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                         THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY


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                    THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
                           CHICAGO, ILLINOIS


                                 Agents

                     THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
                          LONDON AND EDINBURGH

                      THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
                          TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO

                           KARL W. HIERSEMANN
                                LEIPZIG

                       THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
                                NEW YORK

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                                 _The_
                                _SCHOOL_
                                 _and_
                               _SOCIETY_
                         _BEING THREE LECTURES_


                                  _by_

                               JOHN DEWEY

                           _SUPPLEMENTED BY_
            A STATEMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

                    THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
                           CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

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                           COPYRIGHT 1900 BY
                               JOHN DEWEY

                          All Rights Reserved

      FIRST EDITION       -–1,000 copies. Printed November, 1899.
      SECOND IMPRESSION   -–1,500 copies. Printed February, 1900.
      THIRD IMPRESSION    -–5,000 copies. Printed July, 1900.
      FOURTH IMPRESSION   -–1,000 copies. Printed June, 1904.
      FIFTH IMPRESSION    -–2,500 copies. Printed February, 1905.
      SIXTH IMPRESSION    -–2,500 copies. Printed August, 1907.
      SEVENTH IMPRESSION  -–1,000 copies. Printed September, 1909.
      EIGHTH IMPRESSION   -–1,000 copies. Printed August, 1910.
      NINTH IMPRESSION    -–1,000 copies. Printed August, 1911.
      TENTH IMPRESSION    -–1,000 copies. Printed March, 1912.
      ELEVENTH IMPRESSION -–2,000 copies. Printed August, 1913.


                        Composed and Printed By
                    The University of Chicago Press
                       Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

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                                   TO

                           MRS. EMMONS BLAINE

                    TO WHOSE INTEREST IN EDUCATIONAL
                                 REFORM
                      THE APPEARANCE OF THIS BOOK
                                 IS DUE

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                                CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE
   I. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS                                  19

  II. THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD                            47

 III. WASTE IN EDUCATION                                              77

  IV. THREE YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL                113




                         LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                            FACING PAGE

                DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES          56

                DRAWING OF A FOREST                  58

                DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING            60

                DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING           62

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                            PUBLISHER’S NOTE


The three lectures presented in the following pages were delivered
before an audience of parents and others interested in the University
Elementary School, in the month of April of the year 1899. Mr. Dewey
revised them in part from a stenographic report, and unimportant changes
and the slight adaptations necessary for the press have been made in his
absence. The lectures retain therefore the unstudied character as well
as the power of the spoken word. As they imply more or less familiarity
with the work of the Elementary School, Mr. Dewey’s supplementary
statement of this has been added.

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                             AUTHOR’S NOTE


A second edition affords a grateful opportunity for recalling that this
little book is a sign of the coöperating thoughts and sympathies of many
persons. Its indebtedness to Mrs. Emmons Blaine is partly indicated in
the dedication. From my friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Herbert Mead, came
that interest, unflagging attention to detail, and artistic taste which,
in my absence, remade colloquial remarks until they were fit to print,
and then saw the results through the press with the present attractive
result—a mode of authorship made easy, which I recommend to others
fortunate enough to possess such friends.

It would be an extended paragraph which should list all the friends
whose timely and persisting generosity has made possible the school
which inspired and defined the ideas of these pages. These friends, I am
sure, would be the first to recognize the peculiar appropriateness of
especial mention of the names of Mrs. Charles R. Crane and Mrs. William
R. Linn.

And the school itself in its educational work is a joint undertaking.
Many have engaged in shaping it. The clear and experienced intelligence
of my wife is wrought everywhere into its texture. The wisdom, tact and
devotion of its instructors have brought about a transformation of its
original amorphous plans into articulate form and substance with life
and movement of their own. Whatever the issue of the ideas presented in
this book, the satisfaction coming from the coöperation of the diverse
thoughts and deeds of many persons in undertaking to enlarge the life of
the child will abide.

                                                         January 5, 1900

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                                   I
                     THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS


We are apt to look at the school from an individualistic standpoint, as
something between teacher and pupil, or between teacher and parent. That
which interests us most is naturally the progress made by the individual
child of our acquaintance, his normal physical development, his advance
in ability to read, write, and figure, his growth in the knowledge of
geography and history, improvement in manners, habits of promptness,
order, and industry—it is from such standards as these that we judge the
work of the school. And rightly so. Yet the range of the outlook needs
to be enlarged. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child,
that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal
for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our
democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through
the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members. All its
better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new
possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and
socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the
individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.
And in the self-direction thus given, nothing counts as much as the
school, for, as Horace Mann said, “Where anything is growing, one former
is worth a thousand re-formers,”

Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new movement in education,
it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social view.
Otherwise, changes in the school institution and tradition will be
looked at as the arbitrary inventions of particular teachers; at the
worst transitory fads, and at the best merely improvements in certain
details—and this is the plane upon which it is too customary to consider
school changes. It is as rational to conceive of the locomotive or the
telegraph as personal devices. The modification going on in the method
and curriculum of education is as much a product of the changed social
situation, and as much an effort to meet the needs of the new society
that is forming, as are changes in modes of industry and commerce.

It is to this, then, that I especially ask your attention: the effort to
conceive what roughly may be termed the “New Education” in the light of
larger changes in society. Can we connect this “New Education” with the
general march of events? If we can, it will lose its isolated character,
and will cease to be an affair which proceeds only from the
over-ingenious minds of pedagogues dealing with particular pupils. It
will appear as part and parcel of the whole social evolution, and, in
its more general features at least, as inevitable. Let us then ask after
the main aspects of the social movement; and afterwards turn to the
school to find what witness it gives of effort to put itself in line.
And since it is quite impossible to cover the whole ground, I shall for
the most part confine myself to one typical thing in the modern school
movement—that which passes under the name of manual training, hoping if
the relation of that to changed social conditions appears, we shall be
ready to concede the point as well regarding other educational
innovations.

I make no apology for not dwelling at length upon the social changes in
question. Those I shall mention are writ so large that he who runs may
read. The change that comes first to mind, the one that overshadows and
even controls all others, is the industrial one—the application of
science resulting in the great inventions that have utilized the forces
of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale: the growth of a world-wide
market as the object of production, of vast manufacturing centers to
supply this market, of cheap and rapid means of communication and
distribution between all its parts. Even as to its feebler beginnings,
this change is not much more than a century old; in many of its most
important aspects it falls within the short span of those now living.
One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so
rapid, so extensive, so complete. Through it the face of the earth is
making over, even as to its physical forms; political boundaries are
wiped out and moved about, as if they were indeed only lines on a paper
map; population is hurriedly gathered into cities from the ends of the
earth; habits of living are altered with startling abruptness and
thoroughness; the search for the truths of nature is infinitely
stimulated and facilitated and their application to life made not only
practicable, but commercially necessary. Even our moral and religious
ideas and interests, the most conservative because the deepest-lying
things in our nature, are profoundly affected. That this revolution
should not affect education in other than formal and superficial fashion
is inconceivable.

Back of the factory system lies the household and neighborhood system.
Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most
three generations, to find a time when the household was practically the
center in which were carried on, or about which were clustered, all the
typical forms of industrial occupation. The clothing worn was for the
most part not only made in the house, but the members of the household
were usually familiar with the shearing of the sheep, the carding and
spinning of the wool, and the plying of the loom. Instead of pressing a
button and flooding the house with electric light, the whole process of
getting illumination was followed in its toilsome length, from the
killing of the animal and the trying of fat, to the making of wicks and
dipping of candles. The supply of flour, of lumber, of foods, of
building materials, of household furniture, even of metal ware, of
nails, hinges, hammers, etc., was in the immediate neighborhood, in
shops which were constantly open to inspection and often centers of
neighborhood congregation. The entire industrial process stood revealed,
from the production on the farm of the raw materials, till the finished
article was actually put to use. Not only this, but practically every
member of the household had his own share in the work. The children, as
they gained in strength and capacity, were gradually initiated into the
mysteries of the several processes. It was a matter of immediate and
personal concern, even to the point of actual participation.

We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building
involved in this: training in habits of order and of industry, and in
the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce
something, in the world. There was always something which really needed
to be done, and a real necessity that each member of the household
should do his own part faithfully and in coöperation with others.
Personalities which became effective in action were bred and tested in
the medium of action. Again, we cannot overlook the importance for
educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got with
nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the actual
processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their social
necessities and uses. In all this there was continual training of
observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought,
and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with
actualities. The educative forces of the domestic spinning and weaving,
of the saw-mill, the gristmill, the cooper shop, and the blacksmith
forge, were continuously operative.

No number of object-lessons, got up _as_ object-lessons for the sake of
giving information, can afford even the shadow of a substitute for
acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden,
acquired through actual living among them and caring for them. No
training of sense-organs in school, introduced for the sake of training,
can begin to compete with the alertness and fullness of sense-life that
comes through daily intimacy and interest in familiar occupations.
Verbal memory can be trained in committing tasks, a certain discipline
of the reasoning powers can be acquired through lessons in science and
mathematics; but, after all, this is somewhat remote and shadowy
compared with the training of attention and of judgment that is acquired
in having to do things with a real motive behind and a real outcome
ahead. At present, concentration of industry and division of labor have
practically eliminated household and neighborhood occupations—at least
for educational purposes. But it is useless to bemoan the departure of
the good old days of children’s modesty, reverence, and implicit
obedience, if we expect merely by bemoaning and by exhortation to bring
them back. It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an
equally radical change in education suffices. We must recognize our
compensations—the increase in toleration, in breadth of social judgment,
the larger acquaintance with human nature, the sharpened alertness in
reading signs of character and interpreting social situations, greater
accuracy of adaptation to differing personalities, contact with greater
commercial activities. These considerations mean much to the city-bred
child of today. Yet there is a real problem: how shall we retain these
advantages, and yet introduce into the school something representing the
other side of life—occupations which exact personal responsibilities and
which train the child with relation to the physical realities of life?

When we turn to the school, we find that one of the most striking
tendencies at present is toward the introduction of so-called manual
training, shop-work, and the household arts—sewing and cooking.

This has not been done “on purpose,” with a full consciousness that the
school must now supply that factor of training formerly taken care of in
the home, but rather by instinct, by experimenting and finding that such
work takes a vital hold of pupils and gives them something which was not
to be got in any other way. Consciousness of its real import is still so
weak that the work is often done in a half-hearted, confused, and
unrelated way. The reasons assigned to justify it are painfully
inadequate or sometimes even positively wrong.

If we were to cross-examine even those who are most favorably disposed
to the introduction of this work into our school system, we should, I
imagine, generally find the main reasons to be that such work engages
the full spontaneous interest and attention of the children. It keeps
them alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them
more useful, more capable, and hence more inclined to be helpful at
home; it prepares them to some extent for the practical duties of later
life—the girls to be more efficient house managers, if not actually
cooks and sempstresses; the boys (were our educational system only
adequately rounded out into trade schools) for their future vocations. I
do not underestimate the worth of these reasons. Of those indicated by
the changed attitude of the children I shall indeed have something to
say in my next talk, when speaking directly of the relationship of the
school to the child. But the point of view is, upon the whole,
unnecessarily narrow. We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of
weaving, sewing, and cooking, as methods of life not as distinct
studies.

We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of the
processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing
home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and
as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and
ingenuity of man; in short, as instrumentalities through which the
school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life,
instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.

A society is a number of people held together because they are working
along common lines, in a common spirit, and with reference to common
aims. The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought
and growing unity of sympathetic feeling. The radical reason that the
present school cannot organize itself as a natural social unit is
because just this element of common and productive activity is absent.
Upon the playground, in game and sport, social organization takes place
spontaneously and inevitably. There is something to do, some activity to
be carried on, requiring natural divisions of labor, selection of
leaders and followers, mutual coöperation and emulation. In the
schoolroom the motive and the cement of social organization are alike
wanting. Upon the ethical side, the tragic weakness of the present
school is that it endeavors to prepare future members of the social
order in a medium in which the conditions of the social spirit are
eminently wanting.

The difference that appears when occupations are made the articulating
centers of school life is not easy to describe in words; it is a
difference in motive, of spirit and atmosphere. As one enters a busy
kitchen in which a group of children are actively engaged in the
preparation of food, the psychological difference, the change from more
or less passive and inert recipiency and restraint to one of buoyant
outgoing energy, is so obvious as fairly to strike one in the face.
Indeed, to those whose image of the school is rigidly set the change is
sure to give a shock. But the change in the social attitude is equally
marked. The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively
individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into
selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of
mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat. Indeed,
almost the only measure for success is a competitive one, in the bad
sense of that term—a comparison of results in the recitation or in the
examination to see which child has succeeded in getting ahead of others
in storing up, in accumulating the maximum of information. So thoroughly
is this the prevalent atmosphere that for one child to help another in
his task has become a school crime. Where the school work consists in
simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of being the most
natural form of coöperation and association, becomes a clandestine
effort to relieve one’s neighbor of his proper duties. Where active work
is going on all this is changed. Helping others, instead of being a form
of charity which impoverishes the recipient, is simply an aid in setting
free the powers and furthering the impulse of the one helped. A spirit
of free communication, of interchange of ideas, suggestions, results,
both successes and failures of previous experiences, becomes the
dominating note of the recitation. So far as emulation enters in, it is
in the comparison of individuals, not with regard to the quantity of
information personally absorbed, but with reference to the quality of
work done—the genuine community standard of value. In an informal but
all the more pervasive way, the school life organizes itself on a social
basis.

Within this organization is found the principle of school discipline or
order. Of course, order is simply a thing which is relative to an end.
If you have the end in view of forty or fifty children learning certain
set lessons, to be recited to a teacher, your discipline must be devoted
to securing that result. But if the end in view is the development of a
spirit of social coöperation and community life, discipline must grow
out of and be relative to this. There is little order of one sort where
things are in process of construction; there is a certain disorder in
any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons are not engaged in
maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not folded;
they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing a variety
of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results from
activity. But out of occupation, out of doing things that are to produce
results, and out of doing these in a social and coöperative way, there
is born a discipline of its own kind and type. Our whole conception of
school discipline changes when we get this point of view. In critical
moments we all realize that the only discipline that stands by us, the
only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life itself.
That we learn from experience, and from books or the sayings of others
_only_ as they are related to experience, are not mere phrases. But the
school has been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary conditions
and motives of life, that the place where children are sent for
discipline is the one place in the world where it is most difficult to
get experience—the mother of all discipline worth the name. It is only
where a narrow and fixed image of traditional school discipline
dominates, that one is in any danger of overlooking that deeper and
infinitely wider discipline that comes from having a part to do in
constructive work, in contributing to a result which, social in spirit,
is none the less obvious and tangible in form—and hence in a form with
reference to which responsibility may be exacted and accurate judgment
passed.

The great thing to keep in mind, then, regarding the introduction into
the school of various forms of active occupation, is that through them
the entire spirit of the school is renewed. It has a chance to affiliate
itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through
directed living; instead of being only a place to learn lessons having
an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in
the future. It gets a chance to be a miniature community, an embryonic
society. This is the fundamental fact, and from this arise continuous
and orderly sources of instruction. Under the industrial _régime_
described, the child, after all, shared in the work, not for the sake of
the sharing, but for the sake of the product. The educational results
secured were real, yet incidental and dependent. But in the school the
typical occupations followed are freed from all economic stress. The aim
is not the economic value of the products, but the development of social
power and insight. It is this liberation from narrow utilities, this
openness to the possibilities of the human spirit that makes these
practical activities in the school allies of art and centers of science
and history.

The unity of all the sciences is found in geography. The significance of
geography is that it presents the earth as the enduring home of the
occupations of man. The world without its relationship to human activity
is less than a world. Human industry and achievement, apart from their
roots in the earth, are not even a sentiment, hardly a name. The earth
is the final source of all man’s food. It is his continual shelter and
protection, the raw material of all his activities, and the home to
whose humanizing and idealizing all his achievement returns. It is the
great field, the great mine, the great source of the energies of heat,
light, and electricity; the great scene of ocean, stream, mountain, and
plain, of which all our agriculture and mining and lumbering, all our
manufacturing and distributing agencies, are but the partial elements
and factors. It is through occupations determined by this environment
that mankind has made its historical and political progress. It is
through these occupations that the intellectual and emotional
interpretation of nature has been developed. It is through what we do in
and with the world that we read its meaning and measure its value.

In educational terms, this means that these occupations in the school
shall not be mere practical devices or modes of routine employment, the
gaining of better technical skill as cooks, sempstresses, or carpenters,
but active centers of scientific insight into natural materials and
processes, points of departure whence children shall be led out into a
realization of the historic development of man. The actual significance
of this can be told better through one illustration taken from actual
school work than by general discourse.

There is nothing which strikes more oddly upon the average intelligent
visitor than to see boys as well as girls of ten, twelve, and thirteen
years of age engaged in sewing and weaving. If we look at this from the
standpoint of preparation of the boys for sewing on buttons and making
patches, we get a narrow and utilitarian conception—a basis that hardly
justifies giving prominence to this sort of work in the school. But if
we look at it from another side, we find that this work gives the point
of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of
mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and
the mechanical principles involved. In connection with these
occupations, the historic development of man is recapitulated. For
example, the children are first given the raw material—the flax, the
cotton plant, the wool as it comes from the back of the sheep (if we
could take them to the place where the sheep are sheared, so much the
better). Then a study is made of these materials from the standpoint of
their adaptation to the uses to which they may be put. For instance, a
comparison of the cotton fiber with wool fiber is made. I did not know
until the children told me, that the reason for the late development of
the cotton industry as compared with the woolen is, that the cotton
fiber is so very difficult to free by hand from the seeds. The children
in one group worked thirty minutes freeing cotton fibers from the boll
and seeds, and succeeded in getting out less than one ounce. They could
easily believe that one person could only gin one pound a day by hand,
and could understand why their ancestors wore woolen instead of cotton
clothing. Among other things discovered as affecting their relative
utilities, was the shortness of the cotton fiber as compared with that
of wool, the former being one-tenth of an inch in length, while that of
the latter is an inch in length; also that the fibers of cotton are
smooth and do not cling together, while the wool has a certain roughness
which makes the fibers stick, thus assisting the spinning. The children
worked this out for themselves with the actual material, aided by
questions and suggestions from the teacher.

They then followed the processes necessary for working the fibers up
into cloth. They re-invented the first frame for carding the wool—a
couple of boards with sharp pins in them for scratching it out. They
re-devised the simplest process for spinning the wool—a pierced stone or
some other weight through which the wool is passed, and which as it is
twirled draws out the fiber; next the top, which was spun on the floor,
while the children kept the wool in their hands until it was gradually
drawn out and wound upon it. Then the children are introduced to the
invention next in historic order, working it out experimentally, thus
seeing its necessity, and tracing its effects, not only upon that
particular industry, but upon modes of social life—in this way passing
in review the entire process up to the present complete loom, and all
that goes with the application of science in the use of our present
available powers. I need not speak of the science involved in this—the
study of the fibers, of geographical features, the conditions under
which raw materials are grown, the great centers of manufacture and
distribution, the physics involved in the machinery of production; nor,
again, of the historical side—the influence which these inventions have
had upon humanity. You can concentrate the history of all mankind into
the evolution of the flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing. I do
not mean that this is the only, or the best, center. But it is true that
certain very real and important avenues to the consideration of the
history of the race are thus opened—that the mind is introduced to much
more fundamental and controlling influences than usually appear in the
political and chronological records that pass for history.

Now, what is true of this one instance of fibers used in fabrics (and,
of course, I have only spoken of one or two elementary phases of that)
is true in its measure of every material used in every occupation, and
of the processes employed. The occupation supplies the child with a
genuine motive; it gives him experience at first hand; it brings him
into contact with realities. It does all this, but in addition it is
liberalized throughout by translation into its historic values and
scientific equivalencies. With the growth of the child’s mind in power
and knowledge it ceases to be a pleasant occupation merely, and becomes
more and more a medium, an instrument, an organ—and is thereby
transformed.

This, in turn, has its bearing upon the teaching of science. Under
present conditions, all activity, to be successful, has to be directed
somewhere and somehow by the scientific expert—it is a case of applied
science. This connection should determine its place in education. It is
not only that the occupations, the so-called manual or industrial work
in the school, give the opportunity for the introduction of science
which illuminates them, which makes them material, freighted with
meaning, instead of being mere devices of hand and eye; but that the
scientific insight thus gained becomes an indispensable instrument of
free and active participation in modern social life. Plato somewhere
speaks of the slave as one who in his actions does not express his own
ideas, but those of some other man. It is our social problem now, even
more urgent than in the time of Plato, that method, purpose,
understanding, shall exist in the consciousness of the one who does the
work, that his activity shall have meaning to himself.

When occupations in the school are conceived in this broad and generous
way, I can only stand lost in wonder at the objections so often heard,
that such occupations are out of place in the school because they are
materialistic, utilitarian, or even menial in their tendency. It
sometimes seems to me that those who make these objections must live in
quite another world. The world in which most of us live is a world in
which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do. Some are
managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for
the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to
see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human
significance. How many of the employed are today mere appendages to the
machines which they operate! This may be due in part to the machine
itself, or to the _régime_ which lays so much stress upon the products
of the machine; but it is certainly due in large part to the fact that
the worker has had no opportunity to develop his imagination and his
sympathetic insight as to the social and scientific values found in his
work. At present, the impulses which lie at the basis of the industrial
system are either practically neglected or positively distorted during
the school period. Until the instincts of construction and production
are systematically laid hold of in the years of childhood and youth,
until they are trained in social directions, enriched by historical
interpretation, controlled and illuminated by scientific methods, we
certainly are in no position even to locate the source of our economic
evils, much less to deal with them effectively.

If we go back a few centuries, we find a practical monopoly of learning.
The term _possession_ of learning was, indeed, a happy one. Learning was
a class matter. This was a necessary result of social conditions. There
were not in existence any means by which the multitude could possibly
have access to intellectual resources. These were stored up and hidden
away in manuscripts. Of these there were at best only a few, and it
required long and toilsome preparation to be able to do anything with
them. A high-priesthood of learning, which guarded the treasury of truth
and which doled it out to the masses under severe restrictions, was the
inevitable expression of these conditions. But, as a direct result of
the industrial revolution of which we have been speaking, this has been
changed. Printing was invented; it was made commercial. Books,
magazines, papers were multiplied and cheapened. As a result of the
locomotive and telegraph, frequent, rapid, and cheap intercommunication
by mails and electricity was called into being. Travel has been rendered
easy; freedom of movement, with its accompanying exchange of ideas,
indefinitely facilitated. The result has been an intellectual
revolution. Learning has been put into circulation. While there still
is, and probably always will be, a particular class having the special
business of inquiry in hand, a distinctively learned class is henceforth
out of the question. It is an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an
immobile solid; it has been liquefied. It is actively moving in all the
currents of society itself.

It is easy to see that this revolution, as regards the materials of
knowledge, carries with it a marked change in the attitude of the
individual. Stimuli of an intellectual sort pour in upon us in all kinds
of ways. The merely intellectual life, the life of scholarship and of
learning, thus gets a very altered value. Academic and scholastic,
instead of being titles of honor, are becoming terms of reproach.

But all this means a necessary change in the attitude of the school, one
of which we are as yet far from realizing the full force. Our school
methods, and to a very considerable extent our curriculum, are inherited
from the period when learning and command of certain symbols, affording
as they did the only access to learning, were all-important. The ideals
of this period are still largely in control, even where the outward
methods and studies have been changed. We sometimes hear the
introduction of manual training, art and science into the elementary,
and even the secondary schools, deprecated on the ground that they tend
toward the production of specialists—that they detract from our present
scheme of generous, liberal culture. The point of this objection would
be ludicrous if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. It
is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided and
narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the mediæval
conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part
simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn,
to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of
learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create,
to produce, whether in the form of utility or of art. The very fact that
manual training, art and science are objected to as technical, as
tending toward mere specialism, is of itself as good testimony as could
be offered to the specialized aim which controls current education.
Unless education had been virtually identified with the exclusively
intellectual pursuits, with learning as such, all these materials and
methods would be welcome, would be greeted with the utmost hospitality.

While training for the profession of learning is regarded as the type of
culture, as a liberal education, that of a mechanic, a musician, a
lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, a merchant, or a railroad manager is
regarded as purely technical and professional. The result is that which
we see about us everywhere—the division into “cultured” people and
“workers,” the separation of theory and practice. Hardly one per cent.
of the entire school population ever attains to what we call higher
education; only five per cent. to the grade of our high school; while
much more than half leave on or before the completion of the fifth year
of the elementary grade. The simple facts of the case are that in the
great majority of human beings the distinctively intellectual interest
is not dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and
disposition. In many of those in whom by nature intellectual interest is
strong, social conditions prevent its adequate realization. Consequently
by far the larger number of pupils leave school as soon as they have
acquired the rudiments of learning, as soon as they have enough of the
symbols of reading, writing, and calculating to be of practical use to
them in getting a living. While our educational leaders are talking of
culture, the development of personality, etc., as the end and aim of
education, the great majority of those who pass under the tuition of the
school regard it only as a narrowly practical tool with which to get
bread and butter enough to eke out a restricted life. If we were to
conceive our educational end and aim in a less exclusive way, if we were
to introduce into educational processes the activities which appeal to
those whose dominant interest is to do and to make, we should find the
hold of the school upon its members to be more vital, more prolonged,
containing more of culture.

But why should I make this labored presentation? The obvious fact is
that our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change. If our
education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an
equally complete transformation. This transformation is not something to
appear suddenly, to be executed in a day by conscious purpose. It is
already in progress. Those modifications of our school system which
often appear (even to those most actively concerned with them, to say
nothing of their spectators) to be mere changes of detail, mere
improvement within the school mechanism, are in reality signs and
evidences of evolution. The introduction of active occupations, of
nature study, of elementary science, of art, of history; the relegation
of the merely symbolic and formal to a secondary position; the change in
the moral school atmosphere, in the relation of pupils and teachers—of
discipline; the introduction of more active, expressive, and
self-directing factors—all these are not mere accidents, they are
necessities of the larger social evolution. It remains but to organize
all these factors, to appreciate them in their fullness of meaning, and
to put the ideas and ideals involved into complete, uncompromising
possession of our school system. To do this means to make each one of
our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of
occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeated
throughout with the spirit of art, history, and science. When the school
introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such
a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and
providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall
have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy,
lovely, and harmonious.




                                   II
                  THE SCHOOL AND THE LIFE OF THE CHILD


Last week I tried to put before you the relationship between the school
and the larger life of the community, and the necessity for certain
changes in the methods and materials of school work, that it might be
better adapted to present social needs.

Today I wish to look at the matter from the other side, and consider the
relationship of the school to the life and development of the children
in the school. As it is difficult to connect general principles with
such thoroughly concrete things as little children, I have taken the
liberty of introducing a good deal of illustrative matter from the work
of the University Elementary School, that in some measure you may
appreciate the way in which the ideas presented work themselves out in
actual practice.

Some few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the
city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suitable
from all points of view—artistic, hygienic, and educational—to the needs
of the children. We had a good deal of difficulty in finding what we
needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made
this remark: “I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something
at which the children may work; these are all for listening.” That tells
the story of the traditional education. Just as the biologist can take a
bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal, so, if we put before the
mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed
in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little
moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just
space enough to hold books, pencils and paper, and add a table, some
chairs, the bare walls, and possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct
the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place.
It is all made “for listening”—for simply studying lessons out of a book
is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency of one mind
upon another. The attitude of listening means, comparatively speaking,
passivity, absorption; that there are certain ready-made materials which
are there, which have been prepared by the school superintendent, the
board, the teacher, and of which the child is to take in as much as
possible in the least possible time.

There is very little place in the traditional schoolroom for the child
to work. The workshop, the laboratory, the materials, the tools with
which the child may construct, create, and actively inquire, and even
the requisite space, have been for the most part lacking. The things
that have to do with these processes have not even a definitely
recognized place in education. They are what the educational authorities
who write editorials in the daily papers generally term “fads” and
“frills.” A lady told me yesterday that she had been visiting different
schools trying to find one where activity on the part of the children
preceded the giving of information on the part of the teacher, or where
the children had some motive for demanding the information. She visited,
she said, twenty-four different schools before she found her first
instance. I may add that that was not in this city.

Another thing that is suggested by these schoolrooms, with their set
desks, is that everything is arranged for handling as large numbers of
children as possible; for dealing with children _en masse_, as an
aggregate of units; involving, again, that they be treated passively.
The moment children act they individualize themselves; they cease to be
a mass, and become the intensely distinctive beings that we are
acquainted with out of school, in the home, the family, on the
playground, and in the neighborhood.

On the same basis is explicable the uniformity of method and curriculum.
If everything is on a “listening” basis, you can have uniformity of
material and method. The ear, and the book which reflects the ear,
constitute the medium which is alike for all. There is next to no
opportunity for adjustment to varying capacities and demands. There is a
certain amount—a fixed quantity—of ready-made results and
accomplishments to be acquired by all children alike in a given time. It
is in response to this demand that the curriculum has been developed
from the elementary school up through the college. There is just so much
desirable knowledge, and there are just so many needed technical
accomplishments in the world. Then comes the mathematical problem of
dividing this by the six, twelve, or sixteen years of school life. Now
give the children every year just the proportionate fraction of the
total, and by the time they have finished they will have mastered the
whole. By covering so much ground during this hour or day or week or
year, everything comes out with perfect evenness at the end—provided the
children have not forgotten what they have previously learned. The
outcome of all this is Matthew Arnold’s report of the statement, proudly
made to him by an educational authority in France, that so many
thousands of children were studying at a given hour, say eleven o’clock,
just such a lesson in geography; and in one of our own western cities
this proud boast used to be repeated to successive visitors by its
superintendent.

I may have exaggerated somewhat in order to make plain the typical
points of the old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical
massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method. It may be
summed up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. It
is in the teacher, the text-book, anywhere and everywhere you please
except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself.
On that basis there is not much to be said about the _life_ of the
child. A good deal might be said about the studying of the child, but
the school is not the place where the child _lives_. Now the change
which is coming into our education is the shifting of the center of
gravity. It is a change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by
Copernicus when the astronomical center shifted from the earth to the
sun. In this case the child becomes the sun about which the appliances
of education revolve; he is the center about which they are organized.

If we take an example from an ideal home, where the parent is
intelligent enough to recognize what is best for the child, and is able
to supply what is needed, we find the child learning through the social
converse and constitution of the family. There are certain points of
interest and value to him in the conversation carried on: statements are
made, inquiries arise, topics are discussed, and the child continually
learns. He states his experiences, his misconceptions are corrected.
Again the child participates in the household occupations, and thereby
gets habits of industry, order, and regard for the rights and ideas of
others, and the fundamental habit of subordinating his activities to the
general interest of the household. Participation in these household
tasks becomes an opportunity for gaining knowledge. The ideal home would
naturally have a workshop where the child could work out his
constructive instincts. It would have a miniature laboratory in which
his inquiries could be directed. The life of the child would extend out
of doors to the garden, surrounding fields, and forests. He would have
his excursions, his walks and talks, in which the larger world out of
doors would open to him.

Now, if we organize and generalize all of this, we have the ideal
school. There is no mystery about it, no wonderful discovery of pedagogy
or educational theory. It is simply a question of doing systematically
and in a large, intelligent, and competent way what for various reasons
can be done in most households only in a comparatively meager and
haphazard manner. In the first place, the ideal home has to be enlarged.
The child must be brought into contact with more grown people and with
more children in order that there may be the freest and richest social
life. Moreover, the occupations and relationships of the home
environment are not specially selected for the growth of the child; the
main object is something else, and what the child can get out of them is
incidental. Hence the need of a school. In this school the life of the
child becomes the all-controlling aim. All the media necessary to
further the growth of the child center there. Learning?—certainly, but
living primarily, and learning through and in relation to this living.
When we take the life of the child centered and organized in this way,
we do not find that he is first of all a listening being; quite the
contrary.

The statement so frequently made that education means “drawing out” is
excellent, if we mean simply to contrast it with the process of pouring
in. But, after all, it is difficult to connect the idea of drawing out
with the ordinary doings of the child of three, four, seven, or eight
years of age. He is already running over, spilling over, with activities
of all kinds. He is not a purely latent being whom the adult has to
approach with great caution and skill in order gradually to draw out
some hidden germ of activity. The child is already intensely active, and
the question of education is the question of taking hold of his
activities, of giving them direction. Through direction, through
organized use, they tend toward valuable results, instead of scattering
or being left to merely impulsive expression.

If we keep this before us, the difficulty I find uppermost in the minds
of many people regarding what is termed the new education is not so much
solved as dissolved; it disappears. A question often asked is: if you
begin with the child’s ideas, impulses and interests, all so crude, so
random and scattering, so little refined or spiritualized, how is he
going to get the necessary discipline, culture and information? If there
were no way open to us except to excite and indulge these impulses of
the child, the question might well be asked. We should either have to
ignore and repress the activities, or else to humor them. But if we have
organization of equipment and of materials, there is another path open
to us. We can direct the child’s activities, giving them exercise along
certain lines, and can thus lead up to the goal which logically stands
at the end of the paths followed.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Since they are not, since
really to satisfy an impulse or interest means to work it out, and
working it out involves running up against obstacles, becoming
acquainted with materials, exercising ingenuity, patience, persistence,
alertness, it of necessity involves discipline—ordering of power—and
supplies knowledge. Take the example of the little child who wants to
make a box. If he stops short with the imagination or wish, he certainly
will not get discipline. But when he attempts to realize his impulse, it
is a question of making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of
taking the right kind of wood, measuring the parts needed, giving them
the necessary proportions, etc. There is involved the preparation of
materials, the sawing, planing, the sand-papering, making all the edges
and corners to fit. Knowledge of tools and processes is inevitable. If
the child realizes his instinct and makes the box, there is plenty of
opportunity to gain discipline and perseverance, to exercise effort in
overcoming obstacles, and to attain as well a great deal of information.

So undoubtedly the little child who thinks he would like to cook has
little idea of what it means or costs, or what it requires. It is simply
a desire to “mess around,” perhaps to imitate the activities of older
people. And it is doubtless possible to let ourselves down to that level
and simply humor that interest. But here, too, if the impulse is
exercised, utilized, it runs up against the actual world of hard
conditions, to which it must accommodate itself; and there again come in
the factors of discipline and knowledge. One of the children became
impatient recently, at having to work things out by a long method of
experimentation, and said: “Why do we bother with this? Let’s follow a
recipe in a cook-book.” The teacher asked the children where the recipe
came from, and the conversation showed that if they simply followed this
they would not understand the reasons for what they were doing. They
were then quite willing to go on with the experimental work. To follow
that work will, indeed, give an illustration of just the point in
question. Their occupation happened that day to be the cooking of eggs,
as making a transition from the cooking of vegetables to that of meats.
In order to get a basis of comparison they first summarized the
constituent food elements in the vegetables and made a preliminary
comparison with those found in meat. Thus they found that the woody
fiber or cellulose in vegetables corresponded to the connective tissue
in meat, giving the element of form and structure. They found that
starch and starchy products were characteristic of the vegetables, that
mineral salts were found in both alike, and that there was fat in both—a
small quantity in vegetable food and a large amount in animal. They were
prepared then to take up the study of albumen as the characteristic
feature of animal food, corresponding to starch in the vegetables, and
were ready to consider the conditions requisite for the proper treatment
of albumen—the eggs serving as the material of experiment.

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A CAVE AND TREES]

They experimented first by taking water at various temperatures, finding
out when it was scalding, simmering, and boiling hot, and ascertained
the effect of the various degrees of temperature on the white of the
egg. That worked out, they were prepared, not simply to cook eggs, but
to understand the principle involved in the cooking of eggs. I do not
wish to lose sight of the universal in the particular incident. For the
child simply to desire to cook an egg, and accordingly drop it in water
for three minutes, and take it out when he is told, is not educative.
But for the child to realize his own impulse by recognizing the facts,
materials and conditions involved, and then to regulate his impulse
through that recognition, is educative. This is the difference, upon
which I wish to insist, between exciting or indulging an interest and
realizing it through its direction.

Another instinct of the child is the use of pencil and paper. All
children like to express themselves through the medium of form and
color. If you simply indulge this interest by letting the child go on
indefinitely, there is no growth that is more than accidental. But let
the child first express his impulse, and then through criticism,
question, and suggestion bring him to consciousness of what he has done,
and what he needs to do, and the result is quite different. Here, for
example, is the work of a seven-year-old child. It is not average work,
it is the best work done among the little children, but it illustrates
the particular principle of which I have been speaking. They had been
talking about the primitive conditions of social life when people lived
in caves. The child’s idea of that found expression in this way: the
cave is neatly set up on the hill side in an impossible way. You see the
conventional tree of childhood; a vertical line with horizontal branches
on each side. If the child had been allowed to go on repeating this sort
of thing day by day, he would be indulging his instinct rather than
exercising it. But the child was now asked to look closely at trees, to
compare those seen with the one drawn, to examine more closely and
consciously into the conditions of his work. Then he drew trees from
observation.

Finally he drew again from combined observation, memory, and
imagination. He made again a free illustration, expressing his own
imaginative thought, but controlled by detailed study of actual trees.
The result was a scene representing a bit of forest; so far as it goes,
it seems to me to have as much poetic feeling as the work of an adult,
while at the same time its trees are, in their proportions possible
ones, not mere symbols.

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A FOREST]

If we roughly classify the impulses which are available in the school,
we may group them under four heads. There is the social instinct of the
children as shown in conversation, personal intercourse, and
communication. We all know how self-centered the little child is at the
age of four or five. If any new subject is brought up, if he says
anything at all, it is: “I have seen that;” or, “My papa or mamma told
me about that.” His horizon is not large; an experience must come
immediately home to him, if he is to be sufficiently interested to
relate it to others and seek theirs in return. And yet the egoistic and
limited interest of little children is in this manner capable of
infinite expansion. The language instinct is the simplest form of the
social expression of the child. Hence it is a great, perhaps the
greatest of all educational resources.

Then there is the instinct of making—the constructive impulse. The
child’s impulse to do finds expression first in play, in movement,
gesture, and make-believe, becomes more definite, and seeks outlet in
shaping materials into tangible forms and permanent embodiment. The
child has not much instinct for abstract inquiry. The instinct of
investigation seems to grow out of the combination of the constructive
impulse with the conversational. There is no distinction between
experimental science for little children and the work done in the
carpenter shop. Such work as they can do in physics or chemistry is not
for the purpose of making technical generalizations or even arriving at
abstract truths. Children simply like to do things, and watch to see
what will happen. But this can be taken advantage of, can be directed
into ways where it gives results of value, as well as be allowed to go
on at random.

And so the expressive impulse of the children, the art instinct, grows
also out of the communicating and constructive instincts. It is their
refinement and full manifestation. Make the construction adequate, make
it full, free, and flexible, give it a social motive, something to tell,
and you have a work of art. Take one illustration of this in connection
with the textile work—sewing and weaving. The children made a primitive
loom in the shop; here the constructive instinct was appealed to. Then
they wished to do something with this loom, to make something. It was
the type of the Indian loom, and they were shown blankets woven by the
Indians. Each child made a design kindred in idea to those of the Navajo
blankets, and the one which seemed best adapted to the work in hand was
selected. The technical resources were limited, but the coloring and
form were worked out by the children. The example shown was made by the
twelve-year-old children. Examination shows that it took patience,
thoroughness, and perseverance to do the work. It involved not merely
discipline and information of both a historical sort and the elements of
technical design, but also something of the spirit of art in adequately
conveying an idea.

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF HANDS SPINNING]

One more instance of the connection of the art side with the
constructive side. The children had been studying primitive spinning and
carding, when one of them, twelve years of age, made a picture of one of
the older children spinning. Here is another piece of work which is not
quite average; it is better than the average. It is an illustration of
two hands and the drawing out of the wool to get it ready for spinning.
This was done by a child eleven years of age. But, upon the whole, with
the younger children especially, the art impulse is connected mainly
with the social instinct—the desire to tell, to represent.

[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A GIRL SPINNING]

Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests—the interest in
conversation or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in
making things, or construction; and in artistic expression—we may say
they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the
exercise of which depends the active growth of the child. I wish to give
one or two illustrations, the first from the work of children seven
years of age. It illustrates in a way the dominant desire of the
children to talk, particularly about folks and of things in relation to
folks. If you observe little children, you will find they are interested
in the world of things mainly in its connection with people, as a
background and medium of human concerns. Many anthropologists have told
us there are certain identities in the child interests with those of
primitive life. There is a sort or natural recurrence of the child mind
to the typical activities of primitive peoples; witness the hut which
the boy likes to build in the yard, playing hunt, with bows, arrows,
spears, and so on. Again the question comes: What are we to do with this
interest—are we to ignore it, or just excite and draw it out? Or shall
we get hold of it and direct it to something ahead, something better?
Some of the work that has been planned for our seven-year-old children
has the latter end in view—to utilize this interest so that it shall
become a means of seeing the progress of the human race. The children
begin by imagining present conditions taken away until they are in
contact with nature at first hand. That takes them back to a hunting
people, to a people living in caves or trees and getting a precarious
subsistence by hunting and fishing. They imagine as far as possible the
various natural physical conditions adapted to that sort of life; say, a
hilly, woody <DW72>, near mountains and a river where fish would be
abundant. Then they go on in imagination through the hunting to the
semi-agricultural stage, and through the nomadic to the settled
agricultural stage. The point I wish to make is that there is abundant
opportunity thus given for actual study, for inquiry which results in
gaining information. So, while the instinct primarily appeals to the
social side, the interest of the child in people and their doings is
carried on into the larger world of reality. For example, the children
had some idea of primitive weapons, of the stone arrowhead, etc. That
provided occasion for the testing of materials as regards their
friability, their shape, texture, etc., resulting in a lesson in
mineralogy, as they examined the different stones to find which was best
suited to the purpose. The discussion of the iron age supplied a demand
for the construction of a smelting oven made out of clay, and of
considerable size. As the children did not get their drafts right at
first, the mouth of the furnace not being in proper relation to the
vent, as to size and position, instruction in the principles of
combustion, the nature of drafts and of fuel, was required. Yet the
instruction was not given ready-made; it was first needed, and then
arrived at experimentally. Then the children took some material, such as
copper, and went through a series of experiments, fusing it, working it
into objects; and the same experiments were made with lead and other
metals. This work has been also a continuous course in geography, since
the children have had to imagine and work out the various physical
conditions necessary to the different forms of social life implied. What
would be the physical conditions appropriate to pastoral life? to the
beginning of agriculture? to fishing? What would be the natural method
of exchange between these peoples? Having worked out such points in
conversation, they have afterward represented them in maps and
sand-molding. Thus they have gained ideas of the various forms of the
configuration of the earth, and at the same time have seen them in their
relation to human activity, so that they are not simply external facts,
but are fused and welded with social conceptions regarding the life and
progress of humanity. The result, to my mind, justifies completely the
conviction that children, in a year of such work (of five hours a week
altogether), get indefinitely more acquaintance with facts of science,
geography, and anthropology than they get where information is the
professed end and object, where they are simply set to learning facts in
fixed lessons. As to discipline, they get more training of attention,
more power of interpretation, of drawing inferences, of acute
observation and continuous reflection, than if they were put to working
out arbitrary problems simply for the sake of discipline.

I should like at this point to refer to the recitation. We all know what
it has been—a placer where the child shows off to the teacher and the
other children the amount of information he has succeeded in
assimilating from the text-book. From this other standpoint, the
recitation becomes preëminently a social meeting place; it is to the
school what the spontaneous conversation is at home, excepting that it
is more organized, following definite lines. The recitation becomes the
social clearing-house, where experiences and ideas are exchanged and
subjected to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new
lines of thought and inquiry are set up.

This change of the recitation from an examination of knowledge already
acquired to the free play of the children’s communicative instinct,
affects and modifies all the language work of the school. Under the old
_régime_ it was unquestionably a most serious problem to give the
children a full and free use of language. The reason was obvious. The
natural motive for language was seldom offered. In the pedagogical
text-books language is defined as the medium of expressing thought. It
becomes that, more or less, to adults with trained minds, but it hardly
needs to be said that language is primarily a social thing, a means by
which we give our experiences to others and get theirs again in return.
When it is taken from its natural basis, it is no wonder that it becomes
a complex and difficult problem to teach language. Think of the
absurdity of having to teach language as a thing by itself. If there is
anything the child will do before he goes to school, it is to talk of
the things that interest him. But when there are no vital interests
appealed to in the school, when language is used simply for the
repetition of lessons, it is not surprising that one of the chief
difficulties of school work has come to be instruction in the
mother-tongue. Since the language taught is unnatural, not growing out
of the real desire to communicate vital impressions and convictions, the
freedom of children in its use gradually disappears, until finally the
high-school teacher has to invent all kinds of devices to assist in
getting any spontaneous and full use of speech. Moreover, when the
language instinct is appealed to in a social way, there is a continual
contact with reality. The result is that the child always has something
in his mind to talk about, he has something to say; he has a thought to
express, and a thought is not a thought unless it is one’s own. On the
traditional method, the child must say something that he has merely
learned. There is all the difference in the world between having
something to say and having to say something. The child who has a
variety of materials and facts wants to talk about them, and his
language becomes more refined and full, because it is controlled and
informed by realities. Reading and writing, as well as the oral use of
language, may be taught on this basis. It can be done in a _related_
way, as the outgrowth of the child’s social desire to recount his
experiences and get in return the experiences of others, directed always
through contact with the facts and forces which determine the truth
communicated.

I shall not have time to speak of the work of the older children, where
the original crude instincts of construction and communication have been
developed into something like scientifically directed inquiry, but I
will give an illustration of the use of language following upon this
experimental work. The work was on the basis of a simple experiment of
the commonest sort, gradually leading the children out into geological
and geographical study. The sentences that I am going to read seem to me
poetic as well as “scientific.” “A long time ago when the earth was new,
when it was lava, there was no water on the earth, and there was steam
all round the earth up in the air, as there were many gases in the air.
One of them was carbon dioxide. The steam became clouds, because the
earth began to cool off, and after a while it began to rain, and the
water came down and dissolved the carbon dioxide from the air.” There is
a good deal more science in that than probably would be apparent at the
outset. It represents some three months of work on the part of the
child. The children kept daily and weekly records, but this is part of
the summing up of the quarter’s work. I call this language poetic,
because the child has a clear image and has a personal feeling for the
realities imaged. I extract sentences from two other records to
illustrate further the vivid use of language when there is a vivid
experience back of it. “When the earth was cold enough to condense, the
water, with the help of carbon dioxide, _pulls_ the calcium out of the
rocks into a large body of water where the little animals could get it.”
The other reads as follows: “When the earth cooled, calcium was in the
rocks. Then the carbon dioxide and water united and formed a solution,
and, as it ran, it _tore_ out the calcium and carried it on to the sea,
where there were little animals who took it out of solution.” The use of
such words as “pulled” and “tore” in connection with the process of
chemical combination evidences a personal realization which compels its
own appropriate expression.

If I had not taken so much time in my other illustrations, I should like
to show how, beginning with very simple material things, the children
were led on to larger fields of investigation, and to the intellectual
discipline that is the accompaniment of such research. I will simply
mention the experiment in which the work began. It consisted in making
precipitated chalk, used for polishing metals. The children, with simple
apparatus—a tumbler, lime water, and a glass tube—precipitated the
calcium carbonate out of the water; and from this beginning went on to a
study of the processes by which rocks of various sorts, igneous,
sedimentary, etc., had been formed on the surface of the earth and the
places they occupy; then to points in the geography of the United
States, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico; to the effects of these various bodies
of rock, in their various configurations, upon the human occupations; so
that this geological record finally rounded itself out into the life of
man at the present time. The children saw and felt the connection
between these geologic processes taking place ages and ages ago, and the
physical conditions determining the industrial occupations of today.

Of all the possibilities involved in the subject, “The School and the
Life of the Child,” I have selected but one, because I have found that
that one gives people more difficulty, is more of a stumbling-block,
than any other. One may be ready to admit that it would be most
desirable for the school to be a place in which the child should really
live, and get a life-experience in which he should delight and find
meaning for its own sake. But then we hear this inquiry: how, upon this
basis, shall the child get the needed information; how shall he undergo
the required discipline? Yes, it has come to this, that with many, if
not most, people the normal processes of life appear to be incompatible
with getting information and discipline. So I have tried to indicate, in
a highly general and inadequate way (for only the school itself, in its
daily operation, could give a detailed and worthy representation), how
the problem works itself out—how it is possible to lay hold upon the
rudimentary instincts of human nature, and, by supplying a proper
medium, so control their expression as not only to facilitate and enrich
the growth of the individual child, but also to supply the results, and
far more, of technical information and discipline that have been the
ideals of education in the past.

But although I have selected this especial way of approach (as a
concession to the question almost universally raised), I am not willing
to leave the matter in this more or less negative and explanatory
condition. Life is the great thing after all; the life of the child at
its time and in its measure, no less than the life of the adult. Strange
would it be, indeed, if intelligent and serious attention to what the
child _now_ needs and is capable of in the way of a rich, valuable, and
expanded life should somehow conflict with the needs and possibilities
of later, adult life. “Let us live with our children,” certainly means,
first of all, that our children shall live—not that they shall be
hampered and stunted by being forced into all kinds of conditions, the
most remote consideration of which is relevancy to the present life of
the child. If we seek the kingdom of heaven, educationally, all other
things shall be added unto us—which, being interpreted, is that if we
identify ourselves with the real instincts and needs of childhood, and
ask only after its fullest assertion and growth, the discipline and
information and culture of adult life shall all come in their due
season.

Speaking of culture reminds me that in a way I have been speaking only
of the outside of the child’s activity—only of the outward expression of
his impulses toward saying, making, finding out, and creating. The real
child, it hardly need be said, lives in the world of imaginative values,
and ideas which find only imperfect outward embodiment. We hear much
nowadays about the cultivation of the child’s “imagination.” Then we
undo much of our own talk and work by a belief that the imagination is
some special part of the child, that finds its satisfaction in some one
particular direction—generally speaking, that of the unreal and
make-believe, of the myth and made-up story. Why are we so hard of heart
and so slow to believe? The imagination is the medium in which the child
lives. To him there is everywhere and in everything that occupies his
mind and activity at all, a surplusage of value and significance. The
question of the relation of the school to the child’s life is at bottom
simply this: shall we ignore this native setting and tendency, dealing
not with the living child at all, but with the dead image we have
erected, or shall we give it play and satisfaction? If we once believe
in life and in the life of the child, then will all the occupations and
uses spoken of, then will all history and science, become instruments of
appeal and materials of culture to his imagination, and through that to
the richness and the orderliness of his life. Where we now see only the
outward doing and the outward product, there, behind all visible
results, is the re-adjustment of mental attitude, the enlarged and
sympathetic vision, the sense of growing power, and the willing ability
to identify both insight and capacity with the interests of the world
and man. Unless culture be a superficial polish, a veneering of mahogany
over common wood, it surely is this—the growth of the imagination in
flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the
individual lives is informed with the life of nature and of society.
When nature and society can live in the schoolroom, when the forms and
tools of learning are subordinated to the substance of experience, then
shall there be an opportunity for this identification, and culture shall
be the democratic password.




                                  III
                           WASTE IN EDUCATION


The subject announced for today was “Waste in Education.” I should like
first to state briefly its relation to the two preceding lectures. The
first dealt with the school in its social aspects, and the necessary
re-adjustments that have to be made to render it effective in present
social conditions. The second dealt with the school in relation to the
growth of individual children. Now the third deals with the school as
itself an institution, both in relation to society and to its own
members—the children. It deals with the question of organization,
because all waste is the result of the lack of it, the motive lying
behind organization being promotion of economy and efficiency. This
question is not one of the waste of money or the waste of things. These
matters count; but the primary waste is that of human life, the life of
the children while they are at school, and afterward because of
inadequate and perverted preparation.

So, when we speak of organization, we are not to think simply of the
externals; of that which goes by the name “school system”—the school
board, the superintendent, and the building, the engaging and promotion
of teachers, etc. These things enter in, but the fundamental
organization is that of the school itself as a community of individuals,
in its relations to other forms of social life. All waste is due to
isolation. Organization is nothing but getting things into connection
with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully.
Therefore in speaking of this question of waste in education, I desire
to call your attention to the isolation of the various parts of the
school system, to the lack of unity in the aims of education, to the
lack of coherence in its studies and methods.

I have made a chart (I) which, while I speak of the isolations of the
school system itself, may perhaps appeal to the eye and save a little
time in verbal explanations. A paradoxical friend of mine says there is
nothing so obscure as an illustration, and it is quite possible that my
attempt to illustrate my point will simply prove the truth of his
statement.

The blocks represent the various elements in the school system, and are
intended to indicate roughly the length of time given to each division,
and also the overlapping, both in time and subjects studied, of the
individual parts of the system. With each block is given the historical
conditions in which it arose and its ruling ideal.

[Illustration: Chart I]

                                      Professional Schools
                                    +---+---+---+---+---+---+
                                    |///|///|///|///|///|   |
                                    |///|///|///|///|///|   |
                                    +---+---+---+---+---+---+
                                  Mediæval  The 19^{th} Century
                                  _Culture_      _Utility_

                                               High School
          Kindergarten      Primary-            or Academy
          +---+--+--+  +--+--+---+---+---+  +---+---+---+---+
          |   |  |//|  |//|  |   |   |///|  |///|   |   |///|
          |   |  |//|  |//|  |   |   |///|  |///|   |   |///|
          +---+--+--+  +--+--+---+---+---+  +---+---+---+---+
         18^{th} Century   16^{th} Century       Renaissance
           _Moral_         _Utility_            _Culture_
                                              _Discipline_

                                     University-     College
                                      Graduate-------Schools
                                    +---+---+---+---+---+---+
                                    |///|///|   |   |   |   |
                                    |///|///|   |   |   |   |
                                    +---+---+---+---+---+---+
                                             Mediæval
                                             _Culture_
                                             _Discipline_

         Connecting        Grammar or
           Class      Intermediate School        Normal
           +----+      +---+---+---+---+--  +---+---+---+---+
           |////|      |///|   |   |///|    |///|   |///|///|
           |////|      |///|   |   |///|    |///|   |///|///|
           +----+      +---+---+---+---+--  +---+---+---+---+
         19^{th} Century     Renaissance         19th Century
                              _Culture_           _Utility_
                             _Discipline_         _Culture_

                                          Technical Schools
                                        +---+---+---+---+---+
                                        |   |   |   |   |   |
                                        |   |   |   |   |   |
                                        +---+---+---+---+---+
                                          19^{th} Century
                                             _Utility_

The school system, upon the whole, has grown from the top down. During
the middle ages it was essentially a cluster of professional
schools—especially law and theology. Our present university comes down
to us from the middle ages. I will not say that at present it is a
mediæval institution, but it had its roots in the middle ages, and it
has not outlived all mediæval traditions regarding learning.

The kindergarten, rising with the present century, was a union of the
nursery and of the philosophy of Schelling; a wedding of the plays and
games which the mother carried on with her children, to Schelling’s
highly romantic and symbolic philosophy. The elements that came from the
actual study of child life—the continuation of the nursery—have remained
a life-bringing force in all education; the Schellingesque factors made
an obstruction between it and the rest of the school system, brought
about isolations.

The line drawn over the top indicates that there is a certain
interaction between the kindergarten and the primary school; for, so far
as the primary school remained in spirit foreign to the natural
interests of child life, it was isolated from the kindergarten, so that
it is a problem, at present, to introduce kindergarten methods into the
primary school; the problem of the so-called connecting class. The
difficulty is that the two are not one from the start. To get a
connection the teacher has had to climb over the wall instead of
entering in at the gate.

On the side of aims, the ideal of the kindergarten was the moral
development of the children, rather than instruction or discipline; an
ideal sometimes emphasized to the point of sentimentality. The primary
school grew practically out of the popular movement of the sixteenth
century, when along with the invention of printing and the growth of
commerce, it became a business necessity to know how to read, write, and
figure. The aim was distinctly a practical one; it was utility; getting
command of these tools, the symbols of learning, not for the sake of
learning, but because they gave access to careers in life otherwise
closed.

The division next to the primary school is the grammar school. The term
is not much used in the West, but is common in the eastern states. It
goes back to the time of the revival of learning—a little earlier
perhaps than the conditions out of which the primary school originated,
and, even when contemporaneous, having a different ideal. It had to do
with the study of language in the higher sense; because, at the time of
the Renaissance, Latin and Greek connected people with the culture of
the past, with the Roman and Greek world. The classic languages were the
only means of escape from the limitations of the middle ages. Thus there
sprang up the prototype of the grammar school, more liberal than the
university (so largely professional in character), for the purpose of
putting into the hands of the people the key to the old learning, that
men might see a world with a larger horizon. The object was primarily
culture, secondarily discipline. It represented much more than the
present grammar school. It was the liberal element in the college,
which, extending downward, grew into the academy and the high school.
Thus the secondary school is still in part just a lower college (having
an even higher curriculum than the college of a few centuries ago) or a
preparatory department to a college, and in part a rounding up of the
utilities of the elementary school.

There appear then two products of the nineteenth century, the technical
and normal schools. The schools of technology, engineering, etc., are,
of course, mainly the development of nineteenth-century business
conditions, as the primary school was the development of business
conditions of the sixteenth century. The normal school arose because of
the necessity for training teachers, with the idea partly of
professional drill, and partly that of culture.

Without going into more detail, we have some eight different parts of
the school system as represented on the chart, all of which arose
historically at different times, having different ideals in view, and
consequently different methods. I do not wish to suggest that all of the
isolation, all of the separation, that has existed in the past between
the different parts of the school system still persists. One must,
however, recognize that they have never yet been welded into one
complete whole. The great problem in education on the administrative
side is how to unite these different parts.

Consider the training schools for teachers—the normal schools. These
occupy at present a somewhat anomalous position, intermediate between
the high school and the college, requiring the high-school preparation,
and covering a certain amount of college work. They are isolated from
the higher subject-matter of scholarship, since, upon the whole, their
object has been to train persons _how_ to teach, rather than _what_ to
teach; while, if we go to the college, we find the other half of this
isolation—learning _what_ to teach, with almost a contempt for methods
of teaching. The college is shut off from contact with children and
youth. Its members, to a great extent, away from home and forgetting
their own childhood, become eventually teachers with a large amount of
subject-matter at command, and little knowledge of how this is related
to the minds of those to whom it is to be taught. In this division
between what to teach and how to teach, each side suffers from the
separation.

It is interesting to follow out the inter-relation between primary,
grammar, and high schools. The elementary school has crowded up and
taken many subjects previously studied in the old New England grammar
school. The high school has pushed its subjects down. Latin and algebra
have been put in the upper grades, so that the seventh and eighth grades
are, after all, about all that is left of the old grammar school. They
are a sort of amorphous composite, being partly a place where children
go on learning what they already have learned (to read, write, and
figure), and partly a place of preparation for the high school. The name
in some parts of New England for these upper grades was “Intermediate
School.” The term was a happy one; the work was simply intermediate
between something that had been and something that was going to be,
having no special meaning on its own account.

Just as the parts are separated, so do the ideals differ—moral
development, practical utility, general culture, discipline, and
professional training. These aims are each especially represented in
some distinct part of the system of education; and with the growing
interaction of the parts, each is supposed to afford a certain amount of
culture, discipline, and utility. But the lack of fundamental unity is
witnessed in the fact that one study is still considered good for
discipline, and another for culture; some parts of arithmetic, for
example, for discipline and others for use, literature for culture,
grammar for discipline, geography partly for utility, partly for
culture; and so on. The unity of education is dissipated, and the
studies become centrifugal; so much of this study to secure this end, so
much of that to secure another, until the whole becomes a sheer
compromise and patchwork between contending aims and disparate studies.
The great problem in education on the administrative side is to secure
the unity of the whole, in the place of a sequence of more or less
unrelated and overlapping parts and thus to reduce the waste arising
from friction, reduplication and transitions that are not properly
bridged.

[Illustration: Chart II]

                                      Business
                                       | 3. ^
                                       |    |
                                       v    |
                                +------------------+
                                |                  |
                                |                  |
             Technical          |                  |
              Research     ---> |                  |
                                |                  |
                                |                  | --->
           4. University        |      School      |   1. Home
                                |         A        | <---
                                |                  |
            Professional   <--- |                  |
          Schools Teachers      |                  |
                                |                  |
                                |                  |
                                +------------------+
                                       ^  |
                                       |  |
                                       |  v
                                    { Garden
                                 2. { Park
                                    { Country

In this second symbolic diagram (II) I wish to suggest that really the
only way to unite the parts of the system is to unite each to life. We
can get only an artificial unity so long as we confine our gaze to the
school system itself. We must look at it as part of the larger whole of
social life. This block (A) in the center represents the school system
as a whole. (1) At one side we have the home, and the two arrows
represent the free interplay of influences, materials, and ideas between
the home life and that of the school. (2) Below we have the relation to
the natural environment, the great field of geography in the widest
sense. The school building has about it a natural environment. It ought
to be in a garden, and the children from the garden would be led on to
surrounding fields, and then into the wider country, with all its facts
and forces. (3) Above is represented business life, and the necessity
for free play between the school and the needs and forces of industry.
(4) On the other side is the university proper, with its various phases,
its laboratories, its resources in the way of libraries, museums, and
professional schools.

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes
from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school
in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the
other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at
school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life.
When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a
large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in
his home and neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this
everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a
variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies.
While I was visiting in the city of Moline a few years ago, the
superintendent told me that they found many children every year, who
were surprised to learn that the Mississippi river in the text-book had
anything to do with the stream of water flowing past their homes. The
geography being simply a matter of the schoolroom, it is more or less of
an awakening to many children to find that the whole thing is nothing
but a more formal and definite statement of the facts which they see,
feel, and touch every day. When we think that we all live on the earth,
that we live in an atmosphere, that our lives are touched at every point
by the influences of the soil, flora, and fauna, by considerations of
light and heat, and then think of what the school study of geography has
been, we have a typical idea of the gap existing between the everyday
experiences of the child, and the isolated material supplied in such
large measure in the school. This is but an instance, and one upon which
most of us may reflect long before we take the present artificiality of
the school as other than a matter of course or necessity.

Though there should be organic connection between the school and
business life, it is not meant that the school is to prepare the child
for any particular business, but that there should be a natural
connection of the everyday life of the child with the business
environment about him, and that it is the affair of the school to
clarify and liberalize this connection, to bring it to consciousness,
not by introducing special studies, like commercial geography and
arithmetic, but by keeping alive the ordinary bonds of relation. The
subject of compound-business-partnership is probably not in many of the
arithmetics nowadays, though it was there not a generation ago, for the
makers of text-books said that if they left out anything they could not
sell their books. This compound-business-partnership originated as far
back as the sixteenth century. The joint-stock company had not been
invented, and as large commerce with the Indies and Americas grew up, it
was necessary to have an accumulation of capital with which to handle
it. One man said, “I will put in this amount of money for six months,”
and another, “So much for two years,” and so on. Thus by joining
together they got money enough to float their commercial enterprises.
Naturally, then, “compound partnership” was taught in the schools. The
joint-stock company was invented; compound partnership disappeared, but
the problems relating to it stayed in the arithmetics for two hundred
years. They were kept after they had ceased to have practical utility,
for the sake of mental discipline—they were “such hard problems, you
know.” A great deal of what is now in the arithmetics under the head of
percentage is of the same nature. Children of twelve and thirteen years
of age go through gain and loss calculations, and various forms of bank
discount so complicated that the bankers long ago dispensed with them.
And when it is pointed out that business is not done this way, we hear
again of “mental discipline.” And yet there are plenty of real
connections between the experience of children and business conditions
which need to be utilized and illuminated. The child should study his
commercial arithmetic and geography, not as isolated things by
themselves, but in their reference to his social environment. The youth
needs to become acquainted with the bank as a factor in modern life,
with what it does, and how it does it; and then relevant arithmetical
processes would have some meaning—quite in contradistinction to the
time-absorbing and mind-killing examples in percentage, partial
payments, etc., found in all our arithmetics.

The connection with the university, as indicated in this chart, I need
not dwell upon. I simply wish to indicate that there ought to be a free
interaction between all the parts of the school system. There is much of
utter triviality of subject-matter in elementary and secondary
education. When we investigate it, we find that it is full of facts
taught that are not facts, which have to be unlearned later on. Now,
this happens because the “lower” parts of our system are not in vital
connection with the “higher.” The university or college, in its idea, is
a place of research, where investigation is going on, a place of
libraries and museums, where the best resources of the past are
gathered, maintained and organized. It is, however, as true in the
school as in the university that the spirit of inquiry can be got only
through and with the attitude of inquiry. The pupil must learn what has
meaning, what enlarges his horizon, instead of mere trivialities. He
must become acquainted with truths, instead of things that were regarded
as such fifty years ago, or that are taken as interesting by the
misunderstanding of a partially educated teacher. It is difficult to see
how these ends can be reached except as the most advanced part of the
educational system is in complete interaction with the most rudimentary.

The next chart (III) is an enlargement of the second. The school
building has swelled out, so to speak, the surrounding environment
remaining the same, the home, the garden and country, the relation to
business life and the university. The object is to show what the school
must become to get out of its isolation and secure the organic
connection with social life of which we have been speaking. It is not
our architect’s plan for the school building that we hope to have; but
it is a diagrammatic representation of the idea which we want embodied
in the school building. On the lower side you see the dining-room and
the kitchen, at the top the wood and metal shops, and the textile room
for sewing and weaving. The center represents the manner in which all
come together in the library; that is to say, in a collection of the
intellectual resources of all kinds that throw light upon the practical
work, that give it meaning and liberal value. If the four corners
represent practice, the interior represents the theory of the practical
activities. In other words, the object of these forms of practice in the
school is not found chiefly in themselves, or in the technical skill of
cooks, seamstresses, carpenters and masons, but in their connection, on
the social side, with the life without; while on the individual side
they respond to the child’s need of action, of expression, of desire to
do something, to be constructive and creative, instead of simply passive
and conforming. Their great significance is that they keep the balance
between the social and individual sides—the chart symbolizing
particularly the connection with the social. Here on one side is the
home. How naturally the lines of connection play back and forth between
the home and the kitchen and the textile room of the school! The child
can carry over what he learns in the home and utilize it in the school;
and the things learned in the school he applies at home. These are the
two great things in breaking down isolation, in getting connection—to
have the child come to school with all the experience he has got outside
the school, and to leave it with something to be immediately used in his
everyday life. The child comes to the traditional school with a healthy
body and a more or less unwilling mind, though, in fact, he does not
bring both his body and mind with him; he has to leave his mind behind,
because there is no way to use it in the school. If he had a purely
abstract mind, he could bring it to school with him, but his is a
concrete one, interested in concrete things, and unless these things get
over into school life, he cannot take his mind with him. What we want is
to have the child come to school with a whole mind and a whole body, and
leave school with a fuller mind and an even healthier body. And speaking
of the body suggests that, while there is no gymnasium in these
diagrams, the active life carried on in its four corners brings with it
constant physical exercise, while our gymnasium proper will deal with
the particular weaknesses of children and their correction, and will
attempt more consciously to build up the thoroughly sound body as the
abode of the sound mind.

[Illustration: Chart III]

                                      Business
                                        |  |
                                        |  |
                         +------------+<=  =>+------------+
                         |            |      |            |
       Technical Schools |            |      |  Textile   |
          Laboratory     |   Shop     |      | Industries |
           Research      |            |      |            |
                         |            +------+            |-----|
                         |                                |     |
                         +-------+                +-------+<==  |
                                 |                |          |  =>
                                 |    Library     |          Home
                                 |       B        |          |  =>
                         +-------+                +-------+<==  |
       University        |                                |     |
            Library      |            +------+            |-----|
            Museum       |  Dining    |      |            |
                         |   Room     |      |  Kitchen   |
                         |            |      |            |
                         |            |   ==>|            |
                         +------------+   |  +------------+
                                          |    |
                                          |    |
                                       Garden<==
                                        Park
                                       Country

That the dining-room and kitchen connect with the country and its
processes and products it is hardly necessary to say. Cooking may be so
taught that it has no connection with country life, and with the
sciences that find their unity in geography. Perhaps it generally has
been taught without these connections being really made. But all the
materials that come into the kitchen have their origin in the country;
they come from the soil, are nurtured through the influences of light
and water, and represent a great variety of local environments. Through
this connection, extending from the garden into the larger world, the
child has his most natural introduction to the study of the sciences.
Where did these things grow? What was necessary to their growth? What
their relation to the soil? What the effect of different climatic
conditions? and so on. We all know what the old-fashioned botany was:
partly collecting flowers that were pretty, pressing and mounting them;
partly pulling these flowers to pieces and giving technical names to the
different parts, finding all the different leaves, naming all their
different shapes and forms. It was a study of plants without any
reference to the soil, to the country, or to growth. In contrast, a real
study of plants takes them in their natural environment and in their
uses as well, not simply as food, but in all their adaptations to the
social life of man. Cooking becomes as well a most natural introduction
to the study of chemistry, giving the child here also something which he
can at once bring to bear upon his daily experience. I once heard a very
intelligent woman say that she could not understand how science could be
taught to little children, because she did not see how they could
understand atoms and molecules. In other words, since she did not see
how highly abstract facts could be presented to the child independently
of daily experience, she could not understand how science could be
taught at all. Before we smile at this remark, we need to ask ourselves
if she is alone in her assumption, or whether it simply formulates
almost all of our school practice.

The same relations with the outside world are found in the carpentry and
the textile shops. They connect with the country, as the source of their
materials, with physics, as the science of applying energy, with
commerce and distribution, with art in the development of architecture
and decoration. They have also an intimate connection with the
university on the side of its technological and engineering schools;
with the laboratory, and its scientific methods and results.

To go back to the square which is marked the library (Chart III, A): if
you imagine rooms half in the four corners and half in the library, you
will get the idea of the recitation room. That is the place where the
children bring the experiences, the problems, the questions, the
particular facts which they have found, and discuss them so that new
light may be thrown upon them, particularly new light from the
experience of others, the accumulated wisdom of the world—symbolized in
the library. Here is the organic relation of theory and practice; the
child not simply doing things, but getting also the _idea_ of what he
does; getting from the start some intellectual conception that enters
into his practice and enriches it; while every idea finds, directly or
indirectly, some application in experience, and has some effect upon
life. This, I need hardly say, fixes the position of the “book” or
reading in education. Harmful as a substitute for experience, it is
all-important in interpreting and expanding experience.

The other chart (IV) illustrates precisely the same idea. It gives the
symbolic upper story of this ideal school. In the upper corners are the
laboratories; in the lower corners are the studios for art work, both
the graphic and auditory arts. The questions, the chemical and physical
problems, arising in the kitchen and shop, are taken to the laboratories
to be worked out. For instance, this past week one of the older groups

[Illustration: Chart IV]

                          +------------+      +------------+
                          |            |      |            |
                          |  Physical  |      | Biological |
           Laboratories   |and Chemical|      | Laboratory |
             Research     |Laboratories|      |            |
                          |            +------+            |
                          |                                |
                          +-------+                +-------+
           University             |                |
                                  |     Museum     |
                                  |                |
             Library      +-------+                +-------+
             Museum       |                                |
                          |            +------+            |
                          |            |      |            |
                          |    Art     |      |    Music   |
                          |            |      |            |
                          |            |      |            |
                          +------------+      +------------+

of children doing practical work in weaving which involved the use of
the spinning wheel, worked out the diagrams of the direction of forces
concerned in treadle and wheel, and the ratio of velocities between
wheel and spindle. In the same manner, the plants with which the child
has to do in cooking, afford the basis for a concrete interest in
botany, and may be taken and studied by themselves. In a certain school
in Boston science work for months was centered in the growth of the
cotton plant, and yet something new was brought in every day. We hope to
do similar work with all the types of plants that furnish materials for
sewing and weaving. These examples will suggest, I hope, the relation
which the laboratories bear to the rest of the school.

The drawing and music, or the graphic and auditory arts, represent the
culmination, the idealization, the highest point of refinement of all
the work carried on. I think everybody who has not a purely literary
view of the subject recognizes that genuine art grows out of the work of
the artisan. The art of the Renaissance was great, because it grew out
of the manual arts of life. It did not spring up in a separate
atmosphere, however ideal, but carried on to their spiritual meaning
processes found in homely and everyday forms of life. The school should
observe this relationship. The merely artisan side is narrow, but the
mere art, taken by itself, and grafted on from without, tends to become
forced, empty, sentimental. I do not mean, of course, that all art work
must be correlated in detail to the other work of the school, but simply
that a spirit of union gives vitality to the art, and depth and richness
to the other work. All art involves physical organs, the eye and hand,
the ear and voice; and yet it is something more than the mere technical
skill required by the organs of expression. It involves an idea, a
thought, a spiritual rendering of things; and yet it is other than any
number of ideas by themselves. It is a living union of thought and the
instrument of expression. This union is symbolized by saying that in the
ideal school the art work might be considered to be that of the shops,
passed through the alembic of library and museum into action again.

Take the textile room as an illustration of such a synthesis. I am
talking about a future school, the one we hope, some time, to have. The
basal fact in that room is that it is a workshop, doing actual things in
sewing, spinning, and weaving. The children come into immediate
connection with the materials, with various fabrics of silk, cotton,
linen and wool. Information at once appears in connection with these
materials; their origin, history, their adaptation to particular uses,
and the machines of various kinds by which the raw materials are
utilized. Discipline arises in dealing with the problems involved, both
theoretical and practical. Whence does the culture arise? Partly from
seeing all these things reflected through the medium of their scientific
and historic conditions and associations, whereby the child learns to
appreciate them as technical achievements, as thoughts precipitated in
action; and partly because of the introduction of the art idea into the
room itself. In the ideal school there would be something of this sort:
first, a complete industrial museum, giving samples of materials in
various stages of manufacture, and the implements, from the simplest to
the most complex, used in dealing with them; then a collection of
photographs and pictures illustrating the landscapes and the scenes from
which the materials come, their native homes, and their places of
manufacture. Such a collection would be a vivid and continual lesson in
the synthesis of art, science, and industry. There would be, also,
samples of the more perfect forms of textile work, as Italian, French,
Japanese, and Oriental. There would be objects illustrating motives of
design and decoration which have entered into production. Literature
would contribute its part in its idealized representation of the
world-industries, as the Penelope in the Odyssey—a classic in literature
only because the character is an adequate embodiment of a certain
industrial phase of social life. So, from Homer down to the present
time, there is a continuous procession of related facts which have been
translated into terms of art. Music lends its share, from the Scotch
song at the wheel to the spinning song of Marguerite, or of Wagner’s
Senta. The shop becomes a pictured museum, appealing to the eye. It
would have not only materials, beautiful woods and designs, but would
give a synopsis of the historical evolution of architecture in its
drawings and pictures.

Thus I have attempted to indicate how the school may be connected with
life so that the experience gained by the child in a familiar,
commonplace way is carried over and made use of there, and what the
child learns in the school is carried back and applied in everyday life,
making the school an organic whole, instead of a composite of isolated
parts. The isolation of studies as well as of parts of the school system
disappears. Experience has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its
literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise
from aspects of the one earth and the one life lived upon it. We do not
have a series of stratified earths, one of which is mathematical,
another physical, another historical, and so on. We should not live very
long in any one taken by itself. We live in a world where all sides are
bound together. All studies grow out of relations in the one great
common world. When the child lives in varied but concrete and active
relationship to this common world, his studies are naturally unified. It
will no longer be a problem to correlate studies. The teacher will not
have to resort to all sorts of devices to weave a little arithmetic into
the history lesson, and the like. Relate the school to life, and all
studies are of necessity correlated.

Moreover, if the school is related as a whole to life as a whole, its
various aims and ideals—culture, discipline, information, utility—cease
to be variants, for one of which we must select one study and for
another another. The growth of the child in the direction of social
capacity and service, his larger and more vital union with life, becomes
the unifying aim; and discipline, culture and information fall into
place as phases of this growth.

I wish to say one word more about the relationship of our particular
school to the University. The problem is to unify, to organize
education, to bring all its various factors together, through putting it
as a whole into organic union with everyday life. That which lies back
of the pedagogical school of the University is the necessity of working
out something to serve as a model for such unification, extending from
work beginning with the four-year-old child up through the graduate work
of the University. Already we have much help from the University in
scientific work planned, sometimes even in detail, by heads of the
departments. The graduate student comes to us with his researches and
methods, suggesting ideas and problems. The library and museum are at
hand. We want to bring all things educational together; to break down
the barriers that divide the education of the little child from the
instruction of the maturing youth; to identify the lower and the higher
education, so that it shall be demonstrated to the eye that there is no
lower and higher, but simply education.

Speaking more especially with reference to the pedagogical side of the
work: I suppose the oldest university chair of pedagogy in our country
is about twenty years old—that of the University of Michigan, founded in
the latter seventies. But there are only one or two that have tried to
make a connection between theory and practice. They teach for the most
part by theory, by lectures, by reference to books, rather than through
the actual work of teaching itself. At Columbia, through the Teachers’
College, there is an extensive and close connection between the
University and the training of teachers. Something has been done in one
or two other places along the same line. We want an even more intimate
union here, so that the University shall put all its resources at the
disposition of the elementary school, contributing to the evolution of
valuable subject-matter and right method, while the school in turn will
be a laboratory in which the student of education sees theories and
ideas demonstrated, tested, criticised, enforced, and the evolution of
new truths. We want the school in its relation to the University to be a
working model of a unified education.

A word as to the relation of the school to educational interests
generally. I heard once that the adoption of a certain method in use in
our school was objected to by a teacher on this ground: “You know that
it is an experimental school. They do not work under the same conditions
that we are subject to.” Now, the purpose of performing an experiment is
that other people need not experiment; at least need not experiment so
much, may have something definite and positive to go by. An experiment
demands particularly favorable conditions in order that results may be
reached both freely and securely. It has to work unhampered, with all
the needed resources at command. Laboratories lie back of all the great
business enterprises of today, back of every great factory, every
railway and steamship system. Yet the laboratory is not a business
enterprise; it does not aim to secure for itself the conditions of
business life, nor does the commercial undertaking repeat the
laboratory. There is a difference between working out and testing a new
truth, or a new method, and applying it on a wide scale, making it
available for the mass of men, making it commercial. But the first thing
is to discover the truth, to afford all necessary facilities, for this
is the most practical thing in the world in the long run. We do not
expect to have other schools literally imitate what we do. A working
model is not something to be copied; it is to afford a demonstration of
the feasibility of the principle, and of the methods which make it
feasible. So (to come back to our own point) we want here to work out
the problem of the unity, the organization of the school system in
itself, and to do this by relating it so intimately to life as to
demonstrate the possibility and necessity of such organization for all
education.




                                   IV
           THREE YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL[1]


The school was started the first week in January, three years ago. I
shall try this afternoon to give a brief statement of the ideas and
problems that were in mind when the experiment was started, and a sketch
of the development of the work since that time. We began in a small
house in Fifty-seventh street, with fifteen children. We found ourselves
the next year with twenty-five children in Kimbark avenue, and then
moved in January to Rosalie court, the larger quarters enabling us to
take forty children. The next year the numbers increased to sixty, the
school remaining at Rosalie court. This year we have had ninety-five on
the roll at one time, and are located at 5412 Ellis avenue, where we
hope to stay till we have a building and grounds of our own.

Footnote 1:

  Stenographic report of a talk by John Dewey at a meeting of the
  Parents’ Association of the University Elementary School, February,
  1899; somewhat revised.

The children during the first year of the school were between the ages
of six and nine. Now their ages range between four and thirteen—the
members of the oldest group being in their thirteenth year. This is the
first year that we have children under six, and this has been made
possible through the liberality of friends in Honolulu, H. I., who are
building up there a memorial kindergarten along the same lines.

The expenses of the school during the first year, of two terms only,
were between $1,300 and $1,400. The expenses this year will be about
$12,000. Of this amount $5,500 will come from tuitions; $5,000 has been
given by friends interested in the school, and there remains about
$1,500 yet to be raised for the conduct of the school. This is an
indication of the increase of expenses. The average expense per pupil is
about the same since the start, _i. e._, $120 per child per school year.
Relatively speaking, this year the expenses of the school took something
of a jump, through the expense of moving to a new building, and the
repairs and changes there necessary. An increase in the staff of
teachers has also enlarged the work as well as the debits of the school.
Next year (1899–1900) we hope to have about 120 children, and apparently
the expenses will be about $2,500 more than this. Of this amount $2,000
will be met by the increase in tuition from the pupils. The cost of a
child to the school, $120 a year, is precisely the tuition charged by
the University for students and is double the average tuition charged by
the school. But it is not expected that the University tuition will come
anywhere near meeting the expense involved there. One reason for not
increasing the tuition here, even if it were advisable for other
reasons, is that it is well to emphasize, from an educational point of
view, that elementary as well as advanced education requires endowment.
There is every reason why money should be spent freely for the
organization and maintenance of foundation work in education as well as
for the later stages.

The elementary school has had from the outset two sides: one, the
obvious one of instruction of the children who have been intrusted to
it; the other, relationship to the University, since the school is under
the charge, and forms a part of the pedagogical work of the University.

When the school was started, there were certain ideas in mind—perhaps it
would be better to say questions and problems; certain points which it
seemed worth while to test. If you will permit one personal word, I
should like to say that it is sometimes thought that the school started
out with a number of ready-made principles and ideas which were to be
put into practice at once. It has been popularly assumed that I am the
author of these ready-made ideas and principles which were to go into
execution. I take this opportunity to say that the educational conduct
of the school, as well as its administration, the selection of
subject-matter, and the working out of the course of study, as well as
actual instruction of children, have been almost entirely in the hands
of the teachers of the school; and that there has been a gradual
development of the educational principles and methods involved, not a
fixed equipment. The teachers started with question marks, rather than
with fixed rules, and if any answers have been reached, it is the
teachers in the school who have supplied them. We started upon the whole
with four such questions, or problems:

1. What can be done, and how can it be done, to bring the school into
closer relation with the home and neighborhood life—instead of having
the school a place where the child comes solely to learn certain
lessons? What can be done to break down the barriers which have
unfortunately come to separate the school life from the rest of the
everyday life of the child? This does not mean, as it is sometimes,
perhaps, interpreted to mean, that the child should simply take up in
the school things already experienced at home and study them, but that,
so far as possible, the child shall have the same attitude and point of
view in the school as in the home; that he shall find the same interest
in going to school, and in there doing things worth doing for their own
sake, that he finds in the plays and occupations which busy him in his
home and neighborhood life. It means, again, that the motives which keep
the child at work and growing at home shall be used in the school, so
that he shall not have to acquire another set of principles of actions
belonging only to the school—separate from those of the home. It is a
question of the unity of the child’s experience, of its actuating
motives and aims, not of amusing or even interesting the child.

2. What can be done in the way of introducing subject-matter in history
and science and art, that shall have a positive value and real
significance in the child’s own life; that shall represent, even to the
youngest children, something worthy of attainment in skill or knowledge;
as much so to the little pupil as are the studies of the high-school or
college student to him? You know what the traditional curriculum of the
first few years is, even though many modifications have been made. Some
statistics have been collected showing that 75 or 80 per cent. of the
first three years of a child in school are spent upon the form—not the
substance—of learning, the mastering of the symbols of reading, writing,
and arithmetic. There is not much positive nutriment in this. Its
purpose is important—is necessary—but it does not represent the same
kind of increase in a child’s intellectual and moral experience that is
represented by positive truth of history and nature, or by added insight
into reality and beauty. One thing, then, we wanted to find out is how
much can be given a child that is really worth his while to get, in
knowledge of the world about him, of the forces in the world, of
historical and social growth, and in capacity to express himself in a
variety of artistic forms. From the strictly educational side this has
been the chief problem of the school. It is along this line that we hope
to make our chief contribution to education in general; we hope, that
is, to work out and publish a positive body of subject-matter which may
be generally available.

3. How can instruction in these formal, symbolic branches—the mastering
of the ability to read, write, and use figures intelligently—be carried
on with everyday experience and occupation as their background and in
definite relations to other studies of more inherent content, and be
carried on in such a way that the child shall feel their necessity
through their connection with subjects which appeal to him on their own
account? If this can be accomplished, he will have a vital motive for
getting the technical capacity. It is not meant, as has been sometimes
jocosely stated, that the child learn to bake and sew at school, and to
read, write, and figure at home. It is intended that these formal
subjects shall not be presented in such large doses at first as to be
the exclusive objects of attention, and that the child shall be led by
that which he is doing to feel the need for acquiring skill in the use
of symbols and the immediate power they give. In any school, if the
child realizes the motive for the use and application of number and
language he has taken the longest step toward securing the power; and he
can realize the motive only as he has some particular—not some general
and remote—use for the symbols.

4. Individual attention. This is secured by small groupings—eight or ten
in a class—and a large number of teachers supervising systematically the
intellectual needs and attainments and physical well-being and growth of
the child. To secure this we have now 135 hours of instructors’ time per
week, that is, the time of nine teachers for three hours per day, or one
teacher per group. It requires but a few words to make this statement
about attention to individual powers and needs, and yet the whole of the
school’s aims and methods, moral, physical, intellectual, are bound up
in it.

I think these four points present a fair statement of what we have set
out to discover. The school is often called an experimental school, and
in one sense that is the proper name. I do not like to use it too much,
for fear parents will think we are experimenting upon the children, and
that they naturally object to. But it is an experimental school—at least
I hope so—with reference to education and educational problems. We have
attempted to find out by trying, by doing—not alone by discussion and
theorizing—_whether_ these problems may be worked out, and _how_ they
may be worked out.

Next a few words about the means that have been used in the school in
order to test these four questions, and to supply their answers, and
first as to the place given to hand-work of different kinds in the
school. There are three main lines regularly pursued: (_a_) the
shop-work with wood and tools, (_b_) cooking work, and (_c_) work with
textiles—sewing and weaving. Of course, there is other hand-work in
connection with science, as science is largely of an experimental
nature. It is a fact that may not have come to your attention that a
large part of the best and most advanced scientific work involves a
great deal of manual skill, the training of the hand and eye. It is
impossible for one to be a first-class worker in science without this
training in manipulation, and in handling apparatus and materials. In
connection with the history work, especially with the younger children,
hand-work is brought in in the way of making implements, weapons, tools,
etc. Of course, the art work is another side—drawing, painting, and
modeling. Logically, perhaps, the gymnasium work does not come in here,
but as a means of developing moral and intellectual control through the
medium of the body it certainly does. The children have one-half hour
per day of this form of physical exercise. Along this line we have found
that hand-work, in large variety and amount, is the most easy and
natural method of keeping up the same attitude of the child in and out
of the school. The child gets the largest part of his acquisitions
through his bodily activities, until he learns to work systematically
with the intellect. That is the purpose of this work in the school, to
direct these activities, to systematize and organize them, so that they
shall not be as haphazard and as wandering as they are outside of
school. The problem of making these forms of practical activity work
continuously and definitely together, leading from one factor of skill
to another, from one intellectual difficulty to another, has been one of
the most difficult, and at the same time one in which we have been most
successful. The various kinds of work, carpentry, cooking, sewing, and
weaving, are selected as involving different kinds of skill, and
demanding different types of intellectual attitude on the part of the
child, and because they represent some of the most important activities
of the everyday outside world: the question of living under shelter, of
daily food and clothing, of the home, of personal movement and exchange
of goods. He gets also the training of sense organs, of touch, of sight,
and the ability to coördinate eye and hand. He gets healthy exercise;
for the child demands a much larger amount of physical activity than the
formal program of the ordinary school permits. There is also a continual
appeal to memory, to judgment, in adapting ends to means, a training in
habits of order, industry, and neatness in the care of the tools and
utensils, and in doing things in a systematic, instead of a haphazard,
way. Then, again, these practical occupations make a background,
especially in the earlier groups, for the later studies. The children
get a good deal of chemistry in connection with cooking, of number work
and geometrical principles in carpentry, and a good deal of geography in
connection with their theoretical work in weaving and sewing. History
also comes in with the origin and growth of various inventions, and
their effects upon social life and political organization.

Perhaps more attention, upon the whole, has been given to our second
point, that of positive subject-matter, than to any one other thing. On
the history side the curriculum is now fairly well worked out. The
younger children begin with the home and occupations of the home. In the
sixth year the intention is that the children should study occupations
outside the home, the larger social industries—farming, mining, lumber,
etc.—that they may see the complex and various social industries on
which life depends, while incidentally they investigate the use of the
various materials—woods, metals, and the processes applied—thus getting
a beginning of scientific study. The next year is given to the
historical development of industry and invention—starting with man as a
savage and carrying him through the typical phases of his progress
upward, until the iron age is reached and man begins to enter upon a
civilized career. The object of the study of primitive life is not to
keep the child interested in lower and relatively savage stages, but to
show him the steps of progress and development, especially along the
line of invention, by which man was led into civilization. There is a
certain nearness, after all, in the child to primitive forms of life.
They are much more simple than existing institutions. By throwing the
emphasis upon the progress of man, and upon the way advance has been
made, we hope to avoid the objections that hold against paying too much
attention to the crudities and distracting excitements of savage life.

The next two or three years, _i. e._, the fourth and fifth grades, and
perhaps the sixth, will be devoted to American history. It is then that
history, properly speaking, begins, as the study of primitive life can
hardly be so called.

Then comes Greek history and Roman, in the regular chronological order,
each year having its own work planned with reference to what has come
before and after.

The science work was more difficult to arrange and systematize, because
there was so little to follow—so little that has been already done in an
organized way. We are now at work upon a program,[2] and I shall not
speak in detail about it. The first two or three years cultivate the
children’s powers of observation, lead them to sympathetic interest in
the habits of plants and animals, and to look at things with reference
to their uses. Then the center of the work becomes geographical—the
study of the earth, as the most central thing. From this almost all the
work grows out, and to it the work goes back. Another standpoint in the
science work is that of the application of natural forces to the service
of man through machines. Last year a good deal of work was done in
electricity (and will be repeated this year), based on the telegraph and
telephone—taking up the things that can easily be grasped.

Footnote 2:

  This year’s program is published in the _Elementary School Record_.
  Address The University of Chicago Press for particulars.

In mechanics they have studied locks and clocks with reference to the
adaptation of the various parts of the machinery. All this work makes a
most excellent basis for more formal physics later on. Cooking gives
opportunity for getting a great many ideas of heat and water, and of
their effects. The scientific work taken up in the school differs mainly
from that of other schools in having the experimental part—physics and
chemistry—emphasized, and is not confined simply to nature study—the
study of plants and animals. Not that the latter is less valuable, but
that we find it possible to introduce the physical aspects from the
first.

If I do not spend a large amount of time in speaking of the music and
art work, it is not because they are not considered valuable and
important—certainly as much so as any other work done in the school, not
only in the development of the child’s moral and æsthetic nature, but
also from a strictly intellectual point of view. I know of no work in
the school that better develops the power of attention, the habit of
observation and of consecutiveness, of seeing parts in relation to a
whole.

I shall now say a few words about the administrative side of the school.
At the outset we mixed up the children of different ages and attainments
as much as possible, believing there were mental advantages in the
give-and-take thus secured, as well as the moral advantages in having
the older assume certain responsibilities in the care of the younger. As
the school grew, it became necessary to abandon the method, and to group
the children with reference to their common capacities. These groupings,
however, are based, not on ability to read and write, but upon
similarity of mental attitude and interest, and upon general
intellectual capacity and mental alertness. There are ways in which we
are still trying to carry out the idea of mixing up the children, that
we may not build the rigid stepladder system of the “graded” school. One
step in this direction is having the children move about and come in
contact with different teachers. While there are difficulties and evils
connected with this, I think one of the most useful things in the school
is that children come into intimate relation with a number of different
personalities. The children also meet in general assemblies—for singing,
and for the report of the whole school work as read by members of the
different groups. The older children are also given a half hour a week
in which to join some of the younger groups, and, if possible, as in
hand-work, enter into the work of the younger children. In various ways
we are attempting to keep a family spirit throughout the school, and not
the feeling of isolated classes and grades.

The organization of the teaching force has gradually become
departmental, as the needs of the work have indicated its chief
branches. So we now have recognized divisions of Science, History,
Domestic or Household Arts, Manual Training in the limited sense (wood
and metals), Music, Art (that is, drawing, water colors, clay modeling,
etc.), and Gymnasium. As the work goes on into the secondary period, the
languages and mathematics will also of necessity assume a more
differentiated and distinct position. As it is sometimes said that
correlated or thoroughly harmonized work cannot be secured upon this
basis, I am happy to say that our experience shows positively that there
are no intrinsic difficulties. Through common devotion to the best
development of the child, through common loyalty to the main aims and
methods of the school, our teachers have demonstrated that in education,
as in business, the best organization is secured through proper regard
for natural divisions of labor, interest, and training. The child
secures the advantage in discipline and knowledge of contact with
experts in each line, while the individual teachers serve the common
thought in diverse ways, thus multiplying and reinforcing it.

Upon the moral side, that of so-called discipline and order, where the
work of the University Elementary School has perhaps suffered most from
misunderstanding and misrepresentation, I shall say only that our ideal
has been, and continues to be, that of the best form of family life,
rather than that of a rigid graded school. In the latter, the large
number of children under the care of a single teacher, and the very
limited number of modes of activity open to the pupils, have made
necessary certain fixed and somewhat external forms of “keeping order.”
It would be very stupid to copy these, under the changed conditions of
our school, its small groups permitting and requiring the most intimate
personal acquaintance of child and teacher, and its great variety of
forms of work, with their differing adaptations to the needs of
different children. If we have permitted to our children more than the
usual amount of freedom, it has not been in order to relax or decrease
real discipline, but because under our particular conditions larger and
less artificial responsibilities could thus be required of the children,
and their entire development of body and spirit be more harmonious and
complete. And I am confident that the parents who have intrusted their
children to us for any length of time will agree in saying that, while
the children like, or love, to come to school, yet work, and not
amusement, has been the spirit and teaching of the school; and that this
freedom has been granted under such conditions of intelligent and
sympathetic oversight as to be a means of upbuilding and strengthening
character.

At the end of three years, then, we are not afraid to say that some of
our original questions have secured affirmative answers. The increase of
our children from fifteen to almost one hundred, along with a practical
doubling of fees, has shown that parents are ready for a form of
education that makes individual growth its sole controlling aim. The
presence of an organized corps of instructors demonstrates that
thoroughly educated teachers are ready to bring to elementary education
the same resources of training, knowledge, and skill that have long been
at the command of higher education. The everyday work of the school
shows that children can live in school as out of it, and yet grow daily
in wisdom, kindness, and the spirit of obedience—that learning may, even
with little children, lay hold upon the substance of truth that
nourishes the spirit, and yet the forms of knowledge be observed and
cultivated; and that growth may be genuine and thorough, and yet a
delight.

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                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
 2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The School and Society, by John Dewey

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