Newest Education

WHATEVER other complaints the younger generation may have to make, it cannot assert that its education has been neglected. And if parents may justly be reproached for their lack of enterprise in other fields, surely they have not lagged behind when Progressive Educators have cried ‘Forward!’ So docile, indeed, have these parents been — and so easy the conquests of the reformers — that one humble observer cannot resist putting forth the following radical proposal, with the firm conviction that parents will accept it just as soon as pedagogic support can be found.

Only those few rare spirits who have definitely achieved maturity are in a position to understand the importance of adolescence — a period in which all too many of us permanently linger. Toward getting our little ones through this period all the energies of our educators should be bent, and any errors committed in that stage should be rendered as harmless as possible. The increased attendance in our colleges has, of course, hastened a solution, but even now certain academic errors, especially on the football field, have warped entire lives. The younger we are when we commit our indiscretions, the more likely we are to outgrow them.

But the true purpose of adolescent education should be to teach us the limitations, if not the futility, of pleasure. The permanently unbaked cynic, for instance, is a far more familiar figure than the disenchanted football star. For disciples of joy who have drunk the cup of life to the lees, the future holds nothing but a bleak expanse of work, punctuated by occasional hangovers. Their forces are spent and their lives are one third lived. They are truly tragic figures, as all of us who have played the part well know. Gradually, however, the luckier and wiser ones adjust themselves to their apprenticeship of work, which slowly teaches them how to enjoy life, just as their apprenticeship of pleasure taught them why to revile it. The pity is that the process should take so long and that our period of desolation should last well into the twenties, just when we ought to be at the peak of our powers instead of wandering into unhappy marriages and unsanitary saloons. Ask Dad — he knows.

Only a realistic system of education can solve the problem, and it is such a system that is set forth here. Under present conditions, the wildest spree that most children can enjoy, once they have passed the nursing-bottle stage, is a furtive ice-cream cone or a bottle of ginger ale. Pleasure sneaks up on them gradually, without impact. At ten or twelve they begin smoking cigarettes, and many of them must wait until they have entered high school before getting their first taste of hard liquor. Such a slow process makes each fresh discovery a disappointment, and the only pleasure involved consists in doing what is forbidden. By the time they have dared to try a cigarette, their little palates are ripe for gin — and so on ad infinitum.

Let us therefore give them their pleasures with a bang. Let us give them high-powered kiddie-cars, and turn their nurseries into night clubs. Let us equip our little golden-haired daughters with a certain widely advertised brand of lipstick that makes their kisses worth stealing. Of course a few pioneers have already made faltering steps in this direction, but they have not gone far enough. That youth will rebel is almost certain, and in that certainty defenders of the old order will take abundant solace — in fact, it is hard to see who can honestly object to a vigorous enforcement of such a plan. Youth moves at a rapid pace, and there is every reason to believe that a year or two of compulsory, high-pressure pleasure will produce a state of disillusionment that few full college courses can offer to-day. By the time the ten-yearold of the future is matriculating for grammar school, he—or she — will have attained a hardened cynicism with the freshness of youth still upon it, a brighter, fresher, more wholesome cynicism than we have ever known before.

Many delightful vistas at once appear. It is, for instance, by no means impossible that the next war will be fought by youngsters between the ages of six and ten. Adventurers of four and five will inevitably emerge, of course, but the average fighting age will be somewhat older, just when the pugnacious instinct is at its height. And how vivid will be the disillusionment of the grizzled veterans of such a conflict!

Thus there can be small doubt that by the time the products of this new system reach voting age they will be equipped with a rare knowledge of the world, and at the same time a vigor that will be in no wise diminished by that abiding Weltschmerz which has caused so much recent havoc. Trivial objections naturally arise. Some parents have so utterly forgotten their own youth that they wink at the youthful — nay, childish — insistence on pleasure that their offspring feel. Yet even such palæolithic survivals must recognize that the younger generation is getting younger every day, and is setting out independently on a quest for pleasure that its elders vainly forbid. Indeed, the thirteen-or four teen-yea rolder is causing the same anxiety now that the eighteenor twenty-year-older caused before the war.

The call of the older generation is imperative. Before our children have taken matters into their own hands, let us go them ten years better and insist that as soon as they have passed the teething stage they enter upon a disciplined routine of pleasure similar in motive, if not in detail, to the régime of ancient Sparta. In those days the problem was essentially military, and by catching the future citizen young the Spartans built up a highly efficient State. Now our enemies arc cynicism and pleasure, and our youth should be so equipped as to triumph over them at the earliest possible moment. Every tired business man of forty who has discovered the joys of the flesh for the first time in his life pursues them to the grave with an ardor as desperate and unceasing as his despair. The youth of twenty, on the other hand, sometimes recovers with the years. With a child the period of depression will be a matter of months, and recovery is almost certain. Logically, the case is water-tight, and only courage is needed. This quality parents have already shown to a high degree in their unquestioning acceptance of the Montessori method and other halfway measures. Now let the schoolmen do their part. And if anyone fears for the future, let him look about and ask himself if things could possibly be worse than they are.