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.
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
