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I might fill hours recalling the memories of Quincy and its schools, but to what end? The apparent success of the movement is easily explained. There was the opportunity, a faith, a spirit of work, an enthusiasm, to find better things for God's little ones. The outcome can not be explained by methods, devices, and systems, by tricks of the trade, or by particular ways of doing things. What we did in Quincy was nothing new; it came directly from the great authorities in education. What we did is now well-nigh universal; but the mere following of authority, however good, does not always count for progress; repetition of devices does not necessarily bring improvement.

We stand to-day at the beginning of an educational movement that means the salvation of the world, and its elements are faith, spirit, open-mindedness, and work. The teachers are not responsible for what wrong ideas may exist, nor can school committees be justly blamed. The common school was born of the people, it is supported by the people, and its faults are found in the people. The people must demand, and they will receive; they must knock, and it shall be opened unto them. We are bound by tradition, by medieval ways, and deeply-rooted prejudice. The good that has been done is simply a foretaste of what is to come. Our ideals are low. The future demands an education into free government, a strictly American education, an education to meet the demands of these times, with their world problems that are weighing us down, and the ever-increasing duties of citizenship. I repeat, not by the guns of a Dewey or the battalions of Roberts or Kruger must these problems be worked out, but in the common school, where the quiet, devoted, studious, skillful teacher works out the nature and laws of life, complete living, and the righteousness that is to be.

THE QUINCY MOVEMENT.«

[An address delivered at the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the work of Colonel Parker as superintendent of schools, at Quincy, Mass., April 20, 1900, by Nicholas Murray Butler, now president of Columbia University.]

This is sacred educational ground. Around the shores of Massachusetts Bay the people's school has had its prophets and its martyrs. The nation's schoolmasters look back with affection to this rock-bound New England coast as the motherland of what they hold most dear. Here the makers of a commonwealth laid the foundations, steady and strong, on which a world has built. Here Horace Mann plead and exhorted that education might be real and that the public support of it might be both intelligent and determined. Here Eliot has finished an imperishable monument, more lasting than brass, which neither a countless succession of years nor the flight of ages can destroy. Here Parker first gained fame through service of childhood.

There is a letter of the younger Pliny to his friend Paulinus in which he insists that men should consider either the immortality of fame and work for it or the shortness of life and enjoy it. The Roman righteously preferred the former alternative. The modern sage finds the two not incompatible. He has banished asceticism as an incentive to virtue and enthroned a generous humanity in its stead. It is this humanity, broad, sympathetic, affectionate, which has given its fine emotional quality to Colonel Parker's work for children. One follows it not with the attention which is intellectual merely, but with the interest which is life. It bursts the bonds of convention and defies the trammels of tradition. It is real and vital. False ideals have often in the course of history made education an inhuman process. So it was in many schools of the Middle Ages, so it was under Sturm's dreadful curriculum at Strassburg, so it was a century ago when Pesta

a Reprinted from the Educational Review, June, 1900.

lozzi was bending every energy of his great soul to reach the hidden springs of child nature. It is a tendency of teaching to harden into routine. The routine in turn becomes mechanical, and intellectual and moral anæmia follows of necessity. From this there is but one possible escape, the tonic and stimulating influence of new knowledge. The university teacher seeks this knowledge in his library or his laboratory; the elementary teacher must find it in the child. Colonel Parker's work is human; its constant inspiration is the knowledge which the child reveals.

This human quality, together with a passionate faith in democracy, which is based as much on intuition as on conviction, is the surest clew to an interpretation of Colonel Parker's life and influence. He has not only seen but felt that education can not be permanently bolstered up by artificial supports. No patent methods or devices will suffice; not even the powerful force of legislation will make the educational stream run uphill forever. It must spring fresh and pure from the hearts and minds of the people if it is to be unfailing, steady, fertilizing. So Colonel Parker has labored in season and out of season to reach the people themselves, the parents whose most precious possessions are yielded up to the school and the schoolmaster for weal or for woe. He has tried to bring them to a realization of what education means in a democracy, of their responsibility for the character and standards of the schools, of their selfish as well as their public interest in the results. In the same spirit he has appealed to the teacher to open his eyes to the dignity, the influence, and the importance of his work. He has called upon the teacher to leave off being a merchant dealing in information and to prepare himself to become a builder of human souls. These things he has done in the name not of any theory, or school, or sect, but of childhood.

Appeals such as these, if insisted upon and responded to, are, in any stage of the world's history, revolutionary in their results. All practical affairs have their ruts, with a strong predisposition in favor of continuing to follow them. Are not these ruts the results of experience, and is not experience the great teacher? It depends, as the French say. There is experience intelligent and experience unintelligent; experience reflective and experience unreflecting; experience open-eyed and experience blind. The former is a teacher, the latter a slave driver. An unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates insisted. So an experience unquestioned and untried in the light of eternal principles is not a human experience at all. It is the experience of the mountain top on which sun burns and storms beat; the experience of the cliff over which Niagara pours; the experience of the tides as they rise and fall in obedience to a law of which they know nothing, not even its existence. Human experience of the genuine sort is quite different from this. It is inquiring, progressive, illumined by a knowledge of principles. It faces the present and the future, and it uses the past without adoring it. In this wise Colonel Parker began his work at Dayton. He questioned his experience, but it was dumb. He did not speak its language. He did not know enough. The years of study which followed pointed the way to the answering of his questions. Education began to loom large in his field of consciousness; history hinted at its deeper lessons; philosophy suggested principles of action. The town of Quincy, and through it the United States, reaped the benefit of the revelation. It was an object lesson of striking significance to see this veteran soldier, with a German university career behind him, putting forth all his newly roused energies in behalf of the boys and girls of the elementary school. The change in them was startling. "Going to school ceased to be a homesick tribulation," wrote Mr. Adams. “The children actually went to school without being dragged there. The simple fact was that they were happier and more amused and better contented at school than at home." What had happened? Only the obvious, it seems, as we look back at it now. Mr. Adams has described it graphically and

concisely: "Education was to recur to first principles. Not much was to be attempted; but whatever was attempted was to be thoroughly done, and to be tested by its practical results and not by its theoretical importance. Above all, the simple comprehensible processes of nature were to be observed. Children were to learn to read and write and cipher as they learned to swim, or to skate, or to play ball. The rule by which the thing was done was nothing; the fact that it was done well was everything." How sensible, yet novel; how wise, yet how revolutionary! From the vantage ground of to-day it is easy to see that Colonel Parker was merely putting in practice here at Quincy a few fundamental principles of education and of psychology He was not devising methods or concocting ingenious devices. Methods and devices are small things and change with every individual who uses them. A principle is eternal and the parent of a hundred methods; but a cast-iron method is a principle's worst enemy. The teacher whose method is finished and complete has lost touch with human nature. Colonel Parker's principles have saved him from apotheosizing methods. It would show a truer appreciation of what happened here if we spoke oftener of Quincy principles and less often of Quincy methods.

Among cultivated persons there is a more or less widespread opinion that teaching power is declining. Our national journal of despair recently wrote this sentence in an important article on the decline of teaching: "No one, we suppose, will question that the number of great teachers is decidedly less than it once was, and that the depleted ranks are not being adequately filled up." a Without stopping to quibble about what is meant by a great teacher, I not only question the assertion, but deny it absolutely. There are more great teachers to-day than there ever were, and they are more widely distributed and exercising greater influence. It is true that the colleges and universities have not their fair share of them, owing to the passing influence of the lecture system imported from Germany, but even in those institutions there is more good teaching than there was a generation ago. The laudator temporis acti has in mind some one person whose loss he deeply feels, and generalizes from him alone. But north, east, south, and west teaching is constantly improving. It is based on more thorough scholarship, on stronger professional pride, or better special preparation. Where a quarter of a century ago there was one teacher who thought about teaching as such, and studied teaching, there are two score to-day. The Quincy movement was typical. Similar awakenings have come to hundreds of American communities, and he who runs may read the results. When the history for the spread of the new educational spirit comes to be written, Colonel Parker's contribution to it will be honorably remembered.

It was a wise saying of Emerson's that "it is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive." Colonel Parker's principles and insights have not stood still. They have ripened with the years and they have grown fuller and richer with use. A vast city has recognized them at work among its teeming thousands; villages and towns in near and distant States have caught them up and applied them with delight. They are not final; that would be their death. They are only an honest, courageous man's badge of service to his fellows and to his fellow's children. May he long be spared to wear it!

a The Nation, March 8, 1900, p. 180.

COLONEL PARKER AND THE QUINCY SCHOOL.

BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D.

[An address delivered at the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the inauguration of the Quincy movement, April 20, 1900.]

It is not often that a hero, at least in education, hears his praises sung; he usually hears plenty of dispraise from his contemporaries, and it is only the after generations that celebrate him. But it is more pleasant to recognize the services of one who is still with us, and even in the full career of his life work. Let us all hope that the just recognition of the services of Francis W. Parker will inspire him to still greater efforts under more and more favorable conditions.

In this brief contribution to the reminiscences and congratulations of this occasion it is well to recount the reasons which have led me from the beginning to place a high value upon the results of the Quincy movement, to esteem Colonel Parker as a man, and to honor his friends and supporters. The movement is a reform instead of a revolution. It reforms a practice widely prevalent throughout our land, which is pernicious in manifold ways. It attacks the slavish use of the text-book, which has been content to accept verbal memorizing without verification and without understanding. Instead of the method of investigation, by which the pupil is made to go over again the steps which led to discovery, instead of the method of criticism, which tests each item of knowledge and translates the new and unfamiliar by what is already in the experience of the child, there has prevailed the method of authority, which has prescribed for the pupil the implicit acceptance of dead results, and the adoption of opinions without insight into their grounds. That such a method is stultifying has long been known. It represses intellect; it represses individualism. The teacher is made a mere oracle and the pupil an humble follower; the teacher a fugleman and the pupils obedient repeaters. The freedom of the original discoverer ought to become the freedom of the teacher who sees again the light of the truth-and his freedom the teacher ought to make again the freedom of his pupils, enkindling in their minds the power of seeing the truth for themselves. The true method of the school is the method of enlightenment, which comes of self-activity and original investigation. The wrong method is that of oracular authority, blind obedience, dead results, and superstition. Unless the pupil is made active to interpret the new knowledge in terms of his own experience, the school produces mental slavery.

Again, as to the discipline of the school. Order is heaven's first law. But an external order procured by violence is not educative, except in the way of producing rebellious reaction in the pupil. Heavenly order comes from enkindling within the pupil the spirit of order-the spirit which cooperates with fellow-pupils and the teacher in producing a reasonable result.

Of all countries in the world, America is the place where the schools should stimulate the children to self-control-to the love of order for its own sake. And it is one of the great glories of the Quincy method that it has always laid full emphasis on this. It has proclaimed, as if from the housetops, the doctrine that the school must be a delightful place for the children, a temple of freedom, wherein each one adopts all that is done by others as the expression of his own completed will-his own volition rounded to fullness by the volitions of his fellowpupils and of his teacher.

Let us call to mind the primary object of the school, and ask the question how the perversion of its methods arose. Certainly the object of the school has been correctly described as a means of giving to the individual the power to add to his own experience the experience of others-that of his race. At least it shall give the pupil the power to help himself to these stores of wisdom, and there is no doubt that writing and printing has preserved this wisdom and disseminated it.

The printed page holds the results of experience of the past, and it holds the recorded observations and reflections of the present. It enables each one who can read to possess himself of the thoughts and opinions of the wisest and best, near and far. No wonder that the school makes much of the printed page, and especially in the border lands of the world, the countries recently peopled by migration from the great European mother nations. The continuity of American civilization can be preserved only by the printed page.

The oral teachers, numerous though they be, can give very little to their pupils compared with what these can learn for themselves by knowing the art of reading. In a border land it is far more important that every child should learn how to read than in old countries possessing all the monuments of civilization. Here every child must become eye-minded as well as ear-minded. He must know language quite as well by the eye in its printed words as by the ear in its spoken words. It is evident that eye-mindedness has a certain great advantage over earmindedness, because the printed page will await on the leisure of the reader and permit him to stop and ponder over a weighty sentence until it becomes clear as noonday, while the attention of the hearer-the ear-minded-must be on the alert, and jump from word to word and from sentence to sentence, at the mercy of the speaker, without pause. To stop and reflect is to lose the stream of discourse. So, too, if one fails to catch the meaning at once, he loses the thread of the discourse.

What is profound and technical can seldom be taught orally. The individual can not learn the results of science and deep research if he is only ear-minded. To the eye-minded alone comes the ability to master by his own effort science and philosophy and systematic treatises-as well as great literature.

To change a people from illiteracy to a knowledge of letters, from ear-mindedness to eye-mindedness, from dependence on the living teacher which only the few can afford to have, to that independence of personal assistance which comes through eye-mindedness, has, from the beginning, been the great object of the American school. But it has struggled under a load of bad methods. First, there was the theologic method, modeled on the instruction of the pulpit, which has always been that of unquestioned authority addressed to implicit obedience. This method has demanded the verbal memorizing of the text-book. This method has been opposed by nearly everyone of the educational reformers, and yet it still exists. It is the besetting evil, and the most natural one. Because of the importance of becoming eye-minded and of imaging the printed word instead of recalling the mere voice-symbol addressed to the ear, let the pupil go at the book indiscriminatingly, and he will be sure to become eye-minded. So thought the teachers of the past generations; so think the majority of the present generation. It is the first crude thought of anyone who reflects upon it. He does not see in his mind's eye the large percentum of children who are made to hate the printed page and to loath human learning by this injudicious method. Nor does he see that the majority of the remnant, who accept gratefully what the school can give, are arrested in their development at the stage of verbal memory, and never get to become thinkers and original investigators. The educational reformer is needed in all countries and in all times, but he is nowhere needed so much as in America, where the printed page has such an important function to serve. The bad method defeats its own end. Instead of producing that degree of intelligent eye-mindedness, that can at once recognize in the written or printed words all their delicate shades of technical meaning, the bad method produces graphophobia, or hatred of printed words, or a glib process of parroting-i. e., of catching words by external form without becoming interested in their sense.

How many good teachers have fought these evils in method? But among them all I know of no more earnest protest than that of the Quincy movement, nor of

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