concession to the question almost universally raised), I am not willing
to leave the matter in this more or less negative and explanatory
condition. Life is the great thing after all; the life of the child at
its time and in its measure, no less than the life of the adult. Strange
would it be, indeed, if intelligent and serious attention to what the
child _now_ needs and is capable of in the way of a rich, valuable, and
expanded life should somehow conflict with the needs and possibilities
of later, adult life. “Let us live with our children,” certainly means,
first of all, that our children shall live—not that they shall be
hampered and stunted by being forced into all kinds of conditions, the
most remote consideration of which is relevancy to the present life of
the child. If we seek the kingdom of heaven, educationally, all other
things shall be added unto us—which, being interpreted, is that if we
identify ourselves with the real instincts and needs of childhood, and
ask only after its fullest assertion and growth, the discipline and
information and culture of adult life shall all come in their due
season.
Speaking of culture reminds me that in a way I have been speaking only
of the outside of the child’s activity—only of the outward expression of
his impulses toward saying, making, finding out, and creating. The real
child, it hardly need be said, lives in the world of imaginative values,
and ideas which find only imperfect outward embodiment. We hear much
nowadays about the cultivation of the child’s “imagination.” Then we
undo much of our own talk and work by a belief that the imagination is
some special part of the child, that finds its satisfaction in some one
particular direction—generally speaking, that of the unreal and
make-believe, of the myth and made-up story. Why are we so hard of heart
and so slow to believe? The imagination is the medium in which the child
lives. To him there is everywhere and in everything that occupies his
mind and activity at all, a surplusage of value and significance. The
question of the relation of the school to the child’s life is at bottom
simply this: shall we ignore this native setting and tendency, dealing
not with the living child at all, but with the dead image we have
erected, or shall we give it play and satisfaction? If we once believe
in life and in the life of the child, then will all the occupations and
uses spoken of, then will all history and science, become instruments of
appeal and materials of culture to his imagination, and through that to
the richness and the orderliness of his life. Where we now see only the
outward doing and the outward product, there, behind all visible
results, is the re-adjustment of mental attitude, the enlarged and
sympathetic vision, the sense of growing power, and the willing ability
to identify both insight and capacity with the interests of the world
and man. Unless culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany
over common wood, it surely is this—the growth of the imagination in
flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the
individual lives is informed with the life of nature and of society.
When nature and society can live in the schoolroom, when the forms and
tools of learning are subordinated to the substance of experience, then
shall there be an opportunity for this identification, and culture shall
be the democratic password.
III
WASTE IN EDUCATION
The subject announced for today was “Waste in Education.” I should like
first to state briefly its relation to the two preceding lectures. The
first dealt with the school in its social aspects, and the necessary
re-adjustments that have to be made to render it effective in present
social conditions. The second dealt with the school in relation to the
growth of individual children. Now the third deals with the school as
itself an institution, both in relation to society and to its own
members—the children. It deals with the question of organization,
because all waste is the result of the lack of it, the motive lying
behind organization being promotion of economy and efficiency. This
question is not one of the waste of money or the waste of things. These
matters count; but the primary waste is that of human life, the life of
the children while they are at school, and afterward because of
inadequate and perverted preparation.
So, when we speak of organization, we are not to think simply of the
externals; of that which goes by the name “school system”—the school
board, the superintendent, and the building, the engaging and promotion
of teachers, etc. These things enter in, but the fundamental
organization is that of the school itself as a community of individuals,
in its relations to other forms of social life. All waste is due to
isolation. Organization is nothing but getting things into connection
with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully.
Therefore in speaking of this question of waste in education, I desire
to call your attention to the isolation of the various parts of the
school system, to the lack of unity in the aims of education, to the
lack of coherence in its studies and methods.
I have made a chart (I) which, while I speak of the isolations of the
school system itself, may perhaps appeal to the eye and save a little
time in verbal explanations. A paradoxical friend of mine says there is
nothing so obscure as an illustration, and it is quite possible that my
attempt to illustrate my point will simply prove the truth of his
statement.
The blocks represent the various elements in the school system, and are
intended to indicate roughly the length of time given to each division,
and also the overlapping, both in time and subjects studied, of the
individual parts of the system. With each block is given the historical
conditions in which it arose and its ruling ideal.
[Illustration: Chart I]
Professional Schools
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|///|///|///|///|///| |
|///|///|///|///|///| |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
Mediæval The 19^{th} Century
_Culture_ _Utility_
High School
Kindergarten Primary- or Academy
+---+--+--+ +--+--+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+
| | |//| |//| | | |///| |///| | |///|
| | |//| |//| | | |///| |///| | |///|
+---+--+--+ +--+--+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+
18^{th} Century 16^{th} Century Renaissance
_Moral_ _Utility_ _Culture_
_Discipline_
University- College
Graduate-------Schools
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|///|///| | | | |
|///|///| | | | |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
Mediæval
_Culture_
_Discipline_
Connecting Grammar or
Class Intermediate School Normal
+----+ +---+---+---+---+-- +---+---+---+---+
|////| |///| | |///| |///| |///|///|
|////| |///| | |///| |///| |///|///|
+----+ +---+---+---+---+-- +---+---+---+---+
19^{th} Century Renaissance 19th Century
_Culture_ _Utility_
_Discipline_ _Culture_
Technical Schools
+---+---+---+---+---+
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
+---+---+---+---+---+
19^{th} Century
_Utility_
The school system, upon the whole, has grown from the top down. During
the middle ages it was essentially a cluster of professional
schools—especially law and theology. Our present university comes down
to us from the middle ages. I will not say that at present it is a
mediæval institution, but it had its roots in the middle ages, and it
has not outlived all mediæval traditions regarding learning.
The kindergarten, rising with the present century, was a union of the
nursery and of the philosophy of Schelling; a wedding of the plays and
games which the mother carried on with her children, to Schelling’s
highly romantic and symbolic philosophy. The elements that came from the
actual study of child life—the continuation of the nursery—have remained
a life-bringing force in all education; the Schellingesque factors made
an obstruction between it and the rest of the school system, brought
about isolations.
The line drawn over the top indicates that there is a certain
interaction between the kindergarten and the primary school; for, so far
as the primary school remained in spirit foreign to the natural
interests of child life, it was isolated from the kindergarten, so that
it is a problem, at present, to introduce kindergarten methods into the
primary school; the problem of the so-called connecting class. The
difficulty is that the two are not one from the start. To get a
connection the teacher has had to climb over the wall instead of
entering in at the gate.
On the side of aims, the ideal of the kindergarten was the moral
development of the children, rather than instruction or discipline; an
ideal sometimes emphasized to the point of sentimentality. The primary
school grew practically out of the popular movement of the sixteenth
century, when along with the invention of printing and the growth of
commerce, it became a business necessity to know how to read, write, and
figure. The aim was distinctly a practical one; it was utility; getting
command of these tools, the symbols of learning, not for the sake of
learning, but because they gave access to careers in life otherwise
closed.
The division next to the primary school is the grammar school. The term
is not much used in the West, but is common in the eastern states. It
goes back to the time of the revival of learning—a little earlier
perhaps than the conditions out of which the primary school originated,
and, even when contemporaneous, having a different ideal. It had to do
with the study of language in the higher sense; because, at the time of
the Renaissance, Latin and Greek connected people with the culture of
the past, with the Roman and Greek world. The classic languages were the
only means of escape from the limitations of the middle ages. Thus there
sprang up the prototype of the grammar school, more liberal than the
university (so largely professional in character), for the purpose of
putting into the hands of the people the key to the old learning, that
men might see a world with a larger horizon. The object was primarily
culture, secondarily discipline. It represented much more than the
present grammar school. It was the liberal element in the college,
which, extending downward, grew into the academy and the high school.
Thus the secondary school is still in part just a lower college (having
an even higher curriculum than the college of a few centuries ago) or a
preparatory department to a college, and in part a rounding up of the
utilities of the elementary school.
There appear then two products of the nineteenth century, the technical
and normal schools. The schools of technology, engineering, etc., are,
of course, mainly the development of nineteenth-century business
conditions, as the primary school was the development of business
conditions of the sixteenth century. The normal school arose because of
the necessity for training teachers, with the idea partly of
professional drill, and partly that of culture.
Without going into more detail, we have some eight different parts of
the school system as represented on the chart, all of which arose
historically at different times, having different ideals in view, and
consequently different methods. I do not wish to suggest that all of the
isolation, all of the separation, that has existed in the past between
the different parts of the school system still persists. One must,
however, recognize that they have never yet been welded into one
complete whole. The great problem in education on the administrative
side is how to unite these different parts.
Consider the training schools for teachers—the normal schools. These
occupy at present a somewhat anomalous position, intermediate between
the high school and the college, requiring the high-school preparation,
and covering a certain amount of college work. They are isolated from
the higher subject-matter of scholarship, since, upon the whole, their
object has been to train persons _how_ to teach, rather than _what_ to
teach; while, if we go to the college, we find the other half of this
isolation—learning _what_ to teach, with almost a contempt for methods
of teaching. The college is shut off from contact with children and
youth. Its members, to a great extent, away from home and forgetting
their own childhood, become eventually teachers with a large amount of
subject-matter at command, and little knowledge of how this is related
to the minds of those to whom it is to be taught. In this division
between what to teach and how to teach, each side suffers from the
separation.
It is interesting to follow out the inter-relation between primary,
grammar, and high schools. The elementary school has crowded up and
taken many subjects previously studied in the old New England grammar
school. The high school has pushed its subjects down. Latin and algebra
have been put in the upper grades, so that the seventh and eighth grades
are, after all, about all that is left of the old grammar school. They
are a sort of amorphous composite, being partly a place where children
go on learning what they already have learned (to read, write, and
figure), and partly a place of preparation for the high school. The name
in some parts of New England for these upper grades was “Intermediate
School.” The term was a happy one; the work was simply intermediate
between something that had been and something that was going to be,
having no special meaning on its own account.
Just as the parts are separated, so do the ideals differ—moral
development, practical utility, general culture, discipline, and
professional training. These aims are each especially represented in
some distinct part of the system of education; and with the growing
interaction of the parts, each is supposed to afford a certain amount of
culture, discipline, and utility. But the lack of fundamental unity is
witnessed in the fact that one study is still considered good for
discipline, and another for culture; some parts of arithmetic, for
example, for discipline and others for use, literature for culture,
grammar for discipline, geography partly for utility, partly for
culture; and so on. The unity of education is dissipated, and the
studies become centrifugal; so much of this study to secure this end, so
much of that to secure another, until the whole becomes a sheer
compromise and patchwork between contending aims and disparate studies.
The great problem in education on the administrative side is to secure
the unity of the whole, in the place of a sequence of more or less
unrelated and overlapping parts and thus to reduce the waste arising
from friction, reduplication and transitions that are not properly
bridged.
[Illustration: Chart II]
Business
| 3. ^
| |
v |
+------------------+
| |
| |
Technical | |
Research ---> | |
| |
| | --->
4. University | School | 1. Home
| A | <---
| |
Professional <--- | |
Schools Teachers | |
| |
| |
+------------------+
^ |
| |
| v
{ Garden
2. { Park
{ Country
In this second symbolic diagram (II) I wish to suggest that really the
only way to unite the parts of the system is to unite each to life. We
can get only an artificial unity so long as we confine our gaze to the
school system itself. We must look at it as part of the larger whole of
social life. This block (A) in the center represents the school system
as a whole. (1) At one side we have the home, and the two arrows
represent the free interplay of influences, materials, and ideas between
the home life and that of the school. (2) Below we have the relation to
the natural environment, the great field of geography in the widest
sense. The school building has about it a natural environment. It ought
to be in a garden, and the children from the garden would be led on to
surrounding fields, and then into the wider country, with all its facts
and forces. (3) Above is represented business life, and the necessity
for free play between the school and the needs and forces of industry.
(4) On the other side is the university proper, with its various phases,
its laboratories, its resources in the way of libraries, museums, and
professional schools.
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes
from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school
in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the
other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at
school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life.
When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a
large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in
his home and neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this
everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a
variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies.
While I was visiting in the city of Moline a few years ago, the
superintendent told me that they found many children every year, who
were surprised to learn that the Mississippi river in the text-book had
anything to do with the stream of water flowing past their homes. The
geography being simply a matter of the schoolroom, it is more or less of
an awakening to many children to find that the whole thing is nothing
but a more formal and definite statement of the facts which they see,
feel, and touch every day. When we think that we all live on the earth,
that we live in an atmosphere, that our lives are touched at every point
by the influences of the soil, flora, and fauna, by considerations of
light and heat, and then think of what the school study of geography has
been, we have a typical idea of the gap existing between the everyday
experiences of the child, and the isolated material supplied in such
large measure in the school. This is but an instance, and one upon which
most of us may reflect long before we take the present artificiality of
the school as other than a matter of course or necessity.
Though there should be organic connection between the school and
business life, it is not meant that the school is to prepare the child
for any particular business, but that there should be a natural
connection of the everyday life of the child with the business
environment about him, and that it is the affair of the school to
clarify and liberalize this connection, to bring it to consciousness,
not by introducing special studies, like commercial geography and
arithmetic, but by keeping alive the ordinary bonds of relation. The
subject of compound-business-partnership is probably not in many of the
arithmetics nowadays, though it was there not a generation ago, for the
makers of text-books said that if they left out anything they could not
sell their books. This compound-business-partnership originated as far
back as the sixteenth century. The joint-stock company had not been
invented, and as large commerce with the Indies and Americas grew up, it
was necessary to have an accumulation of capital with which to handle
it. One man said, “I will put in this amount of money for six months,”
and another, “So much for two years,” and so on. Thus by joining
together they got money enough to float their commercial enterprises.
Naturally, then, “compound partnership” was taught in the schools. The
joint-stock company was invented; compound partnership disappeared, but
the problems relating to it stayed in the arithmetics for two hundred
years. They were kept after they had ceased to have practical utility,
for the sake of mental discipline—they were “such hard problems, you
know.” A great deal of what is now in the arithmetics under the head of
percentage is of the same nature. Children of twelve and thirteen years
of age go through gain and loss calculations, and various forms of bank
discount so complicated that the bankers long ago dispensed with them.
And when it is pointed out that business is not done this way, we hear
again of “mental discipline.” And yet there are plenty of real
connections between the experience of children and business conditions
which need to be utilized and illuminated. The child should study his
commercial arithmetic and geography, not as isolated things by
themselves, but in their reference to his social environment. The youth
needs to become acquainted with the bank as a factor in modern life,
with what it does, and how it does it; and then relevant arithmetical
processes would have some meaning—quite in contradistinction to the
time-absorbing and mind-killing examples in percentage, partial
payments, etc., found in all our arithmetics.
The connection with the university, as indicated in this chart, I need
not dwell upon. I simply wish to indicate that there ought to be a free
interaction between all the parts of the school system. There is much of
utter triviality of subject-matter in elementary and secondary
education. When we investigate it, we find that it is full of facts
taught that are not facts, which have to be unlearned later on. Now,
this happens because the “lower” parts of our system are not in vital
connection with the “higher.” The university or college, in its idea, is
a place of research, where investigation is going on, a place of
libraries and museums, where the best resources of the past are
gathered, maintained and organized. It is, however, as true in the
school as in the university that the spirit of inquiry can be got only
through and with the attitude of inquiry. The pupil must learn what has
meaning, what enlarges his horizon, instead of mere trivialities. He
must become acquainted with truths, instead of things that were regarded
as such fifty years ago, or that are taken as interesting by the
misunderstanding of a partially educated teacher. It is difficult to see
how these ends can be reached except as the most advanced part of the
educational system is in complete interaction with the most rudimentary.