St Ignatius College - Ignatian Yearbook (San Francisco, CA)

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38 I GNATIAN worry about the actual acquisition of informationg it will come of itself, but every true educator will Worry about the best method of teaching the mind how to handle that infor- mation when it comes. What has been said of classical education is, some one may urge, attended to in the high schools. Unfortunately it is not. Latin, it is true, and sometimes Greek, are found in the curriculum, but the cramming system has succeeded in marring the otherwise beneficial results which the classical languages are calculated to produce. It is no longer how thoroughly the student has read an author, but how much he has read that determines the pedagogical judgment on his efficiency. Perhaps it would be better to dispense with the classics altogether than to administer them in the same overdoses that characterize the administration of other sub- jects., The third flaw in our public education does not come within the scope of this paper. It is the neglect of the will. Professor Burk seems to think that the purpose of education is to train the youth, who are to form the nation. We agree with him, but there is not always an agreement on the means by which this high and noble purpose is to be attained. There is, in this matter, a majestic thought beautifully expressed by Milton, which is as true now as it was in his time: To make the people littest to choose and the chosen littest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty educationg to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice. How can this be done? Do you imagine, says Plato, one of the B. C. school, that polities grow on a tree, or on a rock, and not out of the moral dispositions of men who compose them P Surely out of the moral dispositions. The lirst element of good government, echoes Mill, is to promote virtue and intelligence of the human beings com- prising the community. How can the moral dispositions be trained, how can virtue be promoted, how can tem- perance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice be taught? The question can .not be answered in the limits of this

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PEDAGOGICAL BEWILDERMENT 37 The great training school for thought, apart from other and higher advantages, is classical education. Latin and Greek have been called the parallel bars in the intellectual gymna- sium. A student cannot translate a single Latin or Greek line into English, or a single English line into Latin or Greek without asking himself why as many times as there are words in the sentence. The advantage possessed by the B. C. languages, in this regard, over modern languages consists in this, that they are supremely logical in their structure. You may not be able to find very many utilitarian reasons in favor of classical study, if you are superiicially utilitarian, but if it is of any use to be able to think aright, then, even from an utilitarian viewpoint, the classical languages are capable of justification. Another great result of classical training' is that it de- velops attention or concentration. What is needed now more than anything else is this power of concentration, this power to direct our thoughts along certain definite lines, and hold them there. Every teacher knows that this is the great de- sideratum of a classroom, to keep the students from wander- ing and day-dreamingg and every teacher knows that, with the power of concentration or attentive reading, one can do more in one day, in the way of acquiring information, than in a whole year without that power. Information is indeed necessaryg the truly educated man is one who knows something about everything and everything about something, but actual experience has very amply dem- onstrated that undigested and unclassified information is crowded out by what is added and that the high school pupils are forgetting what they learn in the school to make room for what they learn outside the school, forgetting what they learn one year to make room for the lessons of the next. This is not the case with assimilated knowledge, and so if we are to educate in the true sense of the word, We must train the youthful mind in the process of assimilation, practice it in the art of making its own the thought of others and the methods of arriving at thought which others follow. This, in a word, is to teach them how to think. No one need

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PEDAGOGICAL BEWILDERMENT 39 paper. It is raised merely to show how completely and terribly true is the assertion that our public school system is the most momentous failure in American life to-day. It overloads the memory, it suifocates the understanding, it ignores the will, and again we wonder what they are going to do about it! Raymond T. Feeley. A Menmrg O'er hills, through vales, the bleak winds shriek And glittering Hakes drift on through frozen dellg The shallow brook in secret, silent course Winds on ignored beneath its glassy shell. All Nature's paths are lost in crystal maze: To slender pines refulgent pendants cling, The cold, sweet breath of Nature now pervades The air, where once the lark was wont to sing. Fred S. Johnson.