In educational terms, this means that these occupations in t_The school and society

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

[Illustration]

THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY

NEW YORK

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON

_The_

SCHOOL

_and_

SOCIETY

_By_ JOHN DEWEY

REVISED EDITION

[Illustration]

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO · ILLINOIS

SECOND EDITION AUGUST 1915

FIFTEENTH IMPRESSION JULY 1942

[Illustration]

COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.

MRS. EMMONS BLAINE

TO WHOSE INTEREST IN EDUCATIONAL

REFORM

THE APPEARANCE OF THIS BOOK

IS DUE

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 3

II. THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD 31

III. WASTE IN EDUCATION 59

IV. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 87

V. FROEBEL’S EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES 111

VI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OCCUPATIONS 131

VII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION 141

VIII. THE AIM OF HISTORY IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 155

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES 40

DRAWING OF A FOREST 42

DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING 44

DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING 46

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The first three chapters of this book were delivered as lectures before

an audience of parents and others interested in the University Elementary

School, in the month of April of the year 1899. Mr. Dewey revised them in

part from a stenographic report, and unimportant changes and the slight

adaptations necessary for the press have been made in his absence. The

lectures retain therefore the unstudied character as well as the power of

the spoken word. As they imply more or less familiarity with the work of

the Elementary School, Mr. Dewey’s supplementary statement of this has

been added.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A second printing affords a grateful opportunity for recalling that this

little book is a sign of the co-operating thoughts and sympathies of many

persons. Its indebtedness to Mrs. Emmons Blaine is partly indicated in

the dedication. From my friends Mr. and Mrs. George Herbert Mead came

that interest, unflagging attention to detail, and artistic taste which,

in my absence, remade colloquial remarks until they were fit to print,

and then saw the results through the press with the present attractive

result—a mode of authorship made easy, which I recommend to others

fortunate enough to possess such friends.

It would be an extended paragraph which should list all the friends whose

timely and persisting generosity has made possible the school which

inspired and defined the ideas of these pages. These friends, I am sure,

would be the first to recognize the peculiar appropriateness of especial

mention of the names of Mrs. Charles R. Crane and Mrs. William R. Linn.

And the school itself in its educational work is a joint undertaking.

Many have engaged in shaping it. The clear and experienced intelligence

of my wife is wrought everywhere into its texture. The wisdom, tact, and

devotion of its instructors have brought about a transformation of its

original amorphous plans into articulate form and substance with life

and movement of their own. Whatever the issue of the ideas presented in

this book, the satisfaction coming from the co-operation of the diverse

thoughts and deeds of many persons in undertaking to enlarge the life of

the child will abide.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO SECOND EDITION

The present edition includes some slight verbal revisions of the three

lectures constituting the first portion of the book. The latter portion

is included for the first time, containing material borrowed, with some

changes, from the author’s contributions to the _Elementary School

Record_, long out of print.

The writer may perhaps be permitted a word to express his satisfaction

that the educational point of view presented in this book is not so

novel as it was fifteen years ago; and his desire to believe that the

educational experiment of which the book is an outgrowth has not been

without influence in the change.

J. D.

NEW YORK CITY July, 1915

THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

We are apt to look at the school from an individualistic standpoint, as

something between teacher and pupil, or between teacher and parent. That

which interests us most is naturally the progress made by the individual

child of our acquaintance, his normal physical development, his advance

in ability to read, write, and figure, his growth in the knowledge of

geography and history, improvement in manners, habits of promptness,

order, and industry—it is from such standards as these that we judge

the work of the school. And rightly so. Yet the range of the outlook

needs to be enlarged. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own

child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other

ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys

our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put,

through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members.

All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new

possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and

socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the

individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.

And in the self-direction thus given, nothing counts as much as the

school, for, as Horace Mann said, “Where anything is growing, one former

is worth a thousand re-formers.”

Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new movement in education,

it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social, view.

Otherwise, changes in the school institution and tradition will be

looked at as the arbitrary inventions of particular teachers; at the

worst transitory fads, and at the best merely improvements in certain

details—and this is the plane upon which it is too customary to consider

school changes. It is as rational to conceive of the locomotive or the

telegraph as personal devices. The modification going on in the method

and curriculum of education is as much a product of the changed social

situation, and as much an effort to meet the needs of the new society

that is forming, as are changes in modes of industry and commerce.

It is to this, then, that I especially ask your attention: the effort to

conceive what roughly may be termed the “New Education” in the light of

larger changes in society. Can we connect this “New Education” with the

general march of events? If we can, it will lose its isolated character;

it will cease to be an affair which proceeds only from the over-ingenious

minds of pedagogues dealing with particular pupils. It will appear as

part and parcel of the whole social evolution, and, in its more general

features at least, as inevitable. Let us then ask after the main aspects

of the social movement; and afterward turn to the school to find what

witness it gives of effort to put itself in line. And since it is quite

impossible to cover the whole ground, I shall for the most part confine

myself to one typical thing in the modern school movement—that which

passes under the name of manual training—hoping if the relation of that

to changed social conditions appears, we shall be ready to concede the

point as well regarding other educational innovations.

I make no apology for not dwelling at length upon the social changes

in question. Those I shall mention are writ so large that he who runs

may read. The change that comes first to mind, the one that overshadows

and even controls all others, is the industrial one—the application of

science resulting in the great inventions that have utilized the forces

of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale: the growth of a world-wide

market as the object of production, of vast manufacturing centers to

supply this market, of cheap and rapid means of communication and

distribution between all its parts. Even as to its feebler beginnings,

this change is not much more than a century old; in many of its most

important aspects it falls within the short span of those now living.

One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so

rapid, so extensive, so complete. Through it the face of the earth

is making over, even as to its physical forms; political boundaries

are wiped out and moved about, as if they were indeed only lines on a

paper map; population is hurriedly gathered into cities from the ends

of the earth; habits of living are altered with startling abruptness

and thoroughness; the search for the truths of nature is infinitely

stimulated and facilitated, and their application to life made not only

practicable, but commercially necessary. Even our moral and religious

ideas and interests, the most conservative because the deepest-lying

things in our nature, are profoundly affected. That this revolution

should not affect education in some other than a formal and superficial

fashion is inconceivable.

Back of the factory system lies the household and neighborhood system.

Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most

three generations, to find a time when the household was practically

the center in which were carried on, or about which were clustered,

all the typical forms of industrial occupation. The clothing worn was

for the most part made in the house; the members of the household were

usually familiar also with the shearing of the sheep, the carding and

spinning of the wool, and the plying of the loom. Instead of pressing

a button and flooding the house with electric light, the whole process

of getting illumination was followed in its toilsome length from the

killing of the animal and the trying of fat to the making of wicks and

dipping of candles. The supply of flour, of lumber, of foods, of building

materials, of household furniture, even of metal ware, of nails, hinges,

hammers, etc., was produced in the immediate neighborhood, in shops which

were constantly open to inspection and often centers of neighborhood

congregation. The entire industrial process stood revealed, from the

production on the farm of the raw materials till the finished article was

actually put to use. Not only this, but practically every member of the

household had his own share in the work. The children, as they gained in

strength and capacity, were gradually initiated into the mysteries of the

several processes. It was a matter of immediate and personal concern,

even to the point of actual participation.

We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building

involved in this kind of life: training in habits of order and of

industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do

something, to produce something, in the world. There was always something

which really needed to be done, and a real necessity that each member

of the household should do his own part faithfully and in co-operation

with others. Personalities which became effective in action were bred and

tested in the medium of action. Again, we cannot overlook the importance

for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got

with nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the

actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their

social necessities and uses. In all this there was continual training of

observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought,

and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with

actualities. The educative forces of the domestic spinning and weaving,

of the sawmill, the gristmill, the cooper shop, and the blacksmith forge,

were continuously operative.

No number of object-lessons, got up _as_ object-lessons for the sake

of giving information, can afford even the shadow of a substitute for

acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden acquired

through actual living among them and caring for them. No training of

sense-organs in school, introduced for the sake of training, can begin to

compete with the alertness and fulness of sense-life that comes through

daily intimacy and interest in familiar occupations. Verbal memory can be

trained in committing tasks, a certain discipline of the reasoning powers

can be acquired through lessons in science and mathematics; but, after

all, this is somewhat remote and shadowy compared with the training of

attention and of judgment that is acquired in having to do things with a

real motive behind and a real outcome ahead. At present, concentration

of industry and division of labor have practically eliminated household

and neighborhood occupations—at least for educational purposes. But it

is useless to bemoan the departure of the good old days of children’s

modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience, if we expect merely by

bemoaning and by exhortation to bring them back. It is radical conditions

which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education

suffices. We must recognize our compensations—the increase in toleration,

in breadth of social judgment, the larger acquaintance with human nature,

the sharpened alertness in reading signs of character and interpreting

social situations, greater accuracy of adaptation to differing

personalities, contact with greater commercial activities. These

considerations mean much to the city-bred child of today. Yet there is

a real problem: how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce

into the school something representing the other side of life—occupations

which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child in

relation to the physical realities of life?

When we turn to the school, we find that one of the most striking

tendencies at present is toward the introduction of so-called manual

training, shopwork, and the household arts—sewing and cooking.

This has not been done “on purpose,” with a full consciousness that the

school must now supply that factor of training formerly taken care of

in the home, but rather by instinct, by experimenting and finding that

such work takes a vital hold of pupils and gives them something which

was not to be got in any other way. Consciousness of its real import is

still so weak that the work is often done in a half-hearted, confused,

and unrelated way. The reasons assigned to justify it are painfully

inadequate or sometimes even positively wrong.

If we were to cross-examine even those who are most favorably disposed

to the introduction of this work into our school system, we should, I

imagine, generally find the main reasons to be that such work engages the

full spontaneous interest and attention of the children. It keeps them

alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them more

useful, more capable, and hence more inclined to be helpful at home; it

prepares them to some extent for the practical duties of later life—the

girls to be more efficient house managers, if not actually cooks and

seamstresses; the boys (were our educational system only adequately

rounded out into trade schools) for their future vocations. I do not

underestimate the worth of these reasons. Of those indicated by the

changed attitude of the children I shall indeed have something to say in

my next talk, when speaking directly of the relationship of the school

to the child. But the point of view is, upon the whole, unnecessarily

narrow. We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing,

and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not as distinct studies.

We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of the

processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing

home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and

as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and

ingenuity of man; in short, as instrumentalities through which the school

itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of

a place set apart in which to learn lessons.

A society is a number of people held together because they are working

along common lines, in a common spirit, and with reference to common

aims. The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought

and growing unity of sympathetic feeling. The radical reason that the

present school cannot organize itself as a natural social unit is

because just this element of common and productive activity is absent.

Upon the playground, in game and sport, social organization takes place

spontaneously and inevitably. There is something to do, some activity to

be carried on, requiring natural divisions of labor, selection of leaders

and followers, mutual co-operation and emulation. In the schoolroom the

motive and the cement of social organization are alike wanting. Upon

the ethical side, the tragic weakness of the present school is that it

endeavors to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in

which the conditions of the social spirit are eminently wanting.

The difference that appears when occupations are made the articulating

centers of school life is not easy to describe in words; it is a

difference in motive, of spirit and atmosphere. As one enters a busy

kitchen in which a group of children are actively engaged in the

preparation of food, the psychological difference, the change from more

or less passive and inert recipiency and restraint to one of buoyant

outgoing energy, is so obvious as fairly to strike one in the face.

Indeed, to those whose image of the school is rigidly set the change

is sure to give a shock. But the change in the social attitude is

equally marked. The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively

individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into

selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of

mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat. Indeed,

almost the only measure for success is a competitive one, in the bad

sense of that term—a comparison of results in the recitation or in the

examination to see which child has succeeded in getting ahead of others

in storing up, in accumulating, the maximum of information. So thoroughly

is this the prevailing atmosphere that for one child to help another in

his task has become a school crime. Where the school work consists in

simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of being the most

natural form of co-operation and association, becomes a clandestine

effort to relieve one’s neighbor of his proper duties. Where active work

is going on, all this is changed. Helping others, instead of being a form

of charity which impoverishes the recipient, is simply an aid in setting

free the powers and furthering the impulse of the one helped. A spirit of

free communication, of interchange of ideas, suggestions, results, both

successes and failures of previous experiences, becomes the dominating

note of the recitation. So far as emulation enters in, it is in the

comparison of individuals, not with regard to the quantity of information

personally absorbed, but with reference to the quality of work done—the

genuine community standard of value. In an informal but all the more

pervasive way, the school life organizes itself on a social basis.

Within this organization is found the principle of school discipline or

order. Of course, order is simply a thing which is relative to an end.

If you have the end in view of forty or fifty children learning certain

set lessons, to be recited to a teacher, your discipline must be devoted

to securing that result. But if the end in view is the development of a

spirit of social co-operation and community life, discipline must grow

out of and be relative to such an aim. There is little of one sort of

order where things are in process of construction; there is a certain

disorder in any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons are not

engaged in maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are

not folded; they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing

a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results

from activity. But out of the occupation, out of doing things that are

to produce results, and out of doing these in a social and co-operative

way, there is born a discipline of its own kind and type. Our whole

conception of school discipline changes when we get this point of view.

In critical moments we all realize that the only discipline that stands

by us, the only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life

itself. That we learn from experience, and from books or the sayings of

others _only_ as they are related to experience, are not mere phrases.

But the school has been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary

conditions and motives of life, that the place where children are sent

for discipline is the one place in the world where it is most difficult

to get experience—the mother of all discipline worth the name. It is only

when a narrow and fixed image of traditional school discipline dominates

that one is in any danger of overlooking that deeper and infinitely wider

discipline that comes from having a part to do in constructive work,

in contributing to a result which, social in spirit, is none the less

obvious and tangible in form—and hence in a form with reference to which

responsibility may be exacted and accurate judgment passed.

The great thing to keep in mind, then, regarding the introduction into

the school of various forms of active occupation, is that through them

the entire spirit of the school is renewed. It has a chance to affiliate

itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through

directed living, instead of being only a place to learn lessons having

an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in

the future. It gets a chance to be a miniature community, an embryonic

society. This is the fundamental fact, and from this arise continuous and

orderly streams of instruction. Under the industrial régime described,

the child, after all, shared in the work, not for the sake of the

sharing, but for the sake of the product. The educational results secured

were real, yet incidental and dependent. But in the school the typical

occupations followed are freed from all economic stress. The aim is not

the economic value of the products, but the development of social power

and insight. It is this liberation from narrow utilities, this openness

to the possibilities of the human spirit, that makes these practical

activities in the school allies of art and centers of science and history.

The unity of all the sciences is found in geography. The significance

of geography is that it presents the earth as the enduring home of the

occupations of man. The world without its relationship to human activity

is less than a world. Human industry and achievement, apart from their

roots in the earth, are not even a sentiment, hardly a name. The earth

is the final source of all man’s food. It is his continual shelter and

protection, the raw material of all his activities, and the home to

whose humanizing and idealizing all his achievement returns. It is the

great field, the great mine, the great source of the energies of heat,

light, and electricity; the great scene of ocean, stream, mountain,

and plain, of which all our agriculture and mining and lumbering, all

our manufacturing and distributing agencies, are but the partial

elements and factors. It is through occupations determined by this

environment that mankind has made its historical and political progress.

It is through these occupations that the intellectual and emotional

interpretation of nature has been developed. It is through what we do in

and with the world that we read its meaning and measure its value.

In educational terms, this means that these occupations in the school

shall not be mere practical devices or modes of routine employment, the

gaining of better technical skill as cooks, seamstresses, or carpenters,

but active centers of scientific insight into natural materials and

processes, points of departure whence children shall be led out into a

realization of the historic development of man. The actual significance

of this can be told better through one illustration taken from actual

school work than by general discourse.

There is nothing which strikes more oddly upon the average intelligent

visitor than to see boys as well as girls of ten, twelve, and thirteen

years of age engaged in sewing and weaving. If we look at this from the

standpoint of preparation of the boys for sewing on buttons and making

patches, we get a narrow and utilitarian conception—a basis that hardly

justifies giving prominence to this sort of work in the school. But if

we look at it from another side, we find that this work gives the point

of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of

mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and

the mechanical principles involved. In connection with these occupations

the historic development of man is recapitulated. For example, the

children are first given the raw material—the flax, the cotton plant, the

wool as it comes from the back of the sheep (if we could take them to the

place where the sheep are sheared, so much the better). Then a study is

made of these materials from the standpoint of their adaptation to the

uses to which they may be put. For instance, a comparison of the cotton

fiber with wool fiber is made. I did not know, until the children told

me, that the reason for the late development of the cotton industry as

compared with the woolen is that the cotton fiber is so very difficult

to free by hand from the seeds. The children in one group worked thirty

minutes freeing cotton fibers from the boll and seeds, and succeeded

in getting out less than one ounce. They could easily believe that one

person could gin only one pound a day by hand, and could understand why

their ancestors wore woolen instead of cotton clothing. Among other

things discovered as affecting their relative utilities was the shortness

of the cotton fiber as compared with that of wool, the former averaging,

say, one-third of an inch in length, while the latter run to three

inches in length; also that the fibers of cotton are smooth and do not

cling together, while the wool has a certain roughness which makes the

fibers stick, thus assisting the spinning. The children worked this

out for themselves with the actual material, aided by questions and

suggestions from the teacher.

They then followed the processes necessary for working the fibers up into

cloth. They reinvented the first frame for carding the wool—a couple of

boards with sharp pins in them for scratching it out. They redevised the

simplest process for spinning the wool—a pierced stone or some other

weight through which the wool is passed, and which as it is twirled

draws out the fiber; next the top, which was spun on the floor, while

the children kept the wool in their hands until it was gradually drawn

out and wound upon it. Then the children are introduced to the invention

next in historic order, working it out experimentally, thus seeing

its necessity, and tracing its effects, not only upon that particular

industry, but upon modes of social life—in this way passing in review the

entire process up to the present complete loom, and all that goes with

the application of science in the use of our present available powers. I

need not speak of the science involved in this—the study of the fibers,

of geographical features, the conditions under which raw materials are

grown, the great centers of manufacture and distribution, the physics

involved in the machinery of production; nor, again, of the historical

side—the influence which these inventions have had upon humanity. You

can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of the

flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing. I do not mean that this is

the only, or the best, center. But it is true that certain very real and

important avenues to the consideration of the history of the race are

thus opened—that the mind is introduced to much more fundamental and

controlling influences than appear in the political and chronological

records that usually pass for history.

Now, what is true of this one instance of fibers used in fabrics (and, of

course, I have only spoken of one or two elementary phases of that) is

true in its measure of every material used in every occupation, and of

the processes employed. The occupation supplies the child with a genuine

motive; it gives him experience at first hand; it brings him into contact

with realities. It does all this, but in addition it is liberalized

throughout by translation into its historic and social values and

scientific equivalencies. With the growth of the child’s mind in power

and knowledge it ceases to be a pleasant occupation merely and becomes

more and more a medium, an instrument, an organ of understanding—and is

thereby transformed.

This, in turn, has its bearing upon the teaching of science. Under

present conditions, all activity, to be successful, has to be directed

somewhere and somehow by the scientific expert—it is a case of applied

science. This connection should determine its place in education. It is

not only that the occupations, the so-called manual or industrial work in

the school, give the opportunity for the introduction of science which

illuminates them, which makes them material, freighted with meaning,

instead of being mere devices of hand and eye; but that the scientific

insight thus gained becomes an indispensable instrument of free and

active participation in modern social life. Plato somewhere speaks of the

slave as one who in his actions does not express his own ideas, but those

of some other man. It is our social problem now, even more urgent than in

the time of Plato, that method, purpose, understanding, shall exist in

the consciousness of the one who does the work, that his activity shall

have meaning to himself.

When occupations in the school are conceived in this broad and generous

way, I can only stand lost in wonder at the objections so often heard,

that such occupations are out of place in the school because they

are materialistic, utilitarian, or even menial in their tendency. It

sometimes seems to me that those who make these objections must live in

quite another world. The world in which most of us live is a world in

which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do. Some are

managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as

for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables

him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human

significance. How many of the employed are today mere appendages to the

machines which they operate! This may be due in part to the machine

itself or the régime which lays so much stress upon the products of

the machine; but it is certainly due in large part to the fact that

the worker has had no opportunity to develop his imagination and his

sympathetic insight as to the social and scientific values found in his

work. At present, the impulses which lie at the basis of the industrial

system are either practically neglected or positively distorted during

the school period. Until the instincts of construction and production

are systematically laid hold of in the years of childhood and youth,

until they are trained in social directions, enriched by historical

interpretation, controlled and illuminated by scientific methods, we

certainly are in no position even to locate the source of our economic

evils, much less to deal with them effectively.

If we go back a few centuries, we find a practical monopoly of learning.

The term _possession_ of learning is, indeed, a happy one. Learning was

a class matter. This was a necessary result of social conditions. There

were not in existence any means by which the multitude could possibly

have access to intellectual resources. These were stored up and hidden

away in manuscripts. Of these there were at best only a few, and it

required long and toilsome preparation to be able to do anything with

them. A high-priesthood of learning, which guarded the treasury of truth

and which doled it out to the masses under severe restrictions, was the

inevitable expression of these conditions. But, as a direct result of

the industrial revolution of which we have been speaking, this has been

changed. Printing was invented; it was made commercial. Books, magazines,

papers were multiplied and cheapened. As a result of the locomotive and

telegraph, frequent, rapid, and cheap intercommunication by mails and

electricity was called into being. Travel has been rendered easy; freedom

of movement, with its accompanying exchange of ideas, indefinitely

facilitated. The result has been an intellectual revolution. Learning has

been put into circulation. While there still is, and probably always will

be, a particular class having the special business of inquiry in hand,

a distinctively learned class is henceforth out of the question. It is

an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been

liquefied. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.

It is easy to see that this revolution, as regards the materials of

knowledge, carries with it a marked change in the attitude of the

individual. Stimuli of an intellectual sort pour in upon us in all kinds

of ways. The merely intellectual life, the life of scholarship and of

learning, thus gets a very altered value. Academic and scholastic,

instead of being titles of honor, are becoming terms of reproach.

But all this means a necessary change in the attitude of the school, one

of which we are as yet far from realizing the full force. Our school

methods, and to a very considerable extent our curriculum, are inherited

from the period when learning and command of certain symbols, affording

as they did the only access to learning, were all-important. The ideals

of this period are still largely in control, even where the outward

methods and studies have been changed. We sometimes hear the introduction

of manual training, art, and science into the elementary, and even the

secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend toward the

production of specialists—that they detract from our present scheme of

generous, liberal culture. The point of this objection would be ludicrous

if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present

education which is highly specialized, one-sided, and narrow. It is

an education dominated almost entirely by the mediaeval conception of

learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the

intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate

information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our

impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether

in the form of utility or of art. The very fact that manual training,

art, and science are objected to as technical, as tending toward mere

specialism, is of itself as good testimony as could be offered to the

specialized aim which controls current education. Unless education had

been virtually identified with the exclusively intellectual pursuits,

with learning as such, all these materials and methods would be welcome,

would be greeted with the utmost hospitality.

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES]

While training for the profession of learning is regarded as the type

of culture, or a liberal education, the training of a mechanic, a

musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, a merchant, or a railroad manager

is regarded as purely technical and professional. The result is that

which we see about us everywhere—the division into “cultured” people

and “workers,” the separation of theory and practice. Hardly 1 per cent

of the entire school population ever attains to what we call higher

education; only 5 per cent to the grade of our high school; while much

more than half leave on or before the completion of the fifth year of the

elementary grade. The simple facts of the case are that in the great

majority of human beings the distinctively intellectual interest is not

dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition.

In many of those in whom by nature intellectual interest is strong,

social conditions prevent its adequate realization. Consequently by far

the larger number of pupils leave school as soon as they have acquired

the rudiments of learning, as soon as they have enough of the symbols

of reading, writing, and calculating to be of practical use to them in

getting a living. While our educational leaders are talking of culture,

the development of personality, etc., as the end and aim of education,

the great majority of those who pass under the tuition of the school

regard it only as a narrowly practical tool with which to get bread and

butter enough to eke out a restricted life. If we were to conceive our

educational end and aim in a less exclusive way, if we were to introduce

into educational processes the activities which appeal to those whose

dominant interest is to do and to make, we should find the hold of the

school upon its members to be more vital, more prolonged, containing more

of culture.

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A FOREST]

But why should I make this labored presentation? The obvious fact is

that our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change. If

our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an

equally complete transformation. This transformation is not something

to appear suddenly, to be executed in a day by conscious purpose. It is

already in progress. Those modifications of our school system which often

appear (even to those most actively concerned with them, to say nothing

of their spectators) to be mere changes of detail, mere improvement

within the school mechanism, are in reality signs and evidences of

evolution. The introduction of active occupations, of nature-study, of

elementary science, of art, of history; the relegation of the merely

symbolic and formal to a secondary position; the change in the moral

school atmosphere, in the relation of pupils and teachers—of discipline;

the introduction of more active, expressive, and self-directing

factors—all these are not mere accidents, they are necessities of the

larger social evolution. It remains but to organize all these factors,

to appreciate them in their fulness of meaning, and to put the ideas and

ideals involved into complete, uncompromising possession of our school

system. To do this means to make each one of our schools an embryonic

community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life

of the larger society and permeated throughout with the spirit of art,

history, and science. When the school introduces and trains each child

of society into membership within such a little community, saturating

him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of

effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of

a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING]

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING]

THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD

Last week I tried to put before you the relationship between the school

and the larger life of the community, and the necessity for certain

changes in the methods and materials of school work, that it might be

better adapted to present social needs.

Today I wish to look at the matter from the other side and consider the

relationship of the school to the life and development of the children in

the school. As it is difficult to connect general principles with such

thoroughly concrete things as little children, I have taken the liberty

of introducing a great deal of illustrative matter from the work of the

University Elementary School, that in some measure you may appreciate the

way in which the ideas presented work themselves out in actual practice.

Some few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the

city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suitable

from all points of view—artistic, hygienic, and educational—to the needs

of the children. We had a great deal of difficulty in finding what we

needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made

this remark: “I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something

at which the children may work; these are all for listening.” That tells

the story of the traditional education. Just as the biologist can take a

bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal, so, if we put before the

mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed

in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little

moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just

space enough to hold books, pencils, and paper, and add a table, some

chairs, the bare walls, and possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct

the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. It

is all made “for listening”—because simply studying lessons out of a book

is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency of one mind

upon another. The attitude of listening means, comparatively speaking,

passivity, absorption; that there are certain ready-made materials which

are there, which have been prepared by the school superintendent, the

board, the teacher, and of which the child is to take in as much as

possible in the least possible time.

There is very little place in the traditional schoolroom for the child

to work. The workshop, the laboratory, the materials, the tools with

which the child may construct, create, and actively inquire, and even

the requisite space, have been for the most part lacking. The things that

have to do with these processes have not even a definitely recognized

place in education. They are what the educational authorities who write

editorials in the daily papers generally term “fads” and “frills.” A lady

told me yesterday that she had been visiting different schools trying to

find one where activity on the part of the children preceded the giving

of information on the part of the teacher, or where the children had some

motive for demanding the information. She visited, she said, twenty-four

different schools before she found her first instance. I may add that

that was not in this city.

Another thing that is suggested by these schoolrooms, with their set

desks, is that everything is arranged for handling as large numbers

of children as possible; for dealing with children _en masse_, as an

aggregate of units; involving, again, that they be treated passively. The

moment children act they individualize themselves; they cease to be a

mass and become the intensely distinctive beings that we are acquainted

with out of school, in the home, the family, on the playground, and in

the neighborhood.

On the same basis is explicable the uniformity of method and curriculum.

If everything is on a “listening” basis, you can have uniformity of

material and method. The ear, and the book which reflects the ear,

constitute the medium which is alike for all. There is next to no

opportunity for adjustment to varying capacities and demands. There is a

certain amount—a fixed quantity—of ready-made results and accomplishments

to be acquired by all children alike in a given time. It is in response

to this demand that the curriculum has been developed from the elementary

school up through the college. There is just so much desirable knowledge,

and there are just so many needed technical accomplishments in the

world. Then comes the mathematical problem of dividing this by the six,

twelve, or sixteen years of school life. Now give the children every

year just the proportionate fraction of the total, and by the time they

have finished they will have mastered the whole. By covering so much

ground during this hour or day or week or year, everything comes out with

perfect evenness at the end—provided the children have not forgotten

what they have previously learned. The outcome of all this is Matthew

Arnold’s report of the statement, proudly made to him by an educational

authority in France, that so many thousands of children were studying at

a given hour, say eleven o’clock, just such a lesson in geography; and in

one of our own western cities this proud boast used to be repeated to

successive visitors by its superintendent.

I may have exaggerated somewhat in order to make plain the typical points

of the old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing

of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method. It may be summed

up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in

the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in

the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself. On that

basis there is not much to be said about the _life_ of the child. A good

deal might be said about the studying of the child, but the school is

not the place where the child _lives_. Now the change which is coming

into our education is the shifting of the center of gravity. It is a

change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the

astronomical center shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the

child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he

is the center about which they are organized.

If we take an example from an ideal home, where the parent is intelligent

enough to recognize what is best for the child, and is able to supply

what is needed, we find the child learning through the social converse

and constitution of the family. There are certain points of interest

and value to him in the conversation carried on: statements are made,

inquiries arise, topics are discussed, and the child continually learns.

He states his experiences, his misconceptions are corrected. Again the

child participates in the household occupations, and thereby gets habits

of industry, order, and regard for the rights and ideas of others, and

the fundamental habit of subordinating his activities to the general

interest of the household. Participation in these household tasks becomes

an opportunity for gaining knowledge. The ideal home would naturally have

a workshop where the child could work out his constructive instincts.

It would have a miniature laboratory in which his inquiries could be

directed. The life of the child would extend out of doors to the garden,

surrounding fields, and forests. He would have his excursions, his walks

and talks, in which the larger world out of doors would open to him.

Now, if we organize and generalize all of this, we have the ideal school.

There is no mystery about it, no wonderful discovery of pedagogy or

educational theory. It is simply a question of doing systematically and

in a large, intelligent, and competent way what for various reasons can

be done in most households only in a comparatively meager and haphazard

manner. In the first place, the ideal home has to be enlarged. The child

must be brought into contact with more grown people and with more

children in order that there may be the freest and richest social life.

Moreover, the occupations and relationships of the home environment are

not specially selected for the growth of the child; the main object is

something else, and what the child can get out of them is incidental.

Hence the need of a school. In this school the life of the child becomes

the all-controlling aim. All the media necessary to further the growth of

the child center there. Learning? certainly, but living primarily, and

learning through and in relation to this living. When we take the life of

the child centered and organized in this way, we do not find that he is

first of all a listening being; quite the contrary.