X Science as Related to the Teaching of Literature16
The scientific method is the method of unprejudiced observation and induction. Its function in the scheme of life is to furnish man with facts and principles,—statements which mirror with accuracy and precision the conditions that may exist in any situation of any sort which man may have to face. In other words, the facts of science are important and worthy because they help us to solve the problems of life more satisfactorily. They are instrumental in their function. They are means to an end. And whenever we have a problem to solve, whenever we face a situation that demands some form of adjustment, the more accurate the information that we possess concerning this situation, the better we shall be able to solve it.
Now when I propose that we try to find out some facts about the teaching of English, and that we apply the scientific method in the discovery of these facts, I am immediately confronted with an objection. My opponent will maintain that the subject of English in our school curriculum is not one of the sciences. Taking English to mean particularly English literature rather than rhetoric or composition or grammar, it is clear that we do not teach literature as we teach the sciences. Its function differs from that of science in the curriculum. If there is a science of literature, that is not what we are teaching in the secondary schools, and that is not what most of us believe should be taught in the secondary schools. We think that the study of literature should transmit to each generation the great ideals that are crystallized in literary masterpieces. And we think that, in seeing to it that our pupils are inspired with these ideals, we should also teach literature in such a way that our pupils will be left with a desire to read good literature as a source of recreation and inspiration after they have finished the courses that we offer. When I speak of “inspiration,” “appreciation,” the development of “taste,” and the like, I am using terms that have little direct relation to the scientific method; for, as I have said, science deals with facts, and the harder and more stubborn and more unyielding the facts become, the better they represent true science. What right have I, then, to speak of the scientific study of the teaching of English, when science and literature seem to belong to two quite separate rubrics of mental life?
I refer to this point of view, not because its inconsistencies are not fully apparent to you even upon the surface, but because it is a point of view that has hitherto interfered very materially with our educational progress. It has sometimes been assumed that, because we wish to study education scientifically, we wish to read out of it everything that cannot be reduced to a scientific formula,—that, somehow or other, we intend still further to intellectualize the processes of education and to neglect the tremendous importance of those factors that are not primarily intellectual in their nature, but which belong rather to the field of emotion and feeling.
I wish, therefore, to say at the outset that, while I firmly believe the hope of education to lie in the application of the scientific method to the solution of its problems, I still hold that neither facts nor principles nor any other products of the scientific method are the most important “goods” of life. The greatest “goods” in life are, and always must remain, I believe, its ideals, its visions, its insights, and its sympathies,—must always remain those qualities with which the teaching of literature is primarily concerned, and in the engendering of which in the hearts and souls of his pupils, the teacher of literature finds the greatest opportunity that is vouchsafed to any teacher.
The facts and principles that science has given us have been of such service to humanity that we are prone to forget that they have been of service because they have helped us more effectively to realize our ideals and attain our ends; and we are prone to forget also that, without the ideals and the ends and the visions, the facts and principles would be quite without function. I have sometimes been taken to account for separating these two factors in this way. But unless we do distinguish sharply between them, our educational thinking is bound to be hopelessly obscure.
You have all heard the story of the great chemist who was at work in his laboratory when word was brought him that his wife was dead. As the first wave of anguish swept over him, he bowed his head upon his hands and wept out his grief; but suddenly he lifted up his head, and held before him his hands wet with tears. “Tears!” he cried; “what are they? I have analyzed them: a little chloride of sodium, some alkaline salts, a little mucin, and some water. That is all.” And he went back to his work.
The story is an old one, and very likely apocryphal, but it is not without its lesson to us in the present connection. Unless we distinguish between these two factors that I have named, we are likely either to take this man’s attitude or something approaching it, or to go to the other extreme, renounce the accuracy and precision of the scientific method, and give ourselves up to the cult of emotionalism.
Now, while we do not wish to read out of the teaching of literature the factors of appreciation and inspiration, we do wish to find out how these important functions of our teaching may be best fulfilled. And it is here that facts and principles gained by the scientific method not only can but must furnish the ultimate solution. We have a problem. That problem, it is true, is concerned with something that is not scientific, and to attempt to make it scientific is to kill the very life that it is our problem to cherish. But in solving that problem, we must take certain steps; we must arrange our materials in certain ways; we must adjust hard and stubborn facts to the attainment of our end. What are these facts? What is their relation to our problem? What laws govern their operation? These are subordinate but very essential parts of our larger problem, and it is through the scientific investigation of these subordinate problems that our larger problem is to be solved.
Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. We may assume that every boy who goes out of the high school should appreciate the meaning and worth of self-sacrifice as this is revealed (not expounded) in Dickens’s delineation of the character of Sidney Carton. There is our problem,—but what a host of subordinate problems at once confront us! Where shall we introduce The Tale of Two Cities? Will it be in the second year, or the third, or the fourth? Will it be best preceded by the course in general history which will give the pupil a time perspective upon the crimson background of the French Revolution against which Dickens projected his master character? Or shall we put The Tale of Two Cities first for the sake of the heightened interest which the art of the novelist may lend to the facts of the historian? Again, how may the story be best presented? What part shall the pupils read in class? What part shall they read at home? What part, if any, shall we read to them? What questions are necessary to insure appreciation? How many of the allusions need be run down in order to give the maximal effect of the masterpiece? How may the necessarily discontinuous discussions of the class—one period each day for several days—be so counteracted as to insure the cumulative emotional effect which the appreciation of all art presupposes? Should the story be sketched through first, and then read in some detail, or will one reading suffice?
These are problems, I repeat, that stand to the chief problem as means stand to end. Now some of these questions must be solved by every teacher for himself, but that does not prevent each teacher from solving them scientifically. Others, it is clear, might be solved once and for all by the right kind of an investigation,—might result in permanent and universal laws which any one could apply.
There are, of course, several ways in which answers for these questions may be secured. One way is that of a priori reasoning,—the deductive procedure. This method may be thoroughly scientific, depending of course upon the validity of our general principles as applied to the specific problem. Ordinarily this validity can be determined only by trial; consequently these a priori inferences should be looked upon as hypotheses to be tested by trial under standard conditions. For example, I might argue that The Tale of Two Cities should be placed in the third year because the emotional ferment of adolescence is then most favorable for the engendering of the ideal. But in the first place, this assumed principle would itself be subject to grave question and it would also have to be determined whether there is so little variation among the pupils in respect of physiological age as to permit the application to all of a generalization that might conceivably apply only to the average child. In other words, all of our generalizations applying to average pupils must be applied with a knowledge of the extent and range of variation from the average. Some people say that there is no such thing as an average child, but, for all practical purposes, the average child is a very real reality,—he is, in fact, more numerous than any other single class; but this does not mean that there may be not enough variations from the average to make unwise the application of our principle.
I refer to this hypothetical case to show the extreme difficulty of reaching anything more than hypotheses by a priori reasoning. We have a certain number of fairly well established general principles in secondary education. Perhaps those most frequently employed are our generalizations regarding adolescence and its influences upon the mental and especially the emotional life of high-school pupils. Stanley Hall’s work in this field is wonderfully stimulating and suggestive, and yet we should not forget that most of his generalizations are, after all, only plausible hypotheses to be acted upon as tentative guides for practice and to be tested carefully under controlled conditions, rather than to be accepted as immutable and unchangeable laws. We sometimes assume that all high-school pupils are adolescents, when the likelihood is that an appreciable proportion of pupils in the first two years have not yet reached this important node of their development.
I say this not to minimize in any way the importance that attaches to adolescent characteristics, but rather to suggest that you who are daily dealing with these pupils can in the aggregate add immeasurably to the knowledge that we now have concerning this period. A tremendous waste is constantly going on in that most precious of all our possible resources,—namely, human experience. How many problems that are well solved have to be solved again and again because the experience has not been crystallized in a well-tested fact or principle; how many experiences that might be well worth the effort that they cost are quite worthless because, in undergoing them, we have neglected some one or another of the rules that govern inexorably the validity of our inferences and conclusions. That is all that the scientific method means in the last analysis: it is a system of principles that enable us to make our experience worth while in meeting later situations. We all have the opportunity of contributing to the sum total of human knowledge, if only we know the rules of the game.
I said that one way of solving these subordinate problems that arise in the realization of our chief aims in teaching is the a priori method of applying general principles to the problems. Another method is to imitate the way in which we have seen some one else handle the situation. Now this may be the most effective way possible. In fact, if a sufficient number of generations of teachers keep on blindly plunging in and floundering about in solving their problems, the most effective methods will ultimately be evolved through what we call the process of trial and error. The teaching of the very oldest subjects in the curriculum is almost always the best and most effective teaching, for the very reason that the blundering process has at last resulted in an effective procedure. But the scientific method of solving problems has its very function in preventing the tremendous waste that this process involves. English literature is a comparatively recent addition to the secondary curriculum. Its possibilities of service are almost unlimited. Shall we wait for ten or fifteen generations of teachers to blunder out the most effective means of teaching it, or shall we avail ourselves of these simple principles which will enable us to concentrate this experience within one or two generations?
I should like to emphasize one further point. No one has greater respect than I have for what we term experience in teaching. But let me say that a great deal of what we may term “crude” experience—that is, experience that has not been refined by the application of scientific method—is most untrustworthy,—unless, indeed, it has been garnered and winnowed and sifted through the ages. Let me give you an example of some accepted dictums of educational experience that controlled investigations have shown to be untrustworthy.
It is a general impression among teachers that specific habits may be generalized; that habits of neatness and accuracy developed in one line of work, for example, will inevitably make one neater and more accurate in other things. It has been definitely proved that this transfer of training does not take place inevitably, but in reality demands the fulfillment of certain conditions of which education has become fully conscious only within a comparatively short time, and as a result of careful, systematic, controlled experimentation. The meaning of this in the prevention of waste through inadequate teaching is fully apparent.
Again, it has been supposed by many teachers that the home environment is a large factor in the success or failure of a pupil in school. In every accurate and controlled investigation that has been conducted so far it has been shown that this factor in such subjects as arithmetic and spelling at least is so small as to be absolutely negligible in practice.
Some people still believe that a teacher is born and not made, and yet a careful investigation of the efficiency of elementary teachers shows that, when such teachers were ranked by competent judges, specialized training stood out as the most important factor in general efficiency. In this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,—for twenty-eight per cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against forty-four per cent of the college graduates. These investigations, I may add, were made by university professors, and I am giving them here in a university classroom and as a university representative. And of course I shall hasten to add that general scholarship is one important essential. Our mistake has been in assuming sometimes that it is the only essential.
Very frequently the controlled experience of scientific investigation confirms a principle that has been derived from crude experience. Most teachers will agree, for example, that a certain amount of drill and repetition is absolutely essential in the mastery of any subject. Every time that scientific investigation has touched this problem it has unmistakably confirmed this belief. Some very recent investigations made by Mr. Brown at the Charleston Normal School show conclusively that five-minute drill periods preceding every lesson in arithmetic place pupils who undergo such periods far in advance of others who spend this time in non-drill arithmetical work, and that this improvement holds not only in the number habits, but also in the reasoning processes.
Other similar cases could be cited, but I have probably said enough to make my point, and my point is this: that crude experience is an unsafe guide for practice; that experience may be refined in two ways—first by the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of trial and error could not encompass in a millennium.
The teaching of English merits treatment by this method. I recommend strongly that you give the plan a trial. You may not get immediate results. You may not get valuable results. But in any case, if you carefully respect the scientific proprieties, your experience will be worth vastly more than ten times the amount of crude experience; and, whether you get results or not, you will undergo a valuable discipline from which may emerge the ideals of science if you are not already imbued with them. I always tell my students that, even in the study of science itself, it is the ideals of science,—the ideals of patient, thoughtful work, the ideals of open-mindedness and caution in reaching conclusions, the ideals of unprejudiced observation from which selfishness and personal desire are eliminated,—it is these ideals that are vastly more important than the facts of science as such,—and these latter are significant enough to have made possible our present progress and our present amenities of life.
Footnotes
16 A paper read before the English Section of the University of Illinois High School Conference, November 17, 1910.