The Past tyrannizes over the Present by Interposing the Stolid Resistance of Habit. — Habits of Thought like Habits of the Body become Automatic. — There is much Freedom of Speech but very little Freedom of Thought: Habit, Tradition, and Reverence for Antiquity forbid it. — The Schools educate Automatically. — A glaring Defect of the Schools shown by Mr. John S. Clark, of Boston. — The Automatic Character of the Popular System of Education shown by the Quincy (Mass.) Experiment. — Several Intelligent Opinions to the same Effect. — The Public Schools as an Industrial Agency a Failure. — A Conclusive Evidence of the Automatic and Superficial Character of prevailing Methods of Education in the Schools of a large City. — The Views of Colonel Francis W. Parker. — Scientific Education is found in the Kindergarten and the Manual Training School. — “The Cultivation of Familiarity betwixt the Mind and Things.” — Colonel Augustus Jacobson on the Effect of the New Education.

All reforms must encounter the stolid resistance of habit. It is not less tyrannical because it is a negative force. It braces itself and holds back with all its might. It is in this manner that the past dominates the present.[E11] This automatic habit of mind is precisely like certain automatic habits of the body which operate quite independently of any act of volition. For example: “When we move about in a room with the objects in which we are quite familiar, we direct our steps so as to avoid them, without being conscious what they are or what we are doing; we see them, as we easily discover if we try to move about in the same way with our eyes shut, but we do not perceive them, the mind being fully occupied with some train of thought.”[42] In the same way the mind under certain conditions becomes an automaton, constantly revolving old thoughts after the causes that gave rise to them have ceased to operate. Piano-forte playing affords an excellent illustration of this automatic action of the mind. “A pupil learning to play the piano-forte is obliged to call to mind each note, but the skilful player goes through no such process of conscious remembrance; his ideas, like his movements, are automatic, and both so rapid as to surpass the rapidity of succession of conscious ideas and movements.”[43]

Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are catch-penny phrases. There is much of the former, but very little of the latter. Speech is generally the result of automatic thought rather than of ratiocination. Independent thought is of all mental processes the most difficult and the most rare; habit, tradition, and reverence for antiquity unite to forbid it, and these combined influences are strengthened by the law of heredity. The tendency to automatic action of the mind is still further promoted by the environment of modern life. The crowding of populations into cities, and the division and subdivision of labor in the factory and the shop, and even in the so-called learned professions, have a tendency to increase the dependence of the individual upon the mass of society. And this interdependence of the units of society renders them more and more imitative, and hence more and more automatic both mentally and physically.

Another powerful influence contributes to the same end. The schools educate automatically. They train the absorbing powers of the brain, but fail to cultivate the faculties of assimilation and re-creation, and neglect almost wholly to develop the power of expression. Mr. John S. Clark, of Boston, has made this point of the failure of the schools to train the brain-power of expression to its utmost, so plain that it is here reproduced in full, as follows:

“Studying the functions of the brain, we find that for educational purposes it may be likened to an organism with a threefold form of working, an organism with a power of absorption, a power of assimilation and re-creation, and a power of expressing or giving out. The force or character of a brain is measured entirely by its expressing power, by what comes out of it. Examining a little closer, we find that the brain absorbs through all the five senses, while for expressing purposes it makes use of but two of these senses, or rather of but two organs of these senses—the tongue and the hand. Fig. 1 is a simple diagram representing a brain with the five senses placed on one side, as means of absorbing power, while on the other side the tongue and the hand are placed as organs of expressing power. The other function of the brain, that of assimilation and re-creation, cannot of course be graphically represented. It may, however, be said to be the result of the action of the other two functions. Now, the equipping of a brain, or the healthy education of a brain, consists in giving it expressing power through the tongue and the hand, coextensive with the power of absorption and the power of re-creation.

“Applying our popular schemes of education to the brain, and especially those based on the 3-R idea of education, we find what is indicated in Fig. 2, that provision has been made for greatly distending the absorbing side of the brain, while for the expressing side, the practical side, provision has been limited to the use of the tongue in speech and to the hand in writing. If now we follow the result of this brain equipment into practical life, we find that speech and writing, as means for expressing thought, have their applications mainly in the commercial and financial employments and the professions, and only incidentally in the industrial and mechanical employments. With such an inadequate and one-sided brain equipment it is not possible in any broad, practical way to bring thought or brain-power to the service of industry. The fact so generally admitted, that we are getting so few intelligent artisans or mechanics from our scheme of public education, that we turn out pupils of both sexes with a decided repugnance to industrial labor, is an attestation to the truth of this statement. The simple fact is that our education is not broad enough on the expressing side of the brain, that too much attention has been given to the absorbing side of this organ, that no adequate provisions have been made whereby it can discharge its power in work connected with the industries.

“In Fig. 3 a remedy for this defect is indicated in the addition of the study of graphic and æsthetic art, through drawing, and of training in the manual arts, to the previous brain equipment. Observe where these features come in the scheme—on the expressing side of the brain and in the service of the hand, thus giving the brain ample power to discharge thought in its most complete form for use or for beauty. With these features added to the brain equipment its power of expressing thought in all practical directions will be coextensive with its absorbing and re-creating powers; and just as soon as the public can clearly see that in the outcome of our public education there is no respecting of persons or of classes, that pupils are trained for honest labor with their hands as well as to living by their wits, are taught to produce something, to create values by the action of their brain through the work of their hands, a much deeper interest in public education will not only be manifested, but generous provisions for its support will also be given.”[44]

The charge that the schools educate automatically rather than rationally is of such vital importance that it should be sustained by the best attainable proof. Strong proof is at hand in the history of the so-called Quincy (Mass.) experiment.

In 1878 doubt of the efficiency of the schools of Norfolk County, long indulged, culminated in action by the Association of School Committees and Superintendents. It was insisted by certain members of the committee that the existing methods were “about as good as human intelligence could devise,” and by others that the people were getting “no adequate returns for the money expended under the system in general use.” It was resolved to institute a searching investigation, and the standard for the measurement of the acquirements of pupils adopted was, “a reasonable degree of ability to read, to write legibly, correctly, and grammatically, and to deal readily with simple mathematics after about eight years of schooling.”

The association selected Mr. George A. Walton, an experienced educator, to make the examination of the schools of the county, and the number of pupils examined exceeded three thousand. In their preface to Mr. Walton’s report the gentlemen of the association say:

“Publicity, discussion, and discontent are wholesome things to apply to school management in Massachusetts. That this is a fair sample of the results now accomplished cannot be questioned. But though they may not be flattering to our pride, we yet believe that they are as good as can be obtained in any other county in Massachusetts, or, indeed, of any other State where similar tests are applied in a similar manner. If any school authorities elsewhere doubt the truth of this statement, let the experiment be tried in the schools of their county.

“The questions naturally arise, What is the cause of this lamentable ignorance? and what is the remedy? The answer to the former suggests the reply to the latter. Too much has been attempted in the schools. There has been a slavish adherence to text-books, and no room given for freedom and originality of thought. Rules have been memorized, and the children taught to recite from the text-book, while they have not had the slightest conception of the true meaning of the subject....

“The rules and exceptions in grammar are faithfully committed to memory, and most intricate sentences can be successfully analyzed, the phrases separated, and the modifiers named in true grammatical style, while the pupils who have undergone such severe training in this respect are unable to present their own thoughts concisely or clearly, or even correctly, upon paper. The memory is cultivated, and the reason allowed to slumber.

“In arithmetic the pupils show a readiness to solve a problem when they are able to fit it to some rule that they have learned; but when they are given a simple question out of the regular course, they are like a ship at sea without rudder or compass.”

This is the severest and most sweeping criticism ever passed upon our American common-school system, and it emanates from its friends and the friends of universal education.

Mr. Walton says of reading, as taught in the Norfolk County schools, “As for any systematic analysis by which the pupil learns to make a careful and independent study of his piece, it is but little practised in the schools even of the grammar grade;” and he declares that reading, without comprehending the ideas of which the words are mere signs, “is not merely useless, but dangerous, just in proportion to the facility with which the words are called.”

Of the results of his examinations in penmanship Mr. Walton says, “Most of the faults in the writing indicate imperfect teaching.” Of his examinations in spelling he says that “the commonest words are misspelled when used in sentences or composition, while words of difficult orthography are spelled with accuracy when dictated for spelling.” For example, he says, “The words ‘whose,’ ‘which,’ and ‘father,’ when spelled orally, were generally correct, but when written in sentences they were frequently, in many schools, in a majority of cases, erroneous.” No test could more clearly demonstrate the purely mechanical character of the methods of instruction than this of a comparison between the pupils’ oral and written spelling. The average of excellence in spelling the three simple words “which, whose, scholar,” of the primary grade for the whole county of Norfolk, as found by Mr. Walton, was the exceedingly low one of 55.9, the basis being 100.

The ingenuity in bad spelling of this grade of pupils, who had been at least four years in school, is well illustrated by the example of the word “carriage,” written as follows: “Carage, carrage, craidge, caradg, carege, carriag, carrige;” and of the word “sleigh,” written “saly, slay, slaig, slaigh, slagh, slaw, sleig, sleugh, sleight, sligh, sley, slew, slave, sleygh;” and of the word “Tuesday,” written “Tusgay, tuestay, toesday;” and of the word “Wednesday,” written “wanesday, wedenyday, Wedernsday, wednest, Wenday, Wendsday, wensday, wenesday, wensdaw, wenze, Wenzie, Wendsstay, wenstday, Wesday, Whensday, winday, Windday, Winsday,” etc.

The word “scholar” presented one hundred and sixty different erroneous spellings; that of “depot” fifty, among which were the following: “Deappow, deppowe, deaphow, deapohoe, teapot, doopo,” and “bepo.” An exercise in spelling by both grades of pupils, the “primary,” composed of pupils from eight and a half to ten and a half years old, and the “grammar,” composed of pupils from twelve and a half to fifteen and a half years old, showed errors of which the following are examples: Any, spelled ane and enny; along, aloud and alon; amongst, amunt; animals, anables; arithmetic, rithmes; asked, asted; beautiful, beuful; been, ben, bene, and bin; by-and-by, bimeby; coat, coot, coth, cote, goat, and coate; Boston, bostone; boy, poy, and bou; city, sitty; eggs, ages; custard-pie, custed puy; coming, comin, commun, gomming, and comming.

An exercise in composition developed the following specimen errors: “The was two boys; They was two boys; How is all the boys? Things that was good; They is not many here I know; He come to school; I see him yesterday; He asked cyrus what he done that day; I had saw him; he had wore a coat,” etc.

The examinations in mathematics yielded similar results to those developed in reading, writing, spelling, and composition. Mr. Walton says, “If instead of this [the routine method of the school] the pupil should be compelled to deal with real things, and to find his answer by studying the conditions of his problem, the fiction which arithmetic now is to most pupils would become to them a reality.”[45]

The prime difficulty is here stated. The schools deal in “fictions.” In the language of the Norfolk County committee, “The memory is cultivated and the reason allowed to slumber.” Now, if to every fact memorized the pupil were required to apply the test of reason to analyze it and find out its relation to other facts, and fix it with all its relations in his mind, he would possess certain solid information of an ascertained practical value. It is very simple. It is making the pupil think for himself by showing him how to think for himself instead of thinking for him. Of course this is object-teaching. In the reading-lesson the pupil is required to know the meaning of the words of which it is composed in order to read with correct expression. When required to spell a word orally he is also required to write it. In the study of arithmetic he is shown certain objects, blocks of cubical and other forms, and required to apply the rules of the book to the ascertainment of their contents. In grammar the analysis of the sentence is followed by the writing of it, and the construction of other sentences involving similar principles in the art of composition, and so on.

This is the kindergarten system now rapidly coming into high favor as an essential preliminary step in education. It is also the system of the manual training school. Under this system the pupil is not merely told that the saw is a thin, flat piece of steel with teeth used for cutting boards and timbers; a saw is placed in his hand and he is taught to use it: and so of all the hand and machine tools of the trades. He stands at the forge, bends over the moulding-form, shoves the plane in the carpenter-shop, presides at the turning-lathe, that ingenious invention of Maudslay—an automaton truer than the human eye, more cunning and more accurate than the human hand; executes plans for patterns and then makes the patterns, and finally, from the faint lines he has traced on paper, constructs a machine, breathes the breath of life (steam) into its veins, and with it moves mountains!

In further support of the charge that the schools educate automatically, and hence superficially, the following intelligent opinions are cited:

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., remarks that the common schools of Massachusetts cost $4,000,000 a year; and adds, “The imitative or memorizing faculties only are cultivated, and little or no attention is paid to the thinking or reflective powers. Indeed it may almost be said that a child of any originality or with individual characteristics is looked upon as wholly out of place in a public school.... To skate is as difficult as to write; probably more difficult. Yet in spite of hard teaching in the one case and no teaching in the other, the boy can skate beautifully, and he cannot write his native tongue at all.”[46]

Mr. Edward Atkinson says, “We are training no American craftsmen, and unless we devise better methods than the old and now obsolete apprentice system, much of the perfection of our almost automatic mechanism will have been achieved at the cost not only of the manual but also of the mental development of our men. Our almost automatic mills and machine-shops will become mental stupefactories.”[47]

Prof. Barbour, of Yale College, says, “Our schools are suffering from congestion of the brain: too much thought and too little putting it in practice.”

An English observer of our public schools says, “They teach apparently for information, almost regardless of development. This system develops no special individuality or power, forms few habits of observation, benefits little except the memory, and herein lies its great weakness.”

The late Mr. Wendell Phillips said, “Our system stops too short, and as a justice to boys and girls as well as to society it should see to it that those whose life is to be one of manual labor should be better trained for it.”

Mr. Wickersham, late Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Pennsylvania, says, “It is high time that something should be done to enable our youth to learn trades and to form industrious habits and a taste for work.”

Dr. Runkle, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says, “Public education should touch practical life in a larger number of points; it should better fit all for that sphere in life in which they are destined to find their highest happiness and well-being.”

Opinions of this character might be multiplied almost indefinitely. They reflect the general sentiment that, as an industrial agency, the public school is a failure; but its value as an enlightening and civilizing agency is not therefore underestimated. It was not established as an industrial agency; it was established as a bulwark of liberty, and nobly did it fulfil its mission. The colonial fathers had a horror of ignorance, and as a barrier against it they raised the public school. But they were without industrial interests in the higher departments of skilled labor, and without commerce in a large way. Lord Sheffield said that the American colonies were founded with the sole view of securing to England a monopoly of their trade, and Lord Chatham declared that they had no right to manufacture even a nail or a horseshoe. Even after the Revolution, in 1784, the commerce of the country was so insignificant that eight bales of cotton shipped from South Carolina were seized by the customs authorities of England on the ground that so large a quantity could not have been produced in the United States!

These humble conditions no longer exist, and to object to the expansion of the public-school system to meet the requirements of new exigencies is to ignore the logic and march of events. The nations are running an industrial race, and the nation that applies to labor the most thought, the most intelligence, will rise highest in the scale of civilization, will gain most in wealth, will most surely survive the shocks of time, will live longest in history. In the race for industrial supremacy we are not at the front. It is a fact to be pondered that we are exchanging the products of unskilled for skilled labor with the nations of Europe. In the course of a year, for example, England exports of raw material and food only about $150,000,000 in value, while her exports of manufactures aggregate about $850,000,000 in value. On the other hand, our exports consist almost entirely of raw material and food, their annual value being about $800,000,000, while of manufactures we export only a beggarly $75,000,000 worth, and our imports of manufactures are of the annual value of about $250,000,000. In crude, uneducated, unskilled labor capacity, we have grown much more rapidly than in the departments of educated, skilled labor; and in the exact ratio of this growth of unskilled over skilled labor, we are behind the age. We are industrially ill-balanced. We are selling brawn and buying thought—cunning, invention, genius; exhausting our physical manhood and impoverishing a virgin soil. We are suffering from a paucity of skilled labor, and we hesitate to apply the needed and obviously adequate remedy—the training of the youth of the country in the elements of the useful arts, in the public schools.

A final and conclusive evidence of the verity of the charge that prevailing methods of education are automatic, and hence superficial in their character, is found in an examination test recently made in one of the public schools in a large American city, in the department of mathematics. The superintendent begins to distrust his own system of abstract instruction, and resolves to test the acquirements of certain classes of pupils ranging from ten to twelve years of age. He submits a series of questions in number, which are promptly solved either orally or in chalk on the black-board, showing a complete mastery of the subject from the abstract side, or point of view. To test the practical value of the knowledge thus exhibited the superintendent repeats his series of questions, applying them to things. For example: He passes six cards to a pupil, and requests that one-half of them be returned. This question having been promptly and correctly answered by the return of three of them, and the six cards being again placed in the hands of the pupil, the second question is propounded, namely, “Please give me one-third of one-half of the cards in your hand.” The pupil is puzzled; he fumbles the cards nervously, blushes, and returns a wrong number or becomes entirely helpless and “gives it up.” This question, or some other question of similar general import, is submitted to each member of the class with a like unfavorable result in eight or nine cases in a total of ten cases. The superintendent is astonished; he is more than astonished, he is deeply chagrined; for he knows that the kindergarten child of six or seven years of age, with the blocks, would answer his series of questions correctly eight or nine times in a total of ten.

It is impossible to conceive of a more striking illustration of the prime defects of automatic education than is afforded by the foregoing described experiment. It sustains and justifies the severe criticism of the schools by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in his magazine article of 1880, in the course of which he says,

“From one point of view children are regarded as automatons; from another, as india-rubber bags; from a third, as so much raw material. They must move in step and exactly alike. They must receive the same mental nutriment in equal quantities and at fixed times. Its assimilation is wholly immaterial, but the motions must be gone through with. Finally, as raw material, they are emptied in at the primaries, and marched out at the grammar grades—and it is well!”[48]

The testimony of Col. Francis W. Parker, of the Cook County (Illinois) Normal School, is to the same effect. He says,

“The most important work of to-day is to collect, reconcile, and apply all the principles and methods of education that have been discovered in the past, into one science and art of teaching. This would certainly radically change all our school work in this country. When this is done the ground will be made ready for new advances in the incomplete science of education. Because a complete science has not yet been discovered is a very poor reason for not applying what we already know. What specific changes would the application of known mental laws, in teaching about which all psychologists are in agreement, bring about? For it is only by a sharp comparison of what is now done according to tradition and custom in our schools, with that which can be done by the application of the simplest principles of teaching, that the value of the true art of instruction may be in some degree appreciated.

“To illustrate this it may be mentioned that little children have been taught to read, in the past, and a great majority of them are now taught, by a method that is utterly opposed to a mental law, about which there can be no dispute among those who know anything of the science of teaching. I refer to the A B C method. Nearly three hundred years ago Comenius discovered a rule of teaching which may be said to embrace all rules in its category—‘Things that have to be done should be learned by doing them.’ This rule is so simple and plain that every one, except the teachers, has adopted and used it since man has lived upon the earth. If I am not very much mistaken, the school-master for the last fifty years has been incessantly inventing ways of doing things in the school-room by doing something else. We try to teach the English language by rules, definitions, analyses, diagrams, and parsing. Before the poor innocent child can write a single sentence correctly, we teach the painful pronunciation of words without the grasping of thought as reading. We vainly endeavor to give children a knowledge of number by teaching figures, the signs of number. We cram our victim’s mind full of empty, meaningless words, instead of inspiring and developing it by the sweet and strong realities of thought. This futile struggle to do things by doing something else is to-day costing the people of this country millions and millions of hard-earned dollars; and it is much to be feared that it will one day cost their children the blessings of free government. This is a serious charge.

“The three hundred thousand teachers of this country are as faithful, honest, and earnest as any other class of active workers. If, then, these great truths in education be at the doors of our educators, why do they not acquire and use them? The answer is not far to seek. Not one teacher in five hundred ever makes a practical, thorough study of the history of education, to say nothing of the science.

“The tremendous projecting power of tradition stands stubbornly in the way of progress in education. It can only be met and overcome by the most thorough searching and indefatigable study of the child’s nature, and of the means by which the possibilities for good in God’s greatest creation may be realized.”[49]

The change from automatic to scientific education ought not to be very difficult. It has been made in the kindergarten. It consists in substituting things in place of signs of things. The boys should be taught to read in school as he will be required to read; to write as he will be required to write; and to cipher as he will be required to cipher, when he becomes a man.

In teaching chemistry, for example, there should be a laboratory with the necessary illustrative apparatus. In teaching geography, in addition to the books and the globe, the form of the continent should be moulded in sand, with coast lines, mountain ranges, rivers, canals, harbors, cities, etc. In teaching number the pupil should have the things and parts of things, represented by signs, in his hands. In teaching mechanics the pupil should handle the saw, the plane, the file, the hammer, and the chisel, and stand at the bench, the forge, and the turning-lathe. It is in this way only that the pupil can be taught the power of expressing, as Mr. Clark puts it, “what has been absorbed on the receptive side.”

Mr. MacAlister illustrates the force of Mr. Clark’s diagrams in a sentence: “We must not close our eyes to the fact that by far the larger number of men in every civilized community are workers to whom a skilled hand is quite as important as a well filled head.”[50] The prevailing methods of teaching fill the head but do not provide for assimilation, re-creation, and expression. Now to assimilate, to reduce to practical value and put to use facts memorized, and to create, the power of expression is an essential prerequisite; creating is expressing ideas in concrete form. But under the old régime of education only two modes of expression are provided—speech and writing. A third mode—drawing—has been very generally adopted. Drawing, however, is only the first step, an incomplete step, so to speak, of expression. It is a sign, an outline, of a thing. What we want is the thing itself. That thing can only be produced at the forge, the bench, or the lathe; and this is manual training in the arts.

What manual training will do for the pupil is expressed in the following terse paragraph by Col. Augustus Jacobson:

“The boy leaving school should carry with him mechanical, business, and scientific training, fitting him for whatever it may become necessary for him to do in the world. I would secure for society the advantage of all the brain capacity that is born and all the training it can take. It is possible and practicable to let every child of fair capacity start in life from his school a skilled worker, with the principal tools of all the mechanical employments, an athlete with the maximum of health possible to him, and thoroughly at home in science and literature. The child so trained would, when grown, be to the ordinary man of to-day what Jay-Eye-See is to an ordinary plough-horse.”