Chapter LXXVII: The Educational Mills

The “little red school-house” may of course be anything, depending on the individual teacher. In our two hundred thousand “one-teacher” schools, there are many which are jolly and human, and many which are efficient, and many which are places of irritability and oppression. But the characteristic product of our modern system is the big school, the great educational mill, run by efficiency experts on a quantity production basis. These huge machines are but little influenced by individual personalities; they acquire momentum of their own, and grind up everything which gets in their way. These are the institutions in which our modern “great educators” specialize; the science of running them is what you get from experts such as Professor Strayer, head of the Department of Educational Administration of Columbia University.

From the state of Pennsylvania survey of the schools of Philadelphia, I take this picture of a well disciplined school:

The teachers in charge watched very carefully and jotted down notes of
the slightest transgressions. All pupils raising their eyes from their
books were liable to punishment. The principal believed that the
amount of study done by pupils in the study hall depended upon the man
in charge. The strictest policing would produce the best results. The
practice was clearly one of coercion and pressure.

And now let us skip one-half the continent and visit the high school at Superior, Nebraska, where a young lady of my acquaintance was a teacher three or four years ago; she writes:

The much-vaunted “discipline” of this school included an iron-clad
military regime which forbade pupils ever to run up or down stairs or
to cut corners in passing between classes. When classes were
dismissed, two teachers were required to stand in the hall to see that
nobody cut a corner or took two steps at a time. During general
assembly, when the whole school was gathered together, all the
teachers were required to be in the auditorium and each was assigned
two rows of students to watch during the program. No teacher was
allowed to sit down during assembly, as she was expected to be
watching her rows and seeing that no students exchanged a remark. The
students not unnaturally referred to the school as “the penitentiary,”
and while they were still as mice when the superintendent was looking,
the place seethed with suppressed revolt. Any sort of meanness that
could be done on the sly was a short cut to glory, and teachers were
fair game for anybody who could torment them and get away with it.

And now skip the other half of the continent, and read part of a letter from Mrs. Edith Summers Kelley, author of a splendid novel, “Weeds.” Mrs. Kelley describes what is happening to her two children in the schools of San Diego, California:

At the “Junior High” which my little girl, aged eleven, attends, they
are given no time to play at all. The children race directly from one
classroom to another and have only half an hour for lunch. There is no
chance whatever to form individual friendships, for as the twelve
hundred race from classroom to classroom they are continually changing
roommates and instead of school friendships there is simply a
confusion of half familiar faces soon forgotten. My little girl still
exchanges letters with the friends she made in school in Imperial
Valley. But since she came here she has not made one friend. She could
leave the school tomorrow without the slightest regret for it or any
person, teacher or pupils in it. This seems to me a most damaging
thing to say about a school.

At the “Junior High” they keep strict account of time. If a child has
to go to the toilet during a class he or she is given a “detention
slip” and has to stay after school the length of time that he was out
of the classroom. This sounds like burlesque; but the child tells me
that it is the sober truth. Of course they stuff them at both schools
with flag saluting and patriotic songs, etc. Among other things they
have taken the “Anvil Chorus” from “Il Trovatore” and set to it some
didactic-patriotic words. “With peace and union throughout our happy
land,” is all that the children remember; but you will agree with me
that it is enough.

There is a very strong tendency in both schools to subordinate
individual consciousness to group consciousness. Both of my children
are strongly individualistic, though differently so, and they resent
this. The children are taught they should be “loyal” to their country,
still more so to their state and city, and quite belligerently so to
their school. They have cheer leaders, school yells and songs, and
they hire men to coach the boys in their games so that they can beat
the teams of other schools. The aim seems to be not to encourage the
individual characteristics of a child but to make them all as nearly
as possible alike. My little girl is possessed of insatiable mental
curiosity, and yet she hates the school. This being the case, it seems
to me the fault must be with the school.

The point for you to get is that all this is training for “democracy.” The teacher in Nebraska just quoted confesses that she was a “misfit,” and explains the reason:

It seemed so perfectly inane to me to try to bring up citizens for a
democracy under a system which is an old-style bureaucracy. The school
board vents its lust for authority on the superintendent, the
superintendent takes it out on the principal, the principal takes it
out on the teachers, and the teachers take it out on the classes. The
one unforgivable crime seems to be for student, teacher, principal or
superintendent to be “disloyal” or “insubordinate” to the upper layers
of the hierarchy.

With all the discipline and regimentation, just how much do the pupils succeed in learning? Dean Marshall of the University of Chicago was chairman of the Committee on Correlation of Secondary and Collegiate Education, and he examined the first hundred and fifty freshmen who registered for the School of Commerce and Administration at his university. He found that of these students, 59% had had no modern history, 24% no United States history, 86% no English history, 92% no industrial history, 39% no civics, 72% no economics, 98% no sociology.

And in the courses which they do take, how much do they learn? I think I do not exaggerate in saying that there is general complaint throughout the country that they learn far less than they should. Two illustrations come to me while I am writing. The first is from the San Francisco “Examiner,” November 10, 1923, and I quote it without change:

Failure of students in the sophomore year at the Sacramento high
school to solve problems involving the subtraction of 2 from 3 was
announced today in connection with arithmetic examinations recently
given to 500 pupils at the institution. In multiplying 3 by 2 eleven
students failed, the test papers show, while fifteen gave incorrect
answers when asked to divide 6 by 3. Though a check of the examination
papers has not yet been completed, early returns establish that 416
boys and girls could not multiply a mixed decimal by a plain decimal.

The second is from the New York “Times,” July 22, 1923, and presents a column of data collected from examination papers on “current events” in the high schools of a Tennessee city. The “Times” mercifully withholds the name of this city—no doubt figuring that all are alike. Prizes were offered, and 1,160 high school students entered a competition, to answer a list of sixty questions; the first discovery was that less than 28% knew the name of the governor of their own state! Michael Collins, Irish Free State leader, was described as “ex-President of England,” “a noted boot-legger,” “real estate agent,” “head of labor union,” “manager Boston Red Sox,” “Chicago ball player,” “manager of Piggly-Wiggly store.” Clara Barton was classified as a “movie actress,” “nurse whom the Germans murdered,” “race horse,” “noted writer,” “woman who is to sing for Kosmos Club,” “candidate for Mayor of a city,” “an unmarried woman who lives in exile.” It would appear that not many students in these Tennessee high schools have read “The Goose-step”; for when they were asked to identify Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, they guessed: “President Harding’s private physician,” “a well-known Bible teacher,” “newspaper editor,” “a leader in the medical convention,” “minister,” “writer and essayist.” Needless to say, they scored a hundred per cent of correctness on the identity of “Babe” Ruth; and they doubtless would have done the same for “Fatty” Arbuckle; and who won the last prizefight or the last world’s baseball series, and who are Mutt and Jeff, and have we any bananas today. On the other hand, it would have been easy to frame questions dealing with the higher culture, on which the high school students would have scored one hundred per cent of failure. Mr. O. G. Wood, for four years a teacher and for two years clerk of the school board of Butte, Montana, writes:

The average American boy of today does not care a fig about the
beautiful and art side of life. He wants to see the wheels go round
and run an automobile and fix a spark plug. He is not studious. The
foreign-born boy or the boy born of foreign parentage is far more
studious than the American boy, and I have made an especial study of
this subject right in the class room. The American boy wants to “get
by.” He will shuffle in and out of every class he can. He “fakes” from
morning to night with all kinds of lies and excuses on his mind. It is
doubtful if a single parent will think their boy does this, yet there
are millions of them in the country.

In the course of our travels from city to city we have seen our miseducated school children indulging in rowdyism, patronizing boot-leggers, racing in high-powered automobiles, and spending the night at road-houses. Someone with a sense of humor sends me a copy of a Texas newspaper, the Dallas “Morning News,” October 4, 1923, in which there are three items on one page, which seem to have been especially placed to vindicate my thesis concerning American education. The first item tells that a committee of preachers are investigating the Southern Methodist University, to make sure that no one is teaching modern science. The second reports the director of physical training at this university, speaking at a luncheon of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, telling the youngsters that “foot-ball is character building and training for life.” The third item tells how nine boys and five girls have been arrested and thrashed, either by their parents or their principals, for raiding a Jewish synagogue and doing more than a thousand dollars worth of damage. The Junior Ku Klux Klan!