(Lawrence, Kansas
April 6, 1940)

 

 

THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND LIFE NEEDS

V. K. Brown

eee emer

 

When Dean Schwegler invited me to come here today, and Chairman O'Brien sent
me the theme of the meeting, I wen first pleased _ the ocimpliment, then appalled
by the responsibility. If fifty were to be in attendance, some twenty-five col-
lective hours of yon eliitietenoe time would be involved, time you couldn't afford
to weaiie That caused me adaileinps ; I am not a professional educator, even
though my work seeks to influence life. And it is presumptious to speak too con-
fidently of 1590 ‘atin: Who knows all the needs of life? Who can say which are
most important among those needs which he te sure he does identify?

My only reassurance was this. For over thirty years I have seen intimately,
life forces in action, on great American city. My department of the Chicago
Park District is, I think, the best equipped recreation department in existence.
We offer a wide variety of services to a participant attendance of over fifty
million per year, not to mention uncounted casual strollers in our more than 130
parks. We operate in close to one hundred buildings, some of which or a half
million dollars. ie invite people to consider those structures as centers for
their community, social, and recreational life. Broadly speaking, the people of
our city come to these parks to escape the monotony of workea~-day existence.
Their coming testifies to their wishes. Apparently, they desire thrill and adven-
ture, They wish to introduce ‘challenge into life's humdrum. They seek novel
experiences. They want kindred spirited companionship. They crave social status.
and recognition. They pursue sustained and sustaining interests, to lend life
meaning and enthusiasm. They desire the sense of mastery, the joy of richer and

more fruitful living, the staisfactions of creative accomplishment . They want

3 «
drama, color, poetry, movement, melody - they want secular life to have spiritual
significance. They want it to be gayly gallant, to have dignity, but with a sense
of humor lest its dignity be too solem.

We have a peculiar opportunity to observe them in their most self-revealing
postures - when they are most unstudied, when they are least posed, most spon-
taneous, When they are least self-conscious, most natural. We see them in their
enthusiasms, in their devotion to causes, their loyalty to friends, to hobbies,
to traditions, to the perfections of skill or achievement which they hold as
ideals. We see them divested of the robes of ceremony, when they have taken off
the armour they wear in earning a livelihood. We fraternize with them when they
are relexed, spontaneously concentrating on doing the things they choose to do
because they like to do them.

But in that same off-duty relaxation, when forgetful of everything else,
they are absorbed in the exciting pursuit of the objects of their enthusiasms.

We see them still responding significantly to the codes of social conduct to
which they are pledged. We see them sharing their skills with their neighbors,
aiding, explaining, suggesting solutions to problems. We see them joining
neighborhood associations, working on programs of neighborhood improvement in
response to social ideals. We see the patterns of their sportsmanship, the
texture of their sociability. If you are willing to concede that such unstudied
responses as these indicate hungers which originate in and interpret essential
needs of life, then perhaps we can offer something on our subject.

Out of years of such association, possibly I can bring you some observations
which will supplement your own thinking, if only I can first select subject
matter which is significant from your point of view, rather than my own. In this
I may fail, although I shall try to do it. My other difficulty is to express my

suggestions in terms which will translate themselves into the vernacular, the

2G
thought associations common to your group. I suspect that it was when they got
around to interpreting the art of the Tower of Babel, its architecture, its
educational or its social significance, that the people discovered that each was
speaking in an unknown tongue, incomprehensible to the others. Words are uncertain
containers of meaning. Their cubic content differs with differing habits of
thought and use. We become addicts of our own terminologies. The bridges of
communication between one profession and another are of limited capacity. We

have difficulty in getting the significant essense of our meanings across to each
other.

I have chosen, therefore, to write out and mimeograph what I am going to
say. If it happens to stimulate a responding vibration which calls for reflection
on your part, you can get a copy after I'm through. That will enable you at
your leisure to ferret out the more obscure meanings which seem to have possible
significance to your own thinking. And you may then forgive me for following a
manuscript.

There's one other consideration. I must speak with only a lay person's
knowledge of modern education, Laymen as we are, we are proud of American
education, of its freedom in a world of dictated ideologies. We take our hats
off to its liberal spirit, its desire to make sound and healthy progress.

An outsider cannot look at all closely at education today without noting
the unrest expressed in its experimental schools, its progressive education
conferences, its adult education movements. Its exponents are engaged in
critical self-analysis. Its Kilpatricks and Deweys, its army of research experi-
menters, give it almost the steam shovel and open ditch aspect of a W.P.A. field
project. When volunteering comment or suggestion, an onlooker cannot be sure
that the very thing he proposes may not already be going forward over in the

next excavation.
In addressing you on this subject, I modestly hope to be helpful, even if
mildly provocative. We outsiders don't envy the educator his task. It seems to
us that it's a bewildering job; it involves integrating elements which to a degree
appear mutually destructive of each other - things like fire and water. They
appear irreconcilable. Education's problem is that society needs both fire and
water. Fire suggests the Devil; water, the deep blue sea; and education is in
the middle between the two. Any criticism we offer is, therefore, a sympathetic
criticism. While we may question education's dividends, we wouldn't ourselves
for a moment assume its liabilities. We may yell, "Get in there and fight," but
we do it from the vantage point of a safe position on the sidelines, and we intend
to stay there.

I*1] admit that this is a lot of introduction, but when Someone does get
around to throwing me out the window, it may persuade him not to be too vigorous
about it.

All right! Assuming that we have now a little bit more of common wderstand-
ing, let's talk about the School Curriculum and Life Needs.

From what I have been saying, no doubt you have already located my profes-
sional point of view. You have its range, and can concentrate your firing on it.
But if we are to shoot straight here, let's have no uncertainties. Let's get
it definitely on the map. We think that in our thirty-five years of contact
with the life of a typical American city, our recreation department of the Chicago
Park District has seen people responding to Life Needs, even though they may have
been themselves only dimly conscious of their impulsions as Life Needs. But if
we possess any perceptive sensitivity at all, we should be able to sense at least
some of the significance of their social gropings. We should have learned some-
thing about what people want out of life. ‘We think we have. We believe their

gropings, when released from regimenting compulsions, do have significance.

|.
We think those gropings betray hungers which, however inarticulate, are neverthe-
less eloquent in proclaiming the need of certain vitamins in the lives of men.

We think there are Life Needs which are eternally imperative, and which still
remain unsatisfied. And to our way of thinking, those needs make definite demands
upon Education as the process whereby society purposes to prepare people for the
business, or if one prefers, for the art of living.

The first necd is a rather hazy one, in general terms. But we think it is
basic. We think it is the understructure bencath almost every other need and
particularly basic to treating the individual as a whole unit. Briefly, that
is the need of better integrating an emotional with our intellectual culture.
Let's see whether we can make that clear.

We think humanity still suffers from an ailment which might be called a
sort of secular-spiritual Beri-beri. As you know, that is a disease caused by
unbalanced diet. It comes to people subsisting mainly on rice, but rice which
has been polished. Rice naturally is darker; polishing makes it colorless. It
removes the life germ and robs it of its vitamine content. Beri-beri is a
disease of hunger unsatisfied. It is a nervous irritation which causes pain,
general debility, emaciation, We think our social Beri-beri is kin to this
physical ailment. We believe that subsisting exclusively on an intellectual
diet, divested by polishing of much of the color and of the life germ of emotional
content, contributes to a loss in emotional discipline and cultivation. It only
does half the job. When one considers that impulse rather than reason still
continues to make most of our decisions for us, isntt one safe in saying that
it even does less than half of its job?

It is true that you educators talk about motivation. But we think you

conceive it more as intellectual concept than as emotional experience. Stephen

-~ 5 -
Leacock, in his "Too Much College" states it thus: "All that is best in educa-
tion can only be acquired by spontaneous interest. Real education should be

a wonderful beginning, a marvelous initi&tion --- and life will carry it on."
To use his phrase again, to express what I am trying to emphasize here, it is
"the difference between a spirit and a mechanism."

I want to make this perfectly clear. Let me offer you a concrete illustra-
tion. My youngest son attends an experimental school which is exploring educational
methods. That school has been testing pupils lately to determine how much of
detail they are getting out of their reading assignments. You know the techniques
used. Did the hero come in from the right, the center, or the left of the stage?
Questions like that. Solemn stuff. Scientific testing, and all that. Well,
our lad had the flu lately. Our physician advised him to stay abed. Saturday
came. Mrs. Brown had some shopping to do and was going downtown with me in the
morning. Except for the maid, he would be alone in the house all day. When we
went to his room before we started, he said, "Gee, it's going to be lonesome here.
And I've run out of anything to read. Can't you get me something?" We went
down to the family library. I brought up Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," -
Mrs. Brown, one of her girlhood classics. My selection he greeted with, "Aw, dad,
that looks like biography, and I hate biography!" None too successfully I tried
to interpret the book. He remained unconvinced. I didn't get far. I didn't
carry my point.

That evening when we returned, Mark Twain was untouched, but he had almost
finished reading the other book. School has taught him to read fast, and he does
a lot of it. I asked him whether he enjoyed the beok. Yes, he had. He was
enthusiastic about it. "It's a fine book, Dad. Did ya' ever read it? A dandy

book. Really, I liked it! All but one chapter, That almost spoiled it for me.

a.
I almost quit. But I'm glad now I didn't. I suppose it's one of the best chapters
in the book, too. It's the chapter we had in school, in reading assignment, and

I hate that so that it almost spoiled the book for met"

 

 

Now let's consider what might have happened if the intellectual had been
supplemented by an emotional appeal, - if it had been "a spirit, and not a mechan-
ism." If the school had made a game of close observation in school reading, if
they had given it emotional meaning, do you think the result would have been the
same? If the school reading course had sensed the emotional gulf between a test
and a contest, would the result have been the same? His school made a contest
of spelling. And he loves to spell. His spelling is three — in advance of
his class. He won the whole school's spelling bee, but that, you note, was sport.
That had emotional validity. That tests accuracy of observation too, but his
approach is a different one. He puts more of himself into observation of detail
in spelling, as a sport, than he puts into observation of detail in reading as a
study.

When the brilliant young President of the University a? Chience says that
the purpose of education is to train students to think, one wonders whether that
statement gets clearly into the open, the whole story. Doesn't education have to
do more than just that? Doesn't it have to provide experience, as well as know-
ledge? Do children run adventuring to school as they do to a playground which
operates as a really exploratory center? I'm not talking about all playgrounds
now, nor all schools. Don't misunderstand that. I hasten to admit that many a
playground, if not most of them, are no more vital than the tombs of the Pharaohs,
and many a school no doubt is as electric with power as a crackling dynamo. I'm
only saying that when either brings people to it with eagerness on their faces,
the institution is summoning more than cold reason into conference. It is appeal-

ing to other drives and urges as well. It is issuing a call to the emotion. I

-~ 7 -
think the playground does that oftener than the school. But when either does so,
it assumes a responsibility for affording those emotions a disciplining exercise,
a living experience, just as it affords accuracy in spelling exercise and cxperi-
ence. The emotions can be consciously guided and disciplined. My impression is
that education has scarcely atarted to explore the planning of emotional experi-
ence for the sake of developing emotional controls. It can be done. It has
been started, especially in training for carcers in drama, and to a lesser extent
for careers in music and art. The feeling for the subject gets attention there.
But it has been started, only. It is still embryonic.

Those of us who live close to the dykes against which tides of propaganda
are gnawing while we sleep, realize that civilized sonmming is everywhere en-
dangered in our modern world. Even here where authoritarianism is not yet in
control, we must protect imperiled social values with more than the loose fill
of unconsolidated learnings. Cementing, emotional integration, is needed to
lend cohesion to the facts we know, to bind them into a wearing surface, and there-
by consolidate common knowledge into social wisdom. With sinister purposes, men
who work in darkmess are opening floodgates, releasing torrents to dash against
those dykes. Those men wear a uniform and employ a technique like spiritual
apostles, but the works by which they may be kmown are works of hatred, not of
charity. They learned their process from the evangelists of religion. But instead
of conviction of sin, they generate fear, suspicion, and hatred. Instead of
repentance and deliverance from evil, they concentrate their efforts, artfully
arousing fury against alien opponents of their ideologies, or against internal
minorities, as scapegoats useful in diverting critical attention from themselves.
Instead of entering the fold of the redeemed, they offer converts membership in
the bund, the party, or the organization. That is the art of propaganda. It

isn't new. They haven't even originality to their credit. Their whole strategy

hs
is brazenly appropriated from the altars they defile. But it makes cunning use
of a weakness in our defenses which education has too long tolerated, and still
continues to tolerate. It craftily exploits the fact that while we strive to
make mature our reasoning processes, we give little attention to emotional dis-
cipline. We seem content in our educational system to let the emotions remain
undisciplined, susceptible to any rabble rousing attack, their cultivation
static on a six-year old level. That remains, in my opinion, at once the most
damning indictment of our education, and the source of our greatest danger.

We have been forced to give this subject attention in public recreation. We
have no compulsory attendance laws. Either we attract, or we don't get. patrons.
In their free time, people seek a larger freedom, not a lessened one. And that
word lessen appears equally unappealing, whether it is spelled with an "en" or
an "on." We simply have no market for sombre didacticiam. It strikes no respon-
sive chord at all. It has no emotional pull. We must use what we call the recrea-
tional approach. We have to sell our wares. We have to make participation
adventurous, emotionally appealing.

This is not to say that we must make it easy. I doubt that people fundamen-
tally want life to be too easy. It gets stale if it is too easy. The Youth
Hostel movement - pedalling bikes up mountain sides, sleeping on hard bunks,
cooking one's own ‘ite. priding one's self that he can "take it” without whimper-
ing - that isn't casy. It isn't soft. It isn't devoid of disciplines. But
still it exerts a thrilling appeal. And the games people play when free to do
as they please - haven't you noticed that by virtue of the restrictions the
players voluntarily impose upon themselves, games always tend to become more
difficult? Witness the lively ball, the forward pass, two-move restriction in

checkers, 18-2 in billiards, bridge converted to contract, tennis moving off the

-9 -
lawn onto the faster clay or hard surfaced courts, In every case, they are getting
more difficult. People don't object to difficulty, so long as it interprets
itself as challenge, rather than as drudgery.

I know it isn't one of the sacred cow subjects. I know that some academicians
esteem it rather condescendingly. But as a looker-on in Venice, I venture the
opinion that Physical Baucation in some of ite aspects at least has apparently
realized more of what I am trying to say than any other unit in the curriculun.
With its physiology, its charts and instruments, it had its scientific but dull
approaches. Where it is still obsessed with being scientific, it continues to
be dull and uninspired in most of its health program, for example, or in its
research experiments program, or its solemn body building program. I don't know
why we should feel that we must leave adventure behind to be scientific. Scientific
exploration has in it the essence of intellectual romance. But when we come into
its august presence we seem to resign our sense of humor; we seem to become sus-
picious of inspiration. We seem fatally prone to make drudgery of it. And the
moment we do that, the sense of adventure appears to fly out the window. We don't
have to do that. It's only custom, Playing chess is scientific, but still it's
fun. The physics department of the University of Chicago is doing some interest-
ing exploring in this connection. They are scheduling their laboratories so
students, even in other departments, can come in and perform interesting experi-
ments for the fun of it. They are making the physics laboratory a sort of intel-
lectual recreation center, They are staging scientific verities with something
of dramatic art and appeal.

In part of its disciplines at least, Physical Education seems to the observer
on the sidelines to have been the department which has taken the lead in changing

to that approach. Years ago it had its calculated and cxact calisthenics drills,

«36.
Its German apparatus work, its Swedish exercises. But they didn't catch the
imagination, and they didn't click. However scientific they might be, with

their progressive day's order, their symmetries, their provision for the whole
body, the fact remained that the pupil went through them stolidly and stupidly.
Physical education solemnly tried to be scientific and presently found itself
dead. Thereupon it accomplished a resurrection. It began possibly to sacrifice
science somewhat for the restoration of life. It began interpreting activity

not in measurements, but in sensations - in the zests of living, the thrills of
endurance, of combat and conquest. It stressed the exuberance of abounding
vitality, rather than the facts of muscular development. It began to deal with
things of the spirit - with progress in accomplishment more than abstract health
or posture. Posture came alive only when it was interpreted in terms of beauty.
Latcky wolaks lifting is undergoing a revival, not to mcrely raise so many pounds,
but symmetrically to develop the body beautiful. Physical education's curriculum
began to stress running for the joy of it, sports and games for the tingle of
intensity of living. It took to itself vital emotional motivations, and it came
to life again.

Now, in doing that, it is doing more to provide emotional cultivation than
any other subject in the curriculum, in my opinion. In the old formal physical
education days, when I was a student, inter-school rivalries ran uncontrollably
into hatreds in our football contests. Walter Eckersall was one of our detested
contemporaries. We sang lustily, "Eckie, Eckie, break his neckiet" Out sports-
manship was deplorable. Our passions - we called them school spirit - were un-
restrained. We had no emotional brakes. Today, I officiate in track athletics.
Out on the field I see continuously, rivals offering helpful counsel and encourage-

ment to each other, Student bodies applaud outstanding plays by their opponents.

sit 8
Rabid partisanship is disapproved. Our rivalries are getting under control. We
are growing up to become gentlemen emotionally as well as intellectually. I
think the change in physical education has had a hand in bringing this about.

Now let's look at that from another angle, for a moment. With all the ins
quiries that your educational research has made into the Transfer of Training,
I haven't stumbled onto one which involved subject matter having this emotional
validity. Those which have come to my attention involved dry and dead skills
Which didn't go very deep into the barrel of living intensities. Results were
negative, but the skills appeared to me to be superficial in themselves, and
superficially taught. James Mursell observes that there out to be transfer. He
says the lack of transfer is "not a fiat of the Almighty; it is a reproach to
teaching." May it not be even an tedigtenet of the degree of emotional involve-
ment, the degree to which the learnings come to grips with the issues of life?
There appears to be transfer enough in life itself. Its phobias induce general
timidites. Its single worries or its momentary heroisms spread their effects to
the very boundaries of later living. But notice that where there is such manifest
transfer, there is always intense emotional involvement. The great crises, reli-
gious conversions, sudden exaltations of patriotism or devotion to causes which
transform whole lives before our eyes - aren't they always emotionally charged
experiences? And while mathematics may not affect logic, while study of composi-
tion may not visibly alter reading habits, have you ever known a coach who would
be as well pleased on meeting incoming material in the fall to learn that in
addition to inowing nothing about football, none of them had ever done any hard
labor in their lives? He believes in transfer. His results prove it. The com-
petitive spirit - what we call the heart of the athlete - is something an athlete

brings with him out of his past life experience, even to a new athletic undertaking.

i «
It is a capacity for living intensely, even dangerously, and that capacity isn't
restricted solely to the area in which it has been developed. It is susceptible to
other applications. It transfers: there's no doubt of it. But equally there's
no doubt that it is an emotional hook-up.

Let me quote in illustration a news item from one of our park gymnasiums:
"An incident occured in Grand Crossing Park that is worthy of recording," it reads.
"It was near the end of the final game in the senior basketball league. The score,
which had been see-sawing enough to have the audience hysterical, stood at-one
point from a tie. A forward, captain of the trailing team, stood under his goal
with the ball in hand ready to throw the basket that would put his team in the
lead again. Since there were no opposing players near at hand, he was as sure of
the points as basketball players ever are. Just then, an opposing player, coming
fast, stumbled to crash against a wall nearby, and fell, momentarily stunned.
In a fine gesture of sportsmanship, the forward called time instead of shooting
for the basket, and ran to the aid of his injured opponent. The crowd, catching .
the significance of the act, went into a frenzy of approval, and the event is
still talked of in these parts."

Wasn't that transfer - from an abstract concept of sportsmanship to its appli-
cation in a generous act in the heat of battle? It appears even a transfer in
the face of resistance. In the intensities of combat, that player's fighting
spirit was aroused. Determination to win was stimulating a flow from endocrines
into his bloodstream, of elements toxic to calm and dispassionate reason. He was
doubtless supercharged with adrenalin. His pulse was above normal; ruthless
attitudes were dominant. And yet, at this most unfavorable moment, his sporting
conscience broke through both these chemico-physical and counter-emotional barriers

to lay an arresting hand upon his actions.

. i=
But the crowd reaction was even more significant. Experience proves that ind
hysteria of overwrought spectators, denied the player's outlets in action, to
release and relieve tho pressure, is more difficult to restrain within socially
acceptable bounds than is the fighting intensity of the participant. But this
play of super-sportsmanship on the floor ~- was its spiritual contagion due to shock?
Were the gallerics suddenly recalled from their frenzy of excitement, restored to
calm in which something fine and generous within them might come to the surface
again? Hardly that. Isn't it more probable that as they were absorbed in the play
on the floor, tensed and participant in the ebb and flow of the battle there, they
were carried along to be participant also in the player's gesture of self denial?
His play, so closely were they following the game, had something of themselves in
it; its generosity was a subtle compliment to their own sympathetically responding
sense of rectitude, a sacrifice of self interest in loyalty to a sporting ideal.
Wasn't the spiritual affinity in the incident something of that nature? Whatever
the psychology of it, wasn't it a case of transfer - an abstract ideal, projecting
itself, against resistance, into dynamic action? Wasn't it principle, put to work
in application? And like evory other case of transfer that we see in life itself,
but which we still fail to get in education, like the phobia that induces a general
cowardice, the patriotic or maternal sentiment that engenders an unwonted courage,
the religious conviction that transforms a life, wasn't the significant vitalizing
factor in both player and spectator the emotional intensity which was involved?

Itve said enough on this theme - doubtless you are tired of it. Probably I'm
overstating it in my desire to make it graphic. As I leave it, let me summarize
in these terms. We all agree that we need better integrating of all the forces in
the individual. That is one of the most fundamental of our life necds. The re-
search of its own investigators admits that the present curriculum, taught under

present motivations, still fails to get in full measure such integration. It isn't

a ae
INSERT
(To be read as insert after last completed paragraph at bottom of following page.)

Among other life needs, people need inter-acquaintance, friendlier under-
standing in this troubled world. We need sclewanee Aue benignity. We need
appreciation for cultures other than our own. We need humor and relaxing - a bit
of Will Rogers in our Hitlers. We need it as leaven in the dough of our solem-
nities - it might not come amiss even in our economics whose cockeyed gravity has
been unconsciously funny for so long that a little honest gaiety would be a
relief. In that same economics we need to discover that life isn't all bread
and raiment and possessions, just as we are currently discovering that all the
gold in the world and most of its comforts still doesn't make the possessors
happy.

The Lord knows we acd refinement, not spurious but genuine. And we need
additionally to interpret Democracy as an attitude, not an act - an attitude of
ungrudging loyalty to the will of the majority as expressed in the law of the
land, much as we accept the rules of the game. With that, we adults might set
a pattern of example in law observing instead of bewailing juvenile delinquency
and attempting to cure it by hocus pocus and the easy magic of a ball and bat,
while we ourselves continue to run the orange lights. We need to discover that
one of the reasons why we have juvenile delinquency is that all delinquency isn't
Juvenile and we simply can't get away with expecting the kid to be the only law
abiding member of society. We need to get the flesh and blood of life itself
into more of our studies preparing for life and to learn that the uniform of
the human spirit consists of more than a shirt, red or black, brown or silver.

These are just a few life needs.
building study experience into effective action in later and differing situations.
Old methods are discredited by the evidence of every test - they appear doomed to
continuing futility. Life, on the other hand, docs show integrations. But life
is vital, not lethargic; it is intense, not superficial. It is instinct with
emotional meanings and validity, rather than merely unobjectionable in cither
fact or logic. To bring the curriculum into relation to life needs secms to
require a further transfusion of the life clement into the study program. It
implics vitalizing that program. It is a question of an approach that will make
inert studies come alive. And in the curriculum itsclf is one subject which to
some oxtent, at least, has been resurrected from the dead, and remains a living
example of the process by which that can actually be done, in fact, and not in
theory. To the bystander this constitutes one of the major challenges to educa-
tion today. Despite the oft repeated proverb, knowledge of itself simply isn't
power, until it is connected up with the driving forces, the life forces, that lend
it power.

Other life needs, of course, come to mind as worthy of mention. Thero is
the consciousness of selfhood, in the midst of all our educational standardization.
The scolf respect, the confidence, that comes from individual achievement is an
experience more stressed in the recreational than the educational curriculum. I
suggest that some day you explore it. There is also the matter of a social
consciousness, actual experience in cooperative living. That is a life need of
the utmost importance. And the curriculum pretty generally passes by on the other
Side. You might think that over too.

But because it relates to a life need with which I am particularly concerned, -
I want you to think about one other problem in particular. Let me state it in
this way. The millions who throng our parks demonstrate another need which con-

corns education. They seek adventurous variety, in novel experiences. And lest

. 2.
recreation grow stale by repetition, lest it become itself a monotony, demanding
still another escape, our trained leadership, the product of a special professional
curriculum, must lend new inspiration endlessly. We must devise new challenges,
fresh explorations, higher levels of achievement. Above all, our 300 leaders

need a capacity for independent creative and contributive thinking. They must be
inventive, They must generate novel ideas. They must be recreational producers.
But our greatest difficulty is in discovering that ability. There are plenty

who can teach the old stuff, but few seem able to think up new devices.

Why should this be so? There is surely more satisfaction in creating than
in repeating. Capacity for original thought is of the essence of ability to do
any thinking at all. Natively, the child appears to have a creative imagination. —
His varied use of the same playthings testifies to that. The broomstick which
is a hobby-horse one minute, a sword the next, an airplane or the wall of a house
a moment later, proves the fluid and flexible nature of the child's imagination.
He even insists upon using his imagination. He flees from things which limit its
freedom. In my home my daughter had a doll rejoicing in the name of Susy Polly.
Susy Polly was a rag, without bone or hank of hair, To adult eyes she was gracc-
less, a most unlovely domestic chattel. When the door bell rang we hurried to
conceal her. My father visited us. He was shocked that his granddaughter should
have no worthier object for her affections. He bought her a marvelous doll,
beautiful to behold, real hair, articulated joints, eyes that closed, a complete
and intriguing wardrobe, For a day or two the newcomer held sway. Then Susy
Polly resumed her reign. Why? Possibly the perfect doll was too perfect. She
left nothing to the imagination, She demanded nothing from her possessor. She
was a picture completed and hung on the wall, while Susy Polly was an open window
inviting the vagabond imagination to go wandering to remote and unexplored hori-
zons. Whatever clouds of glory trailed after her were the contribution of an
active fancy which her very poverty in attractions summoned into operation.

ee ae
Susy Polly satisfied something of a creative Urge. You child psychologists,
wasn't the explanation something like that? And the wrecking of some of our
elaborate toy gifts, may that not be explainable in some such terms? May they
not be over-perfect, provoking a desire to change them so the imagination has
something to work on? ,

Thousands of young children frequent our toy play centers. We provide no
dominant directing leadership. We are experimenting with a situation rich in
varlety of playthings, offering their own suggestion. Both toys, and the rooms
themselves are clean, bright colored, attractive. Vividly draped windows, ap-
propriate murals, orderly cabinets and shelves, gayly painted furniture, clean
floors and coverings, provide a stimulating atmosphere. We do not plan the
experience for the children. The law of the jungle is not permitted to prevail.
There is that much of supervision. But we are not assuming that we must dctermine
Just what experiences the children are to have for the good of their health, or
mental growth, or socialization, or for the development of balanced personality.
Rather, we permit the children to evolve their own patterns of activity, living
their own lives, out of their own imaginations. We even have a specially designed,
individual panel type of sectional playhouse which the children may set together
in infinite variety, just as they do their varied building blocks - devices to
encourage them in adapting to the changing impulses of the moment. We are watch-
ing to see what life itself does to them, without either parental or pedagogical
interference, under guardianship which is democratic, rather than authoritarian,

Our toys lend themselves to constructive uses. They all give maximum freedom
to the creative imagination. They are not so complicated as to challenge a child
to discover what makes them tick, neither are they irritatingly stubborn in resist-
ing adaptation to new purposes. We have no destructiveness at all, either inten-
tional or passive. And incidentally, there is no theft. Even in one center with

a large Gypsy attendance, there is no theft. But what I want to emphasize here

~ Wie
is our observation that children have, seemingly, a universal vividness of creative
imagination. They make original patterns of play. They do it easily, natively,
not laboriously. However difficult it may be for our mature leaders to develop
original inspirations, the children in whom it is a living process, appear one and
all to possess the creative faculty.

Now if that faculty is so universal in children, and so rare in our mature
leaders, after they have completed their training, where was it lost along the
line? Apparently, it disappeared during the years devoted to education. If
early in life we employ the left arm of original creativeness, where do we become
right handed? Does this left arm-originality-atrophy, through disusc, while wo
concentrate on appropriating the accumulated wisdom of mankind, the truths which
others have discovered and recorded for us merely to perceive and commit to memory?
As we reach out to grasp this recorded lore with the right, does the left hand
lose its cunning? If so, how can education make us more nearly ambidexterous?

How keep learning exact, faithful to the record, disciplined, without too much of
untested and unscientific personal interpretation on the one hand, and on the other
hand still preserve a vivid individualism which continues to explore and invent
originally, and for itself?

Perhaps this isn't a fair indictment of education, stated thus badly. The
laboratory method no doubt is an attempt to force the student's growing knowledgc,
creatively to grapple with life situations. One must admit that creative writing
today is an improvement upon the themes we composed. Art is infinitely more
spontaneous and original than the copying I did as a student. Some forms of
improvising and transposing music are advances in the direction of creative train-
ing. But one must still maintain that there yet remains o vast amount of improve-
ment to be accomplished before education can generally establish itself as an

exercise effectively developing original inventiveness.

» 4B
It retains still too many of those abominations - tests and examinations.

My whole department's in-service training institute this year was taken over by
Northwestern University. Our workers can get University credit for broadening

the base of their professional competence, while working on the job as employees

of the Park system. Sixty-cight percent of them already have degrees on the
college level, but many of the staff of over 300 are working towards Masters or
Doctors degrees. All are attending one course which attempts to combine into a
working unity, as a practical scientific approach, with special reference to
application to our community problems, the three social scicnces - Psychology,
Sociology, and Education. At the end of our specially adapted Psychology unit

this winter, we were subject to a true or false examination. The results convinced
me that that form of cite in other than purely factual studies closes the door
upon possibility of cultivating any original thinking whatsoever. Those who are
our most creative thinkers were conspicuously low in their grades. Our wax plates,
on the other hand, set the needle, turned on the phonograph, and gave back just
what the lecturer had said, and became thereby the honor students! Hore was a
premium placed on stupid memorizing - a penalty attached to the forming of independ-
ent judgments. Doesn't education today face a challenge to be more concerned than
that in cultivating the ability to think for one's self?

As a layman, it seems to me that education ought to do more than it is doing
currently in my daughter's case, in an Eastern college. In her senior year there,
majoring in Philosophy, she wanted this year to write her honor thesis on the
subject of the Philosophy of our current youth movements. Before finishing high
school, she went on a Youth Hostel tour of Europe. Before entering College she
took another hostelling trip to Japan. She was vastly interested in the attitude
toward life of the youth she contacted abroad. Through her college years, she

has attended the Youth Congresses, except for the recent one in Washington. She |

io 1 e
has gathered the formulated statements of faith of all of the youth organizations.
Now at twenty years of age she is still young enough herself to speak not as an
onlooker, but as a participant in the upsurge of youth consciousness. She would
be studying economics or some other kindred subject, rather than majoring in
philosophy, if she were committed to radical views, and so could not be trusted
to think straight. Her grades in her major subject have been exceptionally high.
At the end of a4 years in college she has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Her
thinking has been termed mature. Her proposed inquiry was in the field of ethics
as youth movements interpret and apply ethics to their own problems. But the
philosophy department refuses to permit her to think originally in a new field of
philosophical exploration because no one has yet done so. There are no already
existing authorities for her to quote! There are no predecessor's footprints

for her to follow. So in the name of education she is denied the right to step
out originally and think novelly on her own account!

Now I'm not a philosopher. Perhaps this explains why I find that attitude
so maddeningly incomprehensible. It seems to me that it is polishing the very
essence out of education, robbing it of essential vitamines. The world, above
all things, needs new but sound and trustworthy thinking, and thinking in which
there is a vital, a living interest. Our old approaches have certainly not saved
us from ideational bankruptcy. Education assumes responsibility for preparing
young minds to face an unpredictable future. That it should refuse to tolerate
exploratory thought on the part of a student, however meagerly equipped such a
student may be - (for the college is still there to inspire and guide, to criti-
cize and influence that thinking) - that such an institution should refuse to
permit such thinking on the sole ground that it is novel, that there are no
already beaten paths for it to follow - well, it goes to prove there are more things

in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in my philosophy at least! It

« ob «
makes one think that "The Sabre Tooth Curriculum,” even today, isn't entirely

a mere figure of speecht We cantt expect much of courageous intcllicctual independ-
ence unless the academic world is generally more liberal than that, and more
concerned with intellectual pioneering, I trust it is.

The Life Needs of our day seem to me to entitle us to expect more than that
from those who have in custody the training of youth to attack realistically the
problems they will face during their life span. Those of us whose years arc past
the peak realize that we have lived in the most interesting single lifc span the
world has yet seen. We have witnessed greater happenings in scientific discovery,
mechanical invention, and social change, than were ever crowded into any single
Lifetime in history. More has occured, before the eyes of our generation than
whole civilizations of the past ever saw, from their origin to their decline. But
the probability is that the rising generation will see so much more happen that
they will think of our day as an Alice Set By The Fire period in which relatively
nothing much occured.

They start with the new 200-inch telescope doubling the knowable universe,
They hit the take-off board when peoples and government are fluid with unrest,
When the atom is being shattered, when capital is realizing that the worker must
have an income to absorb its products, when leisure has been at last related to
culture, when exploitation has been wedded to conservation, when chemistry has
brought about soilless gardening. They start just as the last uncharted physical
areas are being explored with flights over the poles, and the pioneering restless-
ness of man must perforce take new directions, seck new worlds to conquer, worlds
where social experimenting has scarcely yet begun. They start where integration
is implicit in the needs of every day, integration of our knowledge and discovery
into the good, the satisfying life, into a synthesized composite of our intellec-

tual with our spiritual forces, to produce a new plastic which will provide the

a ee
substance of a new socioby. They start when an outworm economic statesmanship has
brought the world to an unholy mess which nothing short of a new type of spiritual
and cultural statesmanship would appear able to redeem, They start when even
mechanization and materialism are discovering that there is something spiritual
about the very facts of substance and the laws of engineering, when our mastery

of the mechanics of production is beginning to propel those same mechanics over
the threshold of a social cxtension into the problems of just and civilization-
saving distribution. It is a timc when we are commencing to realize that the
machine does not end in physical dynamics, but becomes involved inevitably in
social dynamics as well - social dynamics on a planetary, not on a parish planc.

They start when religious faiths in the adequacy of personal and individual
salvation are being rudely shaken, and we are beginning to realize that the
inspired prayer given us as oxample was a collective prayer for a social redemp-
tion. That prayer is to Our Father, whose will, if it is to be done on carth as
it is in heaven, involves not only forgiving Us our trespasses, but also giving us,
sglicavavely as a human family, our daily bread. It is a social, and not an in-
dividual plea, and the words me or mine are significantly absent from the text
of it. Youth faces that emphasis, as a changing spiritual horizon.

They start just at the moment when Democracy has been revealed not as a
thing accomplished, but as a thing prophetic, not as something guaranteed in the
Bill of Rights, but as an animating spirit pervading the ranks of those on the
march toward a still undiscovered but dimly pre-visioned social order. They start
with: their own set, both of tools and of problems, original problems, requiring
original solutions.

And education must prepare them to think originally, to think vitally with
a spiritual understanding and intensity, or it fails us, tragically, at the most

critical point in human history. A scholarship which never needs to use the word:

oo .
"Unquote" will be quite useless to them. Quite! The answers to their problems
are not to be found in the old writings, the records of a past which endlessly
repeated itself. They face conditions undreamed of in that past. The old thinking
is increasing our scoial deficit every day. ‘They will find it necessary to create
their own adaptations to a changed, and still continuously changing world.
Whenever civilizations of the past, qualified only by the thinking of their past,
reached such a critical point as this, to discover that they must think their way
daringly, novelly, into a changed intellectual, economic, or spiritual order, they
failed in the face of that challenge, and swiftly sank into decline. The thinking
of the past will not save us now. Somehow we must find fresh inspiration, to

face the new day which is upon us. Education confronts again the challenge to
which it has never in the past successfully responded,

You who bear the proud title of Educators - I congratulate you on your privi-
lege in days like these - the privilege of writing a new page in the history of
inspiring the minds of youth, to develop their own original genius, and originally
think their own way through their own problems. It is the privilege of responding
painfully and laboriously perhaps to a challenge which will search your very souls,
to their deepest foundations! But if you meet that challenge you can say at the

end, "I lived through the Great Days in Educationt"

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