If we are to have better schools in our cities we must know what kind
of schools we have now. In an attempt to tell us, the school survey has
in the last few years been developed with an admirable technique, and
the passion for being surveyed has spread to cities large and small.
No more illuminating document has come out of this effort than the
recently published study of the school system of Portland, Oregon. It
stirs enthusiasm because it shows the progress that has been made in
clarifying the current problems and the ideals which must be realized
if the public school is to prepare the child of to-day for intelligent
participation in the society of which he will form a part. Compared
with the investigations in New York City and Springfield, Illinois,
this Portland survey, under the direction of Professor Cubberley of
Stanford University, represents a new achievement in educational
thinking. Those surveys contented themselves with a criticism of
details, or, at best, with a vague groping for constructive plan. The
Portland survey represents a definite break with the tradition. It is
characterized by a clear idea not only of how the system fails to meet
the modern demands, but of how these demands can be met.
The investigators cannot, of course, explain how it is that one of
the wealthiest and most comfortable of American cities, a city at
once entirely modern and homogeneously American, should have the most
mechanical and formalistic school system these educators had ever seen.
One gets the sense of how without leadership the school may become
a little backwater in a community. In Portland, a city of 250,000
people, commercial and residential center for the great Northwest,
these investigators found the “maintenance unchanged of a rigidly
prescribed mechanical system poorly adapted to the needs either of
children or community.” “Universal practice,” they say, “is enlisted in
the maintenance of a rigid, minutely and mechanically prescribed system
of instruction, organization, administration, supervision, examination
and inspection. Any change in this elaborate mechanism meets with
resistance, positive as well as negative. So far as this system is
adapted at any point to the actual needs of the individual children and
youth that come under it, so far as it is adapted to the needs of the
communities for adequately trained recruits to serve the community, the
adaptation is accidental, not the result of intelligence now operative
at that point.”
This is a criticism of an American institution, and Portland might be
any large American city which has not had an educational awakening.
The survey is significant because it shows the machinery and motives
of public school education in this country for the last generation
not only in Portland but in a city like New York, whose militaristic,
mechanical system is now being thrown into convulsions by the sudden
challenge of the new type of school embodied in the Gary plan. Indeed
this Portland survey is a much better survey of New York school
conditions than the elaborate Hanus inquiry which was made a few years
ago.
The viciousnesses which the investigators found in the Portland system
are those which are familiar to all who feel the defects of their
own schooling, or have set about to examine the reasons for the poor
quality of the school output. On the administrative side there are
all the evils that come from retaining a scheme of amateur control in
a system which has of necessity become professionalized. A board which
is directing a village school must keep all school matters under its
supervision. But when that village has become a vast city, a school
board which keeps the strings in its own hands is simply manufacturing
wastefulness and inefficiency. A lay board which employs highly paid
and highly trained principals, supervisors, etc., and then insists on
directing all business--from the engaging of janitors and the personal
selection of teachers to the suspension of by-laws whereby a schoolroom
may be leased for an evening lecture or a teacher excused to attend
the funeral of her grandmother--labels itself as archaic and unfit. It
is one of the cardinal principles of modern political and industrial
organization that it is a waste of money to pay salaries large enough
to buy judgment, discretion and expert skill and then not permit them
to be used.
This refusal to delegate responsibility, the investigators found,
paralyzed initiative all through the school system. Nothing could be
done without reference to an untrained body of laymen who, however
conscientious they might be, must usually decide spasmodically and
without any definite educational policy. Indeed their conscientiousness
is often a positive vice. Shiftlessness on their part would have
permitted initiative on the parts of principals and teachers. Under
present conditions the distinction between good teachers and bad fades
out. The concern of every one becomes to keep the machinery going, not
to criticize the work and keep it adapted to the individual aptitudes
of the children.
This administrative lifelessness has its counterpart in a pedagogical
routine the focus of which is the “course of study.” The curriculum
is uniform for all children. It is “vivisected into fifty-four dead
pieces,” laid down in pages in certain adopted textbooks. “The only
thought devoted to the formulation of the course of study,” say the
investigators, “was the simple mathematical thought necessary to
parcel out the pages of the books.” The teacher’s duty is to haul the
pupil through the course of study. This is done by means of the formal
recitation, where “pupils answer hollow word-questions with memorized
hollow word-statements.” Term examinations discover how many of these
word-statements are left in the pupils’ minds. An elaborate system of
inspection and supervision exists to check up and grade both teachers
and principals and ensure that the hallowed “course of study” is fully
being carried out. Many of the teachers are trained in the local
schools and turned back into the system to perpetuate these methods. A
state tenure-of-office act keeps all teachers in their places.
The effect upon the children is logical. The school becomes an
automatic process of elimination. Those who can be hauled through the
course of study are hauled. Those whose talents do not lie in the
capacity to memorize printed pages pass out of the school or become
hopelessly mired in the lower grades. “If the sixteen-year-old child
has not yet transferred to his memory Parts 37 to 54, inclusive, of
the dead and comminuted curriculum, the chief constituents of which
are abstract arithmetic and technical grammar, then he must begin with
Part 37 and appropriate that and each of the succeeding 17 Parts in
order, before he can even be associated with youth of approximately
his own age, and before he can engage in study suited to his age and
condition--study and exercises that will be of immediate and practical
value to him in the effort he must shortly make to serve society
for the sake of his own livelihood.” And this system, formulated
and approved twenty years ago by high educational authorities, the
survey stigmatizes as valuable only in its “cheapness and facility of
administration, and the relief that it affords educational officers
and teachers from all responsibility of knowing and of meeting the
individual needs of their pupils.”
This type of public school, so bald and grotesque in the sober
pages of the Portland survey that it seems more like the ritual of
some primitive tribe than the deliberate educational activity of an
enlightened American community, is yet the type that still prevails
in the majority of our cities. This is the fact that we must face.
Yet a community that asks to be surveyed is a community dissatisfied
with itself. Other communities are likely to stir uneasily, and ask
themselves why, if Los Angeles and Indianapolis and Gary can have
modern and fruitful public school systems, other cities should not. We
may even hope that it is the last of the old system and the promise of
the school of to-morrow.
XII
WHAT IS EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION?
At a time when more people are thinking intelligently about American
education than ever before, it is unfortunate that there should be
any confusion between the widely diverse trails that experimentation
is opening up to the modern school. It is becoming increasingly
evident that the “experimental” in education does not at all mean the
same thing to educational administrators as it does to educational
idealists. “Experimental education” has not yet been pitted in
competition against the “experimental school,” but it is not unlikely
that the different techniques which they suggest may come to seem
hostile to each other, and so the real values of both be lost. At
present the two seem to be developing in a fairly complete disregard
of each other. It would be dangerous for American education to
tangle itself in the dilemma of choosing between them. On the other
hand, it would be even more disastrous to confuse them. If we
attempt to apply the quantitative standards of the new “experimental
education” to the life of the “experimental school,” or to infuse the
qualitative ideals of the “experimental school” into the technique of
“experimental education,” we run the risk of spoiling that modern and
socially-adjusted school towards which we are all feeling our way.
When the inventive school superintendent or professor of education
speaks of “experimental education,” he is thinking, not of the “model
school,” but of the new standard tests in the fundamental subjects
by which the work of large masses of public school children is being
regularly measured and compared. The city school survey has elaborated
a technique of intellectual measurements which is giving us very
rapidly a genuine quantitative science of education. A report like
Professor Judd’s in the “Cleveland Survey”--“Measuring the Work of
the Public Schools”--is a storehouse of suggestiveness for all who
like to see how mathematics can be fruitfully applied to living. These
statistical studies measure accurately the performance of children in
the different grades and at different ages in the specific literate
skills which everybody needs even to start fairly in the race of
opportunity. The standard tests have been worked out experimentally
with great numbers of school-children so that average norms of
accomplishment can be set for any class or any individual. Rates of
speed and quality of handwriting, and their relation to each other;
ability to spell common words; rate and capacity of accurate figuring;
rate and quality of silent and oral reading;--these are the aptitudes
that are rigidly measured by the tests. The children are treated as
segregated arithmetical minds, reading minds, spelling minds, as units
of intellectual behavior. The tests are not “examinations,” for they do
not aim to show any absolute attainment of “knowledge.” Their value is
in the comparison they afford of individual skill, and of deviations
from a norm of effectiveness. In the mass of scores you have an
intellectual relief map of your class, your school, your city system.
Now nothing could apparently be more deadly and mechanical than this
treating of living children as if they were narrowly isolated minds. In
this “experimental education” we are evidently in another world from
the “experimental school.” Yet out of these tests emerge the most
important implications for modern education. Out of this “experimental
education” we at last get a scientific basis for the “modern school.”
For we have irrefutable proof of the enormous diversity of minds
and aptitudes. We have a demonstration of the utter foolishness of
subjecting children to a uniform educational process. We have accurate
proof of the fallacy of the “average” in education. These tests are
added proof of the unscientific character of the typical public school
on that very technical and administrative side which has been most
carefully developed. The graded school was a brilliant invention for
its time, but the bases of classification are shown by these new
tests to be absurd. Children are now classified, for purposes of
education, largely by age and average standing. The tests show that
neither category has the slightest relevance for effective learning.
We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any
classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than
useless. But mere numerical age is no clue whatsoever to mental or
even physiological age, and minds with the same average may plot out
very differently for every individual one of the various skills and
interests that elementary training involves. Our educational grading
has been as sentimental and sterile as the ancient philosophers’
classification of matter into earth, water, fire, air. Such a
conception of the world was interesting, but there was nothing you
could do with it. All the school has done with its classifying has
been to get the children into groups where they could be dosed with an
orderly sequence of lessons. There has been no handle by which their
heterogeneous minds and wills could be taken hold of and directed. The
rule of the classroom is necessarily military, because such diverse
people could only be unified in the most objective and external and
coercive way. No internal control would be possible. So the teacher
must devote a large part of her educational energy to the mere business
of policing. When she actually “taught,” it was only the average child
that she could really address--the fairly bright mediocrity. The
other pupils wasted their time almost in direct proportion to their
deviation above or below that average. Children passed up through their
educational life on the basis of an “average mark,” which represented
nothing whatever but a number. The standard tests have shown repeatedly
that ability is so unevenly distributed that the brightest fourth-year
children overlap the poorest eighth-year children. However children may
average, scarcely two children in the same class will ever be found to
have the identical capacity in the different subjects. The tests reveal
not only that children differ, but just how curiously and widely they
do differ.
The traditional classification is enough to wreck any educational
system, even without the deadness of the curriculum. With the
progressive congestion of the public schools, teaching has become more
and more impossible. The traditional system of grading has successfully
resisted most improvement in teaching, and vitiated the newer values
that have been brought into the school. If children, clearly not
defective, cannot learn arithmetic, read slowly and unintelligently,
spell chaotically and write a slovenly hand, question the grading
system. Never have there been such admirable techniques for teaching
these fundamental things. But the classification defies them. The
“class” gives the teacher no leverage for improving the children’s
skill. An unscientific grading is as much a barrier to altering minds
as it is to changing materials.
These truths seem elementary and obvious, yet we had to wait for this
“experimental education” to shake complacency in the “graded school.”
Now if we accept these tests we have to conclude that it is useless
to grade children for education unless those “grades” correspond
accurately and specifically to the capacities of the children. Work
must be done in each specific subject with--and only with--those
who have approximately the same capacity. The “average” is totally
unknown in that “real life” which we are constantly forced to set up
in antithesis to the school. In no function of life is any one going
to be judged by a composite ability to read, write, spell, figure. One
succeeds not through any average skill or average information, but
through the ability to throw all one’s skill and all one’s intelligence
where it is demanded. A measurement of intelligence by averages will
always produce just that ineffectiveness and vagueness for which the
products of the public school are censured at present.
The fallacy of the educational “average” involves another fallacy,
equally obvious but equally prevalent. This is the fallacy of the
“partially perfect.” The school ranks the seventy per cent. child
equal to the hundred per cent. child. Children pass to more difficult
work on an admitted basis of imperfect accomplishment. But for any
real effectiveness in the world it is not enough to be habitually only
seventy per cent. right. Whenever you need to be literate, the world
demands that you be actually literate. If you have information, you
are either useless or dangerous unless your information is accurate.
It is better not to know arithmetic at all than persistently to make
only seven hits out of ten. For all practical purposes your child is
as much a failure at seventy per cent. as he is at zero per cent. It
will avail him little to be able to read and write and figure at a
rate and an excellence only seventy per cent. of the standard. In any
situation which requires these elementary skills he will be almost as
much handicapped as if he were entirely illiterate. It is time that
the school faced the bitter truth that life demands an approximate
perfection in whatever one tries to do. Education must shape all its
technique towards this approximate perfection. It is not necessary
that all should do the same thing. But it is necessary that what one
pretends to do one should succeed gradually in doing. The individual
who is allowed to persist continuously on a level of imperfect
accomplishment is not being educated. For him education is a failure.
He should either drop his technique, or ways should be found to improve
him towards mastery. What children are learning at any one time they
should be learning with a sense of control. The more difficult should
not be confronted till the less difficult has been absorbed. And this
controlled progress will be possible only in a school where children
work with their equals. Classification in education should be based
only on specific proficiency.
The new “experimental education” is engaged in making dramatic in
the schools these truths. It is a force even more revolutionary than
the idealism of the “experimental school.” The situation suggested
by the “curve of distribution” is one of the most momentous facts to
be reckoned with by us of to-day. It is making over our theories of
democracy, social reform and social progress. To work out its manifold
implications in the school is to touch the very nerve of our democratic
future.
XIII
THE ORGANIC SCHOOL
The Fairhope Summer School, which has just closed its season (Sept.,
1915), at Greenwich, Connecticut, has given to Northern people an
opportunity to see at work Mrs. Marietta Johnson’s widely known ideal
of “organic education.” Just as the Gary plan has shown how the city
school may give a varied training to great masses of children with a
freedom and flexibility never believed possible, so Mrs. Johnson has
demonstrated how the small community, or even household, by using the
natural environment and the natural needs as laboratory and workshop,
may adjust the child to life far more accurately than any formal
school. No school carries out more carefully Professor Dewey’s dictum
that the child can only be educated by concerning himself with what has
meaning to him as a child, and not what is to have meaning to him later
as an adult.
In the organic school, children grow up naturally and healthfully,
playing out-of-doors, following their curiosities, learning as their
life makes demands upon them. The teacher is there to answer their
questions, to sharpen their wits, to name for them and analyze the
flowers and soil and trees, to show how to plant vegetables and build
little coops or houses. In their winter school at the single-tax
colony of Fairhope, Alabama, on the shores of Mobile Bay, the children
can be out in the open air almost every day. The land is a complete
geological, botanical, and physical laboratory, and the household a
natural classroom where they learn to live. The school grew, in fact,
quite naturally out of the household, and the necessity for some sort
of school in a community where there was none. Mrs. Johnson, with her
teacher’s genius, simply sharpened and arranged her intercourse with
the children around her, and presently had a school which has become
one of the most interesting in the country.
Its very informality is its charm and success. The hundred or more
children are not classified in grades, but in “life-classes,” which
correspond roughly to those three periods in child life--the first
seven years of growth, the years to adolescence, and early adolescence.
The first class is really an outgrowth of the nursery. In the cool
rooms of the Fairhope Summer School one comes upon little farmhouses
and villages and doll-houses of building-blocks, which form the
basis for getting acquainted with the village the children lived in.
The next group is characterized by a tough practicality, a capacity
for drill and persistence, and this “life-class” was found in the
wood-working shop and garden. Literary studies are taken up very late
by the third class, whose recitations are rather informal discussions
in an outdoor cluster around the teacher. Only when a broad background
of acquaintance with real things is obtained, practical powers of
observation acquired, and an actual need felt for learning what books
can tell, are the conventional school studies begun. In the organic
school there is thus some chance left to the children for getting real
meanings and not mere words and phrases which they may glibly repeat.
Reading and writing are not taught by drill, but are picked up by
the child from the teacher or the other children, in the Rousseauan
fashion, whenever he finds that he is missing something very important
and interesting in not having this skill.
Learning in this kind of school becomes as natural as eating. One
learns when one is hungry to understand what is going on in the world.
Such schools, it will be said, are all very well as an ideal, but where
can teachers be found to direct them? Certainly many of Mrs. Johnson’s
children could teach others in the way they have learned themselves.
The way to get teachers for this free organic education in the “schools
of to-morrow” is clearly to teach more children in the same way.
XIV
COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN