The Vitalized School Part 6

8. How remove unnatural stilted words and expressions from the oral and written expressions of pupils?

CHAPTER XI

COMPLETE LIVING

=The question raised.=--That education is a preparation for complete living has been quoted by every teacher who lays any sort of claim to the standard definitions. Indeed, so often and so glibly has the quotation been made that it is well-nigh axiomatic and altogether trite.

But we still await any clear explanation of what is meant by complete living. On this point we are still groping, with no prophetic voice to tell us the way. By implication we have had hints, and much has been said on the negative side, but the positive side still lies fallow. When asked for an explanation, those who give the quotation resort to circ.u.mlocution and, at length, give another definition of education, apparently conscious of the mathematical dictum that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. So we continue to travel in a circle, with but feeble attempts to deviate from the course.

=The vitalized school an exemplification.=--Nor will this chapter attempt to resolve the difficult situation in which we are placed. It is not easy to define living, much less complete living. All that is hoped for here is to bring the matter to the attention of all teachers and to cause them to realize that the quest for a definition of complete living will be for them and for their pupils an exhilarating experience. The vitalized school will belie its name if it does not strive toward a solution of the difficulty, and any school that approximates a satisfactory definition will be proclaimed a public benefactor. In fact, the school cannot lay claim to the distinction of being vitalized if it fails to exemplify complete living, in some appreciable degree, and if it fails to groove this sort of living into a habit that will persist throughout the years. This is the big task that the school must essay if it would emanc.i.p.ate itself from the trammels of tradition and become a leader in the larger, better way. Complete living must become the ideal of the school if it would realize the conception of education of which it is a professed exponent.

=Incomplete living.=--The man who walks with a crutch; the man who is afflicted with a felon; the man who lacks a hand or even a finger,--cannot experience complete living. Through the power of adaptation the man with a crutch may compa.s.s more difficult situations than the man with sound legs will attempt, but he cannot realize all the possibilities of life that a sound body would vouchsafe to him. The man without hands may learn to write with his toes, but he is not employed as a teacher of penmanship. His life is a restricted one and, therefore, less than complete. We marvel at the exhibitions of skill displayed by the maimed, but we feel no envy. We may not be able to duplicate their achievements, but we feel that we have ample compensation in the normal use of our members. We know instinctively that, in the solitude of their meditations, they must experience poignant regrets that they are not as other people, and that they must pa.s.s through life under a handicap.

=The sound body.=--It is evident, therefore, that soundness of body is a condition precedent to complete living. The body is the organism by means of which the mind and the spirit function in terms of life; and, if this organism is imperfect, the functioning will prove less than complete. Hence, it is the province of the school to so organize all its activities that the physical powers of the pupils shall be fully conserved. The president of a large university says that during his inc.u.mbency of seventeen years they have found only one young woman of physical perfection and not a single young man, although the tests have been applied to thousands. College students, it will be readily conceded, are a selected group; and yet even in such a group not a physically perfect young man was found in tests extending over seventeen years. If a like condition should be discovered in the scoring of live stock at our fairs, there would ensue a careful investigation of causes in the hope of finding a remedy.

=Personal efficiency.=--We shall not achieve national efficiency until every citizen has achieved personal efficiency, and physical fitness is one of the fundamental conditions precedent to personal efficiency. Here we have the blue print for the guidance of society and the school. If we are ever to achieve national efficiency, we must see to it that every man and woman, every boy and girl, has a strong, healthy body that is fully able to execute the behests of mind and spirit. This may require a stricter censorship of marriage licenses, including physical examinations; it may require more stringent laws on our statute books; it may require radical changes in our methods of physical training; and it may require the state to a.s.sume some of the functions of the home when the home reveals its inability or unwillingness to cope with the situation. Heroic treatment may be necessary; but until we as a people have the courage to apply the remedies that the diagnosis shows to be necessary, we shall look in vain for improvement.

=Physical training.=--Seeing that it is so difficult to find a man or a woman among our people who has attained physical perfection, it behooves society and the schools to take a critical inventory of their methods of physical training and their meager accomplishments as a preliminary survey looking to a change in our procedure. We seem to have delegated scientific physical training to athletics and pugilism, with but scant concern for our people as a whole. If pink-tea calisthenics as practiced mildly in our schools has failed to produce robust bodies, then it is inc.u.mbent upon us to adopt a regime of beefsteak. What the traditional school has failed to do the vitalized school must attempt to do or suffer the humiliation of striking its colors. There is no middle course; it must either win a victory or admit defeat in common with the traditional school. The standard is high, of course, but every standard of the vitalized school is and ought to be high.

=Cigarettes.=--If the use of cigarettes is devitalizing our boys, and this can be determined, then the manufacture and sale must be prohibited unless our legislative bodies would plead guilty to the charge of impotence. But we are told that public sentiment conditions the enactment of laws. If such be the case, then the school and its auxiliaries should feel it a duty to generate public sentiment. If cigarettes are harmful, then they should be banished, and the task is not an impossible one by any means. As to the injurious effects of cigarettes, as distinguished an authority as Thomas A. Edison says the following:

"The injurious agent in cigarettes comes princ.i.p.ally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called 'acrolein.' It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes."

We have eliminated dangerous explosives from our Fourth of July celebrations, and the ban can as easily be placed upon any other dangerous product. Just here we inevitably meet the cry of paternalism, but we shall always be confronted by the question to what extent the government should stand aside and see its citizens follow the bent of their appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions over the brink of destruction. It is the inherent right of government to maintain its own integrity, and this it can do only through the conservation of the powers of its citizens. If paternalism is necessary to this end, then paternalism is a governmental virtue. Better, by far, some paternalism than a race of weaklings.

=Military training.=--We may shrink away from military training in the schools, just as we shrink from the regime of pugilism; but we may profit by observing both these types of training in our efforts to develop some method of training that will render our young people physically fit. We need some type of training that will eliminate round and drooping shoulders, weak chests, shambling gait, sluggish circulation, and shallow breathing. The boys and girls need to be, first of all, healthy animals with large powers of endurance, elastic, buoyant, graceful, and in general well set up. These conditions const.i.tute the foundation for the superstructure of education. The placid, anaemic, fiberless child is ill prepared in physique to attain to that mastery of the mental and spiritual world that makes for an approximation to complete living.

=Examples cited.=--If one will but make a mental apprais.e.m.e.nt of the first one hundred people he meets, he will see among the number quite a few who reveal a lack of physical vigor. They droop and slouch along and seem to be dragging their bodies instead of being propelled through s.p.a.ce by their bodies. They can neither stand nor walk as a human being ought to stand and walk, and their entire ensemble is altogether unbeautiful. We feel instinctively that, being fashioned in the image of their Maker, they have sadly declined from their high estate. Their bodily att.i.tude seems a sort of apology for life, and we long to invoke the aid of some teacher of physical training to rescue them from themselves and restore them to their rightful heritage. They are weak, apparently ill-nourished, scrawny, ill-groomed; and we know, without the aid of words, that neither a vigorous mind nor a great spirit would choose that type of body as its habitation.

=The body subject to the mind.=--A healthy, vigorous, symmetrical body that performs all its functions like a well-articulated, well-adjusted mechanism is the beginning, but only a beginning. Next comes a mind that is so well trained that it knows what orders to give to the body and how to give them. Many a strong body enters the door of a saloon because the mind is not sufficiently trained to issue wise orders. The mind was befuddled before the body became so, and the body becomes so only because the mind commands. Intoxication, primarily, is a mental apostasy, and the body cannot do otherwise than obey. If the mind were intent upon securing a book at the library, the body would not have seen the door of the saloon, but would have been urgent to reach the library.

There is neither fiction nor facetiousness in the adage, "An idle brain is the devil's workshop." On the contrary, the saying is crammed full of psychology for the thoughtful observer. Hence, when we are training the mind we are wreaking destruction upon this workshop.

=Freedom a condition precedent.=--Complete living is impossible outside the domain of freedom. The prisons show forth no examples of complete living. But mental thralldom is quite as inimical to complete living as thralldom of the body. The mind must know in order to move among the things of life in freedom. Ignorance is slavery. The mind that is unable to read the inscription on a monument stands baffled and helpless, and no form of slavery can be more abject. The man who cannot read the bill of fare of life is in no position to revel in the good things that life offers. The man who cannot read the signboards of life gropes and flounders about in the byways and so misses the charms. If he knows the way, he has freedom; otherwise he is in thralldom. The man who cannot interpret life as it shows itself in hill, in valley, in stream and rock and tree, goes through life with bandaged eyes, and that condition affords no freedom.

=Street signs.=--A man who had been traveling through Europe for several weeks, and had finally reached London, wrote enthusiastically of his pleasure at being able to read the street signs. All summer he had felt restricted and hampered, but when he reached a country where the street signs were intelligible, he gained his freedom. Had he been as familiar with Italian, German, and French as he is with English, life would have been for him far more nearly complete during that summer and therefore much more agreeable and fertile. There is no more exhilarating experience than to be able to read the street signs along the highway of life, and this ability is one of the great objectives of every vitalized school.

=Trained minds.=--Nature reveals her inmost secrets only to the trained mind. No power can force her, no wealth can bribe her, to disclose these secrets to others. Only the mind that is trained can gain admission to her treasure house to revel in its glories. John Burroughs lives in a world that the ignorant man cannot know. The trained mind alone has the key that will unlock libraries, art galleries, the treasure houses of science, language, history, and art. The untrained minds must stand outside and win what comfort they can from their wealth, their social status, or whatever else they would fain subst.i.tute for the training that would admit them. All these things are parts of life, and those who cannot gain admission to these conservatories of knowledge cannot know life in its completeness.

=Achievements of trained minds.=--In order to know life in the large, the mind must be able to leap from the multiplication table to the stars; must become intimate with the movements of the tides, the glacier, and the planets; must translate the bubbling fountain and the eruption of Vesuvius; must be able to interpret the whisper of the zephyr and the diapason of the forest; must be able to hear music in the chirp of the cricket as well as in the oratorios; must be able to delve into the recesses of the mine and scale the mountain tops; must know the heart throbs of Little Nell as well as of Cicero and Demosthenes; must be able to see the processions of history from the cradle of the race to the latest proclamation; and must sit in the councils of the poets, the statesmen, the orators, the artists, the scientists, and the historians of all time. A mind thus trained can enter into the very heart of life and know it by experience.

=Things of the spirit.=--But education is a spiritual process, as we have been told; and, therefore, education is without value unless it touches the spirit. Indeed, it is only by the spirit that we may test the quality of education. It is spirit that sets metes and bounds and points the way to the fine things of life. A man may live in the back alley of life or on the boulevard, according to the dictates of the spirit. If his spirit cannot react to the finer things, his way will lie among the coa.r.s.e and bizarre. If he cannot appreciate the glory that is revealed upon the mountain, he will gravitate to the lower levels. If his spirit is not attuned to majestic harmonies, he will drift down to a.s.sociation with his own kind. If he cannot thrill with pleasure at the beauty and fragrance of the lily of the valley, he will seek out the gaudy sunflower. If his spirit cannot rise to the plane of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, he will roam into fields that are less fruitful. The spirit that is rightly attuned lifts him away from the sordid into the realms of the chaste and the glorified; away from the coa.r.s.e and ugly into the realm of things that are fine and beautiful; and away from the things that are mean and petty into the zone of the big, the true, the n.o.ble, and the good. And so with body, mind, and spirit thus doing their perfect work, he can, at least, look over into the promised land of complete living.

=Altruism.=--We are commanded to let our light shine, and this command is a n.o.ble and an inspiring one. A man who by such training as has been depicted approximates complete living is prepared to let his light shine primarily because he has light, and in the next place because his training has made him generous in spirit and altruistic; and his greatest joy comes from letting his light so shine that others may catch his spirit and move up to higher planes of living.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Why is education not satisfactorily defined by saying that it is a preparation for complete living? Who first stated this definition?

2. What is the relation of the school to complete living?

3. What further training should the school give in better living than to teach the pupils what it is?

4. Give an idea of what is meant by incomplete living so far as the body is concerned.

5. Show that soundness of body is necessary to realize one's best.

6. What are some reasons for the scarcity of physically perfect men and women?

7. Have we been able to eliminate physical defects and develop physical merits in people to the same extent that we have in domestic animals?

8. What are some of the things that have been done to improve physical man? Which of these have to do primarily with heredity and which with rearing or training?

9. Why is the possession of healthy bodies a matter of national concern?

10. Wherein does physical training seem to have failed to attain its ends?

11. What are the arguments, from the standpoint of the physically efficient life, for the regulation or prohibition by the government of the sale of injurious products?

12. What are the benefits of such a type of training as military training?

13. Show how the lack of proper training of the mind may result in a less efficient body.

14. In our present civilization what conditions may give rise to mental thralldom? Upon what is mental freedom conditioned?

15. How can the trained mind get the most out of life and contribute the most to it?

16. Explain how the spirit is the dominant element in complete living.

17. Why is one who is living the complete life sure to be altruistic?

CHAPTER XII

THE TIME ELEMENT

=The question stated.=--There are many, doubtless, who will deny, if not actually resent, the statement that some do more real teaching in ten minutes than others do in thirty minutes. But, in spite of denials, the statement can be verified by the testimony of a host of expert observers and supervisors. Indeed, stenographic reports have been made of many cla.s.s exercises by way of testing the truth of this statement, and these reports are a matter of record. a.s.suming the validity of the statement, therefore, it is pertinent to inquire into the causes that underlie the disparity in the teaching ability of the ten-minute teacher and the thirty-minute teacher. The efficiency expert would be quick to seize upon this disparity in the rate of progress as the starting point in his critical examination. In a factory a like disparity would lead to unpleasant consequences. The workman who consumes thirty minutes in accomplishing a piece of work that another does in ten minutes would be admonished to accelerate his progress or else give way to a more efficient man. If we had instruments of sufficient delicacy to test the results of teaching, we should probably discover that the output of the ten-minute teacher is superior in quality to that of the thirty-minute teacher. For we must all have observed in our own experience that the clarity of our thinking depends upon its intensity.

=Examples.=--A young man who won distinction as a college student had a wide shelf fitted up on one side of his room at which he stood in the preparation of all his lessons. His theory was that the att.i.tude of the body conditions the att.i.tude of the mind. Professor James gives a.s.sent to this theory and avers that an att.i.tude of mind may be generated by placing the body in such an att.i.tude as would naturally accompany this mental att.i.tude. This theory proclaims that, if the body is slouching, the mind will slouch; but that, if the body is alert, the mind will be equally so. Another college student always walked to and fro in his room when preparing his history lesson. A fine old lady, in a work of fiction, explained her mental ac.u.men by the single statement, "I never slouch." Every person must have observed many exemplifications of this theory in his own experience even if he has not reduced it to a working formula.

=Basic considerations.=--Any consideration of the time element, in school work, must take into account, therefore, not only the number of minutes involved in a given piece of work, but also the intensity of effort during those minutes. Two minds, of equal natural strength, may be fully employed during a given period and yet show a wide difference in the quality and quant.i.ty of the results. The one may be busy all the while but slouch through the minutes. The other may be taut and intensive, working at white heat, and the output will be more extensive and of better quality. The mind that ambles through the period shows forth results that are both meager and mediocre; but the mind whose impact is both forceful and incisive produces results that serve to magnify the work of the school. Thus we have placed before us two basic considerations, one of which is the time itself, in actual minutes, and the other is the character of the reactions to external stimuli during those minutes.

=Two teachers compared.=--In order to consider these factors of the teaching process with some degree of definiteness it will be well to have the ten-minute teacher and the thirty-minute teacher placed in juxtaposition in our thinking. We shall thus be able to compare and contrast and so arrive at some clear judgments that may be used as a basis for generalizations. We may a.s.sume, for convenience and for concreteness, that the lesson is division of fractions. There will be substantial agreement that the principle involved in this subject can be taught in one recitation period. The reasons for some of the steps in the process may come later, but the child should be able to find his way to the correct answer in a single period. Now if one teacher can achieve this result in thirty minutes and the other in ten minutes, there is a disparity in the effectiveness of the work of these teachers which is worthy of serious consideration. The ten-minute teacher proves that the thirty-minute teacher has consumed twenty minutes of somebody's time unnecessarily. If the salary of this thirty-minute teacher should be reduced to one third its present amount, she would inveigh against the reduction.