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Transcriber's note:
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THE VITALIZED SCHOOL
by
FRANCIS B. PEARSON
Superintendent of Public Instruction of Ohio
Author of "The Evolution of the Teacher"
"The High School Problem"
"Reveries of a Schoolmaster"
New York
The MacMillan Company
1918
Copyright, 1917,
by the MacMillan Company.
Published February, 1917.
Reprinted January, 1918.
PREFACE
The thoughtful observer must have noted in the recent past many
indications of an awakened interest both in the concept of education and
in school procedure on the part of school officials, teachers, and the
public. Educators have been developing pedagogical principles that
strike their roots deep into the philosophy of life, and now their
pronouncements are invading the consciousness of people of all ranks and
causing them to realize more and more that the school process is an
integral part of the life process and not something detached from life.
The following pages constitute an attempt to interpret some of the
school processes in terms of life processes, and to suggest ways in
which these processes may be made identical.
It is hoped that teachers who may read these pages may find running
through them a strand of optimism that will give them increased faith in
their own powers, a larger hope for the future of the school, and an
access of zeal to press valiantly forward in their efforts to excel
themselves.
F. B. P.
COLUMBUS, OHIO,
January, 1917.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. TEACHING SCHOOL
II. THE TEACHER
III. THE CHILD
IV. THE CHILD OF THE FUTURE
V. THE TEACHER-POLITICIAN
VI. SUBLIME CHAOS
VII. DEMOCRACY
VIII. PATRIOTISM
IX. WORK AND LIFE
X. WORDS AND THEIR CONTENT
XI. COMPLETE LIVING
XII. THE TIME ELEMENT
XIII. THE ARTIST TEACHER
XIV. THE TEACHER AS AN IDEAL
XV. THE SOCIALIZED RECITATION
XVI. AGRICULTURE
XVII. THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY
XVIII. POETRY AND LIFE
XIX. A SENSE OF HUMOR
XX. THE ELEMENT OF HUMAN INTEREST
XXI. BEHAVIOR
XXII. BOND AND FEAR
XXIII. EXAMINATIONS
XXIV. WORLD-BUILDING
XXV. A TYPICAL VITALIZED SCHOOL
THE VITALIZED SCHOOL
CHAPTER I
TEACHING SCHOOL
=Life and living compared.=--There is a wide difference between
school-teaching and teaching school. The question "Is she a
school-teacher?" means one thing; but the question "Can she teach
school?" means quite another. School-teaching may be living; but
teaching school is life. And any one who has a definition of life can
readily find a definition for teaching school. Much of the criticism of
the work of the schools emanates from sources that have a restricted
concept of life. The artisan who defines life in terms of his own trade
is impatient with much that the school is trying to do. He would have
the scope of the school narrowed to his concept of life. If art and
literature are beyond the limits of his concept, he can see no warrant
for their presence in the school. The work of the schools cannot be
standardized until life itself is standardized, and that is neither
possible nor desirable. The glory of life is that it does not have
fixity, that it is ever crescent.
=Teaching defined.=--Teaching school may be defined, therefore, as the
process of interpreting life by the laboratory method. The teacher's
work is to open the gates of life for the pupils. But, before these
gates can be opened, the teacher must know what and where they are. This
view of the teacher's work is neither fanciful nor fantastic; quite the
contrary. Life is the common heritage of people young and old, and the
school should be so organized and administered as to teach people how to
use this heritage to the best advantage both for themselves and for
others. If a child should be absent from school altogether, or if he
should be incarcerated in prison from his sixth to his eighteenth year,
he would still have life. But, if he is in school during those twelve
years, he is supposed to have life that is of better quality and more
abundant. Life is not measured by years, but by its own intensity and
scope. It has often been said that some people have more life in
threescore and ten years than Methuselah had in his more than nine
hundred years.
=Life measured by intensity.=--This statement is not demonstrable, of
course, but it serves to make evident the fact that some people have
more of life in a given time than others in the same time. In this
sense, life may be measured by the number of reactions to objectives.
These reactions may be increased by training. Two persons, in passing a
shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as many
as the other, according to their ability to react. The man who was
locked in a vault at the cemetery by accident, and was not discovered
for an hour, thought he had spent four days in his imprisonment. He had
really lived four days in a single hour by reason of the intensity of
life during that hour.
=Illustrations.=--In the case of dreams, we are told that years may be
condensed into minutes, or even seconds, by reason of the rapidity of
reactions. The rapidity and intensity of these reactions make themselves
manifest on the face of the dreamer. Beads of perspiration and facial
contortions betoken intensity of feeling. In such an experience life is
intense. If a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a
case, it would make a high record of speed. Life sometimes touches
bottom, and sometimes scales the heights. But the distance between these
extremes varies greatly in different persons. The life of one may have
but a single octave; of the other, eight, or a hundred, or a thousand.
The life of Job is an apt illustration. No one has been able to sound
the depths of his suffering, nor has any one been able to measure the
heights of his exaltation. We may not readily compute the octaves in
such a life as his.
=The complexity of life.=--It is not easy to think life, much less
define it. The elements are so numerous as to baffle and bewilder the
mind. It looks out at one from so many corners that it seems Argus-eyed.
At one moment we see it on the Stock Exchange where men struggle and
strive in a mad frenzy of competition; at another, in a quiet home,
where a mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no competition
but, rather, a sublime monopoly. Again, it manifests itself in the
clanking of machinery where men are tunneling the mountain or
constructing a canal to unite oceans; or, again, in the laboratory where
the microscope is revealing the form of the snow crystal. One man is
watching the movements of the heavenly bodies as they file by his
telescope, while another writes a proclamation that makes free a race of
people. Another man is leading an army into battle, while some Doctor
MacClure is breasting the storm in the darkness as he goes forth on his
mission of mercy.
=Manifestations of life.=--These manifestations of life men call trade,
commerce, history, mathematics, science, nature, and philanthropy. And
men write these words in books, and other men write other books trying
to explain their meaning. Then, still others divide and subdivide, and
science becomes the sciences, and mathematics becomes arithmetic, and
algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry, and calculus, and astronomy.
Here mathematics and science seem to merge. And, in time, history and
geography come together, and sometimes strive for precedence.
Thus, books accumulate into libraries and so add another to the many
elements of life. Then magazines are written to explain the books and
their authors. The motive behind the book is analyzed in an effort to
discover the workings of the author's mind and heart. In these
revelations we sometimes hear the rippling of the brook, and sometimes
the moan of the sea; sometimes the cooing of the dove, and sometimes the
scream of the eagle; sometimes the bleating of the lamb, and sometimes
the roaring of the lion. In them we see the moonbeams that play among
the flowers and the lightning that rends the forest; the blossoms that
filter from the trees and the avalanche that carries destruction; the
rain that fructifies the earth and the hurricane that destroys.
=Life in literature.=--Back of these sights and sounds we discover
men--Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante. We
trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature. And in
literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life.
Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They saw
and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because they
wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the heights and
saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and with nature.
This panorama generated thoughts and feelings in them, and these they
could not but portray. And so literature and life are identical and not
coördinates, as some would have us think.
=Life as subject matter in teaching.=--In teaching school, therefore,
the subject matter with which we have to do is life--nothing more and
nothing less. We may call it history, or mathematics, or literature, or
psychology,--but it still remains true that life is the real objective
of all our activities. And, as has been already said, we are teaching
life by the laboratory method. We are striving to interpret the thing in
which we are immersed. We feel, and think, and aspire, and love, and
enjoy. All these are life; and from this life we are striving to extract
strength that our feeling may be deeper, our thinking higher, our
aspirations wider and more lofty, our love purer and nobler, and our own
enjoyment greater. By absorbing the life that is all about us we strive
to have more abundant and abounding life.
=The teacher's province.=--Such is the province of one who essays the
task of teaching school. School is life, as we have been told; but, at
the same time, it is a place and an occasion for teaching life. If we
could detach history from life, it would cease to be history. If
literature is not life, it is not literature; and so with the sciences.
These branches are but variants or branches of life, and all emanate
from a common center. Whether we scan the heavens, penetrate the depths
of the sea, pore over the pages of books, or look into the minds and
hearts of men, we are striving after an interpretation of life.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. Distinguish between a "school teacher" and a "man or woman who
teaches school."
2. Discuss the importance of the following agencies of the school in
securing for children "life of a better quality and more abundant":
play; revitalized curricula; vitalized teachers; medical inspection;
social centers; moral instruction.
3. Discuss both from the standpoint of present practice and ideal
educational principles: "More abundant life rather than knowledge is the
chief end of instruction."
4. What changes are necessary in school curricula and in the methods of
school organization, instruction, and discipline, in order that the
chief purpose of our schools, "more abundant _life_," may be realized?
5. Justify the apparent length of the school day to teachers and pupils,
as a means of determining the quality of the work of the school.
6. Some teachers maintain that school is a preparation for life, while
the author maintains that "school is _life_." Is this difference in the
concept of the school a vital one?
7. How may this difference of concept affect the work of the teacher?
the attitude of the pupil?
8. What definition of education will best harmonize with the ideals of
this chapter?