Geography in Cleveland is given the customary amount of time, though
it is distributed over the grades in a somewhat unusual way. It is
exceptionally heavy in the intermediate grades and correspondingly
light in the grammar grades. As geography, like all other subjects,
is more and more humanized and socialized in its reference, much more
time will be called for in the last two grammar grades.
TABLE 9.---TIME GIVEN TO GEOGRAPHY
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| Hours per year | Per cent of grade time|
Grade |-----------------------------------------------
| Cleveland | 50 cities| Cleveland | 50 cities |
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1 | 0 | 16 | 0.0 | 1.8 |
2 | 0 | 7 | 0.0 | 0.8 |
3 | 28 | 50 | 3.2 | 5.4 |
4 | 101 | 83 | 11.4 | 8.5 |
5 | 125 | 102 | 14.3 | 11.2 |
6 | 125 | 107 | 14.3 | 11.0 |
7 | 57 | 98 | 6.4 | 9.9 |
8 | 57 | 76 | 6.4 | 7.6 |
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Total | 493 | 539 | 7.2 | 7.1 |
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As laid out in the manual now superseded, and as observed in the
regular classrooms, the work has been forbiddingly formal. In the
main it has consisted of the teacher assigning to the pupils a certain
number of paragraphs or pages in the textbook as the next lesson, and
then questioning them next day to ascertain how much of this printed
material they have remembered and how well. It has not consisted
of stimulating and guiding the children toward intelligent
inquisitiveness and inquiring interest as to the world, and the skies
above, and waters round about, and the conditions of nature that limit
and shape the development of mankind.
That the latter is the proper end of geographical teaching is being
recognized in developing the new course of study in this subject.
Industries, commerce, agriculture, and modes of living are becoming
the centers about which geographic thought and experience are
gathered. The best work now being done here is thoroughly modern.
Unfortunately it is not yet great in amount in even the best of the
schools, still less in the majority. But the direction of progress is
unmistakable and unquestionably correct.
As in the reading, so in geography, right development of the course of
study must depend in large measure upon the material equipment that is
at the same time provided. It sounds like a legitimate evasion to
say that education is a spiritual process, and that good teachers
and willing, obedient, and industrious pupils are about all that is
required. As a matter of fact, just as modern business has found it
necessary to install one-hundred-dollar typewriters to take the place
of the penny quill pens, so must education, to be efficient, develop
and employ the elaborate tools needed by new and complex modern
conditions, and set aside the tools that were adequate in a simpler
age. The proper teaching of geography requires an abundance of reading
materials of the type that will permit pupils to enter vividly into
the varied experience of all classes of people in all parts of the
world. In the supplementary books now furnished the schools, only
a beginning has been made. The schools need 10 times as much
geographical reading as that now found in the best equipped school.
It would be well to drop the term "supplementary." This reading should
be the basic geographic experience, the fundamental instrument of
the teaching. All else is supplementary. The textbook then becomes
a reference book of maps, charts, summaries, and a treatment for
the sake of perspective. Maps, globes, pictures, stereoscopes,
stereopticon, moving-picture machine, models, diagrams, and museum
materials, are all for the purpose of developing ideas and imagery of
details. The reading should become and remain fundamental and central.
The quantity required is so great as to make it necessary for the city
to furnish the books. While the various other things enumerated are
necessary for complete effectiveness, many of them could well wait
until the reading materials are sufficiently supplied.
In the high schools the clear tendency is to introduce more of the
industrial and commercial geography and to diminish the time given to
the less valuable physiography. The development is not yet vigorous.
The high school geography departments, so far as observed, have not
yet altogether attained the social point of view. But they are moving
in that direction. On the one hand, they now need stimulation; and
on the other, to be supplied with the more advanced kinds of such
material equipment as already suggested for the elementary schools.