Are Our Schools Producing Results?

"T

E. E. CATES, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.

HAT want me." This was said by a boy in the eighth grade of the public school. What are our schools teaching? For what are we paying taxes for their support? The fads and the vocations have so firm a grip upon the schools that the three R's are being strangled. The argument that they fit for life has gained the popular ear, so that now they are like Phaeton driving the horses of Apollo. They are killing every good thing. Perhaps this boy had been taught to say, "That wasn't I," but not in the same way that he had been taught to say that 3 times 4 is 12. He would not say to the grocer that 3 times 4 is 14. Now this was the end of that boy's school days, and he had been taught music, drawing and manual training. Now, I submit, would not the knowledge and ability to say, "It wasn't I," "That doesn't matter," "Whom did. you get that from?" "Between you and me," and many another correct expression which 50 per cent of the people use incorrectly, be of as much worth to this or any boy in securing a position in a mercantile or manufacturing concern, as the ability to sing the scale, draw a vase, or make a flower-stand?

Some one has aptly advised, "Know some thing about every thing and every thing about some thing." Long ago Pope said the same thing:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."

While this may be ideal, it is not possible. To compel every child to sing and to draw is doubtful pedagogy. One of our humorists has said: "I had rather be ignorant than to know so darn much that isn't so." If he meant so much that is useless, he was a true philosopher.

In a quite recent number of the Outlook was an account of the girl ambulance drivers on the French front. There were fourteen in the unit. It was the opinion of the superintendent that these girls kept their machines in better order and were more skillful in finding the disorders and repairing them than were the men. But these girls who came from wealthy and well-to-do English homes, never had any manual training or machine-shop work, and they knew how to dig their ambulances out of a snowdrift without any instruction from Frederick Taylor on how to handle a shovel. The boy on the farm, without any of the frills of the city polytechnic high school, can shoe a horse, repair a reaper, run a gas engine, and build a model henhouse.

The one great lesson that the American boy needs to be taught today is immediate and willing obedience to constituted authority. Many blessings will come to us as the result of the world war, but the greatest good will come to the individual "our boys." They will come home men. Let me explain. The American boy is not obedient; he is not respectful. If he were, half the private schools of the country would have to close their doors. This is a product of our American family life. In the army and in the navy he must obey immediately and willingly; he must be respectful to the officers, and this is what makes a man of him.

Once, when driving by a military school, the gentleman at the wheel remarked, "It was a military school that made a man of me, because there I learned to obey." Roscoe Conkling always revered the memory of the teacher in the country school who gave him a sound thrashing, "Because," he remarked, "it made a United States senator of me." An office boy did not do what the manager had told him to do. When questioned why he had not, he carelessly replied, "Oh, I just didn't want to." The manager knocked him down, which was a very proper thing for the manager to do. When the boy went home that night he complained to his parents, not because the manager had knocked him down, but because they had never taught him to obey.

During a storm the captain of a vessel ordered one of the sailors to go up into the rigging. The sailor hesitated. Quick as a flash

Then he turned to After the storm one

the captain stretched him flat on the deck. the next man and said, "You go." He went. of the passengers said to the captain that he thought he had been pretty harsh on the boy. The captain replied, "Did you not know that your own safety and the safety of the vessel depended on the immediate execution of that order." Go into our schools and you will see that greater stress needs to be put on obedience.

The high school and the college graduate are decidedly ineffi cient. None of them are skilled. None of them take leadership. What can be expected of the rank and file of the modern world when the leaders of American life-men in the professions and in the higher institutions which prepare for the professions, have seemingly gone mad on the question of specialization?

We specialize our grammar school children in bank discount and leave them in lifelong ignorance of what mathematics really means. We specialize our high school youth in battles and sieges and permit them to remain ignorant of the great historic development of mankind through industry and commerce. We specialize our college youth in haphazard electives, each taught by a specialist and most of them unrelated to all the others, and turn that youth out of college a veritable ignoramus in regard to himself and all those other selves with whom his whole subsequent life will be concerned. We send out from our schools of applied science many a man competent to put up a bridge, but not competent to put up a good front among his equals; wise in the handling of formulas, but ignorant of the handling of men; full of little knacks and methods of calculation, but empty of that tact and intellectual skill which are absolutely essential to professional

success.

We need to get back to the humanities-not to the humanities of Greece and Rome, as expounded at Oxford and in some universities in America, but the humanities of the twentieth century. For the study of the real humanities implies a working knowledge of mankind-of men.

We have been so overwhelmed with facts and fancies and theories and names and inventions and problems, that we are

forgetting that the main fact in education is results. Whether our youth is to start in a store, in an office, or as a drummer; whether he is to be a minister, a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor, his success depends enormously on his ability to get along with and to handle other men. That success- -the highest success which comes through the widest social usefulness-he cannot have unless he is broad, catholic, tolerant, tactful and philosophical-not as a specialist but as a man.

Some time ago a writer in one of the magazines said: "The curse of American scholarship and of American education is the Ph. D. For, in exalting this decoration of the specialist, we are repeating the error of the Schoolmen who confounded erudition, which dries up the soul, with real wisdom, which expands man into almost the very image of the All-Wise. Yet this hall-mark of erudition is today practically essential as a key to a faculty position; and it is so, not because there seems to be any valid educational reason for it, but largely because it was used in Germany and looks well in the college catalog. As a result hundreds of young fellows are starving themselves and impoverishing their parents to secure this decoration.

To get this decoration they are pursuing special investigations— research by counting the number of adverbial modifiers in Shakespeare, or by sending out questionnaires regarding the proportion of children who suck their thumbs. Having scraped together this fatuous information they spend much time and money in having it printed, in order that another doctorial dissertation may be added to the dustiest shelves of the college library. And these most precious years of a man's life, these years in which the youth ought to be learning how to broaden his mind and his capacities, how to deal with men, and to handle his faculties, his tongue and himself—these the poor fellow is selling for this mess of pottage with which to feed the trustees of some university.

"Having been admitted to the teaching staff of some university, this fledgling Ph. D., if he is to hold his place, must produce something, and that quickly. Half-starved physically, and wholly starved intellectually and socially, his only alternative is to spe

cialize still more, digging, like a woodpecker, into some wormhole of erudition in the hope of extracting from it a maggot large enough to placate the learned university public accustomed to be fed by young doctors of philosophy. This digging is politely called research; but it is the sorriest counterfeit of the genuine thing, being but perfunctory and profitless grubbing."

Are we producing our due proportion of first class, of great men, of efficient men? To produce men with loins from which will come great contribution to human thought we must make over entirely our whole system of education, so that our youth, instead of being put through vast pages imparting facts, shall be put into small classes under intellectually strong women, and especially under intellectually strong and morally strong men, who will really develop the boy's mind and character. We must then persuade the college authorities not to turn all undergraduates into a jangle of courses taught by specialists, but to lay out for those boys really developing and strengthening coherent work, which shall make them acquainted with men, society, and genuine wisdom. The physicians are getting the nearest to the heart of the problem, by their clinics, their hospitals and "interne" training, through which the embryo physician studies not medicine but human life.