Craftsmanship in Teaching Part 9

It is a general impression among teachers that specific habits may be generalized; that habits of neatness and accuracy developed in one line of work, for example, will inevitably make one neater and more accurate in other things. It has been definitely proved that this transfer of training does not take place inevitably, but in reality demands the fulfillment of certain conditions of which education has become fully conscious only within a comparatively short time, and as a result of careful, systematic, controlled experimentation. The meaning of this in the prevention of waste through inadequate teaching is fully apparent.

Again, it has been supposed by many teachers that the home environment is a large factor in the success or failure of a pupil in school. In every accurate and controlled investigation that has been conducted so far it has been shown that this factor in such subjects as arithmetic and spelling at least is so small as to be absolutely negligible in practice.

Some people still believe that a teacher is born and not made, and yet a careful investigation of the efficiency of elementary teachers shows that, when such teachers were ranked by competent judges, specialized training stood out as the most important factor in general efficiency.

In this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,--for twenty-eight per cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against forty-four per cent of the college graduates. These investigations, I may add, were made by university professors, and I am giving them here in a university cla.s.sroom and as a university representative. And of course I shall hasten to add that general scholarship is one important essential. Our mistake has been in a.s.suming sometimes that it is the only essential.

Very frequently the controlled experience of scientific investigation confirms a principle that has been derived from crude experience. Most teachers will agree, for example, that a certain amount of drill and repet.i.tion is absolutely essential in the mastery of any subject. Every time that scientific investigation has touched this problem it has unmistakably confirmed this belief. Some very recent investigations made by Mr. Brown at the Charleston Normal School show conclusively that five-minute drill periods preceding every lesson in arithmetic place pupils who undergo such periods far in advance of others who spend this time in non-drill arithmetical work, and that this improvement holds not only in the number habits, but also in the reasoning processes.

Other similar cases could be cited, but I have probably said enough to make my point, and my point is this: that crude experience is an unsafe guide for practice; that experience may be refined in two ways--first by the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of trial and error could not encompa.s.s in a millennium.

The teaching of English merits treatment by this method. I recommend strongly that you give the plan a trial. You may not get immediate results. You may not get valuable results. But in any case, if you carefully respect the scientific proprieties, your experience will be worth vastly more than ten times the amount of crude experience; and, whether you get results or not, you will undergo a valuable discipline from which may emerge the ideals of science if you are not already imbued with them. I always tell my students that, even in the study of science itself, it is the ideals of science,--the ideals of patient, thoughtful work, the ideals of open-mindedness and caution in reaching conclusions, the ideals of unprejudiced observation from which selfishness and personal desire are eliminated,--it is these ideals that are vastly more important than the facts of science as such,--and these latter are significant enough to have made possible our present progress and our present amenities of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: A paper read before the English Section of the University of Illinois High School Conference, November 17, 1910.]

~XI~

THE NEW ATt.i.tUDE TOWARD DRILL[17]

Wandering about in a circle through a thick forest is perhaps an overdrawn a.n.a.logy to our activity in attempting to construct educational theories; and yet there is a resemblance. We push out hopefully--and often boastfully--into the unknown wilderness, absolutely certain that we are pioneering a trail that will later become the royal highway to learning. We struggle on, ruthlessly using the hatchet and the ax to clear the road before us. And all too often we come back to our starting point, having unwittingly described a perfect circle, instead of the straight line that we had antic.i.p.ated.

But I am not a pessimist, and I like to believe that, although our course frequently resembles a circle, it is much better to characterize it as a spiral, and that, although we do get back to a point that we recognize, it is not, after all, our old starting point; it is an h.o.m.ologous point on a higher plane. We have at least climbed a little, even if we have not traveled in a straight line.

Now in a figurative way this explains how we have come to take our present att.i.tude toward the problem of drill or training in the process of education. Drill means the repet.i.tion of a process until it has become mechanical or automatic. It means the kind of discipline that the recruit undergoes in the army,--the making of a series of complicated movements so thoroughly automatic that they will be gone through with accurately and precisely, at the word of command. It means the sort of discipline that makes certain activities machine-like in their operation,--so that we do not have to think about which one comes next.

Thus the mind is relieved of the burden of looking after the innumerable details and may use its precious energy for a more important purpose.

In every adult life, a large number of these mechanized responses are absolutely essential to efficiency. Modern civilized life is so highly organized that it demands a mult.i.tude of reactions and adjustments which primitive life did not demand. It goes without saying that there are innumerable little details of our daily work that must be reduced to the plane of unvarying habit. These details vary with the trade or profession of the individual; hence general education cannot hope to supply the individual with all of the automatic responses that he will need. But, in addition to these specialized responses, there is a large ma.s.s of responses that are common to every member of the social group.

We must all be able to communicate with one another, both through the medium of speech, and through the medium of written and printed symbols.

We live in a society that is founded upon the principle of the division of labor. We must exchange the products of our labor for the necessities of life that we do not ourselves produce, and hence arises the necessity for the short cuts to counting and measurement which we call arithmetic.

And finally we must all live together in something at least approaching harmony; hence the thousand and one little responses that mean courtesy and good manners must be made thoroughly automatic.

Now education, from the very earliest times, has recognized the necessity of building up these automatic responses,--of fixing these essential habits in all individuals. This recognition has often been short-sighted and sometimes even blind; but it has served to hold education rather tenaciously to a process that all must admit to be essential.

Drill or training, however, is unfortunate in one important particular.

It invariably involves repet.i.tion; and conscious, explicit repet.i.tion tends to become monotonous. We must hold attention to the drill process, and yet attention abhors monotony as nature abhors a vacuum.

Consequently no small part of the tedium and irksomeness of school work has been due to its emphasis of drill. The formalism of the older schools has been described, criticized, and lampooned in professional literature, and even in the pages of fiction. The disastrous results that follow from engendering in pupils a disgust for school and all that it represents have been eloquently portrayed. Along with the tendency toward ease and comfort in other departments of human life has gone a parallel tendency to relieve the school of this odious burden of formal, lifeless, repet.i.tive work.

This "reform movement," as I shall call it, represents our first plunge into the wilderness. We would get away from the entanglements of drill and into the clearings of pleasurable, spontaneous activities. A new sun of hope dawned upon the educational world.

You are all familiar with some of the more spectacular results of this movement. You have heard of the schools that eliminated drill processes altogether, and depended upon clear initial development to fix the facts and formulae and reactions that every one needs. You have heard and perhaps seen some of the schools that were based entirely upon the doctrine of spontaneity, governing their work by the principle that the child should never do anything that he did not wish to do at the moment of doing,--although the advocates of this theory generally qualified their principle by insisting that the skillful teacher would have the child wish to do the right thing all the time.

Let me describe to you a school of this type that I once visited. I learned of it through a resident of the city in which it was located. He was delivering an address before an educational gathering on the problems of modern education. He told the audience that, in the schools of this enlightened city, the antiquated notions that were so pernicious had been entirely dispensed with. He said that pupils in these schools were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line pa.s.sing, static posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves, through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been eliminated; that corporal punishment was never even mentioned, much less practiced; that all was harmony, and love, and freedom, and spontaneity.

I listened to this speaker with intense interest, and, as his picture unfolded, I became more and more convinced that this city had at last solved the problem. I took the earliest opportunity to visit its schools. When I reached the city I went to the superintendent's office.

I asked to be directed to the best school. "Our schools are all 'best,'"

the secretary told me with an intonation that denoted commendable pride, and which certainly made me feel extremely humble, for here even the laws of logic and of formal grammar had been transcended. I made bold to apologize, however, and amended my request to make it apparent that I wished to see the largest school. I was directed to take a certain car and, in due time, found myself at the school. I inferred that recess was in progress when I reached the building, and that the recess was being celebrated within doors. After some time spent in dodging about the corridors, I at last located the princ.i.p.al.

I introduced myself and asked if I could visit his school after recess was over. "We have no recesses here," he replied (I could just catch his voice above the din of the corridors); "this is a relaxation period for some of the cla.s.ses." He led the way to the office, and I spent a few moments in getting the "lay of the land." I asked him, first, whether he agreed with the doctrines that the system represented, and he told me that he believed in them implicitly. Did he follow them out consistently in the operation of his school? Yes, he followed them out to the letter.

We then went to several cla.s.srooms, where I saw children realizing themselves, I thought, very effectively. There were three groups at work in each room. One recited to the teacher, another studied at the seats, a third did construction work at the tables. I inquired about the mechanics of this rather elaborate organization, but I was told that mechanics had been eliminated from this school. Mechanical organization of the cla.s.sroom, it seems, crushes the child's spontaneity, represses his self-activity, prevents the effective operation of the principle of self-realization. How, then, did these three groups exchange places, for I felt that the doctrine of self-realization would not permit them to remain in the same employment during the entire session. "Oh," the princ.i.p.al replied, "when they get ready to change, they change, that's all."

I saw that a change was coming directly, so I waited to watch it. The group had been working with what I should call a great deal of noise and confusion. All at once this increased tenfold. Pupils jumped over seats, ran into each other in the aisles, scurried and scampered from this place to that, while the teacher stood in the front of the room wildly waving her arms. The performance lasted several minutes. "There's spontaneity for you," the princ.i.p.al shouted above the roar of the storm.

I acquiesced by a nod of the head,--my lungs, through lack of training, being unequal to the emergency.

We pa.s.sed to another room. The same group system was in evidence. I noticed pupils who had been working at their seats suddenly put away their books and papers and skip over to the construction table. I asked concerning the nature of the construction work. "We use it," the princ.i.p.al told me, "as a reward for good work in the book subjects. You see arithmetic is dead and dry. You must give pupils an incentive to master it. We make the privileges of the construction table the incentive." "What do they make at this table?" I asked. "Whatever their fancy dictates," he replied. I was a little curious, however, to know how it all come out. I saw one child start to work on a basket, work at it a few minutes, then take up something else, continue a little time, go back to the basket, and finally throw both down for a third object of self-realization. I called the princ.i.p.al's attention to this phenomenon.

"How do you get the beautiful results that you exhibit?" I asked. "For those," he said, "we just keep the pupils working on one thing until it is finished." "But," I objected, "is that consistent with the doctrine of spontaneity?" His answer was lost in the din of a change of groups, and I did not follow the investigation further.

Noon dismissal was due when I went into the corridor. Lines are forbidden in that school. At the stroke of the bell, the cla.s.sroom doors burst open and bedlam was let loose. I had antic.i.p.ated what was coming, and hurriedly betook myself to an alcove. I saw more spontaneity in two minutes than I had ever seen before in my life. Some boys tore through the corridors at breakneck speed and down the stairways, three steps at a time. Others sauntered along, realizing various propensities by pushing and shoving each other, s.n.a.t.c.hing caps out of others' hands, slapping each other over the head with books, and various other expressions of exuberant spirits. One group stopped in front of my alcove, and showed commendable curiosity about the visitor in their midst. After exhausting his static possibilities, they tempted him to dynamic reaction by making faces; but this proving to be of no avail, they went on their way,--in the hope, doubtless, of realizing themselves elsewhere.

I left that school with a fairly firm conviction that I had seen the most advanced notions of educational theory worked out to a logical conclusion. There was nothing halfway about it. There was no apology offered for anything that happened. It was all fair and square and open and aboveboard. To be sure, the pupils were, to my prejudiced mind, in a condition approaching anarchy, but I could not deny the spontaneity, nor could I deny self-activity, nor could I deny self-realization. These principles were evidently operating without let or hindrance.

Before leaving the school, I took occasion to inquire concerning the effect of such a system upon the teachers. I led up to it by asking the princ.i.p.al if there were any nervous or anaemic children in his school.

"Not one," he replied enthusiastically; "our system eliminates them."

"But how about the teachers?" I ventured to remark, having in mind the image of a distracted young woman whom I had seen attempting to reduce forty little ruffians to some semblance of law and order through moral suasion. If I judged conditions correctly, that woman was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My guide became confidential when I made this inquiry. "To tell the truth," he whispered, "the system is mighty hard on the women."

A few years ago I had the privilege of visiting a high school which was operated upon this same principle. I visited in that school some cla.s.ses that were taught by men and women, whom I should number among the most expert teachers that I have ever seen. The instruction that these men and women were giving was as clear and lucid as one could desire. And yet, in spite of that excellent instruction, pupils read newspapers, prepared other lessons, or read books during the recitations, and did all this openly and unreproved. They responded to their instructors with shameless insolence. Young ladies of sixteen and seventeen coming from cultured homes were permitted in this school to pull each other's hair, pinch the arms of schoolmates who were reciting, and behave themselves in general as if they were savages. The pupils lolled in their seats, pa.s.sed notes, kept up an undertone of conversation, arose from their seats at the first tap of the bell, and piled in disorder out of the cla.s.sroom while the instructor was still talking. If the lessons had been tedious, one might perhaps at least have palliated such conduct, but the instruction was very far from tedious. It was bright, lively, animated, beautifully clear, and admirably ill.u.s.trated. It is simply the theory of this school never to interfere with the spontaneous activity of the pupils. And I may add that the school draws its enrollment very largely from wealthy families who believe that their children are being given the best that modern education has developed, that they are not being subjected to the deadening methods of the average public school, and above all that their manners are not being corrupted by promiscuous mingling with the offspring of illiterate immigrants. And yet soon afterward, I visited a high school in one of the poorest slum districts of a large city. I saw pupils well-behaved, courteous to one another, to their instructors, and to visitors. The instruction was much below that given in the first school in point of quality, and yet the pupils were getting from it, even under these conditions, vastly more than were the pupils of the other school from their masterly instructors.

The two schools that I first described represent one type of the attempt that education has made to pioneer a new path through the wilderness. I have said that many of these attempts have ended by bringing the adventurers back to their starting point. I cannot say so much for these schools. The movement that they represent is still floundering about in the tamarack swamps, getting farther and farther into the mora.s.s, with little hope of ever emerging.

May I tax your patience with one more concrete ill.u.s.tration: this time, of a school that seems to me to have reached the starting point, but on that new and higher plane of which I have spoken?

This school is in a small Ma.s.sachusetts town, and is the model department of the state normal school located at that place. The first point that impressed me was typified by a boy of about twelve who was pa.s.sing through the corridor as I entered the building. Instead of slouching along, wasting every possible moment before he should return to his room, he was walking briskly as if eager to get back to his work.

Instead of staring at the stranger within his gates with the impudent curiosity so often noticed in children of this age, he greeted me pleasantly and wished to know if I were looking for the princ.i.p.al. When I told him that I was, he informed me that the princ.i.p.al was on the upper floor, but that he would go for him at once. He did, and returned a moment later saying that the head of the school would be down directly, and asked me to wait in the office, into which he ushered me with all the courtesy of a private secretary. Then he excused himself and went directly to his room.

Now that might have been an exceptional case, but I found out later that is was not. Wherever I went in that school, the pupils were polite and courteous and respectful. That was part of their education. It should be part of every child's education. But many schools are too busy teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and others are too busy preserving discipline, and others are too busy coquetting for the good will of their pupils and trying to amuse them--too busy to give heed to a set of habits that are of paramount importance in the life of civilized society. This school took up the matter of training in good manners as an essential part of its duty, and it accomplished this task quickly and effectively. It did it by utilizing the opportunities presented in the usual course of school work. It took a little time and a little attention, for good manners cannot be acquired incidentally any more than the multiplication tables can be acquired incidentally; but it utilized the everyday opportunities of the schoolroom, and did not make morals and manners the subject of instruction for a half-hour on Friday afternoons to be completely forgotten during the rest of the week.

When the princ.i.p.al took me through the school, I noted everywhere a happy and courteous relation between pupils and teachers. They spoke pleasantly to one another. I heard no nagging or scolding. I saw no one sulking or pouting or in bad temper. And yet there was every evidence of respect and obedience on the part of the pupils. There was none of that happy-go-lucky comradeship which I have sometimes seen in other modern schools, and which leads the pupil to understand that his teacher is there to gain his interest, not to command his respectful attention.

Pupils were too busy with their work to talk much with one another. They were sitting up in their seats as a matter of habit, and it did not seem to hurt them seriously to do so. And everywhere they were working like beavers at one task or another, or attending with all their eyes and ears to a recitation.

Now it seemed to me that this school was operated with a minimum of waste or loss. Every item of energy that the pupils possessed was being given to some educative activity. Nothing was lost by conflict between pupil and teacher. Nothing was lost by bursts of anger or by fits of depression. These sources of waste had been eliminated so far as I could determine. The pupils could read well and write well and cipher accurately. They even took a keen delight in the drills. And I found that this phase of their work was enlightened by the modern content that had been introduced. In their handwork and manual training they could see that arithmetic was useful,--that it had something to do with the great big buzzing life of the outer world. They learned that spelling was useful in writing,--that it was not something that began and ended within the covers of the spelling book, but that it had a real and vital relation to other things that they found to be important. They had their dramatic exercises in which they and their fellows, and, on occasions, their parents, took a keen delight, and they were glad to afford them pleasure and to receive congratulations at the close. And yet they found that, in order to do these things well, they must read and study and drill on speaking. They liked to have their drawings inspected and praised at the school exhibitions, but they soon found that good drawing and painting and designing were strictly conditioned by a mastery of technique, and they wished to master technique in order to win these rewards.

Now what was the secret of the efficiency of this school? Not merely the fact that it had introduced certain types of content such as drawing, manual training, domestic science, dramatization, story work,--but also that it had not lost sight of the fundamental purpose of elementary education, but had so organized all of its studies that each played into the hands of the others, and that everything that was done had some definite and tangible relation to everything else. The manual training exercises and the mechanical drawing were exercises in arithmetic, but, let me remind you, there were other lessons, and formal lessons, in arithmetic as well. But the one exercise enlightened and made more meaningful the other. In the same way the story and dramatization were intimately related to the reading and the language, but there were formal lessons in reading and formal lessons in language. The geography ill.u.s.trated nature study and employed language and arithmetic and drawing in its exercises. And so the whole structure was organized and coherent and unified, and what was taught in one cla.s.s was utilized in another. There was no needless duplication, no needless or meaningless repet.i.tion. But repet.i.tion there was, over and over again, but always it was effective in still more firmly fixing the habits.

One would be an ingrate, indeed, if one failed to recognize the great good that an extreme reform movement may do. Some very precious increments of progress have resulted even from the most extreme and ridiculous reactions against the drill and formalism of the older schools. Let me briefly summarize these really substantial gains as I conceive them.

In the first place, we have come to recognize distinctly the importance of enlisting in the service of habit building the native instincts of the child. Up to a certain point nature provides for the fixing of useful responses, and we should be unwise not to make use of these tendencies. In the spontaneous activities of play, certain fundamental reactions are continually repeated until they reach the plane of absolute mechanism. In imitating the actions of others, adjustments are learned and made into habits without effort; in fact, the process of imitation, so far as it is instinctive, is a source of pure delight to the young child. Finally, closely related to these two instincts, is the native tendency to repet.i.tion,--nature's primary provision for drill.

You have often heard little children repeat their new words over and over again. Frequently they have no conception of the meanings of these words. Nature seems to be untroubled by a question that has bothered teachers; namely, Should a child ever be asked to drill on something the purpose of which he does not understand? Nature sees to it that certain essential responses become automatic long before the child is conscious of their meaning. Just because nature does this is, of course, no reason why we should imitate her. But the fact is an interesting commentary upon the extreme to which we sometimes carry our principle of rationalizing everything before permitting it to be mastered.

I repeat that the reform movement has done excellent service in extending the recognition in education of these fundamental and inborn adaptive instincts,--play, imitation, and rhythmic repet.i.tion. It has erred when it has insisted that we could depend upon these alone, for nature has adapted man, not to the complicated conditions of our modern highly organized social life, but rather to primitive conditions. Left to themselves, these instinctive forces would take the child up to a certain point, but they would still leave him on a primitive plane. I know of one good authority on the teaching of reading who maintains that the normal child would learn to read without formal teaching if he were placed in the right environment,--an environment of books. This may be possible with some exceptional children, but even an environment reasonably replete with books does not effect this miracle in the case of certain children whom I know very well and whom I like to think of as perfectly normal. These children learned to talk by imitation and instinctive repet.i.tion. But nature has not yet gone so far as to provide the average child with spontaneous impulses that will lead him to learn to read. Reading is a much more complicated and highly organized process. And so it is with a vast number of the activities that our pupils must master.

Another increment of progress that the reform movement has given to educational practice is a recognition of the fact that we have been requiring pupils to acquire unnecessary habits, under the impression, that even if the habits were not useful, something of value was gained in their acquisition. As a result, we have pa.s.sed all of our grain through the same mill, unmindful of the fact that different life activities required different types of grist. To-day we are seeing the need for carefully selecting the types of habit and skill that should be developed in _all_ children. We are recognizing that there are many phases of the educative process that it is not well to reduce to an automatic basis. When I was in the elementary school I memorized Barnes's _History of the United States_ and Harper's _Geography_ from cover to cover. I have never greatly regretted this automatic mastery; but I have often thought that I might have memorized something rather more important, for history and geography could have been mastered just as effectively in another way.

In the third place, and most important of all, we have been led to a.n.a.lyze this complex process of habit building,--to find out the factors that operate in learning. We have now a goodly body of principles that may even be characterized by the adjective "scientific." We know that in habit building, it is fundamentally essential to get the pupil started in the right way. A recent writer states that two thirds of the difficulty that the teacher meets fixing habits is due to the neglect of this principle. Inadequate and inefficient habits get started and must be continually combated while the desirable habit is being formed. How important this is in the initial presentation of material that is to be memorized or made automatic we are just now beginning to appreciate. One writer insists that faulty work in the first grade is responsible for a large part of the r.e.t.a.r.dation which is bothering us so much to-day. The wrong kind of a start is made, and whenever a faulty habit is formed, it much more than doubles the difficulty of getting the right one well under way. We are slowly coming to appreciate how much time is wasted in drill processes by inadequate methods. Technique is being improved and the time thus saved is being given to the newer content subjects that are demanding admission to the schools.