The Dissociated School
I
OUR main concern as a nation, our one possible offering to the cause of civilization, is the organization of a workable democracy. There are other forms of society to be experimented with,— forms which in the end may prove to be better than those we are set out to perfect, — but their development lies in the hands of other nations and other races. Our task here and now is to see what can be done with democracy in a country constituted, as ours is, of diverse peoples and traditions, and of great numbers of human beings distributed over a tremendous extent of territory.
There are two activities which should be of profound interest to our citizens. The first is the functioning of politics. The responsibilities of the electorate, the qualities important in the elected, the performance of their duties by those chosen to represent us, are intimate concerns of each one of us. On the wisdom and integrity of those we choose to rule over us depends not alone the individual security in each day’s existence, but the promise of the coming in of better and finer ways of living together. Yet we have allowed the very names, politics and politician, to become ‘an hissing and a reproach.’ We have absorbed ourselves in our personal affairs, and reserved a shrug of the shoulder for those who busy themselves, from motives noble or base, with our great heritage, sanctified though it has been by the services of a Washington and a Lincoln. The path of history is stained red with the blood of those who have died martyred in the struggle to place this privilege in our hands, and yet we begrudge the modicum of time the duties of citizenship entail upon us. Our one hope of fulfilling the promise to humanity that our type of government holds out is in developing in our people a consciousness of the primary importance and significance to each individual of this participation. For the potential citizen we have deliberately organized the machinery for effecting this purpose by the establishment of our public schools and the passing of laws which compel the attendance at school of all children between specified ages. This second important activity of our common life, the preparation of children for citizenship, has need of the best enthusiasm and the most discriminating attention of which we are capable.
Education, in so far as it means placing the experience of the past in the hands of the next generation, is of moment to all races and peoples. But in a democracy education has an even more extensive responsibility. Democracy is not a type of organization natural to undisciplined man: it is a society based on ideals which entail a heavy strain on the more elemental human instincts. Primitive man accepts the doctrine of all things to the strong and every creature fending for itself. Democracy demands that man respect the weak and the strong alike, and that he safeguard conditions so that he may fend for himself without first fighting off his worst enemy, his fellow being.
The training of individuals to this mutual relation is the exacting task of the educational system of a democracy. Since reactions and attitudes so subtle and complex cannot be taught save by indirection, their imparting accompanies the passing-on of the experience of the race to the children in each generation.
But drilling in the three R’s, or attainment in any other division of learning, must, in this country, be subordinate to, and receive its significance from, the part it plays in the preparation of a child for his place in a democracy. The criterion of a successful education in the United States will never rest solely upon the scholarship achieved, but must measure itself by the degree of loyalty and dedication to American ideals that it inspires. The common-school basic education may seem to the superficial observer a purely pedagogical process; in reality it is essentially moral training, with a superstructure of intellectual exercises, built up on a profound and indefinable base of racial aspiration, ideals, and ethical concepts.
American enthusiasm for public education has been one of our most distinguishing characteristics. No institution we could show has been of more interest to foreign visitors than our public schools. Educational institutions are no novelty to the civilized nations; but a country aiming to educate all its citizens at the expense of the taxpayer is attempting a task whose significance has not been lost on serious students of Western civilization.
When the Philippines fell into our reluctant hands, we invaded their shores, not with conquering battalions, but with an army of schoolteachers. We were the amusement of the chancelleries of Europe in our intent to overcome the Filipino with the spellingbook instead of with the sword. Those experienced in oriental administration disparaged our efforts. But it was not a fantastic move on the part of the administrators of our new dependency. It was the logical carrying-over to the newer part of our country of the principles of democracy itself. We had to ask ourselves, how could the Filipinos, or any other people for that matter, be made fit for the burden of self-government to which we ultimately destined any people under our flag, except through discipline and training, one with another, in the common language, the common ideals, and the common responsibilities that they must eventually bear in common? So the little Filipinos, rich and poor, high and low, were brought together to study the primer of that difficult subject, the technique of creating a democratic society.
The results justify us in cherishing some pride in our achievement. Arducus as was the task, and imperfect and incomplete as was the work done, the foundation was sound, and we may look with hope to the future.
II
We have given the gift of public education as the best we had to offer to our new brothers in the Pacific. Are we within our own borders recreant to this great ideal that we have attempted to realize on those distant islands? What are the facts? Is America, which has held the public or democratic school equal in importance to liberty and justice for all, as prerequisite to her very existence, ready to betray the one God, and erect many brazen idols in his place?
The spread of private and sectarian schools in this country in the last twenty years has gone along with a very great increase in the proportion of citizens of alien traditions and customs in our midst. The withdrawal from the public schools of more and more of the children of those already Americanized greatly enhances the difficulty of making a unit of this inchoate mass of human beings that we call America. What does such a shift of large numbers of children signify? One can think of it only as the recrudescence in this country of the aristocratic, sectarian, exclusive traditions of the older European civilizations—attitudes incompatible with belief in democracy, with groupings determined by individual ability and capacity independent of inherited class or religious associations.
Are not these groups of children set apart for reasons antagonistic to the purposes, and inimical to the upbuilding, of a democracy?
There seem to be three main currents of feeling which lie at the base of this apostasy — all three types of human exclusiveness. Exclusiveness as a moral attitude is singularly out of place in a country built up as ours has been; and yet its disaffecting influence has penetrated into the very heart of our educational system. The type of most importance, as far as numbers are concerned, is religious exclusiveness. In a land where religious freedom is supposed to be secure, specifically safeguarded by both Federal and State constitutions; where religious tolerance itself has almost the status of a universal creed; where the fundamentals of the moral life—honesty, loyalty, responsibility, consideration for others, respect for difference of opinion — are matters of common agreement and are basic to instruction in the publicschool system; hundreds of thousands of future citizens are withdrawn from the public schools, and given an education with those of their own faith, in parochial schools of the d i fferen t denom i nations.
By the very nature of things such training cannot fail to be narrowing. However noble the religious ideals taught, an American school which has failed to be first an instrument of democracy has failed fundamentally. In a theocracy such schools would be appropriate; in a democracy they are an anomaly. It is a sad commentary on the trust that religious leaders have in the holding power of their own beliefs, that they dare not spare their young believers five hours a day, for five days in the week, for nine months in the year, to a training for citizenship in company with the varied groups which go to the making of an American community, lest they lose the faith of their fathers.
The second type of exclusiveness is social. Parents who fear for their children physical or moral contamination from the children of less favored families; or who desire to have their children associate with those of a social status to which they belong or to which they aspire to belong; or who wish their offspring to know only those whose walk in life will parallel their own, send their children to private schools, selected on the basis of the particular type of social exclusiveness that they desire or can attain. This group is largely reënforced by those who do not think at all but merely follow the lead of those about them.
Such reactions are not confined to democratic society. Wherever human beings congregate, the imitative instinct, the fear of being different from one’s group, dominates the weaker members of the community and determines their conduct. In a country like ours, with large numbers of new and alien types being rapidly injected into our midst, the earlier immigrants and their imitators are separating themselves from the more recent; fire grouping themselves defensively. to preserve, not democracy, but the habits and customs which, they feel, cannot withstand the onslaught of the aggressive and dominant peoples now invading our shores. Yielding to this kind of exclusiveness not only impoverishes the individual child involved, but it strikes at the very root of American life; for it crystallizes and defines the class lines which, to our common gain, have been fluid in the past. The grandchild of the rich man of to-day may suffer from this calcifying of our social life, no less than the grandchild of the poor in our midst. These children of the immigrant are here. They cannot be driven away. They will inevitably form a part, and an increasingly numerous part, of our citizenry. If America is to preserve the ideals on which it was founded, these children must in some way learn what these ideals are.
But how can we Americanize without Americans? The teachers cannot carry the burden by precept alone. Our main dependence must be upon example, association, shared experience. And from whom can a child more readily learn such mysteries of human relation and attitude than from those of his own generation? As it is now, differences are emphasized, rather than likenesses. The children of the prosperous miss the sympathy and understanding that come to the various racial, religious, and social groups through the discipline and fellowship of an education shared in common; the children of the less prosperous miss the opportunity for a natural and certain assimilation of American points of view; and the development of the whole country halts, and the problem of the foreigner in our midst becomes increasingly acute.
In addition the community loses the chance to pick out, from every economic and social level, the children of superior ability in the total child-population, to whom it desires to give that special training and rapid advancement which will equip them to render their best service to the cause of democracy. The public schools are accused of disregarding the needs of the unusually gifted child. In varying degrees this is true of all educational institutions, since the needs of the majority of the children press so insistently upon the educators that their attention is distracted from the very dull and the very bright. But the public-school officials are as alive to this defect as any others concerned with the education of the young, and the machinery of the schools is being adapted to meet the country’s demand for trained leaders in all forms of activity. Those destined for leaders in a democracy, however, are destined to failure if trained in a totally different environment from those they are to lead; for a prime requisite for leadership is an understanding of the diversity that is humanity.
The third type of exclusiveness is intellectual. Enthusiasm for the socalled new education in this country is equaled only by enthusiasm for the new medical panaceas successively acclaimed by health enthusiasts; and the varieties of the one are as numerous as those of the other. One apparently needs to know very little about education to develop a jejune fervor over schools for self-expression, schools for self-discipline, schools with free furniture, schools with no furniture, outdoor schools, fresh-air schools, schools for the cultivation of the impulses, schools for the development of the will, schools of correct, posture, project schools, progressive schools, schools training the whole child through music, through the use of the large muscles, through deep breathing.
To the novice they all Sound alluring: so much so, that it is hard to choose among them, since they all seem to promise the perfect child, made out of the more or less nondescript material that we offer our educational systems in the form of our children.
What the newcomer to the problems of education fails to observe is that these schools all alike ignore the purpose fundamental to education in a democracy. The public schools of our Republic are not designed primarily to train native ability, or to follow the pupil’s interests of the moment, or to provide a child with the stimulus of unhampered work or play. For the preservation of the Republic the potential citizens must be taught the principles of democratic society, and learn to understand and to work with their fellow sovereigns. The one place to accomplish this is in the school, before the artificial divisions accompanying maturity arise, while the mutual relations are simple and the consciousness of likenesses is keener than that of unlikenesses.
An additional advantage is furnished by the fact that the school offers an opportunity for activity, supervised by trained persons, in an atmosphere favorable to bringing out the best rather than the worst of human nature. In this environment may be wrought those slow profound alterations of personality which make of diverse races and temperaments the true American; and the children of our nation, in understanding companionship, may come into their own. Any refinement of educational method sinks into insignificance beside this great endowment, the quintessential quality of our public-school system.
III
How do these various dissociated schools justify their existence?
The sectarian schools say, of course, that religious training is indispensable to the life present and to come; that it is more important than training in democracy; that the one does not exclude the other; and that the religious and intellectual education of the child are inseparable. In so far as they say that moral and intellectual training are inseparable, they speak as Americans. When, however, they assert that sectarian and intellectual education must take place together, they are aligning themselves against what we believe to be a principle on which this country was founded — fundamental separation between Church and State. The danger to the advocates of sectarian education is as great as the danger to the country as a whole; for the training of sectarian groups to think and act as groups means the emergence of religious prejudices and intolerance. The greater fellowship is sacrificed to the lesser, and these citizens of an America which was able to be a refuge for the oppressed of all nations are insidiously undermining the very foundations of their own security.
The private schools, the outgrowth of social and intellectual exclusiveness, are a unit in acclaiming their belief in the public schools. Parents, principals, patrons vie with each other in praise of the idea of public education, and in declaring the importance of the activity of the public schools in building up American civilization. But their personal world bristles with exceptions. The parents believe in the public schools — for other people’s children; the principals think public schools the natural refuge for routine educators; the patrons recognize the function of the public schools as the Americanizing agency for our large foreign population. They belong to that naïve group which is convinced that a good textbook and a skillful teacher can perform the miracle of Americanizing the socially insulated alien.
The reasons for sending individual children to private schools are as numerous as the children. A reluctance to impose the burden of the education of one’s own child on the community as a whole; a professed willingness to use the public schools if they were still as good as they used to be; a desire to use them when they become as good as it is hoped they will be; an eagerness to send a child to the public schools as soon as everyone else does; a conviction that one’s own child is too delicate, or too talented, or too sensitive, for exposure to the anticipated rough hurly-burly of public education and must have the special tenderness and consideration which, in the judgment of the anxious parents, can be secured only at great price, in a private school — these are a few of the reasons that pacify the consciences of American fathers and mothers in their apostasy to democratic educational ideals.
Some private schools are satisfied that their main purpose is public service, stimulating public schools by serving as competitors. This ingenuous assumption ignores the competition between public schools themselves, from school to school, from city to city, from state to state, which, in its intensity and fervor, leaves the sporadic educational achievements of the private schools a place of very minor influence. Only a blinded enthusiast could claim that the private schools are created to serve the community as a whole. They are particularistic institutions, designed to serve a portion of society which, in this aspect of life, is willing to be indifferent to, if not actually in contravention of, democratic ideals.
Still other schools feel that they serve as experimental plants for the testing out of new educational ideas. Some are undoubtedly able to emphasize, by superior methods of achieving publicity, educational procedure which it is well now and then to have brought into the foreground of public attention. But groups of enthusiastic parents who establish or back a private school, with the expectation that thereby they are going to make a contribution to educational reform, have an exaggerated sense of the accomplishment possible to an institution so constituted. Any educational development in this country, to be fundamental, must grow out of the soil of democracy. It cannot be nurtured under exotic conditions, and then be expected to grow in any climate. Experiments, to have intellectual quality and staying power, must be tried out in schools connected with universities, or other similar institutions, where scientific, critical methods may be applied, exact data accumulated, and conditions approximating those of the average school provided. Results achieved with small groups, the criterion of whose selection is solely economic, are neither fundamental nor applicable to a true crosssection of society.
The less militant reasons for the establishment of the dissociated schools are often accompanied by sweeping criticisms of the public schools. The teachers are condemned as ignorant, the instruction as poor, the pupils as dirty, profane, and prone to disregard the early symptoms of disease, the school curriculum as impoverished and narrow, the schools as crowded and unsanitary. The system is accused of being rigid and inelastic, forcing the individual child into an inflexible mould; the school authorities are denounced as corrupt, allowing political influence to determine appointments; and the whole organization is held up to scorn, as absolutely impervious to new ideas. It is no wonder that, in face of such a formidable arraignment, the timid hesitate to plunge their cherished young into so degenerating an atmosphere.
On whom do such criticisms reflect? If the facts are as the critics state, they are a tremendous challenge to the citizens of a community which could allow its citizenship to be corrupted at its very source. If the criticisms are unjustified, they are an equal challenge to the citizens to rise to the defense of their institutions. Of course, as a matter of fact, such criticisms are neither all true nor all false. The perfect educational method has not yet been found, either in the democratic or in the dissociated school, and probably never will be, since education, like other human devices, must be in a state of constant flux, a changing system in a changing world.
But the important thing is that we, who are the source of all authority in our democracy, are the bearers of the major responsibility.
Schools which the patron of the dissociated institution feels are not fit places in which to educate his children are unfit places in which to educate any American child; and he and the rest of us are morally liable for the wrongs we are inflicting on the children of the community. As citizens, we are consenting to compulsory education for the children of people less favored by fortune than ourselves, in these schools from which we turn with abhorrence. Every consideration which, we feel, justifies our withdrawal from the school is equally present in the families of the poor. Precocity, feeblemindedness, delicate health, sensitiveness to crowded rooms, to defective ventilation, to long hours of confinement and to working with large groups, are not the perquisites of the rich alone. Any superiority of educational environment which the prosperous family feels that it must have for its children is tenfold more needed by the children of the poor, to whom school is often the only window open to the light.
IV
The American parent is a person of conscience. Whether his child is in the democratic or the dissociated school, he wants to find a way out of the difficulty. His desire is not only to do the best he can for his own child, but to serve the larger purposes of democracy as well. What can he do? The irreducible minimum is the placing of his child in the public school. Everything else will follow. However he might assure himself that, though he withdrew his child, he would give his major efforts to the improvement of the public-school system, he could not do it with the same zeal and dedication that he would give to the cause if the fate of his own were involved.
We inevitably understand the big things of life best through the small and the personal.
We deplore the fact that our country is becoming less rather than more democratic. We are alternately puzzled and outraged by the strange medley of unfamiliar tongues, alien ideals, and militant critics that we find in our midst; but, unlike the amœba, which encircles and absorbs the foreign substance, we are tempted to withdraw at the first touch, and reduce our area of contact by every means in our power. This makes neither for understanding nor for concerted action.
‘ Yes, ‘ says the agitated parent, ‘that is all very well; but I am only one parent. The school organization is a rigid, relentless machine, inaccessible to pressure from me; and meanwhile my own children are physically suffering and mentally starving. Must I beat out my energies against hopeless inertia? Shall my own children be sacrificed while I tackle the larger task, which is, after all, not my first responsibility? You seem to assume that my children are only a part of a great whole. But to me they seem of primary importance, If every parent thought of his progeny in terms of the national life, would not our race go to destruction? ‘
Each parent naturally thinks of his own children as vitally important; but their importance is associated in their parents’ minds with the personal affections. Biologically they count only as a portion of the stream of life, while socially their significance lies in their being a contributing element to the building up of a generation. One of the great gifts of parenthood is the opportunity it offers, through the emerging needs of the individual child, to realize the wants of that child’s contemporaries. Fatherhood and motherhood become privileged citizenship. Those without children cannot know so intimately the awakening longings of childhood, do not feel the hunger and suffer the deprivation, are not so conscious of the incompleteness in the environment, are not actuated by the same incentive to alleviate, and cannot see so promptly the needs, which must be met as they arise or the chance will be lost forever for that particular generation.
The larger social view of one’s child is, after all, the only possible way of seeing a human being. We have all become so inextricably a part one of another, that our every act is determined by conditions remote from us. A murder at Serajevo may tear our lives asunder, and yet be hardly noticed in the daily paper. The fate of our children and ourselves is so tied up with that of our fellows, that we cannot think of them as separate. What will determine the happiness, the dignity of life, the worth of living to our children? Does not the richness and promise of their existence, even as children, flow from the fact that they are little Americans, a part of this beloved democracy of ours? Other elements in their environment and opportunity are of subordinate value. To share from childhood true fellowship with the other children of their community, to be trained with them to take a worthy part in the upbuilding of their country, is to come from earliest youth into the fullness of their inheritance. If, through the indifference of the able and the well-to-do, the level of education sinks so low that democracy becomes a farce; if, through the withdrawal of the older Americans from contact with the newer Americans in their one natural meeting-place, the public schools, class-divisions crystallize and inevitable suspicions and discontents follow; if revolution rears its ugly head in the midst of groups with no clue to each other’s motives and purposes — of what value will the religious and social affiliations, the intellectual finesse, be to our segregated and sheltered, our thought-for and protected children? Their acquired superiorities would be all burned up in the fierce flame of an avenging and destructive proletariat.
V
In the midst of the chorus of strictures against, the public schools and justifications for the existence of the dissociated schools, one element is almost never formulated, which nevertheless stirs obscurely in the consciousness of every parent. As the unit of community life, both in the city and in the country, has grown larger, the parents have been more and more detached from contact with the schools and more and more alienated from participating in the education of their children. Much of what the child formerly learned at home he is now being taught at school. Some of the parents are, of course, glad to shift the burden, and hardly follow the child to school, even in imagination; but the more enlightened see the change with regret, and are as eager to serve the child in the school as they formerly were at those same tasks in the home. For this reason, many parents cherish an enthusiasm for the dissociated school, where they feel, through the payment of a tuition fee, a right to participation in the school activities which the more remote association through a tax-levy does not seem to their minds to confer.
This copartnership between the parent and the school is not only a natural accompaniment of the child’s education, but an essential part of the adult’s education. The school is the place not alone to train the child, but to develop, through the threefold relation of teacher, child, and parent, a community sense.
But is it necessary to resort to the dissociated school to satisfy this parental yearning? No institution in our democracy needs responsible interest on the part of our citizens more than the public schools. And no group holds so strategic a position as the parents. As voters, they are the authority for the establishment of the school system; through the taxes, they are the source of the income for the support of the organization; they become the clientele of the schools by virtue of the children they supply to be educated. What more natural than for the parents to put out their hands to take what is, after all, their own? The surprising yet easily predictable fact is the extreme sensitiveness and rapid response of the system to pressure from the parents.
The one impediment is the likelihood that pressure will confine itself to criticism. Criticism by experts is stimulating, but chance condemnation by parents, who are very prone to hear one side only, is apt to be unfair and to have a deadening effect on the very system which it is hoped to turn to better ways. A mutuality of interest which finds its most natural outlet in indictment of whatever is does not hold out much promise of understanding service on either side. It is fatally easy to find fault, and to decide that stupid conservatism and reaction are responsible for the ignoring of, or opposition to, one’s suggestions.
There are undoubtedly cases, when the children of a public school are suffering from stupidity, graft, or inefficiency, in which fierce criticism and unwavering assault on entrenched authority is the only right course to pursue. But to the one school suffering from these menaces there are hundreds suffering from the indifference, inertia, complacency, or mere fretful faultfinding on the part of the citizens of the community. The responsibility can never be wholly that of the school-administration or of the teachers. A part of the blame must be borne by those who stand aside, expecting miracles to be performed upon their children, — miracles that the parents have never been able even to approximate in the home, — and who yet feel only reproach for a school that does not make scholars of dullards and paragons of the incorrigible.
How can the parents be an integral part of the school system? Two distinct movements, one within the school and one without, are evidence of the consciousness of that need on the part both of the school authorities and of the parents themselves. The visiting teachers, who visit the homes and consult the parents and relatives in cases in which children are out of adjustment to the school organization, are already established in some schools, where a failure to do the best service to the child is found to be due to a failure on the part of the school and the home to understand each other sufficiently to work together and not at cross-purposes. The parent-teacher associations, beginning to be organized all over the United States, offer opportunity to both parents and teachers to meet, to discuss their common problems, and to discover how they can be most helpful to each other in their mutual care of the children.
Both these movements are, it is to be hoped, but tiny beginnings, destined to a great development, bringing about more intimate relations between the home and the school. Their growth means enrichment in the education of the child and a more real content in the citizen’s consciousness of his place in the community.
A hundred practical difficulties stand in the way of full and ardent coöperation between the parents and the school but none that will not yield to a faith in each other’s right purposes on the part of the two groups involved. The school authorities, long the target of criticism usually unintelligent and uninformed, all too often based on a supposed wrong done to an individual child, are justifiably wary of interference. Parents too often fail to realize that the professionals of the school system are, or ought to be, experts; that, in so far as they are not, the responsibility rests upon the citizen, through his elected representatives, to see that they are; and, in so far as they are, to recognize that it is a rare parent who is more informed on pedagogical problems or problems of administration than the expert. The expert knows also the limitations of the budget, the capacity of the teachers and the pupils to take advantage of innovations, the needs of the system as a whole, the potential attitude of a public which may be led but cannot be driven, as the mere parent cannot expect to know.
On the other hand, the over-cautious, the apprehensive school official will welcome the aid that enthusiasm and coöperative effort from the parents will bring to the difficult problems of education. The master of the school that is suffering from poor ventilation is unable to open the windows and withstand the wrathful criticism of those parents, to be found in every school, who are fearful of a draft. But he will welcome a movement originating with the parents themselves, asking for fresh-air rooms or a new ventilating system, for he knows they can deal with the nonconforming parent as he cannot. Principals and teachers become weary in the long battling with ignorance and prejudice, and find fresh courage in an eagerness of parents to make conditions as favorable as they can be made. There are so many things that coöperation and a little money can accomplish. Paying the salaries of school nurses; supplementing the alltoo-restricted budget for school supplies; buying lanterns, slides, maps, pictures, expensive reference-books, unusual musical equipment, ample material for large project work; all the types of expenditure that the school budget does not supply, or is not yet ready to authorize as a part of the regular equipment of all the schools; establishing a fund, to be drawn upon by the principal and teachers, for enrichment of the school-life and curriculum — these are services which lie ready to the hands of parents. They are services that not only fulfill an immediate purpose, but give courage and stimulus to the teachers, whose educational enthusiasms are so often restricted by limitations which the generosity and enlightened self-interest of the parents should spare them. How meagre the return from the investment of one child’s tuition in a dissociated school compared with this giving — not to the growth of the individual child, but to the development of that part of his generation which lies closest at hand!
Enthusiasm for the dissociated schools as places for the educational experimenters seems to ignore the fact that most institutions of learning worthy of the name are eager to try out new ideas. The public schools are no exception to this rule. The superintendents, principals, and teachers alike chafe at the restrictions which the limitations of the budget place upon their ability to try improved methods of instruction. A tithe of the money poured into our dissociated schools, if added to the budgets of public schools as money to be used for experimental purposes, would serve to advance education more rapidly, and on a sounder social basis, than is possible in groups as narrowly selected as those in the dissociated schools. Parents in each public school can band themselves together to aid such a movement on a small scale in their individual institutions; and, in so far as they succeed, be part of an experiment which, in the end, will expand into a fully democratic and growing education, because it is built up of the efforts of the whole community, adjusted to the exigencies of public training of the children, and kept sensitive to changing conditions in the world outside, through participating interest by the citizens themselves. Many a new educational reform, enthusiasm for which has induced parents to put their children into dissociated schools which advertise the reform, might be available for all the children of the community if the enthusiasts would put the same energy into arousing their fellow citizens to demand the new method in the public institutions, and the same money into making it possible. Any improvement in the larger organization means, not a more privileged child, but a more privileged community.
VI
We are much given to oratory about the work of our army of schoolteachers, but we seldom trouble ourselves about the individual teachers who are bearing the burden of making Americans of the chance material produced within our borders and thrown upon our shores. They need us as much as we need them. If the quality of the men and women taking up the profession of teaching to-day is inferior to what it was a generation ago, the blame must rest on our shoulders. We have failed to show the members of the teaching profession the high honor which is their due, and to give them the adequate remuneration which is their right. We owe them sympathy and understanding in the gigantic task which is laid upon them. We must recognize that we belong to a great partnership, neither the parent nor the teacher for the service of the individual child, but all three for the service of the community, deriving our sanction from the common will and our strength from the common effort.
It is only as we see the teacher struggling with her problems in a chaos of nationalities, backgrounds, and habits, that we realize the moral significance of the public-school discipline, to which many of the less disciplined parents in our communities object. The very recognition of that discipline and the submission to its dictates are part of the larger moral adjustment that every citizen in a democracy must make. He must be ready to yield his lesser liberties for the sake of his greater. The parent’s responsibility is an equal acceptance, and a wise interpretation to the child, of the dignity of consent.
Richness of life and experience comes to the privileged in every community. But that enrichment derives its quality and meaning from its occurrence in a civilization where men are free, where opportunity is open to all, and where fellowship is above feuds and social antagonisms. Nothing that he has is his alone to enjoy. In part, it belongs to those whose ideals and self-restraints have allowed him to be happy and to delight in beauty. In part, it belongs to those who are to make the new world out of the old, and who need every treasure of the past to build into the structure of the future. Think what our schools might be if every citizen shared the beautiful things of his life with the children in those schools! If every possessor of a rare picture, a beautiful Greek vase, a unique rug, a treasure from a far country, an ancient musical instrument, possessions with an interesting history, autographs of famous people, strange birds or beasts, costumes of other countries, would hold always in the background of his mind that he must share these things with the children of the community; if every citizen made sure that the children of the public schools should never miss the chance to see distinguished visitors; should always have available the services of the musically gifted; should be able to call the hoarded historic treasures to their need, and, in so far as they could, or wished to, use them, should be assured that nothing would be withheld; if the manufacturers, the agriculturists, and the transportation agencies could feel a responsibility to the education of the next generation, inviting the schoolchildren to see improved technique and new methods of conserving life and energy — then we might feel that the building of the Beloved Community had indeed begun. One cannot think of our communities, rich in lovely things gathered from all the world, without sighing for the public schools so needlessly impoverished of beauty.
A wise and discriminating use of the community resources is not something to be achieved in a day. They must serve as a supplement to the required work of the schools, and be fitted into the programme. In so far as the school organization is not devised to profit by what the community has to give, it must be modified, not alone for the sake of the child to be technically educated, but for the sake of the parent and the citizen, who need to be trained into the fullness of community consciousness. The Children’s Museum is one of the means of bringing this about, particularly when it is a part of the school system; for it gathers gifts and loans from the public, and puts at the service of the children not only such treasures, but the volunteer teaching abilities of travelers, naturelovers, and experts of all kinds in the community. It has a special function as a medium between the community resources and the school needs. Such paths must be kept open. The unpaid advisory committees of experts, occasionally employed in connection with different educational departments, serve as another means of utilizing the abilities of the community for the benefit of the children, which may well take on a very great extension in the coming years.
Certainly, whatever we, as individuals or in groups, pour into the public schools comes back a hundredfold to better life for us all.
Interest in the schools founded in the spirit of exclusiveness and detachment is a distraction from our preponderating interest in schools founded in the spirit of democracy. The abandonment of the dissociated schools would be shortly reflected in an improvement of our public schools. The fact that some states have debated the subject of the abolition of all schools other than public, and that one has legislated to that effect, shows the direction of democratic thought in this country, and reflects an attitude to whose significance we must not blind ourselves. Is it possible that the time may come when, in sheer self-defense, a democracy will have to resort to so undesirable an expedient?
Meanwhile, the public schools are here — the hope not alone of the children of the immigrant and of the poor, but of all the children of the Republic. What these schools teach, our country will be. No child can without impoverishment be deprived of participation in the training in democracy that they give. We parents of America have our unique opportunity to make ourselves partners in the great venture of public education.