THE PUBLIC PEDAGOGUE.
MAKING WISE MEN BY MACHINERY.
IF I might presume to tender a few words of advice
to so
high and mighty a personage as the president of the
University of Texas, I should recommend that he carefully
study the Solomonic proverb: “Even a fool, when
he holdeth his peace, is counted wise; and he that
shutteth
his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.” In
other words, never pull your trigger until sure you're
loaded; for while a fizzle causes the unskillful to laugh, it
cannot but “make the judicious grieve.” Every
man capable of tracing effects to their efficient causes,
who chanced to hear or read President George T.
Winston's address before the Association of
Superintendents and Principals of Public Schools, must
have sighed in bitterness of soul, “Poor Old
Texas!” These gentlemen, assembled for the
ostensible purpose of enhancing their proficiency by the
interchange of ideas, had a right to expect valuable
instruction from the lips of a man who occupies the post
of honor in the chief educational institute of the State;
but were regaled with a cataclysm of misinformation,
precipitated from an amorphous mind, which seemed to
be a compromise between Milton's unimaginable chaos
and that “land of darkness, as darkness itself, and
where the light was as darkness.” That such an
address could proceed from the president of a State
University is most remarkable; that it should be received
as an oracle by the men at whose feet sit the youth of
Texas is simply astounding. I read the address in no
unfriendly or hypercritic spirit, for none rejoice more than
I in whatsoever contributes, even a little, to the luster of
the Lone Star. Every laurel won by Texas in the forum or
the field is worn by all her citizens; her every failure in
the arena of the world is shame to all her sons. President
Winston evidently appreciated the importance of the
occasion but was unable to rise to it. Instead of an
address at once philosophic and practical, conveying to
his auditors a clear concept of duty and the best method
of discharging it, he indulged in a rambling country
lyceum discourse, wherein worthless conclusions were
drawn by main strength and awkwardness from false
premises, interlarded with glaring misstatements and seasoned
with Anglomaniacal slop. It is not pleasant to
think of hundreds of bright young minds being molded by
a man who is a living vindication of Sheridan, long
accused of libeling nature in his character of Mrs.
Malaprop. “What,” says Pope, “must be
the priest when the monkey is a god?” And what,
the taxpayers of Texas well may ask, must be the day-drudges of an educational system wherein a Winston
occupies the post of honor? Where Texas found the
party whom she has made president of her boasted
university, I cannot imagine, but he talks like an
Anglicized Yankee—one of those fellows who try to
conceal the cerulean hue of their equators by wearing the
British flag for a belly-band. It is but mournful
consolation to reflect that the chiefs of pretentious
educational institutes elsewhere have proven by their
parroting that they have as little conception of the
social contract and true position of the pedagogue in
“the scheme of things,” as has our own 'varsity
president. Texas' educational system is probably up
to the average, and President Winston as wise as
many other pompous “gerund-grinders” who
look into leather
spectacles and see nothing, yet imagine that, like the
adventurer in the Arabian tale, they are gazing upon all
the wealth of the world; but that is no reason why we
should continue to waste the public revenue on Lagado
professors who would extract sunbeams from cucumbers
and calcine ice into gunpowder. While nothing short of a
perusal of the complete text of the oration in question
can give an adequate ides of how much folly a 'varsity
president can pump through his face in a given period, its
salient features can be summed up in a brief paragraph:
“The schoolmaster represents the two
greatest factors in modern progress—education and
organization. These two factors are really one, for
education is a means to
organization. Power unorganized is no longer power.
Organization means strength and progress; individualism
means weakness and decay. The English people have
risen by organized effort to the mastery of the globe.
They have created the cheapest and most efficient
government, combining in the highest degree individual
liberty and national power. They have created the
greatest store of things contributing to the welfare,
happiness and refinement of humanity, and in education,
literature, science and art have lifted humanity upon the
highest plane of civilization. The Irish race is deficient in
the faculty of organization, and will be crushed out with
the Indian and Negro, by the more highly organized races.
Football requires better organization than do other games,
a higher order of intellect, hence its popularity with the
people. The best universities may be expected to furnish
the best football teams. The superior organization of the
North enabled it to surpass the South in peace and crush
it in war. The public schoolteacher, being the chief
factor in organization, to him must be given the credit for
the quick recovery of the South from the ravages of civil
war. He is the chief power in things material as well as
in matters intellectual. He alone can introduce new
systems of thought and action in any province of human
endeavor.”
Having thus seined President Winston's
rhetorical sea, let us examine our catch and determine
what is valuable food and what mere jelly-fish. That the
schoolmaster is a very important factor in the social
system there can be no question. Let him have all the
honor to which he is entitled; but let him not seek to
appropriate that which belongs to others. The
pedagogue is not the fount of wisdom: he is but the
pipe—of large or small caliber as the case may be—
through which the wisdom of others flows to fertilize the
intellectual fields. How much, prithee, have
all the public pedagogues of America—including the
president of the Texas 'varsity—added to the world's stock of
wisdom during the last decade? Does it begin to dawn
upon President Winston that there is another very important
factor in the world's progress, viz., the Newtons,
Bacons, Koperniks, Watts, Edisons, Shakespeares,
Burkes, Keplers, Platos, Jeffersons and others who, by
patient research or the outpourings of super-gifted minds
have furnished forth the pedagogue's stock-in-trade?
Science and Art, Philosophy and Religion—all that
contributes to man's welfare, material or spiritual,
originated in obscure closets and caves, in the open
fields, beneath the star-domed vault of night, and during
all these ages have received chief furtherance from
individual genius or application, the schools but recording
the progress made, spreading abroad more or less
skillfully, the sacred fire wrested from Heaven by
intellectual Titans. Still the pedagogue may well be
proud of his profession, for it is a privilege to think—or
even think at—the thoughts of men of genius, to officiate
as their messengers to mankind. Let these royal heralds
flourish their birchrods in every bypath, cry “The
King!” and thereby get much honor. Winston says
that education and organization are really the same,
because one is a means to the other. How that may be I
know not. An avowal of love is usually a means to a
baby; still it were a work of supererogation to put diapers
on a proposal of marriage. Organization is ever education
of a certain sort; but education is not always
organization. Many of the world's wisest have stood,
like Byron,
among men, but not
of
them—“In a shroud of thoughts which were not their
thoughts.”
Oxen organized in teams may accomplish
more than working single; but you cannot yoke Pegasus
and a plow-horse—Bellerophon's winged mount
peremptorily refuses
to be “organized” and turn rectilinear furrows,
but plunges through Time and Space in an orbit of its
own making—often mistaken by the patient organizers for
a lawless comet, its appearance a dire portent. You
cannot drive Shakespeare and Charles Hoyt in double
harness, nor make the mock-bird and night-hawk sing in
harmony.
The public pedagogue does not go out every
morning before breakfast and, with ferula for
Archimedean lever and Three R's for fulcrum, prize open
the gates of day. The organization of infants of every
conceivable degree of intellectuality into classes, and
their formal elevation through successive
“grades” by means of cunningly devised
educational jack-screws or block-and-tackle, does not
constitute the complete dynamics of the universe,
President Winston to the contrary, notwithstanding.
Knowledge must exist somewhere before there be any
pedagogue to impart it; and though, under the name of
Truth, it hide in Ymir's Well, those whose souls are
athirst therefore will assuredly find it, though denied all
mechanical furtherance. Education is simply the
acquirement of useful information, it matters not how nor
where nor when. Deprive any man—even a 'varsity
president—of all knowledge but that obtained in the
schools and he were helpless as an infant abandoned in
mid-ocean. He could not so much as distinguish
between peas and beans, between dogs and wolves, by
the descriptions furnished by naturalists. That man who
has lived to learn wisely and well has reached the Ultima
Thule of terrestrial knowledge, the ne plus ultra
of human understanding. More can no college professor
or 'varsity president impart. If he know not this he is
uneducated, though he be graduate of every university
from Salamanca to the Sorbonne, and from Oxford to
Austin.
Organization connotes mutual
interdependence of the
component parts, limitation of individualism, the
circumscription of personal liberty. To a certain extent
this is advantageous to man—without it civilization, human
progress, were impossible; but to draw a line between wise
use and abuse were a task of some difficulty. President
Winston assures us that the British Government is the
best in the world, yet it is a chaos compared to the
organization of the Russian autocracy. Because we find
beneficial that organization which makes cooperation
possible, would he carry it to the extent of communism?
Because concentration of capital reduces cost of
production, does he approve of that organization which
enables trusts to juggle prices? When organization has
reached that point where one-third of our wealth-producers must stand idle because denied the privilege of
producing the wherewithal to feed and clothe and house
themselves, it might be well for 'varsity presidents to
apply the soft pedal to their pæan of praise and inquire
diligently whether it be possible to get entirely too much
of a good thing. Too many accept St. Paul's concession
of a little wine for the stomach's sake for license to
become sots.
Thomas Carlyle, who could see almost as far
into a millstone as the average 'varsity president, was of
the opinion that the tendency to ever more compact
organization was transforming both education and
religion into farces, blighting the spiritual and intellectual
life of man and precipitating in the world of industry the
most important and complex question with which
political economists had ever been called upon to deal.
That was nearly seventy years ago, when vast
organization of capital had just begun—when the age of
machinery, both for the grinding of corn and the
inculcation of knowledge, was but nascent. Hear him
growl:
“Though mechanism, wisely contrived,
has done much for
man, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been the
chief source of his worth or happines
s. . . . We
have machines for education. Instruction, that
mysterious communing of Wisdom and Ignorance, is no
longer an indefinable, tentative process, requiring a study
of individual aptitude, and a perpetual variation of means
and methods to attain the same end; but a secure,
universal, straightforward business to be conducted in
the gross, by proper mechanism, with such intellect as
comes to han
d. . . . Philosophy, Science, Art,
Literature, all depend on machinery. No Newton, by
silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world
by the falling of an apple; but some quite other than
Newton stands in his Museum, his Scientic{sic}
Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts,
digesters and galvanic piles imperatively `interrogates
nature'—who, however, shows no haste to answer. In
defect of Raphaels, and Angelos, and Mozarts, we have
Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture, Music; whereby
the languishing spirit of Art may be strengthened by the
more generous diet of a Public Kitche
n. . . . Hence
the Royal and Imperial Societies, the Bibliotheques,
Glypthotheques, Technotheques, which front us in all
capital cities, like so many well-finished hives, to which it
is expected the stray agencies of Wisdom will swarm of
their own accord, and hive and make honey!
. . .
Men have grown mechanical in head and heart as well as
in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavor and
in natural force of any kind. Not for internal perfection,
but for external combination and arrangement, for
institutions, constitutions—for Mechanism of one sort or
another, do they hope and struggl
e. . . . Science
and Art have derived only partial help from the culture or
manuring of institutions—often have suffered
damage.”
Of course Carlyle may have been mistaken;
still the fact
that since he uttered his warning the world has not
produced one man of genius except in the department of
mechanics—that intellectually the last half of the present
century is to the first half as “moonlight unto
sunlight and as water unto wine”; that religion is
becoming even more materialistic, patriotism passing and
poetry dying or already dead; that millionaires are
multiplying while the legion of idle labor grows larger,
suggests that important inferences may be drawn from
this ever-increasing organization of powers spiritual and
material; and, like Quintius Fixlien, I “invite the
reader to draw them.”
If “the English race” be indeed
“rising to the mastery of the globe,” there is no
cause for immediate alarm, for, at his present rate of
progress, it will be some ages yet before John Bull
succeeds in stealing it all. Nations, like individuals, have
their youth, their lusty manhood and their decline; and
there is every indication that Britain has passed the
meridian of her power, while Russia and America, her
equals in the arena of the world, still find their shadows
falling toward the west. Persia, Assyria, Rome and Spain
have aspired to the lordship of the world; and each in
turn has been brought low by that insidious power that
for a century has been draining the iron from the blood of
England—the love of luxury, the subjection of Glory to
Greed. If history be “philosophy teaching by
example,” the lion of Britain is senescent, if not
already dead and stuffed with sawdust; but let the world
look well to that savage brute known as the Russian
bear. No: England is not “master of the
globe,” nor can she ever be; for her home territory is
trifling and distant provinces are a source of weakness in
war.
It were idle to discuss with a confirmed
Anglomaniac the respective merits of the British and
American governments. It may be that the former is
“cheapest,” despite
the maintenance of an established church, a great army
and navy and a sovereign who, with her worthless
spawn, costs the taxpayers $3,145,000 per annum,
while our president requires less than one-sixtieth of that
sum. England does not pension the adult orphan children
of men who sprained their moral character in an effort to
dodge the draft, nor does Queen Victoria sell government
bonds to banker syndicates on private bids; hence I will
have no controversy with the learned Theban on the
question of economy. The British subject may enjoy
greater “individual liberty” than does the
American sovereign, for aught I am prepared to prove.
True, he is taxed to support a church founded by that
eminent Christian Apostles Henry VIII, and whose next
fidei defensor will be the present worshipful
Prince of Wales; is represented in but one branch of
Parliament and has no voice in the selection of his chief
executive officer. If the sovereign and hereditary house
of lords refuse to do his bidding, he must grin and bear it,
while we can “turn the rascals out”—even if we
turn a more disreputable crew of chronic gab-traps and
industrial cut-throats in. He enjoys one privilege which is
denied us, much to the dissatisfaction of our
Anglomaniacs, that of purchasing titles of nobility; but
we can acquire a life tenure of the title of Judge by
arbitrating a horse-trade or officiating one term as justice of
the peace, while by assiduous bootlicking we may, like
Rienzi Miltiades Johnsing, obtain a lieutenant-colonelcy—
or even a gigadier-brindleship—on the gilded staff of some
2 x 4 governor, and disport in all the glorious pomp and
circumstance of war at inaugural balls or on mimic battle-fields; hence honors are easy.
. . . . . .
That the Irish race is deficient in the
organizing faculty is a great discovery, and I would
advise President Winston
to apply for a patent. John Bull will prove himself
ungrateful indeed if he neglects to pension him for having
demonstrated that those Irish organizations which, for
half a century have kept his public servants looking under
their beds o' nights for things neither ornamental nor
useful, were mere Fata Morganas, Brocken specters or
disease of the imagination. Winston has evidently been
misled by a mere than Boeotian ignorance blithely footing
it hand-in-hand with a vivid anti-Celtic imagination. He
does not know that Ireland was the seat of learning and
the expounder of law, both human and divine, when the
rest of Europe was a wide-weltering chaos in which
shrieked the demons Ignorance and Disorder. He was
oblivious of the fact that the American people—the
master organizers of the age—are far more Irish than
English. You can scarce scratch an American babe of the
third generation without drawing Celtic blood. Strange
that the only Federal regiment which did not go to pieces
at the Battle of Bull Run, though occupying the hottest
part of the field—was composed of these very Irishmen
who are incapable of organization! McClellan, the
greatest military organizer of modern times—though by no
means the ablest commander—was of Celtic extraction,
as was the Duke of Wellington, as are the men at the
head of the British and American armies to-day.
Were President Winston better informed he
would not talk so glibly of what the “English
race” has done for literature. No Englishman of pure
Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Saxon-Norman lineage has ever
reached the front rank in the great Republic of Letters. In
Art and Science, in Oratory and Music—even in War and
Commerce—they have had to content themselves with
walking well to the rear of the band-wagon.
Shakespeare was of Welsh descent, but whether of
Celtic or Cimbric stock it were difficult
to determine. The Cimbri and Celts are both very
ancient races. A remnant of the former is found in
Wales, while the survivors of the latter are the Irish and
Scotch Highlanders. Northern France and Wales have
strong Celtic contingents. Byron, “Rare” Ben
Jonson, Christopher North, Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift,
Lawrence Sterne and Louis Stevenson were Celts by
blood. Scott, Burns, Carlyle and Macaulay were Scots of
Celtic extraction. Tom Moore, Brinsley Sheridan and
Edmund Burke were Irishmen, as are Balfe and Sullivan,
the musical composers. Disraeli was a Jew. The
genealogy of Pope and Tennyson remain to be traced.
That the original Duke of Marlborough was an
Englishman by birth and breeding “goes without
saying.” He acted like one. No Celtic commander
could have robbed his dead soldiers. In the province of
belles-lettres John Bull can at least claim Alfred Austin,
his present poet-laureate, and Oscar Wilde, the dramatic
decadent. Dr. Jameson is England's military lion and
President George T. Winston of the Texas 'varsity her
representative of learning! The English proper are but
“a nation of shopkeepers,” and the greatest
shops are not conducted by Anglo-Saxons. England's
great manufacturers are Scots, her merchant princes are
Irishmen, her leading bankers are Jews and her reigning
family an indifferent breed of Low Dutch. The Romans
overran England, but unable to subjugate either Scotland
or Ireland, abandoned “perfidious Albion,” as a
worthless conquest. Everybody took a turn at robbing it
whenever it had anything worth carrying off, until the
Norman buccaneers appropriated it bodily and reduced
the Saxons to serfdom. By amalgamation with the
inferior race they produced the Tudors, who gave them
'An'some 'Arry and a Virgin (?) Queen. Then the Scotch
Stuarts took a turn at ruling and robbing England, and
were followed by the
religious bigots and witch-burners. The French ruled it
awhile through their puppets and were succeeded by the
Dutch, who held it in such contempt that they would not
permit its language to be spoken at court. They are still
milking it for more than three millions per annum, with an
extra pull at the udder whenever one of the seventy-odd
descendants of the Sovereign concludes to found a
family. The Scotch, the Welsh and Dutch enabled England
to enslave and plunder Ireland, and upon this meat
John Bull, the J. Cæsar of pawnbrokers, is growing
great.
I much fear that President Winston studied
sports under the tuition of Referee Earp, else he could
have scarce given a decision to the favorite of the college
campus. Football requires neither the intellect nor the
perfect organization which is a sine qua non to
success in our great “national game.” Its chief
requisites are long hair, leathery lungs and abnormally
developed legs. The game owes its popularity to the
average boy's predilection for the brutal, his inherent
animalism. Football has for ages been a favorite game
with savages, while baseball is a product of civilization. I
am not decrying football—I incline to the view that an
occasional rough-and-tumble scrapping match in which
there is imminent danger of black eyes, and even of
broken bones, is good for a boy I simply point out that as
an intellectual game it not only ranks far below chess,
billiards and baseball, but does not rise to a parity with
pugilism. It is a mistake to assume that an intellectual
divertisement must be popular with an intellectual people.
The highest culture is but a film cast over a fathomless
sea of savagery. The most learned of the Greeks, the
most cultured of the Romans gloried in brutal games, and
to-day a dog fight, a slugging match or even a college
football game is relished by the Titan of intellect as
keenly as by the Bowery tough.
I cannot imagine where President Winston
absorbed the idea that lack of organization has been the
curse of the South. It may surprise him to be told that in
ante-bellum days it was not only the chief repository of
culture, but possessed a fair proportion of the nation's
wealth. The South has ever been chiefly an agricultural
country, and will so remain despite the frantic efforts of
enthusiasts to subvert natural laws. Not until the
resources of our soil are in great measure exhausted, or
increase of population forces people from the fields, can
the South become a great manufacturing country. Such
is the lesson of history, which we can only ignore to our
loss. Wealth accumulates at large manufacturing and
trade centers as it cannot elsewhere, and naturally seeks
to further its interest by organization. The concentration
of forces, intellectual and industrial, on that stupendous
scale which has won President Winston's admiration, is a
post-bellum development both North and South. The
greatest of American organizers have been Southern
men. Washington and Jefferson were types of the
individualism which is supposed to have been our bane;
yet one organized the Continental Army which won our
independence, the other organized the Federal
Government. It is not true that the Southern
Confederacy was crushed by superior organization.
Better disciplined troops than the veterans of Lee and
Jackson never faced a battery. “Hardee's
Tactics,” one of the most highly esteemed of
military manuals, was the work of a Confederate general.
The assault on the heights of Gettysburg has become
historic as much because of the wonderful organization
displayed by the Confederate troops as because it
marked the supreme hour of a nation's agony. It was the
only time in the history of this world when an assaulting
column was greeted with cheers of admiration by the
soldiers who stood to receive the shock.
That fact alone should suffice to make an American
college president proud of his country—should purge him
of every atribilarious taint of Anglomaniacism. Only once
have the sons of men in any age or clime displayed a
grander heroism than did those who hurled themselves
against the heights of Gettysburg, and that when the
Federals silenced their guns to cheer the dauntless
courage of their foe. It is not my present purpose to
refight the Civil War, and trace every effect to its
efficient cause; I have simply undertaken to make good
my original proposition—that President Winston is, as
Thersites says of Patroclus, “a fool positive,”
and should, therefore, hold his peace.
The schoolteacher has doubtless played no
unimportant part in the rehabilitation of the South; but he
should not set up as Autocrat of the Universe on a salary
of $40 a month, and burden the Asses' Bridge with the
idea that he “maketh all things, and without him
was nothing made that is made.” His ferula may be
an Aaron's rod which buds and blossoms; but it does not
bear sufficient fruit to furnish a hungry world with
necessary aliment. We still crave manna from Heaven
and grapes from Hebron. The public pedagogue does not
make the laws of trade. His province is to interpret
them; and proud may he be of his labor if his
protégés do not find it necessary to
forget, at the very gateway of a commercial career, that
he ever had a name and habitation on the earth. Nor
does he frequently alarm the plodding natives by the
“introduction of new systems of thought and
action.” Such “systems” do not spring
completely panoplied from the cerebrum of our
educational Jove, and stand about on one foot like a lost
goose, or country lad, awaiting an introduction. New
systems of thought and action are usually the growth of
ages, the seed often sown by men we hear not of.
When of such sudden development that they require a
formal
introduction, they are apt to be received with the scant
courtesy of a poor relation, the introducer reviled as a
crank or condemned as a heretic and crucified. Generally
speaking, the professional educator confines himself
pretty closely to his birch and his textbooks, being quite
content to propagate, as best he may, the ideas of
others. Neither the birch nor the text-book, it may be
well to remark, constitutes the world's stock of wisdom,
but only an incidental furtherance thereto—the key, as it
were, by which the treasure is more readily come at.
When the schoolmaster has put his pupil in possession of
the open sesame he considers his duty done—that he has
earned his provender. And perhaps he has. In this day
and age it is all that is expected of him, all that he is paid
for. He is not required to inculcate wisdom, which is
well; for that can no man do. He is not even expected to
impart much knowledge; but to put his pupil through a
course of mental calisthenics, miscalled education. But
even this is by no means to be despised. With mind
strengthened by exercise, even in a desert, and lungs
developed by football, the youth may be able to delve the
harder for knowledge when happily released from the
“gerund-grinder,” to pray the more lustily to the
immortal gods for understanding, which transmutes what
were else base metal into ingots of fine gold. There was
a time when more was expected of a teacher; but that
was before the application of labor-saving machinery to
spiritual matters; before colleges became known as
places “where coals are brightened and diamonds
are dimmed”—before it became customary to cast
potential Homers and Hannibals, Topsies and Blind Toms
into the same educational hopper, and hire some gabby-Holofernes from God knows where to manipulate the
mill. It was a time when men considered qualified to
teach declined to waste effort on numskulls, no matter
whose
brats they might be. It was a time when the fame of a
great, the honor of a good and the infamy of a bad man
were shared by their preceptors. Those were the days of
individualism which President Winston so much
deplores—the era which fashioned those men whom the
world for twenty centuries has been proud to hail as
masters. As the doctors have decided that all human
frailties are but diseases, I do not despair of our 'varsity
president. Some Theodorus may yet arise to “purge
him canonically with Anticryan hellebore,” and thus
clear out the perverse habit of his brain and make him a
man of as goodly sense as the rejuvenated Gargantua.
