A new basis for social progress

Front matter

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Preface

In 1915 the Board of Trustees of the University of Pittsburgh, in order to produce a better and more properly functioning institution in the local environment, instituted a survey. This investigation extended in time over a period of nearly two years and led those engaged in the undertaking, as any attempt at analysis of an organization so large and so complex as that of our modern American university must inevitably lead, into many fields. The varied histories of our educational institutions of higher learning, their struggles, their reverses, their failures, - their successes, and their present differences in de- . gteee of accomplishment, demonstrate the common . comprehensiveness of the riddles which all are en- \ deavoring to solve, and make clear the relationship V which the problems confronting the local university N bear to the general educational problem.

During the past few years all parts of our educa- ^ tional equipment have been subjected to both sound ; and unsound criticism. Our universities especially • ; have been weighed in many balances furnished for ~ measurement and have fallen far short both in orm ganization and accomplishment of the weight de- * sired. Simultaneously with this discovery, the con-

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383540 viii PREFACE

viction has been growing that quite regardless of the conditions obtaining at present among our universities and equally regardless of their histories, they are facing a future fraught with opportunities, if only those who are responsible for their destinies can be made to see their potentialities for service. It is this conviction, developed by study and investigation and strengthened by research, that has, in spite of the innumerable obstacles encountered in conducting the survey, stimulated those responsible for this volume to publication. While much of that which follows was originally projected that a single better and more serviceable university might be produced, study has bred the belief that the principles promulgated admit of the widest application. Even in the Supplement, while an attempt has been made to suggest ways and means of applying these principles to a special field, the suggestions are in essence, we hope, neither local nor provincial. Familiarity with the local conditions alone determined our choice of a community.

Needless to say, it is not purposed herein to discuss the history and growth of education. Neither is it purposed to engage in any part of the warfare which has been carried on during the past decade by vocationalists and culturalists. Yet the importance of the effects of the vocational-cultural controversy renders a statement of the point of view necessary.

PREFACE is

As the struggle has continued, it has become evident that the ranks of both belligerents are filled with enthusiasts. A survey of the literature published during the last ten years dealing with education and the educational problems in America, of the minutes of the meetings of various state and sectional organizations, cannot fail to impress even the most casual that antagonists and protagonists fall into three roughly classified camps: at one extreme the culturalists, at the other the vocationalists, and between and exposed to the ceaseless fire of both the bewildered parents, who are concerned with the problem primarily as it touches the education of their own children, and who, confused by the amount of ammunition expended by the opposing forces, have been compelled to draw the small solace possible from an ancient stalemate, that "Much may be said for both sides," and have blindly trusted precedent with an historical faith in the traditional good lying somewhere in the thing called "education." The tide of battle has ebbed and flowed, the advantage of ammunition and popular support being now with one, now with the other; and the plight of the bewildered yet vitally concerned non-combatant has remained virtually the same.

The writers believe that culturalists and vocationalists both represent extremes ; that somewhere, as between all extremes, there lies a norm; that any movex PREFACE

ment, regardless of how praiseworthy it be in pur* pose, suffers in proportion to the extremes to which its enthusiasts and extremists proceed; and that while both culturalists and vocationalists do, as the layman believes, marshal much that is good about their banners, neither of them command all that is best. This study, however, is not primarily presented as a further contribution to the literature of warfare, but rather as an earnest attempt at the solution of an age-old problem.

Criticisms of the principles promulgated herein, which have been as freely invited as offered, have dwelt most with the novelty of the plan proposed. Conservatism must ever play its part. Yet in other fields of activity in America novelty has scarcely been an insurmountable barrier to progress. If our proposal be a novelty, as it has been heralded by those educators who have been approached for criticism, it is novel only in the field of education. The principles are ancient ones, long operative in every branch of scientific research. The newness ties, not in the principles, but in the application of those principles.

In conclusion, we wish gratefully to acknowledge our indebtedness to all those who have given of their time and attention and have stimulated by oral criticism and frank Expression of opinion, and to all who in any way assisted the survey organization in

PREFACE xi

carrying on its work at the University of Pittsburgh. Especially are we under obligations to Professor Robert Palfrey Utter, of Amherst College, for his interest in and his criticism of the manuscript, to Dean Le Baron R. Briggs, of Harvard University, and to Professor Malcolm McLeod, of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, for their helpful suggestions and kindly assistance in technical difficulties.

William Charles White. • Louis Jat Heath.

Contents

I. The Building Unit of Internationalism . . 1

II. The Present General Trend of Education . 11

HI. Some Present-Day Influences affecting Education 25

Chapter I The Building Unit Of Internationalism

What is the proper unit of population to be entrusted with autonomy as the building unit, first, of a nation, and second, of an international world? Internationalism is the great commanding movement of modern times. Given new impetus by the world war, that which only a few years ago was the dream of theorists and visionaries is coming to be considered, by practical statesmen the world over, the surest guarantee to all peoples of the inalienable rights of man and of a lasting peace on earth. Present developments indicate that we are moving toward such an era. But our passage toward internationalism can only be a drift until we have answered this first and fundamental question which internationalism raises.

The answer to this question is not to be found by turning the pages of history. The size of the unit to which autonomy has been granted in the past has varied with the demands of -the period and the growth of knowledge. Neither is it possible to eradicate the divisions of the past and build anew with fresh and unused materials. The fact must be faced that, no matter what the size of the autonomic unit determined upon, communities everywhere must be taken as they exist and all effort expended to establish within these already present communities the soundest principles which will project far on into the future the laws which will make for each the ultimate best that combined vision and knowledge can foresee.

While the drift toward internationalism raises new questions, more important still, it focuses attention upon present problems of government which have been multiplying in intricacy and difficulty with the increase in population and the diffusion of knowledge. So great has the task of making adequate and uniform provision for great aggregations of people become that solutions have been sought from many angles.

Steadily the realization has been growing that the voice of a nation resides chiefly in its municipalities. From the past comes the history of such independent cities as Milan and Venice; cities which led in the cultural progress of their age. Advancement came then, and has come since then, with the development of autonomy in communities and has been largely dependent upon the degree

UNIT OP INTERNATIONALISM 3

of autonoifric privilege allowed in business and cultural ways. From out the mass of partially successful experiments, of gropings and strivings, there has emerged evidence that warrants the belief that the soundest principle of government yet suggested is the unit principle; that the unit plan has most to offer in the way of solution for all our problems and can alone give definite guidance to international drift.

Cities in modern times have grown to enormous size. The soundness of a proposal must be measured by its inclusiveness and capacity to reckon with expansion. Herein lies the strength of the unit plan. For the principles of this ordain that, as population increases to a number beyond that which can be efficiently handled, the whole community must be divided into smaller, independent units with duplication of equipment provided in order that each may be allowed the degree of autonomy which shall bring forth the best possible results of uniform growth and progress for those residing in the territory assigned to each unit.

The acceptance of this principle would be but the recognition that the aim of government, of nationalism and internationalism, is, above all else, to provide .uniformly fair opportunities for all with due regard to the bent and demands of nations, municipalities, and individuals. Let us but solve the problem presented by municipalities and we shall have laid the foundations of a nation and of an international world, for they are but epitomes of larger groups.

Whatever the flaws in the structure of the German nation may be, its unprecedented growth and its municipal development, based upon city autonomy as outlined, after the Napoleonic Wars, by Baron von Stein, who sought to transplant into Germany the free spirit of English public life and institutions, is the best example we have of the application of some of these principles. , In 1808 Stein wrote to Hardenberg: —

I regard it as important to break the fetters by which the bureaucracy obstructs all human movement, to destroy the spirit of avarice and pernicious self-interest, and the attachment to mechanical forms which dominate this form of government. The nation must be enabled to manage its own affairs and to emerge from the condition of tutelage in which an ever restless and vigilant Government seeks to keep it.

) In a later memorandum he says: —

The citizens are charged with the undivided administration of their communal affairs. The influence of the State is entirely restricted to supervision, with a view to seeing that nothing is done contrary to the purpose of the State and that the existing laws are observed.

' Says Harbutt Dawson: —

The idea which underlay all Stein's plans was a large decentralization of State authority, which was to add

UNIT OP INTERNATIONALISM 6

weight and importance to civic life without organically weakening the central power. ^

The purpose of the Municipal Ordinance was ... to give to the towns a more independent and efficient constitution, to create for them in the civil parish a firm point of union, to give to them active influence upon the government of the community, and by such*participation in local government to stimulate and preserve public spirit.

For, as the old Germanic rhyme runs, —

In America the growth of the same principle is to be seen also in the autonomy which has been allowed some of our cities, especially those in the State of Ohio. But progress in this direction has been retarded, and largely by the structure of the Nation. The Federal Government has been chary of granting new and additional rights to States. States, ever jealous of the rights which they possess, have been equally reluctant to relinquish any of them to municipalities. And when municipalities have wrung autonomic privileges from conservative State Governments, they have been equally loath to admit any decentralization of their authority by investing institutions and departments with autonomic power. And this jealousy, coupled with the failure of institutions, has obscured the fact that among the privileges of the larger units of population which make for community power, national greatness, and for ultimate internationalism, none stand forth more brilliantly than does education. And among educational institutions, regardless of their inability to guide and direct the thought of America in the past, the most potentially powerful aggregation of all is that which we know as the university.

After all, it is not surprising that American universities have not exerted the influence upon national thought that has been exerted by the institutions of Continental Europe. Our universities have been forced to cope with the difficulties presented by a new, growing country too young to possess either national or educational traditions, and to meet the situation they have imported European ideas and have endeavored regardless of their suitability to transplant these in the New World. The adoption of Germanic principles of university education which resulted in Germanizing the curricula of our older American colleges was not the first evidence of such importation, and since that time the curricula, not only of the universities, but also of the secondary and primary schools, and especially of the kindergartens, have been influenced in innumerable ways by Old- World ideas and Old- World knowledge. Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Montessori are names as familiar in the nomenclature of American education as in European.

UNIT OF INTERNATIONALISM f

The only tradition influencing education in this country which can, in any sense, be termed "American/' is, if it may be so characterized, the "minis* terial." In the beginning, with the single exception of the University of Pennsylvania, the ministerial influence dominated the American colleges. This influence, as the founding of Harvard, of Yale, and later of Princeton and innumerable smaller colleges throughout New England and the Eastern section evidences, has always been a conservative one, clinging to the tenets of the past and receding gradually and grudgingly into new sections to found new institutions for the preservation of the old traditions. American institutions as a whole, save those which have sprung forth full-grown overnight, as it were, have never been entirely free of this influence. Particularly is this true of the colleges. These smaller units or parts of larger organizations have usually reached a period in their development marked as the parting of two ways, and they have taken one or the other as the ministerial tradition has weakened or strengthened. They have either held true to the principles promulgated by their founders and, turning away from a future, have remained small and unimportant save in a denominational way, or have broken to a limited degree with traditional principles to become for a time the storm centers of denominational upheaval and protest, and finally, have devel-

8 k A NEW BASIS FOR SOCIAL PROGRESS

oped specialized units born in a newer age, facing the future more freely, it is true, but still loaded with the ball and chain of institutional tradition. *

*> The government and administration of our universities has, however, been less affected by traditional European organization than has the curriculum. Changes in American university governance have been frequent, but they have, to a greater extent, been brought about by influences outside of what may be termed the "university world" and have been made necessary by the insistent demands of rapidly expanding communities, increased municipal wealth, the disappearance of apprenticeship, and the requirements of new and enormous industries. Numerous experiments have been tried, but here as elsewhere conservatism has played its part in retarding the development. American institutions have failed to keep pace in organization with the growth and development of corporate organization in other fields. Isolation also has had its influence. And the meagerness of the remuneration for administrative and academic service has assisted in forcing men qualified by inheritance, by nature, and by training to administer into occupations more lucrative.

In the main, our universities have followed rather than led in our national journey. Yet here and there at intervals, some have caught a gleam of their true

UNIT OF INTERNATIONALISM 9

function and have endeavored with the light which they possess to seize their opportunities. The history of Johns Hopkins University exemplifies the point and suggests the influence which an educational institution may exert communistically, nationally, and internationally. A study of the brilliant example of this university under President Gilman, an institution which is in our time the only one built and established on a post-graduate basis, will amply repay all who wish to carry on research in this field. The effects upon the whole community of Baltimore that have followed the growth of Johns Hopkins in that city are among the most hopeful of portents and indicate what may be done in other communities. Yet despite this example, the greatness of the mass of our educational institutions has remained potential and will continue so to remain until in some community there shall appear men with the destinies of a university in charge, wise enough to see that this most powerful single arm of service can in no wise be developed as an independency, but only as a correlated part of the whole governmental and educational system.

The road to internationalism lies through the autonomic unit. The development of the autonomic unit is dependent upon education, and the most powerful factor in education is a guiding principle. The position of our universities makes it imperative that they should assume the guidance and lead in rather than follow progressive thought. The building unit of internationalism is the university unit encompassing smaller units created for specific purposes, — units for common-school education, units for welfare and health for such common necessities as infant feeding, maternity, tuberculosis, and charity aid. The architect, the world war, is showing us the elevation of the structure to be built, but the building stones must be furnished by autonomic units of population and must be shaped and fitted by the master mason, Education.

Chapter II The Present General Trend Op Education

However preconceived opinions may be, and however much they may be colored by early educational influences, no conclusions regarding the extrication of a people from governmental and educational difficulties can be drawn before a scrutiny is made of the modern general trend in education. So significant are present-day movings and stirrings that they must be reckoned with before any detailed suggestions pointing toward reconstruction can be offered.

America, during the past few years, has witnessed much individual activity and the drafting of uncounted committees to study the educational problem. Most important among these are such bodies as the General Education Board, founded by Mr. Rockefeller, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Royal Commission of Canada, as well as many agents of the Federal Government and of individual States and communities. These movements and the surveys which have been inaugurated and conducted in various institutions are most significant of the general movement leading to an analysis of the problem by a scrutiny of the causes which have brought about present unsatisfactory conditions. The surveys — of education in the State of Vermont and of Medical and Legal Education in America — under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation exemplify the truth of this. > The fact has become obvious that the social philosophy of the American people has been continuously and persistently changing. These widespread movements toward analysis and critical study have been bred by the failure of the American educational system to meet adequately the demands of this evolving social philosophy.

One of the first great tests of the system came when education was made compulsory. This action created a demand, — a demand for primary schools, — and following this and forced by the graduation of children from these schools, demand for secondary equipment. In this way compulsory education for eight grades created demands which extended through to the equipment which attempted to meet the demands of the secondary schools. The struggles of all parts of the system to face this test have continued for years.

Another result of compulsory education, not so immediate, but no less important, was its effect upon apprenticeship. Compulsory education coupled with other causes, such as increased community wealth, the invention of machinery to do the work

PRESENT TREND OE EIHJCATION IS

formerly done by hand labor, and the amalgamation of small trades, ultimately effected the declination of the whole apprentice system. In the beginning, trade unions in America were largely made up of ignorant, uneducated, yet in the main good workmen. Compulsory education forced the children of these workmen into schools. Then, as the effects of this schooling became apparent, parents gradually became desirous that their children should have one or two extra years of education. Then, as to-day, the majority of workmen, as a rule, were desirous that their children remain longer in the schools than circumstances or inclination permitted their parents. As one immediate consequence of this, the boys and girls no longer wished to follow the calling of their parents. Young children, upon arriving at the time when they would have been bound out as apprentices in various trades, were compelled to remain in school.

This decline of apprenticeship, coming as a remote result of compulsory education, was another social change which tested the competency of the educational system. When the apprentice methods of training became no longer feasible, a new and heavy burden was thrown suddenly upon the educational system. Smug in its pharisaical position of superiority, dealing only with the gifted and the pre-professional, this system found its security suddenly invaded by hordes of those students who had formerly filled the ranks of the apprentices and who demanded now that it find for them occupations in the world. And although it is true that the school has aided a few to find such occupations, it has, through the selective standards of traditional school life, functioned but crudely.

Dr. Henry Suzzallo, President of the University of Washington, has succinctly stated the case against the former system. He says in part: —

The whole system of schooling from the primary school through the college was pre-professional. The old-time teacher gave little thought to those who did not register at the school, — those who were not prosperous enough to take the leisure and pay the rate, those who were not interested in languages and books and abstract thoughts, those who were so handicapped in body and mind that conventional schooling promised little. . • . The school's selection, instruction, and protection, whether exercised consciously or unconsciously, favored the talented few.

The difficulties with this traditionally restricted service of the schools is summarized as follows: -—

The educational system sends into professional life more persons than are required. It gives little or no attention to the education and distribution of men among the very necessary and very numerous non-professional occupations; In consequence the professional suffers from overcrowding and from the type of economic Competition that interferes with the idealism of professional service. But the other occupations fare worse, for they suffer f rom that all round incompetency which follows the com-

PRESENT TREND OF EDUCATION 15

plete want of an appropriate choosing and training of men for tasks. Into the ranks of industry, agriculture, commerce, and personal service enter the men and women whose school experience has directly or subtly convinced them that they are partial or total intellectual failures, for the traditional . school has unjustly measured the mental competencies of every type of youth by its high but narrow standards of pre-prof essional training.

The old type of education has been aptly described again by the committee which, in 1910, reported on the Newton school system : —

It selected, retained and educated those who were fitted by natural endowment and interest to profit by what the school thought fit to offer. Others were eliminated all along the way, but with little concern for the precious material thus forced to waste. It stood for uniformity in materials of education, in methods and in product.

The countless hordes of those members of a community who have found their occupation solely by chance having been cast forth as unfitted for a professional career and therefore only fitted for a position of secondary importance, are sad evidence of the truth of this.

Other natural results of such a system are the bread lines, the soup kitchens, and much of the social phenomena which unemployment has brought. The findings published in the report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, London, 1909, might, in all truth, have been written of America.

We cannot believe [write the Commissioners] that the nation can long persist in ignoring the fact that the unemployed are thus being daily created under our eyes out of bright young lives, capable of better things, for whose training we make no provision. It is, unfortunately , only too clear that the mass of unemployment is continually being recruited by a stream of young men from industries which rely upon unskilled boy labor, and turn it adrift at manhood without any general special industrial qualifications, and that it will never be diminished till this stream is arrested.

With the march of time, however, there has gradually dawned a realization of the fact that the line of demarkation between the professional and the non-professional is a surprisingly indistinguishable one. Herein is to be found the cause for the activities of the various committees and boards. An analysis of the reports of these groups and individuals discloses that running through all the strivings are certain fixed principles which force this conclusion. A study of recent systems — English, German, and French, and those of the various American States — yields evidence of the same single desire; namely, to establish an educational plan that shall prepare at each given period, from those human individuals entering it, groups fitted for a special function in life, and when adequate specialized education has been furnished for each group, to add as much of the cultural as is commensurate with the number of years allowed each individual for the preparation for his life's work. i

PRESENT TREND OF EDUCATION 17

The schools of America have been slow to recognize the obligation which the passing of apprenticeship and the diminution of the traditional barriers between professional and non-professional occupations has placed upon them. The popular conception of education has changed slowly, it is true, but surely, none the less. A new group has seen that thejarger contribution to individual happiness and social efficiency can be made only by aiding all rather than a chosen few to make the "transit from the period of education to that of responsible workmanship in the world."

In various communities there have appeared different expressions of the same tendency, each modified by the bent and demand of the community in which the educational system is to operate. The accompanying chart (p. 19) will perhaps indicate something of this trend of modern education during the past quarter of a century. The variations are many, dependent as they are upon the physical characteristics of individual communities and affected also by differing laws of differing Commonwealths. For the present purpose, however, this general chart will adequately serve to illustrate.

While the rural school or district school, as it is sometimes called, does not appear on the chart, its position in the educational scheme, important as it is, does not make for marked variation in the system. Neither does the chart include the private schools and so-called "finishing" schools. The former occupy a place somewhat analogous to that of the high schools or upper primary schools. The latter, with their student bodies composed of those members of society not primarily interested in either early vocational or higher vocational postions in life, may be considered as appurtenances rather than organic parts of the system.

From this it will be seen that communities are all agreed on but six years of education — that period lying between the entrance to the kindergarten or to the primary school and the beginning of the secondary school. After this six-year period, in some communities, the junior high school has made its appearance. This school includes a year or two from the primary and a year or two from the high school and segregates within its walls certain subjects which will lead its pupils to definite functions in life or to higher educational institutions. Following this is a series of secondary schools of which the prototype is the secondary or high or grammar school of the past. At this point the delineation of courses becomes more marked, and we have the academic high schools, commercial high schools, vocational high schools of various kinds, and in addition, special courses in each of these individual institutions. These, all more or less at variance with the concepts

PRESENT TREND OP EDUCATION

"ULi

Graduate School Mtdlol School Madlcil School Thcologlc.l Schoo

Cloriu Conduct

Mill Wor of antiquity, evidence the trend. The provision of certain fixed types of education and such specialization, by a careful delineation of courses, as will lead to an ultimate, is the educational ideal which has evolved. The ultimate continues to lie within the choice of the individual student, assisted, of course, by parent and teacher guides early in his educational life.

This development has been inspired and directed by the idea that, "It is the function of the school to educate every boy and every girl, to eliminate none and accept all. It fits work and method to individual needs, and strives to send children out of school just as individually diverse as nature designed them to be, and as the diversity of service which awaits them requires."