The Element of Human Interest
=Yearning toward betterment.=--Much has been said and written in recent
times touching the matter and manner of vitalizing and humanizing the
studies and work of the school. The discussions have been nation-wide in
their scope and most fertile in plans and practical suggestions. No
subject of greater importance or of more far-reaching import now engages
the interest of educational leaders. They are quite aware that something
needs to be done, but no one has announced the sovereign remedy. The
critics have made much of the fact that there is something lacking or
wrong in our school procedure, but they can neither diagnose the case
nor suggest the remedy. They can merely criticize. We are having many
surveys, but the results have been meager and inadequate. We have been
working at the circumference of the circle rather than at the center. We
have been striving to reform our educational training, hoping for a
reflex that would be sufficient to modify the entire school régime. We
have added domestic science, hoping thereby to reconstruct the school by
inoculation. We have looked to agriculture and other vocational studies
as the magnetic influences of our dreams. Something has been
accomplished, to be sure, but we are still far distant from the goal.
The best that writers can do in their books or educational conferences
can do in their meetings, is to report progress.
=The obstacle of conservatism.=--One of the greatest obstacles we have
to surmount in this whole matter of vitalizing school work is the
habitual conservatism of the school people themselves. The methods of
teaching that obtained in the school when we were pupils have grooved
themselves into habits of thinking that smile defiance at the theories
that we have more recently acquired. When we venture out from the shore
we want to feel a rope in our hands. The superintendent speaks fervently
to patrons or teachers on the subject of modern methods in teaching,
then retires to his office and takes intimate and friendly counsel with
tradition. In sailing the educational seas he must needs keep in sight
the buoys of tradition. This matter of conservatism is cited merely to
show that our progress, in the very nature of the case, will be slow.
=Schools of education.=--Another obstacle in the way of progress toward
the vitalized school is the attitude and teaching of many who are
connected with colleges of education and normal schools. We have a right
to look to them for leadership, but we find, instead, that their
practices lag far in the rear of their theories. They teach according to
such devitalized methods and in such an unvitalized way as to discredit
the subjects they teach. It is only from such of their students as are
proof against their style of teaching that we may hope for aid. One such
teacher in a college of education in a course of eight weeks on the
subject of School Administration had his students copy figures from
statistical reports for several days in succession and for four and five
hours each day. The students confessed that their only objective was the
gaining of credits, and had no intimation that the work they were doing
was to function anywhere.
=The machine teacher.=--Such work is deadening and disheartening. It has
in it no inspiration, no life, nothing, in short, that connects with
real life. Such a teacher could not maintain himself in a wide-awake
high school for a half year. The boys and girls would desert him even if
they had to desert the school. And yet teachers and prospective teachers
must endure and not complain. Those who submit supinely will attempt to
repeat in their schools the sort of teaching that obtains in his
classes, and their schools will suffer accordingly. His sort of teaching
proclaims him either more or less than a human being in the estimation
of normal people. Such a teacher drones forth weary platitudes as if his
utterances were oracular. The only prerequisite for a position in some
schools of education seems to be a degree of a certain altitude without
any reference to real teaching ability.
=Statistics versus children.=--Such teaching palliates educational
situations without affording a solution. It is so steeped in tradition
that it resorts to statistics as it would consult an oracle. We look to
see it establishing precedents only to find it following precedents.
When we would find in it a leader we find merely a follower. To such
teaching statistical numbers mean far more than living children. Indeed,
children are but objects that become useful as a means of proving
theories. It lacks vitality, and that is sad; but, worst of all, it
strives unceasingly to perpetuate itself in the schools. Real teaching
power receives looks askance in some of these colleges as if it bore the
mark of Cain in not being up to standard on the academic side. And yet
these colleges are teaching the teachers of our schools.
=Teaching power.=--Hence, the work of vitalizing the school must begin
in our colleges of education and normal schools, and this beginning will
be made only when we place the emphasis upon teaching power. The human
qualities of the teachers must be so pronounced that they become their
most distinguished characteristics. It is a sad commentary upon our
educational processes if a man must point to the letters of his degree
to prove that he is a teacher. His teaching should be of such a nature
as to justify and glorify his degree. As the preacher receives his
degree because he can preach, so the teacher should receive his degree
because he can teach, even if we must create a new degree by which to
designate the real teacher.
=Degrees and human qualities.=--There is no disparagement of the
academic degree in the statement that it proves absolutely nothing
touching the ability to teach. It proclaims its possessor a student but
not a teacher. Yet, in our practices, we proceed upon the assumption
that teacher and student are synonymous. We hold examinations for
teachers in our schools, but not for teachers in our colleges of
education. His degree is the magic talisman that causes the doors to
swing wide open for him. Besides, his very presence inside seems to be
prima facie evidence that he is a success, and all his students are
supposed to join in the general chorus of praise.
=Life the great human interest.=--The books are eloquent and persistent
in their admonitions that we should attach all school work to the native
interests of the child. To this dictum there seems to be universal and
hearty assent. But we do not seem to realize fully, as yet, that the big
native interest of the child is life itself. We have not, as yet, found
the way to enmesh the activities of the school in the life processes of
the child so that these school activities are as much a part of his life
as his food, his games, his breathing, and his sleep. We have been
interpreting some of the manifestations of life as his native interests
but have failed thus to interpret his life as a whole. The child is but
the aggregate of all his inherent interests, and we must know these
interests if we would find the child so as to attach school work to the
child himself.
=The child as a whole.=--Here is the crux of the entire matter, here the
big problem for the vitalized school. We have been taking his pulse,
testing his eyes, taking his temperature, and making examinations for
defects--and these things are excellent. But all these things combined
do not reveal the child to us. We need to go beyond all these in order
to find him. We must know what he thinks, how he feels as to people and
things, what his aspirations are, what motives impel him to action, what
are his intuitions, what things he does involuntarily and what through
volition or compulsion. With such data clearly before us we can proceed
to attach school work to his native interests. We have been striving to
bend him to our preconceived notion instead of finding out who and what
he is as a condition precedent to intelligent teaching.
=Three types of teachers.=--The three types of teachers that have been
much exploited in the books are the teacher who conceives it to be her
work to teach the book, the one who teaches the subject, and the one who
teaches the child. The number of the first type is still very large in
spite of all the books that inveigh against this conception. It were
easy to find a teacher whose practice indicates that she thinks that all
the arithmetic there is or ought to be is to be found in the book that
lies on her desk. It seems not to occur to her that a score of books
might be written that would be equal in merit to the one she is using,
some of which might be far better adapted to the children in her
particular school. If she were asked to teach arithmetic without the aid
of a book, she would shed copious tears, if, indeed, she did not resign.
=The first type.=--To such a teacher the book is the Ultima Thule of all
her endeavors, and when the pupils can pass the examination she feels
that her work is a success. If the problem in the book does not fit the
child, so much the worse for the child, and she proceeds to try to make
him fit the problem. It does not occur to her to construct problems that
will fit the child. When she comes to the solution of the right
triangle, the baseball diamond does not come to her mind. She has the
boy learn a rule and try to apply it instead of having him find the
distance from first base to third in a direct line. In her thinking such
a proceeding would be banal because it would violate the sanctity of the
book. She must adhere to the book though the heavens fall, and the boy
with them.
=The book supreme.=--She seems quite unable to draw upon the farm, the
grocery, the store, or the playground for suitable problems. These
things seem to be obscured by her supreme devotion to the book. She
lacks fertility of resources, nor does she realize this lack, because
her eyes are fastened upon the book rather than upon the child. Were she
as intent upon the child as she is upon the book, his interests would
direct attention to the things toward which his inclinations yearn and
toward which his aptitudes lure him. In such a case, her ingenuity and
resourcefulness would roam over wide fields in quest of the objects of
his native interests and she would return to him laden with material
that would fit the needs of the child far better than the material of
the book.
=The child supreme.=--The teacher whose primary consideration is the
child and who sees in the child the object and focus of all her
activities, never makes a fetish of the book. It has its use, to be
sure, but it is subordinate in the scheme of education. It is not a
necessity, but a mere convenience. She could dispense with it entirely
and not do violence to the child's interests. No book is large enough to
compass all that she teaches, for she forages in every field to obtain
proper and palatable food for the child. She teaches with the grain of
the child and not against the grain. If the book contains what she
requires in her work, she uses it and is glad to have it; but, if it
does not contain what she needs, she seeks it elsewhere and does not
return empty-handed.
=Illustrations.=--She places the truth she hopes to teach in the path of
the child's inclination, and this is taken into his life processes. Life
does not stop at way-stations to take on supplies, but absorbs the
supplies that it encounters as it moves along. This teacher does not
stop the ball game to teach the right triangle, but manages to have the
problem solved in connection with or as a part of the game. She does not
taboo the morning paper in order to have a lesson in history, but begins
with the paper as a favorable starting point toward the lesson. She does
not confiscate the contents of the boy's pocket as contraband, but is
glad to avail herself of all these as indices of the boy's interests,
and, therefore, guides for her teaching.
=Attitude toward teaching materials.=--When the boy carries a toad to
school, she does not shudder, but rather rejoices, because she sees in
him a possible Agassiz. When he displays an interest in plant life, she
sees in him another Burbank. When she finds him drawing pictures at his
desk, she smiles approval, for she sees in him another Raphael. She does
not disdain the lowliest insect, reptile, or plant when she finds it
within the circle of the child's interests. She is willing, nay eager,
to ransack the universe if only she may come upon elements of nutrition
for her pupils. From every flower that blooms she gathers honey that she
may distill it into the life of the child. She does not coddle the
child; she gives him nourishment.
=History.=--Her history is as wide as human thought and as high as human
aspiration. It includes the Rosetta stone and the morning paper. It
travels back from the clothing of the child to the cotton gin. The
stitch in the little girl's dress is the index finger that points to the
page that depicts the invention of the sewing machine. Every engine
leads her back to Watt, and she takes the children with her. Every
foreign message in the daily paper revives the story of Field and the
laying of the Atlantic cable. Every mention of the President's cabinet
gives occasion for reviewing the cabinets of other Presidents with
comparisons and contrasts. At her magic touch the libraries and
galleries yield forth rich treasures for her classroom. Life is the
textbook of her study, and the life of the child is the goal of her
endeavors.
=The child's native interests.=--In brief, she is teaching children and
not books or subjects, and the interests of the children take emphatic
precedence over her own. She enters into the life of the child and makes
excursions into all life according to the dictates of his interests. The
child is the big native interest to which she attaches the work of the
school. The program is elastic enough to encompass every child in her
school. Her program is a garden in which something is growing for each
child, and she cultivates every plant with sympathetic care. She
considers it no hardship to learn the plant, the animal, the place, or
the fact in which the child finds interest. Because of the child and for
the sake of the child she invests all these things with the quality of
human interest.
=The school and the home.=--Arithmetic, language, history, and geography
touch life at a thousand points, and we have but to select the points of
contact with the life of each pupil to render any or all of these a
vital part of the day's work and the day's life. They are not things
that are detached from the child's life. The child's errand to the shop
involves arithmetic, and the vitalized teacher makes this fact a part of
the working capital of the school. The dinner table abounds in
geography, and the teacher is quick to turn this fact to account in the
school. Her fertility of resources, coupled with her vital interest in
human beings and human affairs, soon establishes a reciprocal relation
between the home and the school. Similarly, she causes the language of
the school to flow out into the home, the factory, and the office.
=The skill of the teacher.=--History is not a school affair merely. It
is a life affair, and through all the currents of life it may be made to
flow. The languages, Latin, German, French, Spanish, are expressions and
interpretations of life, and they may be made to appear what they really
are if the teacher is resourceful enough and skillful enough to attach
them to the life of the pupil by the human ligaments that are ever at
hand. Chemistry, physics, botany, and physiology all throb with life if
only the teacher can place the fingers of the pupils on their pulses.
Given the human teacher, the human child, and the humanized teaching,
the vitalized school is inevitable.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. What agencies have been employed with the expectation that they would
improve the school?
2. What are the reasons why some of these have not accomplished more?
3. Give instances in which the conservatism of teachers seems to have
stood in the way of utilizing the element of human interest.
4. What do you think of a teacher who asserts that no important advance
has been made in educational theory and practice since, say, 1910?
5. Make an outline of what you think a college of education should do
for the school.
6. What would you expect to gain from a course in school administration?
7. The president of at least one Ohio college personally inspects and
checks up the work of the professors from the standpoint of proper
teaching standards, and has them visit one another's classes for
friendly criticism and observation. He reports improvement in the
standard of teaching. How is his plan applicable in your school?
8. A city high school principal states that it is not his custom to
visit his teachers' classes; that he knows what is going on and that he
interferes only if something is wrong. What do you think of his
practice? How is the principle applicable in your school?
9. Do the duties of a superintendent have to do only with curriculum and
discipline, or have they to do also with teaching power?
10. What are some of the ways in which you have known superintendents
successfully to increase the teaching power of the teachers?
11. What things do we need to know about a child in order to utilize his
interests?
12. Distinguish three types of teachers.
13. What are the objections to teaching the book?
14. What are the objections to teaching the subject?
15. What are some items of school work upon which some teachers spend
time that they should devote to finding materials suited to the child's
interests?
16. Can one teacher utilize all of the interests of a child within a
nine-month term? What is the measure of how far she should be expected
to do so?