The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.)
W >> W. Grant Hague, M.D. >> The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.)Dr. C. W. Saleeby, an international authority on education, writes as
follows:
"A simple analogy will show the disastrous character of the present
process, which may be briefly described as 'education' by cram and emetic.
It is as if you filled a child's stomach to repletion with marbles, pieces
of coal and similar material incapable of digestion--the more worthless the
material the more accurate the analogy--then applied an emetic and
estimated your success by the completeness with which everything was
returned, more especially if it was returned 'unchanged,' as the doctors
say. Just so do we cram the child's mental stomach, its memory, with a
selection of dead facts of history and the like (at least when they are not
fictions) and then apply a violent emetic called an examination (which like
most other emetics causes much depression) and estimate our success by the
number of statements which the child vomits onto the examination paper--if
the reader will excuse me. Further, if we are what we usually are, we
prefer that the statements shall come back 'unchanged'--showing no sign of
mental digestion. We call this 'training the memory.' The present type of
education is a curse to modern childhood and a menace to the future. The
teacher who cannot tell whether a child is doing well without formally
examining it, should be heaving bricks, but such a teacher does not exist.
In Berlin they are now learning that the depression caused by these [23]
emetics (examinations) often lead to child suicide--a steadily increasing
phenomenon mainly due to educational overpressure and worry about
examinations.
"Short of such appalling disasters, however, we have to reckon with the
existence of this enormous amount of stupidity, which those who fortunately
escaped such education in childhood have to drag along with them in the
long struggle towards the stars. This dead weight of inertia lamentably
retards progress.
"If you have been treated with marbles and emetics long enough, you may
begin to question whether there is such a thing as nourishing food; if you
have been crammed with dead facts, and then compelled to disgorge them, you
may well question whether there are such things as nourishing facts or
ideas."
The gifted writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in an editorial in the _New York
American_, expressed herself recently in the following terms:
"A wave of dissatisfaction is sweeping over the country regarding our
school system. And eventually this will cause a change to be made. The
larger understanding of mothers regarding education will result in the
personal element entering into the training of children.
"When women have a voice in the affairs of the nation there will be more
teachers, larger salaries, fewer pupils in each department, and more
attention will be given to the temperaments and varying dispositions of
children by their instructors.
"Instead of regarding the little ones who enter public schools as machines
which must be taught to go according to one rule, each child will be
studied as a threefold being, and his mind, body and spirit will be cared
for and developed according to his own peculiar needs. All this will come
slowly, but it will come.
"Before children enter the public schools there should be a great sifting
process under the direction of a national board of scientific men. The
brain equipment of each child, the tendencies given it at birth, should be
tested; then the nervous, hysterical and erratic minds ought to be [24]
placed in a school by themselves, under the care of men and women who know
the law of mental suggestion.
"Quiet, loving, wholesome rules, followed day after day and month after
month, would bring these children out into the light of self-control and
concentration. The hurried, crowding, exciting methods of the public
schools are disastrous to fully half of the unformed minds sent into the
intellectual maelstrom which America provides under the name of Public
Schools.
"For the well-born, normal-minded, healthy-bodied child, who has wise and
careful guardians or parents to assist in his mental guidance, the public
school forms a good basis on which to build an education. For the average
American child of excitable nerves and precocious tendencies, it is like
deep surf swimming for the inexperienced and adventurous bather.
"The great foundation of education--character--is not taught in the public
schools. There is no systematized process of developing a child's power of
concentration; there is not time for this in the cramming process now in
vogue and with the enormous pressure placed on teachers. No teacher can do
justice to more than fifteen children through the school hours. In many of
our public schools there are fifty and sixty children under one instructor.
This is fatal to the nervous system of the teacher and deprives the pupils
of that personal sympathy which is of such vital importance."
Luther Burbank, the famous California horticulturist, declares that the
great object and aim of his life is to apply to the training of children
those scientific ideas which he has so successfully employed in working
transformation in plant life.
In an editorial, entitled, "Teaching Health," the _New York Globe_ states,
"Anatomy and physiology are reasonably exact sciences, and nine-tenths of
the hygienic abuses against which the doctors are preaching would be
prevented if the laity had an elementary knowledge of physiology. Such an
educational reform could be carried out without causing any clash whatever
between the warring medical sects." [Page 25]
William D. Lewis, Principal of the William Penn School, Philadelphia, in an
article entitled: "The High School and the Girl," in a recent issue of the
_Saturday Evening Post_, wrote in part as follows:
... "The first thing that society wants of our girl is good health. This is
the first essential for her efficient service and personal happiness in
shop, office, store, school or home. The future of the race so far as she
represents it, depends upon her health. What is the high school doing to
improve the girl's health? In the overwhelming majority of cases absolutely
nothing. On the other hand, it is subjecting her to a regimen planned for
boys, without the slightest consideration of the physical and functional
differences between the sexes.
"It pays no attention to the curvature of the spine developed by the
exclusively sit-at-a-desk-and-study-a-book type of education bequeathed to
the girlhood of the nation by the medieval monastery: It ignores the
chorea, otherwise known as St. Vitus' dance developed by overstudy and
underexercise; it disregards the malnutrition of hasty breakfasts, and
lunches of pickles, fudge, cream-puffs and other kickshaws, not to mention
the catch penny trash too often provided by the janitor or concessionaire
of the school luncheon, who isn't doing business for his health or for
anybody else's; it neglects eye-strain, unhygienic dress, uncleanly habits,
anemia, periodic headaches, nervousness, adenoids, and wrong habits of
posture and movements.... If you believe that the high school is a social
institution with a mission of public service, regardless of the relation of
that service to Latin or Algebra, then you must agree that it should look
after what everyone recognizes as the foremost need of the adolescent girl.
"One fact that every educator in both camps knows is that the home is not
attending to the health of the adolescent girl. This problem is pressing
upon us now largely because of the revolutions in living conditions that
has come within the last quarter of a century."
In a report of a recent Conference on the Conservation of School [26]
Children held at Lehigh University by the American Academy of Medicine, the
following items appear.
Four great reasons why medical inspection in schools is needed were brought
out by Dr. Thomas A. Story of New York, who spoke from the educator's
standpoint:
"The first reason is concerned with communicable diseases, and the second
with remediable incapacitating physical defects. It was reported in 1906
that over twenty per cent. of the children in the schools of New York City
had defective vision, and over fifty per cent. had defective teeth. These
defective conditions are amenable to treatment whereby the functional
efficiency of the pupil is improved. He is capable of better work and the
school efficiency is advanced.
"The third reason is concerned with irremediable physical defects. The
cripples, the deformed and the delinquents whose incapacitating defects are
permanent should be found and classified. This enables special instruction
and opens up educational possibilities otherwise unattainable, besides
removing retarding factors in the progress of the normal pupil.
"The fourth reason is concerned with the development of hygienic habits in
the school child, and through the child, of the community. Medical
inspection which influences the health habits of the masses is a matter of
supreme importance. The teacher will have pupils of cleaner habits and
healthier, with fewer interruptions and disturbances from absences.
"To make medical inspection successful physical examinations should uncover
the anatomic, physiologic, and hygienic conditions. Every piece of advice
given to a pupil that can be followed up should be followed up and the
result recorded. No system of medical inspection in schools can be complete
and permanently successful which does not eventually educate the parent and
child to a sympathetic and cooeperative relationship with the system.
Medical inspection is a force working for a better general education in
personal hygiene and should cooerdinate with the class room instruction.
Hence it must be a system in sympathetic relationship with the general [27]
management of the school, and should be under the same responsible control.
Since it is an educational influence and so directly related to the success
of the school, it ought to be a part of the school organization."
A paper was read by Dr. Helen C. Putnam of Providence, R. I., on "The
Teaching of Hygiene for Better Parentage." She said:
"Life is a trust from fathers and mothers beginning before history; to be
guarded and bettered in one's turn, and passed along to children's
children. A definite conception of this trust is essential to right living.
Educators are finding that well directed correlation of human life, with
phenomena of growing things in school gardens and nature studies, develops
a wholesome mental attitude. Since tens of millions of our population have
only fractions of primary schooling, there is where the teaching must
begin. These primary years are the time to lay foundations before a wrong
bias is established.
"Education for parenthood cannot be completed at this early age. The
strategic years for making it most effective are from sixteen to
twenty-four, when home-making instincts are waking and strongest. We have
15,000,000 young people of these ages in no schools, and eligible for such
instruction. All state boards of education were recently petitioned by the
American Association for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality to urge
the appointment of commissions on continuation schools of home-making, to
investigate conditions and needs in their respective states and to report
plans for meeting them effectively through such continuation schools or
classes."
DIFFICULTY IN DEVISING A SATISFACTORY EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM.--It will be
observed that each of these authoritative writers criticises the system of
education now in vogue. The criticism is not, nor could it justly be,
specialized. It is simply an expression, from different viewpoints, of the
feeling that we are not doing ourselves justice as yet, we are groping
after something better. It may be, as I have previously stated, that no[28]
satisfactory system of education will be evolved until the laws of kindred
sciences, which have organic relationship to what we understand as
education, are fixed and better understood. We are just beginning to
appreciate the true meaning of environment. We know little about heredity,
but enough to appreciate its vital importance. Psychology is a realm of
much hope, but we have only tasted of its surface promise and know little
of the mysteries it may unfold. Eugenics, the infant giant of science,
promises to establish the race on an enduring foundation. These sciences
have laws which we do not yet understand; they relate to that part of human
evolution which mind dominates. The quality of the mind's dominion depends
upon the mind's education and environment, and since the laws of these
sciences, upon which a perfect system of education depends, have not been
revealed, it is quite evident that all past systems of education have been
more or less deficient. It is further evident that evolution has suffered
as a result of the mind's imperfect education,--a condition that is
manifest all around us.
It must be appreciated, however, that we are discussing a large subject. If
we understood all there is to know about environment; if we knew the laws
of heredity, and psychology, and eugenics, and then could apply them, and
educate the product of this combination of forces, we would be very near to
the super-man. One must have a sober mental horizon to evolve the picture
which would be the product of the above solution and then to estimate its
meaning on human happiness and progress. We are approaching the ethics of
right living,--of justice and truth,--the divine in man. At no time in the
history of man has civilization been so near a solution of life's supreme
problem as at the present moment.
Education is an important function in life's scheme, and while we may
regret that it is not possible to formulate a system that would be perfect
and capable of immediate application, we can continue to work patiently and
hopefully, with assurance that in the near future the problem will be
satisfactorily solved. When heredity, psychology, and eugenics combine [29]
to dictate the system, we shall doubtless find, that, in the beginning, it
will be a system of individualization. In the interest of health and of
justice, and consequently of efficiency, this would seem to be the natural
and the logical lead.
So long as human nature is as it is, we must meet conditions as they exist.
We know as parents, and some of us know as physicians, that a task easily
performed by one individual, without any apparent harmful results, will tax
the capacity of another individual to the very utmost. Any educational
system which does not recognize this law, is vicious. Yet such is the
system in vogue to-day in America. We must adapt the burden to the
endurance of the pupil. The administration of an educational machinery must
solve this problem from the individual standpoint.
In the departmental work in our public schools there seems to be no system.
Each teacher prescribes home work without any knowledge of what others of
the same grade do, and without any apparent consideration in favor of the
individual pupil. The result is that the total amount for each night is
absurdly in excess of the capacity of the ordinary, or for that matter the
extraordinary, pupil. This engenders nervousness and irritability, and is
contrary to the ethics of education,--the fundamental law of which should
be the preservation of good health. We must have regard for the physical
and mental health of each pupil, and as the capacity of each pupil is
different, the system is committing an egregious wrong by sacrificing the
weaker instead of adapting the burden according to the strength and
endurance of the bearer.
THE HIGH SCHOOL SYSTEM FALLACIOUS.--Even the high schools do not seem to be
wisely availing themselves of their opportunity from the eugenic or
economic standpoint. According to the report of the Commissioner of
Education of the United States the percentage of pupils studying some of
the more important subjects in the year 1909-1910 is stated as follows:[30]
Latin, French and German 83 per cent.
Algebra and Geometry 88 " "
English Literature 57 " "
Rhetoric 57 " "
History 55 " "
Domestic Economy,--including
sewing, cooking and household
economies 4 " "
If only barely four per cent. of the girls in our high schools are studying
subjects which directly contribute to their efficiency as home-makers, what
are the prospects for worthy parenthood in the light of the fact that
seventy-five per cent. of all women between the ages of twenty and
twenty-four are married?
The function of the high school, so far as girls are concerned, is to
conserve health, to train for domestic efficiency and motherhood, and if
necessary for economic independence. It must also furnish the stimulus for
mental culture and direct a proper aspiration for social enlightenment. The
curriculum should include biology, hygiene, psychology, home beautifying,
the story-telling side of literature, music and a few other studies tending
to make woman more like woman than she is to-day. When we have this,
teaching for mothercraft will be more nearly realized.
From the eugenic standpoint the present system of education is not
satisfactory. To attain our end it is essential to devise other means of
education. It must be remembered, however, that no system of education
alone can ever enable us to achieve our end, no matter how perfect the
system may be. Education can only draw out what is in the child; it cannot
draw out what is not there. What the child is, depends upon its heredity.
The pedagogic ability of the school-master will never make a genius.
A child's mind may be likened to a block puzzle, each block representing a
part of a picture, which can only be completed when they are all arranged
in their correct places. Each block is an ancestral legacy,--the child's
heritage--and to find its proper place in order to complete the [31]
character picture--to solve the riddle of the jumbled blocks,--is the duty
of the educator. He can only manipulate what is there, and the test of his
system will depend upon his ability to solve the puzzle of the ancestral
blocks. We must divorce ourselves from the idea that a child's mind, at the
beginning, is an empty space, to be filled in with knowledge according to
the ability of the teacher; or that it is like a sheet of paper, to be
written upon. Education, and the educator, is absolutely limited to
"drawing out" what heredity put there. Education frequently is given credit
which rightly belongs to nature. A child cannot do certain things until
nature intends that it should. A baby cannot possibly walk until the
nervous mechanism which controls the function of walking is developed. Many
children walk at the first attempt, simply because they did not make the
first attempt until after nature had perfected the mechanism and the innate
ability to walk was already there. Suppose we tried to teach that baby to
walk a month before nature was ready; each day we patiently coax it to
"step out," we guide it from support to support, and we protect it from
stumbling. Some day it walks, and we congratulate ourselves on the victory,
when as a matter of fact, we not only had nothing to do with it but were
impertinent meddlers, not instructors. Nature was the teacher and she was
quite capable of completing the task without our aid. It is reasonable also
to assume that any effort to force a natural function is quite likely to do
much harm. We have found this to be so in various departments of education
when the system was wrongly conceived. In physical culture this principle
has been demonstrated over and over again.
If our ancestral legacy is a good one, our picture blocks will be numerous
and it will be possible for the proper system of education, aided by a
suitable environment, to arrange them into many designs. If, on the other
hand, our heredity did not endow us abundantly the number of our picture
blocks may be limited to three or four, and they will be easily arranged so
as to form a simple picture. The one represents a child whom heredity has
richly endowed, the other one whom it has meagerly supplied with innate[32]
possibilities. Heredity therefore dictates the function of education; and
the school-master can only fashion the picture put there. If the ancestral
blocks are not there with which to make an elaborate picture he must
content himself with what is there,--he or his art cannot create others.
When he congratulates himself on achieving a wonderful result in graduating
a particularly brilliant student, he is taking to himself unmerited honors.
If his individual ability is responsible in one instance, why not apply the
same system to all pupils? If this system is responsible for the brilliancy
of one pupil, why does not the same system make all brilliant? The reader
knows the answer,--because heredity did not endow them equally. Men are not
born equal, despite the Declaration of Independence.
The school-master is not responsible for the apt and the inapt pupil. He is
responsible for his system which dictates how he will differentiate between
the apt and the inapt pupil, in order to achieve the best results without
injustice to either.
The inefficient teacher is a dangerous equation in the school system. I
mean by inefficiency, the quality of being temperamentally unsuited to the
profession. There are a large number of anemic, hysterical young women
teaching in the public schools of our cities who should not be there. They
should not be there in justice to themselves, nor should they be there in
justice to their pupils. A strict, yearly medical examination should be
made of the teachers to decide their physical and psychical fitness to fill
their positions adequately. One teacher, physically or psychically
inefficient, can do an inconceivable amount of harm in one school term. We
cannot afford to experiment along this line. It means too much, and even at
the price of one unhappy child it is too much to pay. The teacher who feels
that she is not suited to the work; who has constantly to hold herself and
her temper under control; whose nerves are such that she cannot do justice
to herself, whose sense of justice is capable of perversion on purely
sentimental grounds; or who has lost--or never possessed--the gift of
maintaining discipline, should promptly find another position. She is [33]
earning her salary under false pretenses, and that alone condemns her. I
believe, that a large percentage of the inefficiency of the New York
Schools is due, not to the academic or scholastic inability of the average
teacher, but to the average female teacher's physical, and especially her
psychical unfitness to teach. We must concede, however, that in many
instances the teacher's unfitness is a direct product of the pernicious
system itself.
[Illustration: _From "The Village of a Thousand Souls," Gesell, American
Magazine_
Evidence of a Feeble Mind
A dirty shack in a mud hole in the country is merely another reflection of
the same condition that causes the slums of the city. In our glowing spirit
of humanity we cry out to raise up "the submerged tenth." Rather, should we
not stamp them out of existence--treat them as a menace, and not as a thing
of pity?
Men, in general, rise; their minds are subjectively or objectively educated
to their mental limit. They cannot go beyond it. "The submerged tenth"
exists because its mental limit is low--often close to the upper margins of
feeble-mindedness--and because it is mentally incapable of rising to
anything else.]
[Illustration: _From "The Village of a Thousand Souls," Gesell, American
Magazine_
Evidence of a Vigorous Mind
The family that is vigorous, healthy in mind and body, "up and coming,"
reflects itself in a hundred different ways. Small matter whether or not it
is "an old family," has wealth, social position, a college education. A
daughter's or a son's happiness, the real, deep-down-inside happiness that
is worth while, may be more certainly insured by marrying with an eye to
mentality and stock than by a marriage into a so-called "first family."
Eugenics hath its reward.]
Under an ideal system of education the child would be left absolutely free
until the age of seven. We do not believe that the physical apparatus of
the mind is prepared for educational interference before that age, and we
know that the growth of the brain, physiologically and anatomically, is not
complete until after the seventh year.
The greater portion of a child's education necessarily depends upon its
environment. Heredity and environment, therefore, are the two factors which
determine the characters of any living thing. Heredity gives to the child
its potential greatness,--its promise of greatness. Whether these potential
qualities ever become real depends upon environment. A child may have the
hereditary (innate) ability to become a Shakespeare, but if his environment
is not suitable to the development of this potential greatness, he will
never realize his hereditary promise. In other words, the innate qualities
which he has, and which will make of him a Shakespeare are never "drawn
out" or educated. Hence he can never become great until environment
furnishes the means to him.