The Vitalized School Part 14

"The autumn leaves are falling, They are falling everywhere; They are falling through the atmosphere And likewise through the air."

Woe betide the teacher who tries to explain! There is no explanation--there is just the humor. If that eludes the reader, an explanation will not avail.

A teacher of Latin read to his pupils "The House-Boat on the Styx" in connection with their reading of the "aeneid." It was good fun for them all, and never was Virgil more highly honored than in the a.s.siduous study which those young people gave to his lines. They were eager to complete the study of the lesson in order to have more time for the "House-Boat." The humor of the book opened wide the gates of their spirits through which the truths of the regular lesson pa.s.sed blithely in.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What is the source of humor in a humorous story?

2. When should the teacher laugh with the school? When should she not do so?

3. How does the response of the school to a laughable incident reflect the leadership of the teacher?

4. What can be done to bring more or better humor into the school?

5. Compare as companions those whom you know who exhibit a sense of humor with those who do not.

6. Compare their influence on others.

7. What can be done to bring humor into essays written by the students?

8. Distinguish between wit and humor. Does wit or humor cause most of the laughter in school?

9. What is meant by an "apt.i.tude for vicariousness"?

10. How did Lincoln make use of humor? Is there any humor in the Gettysburg speech? Why?

11. What is the relation of pathos to humor?

12. Give an example from the writings of Mark Twain that shows him a philosopher as well as a humorist.

13. What books could you read to the pupils to enliven some of the subjects that you teach?

CHAPTER XX

The Element of Human Interest

=Yearning toward betterment.=--Much has been said and written in recent times touching the matter and manner of vitalizing and humanizing the studies and work of the school. The discussions have been nation-wide in their scope and most fertile in plans and practical suggestions. No subject of greater importance or of more far-reaching import now engages the interest of educational leaders. They are quite aware that something needs to be done, but no one has announced the sovereign remedy. The critics have made much of the fact that there is something lacking or wrong in our school procedure, but they can neither diagnose the case nor suggest the remedy. They can merely criticize. We are having many surveys, but the results have been meager and inadequate. We have been working at the circ.u.mference of the circle rather than at the center. We have been striving to reform our educational training, hoping for a reflex that would be sufficient to modify the entire school regime. We have added domestic science, hoping thereby to reconstruct the school by inoculation. We have looked to agriculture and other vocational studies as the magnetic influences of our dreams. Something has been accomplished, to be sure, but we are still far distant from the goal.

The best that writers can do in their books or educational conferences can do in their meetings, is to report progress.

=The obstacle of conservatism.=--One of the greatest obstacles we have to surmount in this whole matter of vitalizing school work is the habitual conservatism of the school people themselves. The methods of teaching that obtained in the school when we were pupils have grooved themselves into habits of thinking that smile defiance at the theories that we have more recently acquired. When we venture out from the sh.o.r.e we want to feel a rope in our hands. The superintendent speaks fervently to patrons or teachers on the subject of modern methods in teaching, then retires to his office and takes intimate and friendly counsel with tradition. In sailing the educational seas he must needs keep in sight the buoys of tradition. This matter of conservatism is cited merely to show that our progress, in the very nature of the case, will be slow.

=Schools of education.=--Another obstacle in the way of progress toward the vitalized school is the att.i.tude and teaching of many who are connected with colleges of education and normal schools. We have a right to look to them for leadership, but we find, instead, that their practices lag far in the rear of their theories. They teach according to such devitalized methods and in such an unvitalized way as to discredit the subjects they teach. It is only from such of their students as are proof against their style of teaching that we may hope for aid. One such teacher in a college of education in a course of eight weeks on the subject of School Administration had his students copy figures from statistical reports for several days in succession and for four and five hours each day. The students confessed that their only objective was the gaining of credits, and had no intimation that the work they were doing was to function anywhere.

=The machine teacher.=--Such work is deadening and disheartening. It has in it no inspiration, no life, nothing, in short, that connects with real life. Such a teacher could not maintain himself in a wide-awake high school for a half year. The boys and girls would desert him even if they had to desert the school. And yet teachers and prospective teachers must endure and not complain. Those who submit supinely will attempt to repeat in their schools the sort of teaching that obtains in his cla.s.ses, and their schools will suffer accordingly. His sort of teaching proclaims him either more or less than a human being in the estimation of normal people. Such a teacher drones forth weary plat.i.tudes as if his utterances were oracular. The only prerequisite for a position in some schools of education seems to be a degree of a certain alt.i.tude without any reference to real teaching ability.

=Statistics versus children.=--Such teaching palliates educational situations without affording a solution. It is so steeped in tradition that it resorts to statistics as it would consult an oracle. We look to see it establishing precedents only to find it following precedents.

When we would find in it a leader we find merely a follower. To such teaching statistical numbers mean far more than living children. Indeed, children are but objects that become useful as a means of proving theories. It lacks vitality, and that is sad; but, worst of all, it strives unceasingly to perpetuate itself in the schools. Real teaching power receives looks askance in some of these colleges as if it bore the mark of Cain in not being up to standard on the academic side. And yet these colleges are teaching the teachers of our schools.

=Teaching power.=--Hence, the work of vitalizing the school must begin in our colleges of education and normal schools, and this beginning will be made only when we place the emphasis upon teaching power. The human qualities of the teachers must be so p.r.o.nounced that they become their most distinguished characteristics. It is a sad commentary upon our educational processes if a man must point to the letters of his degree to prove that he is a teacher. His teaching should be of such a nature as to justify and glorify his degree. As the preacher receives his degree because he can preach, so the teacher should receive his degree because he can teach, even if we must create a new degree by which to designate the real teacher.

=Degrees and human qualities.=--There is no disparagement of the academic degree in the statement that it proves absolutely nothing touching the ability to teach. It proclaims its possessor a student but not a teacher. Yet, in our practices, we proceed upon the a.s.sumption that teacher and student are synonymous. We hold examinations for teachers in our schools, but not for teachers in our colleges of education. His degree is the magic talisman that causes the doors to swing wide open for him. Besides, his very presence inside seems to be prima facie evidence that he is a success, and all his students are supposed to join in the general chorus of praise.

=Life the great human interest.=--The books are eloquent and persistent in their admonitions that we should attach all school work to the native interests of the child. To this dictum there seems to be universal and hearty a.s.sent. But we do not seem to realize fully, as yet, that the big native interest of the child is life itself. We have not, as yet, found the way to enmesh the activities of the school in the life processes of the child so that these school activities are as much a part of his life as his food, his games, his breathing, and his sleep. We have been interpreting some of the manifestations of life as his native interests but have failed thus to interpret his life as a whole. The child is but the aggregate of all his inherent interests, and we must know these interests if we would find the child so as to attach school work to the child himself.

=The child as a whole.=--Here is the crux of the entire matter, here the big problem for the vitalized school. We have been taking his pulse, testing his eyes, taking his temperature, and making examinations for defects--and these things are excellent. But all these things combined do not reveal the child to us. We need to go beyond all these in order to find him. We must know what he thinks, how he feels as to people and things, what his aspirations are, what motives impel him to action, what are his intuitions, what things he does involuntarily and what through volition or compulsion. With such data clearly before us we can proceed to attach school work to his native interests. We have been striving to bend him to our preconceived notion instead of finding out who and what he is as a condition precedent to intelligent teaching.

=Three types of teachers.=--The three types of teachers that have been much exploited in the books are the teacher who conceives it to be her work to teach the book, the one who teaches the subject, and the one who teaches the child. The number of the first type is still very large in spite of all the books that inveigh against this conception. It were easy to find a teacher whose practice indicates that she thinks that all the arithmetic there is or ought to be is to be found in the book that lies on her desk. It seems not to occur to her that a score of books might be written that would be equal in merit to the one she is using, some of which might be far better adapted to the children in her particular school. If she were asked to teach arithmetic without the aid of a book, she would shed copious tears, if, indeed, she did not resign.

=The first type.=--To such a teacher the book is the Ultima Thule of all her endeavors, and when the pupils can pa.s.s the examination she feels that her work is a success. If the problem in the book does not fit the child, so much the worse for the child, and she proceeds to try to make him fit the problem. It does not occur to her to construct problems that will fit the child. When she comes to the solution of the right triangle, the baseball diamond does not come to her mind. She has the boy learn a rule and try to apply it instead of having him find the distance from first base to third in a direct line. In her thinking such a proceeding would be ba.n.a.l because it would violate the sanct.i.ty of the book. She must adhere to the book though the heavens fall, and the boy with them.

=The book supreme.=--She seems quite unable to draw upon the farm, the grocery, the store, or the playground for suitable problems. These things seem to be obscured by her supreme devotion to the book. She lacks fertility of resources, nor does she realize this lack, because her eyes are fastened upon the book rather than upon the child. Were she as intent upon the child as she is upon the book, his interests would direct attention to the things toward which his inclinations yearn and toward which his apt.i.tudes lure him. In such a case, her ingenuity and resourcefulness would roam over wide fields in quest of the objects of his native interests and she would return to him laden with material that would fit the needs of the child far better than the material of the book.

=The child supreme.=--The teacher whose primary consideration is the child and who sees in the child the object and focus of all her activities, never makes a fetish of the book. It has its use, to be sure, but it is subordinate in the scheme of education. It is not a necessity, but a mere convenience. She could dispense with it entirely and not do violence to the child's interests. No book is large enough to compa.s.s all that she teaches, for she forages in every field to obtain proper and palatable food for the child. She teaches with the grain of the child and not against the grain. If the book contains what she requires in her work, she uses it and is glad to have it; but, if it does not contain what she needs, she seeks it elsewhere and does not return empty-handed.

=Ill.u.s.trations.=--She places the truth she hopes to teach in the path of the child's inclination, and this is taken into his life processes. Life does not stop at way-stations to take on supplies, but absorbs the supplies that it encounters as it moves along. This teacher does not stop the ball game to teach the right triangle, but manages to have the problem solved in connection with or as a part of the game. She does not taboo the morning paper in order to have a lesson in history, but begins with the paper as a favorable starting point toward the lesson. She does not confiscate the contents of the boy's pocket as contraband, but is glad to avail herself of all these as indices of the boy's interests, and, therefore, guides for her teaching.

=Att.i.tude toward teaching materials.=--When the boy carries a toad to school, she does not shudder, but rather rejoices, because she sees in him a possible Aga.s.siz. When he displays an interest in plant life, she sees in him another Burbank. When she finds him drawing pictures at his desk, she smiles approval, for she sees in him another Raphael. She does not disdain the lowliest insect, reptile, or plant when she finds it within the circle of the child's interests. She is willing, nay eager, to ransack the universe if only she may come upon elements of nutrition for her pupils. From every flower that blooms she gathers honey that she may distill it into the life of the child. She does not coddle the child; she gives him nourishment.

=History.=--Her history is as wide as human thought and as high as human aspiration. It includes the Rosetta stone and the morning paper. It travels back from the clothing of the child to the cotton gin. The st.i.tch in the little girl's dress is the index finger that points to the page that depicts the invention of the sewing machine. Every engine leads her back to Watt, and she takes the children with her. Every foreign message in the daily paper revives the story of Field and the laying of the Atlantic cable. Every mention of the President's cabinet gives occasion for reviewing the cabinets of other Presidents with comparisons and contrasts. At her magic touch the libraries and galleries yield forth rich treasures for her cla.s.sroom. Life is the textbook of her study, and the life of the child is the goal of her endeavors.

=The child's native interests.=--In brief, she is teaching children and not books or subjects, and the interests of the children take emphatic precedence over her own. She enters into the life of the child and makes excursions into all life according to the dictates of his interests. The child is the big native interest to which she attaches the work of the school. The program is elastic enough to encompa.s.s every child in her school. Her program is a garden in which something is growing for each child, and she cultivates every plant with sympathetic care. She considers it no hardship to learn the plant, the animal, the place, or the fact in which the child finds interest. Because of the child and for the sake of the child she invests all these things with the quality of human interest.

=The school and the home.=--Arithmetic, language, history, and geography touch life at a thousand points, and we have but to select the points of contact with the life of each pupil to render any or all of these a vital part of the day's work and the day's life. They are not things that are detached from the child's life. The child's errand to the shop involves arithmetic, and the vitalized teacher makes this fact a part of the working capital of the school. The dinner table abounds in geography, and the teacher is quick to turn this fact to account in the school. Her fertility of resources, coupled with her vital interest in human beings and human affairs, soon establishes a reciprocal relation between the home and the school. Similarly, she causes the language of the school to flow out into the home, the factory, and the office.

=The skill of the teacher.=--History is not a school affair merely. It is a life affair, and through all the currents of life it may be made to flow. The languages, Latin, German, French, Spanish, are expressions and interpretations of life, and they may be made to appear what they really are if the teacher is resourceful enough and skillful enough to attach them to the life of the pupil by the human ligaments that are ever at hand. Chemistry, physics, botany, and physiology all throb with life if only the teacher can place the fingers of the pupils on their pulses.

Given the human teacher, the human child, and the humanized teaching, the vitalized school is inevitable.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What agencies have been employed with the expectation that they would improve the school?

2. What are the reasons why some of these have not accomplished more?

3. Give instances in which the conservatism of teachers seems to have stood in the way of utilizing the element of human interest.

4. What do you think of a teacher who a.s.serts that no important advance has been made in educational theory and practice since, say, 1910?

5. Make an outline of what you think a college of education should do for the school.

6. What would you expect to gain from a course in school administration?