Were You Ever a Child? — Key Ideas to Explore

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In Category - Educational Theory

Authors: Dell, Floyd, 1887-1969 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2018 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Education Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 42,022

Reading time 183 min

Text sections 30

This digital edition of Were You Ever a Child? — Key Ideas to Explore is described by source-level measurements including 42,022 words, 3 hr 3 min estimated reading time, and 30 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 20.2 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Education,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #57949

Floyd Dell's 1919 educational manifesto uses a flippant, dialogic style to argue for reconciling child nature with machine-culture. Through Socratic exchanges and dramatic interludes, he critiques rote learning and champions creative play as the core of genuine education.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

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Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

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File: pg57949

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bit of candour in our schooling--at its very end. They called that ending a Commencement. And so indeed we found it. Bewildered, unprepared, out of touch with the realities, we commenced then and there to learn what life is like. We found it discouraging or inspiriting in a thousand ways; but the thing which struck us at the time most forcibly was that it was in every respect quite unlike school. The values which had obtained there, did not exist outside. One could not cram for a job as if it were an examination; one could not get in the good graces of a machine as if it were a teacher; the docility which won high “marks” in school was called lack of enterprise in the business world, dulness in social life, stupidity in the realm of love. The values of real life were new and different. We had been quite carefully prepared to go on studying and attending classes and taking examinations; but the real world was not like that. It was full of adventure and agony and beauty; its politics were not in the least like the pages of the Civics Text-Book; its journalism and literature had purposes and methods undreamed of by the professor who compiled (from other text-books compiled by other professors) the English Composition Book; going on the road for a wholesale house was a geographical emprise into whose fearful darknesses even the Advanced Geography Course threw no assisting light; the economics of courtship and marriage and parenthood had somehow been overlooked by the man who Lectured upon that Subject.

Whether we had studied our lessons or not; whether we had passed our examinations triumphantly, or just got through by the skin of our teeth--what difference did it make, to us or to the world? And what to us now are those triumphs and humiliations, the failure or success of school, except a matter of occasional humorous reminiscence?

What would we think of a long and painful and expensive surgical operation of which it could be said afterward that it made not the slightest difference to the patient whether it succeeded or failed? Yet, judged by results in later life, the difference between failing and succeeding in school is merely the difference between a railroad collision and a steamboat explosion, as described by Uncle Tom:

“If you’s in a railroad smash-up, why--thar yo’ is! But if yo’s in a steamboat bus’-up, why--whar is yo’?”

It is our task, however, to investigate this confused catastrophe, and fix the responsibility for its casualties.

Education, as popularly conceived, includes as its chief ingredients a Child, a Building, Text-Books, and a Teacher. Obviously, one of them must be to blame for its going wrong. Let us see if it is the Child. We will put him on the witness stand:

A. I am a foreigner in a strange land.

A. Please, sir, that’s what everybody says. Sometimes they call me a little angel; the poet Wordsworth says that I come trailing clouds of glory from Heaven which is my home. On the other hand, I am often called a little devil; and when you see the sort of things I do in the comic supplements, you will perhaps be inclined to accept that description. I really don’t know which is right, but both opinions seem to agree that I am an immigrant.

Q. Speak up so that the jury can hear. Have you any friends in this country?

A. No, sir--not exactly. But there are two people, a woman and a man, natives of this land, who for some reason take an interest in me. It was they who taught me to speak the language. They also taught me many of the customs of the country, which at first I could not understand. For instance, my preoccupation with certain natural--[the rest of the sentence stricken from the record].

Q. You need not go into such matters. I fear you still have many things to learn about the customs of the country. One of them is not to allude to that side of life in public.

A. Yes, sir; so those two people tell me. I’m sure I don’t see why. It seems to me a very interesting and important--

Q. That will do. Now as to those people who are looking after you: Are your relations with them agreeable?

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Floyd Dell opens Were You Ever a Child? with a disarmingly playful preface, admitting his method may seem “unduly flippant” but insisting that the failure of old education is “ridiculous as well as pathetic.” The book’s voice shifts between earnest exposition, Socratic dialogue, and theatrical parody—as when a fake “Artist” is literally thrown off stage for speaking in “mystagogical cant.” This tonal restlessness mirrors Dell’s central argument: that education must become a game, not a civil war.

A Dialogue That Refuses to Settle

The text’s most distinctive structural feature is its use of question-and-answer exchanges, often between a “Questioner” and an “Artist.” These are not dry catechisms but combative, even comic, encounters. In one sequence, the Questioner asks whether good taste can be taught, and the Artist retorts that it is merely “a polite pretense” covering a lack of real beauty. The dialogue then dissolves into a mock parliamentary adjournment—“The Ayes have it”—before the Artist is allowed to speak at length. This deliberate disruption of linear argument keeps the reader alert to the tension between institutional order and creative freedom.

The Child as Artist, the Artist as Child

Dell’s central metaphor—that children are already artists, and artists remain children—is not offered as sentimental praise but as a hard pedagogical problem. In chapter XVII, the Artist declares that the task of education is “to help them to grow up,” yet immediately complicates this by noting that artists “forget the errands upon which the world sends them.” The child at play and the artist at work share a deep divorce from worldly concerns; Dell insists this is “the tragic problem for which we now seek a solution.” The book thus refuses easy reconciliation, instead dwelling on the difficulty of making adult work feel like a child’s game.

Pace as Provocation

Dell controls pace through abrupt genre shifts. A chapter may begin as a straightforward essay on school buildings, then veer into a satirical skit. The preface warns that the book “undertakes a brief review” but immediately undercuts that promise with self-mockery. Later, the Artist’s monologue is interrupted by a stage direction: “Usher, will you please throw this fellow out!” Such moments break the rhythm of argument, forcing the reader to question whose voice is authoritative. The effect is not confusion but a deliberate demonstration that education, like this book, must tolerate mess and play.

Dell’s book is best approached not as a systematic treatise but as a performance of the very principles it advocates. Readers should watch for the moments when the argument stumbles, digresses, or turns into farce—those are where the author’s deepest convictions about freedom and creativity emerge. The flippancy is the point.

It makes me think of my own childhood classroom, the smell of chalk dust and the drone of drills. Another book once gave me that same ache of recognition: The Infant System For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, from One to Seven years of Age — Reading Companion, where learning felt like a kind of gamesome discovery. Dell’s flippancy oddly echoed that older serious joy, like finding a forgotten toy in a dusty attic.