“You could sit outside,” she said.
So I have come and here I am outside. That is, I am sitting in a large pleasant room, the reception hall of the college, in a comfortable chair, alone, while my daughter is being interviewed somewhere in the bowels of the building. She went off bravely with a group of young women, looking serious and independent, though she is a small girl, very blue eyes under dark brown hair. I watch the people who come and go while I wait, a pastime which I always enjoy. Meanwhile I meditate upon the passage of life. This daughter of mine, whom I remember clearly as she was when I first saw her, a minute creature, perfect in detail, the same great blue eyes, already black-fringed, but so small that she fitted comfortably into the crook of my arm, is now a young woman with a mind of her own. She has rejected a fair amount of the education offered her, as most American children seem to do, and until she reached high school I did not know whether to be exasperated with her or with her teachers. Why, oh, why can learning not be made more exciting, more rewarding? I was exasperated with her teachers when she came trudging home from school, weary and pale with too many hours out of the sunshine, and yet with a pile of books under her arm. What wickedness, I cried in my heart, to keep a child sitting on a hard bench all day and then crowd the night hours, too, with homework! The children of Europe sit through long hours, too, but they have more to show for it than our children have. They achieve a prodigious amount of book learning, they can speak several languages, they understand mathematics and the abstractions of philosophy, but our poor children end their school days with pitifully little in the way of sound knowledge. I rebel against the waste of time, remembering my own free childhood, the lessons quickly learned and then the hours of sunshine and play and pleasant freedom. Not until I reached college did I study at night, except for the one year at Miss Jewell’s School in Shanghai where what I learned was not in books.
And I cannot remember at all when I learned to read. I know I read quite comfortably at four, because on my fifth birthday I received a small book as a gift, entitled Little Susie’s Seven Birthdays and I envied Susie for having seven instead of five. Yet my American children learned reading with strange difficulty, and I am shocked at the number of our people, men and women, but especially men, who read slowly, word by word, and are never comfortable in reading and do not enjoy it, although the purpose of education should be to make reading as simple and easy as listening to a voice, for only when a person can really read will he surely continue his own education. And examining into the cause for this slow and painful reading I am convinced that it is chiefly because we have wasted the value of the alphabet. Today’s children — or perhaps it is yesterday’s, since my own, except for the one whom we call our little Postscript, are past the early grades — are taught reading as though each word were a separate entity, exactly as Chinese children are taught their ideographs, or characters, of which five thousand must be separately learned before one can read, and for this reason the Chinese need two more years than we do with our alphabet language in order to complete the same work. The Koreans have an alphabet even more compact than ours and profited thereby until the Japanese conquerors made Japanese the language of the schools, and Japanese is no better than Chinese for learning to read. But English is a matchless language, and the alphabet, each letter with its own sounds, is the key, yet in this generation the teachers have thrown the key away. I rebel, I say, though very little good does the rebellion of the lay mind do against the professional, and this dominance of the professional is a weakness in our civilization, for the professional gets no over-all view of the people and the culture, and we are only torn hither and thither by one professional opinion and another.
When our Postscript came along, a little German war child, I taught her secretly at home how to read, but I knew better than to mention it abroad. Her teacher, an excellent one incidentally, told me the other day that our child, though only in second grade, is reading fifth grade books and needs no help whatever. I smiled and kept my counsel. Of course she knows how to read, and knowing she enjoys it. She learned as I learned, easily and unconsciously, for I gave her the key to reading, as my mother gave it to me, by teaching her how to use the alphabet.
But upon education one can write many books. Examinations, tests, grades, competition, these are all obstacles to true learning. Were I young again — how many things I would do if I were young again and in my own country! I would create a school where children could drink in learning as they drink in fresh milk. They drink because they are thirsty, and children are always thirsty for learning, but they do not know it. And in schools sources of learning are fouled with tensions, anxieties, competitive sports and the shame and fear of low marks, and it is no wonder that we are not a book-loving people. We have been made to hate books and therefore to scorn, with private regret mixed in, the educated man because he is an intellectual. Compulsory education? I doubt the wisdom of it, and certainly the use of the word compulsion is not wise. Education, yes, but not this sausage mill, this hopper, into which our children are all tossed at the age of six, and from which they emerge, too many of them, in dazed confusion, somewhere along the way, as rejects or as mass products.
Education? It is now a Saturday morning, after breakfast, the hour sacred to homework — work before play, and so on. But Rusty, the frivolous cocker spaniel widow, has foolishly neglected to get to the kennel in time to have her current batch of mongrel pups, and waiting greedily at the kitchen door for her morning meal she was overtaken by nature. Instead of retiring in prudence, she continued to wait but the puppies did not, and my second son, a six-foot adolescent, opened the door on her. Seeing her plight, he immediately rushed to her aid. Fresh straw in the kennel, a bowl of warm milk, a blanket-lined basket for the puppies shivering in the raw January air, and then Rusty herself, transported tenderly in his arms into the dry comfortable kennel — all this has, I am sure, taken most of the study hour. He will have to make it up, of course, but meanwhile, absorbed in life, he is learning. I daresay he will do more reading for the next few days than he has done in a month. He will want to know. And probably as a result he will fail his chemistry test on Monday. And his teacher will complain. And the irony is that I can sympathize with her, too. It is hard to teach a boy who has not done his homework, especially a charming boy of whom one is fond, and especially if one is a teacher with a conscience.
Part of the home education of the children has certainly been in the many visitors from abroad who have come to our house and they are too many to mention by name, and many of them have come again and again until our house seems linked to the other countries of the world by the memories of known and unknown friends, their faces, their voices, their letters. At this moment I recall an incident during the war, actually before Pearl Harbor. I had written some articles, quite strong ones, against Japanese militarism and I knew of course that they had reached Japan. But Japan was on the other side of the world, cut off from me, I imagined, by what had happened. Yet here is the story.
One cold winter’s night we sat by the living room fire in our home. The snow lay on the ground, deep and unploughed. No one could come in, none go out. It had been a wonderful day, the snow falling, the wind blowing, the children playing outside until they were half frozen, and in the evening after their supper we had popcorn before they went to bed. They were bathed and read to and tucked into their snug covers, and the father and I had settled ourselves to our books before the fire when suddenly the telephone rang. I answered unwillingly, wondering what neighbor could be calling, and acknowledging my name to the operator. Then I heard her say excitedly, “Hold on, please — Tokyo calling!”