ordination, and continuity, and diversification, and interdependence, and sustained by public moneys and open to all, like that which is unfolding in the great Western States that lie in the watershed of the Mississippi river and to the west of it. The schools are to keep strictly in the middle of the road of moral sense. They are to make no fanciful discriminations between morals and religion. Avoiding sectarian doctrine, they need not avoid the God who is the giver of all life. They may well follow the Father of their Country, and the common usages and the unprejudiced thinking of their countrymen, about all that. They may at least do it until some one tells them they must stop; and then they may take time to find out from competent authority whether they must stop or not. But whether the Bible is read, and the hymn sung, and the simple prayer uttered or not, every process of the schools is to repel untruth and indirection, and promote habits of thinking and a manner of life which are exact. The schools must offer incentives and stir enthusiasms. Ambitions must be awakened and pointed to their goal. When boys and girls are disposed to do what is decent, let us try to have them do what they want to do, lest the spark be quenched and they lose the purpose to do anything at all. If one is long on sport and a little short on work, let us give in somewhat to his love of sport in the hope that he will begin to like companionship with us and reciprocate by giving in to the work which we must require him to do. It is not always well to hold a slow and poky, studious and comfortable boy up as a model to a live and trying one. It is better to bump them together so that their differing virtues and drawbacks will be somewhat transfused. The unexpected often happens in this country, and the teacher may well be cautious lest the time come when the urchin who distracted him because he could manage a horse better than he could manage a book, shall invite him to ride on the president's car on the railroad. It is better to see that it takes something of a boy to manage a horse, and use that fact to get him into the intricacies of the book, so that the time may come when he will bless his old teacher for it, and the teacher may be able to ride in that private car without any disturbing recollections. The great crime in the American schools is intellectual slovenliness. It may be due in part to the fact that we are doing so many new things in a great new country. It may grow out of the inexact training of teachers. It may have resulted in part from fantastic theories about the management of children which the experimental psychologists have been aggressively pushing upon us, without enough reason, for a generation. It may have some relation to the very wide open election of studies which the universities and colleges have encouraged in the same generation, and which some are trying to push down into the secondary schools. From whatever cause it arises, the complaint is general and seems justified, that we do not train children to do definite things; that the completion of courses can not be reckoned in efficiency, and that our proceedings do not generate the intellectual resourcefulness and power which they ought. It is a serious charge. We are entitled to generosity for all we are attempting, and to consideration for all of our newness; but we must get results, or dare a fate. We shall not be excused for training teachers in vague and unsubstantial theories which ignore the economic value of child life and defy his right to be trained just as rapidly as the schools can do it in the proficiency and the accomplishments which will enable him to do the most for himself. There is no imperative reason for doing exactly the same things or perhaps for exacting precisely the same standards in all schools; but there is need enough that the courses in the schools shall be translatable into some definite grasp of the subject and into some real power to go out and do the real things of which they treat. There is every reason why young men and maidens shall be allowed to prepare themselves for the work of their choice, but there is no reason why the schools should leave to immature minds, as much as they do, the determination of what constitutes preparation for the work which they choose. It is well to conserve the resources of nature; but so it is to conserve the lives of children. It is well to be more exact and resultful in the use of materials and the processes of trade; but it will be even better to assert what we actually know in the planning of work, and to make sure that we teach what we undertake in the routine of the schools. But neither teaching to read, nor training to work, nor offering opportunity, nor enforcing the truth, nor all of that together, comprises the sum of the burden that is upon the American schools. The major part is the imparting to the pupil the desire to know, and the power to do, and the purpose to find the truth for himself and act up to it. He must know what men and women have done in the world; where they have succeeded and when they have failed, and why. He must know what manner of social life, what kind of business conduct, has succeeded, and what has failed, and why. He must know that work is a blessing, that participation in the opportunities which rational society creates is a privilege, that public service is a duty, and that government is a burden which all good citizens are bound to bear. In other words, his motives must be aroused, and brought into conformity with the motives which are the groundwork of the schools. The state of New York has just held two monster celebrations in honor of the discovery of Lake Champlain and of the Hudson river, and of the application of steam to the commerce of the world. Champlain and Hudson considerately made their discoveries in the same year, and Fulton made his steamboat go against wind and tide so very near the anniversary year that the state could combine demonstrations with a minimum of time and a maximum of glare, of noise, and of joy. Surely it was a great time. The little Half Moon and the old Clermont were there to receive not only the acclaim of our people, but of all peoples; not only the salutations of our navy, but of the leading battleships of all the navies of the world. There were meetings in every town; oration and poetry seemed to be the easy expression of those days. Beacon fires lighted every hilltop, from the St Lawrence to the mouth of the Hudson. The old bloody ground of the Iroquois, the great warpath of the Revolution upon which national independence was won, was all ablaze. All along the old road there were great military and civic pageants. British grenadiers strode in a stately way to the strains of the air which has long called out every energy of the Britons; and Scotch Highlanders in brilliant plaids were enough to make one know that the Campbells were really coming. The flags and the arms of all the nations brightened the scene. The tricolor of France, and the German, and the Russian, and the Roman Eagles were all there. But the American Eagle was the greatest eagle of all. The regulars of our army and the bluejackets of our navy marched in happy competition with every manner of organization that a bright and complex civilization which loves organization, has had the ingenuity to devise. It was the proclamation of New York that novelists and New Englanders shall no longer be allowed to write her history for her. But perhaps better than all else, certainly no less significant than the expression of our own history, was the graphic portrayal of the intellectual contributions which America has inherited from all the nations of the world. As the great floats went by, each of the national societies told of the work of the great teachers, and writers, and workers, and painters, and poets, and discoverers, and inventors, and martyrs, and statesmen, and heroes, which the fatherlands of all of them had given to the country of their new home, and so had really made it the land of opportunity. There was the Dutchman at the right of the line, and close upon his heels the Englishman, and the Scotchman, and the Irishman, and the Frenchman, and the German, and the Swiss, and the Scandinavian, and the Italian, and the Jew, and the Jap, and all the rest who have had a share in the making of America. And all that has entered into the genius of America, enters into the making and the motive of the American schools. "Hats off! HATS OFF! Along the street there comes A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums, Hats off! The flag is passing by! Blue and crimson and white it shines, The colors before us fly; But more than the flag is passing by." PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS It is being asserted with some persistence that in recent years. there has been a letting down of moral plane among the people of the United States. It is being bruited about that the moral sense of our later years is less acute than in the earlier years in our country, and that the moral standards of America are less exact than those of other countries. Those who say this are quick to attribute the cause to the absence of religious instruction in the common or tax-supported schools. The charge has been given new point since the state universities have grown so great. The men who make this charge are those who are specially interested in church schools of elementary grade, and those who are in charge of, or are particularly concerned about the prosperity of, the denominational colleges. It is a serious charge, from a quarter which, of course, has our entire respect. If the moral sensibilities of our people are less pervasive and acute than those of other peoples are, or than those of our fathers were, our religious teachers would be derelict if they did not present and protest the fact. If they also think that this is because of the nonsectarian character of the common schools, they ought to say so. But before saying that, they ought to realize that they will be discredited in that public opinion of the country which is above every sect, if their belief in the decadence of morals is not justified. And they ought not to fail to see that if there is such moral depression as they think they see, and if it is due to the cause they assert it is, it proves nothing short of the breakdown of the political philosophy and institutions of the Republic. The thing goes to the very foundations of the splendid and costly temple in which the people of the United States live and which they have erected in the belief that it would give them not only shelter and security, but also opportunity to develop the purest and highest type of Christian civilization ever conceived by the heart and mind of man. There is the possibility that all of the people who have had part in the building of this house may have been in error; that the lives which have been lost and the sorrows which have been endured in the doing of it have been in vain; but an educated Address before the Iowa State Teachers Association, Des Moines, Iowa, November 6, 1909. |