A STRONG SERIES ESSENTIALS IN HISTORY Edited by Albert Bushnell Hart, LL. D., Professor of History, JUST PUBLISHED ESSENTIALS IN MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY By Samuel Bannister Harding, Ph. D., Professor of European History, Indiana University This work begins with a survey of the world from the fall of the Western Empire to the year 800. From the latter date there is given an account of the development of the various important countries which have influenced the progress of civilization. The author emphasizes the fact that medieval civilization includes some of the great principles of ancient government, especially the tenacious concept of a world empire. At the very outset Professor Harding attacks and solves what are, for young people, the three most difficult problems in mediæval history the feudal state, the church, and the rivalry between the empire and the church. The maps and illustrations are particularly noteworthy. Not only are they numerous, but they have been prepared and collected with unusual care. PREVIOUSLY ISSUED ESSENTIALS IN ANCIENT HISTORY By Arthur M. Wolfson, Ph. D., First Assistant in History, $1.50 ESSENTIALS IN ENGLISH HISTORY By Albert Perry Walker, A. M., Master in History, English High School, Boston, Mass. ESSENTIALS IN AMERICAN HISTORY By Albert Bushnell Hart, LL D., Professor of History, Harvard University VOL. IX. FROM KINDERGARTEN TO COLLEGE JANUARY, 1906 IMAGINATION IN EDUCATION CARL HOLLIDAY, M. A., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, ALABAMA STATE NORMAL SCHOOL AS one looks back through history it would seem that the chief purpose of education has ever been and continues to be the preservation of man's normal condition. By this I mean to say that the conscious or unconscious effort has been at all times to develop the human faculties in just such proportions as are best for man's earthly and eternal welfare. Not that the exact proportion has ever been attained; but the trend has in every age been in such a direction. Thus, doubtless, the first great epoch in the purposeful education of man concerned itself with his mental development, and that alone. In those early days he probably was a creature more of instinct than of reason. His body needed but little attention; the earthly in him was too strong as it was. The up-lifting of the mental man was the all-in-all. Of course, previous to the Christian era, there was a certain amount of intentional moral training, but, with the exception of the Hebrew race, no highly civilized people of the ancient days made it the predominant trait of man's development. Hence, the cultivated Greek became a philosopher, who, if not indeed an unbeliever in all religion, at least reached his religious conclusions, not through emotions or belief in inspiration, but through processes of subtle reasoning. So it was with the cultured Roman who, giving up his manifold gods, fell back upon the admirable mental powers which were his and believed in no divinity. Such, then, I should say, was the first notable step in man's conscious endeavors No. 5 to educate himself-the purposeful training of the purely mental man. But, with the beginning of the Christian era, it was seen that the moral man was degenerating, and history strongly substantiated this view as taken by the early fathers of the church. Men were indeed lifted mentally from barbarism; the culture of the moment had not been equalled by that of any previous stage of the world's growth; architecture had made Greece and Rome centers of majestic beauty; sculpture reached an excellence unsurpassed to this day; literature had touched the ideal. And, yet, amid all this mental perfection, the wickedness of Rome rose as a stench unto Heaven. Licentiousness, debauchery reveled in halls of grandeur; corruption throttled public and private life; the empire, strong it seemed, as the eternal hills, was even then, because of the rottenness of its individual members, tottering before its eternal downfall. Then it was that the doctrine of the man Jesus was spread abroad: To know God is wisdom. The trend of educational endeavors began to change. Through the era of the first Christian centuries with its consecrated saints and self-torturing hermits, on through the Dark Ages with their church monarchy, on into the beginning of the Renaisance, the education of the moral man gradually lifted itself above the merely mental. Then it was that the whole world began to think upon religion. Martin Luther made the German universities a seething crater of theological strifes; Oxford and Cambridge became more like churches than schools. Students spent more time in prayer and praise than in the study of the things of this earth. Then came the Puritan, the result of an overbalanced training of the moral man, with a religion so stern, so pitiless that the mental man was allowed to live, only because he was the servant of the moral man. Looking upon the old records with their strange names of Praise-God Barebones, and Fight-the-Good-Fight-of-Faith, looking upon such distorted productions as the Bay Psalm Book and the New England Primer, looking back upon that God-dreading code of Blue Laws, we are forced to the conclusion that, however vain the efforts, the second great stage in man's education was the purposeful endeavor to train the moral faculties. Today in what period do we move? I should say that this is the era of the training of the physical man. Without doubt, the world of today is, as a whole, far more cultured than at any previous age of its existence. Moreover, few men will deny that, if it is not really better morally at this moment, it has never in any other era been so well educated morally. It may not follow the precepts of righteousness; but never before have these precepts been so widely known and acknowledged. But can we say that the modern man is physically the equal of the primitive man? It is extremely doubtful. For, in the endeavor to strengthen the mental and moral capacities of the human being, his body has been allowed to dwindle into weakness. Aye, there have been times in the history of the race when it was considered righteousness to mortify the flesh and to reduce it to nothingness. And scarcely a century has passed since the day when the typical scholar was a being of vast brain and piety but of lank and sickly body. Now, education, seeing the unmistakable trend toward physical degeneracy, again took up the battle for what might be called the "normality" of man. In the nineteenth century our present great movement for physical training was born. The gymnasium became an important factor in college life; calisthenics obtained a place in the curriculum of every progressive school; the day of the bloodless book-worm had departed. Later came the idea of manual training. The world demanded something besides thinking prodigies, and the child was now taught, not only to remember and reason, but to do. This, it would seem, is the present stage of the world's growth. The main cry of today is "Save the child's body." If you save his body, his mind and soul will be saved. Manual training has come to the rescue that the muscles may yet remain under implicit obedience to the brain. There is not a thing in any manual training laboratory that could not be made far more quickly by machinery; but machinery is the most hostile enemy of the preservation of the physical man that has ever existed. Indeed, so much attention is given today to the physical phase of education that the outside world hesitates. Many are they who agree with the cynic's description of the modern school curriculum: "Birdcalls, yawps, hoots, barks, cackles (anent nature study), 10 minutes; penmanship, 5 minutes; effects of alcohol, narcotics, Washington pie, and strong cigars, 55 minutes; arithmetic, 10 minutes; boxmaking, cutting, pasting, ripping, painting and kalsomining, 45 minutes; geography, 5 minutes." But the pendulum of life has ever swung from one extreme to another, and when the time comes in which all things are so equally apportioned that the mighty pendulum shall cease to swing, we shall then know that the great clock of the universe has stopped forever. The mental, the moral, the physical, these three have been, so far, the paths of educational endeavor. I believe that the next great movement will be the effort to train the imagination. A great man without imagination is an impossibility. History has never shown one; history never will. The story of all time is but the record of men who saw visions and brought these visions to pass. No man is greater than his imagination; all men are somewhat smaller. For a man's ideals cannot be greater than he can imagine them to be, and no man can quite equal his ideals. And, yet, in spite of these indisputable facts, the educational system of today does almost nothing for the development of the imagination. In fact, if there is anything in which our public schools are highly successful, it is the annihilation of imagination. The average high school graduate is as devoid of imagination as he is of knowledge of his ignorance. In the small child first entering school this faculty is often very strong-so vivid indeed that, as a story-teller, he has few equals. But ask the sophisticated graduate to think out a story, imagine a beautiful picture, or even transport himself, in his mind's eye, to another land or to another condition of life, and he does it but crudely, if at all. How few studies are taught in an imaginative way. The modern methods of science study are absolutely deadly to the imagination of youth. As G. Stanley Hall has pointed out, in the elementary study of the moon, for instance, pupils are taught that it is a dead mass of material, globular in shape and so many thousand miles in diameter and so many thousand miles away; that it is supposed to be dry; that it has little or no atmosphere, and that it is believed to be absolutely dead. Aye, indeed, it is dead enough when such a teacher gets through with it. What a corpse to place before living, growing souls! Why do we not tell of its influence over the minds and souls of mortals here on earth-how it affects the feelings, how it has been the the abounding source of romance, music, painting, poetry, and legend, how man in former days called it the beautiful goddess and worshipped it, and how, today, as it shines far and wide through the silent night, it lifts man's thought to higher realms? We are not teaching to turn out encyclopædias; we are here to develop immortal souls. What, in the name of all that is sensible, have the diameter and the soil of the moon to do with the expansion of a child's soul? Nowhere is the imagination more needful than in the study of literature—and nowhere, one must believe, is it more often absent. Some of our larger universities, it would seem, have well-nigh given up the study of the soul of literature. Only philology and chronology are fit topics for Solomon Graduate, B. A., prospective Ph.D. Perhaps the story is far-fetched that tells of the student who answered most glibly questions on the philology of Horace's odes and yet was stumped when asked to name some of the poems; but it at least portrays the spirit of the present course. From the university this evil tendency has descended into the high school and is encroaching even upon the grammar school. Today, technicalities, details, receive most undue attention. A class is found studying one poem for days and weeks, when in the same time many poems. should be finished. Hence comes the edited classic overloaded with notes. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is left to the child's imagination or invention, unless it be the exquisite pleasure of seeing himself in the act of wringing the editor's neck. Editing scholars have even been known to boast of the incomparable number of thousands of notes and questions contained in their especial editions. So overburdened with commentaries have many of these volumes become that more radical teachers have gone to the other extreme, and reject texts with any notes whatever. In these undue philological, chronological, and historical endeavors we are injuring the cause of literature. The university professor teaches too often, not the eternal spirit of its substance, but the dry bones of its etymological skeleton. Hence the deadly struggle of the ancient languages for existence. They in whose hands these gems of old have been intrusted have forgotten, in their search for roots and comparisons, that literature is a living, breathing being; and the noble classic dies from lack of appreciative treatment. From the same source, too, comes that strange production of the unimaginative school teacher, correlation of studies with literature-a heinous crime, believe me, perpetrated on literature itself. What a glorious victim to the correlater is a beautiful poem: Take Hiawatha for instance. As Dr. Arnold Tompkins has pointed out, here is a wonderful opportunity. The teacher comes to the word "corn." Instantly the poem is deserted, and the pupils enter within the paradise of correlation. If the farmer plant so many grains of corn in so many rows, how many grains of corn does he plant? Arithmetic, you see! Next, what states are the greatest corn-producers? Geography! How is corn meal made? Industry! Corn, corn, corn! Write a composition on corn as a food supply. Now, let us sing Beulah Land: "We've reached the land of corn and wine." Next we will take up Cornwallis, and then we would better stop! And all this time the great Longfellow-great because his imagination was great-sleeps quietly in his grave in Mount Auburn, all ignorant that some heartless teacher is dissecting his beloved, but now lifeless, Hiawatha. Let us, in the name of all that is beautiful, sincere, and ennobling, study literature for its spirit, for its eloquence of beauty, for the reason that here is expressed well the thing which every man has felt but could not tell. Render unto Literature the things that are Literature's and unto Science the things that are Science's. What is the result of all this? To-day many teachers of literature feel called upon to defend the teaching of it. Defend the study of literature! The idea is the most novel of these novel times. Before the pyramids were, the world read and discussed books! Yes, we hear today of the brain-developing power of the classics, its disciplinary value, the training of the reasoning faculties, scientific methods, laboratory methods, methods, methods, methods! "A centipede was happy quite Until a frog in fun, Said, 'Pray which leg comes after which?' Let me declare that literature does not have to defend itself on such grounds. It has not the disciplinary powers of mathematics and science; it is not studied for the sake of logic; it is not a treasury of useful information. It appeals to the soul; it preserves the imagination. In this is its all-sufficient excuse for being. The educational movements of the past have left many ancient institutions of learning as dry as the dusty manuscripts of their libraries. Indeed, so common has this lack of imagination in such places become, that the public is really surprised when a college professor turns writer of fiction or inventor of a novel machine or idea. And, yet, if all the human faculties were properly developed in the public. school and college, the professor would be, in the nature of things, a model of powerful imagination. Holmes has said: "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll; Leave thy low-vaulted past; Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine out-grown shell by life's unresting sea." |