THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Agents
THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO
KARL W. HIERSEMANN
LEIPZIG
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
NEW YORK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_The_
_SCHOOL_
_and_
_SOCIETY_
_BEING THREE LECTURES_
_by_
JOHN DEWEY
_SUPPLEMENTED BY_
A STATEMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1900 BY
JOHN DEWEY
All Rights Reserved
FIRST EDITION -–1,000 copies. Printed November, 1899.
SECOND IMPRESSION -–1,500 copies. Printed February, 1900.
THIRD IMPRESSION -–5,000 copies. Printed July, 1900.
FOURTH IMPRESSION -–1,000 copies. Printed June, 1904.
FIFTH IMPRESSION -–2,500 copies. Printed February, 1905.
SIXTH IMPRESSION -–2,500 copies. Printed August, 1907.
SEVENTH IMPRESSION -–1,000 copies. Printed September, 1909.
EIGHTH IMPRESSION -–1,000 copies. Printed August, 1910.
NINTH IMPRESSION -–1,000 copies. Printed August, 1911.
TENTH IMPRESSION -–1,000 copies. Printed March, 1912.
ELEVENTH IMPRESSION -–2,000 copies. Printed August, 1913.
Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
MRS. EMMONS BLAINE
TO WHOSE INTEREST IN EDUCATIONAL
REFORM
THE APPEARANCE OF THIS BOOK
IS DUE
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CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 19
II. THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD 47
III. WASTE IN EDUCATION 77
IV. THREE YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 113
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES 56
DRAWING OF A FOREST 58
DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING 60
DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING 62
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The three lectures presented in the following pages were delivered
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.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
A second edition affords a grateful opportunity for recalling that this
little book is a sign of the coöperating 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 coöperation of the diverse
thoughts and deeds of many persons in undertaking to enlarge the life of
the child will abide.
January 5, 1900
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I
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,
and 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 afterwards 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 other than 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 not only made in the house, but the members of the household
were usually familiar 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 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: 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 coöperation 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 saw-mill, 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 fullness 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 with 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, shop-work, 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 sempstresses; 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 life 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 coöperation 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 absorption 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 prevalent 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 coöperation 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 coöperation and community life, discipline must grow
out of and be relative to this. There is little order of one sort 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 occupation, out of doing things that are to produce
results, and out of doing these in a social and coöperative 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
where 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 sources 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, sempstresses, 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 only gin 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 being one-tenth of an inch in length, while that of
the latter is an inch 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 re-invented the first frame for carding the wool—a
couple of boards with sharp pins in them for scratching it out. They
re-devised 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 usually appear in the
political and chronological records that 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 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—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 to 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 was, 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 mediæval
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.
While training for the profession of learning is regarded as the type of
culture, as a liberal education, that 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 one per cent.
of the entire school population ever attains to what we call higher
education; only five 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.
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 fullness 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 guarantee of a larger society which is worthy,
lovely, and harmonious.
II
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 good 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 good 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”—for 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 text-book, 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.