The Vitalized School Part 1

The Vitalized School.

by Francis B. Pearson.

PREFACE

The thoughtful observer must have noted in the recent past many indications of an awakened interest both in the concept of education and in school procedure on the part of school officials, teachers, and the public. Educators have been developing pedagogical principles that strike their roots deep into the philosophy of life, and now their p.r.o.nouncements are invading the consciousness of people of all ranks and causing them to realize more and more that the school process is an integral part of the life process and not something detached from life.

The following pages const.i.tute an attempt to interpret some of the school processes in terms of life processes, and to suggest ways in which these processes may be made identical.

It is hoped that teachers who may read these pages may find running through them a strand of optimism that will give them increased faith in their own powers, a larger hope for the future of the school, and an access of zeal to press valiantly forward in their efforts to excel themselves.

F. B. P.

COLUMBUS, OHIO, January, 1917.

THE VITALIZED SCHOOL

CHAPTER I

TEACHING SCHOOL

=Life and living compared.=--There is a wide difference between school-teaching and teaching school. The question "Is she a school-teacher?" means one thing; but the question "Can she teach school?" means quite another. School-teaching may be living; but teaching school is life. And any one who has a definition of life can readily find a definition for teaching school. Much of the criticism of the work of the schools emanates from sources that have a restricted concept of life. The artisan who defines life in terms of his own trade is impatient with much that the school is trying to do. He would have the scope of the school narrowed to his concept of life. If art and literature are beyond the limits of his concept, he can see no warrant for their presence in the school. The work of the schools cannot be standardized until life itself is standardized, and that is neither possible nor desirable. The glory of life is that it does not have fixity, that it is ever crescent.

=Teaching defined.=--Teaching school may be defined, therefore, as the process of interpreting life by the laboratory method. The teacher's work is to open the gates of life for the pupils. But, before these gates can be opened, the teacher must know what and where they are. This view of the teacher's work is neither fanciful nor fantastic; quite the contrary. Life is the common heritage of people young and old, and the school should be so organized and administered as to teach people how to use this heritage to the best advantage both for themselves and for others. If a child should be absent from school altogether, or if he should be incarcerated in prison from his sixth to his eighteenth year, he would still have life. But, if he is in school during those twelve years, he is supposed to have life that is of better quality and more abundant. Life is not measured by years, but by its own intensity and scope. It has often been said that some people have more life in threescore and ten years than Methuselah had in his more than nine hundred years.

=Life measured by intensity.=--This statement is not demonstrable, of course, but it serves to make evident the fact that some people have more of life in a given time than others in the same time. In this sense, life may be measured by the number of reactions to objectives.

These reactions may be increased by training. Two persons, in pa.s.sing a shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as many as the other, according to their ability to react. The man who was locked in a vault at the cemetery by accident, and was not discovered for an hour, thought he had spent four days in his imprisonment. He had really lived four days in a single hour by reason of the intensity of life during that hour.

=Ill.u.s.trations.=--In the case of dreams, we are told that years may be condensed into minutes, or even seconds, by reason of the rapidity of reactions. The rapidity and intensity of these reactions make themselves manifest on the face of the dreamer. Beads of perspiration and facial contortions betoken intensity of feeling. In such an experience life is intense. If a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a case, it would make a high record of speed. Life sometimes touches bottom, and sometimes scales the heights. But the distance between these extremes varies greatly in different persons. The life of one may have but a single octave; of the other, eight, or a hundred, or a thousand.

The life of Job is an apt ill.u.s.tration. No one has been able to sound the depths of his suffering, nor has any one been able to measure the heights of his exaltation. We may not readily compute the octaves in such a life as his.

=The complexity of life.=--It is not easy to think life, much less define it. The elements are so numerous as to baffle and bewilder the mind. It looks out at one from so many corners that it seems Argus-eyed.

At one moment we see it on the Stock Exchange where men struggle and strive in a mad frenzy of compet.i.tion; at another, in a quiet home, where a mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no compet.i.tion but, rather, a sublime monopoly. Again, it manifests itself in the clanking of machinery where men are tunneling the mountain or constructing a ca.n.a.l to unite oceans; or, again, in the laboratory where the microscope is revealing the form of the snow crystal. One man is watching the movements of the heavenly bodies as they file by his telescope, while another writes a proclamation that makes free a race of people. Another man is leading an army into battle, while some Doctor MacClure is breasting the storm in the darkness as he goes forth on his mission of mercy.

=Manifestations of life.=--These manifestations of life men call trade, commerce, history, mathematics, science, nature, and philanthropy. And men write these words in books, and other men write other books trying to explain their meaning. Then, still others divide and subdivide, and science becomes the sciences, and mathematics becomes arithmetic, and algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry, and calculus, and astronomy.

Here mathematics and science seem to merge. And, in time, history and geography come together, and sometimes strive for precedence.

Thus, books acc.u.mulate into libraries and so add another to the many elements of life. Then magazines are written to explain the books and their authors. The motive behind the book is a.n.a.lyzed in an effort to discover the workings of the author's mind and heart. In these revelations we sometimes hear the rippling of the brook, and sometimes the moan of the sea; sometimes the cooing of the dove, and sometimes the scream of the eagle; sometimes the bleating of the lamb, and sometimes the roaring of the lion. In them we see the moonbeams that play among the flowers and the lightning that rends the forest; the blossoms that filter from the trees and the avalanche that carries destruction; the rain that fructifies the earth and the hurricane that destroys.

=Life in literature.=--Back of these sights and sounds we discover men--Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante. We trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature. And in literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life.

Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They saw and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because they wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the heights and saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and with nature.

This panorama generated thoughts and feelings in them, and these they could not but portray. And so literature and life are identical and not coordinates, as some would have us think.

=Life as subject matter in teaching.=--In teaching school, therefore, the subject matter with which we have to do is life--nothing more and nothing less. We may call it history, or mathematics, or literature, or psychology,--but it still remains true that life is the real objective of all our activities. And, as has been already said, we are teaching life by the laboratory method. We are striving to interpret the thing in which we are immersed. We feel, and think, and aspire, and love, and enjoy. All these are life; and from this life we are striving to extract strength that our feeling may be deeper, our thinking higher, our aspirations wider and more lofty, our love purer and n.o.bler, and our own enjoyment greater. By absorbing the life that is all about us we strive to have more abundant and abounding life.

=The teacher's province.=--Such is the province of one who essays the task of teaching school. School is life, as we have been told; but, at the same time, it is a place and an occasion for teaching life. If we could detach history from life, it would cease to be history. If literature is not life, it is not literature; and so with the sciences.

These branches are but variants or branches of life, and all emanate from a common center. Whether we scan the heavens, penetrate the depths of the sea, pore over the pages of books, or look into the minds and hearts of men, we are striving after an interpretation of life.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Distinguish between a "school teacher" and a "man or woman who teaches school."

2. Discuss the importance of the following agencies of the school in securing for children "life of a better quality and more abundant": play; revitalized curricula; vitalized teachers; medical inspection; social centers; moral instruction.

3. Discuss both from the standpoint of present practice and ideal educational principles: "More abundant life rather than knowledge is the chief end of instruction."

4. What changes are necessary in school curricula and in the methods of school organization, instruction, and discipline, in order that the chief purpose of our schools, "more abundant _life_," may be realized?

5. Justify the apparent length of the school day to teachers and pupils, as a means of determining the quality of the work of the school.

6. Some teachers maintain that school is a preparation for life, while the author maintains that "school is _life_." Is this difference in the concept of the school a vital one?

7. How may this difference of concept affect the work of the teacher?

the att.i.tude of the pupil?

8. What definition of education will best harmonize with the ideals of this chapter?

CHAPTER II

THE TEACHER

=Teachers contrasted.=--The vitalized school is an expression of the vitalized teacher. In the hands of the teacher of another sort, the vitalized school is impossible. Unless she can see in the multiplication table the power that throws the bridge across the river, that builds pyramids, that constructs railways, that sends ships across the ocean, that tunnels mountains and navigates the air, this table becomes a stupid thing, a dead thing, and an incubus upon the spirits of her pupils. To such a teacher mathematics is a lifeless thing, without hope or potency, the school is a mere convenience for the earning of a livelihood, the work is the drudgery of bondage, and the children are little less than an impertinence. The vitalized teacher is different. To her the multiplication table pulsates with life. It stretches forth its beneficent hand to give employment to a million workers, and food to a million homes. It pervades every mart of trade; it loads trains and ships with the commerce of nations; and it helps to amplify and enn.o.ble civilization.

=Vitalized mathematics.=--In this table she sees a prophecy of great achievements in engineering, architecture, transportation, and the myriad applications of science. In brief, mathematics to her is vibrant with life both in its present uses and in its possibilities. She knows that it is a part of the texture of the daily life of every home as well as of national life. She knows that it pertains to individual, community, and national well-being. Knowing this, she feels that it is quite worth while for herself and her pupils, both for the present and for the future. She feels that, if she would know life, she must know mathematics, because it is a part of life; that, if she would teach life to her pupils, she must teach them mathematics as an integral part of life; and that she must teach it in such a way that it will be as much a part of themselves as their bodily organs. She wants them to know the mathematics as they know that the rain is falling or that the sun is shining, because the rain, the sunshine, and the mathematics are all elements of life. Her great aim is to have her pupils experience the study just as they experience other phases of life.

=The teacher's att.i.tude.=--Such a teacher with such a conception of life and of her work finds teaching school the very reverse of drudgery. Each day is an exhilarating experience of life. Her pupils are a part of life to her. She enjoys life and, hence, enjoys them. They are her confederates in the fine game of life. The bigness and exuberance of her abundant life enfolds them all, and from the very atmosphere of her presence they absorb life. Their studies, under the influence of her magic, are as much a part of life to them as the air they breathe or the food they eat. No two days are alike in her school, for life to-day is larger than it was yesterday and so presents a new aspect. Her spirit carries over into their spirits the truths of the books, and these truths thus become inherent.

=College influences.=--She teaches life, albeit through the medium of subjects and books, because she knows life. Her college work did not consist in the gathering together of many facts, but in acc.u.mulating experiences of life. Many of these experiences were acquired vicariously, but they were no less real on that account. Her generous nature was able to withstand the most a.s.siduous efforts of some of her teachers to quench the flames of life that glowed in the pages of books, with the wet blanket of erudition. She was able to relive the thoughts and feelings of the authors whose books she studied and so make their experiences her own. She could reconst.i.tute the emotional life of her authors and gain potency through the transfusion of spirit. Her books were living things, and she gleaned life from their pages.

=Reading and life.=--She can teach reading because she can read. Reading to her is an experience in life. The words on the printed page are not meaningless hieroglyphics. They are the electric wires which connect the soul of the author with her own, and through which the current is continually pa.s.sing. When she reads d.i.c.kens, Tiny Tim is never a mere boy with a crutch, but he is Tiny Tim, and, as such, neither men nor angels can supplant him on the printed page. She knows the touch of him and the voice of him. She laughs with him; she cries with him; she prays with him; she lives with him. In her teaching she causes Tiny Tim to stand forth like a cameo to her pupils, with no rival and no peer. This she can do because he is a part of her life. She has no occasion either to pose or to rhapsodize. Sincerity is its own explanation and justification.

=Power of understanding.=--When she reads "Little Boy Blue" she can hear the sobbing of a heartbroken mother and thus, vicariously, comes to know the universality of death and sorrow. But she finds faith and hope in the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds of the mother's grief. Thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood and so shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils. In every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains a knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats. In short, she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus catches the spiritual meaning of what she reads. She can feel as well as think and so can emotionalize the printed page. Nature has endowed her with a sensory foundation that reacts to the emotional situations that the author produces. Thus she understands, and that is the prime desideratum in reading. And because she understands, she can interpret, and cause her pupils to understand. Thus they receive another endowment of life.

=Books as exponents of life.=--She has time for reading as she has time for eating and drinking, and for the same reason. To her they are all coordinate elements of life. She eats, and sleeps, and reads because she is alive; and she is more alive because she eats, and sleeps, and reads.

She taps the sources of spiritual refreshment, without parade, and rejoices in the consequent enrichment of her life. She does not smite the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush forth. She descends into Hades with Dante, and ascends Sinai with Moses, and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys. She sits enrapt as Shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled by Victor Hugo's picture of the human soul. Her sentient spirit is ignited by the fires of genius that glow between the covers of the book, and her fine enthusiasm carries the divine conflagration over into the spirits of her pupils. There is, therefore, no drag or listlessness in her cla.s.s in reading, because, during this exercise, life is as buoyant and spontaneous as it is upon the playground.

=The meaning of history.=--In her teaching of history she invests all the characters with life, because to her they are alive. And because they are alive to her they are alive to her pupils. They are instinct with power, action, life. She rehabilitates the scenes in which they moved, and, therefore, they must be alive in order to perform their parts. They are all flesh and blood people with all the attributes of people. They are all actuated by motives and move along their appointed ways obedient to the laws of cause and effect. They are not named in the book to be learned and recited, but to be known. She causes her pupils to know them as they would come to know people in her home. Nor do they ever mistake one for the other or confuse their actions. They know them too well for that. These characters are made to stand wide apart, so that, being thus seen, they will ever after be known. History is not a directory of names, but groups of people going about their tasks. They hunger, and thirst, and love, and hate, and struggle with their environment as their descendants are doing to-day.