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.

Busy body

One thing I noticed when I became a parent was that a lot of people who have had children wanted to give me advice.  Sometimes I wanted their advice and sometimes I even sought it out, but most of the time I didn’t.  I should quickly add that this unwanted advice came from strangers not from family who were wonderfully supportive and caring of Eleanor and her nervous parents. 

Being a first time parent I was particularly vulnerable to the advice of others as I didn’t have a damn idea what I was doing, and what I was doing seemed very important.  Being confronted with a living being that is utterly dependent on you is, well, quite confronting, as are those first nappies, feeding times, etc, baths, etc….  At first it seems a great boon that there are so many people who are willing to tell you how to do something, and then it seems like a curse.  Once I had survived the first few months of self doubt and crippling insecurity as a dad I began to realise that raising a baby was essentially quite straightforward (please notice that I didn’t say easy).  A baby needs sleep, and warmth, and food, and baths and love.  I think that’s about it (aside from nappy changes).  The only people screwing this simplicity up are the experts.  It doesn’t matter whether they are experts because they had five kids, or because they wrote a book about childcare, they are still messing up something simple, and this is what began to annoy me so much as I read the story of Truby King.

Truby King established himself internationally as an expert on raising children.  He founded an organisation called Plunket (which thankfully bears little resemblance to its original form today).  He had his face on a stamp, had a state funeral and was granted permission to be buried on private land.  Quite recently he was in a book by Joseph Romanos about famous New Zealanders.  And yet, increasingly, I have the feeling that he was a self-righteous prig who felt not only no shame, but an actual compulsion to tell mothers off.  His advice is sometimes sound, often it is laughable, occasionally it is offensive.

While you read this please consider that Dr. King had no children of his own.  In his late forties he and his wife adopted a girl.  This was their solitary experience of being parents.

Every baby responds to wise sensible mothering, the reverse of capricious, fussy, anxious, over-stimulation, and meddling which too often usurp the place of the real thing nowadays, and may even do more harm than comparative indifference or even neglect….  Nervous and mental wrecks too frequently owe the origin of their disorder to want of repose in early infancy, due to injudicious stimulation.  In this connection let it be understood that all evidences of mental precocity, called “smartness” should be regarded as danger signals, and call for repression rather than encouragement.

Here we have learned that an anxious mother is worse than a neglectful one, and that a precocious child must be repressed.  One of the things that particularly offends me about King is his tone towards mothers.

Nature has specially marked out the first twelve months of life as the appointed time, for growing the body and even more emphatically for growing the brain of the human being.  If the mother fritters away this one golden opportunity instead of making the most of it and doing the best possible for her baby, no after care can make up for her mistakes and neglect.

So you better get it right!  Remember that Dr. King was well known as the boss of Seacliff, the country’s largest mental institution, and would have been considered an expert on mental health.  Throughout his book on childcare there is a disturbing sub-text concerning mental illness.  It is a sub-text that implies than failed citizens, the immoral and the deranged in society can be blamed on bad mothers.

Such children [children who won't eat their crusts] merely exemplify the ineptitude of their parents – parents too sentimental, weakly emotional, careless or indifferent to fufill the primary laws of Nature.

This kind of talk makes me angry.  I am not angry because of the advise itself which is consigned to the stack room of the Wellington Public Library, I am angry because Truby King still seems to maintain a very high, slightly saintly reputation in New Zealand when he strikes me as a misinformed, over-opinionated misogynist.  Of course I am not really angry.  To be really angry about this would be silly.  After all Dr. King and the authority of his views have long since passed, but still, I do feel a residual resentment on behalf of all those parents who were made to feel inadequate and small by King and his acylotes for the forty or so years when his views held sway. 

But we are not free of it; this double-edged blade of the expert opinion.  Of course we need doctors and their advice is usually sound and useful.  This makes it even harder to tell when they’re wrong.  When Eleanor was a very new baby she had three injections for meningococcal.  It was horrible for her because each time she was injected she couldn’t understand what had happened.  One minute she was safe in daddy’s arms and the next there was this horrible sharp pain in her thigh.  It was the first time I had seen a face crumple into tears.  We did it though and steadfastly followed the course of three injections because we were told that it was the best thing to do; that the Ministry of Health advised it.  We were given pamphlets.  The pamphlets were friendly and useful, and quietly implied that you would be a pretty poor sort of a parent if you didn’t get your baby immunised.  The Ministry of Health is running a very similar campaign right now for a vaccine against cervical cancer.

I think it was in November or December of last year that a small piece in the news announced that the meningococcal immunisation programme was being discontinued because the vaccine had been found to be almost entirely useless.

Tea

In 1905 Truby King published a booklet called The Feeding of Plants and Animals which put forward the fairly uncontroversial idea that plants and animals given care and good food would grow up healthy.  Of course there is quite a lot of merit in this idea for humans too, but King took it about as far as it could go.  The idea that poor nutrition in the formative years can lead to mental illness seems a bit of a stretch.  Without putting down the intellectual life of cows (the Seacliff cows thrived under Dr. King) I feel that the average human mind is a touch more complicated the the average bovine.

Dr. Truby King, Alexander Turnbull Library

On the 9th of August, 1906 Dr. King gave a lecture in Wellington on The Rearing of Plants and Animals.  Unsurprisingly perhaps, the lecture began with the statement that proper, rational feeding was the way to make plants and animals flourish.  Reference was made to a study on the relationship between education and the nervous system of children by Dr. Francis Warner.  This extraordinary study began by looking at the feeding of “sensitive” plants.  When plants were overfed they became sluggish, and when they were underfed they became,

supersensitive and irritable, and responded in a feeble, weak way to every change in its environment.  The plant became debilitated and suffered from a condition analogous to hysteria or epilepsy….  The pale, anaemic girl, who leads an indoor sedentary life, is careless about her food, takes little exercise and much tea, suffers from similar symptoms to the sensitive underfed plant, from the same cause.

Women who took too much tea must have produced the 19th century equivalent of a crack baby.  I fear that Dr. Warner must have been hanging out with his plants too long if he thought they were suffering from hysteria. 

Dr. King gave extensive examples of how frightfully well everything and everyone he had fed properly had thrived amd went on to explain that,

insanity was essentially a disease of imperfect nutrition.  As long as the brain was well and properly nourished insanity did not occur.

Interesting.  Anything else, Dr. King?

The little ones should be taught at school that the first and most important thing in life was fresh air.

Good nutrition, fresh air and some exercise would stop the creation of more and more “unfit” people clogging up the goals and asylums.

Dr. King is in the papers quite a lot in August of 1906 and after awhile it becomes pretty clear what King thinks the biggest threat to a baby’s health really is: its mother.

Lady Plunket

Mr. Bligh’s lecture in the Wellington Town Hall on 1 July, 1906 drew together some quite important people.  Lord Plunket introduced Mr. Bligh and, as we know, Dr. King was there too.  Shortly after this lecture Dr. King would found a childcare movement that would become known as Plunket. 

Lord and Lady Plunket became Governors of New Zealand in 1904, replacing Lord Ranfurly.  By August of 1904 Lady Plunket was giving interviews.  She was reasonably pleased with New Zealand.  Wellington was quite nice, but one thing displeased her about the city: “It does seem to me a pity that one should see troops of young girls – girls of 14 or 15 – parading the streets, apparently released from parental control.”  There was a distinct lack of respect being shown from the young girl to the married lady:

I notice it here even more than in England.  Girls do not dream of rising on the entrance of married ladies, and will even allow their mothers to get up and come to them on little trifles, instead of instantly rising and going to her.

The cheek.  Lord and Lady Plunket had two young daughters and a son.  Perhaps this gave them the feeling that they should make pronouncements about childcare.

Lady Plunket, Alexander Turnbull Library

At the time of the lecture on impurity Truby King had been the Medical Superintendent at the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum for eighteen years.  Seacliff was the largest mental institution in New Zealand with 500 patients and 50 staff.  Dr. King introduced a variety of measures that seem useful and humane.  He was an advocate of fresh air, exercise and good nutrition.  Curiously, despite all of his reforms Seacliff had the lowest cure rate of all the asylums in New Zealand at that time.

The most recent Truby King biography In a Strange Garden gives a list of the reasons for internment in the asylum in 1905.  In that year there were five people committed for masturbation, four for childbearing, two for adolescence and two for puberty (are these different?).  There was also a solitary chap who was in for “worry”.  The largest groups were classified as congenital, epileptic, alcoholic or senile.

Seacliff, Alexander Turnbull Library

The thing that was really going to push Dr. King towards childcare and away from mental health was his interest in gardening.  An interest that had seen him turn Seacliff into a productive farm supplying the asylum and other institutions in the area with fresh produce on a weekly basis.