processes and products it is hardly necessary to say. Cooking may be so
taught that it has no connection with country life and with the sciences
that find their unity in geography. Perhaps it generally has been taught
without these connections being really made. But all the materials that
come into the kitchen have their origin in the country; they come from
the soil, are nurtured through the influences of light and water, and
represent a great variety of local environments. Through this connection,
extending from the garden into the larger world, the child has his most
natural introduction to the study of the sciences. Where did these things
grow? What was necessary to their growth? What their relation to the
soil? What the effect of different climatic conditions? and so on. We all
know what the old-fashioned botany was: partly collecting flowers that
were pretty, pressing and mounting them; partly pulling these flowers to
pieces and giving technical names to the different parts, finding all the
different leaves, naming all their different shapes and forms. It was a
study of plants without any reference to the soil, to the country, or to
growth. In contrast, a real study of plants takes them in their natural
environment and in their uses as well, not simply as food, but in all
their adaptations to the social life of man. Cooking becomes as well a
most natural introduction to the study of chemistry, giving the child
here also something which he can at once bring to bear upon his daily
experience. I once heard a very intelligent woman say that she could
not understand how science could be taught to little children, because
she did not see how they could understand atoms and molecules. In other
words, since she did not see how highly abstract facts could be presented
to the child independently of daily experience, she could not understand
how science could be taught at all. Before we smile at this remark, we
need to ask ourselves if she is alone in her assumption, or whether it
simply formulates the principle of almost all our school practice.
The same relations with the outside world are found in the carpentry
and the textile shops. They connect with the country, as the source of
their materials, with physics, as the science of applying energy, with
commerce and distribution, with art in the development of architecture
and decoration. They have also an intimate connection with the university
on the side of its technological and engineering schools; with the
laboratory and its scientific methods and results.
To go back to the square which is marked the library (Chart III, A):
if you imagine rooms half in the four corners and half in the library,
you will get the idea of the recitation room. That is the place where
the children bring the experiences, the problems, the questions,
the particular facts which they have found, and discuss them so that
new light may be thrown upon them, particularly new light from the
experience of others, the accumulated wisdom of the world—symbolized in
the library. Here is the organic relation of theory and practice; the
child not simply doing things, but getting also the _idea_ of what he
does; getting from the start some intellectual conception that enters
into his practice and enriches it; while every idea finds, directly or
indirectly, some application in experience and has some effect upon life.
This, I need hardly say, fixes the position of the “book” or reading in
education. Harmful as a substitute for experience, it is all-important in
interpreting and expanding experience.
The other chart (IV) illustrates precisely the same idea. It gives the
symbolic upper story of this ideal school. In the upper corners are the
laboratories; in the lower corners are the studios for art work, both
the graphic and auditory arts. The questions, the chemical and physical
problems, arising in the kitchen and shop, are taken to the laboratories
to be worked out. For instance, this past week one of the older groups
of children doing practical work in weaving, which involved the use of
the spinning wheel, worked out the diagrams of the direction of forces
concerned in treadle and wheel, and the ratio of velocities between
wheel and spindle. In the same manner, the plants with which the child
has to do in cooking afford the basis for a concrete interest in botany
and may be taken and studied by themselves. In a certain school in Boston
science work for months was centered in the growth of the cotton plant,
and yet something new was brought in every day. We hope to do similar
work with all the types of plants that furnish materials for sewing and
weaving. These examples will suggest, I hope, the relation which the
laboratories bear to the rest of the school.
[Illustration: Chart IV.]
The drawing and music, or the graphic and auditory arts, represent the
culmination, the idealization, the highest point of refinement of all
the work carried on. I think everybody who has not a purely literary
view of the subject recognizes that genuine art grows out of the work of
the artisan. The art of the Renaissance was great because it grew out of
the manual arts of life. It did not spring up in a separate atmosphere,
however ideal, but carried on to their spiritual meaning processes
found in homely and everyday forms of life. The school should observe
this relationship. The merely artisan side is narrow, but the mere art,
taken by itself, and grafted on from without, tends to become forced,
empty, sentimental. I do not mean, of course, that all art work must be
correlated in detail to the other work of the school, but simply that a
spirit of union gives vitality to the art and depth and richness to the
other work. All art involves physical organs—the eye and hand, the ear
and voice; and yet it is something more than the mere technical skill
required by the organs of expression. It involves an idea, a thought, a
spiritual rendering of things; and yet it is other than any number of
ideas by themselves. It is a living union of thought and the instrument
of expression. This union is symbolized by saying that in the ideal
school the art work might be considered to be that of the shops, passed
through the alembic of library and museum into action again.
Take the textile room as an illustration of such a synthesis. I am
talking about a future school, the one we hope, some time, to have. The
basal fact in that room is that it is a workshop, doing actual things
in sewing, spinning, and weaving. The children come into immediate
connection with the materials, with various fabrics of silk, cotton,
linen, and wool. Information at once appears in connection with these
materials; their origin, history, their adaptation to particular uses,
and the machines of various kinds by which the raw materials are
utilized. Discipline arises in dealing with the problems involved, both
theoretical and practical. Whence does the culture arise? Partly from
seeing all these things reflected through the medium of their scientific
and historic conditions and associations, whereby the child learns to
appreciate them as technical achievements, as thoughts precipitated in
action; and partly because of the introduction of the art idea into
the room itself. In the ideal school there would be something of this
sort: first, a complete industrial museum, giving samples of materials
in various stages of manufacture, and the implements, from the simplest
to the most complex used in dealing with them; then a collection of
photographs and pictures illustrating the landscapes and the scenes
from which the materials come, their native homes, and their places
of manufacture. Such a collection would be a vivid and continual
lesson in the synthesis of art, science, and industry. There would be,
also, samples of the more perfect forms of textile work, as Italian,
French, Japanese, and Oriental. There would be objects illustrating
motives of design and decoration which have entered into production.
Literature would contribute its part in its idealized representation
of the world-industries, as the Penelope in the _Odyssey_—a classic in
literature because the character is an adequate embodiment of a certain
industrial phase of social life. So, from Homer down to the present
time, there is a continuous procession of related facts which have been
translated into terms of art. Music lends its share, from the Scotch song
at the wheel to the spinning song of Marguerite, or of Wagner’s Senta.
The shop becomes a pictured museum, appealing to the eye. It would have
not only materials—beautiful woods and designs—but would give a synopsis
of the historical evolution of architecture in its drawings and pictures.
Thus I have attempted to indicate how the school may be connected
with life so that the experience gained by the child in a familiar,
commonplace way is carried over and made use of there, and what the
child learns in the school is carried back and applied in everyday life,
making the school an organic whole, instead of a composite of isolated
parts. The isolation of studies as well as of parts of the school system
disappears. Experience has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its
literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise from
aspects of the one earth and the one life lived upon it. We do not have
a series of stratified earths, one of which is mathematical, another
physical, another historical, and so on. We should not be able to live
very long in any one taken by itself. We live in a world where all sides
are bound together. All studies grow out of relations in the one great
common world. When the child lives in varied but concrete and active
relationship to this common world, his studies are naturally unified. It
will no longer be a problem to correlate studies. The teacher will not
have to resort to all sorts of devices to weave a little arithmetic into
the history lesson, and the like. Relate the school to life, and all
studies are of necessity correlated.
Moreover, if the school is related as a whole to life as a whole, its
various aims and ideals—culture, discipline, information, utility—cease
to be variants, for one of which we must select one study and for another
another. The growth of the child in the direction of social capacity and
service, his larger and more vital union with life, becomes the unifying
aim; and discipline, culture, and information fall into place as phases
of this growth.
I wish to say one word more about the relationship of our particular
school to the University. The problem is to unify, to organize,
education, to bring all its various factors together, through putting it
as a whole into organic union with everyday life. That which lies back
of the pedagogical school of the University is the necessity of working
out something to serve as a model for such unification, extending from
work beginning with the four-year-old child up through the graduate
work of the University. Already we have much help from the University
in scientific work planned, sometimes even in detail, by heads of the
departments. The graduate student comes to us with his researches and
methods, suggesting ideas and problems. The library and museum are at
hand. We want to bring all things educational together; to break down
the barriers that divide the education of the little child from the
instruction of the maturing youth; to identify the lower and the higher
education, so that it shall be demonstrated to the eye that there is no
lower and higher, but simply education.
Speaking more especially with reference to the pedagogical side of the
work: I suppose the oldest university chair of pedagogy in our country
is about twenty years old—that of the University of Michigan, founded
in the latter seventies. But there are only one or two that have tried
to make a connection between theory and practice. They teach for the
most part by theory, by lectures, by reference to books, rather than
through the actual work of teaching itself. At Columbia, through the
Teachers College, there is an extensive and close connection between the
University and the training of teachers. Something has been done in one
or two other places along the same line. We want an even more intimate
union here, so that the University shall put all its resources at the
disposition of the elementary school, contributing to the evolution of
valuable subject-matter and right method, while the school in turn will
be a laboratory in which the student of education sees theories and ideas
demonstrated, tested, criticized, enforced, and the evolution of new
truths. We want the school in its relation to the University to be a
working model of a unified education.
A word as to the relation of the school to educational interests
generally. I heard once that the adoption of a certain method in use in
our school was objected to by a teacher on this ground: “You know that
it is an experimental school. They do not work under the same conditions
that we are subject to.” Now, the purpose of performing an experiment is
that other people need not experiment; at least need not experiment so
much, may have something definite and positive to go by. An experiment
demands particularly favorable conditions in order that results may be
reached both freely and securely. It has to work unhampered, with all
the needed resources at command. Laboratories lie back of all the great
business enterprises of today, back of every great factory, every railway
and steamship system. Yet the laboratory is not a business enterprise;
it does not aim to secure for itself the conditions of business life,
nor does the commercial undertaking repeat the laboratory. There is a
difference between working out and testing a new truth, or a new method,
and applying it on a wide scale, making it available for the mass of men,
making it commercial. But the first thing is to discover the truth, to
afford all necessary facilities, for this is the most practical thing
in the world in the long run. We do not expect to have other schools
literally imitate what we do. A working model is not something to be
copied; it is to afford a demonstration of the feasibility of the
principle, and of the methods which make it feasible. So (to come back
to our own point) we want here to work out the problem of the unity, the
organization of the school system in itself, and to do this by relating
it so intimately to life as to demonstrate the possibility and necessity
of such organization for all education.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
Naturally, most of the public is interested in what goes on day by day
in a school in direct relation to the children there. This is true of
parents who send their boys and girls for the sake of the personal
results they wish to secure, not for the sake of contributing to
educational theory. In the main, it is true of visitors to a school who
recognize, in varying degrees, what is actually done with the children
before their eyes, but who rarely have either the interest or the time
to consider the work in relation to underlying problems. A school cannot
lose sight of this aspect of its work, since only by attending to it can
the school retain the confidence of its patrons and the presence of its
pupils.
Nevertheless a school conducted by a department of a university must
have another aspect. From the university standpoint, the most important
part of its work is the scientific—the contribution it makes to the
progress of educational thinking. The aim of educating a certain number
of children would hardly justify a university in departing from the
tradition which limits it to those who have completed their secondary
instruction. Only the scientific aim, the conduct of a laboratory,
comparable to other scientific laboratories, can furnish a reason for the
maintenance by a university of an elementary school. Such a school is a
laboratory of applied psychology. That is, it has a place for the study
of mind as manifested and developed in the child, and for the search
after materials and agencies that seem most likely to fulfil and further
the conditions of normal growth.
It is not a normal school or a department for the training of teachers.
It is not a model school. It is not intended to demonstrate any one
special idea or doctrine. Its task is the problem of viewing the
education of the child in the light of the principles of mental activity
and processes of growth made known by modern psychology. The problem
by its nature is an infinite one. All that any school can do is to
make contributions here and there, and to stand for the necessity of
considering education, both theoretically and practically, in this light.
This being the end, the school conditions must, of course, agree. To
endeavor to study the process and laws of growth under such artificial
conditions as prevent many of the chief facts of child life from showing
themselves is an obvious absurdity.
In its practical aspect, this laboratory problem takes the form of the
construction of a course of study which harmonizes with the natural
history of the growth of the child in capacity and experience. The
question is the selection of the kind, variety, and due proportion of
subjects, answering most definitely to the dominant needs and powers of
a given period of growth, and of those modes of presentation that will
cause the selected material to enter vitally into growth. We cannot admit
too fully or too freely the limits of our knowledge and the depths of our
ignorance in these matters. No one has a complete hold scientifically
upon the chief psychological facts of any one year of child life. It
would be sheer presumption to claim that just the material best fitted
to promote this growth has as yet been discovered. The assumption of an
educational laboratory is rather that enough is known of the conditions
and modes of growth to make intelligent inquiry possible; and that it is
only by acting upon what is already known that more can be found out.
The chief point is such experimentation as will add to our reasonable
convictions. The demand is to secure arrangements that will permit and
encourage freedom of investigation; that will give some assurance that
important facts will not be forced out of sight; conditions that will
enable the educational practice indicated by the inquiry to be sincerely
acted upon, without the distortion and suppression arising from undue
dependence upon tradition and preconceived notions. It is in this sense
that the school would be an experimental station in education.
What, then, are the chief working hypotheses that have been adopted from
psychology? What educational counterparts have been hit upon as in some
degree in line with the adopted psychology?
The discussion of these questions may be approached by pointing out a
contrast between contemporary psychology and the psychology of former
days. The contrast is a triple one. Earlier psychology regarded mind as
a purely individual affair in direct and naked contact with an external
world. The only question asked was of the ways in which the world and
the mind acted upon each other. The entire process recognized would have
been in theory exactly the same if there were one mind living alone in
the universe. At present the tendency is to conceive individual mind as
a function of social life—as not capable of operating or developing by
itself, but as requiring continual stimulus from social agencies, and
finding its nutrition in social supplies. The idea of heredity has made
familiar the notion that the equipment of the individual, mental as well
as physical, is an inheritance from the race: a capital inherited by
the individual from the past and held in trust by him for the future.
The idea of evolution has made familiar the notion that mind cannot be
regarded as an individual, monopolistic possession, but represents
the outworkings of the endeavor and thought of humanity; that it is
developed in an environment which is social as well as physical, and that
social needs and aims have been most potent in shaping it—and the chief
difference between savagery and civilization is not in the naked nature
which each faces, but the social heredity and social medium.
Studies of childhood have made it equally apparent that this socially
acquired inheritance operates in the individual only under present social
stimuli. Nature must indeed furnish its physical stimuli of light, sound,
heat, etc., but the significance attaching to these, the interpretation
made of them, depends upon the ways in which the society in which the
child lives acts and reacts in reference to them. The bare physical
stimulus of light is not the entire reality; the interpretation given to
it through social activities and thinking confers upon it its wealth of
meaning. It is through imitation, suggestion, direct instruction, and
even more indirect unconscious tuition, that the child learns to estimate
and treat the bare physical stimuli. It is through the social agencies
that he recapitulates in a few short years the progress which it has
taken the race slow centuries to work out.
Educational practice has exhibited an unconscious adaptation to and
harmony with the prevailing psychology; both grew out of the same soil.
Just as mind was supposed to get its filling by direct contact with the
world, so all the needs of instruction were thought to be met by bringing
the child mind into direct relation with various bodies of external
fact labeled geography, arithmetic, grammar, etc. That these classified
sets of facts were simply selections from the social life of the past
was overlooked; equally so that they had been generated out of social
situations and represented the answers found for social needs. No social
element was found in the subject-matter nor in the intrinsic appeal which
it made to the child; it was located wholly outside in the teacher—in
the encouragements, admonitions, urgings, and devices of the instructor
in getting the child’s mind to work upon a material which in itself was
only accidentally lighted up by any social gleam. It was forgotten that
the maximum appeal, and the full meaning in the life of the child, could
be secured only when the studies were presented, not as bare external
studies, but from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life of
society. It was forgotten that to become integral parts of the child’s
conduct and character they must be assimilated, not as mere items of
information, but as organic parts of his present needs and aims—which in
turn are social.
In the second place, the older psychology was a psychology of knowledge,
of intellect. Emotion and endeavor occupied but an incidental and
derivative place. Much was said about sensations—next to nothing about
movements. There was discussion of ideas and of whether they originated
in sensations or in some innate mental faculty; but the possibility of
their origin in and from the needs of action was ignored. Their influence
upon conduct, upon behavior, was regarded as an external attachment. Now
we believe (to use the words of Mr. James) that the intellect, the sphere
of sensations and ideas, is but a “middle department which we sometimes
take to be final, failing to see, amidst the monstrous diversity of the
length and complications of the cogitations which may fill it, that
it can have but one essential function—the function of defining the
direction which our activity, immediate or remote, shall take.”
Here also was a pre-established harmony between educational practice
and psychological theory. Knowledge in the schools was isolated and
made an end in itself. Facts, laws, information have been the staple of
the curriculum. The controversy in educational theory and practice was
between those who relied more upon the sense element in knowledge, upon
contact with things, upon object-lessons, etc., and those who emphasized
abstract ideas, generalizations, etc.—reason, so called, but in reality
other people’s ideas as formulated in books. In neither case was
there any attempt to connect either the sense training or the logical
operations with the problems and interests of the life of practice. Here
again an educational transformation is indicated if we are to suppose
that our psychological theories stand for any truths of life.