VIII
A Educational Fantasy
When I look back upon a half-century of wasted
life, I find that there are no years that accuse me of
neglected opportunity more poignantly than those
between five and twelve. If only I had had the
foresight then to apply myself with earnestness to the
tasks set before me! If only now I possessed, those
priceless stores of knowledge that I feel sure must
then have been pumped into me! That I must have
received abundant elementary instruction I feel
confident, although I do not in the least remember
receiving it. My purely academic activities at this
period remain wrapped in obscurity, while other
memories are lively enough. I distinctly recall the
scientific invention displayed in our efforts, to
produce new shades and colors in the soapy water with
which we cleaned our slates. It was I who discovered
that the yolk of an egg well beaten made a more
satisfactory admixture than butter, even though both
are equally yellow to begin with. I remember how one
may by judicious spooning out with a pin, extract
the inner riches of a chocolate drop without visible
disturbance of the outer crust. Despite my scholastic
indifference, I can have been no sluggard, without
spirit, for of my fifty coevals there was not one who
could tag me in the open except Percy Dent alone, and
that only (but in my wisdom I never let him discover
the fact) when I would let him; well do I recollect
with what
eclat, with what flutter of petticoats and
pinafore, I could execute a
pas seul at hop-scotch.
These attainments, the thrill of which still warms me,
prove me not without ambition;—
"Not for such hopes and fears,
Annulling youth's brief years,
Do I remonstrate,"
but for
"Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,"—
such as the multiplication table, and the capital of
Arizona, and the difference between an adjective and an
adverb,—questionings so obstinate that I am convinced
that not even at ten years old did I know the answers;
hinc illae lacrimae.
To some extent it is possible to go back and piece
out the stitches dropped in the course of an education;
only, one is not allowed to go
back so far as I
desire. Roughly speaking, I should say that life does
not allow one to relearn what one has failed to learn
before sixteen, whereas it is the knowledge belonging
to eight years, and ten and twelve, after which I
hunger and thirst. I wish some one would open a school
for able-minded but ignorant grown-ups. Believe me,
enough of us could be found to attend, enough of us
glad to jump down from our college chairs, to leave out
laboratories with their clutter of advanced research,
our counting-houses with their problems, and gladly go
to school, gladly learn once and forever how much nine
times thirteen is, and build Vesuvius past and present
out of clay, and follow out of doors some charming
young lady who would tell us exactly what the birds and
the wild waves are saying.
But I stipulate at the outset that I will have no
offensive superiority in my instructors. If I am to
learn as a child I will be treated as a child. I will
have no one caviling at me, for instance, because I do
not know when Washington was born. I never did know
when Washington was born, but I desire now to amend
this my iniquity of ignorance, and I am even minded, if
only my teachers will be patient, to plod on from the
Revolution to the Civil War, and to learn the
succession of bat
tles thereof, and which side won
them. I wish my instructors to understand that my
humility of spirit needs no augmenting on their part.
I wish them to be as sweetly patient and cheerily
maternal as they would be to my daughter's daughter. I
wish my teachers to administer boundary lines but
mildly, and to give me their minimum doses of mental
arithmetic; for in mathematics and geography my mind is
willing but weak. I think I could promise that
patience in my instructors would have a reward in a
proficiency of pupil such as they could never hope to
win from the iniquitous immature, on whose preoccupied
minds and thankless hearts they squander such devotion.
What a joyous picture it is, as I conjure it up,
this going to school again! What happiness to slip out
of our grown-up households, and go forth into the
morning, with bookstrap and luncheon in hand, to meet
by the way our harried and over-busy acquaintance, men
and women, some whiteheaded in ignorance, perhaps, all
skipping and dancing along to the same glad place.
Gleeful, we enter a sunny room with geraniums on the
windowsill, bright maps on the wall, and a beautiful
young lady at the desk. We are no longer hard and
hardened children: our hearts as
well as our
intellects are softened by the debility of age, and we
appreciate the graciousness of our instructor with the
rose in her belt, the milk of human kindness in her
eye, and the carefully preserved smile upon her lips.
It is with responsive smiles of gratitude that we feel
arithmetic and history and geography trickling into our
craniums from the cranium of our teacher. Then, when
she feels that, still willing, we are perhaps grown
weary with well-doing, she gives a signal, and with one
accord we raise our cracked voices in ecstatic, yet
instructive song, in which perhaps we are poetically
informed of some new fact about the firefly, or the
green grass, or perhaps our own gastronomy, or in
glittering phrase we unweave the rainbow into the
colors of the spectrum. Or, to forestall the ennui
resulting from our too earnest effort, our instructor
bids us stretch our cramped, rheumatic limbs, and with
graceful contortions of her lithe young body, directs
us as we prance stiffly through a calisthenic exercise.
But it is not on these diversions that my fancy
lingers most fondly, but on those more solid parts of
our education. How happy I should be, for example, if
I could only add, both in my head and on paper! How
many bewildered and distrustful moments would
thus
be eliminated from my existence! And if to a
proficiency in addition I superadded an adeptness in
subtraction, then perhaps on some proud day might my
opinion of the bulk of my bank account approximate more
nearly the opinion of the cashier. And if my
rudimentary bump of mathematics were carefully
manipulated according to the newest system of
educational massage, I might even progress as far as
percentage. I might learn how to be richer if I could
once understand the allurements of compound interest.
So much depends on the attitude of mind that I wonder
whether, if I approached fractions in a spirit of
friendliness rather than of enmity to the knife, they
would reward me by allowing me an entrance into their
intricacies, so that I could with impunity buy things
on the bias, or estimate the reduction by the dozen of
merchandise that tags a half-cent to its price when
purchased singly. There are, besides, other valuable
facts to be gleaned from the study of arithmetic, the
possession of which would be matter for gloating. How
proudly I should proclaim to some ignorant companion of
a country stroll the number of feet in a mile! I
should be happy to know under all circumstances the
number of ounces in a pound, grocer's or apothecary's:
how exalted I should
be if I knew the exact amount
of a scruple, that being a fact of which I am sure most
of my friends are ignorant. An exhaustive knowledge of
weights and measures would not only entitle one to
distinction among one's acquaintance, but would open up
many new avenues of interest in one's daily life.
History is another of the subjects for which I
hanker; not history as it is administered to me now,
spiced for the mature palate, with philosophy and
evolution, the ebb and flow of tendencies, but history
for the infant mind, the bread and milk of history, as
it were. I have sometimes thought that historic
research would be easier for me if sometimes I knew
what men did before I was forced to understand why they
did it; and a simple statement of what the actual fact
is under consideration would clarify for me much of the
historian's discussion of cause and effect. I have a
distinct conception of the development of the great and
glorious English people, but even such knowledge would
be materially strengthened if I were able instantly to
sort out all the Henrys and Edwards and stow them away
in their proper cubbyholes among the embarrassment of
decades. As to my own respected fatherland, I have
discussed intelligently the growth of the spoils
system,
skipping from presidential term to
presidential term with all a grown-up's airy
superiority; but ask me by whom and when and why North
Carolina was colonized, or just what Captain John Smith
was about when Pocahontas intercepted the executioner,
and you have me. I want to study history at last
fairly and squarely, out of a dapper little textbook
that I can stow away handily in my brain, with fine
fair outlines at beginning and end of it, and all
important events made salient by heavy type, and a
brisk brushing together of one's information by a
resume after each chapter. Such a primer would
greatly assist me in my study of the metaphysics of
history.
Yet perhaps I do but hanker after impossibilities;
perhaps this school I so happily image forth would
refuse to teach me what I want to know. Possibly such
information belongs only to the period of my negligent
infancy. Perhaps my charming young teacher, exuding
the wit and wisdom of the newest normal school, would
refuse to stand and deliver the knowledge I long for.
If I desired the facts of the French and Indian War, I
might merely be set to building wigwams and drawing
braves in war-paint with colored crayons on the
blackboard. Perhaps after all
there is nobody left
who knows how to teach the things I have forgotten.
For example, do they now acknowledge in the primary
curriculum that fair, old-fashioned study called
penmanship? I yearn to be put once more into a
copybook. I long to set forth once more wise saws in
round
v's and unquestioned
e's and
i's. My
fingers long since became callous and conscienceless to
distinguish t from
l,
b from
p, and I wish
somebody would reform the rascally old digits. It
would be a great relief to my friends and myself if I
could only become legible in my old age.
One branch of knowledge little emphasized in my
youth, however, I could be sure of receiving at the
hands of my fair instructress of to-day,—I refer to
that varied information known as "nature-study." I am
greatly deficient in nature-study. I own to an
unanalytical habit of mind as regards out-of-doors. So
long as the wild flowers make a glory at my feet, I
have never cared much to shred them into pistil and
corolla and stamen. So long as the small fowls make me
melody, I have never cared to know the color of their
pin-feathers. But I would fain amend all this and die
knowing something. I picture our band of eager
grown-ups pouring over the countryside in the wake of
our animated and instruc
tive conductor,—peering
into the grass to lay bare the soul in the sod,
blinking our old eyes to discover the bird in his
coverts, cocking our dull ears to classify the notes of
his song. I see us disporting ourselves over the
landscape, busily seeking some curious knowledge, and
then scampering back to our teacher with treasure trove
of leaf or flower or pebble or captured insect.
Sweetly she commends our application, and explains the
exact nature of our find. We swell with knowledge
momentarily, and return to more prosaic tasks elate,
having hung its proper label on blade and bush, bird
and bough. What a satisfaction it would be, after
having lived with nature for a lifetime in awesome
ignorance, to feel that one had at last assailed her
and ascertained her secrets!
As a young child, I must have been singularly
limited in mental scope; I cannot otherwise explain my
well-remembered aversion to geography. Those
parti-colored maps streaked with inky rivers, and
bordered by the wiggling lines of the Gulf Stream,
filled me with loathing. The revolving globe, and that
oft-repeated image which likens the earth to an orange
flattened at the poles, seemed to me almost sickening.
How bitterly do I repent my obstinacy! Besides, there
is not one trace
left now of my former aversion.
In fact, geography appeals to me to-day as if it were a
brand-new branch of study, so well did I succeed in not
learning it as a child. I have tried ever since
reaching maturity to make up my geographical
deficiencies, but with small success. Often do I find
myself relegated to the dunce-seat in the minds of the
company present. Despite my constant effort, there are
certain countries that always elude my grasp, notably
Burma and New Zealand, and there is always for me an
airy insubstantiality about the entire continent of
South America. Within my own beloved country, certain
rivers have a way of turning up in unexpected States
when I supposed that they had long comfortably emptied
themselves into the ocean; and there are some cities
which always flit with agility to and fro across the
map.
I wonder if my early antagonism to geography might
perhaps have been due to a shrewd sense of its
uselessness to me at that stage of my existence.
Stay-at-home as I was, why trouble myself with strange
lands until necessary? Yet I was lacking in foresight,
and should be grateful now if only I had packed away
some information against the day I should need it,
whereas nowadays I find traveling without any knowledge
of geog
raphy stimulating but inconvenient. This
observation leads me to a broader one on the
topsy-turvy nature of our present educational sequence:
those studies most astute and useless we put in the
college curriculum, and those most immediate and
practical to the college graduate about to grapple with
life, we relegate to the elementary school, where the
children neither desire nor need to master them. I
would suggest a turning about. Let the college youth
and maid who will suffer from a lack of practical
arithmetic learn to add a column accurately; let the
irresponsible infant sport with trigonometry and conic
sections. These subjects unlearned or forgotten, one
could still go through life unfretted by the loss. So
with other subjects forever lost to us because
entrusted to the intelligence of careless infancy. I
would teach geography and handwriting in the senior
year at college, and put philosophy in the primary
school. So would the young collegian go forth upon
life well equipped, and not come to fifty years
burdened with regrets for knowledge lost forever,—as
I. I have kept afloat in higher mathematics, I have
delved into the mines of science, I have trod air with
many a prancing philosopher,—therefore who so well
fitted as I to appreciate at last the peace of having a
foundation!
