Peripatetic school

“ We cannot go back to any period when school life was not fraught with miseries. Classic writers paint in grim colors the harshness of the pedagogues who ruled in Greece and Rome. Mediæval authors tell us more than enough of the passionless severity that swayed the monastic schools,—a severity which seems to have been the result of an hereditary tradition rather than of individual caprice, and which seldom interfered with the mutual affection that existed between master and scholar. ”

“ In world affairs we deem initiative a real asset, but one of the saddest of our mistakes in ordering school [55] activities consists in our fervid attempts to prove that the school is detached from life and something quite apart from the world. We would have our pupils believe that, when they are in school, they are neither in nor of the world. At our commencement exercises we tell the graduates that they are now passing across a threshold out into the world; that they are now entering into the realms of real life ”

“ But, in the school, the teachers rejoice and congratulate one another when their pupils achieve a grade of seventy-five. It matters nothing, apparently, that this grade of seventy-five is a fictitious thing with no basis in logic or reason, in short a mere habit that has no justification save in tradition, and that, in very truth, it is a concession to inaccuracy and ignorance. When we promote the boy for solving three out of four problems we virtually say to him that the fourth problem is negligible and he may as well forget all about it. ”

“ It would be a calamity to have duplicate human beings, and yet the traditional school seems to be doing its utmost to produce duplicates. The native tendencies of one boy impel him [30] toward the realms of nature, but, all heedless of this big fact, we bind him hard and fast to some academic post with traditional bonds of rules and regulations and then strive to coerce him into partaking of our traditional pabulum. ”

“ The pupils in the school have dreams and aspirations that reach far beyond the limits of the picture of our fancy. And all these aspirations are a part of life and so are indigenous in the vitalized school. And woe betide the teacher who would abridge or repress these dreams and aspirations. They are the very warp and woof of life, and the teacher who would eliminate them would suppress life itself. That teacher is in sorry business who would fit her pupils out with mental or spiritual strait-jackets, or mold them to some conventional pattern, even though it be her own. ”

“ The languages, Latin, German, French, Spanish, are expressions and interpretations of life, and they may be made to appear what they really are if the teacher is resourceful enough and skillful enough to attach them to the life of the pupil by the human ligaments that are ever at hand. Chemistry, physics, botany, and physiology all throb with life if only the teacher 257can place the fingers of the pupils on their pulses. Given the human teacher, the human child, and the humanized teaching, the vitalized school is inevitable. ”

“ In the end we should get much the larger harvest of intellectual power, and much the larger man.”
We cannot hope to achieve the reconstructed school until our notion of teaching and teachers has been reconstructed. When we secure teachers who have education and not mere knowledge, we may begin to hope. We must look to the colleges and normal schools to furnish such teachers. If they cannot do so, our schools must plod along on the path of tradition without hope of finding the better way. ”

“ The desire for self-expression is fundamental in the human mind, as the study of archæology abundantly proves. Since this is true, every school should be a school of expression if the nature of the child is to have full recognition. Without expression there is no impression, 26and without impression there is no education that has real value. The more and better expression in the school, therefore, the more and better the education in that school. In the vitalized school we shall find freedom of expression, and the absence of unreasoning repression. ”

“ Schools of education.—Another obstacle in the way of progress toward the vitalized school is the attitude and teaching of many who are connected with colleges of education and normal schools. We have a right to look to them for leadership, but we find, instead, that their practices lag far in the rear of their theories. They teach according to such devitalized methods and in such an unvitalized way as to discredit the subjects they teach. It is only from such of their students as are proof against their style of teaching that we may hope for aid. ”

“ The circle of their wants is extended until it includes their needs, and these, in turn, are transformed into wants. Thus all the pupils ascend to a higher level of appreciation of the things that make for a more comfortable and agreeable civilization. They work under the spell of leadership, for real leadership always inspires confidence.
Society and the school.—At its best, society is 47but an enlarged copy of the vitalized school. Or, to put it in another way, the vitalized school is society in miniature. As the school is engaged in the work of making substitutions, so, in fact, is society. ”

“ It is not easy to define living, much less complete living. All that is hoped for here is to bring the matter to the attention of all teachers and to cause them to realize that the quest for a definition of complete living will be for them and for their pupils an exhilarating experience. The vitalized school will belie its name if it does not strive toward a solution of the difficulty, and any school that approximates a satisfactory definition will be proclaimed a public benefactor. ”

“ The child studies arithmetic, is subjected to an examination that may represent the bent or caprice of the teacher, manages to struggle through seventy per cent of the answers, is promoted to the next higher grade, and, thereupon, starts on his journey around another circle. And we call this education. These processes constitute the mechanics of education, but, in and of themselves, they are not education. One of the big problems of the school today is to emancipate both teachers and pupils from the erroneous notion that they are. ”

“ There were, for the privileged few in the universities, traditional errors and prejudices, authoritarian dogmas, mixed up with the truths which modern research has brought to light. For the people there was primary instruction, which was, and is, a method of taming children. The school was a sort of riding-school, where natural energies were subdued in order that the poor might suffer their hard lot in silence. Real education, separated from faith—education that illumines the mind with the light of evidence—is the creation of the Modern School. ”

“ It is not easy to conceive a situation that lacks the element of history in one or another of its phases or manifestations. Whether the pupil travels, or embarks upon a professional life, or associates, in any relation, with cultivated people, he will find a knowledge of history not only a convenience but a real necessity, if he is to escape the feeling of thralldom. The utilitarian value of school studies has been much exploited, and that phase is not to be neglected ”

“ She must not allow one to perish through her ignorance or malpractice, for she would keep her soul free from the charge of murder. And in the fullness of manhood and womanhood her pupils achieved the full symphony of life. They had won the goals toward which their teacher had been leading. Their spiritual qualities had converged and become life, and they had attained the super-goal. In the joy of their achievement their teacher repeated the words of her own Teacher, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” ”

“ Obviously the searching of the heart concerning the values of a college education does not reach to the essentials of the academic tradition. The ancient notions remain ineffable and inviolable. They presume that students exist for the sake of the school, not the school for the sake of the students. ”

“ All these are life; and from this life we are striving to extract strength that our feeling may be deeper, our thinking higher, our aspirations wider and more lofty, our love purer and nobler, and our own enjoyment greater. By absorbing the life that is all about us we strive to have more abundant and abounding life.
The teacher’s province.—Such is the province of one who essays the task of teaching school. School is life, as we have been told; but, at the same time, it is a place and an occasion for teaching life. If we could detach history from life, it would cease to be history. ”

“ If the school is good for one child, it is good for all children. Indeed, the school is maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of and profit by its presence. If there were no schools, our civilization would surely decline. If school attendance should cease at the end of the fifth year, then we would have a fifth-year civilization. It rests, therefore, with the parents of the children, in large measure, whether we are to have an eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization, or a college civilization. ”

“ They are magnanimous and would refuse to be a part of any life that would decline from this high plane. In this corps there are no hysterics, no heroics, no strain, no stress. They are, first of all, successful human beings; and their expert teaching is an expression of their human qualities. Their teaching is borne along on the tones of conversation. They know that well-modulated tones of voice contribute to the culture and well-being of the school. Should a teacher ever indulge in screeching, nagging, 328hectoring, badgering, or sarcasm, she would find herself ostracized. ”

“ We must not regard these philosophical schools as higher schools in the modern sense; though each school had a head who had the management in his own hands, and at his death appointed a successor, yet there was no question of an organised scheme of studies or of instruction regularly occupying certain hours of the day, or, indeed, of any of the conditions which could be compared with our modern universities, at any rate not before the period of the Roman Empire. ”

“ One of the things that strike visitors to the School is the look of happiness on the boys’ faces, and there is no doubt that there is none of the usual feeling of dislike for school life which one finds in institutions where the only object held before the boys is the passing of examinations. Examinations have been abolished in the lower classes, except once a year when tests of each boy’s progress are made by the teacher who has been teaching the boy himself. ”

“ She causes her pupils to know them as they would come to know people in her home. Nor do they ever mistake one for the other or confuse their actions. They know them too well for that. These characters are made to stand wide apart, so that, being thus seen, they will ever after be known. History is not a directory of names, but groups of people going about their tasks. They hunger, and thirst, and love, and hate, and struggle with their environment as their descendants are doing to-day.
Language and vitality.—When she is teaching a language, it is never less than a living language. ”

“ Prelude.—When the vitalized school has finally been achieved there will result a radical departure from the present procedure in the matter of examinations. A teacher in the act of preparing a list of examination questions of the traditional type is not an edifying spectacle. He has a text-book open before him from which he extracts nuts for his pupils to crack. It is a purely mechanical process and only a mechanician could possibly debase intelligence and manhood to such unworthy uses. ”

“ In setting out to establish a rational school for the purpose of preparing children for their entry into the free solidarity of humanity, the first problem that confronted us was the selection of books. The whole educational luggage of the ancient system was an incoherent mixture of science and faith, reason and unreason, good and evil, human experience and revelation, truth and error; in a word, totally unsuited to meet the new needs that arose with the formation of a new school. ”

“ The studies are adapted to the boy and not the boy to the studies. No boy need discontinue school to find on the outside something that is congenial, for, within the school, he may find work that represents life in all its phases. ”

“ The teachers and pupils are too genuine ever to become thrasonical, and no teacher or pupil is ever heard to boast of anything pertaining to the school. They neither boast nor apologize, but leave every visitor free to make his own appraisement of their school and its belongings. The teachers are too truly cultured and the pupils are too well trained ever to exploit themselves, their school, or their work. ”

“ Somewhere along the way between the ages of six and twenty-six he must gain the ability to assume a heavy responsibility, and it would seem a travesty upon rational education to force him to acquire this ability wholly during the eight years succeeding his school experience. If, at the age of eighteen, he does not exhibit some ability in this respect, the school may justly be charged with dereliction. ”