The evil of cram

OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM.

IS IT RIGHT OR WRONG?

ALLEGED SYSTEM OF CRAM.

THE SMART AND THE DULL

Poverty Bay Herald, 15 May 1906

I have a pet hate of Dr. Truby King.  I don’t care if he founded Plunket, or got his face on a stamp, or got in Joseph Romanos’ Kiwi Heroes book.  He’s a dick.

Sometimes I like to trawl old newspapers looking for the utterly ridiculous things he used to say.  It reminds me to be continually viligant in the face of pronoucements by experts.  They might wind up being right, but they need to be put through their paces and argued with first.  Dr. King wasn’t much tested by the journalists of the day.  His pronouncements were greeted as fact.  Much to the detriment of commonsense.

Socrates was pretty good at putting so called experts through their paces in Athens 2400 years ago.  Clearly it has been a problem of society for a long time.  When the oracle at Delphi announced that there was none wiser than Socrates he astutely refused to believe it and went and interviewed people who were famed for being wise.  After conducting countless interviews he was forced to conclude that he might actually be the wisest man in the world because he knew that he knew nothing while all the so-called experts claimed to know things but were infact largely ignorant.  Like, I would suggest, Dr. Truby King.

In 1906 Dr. Truby King made a pronouncement on the evils of cram in the education system.  The media slavishly took up the call and railed against cram.  Dr. King was the Superintendant at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum and he liked to base his claims in the evidence of Seacliff.  In this instance he continually referred to a young man and a young lady who had formerly been the dux of their respective schools but were now under his care.

The matter is taken up in the Otago Witness:

It is some years since people began to ask themselves, “what has become of our double firsts, of our gold medalists, of the young men and women who have won great honours at school and college, at the university and other exams?  Why don’t we hear of them filling the big places of the earth?”  Dr Truby King answered this question in his recent lecture.  As a rule, they are found among the failures: the extreme cases become mentally diseased, neurapaths, insane.  The others, having lived too fast on the mental side, pay the inevitable penalty of loss of vitality, energy and power on the physical.

Otago Witness, 6 June 1906

This comes from an article entitled SOME EVILS OF CRAM AND EXCESSIVE COMPETITION which begins,

Mrs F. E. Cotton delivered a lecture to kindergarten students, under the auspices of the Froebel Club, on the 17th inst,. on the subject “Some Evils of Cram and Excessive Competition.”

To kindergarten students?  I would suggest that delivering lectures on the education system to four year olds would be a prime example of putting too much academic pressure on children, but nevermind.  Mrs Cotton goes on,

Our age is an age of hurry, bustle and confusion….  We see this hurry everywhere.  In the haste to be rich, which takes no account of the unwritten rights of others.  In the haste to be notorious, which urges people to spend more that they can afford, and to be ever straining to be one better than every other person in the same business.

“The haste to be notorious”.  This appears to be a very early commentary on rappers. 

What follows is an extended simile about people being like oranges and how immature oranges can be squeezed too early and lose all their juice.  I like a good over-extended simile/metaphor any day but once we get into teachers handling oranges and squeezing and juice I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable (or how about this: “these human flowers may develop under the hands of their human gardeners on strictly spiritual lines.”  Blergh).

And let’s remember that Mrs Cotton is drawing her conclusions about New Zealand society in 1906: before electricity in homes, before radio, before TV, washing machines, refrigerators, cars.  It is almost impossible to imagine someone living in the world of 1906 and complaining of the hustle, bustle and confusion, but I suppose it is all a matter of perspective.  In fact, I find it perfectly possible to imagine Mrs Cotton’s railing against the modern world appearing as a letter to the editor or an opinion piece in a paper today.  To be honest, I’m pretty sure I routinely whinge about the inherent greed and waste of capitalism, and the press to get ahead.

I digress.

Let us get back to education and the evils of cramming.  How can this terrible scourge of the education system be avoided?

It may be necessary to organise some plan by which candidates for these scholarships shall be subjected to some degree of supervision by competent medical men, so that the expanding minds of the children may not be given a strain beyond their capacity to bear.

There should be no homework in connection with the primary schools.  The evil of this practice has been often commented upon.

Bush Advocate, 16 May, 1906

“Homework for primary school students” and “evil” seem an odd combination of terms.  Commented upon by whom?  Primary school students?

Every child should be weighed at school at least every three months, if possible every month, and if there is a great change in weight the teacher would have to seek the cause.

Poverty Bay Herald, 15 May, 1906

By now I was not so much enjoying the idiocy of King as I was being struck by the fact that the issues bothering New Zealand about education in 1906 were practically identical to the ones that bother us nowadays.

In fact, after the fever of decrying cram in schools had abated, the education journalism of the day returns quickly to the usual pattern of education reporting, which is of course that schools are failing us, and that students need to be taught better and work harder.

Just recently the Wellington Chamber of Commerce made a complaint… as to the incapacity of sixth standard boys to write legibly, and do ordinary arithmetic accurately.

The reporter goes on to examine these educational flaws.  The deterioration in handwriting is explained not only by the demands of modernity for speed, but by the faddish tastes of the 1900s equivalent of the Ministry of Education:

The evil [of bad handwriting] has been accentuated by teachers requiring a change in style, and a few years ago upright writing became a craze on the part of directors of education with the result that many a lad spoilt his style.

Poor lads.  They would have had to take the shame of the upright style with them to their graves.

We could blame excessive tests,

If properly graded that are of great service to the teacher, but when they are utlised for the purpose of relieving the teacher of actual teaching they become a snare and a curse.

Evening Post, 3 March, 1906

An overarching theme explaining poor results in many newspaper accounts is summarised here:

Still another speaker said that probably the poorness of the handwriting was due to the gradual enlargement of the syllabus until it was so full that masters were unable to make their pupils perfect.

Colonist, 14 September, 1906

Even when I was at primary school I had handwriting class.  I was crap at it.  I never, ever understood why my teachers were making such a big deal about letters having to be joined to other letters, and on an angle, and have nice loopy bits (there was definitely no craze for the upright style at my school).  Interesting to see in the debate above that handwriting was considered a core part of the curriculum and that other, new-fangled parts of the syllabus were taking precious time away from it.

However, an unimpressed letter writer the following year will not have the blame for crappy results and poor handwriting laid at the door of the syllabus:

The size of our classes is undoubtedly a great evil, and it will indeed be quite impossible to do anything like justice to the children and give them the amount of individual attention they require until we have at least double the number of teachers that we have at present.

Nelson Evening Mail, 17 April, 1907

Ah, yes, the old classic: teacher-student ratio.

How about lack of funding and priorities?

That is merely a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.  The colony spends less than one million annually on education and over three millions on drink.

Of course teachers probably account for at least one million of this three million.

So, to recap, students get too much/not enough school work and are working so hard/poorly they are going insane/not able to do simple sums due to a lack of/too much testing, and the syllabus/teachers/student-teacher ratio/funding is to blame.

Sounds about right.  Nice to know that things have changed so much in the last 100 years.

The jaws of physical idleness

When you read a history book it appears a solid stable thing.  The author will have stitched together the facts, opinions and lies into a seamless whole.  When they wrote their book they probably had in their mind some kind of notion of being fair.  Really though there is no particular need to respect the professional historian merely because they followed correct historical procedures and have had their work reviewed by a body of reputable academics.  So did historians one hundred years ago and most of their books now look like the works of deluded fantasists or fanatics.

Truby’s reputation remains healthy I believe because Plunket is still a worthwhile organisation; because his stated goals appear noble, and because a brief glance at his writing suggests an air of sensible sanity.

Whenever Truby makes a list of fundamentals in his essays they usually sound good:

Summary of the absolute necessties for good nutrition

• Fresh air day and night
• Bathing in fresh air and water
• Correctly balanced food with an abundance of fresh natural foods and sufficient water to drink

Truby King, Alexander Turnbull Library

This is all sensible stuff.  That’s the problem with it.  It’s the kind of thing that most parents will wind up doing most of the time anyway.  What is good in King’s books is sensible and obvious and rises smoothly to the surface; what is bad in his books is often submerged and bobs up unexpectantly:

The normal woman is never safer, healthier, happier or more uplifted than during pregnancy.

That tricky little word “normal” must have played on the mind of the expectant mother who read this sentence and felt unready, anxious, or maybe even a little overwhelmed and depressed during their pregnancy.  Not “normal” feelings according to Dr. King, director of Seacliff lunatic asylum.  King also makes declarations which are simply untrue and must have made countless women despair that they had not prepared during their pregnancy adequately:

Morning sickness rarely troubles women who fit themselves for pregnancy by active healthy habits.

Of course there is also plenty of material that can be dismissed with a good natured laugh about “how times change”:

The bowels [of the expectant mother] must be trained to move regularly and easily once a day.

Rubbing, fingering or other stimualtion of the nipples should not be carried to excess: moderation in all things.

But finally, in all of King’s work about babies, there is the slight whiff of the eugenicist and misogynistic, Empire builder:

If we lack noble mothers, we lack the first element of racial success and national greatness….  The main cause of modern bodily unfitness and inefficiency lies with our women….  Motherhood is woman’s exclusive profession – and yet the only one for which no training is considered necessary.

He finds an illustration of his point about the racial decline of the honky when he compares the teeth of the Maori and the European:

To us white intruders the contrast shown ought to appear as the ‘writing on the wall’.  No race or family can remain great or even perpetuate itself if it fails to develop properly and give due exercise to jaws and teeth….  The old time Maori… chewed and ground tough fern root between his molars….  He reaped the reward of honest work; he developed perfect jaws and teeth, which turn us almost green with envy when we see them in museums, side by side with the jaws of our own race – the jaws of physical idleness.

The pre-European Maori tended to die in his mid thirties without any teeth left, and generally afflicted by arthritis.

This is the curious thing about the writings of Truby King: he consistently constructs a list of sensible fundamentals out of the most hair-brained, misinformed nonsense.  It’s like an incredible magic trick where a man is given arrogance, misogyny and racism and somehow pulls Beethoven’s 9th Symphony out of the hat.  Luckily for the man everyone judges him on the symphony.