People talk about children being hard to teach, and in the next breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the “vices.” That seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic States? And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day.
I think that if there were no teachers--no hastily and superficially trained Vestals who were supposed to know everything--but just ordinary human beings who knew passionately and thoroughly one thing (but you’d be surprised to find what a lot of other knowledge that would incidentally comprise!) and who had the patience to show little boys and girls how to do that thing--we might get along without Immaculate Omniscience pretty well. Of course, we’d have to pay them more, because they could get other jobs out in the larger world; and besides, you couldn’t expect to get somebody who knows how to do something, for the price you are accustomed to pay those who only know how to teach everything.
Nor need the change necessarily be abrupt. It could probably be effected with considerable success by firing all the teachers at the beginning of the summer vacations, and engaging their services as human beings for the next year. Many of them would find no difficulty at all in readjusting themselves....
Of the ingredients of the educational catastrophe, the only one remaining to be discussed is the Book. Is it to blame for the failure of the process which has brought us to our present state of elaborate ignorance, and ought it to be abolished?
What have books got to do with education, anyway?
Not half as much as most people think! If education is learning to be a civilized human being, books have their place in it. But civilized life is composed of a number of things besides books--it contains machinery, art, political organization, handicraft, flowers and birds, and other things too numerous to mention, all of which are notoriously capable of being learned about in the great world outside without the use of books. If in the great world outside the school, then why not in the little world inside the school?