Educational problems

Introduction

In looking over the past twenty-five years, it seems hardly too much to say that educational thought has broadened more in the past five, and certainly ten, years than in the twenty that preceded. At the beginning of the period the schools were stagnant, the teachers complacent, and the work formal and mechanical. The great movement started by Horace Mann had spent its force. Pedagogy was despised in academic circles (the word suggesting pettifogging to one don in an Atlantic Monthly contribution). Child study was unknown. Psychology of all kinds had no recognition. The philosophy of education consisted chiefly of a few sonorous metaphysical platitudes which mystified far more than they enlightened. Those who brought lessons from abroad were told that American schools must be kept American, and their voice was almost like that of those who cry in the wilderness. Superintendent Philbrick publicly challenged all comers to find any essential imperfection in the schools of Boston, and State Superintendent Dickinson had a philosophy that was remarkably complete, defining everything needful in four blackboards full, on which every large question which teachers had a right to ask was answered by carefully worded formula. Dr. W. T. Harris was rapidly acquiring the almost papal authority which he later wielded among the leaders, now the " old guard." Educational journals of that period were timid, provincial, and are now utterly unreadable. The N. E. A. under the Bicknell regime was being very rapidly pushed to its later prominence as a pedagogic sanhedrin. The term " and pedagogy " appended to my title as Professor of Psychology at the Johns Hopkins in 1884 was, I think, the second in the country. Professor Payne, of Michigan, preceding, to be attached to any chair in any considerable vi INTRODUCTION

college or university, and was regarded by nearly all my friends as a handicap. President Eliot's introduction of my first Boston course (Chapter XIV, Vol. II, page 241) was very typical of the attitude even of those who were advanced. I still have a letter from a president of a now leading state university canceling my appointment on his faculty upon my return from Germany, because he deemed it unsafe to discuss the fundamental principles of education upon which our system was based, as he thought I would do it, because this would be " unsettling." Another leading orthodox Eastern college president declared that he did not propose to send his philosophy, theology, religion, or basal educational convictions to any psychological laboratory or any psychologist to be tested. But I forbear (for it would be almost cruel to those still living, some of whom have changed for the better, doubtless, more than I have) to cite further from my memoranda of these early days. It was a kind of warfare for years, sometimes merry, sometimes in earnest, with scars which veterans on the winning side may be pardoned for feeling some pride in showing, but had now better ignore and forget, so altered is everything. Educational domains, once denied, then ridiculed, are now represented by experts devoting all their time to each in many of our leading universities. Such topics are school hygiene, the history of education, industrial training of many kinds, plays and playgrounds, subnormality, religious and moral education, art. Meanwhile, our conception of education has broadened far beyond the confines of the school and we are realizing that it is as wide as life itself and that the highest standpoint from which any human institution can be judged is a pedagogic or pragmatic one. Child study, once ridiculed and despised, has spread to every highly civilized land and is represented by academic chairs and journals galore and has become the chief stone of the corner. Instead of the child being for the sake of the school, we have had a Copernican revolution, and now the school, including its buildings, all its matter and method, revolve about the child, whose nature and needs supply the norm for everything. Those who know what has been done in this domain already speak with an authority which is recognized as is no other. Yet, despite all this progress, our school system is yet in

INTRODUCTION vii

the gristle, and comparatively little of its history can be written yet because the best of it has not yet been made. Education is still rutty, mechanical, and the system is, on the whole, poorly served by those who teach, admirable as the best are. Our schools are financially poorly supported, despite the $300,000,000 spent a year, and need and must have a far larger budget. So, too, notwithstanding its rapid growth, our school system has not yet transcended the tadpole stage, and the next twenty-five years ought to — and I am optimist enough to believe they will — show vastly accelerated progress, so that the transformations of the past quarter of a century will appear small beside those of the next quarter, and the per capita sum spent upon each child will be greatly augmented. There will be improvement in the professional standing of teachers, in their character, ability, and training, and many transformations, very likely radical, which it is impossible to forecast, are sure to occur. The many and grave faults that now limit the usefulness and threaten the future of our system must be removed at whatever cost, for our stability, progress, and standing among the nations of the world, which are now gravely imperiled. Our destiny is at stake. Thus, America to-day needs a new educational dispensation. Our system is not fulfilling the purpose for which our fathers established it, nor is it molding men as it did in older days when it was simpler and cheaper, and in these volumes I have tried to point out in some detail, as best I could, why, as well as to suggest the needed cures as I see them.

Let us look at the two extremes of good and had and then ask which we are nearest. I. Ideal teaching focuses in suggestion. The more interest on the child's part, the nearer the nascent period for the topic, the more genius and ability, the lighter may the suggestion be and the less method is necessary to touch off the innate springs, the less repetition is necessary and the more sure and permanent the acquisition. Such teaching at the right psychological moment is, like a hint to the wise, sufficient. Biographies and religion abound with instances where a chance word or event, or perhaps the unconscious influence of a single teacher or acquaintance, has changed the whole current of life. This is the right viii INTRODUCTION

seed upon good soil, fittest if sown in its proper season. Moreover, in every normal child at about every moment of its life there is some zest or curiosity just ripe for impregnation with information and suggestion, which will be instantly and forever assimilated with no need of explanation or review, which, indeed, these would positively injure, because they would interfere with the complete absorption of knowledge and keep it nearer the memory surfaces. The pedagogic world knows little of what might, could, and should happen if a child's soul were thus constantly fructified by the most and the best that an ever-present mentor, charged with love and knowledge and sagely observant of times and seasons in making the most of every opportunity, could do. This is the ideal education, and though it may never be fully realized, it should be ever kept in mind and constantly approximated. The school is to shorten the stages by which the child repeats the history of the race. Perhaps none of these essential stages should be entirely omitted for the fullest and most humanistic culture. Some of them need to reverberate only faintly and but once to do their great work of stimulus. Some need to be touched only in the lightest way. Often even the germs of the sins and errors of all the past must be made to glow up for a moment, for the vestiges of evil are thus burned out, while at the same time their conflagration alone can arouse the next highest powers which control or, it may be, repress them. Others need to be betoned with emphasis lest something vital, that is part of man's precious legacy from, his immemorial past, be lost to life, for the best in us is often only the worst sublimated and transfigured.

II. On the other hand, in an organized system of education we have, of course, to depart point by point from this ideal, so that we cannot afford to forget that by an iron law, like that of gravity itself, schools constantly tend to approximate the worst. What is this? Apathetic, unwilling pupils, coerced to attend ; topics which invoke no alluring interest in the soul and so constantly tend to lapse without incessant repetition and mechanical drill; themes taught out of season and those where method ever tends to predominate over matter and content; everything out of its proper age, either too early or late or at the wrong season of the year or time of day; sex

INTRODUCTION ix

differences ignored; individuality obliterated in the monotonous mass, and the law of average made supreme; skill and knowledge stressed that have no value for later life and will be lost when school is over; prim, formal conventional virtues put in place of essential personal morality; no attention paid to that function of life which is at the dawn of puberty the most dominant of all interests, hungriest for information and capable of assimilating condensed extracts of more that is needful for right conduct in life than any other function of human nature, little or nothing helpful in bread winning, which is the first duty of man, conditioning his value in modern life; incessant recitation and examination because the teacher, with only too much justice, feels that without them everything gained may slip away forever because it strikes no root; the soul-breaking drudgery of marking, because so little is known of the real life and powers of the child that each one has to be judged merely by this factitious and superficial test; so that hosts of children are robbed of their inalienable right to be in that grade and class where they can get most and are sentenced to the treadmill of repeating a subject half or sixty or seventy per cent known already; no time or agency to find the individual proprium of each child, on the detection of and emphasis on which it will depend whether or not he ever does anything worth while, especially if he has, as most do have, capacities above the average in some direction; just half those who should be in the system, out of it, day by day; school keeping half the week days in the year; poorly paid and trained teachers, longing and ready to do better on the first chance and leaving so fast that some fifth of our educational army is every year composed of raw recruits ; shoals of foreigners landing on our shores each year whose children have to be taught the very elementary things of life in this country; school boards, the members of which are, on the whole, not more than half competent, and with more interest in their own personal ambitions than in the duty of public service; women, because their services can be procured for a less fee, where men should be ; teaching largely reduced to lesson setting and hearing ; text-books all-dominant, usurping the place of personal inculcation; occasional corruption; wastefulness; unfit teachers kept in their places by un-

X INTRODUCTION

worthy influences; uniformity of goal; laws by the score enacted each year, but many of them unenforced and unenforceable ; a censorship placed on all within the system who may be moved to speak out their minds and point out defects, and grandiose eulogies of the system on all public occasions by those who may be and are responsible for it; juvenile crime and vice abounding; bad eyes, teeth, and health generally, increasing up the grades; everything slack and at low pressure ; the home abandoning its functions to the school, which latter excuses itself by charging its own defects and shortcomings back upon the home; the church and all religious influences banished from the school, because, forsooth, its representatives cannot agree on what is best and this is therefore the easiest way; moral and industrial education, the two chief problems and needs to-day throughout the educational world, regarded as fads and frills; innovations suspected; nearly all I have described in the last chapter on Civics ignored; a persistent fringe of illiteracy, children leaving, on the average, at the end of the sixth when the bill of fare provides twelve courses — this is the nadir.

Somewhere between these extremes, all great systems of national education hover. None realizes all the worst nor all the best agencies. Which are we nearest and toward which are we mainly tending? This is the vital, heart-searching question which is always in order, and perhaps never so much so as now. One thing is certain, however, that those within the system neither dare nor are they competent to judge it. Few of the outside criticisms, lately so numerous, have that degree of expertness which makes their voice authoritative. College presidents and professors, a few of whom might pronounce upon it, often have their own interests, the one in increasing the number of students for their institutions, and the other the advancing of their own text-books. They can never look at the system from without and with entire impartiality. They usually know only parts of it, especially the high schools. Thus, these doctors, to whom our patients would most naturally turn, are not properly trained to diagnose and prescribe, but are very prone to be suffering more or less from the same distempers while thinking themselves well, and thus do not rightly evaluate essential symptoms.

INTRODUCTION xi

Again, we are so rankly prosperous as a nation, so satisfied, have been so successful that we trust in the principle of laissez faire implicitly. Providence or nature will take care of America, and whatever betides, all will come out right in the end and bread will fall from somewhere into every open and hungry mouth, and so it usually does. The American generally gets a living and gets on in this great land of opportunity without needing to figure too closely. If the school is wasteful, so are homes, railroads, business methods, Congress, and the rest — and we can afford it. If the schools do not teach the right thing in the right way, the children generally survive the loss and the tide of foreign immigrants gets assimilated somehow. Poorer nations may practice small educational economies, but we have no more pressing need of the conservation of humanity which drifts to us from all the earth than of forests and other natural resources. All this compels us to the conclusion that we cannot expect any radical reforms or reconstructions of our educational, without reform and reconstruction of our social, system, of which the school is essentially typical.

Despite complaints of many sorts, just and unjust and from many sources, wise and otherwise, and despite the laudation of our system from top to bottom by its representatives and also by well-disposed and personally conducted foreign visitors, it has never yet had the benefit of much of any true criticism which was at the same time competent and impartial. This it profoundly needs, and never so much so as now, for never since its beginning has the public school been so inadequate to our needs, since, much as the latter has grown and improved, the demands which have to be made upon education have increased far more rapidly. The average American citizen in embryo leaves school at the sixth grade, having had instruction only by poorly trained and underpaid women. He has had practically no training toward self-support, knows little or nothing of personal hygiene, which is the religion of the body, or of civics, which is the religion of citizenship, or of sex, which with the increasingly urban life is a source of more and greater dangers than ever before. Our young people are turned out into life just before the dawn of pubescence, most ignorant and most exposed. If the child has any rexu INTRODUCTION

ligion, it has come to him from outside the school. What is more vital than these things? School methods, texts and topics are traditional and teaching is slack and easy-going. The high school, and often the college, is mechanical, complacent, and mediocrity of both is protected and kept in countenance by their respectability. The true university is only half developed and the administrative and financial methods .of our old endowed institutions, if not " rotten," as the head of one of our largest and oldest universities has lately called them, are in crying need of radical revision, as I had intended to show, point by point, in chapters on the college, the university, the technical, medical, theological, and law schools, which are excluded from this volume by limitations of space, but which will appear later. Thus our whole system is in crying need of thoroughgoing inspection and overhauling by experts, such as commercial, manufacturing, and other concerns are now everywhere employing, to point out how wastage can be avoided and greater efficiency secured. This work, boards that control both educational systems and institutions will, I am convinced, soon bring to pass. We need nothing less than a great educational revival all along the line, and I believe it has already begun and that a greater transformation than we have ever had, impends. Thus I am not pessimistic, for we have gained of late at a pace which, up to date, is constantly accelerating.

I wish, therefore, that I dared to entitle this book The Pedagogy of the Future. Every one of the new departures indicated in the following chapters has, I believe, without exception, already been somewhere put in successful operation, and the first duty of the present is to broaden our comparative viewpoint until it has an international, if not world-wide, range and put into practice all the best that has been anywhere found to work well. But this is not all, for, before it is completely done, many new problems and possibilities now unglimpsed will be seen. Hence, the complete pedagogy of the future, when it comes, will be larger than it has yet entered into the heart of any man to conceive. Thus, the present situation should appeal to the best young men as education has never before appealed. All the four or five score of child-welfare agencies must and will be correlated with the

INTRODUCTION xm

school and directed from one central bureau, so that each child can be placed just where in the whole system it will get the most good. Each, too, will not only be inspected medically and morally, but studied for vocational aptitudes. If the reforms that are now possible, or even those that now seem imminent, are really effected, these volumes, instead of being the pedagogy of the future, will ere long become that of the past. That they may soon become so is my most earnest hope.

For twenty-five years I have lectured Saturday mornings to teachers and to students upon Education, and this book is the final revision of parts of this course up to date, ending February, 191 1. The result is not unlike Uncle Tobey's coat, made over and over, part by part, with not only new fabrics, but new fashions, so that nothing to suggest the original remains. During these years I find that I have given over seven hundred outside addresses on educational subjects, to all kinds of audiences, and written several score of magazine articles and have drawn freely upon all this material, although the chapters as they here stand have been newly written and recast within the last ten months, with the printer at my heels, so that I have not been able to observe the obviously proper order of chapters.

Besides my constant indebtedness to the Librarian of Clark University, Dr. Louis N. Wilson, who has helped me to find and procured from a distance many references, I am under special obligation to Dr. Theodate L. Smith, who has critically read all the manuscript as well as the proof of the second volume and suggested various improvements and additions. I am also under unusual obligations to Miss Helen Cashman, who has typographed, read, and revised a large part of the manuscript and proof and prepared the authors' index; also to my pupils in Education for the use of their printed, and occasionally unprinted, theses, of which I have often made free use.

Table Of Contents

VOLUME I

PAGE

Introduction v-xiii

CHAPTER I The Pedagogy of the Kindergarten ...... i CHAPTER H The Educational Value of Dancing and Pantomime . . 42

CHAPTER HI The Pedagogy of Music 91

CHAPTER IV

The Religious Training of Children and the Sunday- School ^ . 136

CHAPTER V Moral Education 200

CHAPTER VI Children's Lies: Their Psychology and Pedagogy , . 345

CHAPTER VII The Pedagogy of Sex . 388

CHAPTER VIII Industrial Education 540

XV

CHAPTER I

The ideal kindergarten — Its value as a school for educating young women — Need of enlarging the scope of training schools— Froebel as a seer anticipating modern ideals — Froebel's defects — Lack of competent criticism— Need and lack of child study for the kindergarten age — Violations of Froebel's spirit in the modern kindergarten — Some specific reforms needed — Need of transcending Froebelian limitations — Burk's experiments with free play— Miss Blow's criticism of Miss Dopp, Dewey, and Hall— The kindergarten in Europe — Relations to the day nursery — The progressive and conservative schools.

The more advanced the student and the more speciahzed the teaching the less pedagogy and genetic educational philosophy figure. In higher mathematics, astronomy, philology and the rest, the method is the logic of the science itself; and the arts of adaptation to ages and individuals play a small role. But, as we go down the scale of age or of intelligence, and as the interval between the knowledge and mental development of the teacher on the one hand and the taught on the other increases, the proportion of method to subject matter also increases. In teaching infants and still more in educating idiots and animals, as is now often done in the laboratory, we must not only elementarize the subject but know and gauge the capacities of those we teach. Thus the younger the pupils the more we must study them to adjust ; and the more general the culture to be imparted, the more we need to know and utilize the laws of the deepest philosophy of life. When this latter is entirely undeveloped, we must fall back on instinct and intuition, vague and ambiguous though their deliverances may be. To guide ourselves in the development of the very earliest stages of infancy, we can thus do little but stand aside out of Nature's way, and follow the promptings of parental love, or at best muse, brood, and consult the inner oracle of affection for the direction of our care-taking. These considertions, pertinent at every stage of education and history, where pedagogical theory and practice have advanced down the age scale toward the nursery, and even into it, are nowhere so necessary as in considering Froebel, whose nebulous speculations were bred by the Zeitgeist in the natal age of German philosophy, and also by the great idealistic movement which accompanied the birth of this puissant nation.

His weird and bizarre version of this metaphysical ferment was a unique " culture bouillon " concocted of various ingredients : theosophic mysticism, foregleams of evolution, passionate enthusiasm for nature just as the great scientific movement was dawning, and love of children based largely upon self-pity for the pathos of his own childhood, a motive that has prompted so many of the great founders of educational institutions to provide opportunities for subsequent generations to emancipate themselves from the ignorance that had handicapped their own lives. Perhaps these very defects have made Froebel's " Education of Man," which to adepts in the psychological disciplines has always seemed a nondescript medley and conflation of unorganized apercus (a really unreadable book with seven seals, though it is), one of the best and most nourishing of all infant foods for novices in the speculative field, a book which will and should always be dear to women's souls, not so much for what it teaches their intellect, as because it makes them feel so profoundly the burden of the mystery of the nascent soul, the greatest miracle of life, and the sanctity of the offices of ministration to it, and shows that this insight and function are central and cardinal in the universe.^

I. — The very term " Kindergarten " is multifariously suggestive and its every possible meaning is charming. Froebel may well have cried " Eureka " when, after long quest for a fit name, he hit upon this, for it is an apt symbol of his type of mind as well as of the pedagogic endeavor of his life. It may signify a garden for, or a park of, children, themselves regarded as the consummate flowers of nature; or even as a

* See the interesting Chapter VIII on Froebel, in Dr. T. Misawa's Modem Educators and their Ideals, D. Appleton & Co., N. Y., 1909.

paradise fit to be the scene not of the creation of the first mature human pair, but the ideal setting or larger nest for children to be born and grow in. Flowers and trees are vastly older than mankind and have been worshiped at a certain stage by probably every race, of which they were perhaps the first educational environment, idealized always afterwards in folklore, myth, and song. Once every flower was a symbol or oracle, and plants bore the signatures of planets and spoke a language of their own to the heart, while the trees, the abodes of men's ancient forebears, meant shelter or aspiration, ways leading up to the abodes of the gods. Groves, as man's first temples, where Druids felt most strongly the sensus numinis haunted by Dryads and herbs that sustained life before the dawn of agriculture, which marked the first settled modus Vivendi of the race and also the rise of human dominion over vegetal life, suggest precisely the Arcadia where alone childhood is really at home or in its world. Again, a garden is both useful and ornamental and in it nature and nurture, from the time of the very first bower or home, have conspired to do their very best in the botanical, as education should in the animal, kingdom of man; so that it is prophetic of the time when man shall control the evolution of his own species as he has learned to domesticate and improve all the cultivated cereals and shrubs that blossom and bear seed and fruit.

Thus the very word " children-garden " takes us to a region of the soul deep and rankly rich with felted and unanalyzable thoughts, feelings, and impulses, that are very strong but of a very primitive type. It suggests a new setting for childhood, its rescue from an artificial to its pristine state, at a time when fit environment is not only the best background for, but by far the most potent and central of, all the influences of education. Perhaps some time, when the reaction from the present urban and suburban conditions is complete and all schools are in the country (as increasing transportation facilities — trolleys, autos and, perhaps before we know it, flying machines — may make practicable), and when the school-garden movement shall have done its perfect work, our near posterity, if not we, may realize this entrancing ideal of the reunion of the heart of childhood with the heart of nature. One need not be a bucolic poet, a landscape gardener, a horticulturist, or even a trained agriculturist to revel in imaginings of what a scenic farm school the great all-mother Nature has made possible for the early stages of human life. Would that pedagogues were occasionally inclined to see visions and dream dreams, instead of being as a class the most conservative, prosaic, and plodding, if not just now, under the dominion of modern modes of supervision in this country, the most servile, of all half-skilled laborers. Walks, beds, hothouses, nurseries, lawns, playgrounds, shade, brooks, ponds, fertilizing, seed time and harvest, moisture and drought, grafting, budding, cross-fertilization by insects, the lessons of the soil, play in stone fields and snow and ice, tree setting, with arbor-day functions, cutting and lumbering, sugaring, all the impressive lessons of the processional of the seasons with carefully chosen animal and bird life which means so much to children, learning and being taught on foot and out of doors and from objects, not from words or even pictures — such is Nature's pedagogium. Of nearly every item of her curriculum we rob the child during his most impressionable years when the soul is most plastic to her influences, shut children indoors, teach them in droves for years the attenuated and desiccated three R's, that they may learn to con books and newspapers and, above all, to figure. We pay a terrible price for this education. We often succeed in immunizing the child from experiences natural to his age. We rear him in ignorance of and isolate him from contact with the great influences that have made man man. Thus, with all our precautions, we make wizened souls in wizened bodies by kidnaping the child from his only true and real home which God has decreed and Nature has prepared for him.

Only in its normal environment as above can we study the real child. Here he can live out all that is in him, without the repressions which in. the most emancipated child are so many, so dwarfing and often so indescribably pathetic, especially for girls. I am convinced that the civilized world has missed one of the most marvelous and inspiring of all spectacles : viz., the normal young child growing psychically all it is capable of growing, from within out, by leaps and bounds. This even the growth curve of the brain suggests as normal were the child only rightly circumstanced. Our bepedagogued world has little conception of what education can be and do. In his concept of nature as the child's nurse, mother, and teacher, even Rousseau was a palhd and shut-in convalescent, just beginning wistfully to dream and think out of doors. Oh, for one really ideal kindergarten in the world to demonstrate all this to carping and incredulous pedagogues with their distorted and mean ideas of children, and their dense ignorance of their deeper nature and their possibilities ! It would cost much money; but how can the wealth and service in the world be better spent than in restoring children to Nature and opening wide rather than shutting the doors of opportunity and incentive for observation, language, self-activity, all-sided interest, true race recapitulation, hygiene, the preformation of the soul for virtue, religion, social and industrial efficiency — all of which languish in the four walls of the schoolroom where children are caged like wild animals in captivity, until the gamey flavor of the open and the call of the wild within them, and their most inalienable rights to Nature are lost.