The Vitalized School Part 15

7. The president of at least one Ohio college personally inspects and checks up the work of the professors from the standpoint of proper teaching standards, and has them visit one another's cla.s.ses for friendly criticism and observation. He reports improvement in the standard of teaching. How is his plan applicable in your school?

8. A city high school princ.i.p.al states that it is not his custom to visit his teachers' cla.s.ses; that he knows what is going on and that he interferes only if something is wrong. What do you think of his practice? How is the principle applicable in your school?

9. Do the duties of a superintendent have to do only with curriculum and discipline, or have they to do also with teaching power?

10. What are some of the ways in which you have known superintendents successfully to increase the teaching power of the teachers?

11. What things do we need to know about a child in order to utilize his interests?

12. Distinguish three types of teachers.

13. What are the objections to teaching the book?

14. What are the objections to teaching the subject?

15. What are some items of school work upon which some teachers spend time that they should devote to finding materials suited to the child's interests?

16. Can one teacher utilize all of the interests of a child within a nine-month term? What is the measure of how far she should be expected to do so?

CHAPTER XXI

BEHAVIOR

=Behavior in retrospect.=--The caption of this chapter implies the behavior of human beings, as a matter of course, and the study of this subject is, at once, both alluring and illusive. No sooner has the student arrived at deductions that seem conclusive than exceptions begin to loom up on his speculative horizon that disintegrate his theories and cause him to retrace the steps of his reasoning. Such a study affords large scope for introspection, but too few people incline to examine their own behavior in any mental att.i.tude that approaches the scientific. The others seem to think that things just happen, and that their own behavior is fortuitous. They seem not to be able to reason from effect back to cause, or to realize that there may be any possible connection between what they are doing at the present moment and what they were doing twenty years ago.

=Environment.=--In what measure is a man the product of his environment?

To what extent is a man able to influence his environment? These questions start us on a line of inquiry that leads toward the realm of, at least, a hypothetical solution of the problem of behavior. After we have reached the conclusion, by means of concrete examples, that many men have influenced their environment, it becomes pertinent, at once, to inquire still further whence these men derived the power thus to modify their environment. We may not be able to reach final or satisfactory answers to these questions, but it will, none the less, prove a profitable exercise. We need not trench upon the theological doctrine of predestination, but we may, with impunity, speculate upon the possibility of a doctrine of educational predestination.

=Queries.=--Was Mr. George Goethals predestined to become the engineer of the Panama Ca.n.a.l from the foundation of the world, or might he have become a farmer, a physician, or a poet? Could Julius Caesar have turned back from the Rubicon and refrained from saying, "The die is cast"?

Could Abraham Lincoln have withheld his pen from the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation and permitted the negro race to continue in slavery? Could any influence have deterred Walter Scott from writing "Kenilworth"? Was Robert Fulton's invention of the steamboat inevitable? Could Christopher Columbus possibly have done otherwise than discover America? Does education have anything whatever to do in determining what a man will or will not do?

=Antecedent causes.=--Here sits a man, let us say, who is writing a musical selection. He works in a veritable frenzy, and all else seems negligible for the time. He well-nigh disdains food and sleep in the intensity of his interest. Is this particular episode in his life merely happening, or does some causative influence lie back of this event somewhere in the years? Did some influence of home, or school, or playground give him an impulse and an impetus toward this event? Or, in other words, are the activities of his earlier life functioning on the bit of paper before him? If this is an effect, what and where was the cause? In the case of any type of human behavior can we postulate antecedent causes? If a hundred musicians were writing musical compositions at the same moment, would they offer similar explanations of their behavior?

=Leaders.h.i.+p.=--As a working hypothesis, it may be averred that ability to influence environment betokens leaders.h.i.+p. With such a measuring-rod in hand we may go out into the community and determine, with some degree of accuracy, who are leaders and who are mere followers. Then we should need to go further and discover degrees of leaders.h.i.+p, whether small or large, and, also, the quality of the leaders.h.i.+p, whether good or bad, wise or foolish, selfish or altruistic, noisy or serene, and all the many other variations. Having done all this, we are still only on the threshold of our study, for we must reason back from our acc.u.mulated facts to their antecedent causes. If we score one man's leaders.h.i.+p fifty and another's eighty, have we any possible warrant for concluding that the influences in their early life that tend to generate leaders.h.i.+p were approximately as five to eight?

=Restricted concepts.=--This question is certain to encounter incredulity, just as it is certain to raise other questions. Both results will be gratifying as showing an awakening of interest, which is the most and the best that the present discussion can possibly hope to accomplish. Very many, perhaps most, teachers in the traditional school do their teaching with reference to the next examination. They remind their pupils daily of the on-coming examination and remind them of the dire consequences following their failure to attain the pa.s.sing grade of seventy. They ask what answer the pupil would give to a certain question if it should appear in the examination. If they can somehow get their pupils to surmount that barrier of seventy at promotion time, they seem quite willing to turn their backs upon them and let the teacher in the next grade make what she can of such unprofitable baggage.

=Each lesson a prophecy.=--And we still call this education. It isn't education at all, but the merest hack work, and the tragedy of it is that the child is the one to suffer. The teacher goes on her complacent way happy in the consciousness that her pupils were promoted and, therefore, she will retain her place on the pay roll. It were more logical to have the same teacher continue with the pupil during his entire school life of twelve years, for, in that case, her interest in him would be continuous rather than temporary and spasmodic. But the present plan of changing teachers would be even better than that if only every teacher's work could be made to project itself not only to graduation day, but to the days of mature manhood and womanhood. If only every teacher were able to make each lesson a vital prophecy of what the pupil is to be and to do twenty years hence, then that lesson would become a condition precedent to the pupil's future behavior.

=Outlook.=--Groping about in the twilight of possibilities we speculate in a mild and superficial way as to the extent to which heredity, environment, and education either singly or in combination are determining factors in human behavior. But when no definite answer is forthcoming we lose interest in the subject and have recourse to the traditional methods of our grandfathers. We lose sight of the fact that in our quest for the solution of this problem we are coming nearer and nearer to the answer to the perennial question, What is education?

Hence, neither the time nor the effort is wasted that we devote to this study. We may not understand heredity; we may find ourselves bewildered by environment; we may not apprehend what education is; but by keeping all these closely a.s.sociated with behavior in our thinking we shall be the gainers.

=Long division ramified.=--We are admonished so to organize the activities of the school that they may function in behavior. That is an admonition of stupendous import as we discover when we attempt to compa.s.s the content of behavior. One of the activities of the school is Long Division. This is relatively simple, but the possible behavior in which it may function is far less simple. In the past, this same Long Division has functioned in the Brooklyn Bridge, in the Hoosac Tunnel, and Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, in the Simplon Pa.s.s, and in Eiffel Tower. It has helped us to travel up the mountain side on funicular railways, underneath rivers and cities by means of subways, under the ocean in submarines, and in the air by means of aircraft, and over the tops of cities on elevated railways. Only the prophet would have the temerity to predict what further achievements the future holds in store. But all that has been done and all that will yet be done are only a part of the behavior in which this activity functions.

=Behavior amplified.=--Human behavior runs the entire gamut, from the b.e.s.t.i.a.l to the sublime, with all the gradations between. It has to do with the mean thief who pilfers the petty treasures of the little child, and with the high-minded philanthropist who walks and works in obedience to the behests of altruism. It includes the frowzy slattern who offends the sight and also the high-born lady of quality whose presence exhales and, therefore, inspires to, refinement and grace. It has to do with the coa.r.s.e boor who defiles with his person and his speech and the courtly, cultured gentleman who becomes the exemplar of those who come under his influence. It touches the depraved gamin of the alley and the celebrated scholar whose pen and voice shed light and comfort. It concerns itself with the dark lurking places of the prowlers of the night who prey upon innocence, virtue, and prosperity and with the cultured home whose members make and glorify civilization.

=Its scope.=--It swings through the mighty arc, from the anarchist plotting devastation and death up to Socrates inciting his friends to good courage as he drinks the hemlock. It takes cognizance of the slave in his cabin no less than of Lincoln in his act of setting the slaves free. It touches the extremes in Mrs. Grundy and Clara Barton. It concerns itself with Medea scattering the limbs of her murdered brother along the way to delay her pursuers and with Antigone performing the rites of burial over the body of her brother that his soul might live forever. It has to do with Circe, who transformed men into pigs, and with Frances Willard, who sought to restore lost manhood. It includes all that pertains to Lucrezia Borgia and Mary Magdalene; Nero and Phillips Brooks; John Wilkes Booth and Nathan Hale; Becky Sharp and Evangeline; Goneril and Cordelia; and Benedict Arnold and George Was.h.i.+ngton.

=Behavior in history.=--Before the teacher can win a starting-point in her efforts to organize the activities of her school in such a manner that they may function in behavior, she must have a pretty clear notion as to what behavior really is. To gain this comprehensive notion she must review in her thinking the events that make up history. In the presence of each one of these events she must realize that this is the behavior in which antecedent activities functioned. Then she will be free to speculate upon the character of those activities, what modifications, accretions, or abrasions they experienced in pa.s.sing from the place of their origin to the event before her, and whether like activities in another place or another age would function in a similar event. She need not be discouraged if she finds no adequate answer, for she will be the better teacher because of the speculation, even lacking a definite answer.

=Machinery.=--She must challenge every piece of machinery that meets her gaze with the question "Whence camest thou?" She knows, in a vague way, that it is the product of mind, but she needs to know more. She needs to know that the machine upon which she is looking did not merely happen, but that it has a history as fascinating as any romance if only she cause it to give forth a revelation of itself. She may find in tracing the evolution of the plow that the original was the forefinger of some cave man, in the remote past. For a certainty, she will find, lurking in some machine, in some form, the multiplication table, and this fact will form an interesting nexus between behavior in the form of the machine and the activities of the school. She will be delighted to learn that no machine was ever constructed without the aid of the multiplication table, and when she is teaching this table thereafter she does the work with keener zest, knowing that it may function in another machine.

=Art.=--When she looks at the "Captive Andromache" by Leighton she is involved in a network of speculations. She wonders by what devious ways the mind of the artist had traveled in reaching this type and example of behavior. She wonders whether the artistic impulse was born in him or whether it was acquired. She sees that he knew his Homer and she would be glad to know just how his reading of the "Iliad" had come to function in this particular picture. She further wonders what lessons in drawing and painting the artist had had in the schools that finally culminated in this masterpiece, and whether any of his cla.s.smates ever achieved distinction as artists. She wonders, too, whether there is an embryo artist in her cla.s.s and what she ought to do in the face of that possibility. Again she wonders how geography, grammar, and spelling can be made to function in such a painting as Rosa Bonheur's "The Plough Oxen," and her wonder serves to invest these subjects with new meaning and power.

=Shakespeare.=--In the school at Stratford they pointed out to her the desk at which Shakespeare sat as a lad, with all its boyish hieroglyphics, and her thought instinctively leaped across the years to "The Tempest," "King Lear," and "Hamlet." She pondered deeply the relation between the activities of the lad and the behavior of the man, wondering how much the school had to do with the plays that stand alone in literature, and whether he imbibed the power from a.s.sociations, from books, from people, or from his ancestors. She wondered what magic ingredient had been dropped into the activities of his life that had proven the determining factor in the plays that set him apart among men.

She realizes that his behavior was distinctive, and she fain would discover the talisman whose potent influence determined the bent and power of his mind. And she wonders, again, whether any pupil in her school may ever exemplify such behavior.

=History.=--When she reads her history she has a keener, deeper, and wider interest than ever before, for she now realizes that every event of history is an effect, whose inciting causes lie back in the years, and is not fortuitous as she once imagined. She realizes that the historical event may have been the convergence of many lines of thinking emanating from widely divergent sources, and this conception serves to make her interest more acute. In thus reasoning from effect back to cause she gains the ability to reason from cause to effect and, therefore, her teaching of history becomes far more vital. She is studying the philosophy of history and not a mere catalogue of isolated and unrelated facts. History is a great web, and in the events she sees the pattern that minds have worked. She is more concerned now with the reactions of her pupils to this pattern than she is with mere names and dates, for these reactions give her a clew to tendencies on the part of her pupils that may lead to results of vast import.

=Poetry.=--In every poem she reads she finds an ill.u.s.tration of mental and spiritual behavior, and she fain would find the key that will discover the mental operations that conditioned the form of the poem.

She would hark back to the primal impulse of each bit of imagery, and she a.n.a.lyzes and appraises each word and line with the zeal and skill of a connoisseur. She would estimate justly and accurately the activities that functioned in this sort of behavior. She seeks for the influences of landscapes, of sky, of birds, of sunsets, of clouds,--in short, of all nature, as well as of the manifestations of the human soul. Thus the teacher gains access into the very heart of nature and life and can thus cause the poem to become a living thing to her pupils. In all literature she is ever seeking for the inciting causes; for only so can she prove an inspiring guide and counselor in pointing to them the way toward worthy achievements.

=Att.i.tude of teacher.=--In conclusion, then, we may readily distinguish the vitalized teacher from the traditional teacher by her att.i.tude toward the facts set down in the books. The traditional teacher looks upon them as mere facts to be noted, connoted, memorized, reproduced, and graded, whereas the vitalized teacher regards them as types of behavior, as ultimate effects of mental and spiritual activities. The traditional teacher knows that seven times nine are sixty-three, and that is quite enough for her purpose. If the pupil recites the fact correctly, she gives him a perfect grade and recommends him for promotion. For the vitalized teacher the bare fact is not enough. She does not disdain or neglect the mechanics of her work, but she sees beyond the present. She sees this same fact merging into the operations of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, physics, and engineering, until it finally functions in some enterprise that redounds to the well-being of humanity.

=Conclusion.=--To her every event of history, every fact of mathematics and science, every line of poetry, every pa.s.sage of literature is pregnant with meaning, dynamic, vibrant, dramatic, and prophetic.

Nothing can be dull or prosaic to her electric touch. All the facts of the books, all the emotions of life, and all the beauties of nature she weaves into the fabric of her dreams for her pupils. The goal of her aspirations is far ahead, and around this goal she sees cl.u.s.tered those who were her pupils. In every recitation this goal looms large in her vision. She can envisage the viewpoint of her pupils, and thus strives to have them envisage hers. She yearns to have them join with her in looking down through the years when the activities of the school will be functioning in worthy behavior.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. Discuss the relative importance of environment as a factor in the behavior of plants; animals; children; men.

2. How may an understanding of the mutual reaction of the child and his environment a.s.sist the teacher in planning for character building in pupils?

3. Make specific suggestions by which children may influence their environment.

4. Discuss the vitalized teacher's contribution to the environment of the child.

5. After reading this chapter give your definition of "behavior."

6. Discuss the author's idea of leaders.h.i.+p.

7. Define education in terms of behavior, environment, and heredity.

8. Account for the difference in behavior of some of the characters mentioned in the chapter.

9. How may the vitalized teacher be distinguished from the traditional teacher in her att.i.tude toward facts?

10. Discuss the doctrine of educational predestination.

CHAPTER XXII