Education among Primitive ManEver since the heyday of the evolutionary theory we have been accustomed to compare children to savages and savages to children, so much so that it is often forgotten that savages have children and that the whole complicated apparatus of human education is turned on them almost from the moment of birth to transform them into savages. This goal primitive education achieves most effectively. Primitive society, when judged by modern standards, is static, traditionridden. In it the individual fits into the tribal pattern of thought and action with a neatness unheard-of and impossible in modern society. Whatever "progress" there is, it is unconscious, and every conspicuous change or innovation is resented, tabooed, nipped in the bud.

The aim of primitive education is to initiate the rising generation into the knowledge and tradition of the past, so that they may pass it on to the future unchanged.

To realize his educational ambitions, the savage makes use of just two methods, imitation and verbal instruction. They prove amply sufficient. At an age when our children are vainly struggling in the portals separating a confused childhood from a confused maturity, the primitive youth and maiden have already absorbed most of the tribal tradition, barring only some esoteric matters often deferred for years. In the home, on ceremonial occasions, at the chase, at social gatherings, they behave with all the expertness, composure, decorum, required by the various situations. The tribal pattern has descended upon them; nor do they seem any the worse for it.

This remarkable result is greatly facilitated of achievement by another feature of primitive life. The family, here, as with us, remains the great educational agency, especially where the conscious, deliberate aspects of education are concerned. In addition, the largely unconscious education coming from the social life outside the family works in with the tasks of the family circle at all points. This efficient coöperation is made possible by the prevalent uniformity of primitive life. Of the three agencies between which the education of our children is apportioned, family, school, society, the first and the last coincide in primitive life, while the school is as yet unborn.

It may be of interest to note here that the method of punishments and rewards, prevalent later in history, is almost uniformly unknown in earlier days. It would be foolish to rhapsodize over the pedagogical acumen of our forefathers. The absence of punitive measures, moreover, is more often than not due to some magical idiosyncracy, perhaps fear that the household spirits might be hurt (for all we know, they might!); but the fact remains: no punishments, no rewards, and efficient education. As a hint to the wise, let the fact stand for what it may be worth.

The Modern Scene Against the background of primitive life, homogeneous, static, tradition-ridden, tremendously socialized, modern society stands out in striking contrast. In place of primitive uniformity and relative simplicity, there is the great complexity and diversification of modern life. Social classes, groups of professional, economic, educational specialization, religious diversity, political

antagonisms, currents and cross-currents innumerable of social trends and fashions-all this is far removed from the even and uniform flow of primitive life, broken only here and there by occasional crises of ceremonialism and military exploit.

And as dynamism has taken the place of stability, and diversity that of uniformity, so the future is steadily gaining upon the past as a beacon of social standards and ideals. All in all, primitive man was oriented toward the past, we, toward the future; he was backward-minded, we are forwardminded. Our very conservatism gains shape and color through the prevailing background of progressivism. This is best seen in the case of the reactionary whose ideas and policies are determined less by the actualities of the past than they are by his opposition to the ideologies of the ultra-progressive, the radical.

The individual, again, sorely hidebound though he still may be, is far freer, incomparably more detached, than was his primitive forerunner. His choice of occupations, of opportunities, is enormous; the very diversity of life prevents him from complete standardization; again and again he finds himself standing out as a unit against society. His sense of selfdetermination may, perhaps, still rest upon an illusion, but even an illusion of self-determination implies relative freedom.

In the wake of this formal liberation of the individual there rises inevitably the need of psychological adjustment. The perennial problem of the individual and society rises into consciousness. The individual wills to serve society, to be social, or, whether he wills or not, he must,-but he also wills

to be himself. Enters the personal ego: a new orientation, new ideals, a maze of difficulties!

In primitive days coöperation, social solidarity, was spontaneous and efficient. To-day the individual is lost in the network of social groups and participations. He is divided against himself. Solidarity, coöperation, must be analyzed, cultivated, taught.

In the light of the modern scene, the goals of the new education become defined.

Modern Education-Upon analysis, these goals of modern education are reduced to four. First, it strives to communicate the past; secondly, to build for the future; thirdly, to further the self-expression of the individual or creativeness; and, fourthly, to inculcate habits of coöperation with one's fellows.

To achieve all these purposes, a thoroughgoing revolution takes place in educational theories and methods when compared not alone with those of antiquity, but even with those of the proximate past. The new educational platform may be summarized in the following propositions:

Wisdom or intelligence and capacity are more important than mere knowledge. The policy of forcing knowledge down the student's throat by the bucketful finds less and less favor with the progressive educationist. We have little patience with the intellectual set of Main Street who carry their traditional quota of culture with such selfconscious decorum as if fearful to spill some of it. Nor do they ever doubt that such an eventuality would be a genuine tragedy. What we demand is capacity to acquire knowledge, to handle it, to organize it, to use it. That this result is not by any means

assured by the mere possession of vicariously acquired knowledge has long since been discerned by the common sense of mankind. Therefore the new education emphasizes methods and attitudes with reference to the acquisition and handling of knowledge rather than just so much of it acquired during a certain period.

Concrete participation is preferable to abstract contemplation. It is only thus that habits of thought and action can be formed. It is here that the "project method" steps in with its skilful mimicking of reality and the technic it imparts for positing and solving problems.

"Do"s and "Don't's in Education In a sense we are right when we call the child a savage. It always is that in so far as it has but faintly partaken of civilization, of our civilization. Therefore the child falls short of cultural requirements in a double way: it does not know or do many things which eventually it will have learn; it does think and do many things which eventually it will have to unlearn. Thus the "do" and the "don't" are ushered into the educational process. Now, checking is easier than teaching; it comes more natural; moreover it has a delightful finality about it which teaching lacks. Also, while forwardlooking education might accept many apparently heretical or absurd ideas and acts of the child, seeing or suspecting in them the seeds of new developments, backward-looking education scoffs at such a view; the eccentricities of the child do not fit into the stately norm of traditional behavior. That settles it: "don't" is the word.

For some time the new education has been at work on a powerful brief for the "do" as against the "don't" in

dealing with the child. It preserves personality, it strengthens the will, for, with apologies to puritanism, it is the doing, not the abstaining, which builds the will; it is constructive, encouraging; it fosters amiability between the teacher and the learner. Moreover, as every sympathetic educator knows, it is often possible to achieve a desirable "don't" indirectly by imparting a "do" which almost of itself disposes of the "don't."

Freedom is more essential than discipline; interest, than duty. In a mechanical view of education, which from the point of view of the educator is by far the more comfortable view, discipline is essential. If successful, it mechanizes to a nicety the educational process. Individualities disappear; only units, comparable units, remain, which can be handled with ease and made to play the part of cogs in the educational wheel. But suppose the interest is shifted to the cog, suppose its independence and individuality rise in our estimate so as to become more important than the wheel itself. This is what has happened in the new education. The individual is too precious to be sacrificed even temporarily for the sake of the smoothly working educational machinery. It may be foreseen that the educator will be sorely tried chasing individualities. But there is no other path for him to follow if the stultifying effects of discipline are to be avoided. Similarly, interest is a more natural, more spontaneously creative incentive than duty. Through interest the child may be induced to do almost anything within its power, while the harnessing of it by duty absorbs so much energy that efficiency and quality are reduced.

Therefore the new education stands

for freedom and interest as levers of development rather than as matters of discipline and duty. That this approach can count on scant sympathy from the stand-patter may well be imagined.

An ounce of creativeness outweighs a ton of passive absorption. If education is to assist the individual in his task of self-realization, it must place at his disposal opportunities for creativeness; for it is in creativeness, in self-expression, that the individual finds himself. Now, it so happens that nature has endowed the child with vast reservoirs of creativeness. With the years, and all too rapidly, these reservoirs become

exhausted, become depleted, and it is the chosen ones alone who have any free creativeness left when maturity is reached. If creativeness is to be enhanced, therefore, if indeed it can be at all, we must seize upon it when it is at its height, in childhood. If there is such a thing as a habit of creativeness, it is in childhood that it can be acquired, and experience has taught us that the passive absorption in mere learning of ideas and processes does not stimulate, but rather impedes, creativeness. One might say, absorption clogs, creativeness liberates, the individual psyche.

Such, then, is, as I see it, the platform of the new education.

T

HE age which produced "Moby Dick" failed to recognize its features in that stormy glass. Recognition has had to come from an age so different that it is obliged to view the book as a document of the past and to take its delight in qualities which, though essential to Melville, were only incidental to his main design. Whaling is now history. So, too, though more likely to be revived again, are such concerns as Melville felt for the plight of the soul voyaging through oceans of terror and doubt on the mortal quest for immortal certainty. But in Melville's day both matters were almost in the news.

New England, turning from her rocky pastures, had sought the more hospitable acres of the sea and had brought the art and science of whalecatching to a pitch never equaled before or since. In this the island of Nantucket led the chase. "The Nantucketer," says Melville, "he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves,

he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another land, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sail, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."

This, of course, is poetry, but it is founded upon what in 1851 was a matter of common knowledge. Not only New England, but all the northeastern United States sent its imagination habitually to the Pacific with the whalers. Inland youths followed their instincts to the ports and set sail upon vessels which after abominable voyages came home reeking with blubber. Men who stayed behind wished they might go with the greasy Argonauts and listened to their yarns wherever a returned whaler used his tongue. California invited in another direction, and Kansas held forth the promise of adventure. But the sea still filled a great part of the horizon of escape. It was the highway leading out of monotony. It was the purge of desperate moods. moods. "With a philosophical flour