The little school was located on the corner of Highland Avenue and Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, California. Franklin Avenue shot away from the front of the school and a large church, with Baroque architectural design on the right side of Franklin would have been a landmark if directions to the school had been given. "Turn right off Hollywood Boulevard, drive up Highland Avenue to Franklin and you will see the big church to the left on Franklin. To the right on Highland is McEwen's School. The school has windows along the front, from the street to the roof. A peculiar building but unusual and distinctive."
The building had four classrooms and a storage room where the new school books where kept. As a child progressed the director of the school, Colin McEwen would take the child to the storage room and search through the new books while the old book, wrinkled, torn and written in, until there was nothing left to learn was discarded. There the new and untouched vehicle of knowledge would be handed to the waiting child. The excitement and pride shone on the child's face and also the director was always happy and proud on this day when the child would be starting fresh.
There were never more than 200 children in the school at any one time. They were all given equivalent tests and tested for IQ. A child had to have an IQ of 116. But the majority were closer to 200. Many were professional children already and had a relationship with the studios in Hollywood and would be on set a lot of the time. Mr. McEwen had to work with the kids and accommodate the agents. Some would graduate early, around 16. Some would be high achievers or musicians that were child prodigies. And some special because their parents were in the business and famous. All were very capable and some troubled because they perceived to much for their minds to handle. There was the child dwarf who came to school in a limousine and carried $100. dollar bills in his wallet. His father was the CEO of IBM in L.A. There was Donna O'Conner who looked just like her father, no mistaking her. Patty Duke, Glenn Dictrow and Tony Haig, one of the children in the King and I, on Broadway.
Each child would outline the school book by chapter, answer the questions and take the quiz at the end and finally take the test on the entire book. Book reports were due every two weeks and each child had the responsibility of writing a hundred word composition every day and to write an answer to a research question such as, "Who were the carpetbaggers?" Each child studied a language every year and there was a typing and short had room upstairs by Mr. McEwen's office where any child could attend and learn typing and shorthand, but few did and most that attended were women who wanted to do secretarial work. There were four teachers. Mr. McEwen, Mrs. Cellar, Mrs. Hatten and another teacher for the very young children. Mrs. Cellar also taught Persian students that had come for Medical degrees at UCLA, English. She knew five languages and was studying Russian at UCLA at night. A child was expected to work alone. They were able to seek help any time but each classroom had many different aged child and any child could be on any number of grade levels. Maybe they were studying Algebra but were behind in spelling. The school day lasted four hours for children over ten but the small children stayed until 2p in the afternoon. Dad, the food delivery man would drive in front of the school at 10a and all the children would get a break from study and buy something to eat and visit.
Mr. McEwen was an atheist and a humanist. He majored in Philosophy and when he found a child that he could exchange ideas with, he had them reading Bertrand Russel. Every important political event that was covered on T.V. was shared with the children. Everything would stop and all the children would be herded in one classroom with a T.V. showing the special event.
He would invite interesting and unusual people for the children, once a yogi came to the class, cut off his circulation and stuck a thick needle through the palm of his hand while not experiencing pain or loosing blood.
*
The children kept coming to the little school year after year. Finishing their corriculum. Four short hours of academics, with a fifteen minute break at 10 a.m. Mr. McEwen didn't care how pleasurable this process was, he thought that real life began in college and that a child should get there as quickly as possible. No art, no music, no drama and no physical education-these activities were taken care of by their parents. Just pure work at Mr. McEwens.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Monday, June 29, 2015
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Some of McEwen's students.
 |
| Robb Schaller editor of the school news paper |
GLENN DICTEROW
 |
| As I returned to high school, after 2/1/2 years of absence I had compiled my poetry and had it published in 1968. Mr. McEwen credited me with 1 semester of creative writing for my effort. And sent my transcripts to Coronada High School in Scottsdale, Arizona where I graduated in 1969. |
Monday, June 1, 2015
Colin McEwen 1 LETTERS TO A FRIEND
My Dear Friend,
If one has the capacity for substantial reflective thought beyond the most obvious facts of one's
existence in a simple physical environment and has, too, the urge to exercise that capacity, one soon
discerns the astounding artificiality and downright immorality of many rules that are taught as the
highest and indeed (by some persons) divinely revealed or approved moral code.
The conclusion is inescapable that a reconstruction of morals is sorely needed and long overdue.
Only Alice in Wonderland, or persons like her of both sexes, could view our conventional morality
without detecting, at least fleetingly and vaguely, its incongruous relation to natural man and the
natural world.
Human nature, we are often told, must be controlled.
What, then, is the nature of this control; by whom have moral rules been made; what has been the
purpose of them, not only ostensibly as revealed by orthodox explanations, but actually as revealed
by the purpose of them, not only ostensibly as revealed by orthodox explanations, but actually as
revealed by the purposes and interests they have served in the course of their working in human
lives and human affairs?
We are confronted in the very beginning of our analysis by two fundamental facts that lift the fog,
making possible a clearer view and a deeper understanding.
(1) Man has been, and continues to be, divided into superior and inferior social and economic
classes.
(2) The socially approved, conventional morality has been, and remains today, the -superior-
social classes; and these superior -social- classes have been, and in modern capitalist social orders
continue to be, the superior -economic classes.
Prescribed morality has thus become, not rules consistent with man's physiology and psychology
and the facts of the natural environment in which he must live and have his being, but rules
formulated by ruling classes and conforming to their conception of how man -ought- to act and
-ought- to think.
A child or an adult is normally acceptable or morally good if his conduct and ideas conform to what
a ruling group thinks his conduct and ideas -ought- to be.
A child is good if he comports himself as his parents or teachers think proper.
An adult is good if he acts, thinks, talks, and writes as priest or preacher, landlord, businessman,
or other representative citizen of the dominant economic and social classes thinks is fit and proper.
The moral views of these dominant classes are diffused among the general population and became
-mores- that are entertained uncritically and often dogmatically and fanatically.
If these moral standards are questioned at all, the questioning tends to occur, for the average person,
only when their impracticality in his experience becomes glaringly apparent and the accruing results
extremely unsatisfying to the organism. Then, with mental equilibrium destroyed, with an urgent
problem pressing for solution, the moral rule may be examined by reflective, critical intelligence.
Only then is there likely to be progress toward a more realistic morality in the life of man or woman.
To be sure, one may still accept the conventionally approved standard as being morally correct while
actually violating it in daily living. In this case blame may be projected to a personal devil, to Adam
and Eve and their original sin, to the frailties of the flesh. For these folk, Protestantism offers prayer
and salvation through faith and Catholicism offers, among many aids, indulgences...
It is no accident, surely, that socialists and, latterly, socialists of communist persuasion particularly,
have been painted as morally reprehensible in a full, complete sense. If such a person does not accept
established, conventional morality in economic affairs, it is but a step to the belief that he is morally
wrong in other respects as well.
The conclusion to which an honest thinker is logically led is that the social division of man into super
superior and inferior classes results in a morality inconsistent with the facts of human physiology
and psychology and the real environment. This inconsistency creates in men and women a
restlessness, an uncertainty, poor mental hygiene, personal maladjustment and tragedy, a realization,
forfor the most part unconscious, that the individual is led by false priests and praying to false gods.
This unfortunate situation induces hypocrisy and distrust of all moral standards.
Of course it is not true that moral rules can be explained wholly as the conscious effort of ruling
classes to dominate the mass of humanity in the interest of these numerically small superior classes;
when mechanistic and human forces have created a given society, the morality inevitably tends
to freeze into mores that will work toward the perpetuation of that society.
The truth would appear to be that the relationship is a reciprocal one; that moral rules tend to create
and perpetuate a given social and economic order and that a given social and economic order and
that a given social and economic order tends to create and perpetuate a morality congenial to it.
To say that a person of the so-called superior classes does not consciously understand why he holds
passionately to a prevailing morality is not to deny the efficacy of that morality or the purely material
increments it helps to insure for him and his class.
When morals are thought to be confined to an inner realm apart from human nature, two opposed
schools of social reform naturally arise.
First, there is the view that, since morals are a special faculty within man, distinct from human
nature and the environment and independent of them, man's moral faculty must be improved and
strengthened before we may hope for a better, more equitable social system. Then man has thus truly
had a change of heart, his improved moral status will automatically be reflected in a better society.
This theory stems from Plato's notion of faculty psychology.
Second, there is the alternative, the view that man is wholly a creature of his heredity and
environment, that his moral nature is shaped by the social institutions under which he lives.
Consequently, an improved moral tone in man can come only when better institutions under which
he lives. Consequently, an improved moral tone in man can come only when better institutions make
this possible. The institutions themselves will be changed by mechanistic forces inherent in them and
their operations. Institutions shape man, not man, institutions....an explanation that does not
recognize free-will or freedom of choice.
Undoubtedly both views contain much truth, the error being in the absence of a synthesizing
approach. Man influences and shapes society; society influences and shapes man. But the concept
faculy psychology is faulty: there is no separate moral faculty; the human organism is, and acts as, a
unity. Moral values are generated and become meaningful in a social setting, when the organism
upon, and is itself acted upon by, a social environment.
A morality based on the study of human nature integrates man and his activities with the environment
in which he lives. He is seen to be, not a being separate or essentially different from other
manifestations of life, but a product and essential part of the environment in which he lives, an
organism whose well-being and continued existence depend on its success in preserving its
biological integrity.
There are constant organic states the integrity of which must be respected if the organism is to be
healthy and indeed if it is to endure. Nature tolerates a certain limited, temporary violation of them,
it is true; but effort is always directed toward realization and maintenance of them in their full
integrity, toward the reestablishment of a biological equilibrium.
When morals are thought of in terms of the facts of man's organic nature and the facts of his
environment...when morality is founded on natural science..theory corresponds with practice, and
there is no longer a duality in experience..no longer, on the one hand, an unreal morality entertained
in a non-existent moral faculty of the organism and, on the other hand, a practical world of events in
which expediency and unmoral behavior take precedence over the unreality and vapidity of morals
divorced from nature and scientific facts of the environment.
Then failure is truly a source of instruction; for moral rules are reconsidered and reevaluated in the
real world of men and events. The causes of failure can be looked for where scientific method
indicates them to be; the facts of the organism are related to the facts of that organism's experience.
Moral standards are generated, tested, revised, rejected by a laboratory technique practiced in day to
day living.
morals become experimental, tentative, pragmatic, relative.
When morals ar built upon a regard for human nature and not a disregard for it, ethics, too, can
become pragmatic and experimental and be integrated with and grow from physics and biology. A
pragmatic, naturalistic ethics emerges from and helps to shape the social and economic arrangements
by which people live. it is not of a separate, isolated realm.
A morality that is not rooted in human nature is negativistic, prohibitive. It expresses itself in a list of
don'ts in rigid prohibitions. It does not generate in actual ex perience, is not relative or pragmatic but
a moral absolutism that disregards the facts of human physiology, psychology, and experience.
When we say that habits are arts, we are emphasizing primarily the thought that habits are not
independent personal abilities or reactions, self-generating and self-inclosed within the individual,
but responses of an organism to objective circumstances of its environment, to objects and relation-
ships in or concerned with a world external to itself. One's habits, as thus conceived, are conditioned
by the objective circumstances of one's life no less than by one's organic structures themselves.
Habits are formed by interaction between the organism and the facts and conditions of its
environment.
Yet professional moralists have fatuously taught that morals are essentially subjective,
individualistic, the province of a special faculty within man. Morality has been a personal matter,
concerned with a self. To elevate one's moral tone, one should, in this view, listen with decorous
respect to the moral precepts of professional moral guides who have certain knowledge of what
constitutes good morality. Moral rules are thus absolutist and pure--a code to be learned and
practiced because it is authoritarian. Morality is not to generate in actual contact of an organism
with the factors of its environment.
Contrarily, morality scientifically understood comprises "working adaptations of personal capacities
with environing forces".
Morality can in fact not exist apart from a physical and social environment. Only in such a setting
can events take on moral meaning.
There is, consequentinly, no evil per se, no absoute force of wickedness that inheres in man as an
element of his nature.
Evil or morally wrong actions result, not solely from an organism, but from an organism and its
association with physical and biological objects of its environment. The evil is socially created, and
responsibility for it must be socially shared.
An organism's moral predispositions are formed in an identical manner, and responsibility for them is
also clearly social.
No basis exists for the belief, commonly held, that there is a fixed area of wickedness, that morality
is an absolute. The moral and the immoral are socially determined in the course of man's living
among his fellows in a given environment. So far as moral are rational, activities of an organism are
if they preserve its biological integrity and promote its happiness and well being without having
a deleterious effect on others.
Nor are moral values constant, as traditional authoritarianism teaches. The moral and the immoral
do not have precisely the same content at all the same content at all times and for all persons.
In our own day, the morally good may in many respects be variable for different peoples in widely
separated parts of he world, where social, economic, and other environmental conditions differ.
In past ages, conduct that would be frowned upon today might be morally justified. Finally, in a
vitally important sense it is true that morals now, as in fact always, must be thought of in terms of a
given situation. Morals are thus seen to be, not rules that are universally applicable to all human
organisms in all environments, but rules that become moral for a given organism in a given
situation only when they serve moral ends for that organism in that situation.
In a word, we have done with absolutes.
Morally we of today stand between the past and the future, as in truth we do in all other phases of life
also. Our morality is today's morality, applicable to our time and conditions. It has grown out of
yesterday's, and out of it itself will emerge tomorrow's. Morals, too, are subject to evolution.
Civilization is inseparable from history and social environment. The present cannot be understood,
nor the future intelligently planned, unless we have the knowledge of the past that history gives.
There is no progress save through the growth, integration, and reconstruction of habits among men
and women in a social setting. The individual organism fades and dies, but its contribution to
habits is immortal. This is another way of expressing the immortality of influence. The habits of
yesterday are modified, integrated, and reconstructed to form the habits of the present; the habits of
the present become similarly the habits of tomorrow. Thus civilization, always dependent on the
past, progresses to fuller realiztion of the potentialities of nature. The men and women who have
played their parts since man first appeared on the world's stage hundreds of thousands of years ago
have gone the way of all flesh; but nevertheless they live on among us, and will forever live, in the
habits and intellectual and cultural life of the present-- in the human lives of today and tomorrow.
Nothing in nature is static. As we live the habits of today, we reconstruct them toward the habits of
tomorrow.
Many examples of the development of conduct through interaction of an organism's biological
capacities and the factors of the organism's environments come to one's mind. Fiction is rich with
them, the newspapers report a goodly number daily, our juvenile court files are veritable storehouses.
Such cases came to my attention when I was employed in psychometric and probation work for the
Juvenile Court of the most populous County of my home State.
However, I shall make only one specific reference--to Clifford Shaw's THE JACK-ROLLER, a book
that is especially illustrative--and then pass on to other considerations.
If it is asserted, as it often is, that, though people have the ability to change the present economic
order, it is not desirable to make the attempt to change it, one may properly answer by saying that no
economic order has metaphysical sanctions for its continued existence; none is divinely ordained;
none is changeless, permanent, or eternal, however much its special beneficiaries may desire it to be;
the only test that may be applied is the purely pragmatic one: does the economic order promote the
ideals and provide the material goods and services that we want and that scientific study shows our
present abilities, skills, knowledge, and external aids can insure when sanely directed toward these
ends?
In earlier writing, I have emphasized for many years the following two ideals or principles as basic
and enduring:
(1) The preservation and progressive development of economic security and well-being.
(2) The preservation and progressive development of the integrity of the individual human personality.
Principle (2) cannot eventuate in the modern industrial society unless Principle (1) has been
antecedently realized. This is to say that our other personal rights that are cherished in a truly
democratic society cannot be insured if they are not rooted in economic rights inherent in the
freedom and security of a genuine economic democracy.
It may fairly be submitted that an economic order that does not provide and progressively develop
these fundamental principles does not deserve to survive today among intelligent people, particularly
where industrialism has existed for many years.
As for the risks incurred in promotiong such a change, they are as nothing compared to the risks
that inevitably appear and lead to tragedy and disaster when lethargy, the selfishness of special
beneficiaries of the established order, ignorance, stupidity, inertia, and other factors prevent
consummation of changes in our economic arrangements till they are long overdue.
Through interaction of human and environmental elements these changes must be brought about
smoothly when needed if we are to remain on the road that leads toward the goal we cherish. It is
the function of intelligence to readjust our habits in the way--to habituate us to new ways of life
the will insure the preservation and progressive realization of the ideals to which we are devoted.
When this does not occur--when the reactionary or rigidly conservative attitude prevails-- there
develops a social lag that produces economic and social maladjustments and much suffering and
tragedy among individual members of the social order. In recent times the parts of the world where
people live by those economic arrangements known as capitalism experienced, from 1930 to the
Second World War, poverty, misery, deprivation, frustration, worry, and death while machinery,
technical knowledge and skills, and a competent, willing labor force were not permitted to produce
the rich, full life for all that they could surely provide if used under saner arrangements. The shift to
a war economy in 1940 and, in some countries, several years earlier, has revived trade and commerce
and hence has brought a measure of prosperity or, if not this in all cases, at least absence of grave
economic need (again there are exceptions today in several of the European nations); but it has
unleashed all the horrors of war and created for the post-war years a problem that will be utterly
insoluble short of complete, rapid transition to a socialist society-- a transition that must be
consummated within the democratic process if temporary abrogation of important personal rights is
to be avoided. Here is a challenge to all that is finest in the youth of today.
The argument could be implemented with a mass of factual detail, but the answer in its skeletal
essentials has been given. In subsequent letters I shall refer again to these problems, for
contemporary philosophy is less than nothing and futile if it is not concerned with the actualities--
yes, the bread-and-butter facts----of the world in which we live and seek to shape our fortunes.
May I suggest that (1) the socialist and even the communist does not eschew education and political
action; (2) the class struggle, as socialists and communists conceive it, is not something to be
created by agitators but rather a factual social phenomenon that inevitably operates in capitalist
society; and (3) economic determination, as socialists and communists understand and teach it,
does not exclude the forces of idealism, ethics, and human desire--the influence of a creative
organism acting upon its environment. But they would explain that these personal factors are
themselves the result of antecedent causation, one important element of which is environing forces
external to the organism, and another the nature of that organism's inherited and environmentally
modified biological structure. External forces are of course most potent for the socialist and
communist, as they are for many other scholars and thinkers. Referring to the class struggle once
more, it is relevant to say that socialists and communists emphasize this idea so that working people
will understand the dynamics of history and social change, the deeper meanings of events in their
employment and in current industrial, economic, and social life generally. Their intention is thus
seen to be to create, not class hate, but understanding, as a basis of intelligent social engineering
toward formation of a classless society. Their desire is not to make class antagonisms, but to
explain those that inevitably exist and operate. They wish to remove these antagonisms in the
only way possible---by replacing the system that makes them by a system in which they cannot exist.
We should recall, too, that no one is more devoted to education than the socialist or communist, who
practices it always. In fact, plitical campaigns are for them, not mere periodic, sporadic actifity, but
parts of a continuous educational campaign intended to create, or help in the creation of a new
society. And even the revolutionary who expects that forces other than the parliamentary will be
finally decisive and gives precedence to non-olitical factors in social change does not minimize the
value of education or specifically of the educational value of political campaigns.
In dealing with moral problems, our emphasis quite naturall falls on the future; for the past is over
and done, and, if a specific action in the past has been immoral, the problem becomes, not
principally to establish resonsibility and inflict punishment, but so to reconstruct the environmen
that moral actions will henceforth replace the immoral.
For example, in the case of a criminal, or purpose should be to recontruct his environing conditions
in a manner most likely to result in the substitution of morally good habits for those that have been
morally bad. The matter of retributive "justice" (I shall have something to say about "justice" in one
of my letters) is at most only secondary and really may be prejudicial to attainment of the
reconstructed habits we desire. Punishment as traditionslly conceived is psychologically,
ethically, and morally indefensible.
Yesterday someone referred to Clarence Darrow's strictures against society, in which the late
Chicago lawyer, one of the great men of the modern age, charges the social order with complete
responsibility for a criminal's wrong-doing.
I have read a good deal of Darrow's work and am familiar with the chief facts of his life. Though I
cannot accept the philosophical pessimism for which he argues, there is in his position, I am sure
much truth.
Apropos of social responsibility for crime and the criminal, I am convinced that it is by far the major
factor of antecedent causation.
I think we shall at least agree that Darrow was blessed with a deeper insight than most thinkers attain.
Someone-- I tink Lincoln Steffens-- has written that people have told of seeing Darrow wince from
the mere thought of the suffering another person had undergone or was presently enduring.
Darrow does not believe in free-will.
While my position is not identical with his in this respect, tere is a sense in which all human response
is, in my opinion, determined by forces beyond the individual's control.
Let us think of a child who has just been born. What are his resources, and whence have they come?
He brings with him into the light of day only organic structral predispositions that have been
inherited and for which he is not at all responsible.
Now, if we proceed from that point and consider what happens, we see that the organism necessarily
acts upon, and is itself acted upon by, conditions and objects of a social setting.
It is conventionally assumed that in responding to the factors of its environment the organism is
exercising freedom of choice-- free-will.
There is an important sense in which this could never be true.
When the organism responds in a given way in a given complex of circumstances, it does so because
of what it is; and the organism is what it is because of its inherited biological predispositions and the
environing factors that in acting upon these biological structural predispositions have altered them.
Considered from this point of view, free-will hardly enters the picture.
Or, to put the matter a little differently, a decision reached by a man or woman is determined,
regardless of how intelligent the person may be, by the factors of his or her heredity and
environments.
It is extremely difficult for the simon-pure advocate of free-will to get around the horns of this
dilemma.
Nor is much foundation left for the doctrine of personal responsibility unless we charge the organism
with responsibility for it heredity--a position that is scientifically untenable.
Emphasis is on the future when the morality of a social system as such is considered, also. The
history of that system is important to an understanding of the forces that are causing social
maladjustment and decay; but the moral problem is of the future, not the past-- how the system can
be satisfactorily changed or successfully abandoned for a new one, with a minimum of strife and
confusion during transition.
In our present is all the heritage of our past. We cannot live this present at its potential best if we do
not understand our heritage and rethink it for use in the modern social setting. The potential richness
of the future cannot take shape unless intelligence can control impulse, reshaping present habits to fit
changing objective circumstances.
If there is to be no serious cultural lag, morals must be experimental, relative, pragmatic.
They must not stifle the individual human personality by insisting upon a colorless, drab,
unimaginative sameness or uniformity that does not recognize individual differences in biological
structural predispositions.
Model T Fords are preferable to Model T morals.
If intelligence is freely operative, the full richness of our heritage can be lived in the present day, and
the future becomes an ever-widening, ever-brightening horizen.
Very sincerely yours,
Colin McEwen
Surrey, Bristish Columbia
November, 1943
If one has the capacity for substantial reflective thought beyond the most obvious facts of one's
existence in a simple physical environment and has, too, the urge to exercise that capacity, one soon
discerns the astounding artificiality and downright immorality of many rules that are taught as the
highest and indeed (by some persons) divinely revealed or approved moral code.
The conclusion is inescapable that a reconstruction of morals is sorely needed and long overdue.
Only Alice in Wonderland, or persons like her of both sexes, could view our conventional morality
without detecting, at least fleetingly and vaguely, its incongruous relation to natural man and the
natural world.
Human nature, we are often told, must be controlled.
What, then, is the nature of this control; by whom have moral rules been made; what has been the
purpose of them, not only ostensibly as revealed by orthodox explanations, but actually as revealed
by the purpose of them, not only ostensibly as revealed by orthodox explanations, but actually as
revealed by the purposes and interests they have served in the course of their working in human
lives and human affairs?
We are confronted in the very beginning of our analysis by two fundamental facts that lift the fog,
making possible a clearer view and a deeper understanding.
(1) Man has been, and continues to be, divided into superior and inferior social and economic
classes.
(2) The socially approved, conventional morality has been, and remains today, the -superior-
social classes; and these superior -social- classes have been, and in modern capitalist social orders
continue to be, the superior -economic classes.
Prescribed morality has thus become, not rules consistent with man's physiology and psychology
and the facts of the natural environment in which he must live and have his being, but rules
formulated by ruling classes and conforming to their conception of how man -ought- to act and
-ought- to think.
A child or an adult is normally acceptable or morally good if his conduct and ideas conform to what
a ruling group thinks his conduct and ideas -ought- to be.
A child is good if he comports himself as his parents or teachers think proper.
An adult is good if he acts, thinks, talks, and writes as priest or preacher, landlord, businessman,
or other representative citizen of the dominant economic and social classes thinks is fit and proper.
The moral views of these dominant classes are diffused among the general population and became
-mores- that are entertained uncritically and often dogmatically and fanatically.
If these moral standards are questioned at all, the questioning tends to occur, for the average person,
only when their impracticality in his experience becomes glaringly apparent and the accruing results
extremely unsatisfying to the organism. Then, with mental equilibrium destroyed, with an urgent
problem pressing for solution, the moral rule may be examined by reflective, critical intelligence.
Only then is there likely to be progress toward a more realistic morality in the life of man or woman.
To be sure, one may still accept the conventionally approved standard as being morally correct while
actually violating it in daily living. In this case blame may be projected to a personal devil, to Adam
and Eve and their original sin, to the frailties of the flesh. For these folk, Protestantism offers prayer
and salvation through faith and Catholicism offers, among many aids, indulgences...
It is no accident, surely, that socialists and, latterly, socialists of communist persuasion particularly,
have been painted as morally reprehensible in a full, complete sense. If such a person does not accept
established, conventional morality in economic affairs, it is but a step to the belief that he is morally
wrong in other respects as well.
The conclusion to which an honest thinker is logically led is that the social division of man into super
superior and inferior classes results in a morality inconsistent with the facts of human physiology
and psychology and the real environment. This inconsistency creates in men and women a
restlessness, an uncertainty, poor mental hygiene, personal maladjustment and tragedy, a realization,
forfor the most part unconscious, that the individual is led by false priests and praying to false gods.
This unfortunate situation induces hypocrisy and distrust of all moral standards.
Of course it is not true that moral rules can be explained wholly as the conscious effort of ruling
classes to dominate the mass of humanity in the interest of these numerically small superior classes;
when mechanistic and human forces have created a given society, the morality inevitably tends
to freeze into mores that will work toward the perpetuation of that society.
The truth would appear to be that the relationship is a reciprocal one; that moral rules tend to create
and perpetuate a given social and economic order and that a given social and economic order and
that a given social and economic order tends to create and perpetuate a morality congenial to it.
To say that a person of the so-called superior classes does not consciously understand why he holds
passionately to a prevailing morality is not to deny the efficacy of that morality or the purely material
increments it helps to insure for him and his class.
When morals are thought to be confined to an inner realm apart from human nature, two opposed
schools of social reform naturally arise.
First, there is the view that, since morals are a special faculty within man, distinct from human
nature and the environment and independent of them, man's moral faculty must be improved and
strengthened before we may hope for a better, more equitable social system. Then man has thus truly
had a change of heart, his improved moral status will automatically be reflected in a better society.
This theory stems from Plato's notion of faculty psychology.
Second, there is the alternative, the view that man is wholly a creature of his heredity and
environment, that his moral nature is shaped by the social institutions under which he lives.
Consequently, an improved moral tone in man can come only when better institutions under which
he lives. Consequently, an improved moral tone in man can come only when better institutions make
this possible. The institutions themselves will be changed by mechanistic forces inherent in them and
their operations. Institutions shape man, not man, institutions....an explanation that does not
recognize free-will or freedom of choice.
Undoubtedly both views contain much truth, the error being in the absence of a synthesizing
approach. Man influences and shapes society; society influences and shapes man. But the concept
faculy psychology is faulty: there is no separate moral faculty; the human organism is, and acts as, a
unity. Moral values are generated and become meaningful in a social setting, when the organism
upon, and is itself acted upon by, a social environment.
A morality based on the study of human nature integrates man and his activities with the environment
in which he lives. He is seen to be, not a being separate or essentially different from other
manifestations of life, but a product and essential part of the environment in which he lives, an
organism whose well-being and continued existence depend on its success in preserving its
biological integrity.
There are constant organic states the integrity of which must be respected if the organism is to be
healthy and indeed if it is to endure. Nature tolerates a certain limited, temporary violation of them,
it is true; but effort is always directed toward realization and maintenance of them in their full
integrity, toward the reestablishment of a biological equilibrium.
When morals are thought of in terms of the facts of man's organic nature and the facts of his
environment...when morality is founded on natural science..theory corresponds with practice, and
there is no longer a duality in experience..no longer, on the one hand, an unreal morality entertained
in a non-existent moral faculty of the organism and, on the other hand, a practical world of events in
which expediency and unmoral behavior take precedence over the unreality and vapidity of morals
divorced from nature and scientific facts of the environment.
Then failure is truly a source of instruction; for moral rules are reconsidered and reevaluated in the
real world of men and events. The causes of failure can be looked for where scientific method
indicates them to be; the facts of the organism are related to the facts of that organism's experience.
Moral standards are generated, tested, revised, rejected by a laboratory technique practiced in day to
day living.
morals become experimental, tentative, pragmatic, relative.
When morals ar built upon a regard for human nature and not a disregard for it, ethics, too, can
become pragmatic and experimental and be integrated with and grow from physics and biology. A
pragmatic, naturalistic ethics emerges from and helps to shape the social and economic arrangements
by which people live. it is not of a separate, isolated realm.
A morality that is not rooted in human nature is negativistic, prohibitive. It expresses itself in a list of
don'ts in rigid prohibitions. It does not generate in actual ex perience, is not relative or pragmatic but
a moral absolutism that disregards the facts of human physiology, psychology, and experience.
When we say that habits are arts, we are emphasizing primarily the thought that habits are not
independent personal abilities or reactions, self-generating and self-inclosed within the individual,
but responses of an organism to objective circumstances of its environment, to objects and relation-
ships in or concerned with a world external to itself. One's habits, as thus conceived, are conditioned
by the objective circumstances of one's life no less than by one's organic structures themselves.
Habits are formed by interaction between the organism and the facts and conditions of its
environment.
Yet professional moralists have fatuously taught that morals are essentially subjective,
individualistic, the province of a special faculty within man. Morality has been a personal matter,
concerned with a self. To elevate one's moral tone, one should, in this view, listen with decorous
respect to the moral precepts of professional moral guides who have certain knowledge of what
constitutes good morality. Moral rules are thus absolutist and pure--a code to be learned and
practiced because it is authoritarian. Morality is not to generate in actual contact of an organism
with the factors of its environment.
Contrarily, morality scientifically understood comprises "working adaptations of personal capacities
with environing forces".
Morality can in fact not exist apart from a physical and social environment. Only in such a setting
can events take on moral meaning.
There is, consequentinly, no evil per se, no absoute force of wickedness that inheres in man as an
element of his nature.
Evil or morally wrong actions result, not solely from an organism, but from an organism and its
association with physical and biological objects of its environment. The evil is socially created, and
responsibility for it must be socially shared.
An organism's moral predispositions are formed in an identical manner, and responsibility for them is
also clearly social.
No basis exists for the belief, commonly held, that there is a fixed area of wickedness, that morality
is an absolute. The moral and the immoral are socially determined in the course of man's living
among his fellows in a given environment. So far as moral are rational, activities of an organism are
if they preserve its biological integrity and promote its happiness and well being without having
a deleterious effect on others.
Nor are moral values constant, as traditional authoritarianism teaches. The moral and the immoral
do not have precisely the same content at all the same content at all times and for all persons.
In our own day, the morally good may in many respects be variable for different peoples in widely
separated parts of he world, where social, economic, and other environmental conditions differ.
In past ages, conduct that would be frowned upon today might be morally justified. Finally, in a
vitally important sense it is true that morals now, as in fact always, must be thought of in terms of a
given situation. Morals are thus seen to be, not rules that are universally applicable to all human
organisms in all environments, but rules that become moral for a given organism in a given
situation only when they serve moral ends for that organism in that situation.
In a word, we have done with absolutes.
Morally we of today stand between the past and the future, as in truth we do in all other phases of life
also. Our morality is today's morality, applicable to our time and conditions. It has grown out of
yesterday's, and out of it itself will emerge tomorrow's. Morals, too, are subject to evolution.
Civilization is inseparable from history and social environment. The present cannot be understood,
nor the future intelligently planned, unless we have the knowledge of the past that history gives.
There is no progress save through the growth, integration, and reconstruction of habits among men
and women in a social setting. The individual organism fades and dies, but its contribution to
habits is immortal. This is another way of expressing the immortality of influence. The habits of
yesterday are modified, integrated, and reconstructed to form the habits of the present; the habits of
the present become similarly the habits of tomorrow. Thus civilization, always dependent on the
past, progresses to fuller realiztion of the potentialities of nature. The men and women who have
played their parts since man first appeared on the world's stage hundreds of thousands of years ago
have gone the way of all flesh; but nevertheless they live on among us, and will forever live, in the
habits and intellectual and cultural life of the present-- in the human lives of today and tomorrow.
Nothing in nature is static. As we live the habits of today, we reconstruct them toward the habits of
tomorrow.
Many examples of the development of conduct through interaction of an organism's biological
capacities and the factors of the organism's environments come to one's mind. Fiction is rich with
them, the newspapers report a goodly number daily, our juvenile court files are veritable storehouses.
Such cases came to my attention when I was employed in psychometric and probation work for the
Juvenile Court of the most populous County of my home State.
However, I shall make only one specific reference--to Clifford Shaw's THE JACK-ROLLER, a book
that is especially illustrative--and then pass on to other considerations.
If it is asserted, as it often is, that, though people have the ability to change the present economic
order, it is not desirable to make the attempt to change it, one may properly answer by saying that no
economic order has metaphysical sanctions for its continued existence; none is divinely ordained;
none is changeless, permanent, or eternal, however much its special beneficiaries may desire it to be;
the only test that may be applied is the purely pragmatic one: does the economic order promote the
ideals and provide the material goods and services that we want and that scientific study shows our
present abilities, skills, knowledge, and external aids can insure when sanely directed toward these
ends?
In earlier writing, I have emphasized for many years the following two ideals or principles as basic
and enduring:
(1) The preservation and progressive development of economic security and well-being.
(2) The preservation and progressive development of the integrity of the individual human personality.
Principle (2) cannot eventuate in the modern industrial society unless Principle (1) has been
antecedently realized. This is to say that our other personal rights that are cherished in a truly
democratic society cannot be insured if they are not rooted in economic rights inherent in the
freedom and security of a genuine economic democracy.
It may fairly be submitted that an economic order that does not provide and progressively develop
these fundamental principles does not deserve to survive today among intelligent people, particularly
where industrialism has existed for many years.
As for the risks incurred in promotiong such a change, they are as nothing compared to the risks
that inevitably appear and lead to tragedy and disaster when lethargy, the selfishness of special
beneficiaries of the established order, ignorance, stupidity, inertia, and other factors prevent
consummation of changes in our economic arrangements till they are long overdue.
Through interaction of human and environmental elements these changes must be brought about
smoothly when needed if we are to remain on the road that leads toward the goal we cherish. It is
the function of intelligence to readjust our habits in the way--to habituate us to new ways of life
the will insure the preservation and progressive realization of the ideals to which we are devoted.
When this does not occur--when the reactionary or rigidly conservative attitude prevails-- there
develops a social lag that produces economic and social maladjustments and much suffering and
tragedy among individual members of the social order. In recent times the parts of the world where
people live by those economic arrangements known as capitalism experienced, from 1930 to the
Second World War, poverty, misery, deprivation, frustration, worry, and death while machinery,
technical knowledge and skills, and a competent, willing labor force were not permitted to produce
the rich, full life for all that they could surely provide if used under saner arrangements. The shift to
a war economy in 1940 and, in some countries, several years earlier, has revived trade and commerce
and hence has brought a measure of prosperity or, if not this in all cases, at least absence of grave
economic need (again there are exceptions today in several of the European nations); but it has
unleashed all the horrors of war and created for the post-war years a problem that will be utterly
insoluble short of complete, rapid transition to a socialist society-- a transition that must be
consummated within the democratic process if temporary abrogation of important personal rights is
to be avoided. Here is a challenge to all that is finest in the youth of today.
The argument could be implemented with a mass of factual detail, but the answer in its skeletal
essentials has been given. In subsequent letters I shall refer again to these problems, for
contemporary philosophy is less than nothing and futile if it is not concerned with the actualities--
yes, the bread-and-butter facts----of the world in which we live and seek to shape our fortunes.
May I suggest that (1) the socialist and even the communist does not eschew education and political
action; (2) the class struggle, as socialists and communists conceive it, is not something to be
created by agitators but rather a factual social phenomenon that inevitably operates in capitalist
society; and (3) economic determination, as socialists and communists understand and teach it,
does not exclude the forces of idealism, ethics, and human desire--the influence of a creative
organism acting upon its environment. But they would explain that these personal factors are
themselves the result of antecedent causation, one important element of which is environing forces
external to the organism, and another the nature of that organism's inherited and environmentally
modified biological structure. External forces are of course most potent for the socialist and
communist, as they are for many other scholars and thinkers. Referring to the class struggle once
more, it is relevant to say that socialists and communists emphasize this idea so that working people
will understand the dynamics of history and social change, the deeper meanings of events in their
employment and in current industrial, economic, and social life generally. Their intention is thus
seen to be to create, not class hate, but understanding, as a basis of intelligent social engineering
toward formation of a classless society. Their desire is not to make class antagonisms, but to
explain those that inevitably exist and operate. They wish to remove these antagonisms in the
only way possible---by replacing the system that makes them by a system in which they cannot exist.
We should recall, too, that no one is more devoted to education than the socialist or communist, who
practices it always. In fact, plitical campaigns are for them, not mere periodic, sporadic actifity, but
parts of a continuous educational campaign intended to create, or help in the creation of a new
society. And even the revolutionary who expects that forces other than the parliamentary will be
finally decisive and gives precedence to non-olitical factors in social change does not minimize the
value of education or specifically of the educational value of political campaigns.
In dealing with moral problems, our emphasis quite naturall falls on the future; for the past is over
and done, and, if a specific action in the past has been immoral, the problem becomes, not
principally to establish resonsibility and inflict punishment, but so to reconstruct the environmen
that moral actions will henceforth replace the immoral.
For example, in the case of a criminal, or purpose should be to recontruct his environing conditions
in a manner most likely to result in the substitution of morally good habits for those that have been
morally bad. The matter of retributive "justice" (I shall have something to say about "justice" in one
of my letters) is at most only secondary and really may be prejudicial to attainment of the
reconstructed habits we desire. Punishment as traditionslly conceived is psychologically,
ethically, and morally indefensible.
Yesterday someone referred to Clarence Darrow's strictures against society, in which the late
Chicago lawyer, one of the great men of the modern age, charges the social order with complete
responsibility for a criminal's wrong-doing.
I have read a good deal of Darrow's work and am familiar with the chief facts of his life. Though I
cannot accept the philosophical pessimism for which he argues, there is in his position, I am sure
much truth.
Apropos of social responsibility for crime and the criminal, I am convinced that it is by far the major
factor of antecedent causation.
I think we shall at least agree that Darrow was blessed with a deeper insight than most thinkers attain.
Someone-- I tink Lincoln Steffens-- has written that people have told of seeing Darrow wince from
the mere thought of the suffering another person had undergone or was presently enduring.
Darrow does not believe in free-will.
While my position is not identical with his in this respect, tere is a sense in which all human response
is, in my opinion, determined by forces beyond the individual's control.
Let us think of a child who has just been born. What are his resources, and whence have they come?
He brings with him into the light of day only organic structral predispositions that have been
inherited and for which he is not at all responsible.
Now, if we proceed from that point and consider what happens, we see that the organism necessarily
acts upon, and is itself acted upon by, conditions and objects of a social setting.
It is conventionally assumed that in responding to the factors of its environment the organism is
exercising freedom of choice-- free-will.
There is an important sense in which this could never be true.
When the organism responds in a given way in a given complex of circumstances, it does so because
of what it is; and the organism is what it is because of its inherited biological predispositions and the
environing factors that in acting upon these biological structural predispositions have altered them.
Considered from this point of view, free-will hardly enters the picture.
Or, to put the matter a little differently, a decision reached by a man or woman is determined,
regardless of how intelligent the person may be, by the factors of his or her heredity and
environments.
It is extremely difficult for the simon-pure advocate of free-will to get around the horns of this
dilemma.
Nor is much foundation left for the doctrine of personal responsibility unless we charge the organism
with responsibility for it heredity--a position that is scientifically untenable.
Emphasis is on the future when the morality of a social system as such is considered, also. The
history of that system is important to an understanding of the forces that are causing social
maladjustment and decay; but the moral problem is of the future, not the past-- how the system can
be satisfactorily changed or successfully abandoned for a new one, with a minimum of strife and
confusion during transition.
In our present is all the heritage of our past. We cannot live this present at its potential best if we do
not understand our heritage and rethink it for use in the modern social setting. The potential richness
of the future cannot take shape unless intelligence can control impulse, reshaping present habits to fit
changing objective circumstances.
If there is to be no serious cultural lag, morals must be experimental, relative, pragmatic.
They must not stifle the individual human personality by insisting upon a colorless, drab,
unimaginative sameness or uniformity that does not recognize individual differences in biological
structural predispositions.
Model T Fords are preferable to Model T morals.
If intelligence is freely operative, the full richness of our heritage can be lived in the present day, and
the future becomes an ever-widening, ever-brightening horizen.
Very sincerely yours,
Colin McEwen
Surrey, Bristish Columbia
November, 1943
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Second Letter to a friend.
My dear Friend,
Habits are the self---the living, wanting, needing self; they are in truth the human will, the urge to act in specific ways for specific ends.
Habits are therefore active means when they impel the individual to respond to environing forces in a specific manner to realize specific ends.
A traditional view of habits, as I said in my first letter, is that they are self-generating within the organis. Being formed in this way, a bad habit can be explained as the resut of evil inherent in the orgainism.
Many traditional moralists have implemented this idea with another, declaring that the evil in the organism is attributable to the machinations of a personal devil. As the precise antithesis to this devil, or center of wickedness, they have offered a personal God, the supreme power and center of righteousness.
Evil inheres in us, these ladies and gentlemen say, because Adam and Eve, having been created as perfect or near-perfect beings and placed in a garden of bliss. listened to the promptings of God's archenemy, the devil, and indulged a God forbidden habit. Since that most unfortunate incident some thousands of years ago, we have had to fight the evil that is an essential, ever-present element of our nature and also the villainy of the devil, who can now appeal to our wicked natures.
These supernaturalists are quite sure that man, whom God made from the soil of the earth, and woman, whom God, in a moment of afterthought, made from a rib of the first man, must seek to improve their nature and hence their habits by close attention to an absolutist code of commandments alleged to have been given by God and to which he demands of man strict conformity in practice as well as thought. And in our struggle with the devil and his forces of wickedness within us, we should trust implicitly in, and always to, the supernatural for further guidance and enlightenment. The first man and woman displeased God; and that one misstep is declared to be the cause of all the misery and suffering humanity has had to bear, all the evil in our natures, all (this follows logically) our bad habits.
If these are the antecedent circumstances, it is not unreasonable to suppose, as indeed such supernaturalists do, that improvement in our natures and habits must come from our submission and appeal to God, the supreme power and center of goodness and virtue.
Science has a different analysisi, a different synthesis, a different approach.
Instead of teaching that man began as a perfect or near-perfect being and fell, by displeasing his creator, God, from this height to his subsequent low estate of poverty, disease, back-breaking toil, mortality, wickedness, and miscellaneous devilments, science says that he began in the extremely remote past as a minute organism in the warm waters of the sea, an organism that is thought to have itself grown or emerged from inorganic substances, and that this little progenitor of all organic life can be traced through the lower to the higher genera of flora and fauna till it culminates in man, the supreme achievement of nature on planet Earth.
The Earth, not the center of the Universe as supernaturalists have taught, is seen to be one of the smallest planets of a solar system that itself is only a mior system among a number incalculable in infinity. Man, not a being for whom all nature was created, is seen to be a product of nature, the highest achievement of the evolutionary process on a relatively small satellite of a relatively small sun.
For science, man has in the long view forever progressed from the simple to the complex, from little knowledge to much, from little intelligence to his present abilities, from lower to higher moral conceptions.
An enthralling picture, is it not?--A sweeping, vivid glimpse of the greatest drama ever enacted on planet Earth, a beautiful lyric, epic poetry in the grand style, a vision of truth, goodness, and beauty.
It gives us understanding, an understanding that comes from knowledge of what is true. When knowledge and understanding are gained, superstition and magic, with all their cruelties and progress-retarding mechanisms, lose their grip on the mins of men. Science has progressively enlared, and continues to enlarge, the areas of experience in which knowledge and understanding have replaced superstition and magic.
We have been comparing a supernatural version of man's origin with the version taught by science.
The theory of evolution has been accepted by science for many years; today scientists do not doubt the facts of man's evolution, though dispute is interminable regarding how evolution has been achieved. There are, for example, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the Lamarkian theory of modification by inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the DeVries's mutation theory. It would seem probable, on the evidence, that all three of these explanations are in some degree true; and that other factors, still unknown or inadequately understood, have also played their part.
The traditional Christian teaching has been that man has lived on the Earth several thousand years since his creation in the Garden of Eden. Other religions have their own stories of the race's origin and age.
Science, on the other hand, states confidently that man has existed as man at least half a million years; and this statement is not a guess, but an estimate based on the facts revealed by geology, archaelology, anthropology, and other sciences. The skeletal remains of ancient man are mute, but they tell their story nevertheless.
A careful study of biological evolution has persuaded men and women who know most about the relevant facts that all organic life, the flora and fauna, had their origin millions of years ago in the warm waters of the sea. It is also thought---though direct proof is of course unavailable---that these minute marine creatures, the progenitors of all our organic life, themselves somehow grew or emerged from the world of inorgaic substances.
The following statements are truth beyond question and may be given categorically as such:
(1) When one studies the Primates, one finds there are greater differences between the higher and the lower Primates than there are between the higher Primates and man.
(2) When one studies the animals and plants, one finds a point in their evolution where the one tends to merge into the other; where forms of life now existing might be classified as either.
(3) When one studies the simplest forms of organic life know, one finds a point at which these simplest organic structures tend to merge imperceptibly into substances of the inorgaic world. Again
it becomes difficult to discriminate.
For full discussion of the evidence on evolution one must go to heavy tomes---to such a book as, say, Richard S. Lull's ORGANIC EVOLUTION.
It may finally be emphasized that evolution is not cnfined to organic life, but is an eternal, vital principle of inorganic substances also, and of social institutions, including religion itself. In sum, there are no objects or beings and no relationships, that are not subject to evolutionary laws.
We return now, with better understanding, to a consideration of human nature and conduct and specifically of habit and will.
It has been commonly held that, if one has an incorrect habit, all that is necessary to substitute a good one is to get the idea of the latter and will the change. Then the reconstruction of habit will take place without great difficulty.
This view, one perceives, is congenial to the traditional religious teaching that the organism is to get the correct idea of moral habits from supernatural sources. If one believes sufficiently, or has a strong enough faith, habits will automatically be changed.
Science answers that the right idea is the right habit.
We may wish or pray for, or will, a different habit endlessly; but, unless actual stes are taken toward a reconstruction of the present habit, no change will occur. In the recnstruction o habits involved in learning strokes in tennis, the thought of the new stroke does not roduce it in fact. It becomes operative only as we make different responses in an attempt to attain what we desire and profess to know. The correct idea is really gained only as we acquire the correct habit.
Tennis strokes may in general be considered non-moral. But habits in which morality is involved are essentially the same in this respect. While it is commonly supposed that a person knows what is morally right even when he acts in an immoral manner, science does not agree.
The right knowledge, the true idea, comes only as the correct habit patterns are actually formed in experience.
The implications for educational theory and practice are clear and unmistakable.
The learner does not acquire the correct habits of problem-solving and thinking by being told about them. He does acquire these habits by doing them, by learning the technique in actual experience. Then the idea, being active and operative, takes on meaning for the learner and is truly known.
I like to mention arithmetic, spelling, and grammar as examples.
Arithmetic is not properly learned by memorizing rules, nor is algebra, nor geometry. The rules take on meaning and are usable only as they are learned in a context of experience, in practical mathematical operations. Rules that are memorized are meaningless and soon forgotten, since they are divorced from the context in which meaning could adhere. The rules should be learned incidentally in t;he course of the actual mathematical operations. Correct habits are thus formed; and these habits become for all practical purposes the rule.
Spelling, too, has been taught in the past, and is often still taught, in a manner that is psychologically indefensible.
One of the most monstrous educational blunders is to compile lists of words that some educator thinks children at various age levels should know, and then to drill pupils in the spelling of them.
Often words have been selected that have littleor no relation to the pupil's vocabulary needs, in childhood or adulthood. This is illustrated expecially in the case of the old-fashioned spelling contests, when a premium was placed on the spelling of long words that the speller would probably never use. A truer psychology---the psychology I am writing about in these letters---teaches that the spelling of a word should be undertaken as use for that word develops in the child's experience in or out of school. And to wish or will to spell a word is to remain powerless unless the wish or will becomes the actual operational technique involved in the learning process---unless correct habits of learning to spell are extablished.
My third example is grammar, a field in which the point of view I entertain hason at least one occasion cooked my goose with traditionalists.
The traditional conception is that grammar can be taught only directly as such; that a pupil cannot learn to write correctly if he has not antecedently mastered grammatical rules.
I have in my own experience encountered traditionalists who insist that no one can possibly learn to write by any other method. I have heard teachers-in-training counseled to teach their pupils "grammar, grammar, grammar, and more grammar. They can learn in no other way. You will not have many young Cambells." Yet the College of Education was simultaneously teaching the greater desirablility of teaching another procedure, based on the concepts of John Dewey.
I knew that my ability, whatever it might be, had been acquired by a different method; and it was irritatingly obvious that I could write correctly, while the lassies who could diagram charmingly often found it difficult to write intelligibly and to recognize sentences in which their rules were violated with frightful abandon.
What I drive at is that I believed than, and believe now, that traditional grammar teaching is nonsense. A pupil should learn the mechanics of writing by actually writing; as the need for grammar is revealed by this laboratory techique, it should be learned as an integral part of usage. The "rule" then becomes simply usage, or the habits involved in correct writing. Grammatical rules are almost unconsciouslyly and imperceptibly fused in habits of correct writing.
This is the way I learned; it is the psychology I am presently discussing.
During the course of a conversation yesterday, I commented that, when people do not understand the cause-and-effect relationships or sequence of a problem or situation, they often explain events by superstition and attempt to control or alter them by magic. Throughout man's history the area in which magic is relied upon has progressively become smaller as scientific research has revealed these cause-and-effect sequences.
Habits are the self---the living, wanting, needing self; they are in truth the human will, the urge to act in specific ways for specific ends.
Habits are therefore active means when they impel the individual to respond to environing forces in a specific manner to realize specific ends.
A traditional view of habits, as I said in my first letter, is that they are self-generating within the organis. Being formed in this way, a bad habit can be explained as the resut of evil inherent in the orgainism.
Many traditional moralists have implemented this idea with another, declaring that the evil in the organism is attributable to the machinations of a personal devil. As the precise antithesis to this devil, or center of wickedness, they have offered a personal God, the supreme power and center of righteousness.
Evil inheres in us, these ladies and gentlemen say, because Adam and Eve, having been created as perfect or near-perfect beings and placed in a garden of bliss. listened to the promptings of God's archenemy, the devil, and indulged a God forbidden habit. Since that most unfortunate incident some thousands of years ago, we have had to fight the evil that is an essential, ever-present element of our nature and also the villainy of the devil, who can now appeal to our wicked natures.
These supernaturalists are quite sure that man, whom God made from the soil of the earth, and woman, whom God, in a moment of afterthought, made from a rib of the first man, must seek to improve their nature and hence their habits by close attention to an absolutist code of commandments alleged to have been given by God and to which he demands of man strict conformity in practice as well as thought. And in our struggle with the devil and his forces of wickedness within us, we should trust implicitly in, and always to, the supernatural for further guidance and enlightenment. The first man and woman displeased God; and that one misstep is declared to be the cause of all the misery and suffering humanity has had to bear, all the evil in our natures, all (this follows logically) our bad habits.
If these are the antecedent circumstances, it is not unreasonable to suppose, as indeed such supernaturalists do, that improvement in our natures and habits must come from our submission and appeal to God, the supreme power and center of goodness and virtue.
Science has a different analysisi, a different synthesis, a different approach.
Instead of teaching that man began as a perfect or near-perfect being and fell, by displeasing his creator, God, from this height to his subsequent low estate of poverty, disease, back-breaking toil, mortality, wickedness, and miscellaneous devilments, science says that he began in the extremely remote past as a minute organism in the warm waters of the sea, an organism that is thought to have itself grown or emerged from inorganic substances, and that this little progenitor of all organic life can be traced through the lower to the higher genera of flora and fauna till it culminates in man, the supreme achievement of nature on planet Earth.
The Earth, not the center of the Universe as supernaturalists have taught, is seen to be one of the smallest planets of a solar system that itself is only a mior system among a number incalculable in infinity. Man, not a being for whom all nature was created, is seen to be a product of nature, the highest achievement of the evolutionary process on a relatively small satellite of a relatively small sun.
For science, man has in the long view forever progressed from the simple to the complex, from little knowledge to much, from little intelligence to his present abilities, from lower to higher moral conceptions.
An enthralling picture, is it not?--A sweeping, vivid glimpse of the greatest drama ever enacted on planet Earth, a beautiful lyric, epic poetry in the grand style, a vision of truth, goodness, and beauty.
It gives us understanding, an understanding that comes from knowledge of what is true. When knowledge and understanding are gained, superstition and magic, with all their cruelties and progress-retarding mechanisms, lose their grip on the mins of men. Science has progressively enlared, and continues to enlarge, the areas of experience in which knowledge and understanding have replaced superstition and magic.
We have been comparing a supernatural version of man's origin with the version taught by science.
The theory of evolution has been accepted by science for many years; today scientists do not doubt the facts of man's evolution, though dispute is interminable regarding how evolution has been achieved. There are, for example, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the Lamarkian theory of modification by inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the DeVries's mutation theory. It would seem probable, on the evidence, that all three of these explanations are in some degree true; and that other factors, still unknown or inadequately understood, have also played their part.
The traditional Christian teaching has been that man has lived on the Earth several thousand years since his creation in the Garden of Eden. Other religions have their own stories of the race's origin and age.
Science, on the other hand, states confidently that man has existed as man at least half a million years; and this statement is not a guess, but an estimate based on the facts revealed by geology, archaelology, anthropology, and other sciences. The skeletal remains of ancient man are mute, but they tell their story nevertheless.
A careful study of biological evolution has persuaded men and women who know most about the relevant facts that all organic life, the flora and fauna, had their origin millions of years ago in the warm waters of the sea. It is also thought---though direct proof is of course unavailable---that these minute marine creatures, the progenitors of all our organic life, themselves somehow grew or emerged from the world of inorgaic substances.
The following statements are truth beyond question and may be given categorically as such:
(1) When one studies the Primates, one finds there are greater differences between the higher and the lower Primates than there are between the higher Primates and man.
(2) When one studies the animals and plants, one finds a point in their evolution where the one tends to merge into the other; where forms of life now existing might be classified as either.
(3) When one studies the simplest forms of organic life know, one finds a point at which these simplest organic structures tend to merge imperceptibly into substances of the inorgaic world. Again
it becomes difficult to discriminate.
For full discussion of the evidence on evolution one must go to heavy tomes---to such a book as, say, Richard S. Lull's ORGANIC EVOLUTION.
It may finally be emphasized that evolution is not cnfined to organic life, but is an eternal, vital principle of inorganic substances also, and of social institutions, including religion itself. In sum, there are no objects or beings and no relationships, that are not subject to evolutionary laws.
We return now, with better understanding, to a consideration of human nature and conduct and specifically of habit and will.
It has been commonly held that, if one has an incorrect habit, all that is necessary to substitute a good one is to get the idea of the latter and will the change. Then the reconstruction of habit will take place without great difficulty.
This view, one perceives, is congenial to the traditional religious teaching that the organism is to get the correct idea of moral habits from supernatural sources. If one believes sufficiently, or has a strong enough faith, habits will automatically be changed.
Science answers that the right idea is the right habit.
We may wish or pray for, or will, a different habit endlessly; but, unless actual stes are taken toward a reconstruction of the present habit, no change will occur. In the recnstruction o habits involved in learning strokes in tennis, the thought of the new stroke does not roduce it in fact. It becomes operative only as we make different responses in an attempt to attain what we desire and profess to know. The correct idea is really gained only as we acquire the correct habit.
Tennis strokes may in general be considered non-moral. But habits in which morality is involved are essentially the same in this respect. While it is commonly supposed that a person knows what is morally right even when he acts in an immoral manner, science does not agree.
The right knowledge, the true idea, comes only as the correct habit patterns are actually formed in experience.
The implications for educational theory and practice are clear and unmistakable.
The learner does not acquire the correct habits of problem-solving and thinking by being told about them. He does acquire these habits by doing them, by learning the technique in actual experience. Then the idea, being active and operative, takes on meaning for the learner and is truly known.
I like to mention arithmetic, spelling, and grammar as examples.
Arithmetic is not properly learned by memorizing rules, nor is algebra, nor geometry. The rules take on meaning and are usable only as they are learned in a context of experience, in practical mathematical operations. Rules that are memorized are meaningless and soon forgotten, since they are divorced from the context in which meaning could adhere. The rules should be learned incidentally in t;he course of the actual mathematical operations. Correct habits are thus formed; and these habits become for all practical purposes the rule.
Spelling, too, has been taught in the past, and is often still taught, in a manner that is psychologically indefensible.
One of the most monstrous educational blunders is to compile lists of words that some educator thinks children at various age levels should know, and then to drill pupils in the spelling of them.
Often words have been selected that have littleor no relation to the pupil's vocabulary needs, in childhood or adulthood. This is illustrated expecially in the case of the old-fashioned spelling contests, when a premium was placed on the spelling of long words that the speller would probably never use. A truer psychology---the psychology I am writing about in these letters---teaches that the spelling of a word should be undertaken as use for that word develops in the child's experience in or out of school. And to wish or will to spell a word is to remain powerless unless the wish or will becomes the actual operational technique involved in the learning process---unless correct habits of learning to spell are extablished.
My third example is grammar, a field in which the point of view I entertain hason at least one occasion cooked my goose with traditionalists.
The traditional conception is that grammar can be taught only directly as such; that a pupil cannot learn to write correctly if he has not antecedently mastered grammatical rules.
I have in my own experience encountered traditionalists who insist that no one can possibly learn to write by any other method. I have heard teachers-in-training counseled to teach their pupils "grammar, grammar, grammar, and more grammar. They can learn in no other way. You will not have many young Cambells." Yet the College of Education was simultaneously teaching the greater desirablility of teaching another procedure, based on the concepts of John Dewey.
I knew that my ability, whatever it might be, had been acquired by a different method; and it was irritatingly obvious that I could write correctly, while the lassies who could diagram charmingly often found it difficult to write intelligibly and to recognize sentences in which their rules were violated with frightful abandon.
What I drive at is that I believed than, and believe now, that traditional grammar teaching is nonsense. A pupil should learn the mechanics of writing by actually writing; as the need for grammar is revealed by this laboratory techique, it should be learned as an integral part of usage. The "rule" then becomes simply usage, or the habits involved in correct writing. Grammatical rules are almost unconsciouslyly and imperceptibly fused in habits of correct writing.
This is the way I learned; it is the psychology I am presently discussing.
During the course of a conversation yesterday, I commented that, when people do not understand the cause-and-effect relationships or sequence of a problem or situation, they often explain events by superstition and attempt to control or alter them by magic. Throughout man's history the area in which magic is relied upon has progressively become smaller as scientific research has revealed these cause-and-effect sequences.
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