The Reconstructed School Part 5

We test prospective teachers for their knowledge of this subject and that, when, in reality, we should be trying to determine whether they will be good for the pupils. But we have contracted the habit of thinking that knowledge is power and so test for knowledge, thinking, futilely, that we are testing for power. We judge of a teacher's efficacy by some marks that examiners inscribe upon a bit of paper, "a thing laughable to G.o.ds and men." She may be proficient in languages, sciences, and arts and still not be good for the children by reason of the absence of spiritual qualities.

None the less, we admit her to the school as teacher when we would decline to admit her to the hospital as nurse. We say she would not be good for the patients in the hospital but nevertheless accept her as the teacher of our children.

In Ephesians we read, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance," and such an array of excellent spiritual qualities should attract the attention of all the agencies that have to do with the preparation of teachers. We need only to make a list of the opposites of these qualities to be convinced that the teacher who possesses these opposites would not be good for the children. Now serenity embodies all the foregoing excellent qualities and, therefore, the teacher who has serenity has a host of qualities that will make for the success and well-being of her pupils. Again, quoting from Henderson: "My whole point is that these spiritual qualities in a boy are infinitely more important to his present charm and future achievement than any amount of academic training, than the most complete knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, grammar, spelling, cla.s.sics, and natural science. For charm and achievement are of the Spirit. It is very clear, then, that we ought to make these spiritual qualities the major end of all our endeavor during those wonderful years of grace; and that we ought to allow the intellectual development, up to fourteen years at least, to be a by-product, valuable and welcome certainly, but not primarily sought after. In the end we should get much the larger harvest of intellectual power, and much the larger man."

We cannot hope to achieve the reconstructed school until our notion of teaching and teachers has been reconstructed. When we secure teachers who have education and not mere knowledge, we may begin to hope. We must look to the colleges and normal schools to furnish such teachers. If they cannot do so, our schools must plod along on the path of tradition without hope of finding the better way. There are faint indications, however, here and there, that the colleges and normal schools are beginning to stir in their sleep and are becoming somewhat aware of their opportunities and responsibilities. We shall hail with acclaim the glad day when they come to realize that the preparation of teachers for their work is a task of large import and goes deeper than facts, and statistics, and theories, and knowledge. If they furnish a teacher who has the quality of serenity, we shall all be fully alive to the fact that that quality is the luscious and nutritious fruitage of scholarship, of wide knowledge, of much reading, of deep meditation, and keen observation. But these elements, either singly or in combination, are but veneer unless they strike their roots into the spiritual nature and are thus nourished into spiritual qualities.

Excavating into serenity, we shall discover the pure gold of scholarship; we shall find knowledge in great abundance; we shall find the spirit of the greatest and best books; and we shall come upon the cloister in which meditation has done its perfect work.

The machine that is run to the extreme limit of its capacity splutters, sizzles, hisses, and quivers, and finally shakes itself into a condition of ineffectiveness. But the machine that is run well within the limits of its capacity is steady, noiseless, serene, effective, and durable. So with people. The person who essays a task that is beyond his capacity is certain to come to grief and to create no end of disturbance to himself and others before the final catastrophe. If the steam-chest or boiler is not equal to the task, wisdom and safety would counsel the installation of a larger one. Here is one of the tragedies of our scheme of education. The spirit is the power-plant of all life's operations and in this plant are many boilers. Instead of calling more and more of these into action, we seem intent upon repressing them and thus we reduce the capacity of the plant as a whole. When we should be lighting or replenishing the fires under the boilers of imagination, initiative, aspiration, and reverence, we spend our time striving to bank or quench these fires and in playing and dawdling with the torches of arithmetic, grammar, and history with which we should be kindling the fires. Thus we diminish the power of the plant while life's activities are calling for extension and enlargement.

We seem to be trying to train our pupils to work with one or but few boilers when there are scores of them available if only we knew how to utilize them.

Hence, it must appear that reserve-power and serenity are virtually synonymous. The teacher who has achieved serenity never uses all the power at her command and, in consequence, all her actions are easy, quiet, and even. She is always stable and never mercurial or spasmodic. She encounters steep grades, to be sure, but with ease and grace she applies a bit more power from her abundant supply and so compa.s.ses the difficulty without disturbing the calm. She is fully conscious of her reservoir of power and can concentrate all her attention upon the work in hand. The ballast in the hold keeps the mast perpendicular and the sails in position to catch the favoring breeze. We admire and applaud the graceful ship as it speeds along its course, giving little heed to the ballast in the hold that gives it poise and balance. But the ballast is there, else the ship would not be moving with such majestic mien. Nor was this ballast provided in a day. Rather it has been acc.u.mulating through the years, and bears the mark of college halls, of libraries, of laboratories, of the auditorium, of the mountain, the ocean, the starry night, of the deep forest, of the landscape, and of communion with all that is big and fine.

Socrates drinking the hemlock is a fitting and inspiring ill.u.s.tration of serenity. In the presence of certain and imminent death he was far less perturbed than many another man in the presence of a pin-p.r.i.c.k. And his imperturbability betokened bigness and not stolidity. While his disciples wept about him, he could counsel them to calmness and discourse to them upon immortality. He wept not, nor did he shudder back from the ordeal, but calm and masterful he raised the cup to his lips and smiled as he drank. His serenity won immortality for his name; for wherever language may be spoken or written, the story of Socrates will be told. History will not permit his name to be swallowed up in oblivion, not alone because he was the victim of ignorance and prejudice but also because his serenity, which was the offspring and proof of his wisdom, did not fail him and his friends in the supreme test. It is not a slight matter, then, to set up serenity as one of the goals in our school work. Nor is it a slight matter for the teacher to show forth this quality in all her work and so inspire her pupils to follow in her footsteps.

We hope, of course, that the boys and girls of our schools may attain serenity so that, even in their days of youth, urged on as they are by youthful exuberance, they may be orderly, decorous, and kindly-disposed.

We would have them polite, as a matter of course, but we would hope that their politeness may be a part of themselves and not a mere accretion.

They will have joy of life, but so does their teacher who is possessed of serenity. Joy is not necessarily boisterous. The strains of music are no less music because they are mellow. We would have our young people think soberly but not solemnly. And when all our people, young and old, reach the goal of serenity they will extol the teachers and the schools that showed them the way.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

LIFE

Finally, we come to the chief among the goals, which is life itself. In fact, life is the super-goal. We study manual arts, science, and language that we may achieve the goals of integrity, imagination, aspiration, and serenity, and these qualities we weave into the fabric of life. Upon the spiritual qualities we weave into it, depend the texture and pattern of this fabric and the generating and developing of these qualities and the weaving of them into this fabric--this we call life. When we look upon a person who is well-conditioned and whose life is well-ordered, in body, in mind, and in spirit, we know, at once, that he possesses integrity, initiative, a sense of responsibility, reverence, and other high qualities that compose the person as we see him. We do not reflect upon what he knows of history, of geography, or of music, for we are taking note of an exemplification of life. Indeed, the presence or absence of these qualities determines the character of the person's life. Hence it is that life is the supreme goal of endeavor. Life is a composite and the crown-piece of all the qualities toward which we strive by means of arithmetic and grammar--in short, of all our activities both in school and out.

One of our mistakes is that we confuse life and lifetime, and construe life to mean the span of life. In this conception the unit of measurement is so large that our concept of life evaporates into a vague generalization. Life is too specific, too definite for that. The quality of life may better be measured and tested in one-hour periods of duration.

When the clock strikes nine, we know that in just sixty minutes it will strike ten. In the s.p.a.ce of those sixty minutes we may find a cross-section of life. In a single hour we may experience a thousand sensations, arrive at a thousand judgments, and make a thousand responses to things about us. In that hour we may experience joy, sorrow, love, hate, envy, malice, sympathy, kindliness, courage, cowardice, pettiness, magnanimity, egoism, altruism, cruelty, mercy--a list, in fact, that reaches on almost interminably. If we only had a spiritual cyclometer attached to us, when the clock strikes ten we should have an interesting moment in noting the record. Only in some such way may each one of us gain a true notion of what his own life is. The one-hour period is quite long enough for a determination of the spiritual att.i.tude and disposition of the individual.

It is no small matter to achieve life, big, full, round, abounding, pulsating life; but it is certainly well worth striving for. Some one has defined sin as the distance between what one is and what he might have been; and this distance measures his decline from the sphere of life to which he had right and t.i.tle. For life is a sphere, seeing that it extends in all directions. Its limits are conterminous with the boundaries of time and s.p.a.ce. The feeble-minded person has life, but only in a very restricted sphere. He eats; he drinks; he sleeps; he wanders in narrow areas; and that is all. His thinking is weak, meager, and fitful. To him darkness means a time for sleeping, and light a time for eating and waiting. He produces nothing either of thought or substance, but is a pensioner upon the thinking and substance of others. His eyesight is strong and his hearing unimpaired; but he neither sees nor hears as normal persons do, because his spirit is incapable of positive reactions, and his mind too weak to give commands to his bodily organs at the behest of the spirit. In the language of psychology, he lacks a sensory foundation by which to react to external stimuli.

In striking contrast is the man whose sphere of life is large, whose spirit is capable of reacting to the orient and the occident, to height and depth, and whose mind flashes across the s.p.a.ce from the dawn to the sunset, and from nadir to zenith. s.p.a.ce is his playground, and his companions are the stars. Such a man feels and knows more life in an hour than his ant.i.thesis could feel and know in a century. To his spirit there are no metes and bounds; it has freedom and strength to make excursions to the far limits of s.p.a.ce and time. Life comes to him from a thousand sources and in a thousand ways because he is able to go out to meet it.

There has been developed in him a sensory foundation by which he can react to every influence the universe affords, to light and shadow, to joy and sorrow, to the near and the far, to the then and the now, to the lowly and the sublime, and to the finite and the Infinite. He has a big spirit, which is first in command; he has a strong, active mind, which is second in command; and he has a loyal company of bodily organs that are able and willing to obey and execute commands.

To such a man we apply all the epithets of compliment and commendation which the language yields and cite him as an exemplification of life at high tide, of life in its supreme fullness and splendor. The knowledge of the world comes to his doors to do his bidding; before him the arts and sciences make their obeisance; and wisdom is his pillar of cloud by day and his pillar of fire by night. Therefore we call him educated; we call him a man of culture; we call him a gentleman; and all because he has achieved life in abundant measure. Having imagination, he is able to peer into the future, antic.i.p.ate world movements, and visualize the paths on which progress will travel. Having initiative as his badge of leadership, he is able to rally hosts of men to his standard to execute his behests for civic, national, and world betterment. Having aspiration, he obeys the divine urge within him and moves onward and upward, eager to plant the flag of progress upon the summit that others may see and be stimulated to renewed hope and courage.

And he has integrity, for he is a real man. He has wholeness, completeness, soundness, and roundness. He is an integer and never counts for less than one in any relation of life. He cannot be a mere cipher, for he is dynamic. He rings true at every impact of life, is free from dross and veneer, and is genuine through and through. There was arithmetic, back along the line somewhere, but it has been absorbed in the big quality which it helped to generate and develop. And it is better so. For if he were now solving decimals and square root he would be but a cog and not the great wheel itself. He has grown beyond his arithmetic as he has grown beyond his boyhood warts and freckles, for the larger life has absorbed them. Yet he feels no disdain either for freckles or arithmetic, but regards them as gracious incidents of youth and growth. He cannot read his Latin as he once could, but he does not grieve; for he knows it has not been lost but, in changed form, is enshrined in the heart of integrity.

Again, he has the qualities of thoroughness, concentration, a sense of responsibility, loyalty, and serenity. He is big enough, and true enough both to himself and others, to pursue a straight and steady course. To him, life is a boon, a privilege, an investment, an opportunity, a responsibility, and, therefore, a gift too precious to be squandered or frivoled away. To him, hours are of fine gold and should be seized that they may be fused and fashioned into a statue of beauty. Being loyal to this conception, he moves on from achievement to achievement nor stops to note that fragrant flowers of blessing and benediction are springing forth luxuriantly in his path. His spirit is big with rightness, his brain is clear, his conscience is clean, his eyes look upward, his words are sincere, his thoughts are lofty, his purposes are true, and his acts distill blessings. He is no mere figment of fancy, but rather a n.o.ble reality whose prototype may be found on the bench, in the forum, in the study, in the sanctum, in the school and the college, in the factory, on the farm, and in the busy mart.

And, withal, he is a success as a human being. His sincerity is proverbial in all things, both great and small. In him there is nothing of the mystic, the hermit, or the sybarite. He has great joy of life, and this joy is true, honest, and real, and never simulated. He drinks in life at every pore, and gives forth life that invigorates and inspires whomsoever it touches. His laugh is the expression of his wholesome nature; his words are jewels of discrimination; his every sentence bears a helpful message; his fine sense of humor mellows and illumines every situation; and his face always shows forth the light within. Children find delight in his society, and the exuberant vitality of his nature wins for him the friendship of all living creatures. Birds seem to sing for him, and flowers to exhale their odors for his delight. For the influences of birds, flowers, streams, trees, meadows, and mountains are enmeshed in his life. Nature reveals her secrets to him and gives to him of her treasures because he goes out to meet her. Because he smiles at nature she smiles back at him, and the union of their smiles gives joy to those who see.

Moreover, he is a product of the reconstructed school, for this school does already exist, though in conspicuous isolation. But the oasis is accentuated by its isolation in the desert which spreads about it and is the more inviting by contrast. When, as a child, he entered school, the teacher, who was in advance of her time in her conception of the true function of the school, made a close and sympathetic apprais.e.m.e.nt of his apt.i.tudes, his native dispositions, his daily environment, and the bent of his inherent spiritual qualities. First of all, she won his confidence.

Thus he found freedom, ease, and pleasure in her presence. Thus, too, there ensued unconscious self-revelation and nothing in his life evaded her kindly scrutiny. He opened his mind to her frankly and fully, and never after did she permit the closing of the door. Only so could she become his teacher.

She regarded him as an opportunity for the testing of all her knowledge, all her skill, and the full measure of her altruism. Nor was he the proverbial ma.s.s of plastic clay to be molded into some preconceived form.

Her wisdom and modernity interdicted such a conception of childhood as that. Rather, he was a growing plant, waiting for her skill to nurture him into blossom and fruitage. Some of his qualities she found good; others not. The good ones she made the objects of her special care; the others she allowed to perish from neglect. Her experience in gardening had taught her that, if we cultivate the potatoes a.s.siduously, the weeds will disappear and need not concern us. She discerned in him a tender shoot of imagination and this she nurtured as a priceless thing. She fertilized it with legend, story, song, and myth, and enveloped it in an atmosphere of warmth and joyousness. She led him into nature's realm, that his imagination might plume its wings for greater flights by its efforts to interpret the heart of things that live. Thus his imagination learned to traverse s.p.a.ce, to explore sights and sounds his senses could not reach, and to construct for him another world of beauty and delight.

So, too, with the other spiritual qualities. Upon these goals her gaze was fixed and she gently led him toward them. She taught the arithmetic with zest, with large understanding, and in a masterly way, for she was causing it to serve a high purpose. Whatever study she found helpful, this she used as a means with grat.i.tude and gladness. If she found the book ill adapted to her purpose, she sought or wrote another. If pictures proved more potent than books, the galleries obeyed the magic of her skill and yielded forth their treasures. She yearned to have her pupil win the goals before him; everything was grist that came to her mill if only it would serve her purpose. She disdained nothing that could afford nourishment to the spirit of the child and give him zeal, courage, and strength for the upward journey. If more arithmetic was needful, she found it; if more history, she gave it; and if the book on geography was inadequate, she supplemented from libraries or from her own abundant storehouse of knowledge. She dared to deviate from the course of study, if thereby the child might more certainly win the goals toward which she ever looked and worked.

In the boy, she saw a poet, a philosopher, a prophet, an artist, a musician, a statesman, or a philanthropist, and she worked and prayed that the artist in the child might not die but that he might grow to stalwart manhood to glorify the work of her school. In each girl she saw another Ruth, or Esther, or Cordelia, or Clara Barton, or Frances Willard, or Florence Nightingale, or Rosa Bonheur, or Mrs. Stowe, or Mrs. Browning.

And her heart yearned over each one of these and strove with power to nourish them into vigorous life that they might become jewels in her crown of rejoicing. She must not allow one to perish through her ignorance or malpractice, for she would keep her soul free from the charge of murder.

And in the fullness of manhood and womanhood her pupils achieved the full symphony of life. They had won the goals toward which their teacher had been leading. Their spiritual qualities had converged and become life, and they had attained the super-goal. In the joy of their achievement their teacher repeated the words of her own Teacher, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."