate, goods, machinery, and so on.

And is it not a temptation to be able to make obvious common cause with the people who have so much to show for what they do, and who are so much thought of and thought about and remembered ?

Sad is the lot of the teacher, who can show so little; who has to be content to die before his crop matures; whose seed develops so mysteriously and slowly; who by Faith must subdue kingdoms, but rarely participate in the triumphal entry. To be able to show results, to measure the product of education, — the increments added yearly, — to keep a balance-sheet to indicate clearly the success or failure of your efforts! Yes, this is a very understandable temptation. Dear Lord, may we not allow ourselves this indulgence, that, in our own time, the work of our hands may be established upon us?

And another reason is that the people who are running schools can find enough teachers capable of performing the functions of record-keepers, — for it is by records, by a system comparable with bookkeeping and cost-accounting, that this business must operate, — and the function of ‘test givers’; for it is from standardized tests only that records can be made.

The question is, do you think this kind of teacher may be maximized, and the other kind — the kind whose results you can’t measure so easily — minimized, until the premium becomes definitely shifted, the very busy and expert-record-keeping stenographic type becoming the ideal, and this teacher of the by-products from textbooks — this teacher who is his own guide and who cannot live at all in this mechanical place, superintended by a person who should be designing motor-boats or automobiles — finally discredited?

He cannot live there or breathe there, because he is not interested in arriving at destinations, but in enjoying every step of the way by which you go; not in lineal progress and speed, but in the significance of things; not in quantity of ground covered, but in quality of impressions received and stored; not in attainment of mind, so much as in renewal of a right spirit and creation of a clean heart.

This is the teacher who turns on the light in that department of the individual’s establishment where court is held, and establishes there a judge, who may become distinguished for his decisions, which judge is eventually that strange impersonal critic of the man himself, capable of putting his own emotions on the witness stand and relentlessly exposing his own pretensions and hypocrisies, until he cries out with shame and contrition; a teacher who assists you to attain, finally, to this beatitude,the one Walt Whitman emblazoned on his shield, — ‘Nothing exterior shall ever take command of me!'

And then there is the mass—the ever-increasing mass, the fecund, swarming, unassimilated, and refractory multitude of recent European origin, and particularly Southern European and Slavic, — whose adult mental age is between nine and twelve years — how can schools deal with this heartbreaking problem except by mechanics, in some wholesale and ‘ big-business’ manner, whereby they are herded along the runways provided by textbook manufacturers, into some conventional acceptance of standards that provide exterior coatings for very chaotic interiors?

The sins of our industrial fathers are visited upon their children. They satisfied their huge appetites for developing the country, and left us to clean up — to endeavor to compensate for a generation of exclusive association with the ugly assurances and crude ambitions of American municipal life, and American tenements, and American industry.

How many Angelo Patris do we need, and where shall we get them?

Does anybody think the thing called Americanization, with its sterile formulæ and lock-step ritual, will ever do more than whitewash the exterior of this matter?

It begins to have, this new citizenship, with its high birthrate and preponderating bulk, some of the aspects of a glacier on the American social landscape — a cosmic thing, which cause, plus time, carries through to destinations which are entirely hidden, but which are perceptibly changing the contours in preparation for a new landscape, and one which may resemble too much a public park on Monday morning, after the pupils in our schools, and their parents, have enjoyed a Sunday in it.

And, finally, the children themselves are also easily captured by the spectacle of the passing circus — for the flower of this industrial era is something like a circus. They all look out of the windows as the procession goes by. There is the gilded band-wagon, filled with brilliant costumes and very confident music. There are highly decorated ladies and gentlemen on prancing horses, attended by clowns and performers of all sorts — very conspicuous people who are, therefore, enviable people.

To be inconspicuous, to be indistinguishable, is the lot of failure, of the subnormal, of the unprivileged, of the poor, but must not be our lot. The tents are set up in every great city, and the newspapers, as ‘barkers,’ announce with terrible insistence that the show is now going on. And so, at all costs, let us become visible, by any manipulation of costume or by any possible antic in business, profession, or society, and ride as close as possible to the sounding brass instruments, being careful never to consider what an old sailmaker of Tarsus once said on the subject.

Externality — that is the social disease which schools have to combat, and to which they are, instead, beginning to conform — the thing that poisons life at the source, and will make a hideous parade through this country, unless children can be turned aside from following after and, through the agency of teachers who understand the art of furnishing interiors, are rescued from becoming mere gregarious dependents on shows, hollow and dark with the hollowness and darkness that harbor bat-like emotions.

Which does not involve any cloistered timidity and morbid aversion. This pageant of modern civilization makes a most dramatic and fascinating display. All it needs is proper interpretation to prevent that entanglement which produces mutilation. It is a machine, disguised as human, which grinds things up — particularly children whom it catches in school.

The mechanical genius of America, which sent the harvesting machines over the whole world to produce vastly more acreage in wheat, greatly accelerating the tendency of men to believe that they live by bread alone, is now working on educational method.

Instead of the ox and the ass, who were, you remember, present at Bethlehem, and the individual with a plough walking slowly in a single furrow, we have a tractor dragging a multiform horror of wheels, and filling quiet places with its stertorous cough.

Those who make this machinery, and get the joy of creation, then bestow it ‘ready-made’ on their heirs and assigns, to whom it proves almost wholly a disaster.

Children must be so busy going through these standardized and standardizing processes that, before their own most precious creative impulses get a chance to grow more than a seed-leaf, they are ground up and rolled out and packaged and disposed of in the general market — the beaming organizers and mechanicians enjoying themselves hugely in retail and wholesale departments.

If the people who are working in the field of children’s affairs with machinery of this sort cannot more than compensate for the losses involved, they are likely to produce crops that would not even please them if they could live long enough to see them.

But they do not. After zealously ploughing and sowing, with bland and confident expressions, they may look, in old age, with dim and tired eyes, at something luxuriant, but something that makes them content to die and escape the hardships of recultivating that desperate field, green—bright green — with a kind of poison ivy, which, on the ‘body politic,’ as it is called, produces a most irritating rash, the leaves that shall heal the nations being of a very different sort.

What shall we say then to these things? What reconciliation can we suggest?

It seems impossible to avoid ‘wholesaleness’; and yet ‘wholesaleness’ will not do. It is always the little things that count, that give all the fertility and all the flavor and all the character and all the hope and all the happiness to human affairs. Bigness is a delusion, and the organization that bigness requires is a snare.

Speed and efficiency seem necessary in order to get the job done — and yet both are sterilizers, and nothing grows out of speed and efficiency that the spirit of man can live on at all.

So, if we must have wholesaleness and speed and efficiency in school-management, we surely must insist on adequate compensations, and the trouble is that the folks who apply the former seem wholly inadequate to supply the latter. Another species must be called in, — and called in in increasing numbers, and trusted and honored and obeyed, — and the water-breathers and air-breathers must be happy in each other’s company. Is that something they can learn, do you think?

‘Let me not,’ said Shakespeare, ‘to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments.’

True minds! Not minds out of true — crooked — distorted by either immediacy, mass-psychology, vocationalism, or, on the other hand, by sentimentality, and a repugnance for hardness and roughness and endurance under strain.

In the pontifical audience halls of the great temples of industry, of statesmanship, and of politics, the explorers in the huge and almost unknown lands of the spirit of coöperation and national and international toleration and assistance get but formal attention — with suppressed yawns and cynical smiles.

In the councils of the N.E.A., it is too often the man with a mechanical device who produces a crowding and a breathless audience; it is the man who proposes to organize things most perfectly and deliver goods in packages ready for use — even to deliver ‘ leaders,’ though beneficent leaders have never been known to come from any self-conscious organization for leadership.

He begins by doing something that all history has discredited — by endeavoring to take this strange, protoplasmic, wholly mysterious human nature, which comes to him in apparently plastic and passive masses, and appraise the individual units and allot their destinies and specify their functions — some to honor and some to dishonor, forgetting that the thing that has always produced the heaviest weights the race has had to carry has been just that sort of thing — the imposition of rigid measuring appliances in the world of spiritual phenomena or mental phenomena and the apportioning of people to high, low, and intermediate stations according to the result — forgetting that after the ‘ Elaborate futility’ of schools, life will make all their confident expression of wisdom look very pale and sickly indeed, its nose broken and its voice a whisper of apology.

Now does n’t it all really seem to you, the more you think about it, to have something of the appearance of that most dismal friendship and conspiracy — this alliance of industry and schools — between the Walrus and the Carpenter, inviting the little oysters — in fact, all the oysters—for a walk along the beach?

So genial, that invitation, so ingratiating, so big-brotherly, and so lacking in disinterestedness, little oysters and bread and butter somehow belonging very much together after all, and the pleasant run ending in the picture of the grim two, sitting, distended and grotesque, in the evening light.

The endowed colleges still shake their heavy heads, though, one imagines, their confidence shakes also, as the invitations change in tone to something more peremptory, and the undesirable applicants shake their gates; but, so far, the eldest oysters remain among their humanities and examination-forms, entertaining the Walrus, accepting his gifts and his theory of economics and his social ritual, and smiling condescendingly on the Carpenter, but still retaining a dull sense that, once on a walk with them there is no return, and, so far, decline to walk.

Promoters of education by weight and measure, who underestimate, even if they do not discredit, that Spiritus, by refusing to make it the criterion, are likely to be objects for pity and irony, unless the future holds little in store for the individual and for those ‘shy and migratory birds of the imagination’ and the love and expression of beauty, which are, after all, the greatest gifts entrusted to men, and which machinery invariably frightens off, quite as if it were designed for that very function, when it occupies too conspicuous a position.

There is a certain very fine kind of economics, good housekeeping, involved in this so-called ‘scientific education.’ It prevents much waste, and it avoids, when handled by wise people, — which is not very often the case, — a great deal of injustice to individuals who might otherwise be tragically harried to do things they really could not do. This article is meant only to indicate the drift, the permeation of the prevailing psychology into regions that should be more critical and more constructive and directive, and not merely occupied by ‘fans,’ looking on and applauding, and stirred to play the same game themselves — each group on its own rather vacant lot.

And now, to conclude, I wish to refer those realists who feel that they are caricatured and ludicrously misrepresented in the above series of pictures, to a statement in the preface of that most wise book by Professor Hocking, Human Nature and Its Remaking. He says: —

It is precisely the so-called Christian world which, having gone morally to sleep, is now put to a fight for life with the men who persist in reducing their standards to the level of common practice; in reaching their code of behavior from below upward, not from above downward; in keeping their ideals close to the earth, or at least in discernible working connection with the earth. Their creed we may name Moral Realism.

To the competitive element in our own social order we owe much — an impersonal estimate of worth in terms of efficiency, which we shall not surrender; a taste and technique for severe self-measurement; incredible finesse in the discrimination and mounting of individual talents. But we owe to it also an overdevelopment of the invidious comparative eye, a trend of attention fascinated by the powers, perquisites, and opinions of the immediate neighbors.

The eternal standard is obscured; hence we do nothing well; we lack sincerity and simplicity; we are suspicious, disunited, flabby; we do not find ourselves; we are not free. Unless we recover a working hold on some kind of religious innervation, our democracy will shortly contain little that is worthy to survive.

Here, it seems to me, is a perfectly fair statement of the case pro and con — the pros most excellent “pros,” — as, for instance, — ‘an impersonal estimate of worth.’ But, if the eternal standard is obscured — and if the other contras are true, have you anything to hope for? This flood-tide of mechanism — of swirling, eddying, devouring, industrial frenzy — will ebb some day, and if the criteria of education have been dissolved in it, if the Walrus and the Carpenter are to be all that are left, have we any good reason for optimistic interest and devotion now ?