Читать книгу The Vitalized School - Francis B. Pearson - Страница 15

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Rights of the coming generations.—Any school procedure that limits its interests and activities to the present generation takes a too restricted view of the real scope of education. The children of the next generation, and the next, are entitled to consideration if education is to do its perfect work and have complete and convincing justification. The child of the future has a right to grandfathers and grandmothers of sound body and sound mind, and the schools and homes of the present are charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that this right is vouchsafed to him. In actual practice our plans seem not to previse grandfathers and grandmothers, and stop short even of fathers and mothers. The child of the next generation has a right to a father and a mother of untainted blood, and neither the home nor the school can ignore this right.

Transmitted weaknesses.—If these rights are not scrupulously respected by the present generation, the child of the future may come into the world under a handicap that all the educational agencies combined can neither remove nor materially mitigate. If he is crippled in mind or in body because of excesses on the part of his progenitors, the schools and hospitals may help him through life in a sorry sort of fashion, but his condition is evermore a reminder to him of how much he has missed in comparison with the child of sound body and mind. If such a child does not imprecate even the memory of the ancestors whose vitiated blood courses through his stricken body, it will be because his mind is too weak to reason from effect to cause or because his affliction has taught him large charity. He will feel that he has been shamefully cheated in the great game of life, with no hope of restitution. By reason of this, his gaze is turned backward instead of forward, and this is a reversal of the rightful attitude of child life. Instead of looking forward with hope and happiness, he droops through a somber life and constantly broods upon what might have been.

Attitude of ancestors.—Whether he realizes it or not, he reduces the average of humanity and is a burden upon society both in a negative and in a positive sense. In him society loses a worker and gains a dependent. Every taxpayer of the community must contribute to the support which he is unable to provide for himself. He watches other children romp and play and laugh; but he neither romps, nor plays, nor laughs. He is inert. Some ancestor chained him to the rock, and the vultures of disease and unhappiness are feeding at his vitals. He asks for bread, and they give him a stone; he asks for life, and they give him a living death; he asks for a heaven of delight, and they give him a hell of despair. He has a right to freedom, but, in place of that, he is forced into slavery of body and soul to pay the debts of his grandfather. Nor can he pay these debts in full, but must, perforce, pass them on to his own children. Sad to relate, the father and grandfather look upon such a child and charge Providence with unjust dealing in burdening them with such an imperfect scion to uphold the family name. They seem blind to the patent truth before them; they seem unable to interpret the law of cause and effect; they charge the Almighty and the child with their own defections; they acquit themselves of any responsibility for what is before their eyes.

Hospitals cited.—Our hospitals for abnormal and subnormal children, and our eleemosynary institutions, in general, are a sad commentary upon our civilization and something of a reflection upon the school as an exponent of and a teacher of life. If the wards of these institutions, barring the victims of accidents, are the best we can do in the way of coming upon a solution of the problem of life, neither society nor the school has any special warrant for exultation. These defectives did not just happen. The law of life is neither fortuitous nor capricious. On the contrary, like begets like, and the law is immutable. With lavish hand, society provides the pound of cure but gives only superficial consideration to the ounce of prevention. The title of education will be cloudy until such time as these institutions have become a thing of the past. Both pulpit and press extol the efforts of society to build, equip, and maintain these institutions, and that is well; but, with all that, we are merely trying to make the best of a bad situation. Education will not fully come into its own until it takes into the scope of its interests the child of the future as well as the child of the present; not until it comes to regard the children of the present as future ancestors as well as future citizens.

The child as a future ancestor.—If the children of the future are to prove a blessing to society and not a burden, then the children of the present need to become fully conscious of their responsibilities as agencies in bringing to pass this desirable condition. If the teacher or parent can, somehow, cause the boy of to-day to visualize his own grandson, in the years to come, pointing the finger of scorn at him and calling down maledictions upon him because of a taint in the family blood, that picture will persist in his consciousness, and will prove a deterrent factor in his life. The desire for immortality is innate in every human breast, we are taught, but certainly no boy will wish to achieve that sort of immortality. He will not consider with complacency the possibility of his becoming a pariah in the estimation of his descendants, and will go far in an effort to avert such a misfortune. There is no man but will shudder when he contemplates the possibility of having perpetuated upon his gravestone or in the memory of his grandchild the word “Unclean.”

The heart of the problem.—Here we arrive at the very heart of the problem that confronts the home and the school. We may close our eyes, or look another way, but the problem remains. We may not be able to solve it, but we cannot evade it. Each day it calls loudly to every parent and every teacher for a solution. The health and happiness of the coming generations depend upon the right education of the present one, and this responsibility the home and the school can neither shirk nor shift. We take great unction to ourselves for the excellence of the horses, pigs, and cattle that we have on exhibition at the fairs, but are silent as to our failures in the form of children, that drag out a half-life in our hospitals. In one state it costs more to care for the defectives and unfortunates than to provide schooling facilities for all the normal children, but this fact is not written into party platforms nor proclaimed from the stump. In the face of such a fact society seems to proceed upon the agreeable assumption that the less said the better.

Misconceptions.—We temporize with the fundamental situation by the use of such soporifics as the expressions “necessary evil” and the like, but that leaves us exactly at the starting point. Many well-meaning people use these expressions with great frequency and freedom and seem to think that in so doing they have given a proof of virtue and public spirit. It were worthy only of an iconoclast to deprecate or disparage the legislative attempts to foster clean living. All such efforts are worthy of commendation; but in sadness it must be confessed that, laudable as these efforts are, they have not produced results that are wholly satisfactory. Defectives are still granted licenses to perpetuate their kind; children still enervate their bodies and minds by the use of narcotics; and society daintily lifts its skirts as it hurries past the evil, pretending not to see. Legislation is an attempt to express public sentiment in statutory form; but public sentiment must precede legislation if it is to become effective. Efforts have been made through the process of legislation to deny the granting of marriage licenses to people who are physically unsound, but the efforts came to naught because public sentiment has not attained to this plane of thinking. Hence, we shall not have much help from legislation in solving our problem, until public sentiment has been educated.

The responsibility of the school.—This education must come, in large part, through the schools, but even these will fail until they come into a full realization of the fact that their field of effort is life in the large. Time was when the teacher thought she was employed to teach geography, grammar, and arithmetic. Then she enlarged this to include boys and girls. And now she needs to make another addition and realize that her function is to teach boys and girls the subject of Life, using the branches of study as a means to this end. In a report on the work of the schools at Gary, Indiana, the statement is made that the first purpose of these schools seems to be to produce efficient workers for the mills. This seems to savor of the doctrine of educational foreordination, and would make millwork and life synonymous. Life is larger than any mill. We may be justified in educating one horse for the plow and another for the race track, but this justification rests upon the fact that horses are assets and not liabilities.

Clean living.—Clean living in this generation will, undeniably, project itself into the next, and we have only to see to it that all the activities of the school function in clean living in the child of to-day, and we shall surely be safeguarding the interests of the child of the future. But clean living means more than mere externals. The daily bath, pure food, fresh air, and sanitary conditions are essential but not sufficient in themselves. Clean thinking, right motives, and a high respect for the rights and interests of the future must enter into the scheme of life. There must be no devious ways, no back alleys, in the scheme, but only the broad highway of life, open always to the sunlight and to the gaze of all mankind. All this must become thoroughly enmeshed in the social consciousness and in the daily practice of every individual, before the school can lay claim to success in the art of teaching efficient living.