This Progressive Education

I

IN the winter of 1923, a wealthy lady, and a friend, took me to see the Lincoln School in New York. All her four children were in it, and the school’s progressive achievements were her pride and joy. We wandered about among groups scattered here and there throughout the building, some working on a project, others writing, still others discussing the ‘culture’ of the Eskimo. Her pleasure in showing me all this ‘work’ culminated in the ever-repeated word ‘happy.’ That the children were happy seemed to be the final test for everything.

I was frankly dazed. A vague picture of our schoolroom floated through my mind: the rows of tiny even benches, the raised desk of our beloved old man with his long beard, and the stuffed bird above his head which had once given rise to a shocking altercation between me and the fatherly professor, who claimed it to be a raven, while I, then seven, asserted it to be a crow, until Herr Herrmann had to climb on to his chair and take it down to discover that it was — a crow. These trifles — what had they to do with the great Lincoln School in Metropolitan New York which I was discovering under the gentle guidance of my distinguished friend? I did not. know, and SO I just said, ‘Yes,’ and ‘Sure,’ and ‘Isn’t that interesting?’ when I was entreated to admire all the many devices which loving teachers and loving parents had joined in inventing to make the children happy. I just remember wondering vaguely where there might be an opportunity for testing such intellectual courage as the contest over the crow had demanded. And I recall my friend’s saying, when we parted, ‘Is n’t it wonderful?’ and my replying, ‘It is surely full of wonders.’

II

My thoughts did not return to the subject of primary education with any amount of vigor until our children approached school age. To be sure, one argument which I had used in discussing the Lincoln School with my friend had stuck in my mind, and I had at times repeated it when the question of elementary education came up at tea parties. Perhaps it had stayed with me merely because she had not been able to answer it, though I am afraid it did not affect her, since she later went in for progressive education in a big way.

I had asked her simply: ’Don’t you think that such a school is better for children like yours, who can look forward to a life of leisure and comfort?’ It was really a horrid question to ask of her, since she was an avowed progressive and social reformer, and nothing was probably as repellent to her as t he thought of a leisure class. And yet, when I elaborated my point, she found it momentarily convincing, or maybe she was merely polite. ‘My children,’ I told her, ’will have to work for a living, and the likelihood is that they will be professional men like myself. Now the competition in all lines of professional work is daily more severe. If we go further in the direction of a socialized community, that competition will further increase, because opportunities will be given to gifted children of impecunious parents who will struggle the harder, since their chance to get an education will depend upon their proficiency.’

It is an argument which I have not seen challenged effectively by anyone. It has grown upon me as time has given me opportunity to become more familiar with the workings of our industrial society, and its future trends. Knowledge and the capacity to think are probably the greatest source of power to-day.

After all, what the community looks for in a professional man is competence. The doctor, the lawyer, the engineer, the scientist, and above all the public servant, must be the best ‘that money can buy,’ as the ruthless expression goes. This is true in the United States as well as in Soviet Russia. In this country it has been customary to let the incompetent die of starvation; in Russia they shoot him for sabotaging the Five-Year Plan.

Now, what makes a man or woman competent in one of these professions? The constituent elements of competence are essentially three: knowledge, the capacity to think, and self-discipline. But what is the capacity to think but intellectual discipline? Certainly this is about all that training can add to whatever native ability there is. And knowledge? How is knowledge acquired? Essentially by mastering an enormous mass of heterogeneous and often extremely boring data.

Take a boy who aspires to become a doctor. He has got to master all the intricate detail of the human body’s anatomy — thousands of bones, muscles, nerves, veins, and so forth. He has to spend months and months bent over an evil-smelling carcass, dissecting it with his own hands. Is it a question of being happy? Ultimately perhaps, but not in the process. The same is true of the other professional careers. A boy may be ideally fitted to be a trial lawyer; yet he has to master the dry-asdust mass of legal lore which may be and probably is utterly repellent to his active, dramatic nature. Unless he possesses self-discipline, and a goodly measure of it, he cannot get his degree, and therefore he cannot pursue the career for which he is intrinsically fitted. So even knowledge comes down to discipline — discipline in the process of acquiring it.

Discipline, a hateful word! And yet, is it so very surprising that a civilization built by men and women whose stern religious convictions revolved around the idea of discipline should demand of its active leaders that very quality which animated its builders? Obviously not. We may have lost the stern religious faith of our forbears, but the house which we live in is their house, and its management requires their qualities. What we have said about the requirements of modern professional life is the inexorable consequence of the initial conception of our industrial civilization. And, though we may yearn for the happy-go-lucky ways of a pastoral society, bringing up our children in such a spirit merely means putting them out of the society into which they are born. If we can leave them enough to enable them to live the life of the charming amateur, the harm may not be personally apparent, though the loss to the community must inevitably be great. But if we are ourselves professional people, unable to amass a fortune, or if we are convinced that such fortunes will melt away under the hot sun of the fiscal burden which mounting social legislation imposes, then we had better take heed, and look for an education which is progressive in the direction in which our society is progressing.

III

How can such moral and intellectual self-discipline be achieved? If we apply the teachings of modern psychology, we should say that it is basically a matter of conditioning children in such a way that certain situations call forth certain reactions. What are these situations, and what the corresponding reactions? In other words, what are the habit patterns involved in selfdiscipline?

This we can answer most simply by looking at a self-disciplined person. A doctor who responded to calls from patients, no matter at what hour of the day or night, would be self-disciplined, would he not? While one who instructed his secretary to tell callers that he was out on an emergency call, when in fact he was playing golf, would not be so considered. The old-fashioned religious way of talking about this difference was to say that one of these doctors had a sense of duty, while the other was devoid of it. But since there is no rational foundation to a ‘sense of duty,’ and since ‘religious convictions’ are the exception rather than the rule among scientifically trained, professional persons to-day, the only other fairly secure foundation for such habit patterns as are desirable from the community’s point of view is the right kind of education.

Now, would an education built upon the quest for happiness procure the habit pattern we are looking for? There are those who claim that it would; that the vivid realization of the distressed mother’s worry would elicit a feeling of distinct unhappiness in the doctor, and would therefore lead him to respond to her call. Unfortunately this argument presupposes high sensitivity and a vivid imagination, two qualities which are notable by their absence in the generality of mankind. Balancing the beckonings of such imaginative sympathy for the sufferings of unknown fellow beings are the siren calls of callous sophistry which argue, ‘She can get another doctor. I hate to be interrupted in my golf. People make a lot of fuss over nothing most of the time, anyway. I ought to have some rest.’

If, however, the childhood education has been of such a nature that indifference, sloth, carelessness, have invariably, in school and at home, brought down unhappy consequences, even if merely a scolding, then there settles upon such a person the habit pattern of feeling uneasy at the neglect of duties. And as, in later life, such a person discovers that attending to one’s appointed tasks brings the gratification of success and fulfillment, you are more likely to make such a man or woman happy and contented than if you let him discover by the painful process of trial and error that life is hard, and ruthlessly destroys those who do not fulfill the expectations of their fellow men.

If the habit pattern of moral selfdiscipline is set by the child’s being disciplined when small, it is the same with intellectual self-discipline. Not to rest content until an experiment, a term paper, or a case study is as perfect as it can possibly be made (in one’s own view) is a habit which develops slowly under the guidance of teachers who so insist at the time when the natural inclination of a child is to drop a matter when it gets hard. Everything gets boring after a while, and yet no technique is ever acquired without constant application, least of all the technique of thinking. And there are many tools for hard thinking which are so boring to acquire that it is almost impossible to acquire them after a certain age. Latin, for example, develops the abstract logical faculty to an unsurpassed extent, because of the rigidity of its grammar. Yet I have known few people who derived that benefit from it after they had reached maturity. The same thing might also be said, though less emphatically, of foreign languages generally.

But we are told that children arc not happy learning Latin. I suggest that this is a question of relative merit. They are not as happy as they would be playing in the yard, but happier than if weeding a vegetable garden. And it shows us that the problem of successful habit patterning of the intellectual and the moral side of a personality go hand in hand. It is for this reason that I lean in the direction of the old-fashioned schoolroom with its rigid system of order and its unadorned sternness. If we acquire in early childhood a sense of these qualities as being innate to a workroom, we shall later find ourselves less appalled by laboratory, library, and court, not to speak of modern factories.

IV

This leads me to another central point — the rhythm between work and play, between tension and release.

One of the most curious features of our soul, as of all life as we know it, is its need for rhythmic alternations of attitude. The so-called ’law of the pendulum’ in politics is one of the best-known manifestations of this need of the human soul to swing from one outlook to another at more or less regular intervals. Our physical life oscillates day and night, between activity and sleep. Considering this cosmic law, it is not surprising that we should also find a vital need for contrast between work and play. In fact, modern psychological researches have long led factory managers to realize that better work can be done if regular periods of rest and recreation are allowed at stated intervals. This is the more true the more intensive the type of work is.

Looking at our industrial society as a whole, we find that there is a definite trend toward more intensive and more exhausting work patterns all the time. This is as true in the professions as it is in the factory. The high-powered pressure of life all around us is not an American characteristic, but a characteristic of our industrial age. Visitors from Berlin to New York have often commented upon the similarity of life in these two cities. If this is the pattern of our life, our schools should be so organized as to prepare our children to make the best of it. Merely to say, ‘ Why, this is horrid! ’ and then proceed to arrange their training so as to fit them into the pastoral life of the golden age, is fearfully to neglect our duty. For as such children grow up the most agonizing friction will thwart their attempts at participating in the life of the community. It is for this reason that I for one am in favor of a school which in its very physical plant suggests work, and which forms a vivid contrast to the home and the play hours.

It is for this reason also that I believe the play hours should be real play hours, utterly untutored, unsupervised, and therefore allowing the children’s fancy free roaming space. I know that there are those who do not feel that they can arrange for such freedom within their homes to-day. On the whole, I should say that it would be wiser to save the large fees now paid to private schools and use the money to keep the children at home, making it a place in which the children can play freely instead of working on projects designed by older people. The habit patterns which such living contrast between school work and home play will develop in children are likely to carry them through life in our industrial society with comparative case, saving them from the Scylla of overwork as well as from the Charybdis of professional failure; for they will bear the tension of work gayly, looking forward with harmonious assurance to the relaxation of their leisure hours, as do countless people now. The danger for their children lurks in their not realizing that the old-fashioned school is responsible for this most necessary habit pattern.

V

Much of what has so far been said receives further support when we consider the general trend of our society. It is commonly recognized by intelligent people everywhere that largescale organization of work is on the increase in all walks of life, even if actual government control is not established. The Clinic of the Mayo Brothers in Rochester, Minnesota, in the medical held, Stone and Webster, of Boston, in the engineering line, are only two extreme examples of what is in fact a very general development. Big universities, coöperative research organizations, large law offices, and so forth, are the order of the day. Everywhere and all around us it becomes increasingly difficult to ‘start out on your own.’ An ever greater percentage of men and women in professional life enter private and government organizations for a ‘career.’

Now it is the general characteristic of all these organizations, whether private or public, to be in a measure bureaucratic. Harvard University and the Bell Telephone System, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the United States Geodetic Survey, all have their little bureaucracy. That means for the individual member a rather rigid system of subordination. Willingness and ability to take orders and instructions, and to carry them out faithfully — that is a habit pattern without which success in modern life is well-nigh impossible. We have all become soldiers in a huge army of workers, though a few among us still ‘ kid ’ ourselves into thinking we arc independent. This is not to say that we are merely cogs in a machine. But we are in part such cogs. In my opinion the ideal attitude under these conditions is an attitude usually achieved by the good soldier: he cheerfully accepts the need for subordination, and yet retains a sufficient detachment from it to safeguard his inner personality. And such an attitude is best developed under a system of schooling which approaches the military pattern to some extent, as the old-fashioned school did. This means, above all else, that the relationship between teacher and student should never be allowed to be sentimentalized.

It is for this reason, and for none other, that I am a great partisan of men teachers for boys. A man, particularly an older man, has about him an air of authority which is most valuable as a subconscious influence upon the average lad. A certain amount of awe surrounds him which he often merely inherits by transference from the father of the boy. There is no question that there are also women who possess this air, as there are men who do not, but when one talks about a school system one has to consider the matter in terms of the usual, rather than the abnormal. This air of authority, or whatever you like to call it, is valuable because it develops without effort the proper emotional responses to superiors which are essential, it seems to me, in our increasingly organized industrial society. This development takes place, I believe, without the teacher doing much about it; it just happens. It has nothing to do with his teaching ability. I have little doubt that on the whole the teaching ability of women is just as great as that of men. It is merely a natural condition which we have to face, whether we like it or not.

Under the conditions of modern professional life, such a predominance of men teachers in the schools might be advocated on quite another ground, too. At home, the influence of the father is very much more limited than that of the mother. My own childhood is quite characteristic: my father, a professor of surgery with a large practice, rarely came home for lunch or dinner, so that our contacts with him were limited to Sundays. His vacations came at other times than ours, and he wanted to travel for relaxation. So, even if he had not died when I was fifteen, my education would have been seriously unbalanced if I had not been taught by a succession of men in school, men often with vigorous personalities whose authority it was easy to accept and worth while to challenge.

In conclusion, I might say to all those on whose toes I have stepped in the course of my rambling plea for the old-fashioned school, ’Pater, peccavi.’ And I will. Yet I submit these arguments to their most earnest consideration. I feel strongly the paradox of people who consider themselves progressive organizing a kind of school calculated to hinder rather than help the development of children destined to carry on our progressive industrial society, of would-be socialists who train their children for a golden pastoral age. Perhaps my changed outlook is due to my having grown up with the reality of a more and more collectivist society before my eyes. I do not consider myself one of those who shudder at the thought of the Soviet Union; but I am also unable to perceive its similarity to the golden age. Did such an age ever really exist? Has n’t mankind at large always had to work rather hard for a living? At any rate, people have to in Communist Russia. And the habit patterns of professional or craft competence, of moral and intellectual discipline, of subordination and courage, are as necessary there as they have ever been anywhere in the world.

So it seems to me that, whether our future is individualist or collectivist, we need schools which will develop those qualities in young men and women which fit them into an industrial society. It is no longer a question of dwelling upon the divine beauty of these several qualities, but of recognizing them as human behavior patterns which, are needed for succeeding in the face of the stark realities of contemporary existence. Happiness comes to him who does not look for it — a maxim which is truer to-day than ever before.