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.
(1) Printing teaches English. (Francis Parker School, Chicago.)
(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
