We found out what our neglect had made of the public school when three applicants for appointment as policemen under Theodore Roosevelt wrote in their examination papers that five of the thirteen states that formed the union were, “England, Ireland, Wales, Belfast, and Cork”! Another wrote that Lincoln was murdered by Ballington Booth! We had made our public schools into stuffing machines. Where they should have taught the young to think, they jammed them full of all sorts of things that made manikins of them—not men. And the “truants” we made by slamming the school-doors in their faces, we took and locked up in a jail behind iron bars, with burglars and thieves and bad boys of every kind, and divided them there—not into the good and the bad; not into the sheep and the goats, remembering that in mingling them there was fearful danger, for how should the young burglar, bursting with pride in his exploit, keep from bragging of it to his admiring side-partner?—not that way were they classified, with a sense of the peril of such a contact, but into squads according to height: four feet, four feet seven, and over four feet seven! That was how we ran our school machinery, without sense or soul; and, where there is neither, character does not grow. That prop—the school—was gone, knocked out from under the boy, the to-morrow.
However, we have done our best to put it back since we made out how badly off we were, for we understand at last the peril of that. Our schools are every day getting nearer to the ideal school that turns out men and women who think, to do the work of the world. The reformatory I spoke of is no longer guilty of such outrages upon common sense. It is to-day leading the way in an attempt to restore, as nearly as possible, family life and family training in home groups, instead of the deadening institution life, to the children whose greatest misfortune was that they never knew home in the saving sense while they—and we—could so easily have been saved.
And now here is a prop which, certainly during a most critical period of the boy’s life, should stand ahead even of the school. I mean his play. Froebel, the great kindergartner who gave us the best legacy of the nineteenth century to its successor, said that play is “the normal occupation of the child through which he first perceives moral relations.” Upon this truth and the other, that the child “learns by doing,” he built his whole common sense system, which we now know to be the right beginning of all education, whether of rich or poor. How have we dealt with this strong bulwark? As sacredly should it be guarded as the right of habeas corpus; the one is not of greater moment to the commonwealth than the other. You cannot make a good citizen out of the lad whom you denied a chance to kick a ball across lots when that was his ambition and his right. I have said it before: it takes a whole boy to make a whole man.