The Theory of Education in the United States

III

I HAVE mentioned the fact that our system has been subjected to incessant tinkering throughout the post-revolutionary period. We may now observe that all this tinkering has been purely mechanical and external; it has been applied exclusively to the structure and mechanics of the system. We have devised or imported the mechanics of this or that method, and sought to incorporate them; the inductive method, the Gary method, the Montessori method, and so on. We have scrapped one piece of curricular machinery after another, and introduced new ones. I do not recall the names of more than one or two of them, they are so many and have come and gone in such quick succession. Lately, however, as I remember, we have been hearing about the University of Wisconsin plan, the University of Chicago plan, the Harvard plan, and I think I recall seeing somewhere that Yale has recently come forward with a new plan, abolishing certain courses and certain examinations, and introducing something called “reading periods” by way of substitute. I do not speak in disparagement of these innumerable plans and methods, for I do not know enough about them to criticise them either favourably or unfavourably. I am a man of letters, not a mechanician or an actuary, and hence my opinion of their specific merit or lack of merit is without value. I merely ask you to remark that they are of a purely mechanical nature, and that as far as I know, all the effort that has been expended on improving our system during the last thirty-five years has been directed exclusively towards its mechanics.

Now, we may admit that our system, like any other social institution, is a machine, and that any machine is all the better for very careful tending, and that most machines are susceptible of further differentiation and improvement. Whatever care and ingenuity, therefore, has been exercised in these directions in behalf of our educational system has perhaps been well spent. But there is something more to be thought of. Any machine has some kind of theory behind it; and when you have a machine that has had every possible resource of mechanical ingenuity and care expended on it, and yet will not work satisfactorily, the situation at once suggests that something may be amiss with its theory. Perhaps its theory is all wrong, hopelessly wrong; the perpetual-motion devices that we occasionally hear of are instances of this. They are, let us say, mechanically perfect, and as far as mechanics go, they should work perfectly, but they do not work; so we examine their theory, and we at once discover not only why they do not work but also why no machine of the kind can possibly work. Again, perhaps there has been some little slip somewhere in our apprehension of the theory, something overlooked, some minor error that needs to be straightened out, and the structure of our machine correspondingly modified. Well, this can be managed, possibly with ease, possibly the necessary adjustments are slight and simple; but the theory of the machine must be re-examined before anything can be done intelligently. My point is that a complete and clear idea of the theory behind a machine, is valuable; and that as far as I am aware, with all the attention that has been bestowed on the mechanics of our educational system, no one has looked critically into its theory. Perhaps the time for that has only now come. At all events, since we have quite reached the end of our tether in the mechanics of the matter—there seems to be no possible doubt of that—and since we are mostly, save for the Micawbers and Panglosses among us, looking at one another in a rather bewildered and forlorn way, wondering what to do next, we may at least passively entertain the idea of examining the theory of the thing with which we have been so long hopefully tinkering.