The New Education. Scott Nearing

a school system planned to meet the needs of the average child fits the needs of no child at all.

      Mathematics may be taught to the average child. So may history and geography. While subject matter comes first in the minds of educators, a course of study designed to meet average conditions is a possibility. The moment, however, that the schools cease to teach subjects and begin to teach boys and girls, such a proceeding is out of the question.

      The temptation in a complex school system, where children are grouped by hundreds and thousands, to allow the detail of administration to overtop the functions of education is often irresistible. The teacher with forty pupils learns to look upon her pupils as units. The superintendent and principals, seeking ardently for an overburdened commercial ideal named “efficiency,” sacrifice everything else to the perfection of the mechanism. Among the smooth clicking cogs, child individuality has only the barest chance for survival.

      VII The Vicious Practices of One “Good” School

      There are school systems in which organization has overgrown child welfare, in which pedagogy has usurped the place of teaching. In such systems the teacher teaches the prescribed course of study, whether or no. The officers of administration, aiming at some mechanical ideal, shape the schools to meet the requirements of system.

      The proneness of some teachers and school administrators alike to overemphasize mechanics, and to underemphasize the welfare of individual children is well illustrated in a recent statement by Dr. W. E. Chancellor, who, in writing of a first-hand investigation made in a city in the Northeast, describes a condition which he says “I know by fairly authoritative reports does exist in a considerable number of cities and towns—not merely in a school here and there, but generally and characteristically.

      “In the city to which I definitely refer,” Dr. Chancellor continues, “I found that the intermediate and grammar grade teachers had systematically, deliberately, and successfully sacrificed hundreds of boys and girls upon the altar of examinations to the fetish of good schools. They have been so anxious to have good schools that they have kept an average of 20 per cent of their pupils one grade lower than they belong. In some schools the average runs to above 35 per cent.

      “Some teachers and some school superintendents cannot see that the school is simply a machine for developing boys and girls; cannot see that the machine in itself is worthless save as it contributes to human welfare. A school may be so good as actually to damage the souls and bodies of human beings. It damages their souls when the machine operators, seeking 75 per cent in every subject, keep boys and girls in grammar schools until they average sixteen years of age.”[19] Dr. Chancellor continues with a stinging arraignment of school officials who sacrifice children to systems.

      The article strikes an answering chord in the experiences of many men and women. A friend came recently to our bungalow, and, with a troubled face, spoke of his daughter’s ill-health.

      “She is not sick,” he said, “but just ailing. These first May days have taken her appetite. She needs the country air.”

      The daughter was a dear little girl of twelve—any one might have envied the father of his treasure—and we offered to keep her with us for a month in the country, and to go over her school work with her every day. The father accepted our proposal on the spot, but two days later he came back to say that he could not make the arrangements.

      “It cannot be done,” he explained, “because the school will not let her off. I told the principal about my daughter’s health and showed him the advantage of a month in the country with her school work carefully supervised. Her school is rather crowded, and as I want her to go on with her class in the autumn, I asked him if he could arrange to keep her place for her. In reply he said—

      “ ‘I cannot do as you wish. Such cases as yours interfere seriously with the working of the school.’ ”

      VIII Boys and Girls—The One Object of Educational Activity

      Perhaps our language was not as temperate as it should have been, but we told that father something which we would fain repeat until every educator and every parent in the United States has heard it and written it on the tables of his heart—

      THE ONE OBJECT OF EDUCATION IS TO ASSIST AND PREPARE CHILDREN TO LIVE.

      Why have we established a billion-dollar school system in the United States? Is it to pay teachers’ salaries, to build new school houses, and to print text-books by the million? Hardly. These things are incidents of school business, but they are no more reason for the school’s existence than fertilizer and seed are reasons for making a garden. Gardens are cultivated in order to secure plants and flowers; the school organization of which Americans so often boast exists to educate children.

      “Of course,” you exclaim, “we knew that before.” Did you? Then why was my friend forced to choose between the wreck of his daughter’s health and the disarrangement of a bit of school machinery? Why is Dr. Chancellor able to describe a situation existing “generally and characteristically,” in which the welfare of children is bartered away for high promotion averages? The truth is that society still tolerates, and often accepts, the belief that the purpose of education is the formation of a school system. We have yet to learn that, to use Herbert Spencer’s phrase, the object of education is the preparation of children for complete living.

      Education exists for the purpose of preparing and assisting children to live. To do that work effectively, it must devote only so much effort to school administration and to school machinery as will perform for boys and girls that very effective service.

      No two children are alike, and no two children have exactly similar needs. There are, however, certain kinds of needs which all children have in common. It is obviously impossible to discuss in the abstract the needs of any individual child. It is just as obviously possible to analyze child needs, and to classify them in workable groups. It is true that all children are different; so are all roses different, yet all have petals and thorns in common. Similarly, there are certain needs which are common to all children who play, who grow, who live among their fellows, and who expect to do something in life. The matter may be stated more concretely thus—