for years after he had done his work, in many lands and places the
instruction of children continued to be of the memorization of textbook
matter and of the recitation type. The children learned what was down in
the book, and recited the answers to the teacher. Many of the early
textbooks were constructed on the plan of the older Catechism--that is, on
a question and answer plan (R. 351 a). There was nothing for children to
do but to memorize such textbook material, or for the teacher but to see
that the pupils knew the answers to the questions. It was school-keeping,
not teaching, that teachers were engaged in.
The form of instruction worked out by Pestalozzi, based on sense-
perception, reasoning, and individual judgment, called for a complete
change in classroom procedure. What Pestalozzi tried most of all to do was
to get children to use their senses and their minds, to look carefully, to
count, to observe forms, to get, by means of their five important senses,
clear impressions and ideas as to objects and life in the world about
them, and then to think over what they had seen and be able to answer his
questions, because they had observed carefully and reasoned clearly.
Pestalozzi thus clearly subordinated the printed book to the use of the
child's senses, and the repetition of mere words to clear ideas about
things. Pestalozzi thus became one of the first real teachers.
This was an entirely new process, and for the first time in history a real
"technique of instruction" was now called for. Dependence on the words of
the text could no longer be relied upon. The oral instruction of a class
group, using real objects, called for teaching skill. The class must be
kept naturally interested and under control; the essential elements to be
taught must be kept clearly in the mind of the teacher; the teacher must
raise the right kind of questions, in the right order, to carry the class
thinking along to the right conclusions; and, since so much of this type
of instruction was not down in books, it called for a much more extended
knowledge of the subject on the part of the teacher than the old type of
school-keeping had done. The teacher must now both know and be able to
organize and direct. Class lessons must be thought out in advance, and
teacher-preparation in itself meant a great change in teaching procedure.
Emancipated from dependence on the words of a text, and able to stand
before a class full of a subject and able to question freely, teachers
became conscious of a new strength and a professional skill unknown in the
days of textbook reciting. Out of such teaching came oral language
lessons, drill in speech usage, elementary science instruction,
observational geography, mental arithmetic, music, and drawing, to add to
the old instruction in the Catechism, reading, writing, and ciphering, and
all these new subjects, taught according to Pestalozzian ideas as to
purpose, called for an individual technique of instruction.
[Illustration: FIG. 224. THE FIRST MODERN NORMAL SCHOOL
The old castle at Yverdon, where Pestalozzi's Institute was conducted and
his greatest success achieved.]
THE NORMAL SCHOOL FINDS ITS PLACE. These new ideas of Pestalozzi proved so
important that during the first five or six decades of the nineteenth
century the elementary school was made over. The new conception of the
child as a slowly developing personality, demanding subject-matter and
method suited to his stage of development, and the new conception of
teaching as that of directing mental development instead of hearing
recitations and "keeping school," now replaced the earlier knowledge-
conception of school work. Where before the ability to organize and
discipline a school had constituted the chief art of instruction, now the
ability to teach scientifically took its place as the prime professional
requisite. A "science and art" of teaching now arose; methodology soon
became a great subject; the new subject of pedagogy began to take form and
secure recognition; and psychology became the guiding science of the
school.
As these changes took place, the normal school began to come into favor in
the leading countries of Europe and in the United States, and in time has
established itself everywhere as an important educational institution.
Pestalozzi had himself conducted the first really modern teacher-training
school, and his work was soon copied in a number of the Swiss cantons.
Other cantons, on the contrary, for a time would have nothing to do with
the new idea.
1. _The German States._ The first nation, though, to take up the teacher-
training idea and establish it as an important part of its state school
system was Prussia. Beginning in 1809 with the work of Zeller (p. 569), by
1840 there were thirty-eight Teachers' Seminaries, as the normal schools
in German lands have been called, in Prussia alone. The idea was also
quickly taken up by the other German States, and from the first decade of
the nineteenth century on no nation has done more with the normal school,
or used it, ends desired considered, to better advantage than have the
Germans. One of the features of the Prussian schools which most impressed
Professor Bache, when he visited the schools of the German States in 1838,
was the excellence of the Seminaries for Teachers (R. 344), and these he
described (R. 345) in some detail in his Report. Horace Mann, similarly,
on his visit to Europe, in 1843, was impressed with the thoroughness of
the training given prospective teachers in the Teachers' Seminaries of the
German States (R. 278). University pedagogical seminars were also
established early (c. 1810) [3] in the universities, for the training of
secondary teachers, and this training was continued with increasing
thoroughness up to 1914. Every teacher in the German States, elementary or
secondary, before that date, was a carefully-trained teacher. This was a
feature of the German state school systems of the pre-War period of which
no other nation could boast.
2. _France._ After the German States, France probably comes next as the
nation in which the normal school has been most used for training
teachers. The Superior Normal School had been recreated in 1808 (R. 283),
and after the downfall of Napoleon the creation of normal schools for
elementary-school teachers was begun. Twelve had been established by 1830,
and between 1830 and 1833 thirty additional schools for training these
teachers were begun (R. 285). These rendered a service for France (R. 346)
quite similar to that rendered by the Teachers' Seminaries in German
lands. During the period of reaction, from 1848 to 1870, the normal school
did not prosper in France, but since 1870 a normal school to train
elementary teachers has been established for men and one for women in each
of the eighty-seven departments into which France, for administrative
purposes, has been divided. Satisfactory provision has also been made for
the training of teachers for the secondary schools.
3. _The United States._ The United States has also been prominent,
especially since about 1870, in the development of normal schools for the
training of elementary teachers. The Lancastrian schools had trained
monitors for their work, but the first teacher-training school in the
United States to give training to individual teachers was opened
privately, [4] in 1823, and the second in a similar manner, [5] in 1827.
These were almost entirely academic institutions, being in the nature of
tuition high schools, with a little practice teaching and some lectures on
the "Art of Teaching" added in the last year of the course. In 1826
Governor Clinton recommended to the legislature of New York the
establishment by the State of "a seminary for the education of teachers in
the monitorial system of instruction." Nothing coming of this, in 1827 he
recommended the creation of "a central school in each county for the
education of teachers" (R. 349). That year (1827) the New York legislature
appropriated money to aid the academies "to promote the education of
teachers"--the first state aid in the United States for teacher-training.
The publication of an English edition of Cousin's _Report_ (p. 597; R.
284) in New York, in 1835; Calvin E. Stowe's _Report on Elementary
Education in Europe_, [6] in 1837; and Alexander D. Bache's _Report on
Education in Europe_ (Rs. 344, 345), in 1838, with their strong
commendations of the German teacher-training system, awakened new interest
in the United States, in the matter of teacher-training. Finally, in 1839,
the legislature of Massachusetts duplicated a gift of $10,000, and placed
the money in the hands of the newly created State Board of Education (p.
689) to be used "in qualifying teachers for the common schools of
Massachusetts" (R. 350 a). After careful consideration it was decided to
create special state institutions, after the German and French plans, in
which to give the desired training, and the French term of Normal School
was adopted and has since become general in the United States.
[Illustration: TEACHER-TRAINING IN THE UNITED STATES BY 1860.
A few private training-schools also existed, though less than half a dozen
in all.]
On July 3, 1839, the first state normal school in the United States opened
in the town hall at Lexington, Massachusetts, with one teacher and three
students. Later that same year a second state normal school was opened at
Barre, and early the next year a third at Bridgewater, both in
Massachusetts. For these the State Board of Education adopted a statement
as to entrance requirements and a course of instruction (R. 350 b) which
shows well the academic character of these early teaching institutions.
Their success was largely due to the enthusiastic support given the new
idea by Horace Mann. In an address at the dedication of the first building
erected in America for normal-school purposes, in 1846, he expressed his
deep belief as to the fundamental importance of such institutions (R. 350
c). By 1860 eleven state normal schools had been established in eight of
the States of the American Union, and six private schools were also
rendering similar services. Closely related was the Teachers' Institute,
first definitely organized by Henry Barnard in Connecticut, in 1839, to
offer four- to six-weeks summer courses for teachers in service, and these
had been organized in fifteen of the American States by 1860. Since 1870
the establishment of state normal schools has been rapid in the United
States, two hundred having been established by 1910, and many since. The
United States, though, is as yet far from having a trained body of
teachers for its elementary schools. For the high schools, it is only
since about 1890 that the professional training of teachers for such
service has really been begun.
4. _England._ In England the beginnings of teacher-training came with the
introduction of monitorial instruction, both the Bell and the Lancaster
Societies (p. 625) finding it necessary to train pupils for positions as
monitors, and to designate certain schools as model and training schools.
In 1833, it will be remembered (p. 638), Parliament made its first grant
of money in aid of education. Up to 1840 this was distributed through the
two National Societies, and in 1839 a portion of this aid was definitely
set aside to enable these Societies to establish model schools (R. 347).
From this beginning, the model training-schools for the different
religious Societies were developed. In these model schools prospective
teachers were educated, being trained in religious instruction and in the
art of teaching. In 1836, with the founding of the "Home and Colonial
Infant Society," a Pestalozzian Training College was founded by it.
In a further effort to secure trained teachers the government, in 1846,
adopted a plan then in use in Holland, and instituted what became known as
the "pupil-teacher system" (R. 348). This was an improvement on the waning
monitorial training system previously in use. Under this, a favorite old
English method, used somewhat for the same purpose a century earlier (R.
243), was adapted to meet the new need.' Under it promising pupils were
apprenticed to a head teacher for five years (usually from thirteen to
eighteen), he agreeing to give them instruction in both secondary-school
subjects and in the art of teaching in return for their help in the
schoolroom. Beginning in 1846, there were, by 1848, 200 pupil teachers; by
1861, 13,871; and by 1870, 14,612. This system formed the great dependence
of England before the days of national education. In 1874 the pupil-
teacher-center system was begun, and between 1878 and 1896 the age for
entering as a pupil-teacher was raised from thirteen to sixteen, and the
years of apprenticeship reduced from five to two. In most cases now the
academic preparation continues to seventeen or eighteen, and is followed
by one year of practice teaching in an elementary school, under
supervision. After that the teacher may, or may not, enter what is there
known as a Training-College. [7] So far the training of teachers has not
made such headway in England and Wales as has been the case in the German
States, France, the United States, or Scotland, but important progress may
be expected in the near future as an outcome of new educational impulses
arising as a result of the World War.
SPREAD OF THE NORMAL-SCHOOL IDEA. The movement for the creation of normal
schools to train teachers for the elementary schools has in time spread to
many nations. As nation after nation has awakened to the desirability of
establishing a system of modern-type state schools, a normal school to
train leaders has often been among the first of the institutions created.
The normal school, in consequence, is found to-day in all the continental
European States; in all the English self-governing dominions; in nearly
all the South American States; and in China, [8] Japan, Siam, the
Philippines, Cuba, Algiers, India, and other less important nations. In
all these there is an attempt, often reaching as yet to but a small
percentage of the teachers, to extend to them some of that training in the
theory and art of instruction which has for long been so important a
feature of the education of the elementary teacher in the German States,
France, and the United States. Since about 1890 other nations have also
begun to provide, as the German States and France have done for so long,
some form of professional training for the teachers intended for their
secondary schools [9] as well.
PSYCHOLOGY BECOMES THE MASTER SCIENCE. Everywhere the establishment of
normal schools has meant the acceptance of the newer conceptions as to
child development and the nature of the educational process. These are
that the child is a slowly developing personality, needing careful study,
and demanding subject-matter and method suited to his different stages of
development. The new conception of teaching as that of directing and
guiding the education of a child, instead of hearing recitations and
"keeping school," in time replaced the earlier knowledge-conception of
school work. Psychology accordingly became the guiding science of the
school, and the imparting to prospective teachers proper ideas as to
psychological procedure, and the proper methodology of instruction in each
of the different elementary-school subjects, became the great work of the
normal school. Teachers thus trained carried into the schools a new
conception as to the nature of childhood; a new and a minute methodology
of instruction; and a new enthusiasm for teaching;--all of which were
important additions to school work.
A new methodology was soon worked out for all the subjects of instruction,
both old and new. The centuries-old alphabet method of teaching reading
was superseded by the word and sound methods; the new oral language
instruction was raised to a position of first importance in developing
pupil-thinking; spelling, word-analysis, and sentence-analysis were given
much emphasis in the work of the school; the Pestalozzian mental
arithmetic came as an important addition to the old ciphering of sums; the
old writing from copies was changed into a drill subject, requiring
careful teaching for its mastery; the "back to nature" ideas of Rousseau
and Pestalozzi proved specially fruitful in the new study of geography,
which called for observation out of doors, the study of type forms, and
the substitution of the physical and human aspects of geography for the
older political and statistical; object lessons on natural objects, and
later science and nature study, were used to introduce children to a
knowledge of nature and to train them in thinking and observation; while
the new subjects of music and drawing came in, each with an elaborate
technique of instruction.
By 1875 the normal school in all lands was finding plenty to do, and
teaching, by the new methods and according to the new psychological
procedure, seemed to many one of the most wonderful and most important
occupations in the world. How great a change in the scope, as well as in
the nature of elementary-school instruction had been effected in a
century, the above diagram of American elementary-school development will
reveal. History and literature, it will be noticed, had also come in as
additional new subjects, but these were relatively unimportant in either
the elementary school or the normal school until after the coming of
Herbartian ideas, to which we shall refer a little further on.
[Illustration: FIG. 226. EVOLUTION OF THE ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND
OF METHODS OF TEACHING]
Accompanying the organization of professional instruction for teachers,
another important change in the nature of the elementary school was
effected.
THE GRADING OF SCHOOLROOM INSTRUCTION. For some time after elementary
schools began it was common to teach all the children of the different
ages together in one room, or at most in two rooms. In the latter case the
subjects of instruction were divided between the teachers, rather than the
children. [10] Many of the pictures of early elementary schools show such
mixed-type schools. In these the children were advanced individually and
by subjects as their progress warranted, [11] until they had progressed as
far as the instruction went or the teacher could teach (R. 352). From this
point on the division of the elementary school into classes and a graded
organization has proceeded by certain rather well-defined steps.
The first step (Rs. 353, 354) was the division of the school into two
schools, one more advanced than the other, such as lower and higher, or
primary and grammar. Another division was introduced when the Infant
School was added, beneath. The next step was the division of each school
into classes. This began by the employment of assistant teachers, in
England and America known as "ushers," to help the "master," and the
provision of small recitation rooms, off the main large schoolroom, to
which the usher could take his class to hear recitations. The third and
final step came with the erection of a new type of school building, with
smaller and individual classrooms, or the subdivision of the larger
schoolrooms. It was then possible to assign a teacher to each classroom,
sort and grade the pupils by ages and advancement, outline the instruction
by years, and the modern graded elementary school was at hand.
The transition to the graded elementary school came easily and naturally.
For half a century the course of instruction in the evolving elementary
state school had been in process of expansion. Pestalozzi paved the way
for its creation by changing the purpose and direction, and greatly
enlarging (p. 543) the field of instruction of the vernacular school.
After him other new subjects of study were added (see diagram, Figure
226), new and better and longer textbooks were prepared (R. 351), and the
school term was gradually lengthened. The way in time became clear,
earliest in the German lands and in a few American cities, but by about
1850 in most leading nations, for that simple reorganization of school
work which would divide the school into a number of classes, or forms, or
grades, and give one to each teacher to handle. When this point had been
reached, which came about 1850 to 1860 in most nations, but earlier in a
few, the modern type of town or city graded elementary school was at hand.
Teaching had by this time become an organized and a psychological process;
graded courses of study began to appear; professional school
superintendents began to be given the direction and supervision of
instruction; and the modern science of school organization and
administration began to take shape. From this point on the further
development of the graded elementary public school has come through the
addition of new materials of instruction, and by changing the direction of
the school to adapt it better to meeting the new needs of society brought
about by the scientific, industrial, social, and political revolutions
which we, in previous chapters, have described. A few of the more
important of these additions and changes in direction we shall now briefly
describe.
[Illustration: FIG. 227. AN "USHER" AND HIS CLASS.
The usher, or assistant teacher, is here shown with a class in one of the
small recitation-rooms, off the large schoolroom.]
II. NEW IDEAS FROM HERBARTIAN SOURCES
THE WORK OF HERBART. Taking up the problem as Pestalozzi left it, a German
by the name of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) carried it forward by
organizing a truer psychology for the whole educational process, by
erecting a new social aim for instruction, by formulating new steps in
method, and by showing the place and the importance of properly organized
instruction in history and literature in the education of the child.
Though the two men were entirely different in type, and worked along
entirely different lines, the connection between Herbart and Pestalozzi
was, nevertheless, close. [12]
The two men, however, approached the educational problem from entirely
different angles. Pestalozzi gave nearly all his long life to teaching and
human service, while Herbart taught only as a traveling private tutor for
three years, and later a class of twenty children in his university
practice school. Pestalozzi was a social reformer, a visionary, and an
impractical enthusiast, but was possessed of a remarkable intuitive
insight into child nature. Herbart, on the other hand, was a well-trained
scholarly thinker, who spent the most of his life in the peaceful
occupation of a professor of philosophy in a German university. [13] It
was while at Königsberg, between 1810 and 1832, and as an appendix to his
work as professor of philosophy, that he organized a small practice
school, conducted a Pedagogical Seminar, and worked out his educational
theory and method. His work was a careful, scholarly attempt at the
organization of education as a science, carried out amid the peace and
quiet which a university atmosphere almost alone affords. He addressed
himself chiefly to three things: (1) the aim, (2) the content, and (3) the
method of instruction.
THE AIM AND THE CONTENT OF EDUCATION. Locke had set up as the aim of
education the ideal of a physically sound gentleman. Rousseau had declared
his aim to be to prepare his boy for life by developing naturally his
inborn capacities. Pestalozzi had sought to regenerate society by means of
education, and to prepare children for society by a "harmonious training"
of their "faculties." Herbart rejected alike the conventional-social
education of Locke, the natural and unsocial education of Rousseau, and
the "faculty-psychology" conception of education of Pestalozzi. Instead he
conceived of the mind as a unity, instead of being divided into
"faculties," and the aim of education as broadly social rather than
personal. The purpose of education, he said, was to prepare men to live
properly in organized society, and hence the chief aim in education was
not conventional fitness, natural development, mere knowledge, nor
personal mental power, but personal character and social morality. This
being the case, the educator should analyze the interests and occupations
and social responsibilities of men as they are grouped in organized
society, and, from such analyses, deduce the means and the method of
instruction. Man's interests, he said, come from two main sources--his
contact with the things in his environment (real things, sense-
impressions), and from his relations with human beings (social
intercourse). His social responsibilities and duties are determined by the
nature of the social organization of which he forms a part.
Pestalozzi had provided fairly well for the first group of contacts,
through his instruction in objects, home geography, numbers, and geometric
form. For the second group of contacts Pestalozzi had developed only oral
language, and to this Herbart now added the two important studies of
literature and history, and history with the emphasis on the social rather
than the political side. Two new elementary-school subjects were thus
developed, each important in revealing to man his place in the social
whole. History in particular Herbart conceived to be a study of the first
importance for revealing proper human relationships, and leading men to
social and national "good-will."
The chief purpose of education Herbart held to be to develop personal
character and to prepare for social usefulness (R. 355). These virtues, he
held, proceeded from enough of the right kind of knowledge, properly
interpreted to the pupil so that clear ideas as to relationships might be
formed. To impart this knowledge interest must be awakened, and to arouse
interest in the many kinds of knowledge needed, a "many-sided" development
must take place. From full knowledge, and with proper instruction by the
teacher, clear ideas or concepts might be formed, and clear ideas ought to
lead to right action, and right action to personal character--the aim of
all instruction. Herbart was the first writer on education to place the
great emphasis on proper instruction, and to exalt teaching and proper
teaching-procedure instead of mere knowledge or intellectual discipline.
He thus conceived of the educational process as a science in itself,
having a definite content and method, and worthy of special study by those
who desire to teach.
HERBARTIAN METHOD. With these ideas as to the aim and content of
instruction, Herbart worked out a theory of the instructional process and
a method of instruction (R. 356). Interest he held to be of first
importance as a prerequisite to good instruction. If given spontaneously,
well and good; but, if necessary, forced interest must be resorted to.
Skill in instruction is in part to be determined by the ability of the
teacher to secure interest without resorting to force on the one hand or
sugar-coating of the subject on the other. Taking Pestalozzi's idea that
the purpose of the teacher was to give pupils new experiences through
contacts with real things, without assuming that the pupils already had
such, Herbart elaborated the process by which new knowledge is assimilated
in terms of what one already knows, and from his elaboration of this
principle the doctrine of apperception--that is, the apperceiving or
comprehending of new knowledge in terms of the old--has been fixed as an
important principle in educational psychology. Good instruction, then,
involves first putting the child into a proper frame of mind to apperceive
the new knowledge, and hence this becomes a corner-stone of all good
teaching method.
Herbart did not always rely on such methods, holding that the "committing
to memory" of certain necessary facts often was necessary, but he held
that the mere memorizing of isolated facts, which had characterized school
instruction for ages, had little value for either educational or moral
ends. The teaching of mere facts often was very necessary, but such
instruction called for a methodical organization of the facts by the
teacher, so as to make their learning contribute to some definite purpose.
This called for a purpose in instruction; the organization of the facts
necessary to be taught so as to select the most useful ones; the
connection of these so as to establish the principle which was the purpose
of the instruction; and training in systematic thinking by applying the
principle to new problems of the type being studied. The carrying-out of
such ideas meant the careful organization of the teaching process and
teaching method, to secure certain predetermined ends in child
development, instead of mere miscellaneous memorizing and school-keeping.
THE HERBARTIAN MOVEMENT IN GERMANY. Herbart died in 1841, without having
awakened any general interest in his ideas, and they remained virtually
unnoticed until 1865. In that year a professor at Leipzig, Tuiskon Ziller
(1817-1883), published a book setting forth Herbart's idea of instruction
as a moral force. This attracted much attention, and led to the formation
(1868) of a scientific society for the study of Herbart's ideas. Ziller
and his followers now elaborated Herbart's ideas, advanced the theory of
culture-epochs in child development, the theory of concentration in
studies, and elaborated the four steps in the process of instruction, as
described by Herbart, into the five formal steps of the modern Herbartian
school.
In 1874 a pedagogical seminary and practice school was organized at the
University of Jena, and in 1885 this came under the direction of Professor
William Rein, a pupil of Ziller's, who developed the practice school
according to the ideas of Ziller. A detailed course of study for this
school, filling two large volumes, was worked out, and the practice
lessons given were thoroughly planned beforehand and the methods employed
were subjected to a searching analysis after the lesson had been given.
HERBARTIAN IDEAS IN THE UNITED STATES. For a time, under the inspiration
of Ziller and Rein, Jena became an educational center to which students
went from many lands. From the work at Jena Herbartian ideas have spread
which have modified elementary educational procedure generally. In
particular did the work at Jena make a deep impression in the United
States. Between 1885 and 1890 a number of Americans studied at Jena and,
returning, brought back to the United States this Ziller-Rein-Jena brand
of Herbartian ideas and practices. [14] From the first the new ideas met
with enthusiastic approval.
[Illustration: PLATE 18. TWO LEADERS IN THE REORGANIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL
THEORY
JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART (1776-1841)
Organizer of the Psychology of Instruction
FRIEDRICH WILHELM TROEBEL (1782-1852)
Founder of the Kindergarten]
New methods of instruction in history and literature, and a new
psychology, were now added to the normal-school professional instruction.
Though this psychology has since been outgrown (R. 357), it has been very
useful in shaping pedagogical thought. New courses of study for the
training-schools were now worked out in which the elementary-school
subjects were divided into drill subjects, content subjects, and motor-
activity subjects. [15]
Apperception, interest, correlation, social purpose, moral education,
citizenship training, and recitation methods became new terms to conjure
with. From the normal schools these ideas spread rapidly to the better
city school systems of the time, and soon found their way into courses of
study everywhere. Practice schools and the model lessons in dozens of
normal schools were remodeled after the pattern of those at Jena, and for
a decade Herbartian ideas and the new child study vied with one another
for the place of first importance in educational thinking. The Herbartian
wave of the nineties resembled the Pestalozzian enthusiasm of the sixties.
Each for a time furnished the new ideas in education, each introduced
elements of importance into the elementary-school instruction, each deeply
influenced the training of teachers in normal schools by giving a new turn
to the instruction there, and each gradually settled down into its proper
place in educational practice and history.
THE HERBARTIAN CONTRIBUTION. To the Herbartians we are indebted in
particular for important new conceptions as to the teaching of history and
literature, which have modified all our subsequent procedure; for the
introduction of history teaching in some form into all the elementary-
school grades; for the emphasis on a new social point of view in the
teaching of history and geography; for the new emphasis on the moral aim
in instruction; for a new and a truer educational psychology; and for a
better organization of the technique of classroom instruction. In
particular Herbart gave emphasis to that part of educational development
which comes from without--environment acting upon the child--as contrasted
with the emphasis Pestalozzi had placed on mental development from within
and according to organic law. With the introduction of normal child
activities, which came from another source about this same time, the
elementary-school curriculum as we now have it was practically complete,
and the elementary school of 1850 was completely made over to form the
elementary school of the beginning of the twentieth century.
III. THE KINDERGARTEN, PLAY, AND MANUAL ACTIVITIES
To another German, Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), we are indebted,
directly or indirectly, for three other additions to elementary education
--the kindergarten, the play idea, and handwork activities.
ORIGIN OF THE KINDERGARTEN. Of German parentage, the son of a rural
clergyman, early estranged from his parents, retiring and introspective by
nature, having led a most unhappy childhood, and apprenticed to a forester
without his wishes being consulted, at twenty-three Froebel decided to
become a schoolteacher and visited Pestalozzi in Switzerland. Two years
later he became the tutor of three boys, and then spent the years 1808-10
as a student and teacher in Pestalozzi's Institute at Yverdon. During his
years there Froebel was deeply impressed with the great value of music and
play in the education of children, and of all that he carried away from
Pestalozzi's institution these ideas were most persistent. After serving
in a variety of occupations--student, soldier against Napoleon, and
curator in a museum of mineralogy--he finally opened a little private
school, in 1816, which he conducted for a decade along Pestalozzian lines.
In this the play idea, music, and the self-activity of the pupils were
uppermost. The school was a failure, financially, but while conducting it
Froebel thought out and published (1826) his most important pedagogical
work--_The Education of Man_.
Gradually Froebel became convinced that the most needed reform in
education concerned the early years of childhood. His own youth had been
most unhappy, and to this phase of education he now addressed himself.
After a period as a teacher in Switzerland he returned to Germany and
opened a school for little children in which plays, games, songs, and
occupations involving self-activity were the dominating characteristics,
and in 1840 he hit upon the name _Kindergarten_ for it. In 1843 his
_Mutter- und Kose-Lieder_, a book of fifty songs and games, was published.
This has been translated into almost all languages.
SPREAD OF THE KINDERGARTEN IDEA. After a series of unsuccessful efforts to
bring his new idea to the attention of educators, Froebel, himself rather
a feminine type, became discouraged and resolved to address himself
henceforth to women, as they seemed much more capable of understanding
him, and to the training of teachers in the new ideas. Froebel was
fortunate in securing as one of his most ardent disciples, just before his
death, the Baroness Bertha von Marenholtz Bulow-Wendhausen (1810-93), who
did more than any other person to make his work known. Meeting, in 1849,
the man mentioned to her as "an old fool," she understood him, and spent
the remainder of her life in bringing to the attention of the world the
work of this unworldly man who did not know how to make it known for
himself. In 1851 the Prussian Government, fearing some revolutionary
designs in the new idea, and acting in a manner thoroughly characteristic
of the political reaction which by that time had taken hold of all German
official life, forbade kindergartens in Prussia. The Baroness then went to
London and lectured there on Froebel's ideas, organizing kindergartens in
the English "ragged schools." Here, by contrast, she met with a cordial
reception. She later expounded Froebelian ideas in Paris, Italy,
Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and (after 1860, when the prohibition was
removed) in Germany. In 1870 she founded a kindergarten training-college
in Dresden. Many of her writings have been translated into English, and
published in the United States.
Considering the importance of this work, and the time which has since
elapsed, the kindergarten idea has made relatively small progress on the
continent of Europe. Its spirit does not harmonize with autocratic
government. In Germany and the old Austro-Hungary it had made but little
progress up to 1914. Its greatest progress in Europe, perhaps, has been in
democratic Switzerland. [16] In England and France, the two great leaders
in democratic government, the Infant-School development, which came
earlier, has prevented any marked growth of the kindergarten. In England,
though, the Infant School has recently been entirely transformed by the
introduction into it of the kindergarten spirit. [17] In France, infant
education has taken a somewhat different direction. [18]
In the United States the kindergarten idea has met with a most cordial
reception. In no country in the world has the spirit of the kindergarten
been so caught and applied to school work, and probably nowhere has the
original kindergarten idea been so expanded and improved. [19] The first
kindergarten in the United States was a German kindergarten, established
at Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1855, by Mrs. Carl Schurz, a pupil of Froebel.
During the next fifteen years some ten other kindergartens were organized
in German-speaking communities. The first English-speaking kindergarten
was opened privately in Boston, in 1860, by Miss Elizabeth Peabody. In
1868 a private training-college for kindergartners was opened in Boston,
largely through Miss Peabody's influence, by Madame Matilde Kriege and her
daughter, who had recently arrived from Germany. In 1872 Miss Marie Boelte
opened a similar teacher-training school in New York City, and in 1873 her
pupil, Miss Susan Blow, accepted the invitation of Superintendent William
T. Harris, of St. Louis, to go there and open the first public-school
kindergarten in the United States. [20]
To-day the kindergarten is found in some form in nearly all countries in
the world, having been carried to all continents by missionaries,
educational enthusiasts, and interested governments. [21] Japan early
adopted the idea, and China is now beginning to do so.
THE KINDERGARTEN IDEA. The dominant idea in the kindergarten is natural
but directed self-activity, focused upon educational, social, and moral
ends. Froebel believed in the continuity of a child's life from infancy
onward, and that self-activity, determined by the child's interests and
desires and intelligently directed, was essential to the unfolding of the
child's inborn capacities. He saw, more clearly than any one before him
had done, the unutilized wealth of the child's world; that the child's
chief characteristic is self-activity; the desirability of the child
finding himself through play; and that the work of the school during these
early years was to supplement the family by drawing out the child and
awakening the ideal side of his nature. To these ends doing, self
activity, and expression became fundamental to the kindergarten, and
movement, gesture, directed play, song, color, the story, and human
activities a part of kindergarten technique. Nature study and school
gardening were given a prominent place, and motor-activity much called
into play. Advancing far beyond Pestalozzi's principle of sense-
impressions, Froebel insisted on motor-activity and learning by doing (R.
358).
Froebel, as well as Herbart, also saw the social importance of education,
and that man must realize himself not independently amid nature, as
Rousseau had said, but as a social animal in coöperation with his
fellowmen. Hence he made his schoolroom a miniature of society, a place
where courtesy and helpfulness and social coöperation were prominent
features. This social and at times reverent atmosphere of the kindergarten
has always been a marked characteristic of its work. To bring out social
ideas many dramatic games, such as shoemaker, carpenter, smith, and
farmer, were devised and set to music. The "story" by the teacher was made
prominent, and this was retold in language, acted, sung, and often worked
out constructively in clay, blocks, or paper. Other games to develop skill
were worked out, and use was made of sand, clay, paper, cardboard, and
color. The "gifts" and "occupations" which Froebel devised were intended
to develop constructive and aesthetic power, and to provide for connection
and development they were arranged into an organized series of playthings.
Individual development as its aim, motor-expression as its method, and
social coöperation as its means were the characteristic ideas of this new
school for little children (R. 358).
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE KINDERGARTEN. Wholly aside from the specific
training given children during the year, year and a half, or two years
they spend in this type of school, the addition of the kindergarten to
elementary-school work has been a force of very large significance and
usefulness. The idea that the child is primarily an active and not a
learning animal has been given new emphasis, and that education comes
chiefly by doing has been given new force. The idea that a child's chief
business is play has been a new conception of large educational value. The
elimination of book education and harsh discipline in the kindergarten has
been an idea that has slowly but gradually been extended upward into the
lower grades of the elementary school.
To-day, largely as a result of the spreading of the kindergarten spirit,
the world is coming to recognize play and games at something like their
real social, moral, and educational values, wholly aside from their
benefits as concern physical welfare, and in many places directed play is
being scheduled as a regular subject in school programs. Music, too, has
attained new emphasis since the coming of the kindergarten, and methods of
teaching music more in harmony with kindergarten ideas have been
introduced into the schools.
INSTRUCTION IN THE MANUAL ACTIVITIES. Froebel not only introduced
constructive work--paper-folding, weaving, needlework, and work with sand
and clay and color--into the kindergarten, but he also proposed to extend
and develop such work for the upper years of schooling in a school for
hand training which he outlined, but did not establish. His proposed plan
included the elements of the so-called manual-training idea, developed
later, and he justified such instruction on the same educational grounds
that we advance to-day. It was not to teach a boy a trade, as Rousseau had
advocated, or to train children in sense-perception, as Pestalozzi had
employed all his manual activities, but as a form of educational
expression, and for the purpose of developing creative power within the
child. The idea was advocated by a number of thinkers, about 1850 to 1860,
but the movement took its rise in Finland, Sweden, and Russia.
The first country to organize such work as a part of its school
instruction was Finland, where, as early as 1858, Uno Cygnaeus (1810-1888)
outlined a course for manual training involving bench and metal work,
wood-carving, and basket-weaving. In 1866 Finland made some form of manual
work compulsory for boys in all its rural schools, and in its training-
colleges for male teachers. In 1872 the government of Sweden decided to
introduce sloyd work into its schools, partly to counteract the bad
physical and moral effects of city congestion, and partly to revivify the
declining home industries of the people. A sloyd school was established at
Naas, in 1872, to train teachers, and in 1875 a second school, known as a
"Sloyd Seminarium," was begun. The summer courses of these two schools
were soon training teachers from many nations. In 1877 sloyd work was
added to the Folk School instruction of Sweden. At first the old native
sloyd occupations were followed, such as carpentering, turning, wood-
carving, brush-making, book-binding, and work in copper and iron, but
later the industrial element gave way to a well-organized course in
educational tool work for boys from twelve to fifteen years of age, after
the Finnish plan.
SPREAD OF THE MANUAL-TRAINING IDEA. France was the first of the larger
European nations to adopt this new addition to elementary-school
instruction, a training-school being organized at Paris in 1873, and, in
1882, the instruction in manual activities was ordered introduced into all
the primary schools of France. It has required time, though, to provide
work rooms and to realize this idea, and it is still lacking in complete
accomplishment. In England the work was first introduced in London, about
1887. The government at once accepted the idea, encouraged its spread, and
began to aid in the training of teachers. By 1900 the work was found in
all the larger cities, and included cooking and sewing for girls, as well
as manual work for boys. The training for girls goes back still farther,
and was an outgrowth of the earlier "schools of industry" established to
train girls for domestic service (R. 241). By 1846 instruction in
needlework had been begun in earnest in England. In German lands
needlework was also an early school subject, while some domestic training
for girls had been provided in most of the cities, before 1914. Manual
training for boys, though, despite much propaganda work, had made but
little headway up to that time. As in the case of the kindergarten, the
initiative and self-expression aspects of the manual-training movement
made no appeal to those responsible for the work of the people's schools,
and, in consequence, the manual activities have in German lands been
reserved largely for the continuation and vocational schools for older
pupils.
In the United States the manual-training and household-arts ideas have
found a very ready welcome. Curious as it may seem, the first introduction
to the United States of this new form of instruction came through the
exhibit made by the Russian government at the Centennial Exhibition of
1876, showing the work in wood and iron made by the pupils at the Imperial
Technical Institute at Moscow. This, however, was not the Swedish sloyd,
but a type of work especially adapted to secondary-school instruction. In
consequence the movement for instruction in the manual activities in the
United States, unlike in other nations, began as a highly organized
technical type of high-school instruction, [22] while the elementary-
school sloyd and the household arts for girls came in later. This type of
technical high school has since developed rapidly in this country, has
rendered an important educational service, and is a peculiarly American
creation. In Europe the manual-training idea has been confined to the
elementary school, and no institution exists there which parallels these
costly and well-equipped American technical secondary schools.
The introduction of manual work into the elementary schools came a little
later, and a little more slowly. As early as 1880 the Workingmen's School,
founded by the Ethical Culture Society of New York, had provided a
kindergarten and had extended the kindergarten constructive-work idea
upward, in the form of simple woodworking, into its elementary school. In
the public schools, experimental classes in elementary-school woodworking
were tried in one school in Boston, as early as 1882, the expense being
borne privately. In 1888 the city took over these classes. In 1886 a
teacher was brought to Boston from Sweden to introduce Swedish sloyd, and
a teacher-training school which has been very influential was established
there, in 1889. In 1876 Massachusetts permitted cities to provide
instruction in sewing, and Springfield introduced such instruction in
1884, and elementary-school instruction in knifework in 1886.
From these beginnings the movement spread, [23] though at first rather
slowly. By 1900 approximately forty cities, nearly all of them in the
North Atlantic group of States, had introduced work in manual training and
the household arts into their elementary schools, but since that time the
work has been extended to practically all cities, and to many towns and
rural communities as well.
[Illustration: FIG. 228. REDIRECTED MANUAL TRAINING
A boy mending his shoe instead of making a mortice-joint ]
CONTRIBUTION OF THE MANUAL-ACTIVITIES IDEA. These new forms of school work
were at first advocated on the grounds of formal discipline--that they
trained the reasoning, exercised the powers of observation, and
strengthened the will. The "exercises," true to such a conception, were
quite formal and uniform for all. With the breakdown of the "faculty
psychology," and the abandonment in large part of the doctrine of formal
discipline in the training of the mind, the whole manual-training and
household-arts work has had to be reshaped. As the writings of Pestalozzi,
Herbart, and Froebel were studied more closely, and with the new light on
child development gained from child-study and the newer psychology, these
new subjects came to be conceived of in their proper light as means of
individual expression, and to be extended to new forms, materials, colors,
and new practical and artistic ends. To-day the instruction in manual work
and the household arts in all their forms has been further changed to make
of them educational instruments for interpreting the fields of art and
industry and home-life in terms of their social significance and
usefulness. Through these two new forms of education, also, the pupils in
the elementary schools have been given training in expression and an
insight into the practical work of life impossible in the old textbook
type of elementary school. In the kindergarten, manual work, and the
household arts, Froebel's principle of education through directed self-
activity and self-expression has borne abundant fruit.
In the hands of French, English, and American educators the original
manual-arts idea has been greatly expanded. In France some form of
expression has been worked out for all grades of the primary school, and
the work has been closely connected with art and industry on the one hand
and with the home-life of the people on the other. In England the project
system as applied to industry, and the household arts with reference to
home-life, have been emphasized. In the United States the work has been
individualized perhaps more than anywhere else, applied in many new
directions--clay, leather, cement, metal--and used as a very important
instrument for self-expression and the development of individual thinking.
IV. THE ADDITION OF SCIENCE STUDY
THE GRADUAL EXTENSION OF THE INTEREST IN SCIENCE. A very prominent feature
of world educational development, since about the middle of the nineteenth
century, has been the general introduction into the schools of the study
of science. It is no exaggeration of the importance of this to say that no
addition of new subject-matter and no change in the direction and purpose
of education, since that time, has been of greater importance for the
welfare of mankind, or more significant of new world conditions, than has
been the emphasis recently placed, in all divisions of state school
systems, on instruction in the principles and the applications of science.
From the days of Francis Bacon (p. 390) on, the study of science has been
making slow but steady progress. The early history of modern science we
traced in chapter XVII. During the seventeenth century English scholars
were most prominent in the further development, due largely to the greater
tolerance of new ideas there, and the University of Cambridge early
attained to some reputation (p. 423) as a place where instruction in the
new scientific studies might be found. After the middle of the eighteenth
century, in large part due to the illuminating work of Voltaire (p. 485),
a great interest in science arose among the French. In the Revolutionary
days we accordingly find the French creating important scientific
institutions (p. 518), and Napoleon gave frequent evidence of his deep
interest in scientific studies. [24] This interest the French have since
retained.
From France this new interest in science passed quickly to the Germans.
The new mathematical and physical studies had early found a home at the
new University of Göttingen (p. 555), and largely under French influences
scientific studies were later introduced into all the German universities.
Early in the nineteenth century the German universities took the lead as
centers for the new scientific studies (p. 576)--a lead they retained
throughout the century. In England the universities had, by the nineteenth
century, lost much of their seventeenth-century prominence in science, and
had settled down into teaching colleges, instead of developing, as had the
German universities, into institutions for scientific research. Compared
with the reformed German universities, actuated by the new scientific
spirit, the English universities of the mid-nineteenth century presented a
very unfavorable [25] aspect (R. 359). In the United States, book
instruction in the sciences came in near the close of the eighteenth
century, but the first laboratory instruction in our colleges was not
begun until 1846, and our real interest in science teaching dates from an
even later period. Until the coming of German influences, after the middle
of the century, the American college [26] largely followed English models
and practices.
Yet, as we pointed out earlier, the early nineteenth century witnessed a
vast expansion of scientific knowledge, and by 1860 the main keys of
modern science (p. 727) were in the hands of scholars everywhere. The
great early development of scientific study had been carried on in a few
universities or had been done by independent scholars, and had influenced
but little instruction in the colleges or the schools below.
SCIENCE INSTRUCTION REACHES THE SCHOOLS BUT SLOWLY. The textbook
organization of this new scientific knowledge, for teaching purposes, and
its incorporation into the instruction of the schools, took place but
slowly.
1. _The elementary schools._ The greatest and the earliest success was
made in German lands. There the pioneer work of Basedow (p. 534) and the
Philanthropinists had awakened a widespread interest in scientific
studies. In Switzerland, too, Pestalozzi had developed elementary science
study and home geography, and, when Pestalozzian methods were introduced
into the schools of Prussia, the study of elementary science (_Realien_)
soon became a feature of the _Volksschule_ instruction. From Prussia it
spread to all German lands. In England the Pestalozzian idea was
introduced into the Infant Schools, [27] though in a very formal fashion,
under the heading of object lessons. In this form elementary science study
reached the United States, about 1860, though a decade later well-
organized courses in elementary science instruction began to be introduced
into the American elementary schools. [28]
After the political reaction following the Napoleonic wars had set in, on
the continent of Europe, all thought-provoking studies were greatly
curtailed in the people's schools. In England, for other reasons, object
lessons did not make any marked headway, and as late as 1865 practically
nothing relating to the great new world of scientific knowledge had as yet
been introduced into the private and religious elementary schools (R. 360)
which, up to that time, constituted England's chief dependence for the
elementary instruction of her people.
2. _The secondary schools._ In the secondary schools the earliest work of
importance in introducing the new scientific subjects was done by the
Germans and the French. In German lands the _Realschule_ obtained an early
start (1747; p. 420), and the instruction in mathematics and science it
included [29] had begun to be adopted by the German secondary schools,
especially in the South German States, before the period of reaction set
in. During the reign of Napoleon the scientific course in the French
_Lycées_ was given special prominence. After about 1815, and continuing
until after 1848, practical and thought-provoking studies were under an
official ban in both countries, and classical studies were specially
favored. [30] Finally, in 1852 in France and in 1859 in Prussia,
responding to changed political conditions and new economic demands, both
the scientific course in the _Lycées_ and the _Realschulen_ were given
official recognition, and thereafter received increasing state favor and
support. The scientific idea also took deep root in Denmark. There the
secondary schools were modernized, in 1809, when the sciences were given
an important place, and again in 1850, when many of the Latin schools were
transformed into _Realskoler_.
In the United States the academies and the early high schools both had
introduced quite an amount of mathematics and book-science, [31] and,
after about 1875, the development of laboratory instruction in science in
the growing high schools took place rather rapidly. Fellenberg's work in
Switzerland (p. 546) had also awakened much interest in the United States,
and by 1830 a number of Schools of Industry and Science had begun to
appear. [32] These made instruction in mathematics and science prominent
features of their work. After the Napoleonic wars, England attained to
the first place as an industrial and commercial nation. This led to a
continual agitation on the part of manufacturers for some science and art
instruction. In 1853, Parliament created a State Department of Science and
Art (p. 638), and the promotion of science and art education by government
grants was now begun. Though the nation had been the first to be
transformed by the industrial revolution, and its foreign trade by 1850
reached all parts of the world, the secondary schools of England had
remained largely untouched by the change. They were still mainly the
Renaissance Latin grammar schools they had been ever since Dean Colet
(1510) marked out the lines for such instruction by founding his reformed
grammar school at St. Pauls (p. 275). Their courses of instruction
contained little that was modern, and in their aims and purposes they went
back to the days of the Revival of Learning for their inspiration (R.
361).
THE CHALLENGE OF HERBERT SPENCER. By the middle of the nineteenth century
the scientific and industrial revolutions had produced important changes
in the conditions of living in all the then important world nations.
Particularly in the German States, France, England, and the United States
had the effects of the revolutions in manufacturing and living been felt.
In consequence there had been, for some time, a growing controversy
between the partisans of the older classical training and the newer
scientific studies as to their relative worth and importance, both for
intellectual discipline and as preparation for intelligent living, and by
the middle of the nineteenth century this had become quite sharp. The
"faculty psychology," upon which the theory of the discipline of the
powers of the mind by the classics was largely based, was attacked, and
the contention was advanced that the content of studies was of more
importance in education than was method and drill. The advocates of the
newer studies contended that a study of the classics no longer provided a
suitable preparation for intelligent living, and the question of the
relative worth of the older and newer studies elicited more and more
discussion as the century advanced.
[Illustration: FIG. 229. HERBERT SPENCER (1820-1903)]
In 1859 one of England's greatest scholars, Herbert Spencer, brought the
whole question to a sharp issue by the publication of a remarkably
incisive essay on "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?" In this he declared
that the purpose of education was to "prepare us for complete living," and
that the only way to judge of the value of an educational course was first
to classify, in the order of their importance, [33] the leading activities
and needs of life, and then measure the course of study by how fully it
offers such a preparation. Doing so (R. 362), and applying such a test, he
concluded that of all subjects a knowledge of science (R. 363) "was always
most useful for preparation for life," and therefore the type of knowledge
of most worth. In three other essays [34] he recommended a complete change
from the classical type of training which had dominated English secondary
education since the days of the Renaissance. Still more, instead of a few
being educated by a "cultural discipline" for a life of learning and
leisure, he urged general instruction in science, that all might receive
training and help for the daily duties of life.
These essays attracted wide attention, not only in England but in many
other lands as well. They were a statement, in clear and forceful English,
of the best ideas of the educational reformers for three centuries. In his
statement of the principles upon which sound intellectual education should
be based he merely enunciated theses for which educational reformers had
stood since the days of Ratke and Comenius. In his treatment of moral and
physical education he voiced the best ideas of John Locke. Spencer's great
service was in giving forceful expression to ideas which, by 1860, had
become current, and in so doing he pushed to the front anew the question
of educational values. The scientific and industrial revolutions had
prepared the way for a redirection of national education, and the time was
ripe in England, France, German lands, and the United States for such a
discussion. As a result, though the questions he raised are still in part
unsettled, a great change in assigned values has since been effected not
only in these nations, but in most other nations and lands which have
drawn the inspiration for their educational systems from them. Though his
work was not specially original, we must nevertheless class Herbert
Spencer as one of the great writers on educational aims and purposes, and
his book as one of the great influences in reshaping educational practice.
He gave a new emphasis to the work of all who had preceded him, and out of
the discussion which ensued came a new and a greatly enlarged estimate as
to the importance of science study in all divisions of the school.
[Illustration: FIG. 230. THOMAS H. HUXLEY (1825-95)]
THE NEW EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE. It is perhaps not too much to say that out of
Spencer's gathering-up and forceful statement of the best ideas of his
time, and the discussion which followed, a new conception of the
educational purpose as adjustment to the life one is to live--physical,
economic, social, moral, political--was clearly formulated, and a new
definition of a liberal education was framed. The former found expression
in a rather rapid introduction of science-study into the elementary
school, the secondary school, and the college, after about 1865, in the
school systems of all progressive nations, and the subsequent extension of
the scientific method to such new fields as history, politics, government,
and social welfare. The latter--the new definition of a liberal education
--was wonderfully well stated in an address (1868) by the English
scientist, Thomas Huxley, when he said: [35]
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam
engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as
well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a
knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the
laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life
and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous
will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all
beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to
respect others as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together
rarely: she as his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her
conscious self, her minister and interpreter.
The inter-relation between the movement for the study of the sciences and
the other movements for the improvement of instruction which we have so
far described in this chapter, was close. Pestalozzi had emphasized
instruction in geography and the study of nature; Froebel had given a
prominent place to nature study and school gardening; the manual-arts work
tended to exhibit industrial processes and relationships; and the
scientific emphasis on content rather than drill was in harmony with the
theories of all the modern reformers. Still more, the scientific movement
was in close harmony with the new individualistic tendency of the early
part of the nineteenth century, and with the movements for the improvement
of individual and national welfare which have been so prominent a
characteristic of the latter half of the century.
V. SOCIAL MEANING OF THESE CHANGES
A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. Pestalozzi, true to the individualistic spirit of
the age in which he lived and worked, had seen education as an individual
development, and the ends of education as individual ends. The spirit of
the French Revolutionary period was the spirit of individualism. With the
progress of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent rise of new
social problems, the emphasis was gradually shifted from the individual to
society--from the single man to the man in the mass. The first educational
thinker of importance to see and clearly state this new conception in
terms of the school was Herbart. Seeing the educational purpose in far
clearer perspective than had those who had gone before him, he showed that
education must have for its function the preparation of man to live in
organized society, and that character and social morality, rather than
individual development, must in consequence be the larger aims. Froebel,
possessed of something of the same insight, and seeing clearly the
educational importance of activity and expression, had opened up for
children a wealth of new contacts with the world about them in the new
type of educational institution which he created. His principles, he said,
when thoroughly worked out and applied to education "would revolutionize
the world." He did not complete the full educational organization he had
planned, but in the hands of the Swedes and Finns similar ideas were
worked out in practical form and made a part of school work. Applying
Froebel's idea to instruction in the old trades and industries, declining
in importance in the face of the rise of the factory system, they evolved
the manual-training activities, and these have since been made important
tools for giving to young people some intelligent ideas as to the
industrial relationships and economic problems of our complex modern life.
Since this early pioneer work changes in school work have been numerous
and of far-reaching importance. The methods and purpose of instruction in
the older subjects have been revised; new studies, which would serve to
interpret to the young the industrial and social revolutions of the
nineteenth century, have been introduced; the expression-subjects--the
domestic arts, music, drawing, clay-modeling, color work, the manual arts,
nature study, gardening--have given a new direction to school work; and
the study of science and the vocations has attained to a place of
importance previously unknown. During the past half-century the school has
been transformed, in the principal world nations, from a disciplinary
institution where drill in mastering the rudiments of knowledge was given,
into an instrument of democracy calculated to train young people for
living, for useful service in the office and shop and home, and to prepare
them for intelligent participation in the increasingly complex social and
political and industrial life of a modern world. This transformation of
the school has not always been easy (R. 365), but the vastly changed
conditions of modern life have demanded such a transformation in all
progressive nations.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF JOHN DEWEY. The foremost American interpreter, in
terms of the school, of the vast social and industrial changes which have
marked the nineteenth century, is John Dewey [36] (1859- ). Better perhaps
than anyone else he has thought out and stated a new educational
philosophy, suited to the changed and changing conditions of human living.
His work, both experimental and theoretical, has tended both to re-
psychologize (R. 364) and socialize education; to give to it a practical
content, along scientific and industrial lines; and to interpret to the
child the new social and industrial conditions of modern society by
connecting the activities of the school closely with those of real life.
[Illustration: FIG. 231. A REORGANIZED KINDERGARTEN
Drawn from a photograph showing the reconstruction of the kindergarten
activities, as worked out by Dewey at Chicago.]
Starting with the premises that "the school cannot be a preparation for
social life except as it reproduces the typical conditions of social
life"; that "industrial activities are the most influential factors in
determining the thought, the ideals, and the social organization of a
people"; and that "the school should be life, not a preparation for
living"; Dewey for a time conducted an experimental school, for children
from four to thirteen years of age, to give concrete expression to his
educational ideas. These, first consciously set forth by Froebel, were:
[37]
1. That the primary business of the school is to train in coöperative
and mutually helpful living....
2. That the primary root of all educational activity is in the
instinctive, impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not
in the presentation and application of external material.
3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and
directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the coöperative
living ... 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 clinched.
The work of this school [38] was of fundamental importance in directing
the reorganization of the work of the kindergarten along different and
larger lines, and also has been of significance in redirecting the
instruction in both the social subjects--history (R. 366), literature,
etc.--and the manual, domestic, and artistic activities of the school. In
his subsequent writings he may be said to have stated an important new
philosophy for the school in terms of modern social, political, and
industrial needs.
THE DEWEY EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY. Believing that the public school is the
chief remedy for the ills of organized society, Professor Dewey has tried
to show how to change the work of the school so as to make it a miniature
of society itself. Social efficiency, and not mere knowledge, he has
conceived to be the end, and this social efficiency is to be produced
through participation in the activities of an institution of society, the
school. The different parts of the school system thus become a unified
institution, in which children are taught how to live amid the constantly
increasing complexities of modern social and industrial life.
Education, therefore, in Dewey's conception, involves not merely learning,
but play, construction, use of tools, contact with nature, expression, and
activity; and the school should be a place where children are working
rather than listening, learning life by living life, and becoming
acquainted with social institutions and industrial processes by studying
them. The work of the school is in large part to reduce the complexity of
modern life to such terms as children can understand, and to introduce the
child to modern life through simplified experiences. Its primary business
may be said to be to train children in coöperative and mutually helpful
living. The virtues of a school, as Dewey points out, are learning by
doing; the use of muscles, sight and feeling, as well as hearing; and the
employment of energy, originality, and initiative. The virtues of the
school in the past were the colorless, negative virtues of obedience,
docility, and submission. Mere obedience and the careful performance of
imposed tasks he holds to be not only a poor preparation for social and
industrial efficiency, but a poor preparation for democratic society and
government as well. Responsibility for good government, under any
democratic form of organization, rests with all, and the school should
prepare for the political life of to-morrow by training its pupils to meet
responsibilities, developing initiative, awakening social insight, and
causing each to shoulder a fair share of the work of government in the
school.
We have now before us the great contributions to a philosophy for the
educational process made since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Many other workers in different lands, but more particularly in German
lands, France, Italy, England, and the United States, have added their
labors to the expansion and redirection of the school. They are too
numerous to mention and, though often nationally important, need not be
included here. Still more, the contributions of Pestalozzi, Herbart,
Froebel, Spencer, Dewey, and their followers and disciples are so
interwoven in the educational theory and practice of to-day that it is in
most cases impossible to separate them from one another. [39]
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you explain the long-continued objection to teacher-training?
2. Contrast "oral and objective teaching" with the former "individual
instruction."
3. Show how complete a change in classroom procedure this involved.
4. Show how Pestalozzian ideas necessitated a "technique of instruction."
5. Why is it that Pestalozzian ideas as to language and arithmetic
instruction have so slowly influenced the teaching of grammar, language,
and arithmetic?
6. How do you explain the decline in importance of the once-popular mental
arithmetic?
7. Show how child study was a natural development from the Pestalozzian
psychology and methodology.
8. Explain what is meant by the statements that Herbart rejected:
(a) The conventional-social ideal of Locke.
(b) The unsocial ideal of Rousseau.
(c) The "faculty-psychology" conception of Pestalozzi.
9. Explain what is meant by saying that Herbart conceived of education as
broadly social, rather than personal.
10. Show in what ways and to what extent Herbart:
(a) Enlarged our conception of the educational process.
(b) Improved the instruction content and process.
11. Explain why Herbartian ideas took so much more quickly in the United
States than did Pestalozzianism.
12. State the essentials of the kindergarten idea, and the psychology
behind it.
13. State the contribution of the kindergarten idea to education.
14. Show the connection between the sense impression ideas of Pestalozzi,
the self-activity of Froebel, and the manual activities of the modern
elementary school.
15. Explain why scientific studies came into the schools so slowly, up to
about 1860, and so very rapidly after about that time.
16. Explain the particularly long resistance to the introduction of
scientific studies by industrial England.
17. State the comparative importance of content and drill in education.
18. Does the reasoning of Herbert Spencer appeal to you as sound? If not,
why not?
19. Show how the argument of Spencer for the study of science was also an
argument for a more general diffusion of educational advantages.
20. Would schools have advanced in importance as they have done had the
industrial revolution not taken place? Why?
21. Why is more extended education called for as "industrial life becomes
more diversified, its parts narrower, and its processes more concealed"?
22. Point out the social significance of the educational work of John
Dewey.
23. Point out the value, in the new order of society, of each group of
school subjects listed in footnote 1 on page 763.
24. Contrast the virtues of a school before Pestalozzi's time and those of
a modern school.
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following selections
illustrative of the contents of this chapter are reproduced:
344. Bache: The German Seminaries for Teachers.
345. Bache: A German Teachers' Seminary Described.
346. Bache: A French Normal School Described.
347. Barnard: Beginnings of Teacher-Training in England.
348. Barnard: The Pupil-Teacher System Described.
349. Clinton: Recommendation for Teacher-Training Schools.
350. Massachusetts: Organizing the First Normal Schools.
(a) The Organizing Law.
(b) Admission and Instruction in.
(c) Mann: Importance of the Normal School.
351. Early Textbooks: Examples of Instruction from
(a) Davenport: History of the United States.
(b) Morse: Elements of Geography--Map.
(c) Morse Elements of Geography.
352. Murray: A Typical Teacher's Contract.
353. Bache: The Elementary Schools of Berlin in 1838.
354. Providence: Grading the Schools of.
355. Felkin: Herbart's Educational Ideas.
356. Felkin: Herbart's Educational Ideas Applied.
357. Titchener: Herbart and Modern Psychology.
358. Marenholtz-Bülow: Froebel's Educational Views.
359. Huxley: English and German Universities Contrasted.
360. Huxley: Mid-nineteenth-Century Elementary Education in England.
361. Huxley: Mid-nineteenth-Century Secondary Education in England.
362. Spencer: What Knowledge is of Most Worth?
363. Spencer: Conclusions as to the Importance of Science.
364. Dewey: The Old and New Psychology Contrasted.
365. Ping: Difficulties in Transforming the School.
(a) Relating Education to Life.
(b) The Old Teacher and the New System.
366. Dewey: Socialization of School Work illustrated by History.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. Contrast the instruction in a German Teachers' Seminary (345) or a
French normal school (346) of 1838, as described by Bache, with that of an
American normal school of to-day.
2. What do the beginnings of teacher training in England (347, 348)
indicate as to conceptions then existing as to the educational process?
3. Show, by comparison, that the beginnings of the American normal school
were German, rather than English in origin.
4. Just what educational conditions does Governor Clinton (349) indicate
as existing in New York State, in 1827?
5. Contrast the instruction in the early Massachusetts normal schools
(350) with that in the German (345) and French (346) of about the same
time.
6. What do the three professional courses reproduced (345, 346, 350 b)
indicate as to the development of pedagogical work by about 1840?
7. Compare the textbook types, given in 351, with modern textbooks in
equivalent subjects.
8. Just what light on school teaching, in 1841, does the teacher's
contract given (352) throw?
9. State the steps in the evolution of a graded system of schools (353,
354).
10. State the essentials of Herbart's educational ideas (355,356), and the
nature of the advances made over his predecessors.
11. State the essentials of Froebel's educational ideas, as explained by
the Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow (358).
12. Explain the difference between the universities of the two nations
(359).
13. Contrast elementary education in England (360) with that in the United
States at the same period.
14. Would you add anything else to Spencer's requirements to prepare for
complete living? What? Why?
15. How do you explain science being "written against in our theologies
and frowned upon from our pulpits" (363) when it is of such importance as
Spencer concludes?
16. Contrast the old and the new psychology (357, 364).
17. Have the difficulties experienced in the transformation of instruction
in China (365) been essentially different than with us? How?
18. Apply Dewey's idea as to the socialization of history (366) to
instruction in geography.
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
Barnard, Henry. _National Education in Europe_.
* Bowen, H. C. _Froebel and Education through Self-Activity_.
Compayré, G. _Herbart and Education by Instruction_.
* De Garmo, Chas. _Herbart and the Herbartians_.
Dewey, John. _The School and Social Progress_. (Nine numbers.)
* Dewey, John. _The School and Society_.
Gordy, J. P. _Rise and Growth of the Normal School Idea in the United
States_. Circular of Information, United States Bureau of
Education, No. 8, 1891.
Hollis, A. P. _The Oswego Movement_.
* Jordan, D. S. "Spencer's Essay on Education"; in _Cosmopolitan
Magazine_, vol. xxix, pp. 135-49. (Sept. 1902.)
Judd, C. H. _The Training of Teachers in England, Scotland, and
Germany_. (Bulletin 35, 1914, United States Bureau of Education.)
Monroe, Will S. _History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United
States_.
* Parker, S. C. _History of Modern Elementary Education_.
Ping Wen Kuo. _The Chinese System of Public Education_.
Spencer, Herbert. _Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical_.
Vanderwalker, N. C. _The Kindergarten in American Education_.
CHAPTER XXIX
NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS
I. POLITICAL
THE ENLARGED CONCEPTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION. The new ideas as to the
purpose and functions of the State promulgated by English and French
eighteenth-century thinkers, and given concrete expression in the American
and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have
seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a
people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the
empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular
school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction,
first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early organized to
serve national ends. The new American States, also long moving toward
state organization and control, early created state schools to replace the
earlier religious schools; while the French Revolution enthusiasts
abolished the religious school and ordered the substitution of a general
system of state schools to serve their national ends.
From these beginnings, as we have seen, the state-school idea has in
course of time spread to all continents, and nations everywhere to-day
have come to feel that the maintenance of a more or less comprehensive
system of state schools is so closely connected with national welfare and
progress as to be a necessity for the State (R. 367). In consequence,
state ministries for education have been created in all the important
world nations; state and local school officials have been provided
generally to see that the state purpose in creating schools is carried
out; state normal schools for the preparation of teachers have been
established; comprehensive state school codes have been enacted or
educational decrees formulated; and constantly increasing expenditures for
education are to-day derived by taxing the wealth of the State to educate
the children of the State.
CHANGE FROM THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE. The original purpose in the
establishment of schools by the State was everywhere to promote literacy
and citizenship. Under all democratic forms of government it was also to
insure to the people the elements of learning that they might be prepared
for participation in the functions of government. [1] This is well
expressed in the quotations given (p. 525) from early American statesmen
as to the need for the education of public opinion and the diffusion of
knowledge among the people. The same ideas were expressed by French
writers and statesmen of the time, and by the English after the passage of
the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 (p. 642). With the gradual extension of
the franchise to larger and larger numbers of the people, the extension of
educational advantages naturally had to follow. The education of new
citizens for "their political and civil duties as members of society and
freemen" became a necessity, and closely followed each extension of the
right to vote. In all democratic governments the growing complexity of
modern political society has since greatly enlarged these early duties of
the school. To-day, in modern nations where general manhood suffrage has
come to be the rule, and still more so in nations which have added female
suffrage as well, the continually increasing complexity of the political,
economic, and social problems upon which the voters are expected to pass
judgment is such that a more prolonged period of citizenship education is
necessary if voters are to exercise, in any intelligent manner, their
functions of citizenship. In nations where the initiative, referendum, and
recall have been added, the need for special education along political,
economic, and social lines has been still further emphasized.
At first instruction in the common-school branches, with instruction in
morals or religion added, was regarded as sufficient. In States, such as
the German, where religious instruction was retained in the schools, this
has been made a powerful instrument in moulding the citizenship and
upholding the established order. The history of the different nations has
also been used by each as a means for instilling desired conceptions of
citizenship, and some work in more or less formal civil government has
usually been added. To-day all these means have been proven inadequate for
democratic peoples. In consequence, the work in civil government is being
changed and broadened into institutional and community civics; the work of
the elementary school is being socialized, along the lines advocated by
Dewey; and instruction in economic principles and in the functions of
government is being introduced into the secondary schools. Instead of
being made mere teaching institutions, engaged in promoting literacy and
diffusing the rudiments of learning among the electorate, schools are to-
day being called upon to grasp the significance of their political and
social relationships, and to transform themselves into institutions for
improving and advancing the welfare of the State (R. 368).
THE PROMOTION OF NATIONALITY. In Prussia the promotion of national
solidarity was early made an important aim of the school. This has in time
become a common national purpose, as there has dawned upon statesmen
generally the idea that a national spirit or culture is "an artificial
product which transcends social, religious, and economic distinctions,"
and that it "could be manufactured by education" (R. 340). In consequence
of this discovery the school has been raised to a new position of
importance in the national life, and has become the chief means for
developing in the citizenship that national unity and national strength so
desirable under present-day world conditions. In the German States, where
this function of the school has in recent times been perverted to carry
forward imperialistic national ends (R. 342); in France, where it has been
intelligently used to promote a rational type of national strength (R.
341); in Italy, where divergent racial types are being fused into a new
national unity; in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines (R. 343) where
the United States has used education to bring backward peoples up to a new
level of culture, and to develop in them firm foundations of national
solidarity; in China (R. 335) where an ancient people, speaking numerous
dialects, is making the difficult transition from an old culture to the
newer western civilization; and in Algiers and Morocco, where the spirit
of French nationality is being fused into dark-skinned tribesmen--
everywhere to-day, where public education has really taken hold on the
national life, we find the school being used for the promotion of national
solidarity and the inculcation of national ideals and national culture. To
such an extent has this become true that practically all the pressing
problems of the school to-day, in any land, find their ultimate
explanation in terms of the new nineteenth-century conceptions of
political nationality.
Since the development of world trade routes following long rail and
steamship lines, along which people as well as raw materials and
manufactured articles pass to and fro, the entrance of new and diverse
peoples into distant national groups has created a new problem of
nationalization that before the early nineteenth century was largely
unknown. Previous to the nineteenth century the problem was confined
almost entirely to peoples conquered and annexed by the fortunes of war.
To-day it is a voluntary migration of peoples, and a migration of such
proportions and from such distant and unlike civilizations that the
problem of assimilating the foreigner has become, particularly in the
English-speaking nations and colonies, to which distant and unrelated
peoples have turned in largest numbers, [2] a serious national problem.
The migration of 32,102,671 persons to the United States, between 1820 and
1914, from all parts of the world, has been a movement of peoples compared
with which the migrations of the Germanic tribes--Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Danes, Burgundians, Huns--into the old
Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries pale into insignificance.
No such great movement of peoples was ever known before in history, and
the assimilative power of the American nation has not been equal to the
task. The World War revealed the extent of the failure to nationalize the
foreigner who has been permitted to come, and brought the question of
"Americanization" to the front as one of the most pressing problems
connected with American national education. With the world in flux
racially as it now is, the problem of the assimilation of non-native
peoples is one which the schools of every nation which offers political
and economic opportunity to other peoples must face. This has called for
the organization of special classes in the schools, evening and adult
instruction, community-center work, nationalization programs, compulsory
attendance of children, state oversight of private and religious schools,
and other forms of educational undertakings undreamed of in the days when
the State first took over the schools from the Church the better to
promote literacy and citizenship.
EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. The effects of the great industrial
and social changes which we have previously described are written large
across the work of the school. As the civilization in the leading world
nations has increased in complexity, and the ramifications of the social
and industrial life have widened, the school has been called upon to
broaden its work, and develop new types of instruction to increase its
effectiveness. An education which was entirely satisfactory for the
simpler form of social and industrial life of two generations ago has been
seen to be utterly inadequate for the needs of the present and the future.
It is the far-reaching change in social and industrial and home-life,
brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which underlies most of the
pressing problems in educational readjustment to-day. As the industrial
life of nations has become more diversified, its parts narrower, and its
processes more concealed, new and more extended training has been called
for to prepare young people for the work of life; to reveal to them
something of the intricacy and interdependence of modern political and
industrial and social groups; and to point out to them the importance of
each one's part in the national political and industrial organization.
With the ever-increasing subdivision and specialization of labor, the
danger from class subdivision has constantly increased, and more and more
the school has been called upon to instill into all a political and social
consciousness that will lead to unity amid increasing diversity, and to
concerted action for the preservation and improvement of the national
life.
More education than formerly has also been demanded to enable future
citizens to meet intelligently national and personal problems, and with
the widening of the suffrage and the spread of democratic ideas there has
come a necessary widening of the educational ladder, so that more of the
masses of the people may climb. Even in nations having the continental-
European two-class school system, larger educational opportunities for the
masses have had to be provided. This has come through the provision of
middle schools, continuation schools, higher primary schools, and people's
high schools, [3] as in Germany, France (see diagram, p. 598), the
Scandinavian countries (p. 713; R. 370), and Japan (p. 720). In nations
having an American-type educational ladder, it has led to the
multiplication of secondary schools and secondary-school courses, that a
larger and larger percentage of the people may be prepared better to meet
the increasingly complex and increasingly difficult conditions of modern
political, social, and industrial life. In the more advanced and more
democratic nations we also note the establishment of systems of evening
schools, adult instruction, university extension, science and art
instruction in special centers, the multiplication of libraries, and the
increasing use of the lecture, the stereopticon, and the public press, for
the purpose of keeping the people informed. No nation has done more to
extend the advantages of secondary education to its people than has the
United States; France has been especially prominent in adult instruction;
England has done noteworthy work with university extension and science and
art instruction; while the United States has carried the library movement
farther than any other land. All these, again, are extensions of
educational opportunity to the masses of the people in a manner undreamed
of a century ago.
UNIVERSITY EXPANSION. The modern university first attained its development
in Prussia (pp. 553-55), while in England and in the nations which drew
their inspiration from her, the teaching college, with its narrow range of
studies and disciplinary instruction (R. 331), continued to dominate
higher education until past the middle of the nineteenth century (R. 359).
The old universities of France, aside from Paris, were virtually destroyed
in the days of the Revolution, and their re-creation as effective teaching
and research institutions has been a relatively recent (1896) event. The
universities of Italy and Spain ceased to be effective teaching
institutions centuries ago, and only recently have begun to give evidences
of new life.
Within the past three quarters of a century, and in many nations within a
much shorter period of time, the university has very generally experienced
a new manifestation of popular favor, and is to-day looked upon as perhaps
the most important part, viewed from the standpoint of the future welfare
of the State, of the entire system of public instruction maintained by the
State. In it the leaders for the State are trained; in it the thinking
which is to dominate government a quarter-century later is largely done;
out of it come the creative geniuses whose work, in dozens of fields of
human endeavor, will mould the political, social, and scientific future of
the nation (R. 369). Every government depending upon a two-class school
system must of necessity draw its leaders in the professions, in
government, in pure and applied science, and in many other lines from the
small but carefully selected classes its universities train. In a
democracy, depending entirely upon drawing its future leaders from among
the mass, the university becomes an indispensable institution for the
training of leaders and for the promotion of the national welfare. In a
democratic government one of the highest functions of a university is to
educate leaders and to create the standards for democracy.
The university has, accordingly, in all lands, recently experienced a
great expansion. The German universities have been prominent modern
institutions for a century and a half. Realizing, as no other people have
done, their value in developing skilled leaders for the State, promoting
the national welfare, integrating the Empire, and as centers for building
up among students of other nationalities a good-will toward Germany, large
sums have been spent on their further development since 1871. Within the
past quarter-century new and strong French universities have been created,
[4] and old universities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece have been
awakened to a new life. The English universities have been made over,
since 1870, and new municipal universities in Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds,
Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and London have set new standards in
English higher education. The universities of Scotland, Holland,
Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries have also recently attained to
world prominence. In Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, the
Philippines, India, Egypt, Palestine, Algiers, and South Africa, new
universities have been created to advance the national welfare. The South
American nations have also established a number of promising new
foundations, and given new life to older ones. Often nations swinging out
into the current of western civilization have developed their universities
before popular education really got under way.
In no country has the development of university instruction been more
rapid than in the United States and Canada. New and important state
universities are to-day found in most of the American States and Canadian
Provinces, some States maintaining two. These have been relatively recent
creations to serve democracy's needs, and upon the support of these state
universities large and increasing sums of money are spent annually. [5] In
no nation of the world, too, has private benevolence created and endowed
so many private universities of high rank as in the United States, [6] and
these have fallen into their proper places as auxiliary agents for the
promotion of the national welfare in government, science, art, and the
learned professions.
From small collegiate institutions with a very limited curriculum, a
century ago, stimulated in part by the German example and in part
responding to new national needs, universities to-day, in all the leading
world nations, have developed into groups of well-organized professional
schools, ministering to the great number of special needs of modern life
and government. The university development since the middle of the
nineteenth century has been greater than at any period before in world
history, and with the spread of democracy, dependent as democracy is upon
mass education to obtain its leaders, the university has become "the soul
of the State" (R. 369). The university development of the next half-
century, the world as a whole considered, may possibly surpass anything
that we have recently witnessed.
THE STATE SCHOOL SYSTEMS AS ORGANIZED. We now find state school systems
organized in all the leading world nations. In many the system of public
instruction maintained is broad and extensive, beginning often with infant
schools or kindergartens, continuing up through elementary schools, middle
schools, continuation schools, secondary schools, and normal schools, and
culminating in one or more state universities. In addition there are to-
day, in many nations, state systems of scientific and technical schools
and institutions, and vocational schools and schools for special classes,
to which we shall refer more in detail a little further on. The support of
all these systems of public instruction to-day comes largely from the
direct or indirect taxation of the wealth of the State. Being now
conceived of as essential to the welfare and progress of the State, the
State yearly confiscates a portion of every man's property and uses it to
maintain a service deemed vital to its purposes.
The sums spent to-day on education by modern States seem enormous,
compared with the sums spent for education under conditions existing a
century ago. In England, for example, where the first national aid was
granted, in 1833, in the form of a parliamentary grant of £20,000
(approximately $100,000), the parliamentary grants for elementary schools
had reached approximately £12,000,000 by 1910, with an additional national
aid for universities of over £1,100,000. The year following the World War
the grants were £32,853,111. In France a treasury grant of 50,000 francs
(approximately $10,000) was first made for primary schools, in 1816. This
was doubled in 1829, and in 1831 was raised to a million francs. By 1850,
the state aid for primary education had reached 3,000,000 francs; by 1870,
10,000,000 francs; by 1880, 30,000,000; and by 1914, approximately
220,000,000 francs. In addition the State was paying out 25,000,000 francs
for secondary schools, and 10,000,000 francs for universities. In the
United States the total expenditures for maintenance only of public
elementary and secondary schools was $69,107,612, in 1870-71; had reached
$214,964,618 by the end of the nineteenth century; and was $640,717,053 in
1915-16, with an additional $101,752,542 for universities. By 1920 the
total expenditures for the maintenance of public elementary, secondary,
and higher education in the United States will probably total a billion
dollars. These rapidly increasing expenditures merely record the changing
political conception as to the national importance of enlarging the
educational opportunities and advantages of those who are to constitute
and direct the future State.
II. SCIENTIFIC
In no phase of the remarkable educational development made by nations,
since the middle of the nineteenth century, has there been a more
important expansion of the educational service than in the creation of
schools dealing with the applications of science to the affairs of the
national life. Still more, no extension of instruction into new fields has
ever yielded material benefits, increased productivity, alleviated
suffering, or multiplied comforts and conveniences as has this new
development in applied scientific education during the past three quarters
of a century.
SCIENCE INSTRUCTION IN THE SCHOOLS. At first this new work came in, as we
have seen (p. 774), but slowly, and its introduction into the secondary
schools of France, Germany, England, the United States, and other nations
for a time met with bitter opposition from the partisans of the older type
of intellectual training. In Germany it was not until after Emperor
William II came to the throne (1888) that the _Realschulen_ really found a
warm partisan, he demanding (1890), in the name of the national welfare,
that the secondary schools "depart entirely from the basis that has
existed for centuries--the old monastic education of the Middle Ages"--and
that "young Germans and not young Greeks and Romans" be trained in the
schools (R. 368). During his reign the _Realschulen_ (six-year course) and
_Oberrealschulen_ (nine-year course) were especially favored, while
permission to found additional _Gymnasien_ became hard to obtain. The
scientific course in the French _Lycées_ similarly did not prosper until
after the coming of the Third Republic (1871) and the rise of modern
scientific and industrial demands. In England it was not until after 1870
that the endowed secondary schools began to include science instruction,
and laboratory instruction in the sciences began to be introduced into the
secondary schools of the United States at about the same time. In the
United States, too, the first manual-training high school was not
established until 1880, but by 1890 the creation of such schools was
clearly under way. Other nations--Switzerland, Holland, the Scandinavian
countries--also began to include laboratory science instruction in the
work of their secondary schools at about the same time. The decade of the
seventies witnessed a rising interest in instruction in science which
carried such work into the secondary schools of all progressive nations.
To-day, in nearly all lands, we find secondary-school courses in science,
or special secondary schools for scientific instruction, occupying a
position of at least equal importance with the older classical courses or
schools. As science instruction has become organized, and a knowledge of
the principles of science has become diffused, object lessons, _Realien_,
nature study, or elementary science instruction has very generally been
put into the elementary or people's schools for the younger pupils. As a
result, young people finishing the elementary schools to-day know more
relating to the laws of the universe, and the applications of these laws
to human life and industry, than did distinguished scholars two centuries
ago.
All this work in the elementary schools, middle schools, people's high
schools, secondary schools, or special technical schools of middle or
secondary grade has been of much value in diffusing scientific knowledge
and scientific methods of thinking and working among large numbers of
people, as well as in revealing to many the possibilities of a scientific
career. The great and important development of scientific instruction,
however, since about 1860, has been in the fields of advanced applied
science or technical education, and has taken place chiefly in new and
higher specialized schools and research foundations. The fields in which
the greatest scientific advances have been made, and to which we shall
here briefly refer, have been engineering, agriculture, and medicine.
THE BEGINNINGS OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION. The beginnings of technical
education were made earliest in France, Germany, and the United States,
and in the order named. France and German lands, but particularly France,
inherited through the monasteries what survived of the old Roman skills
and technical arts. In the building of bridges, roads, fortifications,
aqueducts, and imposing public buildings, the Romans had shown the
possession of engineering ability of a high order. Some of this knowledge
was retained by the monks of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the
monasteries they erected and the churches they built. Later it passed to
others, and is evidenced in the great cathedrals and town halls of Europe,
and particularly of northern France. In military and civil engineering
the French were also the true successors of the Romans. As early as 1747 a
special engineering school for bridges and highways (_École des Ponts et
Chaussées_) had been created, and a little later a special school to train
mining engineers (_École des Mines_) was added. These were the first of
the world's higher technical schools. After the Revolution, the new need
for military and medical knowledge, as well as the general French interest
in applied science, led to the creation of a large number of important
higher technical institutions (list, p. 518), most of which have persisted
to the present and been enlarged and extended with time. Napoleon also
created a School of Arts and Trades (R. 282), and a number of military
schools (p. 590).
In German lands there was early founded a series of trade schools, [7]
which have in time been developed into important technical universities.
After the creation of the Imperial German Empire, in 1871, these schools
were especially favored by the government, and their work was raised to a
rank equal to that of the older universities. To the excellent training
given in these institutions the German leadership in applied science and
industry, before 1914, was largely due. [8] It has been the particular
function of these technical universities to apply scientific knowledge to
the industries and the arts, and to show the technical schools beneath and
the directors of German industries how further to apply it (R. 371). Of
their work a recent _Report_ [9] well says:
While in other countries the development of science has been academic,
in Germany every new principle elaborated by science has
revolutionized some industry, modified some manufacturing process, or
opened up an entirely new field of commercial exploitation. In the
chemical industries of Germany ... there is one trained university
chemist for every forty working-people. It is important to realize
that the development of Germany's manufactures and commerce has
depended not upon the establishment of any monopoly in the domain of
science, not upon any special advancement of science within her own
boundaries, but primarily upon the practical utilization of the
results of scientific research in Germany and other countries.
The creation of the United States Military Academy, at West Point, in
1802, marks the American beginnings in technical education. In 1824 the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was begun, largely as a manual-labor
school after the Fellenberg plan, to give instruction "in the applications
of science to the common purposes of life," and about 1850 this developed
into one of the earliest of our four-year engineering colleges. In 1846
the United States organized a college for naval engineering, at Annapolis,
to do for the Navy what West Point had done for the Army. In 1861 the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, opening its doors in
1865. This was the first of a number of important new engineering
colleges, and eight others had been established, by private funds, before
1880.
The development in England came a little later. Good engineering schools
have since been developed in connection with the new municipal
universities, while good engineering colleges have also been created at
Oxford and Cambridge, as well as at the Scottish and Irish universities.
THE NEW IMPULSES TO DEVELOPMENT. During the first six decades of the
nineteenth century, France, the German States, and the United States were
slowly moving toward the creation of special schools for technical
education. After about 1860 the movement increased with great rapidity. A
number of events contributed to this change in rate of development, the
most important of which were:
1. The development attained by pure science, by about 1860. (See
chapter XXVII, part II, p. 723.)
2. The Industrial Revolution (p. 728), which changed nations from an
agricultural to an industrial status, opened up the possibilities of
vast world trade, and created enormous demands for technically trained
men to supervise and develop the rapidly growing industries of
nations.
3. The London Exhibition of 1851, which displayed to the world the
applications of science to trade, manufacturing, and the arts, made in
particular by England. This opened the eyes of Europe and America to
the possibilities of technical education, and led to the creation, in
1853, of a national Department of Science and Art (p. 638) for
England. This began the stimulation, by money grants, of technical
education and instruction in drawing, and exerted from the first an
important influence on English education.
4. The passage by the Congress of the United States of the Morrill
Land-Grant-College Act, in 1862, which provided for the creation of
colleges of engineering, military science, and agriculture, in each of
the American States.
5. The militarily successful wars of Prussia against Denmark, in 1864;
Austria, 1866; and France, 1870-71. These revealed to other nations
the importance of sound military and engineering education for a
nation, and so tremendously stimulated German technical education that
the new nation soon arose, in many lines, to a position of world
industrial leadership (369).
6. The Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, in 1876, which repeated
the work of the London Exhibition of 1851, and gave a new meaning to
the scientific and engineering education then developing in the new
American Land-Grant Colleges.
7. The work of Virchow in Germany (1856) in developing pathology; of
Pasteur in France, after 1859, in establishing the germ theory of
disease; the English surgeon Lister, about the same time, in
developing antiseptic surgery; and the new work of physiologists and
chemists. Combined these have remade medical science, and have opened
up immense possibilities for benefiting mankind.
Following these important stimuli to activity, the important nations of
the world began the earnest development of technical education, and later
medical education, with the result that this new development has affected
educational practice all over the world. The new ideas have spread to all
continents, and to-day the call for technical education comes not only
from the older nations and such new countries as Canada, Australia, South
Africa, and the South American States, but from such ancient and backward
civilizations as Japan, China, Siam, the Philippines, the East Indies,
Egypt, Persia, and Turkey.
In consequence to-day numerous and expensive engineering colleges and
research institutions are maintained by the important world nations. To-
day the trained engineer goes to work his wonders in all corners of the
globe, and his task has become primarily that of organizing and directing
men in the work of controlling the forces and materials of nature so that
they may be made to benefit the human race. So rapid has been the
development that, out of the earlier comprehensive type of engineering,
to-day dozens of specialized types of engineering education and
specialization have been evolved, covering such related fields as civil,
mechanical, mining, metallurgical, electrical, architectural, chemical,
electro-chemical, marine, naval, sanitary, biological, and public-health
engineering. No longer can a nation hope to develop its resources, care
properly for the modern needs of its people, or be counted among the
important industrial or agricultural nations if it neglects the
development of technical education.
SCIENCE APPLIED TO AGRICULTURE. France also was the direct inheritor,
through the monks, of the old Roman agricultural knowledge and skills,
though up to the nineteenth century no attempt to organize agricultural
instruction took place anywhere in Europe. The earliest effort in that
direction was a proposal made in 1775 by Abbé Rosier, in France, to
Turgot, then Minister of Finance, on "A Plan for a National School of
Agriculture." Nothing coming of the proposal, the Abbé submitted the
proposal to the National Assembly, in 1789, and the same idea was later
presented to Napoleon, but without results. The first person to give
practical form to the idea was Fellenberg (p. 546), who conducted his
manual-labor agricultural institute at Hofwyl, from 1806 to 1844, and
inaugurated a plan of educational procedure which was soon afterwards
copied in Switzerland, France, the South German States, England, and the
United States. One of the earliest institutions to be established outside
of Switzerland was the Institute of Agriculture and Forestry, founded by
the Agricultural Society of Würtemberg, in 1817, at Hohenheim, near
Stuttgart.
The earliest schools to teach agriculture in France were the Royal
Agronomic Institution at Grignon (1827); the Institute at Coetbo (1830),
and the Agricultural School at San Juan (1833). By 1847 twenty-five
agricultural schools were in operation in France, to several of which
orphan asylums and penal colonies were attached. In 1848 the French
Government reorganized the instruction in agriculture and gave it a
national basis. It ordered the creation of a farm school in each
department of France; a number of higher schools for agricultural
instruction at central places; and a National Agronomic Institute for more
advanced instruction. A treasury grant of 2,500,000 francs to establish
the system was voted. In 1873 elementary instruction in agriculture was
ordered given in all village and rural elementary schools.
In the United States a number of agricultural societies were formed early
in the century, and a private school of agriculture was opened in Maine,
in 1821, and another in Connecticut, in 1824. With the opening-up of the
new West to farming and the change of the East to manufacturing, after
about 1825, the agitation for agricultural education for a time died out,
reappearing in Michigan, in 1850. In that year a new constitution was
adopted which required the legislature to create a State School of
Agriculture, and in 1857 the Michigan Agricultural College opened its
doors. Two years later a "Farmers' High School," which later became the
Pennsylvania State College, was opened in central Pennsylvania. In 1862,
in the midst of the greatest civil war in history, the American Congress
passed the very important Morrill Act, which provided for the creation of
a college to teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military science in
each of the American States. It was a decade before many of these
institutions opened, and for a time they amounted to but little. They had
but few students, little money, and the instruction was very elementary
and but poorly organized. Cornell University, in New York State, was one
of the first (1868) of the new institutions to get under way and find its
work. The Centennial Exposition (1876) gave the needed emphasis to the
engineering courses, and by 1880 these were well established. The
agricultural courses did not flourish for two decades longer, and the
military science not until the World War, Despite feeble beginnings, the
result of the aid given by the national government has in time proved very
valuable, and to-day very large sums of money are being appropriated by
the American States and Territories for instruction in engineering,
agriculture, home economics, and related sciences, and large numbers of
students are now enrolled for this technical training.
THE RECENT NEW INTEREST IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. Since the latter part
of the nineteenth century agricultural education has awakened new interest
in many lands. The German States have created many schools for instruction
in agriculture and forestry. Denmark has regenerated the rural life of the
nation (R. 370) by its "People's High Schools" and its special schools for
instruction in agriculture. Italy has recently made special efforts to
extend agricultural instruction to its people. Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand have established agricultural schools. In Algiers, Morocco, Japan,
China, the Philippines, and India, good beginnings in agricultural
education have been made.
As agricultural knowledge has been worked out and classified, and
agricultural instruction has become organized, it has become possible to
relegate some of the more elementary instruction to the school below. This
was done in European nations before it took place in the United States. In
1888 the first American agricultural high school was established in
Minnesota. By 1898 there were ten such schools in the United States, but
since 1900 the development has been very rapid. By 1920 probably a
thousand high schools were offering instruction in agriculture, while
elementary instruction in agriculture had been introduced into the rural
and village schools of practically every American agricultural State.
The agricultural schools, colleges, and experimental stations established
by the national, state, and local educational authorities of different
nations have added another new division to the work of public education,
and one which is both very costly and very remunerative. Out of the work
of these schools has come a vast quantity of useful knowledge, and
hundreds of important applications of science to farm and home life. Old
breeds in stock and grains have been improved, new breeds have been
derived, and productivity has been greatly increased. Through the
teachings of home economics the farmer's home is being transformed, while
the applications of science made in these schools are modifying almost
every phase of agricultural life and rural living.
MEDICINE AND SANITARY SCIENCE. Closely related to sanitary, biological,
and public-health engineering has been the enormous recent development of
medicine and surgery. Within half a century instruction in these subjects
has been entirely transformed, and large and costly laboratories and
hospitals are now required for the work. There has also been much
specialization in medical training, within recent years, and especially
has preventive medicine been developed. Extending the newly found
biological and medical knowledge to the animal and vegetable worlds has
resulted in a similar development of veterinary medicine [10] and plant
pathology. A combination of medical knowledge with engineering and
chemistry has produced the sanitary engineer, while medical knowledge and
applied biology has produced the public-health expert. [11]
So important, too, has the control of all kinds of disease become, now
that people, animals, insects, plants, and goods move so freely along the
great trade routes of the world, that nations everywhere feel the
necessity, now that scientific research has revealed to questioning man
the methods of transmission of the diseases which once decimated armies
and cities, destroyed stocks, and ruined harvests, of developing ample
quarantine service and medical staffs to cope with diseases--human,
animal, and plant--from without, and to control those which arise within.
Nations too poor as yet to provide such service for themselves are today
having such provision made for them by other nations, or by great national
foundations, [12] so that other lands may be protected from the ravages of
their diseases and the economic wealth of all may be increased. The
element of Christian charity has also entered into the service, the labors
of Dr. Grenfell in Labrador, and the work of the Rockefeller medical and
surgical boat traveling among the Philippine Islands and its hookworm work
on every continent, being good examples of such Christian effort.
[Illustration: FIG. 232. THE PEKING UNION MEDICAL COLLEGE
A well-equipped center for instruction in western medicine, endowed by the
Rockefeller Foundation. A similar school is being created at Shanghai, in
central China. Existing medical schools at two other points, and nineteen
hospitals scattered over the Republic, have also been aided by this
American foundation. In addition, many medical missionaries, Chinese
physicians, and nurses have been sent to the United States for study. To
improve health standards and living conditions throughout the world is the
purpose of the work of the Foundation, which now has work under way on
every continent.]
APPLIED SCIENCE THE NATION'S PROTECTOR. To-day applied science stands
everywhere as the nation's protector. Applied in sanitation and preventive
medicine it has reduced the death rate, prolonged life, and protects homes
from many hidden dangers. In the engineering fields it has transformed the
face of the earth and all our ways of living and doing business. Applied
to industry it builds factories and railways, and works out new processes
to eliminate wastes, improve production, and utilize by-products.
Thousands of labor-saving inventions owe their origin to a new truth
worked out in some laboratory, and applied in another. Applied chemistry
has wrought wonders in advancing industry, protecting the public welfare,
eliminating unnecessary labor, and making life richer for all.
To-day the engineer with his railway and irrigating dam and power plant in
the desert has replaced the monk as the vanguard of the forces of
civilization. The scientist in his laboratory in part replaces armies and
navies as the protector of the nation's safety. The scientifically trained
Red Cross nurse is fast replacing the unskilled devotion of the older
Sister of Charity. The doctor and the surgeon at the medical mission are
carrying a very practical type of Christian civilization into far-away
lands. The laboratory expert in the quarantine station has succeeded the
priest with bell and book in keeping pestilence away from the land. The
public-health officer in the little town, and the sanitary engineer in the
city, protect the health and happiness of millions of homes. The plant
pathologist and veterinarian guard the crops and herds from which food and
clothing are derived. The scientific experts in plant and animal
industries work steadily to improve breeds and increase yields. When one
compares present-day scientific knowledge with that represented in the
thirteenth-century Encyclopaedia of Bartholomew Anglicus (R. 77); our
modern knowledge of diseases with the theories as to disease advanced by
Hippocrates (p. 197), and taught for so many centuries in Christian
Europe; our modern knowledge of bacterial transmission with the mediaeval
theories of Divine wrath and diabolic action; our modern ability to
annihilate time and space compared with early nineteenth-century
conditions; or modern applied science with the very limited technical
knowledge possessed by the guilds of the later Middle Ages--the stories of
Aladdin and his wonderful lamp seem to have been even more than realized
in our practical everyday life.