Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/732

 7i6 THE] AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Ethnic Factors in Education. The efficiency of our educational system depends upon a clear apprehension of the relation of the contributory sciences of biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to pedagogy. The purpose of this paper is to examine anthropological facts and conditions which are vital in the development of the American system of public education.

The aim of all education should be at once individual, social, and ethnic ; for individualization and socialization proceed simultaneously by like processes, and both are conditioned by the type of ethnic experience which forms, as it were, the pedagogical background. It is a trite saying that " the teacher must understand human nature," but we do not always consider the vast significance of that requirement. It presupposes a knowledge not only of man as an individual, but of the effect of meteorologic and dietic, of social and physiographic influences which have dominated human life. In primitive society the individual was a cipher ; he lived, worked, thought, prayed, as did his tribe. Nature's chief product was an ethnic mind, an ethnic character, a race of men.

The American teacher whose pupils represent half a score of different sets of ethno-psychic characteristics, is confronted by no simple task in the effort to inculcate our best ideals of personal and civic righteousness, and to eradicate as far as possible ideals which are adverse to our own. What seems to us criminal tendency may be but a survival of a custom which, in the view of a more primitive race, was a strictly moral act. Thus countless perplexing problems of the teacher root in ethnic mind, and can be solved only when the ethnic factors in the equation are duly considered, and the inheritance from savagery or foreign national life is given its proper value.

The forces that have molded racial character are largely age-long, environ- mental influences. Dr. Edwin G. Dexter has shown, in his " Study of Tusayan Ritual," Smithsonian Report, 1905, the influence of definite meteorological condi- tions on mental states. Whenever, as in the case described, the very existence of a tribe is dependent upon slender natural resources and capricious conditions of rain and weather, there will grow up rituals to prevent their failure and insure a harvest " The cults of a primitive people are products of their necessities."

The persistence of ingrained racial traits even under an artificial environ- ment of civilization is a circumstance which must cot be lost sight of. With a race a thousand years are as yesterday with an individual. Nature will not be hurried. Such facts are particularly applicable to our national task of educating alien races, such as the Indian, the negro, and the Filipino. In the case of the first of these races, I know of no persistent attempt on the part of the govern- ment or philanthropy to develop the inherent Indian character by stimulating him to the perfection of his own arts, his own social institutions, his own religion, his own literature.

A similar problem confronts us in the Philippines ; here many ethnic groups, each with customs, morals, ideals, and modes of reasoning centuries old and almost unknown to us, are coming under our influence. We propose to prepare them for self-government, and to that end have placed over them, in slightly modified form, our highly specialized American public-school system, our only guide to the efficacy of this, when imposed upon other races, being the results of our experience with the American Indians. I do not wish to be understood as being opposed to an educational policy for the Philippine Islands, but I do regard it as premature and wasteful to establish there a public-school system in advance of any considerable scientific knowledge of the mind and character of the Malay race.

Among the conclusions to be drawn from this study are the following:

1. The development of a race must be from within ; a civilization imposed from without is usually harmful, often destructive, and always undesirable.

2. Normal schools and other institutions for the training of teachers should give a prominent place to anthropological sciences.

3. Our national educational interests so greatly increased by our endeavors to develop alien races, call for the organization of an executive Department of Education, in place of our present wasteful and inefficient distribution of educa- tional functions among unrelated departments. EDGAR L. HEWITT, in American Anthropologist, January-March, 1905. E. B. W.