This book is intended as an explanation of the new educational ideals
and methods now being fostered and developed, under great difficulties,
by courageous educators, in various schools for the most part outside
the public school system. These schools are “experimental” in the sense
that they are demonstrating upon a small scale the vast possibilities
of a modern kind of education. The importance of these schools consists
not so much in the advantages which they are now able to give to a few
of our children, but rather in the prophetic vision they afford of all
youth growing up with the same advantages.
Before that can happen, the public must discover what the new education
signifies, and why the old educational system is unable to keep up with
the demands of modern civilization.
This book attempts only a small part of such a tremendous task of
enlightenment. But it does undertake a brief review of the educational
situation in the light of our present scientific knowledge of human
nature--and more especially, of the human nature of the child.
Education may be said to be, essentially, an adjustment between the
child and the age in which he lives. That adjustment can be a painless
and happy one; at present it is a sort of civil war. This book
deals precisely with the special problems involved in the difficult
process of reconciling the nature of the child with the nature of our
twentieth-century machine-culture.
The method chosen in these pages for the exposition of this situation
is one which many readers will consider unduly flippant, particularly
in those passages which deal with the failure of the old educational
system. But one might as well laugh at that failure as cry over it; for
it is a ridiculous as well as a pathetic failure. The important thing
is to recognize that it is a failure, and to lend a hand if we can in
the creating of a better kind of education.