Helpless Youths and Useless Men
By William Lee Howard
Are They the Result of False Education?
“Doctor, what is the matter with my son? Is he stupid or lazy? Is he degenerate?” “Neither stupid nor degenerate, but helpless because he has grown up to eighteen years of age, uninstructed; unskilled in anything that will make for a successful career. He needs educating.” “But, doctor, he has had the best we could give him; he has just been graduated from the high school.” “Doubtless; but the curriculum at the American high school gives a certain privileged number of youths—a very small number—a preparation for college entrance. But how about the boy who is to start in business, trade, or industrial occupation? Does he get a four-year course preparatory to his work?” “You have come to me for professional advice about your son. You say he can find no position that suits him,—nothing to do. He has become indifferent, and has habits which you fear will bring him to no good.” “Yes, he finds fault with every position I have tried to get for him; says he’s not adapted for the work.” “What has he been fitted to do?” “Nothing that I can discover. He says he’ll go to college if I’ll send him. Would you advise me to make the sacrifice?” “No, no; he needs training, not cultivating. He needs to learn something about living men and methods, not about dead men and past manners. Don’t misunderstand me. I am an ardent advocate of college training,—of the highest possible work along these lines,—but only for scholars, men born to intellectual labor and investigation. . . .” “Your son is typical of thousands of helpless youths in this country to-day. He has been unfitted for the work nature intended him to do; not fitted for the work he is capable of doing. To send him to college would only make matters worse, and result in forming habits and acquaintances which would be injurious to his future career; he must be a manual worker; his brain is not made of cells that call for studious application in intellectual work.” “Yes; I have no wealth to give him.” “Well, then, why don’t you fathers give your boys an education that will enable them to earn a living? Not all can become lawyers, doctors, or professors; and of many who have tried, I’ve seen the wrecks, moral and physical. When your boy was in the primary school, he built a boat that beat all the others upon the lake. He should, at that period in his developing ideas, have had a start in the use of tools, in the training of the hands and eyes.” “Yes, that’s true, doctor; the boy wanted to go into a shop, but his mother and sisters—” “I know all about their ruinous false pride. As a handler of tools, as a skilful boat-builder, he would have been successful; and here is the most important fact,—he would have been mentally contented, physically balanced.” “What is his present attitude?—Discontented; unable to know what he wants. His eyes and hands have been allowed to go untrained; his mind, instead of being drilled to observe facts and apply their lessons, instead of realizing that man must make for proficiency in some line, or fail as a producer, has been absorbing the merry-go-round ideas of girls.” “He has no serious ideas of life; has a false pride due to his associations and the doughty smatterings of French and Latin. Of course he won’t go into a carpenter shop in this town now. He feels that such a step would be humiliating. Think of the false ideas he has absorbed! To work with his hands is beneath his social level, so he remains useless and helpless—a parasite.” “It is from this class we specialists get the dipsomaniac, the despondent, and the useless—the men who go to the dump heap.” “Whose fault is this?—You fathers’;26every one of you. You send your boy to school—to the public schools—without any care or investigation concerning his tastes, his teachers, or how he is to be made into a useful man. You pay your school tax, and think your duty ends here.” “When you notice that he is dissatisfied with his school, you pay no attention to his need of advice. When he tells you that he wishes Miss Brown would let him stay in the manual-training room instead of going to that ‘horrid Latin class,’ or says, when he comes home to dinner, ‘I wish I could cut out all the po’try and mush, and learn sumpthin’ I can get onto,’ what do you, fathers, do for him?” “You tell him his teacher knows best; to do as she tells him. What a back slap at your fatherhood! You frankly admit to your sons that a young woman who sees them only in the class room, understands them, knows their desires and longings and capabilities better than you, the fathers, do.” “The fault with the public high school is that it was established with the idea that every boy was born mentally equal to his schoolmate; that every boy’s brain was capable of any development under a universal curriculum. It was the impression held by the pedagogues that every boy was made from the same germinal stuff, that all brain cells were capable of the same kind and amount of development; hence a common mold could be used for any and all. Heredity, nationality, environment, prenatal influence, mental strength, and physical vigor were supposedly equal in all.” “You are a horse dealer. You receive a shipment of horses—young horses to be trained and schooled. You look them over carefully, and try them out in the ring. You pick out the horse that shows by his build and action that he is fitted for the park or hunting-field. Another you put aside as a prospective draft-horse, another as a general utility beast, and so on. Each of these horses needs special training along the line of work it was born to follow, and each is turned over to the instructor proficient in his specialty.” “What would have been the result if cart-horse, farm-horse, racer, hunter, and circus actor had all been placed in one ring and under one set of training rules?—Ruin of all the good qualities and natural attributes in each horse. We would have our horse markets filled with useless animals—horses no man wanted.” “The boy is a young animal. Give him training along the lines he was born to follow,—look into his pedigree,—and you will get a contented man and useful citizen. Many a boy who would have been a steady worker in the shafts of a cabinet shop has been goaded to balk and sulk, through the nagging of a teacher who constantly blamed him for not trotting the same speed as a carefully groomed and born trotter.” What Boys Should Be Taught in School
“We must have schools where boys are taught that a blacksmith is a far better citizen than the political clerk who has a high-school diploma, but is dependent upon the ward boss or saloon proprietor for his sporadic jobs.” “Many of the high schools will have to throw out of the windows Latin and Greek text-books, their French grammars and ancient histories, English history and poetry—but not the English language, or the way to speak and write it.” “Last spring I watched, in a small Massachusetts town, the parading of about three hundred boys from an industrial reformatory. These boys were the offcasts of the streets of Boston. They marched behind their own boys’ band. Every lad in that little regiment was being trained along some line of industry which would make him an independent youth when released from school. Carpenters, hand-workers in iron, masons, gardeners, musicians—some form of craftsmanship was their gift from the State.” “Watching this parade of youthful craftsmen were a large number of boys who attended the high school. Most of them would have to earn a living; many were then a burden to their parents. Some lived four miles from the schools, yet so solicitous was the State that they all should receive an ‘education,’ that every school-day a bus, and in some cases a carriage, was sent to transport these young people to school.” “At these schools not one of them was getting a course of instruction which would enable him to compete for a living wage with the ‘reform’ boys.” “Is there not something ludicrous in sending a carriage every school-day in the year for a boy of sixteen who has not an ounce of scholarship in his mental make-up, and not an extra dollar in his or his parents’ pockets, and then pay a teacher to cram some of the humanities into him?” “True, he may get an hour or so of manual training; but it is not enough to give him an understanding of the dignity of labor, or the necessity of training the eyes and hands. In fact, the slight attention given to this art is conducive to the impression that it is subordinate to a knowledge of history and Latin; and this idea leads to failure—to absolute uselessness. . . .” “This story of misfits, of uselessness from want of development of the inherent productive powers, is repeated to me hundreds of times a year. I have seen such pitiable wrecks, mental and physical, the results of false instruction and unguided talents, that I ask each father to stop a moment, shut down the desk or get leave of absence from the ship for a while, and look into his boy’s mind; find out what he can do, what he is capable of doing, then send him to be trained along that line, and send God’s blessing with him.”—William Lee Howard, M. D., in the American Magazine for November.