THE late lamented Sam Weller once spoke of a schoolboy, who, having learned the alphabet, wondered whether it was worth going through so much to learn so little. The same reflection has come to millions of Americans as they thought of how much time they had spent in schooling and how little they knew when they got out.

There are parts of our vast country where the people are lucky enough to have teachers who know so little about the theories of teaching that they impart to their pupils more information than the law demands. But in the cities and large towns where teaching has been elevated, or more properly speaking, reduced to a science, where the most money is spent on the schools and where the school terms are longest, the prevalence of “how not to do it” is simply appalling.

The country boy who goes to school only four or five months in the year knows quite as much as his city cousin who annually has nine or ten months of schooling. What does the city pupil get for the double outlay of time, bad air, back-ache and discipline?

As he cannot make any subsequent use of his accumulation of bad air and back-ache, his entire gain over the country boy would seem to be in discipline. What does this discipline do for him in the adult life for which school life is a preparation?

Does it make him a better business man? No. If it does, why is it that the majority of business men in our large cities are from the rural districts? A few months ago I happened to be a guest at a dinner party at which more than a dozen men prominent in New York business and professional life came together. A question being asked about a social custom of thirty years before, it gradually transpired that not one of the party had been born or brought up in the city of New York, a city of which all now were permanent citizens.

I have told this story to prominent citizens of Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati, and in return received long lists of the great men of those cities who came from the country. With some fear and trembling I tried the same story in Boston at a large public dinner, but the man to whom I told it—he was a man who seemed to know everybody’s antecedents—replied that not more than one in ten of Boston’s Brahmans or live business men were born at the Hub.

Congress is fairly a representative body, but if you will look at the book which gives biographical sketches of all the members, you will be astonished to find how few cities and large towns are represented by men born in them. Nearly all the members were born and brought up in the country. Occasionally you will find that some representative or senator was born in Philadelphia or New York, but if you look at the head of the page you will discover that he is representing a rural district of some State other than his own.

You will find it the same way in the learned professions. In law, medicine and theology, art, literature and science, the men who are most prominent at all the great centres of education and intelligence date back to some farmhouse and country school. Most of these men went to college in the course of time, but whenever you find one of them and talk with him so long that he feels inclined to unbosom himself to you, you discover that the amount of schooling he had at his birthplace was very small. As most of these men have passed the period of their boyhood by at least a quarter of a century, it is not surprising to hear them tell of school years consisting of only three or four months, and of school-room exercises where the number of text-books were so few that many of the lessons were delivered orally by the teacher, and boys and girls took turns with one another’s books.

If discipline, school discipline, counts for anything, these professions should be full of city-bred men. But they are not, except at the bottom—way down at the bottom. City schools graduate an immense number of young men who enter seminaries and especially departments of colleges, to gain a special education, but somehow these are not the men who are prominent in the new blood of their respective professions.

If discipline, so called, does not make the city-schooled youth superior to his country cousin, what is it good for? Well, it is good to keep the school-room in order. The larger the school the more necessary it is for a teacher to maintain order. In a building containing two or three thousand children, as many school-buildings in the larger cities do, rigid discipline is absolutely necessary to this end. But, to come back to original facts, why does it take seven or eight years to impart a common, a very common, school course which any bright boy or girl of fifteen years could master alone and unaided in a quarter of the time?

School systems, where there are any, seem designed for the special purpose of making the school a machine which should do credit to the individuals who run it. This would be excusable with an actual machine made of wood and metal, but children are not tough enough to be put to such use. Besides, there is better use for them. It is not odd that teachers should look out for themselves and for their own records in the management of schools. If they don’t look out for Number One they will be an exception to all the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, compared with the children, the teachers’ number one as about one to fifty, and their importance should be judged from this standpoint of comparison.

School systems of study seem based on the capacity of the stupidest pupils. All the others must crawl because the stupid ones cannot walk.

This isn’t right. If armies were trained in that way we never would have any soldiers. Let schools, like regiments, have their awkward squads to be specially trained, so that they may catch up with those who are proficient.

What are the branches in which the common schools give elementary instructions? Spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and grammar. The farther from the large city, the surer the student is of getting any instruction beyond those branches during the first six or seven years of a common-school course. He may be qualified by home reading to go into the natural sciences or into mathematics at an early age, but that isn’t part of the system. It seldom pleases the teacher of a graded school to be told of such acquirements of a new pupil. The school exists not to improve the intelligence of the pupil from the standpoint at which the teacher finds it, but to give him such instruction as the teacher is already detailed and instructed by law to give. A boy may forget all he knows of natural science, or algebra, or geometry, in the many years in which he is drilled in elementary studies leading up to the branches which he already understands.

In the country districts boys are often fit to pass rigid examinations for matriculation at college at the age of fifteen years. But the boy who does not begin to go to school until he is eight years of age finds himself at fifteen, in a city, merely fit to enter a high-school, and not a very high school either. Some of the most noted men in our country’s history graduated from college at sixteen or seventeen years. The curriculum of a college in those days was not as high as now. Nevertheless, the graduates certainly gave a very good account of themselves from their earliest entrance into public life. One of them was Alexander Hamilton, who graduated at seventeen, and who elaborated a system of financial management which a whole century of successive Secretaries of the Treasury have not considered themselves competent to improve upon. A very long list of men of similar prominence might be given, but such illustrations are not necessary. Any intelligent man who has been to school knows that a great deal of his class-room time has been entirely at his own disposal, for the lessons were easily memorized; and therefore his hands were idle and Satan found something for them to do. The worst boys in school can often be found among the scholars who stand highest in the classes, and for the very natural reason that there is nothing to occupy their minds during a large portion of the school time.

Seriously, what is there about the elementary branches, as taught in our common schools almost anywhere, that should consume such an immense amount of time? In the Southern States a number of the despised blacks, children of slaves who themselves could date back their ancestors from generations of slaves, became quite proficient in elementary branches during a year or two, lounging about military camps in the capacity of servants. Special schools were founded, as soon as the war ended, by missionary societies, which prepared courses of study which they considered within the comprehension of the Anglo-African mind. Of course there were a great many stupid blacks; but, while some of these stupid children were making faces at text-books and drawing inartistic pictures on slates, their old fathers and mothers were learning from

the same children’s text-books more rapidly than the best children in the public schools of the North are allowed to learn.

Sir John Lubbock complains that “A thousand hours in the most precious seed-time of life of millions of children spent in learning that i must follow e in conceive, and precede it in believe; that two e’s must, no one knows why, come together in proceed and exceed, and be separated in precede and accede; that uncle must be spelled with a c, but ankle with a k,—while lessons in health and thrift, sewing and cooking, which should make the life of the poor tolerable, and elementary singing and drawing which should make it pleasant, and push out lower and degrading amusements, are in many cases almost vainly trying to gain admission.”

Take the course all through, and what is there about it that should require any great consumption of time? Reading certainly is not hard to acquire. Children out of school learn it in spite of any efforts to hold them back. Spelling is learned more effectually through reading than from any text-book. Writing requires only a model of which copies may be made, for there is no business man in New York or in any other large city who writes a copy-book hand. If he did, he would be considered incompetent for whatever position he may occupy. The first thing that a boy must learn on leaving school is to unlearn his writing-lessons. Arithmetic undoubtedly requires considerable practice to make the pupil perfect and quick in computations, but as it consists entirely of applications of the first four rules, why is it that so much time is spent over the text-books and very abstract propositions and problems? Text-books of arithmetic seem to be skilfully designed for the purpose of keeping the child from practical knowledge on the subject as long as possible. Examples that are called practical are given in many of these books, but only after a large amount of figuring, the purpose of which the pupil is not allowed to clearly understand. A man whose education in figures has been obtained on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk will cypher more accurately and quickly any problem of ordinary nature that may be given him than his own son or daughter who has been several years in school, because he understands the relations and purposes of the factors, which never seem to be impressed upon the child.

General F. A. Walker, once superintendent of the census and now president of the Boston Institute of Technology, says: “The old-fashioned readiness and correctness of cyphering have been to a large degree sacrificed by the methods which it is now proposed to reform. A false arithmetic has grown up and has largely crowded out of place that true arithmetic, which is nothing but the art of numbers.”

Geography is so largely a matter of memory of the eye that no man who was denied the privilege of studying this science while he was at school ever thinks it necessary to spend a great amount of time over it afterward, even if his business requires him to have a practical knowledge of the subject. It is simply a question of sight and of memory, just as is the case with knowledge of localities which he may visit either to a great or small extent, yet geography in the public schools is divided into two, three, and sometimes five different books, by the use of which the pupil goes again and again over the same lessons, obtaining in the end no more information than that he would get by a few days’ deliberate study of an atlas or a set of maps.

Prof. Geikie, a recognized authority on this subject, says: “Every question of geography should be one which requires for its answer that the children have actually seen something with their own eyes and taken note of it.” This is reasonable; it would also be practicable if globes and large maps were in the class-rooms, but generally they are conspicuous only by their absence.

It is quite true that grammar must occupy considerable of the pupils’ time. For all the persons who have studied it, there seem very few of any age at the present time who are able to apply the principles of this science in such a manner that they habitually write and speak correctly. But this isn’t so much the fault of the pupil and of the teacher as of the text-books from which the science shall be studied. Good example, from which adults learn grammar more correctly and rapidly than in any other way, seems to be considered too good for children, so they are given text-books with definitions utterly beyond their comprehension—definitions so subdivided that there is nothing which the intelligent teacher so dreads as a few intelligent questions on the subject from a pupil on the grammar-lesson of the day. I have seen an intelligent man, himself a college graduate, and a public speaker of high reputation and elegant style, labor with one of his children over a lesson in grammar, and finally give up in despair and toss the book across the room. If a man of such character is unable to understand a grammatical text-book, what can be expected of the child?

The greater the scholar or teacher, the greater is his contempt for text-books of grammar. Old Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth of England, delights in saying that his distinguished pupil “never yet tooke Greek or Latin Grammer in her hande after the first declininge of a Noun and a Verb.” A more celebrated teacher, John Locke, complained that “Our children are forced to stick unreasonably in grammatical flats and shallows.” Dr. Parkhurst said recently: “The way for a boy to talk correctly is to talk subject to correction—not to apply himself to linguistic anatomy, surgery and dissection. I studied grammar in the ordinary way about three weeks—just long enough to find out what a genius some people can show for putting asunder what God hath joined together. It is a splendid device for using up a boy’s time and souring his disposition.”

Well, all this routine is being imposed upon the children, and the little wretches are losing spirit and impulse through the delay to which the cleverer ones are subjected and the lack of clearness which causes the stupider ones to despair. Nothing whatever is done toward training the senses and physical intelligence of the child. They do this sort of thing abroad, but for some reason Americans are not allowed to follow the foreigners’ example. Apparently our children have a divine call to whatever handiwork may fall to their lot thereafter in the world, for certainly they get as little training in it as the twelve apostles had in theology before they were called to preach and teach. The French or German, the Swedish child, and even many a Russian child, is taught to use his hands and his eyes and all his senses that can be applied to practical affairs, but the American child gets no opportunity of that sort, except in the few schools which conform more or less to the kindergarten system. We have a few technical schools in large cities, but they are regarded as means to finish a course of education instead of part of the ordinary elementary instruction.

When technical education, which means simply the use of the hands and eyes, is spoken of to members of Boards of Education and Superintendents of common school systems in large cities, the result is generally an impatient gesture or word. There is no room for that sort of thing, we are told; beside, it is a mere notion of theorists. The general run of children are not equal to it and would be more troubled than benefited by it.

Well, experience is more valuable than argument in answering assertions. A few years ago a man who had scarcely ever done any work in the school-room brought some theories on the subject of technical education over here from Germany, although he was an American. He went to Philadelphia and started a little class for the instruction of teachers. The majority of common school teachers sneered at his theories, so he proposed to silence all further opposition by a practical test. He started a model school for the purpose of demonstrating that what he asserted was practicable. He did not select the brighter pupils in the public schools, but went deliberately into the streets and picked up at random a lot of little gutter-snipes who had never been to school at all, or who, if they had, were persistent truants ever since. In a short time people saw—for it was necessary to have them see in order to make them believe at all—these ignorant children of the street doing better technical work in several directions than could be found anywhere else in the city except in establishments paying high prices for artistic labor. They carved wood, they modelled in clay, they made designs on paper, they stamped leather and brass and even showed some capacity for engraving and coloring in the direction of the higher arts.

The effect of this display should have been to have given the system prominence and practical demonstration in the public schools, but it amounted to little except the gathering of a few wide-awake teachers who wished to learn to teach as the theorist had been teaching. A few of those who took the course went into public school work elsewhere and have succeeded admirably ever since. In the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, any child who wishes can now receive a technical education under the direction of the common school authorities. The work began in a single school with a single teacher. It has since been extended to all the public schools of the city, and two teachers work hard from morning until night. A strange development of this course of teaching deserves notice. Elizabeth is a city containing a great many large manufacturing establishments, and the modest young woman who had charge of the technical education in the public schools was amazed one day to receive a written request from a number of master mechanics in different establishments for a night school for their own benefit, for which they were willing to pay freely; and some of them told the teacher that their attention to the subject was first attracted by their own children doing clearer and more rapid work in the line of design than they, these master mechanics, who had been in the business all their lives, had ever yet succeeded in doing. So for months there was visible the astonishing spectacle of a lot of middle-aged men being taught their own business by a young woman who herself knew nothing whatever of their business.

The helplessness of the average American teacher when the subject of technical education is mentioned was shown amusingly a few years ago when one of the several superintendents who have general charge of the New York city schools devised a system of teaching from what he called object lessons. He prepared a manual and a set of charts and the Board of Education in compliment to him purchased a great many and placed them in the class-rooms. But it was almost impossible to have them used unless the superintendent himself took the work in hand. The teachers didn’t understand it. They said they couldn’t get the hang of it. The truth was they had never had any education of the same kind themselves and the matter was as foreign to their intelligence as Hebrew or Sanscrit would have been. But, mark the difference; when news of this system penetrated the wilds of the rowdy West, demands and orders for the material to work with came East rapidly, and I was told that a single State in the new West made more use of this system than all the Eastern and Middle States combined. The West knows what it wants; the teachers are closer to the children than in the East. This may be one of the blessings, or perhaps penalties, of life in a new country, but, whatever it may be, the results seem to justify a wish that all of us could be transplanted to a new country, for at least a little while, from the older centres of our American civilization.

General Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “The introduction of shopwork into the public system of education cannot fail to have a most beneficial influence in promoting a respect for labor and in overcoming the false and pernicious passion of our young people for crowding themselves into overdone and underpaid departments where they may escape manual exertion.” Col. Auchmuty, the philanthropic founder of New York’s great “Trades School,” says: “What scientific schools are to the engineer and architect—what the law school and the medical school are to the lawyer and the physician, or what the business college is to the clerk—trade schools must be to the future mechanics.” President Butler, late of Columbia College’s faculty, now president of the Industrial Association’s great model school, says: “Manual training does not claim admittance as a favor; it demands it as a right. The future course of study will not be a Procrustean structure—absolutely and unqualifiedly alike for all localities and for all schools; but it will have in it a principle, and that principle will be founded on a scientific basis—the highest duty of the educator will be its application to his own particular needs and demands.”

Is the experience of practical educators like these to be cast aside in favor of the antiquated theories of teaching now in vogue?

Any one who wonders why country boys become prominent city men, and why there are about as many Western men in New York city in business as there are men from the East, can find out by looking closely to the difference between city and country systems of education. If a country village is too small to have a high school, it is nevertheless generally the case that the higher branches are taught to a large extent in the commonest of schools. College graduates find the profession of teaching a very handy means of paying their expenses while looking about the country and seeing where to begin the practice of law or medicine, or perhaps drop into the pulpit. Boys and girls of twelve or fourteen years may be found studying physiology, algebra and geometry, natural sciences and chemistry in schools all over the new West at a time when children of the same age in the large Eastern cities are slowly wrestling with the lessons and elementary text-books of geography and grammar and arithmetic. When competitive examinations for West Point cadetships are held in the West the general trouble is that the candidates are too young to enter the military academy even could they pass the necessary examination and succeed in winning the competitive prize. I saw such an examination myself in one Western town, which was narrowed down to two boys. These youngsters, the ablest of all the applicants, were aged respectively thirteen and fourteen years. They passed rigid examinations in mathematics, with scarcely a mark against them. That is more than could be done by any boys of similar age in the public schools of New York and Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the three largest cities in the Union.

The rapidity with which children pass through text-books in the newer States and more sparsely settled districts is the cause of the great number of so-called colleges which are found all over our country. There are more colleges by title in the United States than in all the rest of the world beside. Their standards are never those of the universities of Europe—seldom of Yale or Harvard. But they are higher than those of the ordinary high schools, and the young man or young woman who passes through them has a very fair general education, and is fitted to go on by private reading to almost any extent. In the larger cities of the East such opportunities are few. There is, perhaps, a single large institution in each city, like the High School of Philadelphia or the Normal College of New York, at which girls are educated, or the College of the City of New York, to which the better boys are sent for a full college course if they desire it. But these same facilities are demanded and obtained in the newer cities at a rate that would astonish the Eastern person who chose to look into the subject.

The most pressing need of our common school system is more teachers. With more teachers greater personal attention could be paid to each pupil, and smaller time would be required for the ordinary school course. In the cities it is the rule that boys and girls must leave school at a very early age in order to help earn a living for their respective families. The majority of them are children of parents who are very poor, who have to work terribly hard and save in every possible way in order to keep their families from starvation. Consequently the children go to work as soon as they are large enough to be accepted by any employer at any sort of occupation. Their subsequent opportunities for learning anything are necessarily limited. They must learn by general reading if at all, except for such few opportunities as are granted them by night schools, a beneficent class of educational institutions, which those who most need them are least able to attend, for how much studying can a boy or girl do after nine or ten hours of work in a counting-room or shop or factory? With more teachers our city children could obtain a fair high school education at the age of fourteen, and be better able to make their way in the world at whatever their work might be.

The best finishing school that the people of the United States have ever been able to avail themselves of is the course of home reading which one society or other has within a few years devised, and which some of them are conducting with great care and success. Systems of reading and consecutive study are devised, books are supplied, individuals are selected to receive and inspect examination papers to show the capacity of the students and to give suggestions according as the students may seem to require, and in this way one single society has now eighty thousand students, with more than a hundred instructors and inspectors. This system might be definitely extended at very small expense by the various States as part of the local system of education. Until the blunders of the common school system are modified or done away with, it is as little as the State can do to give an intelligent child this much of consolation and assistance for the time that it has been compelled to lose by incompetent tuition in the public schools.