Read Ebook: Were You Ever a Child? by Dell Floyd

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 500 lines and 39631 words, and 10 pages

A. It rises in the East and sets in the West.

Q. How does it get from the West back to the East during the night?

A. It goes under the earth.

Q. How?

A. It digs a tunnel!

Q. What does it dig the tunnel with?

A. With its claws.

Q. Who was George Washington?

A. He was the Father of his country, and he never told a lie.

Q. Would you like to be a soldier?

A. Yes.

Q. If we let you take part in the government of our country, what ticket would you vote?

A. The Republican ticket. My father is a Republican.

Q. What would you do if you had ten cents?

A. I'd go to see Charley Chaplin in the moving-picture show.

Q. Thank you. You can step down.

A. Yes, sir. Where is my ten cents?

And now, gentlemen, you have heard the witness. He has told the truth--and nothing but the truth--and he would have told the whole truth if I had not been vigilant in defence of your modesty. He is, as he says, a foreigner, incompletely naturalized. In certain directions his development has proceeded rapidly. He shows a patriotism and a sense of political principles which are quite as mature as most of ours. But in other directions there is much to be desired. He does not know what kind of world it is he lives in, nor has he any knowledge of how he could best take his place, with the most satisfaction to himself and his fellow-men, in that world--whether as farmer or engineer, poet or policeman, or in the humbler but none the less necessary capacities of dustman or dramatic critic.

It would be idle for us to pretend that we think it will be easy for him to learn all this. But without this knowledge he is going to be a nuisance--not without a certain charm , but still, by reason of incapacity and irresponsibility, an undesirable burden upon the community: unable to support himself, and simply not to be trusted in the responsible relations of marriage and parenthood. We simply can't let him remain in his present state of ignorance.

And yet, how is he ever going to be taught? You have seen just about how far private enterprise is likely to help him. That man and woman of whom he told us have other things to do besides teach him. And if he is turned over to special private institutions, we have no guarantee that they will not take advantage of his helplessness, keep him under their control and rob him of freedom of movement for a long term of years, set him to learning a mass of fabulous or irrelevant information, instil in him a fictitious sense of its value by a system of prizes and punishments, and finally turn him out into our world no better prepared to take his proper part in it than he was before; and thus, having wasted his own time, he would have to waste ours by compelling us to teach him all over again.

In fact, the difficulty of dealing with him appears so great that I am moved to make the statesmanlike proposal--never before, I believe, presented to the public--of passing a law which will prevent this kind of undesirable immigration altogether.

Shall we abolish the Child?

The only other reasonable alternative is for us to undertake this difficult and delicate business of education ourselves--assume as a public responsibility the provision of a full opportunity for this helpless, wistful, stubborn little barbarian to find out about the world and about himself. Well, shall we do that?

Let us not allow any false sentimentality to affect our decision....

The vote seems to be in favour of giving him his chance. Very well!

It is clear that what is most of all the matter with the child is his sense of helplessness.... He told us how he lost inevitably his position of King in the magic realm of infancy--a kingship only to be recovered fragmentarily in dreams and in the fantasies of play--how he discovered himself to be little and weak and clumsy and ignorant of the ways of the strange real world. It is clear too that the chief difference which separates us from childhood is the acquisition of a few powers, physical and intellectual, which make us feel to some extent masters of our world.

Does not education, then, first of all consist in giving to children a progressive sense of power, through a physical and intellectual mastery of their environment? And would not the acquisition of an adequately increasing mastership deprive the child of any need for those outbursts of rage and malice and mischief which are today the most characteristic trait of childhood, and which are only his attempt to deny his shameful helplessness? Shall we not try at the outset to make the child feel that he is a useful and important part of our world?

The answer to these questions being "Yes," we now turn to the building in which what now passes for education is conducted, and inquire whether it answers this primary requirement.

But first of all, let us free our minds from any lingering superstitions we may cherish with reference to school buildings. Let us get over the notion that school-buildings are sacrosanct, like churches. I am inclined to think that we have transferred to the school building some of our traditional respect for churches. We feel that it is a desecration to allow dances and political meetings to be held there. We seem to regard with jealous pride the utter emptiness and uselessness of our school buildings after hours; it is a kind of ceremonial wastefulness which appeals to some deep-seated ridiculous barbaric sense of religious taboo in us. Well, we must get over it if we are to give the children a square deal. If it should turn out that the school building is wrong, we must be prepared to abolish it.

And we must get over our notion that a school building is necessary in order for a school to exist. The most famous school in the world had no building at all--only a stretch of outdoors, with some grass and a few plane trees. Of course, the Greeks were fonder of the open air than we are, and their winters were less severe. And then, too, the Greek idea of education was simpler than ours. It comprised simply athletics and philosophy and one or two other aristocratic subjects which I forget at the moment--art being regarded as manual labour, just as the drama was considered a religious function, and government a kind of communal festivity! And, of course, the Persian theory of education--to be able to ride, shoot, and tell the truth--could be carried out under the open sky better than anywhere else. But our aims are more elaborate, and it may very well be true--in fact, I have been convinced of it all along--that much of our educational process should be carried on indoors.

But let us not be too hasty in conceding the School Building's right to existence. There is another side to the question.

The trouble is, once you give a School Building permission to exist, it straightway commences to put on semi-sacerdotal airs--as if it were a kind of outcast but repentant church. It arranges itself into dingy little secular chapels, with a kind of furtive pulpit in front for the teacher, and a lot of individual pews for the mourners. It makes the chemistry laboratory, which it regards as a profane intruder, feel cramped and uncomfortable; it puts inconveniences in the way of the gymnasium; and it is dreadfully afraid some one will think that the assembly hall will look like a theatre; while as for carpentry and printing shops, ateliers for sculpture groups, and a furnace for the pottery class, it feels that it has lost caste utterly if it is forced to admit them; nor will it condescend to acknowledge such a thing as a kitchen-garden in its back yard as having any relation to itself. You can well understand that if it has these familiar adjuncts of everyday life, it will seem just like part of the ordinary world; and so it tries its hardest to keep them out, and generally succeeds pretty well.

But since what we started out to do was to teach children what the world of reality is like, it is necessary that they should be in and of the real world. And since the real world outside is not, unfortunately, fully available for educational purposes, it is necessary to provide them with the real world on a smaller scale--a world in which they can, without danger, familiarize themselves with their environment in its essential aspects--a world which is theirs to observe, touch, handle, take apart and put back together again, play with, work with, and become master of; a world in which they have no cause to feel helpless or weak or useless or unimportant; a world from which they can go into the great world outside without any abrupt transition--a world, in short, in which they can learn to be efficient and happy human beings.

Shall the Teacher be abolished?...

What's that you say?--Oh, but surely not before she has had a hearing!--the worst criminal deserves that much consideration. I beg of you to let me speak one moment in her behalf.--Ah, thank you, my friends.

My friends, this unhappy woman is more sinned against than sinning. Reflect! The status of women in the United States has changed in the last fifty years. Modern industry has almost utterly destroyed the old pioneer home with its partnership-marriage; ambitious young men no longer have an economic need for capable women-partners; women have lost their wonted economic value as potential helpers, and their capacity for motherhood appears to the largest section of young manhood in the aspect of a danger rather than a blessing. Women have, to be sure, acquired a new value, in the eyes of a smaller class of economically "arrived" men, as a sign of their "arrival"--that is, they are desired as advertisements of their husbands' economic status. In one sense, the task of demonstrating the extent of a husband's income is easier than the pioneer task of helping take care of a farm and raising a houseful of babies; but, after all, such a career does require either natural talent or a high degree of training in the graceful habits of conspicuous idleness and honorific extravagance. And, whether it is that the vast majority of women spurned such a career as an essentially immoral one, or whether they were not really up to its requirements, or whether the demand was found to be more than met by the hordes of candidates turned out yearly by the boarding-schools--whatever the reason, the fact remains that a large number of women began to see the necessity and to conceive the desirability of some career other than marriage. But industrial evolution, which had destroyed their former opportunities, had failed to make any considerable or at least any decent room for them in the industrial scheme. Most particularly was this true for the young women of the middle class. They were unable to go into the professions or the respectable trades, and unwilling to enter the factories; they were given no opportunity to learn how to do anything--they were condemned to profound ignorance of the most important things in the world--work and love; and so, naturally, they became Teachers.

The world did not want them, and so they stayed out of the world, in that drab, quasi-religious edifice, the School Building, and prepared others to go into the world....

In fact, I think that if we could have managed to keep the war going a little longer, she would have pretty much abolished herself. Abdication is becoming popular, and she among all the monarchs is not the least uncomfortable and restricted and hedged in by useless divinity. Her abdication will be as disturbing an event as the Russian Revolution. The Russians were accustomed to their Czar; but they just had to learn to get along without him. And perhaps a similar lesson is in store for us....

You find it a little difficult to imagine what School would be like without Teachers? Well, for one thing, it would be more like the rest of the world than it is now--and that, we agreed, was what we wanted. Where else, indeed, except in School, do you find Teachers? The rest of the world manages to get along without them very well. Perhaps it is merely a superstition that they are needed in School! Let us inquire into the matter.

But this case, of course, assumes an interest of the pupil in the subject, a willingness and even a desire to learn about it, a feeling that the matter is of some importance to himself. And come to think of it, these motives are generally present in the learning that goes on in the outside world. It is only in School that the pupil is expected to be unwilling to learn.

It's nonsense that children do not want to learn. Everybody wants to learn. And everybody wants to teach. And the process is going on all the time. All that is necessary is to put a person who knows something--really knows it--within the curiosity-range of some one who doesn't know it: the process commences at once. It is almost irresistible. In the interest of previous engagements one has to tear one's self away from all sorts of opportunities to learn things which may never be of the slightest use but which nevertheless are alluring precisely because one does not know them.

People talk about children being hard to teach, and in the next breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the "vices." That seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic States? And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day.

I think that if there were no teachers--no hastily and superficially trained Vestals who were supposed to know everything--but just ordinary human beings who knew passionately and thoroughly one thing and who had the patience to show little boys and girls how to do that thing--we might get along without Immaculate Omniscience pretty well. Of course, we'd have to pay them more, because they could get other jobs out in the larger world; and besides, you couldn't expect to get somebody who knows how to do something, for the price you are accustomed to pay those who only know how to teach everything.

Nor need the change necessarily be abrupt. It could probably be effected with considerable success by firing all the teachers at the beginning of the summer vacations, and engaging their services as human beings for the next year. Many of them would find no difficulty at all in readjusting themselves....

Of the ingredients of the educational catastrophe, the only one remaining to be discussed is the Book. Is it to blame for the failure of the process which has brought us to our present state of elaborate ignorance, and ought it to be abolished?

What have books got to do with education, anyway?

Not half as much as most people think! If education is learning to be a civilized human being, books have their place in it. But civilized life is composed of a number of things besides books--it contains machinery, art, political organization, handicraft, flowers and birds, and other things too numerous to mention, all of which are notoriously capable of being learned about in the great world outside without the use of books. If in the great world outside the school, then why not in the little world inside the school?

Not that the use of books should be ever avoided anywhere for the sake of the avoidance. Books are a convenience--or an inconvenience, as the case may be. Like other valuable human utilities, they are frequently a nuisance if obtruded in the place of better things. Every intelligent person has the same attitude toward books that he has toward his sweetheart's photograph: if she is out of reach, if the picture furnishes him his only way of seeing her, he values it profoundly; but if she is in the next room, he does not linger with the image. True, he may fall in love with the picture first--the picture may reveal to him the girl whom otherwise he might never have appreciated; and books do make us appreciate aspects of reality which we have neglected. But in education books are not an adequate substitute for direct contact with the realities with which they deal, precisely because they do not give the sense of power which only comes from direct contact with reality. It is the function of books to assist in that educational contact--not to take the place of it.

Take geography, for instance. I know quite well that it was not the intention of the author of the text-book which I studied that I should conceive the state of Illinois as yellow and the neighbouring state of Indiana as pale green: but I do to this day. They were not realities to me, but pictures in a book; and they were not realities because they had no relation whatever to real experience. If I had been asked to draw a map of the school grounds, with the boys' side distinguished by one colour and the girls' by another, that convention would thereafter have seemed only what it was. If I had drawn a map of the town I lived in, I would have been thenceforth unable, I am sure, to see a map without feeling the realities of stream and wood and hill and house and farm of which it is a conventional abstraction. I would, in short, have learned something about geography. The very word would have acquired a fascinating significance--the depiction of the surface of the earth! whereas all the word geography actually means to me now is--a large flat book. And if an aviator should stop me and ask which is the way to Illinois, I couldn't for my life tell him: but if you brought me that old geography book and opened it to the map of the United States, I could put my finger on Illinois in the dark! You see, Illinois is for me not a part of the real world--it is a yellow picture in a large flat book.

In the same way, I have the impression that the American Revolution happened in a certain thick book bound in red cloth--not by any chance in the New York and New England whose streets I have walked in. . The only thing I know about the crossing of the Delaware, for example, is that it is a Leading Fact of American History, and occurred on the right hand page, a little below and to the left of a picture. And this conception of historical events as a series of sentences occurring in a certain order on a certain page, seems to me the inevitable consequence of learning history from a text-book.

There are other objections to the use of text-books. One is their frequent perversion or suppression of truth for moral, patriotic or sentimental reasons: in this respect they are like practically all books intended for children. They are generally pot-boilers written by men of no standing in the intellectual or even in the scholastic world. But even when a text-book is written by a man of real learning, the absence of a critical audience of his equals seems often to deprive him of a stimulus necessary to good writing, and leave him free to indulge in long-repressed childishnesses of his own which he would never dare exhibit to a mature public. And even when text-books are neither grossly incompetent nor palpably dishonest, there is nevertheless almost invariably something cheap and trashy about their composition which repels the student who can choose his own books. Why should they be inflicted upon helpless children?

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet