Critic of Rule & Rote

It did not take long for the citizens of Little Bay Side, L.I. to like the husky new schoolmaster who came to them one day in the 1830s. It was true, as one pupil later recalled, that young Walt Whitman was "always musin' an' writin', 'stead of tending to his proper dooties." Yet he seemed to love children ("what a hum of little voices! . . . How pleasant . . . How healthful!"), and children seemed to love him. He never used the rod on them, knew how to liven their lessons with poems and games.

Walt Whitman's career as a schoolmaster was short: after five years he turned to journalism, took jobs with the Brooklyn Star and Brooklyn Eagle. But he never lost his interest in U.S. schools, and in his editorial columns he became one of the most dedicated educational critics of his day. In a new book edited by Florence Freedman, Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (King's Crown Press; $3.50), present-day parents and teachers can find a few lessons in the columns Walt Whitman wrote.

"Cluttered & Tangled." To ex-Schoolmaster Whitman, U.S. education in the mid-19th Century was bogged down in "precedent, old times, and respectability," was "cluttered and tangled up with a thousand senseless notions and stupidities." Almost everywhere the whip was used "to crush and tame the mettlesome, soothe the feverish and nervous, reduce the spirits where they are too high, and transform impertinence and obstinacy to mildness and soft obedience." Schools had become "penitential purgatories," and teachers "identified with a dozen unpleasant . . . associations--a sour face, a whip, hard knuckles snapped on tender heads . . ." It was not only whips and sour faces that bothered Whitman. He complained of the overcrowded classrooms he had seen, of the bad ventilation ("Every school room should possess a very high ceiling"), and of meager playgrounds. He advocated a more thorough study of American history, the introduction of music and botany. He saw no reason why children's chairs should not have backs, why their dull texts should not be "worthy of the best literary genius," or why their classrooms should not be brightened with "flower pots and pretty shrubs . . ."

"What Say You . . ." He hammered at niggardly-administrators to spend more money on schools ("What say you, Messieurs of the Board of Education . . ."), upbraided parents for not sending their children regularly to school ("Let us tell you, parent . . ."), railed at the public for not paying its teachers more ("As is the teacher, so is the school, and as is the pay, so is the teacher").

As for the teachers themselves, he had plenty of advice. "A school," he wrote, "is no place for merely drilling boys and girls as soldiers are drilled on parade--no place for the preservation of that 'order' which is seen in their hushing at their master's frown, as a wheel stops the moment the pin fastens it." Nor was it a place for book learning alone--of mere ciphering with no relation to the things children could actually count, or "mere atlas geography" with no relation to real "direction, distances [and] bearings . . ."

To Walt Whitman, education was more than "a heap of disjointed facts ... a proper education unfolds and develops every faculty in its just proportions . . . Its aim is ... to polish and invigorate the mind--to make it used to thinking and acting for itself, and to imbue it with a love for knowledge." Unfortunately, Walt Whitman noted sadly, the minds of too many students were more stunted than nourished by the sort of "rule and rote" he had seen: too often, said he, "the windows have not been thrown open, and all lies hushed and dark."

* Now Bayside, and part of New York City.

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