Read Ebook: If at first by Venable Bill Poulton Peter Illustrator

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Ebook has 400 lines and 63176 words, and 8 pages

Shalimar leaped back with a cry.

The Messrs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, standing along the farther wall, murmured among themselves in interested tones.

"He has too many memory sidetracks," remarked Mr. 3, handing Mr. 7 the small gray box. "It certainly wasn't here. Nothing to do but try again." Mr. 7's finger hovered over the red button on the box's right-hand side.

Shalimar braced himself.

Mr. 7 shoved violently down on the button. Shalimar behaved in the expected fashion; he vanished.

Mr. 7 then pressed the green button on the left side. He and his colleagues followed after Shalimar.

Immediately after Mr. 7 pressed the aforementioned red button, Shalimar Smith felt a violent pain on the top of his head, followed shortly by another. He deduced that somebody was beating him over the head with something.

"Peeping Tom!" shrieked the outraged woman. "Help! Police!" She poised the vase for another blow. Shalimar winced as it descended and took stock of where he was.

He found that he was hanging by his fingertips from a ledge about five stories up on an apartment building in what must be a rather large city. It was, in fact, a window ledge, and immediately above him, leaning from the window, was a woman in a rather flimsy negligee, screaming and wielding a spiked heel on top of his defenseless cranium. He groaned as the heel descended for the fifth time on his skull then the shoe slipped from her grasp and fell to the street below. He remembered vaguely that he had once lived in an apartment like the one to whose window ledge he clung--probably, even, the same apartment--and that he had been accustomed to wash the windows from the outside. That explained his position. Now the shoe had been replaced by another makeshift weapon. A goldfish bowl came down upon him, showering him with fish, water and splinters of glass. Below, a cruising precinct police car had stopped and several men sporting the blue uniform of the Law were looking up.

"Come down from there," demanded a wrathful voice from below.

"How?" gasped Shalimar weakly.

"Come down, I say!" shouted the voice. Several people in adjoining apartments were looking out their respective windows at the scene and thoroughly enjoying his discomfiture. Shalimar cursed them and edged his way along the ledge until he felt another one under his feet. He came to a standing position on the lower one, hugging the wall of the building. The lady in the negligee poised a vase of flowers preparatory to heaving at him.

"Hell!" groaned Shalimar, ducking as the vase shattered against the wall above his head. He edged his way around the corner of the building where the lady could no longer see him, and slipped into an open window.

He emerged on the roof. Looking over the edge, he was immediately spotted from below. Cries of, "There he is!" and "On the roof!" floated to his horrified ears. He ran across the room and jumped to an adjoining one. He zig-zagged across it, keeping well away from the edges, and reached yet another adjoining roof. There he popped into a small utility shed. Stairs led down, and Shalimar followed them, not bothering to worry where they went. He raced down six flights and emerged in the basement.

Dark--too dark to see anything--but there was no mistaking that voice.

"Wrong again," said Mr. 7 cheerfully.

Shalimar couldn't see, but he knew that Mr. 7 was pressing the small red button. There was not enough light for anybody to see that Shalimar had once more vanished.

Apparently, nothing had happened. Shalimar waited expectantly. The darkness was as blank as ever. Shalimar looked about him, felt the air about him. Nothing. He took several steps forward.

Shalimar fell back. No mistaking that rough surface. He had just bumped into a tree. Cautiously, he approached it again, feeling in front of him with his hands. Presently he encountered the rough bark; he could put his arms around the tree. He felt upward--and got a surprise.

It was broken off at the top--rather, burnt or charred off.

His memory went to work again. He was getting closer now, much closer. Something was coming to the surface of his conscious mind, something that he had to remember, something--

He knew this place. But where? When?

Then he saw it, the tall thing, cylindrical and with a pointed nose shoved at the sky. He began to remember, though it came slowly. He thought, the tall thing, with a tapered nose silhouetted against the sky, was....

"I presume you have by now broken away from the limitations of your disintegrating Earth-personality," said a familiar voice.

"When we arrived--almost twenty years ago--in the role of a Galactic study-group assigned to determine whether the planet Earth was yet fit for full Galactic citizenship," said Mr. 7 slowly, "we found it necessary to assume the roles, separately, of representative beings of Earth, in order to obtain what information we required without arousing suspicion. To do this it was necessary, through standard psychological procedure, to isolate the larger portion of our complete Galactic personalities and to leave only a small pseudopersonality, completely equipped with Earth-memories, under which guise we might proceed with our studies.

"In order to assure complete control of the Earth-personality, it was of course necessary to isolate the Galactic one completely and further to remove all knowledge of its existence until such a predetermined time as we would be finished with our work and ready to return home."

Mr. 7 droned on. Shalimar nodded--and remembered.

"You gave us a rather hard time," continued Mr. 7.

"Because my personality was the most psychologically malleable," Shalimar said slowly, "I was chosen to hide the ship where it would be safe until we required it. The seven of you teleported to the Earth's surface and waited while I hid the ship--where you did not know its location. Then I alone knew where the ship was, and because I was the most malleable, my Earth-personality was the most foolproof. Therefore it was extremely unlikely that in any moments of duress or psychological strain, I would babble the location of the ship--which it was imperative to guard."

"Which," said Shalimar, "I did."

"Which you did," agreed Mr. 7. "Are we ready, then, to take off, Captain?"

"We are ready, Lieutenant," said Shalimar Smith, otherwise--Mr. Zero.

And so when we take the broader view, we quickly see that, in spite of our pessimism, we are doing something in the world. We are part of that machine which civilization has invented and is slowly perfecting to preserve itself. We may be a very small part, but, so long as the responsibility for a single child rests upon us, we are not an unimportant part. Society must reckon with you and me perhaps in an infinitesimal degree, but it must reckon with the institution which we represent as it reckons with no other institution that it has reared to subserve its needs.

In a certain sense these statements are platitudes. We have repeated them over and over again until the words have lost their tremendous significance. And it behooves us now and again to revive the old substance in a new form,--to come afresh to a self-consciousness of our function. It is not good for any man to hold a debased and inferior opinion of himself or of his work, and in the field of schoolcraft it is easy to fall into this self-depreciating habit of thought. We cannot hope that the general public will ever come to view our work in the true perspective that I have very briefly outlined. It would probably not be wise to promulgate publicly so pronounced an affirmation of our function and of our worth. The popular mind must think in concrete details rather than in comprehensive principles, when the subject of thought is a specialized vocation. You and I have crude ideas, no doubt, of the lawyer's function, of the physician's function, of the clergyman's function. Not less crude are their ideas of our function. Even when they patronize us by saying that our work is the noblest that any man or woman would engage in, they have but a vague and shadowy perception of its real significance. I doubt not that, with the majority of those who thus pat us verbally upon the back, the words that they use are words only. They do not envy us our privileges,--unless it is our summer vacations,--nor do they encourage their sons to enter service in our craft. The popular mind--the nontechnical mind,--must work in the concrete;--it must have visible evidences of power and influence before it pays homage to a man or to an institution.

Throughout the German empire the traveler is brought constantly face to face with the memorials that have been erected by a grateful people to the genius of the Iron Chancellor. Bismarck richly deserves the tribute that is paid to his memory, but a man to be honored in this way must exert a tangible and an obvious influence.

And yet, in a broader sense, the pre?minence of Germany is due in far greater measure to two men whose names are not so frequently to be found inscribed upon towers and monuments. In the very midst of the havoc and devastation wrought by the Napoleon wars,--at the very moment when the German people seemed hopelessly crushed and defeated,--an intellect more penetrating than that of Bismarck grasped the logic of the situation. With the inspiration that comes with true insight, the philosopher Fichte issued his famous Addresses to the German people. With clear-cut argument couched in white-hot words, he drove home the great principle that lies at the basis of United Germany and upon the results of which Bismarck and Von Moltke and the first Emperor erected the splendid structure that to-day commands the admiration of the world. Fichte told the German people that their only hope lay in universal, public education. And the kingdom of Prussia--impoverished, bankrupt, war-ridden, and war-devastated--heard the plea. A great scheme that comprehended such an education was already at hand. It had fallen almost stillborn from the only kind of a mind that could have produced it,--a mind that was suffused with an overwhelming love for humanity and incomparably rich with the practical experiences of a primary schoolmaster. It had fallen from the mind of Pestalozzi, the Swiss reformer, who thus stands with Fichte as one of the vital factors in the development of Germany's educational supremacy.

And yet Bismarck and Von Moltke and the Emperor are the heroes of Germany, and if Fichte and Pestalozzi are not forgotten, at least their memories are not cherished as are the memories of the more tangible and obvious heroes. Instinct lies deeply embedded in human nature and it is instinctive to think in the concrete. And so I repeat that we cannot expect the general public to share in the respect and veneration which you and I feel for our calling, for you and I are technicians in education, and we can see the process as a comprehensive whole. But our fellow men and women have their own interests and their own departments of technical knowledge and skill; they see the schoolhouse and the pupils' desks and the books and other various material symbols of our work,--they see these things and call them education; just as we see a freight train thundering across the viaduct or a steamer swinging out in the lake and call these things commerce. In both cases, the nontechnical mind associates the word with something concrete and tangible; in both cases, the technical mind associates the same word with an abstract process, comprehending a movement of vast proportions.

To compress such a movement--whether it be commerce or government or education--in a single conception requires a multitude of experiences involving actual adjustments with the materials involved; involving constant reflection upon hidden meanings, painful investigations into hidden causes, and mastery of a vast body of specialized knowledge which it takes years of study to digest and assimilate.

It is not every stevedore upon the docks, nor every stoker upon the steamers, nor every brakeman upon the railroads, who comprehends what commerce really means. It is not every banker's clerk who knows the meaning of business. It is not every petty holder of public office who knows what government really means. But this, at least, is true: in proportion as the worker knows the meaning of the work that he does,--in proportion as he sees it in its largest relations to society and to life,--his work is no longer the drudgery of routine toil. It becomes instead an intelligent process directed toward a definite goal. It has acquired that touch of artistry which, so far as human testimony goes, is the only pure and uncontaminated source of human happiness.

And the chief blessing for which you and I should be thankful to-day is that this larger view of our calling has been vouchsafed to us as it has been vouchsafed no former generation of teachers. Education as the conventional prerogative of the rich,--as the garment which separated the higher from the lower classes of society,--this could scarcely be looked upon as a fascinating and uplifting ideal from which to derive hope and inspiration in the day's work; and yet this was the commonly accepted function of education for thousands of years, and the teachers who did the actual work of instruction could not but reflect in their attitude and bearing the servile character of the task that they performed. Education to fit the child to earn a better living, to command a higher wage,--this myopic view of the function of the school could do but little to make the work of teaching anything but drudgery; and yet it is this narrow and materialistic view that has dominated our educational system to within a comparatively few years.

So silently and yet so insistently have our craft ideals been transformed in the last two decades that you and I are scarcely aware that our point of view has been changed and that we are looking upon our work from a much higher point of vantage and in a light entirely new. And yet this is the change that has been wrought. That education, in its widest meaning, is the sole conservator and transmitter of civilization to successive generations found expression as far back as Aristotle and Plato, and has been vaguely voiced at intervals down through the centuries; but its complete establishment came only as an indirect issue of the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, and its application to the problems of practical schoolcraft and its dissemination through the rank and file of teachers awaited the dawn of the twentieth century. To-day we see expressions and indications of the new outlook upon every hand, in the greatly increased professional zeal that animates the teacher's calling; in the widespread movement among all civilized countries to raise the standards of teachers, to eliminate those candidates for service who have not subjected themselves to the discipline of special preparation; in the increased endowments and appropriations for schools and seminaries that prepare teachers; and, perhaps most strikingly at the present moment, in that concerted movement to organize into institutions of formal education, all of those branches of training which have, for years, been left to the chance operation of economic needs working through the crude and unorganized though often effective apprentice system. The contemporary fervor for industrial education is only one expression of this new view that, in the last analysis, the school must stand sponsor for the conservation and transmission of every valuable item of experience, every usable fact or principle, every tiniest perfected bit of technical skill, every significant ideal or prejudice, that the race has acquired at the cost of so much struggle and suffering and effort.

I repeat that this new vantage point from which to gain a comprehensive view of our calling has been attained only as an indirect result of the scientific investigations of the nineteenth century. We are wont to study the history of education from the work and writings of a few great reformers, and it is true that much that is valuable in our present educational system can be understood and appreciated only when viewed in the perspective of such sources. Aristotle and Quintilian, Abelard and St. Thomas Aquinas, Sturm and Philip Melanchthon, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Herbart, and Froebel still live in the schools of to-day. Their genius speaks to us through the organization of subject-matter, through the art of questioning, through the developmental methods of teaching, through the use of pictures, through objective instruction, and in a thousand other forms. But this dominant ideal of education to which I have referred and which is so rapidly transforming our outlook and vitalizing our organization and inspiring us to new efforts, is not to be drawn from these sources. The new histories of education must account for this new ideal, and to do this they must turn to the masters in science who made the middle part of the nineteenth century the period of the most profound changes that the history of human thought records.

With the illuminating principle of evolution came a new and generously rich conception of human growth and development. The panorama of evolution carried man back far beyond the limits of recorded human history and indicated an origin as lowly as the succeeding uplift has been sublime. The old depressing and fatalistic notion that the human race was on the downward path, and that the march of civilization must sooner or later end in a cul-de-sac --this fatalistic view met its death-blow in the principle of evolution. A vista of hope entirely undreamed of stretched out before the race. If the tremendous leverage of the untold millenniums of brute and savage ancestry could be overcome, even in slight measure, by a few short centuries of intelligence and reason, what might not happen in a few more centuries of constantly increasing light? In short, the principle of evolution supplied the perspective that was necessary to an adequate evaluation of human progress.

But all this was only preparatory to the epoch-making discoveries that have had so much to do with our present attitude toward education. The Darwinian hypothesis led to violent controversy, not only between the opponents and supporters of the theory, but also among the various camps of the evolutionists themselves. Among these controversies was that which concerned itself with the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the outcome of that conflict has a direct significance to present educational theory. The principle, now almost conclusively established, that the characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime are not transmitted by physical heredity to its offspring, must certainly stand as the basic principle of education; for everything that we identify as human as contrasted with that which is brutal must look to education for its preservation and support. It has been stated by competent authorities that, during the past ten thousand years, there has been no significant change in man's physical constitution. This simply means that Nature finished her work as far as man is concerned far beyond the remotest period that human history records; that, for all that we can say to-day, there must have existed in the very distant past human beings who were just as well adapted by nature to the lives that we are leading as we are to-day adapted; that what they lacked and what we possess is simply a mass of traditions, of habits, of ideals, and prejudices which have been slowly accumulated through the ages and which are passed on from generation to generation by imitation and instruction and training and discipline; and that the child of to-day, left to his own devices and operated upon in no way by the products of civilization, would develop into a savage undistinguishable in all significant qualities from other savages.

The possibilities that follow from such a conception are almost overwhelming even at first glance, and yet the theory is borne out by adequate experiments. The transformation of the Japanese people through two generations of education in Western civilization is a complete upsetting of the old theory that as far as race is concerned, there is anything significantly important in blood, and confirms the view that all that is racially significant depends upon the influences that surround the young of the race during the formative years. The complete assimilation of foreign ingredients into our own national stock through the instrumentality of the public school is another demonstration that the factors which form the significant characteristics in the lower animals possess but a minimum of significance to man,--that color, race, stature, and even brain weight and the shape of the cranium, have very little to do with human worth or human efficiency save in extremely abnormal cases.

And so we have at last a fundamental principle with which to illumine the field of our work and from which to derive not only light but inspiration. Unite this with John Fiske's penetrating induction that the possibilities of progress through education are correlated directly with the length of the period of growth or immaturity,--that is, that the races having the longest growth before maturity are capable of the highest degree of civilization,--and we have a pair of principles the influence of which we see reflected all about us in the great activity for education and especially in the increased sense of pride and responsibility and respect for his calling that is animating the modern teacher.

And what will be the result of this new point of view? First and foremost, an increased general respect for the work. Until a profession respects itself, it cannot very well ask for the world's respect, and until it can respect itself on the basis of scientific principles indubitably established, its respect for itself will be little more than the irritating self-esteem of the goody-goody order which is so often associated with our craft.

With our own respect for our calling, based upon this incontrovertible principle, will come, sooner or later, increased compensation for the work and increased prestige in the community. I repeat that these things can only come after we have established a true craft spirit. If we are ashamed of our calling, if we regret openly and publicly that we are not lawyers or physicians or dentists or bricklayers or farmers or anything rather than teachers, the public will have little respect for the teacher's calling. As long as we criticize each other before laymen and make light of each other's honest efforts, the public will question our professional standing on the ground that we have no organized code of professional ethics,--a prerequisite for any profession.

I started out to tell you something that we ought to be thankful for,--something that ought to counteract in a measure the inevitable tendencies toward pessimism and discouragement. The hopeful thing about our present status is that we have an established principle upon which to work. A writer in a recent periodical stoutly maintained that education was in the position just now that medicine was in during the Middle Ages. The statement is hardly fair, either to medicine or to education. If one were to attempt a parallel, one might say that education stands to-day where medicine stood about the middle of the nineteenth century. The analogy might be more closely drawn by comparing our present conception of education with the conception of medicine just prior to the application of the experimental method to a solution of its problems. Education has still a long road to travel before it reaches the point of development that medicine has to-day attained. It has still to develop principles that are comparable to the doctrine of lymph therapy or to that latest triumph of investigation in the field of medicine,--the theory of opsonins,--which almost makes one believe that in a few years violent accident and old age will be the only sources of death in the human race.

Education, we admit, has a long road to travel before it reaches so advanced a point of development. But there is no immediate cause for pessimism or despair. We need especially, now that the purpose of education is adequately defined, an adequate doctrine of educational values and a rich and vital infusion of the spirit of experimental science. For efficiency in the work of instruction and training, we need to know the influence of different types of experience in controlling human conduct,--we need to know just what degree of efficiency is exerted by our arithmetic and literature, our geography and history, our drawing and manual training, our Latin and Greek, our ethics and psychology. It is the lack of definite ideas and criteria in these fields that constitutes the greatest single source of waste in our educational system to-day.

And yet even here the outlook is extremely hopeful. The new movement toward industrial education is placing greater and greater emphasis upon those subjects of instruction and those types of methods whose efficiency can be tested and determined in an accurate fashion. The intimate relation between the classroom, on the one hand, and the machine shop, the experimental farm, the hospital ward and operating room, and the practice school, on the other hand, indicates a source of accurate knowledge with regard to the way in which our teachings really affect the conduct and adjustment of our pupils that cannot fail within a short time to serve as the basis for some illuminating principle of educational values. This, I believe, will be the next great step in the development of our profession.

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