Appreciation
Education may be defined as the process of raising the level of appreciation. This definition will stand the ultimate test. Here is bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation as a goal in every rational system of education. Appreciation has been defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. It must be so or civilization cannot be. Without appreciation there can be no distinction between the coarse and the fine, none between the high and the low, none between the beautiful and the ugly, none between the sublime and the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir. Hence, appreciation is inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the courage to proclaim it or not. Just why it has not been written into the course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the educational process. It is far from clear why the superintendent permits teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that arithmetic is their final destination, or why he fails to take the tax-payers into his confidence and explain to them that appreciation is one of the lode-stars toward which the schools are advancing. In his heart he hopes that the schools may achieve appreciation, and it would be the part of frankness and fairness for him to reveal this hope to his teachers and to all others concerned.
It is common knowledge that business affairs do not require more than ten pages of arithmetic and it would seem only fair that the study of the other pages should be justified. These other pages must serve some useful purpose in the thinking of those who retain them, and, certainly, no harm would ensue from a revelation of this purpose. If they are studied as a means to some high end, they will prove no less important after this fact has been explained. We may need more arithmetic than we have, but it is our due to be informed why we need it; to what use it is to be put. These things we have a right to know, and no superintendent, who is charged with the responsibility of making the course of study, has a right to withhold the information. If he does not know the explanation of the course of study he has devised, he ought to make known that fact and throw himself “on the mercy of the court.”
In these days of conservation and elimination of waste every subject that seeks admission to the course of study should be challenged at the door and be made to show what useful purpose it is to serve. Nor should any subject be admitted on any specious pretext. If there are subjects that are better adapted to the high purposes of education than the ones we are now using, then, by all means, let us give them a hearty welcome.
Above all, we should be careful not to retain a subject unless it has a more valid passport than old age to justify its retention. If Chinese will help us win the goal of appreciation more effectively than Latin, then, by all means, we should make the substitution. But, in doing so, we must exercise care not to be carried away by a yearning for novelty. Least of all should any subject be admitted to the course of study that does not have behind it something more substantial and enduring than whim or caprice.
The subjects that avail in generating and stimulating the growth of appreciation are many and of great variety. Nor are they all found in the proverbial course of study of the schools. When the boy first really sees an ear of corn from another viewpoint than the economic, he finds it eloquent of the marvelous adaptations of nature. From being a mere ear of corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty. No change has taken place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in the boy. Such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for all that. It is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the accepted definition of education. Though it defies analysis and the rule of thumb, the boy is conscious of it and can say with the man who was born blind, “One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see,” and no cabalistic marks in a grade-book can express the value of the change indicated by that statement.
The sluggard deems the sunrise an impertinence because it disturbs his morning slumber; but such a change may be wrought in him as to cause him to stand in reverence before the very thing he once condemned. The sunrise, once an affront, is now nothing less than a miracle, and he stands in the sublime presence with uncovered and lowered head. He is a reverent witness of the re-birth of the world. An hour ago there was darkness; now there is light. An hour ago the world was dead; now it is gloriously alive. An hour ago there was silence; now there is sound of such exquisite quality as to ravish the soul with delight. As the first beams of sunlight come streaming over the hills, ten thousand birds join in a mighty chorus of welcome to the newborn day and the world is flooded with song; and the whilom sluggard thrills under the spell of the scene and feels himself a part of the world that is vibrant with music. Can it be denied that this man is all the better citizen for his ability to appreciate the wonderfulness of a sunrise?
But while we extol and magnify the quality of appreciation, it is well to note that it cannot be superinduced by any imperial mandate nor does it spring into being at the behest of didacticism. It can be caught but not taught. Indeed, it is worthy of general observation that the choice things which young people receive from the schools, colleges, and normal schools are caught and not taught, however much the teachers may plume themselves upon their ability to impart instruction. Education, at its best, is a process of inoculation. The teacher is an important factor in this process of generating situations that render inoculation far more easy; and we omit one of the most vital things in education when we refer only to the teacher’s ability to “impart instruction.” The pupil gets certain things in that room, but the teacher does not give them. The teacher’s function is to create situations in which the spirit of the pupil will become inoculated with the germs of truth in all its aspects. If he could give the things that the pupils get, then all would share alike in the distribution. If the teacher could impart instruction, he certainly would not fail to lift all his pupils over the seventy-five per cent hurdle.
If instruction or knowledge could be imparted, education would no longer be a spiritual process but rather one of driving the boy into a corner, imparting such instruction as the teacher might decree and keeping on until the point of saturation was reached or the supply of instruction became exhausted, when the trick would be done. The process would be as simple as pouring water from one vessel into another. Sometimes the teacher of literature strives to engender appreciation in a pupil by rhapsodizing over some passage. She reads the passage in a frenzy of simulated enthusiasm, with a quaver in her voice and moisture in her eyes, only to find, at the end, that her patient has fallen asleep. Appreciation cannot be generated in such fashion. The boy cannot light his torch of appreciation at a mere phosphorescent glow. There must be heat behind the light or there can be no ignition. The boy senses the fictitious at once and cannot react to what he knows to be spurious. Only the genuine can win his interest.
Napoleon Bonaparte once said that no one can gaze into the starry sky at night for five minutes and not believe in the existence of God. But to people who lack such appreciation the night sky is devoid of significance. There are teachers who never go forth to revel in the glories of this star-lit masterpiece of creation, because, forsooth, they are too busy grading papers in literature. Such a teacher is not likely to be the cause of a spiritual ignition in her pupils, for she herself lacks the divine fire of appreciation. If she only possessed this quality no words would be needed to reveal its presence to the boy; he would know it even as the homing-pigeon knows its course. When the spirits of teacher and pupils become merged as they must become in all true teaching, the boy will find himself in possession of this spiritual quality. He knows that he has it, the teacher knows that he has it, and his associates know that he has it, and one and all know that it is well worth having.
It is related of Keats that in reading Spenser he was thrown into a paroxysm of delight over the expression “sea-shouldering whales.” The churl would not give a second thought to the phrase, or, indeed, a first one; but the man of appreciation finds in it a source of pleasure. Arlo Bates speaks with enthusiasm of the word “highly” as used in the Gettysburg Speech, and the teacher’s work reaches a high point of excellence when it has given to the pupil such a feeling of appreciation as enables him to discover and rejoice in such niceties of literary expression. It widens the horizon of life to him and gives him a deeper and closer sympathy with every form and manifestation of life. Every phase of life makes an appeal to him, from bird on the wing to rushing avalanche; from the blade of grass to the boundless plains; from the prattle of the child to the word miracles of Shakespeare; from the stable of Bethany to the Mount of Transfiguration.
Geography lends itself admirably to the development of appreciation if it is well taught. Indeed, to develop appreciation seems to be the prime function of geography, and the marvel is that it has not been so proclaimed. In this field geography finds a clear justification, and the superintendent who sets forth appreciation as the end and geography as the means is certain to win the plaudits of many people who have long been wondering why there is so much geography in the present course of study. Certainly no appreciation can develop from the question and answer method, for no spiritual quality can thrive under such deadening conditions. If the questions emanated from the pupils, the situation would be improved, but such is rarely the case. Teaching is, in reality, a transfusion of spirit, and when this flow of spirit from teacher to pupil is unimpeded teaching is at high tide. When the subject is artfully and artistically developed the effect upon the child is much the same as that of unrolling a great and beautiful picture. The Mississippi River can be taught as a great drama, from its rise in Lake Itasca to its triumphal entry into the Gulf. As it takes its way southward pine forests wave their salutes, then wheat fields, then corn fields, and, later, cotton fields. Then its tributaries may be seen coming upon the stage to help swell the mighty sweep of progress toward the sea. When geography is taught as a drama, appreciation is inevitable.
The resourceful teacher can find a thousand dramas in the books on geography if she knows how to interpret the pages of the books, and with these inspiring dramas she can lift her pupils to the very pinnacle of appreciation. Such tales are as fascinating as fairy stories and have the added charm of being true to the teachings of science. A raindrop seems a common thing, but cast in dramatic form it becomes of rare charm. It slides from the roof of the house and finds its way into the tiny rivulet, then into the brook, then into the river and thus finally reaches the sea. By the process of evaporation, it is transformed into vapor and is carried over the land by currents of air. As it comes into contact with colder currents, condensation ensues and then precipitation, and our raindrop descends to earth once more. Sinking into the soil at the foot of the tree it is taken up into the tree by capillary attraction, out through the branches and then into the fruit. Then comes the sunshine to ripen the fruit, and finally this fruit is harvested and borne to the market, whence it reaches the home. Here it is served at the breakfast table and the curtain of our drama goes down with our raindrop as orange-juice on the lip of the little girl.
When we come to realize, in our enlarged vision, the possibilities of geography in fostering the quality of appreciation, our teaching of the subject will be changed and vitalized, our textbooks will be written from a different angle, and our pupils will receive a much larger return upon their investment of time and effort. The study of geography will be far less like the conning of a gazetteer or a city directory and more like a fascinating story. In our astronomical geography we shall make many a pleasing excursion into the far spaces and win stimulating glimpses into the infinities. In our physical geography we shall read marvelous stories that outrival the romances of Dumas and Hugo. And geography as a whole will reveal herself as the cherishing mother of us all, providing us with food, and drink, and shelter, and raiment, giving us poetry, and song, and story, and weaving golden fancies for the fabric of our daily dreams.
And when, at length, through the agency of geography and the other means at hand, our young people have achieved the endowment of appreciation, life will be for them a fuller and richer experience and they will be better fitted to play their parts as intelligent, cultivated men and women. The gateways will stand wide open through which they can enter into the palace of life to revel in all its beauteous splendor. They will receive a welcome into the friendship of the worthy good and great of all ages. When they have gained an appreciation of the real meaning of literature, children who have become immortal will cluster about them and nestle close in their thoughts and affections,—Tiny Tim, Little Jo, Little Nell, Little Boy Blue, and Eppie. A visitor in Turner’s studio once said to the artist, “Really, Mr. Turner, I can’t see in nature the colors you portray on canvas.” Whereupon the artist replied, “Don’t you wish you could?” When our pupils gain the ability to read and enjoy the message of the artist they will be able to hold communion with Raphael, Michael Angelo, Murillo, Rembrandt, Rosa Bonheur, Titian, Corot, Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, Fra Angelico, and Ghiberti. In the realms of poetry they will be able to hold agreeable converse with Shelley, Keats, Southey, Mrs. Browning, Milton, Victor Hugo, Hawthorne, Poe, and Shakespeare. And when the great procession of artists, poets, scientists, historians, dramatists, statesmen, and philanthropists file by to greet their gaze, entranced they will be able to applaud.
Chapter Six
Aspiration
Browning says, “’Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do.” The boy who has acquired the habit of wishing ardently in right directions is well on the way toward becoming educated. For earnest wishing precedes and conditions every achievement that is worthy the name. The man who does not wish does not achieve, and the man who does wish with persistency and consistency does not fail of achievement. Had Columbus not wished with consuming ardor to circumnavigate the globe, he would never have encountered America. The Atlantic cable figured in the dreams and wishes of Cyrus W. Field long before even the preliminaries became realities. The wish evermore precedes the blueprint. It required forty-two years for Ghiberti to translate his dream into the reality that we know as the bronze doors of the Baptistry. But had there been no dreams there had been no bronze doors, and the world of art would have been the poorer. Every tunnel that pierces a mountain; every bridge that spans a river; every building whose turrets pierce the sky; every invention that lifts a burden from the shoulders of humanity; every reform that gilds the world with the glow of hope, was preceded by a wish whose gossamer strands were woven in a human brain. The Red Cross of today is but a dream of Henri Dunant realized and grown large.
The student who scans the records of historical achievements and of the triumphs of art, music, science, literature, and philanthropy must realize that ardent wishing is the condition precedent to further extension in any of these lines, and he must be aware, too, that the ranks of wishers must be recruited from among the children of our schools. The yearning to achieve is the urge of the divine part of each one of us, and it naturally follows that whoever does not have this yearning has been reduced to the plane of abnormality in that the divine part of him has been subordinated, submerged, stifled. Every fervent wish is a prayer that emanates from this divine part of us, and, in all reverence, it may be said that we help to answer our own prayers. When we wish ardently we work earnestly to cause our dreams to come true. We are told that every wish comes true if we only wish hard enough, and this statement finds abundant confirmation in the experiences of those who have achieved.
The child’s wishes have their origin and abode in his native interests and when we have determined what his wishes are, we have in hand the clue that will lead us to the inmost shrine of his native tendencies. This, as has been so frequently said, is the point of attack for all our teaching, this the particular point that is most sensitive to educational inoculation. If we find that the boy is eager to have a wireless outfit and is working with supreme intensity to crystallize his wish into tangible and workable form, quite heedless of clock hours, it were unkind to the point of cruelty and altogether unpedagogical to force him away from this congenial task into some other work that he will do only in a heartless and perfunctory way. If we yearn to have him study Latin, we shall do well to carry the wireless outfit over into the Latin field, for the boy will surely follow wherever this outfit leads. But if we destroy the wireless apparatus, in the hope that we shall thus stimulate his interest in Latin, the scar that we shall leave upon his spirit will rise in judgment against us to the end of life. The Latin may be desirable and necessary for the boy, but the wireless comes first in his wishes and we must go to the Latin by way of the wireless.
It is the high privilege of the teacher to make and keep her pupils hungry, to stimulate in them an incessant ardent longing and yearning. This is her chief function. If she does this she will have great occasion to congratulate herself upon her own progress as well as theirs. If they are kept hungry, the sources of supply will not be able to elude them, for children have great facility and resourcefulness in the art of foraging. They readily discover the lurking places of the substantials as well as of the tid-bits and the sweets. They easily scent the trail of the food for which their spiritual or bodily hunger calls. The boy who yearns for the wireless need not be told where he may find screws, bolts, and hammer. The girl who yearns to paint will somehow achieve pigments, brushes, palette, and teachers. Appetite is the principal thing; the rest comes easy. The hungry child lays the whole world under tribute and cheerfully appropriates whatever fits into his wishes. If his neighbor a mile distant has a book for which he feels a craving, the two-mile walk in quest of that book is invested with supreme charm, no matter what the weather. The apple may be hanging on the topmost bough, but the boy who is apple-hungry recks not of height nor of the labyrinth of hostile branches. He gets the apple. As some one has said, “The soul reaches out for the cloak that fits it.”
There is nothing more pathetic in the whole realm of school procedure than the frantic efforts of some teachers to feed their pupils instead of striving to create spiritual hunger. They require pupils to “take” so many problems, con so many words of spelling, turn so many pages of a book on history, and then have them try to repeat in an agony of effort words from a book that they neither understand nor feel an interest in. The teacher would feed them whether they have any craving for food or not. Such teachers seem to be immune to the teachings of psychology and pedagogy; they continue to travel the way their grandparents trod, spurning the practices of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Francis Parker. They seem not to know that their pupils are predatory beings who are quite capable of ransacking creation to get the food for which they feel a craving. Not appreciating the nature of their pupils, they continue the process of feeding and stuffing them and thus fall into the fatal blunder of mistaking distention for education.
Ruth McEnery Stuart has set out this whole matter most lucidly and cogently in her volume entitled Sonny. In this story the boy had four teachers who took no account of his aspirations and natural tendencies, but insisted upon feeding him traditional food by traditional methods. To them it mattered not that he was unlike other boys. What was suitable for them must be equally suitable for him. The story goes that a certain school-master was expounding the passage “Be ye pure in heart.” Turning to the boys he exclaimed, “Are you pure in heart? If you’re not, I’ll flog you till you are.” So with Sonny’s four teachers. If he had no appetite for their kind of food, they’d feed it to him till he had. But when the appetite failed to come as the result of their much feeding, they banished him to outer darkness with epithets expressive of their disappointment and disgust. They washed their hands of him and were glad to be rid of him.
His next teacher, however, was different. She sensed his unlikeness to other boys and knew, instinctively, that his case demanded and deserved special treatment. She consulted his aspirations and appraised his native tendencies. In doing so, she discovered an embryo naturalist and thus became aware of the task to which she must address herself. So she spread her nets for all living and creeping things, for the beasts of the forest, the birds of the air, for plants, and flowers, and stones,—in short, for all the works of nature. In name she was his teacher, but in reality she was his pupil, and his other four teachers might have become members of the class with rich profit to themselves. In his examination for graduation the boy utterly confounded and routed the members of the examining committee by the profundity and breadth of his knowledge and they were glad to check his onslaught upon the ramparts of their ignorance by awarding him a diploma.
It devolves upon the superintendent and teachers, therefore, to determine what studies already in the schools or what others that may be introduced will best serve the purpose of fostering aspiration. They cannot deny that this quality is an essential element in the spiritual composition of every well-conditioned child as well as of every rightly constituted man and woman. For aspiration means life, and the lack of aspiration means death. The man who lacks aspiration is static, dormant, lifeless, inert; the man who has aspiration is dynamic, forceful, potent, regnant. Aspiration is the animating power that gives wings to the forces of life. It is the motive power that induces the currents of life. The man who has aspiration yearns to climb to higher levels, to make excursions into the realms that lie beyond his present horizon, and to traverse the region that lies between what he now is and what he may become. It is the dove that goes forth from the ark to make discovery of the new lands that beckon.
In a former book the author tried to set forth the influence of the poet in generating aspiration, and in this attempt used the following words: “When he would teach men to aspire he writes Excelsior and so causes them to know that only he who aspires really lives. They see the groundling, the boor, the drudge, and the clown content to dwell in the valley amid the loaves and fishes of animal desires, while the man who aspires is struggling toward the heights whence he may gain an outlook upon the glories that are, know the throb and thrill of new life, and experience the swing and sweep of spiritual impulses. He makes them to know that the man who aspires recks not of cold, of storm, or of snow, if only he may reach the summit and lave his soul in the glory that crowns the marriage of earth and sky. They feel that the aspirant is but yielding obedience to the behests of his better self to scale the heights where sublimity dwells.”
It were useless for teachers to pooh-pooh this matter as visionary and inconsequential or to disregard aspiration as a vital factor in the scheme of education. This quality is fundamental and may not, therefore, be either disregarded or slurred. Fundamental qualities must engage the thoughtful attention of all true educators, for these fundamentals must constitute the ground-work of every reform in our school procedure. There can be life without arithmetic, but there can be no real life without aspiration. It points to higher and fairer levels of life and impels its possessor onward and upward. This needs to be fully recognized by the schools that would perform their high functions worthily, and no teacher can with impunity evade this responsibility. Somehow, we must contrive to instill the quality of aspiration into the lives of our pupils if we would acquit ourselves of this obligation. To do less than this is to convict ourselves of stolidity or impotence.
Chief among the agencies that may be made to contribute generously in this high enterprise is history, or more specifically, biography, which is quintessential history. A boy proceeds upon the assumption that what has been done may be done again and, possibly, done even better. When he reads of the beneficent achievements of Edison he becomes fired with zeal to equal if not surpass these achievements. Obstacles do not daunt the boy who aspires. Everything becomes possible in the light and heat of his zeal. Since Edison did it, he can do it, and no amount of discouragement can dissuade him from his lofty purpose. He sets his goal high and marches toward it with dauntless courage. If a wireless outfit is his goal, bells may ring and clocks may strike, but he hears or heeds them not.
To be effective the teaching of history must be far more than the mere droning over the pages of a book. It must be so vital that it will set the currents of life in motion. In his illuminating report upon the schools of Denmark, Mr. Edwin G. Cooley quotes Bogtrup on the teaching of history as follows: “History does not mean books and maps; it is not to be divided into lessons and gone through with a pointer like any other paltry school subject. History lies before our eyes like a mighty and turbulent ocean, into which the ages run like rivers. Its rushing waves bring to our listening ears the sound of a thousand voices from the olden time. With our pupils we stand on the edge of a cliff and gaze over this great sea; we strive to open their eyes to its power and beauty; we point out the laws of the rise and fall of the waves, and of the strong under-currents. We strive by poetic speech to open their ears to the voices of the sea which in our very blood run through the veins from generation to generation, and, humming and singing, echo in our innermost being.”
Such teaching of history as is here portrayed will never fall upon dull ears or unresponsive spirits. It will thrill the youth with a consuming desire to be up and doing. He will ignite at touch of the living fire. His soul will become incandescent and the glow will warm him into noble action. He yearns to emulate the triumphs of those who have preceded him on the stage of endeavor. If he reads “The Message to Garcia” he feels himself pulsating with the zeal to do deeds of valor and heroism. Whether the records deal with Clara Barton, Nathan Hale, Frances Willard, Mrs. Stowe, Columbus, Lincoln, William the Silent, Erasmus, or Raphael, if these people are present as vital entities the young people will thrill under the spell of the entrancing stories. Then will history and biography come into their own as means to a great end, and then will aspiration take its rightful place as one of the large goals in the scheme of education. As Browning says, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” and again:
What I aspired to be
And was not, comforts me.
Chapter Seven
Initiative
No one who gives the matter thoughtful consideration will ever deprecate or disparage the possession of the virtue of obedience; but, on the other hand, no such thoughtful person will attempt to deny that this virtue, desirable as it is, may be fostered and emphasized to such a degree that its possessor will become a mere automaton. And this is bad; indeed, very bad. We extol obedience, to be sure, but not the sort of blind, unthinking obedience that will reduce its possessor to the status of the mechanical toy which needs only to be wound up and set going. The factory superintendent is glad to have men about him who are able to work efficiently from blueprints; but he is glad, also, to have men about him who can dispense with blueprints altogether or can make their own. The difference between these two types of operatives spells the difference between leadership and mere blind, automatic following. Were all the workers in the factory mere followers, the work would be stereotyped and the factory would be unable to compete with the other factory, where initiative and leadership obtain.
One psychologist avers that ninety per cent of our education comes through imitation; but, even so, it is quite pertinent to inquire into the remaining ten per cent. Conceding that we adopt our styles of wearing apparel at the behest of society; that we fashion and furnish our homes in conformity to prevailing customs; that we permit press and pulpit to formulate for us our opinions and beliefs; in short, that we are imitators up to the full ninety per cent limit, it still must seem obvious to the close observer that the remaining ten per cent has afforded us a vast number and variety of improvements that tend to make life more agreeable. This ten per cent has substituted the modern harvester for the sickle and cradle with which our ancestors harvested their grain; it has brought us the tractor for the turning of the soil in place of the primitive plow; it has enabled us to use the auto-truck in marketing our products instead of the ox-teams of the olden times; it has brought us the telegraph and telephone with which to send the message of our desires across far spaces; and it has supplied us with conveniences and luxuries that our grandparents could not imagine even in their wildest fancies.
A close scrutiny will convince even the most incredulous that many teachers and schools arc doing their utmost, in actual practice if not in theory, to eliminate the ten per cent margin and render their pupils imitators to the full one hundred per cent limit. We force the children to travel our standard pedagogical tracks and strive to fashion and fix them in our standard pedagogical molds. And woe betide the pupil who jumps the track or shows an inclination to travel a route not of the teacher’s choosing! He is haled into court forthwith and enjoined to render a strict accounting for his misdoing; for anything that is either less or more than a strict conformity to type is accounted a defection. We demand absolute obedience to the oracular edicts of the school as a passport to favor. Conformity spells salvation for the child and, in the interests of peace, he yields, albeit grudgingly, to the inevitable.
In world affairs we deem initiative a real asset, but one of the saddest of our mistakes in ordering school 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; and that on the morrow they will experience the initial impact of practical life. These time-worn expressions pass current, at face value, among enthusiastic relatives and friends, but there are those in the audience who know them to be the veriest cant, with no basis either in logic or in common sense. It is nothing short of foolishness to assert that a young person must attain the age of eighteen years before he enters real life. The child knows that his home is a part of the world and an element in life, that the grocery is another part, the post-office still another part, and so on through an almost endless list. Equally well does he know that the school is a part of life, because it enters into his daily experiences the same as the grocery and the post-office. Full well does he know that he is not outside of life when he is in school, and no amount of sophistry can convince him otherwise. If the school is not an integral part of the world and of life, so much the worse for the school and, by the same token, so much the worse for the teacher. Either the school is a part of the world or else it is neither a real nor a worthy school.
The hours which the child spends in school are quite as much a part of his life as any other portion of the day, no matter what activities the school provides, and we do violence to the facts when we assume or argue otherwise. Here is a place for emphasis. Here is the rock on which many a pedagogical bark has suffered shipwreck. We become so engrossed in the mechanics of our task—grades, tests, examinations, and promotions—that we lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with real life in a situation that is a part of the real world. The best preparation for life is to practice life aright, and this is the real function of the school. If teachers only could or would give full recognition to this simple, open truth, there would soon ensue a wide departure from some of our present mechanized methods. But so long as we cling to the traditional notion that school is detached from real life, so long shall we continue to pursue our merry-go-round methods. If we could fully realize that we are teaching life by the laboratory method, many a vague and misty phase of our work would soon become clarified.
Seeing, then, that the school is a cross-section of life, it follows, naturally, that it embodies the identical elements that constitute life as a whole. We all know, by experience, that life abounds in vicissitudes, discouragements, trials, and obstacles, and the school, being a part of real life, must furnish forth the same elements even if of less magnitude. There are obstacles, to be sure, and there should be. Abraham Lincoln once said, “When you can’t remove an obstacle, plow around it.” But teachers are prone to remove the obstacles from the pathway of their pupils when they should be training them to surmount these obstacles or, failing that for the time being, to plow around them. It is far easier, however, for the teacher to solve the problem for the boy than to stimulate him to solve it independently. If we would train the boy to leap over hurdles, we must supply the hurdles and not remove them from his path. Still further, we must elevate the hurdles, by easy gradations, if we would increase the boy’s powers and prowess.
Professor Edgar James Swift says, “Man expends just energy enough to satisfy the demands of the situation in which he is placed.” This statement is big with meaning for all who have a true conception of pedagogy and of life. In this sentence we see the finger-board that points toward high achievements in teaching. If the hurdles are too low, the boy becomes flaccid, flabby, sluggish, and lethargic. The hurdles should be just high enough to engage his full strength, physical, mental, and moral. They should ever be a challenge to his best efforts. But they should never be so high that they will invite discouragement, disaster, and failure. The teacher should guard against elevating hurdles as an exhibition of her own reach. The gymnasium is not a stage for exhibitions. On the contrary, it is a place for graduated, cumulative training.
Our inclination is to make life easy and agreeable to our pupils rather than real. To this end we help them over the difficulties, answer questions which they do not ask, and supply them with crutches when we should be training them to walk without artificial aids. The passing mark rather than real training seems to be made the goal of our endeavors even if we enfeeble the child by so doing. We seem to measure our success by the number of promotions and not by the quality of the training we give. We seem to be content to produce weaklings if only we can push them through the gateway of promotion. It matters not that they are unable to find their way alone through the mazes of life; let them acquire that ability later, after they have passed beyond our control. Again quoting from Professor Swift, “Following a leader, even though that leader be the teacher, tends to take from children whatever latent ability for initiative they may have.”
There is a story of an indulgent mother who was quite eager that her boy should have a pleasant birthday and so asked him what he would most like to do. The answer came in a flash: “Thank you, Mother, I should most like just to be let alone.” This answer leads us at once to the inner sanctuary of childhood. Children yearn to be let alone and must grow restive under the incessant attentions of their elders. In school there is ever such a continuous fusillade of questions and answers, assigning of lessons, recitations, corrections, explanations, and promulgations, rules and restrictions that the children have no time for growing inside. They are not left to their own devices but are pulled and pushed about, and managed, and coddled or coerced all day long, so that there is neither time nor scope for the exercise and development of initiative. The teacher, at times, seems to think of the school as a mammoth syringe with which she is called upon to pump information into her bored but passive pupils.
Silence is the element in which initiative thrives, but our school programs rarely provide any periods of silence. They assume that to be effective a school must be a place of bustle, and hurry, and excitement, not to mention entertainment. Sometimes the child is intent upon explorations among the infinities when the teacher summons him back to earth to cross a t or dot an i. The teacher who would implant a thought-germ in the minds of her pupils and then allow fifteen minutes of silence for the process of germination, should be ranked as an excellent teacher. When the child is thinking out things for himself the process is favorable to initiative; but when the teacher directs his every movement, thought, and impulse, she is repressing the very quality that makes for initiative and ultimate leadership. When the boy would do some things on his own, the teacher is striving to force him to travel in her groove.
Henderson well says: “We do not invariably cultivate initiative by letting children alone, but in nine cases out of ten it is a highly effective method. In our honest desire for their betterment, the temptation is always to jump in and to do for them, when we would much better keep hands off, and allow them, under favorable conditions, to do for themselves. They may do something which, from an objective point of view, is much less excellent than our own well-considered plan. But education is not an objective process. It is subjective and was wrapped up in the funny blundering little enterprise of the child, rather than in our own intrusive one.” The crude product of the boy’s work in manual training is far better for him and for the whole process of education than the finished product of the teacher’s skill which sometimes passes for the boy’s own work. Some manual training teachers have many a sin charged to their account in this line that stands in dire need of forgiveness.
There are many worthy enterprises through which initiative may be fostered. Prominent among these are some of the home and school projects that are in vogue. These projects, when wisely selected with reference to the child’s powers and inclination, give scope for the exercise of ingenuity, resourcefulness, perseverance, and unhampered thinking and acting. Besides, some of the by-products are of value, notably self-reliance and self-respect. A child yearns to play a thinking part in the drama of life and not the part of a marionette or jumping-jack that moves only when someone pulls the string. He yearns to be an entity and not a mere echo. Paternalism, in our school work, does not make for self-reliance, and, therefore, is to be deplored. There is small hope for the child without initiative, who is helped over every slightest obstacle, and who acquires the habit of calling for help whenever he encounters a difficulty.
Here we have ample scope for the problem element in teaching and we are recreant to our opportunities and do violence to child-nature if we fail to utilize this method. We are much given to the analytic in our teaching, whereas the pupil enjoys the synthetic. He yearns to make things. Constructing problems in arithmetic, or history, or physics makes a special appeal to him and we do violence to his natural bent if we fail to accord him the opportunity. We can send him in quest of dramatic situations in the poem, or derivatives in his reading lesson, set him thinking of the construction of farm buildings or machinery, or lead him to seek the causes that led up to events in history. In brief, we can appeal to his curiosity and intelligence and so engage the intensest interest of the whole boy.
A school girl assumed the task of looking after all the repairs in the way of plumbing in the home and, certainly, was none the worse for the experience. She is now a dentist and has achieved distinction both at home and abroad in her chosen profession. She gained the habit of meeting difficult situations without abatement of dignity or refinement. The school, at its best, is a favorable situation for self-education and the wise teacher will see to it that it does not decline from this high plane. Only so will its products be young men and women who need no leading strings, who can find their way about through the labyrinth of life and not be abashed. They are the ones to whom we must look for leadership in all the enterprises of life, for they have learned how to initiate work and carry it through to success. That school will win distinction which makes initiative one of its big goals and is diligent in causing the activities of the pupils to reach upward toward the achievement of this end.
We may well conclude with a quotation from Dr. Henry van Dyke: “The mere pursuit of knowledge is not necessarily an emancipating thing. There is a kind of reading which is as passive as massage. There is a kind of study which fattens the mind for examination like a prize pig for a county fair. No doubt the beginning of instruction must lie chiefly in exercises of perception and memory. But at a certain point the reason and the judgment must be awakened and brought into voluntary play. As a teacher I would far rather have a pupil give an incorrect answer in a way which showed that he had really been thinking about the subject, than a literally correct answer in a way which showed that he had merely swallowed what I had told him, and regurgitated it on the examination paper.”
Chapter Eight
Imagination
In his very stimulating book, Learning and Doing, Professor Swift quotes from a business man as follows: “Modern business no longer waits for men to qualify after promotion. Through anticipation and prior preparation every growing man must be largely ready for his new job when it comes to him. I find very few individuals make any effort to think out better ways of doing things. They do not anticipate needs, do not keep themselves fresh at the growing point. If ever they had any imagination they seem to have lost it, and imagination is needed in a growing business, for it is through the imagination that one anticipates future changes and so prepares for them before they come. Accordingly, as a general proposition, the selection of a man for a vacancy within the organization is more or less a matter of guesswork. Now and then an ambitious, wide-awake young man works into the organization and in a very short time is spotted by various department managers for future promotion, but the number of such individuals is discouragingly small. The difficulty with which we are always confronted is that our business grows faster than do those within it. The men do not keep up with our changes. The business grows away from them, and quite reluctantly the management is frequently compelled to go outside for necessary material. We need, at the present time, four or five subordinate chiefs in various parts of the factory and I can fill none of the positions satisfactorily from material in hand.”
This business man, unconsciously perhaps, puts his finger upon one of the weak places in our school procedure. He convicts us of stifling and repressing the imagination of our pupils. For it is a matter of common knowledge that every normal child is endowed with a vivid imagination when he enters school. No one will challenge this statement who has entered into the heart of childhood through the gateway of play. He has seen a rag doll invested with all the graces of a princess; he has seen empty spools take on all the attributes of the railway train; and he has seen the child’s world peopled with entities of which the unimaginative person cannot know. Children revel in the lore of fairyland, and in this realm nothing seems impossible to them. Their toys are the material which their imagination uses in building new and delightful worlds for them. If this imagination is unimpaired when they become grown-ups, these toys are called ideals, and these ideals are the material that enter into the lives of poets, artists, inventors, scientists, orators, statesmen, and reformers. If the child lacks this quality at the end of his school life, the school must be held responsible, at least in part, and so must face the charge of doing him an irreparable injury. It were better by far for the child to lose a leg or an arm somewhere along the school way than to lose his imagination. Better abandon the school altogether if it tends to quench the divine fire of imagination. Better still, devise some plan of so reconstructing the work of the school that we shall forever forestall the possibility of producing a generation of spiritual cripples.
The business man already quoted gives to the schools their cue. He shows the need of imagination in practical affairs and, by implication, shows that the school has been recreant to its opportunities in the way of stimulating this requisite quality. We must be quite aware that the men and women who have done things as well as those who are doing things have had or have imagination. Otherwise no achievements would be set down to their credit. It is the very acme of unwisdom to expect our pupils to accomplish things and then take from them the tools of their craft. Imagination is an indispensable tool, and the teacher assumes a grave responsibility who either destroys or blunts it. Unless the school promotes imagination it is not really a school, seeing that it omits from its plans and practices this basic quality. Too much emphasis cannot be laid upon this patent truth, nor can we deplore too earnestly the tendency of many teachers to strangle imagination.
We all recognize C. Hanford Henderson as one of our most fertile and sane writers on educational themes and we cannot do better just here than to quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: “To say of man or woman that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and potential sins. Such a defect means obtuseness in manners and morals, sterility in arts and science, blundering in the general conduct of life. Children are often accused of having too much imagination, but in reality that is hardly possible. The imagination may run riot, and, growing by what it feeds upon, come dangerously near to untruthfulness,—the store of facts may have been too small. But the remedy is not to cripple or kill the imagination; it is rather to provide the needed equipment of facts and to train the imagination to work within the limits of truth and probability. The unimaginative man is exceedingly dull company. From the moment he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them at night, he is prone to the sins of both omission and commission. No matter how good his intentions, he constantly offends. No matter how great his industry, he fails to attain. One can trace many immoralities, from slight breaches of manners to grave criminal offenses, to a simple lack of imagination. The offender failed to see,—he was, to all intents and purposes, blind. At its best, imagination is insight. It is the direct source of most of our social amenities, of toleration, charity, consideration,—in a word, of all those social virtues which distinguish the child of light.” Another fertile writer says: “Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood when they were in reality repressing the imagination—the faculty which master-artists denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind.”
Some of our boys will be farmers but, if they lack imagination, they will be dull fellows, at the very best, and, relatively speaking, not far above the horse that draws the plow. The girls will be able to talk, but if they lack imagination they can never become conversationalists. The person who has imagination can cause the facts of the multiplication table to scintillate and glow. The person who lacks imagination is unable to invest with interest and charm even the mountain, the river, the landscape, or the poem. The gossip, the scandal-monger, or the coarse jester proves his lack of imagination and his consequent inability to hold his own in real conversation. We hope, of course, that some of our pupils may become inventors, but this will be impossible unless they possess imagination. A sociologist states the case in this fashion: “Wealth, the transient, is material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The products of achievement are not material things at all. They are not ends, but means. They are methods, ways, devices, arts, systems, institutions. In a word, they are inventions.” In short, to say that one is an inventor is but another way of saying that he has imagination.
It is one thing to know facts but quite another thing to know the significance of facts. And imagination is the alembic that discovers the significance of the facts. A thousand men of England knew the facts touching the life and education of the children of that country, but the facts remained mere facts until the imagination of Dickens interpreted them and thus emancipated childhood from the thralldom of ignorance and cruelty. A thousand men knew the fact touching the steam that issues from the tea-kettle, but not until Watts discovered the significance of the fact did the tea-kettle become the precursor of the steam-engine that has transformed civilization. It required the imagination of Newton to interpret the falling of the apple and to cause this simple, common fact to lead on to the discovery of the great truth of gravitation. Had Galileo lacked imagination, the chandelier might have kept on swinging but the discovery of the rotation of the earth would certainly have been postponed.
In this view of the matter we can see one of the weaknesses of some of the work in our colleges as well as in other schools. The teachers are fertile in arriving at facts, but seem to think their tasks completed with these discoveries and so proclaim the discovery of facts to be education. It matters not that the facts are devoid of significance to their students, they simply proceed to the discovery of more facts. They combine two or more substances in a test-tube and thus produce a new substance. This fact is solemnly inscribed in a notebook and the incident is closed. But the student who has imagination and industry inquires “What then?” and proceeds with investigations on his own initiative that result in a positive boon to humanity. Imagination takes the facts and makes something of them, while the college teacher has disclosed his inability to cope with his own students in fields that only imagination can render productive.
To quote Henderson once again: “In most of our current education, instead of cultivating so valuable a quality, we have stupidly done all that we can to suppress it. We have not sufficiently studied the actual boy before us to find out what he is up to, and what end he has in mind. On the contrary, we proclaim, with curious indifference, some end of our own devising, and with what really amounts to spiritual brutality, we try to drive him towards it. We do this, we irresponsible parents and teachers, because we ourselves lack imagination, and do not see that we are blunting, instead of sharpening, our human tool. Yet we define education in terms of imagination when we say that education is the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit; or, that education is a setting-up in the heart of the child of a moral and æsthetic revelation of the universe; for the human spirit which we are trying to establish is not a fact, but a gracious possibility of the future.”
Happy is the child whose teacher possesses imagination; who can touch the common things of life with the magic wand of her fancy and invest them with supreme charm; who can peer into the future with her pupils and help them translate the bright dreams of today into triumphs in the realms of art, music, science, philosophy, language, and philanthropy; and who builds air-castles of her own and thus has the skill to help the children build theirs. It is not easy, if, indeed, it is possible, for the teacher to quicken imagination in her pupils unless she herself is endowed with this animating quality. Dr. Henry van Dyke puts the case thus: “I care not whether a man is called a tutor, an instructor, or a full professor; nor whether any academic degrees adorn his name; nor how many facts or symbols of facts he has stored away in his brain. If he has these four powers—clear sight, quick imagination, sound reason, strong will—I call him an educated man and fit to be a teacher.” And, of a surety, imagination is not the least of these.
To this end every teacher should use every means possible to keep her imagination alive and luxuriant, and never, on any account, permit the exigencies of her task to repress it. The success of her pupils depends upon her, and she should strive against stagnation as she would against death. The passing out, the evaporation of imagination is an insidious process, and when it is gone she is but a barren fig-tree. If her imagination is strong and healthy she cannot have a poor school and her pupils will bless her memory throughout the years. As applying to every grade of school we may well note the words of Van Dyke: “Every true university should make room in its scheme for life out-of-doors. There is much to be said for John Milton’s plan of a school whose pupils should go together each year on long horseback journeys and sailing cruises to see the world. Walter Bagehot said of Shakespeare that he could not walk down a street without knowing what was in it. John Burroughs has a college on a little farm beside the Hudson; and John Muir has a university called Yosemite. If such men cross a field or a thicket they see more than the seven wonders of the world. That is culture. And without it, all scholastic learning is arid, and all the academic degrees known to man are but china oranges hang on a dry tree.” And without imagination this type of culture is impossible.
All reforms and, indeed, all progress depend upon imagination. We must be able to picture the world as it ought to be before we can set on foot plans for betterment. It is the high province of the imagination to enter into the feelings and aspirations of others and so be able to lend a hand; to build a better future out of the materials of the present; to soar above the solemnities and conventions of tradition and to smile while soaring; to see the invisible and touch the intangible; and to see the things that are not and call them forth as realities. Seeing that the business man, the fertile-brained essayist, and the gifted poet agree in extolling the potential value of imagination, we have full warrant for according to it an honored place in the curriculum of the school. Too long has it been an incidental minor; it is now high time to advance it to the rank of a major.
Chapter Nine
Reverence
At the basis of reverence is respect; and reverence is respect amplified and sublimated. A boy must be either dull or heedless who can look at a bird sailing in the air for five minutes and not become surcharged with curiosity to know how it can do it. His curiosity must lead him to an examination of the wing of a bird, and his scrutiny will reveal it as a marvelous bit of mechanism. The adjustment and overlapping of the feathers will convince him that it presents a wonderful design and a no less wonderful adaptation of means to ends. He sees that when the bird is poised in the air the wing is essentially air-tight and that when the bird elects to ascend or descend the feathers open a free passage for the air. Even a cursory examination of the bird’s wing must persuade the boy that, with any skill he might attain, he could never fabricate anything so wonderful. This knowledge must, in the nature of things, beget a feeling of respect, and thereafter, whenever the boy sees a bird, he will experience a resurgence of this feeling.
Some one has said, “Everything is infinitely high that we can’t see over,” and because the boy comes to know that he cannot duplicate the bird’s wing it becomes infinitely high or great to him and so wins his respect. To the boy who has been taught to think seriously, the mode of locomotion of a worm or a snake is likewise a marvel, and he observes it with awe. The boy who treads a worm underfoot gives indisputable evidence that he has never given serious thought to its mode of travel. Had he done so, he would never commit so ruthless an act. The worm would have won his respect by its ability to do a thing at which he himself would certainly fail. He sees the worm scaling the trunk of a tree with the greatest ease, but when he essays the same task he finds it a very difficult matter. So he tips his cap figuratively to the worm and, in boyish fashion, admits that it is the better man of the two. And never again, unless inadvertently, will he crush a worm. Even a snake he will kill only in what he conceives to be self-defense.
An American was making his first trip to Europe. On the way between the Azores and Gibraltar the ship encountered a storm of great violence. For an hour or more the traveler stood on the forward deck, watching the titanic struggle, feeling the ship tremble at each impact of the waves, and hearing the roar that only a storm at sea can produce. Upon returning to his friends he said, “Never again can I speak flippantly of the ocean; never again can I use the expression, ‘crossing the pond.’ The sea is too vast and too sublime for that.” He had achieved reverence. Many a child in school can spell the name of the ocean and give a book definition rather glibly, who, nevertheless, has not the faintest conception of what an ocean really is. The tragedy of the matter is that the teacher gives him a perfect mark for his parrot-like definition and spelling and leaves him in crass ignorance of the reality. The boy deals only with the husk and misses the kernel. When he can spell and define, the work has only just begun, and not until the teacher has contrived to have him emotionalize the ocean will he enter into the heart of its greatness, and power, and utility in promoting life, and so come to experience a feeling of respect for it. When it has won his respect he can read Victor Hugo’s matchless description of the sea with understanding, measurable appreciation, and, certainly, a thrill of delight.
It is rare fun for children, and even for grown-ups, to locate the constellations, planets, and stars. Of course, the North Star is everybody’s favorite because it is so steady, so reliable, so dependable. We know just where to find it, and it never disappoints us. Two boys who once were crossing from New York to Naples found great delight in a star in the Southern sky that retained its relative position throughout the journey. At the conclusion of dinner in the evening the boys were wont to repair to the deck to find their star and receive its greetings. In their passage through the Mediterranean they became curious, wondering how it came about that the star failed to change its relative position in their journey of three thousand miles. When they realized that their star is the apex of a triangle whose base is three thousand miles but whose other legs are so long that the base is infinitesimally short by comparison, their amazement knew no bounds and for the first time in their lives they gained a profound respect for space.
This new concept of space was worth the trip across the ocean to those boys, and the wonder is that space had never before meant anything more or other than a word to be spelled. The school and the home had had boundless opportunities to inculcate in them a sense of space, yet this delightful task was left to a passenger on board the ship. But for his kindly offices those boys might have gone on for years conceiving of space as merely a word of five letters. It would have been easy for parent or teacher to engender in them some appreciation of space by explaining to them that if they were to travel thirty miles a day it would require twenty-two years to reach the moon,—which is, in reality, our next-door neighbor,—and that to reach the sun, at the same rate of travel, would require more than eight thousand years, or the added lifetimes of almost three hundred generations. But they were sent abroad to see the wonders of the Old World with no real conception of space and, therefore, no feeling of respect for it. Before their trip abroad they never could have read the last two verses of the eighth chapter of Romans with any real appreciation.
Still our schools go on their complacent way, teaching words, words, words that are utterly devoid of meaning to the pupils, and, sad to relate, seem to think their mission accomplished. The pupils are required to spell words, define words, write words, and parse words day after day as if these words were lifeless and meaningless blocks of wood to be merely tossed up and down and moved hither and thither. So soon as a word becomes instinct with life and meaning, it kindles the child’s interest at its every recurrence and it becomes as truly an entity as a person. It is then endowed with attributes that distinguish it clearly from its fellows and becomes, to the child, a vivid reality in the scheme of life. To our two boys every star that meets their gaze conjures up a host of memories and helps to renew their spiritual experience and widen their horizon. Space is a reality, to them, a mighty reality, and they cannot think of it without a deep sense of respect.
There are people of mature years who have never given to their hands a close examination. Such an examination will disclose the fact that the hand is an instrument of marvelous design. It will be seen that the fingers all differ in length but, when they grasp an orange or a ball, it will be noted that they are conterminous—that the ends form a straight line. This gives them added purchase and far greater power of resistance. Were they of equal length the pressure upon the ball would be distributed and it could be wrested from the grasp far more readily. No mechanical contrivance has ever been designed that is comparable to the hand in flexibility, deftness, adaptability, or power of prehension. It can pick up a needle or a cannon-ball at will. Its touch is as light as a feather or as stark as a catapult. It can be as gentle as mercy or as harsh as battle. It can soothe to repose or rouse to fury. It can express itself in the gentle zephyr or in the devastating whirlwind. Its versatility is altogether worthy of notice, and we may well hold the lesson in history in abeyance, for the nonce, while we inculcate due respect for the hand. For no one can contemplate his hand for five minutes and not gain for it a feeling of profound respect.
What is true of the hand is true of the whole human body. This is the very acme of created things; this is God’s masterpiece. How any one can fail to respect such a wonderful piece of work is beyond explanation. The process of walking or of breathing must hold the thoughtful person enthralled and enchanted. But, strange as it may seem, there are those who seem not to realize in what a marvelous abode their spirits have their home. Such scant respect do they have for their bodies that they defile them and treat them with shameless ignominy. They saturate them with poisons and vulgarize them with unseemly practices. They seem to regard them as mere property to be used or abused at pleasure and not temples to be honored. The man who does not respect his own body can feel no respect or reverence for its Creator nor for the soul that dwells within it. Such a man lacks self-respect and self-respect is the fertile soil in which many virtues flourish. The teaching of physiology that fails to generate a feeling of deep respect for the human body is not the sort of teaching that should obtain in our schools.
Again, a person who is possessed of fine sensibilities sees in the apple tree in full bloom a creation of transcendant beauty and charm. The poet cannot describe it, nor can the artist reproduce it. It is both a mystery and a miracle. Into this miracle nature has poured her lavish treasures of fertility, of rain, of sunshine, and of zephyrs, and from it at the zenith of its beauty the full-throated robin pours forth his heart in melodious greeting. It may be well to dismiss the school to see the circus parade, but even more fitting is it to dismiss the school to see this burst of splendor. In its glorious presence silence is the only language that is befitting. In such a presence sound is discord, for such enchantment as it begets cannot be made articulate. Its influence steals into the senses and lifts the spirit up. To defile or despoil such beauty would be to desecrate a shrine. But the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. His response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. His spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. He feels no respect for the beauty before him and it is evident that somewhere along the line his spiritual education was neglected. He excites our sympathy and our hope that his children may not share his fate.
In the way of illustrating this quality of respect, we reach the climax in the thirty-eighth chapter of the Book of Job and following. The dramatic element of literature here reaches its zenith. God is the speaker, the stricken, outcast Job is the sole auditor, and the stage is a whirlwind. It is related of the late Professor Hodge that, on one occasion when he was about to perform an experiment in his laboratory, he said to some students who stood near, “Gentlemen, please remove your hats; I am about to ask God a question.” But here in this chapter we have a still more sublime situation, for God is here asking questions of the man. And these questions dig deep into the life of the man and show him how puny and impotent is the finite in the presence of the Infinite. In this presence there is neither pomp, nor parade, nor vaunting, nor self-aggrandizement, nor arrogance. Even the printed page cannot but induce respect, devoutness, and profound reverence, for it tells of nature’s wonders—the snow-crystals, the rain, the dewdrop, the light, the cloud, the lightning—and reveals to the bewildered sight some apprehension of the Author of them all.
The reader must, by now, have divined the conclusion of the whole matter. Without respect there can be no reverence; and, without reverence, there can be neither education nor civilization that is worth while. Some one has defined reverence as “that exquisite constraint which leads a man to hate all that is unsuitable and sordid and exaggerated and to love all that is excellent and temperate and beautiful.” This definition is both comprehensive and inclusive, and the superintendent may well promulgate it in his directions to his teachers. All teaching has to do with Truth and, in the presence of Truth, whether in mathematics, or science, or history, or language, the teacher should feel that he stands in the presence of the Burning Bush and hears the command, “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” It seems a thousand pities that even college students rush into the presence of the Burning Bush in hobnailed shoes, shouting forth the college yell as they go.
The man who is reverent disclaims everything that is cheap, or vulgar, or coarse, or unseemly. He is so essentially fine that the gaudy, the bizarre, and the intemperate, in whatever form, grate upon his sensibilities. He respects himself too much to be lacking in respect to others. He instinctively shrinks away from ugly vulgarization as from a pestilence. He is kindly, charitable, sympathetic, and sincere. Exaggeration, insinuation, and caricature are altogether foreign to his spirit. In his society we feel inspired and ennobled. His very presence is a tonic, and his tongue distills only purity. His example is the lodestar of our aspirations, and we fain would be his disciples. We feel him to be something worshipful in that his life constantly beckons to our better selves. To be reverent is to be liberally educated, while to be irreverent is to dwell in darkness and ignorance. To be reverent is to live on the heights, where the air is pure and tonic and where the sunlight is free from taint. To be reverent is to acknowledge our indebtedness to all those who, in art, in science, in literature, in music, or in philanthropy, have caused the waters of life to gush forth in clear abundance. To be reverent is to stand uncovered in the presence of Life and to experience the thrill of the spiritual impulses that only an appreciation of life can generate. If this is reverence, then the school honors itself by giving this quality a place of honor.