II. THE COURSE OF STUDY--EDUCATIONAL VALUES.

Your Committee would report that it has discussed in detail the several

branches of study that have found a place in the curriculum of the

elementary school, with a view to discover their educational value for

developing and training the faculties of the mind, and more especially

for correlating the pupil with his spiritual and natural environment in

the world in which he lives.

_A. Language studies._

There is first to be noted the prominent place of language study

that takes the form of reading, penmanship, and grammar in the first

eight years’ work of the school. It is claimed for the partiality

shown to these studies that it is justified by the fact that language

is the instrument that makes possible human social organization. It

enables each person to communicate his individual experience to his

fellows and thus permits each to profit by the experience of all. The

written and printed forms of speech preserve human knowledge and make

progress in civilization possible. The conclusion is reached that

learning to read and write should be the leading study of the pupil in

his first four years of school. Reading and writing are not so much

ends in themselves as means for the acquirement of all other human

learning. This consideration alone would be sufficient to justify their

actual place in the work of the elementary school. But these branches

require of the learner a difficult process of analysis. The pupil must

identify the separate words in the sentence he uses, and in the next

place must recognize the separate sounds in each word. It requires a

considerable effort for the child or the savage to analyze his sentence

into its constituent words, and a still greater effort to discriminate

its elementary sounds. Reading, writing, and spelling in their most

elementary form, therefore, constitute a severe training in mental

analysis for the child of six to ten years of age. We are told that it

is far more disciplinary to the mind than any species of observation of

differences among material things, because of the fact that the word

has a twofold character--addressed to external sense as spoken sound to

the ear, or as written and printed words to the eye--but containing a

meaning or sense addressed to the understanding and only to be seized

by introspection. The pupil must call up the corresponding idea by

thought, memory, and imagination, or else the word will cease to be a

word and remain only a sound or character.

On the other hand, observation of things and movements does not

necessarily involve this twofold act of analysis, introspective

and objective, but only the latter--the objective analysis. It is

granted that we all have frequent occasion to condemn poor methods of

instruction as teaching words rather than things. But we admit that we

mean empty sounds or characters rather than true words. Our suggestions

for the correct method of teaching amount in this case simply to laying

stress on the meaning of the word, and to setting the teaching process

on the road of analysis of content rather than form. In the case of

words used to store up external observation the teacher is told to

repeat and make alive again the act of observation by which the word

obtained its original meaning. In the case of a word expressing a

relation between facts or events, the pupil is to be taken step by

step through the process of reflection by which the idea was built up.

Since the word, spoken and written, is the sole instrument by which

reason can fix, preserve, and communicate both the data of sense and

the relations discovered between them by reflection, no new method

in education has been able to supplant in the school the branches,

reading and penmanship. But the real improvements in method have led

teachers to lay greater and greater stress on the internal factor of

the word, on its meaning, and have in manifold ways shown how to repeat

the original experiences that gave the meaning to concrete words, and

the original comparisons and logical deductions by which the ideas of

relations and causal processes arose in the mind and required abstract

words to preserve and communicate them.

It has been claimed that it would be better to have first a basis of

knowledge of things, and secondarily and subsequently a knowledge of

words. But it has been replied to this, that the progress of the

child in learning to talk indicates his ascent out of mere impressions

into the possession of true knowledge. For he names objects only after

he has made some synthesis of his impressions and has formed general

ideas. He recognizes the same object under different circumstances of

time and place, and also recognizes other objects belonging to the same

class by and with names. Hence the use of the word indicates a higher

degree of self-activity--the stage of mere impressions without words

or signs being a comparatively passive state of mind. What we mean by

things first and words afterward, is, therefore, not the apprehension

of objects by passive impressions so much as the active investigation

and experimenting which come after words are used, and the higher forms

of analysis are called into being by that invention of reason known as

language, which, as before said, is a synthesis of thing and thought,

of outward sign and inward signification.

Rational investigation cannot precede the invention of language any

more than blacksmithing can precede the invention of hammers, anvils,

and pincers. For language is the necessary tool of thought used in the

conduct of the analysis and synthesis of investigation.

Your Committee would sum up these considerations by saying that

language rightfully forms the centre of instruction in the elementary

school, but that progress in methods of teaching is to be made, as

hitherto, chiefly by laying more stress on the internal side of the

word, its meaning; using better graded steps to build up the chain of

experience or the train of thought that the word expresses.

The first three years’ work of the child is occupied mainly with the

mastery of the printed and written forms of the words of his colloquial

vocabulary; words that he is already familiar enough with as sounds

addressed to the ear. He has to become familiar with the new forms

addressed to the eye, and it would be an unwise method to require

him to learn many new words at the same time that he is learning to

recognize his old words in their new shape. But as soon as he has

acquired some facility in reading what is printed in the colloquial

style, he may go on to selections from standard authors. The literary

selections should be graded, and are graded in almost all series of

readers used in our elementary schools, in such a way as to bring those

containing the fewest words outside of the colloquial vocabulary into

the lower books of the series, and increasing the difficulties, step by

step, as the pupil grows in maturity. The selections are literary works

of art possessing the required organic unity and a proper reflection

of this unity in the details, as good works of art must do. But they

portray situations of the soul, or scenes of life, or elaborated

reflections, of which the child can obtain some grasp through his

capacity to feel and think, although in scope and compass they far

surpass his range. They are adapted, therefore, to lead him out of and

beyond himself, as spiritual guides.

Literary style employs, besides words common to the colloquial

vocabulary, words used in a semi-technical sense expressive of fine

shades of thought and emotion. The literary work of art furnishes a

happy expression for some situation of the soul, or some train of

reflection hitherto unutterable in an adequate manner. If the pupil

learns this literary production, he finds himself powerfully helped

to understand both himself and his fellow-men. The most practical

knowledge of all, it will be admitted, is a knowledge of human

nature--a knowledge that enables one to combine with his fellow-men,

and to share with them the physical and spiritual wealth of the race.

Of this high character as humanizing or civilizing, are the favorite

works of literature found in the school readers, about one hundred and

fifty English and American writers being drawn upon for the material.

Such are Shakespeare’s speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony, Hamlet’s

and Macbeth’s soliloquies, Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Gray’s

Elegy, Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and Ode on the Death of

the Duke of Wellington, Byron’s Waterloo, Irving’s Rip Van Winkle,

Webster’s Reply to Hayne, The Trial of Knapp, and Bunker Hill oration,

Scott’s Lochinvar, Marmion, and Roderick Dhu, Bryant’s Thanatopsis,

Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, Paul Revere, and the Bridge, O’Hara’s

Bivouac of the Dead, Campbell’s Hohenlinden, Collins’ How Sleep the

Brave, Wolfe’s Burial of Sir John Moore, and other fine prose and

poetry from Addison, Emerson, Franklin, The Bible, Hawthorne, Walter

Scott, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Swift, Milton, Cooper, Whittier, Lowell,

and the rest. The reading and study of fine selections in prose and

verse furnish the chief æsthetic training of the elementary school.

But this should be re-enforced by some study of photographic or other

reproductions of the world’s great masterpieces of architecture,

sculpture, and painting. The frequent sight of these reproductions is

good; the attempt to copy or sketch them with the pencil is better;

best of all is an æsthetic lesson on their composition, attempting to

describe in words the idea of the whole that gives the work its organic

unity, and the devices adopted by the artist to reflect this idea in

the details and re-enforce its strength. The æsthetic taste of teacher

and pupil can be cultivated by such exercises, and once set on the road

of development, this taste may improve through life.

A third phase of language study in the elementary school is formal

grammar. The works of literary art in the readers, re-enforced as they

ought to be by supplementary reading at home of the whole works from

which the selections for the school readers are made, will educate

the child in the use of a higher and better English style. Technical

grammar never can do this. Only familiarity with fine English works

will insure one a good and correct style. But grammar is the science of

language, and as the first of the seven liberal arts it has long held

sway in school as the disciplinary study _par excellence_. A survey

of its educational value, subjective and objective, usually produces

the conviction that it is to retain the first place in the future. Its

chief objective advantage is, that it shows the structure of language,

and the logical forms of subject, predicate, and modifier, thus

revealing the essential nature of thought itself, the most important

of all objects, because it is self-object. On the subjective or

psychological side, grammar demonstrates its title to the first place

by its use as a discipline in subtle analysis, in logical division

and classification, in the art of questioning, and in the mental

accomplishment of making exact definitions. Nor is this an empty,

formal discipline, for its subject-matter, language, is a product of

the reason of a people, not as individuals, but as a social whole, and

the vocabulary holds in its store of words the generalized experience

of that people, including sensuous observation and reflection, feeling

and emotion, instinct and volition.

No formal labor on a great objective field is ever lost wholly,

since at the very least it has the merit of familiarizing the pupil

with the contents of some one extensive province that borders on

his life, and with which he must come into correlation; but it is

easy for any special formal discipline, when continued too long, to

paralyze or arrest growth at that stage. The overcultivation of the

verbal memory tends to arrest the growth of critical attention and

reflection. Memory of accessory details too, so much prized in the

school, is also cultivated often at the expense of an insight into the

organizing principle of the whole and the casual nexus that binds the

parts. So, too, the study of quantity, if carried to excess, may warp

the mind into a habit of neglecting quality in its observation and

reflection. As there is no subsumption in the quantitative judgment,

but only dead equality or inequality (A is equal to or greater or less

than B), there is a tendency to atrophy in the faculty of concrete

syllogistic reasoning on the part of the person devoted exclusively

to mathematics. For the normal syllogism uses judgments wherein the

subject is subsumed under the predicate (This is a rose--the individual

rose is subsumed under the class rose; Socrates is a man, etc.). Such

reasoning concerns individuals in two aspects, first as concrete wholes

and secondly as members of higher totalities or classes--species and

genera. Thus, too, grammar, rich as it is in its contents, is only a

formal discipline as respects the scientific, historic, or literary

contents of language, and is indifferent to them. A training for four

or five years in parsing and grammatical analysis practiced on literary

works of art (Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Scott) is a training of

the pupil into habits of indifference toward and neglect of the genius

displayed in the literary work of art, and into habits of impertinent

and trifling attention to elements employed as material or texture,

and a corresponding neglect of the structural form, which alone is

the work of the artist. A parallel to this would be the mason’s habit

of noticing only the brick and mortar, or the stone and cement, in

his inspection of the architecture, say of Sir Christopher Wren. A

child overtrained to analyze and classify shades of color--examples of

this one finds occasionally in a primary school whose specialty is

“objective teaching”--might in later life visit an art gallery and make

an inventory of colors without getting even a glimpse of a painting as

a work of art. Such overstudy and misuse of grammar as one finds in the

elementary school, it is feared, exists to some extent in secondary

schools and even in colleges, in the work of mastering the classic

authors.

Your Committee is unanimous in the conviction that formal grammar

should not be allowed to usurp the place of a study of the literary

work of art in accordance with literary method. The child can be

gradually trained to see the technical “motives” of a poem or prose

work of art and to enjoy the æsthetic inventions of the artist. The

analysis of a work of art should discover the idea that gives it

organic unity; the collision and the complication resulting; the

solution and _dénouement_. Of course these things must be reached

in the elementary school without even a mention of their technical

terms. The subject of the piece is brought out; its reflection in the

conditions of the time and place to heighten interest by showing its

importance; its second and stronger reflection in the several details

of its conflict and struggle; its reflection in the _dénouement_

wherein its struggle ends in victory or defeat and the ethical or

rational interests are vindicated,--and the results move outward,

returning to the environment again in ever-widening circles,--something

resembling this is to be found in every work of art, and there are

salient features which can be briefly but profitably made subject of

comment in familiar language with even the youngest pupils. There

is an ethical and an æsthetical content to each work of art. It is

profitable to point out both of these in the interest of the child’s

growing insight into human nature. The ethical should, however, be kept

in subordination to the æsthetical, but for the sake of the supreme

interests of the ethical itself. Otherwise the study of a work of art

degenerates into a goody goody performance, and its effects on the

child are to cause a reaction against the moral. The child protects

his inner individuality against effacement through external authority

by taking an attitude of rebellion against stories with an appended

moral. Herein the superiority of the æsthetical in literary art is

to be seen. For the ethical motive is concealed by the poet, and the

hero is painted with all his brittle individualism and self-seeking.

His passions and his selfishness, gilded by fine traits of bravery and

noble manners, interest the youth, interest us all. The established

social and moral order seems to the ambitious hero to be an obstacle

to the unfolding of the charms of individuality. The deed of violence

gets done, and the Nemesis is aroused. Now his deed comes back on

the individual doer, and our sympathy turns against him and we

rejoice in his fall. Thus the æsthetical unity contains within it the

ethical unity. The lesson of the great poet or novelist is taken to

heart, whereas the ethical announcement by itself might have failed,

especially with the most self-active and aspiring of the pupils.

Aristotle pointed out in his Poetics this advantage of the æsthetic

unity, which Plato in his Republic seems to have missed. Tragedy purges

us of our passions, to use Aristotle’s expression, because we identify

our own wrong inclinations with those of the hero, and by sympathy we

suffer with him and see our intended deed returned upon us with tragic

effect, and are thereby cured.

Your Committee has dwelt upon the æsthetic side of literature in this

explicit manner because they believe that the general tendency in

elementary schools is to neglect the literary art for the literary

formalities which concern the mechanical material rather than the

spiritual form. Those formal studies should not be discontinued, but

subordinated to the higher study of literature.

Your Committee reserves the subject of language lessons, composition

writing, and what relates to the child’s expression of ideas in

writing, for consideration under Part 3 of this Report, treating of

programme.

_B. Arithmetic._

Side by side with language study is the study of mathematics in the

schools, claiming the second place in importance of all studies. It

has been pointed out that mathematics concerns the laws of time and

space--their structural form, so to speak--and hence that it formulates

the logical conditions of all matter both in rest and in motion. Be

this as it may, the high position of mathematics as the science of

all quantity is universally acknowledged. The elementary branch of

mathematics is arithmetic, and this is studied in the primary and

grammar schools from six to eight years, or even longer. The relation

of arithmetic to the whole field of mathematics has been stated (by

Comte, Howison, and others) to be that of the final step in a process

of calculation, in which results are stated numerically. There are

branches that develop or derive quantitative functions: say geometry

for spatial forms, and mechanics for movement and rest and the forces

producing them. Other branches transform these quantitative functions

into such forms as may be calculated in actual numbers; namely,

algebra in its common or lower form, and in its higher form as the

differential and integral calculus, and the calculus of variations.

Arithmetic evaluates or finds the numerical value for the functions

thus deduced and transformed. The educational value of arithmetic

is thus indicated both as concerns its psychological side and

its objective practical uses in correlating man with the world of

nature. In this latter respect as furnishing the key to the outer

world in so far as the objects of the latter are a matter of direct

enumeration,--capable of being counted,--it is the first great step

in the conquest of nature. It is the first tool of thought that man

invents in the work of emancipating himself from thraldom to external

forces. For by the command of number he learns to divide and conquer.

He can proportion one force to another, and concentrate against an

obstacle precisely what is needed to overcome it. Number also makes

possible all the other sciences of nature which depend on exact

measurement and exact record of phenomena as to the following items:

order of succession, date, duration, locality, environment, extent

of sphere of influence, number of manifestations, number of cases of

intermittence. All these can be defined accurately only by means of

number. The educational value of a branch of study that furnishes the

indispensable first step toward all science of nature is obvious. But

psychologically its importance further appears in this, that it begins

with an important step in analysis; namely, the detachment of the idea

of quantity from the concrete whole, which includes quality as well as

quantity. To count, one drops the qualitative and considers only the

quantitative aspect. So long as the individual differences (which are

qualitative in so far as they distinguish one object from another) are

considered, the objects cannot be counted together. When counted, the

distinctions are dropped out of sight as indifferent. As counting is

the fundamental operation of arithmetic, and all other arithmetical

operations are simply devices for speed by using remembered countings

instead of going through the detailed work again each time, the hint

is furnished the teacher for the first lessons in arithmetic. This

hint has been generally followed out and the child set at work at

first upon the counting of objects so much alike that the qualitative

difference is not suggested to him. He constructs gradually his tables

of addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and fixes them in his

memory. Then he takes his next higher step; namely, the apprehension

of the fraction. This is an expressed ratio of two numbers, and

therefore a much more complex thought than he has met with in dealing

with the simple numbers. In thinking five-sixths, he first thinks five

and then six, and holding these two in mind thinks the result of the

first modified by the second. Here are three steps instead of one,

and the result is not a simple number, but an inference resting on an

unperformed operation. This psychological analysis shows the reason

for the embarrassment of the child on his entrance upon the study of

fractions and the other operations that imply ratio. The teacher finds

all his resources in the way of method drawn upon to invent steps and

half steps, to aid the pupil to make continuous progress here. All

these devices of method consist in steps by which the pupil descends

to the simple number and returns to the complex. He turns one of the

terms into a qualitative unit, and thus is enabled to use the other

as a simple number. The pupil takes the denominator, for example, and

makes clear his conception of one-sixth as his qualitative unit, then

five-sixths is as clear to him as five oxen. But he has to repeat

this return from ratio to simple numbers in each of the elementary

operations--addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and

in the reduction of fractions--and finds the road long and tedious at

best. In the case of decimal fractions the psychological process is

more complex still; for the pupil has given him one of the terms, the

numerator, from which he must mentally deduce the denominator from

the position of the decimal point. This doubles the work of reading

and recognizing the fractional number. But it makes addition and

subtraction of fractions nearly as easy as that of simple numbers and

assists also in multiplication of fractions. But division of decimals

is a much more complex operation than that of common fractions.

The want of a psychological analysis of these processes has led many

good teachers to attempt decimal fractions with their pupils before

taking up common fractions. In the end they have been forced to make

introductory steps to aid the pupil, and in these steps to introduce

the theory of the common fraction. They have by this refuted their own

theory.

Besides (_a_) simple numbers and the four operations with them, (_b_)

fractions common and decimal, there is (_c_) a third step in number;

namely, the theory of powers and roots. It is a further step in ratio;

namely, the relation of a simple number to itself as power and root.

The mass of material which fills the arithmetic used in the elementary

school consists of two kinds of examples: first, those wherein there

is a direct application of simple numbers, fractions, and powers;

and secondly, the class of examples involving operations in reaching

numerical solutions through indirect data and consequently involving

more or less transformation of functions. Of this character is most

of the so-called higher arithmetic and such problems in the text-book

used in the elementary schools as have, not inappropriately, been

called (by General Francis A. Walker in his criticism on common-school

arithmetic) numerical “conundrums.” Their difficulty is not found in

the strictly arithmetical part of the process of the solution (the

third phase above described), but rather in the transformation of

the quantitative function given into the function that can readily

be calculated numerically. The transformation of functions belongs

strictly to algebra. Teachers who love arithmetic, and who have

themselves success in working out the so-called numerical conundrums,

defend with much earnestness the current practice which uses so much

time for arithmetic. They see in it a valuable training for ingenuity

and logical analysis, and believe that the industry which discovers

arithmetical ways of transforming the functions given in such problems

into plain numerical operations of adding, subtracting, multiplying,

or dividing is well bestowed. On the other hand, the critics of this

practice contend that there should be no merely formal drill in school

for its own sake, and that there should be, always, a substantial

content to be gained. They contend that the work of the pupil in

transforming quantitative functions by arithmetical methods is wasted,

because the pupil needs a more adequate expression than number for

this purpose; that this has been discovered in algebra, which enables

him to perform with ease such quantitative transformations as puzzle

the pupil in arithmetic. They hold, therefore, that arithmetic pure

and simple should be abridged and elementary algebra introduced after

the numerical operations in powers, fractions, and simple numbers

have been mastered, together with their applications to the tables of

weights and measures and to percentage and interest. In the seventh

year of the elementary course there would be taught equations of the

first degree and the solution of arithmetical problems that fall under

proportion, or the so-called “rule of three,” together with other

problems containing complicated conditions--those in partnership, for

example. In the eighth year quadratic equations could be learned, and

other problems of higher arithmetic solved in a more satisfactory

manner than by numerical methods. It is contended that this earlier

introduction of algebra, with a sparing use of letters for known

quantities, would secure far more mathematical progress than is

obtained at present on the part of all pupils, and that it would enable

many pupils to go on into secondary and higher education who are now

kept back on the plea of lack of preparation in arithmetic, the real

difficulty in many cases being a lack of ability to solve algebraic

problems by an inferior method.

Your Committee would report that the practice of teaching two lessons

daily in arithmetic, one styled “mental,” or “intellectual,” and the

other “written” arithmetic (because its exercises are written out with

pencil or pen), is still continued in many schools. By this device the

pupil is made to give twice as much time to arithmetic as to any other

branch. It is contended by the opponents of this practice, with some

show of reason, that two lessons a day in the study of quantity have a

tendency to give the mind a bent or set in the direction of thinking

quantitatively, with a corresponding neglect of the power to observe,

and to reflect upon, qualitative and causal aspects. For mathematics

does not take account of causes, but only of equality and difference in

magnitude. It is further objected that the attempt to secure what is

called thoroughness in the branches taught in the elementary schools

is often carried too far; in fact, to such an extent as to produce

arrested development (a sort of mental paralysis) in the mechanical and

formal stages of growth. The mind, in that case, loses its appetite for

higher methods and wider generalizations. The law of apperception, we

are told, proves that temporary methods of solving problems should not

be so thoroughly mastered as to be used involuntarily, or as a matter

of unconscious habit, for the reason that a higher and more adequate

method of solution will then be found more difficult to acquire. The

more thoroughly a method is learned, the more it becomes part of the

mind, and the greater the repugnance of the mind toward a new method.

For this reason, parents and teachers discourage young children from

the practice of counting on the fingers, believing that it will cause

much trouble later to root out this vicious habit and replace it

by purely mental processes. Teachers should be careful, especially

with precocious children, not to continue too long in the use of a

process that is becoming mechanical; for it is already growing into

a second nature, and becoming a part of the unconscious apperceptive

process by which the mind reacts against the environment, recognizes

its presence, and explains it to itself. The child that has been

overtrained in arithmetic reacts apperceptively against his environment

chiefly by noticing its numerical relations--he counts and adds; his

other apperceptive reactions being feeble, he neglects qualities and

causal relations. Another child who has been drilled in recognizing

colors apperceives the shades of color to the neglect of all else. A

third child, excessively trained in form studies by the constant use

of geometric solids, and much practice in looking for the fundamental

geometric forms lying at the basis of the multifarious objects that

exist in the world, will, as a matter of course, apperceive geometric

forms, ignoring the other phases of objects.

It is, certainly, an advance on immediate sense-perception to be able

to separate or analyze the concrete, whole impression, and consider the

quantity apart by itself. But if arrested mental growth takes place

here, the result is deplorable. That such arrest may be caused by too

exclusive training in recognizing numerical relations is beyond a

doubt.

Your Committee believes that, with the right methods, and a wise use

of time in preparing the arithmetic lesson in and out of school, five

years are sufficient for the study of mere arithmetic--the five years

beginning with the second school year and ending with the close of

the sixth year; and that the seventh and eighth years should be given

to the algebraic method of dealing with those problems that involve

difficulties in the transformation of quantitative indirect functions

into numerical or direct quantitative data.

Your Committee, however, does not wish to be understood as recommending

the transfer of algebra, as it is understood and taught in most

secondary schools, to the seventh year, or even to the eighth year of

the elementary school. The algebra course in the secondary school, as

taught to the pupils in their fifteenth year of age, very properly

begins with severe exercises, with a view to discipline the pupil

in analyzing complex literate expressions at sight, and to make him

able to recognize at once the factors that are contained in such

combinations of quantities. The proposed seventh-grade algebra must

use letters for the unknown quantities and retain the numerical form

of the known quantities, using letters for these very rarely, except

to exhibit the general form of solution, or what, if stated in words,

becomes a so-called “rule” in arithmetic. This species of algebra

has the character of an introduction or transitional step to algebra

proper. The latter should be taught thoroughly in the secondary school.

Formerly it was a common practice to teach elementary algebra of

this sort in the preparatory schools, and reserve for the college a

study of algebra proper. But in this case there was often a neglect

of sufficient practice in factoring literate quantities, and, as a

consequence, the pupil suffered embarrassment in his more advanced

mathematics; for example, in analytical geometry, the differential

calculus, and mechanics. The proposition of your Committee is intended

to remedy the two evils already named: first, to aid the pupils in the

elementary school to solve, by a higher method, the more difficult

problems that now find place in advanced arithmetic; and secondly,

to prepare the pupil for a thorough course in pure algebra in the

secondary school.

Your Committee is of the opinion that the so-called mental arithmetic

should be made to alternate with written arithmetic for two years, and

that there should not be two daily lessons in this subject.

_C. Geography._

The leading branch of the seven liberal arts was grammar, being the

first of the _Trivium_ (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). Arithmetic,

however, led the second division, the _Quadrivium_ (arithmetic,

geometry, music, and astronomy). We have glanced at the reasons for

the place of grammar as leading the humane studies, as well as for

the place of arithmetic as leading the nature studies. Following

arithmetic, as the second study in importance among the branches that

correlate man to nature, is geography. It is interesting to note

that the old quadrivium of the Middle Ages included geography, under

the title of geometry, as the branch following arithmetic in the

enumeration; the subject-matter of their so-called “geometry” being

chiefly an abridgment of Pliny’s geography, to which were added a few

definitions of geometric forms, something like the primary course in

geometric solids in our elementary schools. So long as there has been

elementary education there has been something of geography included.

The Greek education laid stress on teaching the second book of Homer,

containing the Catalogue of the Ships and a brief mention of the

geography and history of all the Greek tribes that took part in the

Trojan War. History remains unseparated from geography and geometry

in the Middle Ages. Geography has preserved this comprehensiveness of

meaning as a branch of the study in the elementary schools down to the

present day. After arithmetic, which treats of the abstract or general

conditions of material existence, comes geography with a practical

study of man’s material _habitat_, and its relations to him. It is not

a simple science by itself, like botany, or geology, or astronomy,

but a collection of sciences levied upon to describe the earth as the

dwelling-place of man and to explain something of its more prominent

features. About one-fourth of the material relates strictly to the

geography, about one-half to the inhabitants, their manners, customs,

institutions, industries, productions, and the remaining one-fourth

to items drawn from the sciences of mineralogy, meteorology, botany,

zoölogy, and astronomy. This predominance of the human feature in a

study ostensibly relating to physical nature, your Committee considers

necessary and entirely justifiable. The child commences with what

is nearest to his interests, and proceeds gradually toward what is

remote and to be studied for its own sake. It is, therefore, a mistake

to suppose that the first phase of geography presented to the child

should be the process of continent formation. He must begin with the

natural difference of climate, and lands, and waters, and obstacles

that separate peoples, and study the methods by which man strives to

equalize or overcome these differences by industry and commerce, to

unite all places and all people, and make it possible for each to

share in the productions of all. The industrial and commercial idea

is, therefore, the first central idea in the study of geography in

the elementary schools. It leads directly to the natural elements of

difference in climate, soil, and productions, and also to those in

race, religion, political status, and occupations of the inhabitants,

with a view to explain the grounds and reasons for this counter-process

of civilization which struggles to overcome the differences. Next

comes the deeper inquiry into the process of continent formation,

the physical struggle between the process of upheaving or upbuilding

of continents and that of their obliteration by air and water; the

explanation of the mountains, valleys, and plains, the islands,

volcanic action, the winds, the rain-distribution. But the study

of cities, their location, the purposes they serve as collecting,

manufacturing, and distributing centres, leads most directly to the

immediate purpose of geography in the elementary school. From this

beginning, and holding to it as a permanent interest, the inquiry into

causes and conditions proceeds concentrically to the sources of the raw

materials, the methods of their production, and the climatic, geologic,

and other reasons that explain their location and their growth.

In recent years, especially through the scientific study of physical

geography, the processes that go to the formation of climate, soil, and

general configuration of land masses have been accurately determined,

and the methods of teaching so simplified that it is possible to lead

out from the central idea mentioned to the physical explanations of the

elements of geographical difference quite early in the course of study.

Setting out from the idea of the use made of the earth by civilization,

the pupil in the fifth and sixth years of his schooling (at the age of

eleven or twelve) may extend his inquiries quite profitably as far as

the physical explanations of land-shapes and climates. In the seventh

and eighth year of school much more may be done in this direction.

But it is believed that the distinctively human interest connected

with geography in the first years of its study should not yield to the

purely scientific one of physical processes until the pupil has taken

up the study of history.

The educational value of geography, as it is and has been in elementary

schools, is obviously very great. It makes possible something like

accuracy in the picturing of distant places and events, and removes

a large tract of mere superstition from the mind. In the days of

newspaper reading one’s stock of geographical information is in

constant requisition. A war on the opposite side of the globe is

followed with more interest in this year than a war near our own

borders before the era of the telegraph. The general knowledge of the

locations and boundaries of nations, of their status in civilization,

and their natural advantages for contributing to the world market, is

of great use to the citizen in forming correct ideas from his daily

reading.

The educational value of geography is even more apparent if we admit

the claims of those who argue that the present epoch is the beginning

of an era in which public opinion is organized into a ruling force by

the agency of periodicals and books. Certainly neither the newspaper

nor the book can influence an illiterate people; they can do little to

form opinions where the readers have no knowledge of geography.

As to the psychological value of geography little need be said. It

exercises in manifold ways the memory of forms and the imagination; it

brings into exercise the thinking power, in tracing back toward unity

the various series of causes. What educative value there is in geology,

meteorology, zoölogy, ethnology, economics, history, and politics

is to be found in the more profound study of geography, and, to a

proportionate extent, in the study of its merest elements.

Your Committee is of the opinion that there has been a vast

improvement in the methods of instruction in this branch in recent

years, due, in large measure, to the geographical societies of this

and other countries. At first there prevailed what might be named

sailor geography. The pupil was compelled to memorize all the capes

and headlands, bays and harbors, mouths of rivers, islands, sounds,

and straits around the world. He enlivened this, to some extent, by

brief mention of the curiosities and oddities in the way of cataracts,

water-gaps, caves, strange animals, public buildings, picturesque

costumes, national exaggerations, and such matters as would furnish

good themes for sailors’ yarns. Little or nothing was taught to give

unity to the isolated details furnished in endless number. It was

an improvement on this when the method of memorizing capital cities

and political boundaries succeeded. With this came the era of map

drawing. The study of watersheds and commercial routes, of industrial

productions and centres of manufacture and commerce, has been adopted

in the better class of schools. Instruction in geography is growing

better by the constant introduction of new devices to make plain and

intelligible the determining influence of physical causes in producing

the elements of difference and the counter-process of industry and

commerce by which each difference is rendered of use to the whole

world, and each locality made a participator in the productions of all.

_D. History._

The next study, ranked in order of value, for the elementary school is

history. But, as will be seen, the value of history, both practically

and psychologically, is less in the beginning and greater at the

end than geography. For it relates to the institutions of men, and

especially to the political state and its evolution. While biography

narrates the career of the individual, civil history records the

careers of nations. The nation has been compared to the individual

by persons interested in the educational value of history. Man has

two selves, they say, the individual self, and the collective self

of the organized state or nation. The study of history is, then, the

study of this larger, corporate, social and civil self. The importance

of this idea is thus brought out more clearly in its educational

significance. For to learn this civil self is to learn the substantial

condition which makes possible the existence of civilized man in all

his other social combinations--the family, the Church, and the manifold

associated activities of civil society. For the state protects these

combinations from destruction by violence. It defines the limits

of individual and associated effort, within which each endeavor

re-enforces the endeavors of all, and it uses the strength of the whole

nation to prevent such actions as pass beyond these safe limits and

tend to collision with the normal action of the other individuals and

social units. Hobbes called the state a Leviathan, to emphasize its

stupendous individuality and organized self-activity. Without this,

he said, man lives in a state of “constant war, fear, poverty, filth,

ignorance, and wretchedness; within the state dwell peace, security,

riches, science, and happiness.” The state is the collective man who

“makes possible the rational development of the individual man, like a

mortal God, subduing his caprice and passion and compelling obedience

to law, developing the ideas of justice, virtue, and religion, creating

property and ownership, nurture and education.” The education of the

child into a knowledge of this higher self begins early within the

nurture of the family. The child sees a policeman or some town officer,

some public building, a court house or a jail; he sees or hears of an

act of violence, a case of robbery or murder followed by arrest of the

guilty. The omnipresent higher self, which has been invisible hitherto,

now becomes visible to him in its symbols and still more in its acts.

History in school, it is contended, should be the special branch for

education in the duties of citizenship. There is ground for this claim.

History gives a sense of belonging to a higher social unity which

possesses the right of absolute control over person and property in

the interest of the safety of the whole. This, of course, is the basis

of citizenship; the individual must feel this or see this solidarity

of the state and recognize its supreme authority. But history shows

the collisions of nations, and the victory of one political ideal

accompanied by the defeat of another. History reveals an evolution

of forms of government that are better and better adapted to permit

individual freedom, and the participation of all citizens in the

administration of the government itself.

People who make their own government have a special interest in the

spectacle of political evolution as exhibited in history. But it

must be admitted that this evolution has not been well presented

by popular historians. Take, for instance, the familiar example of

old-time pedagogy, wherein the Roman republic was conceived as a

freer government than the Roman empire that followed it, by persons

apparently misled by the ideas of representative self-government

associated with the word _republic_. It was the beginning of a new

epoch when this illusion was dispelled, and the college student became

aware of the true Roman meaning of _republic_, namely, the supremacy

of an oligarchy on the Tiber that ruled distant provinces in Spain,

Gaul, Asia Minor, Germany, and Africa, for its selfish ends and with

an ever-increasing arrogance. The people at home in Rome, not having

a share in the campaigns on the borderland, did not appreciate the

qualities of the great leaders who, like Cæsar, subdued the nations by

forbearance, magnanimity, trust, and the recognition of a sphere of

freedom secured to the conquered by the Roman civil laws, which were

rigidly enforced by the conqueror, as much as by the violence of arms.

The change from republic to empire meant the final subordination of

this tyrannical Roman oligarchy, and the recognition of the rights of

the provinces to Roman freedom. This illustration shows how easily a

poor teaching of history may pervert its good influence or purpose into

a bad one. For the Roman monarchy under the empire secured a degree

of freedom never before attained under the republic, in spite of the

election of such tyrants as Nero and Caligula to the imperial purple.

The civil service went on as usual administering the affairs of distant

countries, educating them in Roman jurisprudence, and cultivating a

love for accumulating private property. Those countries had before

lived communistically after the style of the tribe or at best of the

village community. Roman private property in land gave an impulse

to the development of free individuality such as had always been

impossible under the social stage of development known as the village

community.

To teach history properly is to dispel this shallow illusion which

flatters individualism, and to open the eyes of the pupil to the true

nature of freedom, namely, the freedom through obedience to just laws

enforced by a strong government.

Your Committee has made this apparent digression for the sake of a more

explicit statement of its conviction of the importance of teaching

history in a different spirit from that of abstract freedom, which

sometimes means anarchy, although they admit the possibility of an

opposite extreme, the danger of too little stress on the progressive

element in the growth of nations, and its manifestation in new and

better political devices for representing all citizens without

weakening the central power.

That the history of one’s own nation is to be taught in the elementary

school seems fixed by common consent. United States history includes

first a sketch of the epoch of discoveries and next of the epoch of

colonization. This, fortunately, suits the pedagogic requirements. For

the child loves to approach the stern realities of a firmly established

civilization through its stages of growth by means of individual

enterprise. Here is the use of biography as introduction to history.

It treats of exceptional individuals whose lives bring them in one

way or another into national or even world-historical relations. They

throw light on the nature and necessity of governments, and are in turn

illuminated by the light thrown back on them by the institutions which

they promote or hinder. The era of semi-private adventure with which

American history begins is admirably adapted for study by the pupil

in the elementary stage of his education. So, too, the next epoch,

that of colonization. The pioneer is a degree nearer to civilization

than is the explorer and discoverer. In the colonial history the pupil

interests himself in the enterprise of aspiring individualities, in

their conquest over obstacles of climate and soil; their conflicts with

the aboriginal population; their choice of land for settlement; the

growth of their cities; above all, their several attempts and final

success in forming a constitution securing local self-government. An

epoch of growing interrelation of the colonies succeeds, a tendency

to union on a large scale due to the effect of European wars which

involved England, France, and other countries, and affected the

relations of their colonies in America. This epoch, too, abounds

in heroic personalities, like Wolfe, Montcalm, and Washington, and

perilous adventures, especially in the Indian warfare.

The fourth epoch is the Revolution, by which the colonies through

joint effort secured their independence and afterward their union as

a nation. The subject grows rapidly more complex, and tasks severely

the powers of the pupils in the eighth year of the elementary school.

The formation of the Constitution, and a brief study of the salient

features of the Constitution itself, conclude the study of the portion

of the history of the United States that is sufficiently remote to

be treated after the manner of an educational classic. Everything

up to this point stands out in strong individual outlines, and is

admirably fitted for that elementary course of study. Beyond this

point, the War of 1812 and the War of the Rebellion, together with the

political events that led to it, are matters of memory with the present

generation of parents and grandparents, and are, consequently, not so

well fitted for intensive study in school as the already classic period

of our history. But these later and latest epochs may be, and will be,

read at home not only in the text-book on history used in the schools,

but also in the numerous sketches that appear in newspapers, magazines,

and in more pretentious shapes. In the intensive study which should

be undertaken of the classic period of our history, the pupil may be

taught the method appropriate to historical investigation, the many

points of view from which each event ought to be considered. He should

learn to discriminate between the theatrical show of events and the

solid influences that move underneath as ethical causes. Although he

is too immature for very far-reaching reflections, he must be helped

to see the causal processes of history. Armed with this discipline in

historic methods, the pupil will do all of his miscellaneous reading

and thinking in this province with more adequate intellectual reaction

than was possible before the intensive study carried on in school.

The study of the outlines of the Constitution, for ten or fifteen weeks

in the final year of the elementary school, has been found of great

educational value. Properly taught, it fixes the idea of the essential

three-foldness of the constitution of a free government and the

necessary independence of each constituent power, whether legislative,

judicial, or executive. This and some idea of the manner and mode of

filling the official places in these three departments, and of the

character of the duties with which each department is charged, lay

foundations for an intelligent citizenship.

Besides this intensive study of the history of the United States in the

seventh and eighth years, your Committee would recommend oral lessons

on the salient points of general history, taking a full hour of sixty

minutes weekly--and preferably all at one time--for the sake of the

more systematic treatment of the subject of the lesson and the deeper

impression made on the mind of the pupil.

_E. Other branches._

Your Committee has reviewed the staple branches of the elementary

course of study in the light of their educational scope and

significance. Grammar, literature, arithmetic, geography, and history

are the five branches upon which the disciplinary work of the

elementary school is concentrated. Inasmuch as reading is the first

of the scholastic arts, it is interesting to note that the whole

elementary course may be described as an extension of the process

of learning the art of reading. First comes the mastering of the

colloquial vocabulary in printed and script forms. Next come five

incursions into the special vocabularies required (_a_) in literature

to express the fine shades of emotion and the more subtle distinctions

of thought, (_b_) the technique of arithmetic, (_c_) of geography,

(_d_) of grammar, (_e_) of history.

In the serious work of mastering these several technical vocabularies

the pupil is assigned daily tasks that he must prepare by independent

study. The class exercise or recitation is taken up with examining

and criticising the pupil’s oral statements of what he has learned,

especial care being taken to secure the pupil’s explanation of it in

his own words. This requires paraphrases and definitions of the new

words and phrases used in technical and literary senses, with a view

to insure the addition to the mind of the new ideas corresponding

to the new words. The misunderstandings are corrected and the pupil

set on the way to use more critical alertness in the preparation of

his succeeding lessons. The pupil learns as much by the recitations

of his fellow-pupils as he learns from the teacher, but not the same

things. He sees in the imperfect statements of his classmates that they

apprehended the lesson with different presuppositions and consequently

have seen some phases of the subject that escaped his observation,

while they in turn have missed points which he had noticed quite

readily. These different points of view become more or less his own,

and he may be said to grow by adding to his own mind the minds of

others.

It is clear that there are other branches of instruction that may lay

claim to a place in the course of study in the elementary school; for

example, the various branches of natural science, vocal music, manual

training, physical culture, drawing, etc.

Here the question of another method of instruction is suggested.

There are lessons that require previous preparation by the pupil

himself--there are also lessons that may be taken up without such

preparation and conducted by the teacher, who leads the exercise and

furnishes a large part of the information to be learned, enlisting

the aid of members of the class for the purpose of bringing home

the new material to their actual experience. Besides these, there

are mechanical exercises for purposes of training, such as drawing,

penmanship, and calisthenics.

In the first place, there is industrial and æsthetic drawing, which

should have a place in all elementary school work. By it is secured the

training of the hand and eye. Then, too, drawing helps in all the other

branches that require illustration. Moreover, if used in the study of

the great works of art in the way hereinbefore mentioned, it helps to

cultivate the taste and prepares the future workman for a more useful

and lucrative career, inasmuch as superior taste commands higher wages

in the finishing of all goods.

Natural science claims a place in the elementary school not so much

as a disciplinary study side by side with grammar, arithmetic, and

history, as a training in habits of observation and in the use of

the technique by which such sciences are expounded. With a knowledge

of the technical terms and some training in the methods of original

investigation employed in the sciences, the pupil broadens his views

of the world and greatly increases his capacity to acquire new

knowledge. For the pupil who is unacquainted with the technique of

science has to pass without mental profit the numerous scientific

allusions and items of information which more and more abound in all

our literature, whether of an ephemeral or a permanent character.

In an age whose proudest boast is the progress of science in all

domains, there should be in the elementary school, from the first, a

course in the elements of the sciences. And this is quite possible; for

each science possesses some phases that lie very near to the child’s

life. These familiar topics furnish the doors through which the child

enters the various special departments. Science, it is claimed, is

nothing if not systematic. Indeed, science itself may be defined as

the interpretation of each fact through all other facts of a kindred

nature. Admitting that this is so, it is no less true that pedagogic

method begins with the fragmentary knowledge possessed by the pupil

and proceeds to organize it and build it out systematically in all

directions. Hence any science may be taken up best on the side nearest

the experience of the pupil and the investigation continued until the

other parts are reached. Thus the pedagogical order is not always

the logical or scientific order. In this respect it agrees with the

order of discovery, which is usually something quite different from

the logical order; for that is the last thing discovered. The natural

sciences have two general divisions: one relating to inorganic matter,

as physics and chemistry, and one relating to organic, as botany and

zoölogy. There should be a spiral course in natural science, commencing

each branch with the most interesting phases to the child. A first

course should be given in botany, zoölogy, and physics, so as to treat

of the structure and uses of familiar plants and animals, and the

explanation of physical phenomena as seen in the child’s playthings,

domestic machines, etc. A second course, covering the same subjects,

but laying more stress on classification and functions, will build on

to the knowledge already acquired from the former lessons and from

his recently acquired experience. A third course of weekly lessons,

conducted by the teacher as before in a conversational style, with

experiments and with a comparison of the facts of observation already

in the possession of the children, will go far to helping them to an

acquisition of the results of natural science. Those of the children

specially gifted for observation in some one or more departments of

nature will be stimulated and encouraged to make the most of their

gifts.

In the opinion of your committee, there should be set apart a full hour

each week for drawing and the same amount for oral lessons in natural

science.

The oral lessons in history have already been mentioned. The spiral

course, found useful in natural science because of the rapid change in

capacity of comprehension by the pupil from his sixth to his fourteenth

year, will also be best for the history course, which will begin with

biographical adventures of interest to the child, and possessing an

important historical bearing. These will proceed from the native

land first to England, the parent country, and then to the classic

civilizations (Greece and Rome being, so to speak, the grandparent

countries of the American colonies). These successive courses of oral

lessons adapted respectively to the child’s capacity will do much to

make the child well informed on this topic. Oral lessons should never

be mere lectures, but more like Socratic dialogues, building up a

systematic knowledge partly from what is already known, partly by new

investigations, and partly by comparison of authorities.

The best argument in favor of weekly oral lessons in natural science

and general history is the actual experiences of teachers who have for

some time used the plan. It has been found that the lessons in botany,

zoölogy, and physics give the pupil much aid in learning his geography,

and other lessons relating to nature, while the history lessons

assist very much his comprehension of literature, and add interest to

geography.

It is understood by your Committee that the lessons in physiology

and hygiene (with special reference to the effects of stimulants and

narcotics) required by State laws should be included in this oral

course in natural science. Manual training, so far as the theory and

use of the tools for working in wood and iron are concerned, has just

claims on the elementary school for a reason similar to that which

admits natural science. From science have proceeded useful inventions

for the aid of all manner of manufactures and transportation. The child

of to-day lives in a world where machinery is constantly at his hand. A

course of training in wood- and iron-work, together with experimental

knowledge of physics or natural philosophy, makes it easy for him to

learn the management of such machines. Sewing and cookery have not

the same, but stronger claims for a place in school. One-half day in

each week for one-half a year each in the seventh and eighth grades

will suffice for manual training, the sewing and cookery being studied

by the girls, and the wood- and iron-work by the boys. It should be

mentioned, however, that the advocates of manual training in iron- and

wood-work recommend these branches for secondary schools, because of

the greater maturity of body, and the less likelihood to acquire wrong

habits of manipulation, in the third period of four years of school.

Vocal music has long since obtained a well-established place in all

elementary schools. The labors of two generations of special teachers

have reduced the steps of instruction to such simplicity that whole

classes may make as regular progress in reading music as in reading

literature.

In regard to physical culture your Committee is agreed that there

should be some form of special daily exercises amounting in the

aggregate to one hour each week, the same to include the main features

of calisthenics, and German, Swedish, or American systems of physical

training, but not to be regarded as a substitute for the old-fashioned

recess, established to permit the free exercise of the pupils in the

open air. Systematic physical training has for its object rather the

will training than recreation, and this must not be forgotten. To go

from a hard lesson to a series of calisthenic exercises is to go from

one kind of will training to another. Exhaustion of the will should be

followed by the caprice and wild freedom of the recess. But systematic

physical exercise has its sufficient reason in its aid to a graceful

use of the limbs, its development of muscles that are left unused or

rudimentary unless called forth by special training, and for the help

it gives to the teacher in the way of school discipline.

Your Committee would mention in this connection instruction in

morals and manners, which ought to be given in a brief series of

lessons each year with a view to build up in the mind a theory of the

conventionalities of polite and pure-minded society. If these lessons

are made too long or too numerous, they are apt to become offensive to

the child’s mind. It is of course understood by your Committee that the

substantial moral training of the school is performed by the discipline

rather than by the instruction in ethical theory. The child is trained

to be regular and punctual, and to restrain his desire to talk and

whisper--in these things gaining self-control day by day. The essence

of moral behavior is self-control. The school teaches good behavior.

The intercourse of a pupil with his fellows without evil words or

violent actions is insisted on and secured. The higher moral qualities

of truth-telling and sincerity are taught in every class exercise that

lays stress on accuracy of statement.

Your Committee has already discussed the importance of teaching

something of algebraic processes in the seventh and eighth grades with

the view to obtaining better methods of solving problems in advanced

arithmetic; a majority of your Committee are of the opinion that formal

English grammar should be discontinued in the eighth year, and the

study of some foreign language, preferably that of Latin, substituted.

The educational effect on an English-speaking pupil of taking up a

language which, like Latin, uses inflections instead of prepositions,

and which further differs from English by the order in which its words

are arranged in the sentence, is quite marked, and a year of Latin

places a pupil by a wide interval out of the range of the pupil who has

continued English grammar without taking up Latin. But the effect of

the year’s study of Latin increases the youth’s power of apperception

in very many directions by reason of the fact that so much of the

English vocabulary used in technical vocabularies, like those of

geography, grammar, history, and literature, is from a Latin source,

and besides there are so many traces in the form and substance of human

learning of the hundreds of years when Latin was the only tongue in

which observation and reflection could be expressed.

Your Committee refers to the programme given later in this report for

the details of co-ordinating these several branches already recommended.

_The difference between elementary and secondary studies._

In recommending the introduction of algebraic processes in the seventh

and eighth years--as well as in the recommendation just now made to

introduce Latin in the eighth year of the elementary course--your

Committee has come face to face with the question of the intrinsic

difference between elementary and secondary studies.

Custom has placed algebra, geometry, the history of English literature,

and Latin in the rank of secondary studies; also general history,

physical geography, and the elements of physics and chemistry. In

a secondary course of four years trigonometry may be added to the

mathematics; some of the sciences whose elements are used in physical

geography may be taken up separately in special treatises, as geology,

botany, and physiology. There may be also a study of whole works of

English authors, as Shakespeare, Milton, and Scott. Greek is also

begun in the second or third year of the secondary course. This is the

custom in most public high schools. But in private secondary schools

Latin is begun earlier, and so, too, Greek, algebra, and geometry.

Sometimes geometry is taken up before algebra, as is the custom in

German schools. These arrangements are based partly on tradition,

partly on the requirements of higher institutions for admission, and

partly on the ground that the intrinsic difficulties in these studies

have fixed their places in the course of study. Of those who claim

that there is an intrinsic reason for the selection and order of these

studies, some base their conclusions on experience in conducting pupils

through them, others on psychological grounds. The latter contend, for

example, that algebra deals with general forms of calculation, while

arithmetic deals with the particular instances of calculation. Whatever

deals with the particular instance is relatively elementary, whatever

deals with the general form is relatively secondary. In the expression

a + b = c algebra indicates the form of all addition. This arithmetic

cannot do, except in the form of a verbal rule describing the steps

of the operation: its examples are all special instances falling

under the general form given in algebra. If, therefore, arithmetic

is an elementary branch, algebra is relatively to it a secondary

branch. So, too, geometry, though not directly based on arithmetic,

has to presuppose an acquaintance with it when it reduces spatial

functions into numerical forms, as, for example, in the measurement

of surfaces and solids, and in ascertaining the ratio of the

circumference to the radius, and of the hypothenuse to the two other

sides of the right-angled triangle. Geometry, moreover, deals with

necessary relations; its demonstrations reach universal and necessary

conclusions, holding good not merely in such material shapes as we

have met with in actual experience, but with all examples possible,

past, present, or future. Such knowledge transcending experience is

intrinsically secondary as compared with the first acquaintance with

geometric shapes in concrete examples.

In the case of geometry it is claimed by some that what is called

“inventional geometry” may be properly introduced into the elementary

grades. By this some mean the practice with blocks in the shape of

geometric solids, and the construction of different figures from the

same; others mean the rediscovery by the pupil for himself of the

necessary relations demonstrated by Euclid. The former--exercises of

construction with blocks--are well enough in the kindergarten, where

they assist in learning number, as well as in the analysis of material

forms. But its educational value is small for pupils advanced into

the use of books. The original discovery of Euclid’s demonstrations,

on the other hand, belongs more properly to higher education than

to elementary. In the geometrical text-books, recently introduced

into secondary schools, there is so much of original demonstration

required that the teacher is greatly embarrassed on account of the

differences in native capacity for mathematics that develop among

the pupils of the same class in solving the problems of invention. A

few gifted pupils delight in the inventions, and develop rapidly in

power, while the majority of the class use too much time over them,

and thus rob the other branches of the course of study, or else fall

into the bad practice of getting help from others in the preparation

of their lessons. A few in every class fall hopelessly behind and

are discouraged. The result is an attempt on the part of the teacher

to correct the evil by requiring a more thorough training in the

mathematical studies preceding, and the consequent delay of secondary

pupils in the lower grades of the course in order to bring up their

“inventional geometry.” Many, discouraged, fail to go on; many more

fail to reach higher studies because unable to get over the barrier

unnecessarily placed before them by teachers who desire that no pupils

except natural geometricians shall enter into higher studies.

Physical geography in its scientific form is very properly made a part

of the secondary course of study. The pupil in his ninth year of work

can profitably acquire the scientific technique of geology, botany,

zoölogy, meteorology, and ethnology, and in the following years take

up those sciences separately and push them further, using the method

of actual investigation. The subject-matter of physical geography is

of very high interest to the pupil who has studied geography in the

elementary grades after an approved method. It takes up the proximate

grounds and causes for the elements of difference on the earth’s

surface, already become familiar to him through his elementary studies,

and pushes them back into deeper, simpler, and more satisfactory

principles. This study performs the work also of correlating the

sciences that relate to organic nature by showing their respective

uses to man. From the glimpses which the pupil gets of mineralogy,

geology, botany, zoölogy, ethnology, and meteorology in their necessary

connection as geographic conditions he sees the scope and grand

significance of those separate inquiries. A thirst is aroused in him to

pursue his researches into their domains. He sees, too, the borderlands

in which new discoveries may be made by the enterprising explorer.

Physics, including what was called until recently “natural

philosophy,” after Newton’s _Principia_ (_Philosophiæ naturalis

principia mathematica_), implies more knowledge of mathematics

for its thorough discussion than the secondary pupil is likely to

possess. In fact, the study of this branch in college thirty years

ago was crippled by the same cause. It should follow the completion

of analytical geometry. Notwithstanding this, a very profitable study

of this subject may be made in the second year of the high school or

preparatory school, although the formulas can then be understood in

so far as they imply elementary algebra only. The pupil does not get

the most exact notions of the quantitative laws that rule matter in

its states of motion and equilibrium, but he does see the action of

forces as qualitative elements of phenomena, and understand quite

well the mechanical inventions by which men subdue them for his use

and safety. Even in the elementary grades the pupil can seize very

many of these qualitative aspects and learn the explanation of the

mechanical phenomena of nature, and other applications of the same

principles in invention, as, for example, gravitation in falling

bodies: its measurement by the scales; the part it plays in the pump,

the barometer, the pendulum; cohesion in mud, clay, glue, paste,

mortar, cement, etc.; capillary attraction in lamp-wicks, sponges,

sugar, the sap in plants; the applications of lifting by the lever,

pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw; heat in the sun, combustion,

friction, steam, thermometer, conduction, clothing, cooking, etc.;

the phenomena of light, electricity, magnetism, and the explanation

of such mechanical devices as spectacles, telescopes, microscopes,

prisms, photographic cameras, electric tension in bodies, lightning,

mariner’s compass, horseshoe magnet, the telegraph, the dynamo. This

partially qualitative study of forces and mechanical inventions has

the educational effect of enlightening the pupil, and emancipating him

from the network of superstition that surrounds him in the child world,

partly of necessity and partly by reason of the illiterate adults

that he sometimes meets with in the persons of nurses, servants, and

tradespeople, whose occupations have more attraction for him than those

of cultured people. The fairy world is a world of magic, of immediate

interventions of supernatural spiritual beings, and while this is

proper enough for the child up to the time of the school, and in a

lessening degree for some time after, it is only negative and harmful

in adult manhood and womanhood. It produces arrested development of

powers of observation and reflection in reference to phenomena, and

stops the growth of the soul at the infantine stage of development.

Neither is this infantine stage of wonder and magic more religious

than the stage of disillusion through the study of mathematics and

physics. It is the arrest of religious development, also, at the stage

of fetichism. The highest religion, that of pure Christianity, sees

in the world infinite mediations, all for the purpose of developing

independent individuality; the perfection of human souls not only in

one kind of piety, namely, that of the heart, but in the piety of the

intellect that beholds truth, the piety of the will that does good

deeds wisely, the piety of the senses that sees the beautiful and

realizes it in works of art. This is the Christian idea of divine

Providence as contrasted with the heathen idea of that Providence,

and the study of natural philosophy is an essential educational

requisite in its attainment, although a negative means. Of course

there is danger of replacing the spiritual idea of the divine by the

dynamical or mechanical idea, and thus arresting the mind at the stage

of pantheism instead of fetichism. But this danger can be avoided by

further education through secondary into higher education, whose entire

spirit and method are comparative and philosophical in the best sense

of the term. For higher education seems to have as its province the

correlation of the several branches of human learning in the unity

of the spiritual view furnished by religion to our civilization. By

it one learns to see each branch, each science or art or discipline,

in the light of all the others. This higher or comparative view is

essential to any completeness of education, for it alone prevents

the one-sidedness of hobbies, or “fads,” as they are called in the

slang of the day. It prevents also the bad effects that flow from the

influence of what are termed “self-educated men,” who for the most part

carry up with them elementary methods of study, or at best, secondary

methods, which accentuate the facts and relations of natural and

spiritual phenomena, but do not deal with their higher correlations.

The comparative method cannot, in fact, be well introduced until the

student is somewhat advanced, and has already completed his elementary

course of study dealing with the immediate aspects of the world, and

his secondary course dealing with the separate formal and dynamical

aspects that lie next in order behind the facts of first observation.

Higher education in a measure unifies these separate formal and dynamic

aspects, corrects their one-sidedness, and prevents the danger of what

is so often noted in the self-educated men who unduly exaggerate some

one of the subordinate aspects of the world and make it a sort of first

principle.

Here your Committee finds in its way the question of the use of the

full scientific method in the teaching of science in the elementary

school. The true method has been called the method of investigation,

but that method as used by the child is only a sad caricature of the

method used by the mature scientific man, who has long since passed

through the fragmentary observation and reflection that prevail in the

period of childhood, as well as the tendencies to exaggeration of the

importance of one or another branch of knowledge at the expense of

the higher unity that correlates all; an exaggeration that manifests

itself in the possession and use of a hobby. The ideal scientific man

has freed himself from obstacles of this kind, whether psychological

or objective. What astronomical observers call the subjective

coefficient must be ascertained and eliminated from the record that

shows beginnings, endings, and rates. There is a possibility of perfect

specialization in a scientific observer only after the elementary and

secondary attitudes of mind have been outgrown. An attempt to force the

child into the full scientific method by specialization would cause

an arrest of his development in the other branches of human learning

outside of his specialty. He could not properly inventory the data of

his own special sphere unless he knew how to recognize the defining

limits or boundaries that separate his province from its neighbors. The

early days of science abounded in examples of confusion of provinces

in the inventories of their data. It is difficult, even now, to decide

where physics and chemistry leave off, and biology begins.

Your Committee does not attempt to state the exact proportion in which

the child, at his various degrees of advancement, may be able to

dispense with the guiding influence of teacher and text-book in his

investigations, but they protest strongly against the illusion under

which certain zealous advocates of the early introduction of scientific

method seem to labor. They ignore in their zeal the deduction that is

to be made for the guiding hand of the teacher, who silently furnishes

to the child the experience that he lacks, and quietly directs his

special attention to this or to that phase, and prevents him from

hasty or false generalization as well as from undue exaggeration of

single facts or principles. Here the teacher adds the needed scientific

outlook which the child lacks, but which the mature scientist possesses

for himself.

It is contended by some that the scientific frame of mind is adapted

only to science, but not to art, literature, and religion, which

have something essential that science does not reach; not because of

the incompleteness of the sciences themselves, but because of the

attitude of the mind assumed in the observation of nature. In analytic

investigation there is isolation of parts one from another, with a view

to find the sources of the influences which produce the phenomena shown

in the object. The mind brings everything to the test of this idea.

Every phenomenon that exists comes from beyond itself, and analysis

will be able to trace the source.

Now, this frame of mind, which insists on a foreign origin of all

that goes to constitute an object, debars itself in advance from the

province of religion, art, and literature as well as of philosophy.

For self-determination, personal activity, is the first principle

assumed by religion, and it is tacitly assumed by art and literature,

Classic and Christian. The very definition of philosophy implies this,

for it is the attempt to explain the world by the assumption of a

first principle, and to show that all classes of objects imply that

principle as ultimate presupposition. According to this view it is

important not to attempt to hasten the use of a strictly scientific

method on the part of the child. In his first years he is acquiring

the results of civilization rather as an outfit of habits, usages, and

traditions than as a scientific discovery. He cannot be expected to

stand over against the culture of his time, and challenge one and all

of its conventionalities to justify themselves before his reason. His

reason is too weak. He is rather in the imitation stage of mind than in

that of criticism. He will not reach the comparative or critical method

until the era of higher education.

However this may be, it is clear that the educational value of science

and its method is a very important question, and that on it depends the

settlement of the question where specialization may begin. To commence

the use of the real scientific method would imply a radical change also

in methods from the beginning. This may be realized by considering the

hold which even the kindergarten retains upon symbolism and upon art

and literature. But in the opinion of a majority of your Committee

natural science itself should be approached, in the earliest years of

the elementary school, rather in the form of results with glimpses into

the methods by which these results were reached. In the last two years

(the seventh and eighth) there may be some strictness of scientific

form and an exhibition of the method of discovery. The pupil, too, may

to some extent put this method in practice himself. In the secondary

school there should be some laboratory work. But the pupil cannot

be expected to acquire for himself fully the scientific method of

dealing with nature until the second part of higher education--its

post-graduate work. Nevertheless this good should be kept in view from

the first year of the elementary school, and there should be a gradual

and continual approach to it.

In the study of general history appears another branch of the secondary

course. History of the native land is assumed to be an elementary

study. History of the world is certainly a step further away from

the experience of the child. It is held by some teachers to be in

accordance with proper method to begin with the foreign relations

of one’s native land and to work outward to the world-history. The

European relations involved in the discovery and colonization of

America furnish the only explanation to a multitude of questions that

the pupil has started in the elementary school. He should move outward

from what he has already learned, by the study of a new concentric

circle of grounds and reasons, according to this view. This, however,

is not the usual course taken. On beginning secondary history the

pupil is set back face to face with the period of tradition, just

when historic traces first make their appearance. He is, by this

arrangement, broken off from the part of history that he has become

acquainted with, and made to grapple with that period which has no

relation to his previous investigations. It is to be said, however,

that general history lays stress on the religious thread of connection,

though less now than formerly. The world history is a conception of the

great Christian thinker, St. Augustine, who held that the world and its

history is a sort of antiphonic hymn, in which God reads his counsels,

and the earth and man read the responses. He induced Orosius, his

pupil, to sketch a general history in the spirit of his view. It was

natural that the Old Testament histories, and especially the chapters

of Genesis, should furnish the most striking part of its contents. This

general history was connected with religion, and brought closer to

the experience of the individual than the history of his own people.

To commence history with the Garden of Eden, the Fall of Man, and the

Noachian Deluge was to begin with what was most familiar to all minds,

and most instructive, because it concerned most nearly the conduct of

life. Thus religion furnished the apperceptive material by which the

early portions of history were recognized, classified, and made a part

of experience.

Now that studies in archæology, especially those in the Nile and

Euphrates valleys, are changing the chronologies and the records of

early times and adding new records of the past, bringing to light

national movements and collisions of peoples, together with data

by which to determine the status of their industrial civilization,

their religious ideas, and the form of their literature and art, the

concentric arrangement of all this material around the history of the

chosen people as a nucleus is no longer possible. The question has

arisen, therefore, whether general history should not be rearranged

for the secondary school, and made to connect with American history

for apperceptive material rather than with Old Testament history. To

this it has been replied with force that the idea of a world history,

as St. Augustine conceived it, is the noblest educative ideal ever

connected with the subject of history. Future versions of general

history will not desert this standpoint, we are told, even if they take

as their basis that of ethnology and anthropology, for these, too, will

exhibit a plan in human history--an educative principle that leads

nations toward freedom and science, because the Creator of nature has

made it, in its fundamental constitution, an evolution or progressive

development of individuality. Thus the idea of divine Providence is

retained, though made more comprehensive by bringing the whole content

of natural laws within his will as his method of work.

These considerations, we are reminded by the partisans of humanity

studies, point back to the educative value of history as corrective of

the one-sidedness of the method of science. Science seeks explanation

in the mechanical conditions of, and impulses received from, the

environment, while history keeps its gaze fixed on human purposes, and

studies the genesis of national actions through the previous stages of

feelings, convictions, and conscious ideas. In history the pupil has

for his object self-activity, reaction against environment, instead of

mechanism, or activity through another.

The history of English literature is another study of the secondary

school. It is very properly placed beyond the elementary school, for

as taught it consists largely of the biographies of men of letters.

The pupils who have not yet learned any great work of literature

should not be pestered with literary biography, for at that stage

the greatness of the men of letters cannot be seen. Plutarch makes

great biographies because he shows heroic struggles and great deeds.

The heroism of artists and poets consists in sacrificing all for

the sake of their creations. The majority of them come off sadly

at the hands of the biographer, for the reason that the very sides

of their lives are described which they had slighted and neglected

for the sake of the Muses. The prophets of Israel did not live in

city palaces, but in caves; they did not wear fine raiment, nor feed

sumptuously, nor conform to the codes of polite society. They were no

courtiers when they approached the king. They neglected all the other

institutions--family, productive industry, and state--for the sake of

one, the Church, and even that not the established ceremonial of the

people, but a higher and more direct communing with Jehovah. So with

artists and men of letters, it is more or less the case, that the

institutional side of their lives is neglected, or unsymmetrical, or if

this is not the case, it will be found prosaic and uneventful, throwing

no light on their matchless productions.

For these reasons, should not the present use of literary biography

as it exists in secondary schools, and is gradually making its way

into elementary schools, be discouraged, and the time now given to it

devoted to the study of literary works of art? It will be admitted

that the exposure of the foibles of artists has an immoral tendency on

youth: for example, one affects to be a poet, and justifies laxity and

self-indulgence through the example of Byron. Those who support this

view hold that we should not dignify the immoral and defective side of

life by making it a branch of study in school.

_Correlation by synthesis of studies._

Your Committee would mention another sense in which the expression

correlation of studies is sometimes used. It is held by advocates of

an artificial centre of the course of study. They use, for example,

De Foe’s Robinson Crusoe for a reading exercise, and connect with

it the lessons in geography and arithmetic. It has been pointed out

by critics of this method that there is always danger of covering

up the literary features of the reading matter under accessories of

mathematics and natural science. If the material for other branches

is to be sought for in connection with the literary exercise, it will

distract the attention from the poetic unity. On the other hand,

arithmetic and geography cannot be unfolded freely and comprehensively

if they are to wait on the opportunities afforded in a poem or novel

for their development. A correlation of this kind, instead of being

a deeper correlation, such as is found in all parts of human learning

by the studies of the college and university, is rather a shallow and

uninteresting kind of correlation, that reminds one of the system of

mnemonics, or artificial memory, which neglects the association of

facts and events with their causes and the history of their evolution,

and looks for unessential quips, puns, or accidental suggestions with a

view to strengthening the memory. The effect of this is to weaken the

power of systematic thinking which deals with essential relations, and

substitute for it a chaotic memory that ties together things through

false and seeming relations, not of the things and events, but of the

words that denote them.

The correlation of geography and arithmetic and history in and through

the unity of a work of fiction is at best an artificial correlation,

which will stand in the way of the true objective correlation. It is

a temporary scaffolding made for school purposes. Instruction should

avoid such temporary structures as much as possible, and when used

they should be only used for the day, and not for the year, because of

the danger of building up an apperceptive centre in the child’s mind

that will not harmonize with the true apperceptive centre required by

the civilization. The story of Robinson Crusoe has intense interest

to the child as a lesson in sociology, showing him the helplessness

of isolated man and the re-enforcement that comes to him through

society. It shows the importance of the division of labor. All children

should read this book in the later years of the elementary course,

and a few profitable discussions may be had in school regarding its

significance. But De Foe painted in it only the side of adventure that

he found in his countrymen in his epoch, England after the defeat

of the Armada having taken up a career of conquest on the seas,

ending by colonization and a world commerce. The liking for adventure

continues to this day among all Anglo-Saxon peoples, and beyond other

nationalities there is in English-speaking populations a delight in

building up civilization from the very foundation. This is only,

however, one phase of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Consequently the history of

Crusoe is not a proper centre for a year’s study in school. It omits

cities, governments, the world commerce, the international process,

the Church, the newspaper and book from view, and they are not even

reflected in it.

Your Committee would call attention in this connection to the

importance of the pedagogical principle of analysis and isolation as

preceding synthesis and correlation. There should be rigid isolation

of the elements of each branch for the purpose of getting a clear

conception of what is individual and peculiar in a special province

of learning. Otherwise one will not gain from each its special

contribution to the whole. That there is some danger from the kind of

correlation that essays to teach all branches in each will be apparent

from this point of view.