Visual Education (Jan 1923-Dec 1924)

February, 192 3 37 And she took up the confession herself, scanning the text. "No, I never heard an eagle scream, and I don't know what a thin wind-graved line on the front of a mountain looks like, and I never saw an eagle's eyrie, or a kestrel, or a rabbit's burrow, except in a picture, and I never heard a fox bark, or a curlew wail. I am ignorant of strath, but I have heard a sheep bleat. What of it?" "A fine judge you are," said I, ""of graphic description. Read to your mother, "Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.' That's graphic description, too — if one knows what it describes." "I've seen pictures of Scotland," said the college graduate, "and mountains and valleys in other countries. And I've seen birds fly. I did get the feeling of distance, and loneliness, and silence so profound that it was emphasized by the sounds that broke it." All that visual instruction can hope to do for our children, cloistered amid the vociferous silences of the great cities, is to make them as intelligent as is this college-bred reader of Sharpe. And the libraries and museums, as well as the textbook publishers and sundry other purveyors of pictures, still and motion, are offering aids in doing it. "Learn to Do by Doing" I have read what the several museum representatives who have preceded me in this magazine have had to say about their activities, and I have visited their museums and observed their work. All of it is interesting, profitable and prophetic. Of course, apprentices from the beginnings of trades, carpenters, farmers, potters, dressmakers, and young mothers — Heaven protect their babies — have learned to do by doing, and have learned what to do by observing and imitating. The only people in the world who have ignored the necessity of these processes have been the accredited professional teachers. And they were not, in the beginning, as stupid as we make them out. For when everybody saw, heard, imitated, experimented in doing, then the professional teacher could rely upon the substance of thought, the images thus accumulated, and show her pupils how by hearing and reading words, by speaking and writing sentences, they might receive and transmit through space and time an infinite number of combinations of ideas. Thus everybody's invention could become anybody's property. We do plenty of such work today. The unlettered mother, with a fourteen-year-old son of mechanical bent, may, and does, sit today in her untidy flat mending her husband's trousers, or ironing her baby's petticoats, what time she hears with wonder a simple lecture broadcasted by the radio folk on "How This Country Was First Settled." And the inexperienced young wife successfully prepares her husband's dinner because she follows a direction given by a skillful housewife in the Boston Cook Book. So the engineer builds the bridge and the architect plans the house, using formulae worked out long ago in far places by forgotten mathematicians. Our Ever-Expanding Outlook Today we have to teach not only symbols but the things signified. For our children have been born into a press-the-button world, while at the same time they are offered, in books, magazines and newspapers, the concentrated experience of all ages and all climes. I find on my desk a volume of "fugitive pieces" by a lad promising enough to make his loss a sort of epitome of what the Great War did to us, and yet but a lad — Joyce Kilmer. On five pages I find casual references, as to things that every one knows, to: the literature of the day; the aeroplane; astronomy; engineering; schools of philosophy; theories of historic interpretation; sociology; details of New York's geography; details of subway practice; details of the boudoir; vocations in the metropolis; the coinage of the United States ; details of London life ; div MODEL OF EARLY NORMAN CASTLE This castle is not so big as it appears. It is comfortably accommodated on the teacher's desk. The background may be lighted by electricity, and there is a knob by means of which pupils may raise and lower its drawbridge and portcullis. Such models supply a need in the child's education which no amount of descriptive matter, however graphic in style, can answer.