DAVID STARR JORDAN

MODERN EDUCATION.

DOES IT EDUCATE IN THE BROADEST AND MOST LIBERAL SENSE OF THE TERM?

ANSWERS OF DAVID STARR JORDAN, PRESIDENT OF LELAND STANFORD UNIVERSITY.

That training which does not disclose the secret of power is unworthy the name of education.- President Jordan.

1. The first article of the educational series which has been published in The Cosmopolitan was founded upon the following hypothesis: "The pursuit of all mankind is happiness.* There is no other basis upon which any tenable theory of education for youth may be built than that the training received tends, in the highest degree, toward those conditions of mind and body which will best serve to bring happiness to the individual educated and to those about him. That, at least, is the ideal toward which education must move with ever-quickening strides."

Do you believe that this is the true ideal? If not-what?

Answer of President Jordan.-I should say rather effectiveness. But all true happiness depends on action, there is not so much difference. But mere pleasure or contentment should not be called 'happiness."

2. Do you think that the training of the mind of youth can be accomplished by the study of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Psychology and English, German and French Literature as thoroly as by that of Latin and Greek?

Answer of President Jordan.-With most men better.

3. Will not a curriculum made up of the sciences and modern literature develop the reasoning powers to a higher degree than one in which the study of Latin and Greek is the chief factor?

Answer of President Jordan.-With most men-yes.

4. Inasmuch as the student, in a large percentage of cases, immediately following graduation enters upon a professional or business career and not infrequently assumes family cares, should not provision be made for thoro instruction by lectures on choice of occupation or profession-the intention being to afford him the widest possible information regarding the occupations of life, and to enable him to choose with knowledge rather than with prejudice?

Answer of President Jordan.-Lectures are not very effective in this regard. Personal conversation is better.

. Should not thoro instruction regarding the duties of the married state, the psychological aids to selection and to happy wedded relations and the proper bringing up of children, constitute an important part of every college course?

Answer of President Jordan.-Such information is most valuable and should be included. But it should not be spurious, hysterical, mawkish. It takes a manly man with thoro knowledge to give such instruction.

6. Should not all students be compelled to include, as part of their daily duties, exercise sufficient to develop sound bodies while establishing habits tending to maintain health at a maximum of efficiency?

Answer of President Jordan.-A student should be led to seek such training, but education is largely a training of the will. He should seek it for himself, not be obliged to take it.-Extract from an article in March Cosmopolitan.

*FROM WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY.-Happiness is generic, and is applied to almost every kind of enjoyment except that of the animal appetites.

FROM THE CENTURY DICTIONARY.-Every man speaks of happiness as his end of ends he wishes to live well or to do well, which he considers to be the same as being happy. But men disagree exceedingly in their opinions as to that which constitutes happiness; nay, the same man sometimes places it in one thing, sometimes in another-in health or in riches, according as he happens to be sick or poor.-Grote's Aristotle.

Concerning "Tom."

"Tom" is the average young American-boy or girl. Bishop Vincent knows Tom, and what is good for him, and how to tell it so Tom's teachers and mothers and fathers and employers can understand it and govern themselves accordingly. Here is a sample paragraph or two:

Now for the radical lessons which Tom must learn. He must Le taught to consider himself a person and not a thing, a cause and not an effect. There is current an idea which receives its support from weak fiction, cheap lecture platforms and even from shabby pulpits the idea that men are the creatures of circumstances and environment, that evil tendencies are the result of the choice of a great-grandfather. Tom must learn that he is in the world for the purpose of overcoming heredity, breaking thru environment and putting circumstances under foot, and he must stand as a man, not a thing. I take great stock in a boy who is courageous enough to assert his principles in spite of "the fellows;" such a boy is a power and not a piece of putty.

Knowing that he is power, Tom must be taught to be independent and to earn his own way. And this applies to girls as well as to boys. I detest tramps, rich and poor. When Tom has learned to be independent himself he will respect others who have to earn their own way in the world. Again, Tom's teachers must teach him that he being a power and independent, should not forget the law of independence. That is why I like the public school. It brings future citizens together on an equal footing. It is a good thing for broadcloth and homespun to sit side by side: it doesn't hurt homespun and it does broadcloth good.

Tom's most effective teacher, when the boy is between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, is the man for whom he works and who pays him money. Here Tom's parents have a responsibility. They must choose his employer wisely. Finally, I would say, never give Tom up. If his teacher is cross and sarcastic. take up a missionary collection and send that teacher to the north pole. Remember that some boys do not mature until they are twenty-five and some men have astonished the world at fifty. The stupid-boy of to day may be the valedictorian at college, the statesman of future years. It sometimes takes the Almighty Father eighty years to get a good grip upon a human soul. Therefore, I say, Tom's teachers at home and in society should never give up.

Paul Hull; writing of the Jacksonville (I11.) Institution for the Blind, in the Chicago Inter Ocean, tells the story of two blind boys who were overheard exchanging views about heaven: "What would you like to see first when you get there?" said the first, I'd like to see my mother," was the answer.

"I wouldn't. I'd like to see the days of the week."

Susie's grandmother had been scolding her. A few minutes later, Susie sat alone with her grandmother, playing with her kitten. She took the kitten in her arms and said: "Kitty, I wish one of us three was dead. 'Tisn't you, Kitty, and 'tisn't me, Kitty."

No American can live in England, even for a few months, without realizing that the whole theory and practice of human control is very different from what it is with us. If from England the visitor goes on to France the marked characteristics of English control are still more emphasized.

The English are a strong people-their present empire is a sufficient proof of this statement. They are frankly, directly masterful; and this masterful quality is most simply expressed in their attitude toward corporal punishment. Everywhere one is brought face to face with the national dependence on physical pain and discomfort as a means of correcting evil ways. Thus in the London Daily Telegraph of Sept. 3, 1897, one reads that Henry Bunce, aged 13, was charged at a London police court with stealing a water-can, value 2s. 6d. "Prisoner said he certainly broke into the house by forcing the back window catch, but all he did to the house was to wind the clocks. (Laughter.) Prisoner had been previously convicted, receiving six strokes with the birch. for stealing. He now pleaded guilty, and Mr. Bird reduced the charge to one of stealing, and ordered him twelve strokes with the birch." Again, from the Telegraph of September 21: "Walter Tucker, 9, school-boy, was charged with stealing a pair of tennis shoes. Prisoner was sentenced to receive eight strokes with the birch."

One reads such statements in all the papers; nor are the birchings confined to children in the police courts. Flogging was abolished in the United States navy half a century ago; but in the same London Telegraph for September 21, we read that, "A court martial was held yesterday on board the flagship " Victory" -for the trial of James Watkins--charged with being absent without leave--and with having struck his superior officer. Prisoner was sentenced to receive twenty-four cuts with the birch, then to be imprisoned for one year, and afterwards to be dismissed from her Majesty's service.

One does not need to go to the newspapers to realize this constant dependence of the English people on immediate physical reactions. One cannot walk ten blocks in London without being impressed with this pushing and pulling tendency of the common people; and if his walk take him through one of the tenement districts he feels that the parents have never heard of any treatment for children except that prescribed by Solomon. One might

say this is because London is a great city, but the traveler may walk about Paris for a week and never see a child struck or kicked.

In his last novel, Captains Courageous, Mr. Kipling has again summed up and expressed the whole English philosophy of control. The hero is Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled son of an American millionaire. We first meet him on an Atlantic liner on his way to "be finished in Europe." At this time he is "a slight, slimbuilt boy, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. His pasty, yellow complexion did not show well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution, bravado, and very cheap 'smartness' "' On the way he falls overboard and is picked up by a boat belonging to the schooner We're Here, of Gloucester, out on a four months' cruise. He demands He demands to be taken home but the captain does not believe his story and he has to remain. He is offered regular employment but he refuses it and so he suffers forcible indoctrination in seamanship, his first lesson taking the form of a knock-down blow, instantly productive of one of "them hemmeridges" that are warrented to clear the head.

In this spirit his instruction is inflexibly continued. Teachings and admonitions are alike convincingly emphasized by severe but dispassionate thrashings with a knotted rope, and Harvey soon discovers that it is his immediate personal interest to apply himself cheerfully to the performance of whatever duties may be assigned him by his master. "The same smartness that led him to take such advantage of his mother made him very sure that no

one on the boat would stand the least nonsense." The thorogoing reformation of his character dates from the moment when this conviction becomes implanted in his mind. When restored to his parents at the close of the cruise, Harvey Cheyne is a frank, resolute, even-tempered youth, inured to hardships, trained to obedience, and proud of his ability to earn his own living.

This form of control is reduced to a working system and dignified by tradition and noble associations in the great public schools of Etou, Harrow and Rugby. Thomas Arnold counted on the "fagging system" of Rugby "as the key-stone of his whole government. When a liberal journal made an attack on corporal punishment, he replied: "I know well of what feeling this is the expression; it originates in that proud spirit of personal independence, which is neither reasonable nor Christian-but essentially barbarian. It visited Europe with all the evils of chivalry, and is thaeatening us now with those of Jacobinism. At an age when it is almost impossible to find a true manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornament of youth and the best promise of a noble manhood?"

When corporal punishment is common, and grounded in a generally accepted philosophy of control it does not carry with it that disgrace which attaches to it where any form of physical assault is considered as not only painful but as personally insulting. Hence we find that in England this form of control is not lacking in elements that may appeal to taste and be used to give brightness and color to literature and art. Tom Brown at Rugby will occur to every one; and in Kenneth Graham's Golden Age we have a charming treatment of the physical give and take solution of human relations in a well-to-do English home. Or take the review in a current English paper where Mr. G. W. Stevens quotes Elizabeth Turner's child's lyric:

"Mama had ordered Ann, the maid,

Miss Caroline to wash;

And put on with her clean white frock

A handsome muslin sash.

But Caroline began to cry,

For what you cannot think: She said, 'Oh, that's an ugly sash; I'll have my pretty pink.' Papa, who in the parlor heard Her make the noise and rout, That instant went to Caroline,

To whip her, ther's no doubt."

the current articles in to-day's Chronicle or Telegraph all express this distrust of activity that is carried on outside the shadow of the strong arm of a law that can be distinctly seen and felt if necessary. Or the current editorials on our recent elections illustrate the point as well. To read them one would imagine that America, light. fickle, with no fixed policy, and no vissble power of compulsion, was on the brink of anarchy. England's attitude towards us is very much like our attitude toward Brazil or Guatamala.

Now this attitude toward law, with its accompaniment of possible pain, has been characteristic of the great conquering nations of all time. All that has been said of England would have been even more true of ancient Rome; and wherever a great work is accomplished through a long period of time we cannot doubt that the agent working in harmony with the constitution of things. Capital punishment then, using the phrase with its largest content, would seem to have its place and function. What is it?

The studies made on children's attitude toward punishment during these past four or five years go to show that young children accept physical reactions as a perfectly natural thing against which they teel no particular revolt. Their own tendency is to impose physical pain as a means of bringing things or people into line with what they think ought to be done. Farther, all our studies on undisciplined and spoiled children go to show that a young child finds at first the conditions of sound mental and moral growth only in absolutę obedience to a will and a direction superior to his own. But from the earliest age the child is also struggling for self direction and if he is prevented from following this natural development we have as a result either the helpless and dependent human being, or the revolutionist with his hand. turned against all law. So with a primitive people, all history teaches that they find their best conditions of growth in strong paternal rule, backed by immediate physical pain. An unprejudiced observer cannot be brought into immediate relations with the lower classes of our negro population without feeling that any one of them would find his best condititions for mental and moral growth in a state of immediete dependence on a wise and sympathetic superior. If a child or a primitive people misses this normal stage in its growth we have the hoodlums of our American cities, or the lower type of citizens in our Spanish-American republics. In these cases we must apply the rule, Better late than never. Spoiled people may find their salvation, even late in life, in a strong hand backed by immediate and painful penalties.

These, then, are cases where direct physical rule seems desirable: with young children; with primitive peoples; and with certain types of spoiled people. It will be noted that these are exactly the cases with which Mr. Kipling deals, the neglected and spoiled son of a New York millionaire, the English "gutter devil" and the Egyptain fellaheen, with his centuries of oppression and misuse behind him, and in him. But the trouble comes when we take it for granted that this is the whole secret and science of government. It seems to me that this mistake marks the whole attitude of the English people toward control. All sane and healthy living must certainly start in absolue and willing obedience to some superior human power; without this start, no sound growth. But it is equally true that from the first each individual must not only be allowed, but encouraged to struggle for and to attain self-direction;-that is to say, a direction that is in accord with the constitution of the universe, his own nature and human society being two elements of that universe. Absolute control, backed by prompt physical penalties will give the foundations for healthy growth; it will form a great army; it will conquer and govern provinces; it will at least hold in subjection the criminal and spoiled classes, and it will sometimes cure them. But if it is too long continued it will destroy initiative, crush out artistic development and ultimately brutalize a people. These conditions have not been realized in England, but the national tendency seems to me in that direction.

Meantime the new movement that is centering about the free common schools seems destined to work a great change in Eng. lish public opinion. In the past England has never believed in the free general education of her people. Not until 1870 did she establish schools under the direction and control of government; and not until 1892 did she make elementary education free.

With the expansion of the suffrage, however, all parts of the country, and especially the great municipalities, have made rapidly increasing grants for the support of elementary education: and just now all England is facing the problem of free secondary

education. The influence of the free schools is already seen in an attempt on the part of the lower classes of society to realize existence as individuals as well as parts of society. These first attempts at self-direction and expression will be rude and often vulgar, but an American must believe that in the long run they will justify themselves.

When we turn to America the conditions are all very different. The free life of our early settlers developed an extreme confidence. in self-direction; our revolutionary struggle with England strengthened this confidence into a conviction which is formulated in our Declaration of Independence. With plenty of room for growth we passed the period of swaggering young manhood, from 1800 to 1840, without having our self confidence properly tempered by a large and cosmopolitan experience. Then came the anti-slavery agitation with its vehement denunciations of the whip and personal degradation, and its soul-stirring orations on our black brother and human equality. Whatever ideas of direct control and compulsory obedience might have survived these national experiences have been still further obscured by the varied immigration with which our country has been flooded since 1840. The German has had no respect for the Irishman's ideas of public control, and the Irishman has rejected the German's traditions. As a consequence of our development we have accepted as the basis of control in the family and school, and even in our relations with our Indians and negroes a variety of doctrinaire belief often better fitted to the society that we hope will exist in 2098 than to the society that actually exists in 1898.

Thus it has come about that the difference between the social faiths of England and America is profound. With us the individual is the centre of the universe; we believe in him; we trust him; and this trust rests in a deeper optimism, in a belief in the essential rightness and sanity of the universe. To slightly change Lincoln's saying;-"We believe that some of the people will go wrong all of the time, and all of the people will go wrong sometimes,--but all of the people cannot go wrong all of the time." This belief must inevitably produce a state of unstable equilibrium among the molecules of our commonwealth; and the Englishman watching us grows giddy, for he has not in the bottom of his heart that profound faith in the rightness of human nature in which the American rests.

But in this general optimism have we not carried our theories of physical inviolability so far that it has unfitted us for dealing intelligently with backward people and diseased classes? Our lowest class of negroes, our lazy and habitual tramps, and our city hoodlums are the hardest problem we have to meet. We have a lot of work in our country that could be very effectively done by Sergeant Whatisname. Our children especially suffer from this lack of discrimination on our part. Freedom that comes too soon, before the individual is ready for it, is ruin; and we in America have to learn when in the advance from savagery to civilization, from childhood to manhood, the admonitions of experience need the back ing of physical force.

If England's danger lies in the direction of a force that may weaken artistic power, destroy initiative and ultimately brutalize a people, ours lies in the direction of a lawless individualism that precociously ripens children, develops hoodlums, and leaves us powerless to deal with the infinitely difficult social and political problems of the undeveloped peoples within and all about our borders. Extracts from an article in Education.