Problems of educational readjustment

Preface

How shall education be made efficient? Undiscriminating critics have always condemned the schools for their failure to produce a higher type of men and women ; but now the large majority of educators are themselves convinced that the traditional processes of training and instruction are far from rendering efficient educational service. In all directions men and women, moved by the vision of a brighter future on earth, are striving to promote human well-being. Education is but one of the phases of this newer social economy. It, too, is certainly capable of being made more purposeful, more scientific, less blind in its methods, less doubtful as to its results.

But educational processes can be improved only as particular phases or fields of education are singled out for consideration and constructive effort. It is probable, for example, that American primary education, judged by valid iv PREFACE

standards, would be found to be far more efficient than that designed for young persons from twelve to fourteen years of age, or that designed for youths from fourteen to eighteen years of age. Again, careful analysis might show that the customary education of the high school is fairly effective for that minority who are qualified to pass to institutions of higher learning; while for the large majority, to whom it represents the final stage of systematic cultural education, it may be of little actual service. The problem is one to be considered as it touches particular groups of children or particular aims to be realized.

In each of the following papers a particular educational problem is isolated for purposes of analysis and discussion. In each case the problem is one growing out of contemporary efforts to render education more effective by defining purposes or aims in a scientific manner, and to secure methods designed to achieve these purposes.

There can be but little question that the most characteristic weakness of American edu-

PREFACE v

cation, as that concerns young persons from twelve to eighteen years of age, is to be found in its failure to formulate valid aims. Being guided by no sufficient aims, it is inevitable that the educational practice followed shall waver between the Scylla of custom-made (and therefore blind) method on the one hand, and the Charybdis of purely empirical device on the other.

The following papers, with one exception, treat of but a few of the fundamental problems growing out of the unscientific aims of contemporary education as that is designed for adolescents. What do we mean by culture, social efficiency, or liberal education? What is vocational education, and how is it related to general education? What are some broad principles of method by which profitable results are to be achieved? These questions are at least implicit in the discussion of each topic presented.

The papers have been written with a view to provoking further discussion of the questions involved. If it be true that in the field vi PREFACE

of general secondary education we have as yet few aims that are educationally serviceable or valid, then we must address ourselves to this field of study before we can either determine subject-matter or elaborate right method. An illustration may serve to make this clear.

If, for example, we ask the question as to why girls should, as a condition of graduating from the ordinary high school course, be required to study algebra, we shall be given two sorts of replies, each based on certain conceptions of educational aim. The first answer will be to the effect that algebra is a necessary part of a secondary education, that it is prescribed for admission to college, etc. But if it be further asked why the subject is required in secondary education or for admission to college, we receive the familiar replies that the study of algebra has peculiar merit as a means of " training the mind," " giving culture," "leading to a comprehension of the universe," " serving as a foundation for vocational efficiency," etc.

It is evident that no school subject can

PREFACE vii

rightly be regarded as an end in itself. But equally it should be clear that the vague and general ends stated above are as yet so indeterminate and illusory as to serve little or no useful purpose in enabling us to determine, in the first place, whether algebra study should be required at all, and in the second, as to the methods to be followed and specific results to be sought in teaching it.

Somewhere in the cultural, social, and vocational utilities of modern life are to be found the determining aims of education; and in large measure these must be analyzed and studied one by one. The educator must evolve a philosophy of the educative process as a whole ; but he must learn to seek his goal by successive steps and stages, each clearly previsioned in relation to the whole.

D. S.

Contents

I. New Education and Educational Readjustment 1

II. The New Basis of Method 33

III. What is Liberal Education? 65

II

The study of the art and science of education to-day involves, among other phases, consideration of the learning processes as these are connected with the various subjects making up the curricula of our schools. The study of method may be approached from either one of two standpoints. On the one hand, in connection with the organization of the content and in the development of devices of presentation of the special subjects, such as the mechanics of reading, number work, writing, chemistry, French, drawing, and the others, we obtain the studies of special method ; on the other hand, when the educational process is viewed less with reference to the mastery of special subjects and more with reference to the physiological and psychological processes involved, we have general method. In the former case the peculiar characteristics of various forms of subject-matter largely determine method ; in the latter, the main influence comes from a consideration of the educational ends to be attained, as these may be expressed in terms of habits to be formed, appreciations to be stimulated, knowledge to be acquired, and ideals to be developed. A study of the learning process, when special method is under consideration, tends to expend its effort on subject-matter ; while the influence of the study of general method is to emphasize the powers and processes of the learner himselfc

Historically it would seem to be true, except at rare intervals, that the development of the art of teaching tended to center about the thing which it was deemed desirable to have the child learn. Hence the processes of trial, experiment, and selection have tended to produce an elaborate body of method — method of organization of subject-matter as well as method of presentation — in connection with each one of the studies. Each division of mathematics, each phase of the study of the vernacular, writing, drawing, Latin, manual training, history, each one of the sciences — in every case we find a more or less detailed and elaborated methodology. And running through it all we find one prominent characteristic : the organization of subjects for teaching purposes seems to have been effected by mature and scholarly minds which have made but grudging acknowledgment that the limitations and peculiarities of the child mind might have to be taken into account in making the learning process most effective. Only seldom, historically speaking, have textbooks been written or other organizations of the subject-matter of special studies been produced by those who, either by virtue of keen sympathy and intuition, or even owing to long experience, could enter easily into the interests, capacities, and points of view of children. And it must be remembered that it has been chiefly in the organization of the special subjects that, in the past, conscious method manifested itself. Note how the adult and scholarly mind has worked in producing the teaching organizations of the special school subjects.

In proportion as knowledge has developed in each subject, underlying principles have come into view and logical system has developed. Through long experience and study the mature mind comes to grasp the general outlines and principles of a study, and, having found a few simple keys to the whole, which simplifies it for him, he immediately assumes that such order should be most effective in teaching children. Not many years ago the student of script letters was able to discern a few simple elements of which nearly all the letters were composed. What more natural than that a scheme of penmanship teaching (now happily obsolete) should be developed which would involve as the central feature of its method the complete preliminary mastery of these elements ? Again, it is found that drawing in many of its phases involves the application of a few elemental forms ; and, naturally, systems of drawing for children have been developed which require that years shall be spent in drill on these elemental forms. The varied processes of applied arithmetic may be comprehended in a small number of fundamental rules ; the complexity of machines may be resolved into six or even two fundamental forms ; the study of the plant world may be approached through the classifications which order and simplify it; and so on for each subject which enters into the schools. And in each case that logical order inherent in the subject has been seized upon by the adult maker of schemes of study as giving the most effective basis of method for teaching purposes.

So long as teachers failed to study the learning process as conditioned partly by the limitations and peculiar powers of the child's mind, it was natural that this should be true. To the discoverer and admirer of organization in the various divisions of knowledge, it was inevitable to think of these as exhibiting the most effective way for the young learner. If all penmanship may be reduced to a half-dozen fundamental forms, why not secure the mastery of these at the outset ? If all reading involves the alphabet, and the ability to unite its members into untold numbers of meaningful and meaningless syllables, why not give the first two or three years to drill on letters and syllables ? If the mastery of tool processes seems to involve, sooner or later, a limited number of detailed and very special types of skill, why not strive for these at the outset, as has been done in certain types of manual training? There have been times when the study of a foreign language began and continued long with its grammar ; when the study of literature was mostly a study of the lives of authors and lists of their work ; when the study of music, at least in the schools, was mainly a study of the written technique of music ; when the study of history was an attempted mastery of the dates and the far-reaching generalizations of history. We have seen the study of physics by beginners confined mainly to tasks in quantitative work, because the mature mind finds quantitative method so serviceable. Not long since the teaching of biology by many teachers was organized on the basis of a logical system beginning with the most elemental forms. While it may not be true that all of our studies still exhibit these vices at their worst, it may well be questioned whether the studies as we have them organized for children, especially in the upper elementary grades and secondary schools, are not even yet primarily determined in their method by logical and other considerations quite external to the intrinsic capacities of the learner himself.

On the other hand, when the educator tends to study the learning processes largely apart from special subjects of study or apart from the bias which a too exclusive consideration of subject-matter seems to give, and more with reference to the child as a self-active organism, developing in a material and social environment which in itself is stimulating and educative, it is natural that the traditional school subjects should receive less consideration. For, under these circumstances, the educator realizes that, in any environment, a large part of the sum-total of learning is quite independent of artificial direction and manipulation. Nature has so equipped the child with instincts and impulses that he literally must learn. A thousand physical adjustments, some of them very complex, he will learn even if deprived of human example. In the presence of human example the mere exercise of the instincts of imitation and invention gives him speech and numberless other social habits and appreciations. During the years ordinarily given to school life, the youth will, if a savage, or if loose among his fellows and his elders, acquire a vast range of useful habits, significant knowledge, and influential ideals. For all this learning no schools need be provided, no teachers' salaries paid, no textbooks or schemes of study organized. Even more significant, there are required no long hours of confinement at hard desks, no penalties and rewards, and no final examinations. It is all part of the natural growth process, as spontaneous as the play of animals or the flowering of plants.

Viewing education from this side, it is natural that the enthusiastic man who is little concerned with special subjects should desire to make all education simply a somewhat wider and somewhat more directed form of that educational process which nature organized for human beings long before schools were dreamed of. Method, from this standpoint, becomes less a matter of the fine adjustment of this or that bit of external knowledge or process of acquiring skill, than of providing a rich environment and a field for free expression of native powers, to the end that the child will, through sheer force of the unrestricted, but guided and aided, growth process, reach the higher levels of habit, appreciation, knowledge, and ideal. Under the influence of this conception, the belief develops that in each department of human knowledge and attainment there is somewhere an order of approach and development which closely corresponds to the natural growth process and which is the most effective teaching order on the one side and learning order on the other. The essence of method, as here conceived, consists in putting the child in an environment of suitable stimuli and then allowing the natural learning powers to do their inevitable work. Not the perfect organization of subject-matter according to logical schemes, it is asserted, but the presentation of it in ways that correspond to the child's native powers, is the function of true educational method. If the child has inherently a thirst for knowledge, why may we not lead him into an environment of knowledge, geographical, historical, or scientific, and leave him free until his natural demand for aid in organizing it shall again call on us for additional suggestion ? If the unspoiled child craves expression through speech, through drawing, and through constructive activities, why should we organize this or that scheme which is denaturalized by adult experience rather than provide him the tools, the objects, and the suggestion which will suffice to draw forth his own activities? So questions the theorist in this field, but it must be admitted that he can as yet point to no well-developed scheme of instruction based on his theory.

The influence of this conception has, however, been sufficiently great in recent years to produce considerable modification in educational method. In some slight degree it has tended to introduce new kinds of subject-matter. More important for present purposes, it has tended to affect the methods of organizing and presenting the traditional subjects — for, after all, the schools may not aim at the complete educative process, and their field is largely determined by the traditional organizations of knowledge and skill which we call subjects — and in providing certain new ideas as to educational aims. In much of primary teaching the logical organization of subject-matter has largely given way to a teaching order, empirically determined, which is sometimes called psychological or natural, and which is unquestionably more effective and economical. With regard to the subjects more adapted to older children we hear it constantly insisted that we must search for a more pedagogical order for the reason that the older and more artificial order of organizing and presenting subject-matter fails to interest pupils, fails to produce a valuable permanent result, and tends to bring school education into disrepute.

It can easily be shown that in the primary schools of to-day children are rarely taught penmanship, reading, and number according to the more strictly logical methods once in vogue. Drills on the alphabet and on the elemental forms of letters as used in writing are not necessarily abandoned, but they follow a considerable time after the pupil's introduction to printed and written words as something nearly allied to the objects about which he thinks and cares. Primary teaching has found avenues of approach from the object, through the picture and other concrete representation, and on to the purely abstract symbol which, whatever their inherent lack of system, as that appeals to the adult mind, constitute a far more effective order for the naive powers of the young learner than any which preceded. In the teaching of drawing we are now in the midst of a transition from the logical, uninteresting, and, for the majority of children, less effective formal processes to more natural processes (natural from the standpoint of the child learner), but which are still experimental. The same transition is in process in manual work. It is recognized that the child, left to himself in an environment that is full of suggestion towards constructive activity due to the presence of tools, the opportunity to use them, and the suggestion of elders at work, becomes spontaneously an imitator and develops powers and interests which no formal processes of teaching can give. Left to himself, the child uses tools, first with little purpose, then in a deliberate attempt to realize aims and projects partly due to suggestion and partly due to invention. But, as educators clearly see, the forms of manual training which have already largely become traditional take little account of childish capacities, and derive their chief principles of organization and method from the carefully studied experiences of mature workers. These forms of manual training not only do not encourage naive childish tendencies, but even flout them by laying an embargo upon the child's native desires to experiment and to try to make things which have for him a genuine significance in use.

Recent developments in the teaching of mathematics point also to the influence of the conception that logical organization of subject-matter is not a final basis for the method of the teaching order. For it is believed by the proponents of the so-called Perry movement that the central deficiency in the teaching of mathematics at the present time is the too great insistence upon the logical and abstract, to the exclusion of the concrete and applied. Teaching geometry largely through its applications certainly appears at war with the simple and orderly teaching that is based on the strictly logical organization of that subject; but experience may show that there are many paths through applied geometry which reach the real goal of learning more effectively than the traditional approaches. Among the sciences, it is apparent that in the best teaching of nature study, modern method is coming nearer to a more natural order, as concerns the learner. It is noteworthy that biology in secondary education, whether under that name, or as botany and zoology, has attempted many schemes based upon the logical organization of subject-matter which appeals to the mature scientist, but without success ; and that in the best secondary schools it is now following various experimental orders which are frankly claimed to be psychological or pedagogical in their nature.

Illustrations might be multiplied. On both sides of the question are camps of those who teach geography, to some extent teachers in one, and geographers in the other. The historians have given the world new definitions of history and new tests of its organization, and are insisting that those who teach history to children shall accept their criteria ; and educators who think they understand children are waiting expectantly for the man who is at once historian and also learned in, or intuitive of, the ways of growing youth. In some respects a natural method in selecting and presenting the materials of literature has been found for all the grades ; but so far it is not believed that the American secondary school shows traces of this influence, though the English secondary school has felt it to some extent. In the teaching of modern languages there are methods called natural, but whether they are actually pedagogical is still a question of fact.

The foregoing account presents in outline two great and in large part opposed theoretic foundations of method. The first grows out of the exclusive consideration of those phases of human experience which are chosen as the subjects of school education, and is primarily characterized by the logical organization which develops in the mind of the adult student and the most inclusive thinker ; this logical order and full content modified, reduced, and diluted only where painful experience renders it absolutely necessary to make certain accommodations to the child's immaturity (or stupidity, as some are prone to think). The second represents an attempt to utilize to the full the possibilities of the learning processes which are a part of the natural inheritance, the teacher acting as a guide, example, and purveyor of opportunities for learning rather than dictator of content and method. In the first, the thing to be taught determines method ; in the second, natural processes of learning claim chief attention. The ultimate ends are not greatly different; under both theories there is substantial agreement as to the elements of the social inheritance whose mastery must be made the end of school education. The essential opposition lies in the methods of attaining these ends.

The educational literature of the day abounds in criticism of each theory and especially of the observed results of the application of each theory. It is believed by many educators that schemes of teaching built largely through study of subject-matter are failing to produce results. Especially is this believed to be true in the field of secondary education where the influences of recent pedagogical thinking have, as yet, hardly been felt. It is contended that formal education does not function in any kind of genuine experience, or that it functions abnormally. Faulty method produces mental sterility, and compels the children to forsake the school in order to gain contact with reality, as that answers to their instinctive demands. In some quarters it is believed that many of the evils growing out of wrong methods of teaching which take little account of the natural capacities and limitations of children are insidious in their nature and, detected long after the harm has been done, cannot be traced to their real cause. Good ground can be found for the assertion that the too logical organization of subject-matter (which means, in effect, that it becomes too much removed from the processes of learning on the natural level) may be responsible for a subtle arrest of development in the mental and moral nature of the child, comparable, in its results, to premature and maladjusted physical labor on the body. Attempts at learning carried along in opposition to the natural processes result finally in a paralysis of interest and an incapacity for spontaneous and active effort in the fields of human experience involved.

Hence the seeming paradox that we may, by extensive teaching of English literature (in ways remote from natural), destroy all taste and appreciation for the kinds of literature which we teach. Hence the probability that modern methods of teaching science in secondary schools may, except in a few cases, destroy the native curiosity and interest which, if permitted or encouraged to grow in more natural ways, might result in permanent increase of pleasure and capacity in these fields. Hence the observed fact that wrong methods of teaching religion and morality, methods themselves the outgrowth of too exclusive consideration of the subject as it appealed to mature leaders and thinkers, have operated so as to stultify true development in these directions. In general the criticism is repeatedly advanced that the limitations of a pedagogy built largely on considerations of the logical order of subject-matter are not found so much in the immediately recognized difficulties of teaching as in the permanent arrest of development which ultimately supervenes. From the standpoint of the modern educator there is something quite pathetic in the ease with which children can be artifieialized in the educative process. They can be taught schemes of language, literature, science, history, and other studies with apparent good result, and can be successfully crammed for the tests which examinations provide. It is only when we consider the deeper significance of it all, say the critics, in producing individual and social arrest of development and ultimate decay, that we can realize that nature has established certain paths of educational procedure which cannot be greatly ignored except at our peril.

On the other hand, schemes of method based more nearly on the supposed natural process are frequently open to the criticism that the interest they evoke is temporary rather than permanent, that they fail to produce the concrete results in habit and knowledge which the world demands, that they tend to make of the youth a barbarian or " natural savage " rather than the refined and molded man demanded by modern society. Where the movement for a less artificial education has had its effect on method, it is claimed that there has been a decline in certain measurable kinds of efficiency. Children read and write less well than formerly; their arithmetical knowledge is imperfect and unusable ; their knowledge of history and geography is vague and mixed with much error ; their execution in drawing, language, and manual work is slipshod and characterized by low ideals and lack of standards. What does it profit a child if he have great interest in learning to spell if he never learn to spell ? As was said before, primary teaching has unquestionably justified the change in the basis of method ; but it can hardly be said that the same is true of the attempts to reorganize the subjects of the upper grades and the high school.

To the criticisms of the second theory it may be answered, of course, that any methodology based on a consideration of the natural learning processes must be a matter of slow growth and that we can hardly expect any great achievements until, in the upper schools, methods shall have been experimentally worked out, as they have already been worked out in the primary schools. But this is small satisfaction in view of the fact that it is especially in the maturer pupils that the world demands some tangible evidence of the results of education.

Where, then, can the practical educator of to-day find a sound basis of method, one that will combine a maximum of good with a minimum of evil ? The writer believes that a careful study of the best educational experiments of recent times and of the processes involved in procuring excellent results in the physical, moral, and vocational education of individuals and groups in the past will show that in all best method there is involved a conscious or unconscious recognition of the two large principles discussed above, but each in a definite relation to particular stages of the learning process. In individuals or among groups of individuals education has become sterile, cramping, and repulsive when its votaries have too greatly intruded the adult point of view and the mechanical forms of adult thinking on youth ; and on the other hand, when enthusiastic teachers and educational prophets have been able to supplant traditional subjects and methods with others supposed to lie near to the lines of natural and unforced development, there has been a failure to realize the habits, forms of skill, and definite knowledge which social conditions demand. But whenever and wherever it has been possible to combine the two principles it would seem that education has more nearly approximated a maximum of efficiency.

On the basis of this accumulated experience it would seem, for example, other things being equal, that in organizing human experience for the purpose of teaching young children, the pedagogical rather than the logical order should receive consideration, but that with increasing maturity of mind there might be a gradual shifting of emphasis to the logical. Again, other things being equal, and age being left out of consideration, it would appear that the early contact of the child or youth with a new field of human experience which is to be made his through the learning process, should be governed by pedagogical rather than logical considerations. Again, within any study which is long pursued for the sake of a considerable body of habit or knowledge, it would seem desirable to vary the procedure from natural to logical and the reverse around each fairly large unit which might develop within that subject-matter. The reasons for this shifting from one organizing principle of method to another lie in the fact that underlying all formal, logical, and highly systematized learning is a substratum of kindled feeling and interest, crude first-hand knowledge, and aspiration and ideal such as spring from large self-activity. These rough, undifferentiated, and pervasive qualities are best developed by those forms of learning which approximate the spontaneous. They seem to be basal to permanent interests and to the fullest development of organized and systematized habit and knowledge to be acquired later. The idea might be expressed in another way by saying that the true educative process consists in first providing abundant opportunities for that development, in connection with any study or practice, which comes from the largely spontaneous exercise of the instincts and other natural capacities ; and then in proceeding to build on this foundation the habit, skill, knowledge, and ideal which are demanded of civilized conditions, and which require what we term artificial organization on the one hand to correspond to artificial requirements, or logical on the other as best exhibiting the grasp which experience and insight have attained in the world of knowledge.