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Title: The school and society
Author: John Dewey
Release date: September 5, 2024 [eBook #74376]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1899
Credits: Lukas Bystricky and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY ***
THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
[Illustration]
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
NEW YORK
THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON
_The_
SCHOOL
_and_
SOCIETY
_By_ JOHN DEWEY
REVISED EDITION
[Illustration]
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO · ILLINOIS
COPYRIGHT 1900 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT 1900 AND 1915 BY JOHN DEWEY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1899
SECOND EDITION AUGUST 1915
FIFTEENTH IMPRESSION JULY 1942
[Illustration]
COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.
TO
MRS. EMMONS BLAINE
TO WHOSE INTEREST IN EDUCATIONAL
REFORM
THE APPEARANCE OF THIS BOOK
IS DUE
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 3
II. THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD 31
III. WASTE IN EDUCATION 59
IV. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 87
V. FROEBEL’S EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES 111
VI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OCCUPATIONS 131
VII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION 141
VIII. THE AIM OF HISTORY IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 155
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES 40
DRAWING OF A FOREST 42
DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING 44
DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING 46
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The first three chapters of this book were delivered as lectures before
an audience of parents and others interested in the University Elementary
School, in the month of April of the year 1899. Mr. Dewey revised them in
part from a stenographic report, and unimportant changes and the slight
adaptations necessary for the press have been made in his absence. The
lectures retain therefore the unstudied character as well as the power of
the spoken word. As they imply more or less familiarity with the work of
the Elementary School, Mr. Dewey’s supplementary statement of this has
been added.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A second printing affords a grateful opportunity for recalling that this
little book is a sign of the co-operating thoughts and sympathies of many
persons. Its indebtedness to Mrs. Emmons Blaine is partly indicated in
the dedication. From my friends Mr. and Mrs. George Herbert Mead came
that interest, unflagging attention to detail, and artistic taste which,
in my absence, remade colloquial remarks until they were fit to print,
and then saw the results through the press with the present attractive
result—a mode of authorship made easy, which I recommend to others
fortunate enough to possess such friends.
It would be an extended paragraph which should list all the friends whose
timely and persisting generosity has made possible the school which
inspired and defined the ideas of these pages. These friends, I am sure,
would be the first to recognize the peculiar appropriateness of especial
mention of the names of Mrs. Charles R. Crane and Mrs. William R. Linn.
And the school itself in its educational work is a joint undertaking.
Many have engaged in shaping it. The clear and experienced intelligence
of my wife is wrought everywhere into its texture. The wisdom, tact, and
devotion of its instructors have brought about a transformation of its
original amorphous plans into articulate form and substance with life
and movement of their own. Whatever the issue of the ideas presented in
this book, the satisfaction coming from the co-operation of the diverse
thoughts and deeds of many persons in undertaking to enlarge the life of
the child will abide.
AUTHOR’S NOTE TO SECOND EDITION
The present edition includes some slight verbal revisions of the three
lectures constituting the first portion of the book. The latter portion
is included for the first time, containing material borrowed, with some
changes, from the author’s contributions to the _Elementary School
Record_, long out of print.
The writer may perhaps be permitted a word to express his satisfaction
that the educational point of view presented in this book is not so
novel as it was fifteen years ago; and his desire to believe that the
educational experiment of which the book is an outgrowth has not been
without influence in the change.
J. D.
NEW YORK CITY July, 1915
THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
I
THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
We are apt to look at the school from an individualistic standpoint, as
something between teacher and pupil, or between teacher and parent. That
which interests us most is naturally the progress made by the individual
child of our acquaintance, his normal physical development, his advance
in ability to read, write, and figure, his growth in the knowledge of
geography and history, improvement in manners, habits of promptness,
order, and industry—it is from such standards as these that we judge
the work of the school. And rightly so. Yet the range of the outlook
needs to be enlarged. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own
child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other
ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys
our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put,
through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members.
All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new
possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and
socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the
individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.
And in the self-direction thus given, nothing counts as much as the
school, for, as Horace Mann said, “Where anything is growing, one former
is worth a thousand re-formers.”
Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new movement in education,
it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social, view.
Otherwise, changes in the school institution and tradition will be
looked at as the arbitrary inventions of particular teachers; at the
worst transitory fads, and at the best merely improvements in certain
details—and this is the plane upon which it is too customary to consider
school changes. It is as rational to conceive of the locomotive or the
telegraph as personal devices. The modification going on in the method
and curriculum of education is as much a product of the changed social
situation, and as much an effort to meet the needs of the new society
that is forming, as are changes in modes of industry and commerce.
It is to this, then, that I especially ask your attention: the effort to
conceive what roughly may be termed the “New Education” in the light of
larger changes in society. Can we connect this “New Education” with the
general march of events? If we can, it will lose its isolated character;
it will cease to be an affair which proceeds only from the over-ingenious
minds of pedagogues dealing with particular pupils. It will appear as
part and parcel of the whole social evolution, and, in its more general
features at least, as inevitable. Let us then ask after the main aspects
of the social movement; and afterward turn to the school to find what
witness it gives of effort to put itself in line. And since it is quite
impossible to cover the whole ground, I shall for the most part confine
myself to one typical thing in the modern school movement—that which
passes under the name of manual training—hoping if the relation of that
to changed social conditions appears, we shall be ready to concede the
point as well regarding other educational innovations.
I make no apology for not dwelling at length upon the social changes
in question. Those I shall mention are writ so large that he who runs
may read. The change that comes first to mind, the one that overshadows
and even controls all others, is the industrial one—the application of
science resulting in the great inventions that have utilized the forces
of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale: the growth of a world-wide
market as the object of production, of vast manufacturing centers to
supply this market, of cheap and rapid means of communication and
distribution between all its parts. Even as to its feebler beginnings,
this change is not much more than a century old; in many of its most
important aspects it falls within the short span of those now living.
One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so
rapid, so extensive, so complete. Through it the face of the earth
is making over, even as to its physical forms; political boundaries
are wiped out and moved about, as if they were indeed only lines on a
paper map; population is hurriedly gathered into cities from the ends
of the earth; habits of living are altered with startling abruptness
and thoroughness; the search for the truths of nature is infinitely
stimulated and facilitated, and their application to life made not only
practicable, but commercially necessary. Even our moral and religious
ideas and interests, the most conservative because the deepest-lying
things in our nature, are profoundly affected. That this revolution
should not affect education in some other than a formal and superficial
fashion is inconceivable.
Back of the factory system lies the household and neighborhood system.
Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most
three generations, to find a time when the household was practically
the center in which were carried on, or about which were clustered,
all the typical forms of industrial occupation. The clothing worn was
for the most part made in the house; the members of the household were
usually familiar also with the shearing of the sheep, the carding and
spinning of the wool, and the plying of the loom. Instead of pressing
a button and flooding the house with electric light, the whole process
of getting illumination was followed in its toilsome length from the
killing of the animal and the trying of fat to the making of wicks and
dipping of candles. The supply of flour, of lumber, of foods, of building
materials, of household furniture, even of metal ware, of nails, hinges,
hammers, etc., was produced in the immediate neighborhood, in shops which
were constantly open to inspection and often centers of neighborhood
congregation. The entire industrial process stood revealed, from the
production on the farm of the raw materials till the finished article was
actually put to use. Not only this, but practically every member of the
household had his own share in the work. The children, as they gained in
strength and capacity, were gradually initiated into the mysteries of the
several processes. It was a matter of immediate and personal concern,
even to the point of actual participation.
We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building
involved in this kind of life: training in habits of order and of
industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do
something, to produce something, in the world. There was always something
which really needed to be done, and a real necessity that each member
of the household should do his own part faithfully and in co-operation
with others. Personalities which became effective in action were bred and
tested in the medium of action. Again, we cannot overlook the importance
for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got
with nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the
actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their
social necessities and uses. In all this there was continual training of
observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought,
and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with
actualities. The educative forces of the domestic spinning and weaving,
of the sawmill, the gristmill, the cooper shop, and the blacksmith forge,
were continuously operative.
No number of object-lessons, got up _as_ object-lessons for the sake
of giving information, can afford even the shadow of a substitute for
acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden acquired
through actual living among them and caring for them. No training of
sense-organs in school, introduced for the sake of training, can begin to
compete with the alertness and fulness of sense-life that comes through
daily intimacy and interest in familiar occupations. Verbal memory can be
trained in committing tasks, a certain discipline of the reasoning powers
can be acquired through lessons in science and mathematics; but, after
all, this is somewhat remote and shadowy compared with the training of
attention and of judgment that is acquired in having to do things with a
real motive behind and a real outcome ahead. At present, concentration
of industry and division of labor have practically eliminated household
and neighborhood occupations—at least for educational purposes. But it
is useless to bemoan the departure of the good old days of children’s
modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience, if we expect merely by
bemoaning and by exhortation to bring them back. It is radical conditions
which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education
suffices. We must recognize our compensations—the increase in toleration,
in breadth of social judgment, the larger acquaintance with human nature,
the sharpened alertness in reading signs of character and interpreting
social situations, greater accuracy of adaptation to differing
personalities, contact with greater commercial activities. These
considerations mean much to the city-bred child of today. Yet there is
a real problem: how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce
into the school something representing the other side of life—occupations
which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child in
relation to the physical realities of life?
When we turn to the school, we find that one of the most striking
tendencies at present is toward the introduction of so-called manual
training, shopwork, and the household arts—sewing and cooking.
This has not been done “on purpose,” with a full consciousness that the
school must now supply that factor of training formerly taken care of
in the home, but rather by instinct, by experimenting and finding that
such work takes a vital hold of pupils and gives them something which
was not to be got in any other way. Consciousness of its real import is
still so weak that the work is often done in a half-hearted, confused,
and unrelated way. The reasons assigned to justify it are painfully
inadequate or sometimes even positively wrong.
If we were to cross-examine even those who are most favorably disposed
to the introduction of this work into our school system, we should, I
imagine, generally find the main reasons to be that such work engages the
full spontaneous interest and attention of the children. It keeps them
alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them more
useful, more capable, and hence more inclined to be helpful at home; it
prepares them to some extent for the practical duties of later life—the
girls to be more efficient house managers, if not actually cooks and
seamstresses; the boys (were our educational system only adequately
rounded out into trade schools) for their future vocations. I do not
underestimate the worth of these reasons. Of those indicated by the
changed attitude of the children I shall indeed have something to say in
my next talk, when speaking directly of the relationship of the school
to the child. But the point of view is, upon the whole, unnecessarily
narrow. We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing,
and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not as distinct studies.
We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of the
processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing
home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and
as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and
ingenuity of man; in short, as instrumentalities through which the school
itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of
a place set apart in which to learn lessons.
A society is a number of people held together because they are working
along common lines, in a common spirit, and with reference to common
aims. The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought
and growing unity of sympathetic feeling. The radical reason that the
present school cannot organize itself as a natural social unit is
because just this element of common and productive activity is absent.
Upon the playground, in game and sport, social organization takes place
spontaneously and inevitably. There is something to do, some activity to
be carried on, requiring natural divisions of labor, selection of leaders
and followers, mutual co-operation and emulation. In the schoolroom the
motive and the cement of social organization are alike wanting. Upon
the ethical side, the tragic weakness of the present school is that it
endeavors to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in
which the conditions of the social spirit are eminently wanting.
The difference that appears when occupations are made the articulating
centers of school life is not easy to describe in words; it is a
difference in motive, of spirit and atmosphere. As one enters a busy
kitchen in which a group of children are actively engaged in the
preparation of food, the psychological difference, the change from more
or less passive and inert recipiency and restraint to one of buoyant
outgoing energy, is so obvious as fairly to strike one in the face.
Indeed, to those whose image of the school is rigidly set the change
is sure to give a shock. But the change in the social attitude is
equally marked. The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively
individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into
selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of
mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat. Indeed,
almost the only measure for success is a competitive one, in the bad
sense of that term—a comparison of results in the recitation or in the
examination to see which child has succeeded in getting ahead of others
in storing up, in accumulating, the maximum of information. So thoroughly
is this the prevailing atmosphere that for one child to help another in
his task has become a school crime. Where the school work consists in
simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of being the most
natural form of co-operation and association, becomes a clandestine
effort to relieve one’s neighbor of his proper duties. Where active work
is going on, all this is changed. Helping others, instead of being a form
of charity which impoverishes the recipient, is simply an aid in setting
free the powers and furthering the impulse of the one helped. A spirit of
free communication, of interchange of ideas, suggestions, results, both
successes and failures of previous experiences, becomes the dominating
note of the recitation. So far as emulation enters in, it is in the
comparison of individuals, not with regard to the quantity of information
personally absorbed, but with reference to the quality of work done—the
genuine community standard of value. In an informal but all the more
pervasive way, the school life organizes itself on a social basis.
Within this organization is found the principle of school discipline or
order. Of course, order is simply a thing which is relative to an end.
If you have the end in view of forty or fifty children learning certain
set lessons, to be recited to a teacher, your discipline must be devoted
to securing that result. But if the end in view is the development of a
spirit of social co-operation and community life, discipline must grow
out of and be relative to such an aim. There is little of one sort of
order where things are in process of construction; there is a certain
disorder in any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons are not
engaged in maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are
not folded; they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing
a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results
from activity. But out of the occupation, out of doing things that are
to produce results, and out of doing these in a social and co-operative
way, there is born a discipline of its own kind and type. Our whole
conception of school discipline changes when we get this point of view.
In critical moments we all realize that the only discipline that stands
by us, the only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life
itself. That we learn from experience, and from books or the sayings of
others _only_ as they are related to experience, are not mere phrases.
But the school has been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary
conditions and motives of life, that the place where children are sent
for discipline is the one place in the world where it is most difficult
to get experience—the mother of all discipline worth the name. It is only
when a narrow and fixed image of traditional school discipline dominates
that one is in any danger of overlooking that deeper and infinitely wider
discipline that comes from having a part to do in constructive work,
in contributing to a result which, social in spirit, is none the less
obvious and tangible in form—and hence in a form with reference to which
responsibility may be exacted and accurate judgment passed.
The great thing to keep in mind, then, regarding the introduction into
the school of various forms of active occupation, is that through them
the entire spirit of the school is renewed. It has a chance to affiliate
itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through
directed living, instead of being only a place to learn lessons having
an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in
the future. It gets a chance to be a miniature community, an embryonic
society. This is the fundamental fact, and from this arise continuous and
orderly streams of instruction. Under the industrial régime described,
the child, after all, shared in the work, not for the sake of the
sharing, but for the sake of the product. The educational results secured
were real, yet incidental and dependent. But in the school the typical
occupations followed are freed from all economic stress. The aim is not
the economic value of the products, but the development of social power
and insight. It is this liberation from narrow utilities, this openness
to the possibilities of the human spirit, that makes these practical
activities in the school allies of art and centers of science and history.
The unity of all the sciences is found in geography. The significance
of geography is that it presents the earth as the enduring home of the
occupations of man. The world without its relationship to human activity
is less than a world. Human industry and achievement, apart from their
roots in the earth, are not even a sentiment, hardly a name. The earth
is the final source of all man’s food. It is his continual shelter and
protection, the raw material of all his activities, and the home to
whose humanizing and idealizing all his achievement returns. It is the
great field, the great mine, the great source of the energies of heat,
light, and electricity; the great scene of ocean, stream, mountain,
and plain, of which all our agriculture and mining and lumbering, all
our manufacturing and distributing agencies, are but the partial
elements and factors. It is through occupations determined by this
environment that mankind has made its historical and political progress.
It is through these occupations that the intellectual and emotional
interpretation of nature has been developed. It is through what we do in
and with the world that we read its meaning and measure its value.
In educational terms, this means that these occupations in the school
shall not be mere practical devices or modes of routine employment, the
gaining of better technical skill as cooks, seamstresses, or carpenters,
but active centers of scientific insight into natural materials and
processes, points of departure whence children shall be led out into a
realization of the historic development of man. The actual significance
of this can be told better through one illustration taken from actual
school work than by general discourse.
There is nothing which strikes more oddly upon the average intelligent
visitor than to see boys as well as girls of ten, twelve, and thirteen
years of age engaged in sewing and weaving. If we look at this from the
standpoint of preparation of the boys for sewing on buttons and making
patches, we get a narrow and utilitarian conception—a basis that hardly
justifies giving prominence to this sort of work in the school. But if
we look at it from another side, we find that this work gives the point
of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of
mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and
the mechanical principles involved. In connection with these occupations
the historic development of man is recapitulated. For example, the
children are first given the raw material—the flax, the cotton plant, the
wool as it comes from the back of the sheep (if we could take them to the
place where the sheep are sheared, so much the better). Then a study is
made of these materials from the standpoint of their adaptation to the
uses to which they may be put. For instance, a comparison of the cotton
fiber with wool fiber is made. I did not know, until the children told
me, that the reason for the late development of the cotton industry as
compared with the woolen is that the cotton fiber is so very difficult
to free by hand from the seeds. The children in one group worked thirty
minutes freeing cotton fibers from the boll and seeds, and succeeded
in getting out less than one ounce. They could easily believe that one
person could gin only one pound a day by hand, and could understand why
their ancestors wore woolen instead of cotton clothing. Among other
things discovered as affecting their relative utilities was the shortness
of the cotton fiber as compared with that of wool, the former averaging,
say, one-third of an inch in length, while the latter run to three
inches in length; also that the fibers of cotton are smooth and do not
cling together, while the wool has a certain roughness which makes the
fibers stick, thus assisting the spinning. The children worked this
out for themselves with the actual material, aided by questions and
suggestions from the teacher.
They then followed the processes necessary for working the fibers up into
cloth. They reinvented the first frame for carding the wool—a couple of
boards with sharp pins in them for scratching it out. They redevised the
simplest process for spinning the wool—a pierced stone or some other
weight through which the wool is passed, and which as it is twirled
draws out the fiber; next the top, which was spun on the floor, while
the children kept the wool in their hands until it was gradually drawn
out and wound upon it. Then the children are introduced to the invention
next in historic order, working it out experimentally, thus seeing
its necessity, and tracing its effects, not only upon that particular
industry, but upon modes of social life—in this way passing in review the
entire process up to the present complete loom, and all that goes with
the application of science in the use of our present available powers. I
need not speak of the science involved in this—the study of the fibers,
of geographical features, the conditions under which raw materials are
grown, the great centers of manufacture and distribution, the physics
involved in the machinery of production; nor, again, of the historical
side—the influence which these inventions have had upon humanity. You
can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of the
flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing. I do not mean that this is
the only, or the best, center. But it is true that certain very real and
important avenues to the consideration of the history of the race are
thus opened—that the mind is introduced to much more fundamental and
controlling influences than appear in the political and chronological
records that usually pass for history.
Now, what is true of this one instance of fibers used in fabrics (and, of
course, I have only spoken of one or two elementary phases of that) is
true in its measure of every material used in every occupation, and of
the processes employed. The occupation supplies the child with a genuine
motive; it gives him experience at first hand; it brings him into contact
with realities. It does all this, but in addition it is liberalized
throughout by translation into its historic and social values and
scientific equivalencies. With the growth of the child’s mind in power
and knowledge it ceases to be a pleasant occupation merely and becomes
more and more a medium, an instrument, an organ of understanding—and is
thereby transformed.
This, in turn, has its bearing upon the teaching of science. Under
present conditions, all activity, to be successful, has to be directed
somewhere and somehow by the scientific expert—it is a case of applied
science. This connection should determine its place in education. It is
not only that the occupations, the so-called manual or industrial work in
the school, give the opportunity for the introduction of science which
illuminates them, which makes them material, freighted with meaning,
instead of being mere devices of hand and eye; but that the scientific
insight thus gained becomes an indispensable instrument of free and
active participation in modern social life. Plato somewhere speaks of the
slave as one who in his actions does not express his own ideas, but those
of some other man. It is our social problem now, even more urgent than in
the time of Plato, that method, purpose, understanding, shall exist in
the consciousness of the one who does the work, that his activity shall
have meaning to himself.
When occupations in the school are conceived in this broad and generous
way, I can only stand lost in wonder at the objections so often heard,
that such occupations are out of place in the school because they
are materialistic, utilitarian, or even menial in their tendency. It
sometimes seems to me that those who make these objections must live in
quite another world. The world in which most of us live is a world in
which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do. Some are
managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as
for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables
him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human
significance. How many of the employed are today mere appendages to the
machines which they operate! This may be due in part to the machine
itself or the régime which lays so much stress upon the products of
the machine; but it is certainly due in large part to the fact that
the worker has had no opportunity to develop his imagination and his
sympathetic insight as to the social and scientific values found in his
work. At present, the impulses which lie at the basis of the industrial
system are either practically neglected or positively distorted during
the school period. Until the instincts of construction and production
are systematically laid hold of in the years of childhood and youth,
until they are trained in social directions, enriched by historical
interpretation, controlled and illuminated by scientific methods, we
certainly are in no position even to locate the source of our economic
evils, much less to deal with them effectively.
If we go back a few centuries, we find a practical monopoly of learning.
The term _possession_ of learning is, indeed, a happy one. Learning was
a class matter. This was a necessary result of social conditions. There
were not in existence any means by which the multitude could possibly
have access to intellectual resources. These were stored up and hidden
away in manuscripts. Of these there were at best only a few, and it
required long and toilsome preparation to be able to do anything with
them. A high-priesthood of learning, which guarded the treasury of truth
and which doled it out to the masses under severe restrictions, was the
inevitable expression of these conditions. But, as a direct result of
the industrial revolution of which we have been speaking, this has been
changed. Printing was invented; it was made commercial. Books, magazines,
papers were multiplied and cheapened. As a result of the locomotive and
telegraph, frequent, rapid, and cheap intercommunication by mails and
electricity was called into being. Travel has been rendered easy; freedom
of movement, with its accompanying exchange of ideas, indefinitely
facilitated. The result has been an intellectual revolution. Learning has
been put into circulation. While there still is, and probably always will
be, a particular class having the special business of inquiry in hand,
a distinctively learned class is henceforth out of the question. It is
an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been
liquefied. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.
It is easy to see that this revolution, as regards the materials of
knowledge, carries with it a marked change in the attitude of the
individual. Stimuli of an intellectual sort pour in upon us in all kinds
of ways. The merely intellectual life, the life of scholarship and of
learning, thus gets a very altered value. Academic and scholastic,
instead of being titles of honor, are becoming terms of reproach.
But all this means a necessary change in the attitude of the school, one
of which we are as yet far from realizing the full force. Our school
methods, and to a very considerable extent our curriculum, are inherited
from the period when learning and command of certain symbols, affording
as they did the only access to learning, were all-important. The ideals
of this period are still largely in control, even where the outward
methods and studies have been changed. We sometimes hear the introduction
of manual training, art, and science into the elementary, and even the
secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend toward the
production of specialists—that they detract from our present scheme of
generous, liberal culture. The point of this objection would be ludicrous
if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present
education which is highly specialized, one-sided, and narrow. It is
an education dominated almost entirely by the mediaeval conception of
learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the
intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate
information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our
impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether
in the form of utility or of art. The very fact that manual training,
art, and science are objected to as technical, as tending toward mere
specialism, is of itself as good testimony as could be offered to the
specialized aim which controls current education. Unless education had
been virtually identified with the exclusively intellectual pursuits,
with learning as such, all these materials and methods would be welcome,
would be greeted with the utmost hospitality.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES]
While training for the profession of learning is regarded as the type
of culture, or a liberal education, the training of a mechanic, a
musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, a merchant, or a railroad manager
is regarded as purely technical and professional. The result is that
which we see about us everywhere—the division into “cultured” people
and “workers,” the separation of theory and practice. Hardly 1 per cent
of the entire school population ever attains to what we call higher
education; only 5 per cent to the grade of our high school; while much
more than half leave on or before the completion of the fifth year of the
elementary grade. The simple facts of the case are that in the great
majority of human beings the distinctively intellectual interest is not
dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition.
In many of those in whom by nature intellectual interest is strong,
social conditions prevent its adequate realization. Consequently by far
the larger number of pupils leave school as soon as they have acquired
the rudiments of learning, as soon as they have enough of the symbols
of reading, writing, and calculating to be of practical use to them in
getting a living. While our educational leaders are talking of culture,
the development of personality, etc., as the end and aim of education,
the great majority of those who pass under the tuition of the school
regard it only as a narrowly practical tool with which to get bread and
butter enough to eke out a restricted life. If we were to conceive our
educational end and aim in a less exclusive way, if we were to introduce
into educational processes the activities which appeal to those whose
dominant interest is to do and to make, we should find the hold of the
school upon its members to be more vital, more prolonged, containing more
of culture.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A FOREST]
But why should I make this labored presentation? The obvious fact is
that our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change. If
our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an
equally complete transformation. This transformation is not something
to appear suddenly, to be executed in a day by conscious purpose. It is
already in progress. Those modifications of our school system which often
appear (even to those most actively concerned with them, to say nothing
of their spectators) to be mere changes of detail, mere improvement
within the school mechanism, are in reality signs and evidences of
evolution. The introduction of active occupations, of nature-study, of
elementary science, of art, of history; the relegation of the merely
symbolic and formal to a secondary position; the change in the moral
school atmosphere, in the relation of pupils and teachers—of discipline;
the introduction of more active, expressive, and self-directing
factors—all these are not mere accidents, they are necessities of the
larger social evolution. It remains but to organize all these factors,
to appreciate them in their fulness of meaning, and to put the ideas and
ideals involved into complete, uncompromising possession of our school
system. To do this means to make each one of our schools an embryonic
community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life
of the larger society and permeated throughout with the spirit of art,
history, and science. When the school introduces and trains each child
of society into membership within such a little community, saturating
him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of
effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of
a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING]
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING]
THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD
II
THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD
Last week I tried to put before you the relationship between the school
and the larger life of the community, and the necessity for certain
changes in the methods and materials of school work, that it might be
better adapted to present social needs.
Today I wish to look at the matter from the other side and consider the
relationship of the school to the life and development of the children in
the school. As it is difficult to connect general principles with such
thoroughly concrete things as little children, I have taken the liberty
of introducing a great deal of illustrative matter from the work of the
University Elementary School, that in some measure you may appreciate the
way in which the ideas presented work themselves out in actual practice.
Some few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the
city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suitable
from all points of view—artistic, hygienic, and educational—to the needs
of the children. We had a great deal of difficulty in finding what we
needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made
this remark: “I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something
at which the children may work; these are all for listening.” That tells
the story of the traditional education. Just as the biologist can take a
bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal, so, if we put before the
mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed
in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little
moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just
space enough to hold books, pencils, and paper, and add a table, some
chairs, the bare walls, and possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct
the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. It
is all made “for listening”—because simply studying lessons out of a book
is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency of one mind
upon another. The attitude of listening means, comparatively speaking,
passivity, absorption; that there are certain ready-made materials which
are there, which have been prepared by the school superintendent, the
board, the teacher, and of which the child is to take in as much as
possible in the least possible time.
There is very little place in the traditional schoolroom for the child
to work. The workshop, the laboratory, the materials, the tools with
which the child may construct, create, and actively inquire, and even
the requisite space, have been for the most part lacking. The things that
have to do with these processes have not even a definitely recognized
place in education. They are what the educational authorities who write
editorials in the daily papers generally term “fads” and “frills.” A lady
told me yesterday that she had been visiting different schools trying to
find one where activity on the part of the children preceded the giving
of information on the part of the teacher, or where the children had some
motive for demanding the information. She visited, she said, twenty-four
different schools before she found her first instance. I may add that
that was not in this city.
Another thing that is suggested by these schoolrooms, with their set
desks, is that everything is arranged for handling as large numbers
of children as possible; for dealing with children _en masse_, as an
aggregate of units; involving, again, that they be treated passively. The
moment children act they individualize themselves; they cease to be a
mass and become the intensely distinctive beings that we are acquainted
with out of school, in the home, the family, on the playground, and in
the neighborhood.
On the same basis is explicable the uniformity of method and curriculum.
If everything is on a “listening” basis, you can have uniformity of
material and method. The ear, and the book which reflects the ear,
constitute the medium which is alike for all. There is next to no
opportunity for adjustment to varying capacities and demands. There is a
certain amount—a fixed quantity—of ready-made results and accomplishments
to be acquired by all children alike in a given time. It is in response
to this demand that the curriculum has been developed from the elementary
school up through the college. There is just so much desirable knowledge,
and there are just so many needed technical accomplishments in the
world. Then comes the mathematical problem of dividing this by the six,
twelve, or sixteen years of school life. Now give the children every
year just the proportionate fraction of the total, and by the time they
have finished they will have mastered the whole. By covering so much
ground during this hour or day or week or year, everything comes out with
perfect evenness at the end—provided the children have not forgotten
what they have previously learned. The outcome of all this is Matthew
Arnold’s report of the statement, proudly made to him by an educational
authority in France, that so many thousands of children were studying at
a given hour, say eleven o’clock, just such a lesson in geography; and in
one of our own western cities this proud boast used to be repeated to
successive visitors by its superintendent.
I may have exaggerated somewhat in order to make plain the typical points
of the old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing
of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method. It may be summed
up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in
the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in
the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself. On that
basis there is not much to be said about the _life_ of the child. A good
deal might be said about the studying of the child, but the school is
not the place where the child _lives_. Now the change which is coming
into our education is the shifting of the center of gravity. It is a
change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the
astronomical center shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the
child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he
is the center about which they are organized.
If we take an example from an ideal home, where the parent is intelligent
enough to recognize what is best for the child, and is able to supply
what is needed, we find the child learning through the social converse
and constitution of the family. There are certain points of interest
and value to him in the conversation carried on: statements are made,
inquiries arise, topics are discussed, and the child continually learns.
He states his experiences, his misconceptions are corrected. Again the
child participates in the household occupations, and thereby gets habits
of industry, order, and regard for the rights and ideas of others, and
the fundamental habit of subordinating his activities to the general
interest of the household. Participation in these household tasks becomes
an opportunity for gaining knowledge. The ideal home would naturally have
a workshop where the child could work out his constructive instincts.
It would have a miniature laboratory in which his inquiries could be
directed. The life of the child would extend out of doors to the garden,
surrounding fields, and forests. He would have his excursions, his walks
and talks, in which the larger world out of doors would open to him.
Now, if we organize and generalize all of this, we have the ideal school.
There is no mystery about it, no wonderful discovery of pedagogy or
educational theory. It is simply a question of doing systematically and
in a large, intelligent, and competent way what for various reasons can
be done in most households only in a comparatively meager and haphazard
manner. In the first place, the ideal home has to be enlarged. The child
must be brought into contact with more grown people and with more
children in order that there may be the freest and richest social life.
Moreover, the occupations and relationships of the home environment are
not specially selected for the growth of the child; the main object is
something else, and what the child can get out of them is incidental.
Hence the need of a school. In this school the life of the child becomes
the all-controlling aim. All the media necessary to further the growth of
the child center there. Learning? certainly, but living primarily, and
learning through and in relation to this living. When we take the life of
the child centered and organized in this way, we do not find that he is
first of all a listening being; quite the contrary.
The statement so frequently made that education means “drawing out” is
excellent, if we mean simply to contrast it with the process of pouring
in. But, after all, it is difficult to connect the idea of drawing out
with the ordinary doings of the child of three, four, seven, or eight
years of age. He is already running over, spilling over, with activities
of all kinds. He is not a purely latent being whom the adult has to
approach with great caution and skill in order gradually to draw out some
hidden germ of activity. The child is already intensely active, and the
question of education is the question of taking hold of his activities,
of giving them direction. Through direction, through organized use, they
tend toward valuable results, instead of scattering or being left to
merely impulsive expression.
If we keep this before us, the difficulty I find uppermost in the minds
of many people regarding what is termed the new education is not so much
solved as dissolved; it disappears. A question often asked is: If you
begin with the child’s ideas, impulses, and interests, all so crude, so
random and scattering, so little refined or spiritualized, how is he
going to get the necessary discipline, culture, and information? If there
were no way open to us except to excite and indulge these impulses of
the child, the question might well be asked. We should either have to
ignore and repress the activities or else to humor them. But if we have
organization of equipment and of materials, there is another path open
to us. We can direct the child’s activities, giving them exercise along
certain lines, and can thus lead up to the goal which logically stands at
the end of the paths followed.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Since they are not, since
really to satisfy an impulse or interest means to work it out, and
working it out involves running up against obstacles, becoming acquainted
with materials, exercising ingenuity, patience, persistence, alertness,
it of necessity involves discipline—ordering of power—and supplies
knowledge. Take the example of the little child who wants to make a box.
If he stops short with the imagination or wish, he certainly will not get
discipline. But when he attempts to realize his impulse, it is a question
of making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of taking the right
kind of wood, measuring the parts needed, giving them the necessary
proportions, etc. There is involved the preparation of materials, the
sawing, planing, the sandpapering, making all the edges and corners
to fit. Knowledge of tools and processes is inevitable. If the child
realizes his instinct and makes the box, there is plenty of opportunity
to gain discipline and perseverance, to exercise effort in overcoming
obstacles, and to attain as well a great deal of information.
So undoubtedly the little child who thinks he would like to cook has
little idea of what it means or costs, or what it requires. It is simply
a desire to “mess around,” perhaps to imitate the activities of older
people. And it is doubtless possible to let ourselves down to that
level and simply humor that interest. But here, too, if the impulse
is exercised, utilized, it runs up against the actual world of hard
conditions, to which it must accommodate itself; and there again come
in the factors of discipline and knowledge. One of the children became
impatient, recently, at having to work things out by a long method of
experimentation, and said: “Why do we bother with this? Let’s follow a
recipe in a cook-book.” The teacher asked the children where the recipe
came from, and the conversation showed that if they simply followed this
they would not understand the reasons for what they were doing. They were
then quite willing to go on with the experimental work. To follow that
work will, indeed, give an illustration of just the point in question.
Their occupation happened that day to be the cooking of eggs, as making
a transition from the cooking of vegetables to that of meats. In order
to get a basis of comparison they first summarized the constituent
food elements in the vegetables and made a preliminary comparison with
those found in meat. Thus they found that the woody fiber or cellulose
in vegetables corresponded to the connective tissue in meat, giving
the element of form and structure. They found that starch and starchy
products were characteristic of the vegetables, that mineral salts were
found in both alike, and that there was fat in both—a small quantity in
vegetable food and a large amount in animal. They were prepared then to
take up the study of albumen as the characteristic feature of animal
food, corresponding to starch in the vegetables, and were ready to
consider the conditions requisite for the proper treatment of albumen—the
eggs serving as the material of experiment.
They experimented first by taking water at various temperatures, finding
out when it was scalding, simmering, and boiling hot, and ascertained the
effect of the various degrees of temperature on the white of the egg.
That worked out, they were prepared, not simply to cook eggs, but to
understand the principle involved in the cooking of eggs. I do not wish
to lose sight of the universal in the particular incident. For the child
simply to desire to cook an egg, and accordingly drop it in water for
three minutes, and take it out when he is told, is not educative. But for
the child to realize his own impulse by recognizing the facts, materials,
and conditions involved, and then to regulate his impulse through that
recognition, is educative. This is the difference, upon which I wish
to insist, between exciting or indulging an interest and realizing it
through its direction.
Another instinct of the child is the use of pencil and paper. All
children like to express themselves through the medium of form and
color. If you simply indulge this interest by letting the child go on
indefinitely, there is no growth that is more than accidental. But
let the child first express his impulse, and then through criticism,
question, and suggestion bring him to consciousness of what he has done,
and what he needs to do, and the result is quite different. Here, for
example, is the work of a seven-year-old child. It is not average work,
it is the best work done among the little children, but it illustrates
the particular principle of which I have been speaking. They had been
talking about the primitive conditions of social life when people lived
in caves. The child’s idea of that found expression in this way: the
cave is neatly set up on the hillside in an impossible way. You see the
conventional tree of childhood—a vertical line with horizontal branches
on each side. If the child had been allowed to go on repeating this sort
of thing day by day, he would be indulging his instinct rather than
exercising it. But the child was now asked to look closely at trees,
to compare those seen with the one drawn, to examine more closely and
consciously into the conditions of his work. Then he drew trees from
observation.
Finally he drew again from combined observation, memory, and imagination.
He made again a free illustration, expressing his own imaginative
thought, but controlled by detailed study of actual trees. The result was
a scene representing a bit of forest; so far as it goes, it seems to me
to have as much poetic feeling as the work of an adult, while at the same
time its trees are, in their proportions, possible ones, not mere symbols.
If we roughly classify the impulses which are available in the school,
we may group them under four heads. There is the social instinct of
the children as shown in conversation, personal intercourse, and
communication. We all know how self-centered the little child is at
the age of four or five. If any new subject is brought up, if he says
anything at all, it is: “I have seen that;” or, “My papa or mamma told
me about that.” His horizon is not large; an experience must come
immediately home to him, if he is to be sufficiently interested to
relate it to others and seek theirs in return. And yet the egoistic and
limited interest of little children is in this manner capable of infinite
expansion. The language instinct is the simplest form of the social
expression of the child. Hence it is a great, perhaps the greatest of all
educational resources.
Then there is the instinct of making—the constructive impulse. The
child’s impulse to do finds expression first in play, in movement,
gesture, and make-believe, becomes more definite, and seeks outlet in
shaping materials into tangible forms and permanent embodiment. The child
has not much instinct for abstract inquiry. The instinct of investigation
seems to grow out of the combination of the constructive impulse with
the conversational. There is no distinction between experimental science
for little children and the work done in the carpenter shop. Such work
as they can do in physics or chemistry is not for the purpose of making
technical generalizations or even arriving at abstract truths. Children
simply like to do things and watch to see what will happen. But this can
be taken advantage of, can be directed into ways where it gives results
of value, as well as be allowed to go on at random.
And so the expressive impulse of the children, the art instinct, grows
also out of the communicating and constructive instincts. It is their
refinement and full manifestation. Make the construction adequate, make
it full, free, and flexible, give it a social motive, something to tell,
and you have a work of art. Take one illustration of this in connection
with the textile work—sewing and weaving. The children made a primitive
loom in the shop; here the constructive instinct was appealed to. Then
they wished to do something with this loom, to make something. It was
the type of the Indian loom, and they were shown blankets woven by the
Indians. Each child made a design kindred in idea to those of the Navajo
blankets, and the one which seemed best adapted to the work in hand was
selected. The technical resources were limited, but the coloring and
form were worked out by the children. The example shown was made by
the twelve-year-old children. Examination shows that it took patience,
thoroughness, and perseverance to do the work. It involved not merely
discipline and information of both a historical sort and the elements of
technical design, but also something of the spirit of art in adequately
conveying an idea.
One more instance of the connection of the art side with the constructive
side: The children had been studying primitive spinning and carding, when
one of them, twelve years of age, made a picture of one of the older
children spinning. Here is another piece of work which is not quite
average; it is better than the average. It is an illustration of two
hands and the drawing out of the wool to get it ready for spinning. This
was done by a child eleven years of age. But, upon the whole, with the
younger children especially, the art impulse is connected mainly with the
social instinct—the desire to tell, to represent.
Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests—the interest in
conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in
making things, or construction; and in artistic expression—we may say
they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise
of which depends the active growth of the child. I wish to give one or
two illustrations, the first from the work of children seven years of
age. It illustrates in a way the dominant desire of the children to
talk, particularly about folks and of things in relation to folks. If
you observe little children, you will find they are interested in the
world of things mainly in its connection with people, as a background and
medium of human concerns. Many anthropologists have told us there are
certain identities in the child interests with those of primitive life.
There is a sort of natural recurrence of the child mind to the typical
activities of primitive peoples; witness the hut which the boy likes
to build in the yard, playing hunt, with bows, arrows, spears, and so
on. Again the question comes: What are we to do with this interest—are
we to ignore it, or just excite and draw it out? Or shall we get hold
of it and direct it to something ahead, something better? Some of the
work that has been planned for our seven-year-old children has the
latter end in view—to utilize this interest so that it shall become a
means of seeing the progress of the human race. The children begin by
imagining present conditions taken away until they are in contact with
nature at first hand. That takes them back to a hunting people, to a
people living in caves or trees and getting a precarious subsistence by
hunting and fishing. They imagine as far as possible the various natural
physical conditions adapted to that sort of life; say, a hilly, woody
slope, near mountains, and a river where fish would be abundant. Then
they go on in imagination through the hunting to the semi-agricultural
stage, and through the nomadic to the settled agricultural stage. The
point I wish to make is that there is abundant opportunity thus given
for actual study, for inquiry which results in gaining information. So,
while the instinct primarily appeals to the social side, the interest
of the child in people and their doings is carried on into the larger
world of reality. For example, the children had some idea of primitive
weapons, of the stone arrow-head, etc. That provided occasion for the
testing of materials as regards their friability, their shape, texture,
etc., resulting in a lesson in mineralogy, as they examined the different
stones to find which was best suited to the purpose. The discussion
of the iron age supplied a demand for the construction of a smelting
oven made out of clay and of considerable size. As the children did not
get their drafts right at first, the mouth of the furnace not being in
proper relation to the vent as to size and position, instruction in the
principles of combustion, the nature of drafts and of fuel, was required.
Yet the instruction was not given ready-made; it was first needed, and
then arrived at experimentally. Then the children took some material,
such as copper, and went through a series of experiments, fusing it,
working it into objects; and the same experiments were made with lead and
other metals. This work has been also a continuous course in geography,
since the children have had to imagine and work out the various physical
conditions necessary to the different forms of social life implied.
What would be the physical conditions appropriate to pastoral life? to
the beginning of agriculture? to fishing? What would be the natural
method of exchange between these peoples? Having worked out such points
in conversation, they have afterward represented them in maps and
sand-molding. Thus they have gained ideas of the various forms of the
configuration of the earth, and at the same time have seen them in their
relation to human activity, so that they are not simply external facts,
but are fused and welded with social conceptions regarding the life and
progress of humanity. The result, to my mind, justifies completely the
conviction that children, in a year of such work (of five hours a week
altogether), get infinitely more acquaintance with facts of science,
geography, and anthropology than they get where information is the
professed end and object, where they are simply set to learning facts in
fixed lessons. As to discipline, they get more training of attention,
more power of interpretation, of drawing inferences, of acute observation
and continuous reflection, than if they were put to working out arbitrary
problems simply for the sake of discipline.
I should like at this point to refer to the recitation. We all know
what it has been—a place where the child shows off to the teacher
and the other children the amount of information he has succeeded in
assimilating from the textbook. From this other standpoint the recitation
becomes pre-eminently a social meeting-place; it is to the school what
the spontaneous conversation is at home, excepting that it is more
organized, following definite lines. The recitation becomes the social
clearing-house, where experiences and ideas are exchanged and subjected
to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new lines of
thought and inquiry are set up.
This change of the recitation, from an examination of knowledge already
acquired to the free play of the children’s communicative instinct,
affects and modifies all the language work of the school. Under the old
régime it was unquestionably a most serious problem to give the children
a full and free use of language. The reason was obvious. The natural
motive for language was seldom offered. In the pedagogical textbooks
language is defined as the medium of expressing thought. It becomes that,
more or less, to adults with trained minds, but it hardly needs to be
said that language is primarily a social thing, a means by which we give
our experiences to others and get theirs again in return. When it is
taken away from its natural purpose, it is no wonder that it becomes a
complex and difficult problem to teach language. Think of the absurdity
of having to teach language as a thing by itself. If there is anything
the child will do before he goes to school, it is to talk of the things
that interest him. But when there are no vital interests appealed to in
the school, when language is used simply for the repetition of lessons,
it is not surprising that one of the chief difficulties of school work
has come to be instruction in the mother-tongue. Since the language
taught is unnatural, not growing out of the real desire to communicate
vital impressions and convictions, the freedom of children in its use
gradually disappears, until finally the high-school teacher has to invent
all kinds of devices to assist in getting any spontaneous and full use of
speech. Moreover, when the language instinct is appealed to in a social
way, there is a continual contact with reality. The result is that the
child always has something in his mind to talk about, he has something to
say; he has a thought to express, and a thought is not a thought unless
it is one’s own. On the traditional method, the child must say something
that he has merely learned. There is all the difference in the world
between having something to say and having to say something. The child
who has a variety of materials and facts wants to talk about them, and
his language becomes more refined and full, because it is controlled and
informed by realities. Reading and writing, as well as the oral use of
language, may be taught on this basis. It can be done in a _related_ way,
as the outgrowth of the child’s social desire to recount his experiences
and get in return the experiences of others, directed always through
contact with the facts and forces which determine the truth communicated.
I shall not have time to speak of the work of the older children, where
the original crude instincts of construction and communication have
been developed into something like scientifically directed inquiry, but
I will give an illustration of the use of language following upon this
experimental work. The work was on the basis of a simple experiment of
the commonest sort, gradually leading the children out into geological
and geographical study. The sentences that I am going to read seem to
me poetic as well as “scientific.” “A long time ago when the earth
was new, when it was lava, there was no water on the earth, and there
was steam all round the earth up in the air, as there were many gases
in the air. One of them was carbon dioxide. The steam became clouds,
because the earth began to cool off, and after a while it began to
rain, and the water came down and dissolved the carbon dioxide from the
air.” There is a good deal more science in that than probably would be
apparent at the outset. It represents some three months of work on the
part of the child. The children kept daily and weekly records, but this
is part of the summing up of the quarter’s work. I call this language
poetic, because the child has a clear image and has a personal feeling
for the realities imaged. I extract sentences from two other records
to illustrate further the vivid use of language when there is a vivid
experience back of it. “When the earth was cold enough to condense, the
water, with the help of carbon dioxide, _pulled_ the calcium out of the
rocks into a large body of water where the little animals could get it.”
The other reads as follows: “When the earth cooled, calcium was in the
rocks. Then the carbon dioxide and water united and formed a solution,
and, as it ran, it _tore_ out the calcium and carried it on to the sea,
where there were little animals who took it out of solution.” The use
of such words as “pulled” and “tore” in connection with the process of
chemical combination evidences a personal realization which compels its
own appropriate expression.
If I had not taken so much time in my other illustrations, I should like
to show how, beginning with very simple material things, the children
are led on to larger fields of investigation and to the intellectual
discipline that is the accompaniment of such research. I will simply
mention the experiment in which the work began. It consisted in making
precipitated chalk, used for polishing metals. The children, with
simple apparatus—a tumbler, lime water, and a glass tube—precipitated
the calcium carbonate out of the water; and from this beginning went on
to a study of the processes by which rocks of various sorts, igneous,
sedimentary, etc., had been formed on the surface of the earth and
the places they occupy; then to points in the geography of the United
States, Hawaii, and Porto Rico; to the effects of these various bodies
of rock, in their various configurations, upon the human occupations;
so that this geological record finally rounded itself out into the life
of man at the present time. The children saw and felt the connection
between these geologic processes, taking place ages and ages ago, and the
physical conditions determining the industrial occupations of today.
Of all the possibilities involved in the subject, “The School and the
Life of the Child,” I have selected but one, because I have found that
that one gives people more difficulty, is more of a stumbling-block, than
any other. One may be ready to admit that it would be most desirable
for the school to be a place in which the child should really live,
and get a life-experience in which he should delight and find meaning
for its own sake. But then we hear this inquiry: How, upon this basis,
shall the child get the needed information; how shall he undergo the
required discipline? Yes, it has come to this, that with many, if not
most, people the normal processes of life appear to be incompatible with
getting information and discipline. So I have tried to indicate, in a
highly general and inadequate way (for only the school itself, in its
daily operation, could give a detailed and worthy representation), how
the problem works itself out—how it is possible to lay hold upon the
rudimentary instincts of human nature, and, by supplying a proper medium,
so to control their expression as not only to facilitate and enrich the
growth of the individual child, but also to supply the same results, and
far more, of technical information and discipline that have been the
ideals of education in the past.
But although I have selected this especial way of approach (as a
concession to the question almost universally raised), I am not willing
to leave the matter in this more or less negative and explanatory
condition. Life is the great thing after all; the life of the child at
its time and in its measure no less than the life of the adult. Strange
would it be, indeed, if intelligent and serious attention to what the
child _now_ needs and is capable of in the way of a rich, valuable, and
expanded life should somehow conflict with the needs and possibilities of
later, adult life. “Let us live with our children” certainly means, first
of all, that our children shall live—not that they shall be hampered and
stunted by being forced into all kinds of conditions, the most remote
consideration of which is relevancy to the present life of the child. If
we seek the kingdom of heaven, educationally, all other things shall be
added unto us—which, being interpreted, is that if we identify ourselves
with the real instincts and needs of childhood, and ask only after its
fullest assertion and growth, the discipline and information and culture
of adult life shall all come in their due season.
Speaking of culture reminds me that in a way I have been speaking only
of the outside of the child’s activity—only of the outward expression
of his impulses toward saying, making, finding out, and creating. The
real child, it hardly need be said, lives in the world of imaginative
values and ideas which find only imperfect outward embodiment. We hear
much nowadays about the cultivation of the child’s “imagination.” Then
we undo much of our own talk and work by a belief that the imagination
is some special part of the child that finds its satisfaction in some
one particular direction—generally speaking, that of the unreal and
make-believe, of the myth and made-up story. Why are we so hard of heart
and so slow to believe? The imagination is the medium in which the child
lives. To him there is everywhere and in everything which occupies his
mind and activity at all a surplusage of value and significance. The
question of the relation of the school to the child’s life is at bottom
simply this: Shall we ignore this native setting and tendency, dealing,
not with the living child at all, but with the dead image we have
erected, or shall we give it play and satisfaction? If we once believe
in life and in the life of the child, then will all the occupations and
uses spoken of, then will all history and science, become instruments of
appeal and materials of culture to his imagination, and through that to
the richness and the orderliness of his life. Where we now see only the
outward doing and the outward product, there, behind all visible results,
is the readjustment of mental attitude, the enlarged and sympathetic
vision, the sense of growing power, and the willing ability to identify
both insight and capacity with the interests of the world and man. Unless
culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany over common
wood, it surely is this—the growth of the imagination in flexibility,
in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is
informed with the life of nature and of society. When nature and society
can live in the schoolroom, when the forms and tools of learning are
subordinated to the substance of experience, then shall there be an
opportunity for this identification, and culture shall be the democratic
password.
WASTE IN EDUCATION
III
WASTE IN EDUCATION
The subject announced for today was “Waste in Education.” I should like
first to state briefly its relation to the two preceding lectures. The
first dealt with the school in its social aspects, and the necessary
readjustments that have to be made to render it effective in present
social conditions. The second dealt with the school in relation to the
growth of individual children. Now the third deals with the school
as itself an institution, in relation both to society and to its own
members—the children. It deals with the question of organization, because
all waste is the result of the lack of it, the motive lying behind
organization being promotion of economy and efficiency. This question
is not one of the waste of money or the waste of things. These matters
count; but the primary waste is that of human life, the life of the
children while they are at school, and afterward because of inadequate
and perverted preparation.
So, when we speak of organization, we are not to think simply of the
externals; of that which goes by the name “school system”—the school
board, the superintendent, and the building, the engaging and promotion
of teachers, etc. These things enter in, but the fundamental organization
is that of the school itself as a community of individuals, in its
relations to other forms of social life. All waste is due to isolation.
Organization is nothing but getting things into connection with one
another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully. Therefore in
speaking of this question of waste in education I desire to call your
attention to the isolation of the various parts of the school system, to
the lack of unity in the aims of education, to the lack of coherence in
its studies and methods.
I have made a chart (I) which, while I speak of the isolations of the
school system itself, may perhaps appeal to the eye and save a little
time in verbal explanations. A paradoxical friend of mine says there is
nothing so obscure as an illustration, and it is quite possible that
my attempt to illustrate my point will simply prove the truth of his
statement.
[Illustration: Chart I.]
The blocks represent the various elements in the school system and are
intended to indicate roughly the length of time given to each division,
and also the overlapping, both in time and in subjects studied, of the
individual parts of the system. With each block is given the historical
conditions in which it arose and its ruling ideal.
The school system, upon the whole, has grown from the top down.
During the Middle Ages it was essentially a cluster of professional
schools—especially law and theology. Our present university comes down to
us from the Middle Ages. I will not say that at present it is a mediaeval
institution, but it had its roots in the Middle Ages, and it has not
outlived all mediaeval traditions regarding learning.
The kindergarten, rising with the present century, was a union of the
nursery and of the philosophy of Schelling; a wedding of the plays and
games which the mother carried on with her children to Schelling’s highly
romantic and symbolic philosophy. The elements that came from the actual
study of child life—the continuation of the nursery—have remained a
life-bringing force in all education; the Schellingesque factors made an
obstruction between it and the rest of the school system—brought about
isolations.
The line drawn over the top indicates that there is a certain interaction
between the kindergarten and the primary school; for, so far as the
primary school remained in spirit foreign to the natural interests of
child life, it was isolated from the kindergarten, so that it is a
problem, at present, to introduce kindergarten methods into the primary
school; the problem of the so-called connecting class. The difficulty is
that the two are not one from the start. To get a connection the teacher
has had to climb over the wall instead of entering in at the gate.
On the side of aims, the ideal of the kindergarten was the moral
development of the children, rather than instruction or discipline; an
ideal sometimes emphasized to the point of sentimentality. The primary
school grew practically out of the popular movement of the sixteenth
century, when, along with the invention of printing and the growth of
commerce, it became a business necessity to know how to read, write, and
figure. The aim was distinctly a practical one; it was utility; getting
command of these tools, the symbols of learning, not for the sake of
learning, but because they gave access to careers in life otherwise
closed.
The division next to the primary school is the grammar school. The term
is not much used in the West, but is common in the eastern states. It
goes back to the time of the revival of learning—a little earlier perhaps
than the conditions out of which the primary school originated, and,
even when contemporaneous, having a different ideal. It had to do with
the study of language in the higher sense; because, at the time of the
Renaissance, Latin and Greek connected people with the culture of the
past, with the Roman and Greek world. The classic languages were the
only means of escape from the limitations of the Middle Ages. Thus there
sprang up the prototype of the grammar school, more liberal than the
university (so largely professional in character), for the purpose of
putting into the hands of the people the key to the old learning, that
men might see a world with a larger horizon. The object was primarily
culture, secondarily discipline. It represented much more than the
present grammar school. It was the liberal element in the college,
which, extending downward, grew into the academy and the high school.
Thus the secondary school is still in part just a lower college (having
an even higher curriculum than the college of a few centuries ago) or a
preparatory department to a college, and in part a rounding up of the
utilities of the elementary school.
There appear then two products of the nineteenth century, the technical
and normal schools. The schools of technology, engineering, etc., are, of
course, mainly the development of nineteenth-century business conditions,
as the primary school was the development of business conditions of the
sixteenth century. The normal school arose because of the necessity for
training teachers, with the idea partly of professional drill and partly
that of culture.
Without going more into detail, we have some eight different parts of
the school system as represented on the chart, all of which arose
historically at different times, having different ideals in view, and
consequently different methods. I do not wish to suggest that all of the
isolation, all of the separation, that has existed in the past between
the different parts of the school system still persists. One must,
however, recognize that they have never yet been welded into one complete
whole. The great problem in education on the administrative side is how
to unite these different parts.
Consider the training schools for teachers—the normal schools. These
occupy at present a somewhat anomalous position, intermediate between
the high school and the college, requiring the high-school preparation,
and covering a certain amount of college work. They are isolated from
the higher subject-matter of scholarship, since, upon the whole, their
object has been to train persons _how_ to teach, rather than _what_ to
teach; while, if we go to the college, we find the other half of this
isolation—learning _what_ to teach, with almost a contempt for methods
of teaching. The college is shut off from contact with children and
youth. Its members, to a great extent, away from home and forgetting
their own childhood, become eventually teachers with a large amount of
subject-matter at command, and little knowledge of how this is related to
the minds of those to whom it is to be taught. In this division between
what to teach and how to teach, each side suffers from the separation.
It is interesting to follow out the interrelation between primary,
grammar, and high schools. The elementary school has crowded up and taken
many subjects previously studied in the old New England grammar school.
The high school has pushed its subjects down. Latin and algebra have been
put in the upper grades, so that the seventh and eighth grades are, after
all, about all that is left of the old grammar school. They are a sort of
amorphous composite, being partly a place where children go on learning
what they already have learned (to read, write, and figure), and partly a
place of preparation for the high school. The name in some parts of New
England for these upper grades was “Intermediate School.” The term was a
happy one; the work was simply intermediate between something that had
been and something that was going to be, having no special meaning on its
own account.
Just as the parts are separated, so do the ideals differ—moral
development, practical utility, general culture, discipline, and
professional training. These aims are each especially represented in
some distinct part of the system of education; and, with the growing
interaction of the parts, each is supposed to afford a certain amount
of culture, discipline, and utility. But the lack of fundamental unity
is witnessed in the fact that one study is still considered good for
discipline, and another for culture; some parts of arithmetic, for
example, for discipline and others for use; literature for culture;
grammar for discipline; geography partly for utility, partly for culture;
and so on. The unity of education is dissipated, and the studies become
centrifugal; so much of this study to secure this end, so much of that to
secure another, until the whole becomes a sheer compromise and patchwork
between contending aims and disparate studies. The great problem in
education on the administrative side is to secure the unity of the whole,
in the place of a sequence of more or less unrelated and overlapping
parts, and thus to reduce the waste arising from friction, reduplication,
and transitions that are not properly bridged.
[Illustration: Chart II.]
In this second symbolic diagram (II) I wish to suggest that really the
only way to unite the parts of the system is to unite each to life. We
can get only an artificial unity so long as we confine our gaze to the
school system itself. We must look at it as part of the larger whole of
social life. This block (A) in the center represents the school system as
a whole. (1) At one side we have the home, and the two arrows represent
the free interplay of influences, materials, and ideas between the home
life and that of the school. (2) Below we have the relation to the
natural environment, the great field of geography in the widest sense.
The school building has about it a natural environment. It ought to be in
a garden, and the children from the garden would be led on to surrounding
fields, and then into the wider country, with all its facts and forces.
(3) Above is represented business life, and the necessity for free play
between the school and the needs and forces of industry. (4) On the other
side is the university proper, with its various phases, its laboratories,
its resources in the way of libraries, museums, and professional schools.
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes
from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school
in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the
other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at
school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life. When
the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large
part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home
and neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday
experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of
means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies. While I was
visiting in the city of Moline a few years ago, the superintendent told
me that they found many children every year who were surprised to learn
that the Mississippi river in the textbook had anything to do with the
stream of water flowing past their homes. The geography being simply a
matter of the schoolroom, it is more or less of an awakening to many
children to find that the whole thing is nothing but a more formal and
definite statement of the facts which they see, feel, and touch every
day. When we think that we all live on the earth, that we live in an
atmosphere, that our lives are touched at every point by the influences
of the soil, flora, and fauna, by considerations of light and heat, and
then think of what the school study of geography has been, we have a
typical idea of the gap existing between the everyday experiences of
the child and the isolated material supplied in such large measure in
the school. This is but an instance, and one upon which most of us may
reflect long before we take the present artificiality of the school as
other than a matter of course or necessity.
Though there should be organic connection between the school and business
life, it is not meant that the school is to prepare the child for any
particular business, but that there should be a natural connection
of the everyday life of the child with the business environment
about him, and that it is the affair of the school to clarify and
liberalize this connection, to bring it to consciousness, not by
introducing special studies, like commercial geography and arithmetic,
but by keeping alive the ordinary bonds of relation. The subject of
compound-business-partnership is probably not in many of the arithmetics
nowadays, though it was there not a generation ago, for the makers of
textbooks said that if they left out anything they could not sell their
books. This compound-business-partnership originated as far back as
the sixteenth century. The joint-stock company had not been invented,
and as large commerce with the Indies and Americas grew up, it was
necessary to have an accumulation of capital with which to handle it.
One man said, “I will put in this amount of money for six months,” and
another, “So much for two years,” and so on. Thus by joining together
they got money enough to float their commercial enterprises. Naturally,
then, “compound partnership” was taught in the schools. The joint-stock
company was invented; compound partnership disappeared, but the problems
relating to it stayed in the arithmetics for two hundred years. They
were kept after they had ceased to have practical utility, for the sake
of mental discipline—they were “such hard problems, you know.” A great
deal of what is now in the arithmetics under the head of percentage is
of the same nature. Children of twelve and thirteen years of age go
through gain and loss calculations, and various forms of bank discount so
complicated that the bankers long ago dispensed with them. And when it is
pointed out that business is not done this way, we hear again of “mental
discipline.” And yet there are plenty of real connections between the
experience of children and business conditions which need to be utilized
and illuminated. The child should study his commercial arithmetic and
geography, not as isolated things by themselves, but in their reference
to his social environment. The youth needs to become acquainted with the
bank as a factor in modern life, with what it does, and how it does it;
and then relevant arithmetical processes would have some meaning—quite
in contradistinction to the time-absorbing and mind-killing examples in
percentage, partial payments, etc., found in all our arithmetics.
The connection with the university, as indicated in this chart, I need
not dwell upon. I simply wish to indicate that there ought to be a free
interaction between all the parts of the school system. There is much of
utter triviality of subject-matter in elementary and secondary education.
When we investigate it, we find that it is full of facts taught that
are not facts, which have to be unlearned later on. Now, this happens
because the “lower” parts of our system are not, in vital connection
with the “higher.” The university or college, in its idea, is a place
of research, where investigation is going on: a place of libraries and
museums, where the best resources of the past are gathered, maintained,
and organized. It is, however, as true in the school as in the university
that the spirit of inquiry can be got only through and with the attitude
of inquiry. The pupil must learn what has meaning, what enlarges his
horizon, instead of mere trivialities. He must become acquainted with
truths, instead of things that were regarded as such fifty years ago or
that are taken as interesting by the misunderstanding of a partially
educated teacher. It is difficult to see how these ends can be reached
except as the most advanced part of the educational system is in complete
interaction with the most rudimentary.
The next chart (III) is an enlargement of the second. The school building
has swelled out, so to speak, the surrounding environment remaining the
same, the home, the garden and country, the relation to business life
and the university. The object is to show what the school must become to
get out of its isolation and secure the organic connection with social
life of which we have been speaking. It is not our architect’s plan for
the school building that we hope to have; but it is a diagrammatic
representation of the idea which we want embodied in the school building.
On the lower side you see the dining-room and the kitchen, at the top
the wood and metal shops and the textile room for sewing and weaving.
The center represents the manner in which all come together in the
library; that is to say, in a collection of the intellectual resources
of all kinds that throw light upon the practical work, that give it
meaning and liberal value. If the four corners represent practice, the
interior represents the theory of the practical activities. In other
words, the object of these forms of practice in the school is not found
chiefly in themselves, or in the technical skill of cooks, seamstresses,
carpenters, and masons, but in their connection, on the social side,
with the life without; while on the individual side they respond to the
child’s need of action, of expression, of desire to do something, to be
constructive and creative, instead of simply passive and conforming.
Their great significance is that they keep the balance between the social
and individual sides—the chart symbolizing particularly the connection
with the social. Here on one side is the home. How naturally the lines
of connection play back and forth between the home and the kitchen and
the textile room of the school! The child can carry over what he learns
in the home and utilize it in the school; and the things learned in the
school he applies at home. These are the two great things in breaking
down isolation, in getting connection—to have the child come to school
with all the experience he has got outside the school, and to leave it
with something to be immediately used in his everyday life. The child
comes to the traditional school with a healthy body and a more or less
unwilling mind, though, in fact, he does not bring both his body and mind
with him; he has to leave his mind behind, because there is no way to
use it in the school. If he had a purely abstract mind, he could bring
it to school with him, but his is a concrete one, interested in concrete
things, and unless these things get over into school life he cannot take
his mind with him. What we want is to have the child come to school with
a whole mind and a whole body, and leave school with a fuller mind and an
even healthier body. And speaking of the body suggests that, while there
is no gymnasium in these diagrams, the active life carried on in its four
corners brings with it constant physical exercise, while our gymnasium
proper will deal with the particular weaknesses of children and their
correction, and will attempt more consciously to build up the thoroughly
sound body as the abode of the sound mind.
[Illustration: Chart III.]
That the dining-room and kitchen connect with the country and its
processes and products it is hardly necessary to say. Cooking may be so
taught that it has no connection with country life and with the sciences
that find their unity in geography. Perhaps it generally has been taught
without these connections being really made. But all the materials that
come into the kitchen have their origin in the country; they come from
the soil, are nurtured through the influences of light and water, and
represent a great variety of local environments. Through this connection,
extending from the garden into the larger world, the child has his most
natural introduction to the study of the sciences. Where did these things
grow? What was necessary to their growth? What their relation to the
soil? What the effect of different climatic conditions? and so on. We all
know what the old-fashioned botany was: partly collecting flowers that
were pretty, pressing and mounting them; partly pulling these flowers to
pieces and giving technical names to the different parts, finding all the
different leaves, naming all their different shapes and forms. It was a
study of plants without any reference to the soil, to the country, or to
growth. In contrast, a real study of plants takes them in their natural
environment and in their uses as well, not simply as food, but in all
their adaptations to the social life of man. Cooking becomes as well a
most natural introduction to the study of chemistry, giving the child
here also something which he can at once bring to bear upon his daily
experience. I once heard a very intelligent woman say that she could
not understand how science could be taught to little children, because
she did not see how they could understand atoms and molecules. In other
words, since she did not see how highly abstract facts could be presented
to the child independently of daily experience, she could not understand
how science could be taught at all. Before we smile at this remark, we
need to ask ourselves if she is alone in her assumption, or whether it
simply formulates the principle of almost all our school practice.
The same relations with the outside world are found in the carpentry
and the textile shops. They connect with the country, as the source of
their materials, with physics, as the science of applying energy, with
commerce and distribution, with art in the development of architecture
and decoration. They have also an intimate connection with the university
on the side of its technological and engineering schools; with the
laboratory and its scientific methods and results.
To go back to the square which is marked the library (Chart III, A):
if you imagine rooms half in the four corners and half in the library,
you will get the idea of the recitation room. That is the place where
the children bring the experiences, the problems, the questions,
the particular facts which they have found, and discuss them so that
new light may be thrown upon them, particularly new light from the
experience of others, the accumulated wisdom of the world—symbolized in
the library. Here is the organic relation of theory and practice; the
child not simply doing things, but getting also the _idea_ of what he
does; getting from the start some intellectual conception that enters
into his practice and enriches it; while every idea finds, directly or
indirectly, some application in experience and has some effect upon life.
This, I need hardly say, fixes the position of the “book” or reading in
education. Harmful as a substitute for experience, it is all-important in
interpreting and expanding experience.
The other chart (IV) illustrates precisely the same idea. It gives the
symbolic upper story of this ideal school. In the upper corners are the
laboratories; in the lower corners are the studios for art work, both
the graphic and auditory arts. The questions, the chemical and physical
problems, arising in the kitchen and shop, are taken to the laboratories
to be worked out. For instance, this past week one of the older groups
of children doing practical work in weaving, which involved the use of
the spinning wheel, worked out the diagrams of the direction of forces
concerned in treadle and wheel, and the ratio of velocities between
wheel and spindle. In the same manner, the plants with which the child
has to do in cooking afford the basis for a concrete interest in botany
and may be taken and studied by themselves. In a certain school in Boston
science work for months was centered in the growth of the cotton plant,
and yet something new was brought in every day. We hope to do similar
work with all the types of plants that furnish materials for sewing and
weaving. These examples will suggest, I hope, the relation which the
laboratories bear to the rest of the school.
[Illustration: Chart IV.]
The drawing and music, or the graphic and auditory arts, represent the
culmination, the idealization, the highest point of refinement of all
the work carried on. I think everybody who has not a purely literary
view of the subject recognizes that genuine art grows out of the work of
the artisan. The art of the Renaissance was great because it grew out of
the manual arts of life. It did not spring up in a separate atmosphere,
however ideal, but carried on to their spiritual meaning processes
found in homely and everyday forms of life. The school should observe
this relationship. The merely artisan side is narrow, but the mere art,
taken by itself, and grafted on from without, tends to become forced,
empty, sentimental. I do not mean, of course, that all art work must be
correlated in detail to the other work of the school, but simply that a
spirit of union gives vitality to the art and depth and richness to the
other work. All art involves physical organs—the eye and hand, the ear
and voice; and yet it is something more than the mere technical skill
required by the organs of expression. It involves an idea, a thought, a
spiritual rendering of things; and yet it is other than any number of
ideas by themselves. It is a living union of thought and the instrument
of expression. This union is symbolized by saying that in the ideal
school the art work might be considered to be that of the shops, passed
through the alembic of library and museum into action again.
Take the textile room as an illustration of such a synthesis. I am
talking about a future school, the one we hope, some time, to have. The
basal fact in that room is that it is a workshop, doing actual things
in sewing, spinning, and weaving. The children come into immediate
connection with the materials, with various fabrics of silk, cotton,
linen, and wool. Information at once appears in connection with these
materials; their origin, history, their adaptation to particular uses,
and the machines of various kinds by which the raw materials are
utilized. Discipline arises in dealing with the problems involved, both
theoretical and practical. Whence does the culture arise? Partly from
seeing all these things reflected through the medium of their scientific
and historic conditions and associations, whereby the child learns to
appreciate them as technical achievements, as thoughts precipitated in
action; and partly because of the introduction of the art idea into
the room itself. In the ideal school there would be something of this
sort: first, a complete industrial museum, giving samples of materials
in various stages of manufacture, and the implements, from the simplest
to the most complex used in dealing with them; then a collection of
photographs and pictures illustrating the landscapes and the scenes
from which the materials come, their native homes, and their places
of manufacture. Such a collection would be a vivid and continual
lesson in the synthesis of art, science, and industry. There would be,
also, samples of the more perfect forms of textile work, as Italian,
French, Japanese, and Oriental. There would be objects illustrating
motives of design and decoration which have entered into production.
Literature would contribute its part in its idealized representation
of the world-industries, as the Penelope in the _Odyssey_—a classic in
literature because the character is an adequate embodiment of a certain
industrial phase of social life. So, from Homer down to the present
time, there is a continuous procession of related facts which have been
translated into terms of art. Music lends its share, from the Scotch song
at the wheel to the spinning song of Marguerite, or of Wagner’s Senta.
The shop becomes a pictured museum, appealing to the eye. It would have
not only materials—beautiful woods and designs—but would give a synopsis
of the historical evolution of architecture in its drawings and pictures.
Thus I have attempted to indicate how the school may be connected
with life so that the experience gained by the child in a familiar,
commonplace way is carried over and made use of there, and what the
child learns in the school is carried back and applied in everyday life,
making the school an organic whole, instead of a composite of isolated
parts. The isolation of studies as well as of parts of the school system
disappears. Experience has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its
literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise from
aspects of the one earth and the one life lived upon it. We do not have
a series of stratified earths, one of which is mathematical, another
physical, another historical, and so on. We should not be able to live
very long in any one taken by itself. We live in a world where all sides
are bound together. All studies grow out of relations in the one great
common world. When the child lives in varied but concrete and active
relationship to this common world, his studies are naturally unified. It
will no longer be a problem to correlate studies. The teacher will not
have to resort to all sorts of devices to weave a little arithmetic into
the history lesson, and the like. Relate the school to life, and all
studies are of necessity correlated.
Moreover, if the school is related as a whole to life as a whole, its
various aims and ideals—culture, discipline, information, utility—cease
to be variants, for one of which we must select one study and for another
another. The growth of the child in the direction of social capacity and
service, his larger and more vital union with life, becomes the unifying
aim; and discipline, culture, and information fall into place as phases
of this growth.
I wish to say one word more about the relationship of our particular
school to the University. The problem is to unify, to organize,
education, to bring all its various factors together, through putting it
as a whole into organic union with everyday life. That which lies back
of the pedagogical school of the University is the necessity of working
out something to serve as a model for such unification, extending from
work beginning with the four-year-old child up through the graduate
work of the University. Already we have much help from the University
in scientific work planned, sometimes even in detail, by heads of the
departments. The graduate student comes to us with his researches and
methods, suggesting ideas and problems. The library and museum are at
hand. We want to bring all things educational together; to break down
the barriers that divide the education of the little child from the
instruction of the maturing youth; to identify the lower and the higher
education, so that it shall be demonstrated to the eye that there is no
lower and higher, but simply education.
Speaking more especially with reference to the pedagogical side of the
work: I suppose the oldest university chair of pedagogy in our country
is about twenty years old—that of the University of Michigan, founded
in the latter seventies. But there are only one or two that have tried
to make a connection between theory and practice. They teach for the
most part by theory, by lectures, by reference to books, rather than
through the actual work of teaching itself. At Columbia, through the
Teachers College, there is an extensive and close connection between the
University and the training of teachers. Something has been done in one
or two other places along the same line. We want an even more intimate
union here, so that the University shall put all its resources at the
disposition of the elementary school, contributing to the evolution of
valuable subject-matter and right method, while the school in turn will
be a laboratory in which the student of education sees theories and ideas
demonstrated, tested, criticized, enforced, and the evolution of new
truths. We want the school in its relation to the University to be a
working model of a unified education.
A word as to the relation of the school to educational interests
generally. I heard once that the adoption of a certain method in use in
our school was objected to by a teacher on this ground: “You know that
it is an experimental school. They do not work under the same conditions
that we are subject to.” Now, the purpose of performing an experiment is
that other people need not experiment; at least need not experiment so
much, may have something definite and positive to go by. An experiment
demands particularly favorable conditions in order that results may be
reached both freely and securely. It has to work unhampered, with all
the needed resources at command. Laboratories lie back of all the great
business enterprises of today, back of every great factory, every railway
and steamship system. Yet the laboratory is not a business enterprise;
it does not aim to secure for itself the conditions of business life,
nor does the commercial undertaking repeat the laboratory. There is a
difference between working out and testing a new truth, or a new method,
and applying it on a wide scale, making it available for the mass of men,
making it commercial. But the first thing is to discover the truth, to
afford all necessary facilities, for this is the most practical thing
in the world in the long run. We do not expect to have other schools
literally imitate what we do. A working model is not something to be
copied; it is to afford a demonstration of the feasibility of the
principle, and of the methods which make it feasible. So (to come back
to our own point) we want here to work out the problem of the unity, the
organization of the school system in itself, and to do this by relating
it so intimately to life as to demonstrate the possibility and necessity
of such organization for all education.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
Naturally, most of the public is interested in what goes on day by day
in a school in direct relation to the children there. This is true of
parents who send their boys and girls for the sake of the personal
results they wish to secure, not for the sake of contributing to
educational theory. In the main, it is true of visitors to a school who
recognize, in varying degrees, what is actually done with the children
before their eyes, but who rarely have either the interest or the time
to consider the work in relation to underlying problems. A school cannot
lose sight of this aspect of its work, since only by attending to it can
the school retain the confidence of its patrons and the presence of its
pupils.
Nevertheless a school conducted by a department of a university must
have another aspect. From the university standpoint, the most important
part of its work is the scientific—the contribution it makes to the
progress of educational thinking. The aim of educating a certain number
of children would hardly justify a university in departing from the
tradition which limits it to those who have completed their secondary
instruction. Only the scientific aim, the conduct of a laboratory,
comparable to other scientific laboratories, can furnish a reason for the
maintenance by a university of an elementary school. Such a school is a
laboratory of applied psychology. That is, it has a place for the study
of mind as manifested and developed in the child, and for the search
after materials and agencies that seem most likely to fulfil and further
the conditions of normal growth.
It is not a normal school or a department for the training of teachers.
It is not a model school. It is not intended to demonstrate any one
special idea or doctrine. Its task is the problem of viewing the
education of the child in the light of the principles of mental activity
and processes of growth made known by modern psychology. The problem
by its nature is an infinite one. All that any school can do is to
make contributions here and there, and to stand for the necessity of
considering education, both theoretically and practically, in this light.
This being the end, the school conditions must, of course, agree. To
endeavor to study the process and laws of growth under such artificial
conditions as prevent many of the chief facts of child life from showing
themselves is an obvious absurdity.
In its practical aspect, this laboratory problem takes the form of the
construction of a course of study which harmonizes with the natural
history of the growth of the child in capacity and experience. The
question is the selection of the kind, variety, and due proportion of
subjects, answering most definitely to the dominant needs and powers of
a given period of growth, and of those modes of presentation that will
cause the selected material to enter vitally into growth. We cannot admit
too fully or too freely the limits of our knowledge and the depths of our
ignorance in these matters. No one has a complete hold scientifically
upon the chief psychological facts of any one year of child life. It
would be sheer presumption to claim that just the material best fitted
to promote this growth has as yet been discovered. The assumption of an
educational laboratory is rather that enough is known of the conditions
and modes of growth to make intelligent inquiry possible; and that it is
only by acting upon what is already known that more can be found out.
The chief point is such experimentation as will add to our reasonable
convictions. The demand is to secure arrangements that will permit and
encourage freedom of investigation; that will give some assurance that
important facts will not be forced out of sight; conditions that will
enable the educational practice indicated by the inquiry to be sincerely
acted upon, without the distortion and suppression arising from undue
dependence upon tradition and preconceived notions. It is in this sense
that the school would be an experimental station in education.
What, then, are the chief working hypotheses that have been adopted from
psychology? What educational counterparts have been hit upon as in some
degree in line with the adopted psychology?
The discussion of these questions may be approached by pointing out a
contrast between contemporary psychology and the psychology of former
days. The contrast is a triple one. Earlier psychology regarded mind as
a purely individual affair in direct and naked contact with an external
world. The only question asked was of the ways in which the world and
the mind acted upon each other. The entire process recognized would have
been in theory exactly the same if there were one mind living alone in
the universe. At present the tendency is to conceive individual mind as
a function of social life—as not capable of operating or developing by
itself, but as requiring continual stimulus from social agencies, and
finding its nutrition in social supplies. The idea of heredity has made
familiar the notion that the equipment of the individual, mental as well
as physical, is an inheritance from the race: a capital inherited by
the individual from the past and held in trust by him for the future.
The idea of evolution has made familiar the notion that mind cannot be
regarded as an individual, monopolistic possession, but represents
the outworkings of the endeavor and thought of humanity; that it is
developed in an environment which is social as well as physical, and that
social needs and aims have been most potent in shaping it—and the chief
difference between savagery and civilization is not in the naked nature
which each faces, but the social heredity and social medium.
Studies of childhood have made it equally apparent that this socially
acquired inheritance operates in the individual only under present social
stimuli. Nature must indeed furnish its physical stimuli of light, sound,
heat, etc., but the significance attaching to these, the interpretation
made of them, depends upon the ways in which the society in which the
child lives acts and reacts in reference to them. The bare physical
stimulus of light is not the entire reality; the interpretation given to
it through social activities and thinking confers upon it its wealth of
meaning. It is through imitation, suggestion, direct instruction, and
even more indirect unconscious tuition, that the child learns to estimate
and treat the bare physical stimuli. It is through the social agencies
that he recapitulates in a few short years the progress which it has
taken the race slow centuries to work out.
Educational practice has exhibited an unconscious adaptation to and
harmony with the prevailing psychology; both grew out of the same soil.
Just as mind was supposed to get its filling by direct contact with the
world, so all the needs of instruction were thought to be met by bringing
the child mind into direct relation with various bodies of external
fact labeled geography, arithmetic, grammar, etc. That these classified
sets of facts were simply selections from the social life of the past
was overlooked; equally so that they had been generated out of social
situations and represented the answers found for social needs. No social
element was found in the subject-matter nor in the intrinsic appeal which
it made to the child; it was located wholly outside in the teacher—in
the encouragements, admonitions, urgings, and devices of the instructor
in getting the child’s mind to work upon a material which in itself was
only accidentally lighted up by any social gleam. It was forgotten that
the maximum appeal, and the full meaning in the life of the child, could
be secured only when the studies were presented, not as bare external
studies, but from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life of
society. It was forgotten that to become integral parts of the child’s
conduct and character they must be assimilated, not as mere items of
information, but as organic parts of his present needs and aims—which in
turn are social.
In the second place, the older psychology was a psychology of knowledge,
of intellect. Emotion and endeavor occupied but an incidental and
derivative place. Much was said about sensations—next to nothing about
movements. There was discussion of ideas and of whether they originated
in sensations or in some innate mental faculty; but the possibility of
their origin in and from the needs of action was ignored. Their influence
upon conduct, upon behavior, was regarded as an external attachment. Now
we believe (to use the words of Mr. James) that the intellect, the sphere
of sensations and ideas, is but a “middle department which we sometimes
take to be final, failing to see, amidst the monstrous diversity of the
length and complications of the cogitations which may fill it, that
it can have but one essential function—the function of defining the
direction which our activity, immediate or remote, shall take.”
Here also was a pre-established harmony between educational practice
and psychological theory. Knowledge in the schools was isolated and
made an end in itself. Facts, laws, information have been the staple of
the curriculum. The controversy in educational theory and practice was
between those who relied more upon the sense element in knowledge, upon
contact with things, upon object-lessons, etc., and those who emphasized
abstract ideas, generalizations, etc.—reason, so called, but in reality
other people’s ideas as formulated in books. In neither case was
there any attempt to connect either the sense training or the logical
operations with the problems and interests of the life of practice. Here
again an educational transformation is indicated if we are to suppose
that our psychological theories stand for any truths of life.
The third point of contrast lies in the modern conception of the mind as
essentially a process—a process of growth, not a fixed thing. According
to the older view mind was mind, and that was the whole story. Mind was
the same throughout, because fitted out with the same assortment of
faculties whether in child or adult. If any difference was made it was
simply that some of these ready-made faculties—such as memory—came into
play at an earlier time, while others, such as judging and inferring,
made their appearance only after the child, through memorizing drills,
had been reduced to complete dependence upon the thought of others.
The only important difference that was recognized was one of quantity,
of amount. The boy was a little man and his mind was a little mind—in
everything but the size the same as that of the adult, having its own
ready-furnished equipment of faculties of attention, memory, etc. Now
we believe in the mind as a growing affair, and hence as essentially
changing, presenting distinctive phases of capacity and interest
at different periods. These are all one and the same in the sense
of continuity of life, but all different, in that each has its own
distinctive claims and offices. “First the blade, then the ear, and then
the full corn in the ear.”
It is hardly possible to overstate the agreement of education and
psychology at this point. The course of study was thoroughly, even if
unconsciously, controlled by the assumption that since mind and its
faculties are the same throughout, the subject-matter of the adult,
logically arranged facts and principles, is the natural “study” of the
child—simplified and made easier of course, since the wind must be
tempered to the shorn lamb. The outcome was the traditional course of
study in which again child and adult minds are absolutely identified,
except as regards the mere matter of amount or quantity of power. The
entire range of the universe is first subdivided into sections called
studies; then each one of these studies is broken up into bits, and some
one bit assigned to a certain year of the course. No order of development
was recognized—it was enough that the earlier parts were made easier
than the later. To use the pertinent illustration of Mr. W. S. Jackman
in stating the absurdity of this sort of curriculum: “It must seem to
geography teachers that Heaven smiled on them when it ordained but four
or five continents, because starting in far enough along the course it
was so easy, that it really seemed to be natural, to give one continent
to each grade, and then come out right in the eight years.”
If once more we are in earnest with the idea of mind as growth, this
growth carrying with it typical features distinctive of its various
stages, it is clear that an educational transformation is again
indicated. It is clear that the selection and grading of material in the
course of study must be done with reference to proper nutrition of the
dominant directions of activity in a given period, not with reference to
chopped-up sections of a ready-made universe of knowledge.
It is, of course, comparatively easy to lay down general propositions
like the foregoing; easy to use them to criticize existing school
conditions; easy by means of them to urge the necessity of something
different. But art is long. The difficulty is in carrying such
conceptions into effect—in seeing just what materials and methods, in
what proportion and arrangement, are available and helpful at a given
time. Here again we must fall back upon the idea of the laboratory.
There is no answer in advance to such questions as these. Tradition does
not give it because tradition is founded upon a radically different
psychology. Mere reasoning cannot give it because it is a question of
fact. It is only by trying that such things can be found out. To refuse
to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth
involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the
only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.
Hence the following statement simply reports various lines of inquiry
started during the last five years, with some of the results more
recently indicated. These results can, of course, make no claim to
be other than tentative, excepting in so far as a more definite
consciousness of what the problems are, clearing the way for more
intelligent action in the future, is a definitive advance. It should
also be stated that practically it has not as yet been possible, in
many cases, to act adequately upon the best ideas obtained, because of
administrative difficulties, due to lack of funds—difficulties centering
in the lack of a proper building and appliances, and in inability to pay
the amounts necessary to secure the complete time of teachers in some
important lines. Indeed, with the growth of the school in numbers, and
in the age and maturity of pupils, it is becoming a grave question how
long it is fair to the experiment to carry it on without more adequate
facilities.
In coming now to speak of the educational answers which have been sought
for the psychological hypotheses, it is convenient to start from the
matter of the stages of growth. The first stage (found in the child say
of from four to eight years of age) is characterized by directness
of social and personal interests, and by directness and promptness
of relationship between impressions, ideas, and action. The demand
for a motor outlet for expression is urgent and immediate. Hence the
subject-matter for these years is selected from phases of life entering
into the child’s own social surroundings, and, as far as may be, capable
of reproduction by him in something approaching social form—in play,
games, occupations, or miniature industrial arts, stories, pictorial
imagination, and conversation. At first the material is such as lies
nearest the child himself, the family life and its neighborhood setting;
it then goes on to something slightly more remote, social occupations
(especially those having to do with the interdependence of city and
country life), and then extends itself to the historical evolution of
typical occupations and of the social forms connected with them. The
material is not presented as lessons, as something to be learned, but
rather as something to be taken up into the child’s own experience,
through his own activities, in weaving, cooking, shopwork, modeling,
dramatic plays, conversation, discussion, story-telling, etc. These in
turn are direct agencies. They are forms of motor or expressive activity.
They are emphasized so as to dominate the school program, in order that
the intimate connection between knowing and doing, so characteristic of
this period of child life, may be maintained. The aim, then, is not for
the child to go to school as a place apart, but rather in the school so
to recapitulate typical phases of his experience outside of school, as to
enlarge, enrich, and gradually formulate it.
In the second period, extending from eight or nine to eleven or twelve,
the aim is to recognize and respond to the change which comes into the
child from his growing sense of the possibility of more permanent and
objective results and of the necessity for the control of agencies for
the skill necessary to reach these results. When the child recognizes
distinct and enduring ends which stand out and demand attention on their
own account, the previous vague and fluid unity of life is broken up. The
mere play of activity no longer directly satisfies. It must be felt to
accomplish something—to lead up to a definite and abiding outcome. Hence
the recognition of rules of action—that is, of regular means appropriate
to reaching permanent results—and of the value of mastering special
processes so as to give skill in their use.
Hence, on the educational side, the problem is, as regards the
subject-matter, to differentiate the vague unity of experience into
characteristic typical phases, selecting such as clearly illustrate the
importance to mankind of command over specific agencies and methods of
thought and action in realizing its highest aims. The problem on the
side of method is an analogous one: to bring the child to recognize the
necessity of a similar development within himself—the need of securing
for himself practical and intellectual control of such methods of work
and inquiry as will enable him to realize results for himself.
On the more direct social side, American history (especially that of the
period of colonization) is selected as furnishing a typical example of
patience, courage, ingenuity, and continual judgment in adapting means to
ends, even in the face of great hazard and obstacle; while the material
itself is so definite, vivid, and human as to come directly within the
range of the child’s representative and constructive imagination and thus
becomes, vicariously at least, a part of his own expanding consciousness.
Since the aim is not “covering the ground,” but knowledge of social
processes used to secure social results, no attempt is made to go over
the entire history, in chronological order, of America. Rather a series
of types is taken up: Chicago and the northwestern Mississippi valley;
Virginia, New York, and the Puritans and Pilgrims in New England. The aim
is to present a variety of climatic and local conditions, to show the
different sorts of obstacles and helps that people found, and a variety
of historic traditions and customs and purposes of different people.
The method involves presentation of a large amount of detail, of minutiae
of surroundings, tools, clothing, household utensils, foods, modes of
living day by day, so that the child can reproduce the material as
life, not as mere historic information. In this way, social processes
and results become realities. Moreover, to the personal and dramatic
identification of the child with the social life studied, characteristic
of the earlier period, there now supervenes an _intellectual_
identification—the child puts himself at the standpoint of the problems
that have to be met and rediscovers, so far as may be, ways of meeting
them.
The general standpoint—the adaptation of means to ends—controls also the
work in science. For purposes of convenience, this may be regarded as
now differentiated into two sides—the geographical and the experimental.
Since, as just stated, the history work depends upon an appreciation of
the natural environment as affording resources and presenting urgent
problems, considerable attention is paid to the physiography, mountains,
rivers, plains, and lines of natural travel and exchange, flora and fauna
of each of the colonies. This is connected with field excursions in
order that the child may be able to supply from observation, as far as
possible, the data to be used by constructive imagination, in reproducing
more remote environments.
The experimental side devotes itself to a study of processes which yield
typical results of value to men. The activity of the child in the earlier
period is directly productive, rather than investigative. His experiments
are modes of active doing—almost as much so as his play and games. Later
he tries to find out how various materials or agencies are manipulated
in order to give certain results. It is thus clearly distinguished from
experimentation in the scientific sense—such as is appropriate to the
secondary period—where the aim is the discovery of facts and verification
of principles. Since the practical interest predominates, it is a study
of applied science rather than of pure science. For instance, processes
are selected found to have been of importance in colonial life—bleaching,
dyeing, soap and candle-making, manufacture of pewter dishes, making
of cider and vinegar, leading to some study of chemical agencies, of
oils, fats, elementary metallurgy. “Physics” is commenced from the same
applied standpoint. A study is made of the use and transfer of energy in
the spinning-wheel and looms; everyday uses of mechanical principles are
taken up—in locks, scales, etc., going on later to electric appliances
and devices—bells, the telegraph, etc.
The relation of means to ends is emphasized also in other lines of work.
In art attention is given to practical questions of perspective, of
proportion of spaces and masses, balance, effect of color combinations
and contrasts, etc. In cooking, the principles of food-composition and
of effects of various agencies upon these elements are taken up, so that
the children may deduce, as far as possible, their own rules. In sewing,
methods of cutting, fitting (as applied to dolls’ clothing) come up, and
later on the technical sequence of stitches, etc.
It is clear that with the increasing differentiation of lines of work and
interest, leading to greater individuality and independence in various
studies, great care must be taken to find the balance between, on one
side, undue separation and isolation, and, on the other, a miscellaneous
and casual attention to a large number of topics, without adequate
emphasis and distinctiveness to any. The first principle makes work
mechanical and formal, divorces it from the life-experience of the child
and from effective influence upon conduct. The second makes it scrappy
and vague and leaves the child without definite command of his own powers
or clear consciousness of purposes. It is perhaps only in the present
year that the specific principle of the conscious relation of means to
ends has emerged as the unifying principle of this period; and it is
hoped that emphasis of this in all lines of work will have a decidedly
cumulative and unifying effect upon the child’s development.
Nothing has been said, as yet, of one of the most important agencies
or means in extending and controlling experience—command of the social
or conventional symbols—symbols of language, including those of
quantity. The importance of these instrumentalities is so great that the
traditional or three R’s curriculum is based upon them—from 60 to 80 per
cent of the time program of the first four or five years of elementary
schools being devoted to them, the smaller figure representing selected
rather than average schools.
These subjects are social in a double sense. They represent the tools
which society has evolved in the past as the instruments of its
intellectual pursuits. They represent the keys which will unlock to the
child the wealth of social capital which lies beyond the possible range
of his limited individual experience. While these two points of view
must always give these arts a highly important place in education, they
also make it necessary that certain conditions should be observed in
their introduction and use. In a wholesale and direct application of the
studies no account is taken of these conditions. The chief problem at
present relating to the three R’s is recognition of these conditions and
the adaptation of work to them.
The conditions may be reduced to two: (1) The need that the child shall
have in his own personal and vital experience a varied background of
contact and acquaintance with realities, social and physical. This is
necessary to prevent symbols from becoming a purely second-hand and
conventional substitute for reality. (2) The need that the more ordinary,
direct, and personal experience of the child shall furnish problems,
motives, and interests that necessitate recourse to books for their
solution, satisfaction, and pursuit. Otherwise, the child approaches
the book without intellectual hunger, without alertness, without a
questioning attitude, and the result is the one so deplorably common:
such abject dependence upon books as weakens and cripples vigor of
thought and inquiry, combined with reading for mere random stimulation of
fancy, emotional indulgence, and flight from the world of reality into a
make-belief land.
The problem here is then (1) to furnish the child with a sufficiently
large amount of personal activity in occupations, expression,
conversation, construction, and experimentation, so that his
individuality, moral and intellectual, shall not be swamped by a
disproportionate amount of the experience of others to which books
introduce him; and (2) so to conduct this more direct experience as to
make the child feel the need of resort to and command of the traditional
social tools—furnish him with motives and make his recourse to them
intelligent, an addition to his powers, instead of a servile dependency.
When this problem shall be solved, work in language, literature, and
number will not be a combination of mechanical drill, formal analysis,
and appeal, even if unconscious, to sensational interests; and there will
not be the slightest reason to fear that books and all that relates to
them will not take the important place to which they are entitled.
It is hardly necessary to say that the problem is not yet solved. The
common complaints that children’s progress in these traditional school
studies is sacrificed to the newer subjects that have come into the
curriculum is sufficient evidence that the exact balance is not yet
struck. The experience thus far in the school, even if not demonstrative,
indicates the following probable results: (1) the more direct modes of
activity, constructive and occupation work, scientific observation,
experimentation, etc., present plenty of opportunities and occasions
for the necessary use of reading, writing (and spelling), and number
work. These things may be introduced, then, not as isolated studies, but
as organic outgrowths of the child’s experience. The problem is, in a
systematic and progressive way, to take advantage of these occasions. (2)
The additional vitality and meaning which these studies thus secure make
possible a very considerable reduction of the time ordinarily devoted to
them. (3) The final use of the symbols, whether in reading, calculation,
or composition, is more intelligent, less mechanical; more active, less
passively receptive; more an increase of power, less a mere mode of
enjoyment.
On the other hand, increasing experience seems to make clear the
following points: (1) that it is possible, in the early years, to appeal,
in teaching the recognition and use of symbols, to the child’s power
of production and creation; as much so in principle as in other lines
of work seemingly much more direct, and that there is the advantage
of a limited and definite result by which the child may measure his
progress. (2) Failure sufficiently to take account of this fact resulted
in an undue postponement of some phases of these lines of work, with
the effect that the child, having progressed to a more advanced plane
intellectually, feels what earlier might have been a form of power and
creation to be an irksome task. (3) There is a demand for periodic
concentration and alternation in the school program of the time devoted
to these studies—and of all studies where mastery of technique or special
method is advisable. That is to say, instead of carrying all subjects
simultaneously and at an equal pace upon the program, at times one must
be brought to the foreground and others relegated to the background,
until the child is brought to the point of recognizing that he has a
power or skill which he can now go ahead and use independently.
The third period of elementary education is upon the borderland of
secondary. It comes when the child has a sufficient acquaintance of a
fairly direct sort with various forms of reality and modes of activity;
and when he has sufficiently mastered the methods, the tools of thought,
inquiry, and activity, appropriate to various phases of experience,
to be able profitably to specialize upon distinctive studies and arts
for technical and intellectual aims. While the school has a number of
children who are in this period, the school has not, of course, been
in existence long enough so that any typical inferences can be safely
drawn. There certainly seems to be reason to hope, however, that with
the consciousness of difficulties, needs, and resources gained in the
experience of the last five years, children can be brought to and through
this period without sacrifice of thoroughness, mental discipline, or
command of technical tools of learning, and with a positive enlargement
of life, and a wider, freer, and more open outlook upon it.
FROEBEL’S EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
V
FROEBEL’S EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
One of the traditions of the Elementary School of the University of
Chicago is of a visitor who, in its early days, called to see the
kindergarten. On being told that the school had not as yet established
one, she asked if there were not singing, drawing, manual training, plays
and dramatizations, and attention to the children’s social relations.
When her questions were answered in the affirmative, she remarked, both
triumphantly and indignantly, that that was what she understood by a
kindergarten, and that she did not know what was meant by saying that the
school had no kindergarten. The remark was perhaps justified in spirit,
if not in letter. At all events, it suggests that in a certain sense
the school endeavors throughout its whole course—now including children
between four and thirteen—to carry into effect certain principles which
Froebel was perhaps the first consciously to set forth. Speaking still in
general, these principles are:
1. That the primary business of school is to train children in
co-operative and mutually helpful living; to foster in them the
consciousness of mutual interdependence; and to help them practically in
making the adjustments that will carry this spirit into overt deeds.
2. That the primary root of all educative activity is in the instinctive,
impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not in the
presentation and application of external material, whether through the
ideas of others or through the senses; and that, accordingly, numberless
spontaneous activities of children, plays, games, mimic efforts, even the
apparently meaningless motions of infants—exhibitions previously ignored
as trivial, futile, or even condemned as positively evil—are capable of
educational use; nay, are the foundation-stones of educational method.
3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and
directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the co-operative
living already spoken of; taking advantage of them to reproduce on the
child’s plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer
society into which he is finally to go forth; and that it is through
production and creative use that valuable knowledge is secured and
clinched.
So far as these statements correctly represent Froebel’s educational
philosophy, the School should be regarded as its exponent. An attempt
is making to act upon them with as much faith and sincerity in their
application to children of twelve as to children of four. This attempt,
however, to assume what might be called the kindergarten attitude
throughout the whole school makes necessary certain modifications of
the work done in what is more technically known as the kindergarten
period—that is, with the children between the ages of four and six. It
is necessary only to state reasons for believing that in spite of the
apparently radical character of some of them they are true to the spirit
of Froebel.
AS REGARDS PLAY AND GAMES
Play is not to be identified with anything which the child externally
does. It rather designates his mental attitude in its entirety and in its
unity. It is the free play, the interplay, of all the child’s powers,
thoughts, and physical movements, in embodying, in a satisfying form,
his own images and interests. Negatively, it is freedom—from economic
pressure—the necessities of getting a living and supporting others—and
from the fixed responsibilities attaching to the special callings of the
adult. Positively, it means that the supreme end of the child is fulness
of growth—fulness of realization of his budding powers, a realization
which continually carries him on from one plane to another.
This is a very general statement, and taken in its generality, is so
vague as to be innocent of practical bearing. Its significance in detail,
in application, however, means the possibility, and in many respects
the necessity, of quite a radical change of kindergarten procedure. To
state it baldly, the fact that “play” denotes the psychological attitude
of the child, not his outward performances, means complete emancipation
from the necessity of following any given or prescribed system, or
sequence of gifts, plays, or occupations. The judicious teacher will
certainly look for suggestions to the activities mentioned by Froebel (in
his _Mother-Play_ and elsewhere), and to those set forth in such minute
detail by his disciples; but she will also remember that the principle of
play requires her carefully to investigate and criticize these things,
and decide whether they are really activities for her own children, or
just things which may have been vital in the past to children living
in different social conditions. So far as occupations, games, etc.,
simply perpetuate those of Froebel and his earlier disciples, it may
fairly be said that in many respects the presumption is against them—the
presumption is that in the worship of the external doings discussed by
Froebel we have ceased to be loyal to his principle.
The teacher must be absolutely free to get suggestions from any and from
every source, asking herself but these two questions: Will the proposed
mode of play appeal to the child as his own? Is it something of which
he has the instinctive roots in himself, and which will mature the
capacities that are struggling for manifestation in him? And again: Will
the proposed activity give that sort of expression to these impulses that
will carry the child on to a higher plane of consciousness and action,
instead of merely exciting him and then leaving him just where he was
before, plus a certain amount of nervous exhaustion and appetite for more
excitation in the future?
There is every evidence that Froebel studied carefully—inductively we
might now say—the children’s plays of his own time, and the games which
mothers played with their infants. He also took great pains—as in his
_Mother-Play_—to point out that certain principles of large import were
involved. He had to bring his generation to consciousness of the fact
that these things were not merely trivial and childish because done by
children, but were essential factors in their growth. But I do not see
the slightest evidence that he supposed that just these plays, and only
these plays, had meaning, or that his philosophic explanation had any
motive beyond that just suggested. On the contrary, I believe that he
expected his followers to exhibit their following by continuing his own
study of contemporary conditions and activities, rather than by literally
adhering to the plays he had collected. Moreover, it is hardly likely
that Froebel himself would contend that in his interpretation of these
games he did more than take advantage of the best psychological and
philosophical insight available to him at the time; and we may suppose
that he would have been the first to welcome the growth of a better
and more extensive psychology (whether general, experimental, or as
child study), and would avail himself of its results to reinterpret
the activities, to discuss them more critically, going from the new
standpoint into the reasons that make them educationally valuable.
SYMBOLISM
It must be remembered that much of Froebel’s symbolism is the product of
two peculiar conditions of his own life and work. In the first place,
on account of inadequate knowledge at that time of the physiological
and psychological facts and principles of child growth, he was often
forced to resort to strained and artificial explanations of the value
attaching to the plays, etc. To the impartial observer it is obvious
that many of his statements are cumbrous and far-fetched, giving
abstract philosophical reasons for matters that may now receive a
simple, everyday formulation. In the second place, the general political
and social conditions of Germany were such that it was impossible to
conceive continuity between the free, co-operative social life of the
kindergarten and that of the world outside. Accordingly, he could not
regard the “occupations” of the schoolroom as literal reproductions of
the ethical principles involved in community life—the latter were often
too restricted and authoritative to serve as worthy models.
Accordingly he was compelled to think of them as symbolic of abstract
ethical and philosophical principles. There certainly is change enough
and progress enough in the social conditions of the United States of
today, as compared with those of the Germany of his day, to justify
making kindergarten activities more natural, more direct, and more
real representations of current life than Froebel’s disciples have
done. Even as it is, the disparity of Froebel’s philosophy with German
political ideals has made the authorities in Germany suspicious of
the kindergarten, and has been undoubtedly one force operating in
transforming its social simplicity into an involved intellectual
technique.
IMAGINATION AND PLAY
An excessive emphasis on symbolism is sure to influence the treatment of
imagination. It is of course true that a little child lives in a world
of imagination. In one sense, he can only “make believe.” His activities
represent or stand for the life that he sees going on around him. Because
they are thus representative they may be termed symbolic, but it should
be remembered that this make-believe or symbolism has reference to
the activities suggested. Unless they are, to the child, as real and
definite as the adult’s activities are to him, the inevitable result
is artificiality, nervous strain, and either physical and emotional
excitement or else deadening of powers.
There has been a curious, almost unaccountable, tendency in the
kindergarten to assume that because the value of the activity lies in
what it stands for to the child, therefore the materials used must be
as artificial as possible, and that one must keep carefully away from
real things and real acts on the part of the child. Thus one hears
of gardening activities which are carried on by sprinkling grains of
sand for seeds; the child sweeps and dusts a make-believe room with
make-believe brooms and cloths; he sets a table using only paper cut
in the flat (and even then cut with reference to geometric design,
rather then to dishes), instead of toy tea things with which the child
outside of the kindergarten plays. Dolls, toy locomotives, and trains
or cars, etc., are tabooed as altogether too grossly real—and hence not
cultivating the child’s imagination.
All this is surely mere superstition. The imaginative play of the
child’s mind comes through the cluster of suggestions, reminiscences,
and anticipations that gather about the things he uses. The more natural
and straightforward these are, the more definite basis there is for
calling up and holding together all the allied suggestions which make his
imaginative play really representative. The simple cooking, dishwashing,
dusting, etc., which children do are no more prosaic or utilitarian to
them than would be, say, the game of the Five Knights. To the children
these occupations are surcharged with a sense of the mysterious values
that attach to whatever their elders are concerned with. The materials,
then, must be as “real,” as direct and straightforward, as opportunity
permits.
But the principle does not end here—the reality symbolized must also lie
within the capacities of the child’s own appreciation. It is sometimes
thought the use of the imagination is profitable in the degree it stands
for very remote metaphysical and spiritual principles. In the great
majority of such cases it is safe to say that the adult deceives himself.
He is conscious of both the reality and the symbol, and hence of the
relation between them. But since the truth or reality represented is far
beyond the reach of the child, the supposed symbol is not a symbol to him
at all. It is simply a positive thing on its own account. Practically
about all he gets out of it is its own physical and sensational meaning,
plus, very often, a glib facility in phrases and attitudes that he
learns are expected of him by the teacher—without, however, any mental
counterpart. We often teach insincerity, and instil sentimentalism, and
foster sensationalism when we think we are teaching spiritual truths
by means of symbols. The realities reproduced, therefore, by the child
should be of as familiar, direct, and real a character as possible. It is
largely for this reason that in the kindergarten of our School the work
centers so much about the reproduction of home and neighborhood life.
This brings us to the topic of
SUBJECT-MATTER
The home life in its setting of house, furniture, utensils, etc.,
together with the occupations carried on in the home, offers,
accordingly, material which is in a direct and real relationship to the
child, and which he naturally tends to reproduce in imaginative form.
It is also sufficiently full of ethical relations and suggestive of
moral duties to afford plenty of food for the child on his moral side.
The program is comparatively unambitious compared with that of many
kindergartens, but it may be questioned whether there are not certain
positive advantages in this limitation of the subject-matter. When
much ground is covered (the work going over, say, industrial society,
army, church, state, etc.), there is a tendency for the work to become
over-symbolic. So much of this material lies beyond the experience and
capacities of the child of four and five that practically all he gets
out of it is the physical and emotional reflex—he does not get any real
penetration into the material itself. Moreover, there is danger, in these
ambitious programs, of an unfavorable reaction upon the child’s own
intellectual attitude. Having covered pretty much the whole universe in a
purely make-believe fashion, he becomes blasé, loses his natural hunger
for the simple things of direct experience, and approaches the material
of the first grades of the primary school with a feeling that he has
had all that already. The later years of a child’s life have their own
rights, and a superficial, merely emotional anticipation is likely to do
the child serious injury.
Moreover, there is danger that a mental habit of jumping rapidly from
one topic to another be induced. The little child has a good deal of
patience and endurance of a certain type. It is true that he has a liking
for novelty and variety; that he soon wearies of an activity that does
not lead out into new fields and open up new paths for exploration. My
plea, however, is not for monotony. There is sufficient variety in the
activities, furnishings, and instrumentalities of the homes from which
the children come to give continual diversity. It touches the civic and
the industrial life at this and that point; these concerns can be brought
in, when desirable, without going beyond the unity of the main topic.
Thus there is an opportunity to foster that sense which is at the basis
of attention and of all intellectual growth—a sense of continuity.
This continuity is often interfered with by the very methods that
aim at securing it. From the child’s standpoint unity lies in the
subject-matter—in the present case, in the fact that he is always dealing
with one thing: home life. Emphasis is continually passing from one
phase of this life to another; one occupation after another, one piece
of furniture after another, one relation after another, etc., receive
attention; but they all fall into building up one and the same mode of
living, although bringing now this feature, now that, into prominence.
The child is working all the time _within a unity_, giving different
phases of its clearness and definiteness, and bringing them into
coherent connection with each other. When there is a great diversity of
subject-matter, continuity is apt to be sought simply on the formal side;
that is, in schemes of sequence, “schools of work,” a rigid program of
development followed with every topic, a “thought for the day” from which
the work is not supposed to stray. As a rule such sequence is purely
intellectual, hence is grasped only by the teacher, quite passing over
the head of the child. Hence the program for the year, term, month, week,
etc., should be made out on the basis of estimating how much of the
common subject-matter can be covered in that time, not on the basis of
intellectual or ethical principles. This will give both definiteness and
elasticity.
METHOD
The peculiar problem of the early grades is, of course, to get hold of
the child’s natural impulses and instincts, and to utilize them so that
the child is carried on to a higher plane of perception and judgment,
and equipped with more efficient habits; so that he has an enlarged
and deepened consciousness and increased control of powers of action.
Wherever this result is not reached, play results in mere amusement and
not in educative growth.
Upon the whole, constructive or “built up” work (with, of course, the
proper alternation of story, song, and game which may be connected, so
far as is desirable, with the ideas involved in the construction) seems
better fitted than anything else to secure these two factors—initiation
in the child’s own impulse and termination upon a higher plane. It
brings the child in contact with a great variety of material: wood, tin,
leather, yarn, etc.; it supplies a motive for using these materials in
real ways instead of going through exercises having no meaning except
a remote symbolic one; it calls into play alertness of the senses and
acuteness of observation; it demands clear-cut imagery of the ends to
be accomplished, and requires ingenuity and invention in planning; it
makes necessary concentrated attention and personal responsibility in
execution, while the results are in such tangible form that the child may
be led to judge his own work and improve his standards.
A word should be said regarding the psychology of imitation and
suggestion in relation to kindergarten work. There is no doubt that
the little child is highly imitative and open to suggestions; there is
no doubt that his crude powers and immature consciousness need to be
continually enriched and directed through these channels. But on this
account it is imperative to discriminate between a use of imitation and
suggestion which is so external as to be thoroughly non-psychological,
and a use which is justified through its organic relation to the child’s
own activities. As a general principle no activity should be _originated_
by imitation. The start must come from the child; the model or copy may
then be supplied in order to assist the child in imaging more definitely
what it is that he really wants—in bringing him to consciousness. Its
value is not as model to copy in action, but as guide to clearness and
adequacy of conception. Unless the child can get away from it to his own
imagery when it comes to execution, he is rendered servile and dependent,
not developed. Imitation comes in to reinforce and help out, not to
initiate.
There is no ground for holding that the teacher should not suggest
anything to the child until he has _consciously_ expressed a want in that
direction. A sympathetic teacher is quite likely to know more clearly
than the child himself what his own instincts are and mean. But the
suggestion must _fit in_ with the dominant mode of growth in the child;
it must serve simply as stimulus to bring forth more adequately what
the child is already blindly striving to do. Only by watching the child
and seeing the attitude that he assumes toward suggestions can we tell
whether they are operating as factors in furthering the child’s growth,
or whether they are external, arbitrary impositions interfering with
normal growth.
The same principle applies even more strongly to so-called dictation
work. Nothing is more absurd than to suppose that there is no middle
term between leaving a child to his own unguided fancies and likes or
controlling his activities by a formal succession of dictated directions.
As just intimated, it is the teacher’s business to know what powers are
striving for utterance at a given period in the child’s development,
and what sorts of activity will bring these to helpful expression, in
order then to supply the requisite stimuli and needed materials. The
suggestion, for instance, of a playhouse, the suggestion that comes from
seeing objects that have already been made to furnish it, from seeing
other children at work, is quite sufficient definitely to direct the
activities of a normal child of five. Imitation and suggestion come in
naturally and inevitably, but only as instruments to help him carry out
his own wishes and ideas. They serve to make him realize, to bring to
consciousness, what he already is striving for in a vague, confused,
and therefore ineffective way. From the psychological standpoint it may
safely be said that when a teacher has to rely upon a series of dictated
directions, it is just because the child has no image of his own of what
is to be done or why it is to be done. Instead, therefore, of gaining
power of control by conforming to directions, he is really losing it—made
dependent upon an external source.
In conclusion, it may be pointed out that such subject-matter and the
method connect directly with the work of the six-year-old children
(corresponding to the first grade of primary work). The play reproduction
of the home life passes naturally on into a more extended and serious
study of the larger social occupations upon which the home is dependent;
while the continually increasing demands made upon the child’s own
ability to plan and execute carry him over into more controlled use of
attention upon more distinctively intellectual topics. It must not be
forgotten that the readjustment needed to secure continuity between
“kindergarten” and “first-grade” work cannot be brought about wholly
from the side of the latter. The school change must be as gradual and
insensible as that in the growth of the child. This is impossible unless
the subprimary work surrenders whatever isolates it, and hospitably
welcomes whatever materials and resources will keep pace with the full
development of the child’s powers, and thus keep him always prepared,
ready, for the next work he has to do.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OCCUPATIONS
VI
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OCCUPATIONS
By occupation is not meant any kind of “busy work” or exercises that may
be given to a child in order to keep him out of mischief or idleness
when seated at his desk. By occupation I mean a mode of activity on
the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form
of work carried on in social life. In the University Elementary School
these occupations are represented by the shopwork with wood and tools; by
cooking, sewing, and by the textile work herewith reported upon.
The fundamental point in the psychology of an occupation is that it
maintains a balance between the intellectual and the practical phases
of experience. As an occupation it is active or motor; it finds
expression through the physical organs—the eyes, hands, etc. But it also
involves continual observation of materials, and continual planning
and reflection, in order that the practical or executive side may be
successfully carried on. Occupation as thus conceived must, therefore, be
carefully distinguished from work which educates primarily for a trade.
It differs because its end is in itself; in the growth that comes from
the continual interplay of ideas and their embodiment in action, not in
external utility.
It is possible to carry on this type of work in other than trade schools,
so that the entire emphasis falls upon the manual or physical side. In
such cases the work is reduced to a mere routine or custom, and its
educational value is lost. This is the inevitable tendency wherever,
in manual training for instance, the mastery of certain tools, or the
production of certain objects, is made the primary end, and the child is
not given, wherever possible, intellectual responsibility for selecting
the materials and instruments that are most fit, and given an opportunity
to think out his own model and plan of work, led to perceive his own
errors, and find out how to correct them—that is, of course, within
the range of his capacities. So far as the external result is held in
view, rather than the mental and moral states and growth involved in
the process of reaching the result, the work may be called manual, but
cannot rightly be termed an occupation. Of course the tendency of all
mere habit, routine, or custom is to result in what is unconscious and
mechanical. That of occupation is to put the maximum of consciousness
into whatever is done.
This enables us to interpret the stress laid (_a_) upon personal
experimenting, planning, and reinventing in connection with the textile
work, and (_b_) its parallelism with lines of historical development.
The first requires the child to be mentally quick and alert at every
point in order that he may do the outward work properly. The second
enriches and deepens the work performed by saturating it with values
suggested from the social life which it recapitulates.
Occupations, so considered, furnish the ideal occasions for both
sense-training and discipline in thought. The weakness of ordinary
lessons in observation, calculated to train the senses, is that they have
no outlet beyond themselves, and hence no necessary motive. Now, in the
natural life of the individual and the race there is always a reason for
sense-observation. There is always some need, coming from an end to be
reached, that makes one look about to discover and discriminate whatever
will assist him. Normal sensations operate as clues, as aids, as stimuli,
in directing activity in what has to be done; they are not ends in
themselves. Separated from real needs and motives, sense-training becomes
a mere gymnastic and easily degenerates into acquiring what are hardly
more than mere knacks or tricks in observation, or else mere excitement
of the sense organs.
The same principle applies in normal _thinking_. It also does not occur
for its own sake, nor end in itself. It arises from the need of meeting
some difficulty, in reflecting upon the best way of overcoming it, and
thus leads to planning, to projecting mentally the result to be reached,
and deciding upon the steps necessary and their serial order. This
concrete logic of action long precedes the logic of pure speculation or
abstract investigation, and through the mental habits that it forms is
the best of preparations for the latter.
Another educational point upon which the psychology of occupations
throws helpful light is the place of interest in school work. One of the
objections regularly brought against giving in school work any large
or positive place to the child’s interest is the impossibility on such
a basis of proper selection. The child, it is said, has all kinds of
interests, good, bad, and indifferent. It is necessary to decide between
the interests that are really important and those that are trivial;
between those that are helpful and those that are harmful; between those
that are transitory or mark immediate excitement, and those which endure
and are permanently influential. It would seem as if we had to go beyond
interest to get any basis for using interest.
Now, there can be no doubt that occupation work possesses a strong
interest for the child. A glance into any school where such work is
carried on will give sufficient evidence of this fact. Outside of the
school, a large portion of the children’s plays are simply more or less
miniature and haphazard attempts at reproducing social occupations.
There are certain reasons for believing that the type of interest which
springs up along with these occupations is of a thoroughly healthy,
permanent, and really educative sort; and that by giving a larger place
to occupations we should secure an excellent, perhaps the very best, way
of making an appeal to the child’s spontaneous interest, and yet have, at
the same time, some guaranty that we are not dealing with what is merely
pleasure-giving, exciting, or transient.
In the first place, every interest grows out of some instinct or
some habit that in turn is finally based upon an original instinct.
It does not follow that all instincts are of equal value, or that we
do not inherit many instincts which need transformation, rather than
satisfaction, in order to be useful in life. But the instincts which
find their conscious outlet and expression in occupation are bound to
be of an exceedingly fundamental and permanent type. The activities of
life are of necessity directed to bringing the materials and forces of
nature under the control of our purposes; of making them tributary to
ends of life. Men have had to work in order to live. In and through
their work they have mastered nature, they have protected and enriched
the conditions of their own life, they have been awakened to the sense
of their own powers—have been led to invent, to plan, and to rejoice
in the acquisition of skill. In a rough way, all occupations may be
classified as gathering about man’s fundamental relations to the world in
which he lives through getting food to maintain life; securing clothing
and shelter to protect and ornament it, and thus, finally, to provide a
permanent home in which all the higher and more spiritual interests may
center. It is hardly unreasonable to suppose that interests which have
such a history behind them must be of the worthy sort.
However, these interests as they develop in the child not only
recapitulate past important activities of the race, but reproduce those
of the child’s present environment. He continually sees his elders
engaged in such pursuits. He daily has to do with things which are the
results of just such occupations. He comes in contact with facts that
have no meaning, except in reference to them. Take these things out of
the present social life and see how little would remain—and this not
only on the material side, but as regards intellectual, aesthetic, and
moral activities, for these are largely and necessarily bound up with
occupations. The child’s instinctive interests in this direction are,
therefore, constantly reinforced by what he sees, feels, and hears going
on around him. Suggestions along this line are continually coming to
him; motives are awakened; his energies are stirred to action. Again,
it is not unreasonable to suppose that interests which are touched so
constantly, and on so many sides, belong to the worthy and enduring type.
In the third place, one of the objections made against the principle
of interest in education is that it tends to disintegration of mental
economy by constantly stirring up the child in this way or that,
destroying continuity and thoroughness. But an occupation (such as the
textile one herewith reported on) is of necessity a continuous thing. It
lasts, not only for days, but for months and years. It represents, not
a stirring of isolated and superficial energies, but rather a steady,
continuous organization of power along certain general lines. The same
is true, of course, of any other form of occupation, such as shopwork
with tools, or as cooking. The occupations articulate a vast variety of
impulses, otherwise separate and spasmodic, into a consistent skeleton
with a firm backbone. It may well be doubted whether, wholly apart from
some such regular and progressive modes of action, extending as cores
throughout the entire school, it would be permanently safe to give the
principle of “interest” any large place in school work.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION
VII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION
The subprimary or kindergarten department is undertaking the pedagogical
problems growing out of an attempt to connect kindergarten work
intimately with primary, and to readapt traditional materials and
technique to meet present social conditions and our present physiological
and psychological knowledge. A detailed statement of the work will be
published later.
Little children have their observations and thoughts mainly directed
toward people: what they do, how they behave, what they are occupied
with, and what comes of it. Their interest is of a personal rather than
of an objective or intellectual sort. Its intellectual counterpart
is the story-form; not the task, consciously defined end, or
problem—meaning by story-form something psychical, the holding together
of a variety of persons, things, and incidents through a common idea
that enlists feeling; not an outward relation or tale. Their minds
seek wholes, varied through episode, enlivened with action and defined
in salient features—there must be go, movement, the sense of use and
operation—inspection of things separated from the idea by which they
are carried. Analysis of isolated detail of form and structure neither
appeals nor satisfies.
Material provided by existing social occupations is calculated to
meet and feed this attitude. In previous years the children have been
concerned with the occupations of the home, and the contact of homes
with one another and with outside life. Now they may take up typical
occupations of society at large—a step farther removed from the child’s
egoistic, self-absorbed interest, and yet dealing with something personal
and something which touches him.
From the standpoint of educational theory, the following features may be
noted:
1. The study of natural objects, processes, and relations is placed in a
human setting. During the year, a considerably detailed observation of
seeds and their growth, of plants, woods, stones, animals, as to some
phases of structure and habit, of geographical conditions of landscape,
climate, arrangement of land and water, is undertaken. The pedagogical
problem is to direct the child’s power of observation, to nurture his
sympathetic interest in characteristic traits of the world in which he
lives, to afford interpreting material for later more special studies,
and yet to supply a carrying medium for the variety of facts and ideas
through the dominant spontaneous emotions and thoughts of the child.
Hence their association with human life. Absolutely no separation is
made between the “social” side of the work, its concern with people’s
activities and their mutual dependencies, and the “science,” regard for
physical facts and forces—because the conscious distinction between man
and nature is the result of later reflection and abstraction, and to
force it upon the child here is not only to fail to engage his whole
mental energy, but to confuse and distract him. The environment is always
that in which life is situated and through which it is circumstanced; and
to isolate it, to make it with little children an object of observation
and remark by itself, is to treat human nature inconsiderately. At last,
the original open and free attitude of the mind to nature is destroyed;
nature has been reduced to a mass of meaningless details.
In its emphasis upon the “concrete” and “individual,” modern pedagogical
theory often loses sight of the fact that the existence and presentation
of an individual physical thing—a stone, an orange, a cat—is no guaranty
of _concreteness_; that this is a psychological affair, whatever appeals
to the mind as a whole, as a self-sufficient center of interest and
attention. The reaction from this external and somewhat dead standpoint
often assumes, however, that the needed clothing with human significance
can come only by direct personification, and we have that continued
symbolization of a plant, cloud, or rain which makes only pseudo-science
possible; which, instead of generating love for nature itself, switches
interest to certain sensational and emotional accompaniments, and leaves
it, at last, dissipated and burnt out. And even the tendency to approach
nature through the medium of literature, the pine tree through the fable
of the discontented pine, etc., while recognizing the need of the human
association, fails to note that there is a more straightforward road
from mind to the object—direct through connection with life itself;
and that the poem and story, the literary statement, have their place
as reinforcements and idealizations, not as foundation stones. What is
wanted, in other words, is not to fix up a connection of child mind and
nature, but to give free and effective play to the connection already
operating.
2. This suggests at once the practical questions that are usually
discussed under the name of “correlation,” questions of such interaction
of the various matters studied and powers under acquisition as will
avoid waste and maintain unity of mental growth. From the standpoint
adopted the problem is one of differentiation rather than of correlation
as ordinarily understood. The unity of life, as it presents itself to
the child, binds together and carries along the different occupations,
the diversity of plants, animals, and geographic conditions; drawing,
modeling, games, constructive work, numerical calculations are ways of
carrying certain features of it to mental and emotional satisfaction
and completeness. Not much attention is paid in this year to reading
and writing; but it is obvious that if this were regarded as desirable,
the same principle would apply. It is the community and continuity of
the subject-matter that organizes, that correlates; correlation is
not through devices of instruction which the teacher employs in tying
together things in themselves disconnected.
3. Two recognized demands of primary education are often, at present,
not unified or are even opposed. The need of the familiar, the already
experienced, as a basis for moving upon the unknown and remote, is a
commonplace. The claims of the child’s imagination as a factor is at
least beginning to be recognized. The problem is to work these two forces
together, instead of separately. The child is too often given drill upon
familiar objects and ideas under the sanction of the first principle,
while he is introduced with equal directness to the weird, strange, and
impossible to satisfy the claims of the second. The result, it is hardly
too much to say, is a twofold failure. There is no special connection
between the unreal, the myth, the fairy tale, and the play of mental
imagery. Imagination is not a matter of an impossible subject-matter,
but a constructive way of dealing with any subject-matter under the
influence of a pervading idea. The point is not to dwell with wearisome
iteration upon the familiar and under the guise of object-lessons to
keep the senses directed at material which they have already made
acquaintance with, but to enliven and illumine the ordinary, commonplace,
and homely by using it to build up and appreciate situations previously
unrealized and alien. And this also is culture of imagination. Some
writers appear to have the impression that the child’s imagination has
outlet only in myth and fairy tale of ancient time and distant place or
in weaving egregious fabrications regarding sun, moon, and stars; and
have even pleaded for a mythical investiture of all “science”—as a way
of satisfying the dominating imagination of the child. But fortunately
these things are exceptions, are intensifications, are relaxations of the
average child; not his pursuits. The John and Jane that most of us know
let their imaginations play about the current and familiar contacts and
events of life—about father and mother and friend, about steamboats and
locomotives, and sheep and cows, about the romance of farm and forest, of
seashore and mountain. What is needed, in a word, is to afford occasion
by which the child is moved to educe and exchange with others his store
of experiences, his range of information, to make new observations
correcting and extending them in order to keep his images moving,
in order to find mental rest and satisfaction in definite and vivid
realization of what is new and enlarging.
With the development of reflective attention come the need and the
possibility of a change in the mode of the child’s instruction. In the
previous paragraphs we have been concerned with the direct, spontaneous
attitude that marks the child till into his seventh year—his demand
for new experiences and his desire to complete his partial experiences
by building up images and expressing them in play. This attitude is
typical of what writers call spontaneous attention, or, as some say,
non-voluntary attention.
The child is simply absorbed in what he is doing; the occupation in which
he is engaged lays complete hold upon him. He gives himself without
reserve. Hence, while there is much energy spent, there is no _conscious_
effort; while the child is intent to the point of engrossment, there is
no _conscious_ intention.
With the development of a sense of more remote ends, and of the need
of directing acts so as to make them means for these ends (a matter
discussed in the second number), we have the transition to what is termed
indirect, or, as some writers prefer to say, voluntary, attention. A
result is imaged, and the child attends to what is before him or what
he is immediately doing because it helps to secure the result. Taken by
itself, the object or the act might be indifferent or even repulsive.
But because it is felt to belong to something desirable or valuable, it
borrows the latter’s attracting and holding power.
This is the transition to “voluntary” attention, but only the transition.
The latter comes fully into being only when the child entertains results
in the form of problems or questions, the solution of which he is to
seek for himself. In the intervening stage (in the child from eight to,
say, eleven or twelve), while the child directs a series of intervening
activities on the basis of some end he wishes to reach, this end is
something to be done or made, or some tangible result to be reached; the
problem is a practical difficulty, rather than an intellectual question.
But with growing power the child can conceive of the end as something to
be found out, discovered; and can control his acts and images so as to
help in the inquiry and solution. This is reflective attention proper.
In history work there is change from the story and biography form, from
discussion of questions that arise, to the formulation of questions.
Points about which difference of opinion is possible, matters upon which
experience, reflection, etc., can be brought to bear, are always coming
up in history. But to use the discussion to develop this matter of
doubt and difference into a definite problem, to bring the child to feel
just what the difficulty is, and then throw him upon his own resources
in looking up material bearing upon the point, and upon his judgment in
bringing it to bear, or getting a solution, is a marked intellectual
advance. So in the science there is a change from the practical attitude
of making and using cameras to the consideration of the problems
intellectually involved in this—to principles of light, angular
measurements, etc., which give the theory or explanation of the practice.
In general, this growth is a natural process. But the proper recognition
and use of it is perhaps the most serious problem in instruction upon
the intellectual side. A person who has gained the power of reflective
attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind,
_is_ in so far, intellectually speaking, educated. He has mental
discipline—power _of_ the mind and _for_ the mind. Without this the
mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions. Some of
the difficulties may be barely indicated by referring to an error that
almost dominates instruction of the usual type. Too often it is assumed
that attention can be given directly to any subject-matter, if only the
proper will or disposition be at hand, failure being regarded as a sign
of unwillingness or indocility. Lessons in arithmetic, geography, and
grammar are put before the child, and he is told to attend in order to
learn. But excepting as there is some question, some doubt, present in
the mind as a _basis_ for this attention, _reflective_ attention is
impossible. If there is sufficient _intrinsic_ interest in the material,
there will be direct or spontaneous attention, which is excellent so far
as it goes, but which merely of itself does not give power of thought or
internal mental control. If there is not an inherent attracting power
in the material, then (according to his temperament and training, and
the precedents and expectations of the school) the teacher will either
attempt to surround the material with foreign attractiveness, making a
bid or offering a bribe for attention by “making the lesson interesting”;
or else will resort to counterirritants (low marks, threats of
non-promotion, staying after school, personal disapprobation, expressed
in a great variety of ways, naggings, continuous calling upon the child
to “pay attention,” etc.); or, probably, will use some of both means.
But (1) the attention thus gained is never more than partial, or divided;
and (2) it always remains dependent upon something external—hence, when
the attraction ceases or the pressure lets up, there is little or no gain
in inner or intellectual control. And (3) such attention is always for
the sake of “learning,” i.e., _memorizing ready-made answers to possible
questions to be put by another_. True, reflective attention, on the other
hand, always involves judging, reasoning, deliberation; it means that
the child has a _question of his own_ and is actively engaged in seeking
and selecting relevant material with which to answer it, considering the
bearings and relations of this material—the kind of solution it calls
for. The problem is one’s own; hence also the impetus, the stimulus
to attention, is one’s own; hence also the training secured is one’s
own—it is discipline, or gain in power of control; that is, a _habit_ of
considering problems.
It is hardly too much to say that in the traditional education so much
stress has been laid upon the presentation to the child of ready-made
material (books, object-lessons, teacher’s talks, etc.), and the child
has been so almost exclusively held to bare responsibility for reciting
upon this ready-made material, that there has been only accidental
occasion and motive for developing reflective attention. Next to no
consideration has been paid to the fundamental necessity—leading the
child to realize a problem as his own, so that he is self-induced to
attend in order to find out its answer. So completely have the conditions
for securing this self-putting of problems been neglected that the very
idea of voluntary attention has been radically perverted. It is regarded
as measured by unwilling effort—as activity called out by foreign,
and so repulsive, material under conditions of strain, instead of as
self-initiated effort. “Voluntary” is treated as meaning the reluctant
and disagreeable instead of the free, the self-directed, through personal
interest, insight, and power.
THE AIM OF HISTORY IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
VIII
THE AIM OF HISTORY IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
If history be regarded as just the record of the past, it is hard to
see any grounds for claiming that it should play any large rôle in the
curriculum of elementary education. The past is the past, and the dead
may be safely left to bury its dead. There are too many urgent demands in
the present, too many calls over the threshold of the future, to permit
the child to become deeply immersed in what is forever gone by. Not so
when history is considered as an account of the forces and forms of
social life. Social life we have always with us; the distinction of past
and present is indifferent to it. Whether it was lived just here or just
there is a matter of slight moment. It is life for all that; it shows
the motives which draw men together and push them apart, and depicts
what is desirable and what is hurtful. Whatever history may be for the
scientific historian, for the educator it must be an indirect sociology—a
study of society which lays bare its process of becoming and its modes of
organization. Existing society is both too complex and too close to the
child to be studied. He finds no clues into its labyrinth of detail and
can mount no eminence whence to get a perspective of arrangement.
If the aim of historical instruction is to enable the child to appreciate
the values of social life, to see in imagination the forces which favor
and let men’s effective co-operation with one another, to understand
the sorts of character that help on and that hold back, the essential
thing in its presentation is to make it moving, dynamic. History must be
presented, not as an accumulation of results or effects, a mere statement
of what happened, but as a forceful, acting thing. The motives—that is,
the motors—must stand out. To study history is not to amass information,
but to use information in constructing a vivid picture of how and why men
did thus and so; achieved their successes and came to their failures.
When history is conceived as dynamic, as moving, its economic and
industrial aspects are emphasized. These are but technical terms which
express the problem with which humanity is unceasingly engaged; how to
live, how to master and use nature so as to make it tributary to the
enrichment of human life. The great advances in civilization have come
through those manifestations of intelligence which have lifted man from
his precarious subjection to nature, and revealed to him how he may make
its forces co-operate with his own purposes. The social world in which
the child now lives is so rich and full that it is not easy to see how
much it cost, how much effort and thought lie back of it. Man has a
tremendous equipment ready at hand. The child may be led to translate
these ready-made resources into fluid terms; he may be led to see man
face to face with nature, without inherited capital, without tools,
without manufactured materials. And, step by step, he may follow the
processes by which man recognized the needs of his situation, thought out
the weapons and instruments that enable him to cope with them; and may
learn how these new resources opened new horizons of growth and created
new problems. The industrial history of man is not a materialistic or
merely utilitarian affair. It is a matter of intelligence. Its record
is the record of how man learned to think, to think to some effect, to
transform the conditions of life so that life itself became a different
thing. It is an ethical record as well; the account of the conditions
which men have patiently wrought out to serve their ends.
The question of how human beings live, indeed, represents the dominant
interest with which the child approaches historic material. It is this
point of view which brings those who worked in the past close to the
beings with whom he is daily associated, and confers upon him the gift of
sympathetic penetration.
The child who is interested in the way in which men lived, the tools
they had to do with, the new inventions they made, the transformations
of life that arose from the power and leisure thus gained, is eager to
repeat like processes in his own action, to remake utensils, to reproduce
processes, to rehandle materials. Since he understands their problems and
their successes only by seeing what obstacles and what resources they
had from nature, the child is interested in field and forest, ocean and
mountain, plant and animal. By building up a conception of the natural
environment in which lived the people he is studying, he gets his hold
upon their lives. This reproduction he cannot make excepting as he gains
acquaintance with the natural forces and forms with which he is himself
surrounded. The interest in history gives a more human coloring, a
wider significance, to his own study of nature. His knowledge of nature
lends point and accuracy to his study of history. This is the natural
“correlation” of history and science.
This same end, a deepening appreciation of social life, decides the place
of the biographic element in historical instruction. That historical
material appeals to the child most completely and vividly when presented
in individual form, when summed up in the lives and deeds of some heroic
character, there can be no doubt. Yet it is possible to use biographies
so that they become a collection of mere stories, interesting, possibly,
to the point of sensationalism, but yet bringing the child no nearer to
comprehension of social life. This happens when the individual who is
the hero of the tale is isolated from his social environment; when the
child is not brought to feel the social situations which evoked his acts
and the social progress to which his deeds contributed. If biography
is presented as a dramatic summary of social needs and achievements,
if the child’s imagination pictures the social defects and problems
that clamored for the man and the ways in which the individual met the
emergency, then the biography is an organ of social study.
A consciousness of the social aim of history prevents any tendency to
swamp history in myth, fairy story, and merely literary renderings. I
cannot avoid the feeling that much as the Herbartian school has done
to enrich the elementary curriculum in the direction of history, it
has often inverted the true relationship existing between history and
literature. In a certain sense the motif of American colonial history
and of De Foe’s _Robinson Crusoe_ are the same. Both represent man
who has achieved civilization, who has attained a certain maturity of
thought, who has developed ideals and means of action, but suddenly
thrown back upon his own resources, having to cope with a raw and often
hostile nature, and to regain success by sheer intelligence, energy,
and persistence of character. But when _Robinson Crusoe_ supplies the
material for the curriculum of the third- or fourth-grade child, are
we not putting the cart before the horse? Why not give the child the
reality with its much larger sweep, its intenser forces, its more vivid
and lasting value for life, using the _Robinson Crusoe_ as an imaginative
idealization in a particular case of the same sort of problems and
activities? Again, whatever may be the worth of the study of savage life
in general, and of the North American Indians in particular, why should
that be approached circuitously through the medium of _Hiawatha_, instead
of at first hand? employing indeed the poem to furnish the idealized and
culminating touches to a series of conditions and struggles which the
child has previously realized in more specific form. Either the life of
the Indian presents some permanent questions and factors in social life,
or it has next to no place in a scheme of instruction. If it has such
a value, this should be made to stand out on its own account, instead
of being lost in the very refinement and beauty of a purely literary
presentation.
The same end, the understanding of character and social relations
in their natural dependence, enables us, I think, to decide upon
the importance to be attached to chronological order in historical
instruction. Considerable stress has of late been laid upon the supposed
necessity of following the development of civilization through the
successive steps in which it actually took place—beginning with the
valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, and coming on down through Greece,
Rome, etc. The point urged is that the present depends upon the past and
each phase of the past upon a prior past.
We are here introduced to a conflict between the logical and
psychological interpretation of history. If the aim be an appreciation of
what social life is and how it goes on, then, certainly, the child must
deal with what is near in spirit, not with the remote. The difficulty
with the Babylonian or Egyptian life is not so much its remoteness in
time, as its remoteness from the present interests and aims of social
life. It does not simplify enough and does not generalize enough; or,
at least, it does not do so in the right way. It does it by omission
of what is significant now, rather than by presenting these factors
arranged on a lower scale. Its salient features are hard to get at and
to understand, even by the specialist. It undoubtedly presents factors
which contributed to later life, and which modified the course of events
in the stream of time. But the child has not arrived at a point where he
can appreciate abstract causes and specialized contributions. What he
needs is a picture of typical relations, conditions, and activities. In
this respect, there is much of prehistoric life which is much closer to
him than the complicated and artificial life of Babylon or of Egypt. When
a child is capable of appreciating institutions, he is capable of seeing
what special institutional idea each historic nation stands for, and what
factor it has contributed to the present complex of institutions. But
this period arrives only when the child is beginning to be capable of
abstracting causes in other realms as well; in other words, when he is
approaching the time of secondary education.
In this general scheme three periods or phases are recognized: first
comes the generalized and simplified history—history which is hardly
history at all in the local or chronological sense, but which aims at
giving the child insight into, and sympathy with, a variety of social
activities. This period includes the work of the six-year-old children
in studying typical occupations of people in the country and city at
present; of the seven-year-old children in working out the evolution
of inventions and their effects upon life, and of the eight-year-old
children in dealing with the great movements of migration, exploration,
and discovery which have brought the whole round world into human ken.
The work of the first two years is evidently quite independent of any
particular people or any particular person—that is, of historical data
in the strict sense of the term. At the same time, plenty of scope is
provided through dramatization for the introduction of the individual
factor. The account of the great explorers and the discoverers serves to
make the transition to what is local and specific, that which depends
upon certain specified persons who lived at certain specified places and
times.
This introduces us to the second period where local conditions
and the definite activities of particular bodies of people become
prominent—corresponding to the child’s growth in power of dealing with
limited and positive fact. Since Chicago, since the United States,
are localities with which the child can, by the nature of the case,
most effectively deal, the material of the next three years is derived
directly and indirectly from this source. Here, again, the third year
is a transitional year, taking up the connections of American life with
European. By this time the child should be ready to deal, not with social
life in general, or even with the social life with which he is most
familiar, but with certain thoroughly differentiated and, so to speak,
peculiar types of social life; with the special significance of each
and the particular contribution it has made to the whole world-history.
Accordingly, in the next period the chronological order is followed,
beginning with the ancient world about the Mediterranean and coming
down again through European history to the peculiar and differentiating
factors of American history.
The program is not presented as the only one meeting the problem, but
as a contribution; the outcome, not of thought, but of considerable
experimenting and shifting of subjects from year to year, to the problem
of giving material which takes vital hold upon the child and at the same
time leads on, step by step, to more thorough and accurate knowledge of
both the principles and facts of social life, and makes a preparation for
later specialized historic studies.
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