Craftsmanship in Teaching | Page 9

but you who deal with children know from experience the principle for
which the biologist Weismann stands sponsor--the principle, namely, that acquired
characteristics are not inherited; that whatever changes may be wrought during life in the
brains and nerves and muscles of the present generation cannot be passed on to its
successor save through the same laborious process of acquisition and training; that,
however far the civilization of the race may progress, education, whose duty it is to
conserve and transmit this civilization, must always begin with the "same old child."

This, I take it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster's pessimism. In our work we
are constantly struggling against that same inertia which held the race in bondage for how
many millenniums only the evolutionist can approximate a guess,--that inertia of the
primitive, untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which,
for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man possessed. This
inertia has been conquered at various times in the course of recorded history,--in Egypt
and China and India, in Chaldea and Assyria, in Greece and Rome,--conquered only
again to reassert itself and drive man back into barbarism. Now we of the Western world
have conquered it, let us hope, for all time; for we of the Western world have discovered
an effective method of holding it in abeyance, and this method is universal public
education.
Let Germany close her public schools, and in two generations she will lapse back into the
semi-darkness of medievalism; let her close both her public schools and her universities,
and three generations will fetch her face to face with the Dark Ages; let her destroy her
libraries and break into ruin all of her works of art, all of her existing triumphs of
technical knowledge and skill, from which a few, self-tutored, might glean the wisdom
that is every one's to-day, and Germany will soon become the home of a savage race, as it
was in the days of Tacitus and Cæsar. Let Italy close her public schools, and Italy will
become the same discordant jumble of petty states that it was a century ago,--again to
await, this time perhaps for centuries or millenniums, another Garibaldi and Victor
Emmanuel to work her regeneration. Let Japan close her public schools, and Japan in two
generations will be a barbaric kingdom of the Shoguns, shorn of every vestige of power
and prestige,--the easy victim of the machinations of Western diplomats. Let our country
cease in its work of education, and these United States must needs pass through the
reverse stages of their growth until another race of savages shall roam through the
unbroken forest, now and then to reach the shores of ocean and gaze through the
centuries, eastward, to catch a glimpse of the new Columbus. Like the moving pictures of
the kinetoscope when the reels are reversed, is the picture that imagination can unroll if
we grant the possibility of a lapse from civilization to savagery.
And so when we take the broader view, we quickly see that, in spite of our pessimism, we
are doing something in the world. We are part of that machine which civilization has
invented and is slowly perfecting to preserve itself. We may be a very small part, but, so
long as the responsibility for a single child rests upon us, we are not an unimportant part.
Society must reckon with you and me perhaps in an infinitesimal degree, but it must
reckon with the institution which we represent as it reckons with no other institution that
it has reared to subserve its needs.
In a certain sense these statements are platitudes. We have repeated them over and over
again until the words have lost their tremendous significance. And it behooves us now
and again to revive the old substance in a new form,--to come afresh to a
self-consciousness of our function. It is not good for any man to hold a debased and
inferior opinion of himself or of his work, and in the field of schoolcraft it is easy to fall
into this self-depreciating habit of thought. We cannot hope that the general public will
ever come to view our work in the true perspective that I have very briefly outlined. It
would probably not be wise to promulgate publicly so pronounced an affirmation of our

function and of our worth. The popular mind must think in concrete details rather than in
comprehensive principles, when the subject of thought is a specialized vocation. You and
I have crude ideas, no doubt, of the lawyer's function, of the physician's function, of the
clergyman's function. Not less crude are their ideas of our function. Even when they
patronize us by saying that our work is the noblest that