essentially a process—a process of growth, not a fixed thing. According
to the older view mind was mind, and that was the whole story. Mind was
the same throughout, because fitted out with the same assortment of
faculties whether in child or adult. If any difference was made it was
simply that some of these ready-made faculties—such as memory—came into
play at an earlier time, while others, such as judging and inferring,
made their appearance only after the child, through memorizing drills,
had been reduced to complete dependence upon the thought of others.
The only important difference that was recognized was one of quantity,
of amount. The boy was a little man and his mind was a little mind—in
everything but the size the same as that of the adult, having its own
ready-furnished equipment of faculties of attention, memory, etc. Now
we believe in the mind as a growing affair, and hence as essentially
changing, presenting distinctive phases of capacity and interest
at different periods. These are all one and the same in the sense
of continuity of life, but all different, in that each has its own
distinctive claims and offices. “First the blade, then the ear, and then
the full corn in the ear.”
It is hardly possible to overstate the agreement of education and
psychology at this point. The course of study was thoroughly, even if
unconsciously, controlled by the assumption that since mind and its
faculties are the same throughout, the subject-matter of the adult,
logically arranged facts and principles, is the natural “study” of the
child—simplified and made easier of course, since the wind must be
tempered to the shorn lamb. The outcome was the traditional course of
study in which again child and adult minds are absolutely identified,
except as regards the mere matter of amount or quantity of power. The
entire range of the universe is first subdivided into sections called
studies; then each one of these studies is broken up into bits, and some
one bit assigned to a certain year of the course. No order of development
was recognized—it was enough that the earlier parts were made easier
than the later. To use the pertinent illustration of Mr. W. S. Jackman
in stating the absurdity of this sort of curriculum: “It must seem to
geography teachers that Heaven smiled on them when it ordained but four
or five continents, because starting in far enough along the course it
was so easy, that it really seemed to be natural, to give one continent
to each grade, and then come out right in the eight years.”
If once more we are in earnest with the idea of mind as growth, this
growth carrying with it typical features distinctive of its various
stages, it is clear that an educational transformation is again
indicated. It is clear that the selection and grading of material in the
course of study must be done with reference to proper nutrition of the
dominant directions of activity in a given period, not with reference to
chopped-up sections of a ready-made universe of knowledge.
It is, of course, comparatively easy to lay down general propositions
like the foregoing; easy to use them to criticize existing school
conditions; easy by means of them to urge the necessity of something
different. But art is long. The difficulty is in carrying such
conceptions into effect—in seeing just what materials and methods, in
what proportion and arrangement, are available and helpful at a given
time. Here again we must fall back upon the idea of the laboratory.
There is no answer in advance to such questions as these. Tradition does
not give it because tradition is founded upon a radically different
psychology. Mere reasoning cannot give it because it is a question of
fact. It is only by trying that such things can be found out. To refuse
to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth
involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the
only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.
Hence the following statement simply reports various lines of inquiry
started during the last five years, with some of the results more
recently indicated. These results can, of course, make no claim to
be other than tentative, excepting in so far as a more definite
consciousness of what the problems are, clearing the way for more
intelligent action in the future, is a definitive advance. It should
also be stated that practically it has not as yet been possible, in
many cases, to act adequately upon the best ideas obtained, because of
administrative difficulties, due to lack of funds—difficulties centering
in the lack of a proper building and appliances, and in inability to pay
the amounts necessary to secure the complete time of teachers in some
important lines. Indeed, with the growth of the school in numbers, and
in the age and maturity of pupils, it is becoming a grave question how
long it is fair to the experiment to carry it on without more adequate
facilities.
In coming now to speak of the educational answers which have been sought
for the psychological hypotheses, it is convenient to start from the
matter of the stages of growth. The first stage (found in the child say
of from four to eight years of age) is characterized by directness
of social and personal interests, and by directness and promptness
of relationship between impressions, ideas, and action. The demand
for a motor outlet for expression is urgent and immediate. Hence the
subject-matter for these years is selected from phases of life entering
into the child’s own social surroundings, and, as far as may be, capable
of reproduction by him in something approaching social form—in play,
games, occupations, or miniature industrial arts, stories, pictorial
imagination, and conversation. At first the material is such as lies
nearest the child himself, the family life and its neighborhood setting;
it then goes on to something slightly more remote, social occupations
(especially those having to do with the interdependence of city and
country life), and then extends itself to the historical evolution of
typical occupations and of the social forms connected with them. The
material is not presented as lessons, as something to be learned, but
rather as something to be taken up into the child’s own experience,
through his own activities, in weaving, cooking, shopwork, modeling,
dramatic plays, conversation, discussion, story-telling, etc. These in
turn are direct agencies. They are forms of motor or expressive activity.
They are emphasized so as to dominate the school program, in order that
the intimate connection between knowing and doing, so characteristic of
this period of child life, may be maintained. The aim, then, is not for
the child to go to school as a place apart, but rather in the school so
to recapitulate typical phases of his experience outside of school, as to
enlarge, enrich, and gradually formulate it.
In the second period, extending from eight or nine to eleven or twelve,
the aim is to recognize and respond to the change which comes into the
child from his growing sense of the possibility of more permanent and
objective results and of the necessity for the control of agencies for
the skill necessary to reach these results. When the child recognizes
distinct and enduring ends which stand out and demand attention on their
own account, the previous vague and fluid unity of life is broken up. The
mere play of activity no longer directly satisfies. It must be felt to
accomplish something—to lead up to a definite and abiding outcome. Hence
the recognition of rules of action—that is, of regular means appropriate
to reaching permanent results—and of the value of mastering special
processes so as to give skill in their use.
Hence, on the educational side, the problem is, as regards the
subject-matter, to differentiate the vague unity of experience into
characteristic typical phases, selecting such as clearly illustrate the
importance to mankind of command over specific agencies and methods of
thought and action in realizing its highest aims. The problem on the
side of method is an analogous one: to bring the child to recognize the
necessity of a similar development within himself—the need of securing
for himself practical and intellectual control of such methods of work
and inquiry as will enable him to realize results for himself.
On the more direct social side, American history (especially that of the
period of colonization) is selected as furnishing a typical example of
patience, courage, ingenuity, and continual judgment in adapting means to
ends, even in the face of great hazard and obstacle; while the material
itself is so definite, vivid, and human as to come directly within the
range of the child’s representative and constructive imagination and thus
becomes, vicariously at least, a part of his own expanding consciousness.
Since the aim is not “covering the ground,” but knowledge of social
processes used to secure social results, no attempt is made to go over
the entire history, in chronological order, of America. Rather a series
of types is taken up: Chicago and the northwestern Mississippi valley;
Virginia, New York, and the Puritans and Pilgrims in New England. The aim
is to present a variety of climatic and local conditions, to show the
different sorts of obstacles and helps that people found, and a variety
of historic traditions and customs and purposes of different people.
The method involves presentation of a large amount of detail, of minutiae
of surroundings, tools, clothing, household utensils, foods, modes of
living day by day, so that the child can reproduce the material as
life, not as mere historic information. In this way, social processes
and results become realities. Moreover, to the personal and dramatic
identification of the child with the social life studied, characteristic
of the earlier period, there now supervenes an _intellectual_
identification—the child puts himself at the standpoint of the problems
that have to be met and rediscovers, so far as may be, ways of meeting
them.
The general standpoint—the adaptation of means to ends—controls also the
work in science. For purposes of convenience, this may be regarded as
now differentiated into two sides—the geographical and the experimental.
Since, as just stated, the history work depends upon an appreciation of
the natural environment as affording resources and presenting urgent
problems, considerable attention is paid to the physiography, mountains,
rivers, plains, and lines of natural travel and exchange, flora and fauna
of each of the colonies. This is connected with field excursions in
order that the child may be able to supply from observation, as far as
possible, the data to be used by constructive imagination, in reproducing
more remote environments.
The experimental side devotes itself to a study of processes which yield
typical results of value to men. The activity of the child in the earlier
period is directly productive, rather than investigative. His experiments
are modes of active doing—almost as much so as his play and games. Later
he tries to find out how various materials or agencies are manipulated
in order to give certain results. It is thus clearly distinguished from
experimentation in the scientific sense—such as is appropriate to the
secondary period—where the aim is the discovery of facts and verification
of principles. Since the practical interest predominates, it is a study
of applied science rather than of pure science. For instance, processes
are selected found to have been of importance in colonial life—bleaching,
dyeing, soap and candle-making, manufacture of pewter dishes, making
of cider and vinegar, leading to some study of chemical agencies, of
oils, fats, elementary metallurgy. “Physics” is commenced from the same
applied standpoint. A study is made of the use and transfer of energy in
the spinning-wheel and looms; everyday uses of mechanical principles are
taken up—in locks, scales, etc., going on later to electric appliances
and devices—bells, the telegraph, etc.
The relation of means to ends is emphasized also in other lines of work.
In art attention is given to practical questions of perspective, of
proportion of spaces and masses, balance, effect of color combinations
and contrasts, etc. In cooking, the principles of food-composition and
of effects of various agencies upon these elements are taken up, so that
the children may deduce, as far as possible, their own rules. In sewing,
methods of cutting, fitting (as applied to dolls’ clothing) come up, and
later on the technical sequence of stitches, etc.
It is clear that with the increasing differentiation of lines of work and
interest, leading to greater individuality and independence in various
studies, great care must be taken to find the balance between, on one
side, undue separation and isolation, and, on the other, a miscellaneous
and casual attention to a large number of topics, without adequate
emphasis and distinctiveness to any. The first principle makes work
mechanical and formal, divorces it from the life-experience of the child
and from effective influence upon conduct. The second makes it scrappy
and vague and leaves the child without definite command of his own powers
or clear consciousness of purposes. It is perhaps only in the present
year that the specific principle of the conscious relation of means to
ends has emerged as the unifying principle of this period; and it is
hoped that emphasis of this in all lines of work will have a decidedly
cumulative and unifying effect upon the child’s development.
Nothing has been said, as yet, of one of the most important agencies
or means in extending and controlling experience—command of the social
or conventional symbols—symbols of language, including those of
quantity. The importance of these instrumentalities is so great that the
traditional or three R’s curriculum is based upon them—from 60 to 80 per
cent of the time program of the first four or five years of elementary
schools being devoted to them, the smaller figure representing selected
rather than average schools.
These subjects are social in a double sense. They represent the tools
which society has evolved in the past as the instruments of its
intellectual pursuits. They represent the keys which will unlock to the
child the wealth of social capital which lies beyond the possible range
of his limited individual experience. While these two points of view
must always give these arts a highly important place in education, they
also make it necessary that certain conditions should be observed in
their introduction and use. In a wholesale and direct application of the
studies no account is taken of these conditions. The chief problem at
present relating to the three R’s is recognition of these conditions and
the adaptation of work to them.
The conditions may be reduced to two: (1) The need that the child shall
have in his own personal and vital experience a varied background of
contact and acquaintance with realities, social and physical. This is
necessary to prevent symbols from becoming a purely second-hand and
conventional substitute for reality. (2) The need that the more ordinary,
direct, and personal experience of the child shall furnish problems,
motives, and interests that necessitate recourse to books for their
solution, satisfaction, and pursuit. Otherwise, the child approaches
the book without intellectual hunger, without alertness, without a
questioning attitude, and the result is the one so deplorably common:
such abject dependence upon books as weakens and cripples vigor of
thought and inquiry, combined with reading for mere random stimulation of
fancy, emotional indulgence, and flight from the world of reality into a
make-belief land.
The problem here is then (1) to furnish the child with a sufficiently
large amount of personal activity in occupations, expression,
conversation, construction, and experimentation, so that his
individuality, moral and intellectual, shall not be swamped by a
disproportionate amount of the experience of others to which books
introduce him; and (2) so to conduct this more direct experience as to
make the child feel the need of resort to and command of the traditional
social tools—furnish him with motives and make his recourse to them
intelligent, an addition to his powers, instead of a servile dependency.
When this problem shall be solved, work in language, literature, and
number will not be a combination of mechanical drill, formal analysis,
and appeal, even if unconscious, to sensational interests; and there will
not be the slightest reason to fear that books and all that relates to
them will not take the important place to which they are entitled.
It is hardly necessary to say that the problem is not yet solved. The
common complaints that children’s progress in these traditional school
studies is sacrificed to the newer subjects that have come into the
curriculum is sufficient evidence that the exact balance is not yet
struck. The experience thus far in the school, even if not demonstrative,
indicates the following probable results: (1) the more direct modes of
activity, constructive and occupation work, scientific observation,
experimentation, etc., present plenty of opportunities and occasions
for the necessary use of reading, writing (and spelling), and number
work. These things may be introduced, then, not as isolated studies, but
as organic outgrowths of the child’s experience. The problem is, in a
systematic and progressive way, to take advantage of these occasions. (2)
The additional vitality and meaning which these studies thus secure make
possible a very considerable reduction of the time ordinarily devoted to
them. (3) The final use of the symbols, whether in reading, calculation,
or composition, is more intelligent, less mechanical; more active, less
passively receptive; more an increase of power, less a mere mode of
enjoyment.
On the other hand, increasing experience seems to make clear the
following points: (1) that it is possible, in the early years, to appeal,
in teaching the recognition and use of symbols, to the child’s power
of production and creation; as much so in principle as in other lines
of work seemingly much more direct, and that there is the advantage
of a limited and definite result by which the child may measure his
progress. (2) Failure sufficiently to take account of this fact resulted
in an undue postponement of some phases of these lines of work, with
the effect that the child, having progressed to a more advanced plane
intellectually, feels what earlier might have been a form of power and
creation to be an irksome task. (3) There is a demand for periodic
concentration and alternation in the school program of the time devoted
to these studies—and of all studies where mastery of technique or special
method is advisable. That is to say, instead of carrying all subjects
simultaneously and at an equal pace upon the program, at times one must
be brought to the foreground and others relegated to the background,
until the child is brought to the point of recognizing that he has a
power or skill which he can now go ahead and use independently.
The third period of elementary education is upon the borderland of
secondary. It comes when the child has a sufficient acquaintance of a
fairly direct sort with various forms of reality and modes of activity;
and when he has sufficiently mastered the methods, the tools of thought,
inquiry, and activity, appropriate to various phases of experience,
to be able profitably to specialize upon distinctive studies and arts
for technical and intellectual aims. While the school has a number of
children who are in this period, the school has not, of course, been
in existence long enough so that any typical inferences can be safely
drawn. There certainly seems to be reason to hope, however, that with
the consciousness of difficulties, needs, and resources gained in the
experience of the last five years, children can be brought to and through
this period without sacrifice of thoroughness, mental discipline, or
command of technical tools of learning, and with a positive enlargement
of life, and a wider, freer, and more open outlook upon it.
FROEBEL’S EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
V
FROEBEL’S EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
One of the traditions of the Elementary School of the University of
Chicago is of a visitor who, in its early days, called to see the
kindergarten. On being told that the school had not as yet established
one, she asked if there were not singing, drawing, manual training, plays
and dramatizations, and attention to the children’s social relations.
When her questions were answered in the affirmative, she remarked, both
triumphantly and indignantly, that that was what she understood by a
kindergarten, and that she did not know what was meant by saying that the
school had no kindergarten. The remark was perhaps justified in spirit,
if not in letter. At all events, it suggests that in a certain sense
the school endeavors throughout its whole course—now including children
between four and thirteen—to carry into effect certain principles which
Froebel was perhaps the first consciously to set forth. Speaking still in
general, these principles are:
1. That the primary business of school is to train children in
co-operative and mutually helpful living; to foster in them the
consciousness of mutual interdependence; and to help them practically in
making the adjustments that will carry this spirit into overt deeds.
2. That the primary root of all educative activity is in the instinctive,
impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not in the
presentation and application of external material, whether through the
ideas of others or through the senses; and that, accordingly, numberless
spontaneous activities of children, plays, games, mimic efforts, even the
apparently meaningless motions of infants—exhibitions previously ignored
as trivial, futile, or even condemned as positively evil—are capable of
educational use; nay, are the foundation-stones of educational method.
3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and
directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the co-operative
living already spoken of; taking advantage of them to reproduce on the
child’s plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer
society into which he is finally to go forth; and that it is through
production and creative use that valuable knowledge is secured and
clinched.
So far as these statements correctly represent Froebel’s educational
philosophy, the School should be regarded as its exponent. An attempt
is making to act upon them with as much faith and sincerity in their
application to children of twelve as to children of four. This attempt,
however, to assume what might be called the kindergarten attitude
throughout the whole school makes necessary certain modifications of
the work done in what is more technically known as the kindergarten
period—that is, with the children between the ages of four and six. It
is necessary only to state reasons for believing that in spite of the
apparently radical character of some of them they are true to the spirit
of Froebel.
AS REGARDS PLAY AND GAMES
Play is not to be identified with anything which the child externally
does. It rather designates his mental attitude in its entirety and in its
unity. It is the free play, the interplay, of all the child’s powers,
thoughts, and physical movements, in embodying, in a satisfying form,
his own images and interests. Negatively, it is freedom—from economic
pressure—the necessities of getting a living and supporting others—and
from the fixed responsibilities attaching to the special callings of the
adult. Positively, it means that the supreme end of the child is fulness
of growth—fulness of realization of his budding powers, a realization
which continually carries him on from one plane to another.