Listen to President Wilson's opinion:"To be carried along by somebody's suggestions from the time you begin until the time when you are thrust groping and helpless into the world,is the very negation of education.By the nursing process,by the coddling process you are sapping a race;and only loss can possibly result except upon the part of individuals here and there who are so intrinsically strong that you cannot spoil them."Hugo Munsterberg is a keen observer of the product of American schools,and contrasting their methods with those of his boyhood he says:"My school work was not adjusted to botany at nine years because I played with an herbarium,and at twelve to physics because I indulged in noises with home-made electric bells,and at fifteen to Arabic,an elective which I miss still in several high schools,even in Brookline and Roxbury.The more my friends and I wandered afield with our little superficial interests and talents and passions,the more was the straight-forward earnestness of the school our blessing;and all that beautified and enriched our youth,and gave to it freshness and liveliness,would have turned out to be our ruin,if our elders had taken it seriously,and had formed a life's program out of petty caprices and boyish inclinations."And Prof.Munsterberg thrusts his finger into what I believe to be the weakest joint in our educational armor when he says,"As there is indeed a difference whether I ask what may best suit the taste and liking of Peter,the darling,or whether I ask what Peter,the man,will need for the battle of life in which nobody asks what he likes,but where the question is how he is liked,and how he suits the taste of his neighbors."What would become of our civilization if we were to follow merely the instincts and natural desires?Yet is there not in America a tremendous tendency to the notion,that except in matters of physical welfare,the child's lead is to be followed to extreme limits?Don't we librarians feel it in the pressure brought to bear upon us by those who fail to find certain stories,wanted by the children,on our shelves?"Why,that's a good book,"the parent will say,"The hero is honest and kind,the book won't hurt him any--in fact it will give the child some good ideas.""Ideas."Yes,perhaps.There is another educator I should like to quote,J.H.Baker in his "Education and life.""Whatever you would wish the child to do and become,that let him practice.We learn to do,not by knowing,but by knowing and then doing.
Ethical teaching,tales of heroic deeds,soul-stirring fiction that awakens sympathetic emotions may accomplish but little unless in the child's early life the ideas and feelings find expression in action and so become a part of the child's power and tendency..."Now we believe with G.Stanley Hall that,"The chief enemy of active virtue in the world is not vice but laziness,languor and apathy of will;"that "mind work is infinitely harder than physical toil;"that (as another says)"all that does not rouse,does not set him to work,rusts and taints him the disease of laziness destroys the whole man."And when children of good heritage,good homes,sound bodies,bright minds,spend hours every week curled up among cushions,allowing a stream of cambric-tea literature gently to trickle over their brain surfaces,we know that though the heroes and heroines of these stories be represented as prodigies of industry and vigor,our young swallowers of the same are being reduced to a pulp of brain and will laziness that will not only make them incapable of struggling with a page of Quentin Durward,for example,but will affect their moral stamina,since fighting fiber is the price of virtue.
Ours is,as I have said,a public education,a republic's problem.To quote President Wilson again:"Our present plans for teaching everybody involve certain unpleasant things quite inevitably.It is obvious that you cannot have universal education without restricting your teaching to such things as can be universally understood.It is plain that you cannot impart 'university methods'to thousands,or create 'investigators'by the score,unless you confine your university education to matters which dull men can investigate,your laboratory training to tasks which mere plodding diligence and submissive patience can compass.Yet,if you do so limit and constrain what you teach,you thrust taste and insight and delicacy of perception out of the schools,exalt the obvious and merely useful things above the things which are only imaginatively or spiritually conceived,make education an affair of tasting and handling and smelling,and so create Philistia,that country in which they speak of 'mere literature.'"In our zeal to serve the little alien,descendant of generations of poverty and ignorance,let us not lose sight of the importance to our country of the child more fortunate in birth and brains.
So strong is my feeling on the value of leaders that I hold we should give at least as much study to the training of the accelerate child as we give to that of the defective.Though Iboast the land of Abraham Lincoln and Booker Washington I do not give up one iota of my belief that the child who is born into a happy environment,of parents strong in body and mind,holds the best possibilities of making a valuable citizen;and so I am concerned that this child be not spoiled in the making by a training or lack of training that fails to recognize his possibilities.
