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

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PEDAGOGICAL' BEWILDERMENT 31 test examination to which he subjected a class of girls who were seeking admission into the Normal School. This com- mon sense test, which affords an additional proof that common sense is a very uncommon possession, will serve as our guide in the thoughts or suggestions that follow. The test was arrayed in formidable language: Charac- terize in a line or so the following persons, in a way to state what they stand for in general public intelligence: Queen Elizabeth, Burbank, Hamlet, Lancelot, etc. There were, in all, 27 names chosen from the widest possible field, from sacred scripture down through Greek mythology to Roman history, thence through English mythology, English history and English literature, to American fiction, politics, sociology and trades unionism, with a side study of music, painting and botany. The girl students manifested a certain degree of familiarity with the classical and historical personages, but were, in great part, deficient in knowledge of current events and modern characters. One little girl though LaFollette was the French general who helped the Americans in the Revo- lutionary war. Another characterized Booker T. Washington as the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. All knew more about the past, particularly the distant past, than about the present, and this aroused the pedagogical indignation of Professor Burk to such a point that he exclaimed: Are we living A. D. or B. C. P He thereupon proceeded to answer the ques- tion which he had himself raised, his answer being sub- stantially as follows: We are, of course, living in the year of our Lord, but no one would be able to judge of the truth of this assertion by the answers received from the girls who sought admission into the State Normal School. They actually knew more about Roman insurgency under Cassius than they did about American insurgency under LaEollette! They seemed to be living Before Christ ! Apart from the main thought which it is our intention to suggest, it may be stated here, in passing, that, educationally speaking, it is not a very undesirable thing to live among the ancients, to breathe the intellectual atmosphere which they

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Iieimgngiral Eemilhermrnt its allotment of abuse in this destructive iw Q age when even the most sacred things .are being criticiaed, 1s.not, in itself, aph cibjtict for surprise, but it is surprising a e abuse should come from men and women who have been identified with the system all their lives. At- tacks from without might have been expectedg it was alto- gether unexpected to hear of internal dissension and it was astonishing to find the dissenters so full of destructive criti- cism and of unmistakable bitterness. One public school teacher writing in The Ladies' Home Journal tells us that the system is the most momentous failure in our American life today. From another we learn that the high schools in particular are little more than fool factories. And when we add to these thoughts the criticism of the universities that appeared some time ago in Everybody's Magazine under the general heading Blasting at the Rock of Ages, we are forced to wonder what they are going to do about it. - ll I-IAT the public school system should receive if M' E ' I 5 Q fi? While thus wondering we beg leave to offer a few thoughts of our own, which may be of advantage in deter- mining just what is wrong with the system. That some- thing is wrong is now generally admitted, and the articles recently contributed to The Ladies' Home Journal empha- size this general conviction. Still we fail to see that any of the critics have indicated the real source of the evil. They are self-constituted physicians, and, in our opinion, they are very faulty in their diagnosis. In fact, one of the articles -that of Professor Frederick Burk, Principal of the State Normal School of San Francisco-affords a very beautiful, though unconscious illustration of the real pedagogical dis- ease that is afflicting the schools. The learned professor, than whom there is no higher authority in the land, builds his article in criticism on the results of a common sense I

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32 IGNA TIAN breathed, to study the great models of literature which they bequeathed to the world. All the truly great intellects of modern times reveled in ancient learning, studied their logic, sought the secret of their accuracy in expression, tried to make their own the beauty and vigor and consistency of their unequalled style. If, with a blind utilitarian zeal, we succeed in changing the old educational scheme and substituting a twentieth cen- tury system with newspapers and literary digests and cur- rent history magazines for text-books-and this seems to be implicitly advocated by Professor Burk-we shall find that the boys and girls who present themselves for future exam- inations will know more about Lillian Perkins than Queen Elizabeth, and more about Rube Marquard than about Gifford Pinchot. That this, in itself, would make a very great dif- ference, educationally speaking, is not altogether certain, for if information is the standard by which you are to judge of mental proficiency, how are you to determine, how are the students to determine on just what subjects they are to be informed? If the teachers or the pupils or both follow the lead of what seems to be meant by general public intelli- gence, they will give more prominence to jack johnson and Harry Thaw than to Pinchot and Henry M. Stanley, as Philosopher Dooley very beautifully pointed out: . So much in passing. We are not prepared to ask: What is wrong with the palladium of our popular government P We shall try to proceed logically in our endeavor to answer this question. It is generally admitted that there are in us three functionally distinct faculties or powers, the memory, the understanding, and the will. It' is also generally admitted -and it is undeniably true-that, though functionally distinct, these three powers have a mutual relation, they act and react on one another, the memory supplies the material, the understanding classifies and co-ordinates it, the will controls the conduct or action which is called for by the classified knowledge. Knowledge is a call to action. Besides the scientific knowledge which consists in systematizing theima-