Life, or Preparation for Life?
By A. W. SPAULDING
ONE conception of the school is that it is a secluded place, like a shipyard or a machine-shop, meant to form and finish certain products which are thereafter to do a work in active life. The similes could not bear criticism, it is true; but neither can such a conception of the school, when the character and needs of the mind are considered. Yet that idea is common enough. The student looks forward to a career for which he believes he is now fitting himself; the teacher feels his teaching to be apart from his other life interests, or else, wrapped wholly in scholasticism, feels himself apart from other classes of men. Lineal descendant of the cloisters and cells of the Dark Ages, such a school fails to meet the needs of so practical a life as ours must be; for however much men may plan first to learn, then to do, the law of life demands that the science be learned in the art. The often-quoted injunction, “Learn to do by doing,” is meant to voice this truth; yet many who quote it as an expression of their educational creed, try to apply it under conditions which forbid its application. The school which, because of its artificial forms, departs widely from the mode of life the student must observe afterward, can not, with all the theory it gives him, fit the student for that after life; for what men and women learn is what they form the habit of doing, not what they merely read or what they are merely told. If, then, the student learns the facts of physiology, but eats, and sleeps, and otherwise lives irregularly and evilly, he will not afterward give the gospel of health. If he studies enthusiastically the deeds of Christian heroes active in evangelization, but confines his emulation to dreams from the easy-chair, and neglects spiritual and physical exercise in worthy matters, he will not thereafter make a Livingstone nor a Mackay. If he swallows abstract sciences and religious tenets, without at the time finding a use for them and applying them, he will be most likely in later life to cling to the habit of always acquiring and never giving. If he regularly makes a disproportionate division of his school time between abstract study and practical duties,—disproportionate as measured by the standard of life’s work,—it will take all the grim threats of debt or starvation to bring him back from among mental gluttons into the ranks of rational livers. There are great difficulties in the way of the school which would teach its students how to live life rightly. Ages have done their work in drawing men’s ideal of the school away from the home to the institution. Generations have set such a rapid pace for mental progress through the sciences of the school that the average student must despair of keeping it, if he must at the same time maintain his other proper relations to life. Ambition and pride, and sometimes misguided zeal for a worthy cause, urge student and teacher into practising what the whole world accepts as the proper standard of education, and into neglecting or postponing what they dimly feel is also important. So far-reaching and so interlaced are25the principles and practises that belong to the two opposing ideas, school as life, or school as preparation for life, that they can not be compassed in a day. A comprehension of their significance and results, and a knowledge of the principles which should guide us, can, we must believe, be best gained by a study of and a return to God’s ideal of the school, which is the home. The nearer we come to that ideal, and the farther we get from institutionalism, the nearer shall we get to the life and its proper culture, and the farther from the formalism which is death to our cause. It may become a problem whether the school, disconnected from the home and perhaps opposed to it, can accomplish anything in the transforming of character and the preparing of Christian workers. It may become a question and an issue whether the school can, in justice to its work and its members, extend its privileges to those who are outside of its complete influence, and whose homes are in practise opposed to its teachings. It may be a matter for study how the school home may grow to conform more closely to the natural home in its program, social life, and duties. And the future may see among us every home a school, every school a true home, and every teacher, in his relations to his pupils, a father or a mother.