Chapter IV: Part 4

The Gary school not only lightens this strain of discipline for the teacher and cultivates her initiative, but serves as a kind of training-school for the teachers themselves. The new-coming teacher learns by acting as helper or “apprentice” to the older teacher, just as the children in shop or laboratory learn from one another. The result is an uncommon and appealing equality between teachers and children, without imposed authority on one side or subservience on the other. Beside Mr. Wirt Mme. Montessori seems almost a beginner, so daringly has he carried the principles of self-instruction up through the higher grades. Even visiting teachers and superintendents who wish to learn the theory and practice of the Gary school must learn in the same way. Mr. Wirt does not lecture to them. He allows them also to come into the school for a few months as helpers to teacher or principal. Everybody who has anything to do with a Gary school must evidently learn by doing the real work itself. Nothing shows more clearly the whole-knit fiber of Mr. Wirt’s philosophy than this new kind of “normal” school for visiting teachers.

I was pleased with the absence of self-display. Advertising has come from the outside. The teachers seem innocent of the great number of things they are doing which a large part of the orthodox educational world believes to be impossible. You are talked with frankly and genially, but nothing is done to impress you. You are left to interpret it all for yourself. Those who miss the spirit will find weaknesses. Professional educators hold up hands of horror at the “looseness” of the teaching. They miss the dramatic effect of the “well-conducted recitation”--the drawing-out of the pupil’s memory, or the appeals to glib guesses at what the teacher wants. They judge by the old-fashioned standard of how the teacher is teaching rather than the new one of what the child is learning. My complaint would be rather that there was still too much teaching that is conventional, particularly in the lower grades. And I have an animus against the deadly desks and seats which are still in use in too many of the classrooms. But the significant thing is that this kind of a school is not static or completed, but a constantly growing organism. The only limit to which it may grow lies in the imagination and initiative of teachers and pupils. And the school cannot be judged in cross-section. Even when it starts with so admirable an equipment, its life has just begun. For the mechanical and artistic, manual work and intellectual study, are all directed towards enriching the physical body and the spiritual life and atmosphere of the school. This intensive cultivation of resources produces that “embryonic community life” which is Professor Dewey’s ideal, where in actual work the child senses the occupations and interests of the larger society into which he is to enter.

Mr. Wirt’s schools would be unworthy of discussion were they not capable of imitation generally in American towns and cities. Already a number of communities have copied the essential features, and Mr. Wirt is at present occupied in remodeling a few of the New York City schools, successfully, too, in spite of the fact that New York, on account of its rapid growth, its great alien population, and its political cross-currents, presents perhaps the most formidable school problems in the country. The only substantial difficulty in remodeling schools according to the Gary scheme is the matter of playgrounds. Even this is surmountable, for most cities have parks or usable vacant lots within reach of the school. Mr. Wirt’s great triumph in Gary is the old Jefferson School which he found when he came to the town. This was an orthodox ten-room building built by the city fathers to accommodate Gary children for many generations. By turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium, transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a jack-of-all-trades workshop around the engine-room in the cellar, a domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner, and by appropriating a nearby park space, he transformed a perfectly ordinary school building, whose prototype may be found in every town in the land, into a full-fledged, varied and smoothly-functioning Wirt school. Through the “rotation of crops” system, this school, built for three hundred and sixty children, actually accommodates over eight hundred, and gives them every facility, if less elaborately, of the specially designed new schools.

Perhaps I may here recapitulate. The mere prosaic business economy of the Wirt scheme is enough to recommend it. No school board can afford to neglect a plan which not only saves money to the taxpayers, but provides better facilities, more varied equipment and better educational opportunities than even well-to-do communities can at present afford. The Wirt school solves the vexing “part-time” problem. Gary is the only city I know that has room (March, 1915) in its present buildings for at least one-third more children than there now are to go to school.

In the second place, the plan solves most of the problems of vocational and industrial training which now confront the public school. It catches the child’s curiosity and skill on the upstroke. It makes no separation of manual from intellectual work, and avoids that sinister caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement. And from the point of view of economy again, the scheme of devoting industrial work to actual care of the school-plant enables the school to provide a great variety of occupations almost without additional cost to the community.

In the third place, the plan provides a large measure of individual instruction. It is a school for every kind of a child. The flexibility of schedules, the coöperation of outside agencies like the churches, the varied activities, give opportunity for the fullest development of differing interests and capacities.

In the fourth place, the plan carries out throughout the school life the educational truth that learning can only come through doing. The habits and attitudes of careful scientific observation, or purposeful interesting activity which is neither work nor play, the social, democratic, and coöperative background which such a school cultivates, are exactly the qualities we need for our younger generation in American society.

Such a school carries out the best ideals of American democracy, as I see them, in an extremely effective way. Its philosophy is American, its democratic organization is American. It is one of the institutions that our American culture should be proudest of. Perhaps professional educators, accustomed to other concepts and military methods and administrative illusions, will not welcome this kind of school. But teachers hampered by drill and routine will want it, and so will parents and children.

XVIII

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL

A recent article in the “New York Times” (Oct. 17, 1915) by Dr. Thomas S. Baker, Headmaster of the Tome School, contains an able pedagogical criticism of the Gary school which is typical of the general attitude towards the Gary idea on the part of conservative schoolmen. Nothing could bring out more clearly the difference in educational values between this professional teaching opinion and the broad social vision of Superintendent Wirt. Dr. Baker admits the impressive social effectiveness of the plan. It is “the last development in socializing the schools.” Mr. Wirt is “not only an educator, but also a social reformer, a city worker.” But Dr. Baker’s argument is really the specialized pedagogical one against the social. Where Mr. Wirt sees the school as a community center, a children’s world, Dr. Baker sees it as an educational factory. “The social value of the Gary schools,” he says, “is beyond question. Its pedagogic excellence has still to be determined.” From his point of view, a school is not so much a place to train effective citizens as to make “thorough scholars.” He questions whether “these side issues in the scheme of child-training”--the gymnasia, shops, laboratories, which the Gary school contains--“are really essential in mental development.” He is afraid that the young citizens of Gary learn more from their industrial shops and science laboratories than from their books.

Dr. Baker’s guarded argument is really a glorification of “intellectual discipline” as against an intelligent capacity to lead an organic life in a modern society which needs above all things resourceful adaptation and social appreciations. It is a question of ideals, and no more important issue was ever put to a people than this one of how we want our next generation trained. The school is not only the one institution which assimilates all the people, but it is the most easily modifiable. It is not only the easiest lever of social progress but the most effective, for it deals with relatively plastic human material. To decide what kind of a school we want is almost to decide what kind of a society we want.

If we only want that kind of a school which would “make hard-working and accurate scholars and produce thoughtful men,” we must resign ourselves to a progressive softening of the fiber and capacity of the mass of our people. The average educator acts as if he thought of his child-world as a level plain of capacities. There is the mass of unskilled, unawakened minds; here is the level of scholarship, knowledge, civic virtue, appreciations. Education is to him the process of lifting up the mass from their primitive level to the higher one. The public school is the elevator into which all are to be shoveled and transported to the upper story. And the American public school in the last fifty years has been faithfully following this ideal.

The truth is, of course, that mental aptitude is not any such level desert, but rather a series of inclined planes. When we try to educate all the children of all the people, we are not dealing with a homogeneous mass, but with sliding scales of capacity. A mental test of the school-children of a state would reveal an incline extending in orderly gradation from the genius down to the imbecile. A physical test would give us a different slant, a test for artistic or mechanical capacity another. Stand at the center of divine average and try to lever any of these slopes into a horizontal position and you find half of your society squatting heavily at the lower end. You may ascribe it to race capacity, personal heredity, social environment, malnutrition, defective nervous organization or anything you please, but the fact remains that the greater part of the human raw material will be permanently resistive to or only dully appreciative of any attempts to elevate them to a level. This is true of any capacity you may choose. The outstanding truth of society seems to be the heterogeneous distribution of capacities. And the irony of it is that after artistic capacity true intellectual capacity is probably the rarest. For the public school to try to make intellectualists of all its children is a sheer defiance of sociological reality.

Some educators, while they recognize this diversity, yet insist on uniform standards, uniform curricula, uniform discipline, on the ground that social order in a democracy is imperiled unless the highest degree of like-mindedness prevails. Such a democracy would be the stagnant democracy of China. The result of these attempts at standardization have been the automatic centrifugal flinging off into space of the children whose interests were not intellectual, who were no more capable of being made into “accurate scholars” than they were into artists and poets. And from those who did not get quite flung off, but clung on with their teeth, we get most of our prevailing pseudo-culture. To keep on trying to “develop the mind” and produce “thorough scholarship” in those whom we force to submit to educational processes, means simply to go on creating a nerveless and semi-helpless mass of boys and girls who will never take their effective and interested place in the world because they have no mental tools which they can wield. Such a course is coming to be generally recognized as a kind of slow national suicide, a slow suffocation of industrial and social progress.

The schools do change, but the schoolmen yield grudgingly. Nothing could be more naïve than the test which Dr. Baker proposes for evaluating the Gary plan. Submit, he says, the highest class in the Gary schools to an examination by the College Examining Board. If the students pass, the Gary system will be justified of its children. Was ever a more patent assertion of the professional bias? Let the children drop out of the lower grades untrained except in the rudiments, but if the small minority in the highest class passes its Vergil and algebra and English literature and German with marks as high as the graduates of the Tome School, then the Gary system will cease to be considered a “mere experiment.” If this is what the critics of the Gary plan mean when they plead for an “evaluation of this novel experiment,” we may well hope that it will escape the peril.

Such a conception of educational values cannot become too speedily obsolete. A public school is a mockery unless it educates the public. It cannot make the rarefied and strained product at the top the test of its effectiveness. And the public is not ideally educated unless its individuals--all of them--are intelligent, informed, skilled, resourceful, up to the limit of their respective capacities. Life itself can no longer be trusted to provide this education; the school must substitute. The Gary school deliberately sets such an ideal. Democracy does not mean uniformity, but it does mean equality of opportunity. A democratic school would be one where every child had the chance to discover and develop aptitude. The Gary school, with its harmonious activities of intellectual, manual, artistic and scientific work, physical education and play, gives just this chance. Democratic education does not mean the provision of separate schools for different kinds of children, or even separate courses in the same school, as the movement for industrial education is now threatening to bring. This is to create at once invidious distinctions, and fasten class education upon us. To say that children are different does not mean that some are fitted to be scholars and others to be manual workers, some to be artists and some to be scientists. The differences are differences of focus and not of quality.

To most children will appear in the course of school life some dominant interest, and it is upon the cultivation of that interest that the child’s chance of being more than a nerveless mediocrity will depend. It is upon that training that his chance of being absorbed out of the school into the social and industrial world will depend. At the same time, without a common background with his fellows he will be alien and adrift in the world. Interest and skill in one’s work, whether it be making automobiles or teaching Greek, an acquaintance with the contemporary world, an alert intelligence which is always seeking to diminish the area of things human that are alien to one--a man or woman with this would be truly educated in any society. But both focus and background are supremely necessary. The present educational system does not really set itself to provide either. Only in a school organized on some such plan as the Gary plan will such education be possible.

This does not mean that every child is to marvelously blossom into ideally alert and skilled intelligence. But we can be sure that a school which gives opportunity for the development of the most varied aptitudes in the free play of a child-community life will have done all that it could. No one pretends that the Gary education is the intrinsically ideal education for all time. But we can say that, given the best social demands of America to-day, this school will make for the most robust, effective, intelligent citizenship of which we are at present capable.

XIX

THE TRAINED MIND

How much longer are we to expect the headmasters of our private secondary schools to view with anything but alarm the current radical tendencies in education? In the November “Atlantic,” Dr. Alfred E. Stearns of Phillips-Andover is stirred to wrath against the fallacies of the modern school as expounded by Mr. Flexner and others. The paper contributes little new to the well-worn theory of mental discipline upon which upper-class education has so long been based. But it is highly significant as a pattern of the “trained” mind as it works in the exposure of fallacies. Dr. Stearns is presumably an immensely successful product of the old idealistic and linguistic education, gained by strenuous effort and vigorous thinking. It is worth while to examine how such a mind argues, what it considers as clinching evidence, how it hopes to convince the alert intellectual of to-day.

The “fallacies” in modern education which Dr. Stearns is exposing are the materialistic and utilitarian ideal, the belief in the non-transferability of mental power from one field to another, the cultivation of interest rather than discipline, of play rather than drudgery, the scientific rather than the cultural emphasis. He wishes to persuade the reader that all these tendencies make for the perversion of the child’s character, the weakening of his mental grasp, the materializing of his soul. One waits eagerly for proofs of such very serious menaces. The student of education to-day is rapidly acquiring a belief in objective evidence, in statistical or at least analytic experiment, in scientific formulation. The kind of evidence that appeals to the alert student to-day is the kind that comes out of the psychological laboratory of Clark University, or Columbia or Chicago, out of the great city school surveys, like Portland or Cleveland or New York, out of the experimental schools in different parts of the country. These are the arenas where educational problems will, he believes, ultimately be solved. And to him the so-called “fallacies” in modern education are not “dogmas” or “assumptions” at all, but rather hopeful hypotheses which are now being tested in dozens of American schools.

Is this the sort of evidence to which Dr. Stearns’ trained mind appeals when he wishes to discredit the “new” education? Not at all. He does not even so much as show that he is acquainted with the existence of the great mass of literature which would throw light on the success or failure of the radical theories which he deplores. Educational journals, school surveys, reports of intelligence tests, descriptions of play schools,--none of these seem to have come into contact with his training. For the benefit of the philosophically-minded, he does not even refer to the writings of Dewey or Hall, or the other radical writers on education. All this writing and doing which represents the new education at work, he lumps into “the pedagogical expert,” upon whom he lavishes his anxious scorn. The only concrete data he offers is the record of the College Examination Board, which Dr. Flexner, whom he is criticizing, had cited in his “Modern School.” Dr. Flexner had argued against Latin and mathematics in the secondary school on the ground that the majority of even the picked students failed in them. Dr. Stearns succeeds in showing that a majority of college candidates fail not only in Latin and Algebra but in all other subjects as well. The normal mind, untrained by the old dispensation, would consider these statistics very damaging to Dr. Stearns’ cause. The inexorable conclusion would be not that Latin and algebra should be retained in the secondary school curriculum, but that the entire curriculum should undergo a radical reorganization in teaching methods and educational philosophy.

Dr. Stearns, like most of the critics of the “new” education, makes the fundamental error of confusing the narrow business man, who sees no “use” for his son’s taking Latin or algebra in school, with the “new” educator who would give these subjects a new orientation in the curriculum. The “practical” business man is as much anathema to the “modern school” as he is to the cultural school. The “modern school” would not refuse any subject to minds that fed upon it and fused it into vital experience. But it would not force it on minds that could not digest it. And Dr. Stearns’ own figures show how generally indigestible, with all the drudgery and mental discipline in the world, is the entire conventional secondary school curriculum. The pseudo-modern high school where science and manual arts have been added, only to be taught in the same unilluminated way, is as objectionable to the “new” educator as it is to Dr. Stearns.

Since the latter’s only use of objective evidence proves a boomerang, what considerations does he think will be persuasive in his attack on the “new” education? It is easy to see. His reliance is entirely on authority, upon personal belief. Several very successful business men of his acquaintance attribute their success to the training of the old education. The majority of schoolmasters are not yet ready to abandon the doctrine of mental discipline. The sons of Mr. Hill go to college to get something which their father, for all his success, recognizes that he missed. It is a serious question in the minds of many observers whether Dr. Eliot’s advocacy of “observational” training is sound. Always the reference to personal authority, to prestige, to anything but objective standards on which both sides may agree! Always the naïve appeal to schoolmasters and successful business men, the pillars of his world! Dr. Stearns deplores the materialistic trend of the age, but he does not consider how powerfully his own innocent use of the verdict of successful business men as scientific evidence is likely to glorify material success in the minds of his students.

Dr. Stearns’ logic is as unconvincing as his evidence. A doctrine is monstrous. Therefore, he implies, it is untrue. Intelligent children are usually bright in all their school subjects. Therefore, if you force a child to learn through drudgery, you automatically endow him with general intelligence. The interest of boys in wireless telegraphy and automobiles, he thinks, is the best argument for keeping all these things out of a school where one must learn to work. At the same time, Dr. Stearns objects to scientific schools because students so soon lose interest in their work. But, according to the gospel of drudgery, why would not this make science the ideal “mental discipline”?

Such a paper as this shows the technique of a thoroughly obsolete mind. Such “mental discipline” as this old education gave is evidently of little use in handling a world of facts, of experiment, of recorded tests. Criticism does not make such thinkers critical. It only makes them belligerent. They do not analyze, they repel. They are more interested in a moral justification for the structure of their craft and their practices than in the truth. Dr. Stearns’ paper is the best evidence of how little relevant is the old linguistic and idealistic education to the intellectual demands of to-day. The critical, analytic, impersonal, experimental approach is wholly lacking in his paper. His evidence is personal authority, his logic is special pleading. Parents with sons in private schools might well view with grave concern the kind of “trained mind” which is likely to be developed under such masters of the old education. They might ask how likely a boy, taught to use his mind the way Dr. Stearns uses his, is to analyze and grasp the complex facts of the world into which he will come.

XX

CLASS AND SCHOOL

The proposed experimental school which the General Education Board is to found in conjunction with Teachers’ College in New York has sent a shiver through the conservative schoolmen of America. It is assumed that the policy of the new school will follow Dr. Flexner’s manifesto of the “Modern School,” that adroit and uncompromising crystallization of the radical philosophy of our new American education. Dr. Flexner has proved himself to be an admirable agitator, for he has succeeded, with doctrines that public-school educators have been discussing for ten years and which experimental schools all through the country have been testing out, in rousing the slumberous camp of private secondary schoolmasters to a sense of what is going on in the educational world. The private secondary school is the last stronghold of educational conservatism. Enlightenment has to proceed upward through thick layers of prejudice and smugness. Dr. Flexner’s voice seems to have broken in the walls and gotten a hearing for the new education even in the walls of the traditional New England academy. It is for these people that the “Modern School” was written, for only those will find its proposals “revolutionary and dangerous” who have never read a line of Dewey or G. Stanley Hall, never read a copy of an educational journal, never visited an experimental school, or even the newer plants of the best public schools in American cities. There is irony in the location of the new school at Teachers’ College. For the latter has been one of the most persistently experimental educational centers in the country. If its “model” schools have felt in the course of time the blighting touch of conventionality, at least in the Speyer course of industrial arts there has been developed a method of permanent value. There is no more accurate application of Dr. Flexner’s demand that “children should begin by getting acquainted with objects,” “follow the life-cycles of plants and animals,” “the observation and execution of industrial and commercial processes,” and so forth. In this industrial arts course the children are concerned from the beginning with food-products and clothing and building and the way different peoples make their living. Out of this handling of homely things grow the geography and science and history and mathematics. It seems only a question of time before there will be scarcely an elementary school untouched by this practical approach to knowledge through objects and projects and concrete facts.

Dr. Flexner’s tilting is not against our rapidly improving public elementary school so much as it is against the private secondary school, with its sub-college, classical, formal curriculum, and its obsolete educational theory of formal discipline and salvation through drudgery. It is as an object-lesson for this branch of American education that the new school will have permanent value. It will be the heaviest assault which has yet had to be met by that vested educational interest which we know as the private secondary school. The private school has made it its function to prepare the sons and daughters of the well-to-do for college, and so keep up the tradition of leisured and cultured wealth. This is the ideal at the bottom of the hearts of the conservative schoolmen. A knowledge which is useless, like the formal classics and mathematics, is only a sharpened tool of exclusiveness, for only the younger generation of a ruling class can afford to give its time to it. In a growing industrial society such an education becomes ever more and more a dividing line between classes. That the public high school has been largely controlled by the same ideals does not mean at all that this kind of education has been democratized, but merely that the unthinking and clambering middle classes have been hypnotized by vague aspirations of “culture” and “intellectual training” into imitation of the traditional ruling-class education. Some of the strongest opposition to vocational education in the public schools comes even from the ranks of the ambitious wage-earners who “want their children to have the educational advantages they were denied.” They resent what they misinterpret as an attempt to keep their younger generation in a subordinate labor class. What they do not see is that the traditional education which they admire is no real education for the modern world. We find the industrious proletarian and the exclusive Tory joining hands in opposing the new democratic education which is meant to have the effects of freeing both classes and making them fit together to administer a free society. The Tory wants to keep for his children his privileged status; the wage-earner wants to obtain for his children this privileged status. “Book” education, innocent of practicality and use, is still an accepted mark of this geniality. Neither class has any real sense yet of a democratic attitude that finds both the “utilitarian” and the “cultural” irrelevant terms, and demands only effective activity and imaginative understanding from every citizen up to the limit of his capacity.

The “old” education then is a class-education, and therefore has no place in a society which is trying to become democratic. How much class-feeling is behind the current allegiance to the education of discipline and drudgery is shown in a paper by Miss Edith Hamilton of the Bryn Mawr School in the “New Republic” for February 10, 1917. She pleads for the “old” education in behalf of her girls. But when she says “school” she has in the back of her mind an institution for the training of the well-to-do classes. Her argument against a change in education seems to be based on the idea that change would be prejudicial to the life which she accepts as worthiest for those fortunate classes with which she is best acquainted. Her argument is that life will make no stern demands upon the sheltered, economically endowed leisure which most of her girls will enjoy. Without external standards their fiber must deteriorate unless they have learned the joy of work by the doing of things because they are hard. Without impersonal intellectual interests, their personal energy, she says, will waste away in futility or in a meddlesome control of their own daughters. The boy is harnessed into some kind of self-discipline by the exigencies of business life. But for the girl, the substitution in the “modern school” of domestic science for “elegant accomplishments” is only an illusory discipline. Not only are these arts of housekeeping too easy to provide discipline, but they will never be demanded from the upper-class girl. Only the traditional curriculum, therefore, impersonal, cultural, laborious, will give her the needed stimulus to play her leisured rôle worthily.

At first sight nothing could be more ironic than this gospel of strenuous effort preached in the name of a sheltered class. Why should a girl be disciplined, trained to do things “_because_ they are hard,” for a life which becomes “easier and easier,” unless her teachers wish to provide her with some kind of moral and intellectual justification for her social rôle? The “old” education combines uselessness and effort, and it is just this combination which would maintain leisure-class functions and yet leave the individuals morally justified. The uselessness makes you exclusive and the effort satisfies your moral sense. It is a little curious to find Miss Hamilton using the “utilitarian” argument against domestic science, that is, that it will never be used by her girls. Yet she wishes them to acquire “impersonal intellectual interests,” which they can never use except in not very real “cultural” dabblings and social work.

Miss Hamilton’s argument for tradition is the orthodox one that is now being repeated by all those who oppose the new Rockefeller school. “The old education is superior to any training which makes interest not discipline, efficiency not knowledge, the standard.” Now this point at issue between interest and discipline has been so thoroughly discussed by John Dewey in his “Interest as Related to Will” and other writings, that one is surprised at this late day to find responsible educators who are willing to give the impression that they are unacquainted with Dewey’s arguments. Even if disciples like Dr. Flexner and myself in our enthusiasm unconsciously caricature him, the philosophy is there in its classic form in Dewey for all to read. The curious notion of the “old” educator that interest makes work “easy,” instead of intensifying the effort, is only possible, of course, to minds soaked in a Puritan tradition. Dewey shows that interest and discipline are not antagonistic to efficiency and knowledge, but that knowledge is merely information effectively used and manipulated, and discipline is willed and focused interest. Each has an element of the other. It is meaningless to talk of interest vs. discipline when all real interest has an organizing effect on one’s activity, and any real discipline is built up on a foundation of interest. Indeed in one of my articles to which Miss Hamilton takes exception, I define discipline as “willed skill,” which is as far from any conception of “making things easy,” of “smattering and superficiality,” as could well be imagined. It is a superstition, of course, as Miss Hamilton says, to suppose that all children burn with a hard gem-like flame of curiosity to know, but it is equally a superstition to suppose that with all children strenuous drudgery flowers into the immense joy of work and creation, or that effort taken consistently against the grain of interest can suddenly be transmuted into spontaneous activity. A certain habit, a mechanical routine spirit, may be evolved by drudgery, but not imaginative skill. All true discipline comes from overcoming obstacles beyond which one is conscious of a goal in itself worth while. It is only a feeble spirit which can be drugged by effort in and for itself. In those admired cases where facility comes after conscientious but uninteresting effort, let the old-fashioned educator ask herself whether the child gained the satisfaction of accomplishment _because_ he went through the discipline, or whether it was not only _because_ he liked the satisfaction of accomplishment that he was willing to go through the drudgery. If you admit the latter, then you have admitted the case for the new education. Temperaments, impulses, interests--or, if you like, the lack of interests--will insist on dominating, on determining the way each child takes his experience. All education can ever do is to provide the experience, and stimulate, guide, organize interests. Anything else may produce, at its best, a trained animal. It will not be education, and it will not produce men and women.

The task of the democratic school is to provide just this general experience and stimulation. Miss Hamilton’s paper shows that such a school would be a challenge to the kind of institution she has in mind when she speaks of education. When leisure-class functions and leisure-class education clasp in a perfect circle, a new sociological and industrial emphasis, such as the “Modern School” suggests, might make the leisure-class pupils uneasy, restless, questioning. If you began emphasizing interest instead of drudgery, you might find yourself calling into question the sincerity of those “impersonal intellectual interests.” If you emphasized efficiency instead of knowledge, you might make uncomfortably evident the unreality of much of what passes for culture in society to-day. You would be making insecure the moral and intellectual justifications of caste. But that is exactly the critical and undermining work which a democratic education is designed to stimulate.

These new educators are seeking a type of school which shall provide for children as human beings and not as members of any one social class. They want a school which creates a common sympathy, a common intimacy with the various activities and expressions of the modern well-rounded personality, just so far as each individual is capable, with his endowments and intelligence, of acquiring such an intimacy. The “Modern School” would turn the child’s attention to the projects, objects, processes, facts, of the active world about him, not because they are good in themselves, but because they are the common stock of all classes. The development of communal functions and services forces every family more or less into touch with the active world out of which the “Modern School’s” curriculum grows. It is in the study of these “real things,” rather than in the logical systems of text-books, the predigested ideals of literature or a leisured class, the technical manipulation of dead languages and official science, that common interest and the sense of common possession will arise. The expectation is that interpretations and ideals which grow out of such a study will be more vital and sound because they will have come out of the child’s own experience, and not have been merely shoveled into his memory. It is expected that the “strenuous effort” of the past, which was so much an effort of memory and routine, will become, in a curriculum harnessed to occupational life, an effort of interest and intelligent enthusiasm. Out of such a spirit and such a school should issue the self-sustained discipline by which all good work is done in the world.

XXI

A POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

Now that the passage of the Smith-Hughes bill is assured, interest moves to the distribution of this federal subsidy for vocational continuation and part-time schools. For the actual sums appropriated, even the maximum which will be available in nine years, are too small to be of constructive significance. Indeed there is something grotesque about the solemn and arduous study which went into the passage of this timid educational bill by a Congress which could appropriate a full third of a billion for armaments. The Smith-Hughes bill has all the aspect of a pious wish rather than the beginning of a thorough national policy in education. There was nothing revolutionary in this principle of federal aid. The principle was established by the Morrill act of 1862 and recently confirmed by the Smith-Lever bill for agricultural education. The halting character of this new legislation must be explained partly by the novelty of vocational training in America and by the extremely confused condition of mind about it.

We scarcely know yet how to institute a vocational education that will make out of our youth effective workers and at the same time free and initiating citizens. The hopeless lack of coördination between industry and our educational system blocks and bewilders our efforts. In working towards a solution we meet two very real perils. When we attempt a coördination we run the risk of turning the public school into a mere preparatory school for factory, store and workshop, producing helpless workers riveted by their very training to a rigid and arbitrary industrial life. The better trained they are, or at least the more intense their specialization, the greater will be their subjection. Organized labor fears, and not unjustly, that a public vocational education might be the means of over-crowding the labor market and thereby “furnishing strike-breakers to industry.” This is always the danger when we attempt to adjust our training too tightly to existing industrial conditions. On the other hand, if we try to evade this danger and make the young worker’s training more general, so that a number of fields of industrial opportunity will be open to him, we may leave him more helpless than ever, for he has no assurance of being fit for the very concrete demands of skill that paying industry will make upon him.

This is the dilemma. If the organization of vocational training is left in charge of the representatives of the employers, educators fear, and fear rightly, that the first result will ensue. If it is left exclusively in the hands of educators, the employers fear the other danger. Vocational education in this country has, therefore, run its uncertain course through experiments in continuation schools, “pre-vocational” courses in the regular schools, trade courses, “coöperative” courses, until a certain skepticism has been aroused in the minds of professional educators and the interested public whether we can institute a workable system at all in our present public school. Skepticism has meant hesitation. In spite of the propaganda and survey work of an influential society of educators, employers and labor men--the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education--progress has been very slow. Only eight states have provided for the encouragement of vocational education and in only one is continuation schooling compulsory. The whole movement has needed some very definite concentrated stimulus and some new, clear focusing of the issues.

This is the real value of the new federal bill. If it is negligible in its actual power for aid, its indirect effects should be of great importance in the way of stimulus. It will undoubtedly suggest to the majority of states the immediate establishment of a comprehensive system of continuation schools. The grants will be just large enough to make it seem possible. They are not nearly large enough to exempt the states from local appropriations. According to the federal bill these must duplicate the federal grants. The latter will therefore mean actual additional resources, an increment to local and state appropriations. If the states are wise, and appropriate this increment to the payment and training of teachers, then these small sums may be made to mean just the difference between the present hardly attained mediocrity of vocational teaching and a new and effective type of artisan-instructors.

The bill puts the distribution of the funds in the hands of such state boards as the legislatures shall designate. The latter may designate the regular state board of education, or a special board of industrial education working under the direction of the regular board, or it may create a new and independent board to handle these funds. No state is likely to trifle with this now thoroughly discredited “dual” system originally sponsored in Illinois under the form of separate boards controlled wholly by employing interests. The practical choice will lie between the purely “educational” control and the mixed educational, industrial and labor control, such as exists in Wisconsin. The objection to the former grows persistently on the ground that the new vocational methods and work tend infallibly in the hands of the professional educator to drift back to the academic. Educators have too often shown a willingness either to divorce the “pre-vocational” work entirely from the regular school, or else to emasculate it of its realistic potency. Instead of seeing the new practical emphasis infusing and reinvigorating the regular primary and secondary school, the enthusiast for the “new” education has too often had to watch merely the slow reduction of the vocational work to the old unimaginative level of “manual training.” The question of control, therefore, which the new bill puts indirectly to the states is of the greatest moment, both to the traditional type of school and to the new activities. The board that distributes the funds will in the last analysis control the policy. Certainly the conservatism of the professional educator is far less to be feared than the narrowness and self-interest of employers’ associations. In following the provisions of the federal bill that the aided schools shall be below college grade, for children over fourteen, the state board will control the standards of the individual schools. Whichever form of control is adopted, the trend towards state centralization of the school system is likely to be greatly strengthened.

In this development the states will be influenced largely by the experience of Wisconsin and Massachusetts, where the continuation schools, part-time schools, apprentice classes, which the bill encourages, have been longest in operation. The Wisconsin experience will be found particularly instructive. The state subsidizes its vocational schools by duplicating the funds raised by the community under an obligatory half-mill tax. The local schools are under the control of a special board of industrial education appointed by the local board of education, and consisting of the superintendent of schools with two labor representatives and two employers. The distribution of the state funds is in the hands of the regular state educational administration. There is an advisory industrial board of similar composition to the local boards. At present the situation is much confused owing to the reluctance of this state board of industrial education to remain merely advisory. A “developer” has been appointed as its secretary, an expert in the field, but without administrative power over the schools. His attempts at acceleration have produced their inevitable and intense resentment among the regular school officials. Obviously such a system, with two boards contending for mastery, creates an impossible situation. With the exception of this--and the actual effect of this very largely personal and political feud upon the local development seems to have been negligible--the Wisconsin system seems to be based on sound principles. The local industrial boards have worked with effectiveness and responsibility. In Milwaukee a remarkable system of continuation schools has been built up, which provides for no less than eight thousand children between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, children whom the public and parochial schools have sloughed off into “blind-alley” work, and at whose education and guidance the city makes a last stab in the four-hour-a-week continuation school. One definite principle these Milwaukee schools seem to have established--that education must not be “preparatory” to work, that there is no real place for the merely “pre-vocational,” but that education should accompany work and do that just as long as there is anything to learn. The ideal vocational education will be a liberal “part-time” education, in which the school furnishes the background and the constant opening of new suggestions and possibilities, and the shop or trade or office provides the arena for acting skilfully on what is learned.

The Wisconsin system is particularly suggestive. For the local boards constitute one of our first American attempts at representation by interest instead of political parties or arbitrary geographical divisions. Their success is largely ascribed in Wisconsin to this fact, that they do accurately represent just the three classes most concerned in this form of education--organized labor, the employers, and the professional schoolman. The labor representatives are on the board to see that the policy does not swing over to narrow employing interests, the employers are on the board to see that the school is kept in touch with the practical demands of industry. The professional educator holds the balance of power between these two interests. With this administrative development to build on, with the improvement in teaching caliber that the new federal grants should bring, with the state centralization of the school system to which the new bill will give impetus, the future is good for a national system of education for work and with work, a free and democratic vocational training.

XXII

AN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

Nothing is more significant of the new spirit in public education than our use of the term “vocational training.” It strikes out at a blow the old antithesis between the cultural and the utilitarian. For a genuine vocation implies neither a life devoted to thought, nor a dull mechanical job to which personal and artistic and intellectual interests are mere trimmings--recreations which can be easily omitted by those who cannot afford to pay for them. A vocation is rather a nucleus of any kind of interesting activity by which one earns one’s living, and around which whatever else comes to one’s experience clusters to enhance its value and interest. It is not fantastic to hope that the very demands of modern industrial technique will make of most trades just such nuclei. When we justify trade-schools and industrial courses by the existence of law and medical and engineering schools, we are implying that the skilled worker in modern industry can and should lead a life as genuinely “professional” as the lawyer and doctor and engineer.

New York City has at the present time (June, 1915) a unique opportunity to meet these important issues. In no other city has the question been so squarely presented. New York has to choose between what is called the Ettinger plan, put into operation by a local superintendent to solve “part-time” and vocational training problems, and the Gary plan, as worked out by William Wirt and now on trial under his personal direction in several of the New York schools. In that choice may be indicated the tendencies and purposes of industrial education in this country.

The Ettinger plan emphasizes in the sharpest way the difference between “cultural” and “industrial” work. The child chooses between them in his sixth or seventh year of school. If economic pressure is going to force him into manual work, he is allowed to try a number of different trades in the school industrial shops in order to discover what he is best fitted for. This hasty experimentation has received the schoolman’s label of “prevocational.” Having chosen his trade, the young worker specializes in the shop, under conditions as nearly as possible like the trade, continuing in trade-school or technical high school, or in the industry under a coöperative scheme, as in the German schools. His academic studies, as far as they are continued, are of a severely practical character, theory and science being used merely to explain the industrial processes which he is learning. The ideal is a specialized school, gradually breaking off from the traditional one and developing radically different methods and interests. The object of the industrial course is to turn out a competent workman who has escaped the blind occupations of those who leave school at the minimum age.

The school under this plan may give the child an elementary industrial training, with an intellectual orientation better than he could get under any system of apprenticeship, but it can scarcely be said to give a vocational training. The Ettinger plan treats the child solely as a potential workman who is to be absorbed as a permanent subordinate in one specialized trade of a rigidly organized industrial system. It makes of the school a mere downward extension of the staple trades and machine industries, a sort of kindergarten where the employer gets his workmen trained, free of cost to himself. It quite ignores any other rôles the young worker may be called upon to play in society--as citizen or as member of an economic class. It makes an undemocratic class-division in the public school, and by divorcing the academic from the industrial work gives to both the wrong setting.

The Gary plan, on the other hand, prepares for a genuinely vocational life. It views the world outside the school not as a collection of trades but as a community, a network of occupations and interests, of interweaving services, intellectual, administrative, manual. It sees the individual as a citizen who contributes his share to the community and pays for the things he enjoys. The school itself is organized as a community, self-supporting industrially and as varied in its work, study and play as is the larger community. The industrial work is made an indispensable part of the maintenance and enhancement of this school community life. The Gary child begins in his third or fourth school year as helper in a shop or laboratory that interests him. If he is to work at a trade after he leaves school, he gets a long and thorough training under real workmen in the school shops engaged in the repair and maintenance of the school-plant. He is at no time called upon to choose between the “academic” and the “industrial.” His work is a focusing of all the interests of the school, and the attitudes developed in the school are bound to be carried into productive life and to give a new setting to the business of making a livelihood. Science, apart from the light it throws upon the artisan’s trade, is bound to mean something to him, for in the Gary school it has answered his questions about the physical world around him. History and geography and sociology and economics are likely to mean something because they have answered questions about the social institutions and the relations of men. Art and music will continue to interest him because they have been an integral part of the school life. The Gary plan would tend to produce not only a skilled workman but a critical citizen, ready, like the energetic professional man, to affect the standards and endeavors of his profession and the community life.

The Ettinger plan is as economically unsound as it is pedagogically unsound. It requires special teachers, and expensive shops which are unproductive. Without state or federal subsidies, the cost of any extensive or even adequate industrial training in trade-school or elementary school will continue to be prohibitive. The Gary plan, which connects the school shops directly with the repair and maintenance of the school-plant, demands and can afford a much greater variety of shops than the ordinary school. And since the workmen-teachers earn their salaries by their work, the children get their industrial training practically without cost to the community. By the Gary plan the vocational training features are only practicable if all the other liberally varied “cultural” features are put into operation at the same time. This effectually prevents that “exploitation” of the children which its opponents fear because the young workers get their training as “apprentices” in the school shops.

Many who admit the superior social aims of the Gary plan are inclined to feel that the practical results of the two plans will not be radically different. But the Gary plan and the Ettinger plan are not merely two different ways of reaching the same end. They not only involve different conceptions of the school and of industrial society, but they are bound to turn out different kinds of people.

The Ettinger plan is dangerous because it is typical of most schemes now being put forward by the advocates of industrial education. These plans are concerned neither with genuine educational interests nor with genuine industrial interests, but only with the interest of the employer. No person who feels that the public schools should train critical citizens who will have something to say to the industrial system into which they go, and not mere docile workers, counting socially no more than their tools, will fail to realize the vast importance that the Gary plan should prevail over all these schemes.

XXIII

ORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION