Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
This is not in accordance with the practice or the theory of recent
times, and in this fact lies one of the prime causes of failure. The one
thing man exists to accomplish is character; not worldly success and
eminence in any line, not the conquest of nature (though some have held
otherwise), not even "adaptation to environment" in the _argot_ of last
century science, but _character;_ the assimilation and fixing in
personality of high and noble qualities of thought and deed, the
furtherance, in a word, of the eternal sacramental process of redemption
of matter through the operation of spiritual forces. Without this,
social and political systems, imperial dominion, wealth and power, a
favourable balance of trade avail nothing; with it, forms and methods
and the enginery of living will look out for themselves. And yet this
thing which comprises "the whole duty of man" has, of late, fallen into
a singular disregard, while the constructive forces that count have
either been discredited and largely abandoned, as in the case of
religion, or, like education, turned into other channels or reversed
altogether, as has happened with the idea and practice of obedience,
discipline, self-denial, duty, honour and unselfishness; surely the most
fantastic issue of the era of enlightenment, of liberty and of freedom
of conscience.
As a matter of fact character, as the chief end of man and the sole
guaranty of a decent society, has been neglected; it was not disregarded
by any conscious process, but the headlong events that have followed
since the fifteenth century have steadily distorted our judgment and
confused our standards of value even to reversal. By an imperceptible
process other matters have come to engage our interest and control our
action, until at last we are confronted by the nemesis of our own
unwisdom, and we entertain the threat of a dissolving civilization just
because the forces we have engendered or set loose have not been curbed
or directed by that vigorous and potent personal character informing a
people and a society, that we had forgot in our haste and that alone
could give us safety.
Formal education is but one of the factors that may be employed towards
the development of character; you cannot so easily separate one force in
life from another, assigning a specific duty here, a definite task
there. That is one of the weaknesses of our time, the water-tight
compartment plan of high specialization, the cellular theory of
efficiency. Life must be seen as a whole, organized as a whole, lived as
a whole. Every thought, every emotion, every action, works for the
building or the unbuilding of character, and this synthesis of living
must be reestablished before we can hope for social regeneration.
Nevertheless formal education may be made a powerful factor, even now,
and not only in this one specific direction, but through this, for the
accomplishing of that unification of life that already is indicated as
the next great task that is set before us; and this brings me to a
consideration of the last of the questions I have proposed for answer,
viz.: is our present system of education adequate to the sufficient
development of character, and if not, how should it be modified?
I do not think it adequate, and experience seems to me to prove the
point. It has not maintained the sturdy if sometimes acutely unpleasant
character of the New England stock, or the strong and handsome character
of the race that dwelt in the thirteen original colonies as this
manifested itself well into the last century, and it has, in general,
bred no new thing in the millions of immigrants and their descendants
who have flooded the country since 1840 and from whom the public schools
and some of the colleges are largely recruited. It is not a question of
expanded brain power or applied aptitude, but of character, and here
there is a larger measure of failure than we had a right to expect. And
yet, had we this right? The avowed object of formal education is mental
and vocational training, and by no stretch of the imagination can we
hold these to be synonymous with character. We have dealt with and
through one thing alone, and that is the intellect, whereas character is
rather the product of emotions judiciously stimulated, balanced (not
controlled) by intellect, and applied through active and varied
experience. Deliberately have we cut out every emotional and spiritual
factor; not only religion and the fine arts, but also the studies, and
the methods of study, and the type of text-books, that might have helped
in the process of spiritual and emotional development. We have
eliminated Latin and Greek, or taught them as a branch of philology; we
have made English a technical exercise in analysis and composition,
disregarding the moral and spiritual significance of the works of the
great masters of English; we minimize ancient history and concentrate on
European history since the French Revolution, and on the history of the
United States, and because of the sensitiveness of our endless variety
of religionists (pro forma) text books are written which leave religion
out of history altogether--and frequently economics and politics as well
when these cannot be made to square with popular convictions; philosophy
and logic are already pretty well discarded, except for special
electives and post-graduate courses, and as for art in its multifarious
forms we know it not, unless it be in the rudimentary and devitalized
form of free-hand drawing and occasional concerted singing. The only
thing that is left in the line of emotional stimulus is competitive
athletics, and for this reason I sometimes think it one of the most
valuable factors in public education. It has, however, another function,
and that is the coordination of training and life; it is in a sense an
_ecole d'application,_ and through it the student, for once in a way,
tries out his acquired mental equipment and his expanding character--as
well as his physical prowess--against the circumstances of active
vitality. It is just this sort of thing that for so long made the
"public schools" of England, however limited or defective may have been
the curriculum, a vital force in the development of British character.
At best, however, this seems to me but an indifferent substitute, an
inadequate "extra," doing limitedly the real work of education by
indirection. What we need (granting my assumption of character as the
_terminus ad quem_) is an educational system so recast that the formal
studies and the collateral influences and the school life shall be more
coordinated in themselves and with life, and that the resulting stimulus
shall be equally operative along intellectual, emotional and creative
lines.
It is sufficiently easy to make suggestions as to how this is to be
accomplished, to lay out programmes and lay down curricula, but here as
elsewhere this does not amount to much; the change must come and the
institutions develop as the result of the operations of life. If we can
change our view of the object of education, the very force of life,
working through experience, will adequately determine the forms. It is
not therefore as a meticulous and mechanical system that I make the
following suggestions as to certain desirable changes, but rather to
indicate more exactly what I mean by a scheme of education that will
work primarily towards the development of character.
Now in the first place, I must hold that there can be no education which
works primarily for character building, that is not interpenetrated at
every point by definite, concrete religion and the practice of religion.
As I shall try to show in my last two lectures, religion is the force or
factor that links action with life. It is the only power available to
man that makes possible a sound standard of comparative values, and with
philosophy teaching man how to put things in their right order, it
enters to show him how to control them well, while it offers the great
constructive energy that makes the world an orderly unity rather than a
type of chaos. Until the Reformation there was no question as to this,
and even after, in the nations that accepted the great revolution, the
point was for a time maintained; thereafter the centrifugal tendency in
Protestantism resulted in such a wealth of mutually antagonistic sects
that the application of the principle became impracticable, and for
this, as well as for more fundamental reasons, it fell into desuetude.
The condition is as difficult today for the process of denominational
fission has gone steadily forward, and as this energy of the religious
influence weakens the strenuosity of maintenance strengthens. With our
157 varieties of Protestantism confronting Catholicism, Hebraism, and a
mass of frank rationalism and infidelity as large in amount as all
others combined, it would seem at first sight impossible to harmonize
free public education with concrete religion in any intimate way. So it
is; but if the principle is recognized and accepted, ways and means will
offer themselves, and ultimately the principle will be embodied in a
workable scheme.
For example; there is one thing that can be done anywhere, and whenever
enough votes can be assembled to carry through the necessary
legislation. At present the law regards with an austere disapproval that
reflects a popular opinion (now happily tending towards decay), what are
known as "denominational schools" and other institutions of learning.
Those that maintain the necessity of an intimate union between religion
and education, as for example the great majority of Roman Catholics and
an increasing number of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are taxed for
the support of secular public schools which they do not use, while they
must maintain at additional, and very great, expense, parochial and
other private schools where their children may be taught after a fashion
which they hold to be necessary from their own point of view. Again,
state support is refused to such schools or colleges as may be under
specific religious control, while pension funds for the teachers,
established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those
who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate
themselves from any religious influence. I maintain that this is both
unjust and against public policy. Under our present system of religious
individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are
possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to
fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from
the public funds must maintain, and then, this condition being carried
out, distribute the funds received from general taxation to public and
private schools alike. This would enable Episcopalians, let us say, or
Roman Catholics, or Jews, when in any community they are numerous enough
to provide a sufficiency of scholars for any primary, grammar, or high
school, to establish such a school in as close a relationship to their
own religion as they desired, and have this school maintained out of the
funds of the city. This is not a purely theoretical proposition; after
an agitation lasting nearly half a century, Holland has this year put
such a law in force. From every point of view we should do well to
recognize this plan as both just and expedient. One virtue it would
have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit
in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one
school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that
standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most
mechanistic manifestation in France.
Of course this need for the fortifying of education by religion is
recognized even now, but the only plan devised for putting it into
effect is one whereby various ministers of religion are allowed a
certain brief period each week in which they may enter the public
schools and give denominational instruction to those who desire their
particular ministrations. This is one of the compromises, like the older
method of Bible reading without commentary or exposition, which avails
nothing and is apt to be worse than frank and avowed secularism. It is
putting religion on exactly the same plane as analytical chemistry,
psychoanalysis or salesmanship, (the latter I am told is about to be
introduced in the Massachusetts high schools) or any other "elective,"
whereas if it is to have any value whatever it must be an ever-present
force permeating the curriculum, the minds of the teachers, and the
school life from end to end, and there is no way in which this can be
accomplished except by a policy that will permit the maintenance of
schools under religious domination at the expense of the state, provided
they comply with certain purely educational requirements established and
enforced by the state.
I have already pointed out what seems to me the desirability of a
considerable variation between the curriculum of one school and another.
This would be possible and probably certain under the scheme proposed,
but barring this, it is surely an open question whether the pretty
thoroughly standardized curriculum now in operation would not be
considerably modified to advantage if it is recognized that the prime
object of education is character rather than mental training and the
fitting of a pupil to obtain a paying job on graduation. From my own
point of view the answer is in a vociferous affirmative. I suggest the
drastic reduction of the very superficial science courses in all schools
up to and including the high school, certainly in chemistry, physics and
biology, but perhaps with some added emphasis on astronomy, geology and
botany. History should become one of the fundamental subjects, and
English, both being taught for their humanistic value and not as
exercises in memory or for the purpose of making a student a sort of
dictionary of dates. This would require a considerable rewriting of
history text books, as well as a corresponding change in the methods of
teaching, but after all, are not these both consummations devoutly to be
wished. There are few histories like Mr. Chesterton's "Short History of
England," unfortunately. One would, perhaps, hardly commend this
stimulating book as a sufficient statement of English history for
general use in schools, but its approach is wholly right and it
possesses the singular virtue of interest. Another thing that commends
it is the fact that while it runs from Caesar to Mr. Lloyd George, it
contains, I believe, only seven specific dates, three of which are
possibly wrong. This is as it should be--not the inaccuracies but the
commendable frugality in point of number. Dates, apart from a few key
years, are of small historical importance; so are the details of palace
intrigues and military campaigns. History is, or should be, life
expressed in terms of romance, and it is of little moment whether the
narrated incidents are established by documentary evidence or whether
they are contemporary legend quite unsubstantiated by what are known
(and overestimated) as "facts." There is more of the real Middle Ages in
Mallory's "Mort d'Arthur" than there is in all Hallam, and the same
antithesis can be established for nearly all other periods of history.
The history of man is one great dramatic romance, and so used it may be
made perhaps the most stimulating agency in education as character
development. I do not mean romance in the sense in which Mr. Wells takes
it, that is to say, the dramatic assembling and clever cooerdination of
unsubstantiated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and
aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by
all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any
other art at communicating from one person to another something of the
inner and essential quality of life as it has been lived, even if the
material used is textually doubtful or even probably apocryphal. The
deadly enemy of good, sound history is scientific historical criticism.
The true history is romantic tradition; the stimulating thing, the tale
that makes the blood leap, the pictorial incident that raises up in an
instant the luminous vision of some great thing that once was.
I would not exchange Kit Marlowe's
_"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"_
for all the critical commentaries of Teutonic pedants on the character
and attributes of Helen of Troy as these have (to them) been revealed by
archaeological investigations. I dare say that Bishop St. Remi of Reims
never said in so many words "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian; destroy
what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed," and that
the Meroving monarch did not go thence to issue an "order of the day"
that the army should forthwith march down to the river and be baptized
by battalions; but _there_ is the clear, unforgettable picture of the
times and the men, and it will remain after the world has forgotten that
some one has proved that St. Remi never met Clovis, and that he himself
was probably only a variant of the great and original "sun-myth."
Closely allied with the teaching of history and forming a link as it
were with the teaching of English, is a branch of study at present
unformulated and unknown, but, I am convinced, of great importance in
education as a method of character development. Life has always focused
in great personalities, and formal history has recognized the fact while
showing little discretion, and sometimes very defective judgment, in the
choices it has made. A past period becomes our own in so far as we
translate it through its personalities and its art; the original
documents matter little, except when they become misleading, as they
frequently do, when read through contemporary spectacles. Now the great
figures of a time are not only princes and politicians, conquerors and
conspirators, they are quite as apt to be the knights and heroes and
brave gentlemen who held no conspicuous position in Church or state. I
think we need what might be called "The Golden Book of Knighthood"--or a
series of text books adapted to elementary and advanced schools--made up
of the lives and deeds (whether attested by "original documents," or
legendary or even fabulous does not matter) of those in all times, and
amongst all peoples, who were the glory of knighthood; the "parfait
gentyl Knyghtes" "without fear and without reproach." Such for example,
to go no farther back than the Christian Era, as St. George and St.
Martin, King Arthur and Launcelot and Galahad, Charles Martel and
Roland, St. Louis, Godfrey de Bouillon and Saladin, the Earl of
Strafford, Montrose and Claverhouse, the Chevalier Bayard, Don John of
Austria, Washington and Robert Lee and George Wyndham. These are but a
few names, remembered at random; there are scores besides, and I think
that they should be held up to honour and emulation throughout the
formative period of youth. After all, they became, during the years when
these qualities were exalted, the personification of the ideals of
honour and chivalry, of compassion and generosity, of service and
self-sacrifice and courtesy, and these, the qualifications of a
gentleman and a man or honour, are, with the religion that fostered
them, and the practice of that religion, the just objective of
education.
Much of all this can even now be taught through a judicious use of the
opportunities offered instructors in English, whether this is through
the graded "readers" of elementary education, or the more extended
courses in colleges and universities. Very frequently these
opportunities are ignored, and will be until we achieve something of a
new orientation in the matter of teaching English.
Now it may be I hold a vain and untenable view of this subject, but I am
willing to confess that I believe the object of teaching English is the
unlocking of the treasures of thought, character and emotion preserved
in the written records of the tongue, and the arousing of a desire to
know and assimilate these treasures on the part of the pupil. I am very
sure that English should not be taught as a thing ending in "ology," not
as an intricate science with all sorts of laws and rules and exceptions;
not as a system whereby the little children of the Ghetto, and the
offspring of Pittsburgh millionaires, and the spectacled infant elect of
Beacon Hill may all be raised to the point where they can write with
acceptable fluency the chiseled phrases of Matthew Arnold, the cadenced
Latinity of Sir Thomas Browne, the sonorous measures of Bolingbroke or
the distinguished and resonant periods of the King James Bible. Such an
aim as this will always result in failure.
The English language is the great storehouse of the rich thought and the
burning emotion of the English race, and all this, as it has issued out
of character, works towards the development of character, when it is
made operative in new generations. There is no other language but Latin
that has preserved so great a wealth of invaluable things, and English
is taught in order that it all may be more available through that
appreciation that comes from familiarity. There is no nobler record in
the world: from Chaucer down to the moderns is one splendid sequence of
character-revelations through a perfect but varied art, for literature
is also a fine art, and one of the greatest of all. Is it not fair to
say that the chief duty of the teacher of English is to lead the student
to like great literature, to find it and enjoy it for himself, and
through it to come to the liking of great ideas?
In the old days there was an historical, or rather archaeological,
method that was popular; also an analytical and grammarian method. There
was also the philological method which was quite the worst of all and
had almost as devastating results as in the case of Latin. It almost
seems as though English were being taught for the production of a
community of highly specialized teachers. No one would now go back to
any of those quaint and archaic ways digged up out of the dim and remote
past of the XIXth century. We should all agree, I think, that for
general education, specialized technical knowledge is unimportant and
scientific intensive methods unjustifiable. For one student who will
turn out a teacher there are five hundred that will be just simple
voters, wage-earners, readers of the Saturday Evening Post and the New
Republic, members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church or the Ethical
Society, and respectable heads of families. The School of Pedagogy has
its own methods (I am given to understand), but under correction I
submit they are not those of general education. Shall I put the whole
thing in a phrase and say that the object of teaching English is to get
young people to like good things?
You may say this is English Literature, not English. Are the two so very
far apart? English as a language is taught to make literature available.
"Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love
of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far
more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the
principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and
facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws
should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are
derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that
needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive _"distinguo."_
Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English
composition possible. The "daily theme" may be overdone; it is of little
use unless _thought_ keeps ahead of the pen.
I would plead then for the teaching of English after a fashion that will
reveal great thoughts and stimulate to greater life, through the noble
art of English literature and the perfectly illogical but altogether
admirable English language. The function of education is to make
students feel, think and act, after a fashion that increasingly reveals
and utilizes the best that is in them, and increasingly serves the uses
of society, and both history and English can be so taught as to help
towards the accomplishment of these ends.
There is another factor that may be so used, but I confess I shall speak
of it with some hesitation. It is at present, and has been for ages,
entirely outside the possibility even of consideration, and in a sense
that goes beyond the general ignoring of religion, for while Catholics,
who form the great majority of Christians, still hold to religion as a
prime element in education, there are none--or only a minority so small
as to be negligible--who give a thought to art in this connection. I
bring forward the word, and the thing it represents, with diffidence,
even apologetically: indeed, it is perhaps better to renounce the word
altogether and substitute the term "beauty," for during the nineteenth
century art got a bad name, not altogether undeservedly, and the
disrepute lingers. So long as beauty is an instinct native to men (and
it was this, except for very brief and periodic intervals, until hardly
more than a century ago, though latterly in a vanishing form), it is
wholesome, stimulating and indispensable, but when it becomes
self-conscious, when it finds itself the possession of a few highly
differentiated individuals instead of the attribute of man as such, then
it tends to degenerate into something abnormal and, in its last estate,
both futile and unclean. In its good estate, as for example in Greece,
Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and in Oriental countries until the last few
decades, beauty was so natural an object of endeavour and a mode of
expression, and its universality resulted in so characteristic an
environment, it was unnecessary to talk about it very much, or to give
any particular thought to the educational value of the arts which were
its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The
things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the
painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and
poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular
and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages
in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete forms of art,
was highly valued, almost as highly as religion or liberty or bodily
health, but then it was a part of normal life and therefore taken for
granted.