Blunders of Modern Education

Blunders of Modern Education The assertion that our entire system of education is totally wrong from beginning to end will probably scandalize both the ruin conventional Conservative and the progressive-minded Educationalist. The vast majority of people either cling to the conviction that the system itself is adequate, or believe that its principles only require extension to meet the growing necessities of a rapid increase in population and commercial competition. Such persons can be induced to tinker with the existing machinery, but they are unable to grasp the idea that the whole foundations of our educational system are absolutely false in principle; that most of the great educationalists and teachers of the past have expended their genius in building up this system on altogether wrong lines, and that their efforts have had the effect of retarding, instead of encouraging, the intellectual development of the race. The greatest obstacle to human progress that evolution has to encounter is this mental conventionality which is the direct product of a system of education that aims at creating a uniform type of mind. Thousands of young men and women are turned out every year by our schools and universities upon an exact pattern, like sausages from a Chicago factory. Each is divided with precisely the same stock of knowledge, and consequently the market becomes overcrowded with enormous numbers of workers all trained to perform the same set of functions. The number of university graduates who sink into poverty and obscurity has often been remarked upon by persons who have made a special study of cheap lodging houses and their inmates. What is the explanation of this circumstance? It is because education is in itself an ineffectual preparation for the actualities of life? Or are the subjects taught in our schools and universities useless and unprofitable of themselves? The answer is that education is an indispensible preparation for tiny kind of efficient work, but that it must be education applied in a sensible and logical manner. The curriculum itself probably contains all the subjects that may be necessary or useful. It is not what is taught that is ridiculous, but the cramming of each individual with the identical stock of knowledge possessed by his neighbor, without regard to his personal taste and capacity. Let’s take the case of the average well-educated man. He is born, we will suppose, of parents whose means just enable them to give him the best obtainable education, but do not suffice to render him independent of earning his own livelihood. At the age of five, probably earlier, he is taught to read and write. Half a dozen years are then spent in preparing him, by a conventional course of elementary study, for a public school. He is sent to the latter at eleven or twelve, and remains there until he is twenty or thereabouts. During this period he is crammed with precisely the same information as the other hoys. His recreations are practically organized for him, and he acquires uniform in habits of mind with his companions. When he leaves, the school has stamped upon him a common individuality shared by all his schoolfellows. This process is then continued at the university. He enters with hundreds of other young men upon a certain course with a fixed object—the taking of his degree. The same kind of inflexible routine is conscientiously gone through, and his mind thoroughly flavored with the university sauce which is to identify him throughout life. By the time he has graduated not only in book knowledge, but in manners, habits of dress, thought and everything else—his parents have done all they can for him. He has now to choose a career for himself. Feeling no call to the church, he elects to go in for the civil service competitive examinations. Then follows the greatest of all educational crimes- the stuffing of the brain with so much knowledge avoirdupois. He muffs at everything, however, and. having no taste for the law and being absolutely unfitted for business, he tries to make a living by his pen. Hundreds, of others, he finds are in a similar plight and are trying to do the same thing. But here if anywhere, the defects of his training become conspicuous. Journalism wants ideas. He can only offer good gram-mar, a style founded upon the Latin Syntax and some classical ornamentation. There is no market, he discovers, for these commodities. They may be excellent accessories but they are to be found, like the Masters of Arts who pen them, at every street corner. So being equally unfitted by reason of his grammatical accomplishments for cheap reporting on the daily press, he drags on a miserable and immoral existence as a university coach, helping others to the same unhappy state of existence into which he has himself fallen. By the time he has arrived at middle age, he begins to discover that the world is not very well ordered: a fact which he probably ascribes to some defect in the political system. An exceptionally gifted man, even at this mature period, sometimes succeeds in shaking off the parasitic traces, of his early training- But for the average person it is too late: and it is even doubtful if he ever realizes that he is the victim, not of a cruel and callous world, but of an idiotic system of education especially designed to fit the smallest possible number for survival. The whole theory upon which our educational method is based is, in fact, utterly absurd and hopelessly unsuited to the ordinary conditions of life. If we wish to establish a rational system, we must go to the root of the evil and build up an entirely new edifice upon fresh foundations. The modern method of bringing up children, in the first instance, completely stunts their educational growth, and the process of teaching to which they are subjected at too early a n age succeeds in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in merely checking their intellectual development: while the final touch of the university—unless it be happily escaped—deals it the " coup de grace" in the most approved fashion. The mischief really commences, therefore, with early childhood. Genius and originality both of which exist potentially in the unsophisticated child are eradicated with a perversity that is almost malicious. If not utterly and wantonly destroyed, they are kept under and discouraged, until like all disused faculties, they finally disappear of their own accord. At the age of five, children begin to develop powers of observation. If left alone, or merely encouraged to exercise this function in their own way, children will contract the habit, of thinking things out for themselves. How many grown-up people do this? The whole science of life as we practice it consists in using substitutes for individual reflection. Novelists save us the trouble of philosophising on our own account about human nature: the press provides us with manufactured opinions on all the topics of the day; the pulpit bolsters up our religious beliefs with ready-made arguments. It is all the result of our early trainings and the wonder is that people can be found to express any new ideas at all. On this fatal plan the youth of the nation is brought up. Original thought is methodically nipped in the bud. Our existing school system consists in lumping together masses of school children in what are called classes, and stuffing into their head collectively a quantity of knowledge based, not upon the individual bent of each child, but upon a fixed code and curriculum. The principle is to set forty or fifty children doing and thinking precisely the same thing. The result is inevitable. There is a top of the class and a bottom of the class. Those, who reach the former, are regarded as the clever ones: those who remain at the latter are looked upon as dunces. The classification is wholly unfair and grossly idiotic. All that it really reveals is the perniciousness of a system which creates stupid children by forcing upon their brains subjects for which they are not receptive. The fool of the Latin class might distinguish himself in natural history, but the pedagogue goes on stuffing him with syntax and grammar, regardless of the fact that his mind is absorbed in beetles, and that he need attends school without a pocketful of mice. Not only must this method of teaching “en bloc” be abolished altogether, but teaching in itself, as we understand the term, should be rigorously avoided. Every encouragement ought to be given to pupils to think. "There should be less reading and more reflection. The pernicious custom of learning by rote ought to be inscribed the penal code. Hanging would be too light a punishment for the teachers, ho destroyed the minds of his charges by making them commit "'Casablanca” to memory. It is not the duty of the schoolmaster to drone out set lessons to a class, but to get into touch with each pupil and to assist the development of his individuality. Teachers should not lead but follow. It should be their function to discover the natural talent of the child, and to shape its course of study accordingly. The minds of children cannot be developed to full advantage under a compulsory and uniform method. The aim of education should be to get the best out of each individual, and not to obtain an average of mediocrity. In times of national emergency we have need of exceptional talent and commanding force of character. We cannot boast a liberal supply of this material. There are some who might have possessed, but their education has handicapped them. The imagination was killed in early childhood: ideas have been allowed no room to expand: the mind has been forced to remain within rigid limits, like a fowl’s beak bent to a chalk line. The enormous expenditure of public money upon the production of machine-made human automata is sheer waste. It is at the bottom of half the social problems that are perplexing statesmen all over the globe, and is wholly responsible for a disastrous form of intellectual competition besides which commercial rivalry sinks into insignificance.