Schools of to-morrow
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Title: Schools of to-morrow
Author: John Dewey
Evelyn Dewey
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW ***
[Illustration: A test with books open. (Fairhope, Alabama.)
_Frontispiece_.]
SCHOOLS OF
TO-MORROW
BY
JOHN DEWEY
AND
EVELYN DEWEY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_First Printing, May, 1915._
_Second Printing, August, 1915._
_Third Printing, March, 1916._
_Fourth Printing, March, 1916._
_Fifth Printing, July, 1916._
_Sixth Printing, July, 1916._
_Seventh Printing, Jan’y, 1917._
_Eighth Printing, Jan’y, 1917._
_Ninth Printing, April, 1919._
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
There has been no attempt in this book to develop a complete theory
of education nor yet review any “systems” or discuss the views of
prominent educators. This is not a text book of education, nor yet an
exposition of a new method of school teaching, aimed to show the weary
teacher or the discontented parent how education should be carried on.
We have tried to show what actually happens when schools start out to
put into practice, each in its own way, some of the theories that have
been pointed to as the soundest and best ever since Plato, to be then
laid politely away as precious portions of our “intellectual heritage.”
Certain views are well known to every teacher who has studied
pedagogy, and portions of them form an accepted part of every theory
of education. Yet when they are applied in a classroom the public in
general and other teachers in particular cry out against that classroom
as a place of fads and caprices; a place lacking in any far reaching
aim or guiding principle. We have hoped to suggest to the reader the
practical meaning of some of the more widely recognized and accepted
views of educational reformers by showing what happens when a teacher
applies these views.
The schools we have used for purposes of illustration are all of them
directed by sincere teachers trying earnestly to give their children
the best they have by working out concretely what they consider
the fundamental principles of education. More and more schools are
growing up all over the country that are trying to work out definite
educational ideas. It is the function of this book to point out how the
applications arise from their theories and the direction that education
in this country seems to be taking at the present time. We hope that
through the description of classroom work we may help to make some
theories living realities to the reader. On the other hand, we have
dwelt on theoretical aspects in order to point out some of the needs of
modern education and the way in which they are being met.
The schools that are used for illustration were chosen more or less
at random; because we already knew of them or because they were
conveniently located. They do not begin to represent all that is
being done to-day to vitalize the school life of children. Schools
with like traits may be found in every part of the country. Space
has forced us to omit a very important movement--the reorganization
of the rural school and the utilization of agriculture in education.
But this movement shows the tendencies that mark the schools we have
described; tendencies towards greater freedom and an identification of
the child’s school life with his environment and outlook; and, even
more important, the recognition of the rôle education must play in a
democracy. These tendencies seem truly symptoms of the times, and with
a single exception proved to be the most marked characteristics of all
the schools visited.
Without the very material help and interest of the teachers and
principals of the schools visited this book would not have been
possible. We thank them most sincerely for the unfailing courtesy they
have shown in placing their time and the material of their classrooms
at our disposal. Our thanks are especially due to Mrs. Johnson of
Fairhope and to Miss Georgia Alexander of Indianapolis for information
and suggestions. The visiting of the schools with one exception was
done by Miss Dewey, who is also responsible for the descriptive
chapters of the book.
J.D.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I EDUCATION AS NATURAL DEVELOPMENT 1
II AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION AS NATURAL DEVELOPMENT 17
III FOUR FACTORS IN NATURAL GROWTH 41
IV THE REORGANIZATION OF THE CURRICULUM 60
V PLAY 103
VI FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 132
VII THE RELATION OF THE SCHOOL TO THE COMMUNITY 164
VIII THE SCHOOL AS A SOCIAL SETTLEMENT 205
IX INDUSTRY AND EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 229
X EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 251
XI DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 287
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
A TEST WITH BOOKS OPEN. (FAIRHOPE, ALA.) _Frontispiece_
(1) NATURE WOULD HAVE CHILDREN BE CHILDREN BEFORE
THEY ARE MEN. 8
(2) TEACH THE CHILD WHAT IS OF USE TO HIM AS A CHILD.
(TEACHERS’ COLLEGE, N. Y. CITY) 8
TO LEARN TO THINK, WE MUST EXERCISE OUR LIMBS.
(FRANCIS PARKER SCHOOL, CHICAGO) 15
(1) AN HOUR A DAY SPENT IN THE “GYM.” 30
(2) THE GULLY IS A FAVORITE TEXTBOOK. (FAIRHOPE, ALA.) 30
GAMES OFTEN REQUIRE MUSCULAR SKILL, READING, WRITING, AND
ARITHMETIC. (UNIVERSITY SCHOOL, COLUMBIA, MO.) 45
(1) THE BASIS OF THE YEAR’S WORK. (INDIANAPOLIS) 58
(2) PRINTING TEACHES ENGLISH. (FRANCIS PARKER SCHOOL,
CHICAGO) 58
SONGS AND GAMES HELP ARITHMETIC. (PUBLIC SCHOOL 45,
INDIANAPOLIS) 75
THE PUPILS BUILD THE SCHOOL-HOUSES. (INTERLAKEN SCHOOL,
IND.) 87
REAL GARDENS FOR CITY NATURE STUDY. (PUBLIC SCHOOL 45,
INDIANAPOLIS) 97
(1) MAKING A TOWN, INSTEAD OF DOING GYMNASTIC EXERCISES.
(TEACHERS’ COLLEGE PLAYGROUND, N. Y. CITY) 109
(2) GYMNASIUM DANCES IN SEWING-CLASS COSTUMES. (HOWLAND
SCHOOL, CHICAGO) 109
CONSTRUCTING IN MINIATURE THE THINGS THEY SEE AROUND THEM.
(PLAY SCHOOL, NEW YORK CITY) 118
USING THE CHILD’S DRAMATIC INSTINCT TO TEACH HISTORY.
(COTTAGE SCHOOL, RIVERSIDE, ILL.) 129
LEARNING TO LIVE THROUGH SITUATIONS THAT ARE TYPICAL OF
SOCIAL LIFE. (TEACHERS’ COLLEGE, N. Y. CITY) 140
SOLVING PROBLEMS IN SCHOOL AS THEY WOULD HAVE TO BE MET
OUT OF SCHOOL. (FRANCIS PARKER SCHOOL, CHICAGO) 159
THE PUPIL STAYS IN THE SAME BUILDING FROM DAY NURSERY
THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL. (GARY, IND.) 177
SPECIAL TEACHERS FOR SPECIAL SUBJECTS FROM THE VERY
BEGINNING. (GARY, IND.) 193
(1) THE BOYS LIKE COOKING MORE THAN THE GIRLS DO. 218
(2) MENDING THEIR OWN SHOES, TO LEARN COBBLING.
(PUBLIC SCHOOL 26, INDIANAPOLIS) 218
LEARNING MOULDING, AND MANUFACTURING SCHOOL EQUIPMENT.
(GARY, IND.) 255
REAL WORK IN A REAL SHOP BEGINS IN THE FIFTH GRADE.
(GARY, IND.) 269
(1) CHILDREN ARE INTERESTED IN THE THINGS THEY NEED TO
KNOW ABOUT. (GARY, IND.) 284
(2) MAKING THEIR OWN CLOTHES IN SEWING CLASS. (GARY, IND.) 284
TRAINING THE HAND, EYE, AND BRAIN BY DOING USEFUL WORK.
(GARY, IND.) 297
SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION AS NATURAL DEVELOPMENT
“We know nothing of childhood, and with our mistaken notions of it the
further we go in education the more we go astray. The wisest writers
devote themselves to what a man ought to know without asking what a
child is capable of learning.” These sentences are typical of the
“Émile” of Rousseau. He insists that existing education is bad because
parents and teachers are always thinking of the accomplishments of
adults, and that all reform depends upon centering attention upon the
powers and weaknesses of children. Rousseau said, as well as did, many
foolish things. But his insistence that education be based upon the
native capacities of those to be taught and upon the need of studying
children in order to discover what these native powers are, sounded the
key-note of all modern efforts for educational progress. It meant that
education is not something to be forced upon children and youth from
without, but is the growth of capacities with which human beings are
endowed at birth. From this conception flow the various considerations
which educational reformers since his day have most emphasized.
It calls attention, in the first place, to a fact which professional
educators are always forgetting: What is learned in school is at the
best only a small part of education, a relatively superficial part; and
yet what is learned in school makes artificial distinctions in society
and marks persons off from one another. Consequently we exaggerate
school learning compared with what is gained in the ordinary course
of living. We are, however, to correct this exaggeration, not by
despising school learning, but by looking into that extensive and more
efficient training given by the ordinary course of events for light
upon the best ways of teaching within school walls. The first years of
learning proceed rapidly and securely before children go to school,
because that learning is so closely related with the motives that are
furnished by their own powers and the needs that are dictated by their
own conditions. Rousseau was almost the first to see that learning is
a matter of necessity; it is a part of the process of self-preservation
and of growth. If we want, then, to find out how education takes place
most successfully, let us go to the experiences of children where
learning is a necessity, and not to the practices of the schools
where it is largely an adornment, a superfluity and even an unwelcome
imposition.
But schools are always proceeding in a direction opposed to this
principle. They take the accumulated learning of adults, material that
is quite unrelated to the exigencies of growth, and try to force it
upon children, instead of finding out what these children need as they
go along. “A man must indeed know many things which seem useless to a
child. Must the child learn, can he learn, all that the man must know?
Try to teach a child what is of use to him as a child, and you will
find that it takes all his time. Why urge him to the studies of an age
he may never reach, to the neglect of those studies which meet his
present needs? But, you ask, will it not be too late to learn what he
ought to know when the time comes to use it? I cannot tell. But this I
know; it is impossible to teach it sooner, for our real teachers are
experience and emotion, and adult man will never learn what befits
_him_ except under his own conditions. A child knows he must become
a man; all the ideas he may have as to man’s estate are so many
opportunities for his instruction, but he should remain in complete
ignorance of those ideas that are beyond his grasp. My whole book is
one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of
education.”
Probably the greatest and commonest mistake that we all make is to
forget that learning is a necessary incident of dealing with real
situations. We even go so far as to assume that the mind is naturally
averse to learning--which is like assuming that the digestive organs
are averse to food and have either to be coaxed or bullied into
having anything to do with it. Existing methods of instruction give
plenty of evidence in support of a belief that minds are opposed to
learning--to their own exercise. We fail to see that such aversion is
in reality a condemnation of our methods; a sign that we are presenting
material for which the mind in its existing state of growth has no
need, or else presenting it in such ways as to cover up the real need.
Let us go further. We say only an adult can really learn the things
needed by the adult. Surely the adult is much more likely to learn
the things befitting him when his hunger for learning has been kept
alive continuously than after a premature diet of adult nutriment has
deadened desire to know. We are of little faith and slow to believe.
We are continually uneasy about the things we adults know, and are
afraid the child will never learn them unless they are drilled into
him by instruction before he has any intellectual or practical use
for them. If we could really believe that attending to the needs
of present growth would keep the child and teacher alike busy, and
would also provide the best possible guarantee of the learning needed
in the future, transformation of educational ideals might soon be
accomplished, and other desirable changes would largely take care of
themselves.
It is no wonder, then, that Rousseau preaches the necessity of being
willing to lose time. “The greatest, the most important, the most
useful rule of education is: Do not save time, but lose it. If the
infant sprang at one bound from its mother’s breast to the age of
reason, the present education would be quite suitable; but its natural
growth calls for quite a different training.” And he says, again, “The
whole of our present method is cruel, for it consists in sacrificing
the present to the remote and uncertain future. I hear from afar the
shouts of the false wisdom that is ever dragging us on, counting the
present as nothing, and breathlessly pursuing a future that flies as we
pursue; a false wisdom that takes us away from the only place we ever
have and never takes us anywhere else.”
In short, if education is the proper growth of tendencies and powers,
attention to the process of growing _in the particular form in which
it goes on from day to day_ is the only way of making secure the
accomplishments of adult life. Maturity is the result of the slow
growth of powers. Ripening takes time; it cannot be hurried without
harm. The very meaning of childhood is that it is the time of growth,
of developing. To despise the powers and needs of childhood, in behalf
of the attainments of adult life, is therefore suicidal. Hence “Hold
childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good
or ill. Give nature time to work before you take upon yourself her
business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you
know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive
that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing,
and that a child ill taught is further from excellence than a child who
has learned nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his
early years doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy, nothing
to jump and run all day? He will never be so busy again all his life
long.... What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he
should waste part of his life?” Reverence for childhood is identical
with reverence for the needs and opportunities of growth. Our tragic
error is that we are so anxious for the results of growth that we
neglect the process of growing. “Nature would have children be children
before they are men. If we try to invert this order we shall produce a
forced fruit, immature and flavorless, fruit that rots before it can
ripen.... Childhood has its own ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling.”
Physical growth is not identical with mental growth but the two
coincide in time, and normally the latter is impossible without the
former. If we have reverence for childhood, our first specific rule
is to make sure of a healthy bodily development. Even apart from its
intrinsic value as a source of efficient action and of happiness, the
proper development of the mind directly depends upon the proper use
of the muscles and the senses. The organs of action and of reception
are indispensable for getting into relation with the materials of
knowledge. The child’s first business is self-preservation. This does
not mean barely keeping himself alive, but preservation of himself as
a growing, developing being. Consequently, the activities of a child
are not so aimless as they seem to adults, but are the means by which
he becomes acquainted with his world and by which he also learns the
use and limits of his own powers. The constant restless activities of
children seem senseless to grown-up people, simply because grown-up
people have got used to the world around them and hence do not feel
the need of continual experimentation. But when they are irritated
by the ceaseless movements of a child and try to reduce him to a
state of quiescence, they both interfere with the child’s happiness
and health, and cut him off from his chief means of real knowledge.
Many investigators have seen how a sound bodily state is a _negative_
condition of normal mental development; but Rousseau anticipated
our present psychology as to the extent in which the action of the
organs of sense and movement is a positive cause of the unfolding
of intelligence. “If you follow rules that are the opposite of the
established practice and instead of taking your pupil far afield,
wandering to distant places, far-off lands, remote centuries, the ends
of the world and to heavens themselves, you keep him to himself,
to his own concerns, he will be able to perceive, to remember, and to
reason in nature’s order of development. As the sentient infant grows
into an active being, his discernment keeps pace with his increase
in strength. Not till strength is developed beyond the needs of
self-preservation is the faculty of speculation manifested, for this is
the faculty of employing superfluous strength for other than necessary
purposes. Hence, if you would cultivate your pupil’s intelligence,
_cultivate the strength it is meant to control_. Give his body constant
exercise, make it strong and healthy in order to make him good and
wise; let him work, let him do things; let him run and shout; let him
be on the go.... It is a lamentable mistake to imagine that bodily
activity hinders the working of the mind, as if the two kinds of
activity ought not to advance hand in hand, and as if the one were not
_intended to act as guide to the other_.”
[Illustration: (1) Nature would have children be children before they
are men.]
[Illustration: (2) Teach the child what is of use to him as a child.
(Teachers College, N. Y. City.)]
In the following passage Rousseau is more specific as to the way in
which the physical activities which conduce to health and the growth
of mind reinforce each other. “Physical exercise teaches us to use our
strength, to perceive the relation between our own and neighboring
bodies, to use natural tools which are within our reach and adapted
to our senses.... At eighteen we are taught in our schools the use of
the lever; every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better
than the cleverest mechanician in the academy. The lessons the scholars
give one another on the playground are worth a hundredfold more than
what they learn in the classroom. Watch a cat when she first comes into
a room. She goes from place to place; she sniffs about and examines
everything. She is not still for a moment. It is the same with a child
when he begins to walk and enters, as it were, the room of the world
about him. Both use sight, and the child uses his hands as the cat her
nose.”
“As man’s first natural impulse is to measure himself upon his
environment, to find in every object he sees the qualities that may
concern himself, so his first study is a kind of experimental physics
for his own preservation. He is turned away from this, and sent to
speculative studies before he has found his own place in the world.
While his delicate and flexible limbs and keen senses can adjust
themselves to the bodies upon which they intended to act is the time to
exercise senses and limbs in their proper business--the time to learn
the relation between themselves and things. Our first teachers in
natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. To substitute books
for them does not teach us to reason; it teaches us to use the reason
of others rather than our own; it teaches us to believe much and to
know little.”
“Before you can get an art, you must first get your tools; and if you
are to make good use of your tools, they must be fashioned sufficiently
strong to stand use. To learn to think, we must accordingly exercise
our limbs, our senses, and our bodily organs, for these are the tools
of intellect. To get the best use of these tools, the body that
supplies us with these tools must be kept strong and healthy. Not only
is it a mistake that true reason is developed apart from the body, but
it is a good bodily constitution that makes the workings of the mind
easy and correct.”
The passage shows how far Rousseau was from considering bodily
development as a complete end in itself. It also indicates how far
ahead he was of the psychology of his own day in his conception of the
relation of the senses to knowledge. The current idea (and one that
prevails too much even in our own time) was that the senses were a sort
of gateway and avenue through which impressions traveled and then
built up knowledge pictures of the world. Rousseau saw that they are
a part of the apparatus of action by which we adjust ourselves to our
environment, and that instead of being passive receptacles they are
directly connected with motor activities--with the use of hands and
legs. In this respect he was more advanced than some of his successors
who emphasized the importance of sense contact with objects, for the
latter thought of the senses simply as purveyors of information about
objects instead of instruments of the necessary adjustments of human
beings to the world around them.
Consequently, while he makes much of the senses and suggests many
games for cultivating them, he never makes the mere training of the
senses an object on its own account. “It is not enough,” he says, “to
use the senses in order to train them; we must learn to judge by their
means--we cannot really see, hear, or touch except as we have learned.
A merely mechanical use of the senses may strengthen the body without
improving the judgment. It is all very well to swim, run, jump, whip a
top, throw stones. But we have eyes and ears as well as arms and legs,
and these organs are necessary for learning the use of the rest. Do
not, then, merely exercise strength, but exercise the senses as the
powers by which strength is guided. Make the best use of every one of
them, and check the results of one by another. Measure, count, weigh,
compare. Do not use force till you have estimated the resistance; let
estimation of the effect always precede application of the means. Get
the child interested in avoiding superfluous and insufficient efforts.
If you train him to calculate the consequences of what he does and then
to correct the errors of his prevision by experience, the more he does,
the wiser he will become.”
One more contrast between teaching which guides natural growth and
teaching which imposes adult accomplishments should be noticed. The
latter method puts a premium upon accumulating information in the form
of symbols. Quantity rather than quality of knowledge is emphasized;
results that may be exhibited when asked for rather than personal
attitude and method are demanded. Development emphasizes the need of
intimate and extensive personal acquaintance with a small number of
typical situations with a view to mastering the way of dealing with the
problems of experience, not the piling up of information. As Rousseau
points out, the facility with which children lend themselves to our
false methods is a constant source of deception to us. We know--or
fancy we know--what statements mean, and so when the child uses the
proper form of words, we attribute the same understanding to him. “The
apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. We fail to see
that this very ease proves that they are not learning. Their shining,
polished brain merely reflects, as in a mirror, the things we show
them.” Rousseau describes in a phrase the defect of teaching _about_
things instead of bringing to pass an acquaintance with the relations
of the things themselves. “You think you are teaching him what the
world is like; he is only learning the map.” Extend the illustration
from geography to the whole wide realm of knowledge, and you have the
gist of much of our teaching from the elementary school through the
college.
[Illustration: To learn to think, we must exercise our limbs. (Francis
Parker School, Chicago.)]
Rousseau has the opposite method in mind when he says, “Among the
many short cuts to science we badly need one to teach us the art of
learning with difficulty.” Of course his idea is not to make things
difficult for the sake of having them difficult, but to avoid the
simulation of learning found in repeating the formulas of learning, and
to substitute for it the slow and sure process of personal discovery.
Textbooks and lectures give the results of other men’s discoveries,
and thus seem to provide a short cut to knowledge; but the outcome is
just a meaningless reflecting back of symbols with no understanding
of the facts themselves. The further result is mental confusion; the
pupil loses his original mental sure-footedness; his sense of reality
is undermined. “The first meaningless phrase, the first thing taken
for granted on the authority of another without the pupil’s seeing
its meaning for himself, is the beginning of the ruin of judgment.”
And again: “What would you have him think about, when you do all the
thinking for him?” (And we must not forget that the organized material
of our texts and set lessons represents the thinking of others.) “You
then complete the task of discrediting reason in his mind by making him
use such reason as he has upon the things which seem of the least use
to him.”
If it was true in Rousseau’s day that information, knowledge, as an
end in itself, is an “unfathomable and shoreless ocean,” it is much
more certain that the increase of science since his day has made
absurd the identification of education with the mere accumulation of
knowledge. The frequent criticism of existing education on the ground
that it gives a smattering and superficial impression of a large and
miscellaneous number of subjects, is just. But the desired remedy will
not be found in a return to mechanical and meager teaching of the three
R’s, but rather in a surrender of our feverish desire to lay out the
whole field of knowledge into various studies, in order to “cover the
ground.” We must substitute for this futile and harmful aim the better
ideal of dealing thoroughly with a small number of typical experiences
in such a way as to master the tools of learning, and present
situations that make pupils hungry to acquire additional knowledge. By
the conventional method of teaching, the pupil learns maps instead of
the world--the symbol instead of the fact. What the pupil really needs
is not exact information about topography, but how to find out for
himself. “See what a difference there is between the knowledge of your
pupils and the ignorance of mine. They learn maps; he makes them.” _To
find out how to make knowledge when it is needed_ is the true end of
the acquisition of information in school, not the information itself.
CHAPTER II
AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION AS NATURAL DEVELOPMENT
Rousseau’s teaching that education is a process of natural growth
has influenced most theorizing upon education since his time. It has
influenced the practical details of school work to a less degree.
Occasionally, however, experimenters have based their plans upon his
principles. Among these experiments is one conducted by Mrs. Johnson
at Fairhope, Alabama. To this spot during the past few years students
and experts have made pilgrimages, and the influence of Mrs. Johnson’s
model has led to the starting of similar schools in different parts of
the United States. Mrs. Johnson carries on a summer course for training
teachers by giving a working object lesson in her ideas at Greenwich,
Connecticut, where a school for children has been conducted as a model.
Her main underlying principle is Rousseau’s central idea; namely:
The child is best prepared for life as an adult by experiencing in
childhood what has meaning to him as a child; and, further, the child
has a right to enjoy his childhood. Because he is a growing animal who
must develop so as to live successfully in the grown-up world, nothing
should be done to interfere with growth, and everything should be done
to further the full and free development of his body and his mind.
These two developments go on together; they are inseparable processes
and must both be constantly borne in mind as of equal importance.
Mrs. Johnson criticizes the conventional school of to-day. She says
it is arranged to make things easy for the teacher who wishes quick
and tangible results; that it disregards the full development of
the pupils. It is arranged on the fatal plan of a hothouse, forcing
to a sterile show, rather than fostering all-around growth. It does
not foster an individuality capable of an enduring resistance and of
creative activities. It disregards the _present_ needs of the child;
the fact that he is living a full life each year and hour, not waiting
to live in some period defined by his elders, when school is a thing
of the past. The distaste of children for school is a natural and
necessary result of such mistakes as these. Nature has not adapted the
young animal to the narrow desk, the crowded curriculum, the silent
absorption of complicated facts. His very life and growth depend upon
motion, yet the school forces him into a cramped position for hours at
a time, so that the teacher may be sure he is listening or studying
books. Short periods of exercise are allowed as a bribe to keep him
quiet the rest of the time, but these relaxations do not compensate
for the efforts which he must make. The child is eager to move both
mentally and physically. Just as the physical growth must progress
together with the mental, so it is in the separate acts of a child. His
bodily movements and his mental awakening are mutually dependent upon
each other.
It is not enough to state this principle without carrying its proof
into practice, says Mrs. Johnson. The child with the well-nourished,
active body is the child who is most anxious to do and to know things.
The need of activity must be met in the exercise of the school, hour by
hour; the child must be allowed to move about both in work and in play,
to imitate and to discover for himself. The world of objects around him
is an unexplored hemisphere to the child even at the age of six years,
a world constantly enlarging to his small vision as his activities
carry him further and further in his investigations, a world by no
means so commonplace to him as to the adult. Therefore, let the child,
while his muscles are soft and his mind susceptible, look for himself
at the world of things both natural and artificial, which is for him
the source of knowledge.
Instead of providing this chance for growth and discovery, the ordinary
school impresses the little one into a narrow area, into a melancholy
silence, into a forced attitude of mind and body, till his curiosity is
dulled into surprise at the strange things happening to him. Very soon
his body is tired of his task and he begins to find ways of evading
his teacher, to look about him for an escape from his little prison.
This means that he becomes restless and impatient, in the language of
the school, that he loses interest in the small tasks set for him and
consequently in that new world so alluring a little while ago. The
disease of indifference has attacked his sensitive soul, before he is
fairly started on the road to knowledge.
The reason for having a school where children work together is that
the child must learn to work with others. Granting this, Mrs. Johnson
has tried to find a plan giving the utmost liberty of individual
development. Because the young child is unfitted by reason of his soft
muscles and his immature senses to the hard task of settling down to
fine work on the details of things, he should not begin school life by
learning to read and write, nor by learning to handle small playthings
or tools. He must continue the natural course he began at home of
running from one interesting object to another, of inquiring into the
meaning of these objects, and above all of tracing the relation between
the different objects. All this must be done in a large way so that
he gets the names and bearings of the obvious facts as they appear in
their order. Thus the obscure and difficult facts come to light one
after another without being forced upon the child’s attention by the
teacher. One discovery leads to another, and the interest of pursuit
leads the child of his own accord into investigations that often amount
to severe intellectual discipline.
Following this path of natural growth, the child is led into reading,
writing, arithmetic, geography, etc., by his own desire to know. We
must wait for the desire of the child, for the consciousness of need,
says Mrs. Johnson; then we must promptly supply the means to satisfy
the child’s desire. Therefore, the age of learning to read is put off
until the child is well grounded in his experience and knowledge of
the larger relations of things. Mrs. Johnson goes so far as to prevent
children from learning to read at too early an age. At eight or nine
years, she thinks they are keen to explore books just as they have
previously explored things. By this time they recognize the need and
use of the information contained in books; they have found out they can
get this information in no other way. Hence, the actual learning to
read is hardly a problem; children teach themselves. Under the stimulus
of interest in arriving at the knowledge of some particular subject,
they overcome the mechanical difficulty of reading with ease and
rapidity. Reading is not to them an isolated exercise; it is a means of
acquiring a much-desired object. Like climbing the pantry shelves, its
difficulties and dangers are lost sight of in the absorbing desire to
satisfy the mental appetite.
Each of the subjects of the curriculum should be given to the child to
meet a demand on his part for a greater knowledge of relations than
he can get from studying objects. Arithmetic and abstract notions
represented by figures are meaningless to the child of six, but numbers
as a part of the things he is playing with or using every day are so
full of meaning that he soon finds he cannot get along without a
knowledge of them.
Mrs. Johnson is trying an experiment under conditions which hold in
public schools, and she believes that her methods are feasible for any
public school system. She charges practically no tuition, and any child
is welcome. She calls her methods of education “organic” because they
follow the natural growth of the pupil. The school aims to provide for
the child the occupations and activities necessary at each stage of
development for his unfolding at that stage. Therefore, she insists
that general development instead of the amount of information acquired,
shall control the classification of the pupils. Division into groups is
made where it is found that the children naturally divide themselves.
These groups are called “Life Classes” instead of grades. The first
life class ends between the eighth and ninth years; the second between
the eleventh and twelfth, and since an even more marked change of
interests and tastes occurs at the period of adolescence, there are
distinct high-school classes. The work within the group is then
arranged to give the pupils the experiences which are needed at that
age for the development of their bodies, minds, and spirits.
Doing forced tasks, assignment of lessons to study, and ordinary
examinations have no share in the Fairhope curriculum. Hence, the
children do not acquire that dislike of learning and mistrust of what
a teacher or text-book says, which are unfortunately so common among
scholars in the ordinary school. They exercise their instincts to learn
naturally, without that self-consciousness which comes from having been
forced to keep their minds on examinations and promotions.
Bright and intelligent children often acquire a distaste for the
schoolroom and what comes out of it, which they not only never wholly
outgrow but which is a real handicap to them as they grow up, often
preventing them from taking their college work seriously, and making
them suspicious of all ideas not actually deduced from their own
experience outside the classroom. Perhaps they grow so docile they
acquiesce in all authoritative statements whatsoever, and lose their
sense of reality. We tell our children that books are the storehouses
of the world, and that they contain the heritage of the past without
which we would be savages; then we teach them so that they hate books
of information and discount what a teacher tells them. Incompetency
is general not because people are not instructed enough as children,
but because they cannot and do not make any use of what they learn.
The extent to which this is due to an early mistrust of school and the
learning associated with it cannot be overstated.
The students at Fairhope will never have this handicap to contend with.
They are uniformly happy in school, and enthusiastically proclaim
their “love” for it. Not only is the work interesting to the group
as a whole, but no individual child is forced to a task that does
not appeal; each pupil may do as he pleases as long as he does not
interfere with any one else. The children are not freed, however,
from all discipline. They must keep at work while they are in school,
and learn not to bother their neighbors, as well as to help them when
necessary. Caprice or laziness does not excuse a child from following a
healthy or useful régime.
Mrs. Johnson feels that children in their early years are neither moral
nor immoral, but simply unmoral; their sense of right and wrong has
not yet begun to develop. Therefore, they should be allowed as much
freedom as possible; prohibitions and commands, the result of which
either upon themselves or their companions they cannot understand, are
bound to be meaningless; their tendency is to make the child secretive
and deceitful. Give a child plenty of healthy activity. When he must
be disciplined, do not appeal to a sense which he has not got, but
show him by a little pain if necessary what his naughty act meant to
his playmate. If he is to share in fun and good things with his family
and friends, he must behave so that they will want his company. This
is a motive which a young child can understand, for he knows when his
friends are agreeable or disagreeable to him. There is less in such a
scheme of discipline that impels the child to shirk or conceal, to lie
or to become too conscious of his acts, than in a discipline based on
moral grounds, which seems to the child to be a mere excuse for forcing
him to do something simply because some grown person wants it done.
Lack of self-consciousness is a positive gain on the side of happiness.
Mrs. Johnson’s scheme of discipline contributes toward that love
of school and work which all teaching aims to establish. When work
is interesting, it is not necessary to hamper children in their
performance of it by meaningless restrictions and petty prohibitions.
When children work willingly they come to associate learning with the
doing of what is congenial. This is undoubtedly of positive moral
value. It helps develop a confident, cheerful attitude toward work; an
ability to face a task without dislike or repulsion, which is of more
real value in character building than doing hard, distasteful tasks, or
forcing attention and obedience.
The division into age groups or “life classes” takes away that emphasis
upon the pupils’ failures and shortcomings which is bound to be more
or less evident where pupils are graded according to their proficiency
in books. The child who is slow mentally is not made to feel that he
is disgraced. Attention is not called to him and he is not prodded,
scolded, or “flunked.” Unaware of his own weaknesses, he retains the
moral support of confidence in himself; and his hand work and physical
accomplishments frequently give him prestige among his fellows. Mrs.
Johnson believes that the recitations and examination of the ordinary
schoolroom are merely devices to make the work easier for the teacher;
while the consciousness of what he does or does not “know,” resulting
from marks and grades, is harmful to the child just as an emphasis of
his failures is harmful.
Especially marked is the contrast of the classroom exercises at
Fairhope with recitations where, sitting still with their books closed,
the children are subject to a fire of questions from the teacher
to find out how much they remember of a lesson they are supposed to
have “studied” alone. To quote again from Rousseau: “He (the teacher)
makes a point of showing that no time has been wasted; he provides his
pupils with goods that can be readily displayed in the shop windows,
accomplishments which can be shown off at will.... If the child is
to be examined, he is set to display his wares; he spreads them out;
satisfies those who behold them, packs up his bundle, and goes his
way. Too many questions are tedious and revolting to most of us and
especially to children. After a few minutes their attention flags;
they cease to listen to your everlasting questions and they answer
at random.” At Fairhope the children do the work, and the teacher
is there to help them to know, not to have them give back what they
have memorized. Tests are often conducted with books open, since they
are not to show the teacher what the child can remember, but rather
to discover his progress in ability to use books. Lessons are not
assigned, but the books are open in the hands of the pupils and with
the teacher they discuss the text, getting out of it all the joy
and information possible. This stimulates a real love of books, so
that these children who have never been assigned a lesson to study,
voluntarily study the text after the class work. They are not tempted
to cheat, for they are not put in the position of having to show off.
The result of this system of discipline and study over and
above satisfactory progress in the “three R’s,” is freedom from
self-consciousness on the mental and moral side; the ability of a
child to put all his native initiative and enthusiasm into his work;
the power to indulge his natural desire to learn; thus preserving joy
in life and a confidence in himself which liberates all his energies
for his work. He likes school and forgets that he is “learning”; for
learning comes unconsciously as a by-product of experiences which he
recognizes as worth while on their own account.
The following activities have been worked out at Fairhope as a
substitute for the usual curriculum: physical exercise, nature study,
music, hand work, field geography, story telling, sense culture,
fundamental conceptions of number, dramatizations, and games. In the
second class map drawing and descriptive geography are added, for
reading is acquired, and the number work is modified by the knowledge
of figures. Each lesson is planned as a concrete experience with a
definite end in view, appealing to the child as desirable. As would be
expected from the emphasis put upon following the development of the
child, physical exercise plays an important part in the day’s work. It
comes every day, during the regular school hours and usually in the
first part of the morning while the children are fresh and energetic.
For an hour the school is outdoors in a field the children call “the
gym.” Bars, horses, etc., are scattered about, and there is some
one there to help them try new things and see that the work is well
balanced, but formal gymnastics in the accepted meaning of the term
do not exist. Mrs. Johnson believes that the distaste of children is
sufficient reason for doing away with them, and that, since the growing
child is constantly seeking of his own accord opportunities to stretch
and exercise his muscles, all the school needs to do is to supply the
opportunity, seeing to it that this is not indulged to the point of
harming the child. The children fall naturally into groups; those who
want to swing on the bars and rings, those who want to climb, to jump,
or run, or throw, etc. Running usually takes the form of races; a
tree is used as a target in the stone throwing contests. The children
themselves have invented games to use on the apparatus, and the hour
in the “gym” is one of the busiest in the day. It leaves the
children eager and stimulated for their mental work, since it has meant
no overworking of one set of muscles, no dull repetition of meaningless
movements at some one else’s command. Besides this regular time for
exercise, the children may study outdoors, and many of the classes
are conducted in the open air. Indoors there are games, handwork, and
dramatizations, all of which contribute to the physical well-being of
the children. There are no cramping desks, the pupil may sit where or
how he pleases, or even move from place to place if he does not disturb
his fellows. The classes go on in a room in which two groups, each of
fifteen or more children, are working, and the necessary quiet and
order exist.
[Illustration: (1) An hour a day spent in the “Gym.”]
[Illustration: (2) The Gully is a favorite textbook. (Fairhope, Ala.)]
Nature study and field geography are conducted almost entirely out of
doors. The children go into the fields and woods and look at the trees
and flowers, ask questions about them, examine the differences in bark,
leaves, and flowers, tell each other what they think, and use their
books to answer questions that the trees and plants have suggested
to them. They learn the meaning of the words pistils, stamens, and
petals with flowers they have gathered, or watch a bee carrying
pollen from plant to plant. Individual pupils are encouraged to tell
the class what they may have learned at home, to bring flowers from
their gardens, or to tell of things they have seen. The class visit a
neighboring truck farm, recognize as many vegetables as they can, and
learn the names and characteristics of the new ones. When they are
back in the schoolroom those that can write make a list of all the
vegetables they can remember, thus combining with their nature lesson
a lesson in writing. There is a garden in the school grounds where the
pupils learn to plow, rake, and plant, watch their seeds come up and
grow and flower. In a little plot of ground that is their own, they
observe all the phases in the cycle of plant life, and besides get
the benefits of the moral training that comes from carrying through a
piece of work that lasts several months and demands constant thought
and care. This sort of work plays a large part in the curriculum of the
younger children, for it seems to belong particularly to their world;
to the world of definite concrete objects which they see about them
every day, which they can handle and play with, and which consequently
arouse their curiosity.
The field geography is conducted in much the same way. Even the very
young children acquire a good idea of the different sorts of rock
formations, of the action of the wind and rain, of river currents,
by direct observation; if text-books are used they come afterwards,
to explain or amplify something the pupils have seen. The soil about
the school is clay and after a rain the smallest stream furnishes
excellent examples of the ways of rivers, erosions, watersheds, floods,
or changing currents, while an explanation of tides or the Gulf Stream
is made vital by a little trip to the Bay. A gully near the school
building not only furnishes a splendid place for play but serves as a
text-book in mountain ranges, valleys, and soil and rock formation.
All this serves as an excellent foundation and illustration for the
descriptive geography which comes later. The more advanced geography is
principally commercial geography; and with the scientific background
that the pupils have already obtained, the real significance of the
relations between climates and crops, industries, exports and imports,
and social conditions is much more likely to be understood.
The value of handwork is strongly emphasized at Fairhope, consistently
with the emphasis put on physical growth. The little child must go on
learning to coördinate with more and more skill his muscular movements
if his body is to be developed to the highest standards of health and
efficiency, and nothing contributes to this better than the controlled
and rather delicate motions necessary for making things with the hands.
The fact that he is making things gives just the stimulus the child
needs to enable him to keep on at the task, to repeat over and over
the same efforts of mind, hand, and eye, to give him real control of
himself in the process. The benefits of handwork on the utilitarian
side are just as great. The child learns how to use the ordinary tools
of life, the scissors, knife, needle, plane, and saw, and gets an
appreciation of the artists’ tools, paint and clays, which lasts the
rest of his life. If he is a child with initiative and inventiveness
he finds a natural and pleasant outlet for his energies. If he is
dreamy or unpractical, he learns a respect for manual work, and gains
something toward becoming a well-rounded human being. Boys and girls
alike do cooking and carpentry work, for the object of the work is not
to train them for any trade or profession, but to train them to be
capable, happy members of society. Painting or clay modeling play quite
as large a rôle, even with the little ones, as carpentry or sewing,
providing they serve a purpose or are sufficiently connected with
other work to hold the pupil’s interest. A sense of the beautiful is
not consciously present in small children and must be developed through
their handling of every-day objects if it is to become a real force in
their lives. Therefore “art” is taught as part of the handwork, the
story telling, the dramatization, or the nature study. The youngest
children in clay modeling, painting, weaving paper mats, making paper
or wooden toys, etc., are asked as much as possible to suggest things
they want to make. With the acquisition of skill, they go on making
more and more difficult objects; pupils of nine or ten make raffia
baskets, boats, and dolls’ furniture.
The story telling and dramatization are very closely connected and
(up to the age of about ten) take the place of the usual bookwork.
Stories of literary value, suited in subject matter to the age of the
pupils, are told or read to them, and they in turn are asked to tell
stories they have heard outside of school. After the ninth or tenth
year, when the children have learned to read, they read stories from
books, either to themselves or aloud, and then the whole class discuss
them. The Greek myths, the Iliad, and the Odyssey are favorites at
this age, and very frequently without directions from the teacher,
a class will act out a whole story, such as the Fall of Troy, or any
tale that has appealed especially to their dramatic imagination. The
school believes that this is the true way for young people to approach
literature, if they are to learn to love and appreciate it, not simply
to study the text for strange words and figures of speech. The pupils
are not allowed to use books until the eighth or ninth year, and by
this time they have realized so keenly their need, they beg for help in
learning. The long, tiresome drill necessary for six-year-old children
is eliminated. Each child is anxious to read some particular book, so
there is little or no need to trap his attention, or to insist on an
endless repetition. Mrs. Johnson believes also that it is better for
the natural physical and mental development of the child, if learning
to write and figure is put off as late as possible. Then pupils
approach it with a consciousness of their real need for it, of the help
it will be to them in their daily life. Their background of knowledge
of things and skill acquired through handwork renders the actual
processes of learning comparatively simple. Mrs. Johnson is convinced
that a child who does not learn to read and write in her school until
he is ten years old, is as well read at fourteen, and writes and
spells as well as a child of fourteen in a school where the usual
curriculum is followed.
The fundamental conception of number is taught orally. The smallest
children begin by counting one another or the things about them.
Then perhaps at the blackboard they will divide a line in half, then
into three parts, then quarters. By means of objects or lines on the
blackboard they next begin to add, to subtract, to take three-fourths,
even to divide. The oral drill in this kind of work is constant, and
the children become thoroughly familiar with the fundamental processes
of arithmetic, before they can write a number or know the meaning of
the addition or multiplication sign. Then when the time comes, at about
the age of nine, to learn to write numbers, the drill is repeated
by using the conventional signs instead of lines or objects. The
school has found that this method does away with the usual struggles,
especially in learning fractions and their handling. Long division
and the other complicated processes are taught after the pupils can
write well and easily, and no emphasis is put on formal analysis
until repeated drill has made the children fairly familiar with, and
proficient in, the process. Games and contests of all sorts invented
by the individual teacher are used to make this drill interesting to
the pupils.
Sense culture means the specific training of the child’s body and
muscles to respond accurately to the desire to perform definite
muscular or other sense acts; or more technically it means
motor-sensory coördination. Besides the general training coming from
handwork and physical exercise, special games are arranged to exercise
the different senses. The youngest class does relatively most of this
sense gymnastic. The whole class sits motionless and in absolute
silence; some child tiptoes from his seat to another part of the room,
and then with his eyes shut every other child tries to tell where he
is; or one child says something and the others try to guess who it was,
by the voice. To train the sense of touch, a blindfolded child is given
some ordinary objects, and by touching them tries to recognize them.
One of the favorite games of the whole school was invented to train
muscular accuracy. Children of different ages, divided into groups,
throw stones at a large tree in the yard. This game has all the zest
of competition, while teaching the eye and hand to work together, and
exercising the whole body. The unusual physical control of the Fairhope
pupils is seen best in the carpenter shop, where even the youngest
children work and handle full-sized tools, hammers, saws, and planes
and do not hurt themselves. There is a foot power jig-saw in the shop
and it is an instructive sight to see a child of seven, too small to
work the pedal, holding his piece of wood, turning and shaping it in
the saw without hurting himself.
The Fairhope pupils compare favorably with pupils in the ordinary
public schools. When for any reason they make a change, they have
always been able to work with other children of their age without
extra effort; they are apt to be stronger physically and are much more
capable with their hands, while they have a real love of books and
study that makes them equally strong on the purely cultural side of
their work. The organic curriculum has been worked out in detail and
in use longest for the younger children, but Mrs. Johnson is convinced
the principle of her work will apply equally well to high school pupils
and is beginning an experiment with high school children. Under her
direction the school has proved a decided success. Time and larger
opportunities will undoubtedly correct the weak spots and discrepancies
that are bound to appear while any school is in the experimental stage.
The school has provided conditions for wholesome, natural growth
in small enough groups for the teacher (as a leader rather than an
instructor) to become acquainted with the weaknesses of each child
individually and then to adapt the work to the individual needs. It has
demonstrated that it is possible for children to lead the same natural
lives in school that they lead in good homes outside of school hours;
to progress bodily, mentally, and morally in school without factitious
pressure, rewards, examinations, grades, or promotions, while they
acquire sufficient control of the conventional tools of learning and of
study of books--reading, writing, and figuring--to be able to use them
independently.
CHAPTER III
FOUR FACTORS IN NATURAL GROWTH
The Elementary School of the University of Missouri, at Columbia, under
the direction of Prof. J. L. Meriam, has much in common with Mrs.
Johnson’s school at Fairhope. In its fundamental idea, that education
shall follow the natural development of the child, it is identical, but
its actual organization and operation are sufficiently different to
make a description of it suggestive. In common with most educational
reformers, Professor Meriam believes the schools of the past have been
too much concerned with teaching children adult facts. In attempting to
systematize and standardize, the curriculum has ignored the needs of
the individual child. He believes that the work and play of the school
should be children’s work and play; that the children should enjoy
school. The life there should be like, only better than, the life of
the children outside the school; better because they are helped to know
how to play and work correctly and to do it with other children.
“Do children remember how they learned to talk? No, but their parents
remember for them. Yet most of us, both children and adults, remember
how we struggled in learning to read and write at school. We learned to
talk simply by talking when we were in need or had something to say.
We learned to say, ‘Please, Mamma, give me a drink,’ when we wanted a
drink. We did not practice on such words at nine o’clock each morning.
The pupils in the University Elementary School learn to read, to write,
to draw, and to do other things, just when they need to do so. The
pupils do in this school about what they would do at home, but they
learn to do it better. They work and play. At home they are very active
most of the time doing many things; and so they are in this school.”
What would these children naturally be doing if there were no school?
On the answer to this question Professor Meriam has based his
curriculum, which contains but one subject that appears on the ordinary
program; namely, handwork. They would, he says, be playing outdoors,
exercising their bodies by running, jumping, or throwing; they would
be talking together in groups, discussing what they had seen or heard;
they would be making things to use in their play: boats, bean bags,
dolls, hammocks, or dresses; if they live in the country they would
be watching animals or plants, making a garden or trying to fish.
Every one recognizes that the child develops quite as much through
such activities as through what he learns in school, and that what he
learns out of school is much more apt to become a part of his working
knowledge, because it is entirely pleasurable and he recognizes the
immediate use of it. Again, these occupations are all closely connected
with the business of living; and we send our children to school to
learn this. What, then, could be more natural than making the school’s
curriculum of such material? This is what Professor Meriam does. The
day is divided into four periods, which are devoted to the following
elements: play, stories, observation, and handwork. For the younger
children the work is drawn almost entirely from the community in which
they live; they spend their time finding out more about the things they
are already familiar with. As they grow older their interest naturally
reaches out to remoter things and to the processes and reasons back of
things; and they begin to study history, geography, and science.
The time of the first three grades is divided in this way: From 9 to
10:30, observation; 10:30 to 11, physical exercises; from 11 to 12,
play; 1:30 to 3, stories; and 3 to 4, handwork.
[Illustration: Games often require muscular skill, reading, writing,
and arithmetic. (University School, Columbia, Mo.)]
The observation period is devoted to the study of one topic, and this
topic may take only a single morning or it may take several weeks.
While there is a general plan for the year’s work, if the children
bring up anything which seems of importance to them and which fits in,
the program is laid aside and the teacher helps the pupils in their
study of their own problem. This might be true of any of the studies
of the day; the program is flexible, the school aims to meet the
individual needs of the child and the group. The observation periods of
the first three grades are devoted to a study of flowers, trees, and
fruits; birds and animals, of the weather and the changing seasons, of
holidays, of the town grocery store, or the neighborhood dwellings, and
the clothing that the children see for sale in the stores. The pupils
learn to read and write and figure only as they feel the need of it to
enlarge their work. The nature work is taught as much as possible out
of doors; the children take walks with the teacher and talk about the
trees, plants, and animals they meet on their way; they gather tadpoles
and fish for the school aquarium and pick out a tree to watch and
keep a record of for the whole year. Their study of the weather also
lasts through the whole year; they watch the changing seasons, what
things look like in the fall and what happens as winter begins, what
the plants and animals do in winter, etc. In this way they watch the
whole cycle of the year, and learn unconsciously the relation between
their own climate and the vegetation and animal life about them.
The study of their own food, shelter, and clothing is concentrated into
a consecutive period, and as interest and time dictate it is added to
by a study of some phases of local life that are not concerned with
the actual necessities of life. They learn about their neighbors’
recreations and pleasures by studying the jewelry store and the circus,
or the community interests of their parents by studying the local fire
department and post-office.
The method of study is the same for all work. First, with help from
the teacher the children tell all they know about the subject they are
beginning to study; if it is food, each child has an opportunity to say
anything he can think of about it; what his own family eats, where the
food comes from, how it is taken care of, what he has noticed in the
grocery stores, etc. Then the whole class with the teacher make a visit
to the grocery store, spend perhaps all the morning there, each child
trying to see how much he can find out for himself. Before they start
the teacher has called their attention to the fact that the things
are sold by the quart, etc., for the subject of weights and measures
seems to be of absorbing interest to the children when approached from
this side. Some first grade children have proved to be remarkably keen
detectives in noticing the grocer’s innumerable devices for making
quantities look greater than they are. The pupils are also encouraged
to note and compare prices, and to bring food budgets from home
whenever their parents are willing. When they return to their classroom
they again discuss what they have seen, and those who can write make a
list with prices of all the articles which they can remember, or write
an account of their visit, which is dictated by the teacher from the
oral accounts the children themselves have given of it.
The pupils who cannot read will draw a picture of the grocery store or
perhaps have a reading lesson in the catalogue the grocer has given
them. Later they will study the way the grocer delivers his goods to
his patrons, and in a very general way where the things come from.
They will bring grocers’ bills from home, compare them, add them up,
and discuss the question of economical and nutritious food. Perhaps
they will do the same thing with the milk and bakery business, before
moving on to the question of the houses in the neighborhood. This and
the clothing and recreation of the town will be studied in the same
way. Later the class will visit the fire department and the post-office
and find out what each is for and how they are conducted. This and
the study of local amusements usually come in the third grade. The
opportunity for the constant use of reading, writing, and arithmetic,
and for drill in the correct use of spoken English, is obvious.
Professor Meriam is insistent upon the fact that this study of the
community in which the child lives is made for the educational value of
the work itself to the pupil, never as a mere cloak for the teaching of
“the three R’s,” which must be done only as it contributes directly to
the work the children are doing.
The period devoted to games by the first three grades is of the same
educational value. The children are exercising their bodies, learning
to control them and to make skillful motions aimed at some immediate
result. Much variety and liberty is allowed in this work, and the
teacher is only an observer. Most of the games the children play are
competitive, for they have found that the element of skill and chance
is what the pupils need to make them work hard at the games. Bean
bags and nine pins are favorites; any game, in fact, where they can
keep score; the teacher acts as scorekeeper for the little children,
and when the game is over they copy the score in a folder to refer to
and see how they progress. The better they play, the more they enjoy
the game; so they watch the best player, studying how he moves and
stands, and make drawings. The teacher also writes on the board some
of the things the pupils say as they play, and at the end of the game
they find a reading lesson which they have made themselves and which
gives an account of their game; in copying this into their folders
they have a writing lesson. The children are allowed to talk and laugh
as much as they please while they are playing, and this is an English
lesson. Great variety is introduced into the games so as to encourage
the pupils to talk freely, and added stimulus is given by using
interesting things to play with, bright colored balls, dolls, and gaily
painted “roly-polys.” The new words and phrases the children use are
written down in the daily account of the game, and in this way their
vocabulary is enlarged in a natural way.
The hour devoted to stories is no more a reading and writing lesson
than all the rest of the day’s work. Children immensely enjoy good
stories, therefore they ought to be given plenty of opportunity to
become acquainted with them. During this period, the teacher and the
children tell stories to each other; not stories they have studied
from their primers, but stories that they already know, that they have
listened to, or read because they enjoyed them. Every child likes to be
listened to, and they soon discover they must tell their story well or
they will get no audience. Some stories they tell by acting them out,
others by drawing. Soon they want to learn a new group of stories, and
then, quite naturally, they go to the school library, pick out a story
book and read. It has been found that the first grade pupils read from
twelve to thirty books during the year; the second grade pupils from
twenty-five to fifty. In this way they learn to read, to read good
books--for there is nothing else in the library--and to read them well,
for they always have the desire to find a story to tell to their class,
or one that they can act. Appreciation of good literature begins very
early in this way, or rather, it is never lost. Very small children
always enjoy most the best stories--Mother Goose, Hans Andersen, or
Kipling’s “Just So Stories.” The dislike of books gained in school
turns children from literature to trash. But if children are allowed
and encouraged to hear, and read, and act out these stories in school
just as they would at home--that is, for the sake of the fun there is
in it--they will keep their good taste and enjoyment of good books.
Songs, says Professor Meriam, are another sort of story, and little
children sing for the fun of it, for the story of the song; so the
singing at this school is part of the story work, and the children work
and learn to sing better, in order to increase their enjoyment.
Children are always clamoring to “make something.” Professor Meriam
takes this fact as sufficient grounds for making handwork a regular
part of the curriculum and having it occupy an hour a day, a period
which usually seems so short to the pupils that they take their
work home. The youngest children, boys and girls alike, go into the
carpenter shop and learn to handle tools and to make things: furniture
for their dolls, a boat, or some present to take home. Weaving and
sewing interest both boys and girls alike and give scope to the young
child for beauty and utility, so they do a lot of it. The youngest
begin usually with dolls’ hammocks; then they learn to do coarse
cross-stitching and crocheting. An entire class, especially among
the youngest children, usually make the same thing at the same time,
but they may suggest what they want to make, and the older children
are allowed a great deal of liberty. The work naturally increases in
variety and complexity as the pupils grow older, and as they acquire
skill in the handling of tools. Some of the fifth and sixth grade boys
have made excellent pieces of furniture which are in constant use in
the school. The handwork furnishes another opportunity for drawing and
color work, in the making of drawings for patterns.
With the fourth grade there is a marked shift in the work, due to the
widening interests that are coming to the child. The day is divided
then into three periods, which are devoted to industries, stories, and
handwork. Organized games no longer appeal to the pupils; they want
their play outdoors, or in the freedom of a big gymnasium, where they
can play rougher, noisier games, and they are big enough to keep their
own scores in their heads. The “industries” period takes the place of
the “observation” of the younger children, and continues the same sort
of work. The child has learned the meaning of the immediate objects he
sees about him, their relation to himself and his friends, and he is
ready to go on and enlarge this knowledge so as to take in the things
he cannot see, processes and reasons, and relations that embrace the
whole community, or more communities, and finally the whole world.
In the same way that the younger children study their immediate
environment, the fourth grade studies the industries that go on in
their own neighborhood: the shoe factory, the flour mill, the work in
the wheat and corn fields. They go on excursions to the factory and
farm, and their work in the classroom is based on what they see on
their trips. Their writing and composition are the stories of their
trips, which they write; their reading, the books that tell about
farming or shoemaking; their arithmetic the practical problems they
find the farmer or foreman doing; all done so that it will contribute
to the pupils’ understanding of the industry he is studying. Geography
too comes from these trips. It answers the questions: Why do they grow
wheat? Where will it grow best in the neighborhood and why? etc. This
school happens to be situated in a small town where the industries are
chiefly agricultural, but obviously such a plan could easily be adapted
to any community by substituting the industries that are found in the
immediate neighborhood.
In the fifth and sixth years the study of industries is continued,
but the scope is extended to include the principal industries of the
world. Here, of course, pupils must learn to substitute more and more
the printed page for their former excursions. This includes drill in
reading, writing, and mathematics, related to earlier studies, and
also more and more geography. The use of the library becomes of great
importance, for the pupils are not given one text-book from which they
study and recite. Work in geography begins with this question: What
becomes of the things made in this town, which we do not use up? The
next step is: Where else are these same things made, and are they made
in the same way? What else is made in that place and how is it done?
Then, where and how are the things made that we get from elsewhere?
No one text-book could suffice for this work, and if it did it would
contradict the idea of the school that the children should learn by
investigation. They must find for themselves from among the books in
the library the ones that tell about the particular industry they
are studying. Every child does not read the same book, and as far as
possible each pupil makes some contribution to the discussion. Just as
in the lower grades, the older pupils all make folders where they keep
their descriptions of the industries and illustrations of machines and
processes.
In the seventh and highest grade in the school, the study of industries
is continued as history; that is, the history of the industries
connected with clothing, feeding, and housing is taken up. The pupils
study the history of shelter from the first beginnings with a cave or
a brush thicket, through the tents of the wandering tribes and the
Greek and Roman house, to the steel skyscraper of to-day. They study
the history of agriculture and learn to understand the development of
the steam reaper and thresher from the wooden stick of the savage.
The study of the industries in these four higher grades includes a
study of the institutions of government. The fourth grade studies the
local post-office, in the fifth and sixth they study the mail system
of the United States, and then how letters are carried to all parts
of the world. The seventh grade studies the history of some of these
institutions. Part of their time during the past year was devoted to
finding out how the different peoples of the world have fought their
battles and organized their armies, first by means of reading and then
by discussing what they had read. Each pupil kept a record of this
work, writing a short paper on the army of each country he studied and
illustrating it as he cared to.
The story period of the four highest grades continues the work begun
in the lower grades. Music and art become more and more concentrated
into it. The children continue reading and discussing what they have
read. Each pupil keeps a record of the books he reads with a short
account of the story and reasons why he liked it, and these records
are kept on a shelf in the library where any other pupil can consult
them for help in his choice of books. Even in high school, Professor
Meriam does not believe in teaching composition for its own sake, nor
literature by the usual method of analysis. All the work of the school
is a constant drill in English, and by helping the pupils to use and
write good English during every school hour, more is accomplished than
by concentrating the work into one hour of formal drill.
The teaching of French and German is also considered part of story
work. It is a study the pupils take for the pleasure they get from
talking and reading another language; for the sake of the literature
they will be able to read. For this reason it finds its place in the
curriculum among the things that are purely cultural: for recreation
and pleasure. The studies that come under the title of “stories” are
the only ones where homework is given. The children come to school to
do their work, and it is not fair to ask them to do this same work at
home as well. They should look forward to school as a pleasure, if they
are to get the utmost benefit out of it, but if the doing of set tasks
becomes associated with school work, the pupil’s interest in his work
in school is bound to diminish. If, however, some of the school work is
regarded as appropriate to leisure and recreation, it is natural that
the children should keep on with it out of school hours, in their homes.
The school has been working with this program for eight years, and
has about 120 pupils. The school building has few rooms and these are
connected with large folding doors. At least two and usually three
grades work in the same room, and the pupils are allowed freedom to
move about and talk to each other as long as they do not disturb
their classmates. One teacher takes charge of an entire room, about
thirty-five children, divided into several groups, each doing a
different thing. Individual teachers in some of the neighboring country
public schools have also followed the program through one grade and
have found that the pupils were all ready for promotion at the end of
the year and that they did their work in the next grade with as much
ease as if they had followed the usual formal drill. Records are being
kept of the graduates of the elementary school. Most of them go into
the high school of the university, where there is every opportunity to
watch them closely. They find no unusual difficulty in keeping up with
the regular college preparatory work, and their marks and the age at
which they enter college indicate that their elementary training has
given them some advantages over the public school pupils in ability to
do the hard formal studying.
Professor Meriam is also director of the high school, but has not as
yet changed the regular college preparatory curriculum, except in the
English. He expects to do so, however, and believes an equally radical
reorganization of the work will have beneficial results. In the high
school, English is not taught at all as a separate study, but work
on it is continued along the same lines followed in the elementary
school. A study of a certain number of graduates from the university
schools and an equal number from the town high school, has indicated
that the pupils who have received none of the usual training in English
during their high school course do better work in their English courses
in college than those who have followed the regular routine.
[Illustration: (1) Printing teaches English. (Francis Parker School,
Chicago.)]
[Illustration: (2) The basis of the year’s work. (Indianapolis.)]
Of course, judging an educational experiment by the pupil’s ability
to “keep up” with the system the experiment is trying to improve, is
of very little value. The purpose of the experiment is not to devise
a method by which the teacher can teach more to the child in the same
length of time, or even prepare him more pleasantly for his college
course. It is rather to give the child an education which will make
him a better, happier, more efficient human being, by showing him what
his capabilities are and how he can exercise them, both materially and
socially, in the world he finds about him. If, while a school is still
learning how best to do this for its pupils, it can at the same time
give them all they would have gained in a more conventional school, we
can be sure there has been no loss. Any manual skill or bodily strength
that their schooling has given them, or any enjoyment of the tasks
of their daily life and the best that art and literature has to offer,
are further definite gains that can be immediately seen and measured.
All contribute to the larger aim, but the lives of all the pupils will
furnish the only real test of the success or failure of any educational
experiment that aims to help the whole of society by helping the whole
individual.
CHAPTER IV
THE REORGANIZATION OF THE CURRICULUM
Rousseau, while he was writing his Émile, was allowing his own
children to grow up entirely neglected by their parents, abandoned
in a foundling asylum. It is not strange then that his readers and
students should center their interest in his theories, in his general
contribution to education rather than in his account of the impractical
methods he used to create that exemplary prig--Émile. If Rousseau
himself had ever tried to educate any real children he would have found
it necessary to crystallize his ideas into some more or less fixed
program. In his anxiety to reach the ideal described in his theories,
the emphasis of his interest would have unconsciously shifted to the
methods by which he could achieve his ideal in the individual child.
The child should spend his time on things that are suited to his age.
The teacher immediately asks what these things are? The child should
have an opportunity to develop naturally, mentally, spiritually, and
physically. How is the teacher to offer this opportunity and what
does it consist in? Only in the very simplest environment where one
teacher is working out her own theories is it possible to get along
without a rather definite embodiment of the ideal in specific materials
and methods. Therefore in reviewing some of the modern attempts at
educational reform, we quite naturally find that emphasis has been put
upon the curriculum.
Pestalozzi and Froebel were the two educators most zealous in reducing
inspiration got from Rousseau into the details of schoolroom work.
They took the vague idea of natural development and translated it
into formulæ which teachers could use from day to day. Both were
theorists, Froebel by temperament, Pestalozzi by necessity; but both
made vigorous efforts to carry their theories into practice. They
not only popularized the newer ideas about education, but influenced
school practice more than any other modern educators. Pestalozzi
substantially created the working methods of elementary education;
while, as everybody knows, Froebel created a new kind of school, the
kindergarten, for children too young to attend regular primary classes.
This combination of theoretical and practical influence makes it
important to discriminate between the points where they carried the
idea of education as growth forward, and the points where, in their
anxiety to supply a school program to be followed by everybody, they
fell back upon mechanical and external methods. Personally, Pestalozzi
was as heroic in life as Rousseau was the reverse. Devotion to others
took with him the place occupied by a sentimental egotism in Rousseau.
For this very reason, perhaps, he had a firm grasp on a truth which
Rousseau never perceived. He realized that natural development for
a man means a social development, since the individual’s vital
connections are with others even more than with nature. In his own
words: “Nature educated man for social relations, and by means of
social relations. Things are important in the education of man in
proportion to the intimacies of social relations into which man
enters.” For this reason family life is the center of education, and,
in a way, furnishes the model for every educational institution. In
family life physical objects, tables, chairs, the trees in the orchard,
the stones of the fence, have a social meaning. They are things which
people use together and which influence their common actions.
Education in a medium where things have social uses is necessary for
intellectual as well as for moral growth. The more closely and more
directly the child learns by entering into social situations, the
more genuine and effective is the knowledge he gains. Since power
for dealing with remoter things comes from power gained in managing
things close to us, “the direct sense of reality is formed only in
narrow social circles, like those of family life. True human wisdom
has for its bedrock an intimate knowledge of the immediate environment
and trained capacity for dealing with it. The quality of mind thus
engendered is simple and clear-sighted, formed by having to do with
uncompromising realities and hence adapted to future situations. It is
firm, sensitive and sure of itself.”
“The opposite education is scattering and confused; it is superficial,
hovering lightly over every form of knowledge, without putting any
of it to use: a medley, wavering and uncertain.” The moral is plain:
Knowledge that is worthy of being called knowledge, training of the
intellect that is sure to amount to anything, is obtained only by
participating intimately and actively in activities of social life.
This is Pestalozzi’s great positive contribution. It represents an
insight gained in his own personal experience; for as an abstract
thinker he was weak. It not only goes beyond Rousseau, but it puts what
is true in Rousseau upon a sound basis. It is not, however, an idea
that lends itself readily to formal statement or to methods which can
be handed from one to another. Its significance is illustrated in his
own early undertaking when he took twenty vagabond children into his
own household and proceeded to teach them by means of farm pursuits in
summer and cotton spinning and weaving in the winter, connecting, as
far as possible, book instruction with these active occupations. It
was illustrated, again later in his life, when he was given charge of
a Swiss village, where the adults had been practically wiped out for
resistance to an army of Napoleon. When a visitor once remarked: “Why,
this is not a school; this is a household,” Pestalozzi felt he had
received his greatest compliment.
The other side of Pestalozzi is found in his more official school
teaching career. Here also he attacked the purely verbal teaching of
current elementary education and struggled to substitute a natural
development. But instead of relying upon contact with objects used in
active social pursuits (like those of the home), he fell back upon
bare contact with the objects themselves. The result was a shift in
Pestalozzi’s fundamental idea. Presentation of objects by the teacher
seemed to take the place of growth by means of personal activities. He
was dimly conscious of the inconsistency, and tried to overcome it by
saying that there are certain fixed laws of development which can be
abstracted from the various experiences of particular human beings.
Education cannot follow the development going on in individual children
at a particular time; that would lead to confusion and chaos, anarchy
and caprice. It must follow general laws derived from the individual
cases.
At this point, the emphasis is taken from participation in social
uses of things and goes over to dependence upon objects. In searching
for general laws which can be abstracted from particular experiences,
he found three constant things: geometrical form, number, and
language--the latter referring, of course, not to isolated verbal
expressions but to the statement of the qualities of things. In this
phase of his activity as teacher, Pestalozzi was particularly zealous
in building up schemes of object-lesson teaching in which children
should learn the spatial and numerical relations of things and acquire
a vocabulary for expressing all their qualities. The notion that
object-lessons, by means of presentation of things to the senses, is
the staple of elementary education thus came from Pestalozzi. Since
it was concerned with external things and their presentation to the
senses, this scheme of education lent itself to definite formulation of
methods which could be passed on, almost mechanically, from one person
to another.
In developing such methods, Pestalozzi hit upon the idea that the
“order of nature” consists in going from the simple to the complex.
It became his endeavor to find out in every subject the A B C (as he
called it) of observation in that topic--the simplest elements that can
be put before the senses. When these were mastered, the pupils were to
pass on to various complications of these elements. Thus, in learning
to read, children were to begin with combinations like A B, E B, I B,
O B; then take up the reverse combinations B A, B E, B I, B O, etc.,
until having mastered all the elements, they could go on to complex
syllables and finally to words and sentences. Number, music, drawing
were all taught by starting with simple elements which could be put
before the senses, and then proceeding to build up more complex forms
in a graded order.
So great was the vogue of this procedure that the very word “method”
was understood by many to signify this sort of analysis and combination
of external impressions. To this day, it constitutes, with many people,
a large part of what is understood by “pedagogy.” Pestalozzi himself
called it the psychologizing of teaching, and, more accurately, its
mechanizing. He gives a good statement of his idea in the following
words: “In the world of nature, imperfection in the bud means imperfect
maturity. What is imperfect in its germ is crippled in its growth. In
the development of its component parts, this is as true of the growth
of the intellect as of an apple. We must, therefore, take care, in
order to avoid confusion and superficiality in education, to make
_first impressions of objects as correct and as complete as possible_.
We must begin with the infant in the cradle, and take the training
of the race out of the hands of blind sportive nature, and bring it
under the power which the experience of the centuries has taught us to
abstract from nature’s own processes.”
These sentences might be given a meaning to which no one could
object. All of the educational reformers have rightly insisted upon
the importance of the first years in which fundamental attitudes
controlling later growth are fixed. There can be no doubt that if we
could regulate the earlier relations of children to the world about
them so that _all_ ideas gained are certain, solid, definite, and right
as far as they go, we might give children unconscious, intellectual
standards which would operate later on with an efficacy quite foreign
to our present experience. But the certainty and definiteness of
geometrical forms, and of isolated qualities of objects are artificial.
Correctness and completeness are gained at the expense of isolation
from the every-day human experience of the child. It is possible for
a child to learn the various properties of squares, rectangles, etc.,
and to acquire their names. But unless the squares and rectangles enter
into his purposeful activities he is merely accumulating scholastic
information. Undoubtedly it is better that the child should learn the
names in association with the objects than to learn mere strings of
words. But one is almost as far from real development as the other.
Both are very far from the “firm, sensitive, and sure knowledge” which
comes from using things for ends which appeal to the child. The things
that the child uses in his household occupations, in gardening, in
caring for animals, in his plays and games, have real simplicity and
completeness of meaning for him. The simplicity of straight lines,
angles, and quantities put before him just to be learned is mechanical
and abstract.
For a long time the practical influence of Pestalozzi was confined to
expelling from the schools reliance upon memorizing words that had no
connection with things; to bringing object-lessons into the schools,
and to breaking up every topic into its elements, or A B C, and then
going on by graded steps. The failure of these methods to supply
motives and to give real power made many teachers realize that things
which the child has a use for are really simpler and more complete
to him, even if he doesn’t understand _everything_ about them, than
isolated elements. In the newer type of schools, there is a marked
return (though of course quite independently of any reference to
Pestalozzi) to his earlier and more vital idea of learning by taking a
share in occupations and pursuits which are like those of daily life
and which are engaged in by the friends about him.
Different schools have worked the matter out in different ways. In the
Montessori schools there is still a good deal of effort to control
the growth of mind by the material presented. In others, as in the
Fairhope experiment, the material is incidental and informal, and the
curriculum follows the direct needs of the pupils.
Most schools fall, of course, between these two currents. The child
must develop, and naturally, but society has become so complicated,
its demands upon the child are so important and continuous, that a
great deal must be presented to him. Nature is a very extensive as
well as compact thing in modern life, including not only the intricate
material environment of the child, but social relations as well. If
the child is to master these he must cover a great deal of ground. How
is this to be done in the best way? Methods and materials must be used
which are in themselves vital enough to represent to the child the
whole of this compact nature which constitutes his world. The child
and the curriculum are two operative forces, both of them developing
and reacting on each other. In visiting schools the things that are
interesting and helpful to the average school teacher are the methods,
and the curriculum, the way the pupils spend their time; that is, the
way the adjustment between the child and his environment is brought
about.
“Learning by doing” is a slogan that might almost be offered as a
general description of the way in which many teachers are trying to
effect this adjustment. The hardest lesson a child has to learn is a
practical one, and if he fails to learn it no amount of book knowledge
will make up for it: it is this very problem of adjustment with his
neighbors and his job. A practical method naturally suggests itself as
the easiest and best way of solving this problem. On the face of it,
the various studies--arithmetic, geography, language, botany, etc.--are
in themselves experiences. They are the accumulation of the past of
humanity, the result of its efforts and successes, for generation
after generation. The ordinary school studies present this not as a
mere accumulation, not as a miscellaneous heap of separate bits of
experience, but in some organized way. Hence, the daily experiences
of the child, his life from day to day, and the subject matter of the
schoolroom, are parts of the same thing; they are the first and last
steps in the life of a people. To oppose one to the other is to oppose
the infancy and maturity of the same growing life; it is to set the
moving tendency and the final result of the same power over against
each other; it is to hold that the nature and the destiny of the child
war with each other.
The studies represent the highest development possible in the child’s
simple every-day experiences. The task of the school is to take
these crude experiences and organize them into science, geography,
arithmetic, or whatever the lesson of the hour is. Since what the child
already knows is part of some one subject that the teacher is trying to
teach him, the method that will take advantage of this experience as a
foundation stone on which to build the child’s conscious knowledge of
the subject appears as the normal and progressive way of teaching. And
if we can enlarge the child’s experience by methods which resemble as
nearly as possible the ways that the child has acquired his beginning
experiences, it is obvious that we have made a great gain in the
effectiveness of our teaching. It is a commonplace that until a child
goes to school he learns nothing that has not some direct bearing on
his life. How he acquires this knowledge, is the question that will
furnish the clew for natural school method. And the answer is, not by
reading books or listening to explanations of the nature of fire or
food, but by burning himself and feeding himself; that is, by doing
things. Therefore, says the modern teacher, he ought to do things in
school.
Education which ignores this vital impulse furnished by the child is
apt to be “academic,” “abstract,” in the bad sense of these words.
If text-books are used as the sole material, the work is much harder
for the teacher, for besides teaching everything herself she must
constantly repress and cut off the impulses of the child towards
action. Teaching becomes an external presentation lacking meaning and
purpose as far as the child is concerned. Facts which are not led up to
out of something which has previously occupied a significant place for
its own sake in the child’s life, are apt to be barren and dead. They
are hieroglyphs which the pupil is required to study and learn while
he is in school. It is only after the child has learned the same fact
out of school, in the activities of real life, that it begins to mean
anything to him. The number of isolated facts to which this can happen,
which appear, say, in a geography text-book, are necessarily very small.
For the specialist in any one subject the material is all classified
and arranged, but before it can be put in a child’s text-book it must
be simplified and greatly reduced in bulk. The thought provoking
character is obscured and the organizing function disappears.
The child’s reasoning powers, the faculty of abstraction and
generalization, are not adequately developed. This does not mean
that the text-book must disappear, but that its function is changed.
It becomes a guide for the pupil by which he may economize time and
mistakes. The teacher and the book are no longer the only instructors;
the hands, the eyes, the ears, in fact the whole body, become sources
of information, while teacher and text-book become respectively the
starter and the tester. No book or map is a substitute for personal
experience; they cannot take the place of the actual journey. The
mathematical formula for a falling body does not take the place of
throwing stones or shaking apples from a tree.
Learning by doing does not, of course, mean the substitution of manual
occupations or handwork for text-book studying. At the same time,
allowing the pupils to do handwork whenever there is opportunity for
it, is a great aid in holding the child’s attention and interest.
[Illustration: Songs and games help arithmetic. (Public School 45,
Indianapolis.)]
Public School 45 of the Indianapolis school system is trying a number
of experiments where the children may be said to be learning by doing.
The work done is that required by the state curriculum, but the
teachers are constantly finding new ways to prevent the work becoming a
mere drill in text-book facts, or preparation for examinations. In the
fifth grade, class activities were centered around a bungalow that
the children were making. The boys in the class made the bungalow in
their manual training hours. But before they started it every pupil had
drawn a plan to scale of the house, and worked out, in their arithmetic
period, the amount and cost of the lumber they would need, both for
their own play bungalow and for a full sized one; they had done a large
number of problems taken from the measurements for the house, such as
finding the floor and wall areas and air space of each room, etc. The
children very soon invented a family for their house and decided they
would have them live on a farm. The arithmetic work was then based on
the whole farm. First this was laid out for planting, plans were drawn
to scale, and from information the children themselves gathered they
made their own problems, basing them on their play farm: such as the
size of the corn field, how many bushels of seeds would be needed to
plant it; how big a crop they could expect, and how much profit. The
children showed great interest and ingenuity in inventing problems
containing the particular arithmetical process they were learning and
which still would fit their farm. They built fences, cement sidewalks,
a brick wall, did the marketing for the family, sold the butter, milk
and eggs, and took out fire insurance. When they were papering the
house the number of area problems connected with buying, cutting, and
fitting the paper, were enough to give them all the necessary drill in
measurement of areas.
English work centered in much the same way around the building of the
bungalow and the life of its inhabitants. The spelling lessons came
from the words they were using in connection with the building, etc.
The plans for the completed bungalow, a description of the house and
the furnishings, or the life of the family that dwelt in it, furnished
inexhaustible material for compositions and writing lessons. Criticism
of these compositions as they were read aloud to the class by their
authors became work in rhetoric; even the grammar work became more
interesting because the sentences were about the farm.
Art lessons were also drawn from the work the children were actually
doing in building and furnishing the house. The pupils were very
anxious that their house should be beautiful, so the color scheme for
both the inside and outside furnished a number of problems in coloring
and arrangement. Later they found large opportunities for design,
in making wallpaper for the house, choosing and then decorating
curtains and upholstery. Each pupil made his own design, and then the
whole class decided which one they wanted to use. The pupils also
designed and made clay tiles for the bathroom floor and wall, and
planned and laid out a flower garden. The girls designed and made
clothes for the doll inmates of the house. The whole class enjoyed
their drawing lessons immensely because they drew each other posing
as different members of the family in their different occupations on
the farm. The work of this grade in expression consisted principally
in dramatizations of the life on the farm which the children worked
out for themselves. Not only were the children “learning by doing” in
the sense that nearly all the school work centered around activities
which had intrinsic meaning and value to the pupils, but most of the
initiative for the work came from the children themselves. They made
their own number problems; suggested the next step in the work on the
house; criticised each other’s compositions, and worked out their own
dramatizations.
In almost all the grades in the school the pupils were conducting
the recitations themselves whenever there was an opportunity. One
pupil took charge of the class, calling on the others to recite; the
teacher becoming a mere observer unless her interference was necessary
to correct an error or keep the lesson to the point. When the class
is not actually in charge of a pupil, every method is used to have
the children do all the work, not to keep all the responsibility and
initiative in the hands of the teacher. The pupils are encouraged to
ask each other questions, to make their objections and corrections
aloud, and to think out for themselves each problem as it comes up.
This is not done by giving a class a set lesson in a text-book as an
introduction to a new problem, but by suggesting the problem to the
class and by means of questions and discussion, helped out whenever
possible by actual experiments by the pupils, trying to bring out
the solution of the problem, or at the least to give the pupil an
understanding of what the problem is about before he sees it in print.
The method can be applied to all the classroom work, but one
illustration taken from a geography lesson is especially suggestive.
One grade was studying the Panama Canal, and had great difficulty in
understanding the purpose or working of the canal, and especially
the locks; in other words, they were not intellectually interested
in what the teacher told them. She changed her method entirely and
starting from the beginning, asked the class to pretend that Japan and
the United States were at war, and that they were the Government at
Washington and had to run the army. They at once became interested,
and discovered that a canal across Panama was a necessity if the
United States’ ships were to arrive in the Pacific in time to defend
the coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The mountain range seemed an
impossible barrier, until the locks were explained to them again, when
they seized the principle. Many of them, indeed, became so interested
that they made models of locks at home to bring to school. They used
the map freely and accurately in their interest in saving the country
from invasion, but until one pupil asked why the United States did not
actually build a canal across the Isthmus, they did not notice that
their exciting game had anything to do with the puzzling facts that
they had previously been trying to memorize from their text-book.
The teachers in the school make use of any illustrations from the
practical life about them that fit in well with the work the grade
is doing. Thus the third grade set up a parcel post system in their
classroom, basing all their English and arithmetic work on it for
some time, and learning to use a map and scales and weights as well.
A retail shoe store gave the first grade plenty of work and fun, and
games and dances with little songs have proved a great help in their
number work. Most of the furniture in the school office was made by the
big boys in their shop work, and several of the rooms are decorated
with stencil designs the pupils made in their art lessons. The number
work of the whole school is taught from the concrete side. The little
children have boxes of tooth-picks and paper counters, which they
use for adding and subtracting; the older pupils may tear paper or
draw squares when they are learning a new process. The class is given
something to do which illustrates the process to be taught; then the
children themselves analyze what they have done and, as the last step,
they do examples with pure numbers.
Many of the public schools of Chicago are also trying in every way
possible to vitalize their work; to introduce into the curriculum
material which the children themselves can handle and from which
they may get their own lessons. This work is fitted into the regular
curriculum; it is not dependent on any peculiarities of an individual
teacher, but may be introduced throughout the entire system, just
as text-books are now uniform through a large number of schools.
The work has been applied principally in history and civics for the
younger grades, but it is easy to imagine how the same sort of thing
could be used in geography or some of the other subjects. The history
in the younger grades is taught largely by means of sand tables. The
children are perhaps studying the primitive methods of building houses,
and on their sand table they build a brush house, a cave dwelling, a
tree house, or an eskimo snow hut. The children themselves do all the
work. The teacher steps in with advice and help only when necessary
to prevent real errors, but the pupils are given the problem of the
manufacture of the house they are studying, and are expected to solve
it for themselves. Sand tables are used in the same way by a third
grade in their study of the early history of Chicago. They mold the
sand into a rough relief map of the neighborhood and then with twigs
build the forts and log cabins of the first frontier settlement, with
an Indian encampment just outside the stockade. They put real water
in their lake and river, and float canoes in it. Other grades do the
same thing with the history of transportation among the first settlers
in this country, and with the logging and lumber industry. The older
grades are studying the government of their city, and make sand tables
to illustrate the different departments of city government. One room
has a life-saving station, with different types of boats, and life
lines that work. Others have the telephone, mail carrier, and parcel
posts systems, and a system of street cleaning of which the children
are particularly proud, because they have copied conditions which they
actually found in some of the alleys near the school buildings. Beside
the alleys which were dirty, like those in the neighborhood, they have
constructed a model alley with sanitary garbage appliances made on the
best plane based on what the teacher has told them about systems in
other cities.
In another building all the pupils above the fourth grade have
organized into civic clubs. They divided the school district into
smaller districts and one club took charge of each district, making
surveys and maps of their own territory, counting lamp posts, alleys,
and garbage cans, and the number of policemen, or going intensively
into the one thing which interested them most. Then each club
decided what they wanted to do for their own district and set out to
accomplish it, whether it was the cleaning up of a bad alley or the
better lighting of a street. They used all the methods that an adult
citizens’ club would employ, writing letters to the city departments,
calling at the City Hall, and besides actually went into the alleys
and cleaned them up. The interest and enthusiasm of the pupils in
this work was remarkable and they are now undertaking a campaign to
get a playground for the school, by means of advertising and holding
neighborhood meetings. The English work in these grades is based on the
work of the clubs; the pupils keep track of the work they do, make maps
and write letters.
Most of the hand and industrial work, which is not taught for strictly
vocational purposes illustrates the principles which “learning by
doing” stand for. Examples of this are to be found in nearly all
schools to-day which aim to be progressive. Many school systems all
over the country have tried having a printing press operated by pupils
with great success. The presses were installed not to teach the pupils
the different processes in the trade, but so that the children might
themselves print some of the pamphlets, posters, or other papers that
any school is constantly needing. Besides the interest that the pupils
have shown in setting up the type, operating the presses, and getting
out the printed matter, the work has proved itself especially valuable
in the teaching of English. Type setting is an excellent method of
drilling in spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and grammar, for
the fact that the copy is going to be printed furnishes a motive for
eliminating mistakes which exercises written by a pupil for his teacher
never provides. Proofreading is another exercise of the same sort. In
such schools the press publishes practically all the printed matter
that is needed during the year, including spelling lists, programs, and
school papers.
Schools are trying all sorts of experiments to make the work in
English concrete. The text-book method of teaching--learning rules and
definitions and then doing exercises in their application--has proved
unsuccessful. Every teacher is familiar with the story of the boy who
wrote, “I have gone,” on a piece of paper fifty times, in order to
impress the correct form on his mind, and then on the bottom of the
page left a note for the teacher beginning, “I have went home.” A
purpose in English work seems absolutely necessary, for the child sees
no gain in efficiency in the things he is most interested in due to
progress in isolated grammar or spelling. When the progress is brought
about as a by-product of the scholars’ other work the case is quite
otherwise. Give him a reason for writing, for spelling, punctuating,
and paragraphing, for using his verbs correctly, and improvement
becomes a natural demand of experience. Mr. Wirt in the Gary, Ind.,
schools has found this so true that the regular English required by
the state curriculum has been supplemented by “application periods in
English.” In these hours the class in carpentry or cooking discusses
the English used in doing their work in those subjects, and corrects
from the language point of view any written work done as part of their
other activity. A pupil in one of these classes, who had been corrected
for a mistake in grammar, was overheard saying, “Well, why didn’t they
tell us that in English?” to which her neighbor answered, “They did,
but we didn’t know what they were talking about.”
In some schools as in the Francis Parker School, Chicago, and in the
Cottage School at Riverside, Ill., English is not taught as a separate
subject to the younger grades, but the pupils have compositions to
write for their history lessons, keep records of their excursions, and
of other work where they do not use text-books. The emphasis is put on
helping the child to express his ideas; but such work affords ample
opportunity for the drill in the required mechanics of writing. Grammar
no longer appears as a separate subject in the Chicago public school
curriculum; the teacher gives a lesson in grammar every time any one in
the classroom talks and with every written exercise.
[Illustration: The pupils build the schoolhouses. (Interlaken School,
Ind.)]
However, grammar can be given a purpose and made interesting even
to eleven-year-old children, if the pupils are helped to make their
own grammar and rules by doing their own analyzing as the first step
instead of the last. This is being done with great success in the Phœbe
Thorn Experimental School of Bryn Mawr College. Grammar had no place
on the curriculum, but the pupils asked so many questions that their
teacher decided to let them discover their own grammatical rules,
starting from the questions they had asked. A few minutes were taken
from the English hour two or three times a week for their lessons. At
the end of three months the class could analyze any simple sentence,
could tell a transitive from an intransitive verb instantly, and were
thoroughly familiar with the rules governing the verb to be. The
grammar lesson was one of the favorite lessons; the teacher and pupils
together had invented a number of games to help their drill. For
example, one child had a slip of paper pinned to her back describing
a sentence in grammatical terms; the class made sentences that fitted
the sentence, and the first pupil had to guess what her paper said.
No text book was used in the work, and the teacher started with the
sentence, called it a town, and by discussion helped the pupils to
divide it up into districts--singular, plural, etc. Starting from
this, they developed other grammatical rules. The general tendency in
the progressive schools to-day, nevertheless, seems to be toward the
elimination of the separate study of grammar, and toward making it and
the remainder of the English work (with the exception of literature) a
part of other subjects which the class is studying.
The motto of the boys’ school at Interlaken, Ind., “To teach boys to
live,” is another way of saying, “learning by doing.” Here this is
accomplished, not so much by special devices to render the curriculum
more vital and concrete, and by the abolition of text-books with the
old-fashioned reservoir and pump relation of pupil and teacher, as by
giving the boys an environment which is full of interesting things that
need to be done.
The school buildings have been built by the pupils, including four or
five big log structures, the plans being drawn, the foundations dug and
laid, and the carpentry and painting on the building done by boy labor.
The electric light and heating plant is run by the boys, and all the
wiring and bulbs were put in and are kept in repair by them. There is a
six hundred acre farm, with a dairy, a piggery and hennery, and crops
to be sowed and gathered. Nearly all this work is also done by pupils;
the big boys driving the reapers and binders and the little boys going
along to see how it is done. The inside of the houses are taken care of
in the same way by the students. Each boy looks after his own room, and
the work in the corridors and schoolrooms is attended to by changing
shifts. There is a lake for swimming and canoeing, and plenty of time
for the conventional athletics. Most of the boys are preparing for
college, but this outdoor and manual work does not mean that they have
to take any longer for their preparation than the boy in the city high
school.
The school has also bought the local newspaper from the neighboring
village and edits and prints a four-page weekly paper of local and
school news. The boys gather the news, do much of the writing and all
of the editing and printing, and are the business managers, getting
advertisements and tending to the subscription list. The instructors in
the English department give the boys any needed assistance. They do all
these things, not because they want to know certain processes that will
help them earn a living after they are through school, but because to
use tools, to move from one kind of work to another, to meet different
kinds of problems, to exercise outdoors, and to learn to supply one’s
daily needs are educating influences, which develop skill, initiative,
independence, and bodily strength--in a word, character and knowledge.
Work in nature study is undergoing reorganization in many schools in
all parts of the country. The attempt is to vitalize the work, so that
pupils shall actually get a feeling for plants and animals, together
with some real scientific knowledge, not simply the rather sentimental
descriptions and rhapsodizings of literature. It is also different
from the information gathering type of nature study, which is no more
real science than is the literary type. Here the pupils are taught a
large number of isolated facts, starting from material that the teacher
gathers in a more or less miscellaneous way; they learn all about one
object after another, each one unrelated to the others or to any
general plan of work. Even though a child has gone over a large number
of facts about the outdoor world, he gains little or nothing which
makes nature itself more real or more understandable.
If nature study is turned into a science, the real material of the
subject must be at hand for the students; there must be a laboratory,
with provision for experimentation and observation. In the country
this is easy, for nature is just outside the school doors and windows.
The work can be organized in the complete way that has already been
described in the schools at Fairhope and Columbia.
The Cottage School at Riverside, Ill., and the Little School in the
Woods at Greenwich, Conn., both put a great deal of stress on their
nature study work. At the former, the children have a garden where they
plant early and late vegetables, so that they can use them for their
cooking class in the spring and fall; the pupils do all the work here,
plant, weed, and gather the things. Even more important is the work
they do with animals. They have, for example, a rare bird that is as
much a personality in the school life as any of the children, and the
children, having cared for him and watched his growth and habits, have
become much more interested in wild birds. In the backyard is a goat,
the best liked thing on the place, which the children have raised from
a little kid; and they still do all the work of caring for him. They
are encouraged in every way to watch and report on the school pets and
also on the animals they find in the woods.
In the Little School in the Woods at Greenwich outdoor work is the
basis of the whole school organization. Nature study plays a large
part in this. Groups of pupils take long walks through the woods in
all seasons and weathers, learning the trees in all their dresses,
and the flowers which come with each season. They learn to know the
birds and their habits; they study insects in the same way, and learn
about the stars. In fact, so much of their time is spent out of
doors, that the pupils acquire first hand a large fund of knowledge
of the world of nature in all its phases. The basis of this work, the
director of the school calls Woodcraft; he believes that experience
in the things the woodman does--riding, hunting, camping, scouting,
mountaineering, Indian-craft, boating, etc.--will make strong, healthy,
and independent young people with well developed characters and a true
sense of the beauty of nature. The nature study then is a part of this
other training. A teacher is always with the pupils, whether they are
boating, walking, or gardening, to explain what they are doing and
why, and to call their attention to the things about them. There is no
doubt that the children in the school, even the very little ones, have
a knowledge and appreciation of nature which are very rare even among
country children.
Nature study in the big city, where the only plants are in parks and
formal yards and where the only animals are the delivery horse and
the alley cat, offers a very different problem. The teacher may well
be puzzled as to the best way to teach her pupils to love nature when
they never see it; or be doubtful as to the value of trying to develop
powers of observation when the things which they are asked to observe
not only do not play any part in the lives of the pupils but are in
quite artificial surroundings. Yet while wild nature, the world of
woods and fields and streams, is almost meaningless to the city bred
child, there is plenty of material available to make nature a very real
thing even for the child who has never seen a tree or cow. The modern
teacher takes as a starting point anything that is familiar to the
class; a caged canary, a bowl of gold fish, or the dusty trees on the
playground, and starting from these she introduces the children to
more and more of nature, until they can really get some idea of “the
country” and the part it plays in the lives of every one. The vegetable
garden is the obvious starting point for most city children; if they do
not have tiny gardens in their own backyards, there is a neighbor who
has, or they are interested to find out where the vegetables they eat
come from and how they are grown.
Both in Indianapolis and Chicago, the public schools realize the value
of this sort of work for the children. In Indianapolis, gardening is
a regular department in the seventh and eighth grades and the high
school. The city has bought a large tract of land far enough in town
to be accessible, and any child who cannot have a garden at home may,
by asking, have a garden plot together with lessons in the theory and
practice of gardening. The plots are large enough for the pupils to
gain considerable experience and to put into practice what they learn
in the classroom. Both boys and girls have the gardens, and are given
credit for work in them just as for other work. All through the school
system every attempt is made to arouse an interest in gardening. From
the first grade on, statistics are kept of the numbers of children with
gardens at home, whether they are vegetable or flower gardens, and
what is grown. Seeds are given to the children who wish to grow new
things, and the child is supposed to account to his grade for the use
he has made of his garden.
This work has become a matter of course in many rural districts; every
one is familiar with the “corn clubs” among the school children of the
South and West, and the splendid example they have set the farmers as
to the possibilities of the soil. In many small towns seeds are given
to the children who want gardens, and in the fall a competitive flower
and vegetable show is held, where prizes are given, as a means of
keeping track of the work and arousing community interest. It is true
that most of these efforts have been grafted on to the schools by the
local agricultural interests, in an effort to improve the crops and so
increase the wealth of the neighborhood; but local school boards are
beginning to take the work over, and it is no less real nature study
work because of its utilitarian color. It may be made a means of making
a real science of nature study; in no way does it hinder the teaching
of the beauty and usefulness of nature, which was the object of the
old-fashioned study. In fact, it is the strongest weapon the school
can make use of for this purpose. Every one, and children especially,
enjoy and respect most the things about which their fund of knowledge
is largest. The true value of anything is most apparent to the person
who knows something about it. Familiarity with growing things and with
the science of getting food supplies for a people, cannot fail to be
a big influence towards habits of industry and observation, for only
the gardener who watches all the stages and conditions of his garden,
seeking constantly for causes, will be successful. Added to this is the
purely economic value of having our young people grow up with a real
respect for the farmer and his work, a respect which should counteract
that overwhelming flow of population toward congested cities.
[Illustration: Real gardens for city nature study. (Public School 45,
Indianapolis.)]
The work in the Chicago public schools has not been organized as it
is in Indianapolis, but in some districts of the city a great deal
of emphasis is put on nature study work through gardens. Many of the
schools have school gardens where all the children get an opportunity
to do real gardening, these gardens being used as the basis for the
nature study work, and the children getting instruction in scientific
gardening besides. The work is given a civic turn; that is to say,
the value of the gardens to the child and to the neighborhood is
demonstrated: to the child as a means of making money or helping
his family by supplying them with vegetables, to the community in
showing how gardens are a means of cleaning up and beautifying the
neighborhood. If the residents want their backyards and empty lots for
gardens, they are not going to throw rubbish into them or let other
people do so. Especially in the streets around one school has this
work made a difference. Starting with the interest and effort of the
children, the whole community has become tremendously interested in
starting gardens, using every bit of available ground. The district is
a poor one and, besides transforming the yards, the gardens have been a
real economic help to the people. With the help of one school a group
of adults in the district hired quite a large tract of land outside the
city and started truck gardens. The experiment was a great success.
Inexperienced city dwellers, by taking advantage of the opportunities
for instruction which the school could offer, were able to plan and do
the work and make the garden a success from the start. The advantage to
the school was just as great, for a large group of foreign parents came
into close touch with it, discovered that it was a real force in the
neighborhood, and that they could coöperate with it. This element of
the population usually stands quite aloof from the school its children
go to, through timidity and ignorance, or simply through feeling that
it is an institution above them.
The impetus to “civic nature study” in Chicago, aside from the district
just described, has come largely from the Chicago Teachers’ College,
where the teacher of biology has devoted himself especially to working
out this problem. In addition to the familiar gardening work, with
especial attention to the organization of truck gardening, plants
are grown in the classroom for purposes of developing appreciation
of beauty, scientific illustration, and assistance in geography. But
plants are selected with special reference to local conditions, and
with the desire to furnish a stimulus to beautifying the pupils’ own
environment. For it is found that the scientific principles of botany
can be taught by means of growing plants which are adapted to home use
as well as by specimens selected on abstract scientific grounds. By
making a special study of the parks, playgrounds, and yards of their
surroundings, the children learn what can be done to beautify their
city, and secure an added practical motive for acquiring information.
They keep pets in the schoolroom, such as white mice, fish, birds,
and rabbits. While these are utilized, of course, for illustrating
principles of animal structure and physiology, they are also employed
to teach humaneness to animals and a general sympathy for animal life.
This is easy, for children are naturally even more interested in
animals than in plants, and the animals become real individualities
to the children whose needs are to be respected. As the effect of
conditions upon the health and vigor of their pets is noted, there is a
natural growth of interest in questions of personal hygiene.
It will be observed that while nature study is used to instill the
elements of science, its chief uses are to cultivate a sympathetic
understanding of the place of plants and animals in life and to
develop emotional and æsthetic interest. In the larger cities the
situation is very different from that of rural life and the country
village. There are thousands of children who believe that cement and
bricks are the natural covering of the ground, trees and grass being
to them the unusual and artificial thing. Their thoughts do not go
beyond the fact that milk and butter and eggs come from the store;
cows and chickens are unknown to them--so much so that in a recent
reunion of old settlers in a congested district of New York one of
the greatest curiosities was a live cow imported from the country.
Under such circumstances, it is difficult to make the scientific
problems of nature study of vital interest. There are no situations of
the children’s experience into which the facts and principles enter
as a matter of course. Even the weather is tempered and the course
of the changing seasons has no special effect upon the lives of the
pupils, save upon the need for greater warmth in winter. Nature study
in the city is like one of the fine arts, such as painting or music;
its value is æsthetic rather than directly practical. Nature is such
a small factor in the activities of the children that it is hard to
give it much “disciplinary” value, save as it is turned to civic ends.
A vague feeling for this state of affairs probably accounts for much
of the haphazard and half-hearted nature study teaching which goes on
in city schools. There is a serious problem in finding material for
city children which will do for observation what the facts of nature
accomplish in the case of rural children.
A valuable experiment with this end in view is carried on in the
little “Play School” taught by Miss Pratt in one of the most congested
districts of New York City. Nature study is not taught at all to
these little children. If they go to the park or have pets and plant
flowers it is because these things make good play material, because
they are beautiful and interesting; if the children ask questions and
want to know more about them, so much the better. Instead of telling
them about leaves and grass, cows and butterflies, and hunting out
the rare opportunities for the children to observe them, use is made
of the multitudes of things which the children see about them in the
streets and in their homes. The new building going up across the street
furnishes just as much for observation and questioning as does the
park, and is a much more familiar sight to the children. They find out
how the men get the bricks and mortar to the upper floors; they see
the sand cart unloading; possibly one child knows that the driver has
been to the river to get the sand from a boat. They notice the delivery
man going through the streets, and find out where he got the bread to
take to their mothers. They see the children on the playground and
learn that besides the fun they have, the playing is good for their
bodies. They walk to the river and see the ferries carrying people
back and forth and the coal barges unloading. All these facts are
more closely related to them than the things of country life; hence
it is more important that they understand their meaning and their
relation to their own lives, while acuteness of observation is just
as well trained. Such work is also equally valuable as a foundation
for the science and geography the pupils will study later on. Besides
awakening their curiosity and faculties of observation, it shows them
the elements of the social world, which the later studies are meant to
explain.
The Elementary School at Columbia, Missouri, has arranged its
curriculum according to the same principle. All the material from
nature which the children use and study they find near the school or
their homes, and their study of the seasons and the weather is made
from day to day, as the Columbia weather and seasons change. Even more
important is the work the children do in studying their own town, their
food, clothing, and houses, so that the basis of the study is not
instruction given by the teacher but what the children themselves have
been able to find out on excursions and by keeping their eyes open.
The material bears a relation to their own lives, and so is the more
available for teaching children how to live. The reasons for teaching
such things to the city bred child are the same as those for teaching
the country child the elements of gardening and the possibilities of
the local soil. By understanding his own environment child or adult
learns the measure of the beauty and order about him, and respect
for real achievement, while he is laying the foundations for his own
control of the environment.
CHAPTER V
PLAY
All peoples at all times have depended upon plays and games for a large
part of the education of children, especially of young children. Play
is so spontaneous and inevitable that few educational writers have
accorded to it in theory the place it held in practice, or have tried
to find out whether the natural play activities of children afforded
suggestions that could be adopted within school walls. Plato among the
ancients and Froebel among the moderns are the two great exceptions.
From both Rousseau and Pestalozzi, Froebel learned the principle of
education as a natural development. Unlike both of these men, however,
he loved intellectual system and had a penchant for a somewhat mystical
metaphysics. Accordingly we find in both his theory and practice
something of the same inconsistency noted in Pestalozzi.
It is easier to say natural development than to find ways for assuring
it. There is much that is “natural” in children which is also
naturally obnoxious to adults. There are many manifestations which
do not seem to have any part in helping on growth. Impatient desire
for a method which would cover the whole ground, and be final so as to
be capable of use by any teacher, led Froebel, as it has led so many
others, into working out alleged “laws” of development which were to
be followed irrespective of the varying circumstances and experiences
of different children. The orthodox kindergarten, which has often been
more Froebellian than Froebel himself, followed these laws; but now we
find attempts to return to the spirit of his teaching, with more or
less radical changes in its letter.
While Froebel’s own sympathy with children and his personal experience
led him to emphasize the instinctive expressions of child-life, his
philosophy led him to believe that natural development consisted
in the _un_folding of an absolute and universal principle already
_en_folded in the child. He believed also that there is an exact
correspondence between the general properties of external objects and
the unfolding qualities of mind, since both were manifestations of
the same absolute reality. Two practical consequences followed which
often got the upper hand of his interest in children on their own
account. One was that, since the law of development could be laid down
in general, it is not after all so important to study children in the
concrete to find out what natural development consists in. If they
vary from the requirements of the universal law so much the worse for
them, not for the “law.” Teachers were supposed to have the complete
formula of development already in their hands. The other consequence
was that the presentation and handling, according to prescribed
formulæ, of external material, became the method in detail of securing
proper development. Since the general relations of these objects,
especially the mathematical ones, were manifestations of the universal
principle behind development, they formed the best means of bringing
out the hidden existence of the same principle in the child. Even the
spontaneous plays of children were thought to be educative not because
of what they are, directly in themselves, but because they symbolize
some law of universal being. Children should gather, for example, in a
circle, not because a circular grouping is convenient for social and
practical purposes, but because the circle is a symbol of infinity
which will tend to evoke the infinite latent in the child’s soul.
The efforts to return to Froebel’s spirit referred to above have
tried to keep the best in his contributions. His emphasis upon play,
dramatization, songs and story telling, which involve the constructive
use of material, his deep sense of the importance of social relations
among the children--these things are permanent contributions which
they retain. But they are trying with the help of the advances of
psychological knowledge since Froebel’s time and of the changes
in social occupations which have taken place to utilize these
factors directly, rather than indirectly, through translation into
a metaphysics, which, even if true, is highly abstract. In another
respect they are returning to Froebel himself, against an alteration
in his ideas introduced by many of his disciples. These followers have
set up a sharp contrast between play and useful activity or work, and
this has rendered the practices of their kindergartens more symbolic
and sentimental than they otherwise would have been. Froebel himself
emphasized the desirability of children sharing in social occupations
quite as much as did Pestalozzi--whose school he had visited. He
says, for example, “The young, growing human being should be trained
early for outer work, for creative and productive activities. Lessons
through and by work, through and from life, are the most impressive
and the most intelligible, the most continuous and progressive, in
themselves and in their effect upon the learner. Every child, boy and
youth, whatever his position and condition in life, should devote,
say, at least one or two hours a day to some serious active occupation
constructing some definite external piece of work. It would be a most
wholesome arrangement in school to establish actual working hours
similar to existing study hours, and it will surely come to this.” In
the last sentence, Froebel showed himself a true prophet of what has
been accomplished in some of the schools such as we are dealing with in
this book.
Schools all over the country are at present making use of the child’s
instinct for play, by using organized games, toy making, or other
construction based on play motives as part of the regular curriculum.
This is in line with the vitalization of the curriculum that is going
on in the higher grades by making use of the environment of the child
outside the schoolroom. If the most telling lessons can be given
children through bringing into the school their occupations in their
free hours, it is only natural to use play as a large share of the work
for the youngest pupils. Certainly the greatest part of the lives
of very young children is spent in playing, either games which they
learn from older children or those of their own invention. The latter
usually take the form of imitations of the occupations of their elders.
All little children think of playing house, doctor, or soldier, even
if they are not given toys which suggest these games; indeed, half of
the joy of playing comes from finding and making the necessary things.
The educational value of this play is obvious. It teaches the children
about the world they live in. The more they play the more elaborate
becomes their paraphernalia, the whole game being a fairly accurate
picture of the daily life of their parents in its setting, clothed in
the language and bearing of the children. Through their games they
learn about the work and play of the grown-up world. Besides noticing
the elements which make up this world, they find out a good deal about
the actions and processes that are necessary to keep it going.
[Illustration: (1) Making a town, instead of doing gymnastic exercises.
(Teachers College Playground, N. Y. City.)]
[Illustration: (2) Gymnasium dances in sewing-class costumes.
(Howland School, Chicago.)]
While this is of real value in teaching the child how to live, it is
evident as well that it supplies a strong influence against change.
Imitative plays tend, by the training of habit and the turn they give
to the child’s attention and thoughts, to make his life a replica of
the life of his parents. In playing house children are just as apt
to copy the coarseness, blunders, and prejudices of their elders as
the things which are best. In playing, they notice more carefully and
thus fix in their memory and habits, more than if they simply lived
it indifferently, the whole color of the life around them. Therefore,
while imitative games are of great educational value in the way of
teaching the child to notice his environment and some of the processes
that are necessary for keeping it going, if the environment is not good
the child learns bad habits and wrong ways of thinking and judging,
ways which are all the harder to break because he has fixed them by
living them out in his play.
Modern kindergartens are beginning to realize this more and more.
They are using play, the sort of games they find the children
playing outside of school hours, not only as a method of making work
interesting to the children, but for the educational value of the
activities it involves, and for giving the children the right sort of
ideals and ideas about every day life. Children who play house and
similar games in school, and have toys to play with and the material to
make the things they need in their play, will play house at home the
way they played it in school. They will forget to imitate the loud
and coarse things they see at home, their attention will be centered
on problems which were designed by the school to teach better aims and
methods.
The kindergarten of the Teachers’ College of Columbia University
could hardly be recognized as a kindergarten at all by a visitor who
was thinking of the mechanism of instruction worked out by Froebel’s
disciples. The kindergarten is part of the training school of the
university, and from the start has been considered as a real part of
the school system, as the first step in an education, not as a more or
less unnecessary “extra.” With a view to laying a permanent basis for
higher education, the authorities have been developing a curriculum
that should make use of whatever was of real worth in existing systems
of education and in the experiments tried by themselves. To find what
is of real worth, experiments have been conducted, designed to answer
the following questions: “Among the apparently aimless and valueless
spontaneous activities of the child is it possible to discover some
which may be used as the point of departure for ends of recognized
worth? Are there some of these crude expressions which, if properly
directed, may develop into beginnings of the fine and industrial arts?
How far does the preservation of the individuality and freedom of the
child demand self-initiated activities? Is it possible for the teacher
to set problems or ends sufficiently childlike to fit in with the mode
of growth, and to inspire their adoption with the same fine enthusiasm
which accompanies the self-initiated ones?”
The result showed that the best success came when the children’s
instinctive activities were linked up with social interests and
experiences. The latter center, with young children, in their home.
Their personal relations are of the greatest importance to them.
Children’s intense interest in dolls is a sign of the significance
attached to human relations. The doll thus furnished a convenient
starting point. With this as a motive, the children have countless
things they wish to do and make. Hand and construction work thus
acquired a real purpose, with the added advantage of requiring the
child to solve a problem. The doll needs clothes; the whole class is
eager to make them, but the children do not know how to sew or even
cut cloth. So they start with paper and scissors, and make patterns,
altering and experimenting on the doll for themselves, receiving
only suggestions or criticisms from the teacher. When they have made
successful patterns, they choose and cut the cloth, and then learn to
sew it. If the garments are not wholly successful, the class has had a
great deal of fun making them, and has had the training that comes from
working towards a definite end, besides acquiring as much control over
scissors, paper, and needle, and manual dexterity as would accrue from
the conventional paper cutting, pricking, and sewing exercises.
The doll needs a house. In a corner of the room there is a great
chest of big blocks, so large that it takes the whole class to build
the house, and then it is not done in one day. There are flat long
blocks like boards for the walls and roof, and square blocks for the
foundations and window frames. When the house is done, it is big
enough for two or three children to go into to play with the doll.
One readily sees that it has taken a great deal of hard thinking and
experimenting to make a house that would really stand up and serve such
uses. Then the house needs furniture; the children learn to handle
tools in fashioning tables, chairs, and beds, from blocks of wood and
thin boards. Getting the legs on a table is an especially interesting
problem to the class, and over and over again they have discovered for
themselves how it can be done. Dishes for the doll family furnish the
motive for clay modeling and decoration. Dressing and undressing the
dolls is an occupation the children never tire of, and it furnishes
excellent practice in buttoning and unbuttoning and tying bows.
The changing seasons of the year and the procession of outdoor games
they bring furnish other motives for production that meet a real
need of the children. In the spring-time they want marbles and tops,
in the fall, kites; the demand for wagons is not limited to any one
season. Whenever possible the children are allowed to solve their
own problems. If they want marbles they experiment until they find a
good way to make them round, while if they are making something more
difficult where the whole process is obviously beyond them, they are
helped. This help, however, never takes the form of dictation as to how
to perform each step in its order, for the object of the work is to
train the child’s initiative and self-reliance, to teach him to think
straight by having him work on his own problems. The little carts which
the older children make would be beyond them if they had to plan and
shape the material for themselves; but when they are given the sawed
boards and round pieces for wheels, they find out by trying how they
can be put together, and thus make usable little wagons. Making bags
for their marbles, and aprons to protect their clothes while they are
painting the dolls’ furniture or washing the dishes after lunch, offer
additional opportunities for sewing.
From the needs of an individual doll the child’s interest naturally
develops to the needs of a family and then of a whole community. With
paper dolls and boxes, the children make and furnish dolls’ houses for
themselves, until all together they produce an entire village. On their
sand table the whole class may make a town with houses and streets,
fences and rivers, trees and animals for the gardens. In fact, the
play of the children furnishes more opportunity for making things than
there is time for in the school year. This construction work not only
fills the children with the interest and enthusiasm they always show
for any good game, but teaches them the use of work. In supplying the
needs of the dolls and their own games, they are supplying in miniature
the needs of society, and are acquiring control over the tools that
society actually uses in meeting these wants. Boys and girls alike take
the same interest in all these occupations, whether they are sewing
and playing with dolls, or marble making and carpentry. The idea
that certain games and occupations are for boys and others for girls
is a purely artificial one that has developed as a reflection of the
conditions existing in adult life. It does not occur to a boy that
dolls are not just as fascinating and legitimate a plaything for him as
for his sister, until some one puts the idea into his head.
The program of this kindergarten is not devoted exclusively to play
construction. It occupies the place of the paper folding, pricking and
sewing and the object lesson work of the older kindergartens, leaving
plenty of time every day to try their playthings and to take care of
their little gardens out of doors, as well as for group games, stories
and songs.
An interesting application of the play motive is being tried at the
Teachers’ College playground, by the same teachers who are conducting
the kindergarten. There is an outdoor playground for the use of the
younger grades after school hours. Instead of spending their time
doing gymnastic exercises or playing group games the children are
making a town. They use large packing cases for houses and stores, two
or three children taking care of each one; and have worked out quite
an elaborate town organization, with a telephone, mail and police
service, a bank to coin money, and ingenious schemes for keeping the
cash in circulation. Much of the time is spent in carpentry work,
building and repairing the houses and making wagons, furniture for
the houses, or stock for the two stores. The work affords almost as
much physical exercise as the ordinary sort of playground. It keeps
the children busy and happy in a much more effective way, for besides
healthy play in the open air they are learning to take a useful and
responsible share in a community.
A kindergarten conducted along the same lines exists in Pittsburgh as
part of the city university. It is called “The School of Childhood,”
and emphasizes the healthy physical development of the children. The
work is centered around the natural interests of children; and while
they apparently do not do as much construction work as in the Teachers’
College kindergarten, there is more individual play. The writer has not
visited the school, but it seems to embrace a number of novel elements
that ought to be suggestive to any one interested in educational
experiments.
The “Play School” conducted by Miss Pratt in New York City organizes
all the work around the play activities of little children. Quoting
Miss Pratt, her plan is: “To offer an opportunity to the child to pick
up the thread of life in his own community, and to express what he
gets in an individual way. The experiment concerns itself with getting
subject-matter first hand, and it is assumed that the child has much
information to begin with, that he is adding to it day by day, that it
is possible to direct his attention so that he may get his information
in a more related way; and with applying such information to individual
schemes of play with related toys and blocks as well as expressing
himself through such general means as drawing, dramatization, and
spoken language.”
The children are of kindergarten age and come from homes where the
opportunities for real activity are limited. Each child has floor space
of his own with a rug, and screens to isolate him sufficiently so that
his work is really individual. There is a small work shop in the room
where the pupils can make or alter things they need in their play. The
tools are full size, and miscellaneous scraps of wood are used. In
cupboards and shelves around the room are all sorts of material: toys,
big and little blocks, clay, pieces of cloth, needle and thread, and a
set of Montessori material. Each child has scissors, paper, paints, and
pencil of his own, and is free to use all the material as he chooses.
He selects either isolated objects he wants to make, or lays out some
larger construction, such as a railroad track and stations, or a doll’s
house, or a small town or farm, and then from the material at hand
works out his own execution of his idea. One piece of work often lasts
over several days, and involves considerable incidental construction,
such as tracks and signals, clay dishes, furniture or new clothes for
the doll. The rôle of the teacher is to teach the pupil processes and
control of tools, not in a prearranged scale but as they are needed in
construction. The teacher has every opportunity to see the individual’s
weaknesses and abilities and so to check or stimulate at the proper
time. Besides the motor control which the pupils develop through their
handling of material, they are constantly increasing their ingenuity
and initiative.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Constructing in miniature the things they see around
them.
(Play School, New York City.)]
The elements of number work are taught in connection with the
construction; and if a child shows a desire to make letters or signs
in connection with his other work, he is helped and shown how. The
toys used are particularly good. There are flat wooden dolls about
half an inch thick, men, women, and children, whose joints bend so
that they will stay in any position; all sorts of farm animals and
two or three kinds of little wagons that fit the dolls; quantities of
big blocks that fasten together with wooden pegs, so that the houses
and bridges do not fall down. Everything is strongly made on the
simplest plan, so that material can be used not only freely but also
effectively. Each success is a stimulus to new and more complicated
effort. There is no discouragement from slipshod stuff. The pupils
take care of the toys themselves, getting them out and putting them
away. They also care for the classroom and serve their mid-morning
luncheon. This work, coupled with the fact that the constructions are
almost always miniature copies of the things that the pupils see in
their community, saves the work from any hint of artificiality. The
children’s constructions grow out of the observations already spoken of
(p. 100), and give a motive for talking over what they have seen and
making new, more extensive and more accurate observations.
The natural desire of children to play can, of course, be made the most
of in the lowest grades, but there is one element of the play instinct
which schools are utilizing in the higher grades--that is, the instinct
for dramatization, for make-believe in action. All children love to
pretend that they are some body or thing other than themselves; they
love to make a situation real by going through the motions it suggests.
Abstract ideas are hard to understand; the child is never quite sure
whether he really understands or not. Allow him to act out the idea and
it becomes real to him, or the lack of understanding is shown in what
is done. Action is the test of comprehension. This is simply another
way of saying that learning by doing is a better way to learn than
by listening--the difference of dramatization from the work already
described lies in the things the child is learning. He is no longer
dealing with material where _things_ are needed to carry an act to a
successful result, but with _ideas_ which need action to make them
real. Schools are making use of dramatization in all sorts of different
ways to make teaching more concrete. For older children dramatization
is used principally in the strict sense of the word; that is, by having
pupils act in plays, either as a means of making the English or history
more real, or simply for the emotional and imaginative value of the
work. With the little children it is used as an aid in the teaching of
history, English, reading, or arithmetic, and is often combined with
other forms of activity.
Many schools use dramatization as a help in teaching the first
steps of any subject, especially in the lower grades. A first year
class, for example, act the subject-matter of their regular reading
lesson, each child having the part of one of the characters of the
story, animal or person. This insures an idea of the situation as a
whole, so that reading ceases to be simply an attempt to recognize
and pronounce isolated words and phrases. Moreover, the interest
of the situation carries children along, and enlists attention to
difficulties of phraseology which might, if attacked as separate
things, be discouraging. The dramatic factor is a great assistance in
the expressive side of reading. Teachers are always having to urge
children to read “naturally,” “to read as they talk.” But when a child
has no motive for communication of what he sees in the text, knowing
as he does that the teacher has the book and can tell it better than
he can, even the naturalness tends to be forced and artificial. Every
observer knows how often children who depart from humdrum droning,
learn to exhibit only a superficial breathless sort of liveliness and
a make-believe animation. Dramatization secures both attention to the
thought of the text and a spontaneous endeavor, free from pretense
and self-consciousness, to speak loudly enough to be heard and to
enunciate distinctly. In the same way, children tell stories much more
effectively when they are led to visualize for themselves the actions
going on, than when they are simply repeating something as a part of
the school routine. When children are drawing scenes involving action
and posture, it is found that prior action is a great assistance. In
the case of a pose of the body, the child who has done the posing is
often found to draw better than those who have merely looked on. He
has got the “feel” of the situation, which readily influences his
hand and eye in the subsequent reproduction. In the early grades when
pupils fail in a concrete problem in arithmetic, it is frequently found
that resort to “acting out” the situation supplies all the assistance
needed. The real difficulty was not with the numbers but in failure to
grasp the meaning of the situation in which the numbers were to be used.
In the upper grades, literature and history, as already indicated, are
often reënforced by dramatic activities. A sixth grade in Indianapolis
engaged in dramatizing “Sleeping Beauty,” not merely composed the words
and the stage directions, but also wrote songs and the music for them.
Such concentration on a single purpose of studies usually pursued
independently stimulates work in each. Literary expression is less
monotonous, the phrasing of an idea more delicate and flexible, than
when composition is an end in itself; and while of course the music is
not likely to be remarkable, it almost always has a freshness and charm
exceeding that which could be attained from the same pupils if they
were merely writing music.
A shoe store in the second grade furnished the basis of the work for
several days. The children set up a shop and chose pupils to take the
part of the shoe clerk, the shoemaker, and the family going to buy
shoes. Then they acted out the story of a mother and children going to
the store for shoes. Arithmetic and English lessons were based on the
store, and the class wrote stories about it. This same class sang and
acted out to a simple tune a little verse about the combinations that
make ten. The same pupils were doing problems in mental arithmetic
that were much beyond the work usually found in a second grade, adding
almost instantly numbers like 74 and 57. They probably could not have
gone so rapidly if they had not had so much of the dramatization work.
It served to make their abstract problems seem real. In doing problems
about Mrs. Baldwin’s shoes they had come to think of numbers as having
some meaning and purpose, so that when a problem in pure numbers was
given they did not approach it with misgivings and uncertainty. One of
the fifth grades had installed a parcel post office; they made money
and stamps and brought bundles to school, then they played post office;
two boys took the part of postmen, weighed the packages, looked up the
rate of postage, and gave change for the customers. Tables of weights
ceased to be verbal forms to be memorized; consultation of the map was
a necessity; the multiplication table was a necessity; the system and
order required in successful activity were impressed.
The Francis Parker School is one of many using the dramatic interest
of the pupils as an aid in teaching history. The fourth grade studies
Greek history, and the work includes the making of a Greek house, and
writing poems about some Greek myth. The children make Greek costumes
and wear them every day in the classroom. To quote Miss Hall, who
teaches this grade: “They play sculptor and make clay statuettes of
their favorite gods and mould figures to illustrate a story. They model
Mycenæ in sand-pans, ruin it, cover it, and become the excavators who
bring its treasures to light again. They write prayers to Dionysius
and stories such as they think Orpheus might have sung. They play Greek
games and wear Greek costumes, and are continually acting out stories
or incidents which please them. To-day as heroes of Troy, they have a
battle at recess time with wooden swords and barrel covers. In class
time, with prayers and dances and extempore song, they hold a Dionysiac
festival. Again, half of them are Athenians and half of them Spartans
in a war of words as to which city is more to be desired. Or they are
freemen of Athens, replying spiritedly to the haughty Persian message.”
Besides these daily dramatizations, they write and act for the whole
school a little play which illustrates some incident of history that
has particularly appealed to them. History taught in this way to little
children acquires meaning and an emotional content; they appreciate
the Greek spirit and the things which made a great people. The work so
becomes a part of their lives that it is remembered as any personal
experience is retained, not as texts are committed to memory to be
recited upon.
The Francis Parker School takes advantage of the social value of
dramatizations in its morning exercises. Studying alone out of a book
is an isolated and unsocial performance; the pupil may be learning the
words before him, but he is not learning to act with other people, to
control and arrange his actions and thought so that other persons have
an equal opportunity to express themselves in a shared experience. When
the classes represent by action what they have learned from books, all
the members have a part, so that they learn to cherish socially, as
well as to develop, powers of expression and of dramatic and emotional
imagery. When they act in front of the whole school they get the value
of the work for themselves individually and help the growth of a spirit
of unity and coöperation in the entire school. All the children, big
and little, become interested in the sort of thing that is going on
in the other grades, and learn to appreciate effort that is simple
and sincere, whether it comes from the first grade or the seniors in
high school. In their efforts to interest the whole school the actors
learn to be simple and direct, and acquire a new respect for their work
by seeing its value for others. Summaries of the work in different
subjects are given in the morning exercises by any grade which thinks
it has something to say that would interest the other children.
The dramatic element is sometimes small, as in the descriptions of
excursions, of curious processes in arithmetic or of some topic in
geography; but the children always have to think clearly and speak
well, or their audience will not understand them, and maps or diagrams
and all sorts of illustrative material are introduced as much as
possible. Other exercises, such as the Greek play written by the fourth
grade, or a dramatization of one of Cicero’s orations against Cataline,
are purely dramatic in their interest.
The production of plays by graduating classes or for some specific
purpose is of course a well-known method of interesting pupils or
advertising a school. But recently schools have been giving plays and
festivals for their educational value as well as for their interest
to children and the public. The valuable training which comes from
speaking to an audience, using the body effectively and working with
other pupils for a common end, is present, whatever the nature of
the play; and schools usually try to have their productions of some
literary value. But until recently the resources of the daily work
of the pupils for dramatic purposes have been overlooked. Being for
purposes of public entertainment, plays were added on after school
hours. But schools are beginning to utilize this natural desire of
young people to “act something” for amplifying the curriculum. In
many schools where dramatization of a rather elaborate character is
employed for public performances, the subject-matter is now taken from
English and history, while writing the play supplies another English
lesson. The rehearsals take the place of lessons in expression and
elocution, and involve self-control. The stage settings and costumes
are made in the shop and art periods, the planning and management being
done by the pupils, the teacher helping enough to prevent blunders
and discouragement. At Riverside one of the classes had been reading
Tolstoi’s “Where Love Is There Is God” for their work in literature.
They rewrote the story as a play and rehearsed it in their English
lessons, the whole class acting as coach and critic. As their interest
grew they made costumes and arranged a stage setting and finally gave
the play to an audience of the school and its friends. At another
time the English class gave an outdoor performance of a sketch which
they had written, based on the Odyssey. The American history class at
the Speyer School give a play which they write about some incident in
pioneer history. During the rehearsal nearly all the children try the
parts, quite regardless of sex or other qualifications, and the whole
class chooses the final cast. The fifth grade was studying Irving’s
“Sketch Book” in connection with its history and literature work, and
dramatized the story of Rip Van Winkle, doing all its own coaching and
costuming.
[Illustration: Using the child’s dramatic instinct to teach history.
(Cottage School, Riverside, Ill.)]
The Howland School, one of the public schools of Chicago situated in
a foreign district, gave a large festival play during the past year.
The principal wrote and arranged a pageant illustrating the story of
Columbus, and the whole school took part in the acting. The story gave
a simple outline of the life of Columbus. A few tableaux were added
about some of the most striking events in pioneer history, arranged
to bring out the fact that this country is a democracy. The children
made their own costumes for the most part, and all the dances they
had learned during the year in gymnasium were introduced. Thus the
whole exhibition presented a very good picture of the outline of our
history and the spirit of the country, and at the same time offered
an interesting summary of the year’s work. Its value as a unifying
influence in a foreign community was considerable, for besides teaching
the children something of the history of their new country, it gave
the parents, who made up the audience, an opportunity to see what the
school could do for their children and the neighborhood. The patriotic
value of such exercises is greater than the daily flag salute or
patriotic poem, for the children understand what they are supposed
to be enthusiastic about, as they see before them the things which
naturally arouse patriotic emotions.
Exercises to commemorate holidays or seasons are more interesting
and valuable than the old-fashioned entertainment where individual
pupils recited poems, and adults made speeches, for they concentrate
in a social expression the work of the school. The community is more
interested because parents know that their own children have had
their share in the making of the production, and the children are
more interested because they are working in groups on something which
appeals to them and for which they are responsible. The graduating
exercises at many schools are now of a kind to present in a dramatic
review the regular work of the year. Each grade may take part,
presenting a play which they have written for work in English, dancing
some of the folk or fancy dances they have learned in gymnasium, etc.
Many schools have a Thanksgiving exercise in which different grades
give scenes from the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, or present
dramatic pictures of the harvest festivals of different nations. In
similar fashion Christmas entertainments are often made up of songs,
poems and readings by children from different grades, or by the whole
grade, which have been arranged in the English and music classes. The
possibilities for plays, festivals, and pageants arranged on this plan
are endless; for it is always possible to find subject-matter which
will give the children just as much training in reading, spelling,
history, literature, or even some phases of geography, as would dry
Gradgrind facts of a routine text-book type.
CHAPTER VI
FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY
The reader has undoubtedly been struck by the fact that in all of
the work described, pupils must have been allowed a greater amount
of freedom than is usually thought compatible with the necessary
discipline of a schoolroom. To the great majority of teachers and
parents the very word school is synonymous with “discipline,” with
quiet, with rows of children sitting still at desks and listening to
the teacher, speaking only when they are spoken to. Therefore a school
where these fundamental characteristics are lacking must of necessity
be a poor school; one where pupils do not learn anything, where they do
just as they please, quite regardless of what they please, even though
it be harmful to the child himself or disagreeable to his classmates
and the teacher.
There is a certain accumulation of facts that every child must acquire
or else grow up to be illiterate. These facts relate principally to
adult life; therefore it is not surprising that the pupil is not
interested in them, while it is the duty of the school to see that he
knows them nevertheless. How is this to be done? Obviously by seating
the children in rows, far enough apart so that they cannot easily talk
to each other, and hiring the most efficient person available to teach
the facts; to tell them to the child, and have him repeat them often
enough so that he can reasonably be expected to remember them, at least
until after he is “promoted.”
Again, children should be taught to obey; efficiency in doing as one
is told is a useful accomplishment, just as the doing of distasteful
and uninteresting tasks is a character builder. The pupil should be
taught to “respect” his teacher and learning in general; and how can
he be taught this lesson if he does not sit quietly and receptively in
the face of both? But if he will not be receptive, he must at least be
quiet, so that the teacher can teach him anyway. The very fact that
the pupil so often is lawless, destructive, rude and noisy as soon as
restraint is removed proves, according to the advocates of “discipline”
by authority, that this is the only way of dealing with the child,
since without such restraint the child would behave all day long as he
does when it is removed for a few uncertain minutes.
If this statement of the disciplinarian’s case sounds harsh and
unadorned, think for a moment of the things that visitors to “queer
schools” say after the visit is over; and consider whether they do
not force the unprejudiced observer to the conclusion that their
idea of schools and schooling is just such a harsh and unadorned
affair. The discussion of freedom versus authoritative discipline in
schools resolves itself after all into a question of the conception
of education which is entertained. Are we to believe, with the strict
disciplinarian, that education is the process of making a little
savage into a little man, that there are many virtues as well as facts
that have to be taught to all children so that they may as nearly
as possible approach the adult standard? Or are we to believe, with
Rousseau, that education is the process of making up the discrepancy
between the child at his birth and the man as he will need to be, “that
childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling,” and that
the method of training these ways to what a man will need is to let the
child test them upon the world about him?
The phrase, “authoritative discipline,” is used purposely, for
discipline and freedom are not contradictory ideas. The following
quotation from Rousseau shows very plainly what a heavy taskmaster
even his freedom was, a freedom so often taken to mean mere lawlessness
and license. “Give him [the pupil] no orders at all, absolutely none.
Do not even let him think that you claim any authority over him. Let
him know only that he is weak and you are strong, that his condition
and yours puts him at your mercy; let this be perceived, learned and
felt. Let him early find upon his proud neck the heavy yoke which
nature has imposed upon us, the heavy yoke of necessity, under which
every finite being must bow. Let him find the necessity in things, not
in the caprices of man; let the curb be the force of conditions, not
authority.”
Surely no discipline could be more severe, more apt to develop
character and reasonableness, nor less apt to develop disorder and
laziness. In fact the real reason for the feeling against freedom in
schools seems to come from a misunderstanding. The critic confuses
physical liberty with moral and intellectual liberty. Because the
pupils are moving about, or sitting on the floor, or have their chairs
scattered about instead of in a straight line, because they are using
their hands and tongues, the visitor thinks that their minds must
be relaxed as well; that they must be simply fooling, with no more
restraint for their minds and morals than appears for their bodies.
Learning in school has been so long associated with a docile or passive
mind that because that useful organ does not squirm or talk in its
operations, observers have come to think that none of the child should
do so, or it will interfere with learning.
Assuming that educational reformers are right in supposing that the
function of education is to help the growing of a helpless young animal
into a happy, moral, and efficient human being, a consistent plan of
education must allow enough liberty to promote that growth. The child’s
body must have room to move and stretch itself, to exercise the muscles
and to rest when tired. Every one agrees that swaddling clothes are a
bad thing for the baby, cramping and interfering with bodily functions.
The swaddling clothes of the straight-backed desk, head to the front
and hands folded, are just as cramping and even more nerve racking to
the school child. It is no wonder that pupils who have to sit in this
way for several hours a day break out in bursts of immoderate noise
and fooling as soon as restraining influences are removed. Since they
do not have a normal outlet for their physical energy to spend itself,
it is stored up, and when opportunity offers it breaks forth all the
more impetuously because of the nervous irritation previously suffered
in repressing the action of an imperfectly trained body. Give a child
liberty to move and stretch when he needs it, with opportunities for
real exercise all through the day and he will not become so nervously
overwrought that he is irritable or aimlessly boisterous when left to
himself. Trained in _doing_ things, he will be able to keep at work and
to think of other people when he is not under restraining supervision.
A truly scientific education can never develop so long as children
are treated in the lump, merely as a class. Each child has a strong
individuality, and any science must take stock of all the facts in its
material. Every pupil must have a chance to show what he truly is, so
that the teacher can find out what he needs to make him a complete
human being. Only as a teacher becomes acquainted with each one of her
pupils can she hope to understand childhood, and it is only as she
understands it that she can hope to evolve any scheme of education
which shall approach either the scientific or the artistic standard.
As long as educators do not know their individual facts they can never
know whether their hypotheses are of value. But how are they to know
their material if they impose themselves upon it to such an extent
that each portion is made to act just like every other portion? If the
pupils are marched into line, information presented to them which they
are then expected to give back in uniform fashion, nothing will ever be
found out about any of them. But if every pupil has an opportunity to
express himself, to show what are his particular qualities, the teacher
will have material on which to base her plans of instruction.
Since a child lives in a social world, where even the simplest act or
word is bound up with the words and acts of his neighbors, there is
no danger that this liberty will sacrifice the interests of others to
caprice. Liberty does not mean the removal of the checks which nature
and man impose on the life of every individual in the community, so
that one individual may indulge impulses which go against his own
welfare as a member of society. But liberty for the child is the chance
to test all impulses and tendencies on the world of things and people
in which he finds himself, sufficiently to discover their character so
that he may get rid of those which are harmful, and develop those which
are useful to himself and others. Education which treats all children
as if their impulses were those of the average of an adult society
(whose weaknesses and failures are moreover constantly deplored) is
sure to go on reproducing that same average society without even
finding out whether and how it might be better. Education which finds
out what children really are may be able to shape itself by this
knowledge so that the best can be kept and the bad eliminated. Meantime
much is lost by a mere external suppression of the bad which equally
prevents the expression of the better.
If education demands liberty before it can shape itself according to
facts, how is it to use this liberty for the benefit of the child?
Give a child freedom to find out what he can and can not do, both in
the way of what is physically possible and what his neighbors will
stand for, and he will not waste much time on impossibilities but will
bend his energies to the possibilities. The physical energy and mental
inquisitiveness of children can be turned into positive channels. The
teacher will find the spontaneity, the liveliness, and initiative of
the pupil aids in teaching, instead of being, as under the coercive
system, nuisances to be repressed. The very things which are now
interferences will become positive qualities that the teacher is
cultivating. Besides preserving qualities which will be of use to the
man and developing habits of independence and industry, allowing the
child this freedom is necessary if pupils are really to learn by doing.
Most doing will lead only to superficial muscle training if it is
dictated to the child and prescribed for him step by step. But when the
child’s natural curiosity and love of action are put to work on useful
problems, on finding out for himself how to adjust his environment to
his needs, the teacher finds that the pupils are not only doing their
lessons as well as ever, but are also learning how to control and put
to productive use those energies which are simply disturbing in the
average classroom. Unless the pupil has some real work on which to
exercise his mind by means of his senses and muscles, the teacher will
not be able to do away with the ordinary disciplinary methods. For in
a classroom where the teacher is doing all the work and the children
are listening and answering questions, it would be absurd to allow
the children to place themselves where they please, to move about,
or to talk. Where the teacher’s rôle has changed to that of helper
and observer, where the development of every child is the goal, such
freedom becomes as much a necessity of the work as is quiet where the
children are simply reciting.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Learning to live through situations that are typical of
social life. (Teachers College, N. Y. City.)]
At present, the most talked of schools in which freedom and liberty
are necessary for the children’s work are the schools of Madame Maria
Montessori in Italy and those of her pupils in this country. Madame
Montessori believes, with many educators in this country, that liberty
is necessary in the classroom if the teacher is to know the needs and
capabilities of each pupil, if the child is to receive in school a
well-rounded training making for the best development of his mind,
character, and physique. In general, her reasons for insisting upon
this liberty, which is the basis of her method, correspond with those
outlined above, with one exception. She holds that liberty is necessary
for the child if a scientific education is to be created, because
without it data on which to base principles can not be collected;
also that it is necessary for the physical welfare of the pupils and
for the best development of their characters in training them to be
independent. The point of difference between the Italian educator and
most reformers in this country lies in their respective views of the
value of liberty in the use of material, and this point will be taken
up later.
Madame Montessori believes that repressing children physically while
they are in school and teaching them habits of mental passivity and
docility is mistaking the function of the school and doing the children
real harm. Scientific education not only needs freedom for the child
in order to collect data, but liberty is its very basis; “liberty is
activity,” says Madame Montessori in her book called “The Montessori
Method.” Activity is the basis of life, consequently training children
to move and act is training them for life, which is the proper office
of the schoolroom. The object of liberty is the best interests of the
whole group; this becomes the end of the liberty allowed the children.
Everything which does not contribute to it must be suppressed, while
the greatest care is taken to foster every action with a useful scope.
In order to give the pupils the largest possible scope for such useful
activity, they are allowed a very large amount of freedom in the
classroom. They may move about, talk to each other, place their tables
and chairs where they please, and, what is of more significance, each
pupil may choose what work he will do, and may work at one thing as
long or as short a time as he wishes. She says, “A room in which all
the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily,
without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom
very well disciplined indeed.” Discipline, in short, is ability to do
things independently, not submission under restraint.
In order to bring about this active discipline, which allows free
scope for any useful work, and at the same time does not stifle the
spontaneous impulses of the child, the ordinary methods of discipline
are done away with, and a technique is developed to emphasize the
positive, not the negative, side of discipline. Montessori has
described it in this way: “As to punishments, we have many times come
in contact with children who disturbed the others, without paying any
attention to our corrections. Such children were at once examined by
the physician. When the case proved to be that of a normal child,
we placed one of the little tables in a corner of the room, and in
this way isolated the child, having him sit in a comfortable little
armchair, so placed that he might see his companions at work, and
giving him those games and toys to which he was most attracted. This
isolation almost always succeeded in calming the child; from his
position he could see the entire assembly of his companions, and the
way in which they carried on their work was an object-lesson much more
efficacious than any words of the teacher could possibly have been.
Little by little he would come to see the advantages of being one of
the company working so busily before his eyes, and he would really
wish to go back and do as the others did.” The corrections which the
teachers first offer never take the form of scoldings; the child is
quietly told that what he is doing is not polite or disturbs the other
children. Then he is told how he ought to behave to be a pleasant
companion, or his attention is diverted to a piece of work. Because
children are working on something of their own choice, and when they
want to, and because they may move and talk enough so that they do not
get nervously tired, there is very little need for any “punishment.”
Except for an isolated case of real lawlessness, such as Montessori
refers to in the quotation just cited, the visitor to one of her
schools sees very little need of negative discipline. The teachers’
corrections are practically all for small breaches of manners or for
carelessness.
Activity founded on liberty being the guiding principle of the
Montessori schools, activity is expended by the child on two sorts of
material. Montessori believes that the child needs practice in the
actions of daily life; that, for example, he should be taught how to
take care of and wait on himself. Part of the work is accordingly
directed to this end. She also believes that the child possesses
innate faculties which should be allowed to develop to their fullest;
consequently part of the work is designed to give adequate expression
to these faculties. These exercises for the culture of the inner
potentialities of the child she considers the more important of the
two. The child needs to know how to adjust himself to his environment
in order to be independent and happy; but an imperfect development
of the child’s faculties is an imperfect development of life itself;
so the real object of education consists in furnishing active help
to the normal expansion of the life of the child. These two lines of
development Madame Montessori considers to be so distinct one from the
other that the exercises of practical life cannot perform the function
of the exercises arranged to train the faculties and senses of the
child.
The exercises of practical life are designed to teach the child to
be independent, to supply his own wants, and to perform the actions
of daily life with skill and grace. The pupils keep the schoolroom
in order, dusting and arranging the furniture, and putting away each
piece of material as soon as they are through with it. They wait
on themselves while they are working, getting out the things they
want, finding a convenient place to work, and then taking care of
the apparatus when they have worked with it as long as they like. In
schools where the children do not live in the building, a midday lunch
is served for the pupils; and, except for the cooking, the children do
all the work connected with the meal, setting tables, serving food, and
then clearing away and washing the dishes. All the pupils share alike
in this work, regardless of their age; children of three and four soon
learn to handle the plates and glasses, and to pass the food. Wherever
possible the schools have gardens, which the children care for, and
animal pets of a useful sort--hens and chickens or pigeons. Even the
youngest children put on their own wraps, button and unbutton their
aprons and slippers, and when they can not do it for themselves, they
help each other. The necessity of the pupils’ learning to take care of
themselves as early as possible is so much insisted upon that in order
to help the youngest in learning this lesson, Montessori has designed
several appliances to give them practice before they begin to wait upon
themselves. These are wooden frames, fitted with cloth which is opened
down the center. Then the edges are joined either with buttons, hooks
and eyes, or ribbons, and practice consists in opening and closing
these edges by buttoning, hooking, or tying as the case may be.
These appliances may be taken as a bridge between the two sorts of
exercises in use in the Montessori schools. They mark a transition
from the principles which are common to most educational reformers to
those associated particularly with the method worked out by Madame
Montessori. Another quotation from her first book gives the clew to
an understanding of this method: “In a pedagogical method which is
experimental the education of the senses must undoubtedly assume
the greatest importance.... The method used by me is that of making
a pedagogical experiment with a didactic object and awaiting the
spontaneous reaction of the child.... With little children, we must
proceed to the making of trials, and must select the didactic materials
in which they show themselves to be interested.... I believe, however,
that I have arrived at a selection of objects representing the minimum
necessary to a practical sense education.”
Madame Montessori started her career as a teacher among deficient
children in the hospitals where Seguin had worked. Naturally she
experimented with the material used with her subnormal pupils when she
began working with normal children. It is equally natural that many of
the objects which had proved useful with the former were also usable
with the average school child. Ordinary school methods succeed with
deficient children when used more slowly and with more patience; and in
the same way Madame Montessori found that many of the appliances which
had before been used only for deficients produced remarkably successful
results with ordinary children, when used with more rapidity and
liberty. Therefore her “didactic material” includes many things that
are used generally to develop sensory consciousness among deficients.
But instead of using the material in a fixed order and under the
guidance of a teacher, the normal child is allowed complete liberty in
its use; for the object is no longer to awaken powers that are nearly
lacking, but to exercise powers that the child is using constantly in
all his daily actions, so that he may have a more and more accurate and
skillful control over them.
The exercises to develop the faculties of the child are especially
so arranged as to train the power to discriminate and to compare.
His sensory organs are nearly all exercised with apparatus designed,
like the button frames, to allow the child to do one thing for one
purpose. The pupil does not have to use these objects in any fixed
order or work for any length of time on one thing. Except for the very
youngest children, who do only the very simplest exercises, pupils
are at liberty to work at any one they wish and for as long as they
wish. Montessori believes that the child will turn naturally to the
exercise he is ready for. The materials to develop the sense of touch
are among the simplest. There are small boards with strips of sandpaper
running from the roughest to the smoothest, and pieces of different
kinds of cloth; these the child rubs his hands over while his eyes are
blindfolded, distinguishing the differences. The appliances designed
to teach the child to distinguish differences of form and size use the
sense of touch as a strong aid to sight. There are blocks of wood with
holes of different diameters and depths, and cylinders to fit each
hole. The child takes all the cylinders out, rubs his fingers around
their edge and then around the rim of the holes and puts them back
in the proper hole. The ability to judge of size is also exercised
by giving the child a set of graduated wooden blocks with which he
builds a tower, and another set which he may use to make a stair. The
power to distinguish form is developed by wooden insets of all shapes
which fit into holes in a thin board. The child takes out the insets,
feels of them and then replaces them. Later the teacher tells him the
geometrical name of each form while he is touching it, and then has him
distinguish them by name.
There are sets of cardboard forms to correspond to the wooden ones,
and metal plaques where the form appears as a hole in the center of
the plaque. These are used in games which consist in matching the same
form in the different materials, and for drawing the form in outline on
paper to be filed in with colored pencils.
The method of teaching reading and writing uses the sense of touch to
reënforce the lesson the pupil gets through the eye and ear. Sandpaper
alphabets with each letter pasted on a square of cardboard are given a
child. He rubs his finger over these as if he were writing and makes
the sound of the letter as he rubs. Movable letters are used only after
the child is familiar with the letters by touch, and with them he makes
words. Writing usually precedes reading when children learn in this
way; when they take pencil or chalk, they are able to trace the letters
with very little difficulty because the muscles as well as the eye are
familiar with the forms.
The sense of hearing is exercised by means of two sets of bells, one
fixed to give the scale, the other movable, so that the child can make
his own scale by comparing with the fixed scale. The children play a
number of games where they are as quiet as possible, acting out simple,
whispered directions from the teacher. There is as well a series of
rattles filled with sand, gravel, and grains, and the game is to guess
which rattle is being shaken. The sense of color is developed in the
same way by means of specially arranged apparatus. This consists of
small tablets wound with colored silks in all colors and shades, which
are used in many different ways, according to the age and skill of the
pupil. The youngest learn to distinguish two or three colors and to
tell dark from light shades. The older pupils who are familiar with the
colors acquire enough skill in their manipulation to be able to glance
at one tablet and then go to the other side of the room and bring
either an exact match or the next shade lighter or darker, according to
what the teacher has asked for.
Muscular development is provided for by giving the children plenty of
time during the school day to run and play, and by means of apparatus
for free gymnastics, while the finer coördinating muscles are being
constantly exercised while the child is manipulating the appliances for
sense training. The faculty of speech is trained by having the children
practice the pronunciation of words and syllables. The fundamental
conceptions of number are taught much as are reading and writing.
Besides the sandpaper numbers and the plain cardboard ones, there is
a series of wooden bars varying in length from one to ten meters,
which the children use in connection with numbers in learning the
combinations up to ten.
The foregoing description of the didactic material is very brief
and general and omits many of the uses of the appliances as well
as reference to some of the less used material, but it serves to
illustrate the nature and purpose of the work done by the children.
Pupils acquire a marked skill in the handling of the material which
appeals especially to them, and children of four and five learn to
write with very little effort. In fact, Madame Montessori believes
that the average child is ready for many of the ideas which he usually
does not get until his sixth year at an earlier age, when they can be
acquired more easily; and that a system such as hers which allows the
child to perform one set of acts at the time when he is ready for it
saves him a great deal of time later on, besides giving a more perfect
result than could then be achieved.
Each piece of material is designed to train singly one specific sense
through the performance of one set of fixed acts. Consequently if
liberty is confounded with doing as one pleases, this method must
appear very strict. Liberty is found in the use the children make of
material. The amount of freedom the pupils are allowed in the classroom
has already been described, and the rôle of the teacher is made to
correspond with this liberty. She is trained not to interfere with any
spontaneous activity of the child and never to force his attention
where it is not given naturally. When a child has turned of his own
accord to a certain apparatus the teacher may show him the proper use
of it; or in rare cases she may try to direct the child’s attention to
a different type of work if he seems inclined to concentrate to excess
on one thing, but if she fails she never insists. In fact nothing is
done by the teacher to call the ch
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