THE AIM OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOL
During the past thirty years no part of our educational system has
received so much attention as the Elementary Schools of the country. If
we compare the condition of things which prevails at the present time
with that which existed previous to 1870, there can be no doubt that a
great advance has been made both in the better provision of the means of
education and in the efficiency of the instruction given. Previous to
1870 a large number of the children of the poor received no
education.[39] Of those attending school many left with but a scanty
knowledge. Now practically every child[40] receives a training in the
primary arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic; and with the gradual
extension of the period during which the child must attend school, it
has become possible to ensure that a larger and larger number of
children leaving our Elementary Schools have received an education which
may be of value for the after-fulfilment of the simpler practical ends
of life. Again, previous to 1870 the school buildings were in many cases
unfit for their purpose; now the Elementary Schools of the country both
in their building arrangements and equipment are as a rule much superior
to the voluntary and endowed schools providing secondary education.
Previous to 1870 anyone was thought good enough to undertake the work of
teaching; since that time more and more attention has been paid to the
qualifications of the teacher and to securing that he shall have
attained a certain standard of education, and have received a certain
measure of training before engaging upon the work of the instruction of
the young. We, _e.g._, no longer entrust the instruction of the younger
children in the school to the older, as was the custom under the
monitorial system of Bell and Lancaster, and with the abolition of the
pupil-teacher the last remnant of a system introduced at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, as the only remedy to meet the dire
educational necessities of the time, will have been removed.
But in spite of the great advances which have been made, there is a
deep-seated feeling now beginning to find expression, that somehow or
other the Elementary School has not realised all the expectations that
were once thought likely to result from the universal education of the
children of the nation, and that in particular the Primary School has
failed to foster and to establish the moral and social qualities
necessary for the welfare of a State whose government is founded on the
representative principle.
This, it seems to me, is largely due to the wrong conception of the aims
which the Primary School is intended to realise--a conception which
prevailed for many years after the introduction of compulsory elementary
education. For some time now, and especially during the past few years,
a counter-reaction has set in against the narrowness of the aims of the
preceding period, and like all reactions it tends to go to the opposite
extreme, and so to broaden the aims of the Primary School as to be in
danger of failing to realise efficiently any one of the ends which it
sets before it.
The state of things immediately preceding 1870 not unnaturally gave rise
to the idea that the acquisition of the arts of reading, writing, and
arithmetic was the one indispensable object to be attained in the
elementary education of the child. This conviction was strengthened by
the system of Government grants introduced into both English and Scotch
schools, payments to school managers being largely based upon the
successes obtained in passes in the three elementary subjects.
Certain results naturally followed. In the first place, no provision was
made for the special education of the infant classes. Since the
after-success of the child was measured by his attainments in the three
R's, the sooner the infant mind was introduced to these subjects the
better the after-result might be expected to be. Thus the grant-earning
capacity of the child became the teacher's chief consideration. In the
second place, the energies of the teacher were directed to secure a
certain mechanical accuracy in the use of the three elementary arts
rather than their intelligent apprehension. As a consequence, these
subjects came in time to be thought of as subjects worthy of attainment
for their own sake and their acquisition as an end in itself. Hence it
was forgotten that the acquisition and organisation of these systems of
elementary knowledge are only valuable because they are the
indispensable means of all intercourse, of all commerce, and of all
culture. Hence also their use as instruments for the after-realisation
of many purposes in life tended to be neglected, or at least to fall
into the background. Individual teachers, no doubt, in many cases
realised the partial error in this conception of the aims of the Primary
School, but the demands of Government inspectors and of school
authorities, with their rule-of-thumb methods of testing the success of
the teacher's work by the percentage of passes gained, tended often to
make the teacher, in spite of his better judgment, look upon the child
mainly as a three-R grant-earning subject and to consider the chief aim
of primary education to be the securing of a certain mechanical
proficiency in the use of the three elementary arts.
Under such a method of examination it was certainly necessary for the
teacher to pay some attention to the individuality of the child. If his
efforts were to be at all successful it was incumbent upon him to
discover as early as possible the range of the child's previous
knowledge in the three grant-earning subjects and to find out in which
of the three the power of acquisition of the child was naturally weak or
naturally strong. Where the number of children in a class was large,
little individual attention could, of course, be paid to the child, and
in such cases the acquisition of the subject was aided by the mechanical
drilling of sections of the class and by recourse to all manner of
devices for ensuring the accurate acquisition of the essential subjects.
As a result of this partial and one-sided conception little attention
was paid to the use to which these subjects may be put in the
realisation of the practical ends of life. Arithmetic, _e.g._, seemed to
the child to be made up of a number of kinds of arithmetic, each process
having its own rules and methods of procedure; but it never entered into
his mind, and but seldom into that of his teacher, that the various
arithmetical processes are at bottom but diverse forms of the one
fundamental process of adding to or subtracting from a group. Proportion
was one kind of arithmetic, simple interest another, but that these
processes symbolised real group-forming processes, or that they had to
do with any of the realities of life, was apprehended, if at all, in the
most imperfect and hazy manner.
In a similar manner, the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties of
language construction occupied the major portion of the attention of the
child during the school period, and the function of language in
conveying a knowledge of things and persons and events received but a
small share of his attention. Meanings of words were indeed tabulated
and learnt by heart, and as a rule the child on examination-day could
make a fair show in deluding the inspector that the passage read was
intelligently apprehended. In very much the same way, the overcoming of
the mechanical difficulties of writing and the drilling of the child to
form his letters in a uniform style received the chief share of the
school-time devoted to the subject.
The interest and attention of the child having been thus mainly occupied
in the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties involved in the
learning of the three grant-earning subjects, and little attention
having been paid to the use of these arts, it followed that upon the
conclusion of the school period the child left the school without any
real interests having been established as the result of the educative
process.
Moreover, except in so far as by their teaching we may establish habits
of order and of accuracy, the three elementary subjects in themselves
possess no moral or social intent; hence unless we can make the child
realise their value as instruments for the attainment of ends of social
worth they in themselves fail to play any important part in the building
up of character.
Let me put this in another way. We have defined education as the process
of acquiring and systematising experiences that will render future
action more efficient, or alternatively it is the process by which we
organise and establish in the mind systems of ideas for the attainment
of ends. But if we make the acquisition of these elementary arts ends in
themselves, then it follows that the more efficient action we seek to
realise is the more efficient manipulation of a number system or a
language system. If, however, we realise that these arts are but means
to the realisation of other ends, then we shall understand that it is
the character of the latter which mainly determines the resulting
character of the education given.
Partly to this erroneous conception of the real function of the
elementary arts, and partly to another cause which we shall mention
later, may be attributed the poor results which our Elementary School
system has attained in the establishment of interests of moral and
social worth. If, moreover, we realise how large a proportion of the
children left and still do leave school at an early age, before such
interests can be permanently established, and in some cases with
anything but an adequate knowledge of the elementary arts necessary for
all further progress, we may rather be astonished that so much has been
done than so little.
But in the reaction against the narrowness and formalism of our early
aims in elementary education, there is a tendency--a strong tendency--at
the present time to go to the opposite extreme, and to make the
elementary instrumental arts the vehicles for the fostering of real
interests at too early a stage. This manifests itself on the one hand in
the desire to make all instruction interesting to the child, and on the
other to introduce the child prematurely to a knowledge of the real
conditions of life, before he can have any intelligent understanding of
these conditions. From the barrenness and formalism of the earlier
period, we now have the demand made that the school should throughout
take into account the real and practical necessities of life.
The former tendency--the tendency to make everything interesting to the
child by lessening or minimising the mechanical difficulties and by
endeavouring in every way to incite the child to become interested in
the content of the lesson--is best exemplified by the character of the
school books which we now place in the hands of our children. The latter
tendency--the tendency to the premature use of the elementary arts--is
exemplified by the craving to make our teaching of arithmetic practical
and real from the very beginning.
In the former case, instead of endeavouring to make the process of
language construction interesting in itself, we divert the child's
attention from the acquiring and organising of the system of language
forms to the premature acquirement of the content of language. What
results is obvious: the main interest being in the content, the
interest in the mechanical construction of the form suffers, and as a
consequence the child never attains a full mastery over the instrumental
art.
In the latter case we attempt to do two things at the same time in our
teaching of arithmetic. In every concrete application of arithmetic
there are two interests involved: in the first place, there is the
number interest--the interest in the analysing and recombining of a
group, undertaken for the sake of the reconstruction itself; in the
second place, there is the business or real interest, which the number
interest indeed subserves, but the two interests are in no case
identical. If we attempt to teach the two together, we as a rule teach
both badly. The pupil will have but a hazy idea of the business
relation, and will run the risk of imperfectly organising the pure
number system. Hence all kinds of impossible problems may be given to
the child without raising any suspicion of error in his mind, and such
cases furnish certain evidence that the business relation does not
really concern him, but that his whole attention is engaged with the
purely constructive aspect of number. Another example of the same error
of confounding two separate things is the "blind mixture we make of
arithmetic and measuring." Because arithmetic is involved in all
measuring we assume that when the child can add together feet and
inches, therefore he has a complete knowledge of these spatial
magnitudes. But manifestly, if spatial magnitude is to be taught
intelligently, it must at first be taught independently of the number
relation, which is a general system instrumental in the realisation of
many concrete interests.
From these considerations, certain general results follow. On the one
hand, the earlier conception of the aim of the Primary School as being
mainly concerned with the acquirement and organisation of the three
elementary arts as ends in themselves must be condemned. Language and
number systems are means to the realisation of certain concrete ends of
after-life, and the school during the later stages of education must
endeavour to lead the child to perceive how these systems may be
utilised in the furtherance of these real concrete interests. On the
other hand, the attempt to combine prematurely these two aims will
result in the imperfect attainment of both. During the earlier stages of
education the main interest must be in the construction for its own sake
of the language system or the number system, and while the real interest
may be introduced it must always be kept subsidiary to the main
interest--must first of all be taught for its own sake, and the
instrumental art only used for its furtherance in so far as the
acquirement of the former is not obstructed. _E.g._, the placing of
geography and history Readers in the hands of the child while he is
still struggling with the difficulties of language construction can only
result in the history and geography being imperfectly understood and the
organisation of the language system being delayed and hindered.
Once the elementary and subsidiary systems have been fairly well
organised and established, their function as means for the furtherance
of real interests should occupy a larger share of the child's attention
and of the time of the school. These real interests, however, must in
every case and at every stage be taught at first for their own sake, and
thereafter their relation to the instrumental art explained and applied.
Gradually, as they become better organised and more firmly established,
the elementary arts occupy a smaller and smaller share of attention,
until finally they function automatically, and the whole attention can
be directed to the furtherance of the real interests to which the
elementary arts are the indispensable means.
Hence we note three stages in the elementary education of the child--the
stage preceding the formal instruction in the elementary arts; the stage
in which the formal instruction should predominate and receive the
greater share of the child's attention; the stage in which the
elementary systems having been in great measure organised and
established, they may be utilised as means to the furtherance of the
real interests. The first stage corresponds to the Infant or
Kindergarten age: here the main object is to build up in the mind of the
child systems of ideas about the things of his environment; to extend,
by conversation and by reading to the child, the vocabulary of his own
language; to give him practice in the combining and recombining of
concrete groups of things, and to introduce him to a knowledge of the
various language forms in a concrete shape.
In the second stage, and here the work of the Primary School begins, the
main emphasis at the beginning must be laid on the acquirement and
establishment of the language and number systems for their own sake. If
right methods are followed, the child can be interested in these
processes of construction without the need of calling into use at every
point some real interest. In the concluding stage the use of these
instruments as means to the realisation of the simpler practical ends of
life should receive more attention.
One reason, then, for the poor moral and social results effected in the
past by our Elementary School system has been the undue emphasis placed
upon the acquisition of the merely formal arts to the neglect of the
real interests to which the former are but the means. Another cause,
however, has been operative in producing this negative result. In the
Elementary Schools, in the past, little attention has been paid to the
individuality of the child, and little heed given to the differences
between children as regards their different rates of intellectual growth
and their differing aptitudes for various branches of study. Under a
system of classification which compelled each individual, whether
intellectually well or moderately or poorly equipped, to advance at an
equal rate, attention to the individual with any other aim than to raise
the weak to the standard of the average child in acquiring the three R's
was impossible. Again, our huge city schools, partly on account of their
vast size, partly on the ground that they are unable to organise school
games, partly on account of their lack of any common school interests,
do not and cannot foster any sense of a corporate life, any feeling of a
common social spirit. Where our English Public School system is strong,
our Elementary and sometimes even our Day Secondary School systems are
weak. If the home fails to foster these qualities, and the school does
not or cannot fill the gap, then as a rule we turn out our boys and
girls poorly equipped to fulfil their duties in after-life as members of
a corporate community and as citizens of a State. Mere teaching of
history or of civics in our schools will do little to attain this end,
unless by some method or other we can foster by means of the school-life
the real civic spirit. It is, of course, easy to point out the nature of
the disease; it is more difficult to prescribe a remedy. But much might
be done to strengthen and increase the moral influence of the school by
a better system of classification, which took into account the
differences in intellectual capacity and in natural aptitude, and which
as a consequence, in the education of the child, paid more attention to
each child's individuality. This would involve much smaller classes than
exist at present, and would further involve that the children should be
under the care of one teacher for a longer time than is now the rule. At
the present time, in many cases, the teacher is employed in teaching the
same subjects, at the same stage, year after year, to a yearly fresh
batch of sixty or seventy children. Consequently he learns to look upon
his pupils as mere subjects to whom must be imparted the required
measure of instruction. Of the children in themselves, of their
home-life, of their interests outside school, he knows nothing, and as a
rule cares less.
If in addition to this we ceased erecting barracks for the instruction
of children and erected schools for their education, we should make even
a further advance in this direction. If it is impossible for other
reasons to lessen the size of our city Elementary Schools, then the
remedy lies in the division of the schools into departments in which the
Head should be entrusted with the supervision of the education of the
children during several years. In this way it would be possible for the
teacher to get to know each child individually, to direct his education
in accordance with his aptitudes, and to exert an influence over him.
Thus, by giving more attention to the organised games of the school and
by the creation of school interests, much might be done to remedy the
defects of the school on the side of moral and social education. At
best, however, when the home fails, the Elementary School can do little,
and we must put our trust in the ethical agencies of society to assist
and promote the efforts of the school in the furthering of a right
social spirit and in the creation of a common corporate feeling.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] _E.g._, in 1861 it was calculated that only 6 per cent. of the
children of the poor in England were receiving a satisfactory elementary
education. Cf. Balfour Graham's _Educational System of Great Britain and
Ireland_, p. 14.
[40] _E.g._, in 1872 in Scotland school places were provided for only
8.3 per cent. of the population. In 1905 places were provided for 21.22
of the population. Cf. _Report on Scotch Education_, 1905, p. 6.