How to teach elementary subjects

Preface

The art of teaching is based upon a knowledge of children, of society, and of how one is to be adjusted to the other. For a knowledge of children we have the sciences of educational psychology and educational hygiene. For a knowledge of society we have sociology, or the social sciences in general, and educational sociology in particular. Direct experience with children and in society and first-hand study of and participation in life are indispensable to those who would guide life effectively as teachers. For helping the immature adjust themselves happily to our complex social life, we use among other instruments the subjects of study. We call the methods of teaching each of the various subjects of the school special methods as distinguished from the general methods of teaching all subjects.

Our chapter contributors have been chosen from among the leading speciaHsts in all the ''common branches," most of them having written considerably elsewhere on their respective subjects. It has been the aim to give briefly such a statement of minimal essentials of matter and method as will not only be of assistance to many actual and prospective teachers and to parents in homes who attempt to teach their children, but will lead on to the monographic literature on each subject. With the very rapid changes being made in the elementary-school subjects by the modern scientific methods of educational research and with a teaching population of more than a half million, one-fourth of whom are new to the profession each year and four-fifths of whom have not had normal-school or college training, such a volume, we feel, may be of great service. Professional progress and the wide-spread application of recent scientific discoveries will be facilitated.

iii iv PREFACE

To help to bring to bear apperceptively the worth-while past experience and the best learning attitude of our readers, we have initiated the feature of the ''preliminary problems," hoping that previous discussion and meditation will preserve individuality and promote the self-active use of the chapters as instruments and suggestions by which to solve actual classroom problems when they arise. The projects at the end of each chapter will also prove, we hope, a means to thorough discussion and application of principles advanced. Further, the general division of each chapter is indicated by Roman numerals and subheadings, and the main points are brought together as theses at the end of each chapter. The bibliographies offer a brief but rich list of noteworthy and generally available literature not obtainable by teachers until within the last few years.

If the teacher will but take one or two of the best magazines of her profession, such, for a good example, as the Elementary School Journal, published by the University of Chicago Press, she will have little difficulty in learning of the latest and best pubHcations for her service as they appear. The recent publication by the National Society for the Study of Education of Yearbooks (14th and i6th) dealing with the minimal essentials of the elementary- school subjects, and the splendid scientific achievements now available in the form of scales for measuring accurately and objectively the progress of pupils in school subjects, cannot be too highly commended for use and have been of much value in preparing this handbook.

L. W. R.

Contents

CHAPTER ^ PAGE

I. The Educative Process i

By Louis W. Rapeer, Ph.D., Dean of the University of Porto Rico, Rio Piedras, P. R. Author of "School Health Administration," Co-author and Editor of "Educational Hygiene," Associate Editor of American Education, and Contributing Editor of the American Journal of School Hygiene.

CHAPTER I THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS Preliminary Problems for Independent Study*

1. What do people usually mean by being educated or "getting an

education"?

2. Can a person become fairly well educated without attending

school ?

3. What man and woman in your community are most like your

ideals of what boys and girls should become in adult life?

4. What educative forces in school and out tended to make them

admirable ?

5. What admirable qualities and abilities do they possess?

6. How can we judge whether a person is educated or not ?

7. What phases of education, if any, cannot be carried on by the

school ?

8. How can we determine what subjects or phases of subjects are

of most value to elementary school pupils ?

9. What is the average length of preparation and of service of ele-

mentary school teachers in this country, and what effect has this on the development of a science of education similar to the science of medicine? 10. What do you consider the chief points of difference between a trade and a profession ?2

^ We have tried to preserve the individuality and to stimulate the self-activity of our readers by providing preliminary problems for independent study before the respective chapters are read. If these or others are worked out first, the reader will find that he not only understands the chapter better when he reads it, but he can utilize better his own experiences in thinking out the solutions to his own problems. The chapters are to be read for the suggestions and data they contribute to the individual solution of practical school difficulties.

'See Professor Palmer's little book on "Trades and Professions" [21].

I. The Educational Situation

How to teach successfully in the elementary schools of our country is an annual and persistent problem to about a half million teachers. Of these approximately one-fourth are new to the profession each year, taking the places of those who have ''kept school" for a shorter period on the average than it takes to learn to do well this delicate and important work. The situation is in marked contrast with the practice in certain foreign countries, such as France and Germany, where teaching is entered only after keen competitive preparation lasting a number of years, and the average term of service is near that of physicians, lawyers, bankers, and others — a life-work [29]. ^ Lack of prehminary professional preparation and of teaching experience, for a large percentage of our teachers, combined with rising standards of preparation, daily efficiency, and ''keeping up" with rapid changes and developments in social conditions and in the science and practice of their profession, tend to make this problem of teachers more general and acute. Adding to their difficulties we find also (i) frequent lack of opportunity before they enter the profession to study under permanent and highly-skilled teachers who may serve as examples, and (2) a wide-spread lack of skilled supervision and instruction after they enter, especially in rural and village schools. Many teach poorly because they have never seen good teaching done, nor learned before or during service the principles and skill necessary to effective teaching.

Recent investigations by the United States Bureau of Education and other agencies show that on the whole the average professional efficiency of the entire group of persons who teach school each year is far below what it must be, and probably very much lower than that of some of the other professions in which long technical preparation, lasting one

^ Bibliography at end of chapter.

to four years beyond a college course of four years, a life spent in the work frequently in one community, higher annual salaries, and more stimulating working conditions are the rule [17]. We as teachers may well consider, for example, the skill, the knowledge, the methods of preparation, the cumulative and recorded experience, the standards of self-sacrificing devotion to community welfare, the constant study and ''keeping up to date" necessary, and the general ethics of the medical profession. The professional standards which we find being attained among the best physicians here and abroad, and the high standard now reached by the teaching profession in France and Germany are goals toward which teachers in America are slowly approaching. Certainly the standards which now prevail will soon be rendered obsolete in the inevitable advance toward the higher-efficiency demands of both the public and the profession. It is for that large proportion of prospective and actual elementary school teachers who are attempting to live up to high professional ideals as public, official teachers in America's democratic schools that this volume has been prepared by specialists in the methods of teaching the various elementary school subjects.

The free, public, elementary schools, compulsory for all children from five to seven up to twelve to sixteen years of age, have been slowly and resolutely established at considerable sacrifice by the American people. ''The little red schoolhouse" now dots the land from sea to sea, and, until quite recently, the confidence of the great majority of our people in its far-reaching value and influence has been almost unHmited. However, the recent and increasing number of local and state-wide surveys and investigations of school systems are both symptoms and causes of a desirably more critical and helpful attitude on the part of the public. The vigorous and scientific reorganization now going on in both rural and city elementary schools, and a greater tendency to make educational experiments, such as the Gary system, the six-six (or six-five) plan of reorganization, rural school consolidation, elimination of useless subject-matter, measurement of results, and so on, bid fair to give in the next decade or two many decided improvements in methods of teaching, administration, courses of study, qualifications and requirements for teachers with accompanying financial and social recognition, and in generally improved social service to the supporting communities [i6]. All teachers should be abreast of and participate in these movements. Many of them will be leaders.

Methods of teaching school are determined by the nature and needs of society on the one hand and by the nature and needs of the children on the other. The fact that the human race has a pronounced tendency for its members to live Httle longer than seven or eight decades as a maximum makes contingent an immature proportion of the population quite large in extent which, in the highest civilizations, has to be raised, by passing on the social heredity, through many higher levels than those which separate the children of primitive peoples from their parents. Analysis of recent national-census statistics shows that approximately the following proportions of the population are of these immature-age groups:

Under 5 years 12 per cent of the total population.

5 to 9 years, inclusive 11 . 6 " *' " "

Under 20 years 44.1

This is "the white man's burden," cheerfully carried by a mature group which, after eliminating the superannuated and non-productive members, is of almost the same size as the immature group — an average of about one child or youth to each person of productive maturity [15, Chap. I, and 14].

If people lived to be a thousand years old on the average instead of about forty as at present and the number of births were proportionately decreased, the problem of elementary and secondary education would not be one of such magnitude. As Spencer quotes from an old song, in his ''What Knowledge is of Most Worth":

'' Could a man be secure That his days would endure As of old, for a thousand long years, What things might he know !

What deeds might he do !

And all without hurry or care."

With all of our increasingly successful efforts to raise the average term of human Kfe, we shall probably not suffer much nationally from injurious and non-productive old-age conservatism and aversion to progress. Almost a fifth to a sixth of the population will continue to be of the present elementary school ages, and society will constantly have the contingent problem of helping at great cost the immature members to become desirable mature members.^ It is in this sense that teachers are makers of society.

II. The Aims of Education

Education and the Goal of Life. — The most fundamental answer we can give to the problem of the function of education is that it, like all other social processes and institutions, must help people to realize or attain the goal of life. Many answers have been given to the questions, ''What is the aim or goal of life?" "What are we to attempt to help children and adults to attain?" and "For what are we living?" The answer has always been difficult to discover and to state in any single term or terms, largely, as Professor Dewey points out, because Kfe itself is the final goal:

^ If the six-year elementary school becomes the typical one in place of the eight-year course, as seems now probable, the percentages will be, of course, slightly different.

The ultimate end is simply life itself, an increase of its own vitality, and an enriching of its meaning. This is invaluable, and so undefined except with respect to the need which shows itself in life at a given time. Discipline becomes a value from the need of methodic power in the guidance of life; knowledge, because of the need of insight and judgment; utility, because of the need of control of the conditions of the environment, and so on. . . . Recognize that the educative process is in the last analysis identical with the process of life, and that life is not life save in growth, and education itself becomes an invaluable or ultimate [14 — Values].

Happiness (both individual and social), self-realization, duty, achievement, adjustment, normal functioning, growth, and other single aims have been set up as the goals. ''Social efficiency" is a valuable term to use as a goal when it is carefully defined to include all that we have found best for "vitalizing and enriching" life. Christ's statement, "I came that ye might have life and that more abundantly," is of great value as an aim of education when we learn the factors which make for "life and that more abundantly." This answer to the enigma is very close also to that given by Spencer of "living in the widest sense," or "complete living." As a general ethical statement of the goal, "self-realization" comes near to being a satisfactory term — the rational control of life in such a way as to attain not only pleasure and happiness for all but other important and desirable ends held up by reason, as the highest phase of the self to be realized, and which may perchance be in conflict with happiness and pleasure on the more instinctive plane.

The constituents of the aim of education include the lower utilities of mere self-preservation — health, mastery of a vocation, and ability to get on well in society. The standard in reference to each of these varies. The health requirements of one age are not so exacting as they may be in the next, and the same is true of vocational skill or social adaptability. Education is bound to consult the existing standards and to strive to better them where this seems desirable in view of the other aims of Ufe. The aim of the school includes [also] the higher utilities, the ideal values of life, knowledge, beauty, and morality.

These values are, as we have seen, grounded in instinct. Curiosity leads on to the ideal of the intellect ; the parental and social instincts lead, when rationalized, toward the ideal of duty, and there are doubtless instinctive preferences of taste which are the foundation of intelligent esthetic appreciation. Since the ideal is in each case the instinct rationalized, we may speak of it as the ideal of the reason [i8 : 528]. The constituents of the educational ideal include such fundamental conditions of self-preservation as health, vocational efficiency, and conformity to the social order. These are factors of the simplest phase of utility. The educational aim concerns [also] the service of the ideals of the reason, knowledge, artistic taste, virtue. These are the higher utilities, because in man's scale of valuation they are held as of greater worth. The highest utility is the service of self-realization, and in the control of this the school may be assigned a voice. But everywhere it must keep close to practice, to relative values, to the gospel of achievement. It must be on the alert to the verdict of practice on its work. It must combine a wise conservatism with willingness ruthlessly to cut loose any form of culture, the service of which has fallen below that which its presence excludes from the curriculum. Especially should the school cultivate the spirit of critical valuation or of utilitarianism among its pupils, for only through this can they achieve the highest service both for themselves and for the society in which they live [18 : 533-4].

While self-realization is a valuable philosophical term to hold up as the end or goal of life it has the disadvantage of being misunderstood as emphasizing the selfish, while terms like social efhciency, achievement, social happiness, and social progress are usually more meaningful and exact, and so probably more serviceable. Any term like happiness, duty, culture, growth, or self-reaUzation can be so defined and its elements so selected as to cover the meaning of other similar terms. The teacher should know her social and ethical philosophy well enough to get value from all and to see the underlying unity in them. She will usually find it difficult to state the ultimate goal of life and education by any satisfactory single term, but the proximate factors or goals are more easily named, and these she will find of the greatest value for every-day guidance. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of '4ife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the first two contributory to the last, as being the object of our separation from the mother country. In somewhat different words, the utihtarians have used well the same goal of ''the greatest good to the greatest number."

In these times of great continental wars we see that national or race perpetuation is no small part of the aim for all peoples and institutions. Its importance is realized when we learn that China has used her school system to promote national peace and perpetuation, and has actually succeeded in self -perpetuation, from the days of early Rome, which has long since gone down in dust, ashes, and disgrace, though at one time a democracy like our own. If a too intense and narrow nationalism has separated nations and destroyed peace to-day, a greater world patriotism and citizenship must be cultivated. Aristotle said that in a democracy the schools should be devoted to promoting the principal aims of a democracy in order to insure the success of this type of life; and Lycurgus in practice and Plato in theory established public schooling systems that were dedicated and thoroughly organized to promote the welfare of the nation. In general, the principal aims and problems of a nation or people set the principal problems and aims of its state-supported and statecontrolled schools.

Need of Social Insight on Part of Teachers.— These principles which identify the general goal of education with the goal of life and of national and world progress involve the requirement that teachers know excellently well, first of all. our present-day complex (industrial) civilization, and the principal aims and problems which we here in America face. The principal moulders of the life of the nation must be persons with a thorough appreciation of the nature and meaning of our national life. To change the figure, the blind cannot well be leaders of the blind. Social science, beginning with acquaintance with the life of the people of the community, is thus of as much importance to the teacher and educator as a knowledge of child psychology and hygiene, indispensable

THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS Q

as the latter are for skilfully guiding the growth of children toward the best type of social life to-day. Community and general social needs and aims stand first. The hand at the helm must see the guiding star.

The nation as a whole and each community are still carrying on, in an industrial and scientific era, our great experiment in democracy. No one yet foresees the outcome. Partial failure and manifold unsolved problems confront us on every hand. We have yet to live up to the expectations of our nation's founders. Poverty, crime, political injustice, an enormous preventable death-and-illness rate, industrial oppression and lack of vocational preparation, immorality, selfishness, greed, graft, political indifference, lack of citizenship, inability of citizens to co-operate, to take the initiative, or to lead in public causes, insufficient and poorly used leisure, indifference to the higher esthetic and intellectual activities which made Greece the pride of the ages — all these forms of serious maladjustment, which mean wide-spread failure to realize any reasonable goal of life, are still with us, contrary to the sanguine expectations of our forefathers for this glorious new country. It is significant that the United States Bureau of Education is at this late day asking for large appropriations to use in attacking the problem of bare illiteracy, greater here than in many modern foreign countries, and far below the necessary and minimum foundations of education for present-day democracy. These problems are especially the problems of all such government officials as teachers in public schools dedicated to social stability and amelioration [9, 10, 11].

Proximate Ends of Education. — Professor Bagley has ably argued for '' social efficiency " as the final goal of education. As he defines it, and since both happiness and self-realization are apt to be misunderstood and misused, thus ''leading from the path direct," the term has many practical advantages. Social efficiency, of course, is ultimately a means to the vitalization, growth, and enrichment of life; self-realization and rational character are reached thereby; and individual and solO TEACHING ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SUBJECTS

cial happiness, or enriched and vitalized experience, characterizes such Hving. The goal of living is superior living [13].

A chart may easily be made showing the factors of the ultimate aim of Hfe and education according to several different educational philosophers. Constructed from several different points of view, they are all helpful. Most persons will, for example, readily agree with the analysis given by Professor Yocum below, especially since his term *' vocational efficiency " includes both domestic and economic efficiency. These are easily understood problems of both the community and individual, and ends for the promotion of which, as will appear later, the schools are especially responsible.

A modification of Gidding's Hst of the aims, or "goods," of life and of education as given in his ''Elements of Sociology," and based on the hst given by Herbert Spencer, has been used by the writer in another place,^ namely:

1. Self-preservation, including the attainment of such minimum goods essential to happiness or complete living, as health, food, clothing, shelter, and general protection.

2. Race- preservation, including all that is necessary to make home life better, the relations of the sexes less a cause of serious maladjustment, and national or racial life more permanent and meaningful.

3. Association, including all that makes social organization, social co-operation, and social happiness through group activities advance to a higher plane.

4. Emancipation from fear, including all that substitutes science, confidence, and trust for superstition, excessive competition, warfare, and ignorant prejudices and attitudes.

5. Individual growth and self-realization, including all that promotes the most complete social development of the individual through rational self-activity, Hfe-education [13].

These factors found by analysis have proved of value in setting up standards for judging the worth of the content of

^In American Education for June, 1913, article entitled " Educational Sociology." Published at Albany, N. Y.

THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS II

courses of study, and for holding up guiding points for methods of teaching. Teachers very much need such standards and such an analysis of the problems of life, since one of their great temptations is to teach subject-matter from text-books with too Kttle regard to the relative worth of the matter for achieving any of the goals of education. Superintendents, supervisors, and principals need them, for they have the tendency also to take subject-matter by the ''scissors-andpaste" method in making their courses of study, simply copying imitatively what other schools have done instead of discovering, surveying, and facing the problems which individuals, community, and nation have to meet, and then helping them to attack these problems by such subject-matter and activities as will actually and most effectively solve them. An examination of the common and traditional high school curriculum will show that it quite largely omits preparation along many or most of the Hnes laid down as fundamental minimum essentials above, e. g., health, vocational efhciency, citizenship, avocation, and morality. The elementary school will find also that it has overlooked essentials for non-essentials because of a lack of such guides. Fortunately, in both elementary and secondary education there is to-day a general awakening to a sense of relative values, based on scientific analysis which is to take the place of our former naive traditional imitation of '^ sanctified" subject-matter and methods.^ Many of the recent educational surveys and other investigations previously mentioned have asked of entire cities and states how well they were contributing to human welfare along one or more of these lines. The city of MinneapoHs, Minnesota, for example, recently made a thorough study of the needs of its citizens industrially, and of how well it was

* See, for example, the second, or later, report of the Iowa State Teachers* Association on "Elimination of Subject-Matter," Professor G. M. Wilson, Chairman, Ames, Iowa (free); and the reports on minimal essentials by the National Society for the Study of Education, 1915 and 1916, Public School Publishing Co., Bloomington, 111.

contributing through the public schools to desirable kinds of industrial efficiency [35]. The cities of Springfield, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; Ipswich, Massachusetts, and many others, have made studies of their provisions for leisure and suitable educational recreation for young and old.^ The writer has made studies of how an entire state through its rural schools and twenty-five cities in several states were contributing through the pubKc schools to ameliorate disgraceful health conditions [24 : chap. V]. The needs for education along the lines of citizenship, and the part the schools can play in this prime factor of democracy and freedom have also been given considerable attention in the last few years.

An analysis of social efficiency as the proximate aim of education gives us five phases or specific aims, namely, vital efficiency, vocational efficiency, avocational efficiency, civic efficiency, and moral efficiency. The chief changes which can be made in pupils to help them and their nation or civilization to achieve genuine social efficiency and universal happiness of the highest types are, according to Professor Yocum, also five in number. Children may, of course, be changed, or modified, in their development both physically and mentally. The removal of adenoids and enlarged tonsils and the correction of physical deformities or faulty development may stand as examples of physical changes (not given space in the accompanying charts). The five mental changes or forms of control, according to Professor Yocum, are: (i) vocabulary, or knowledge that is barely retained, (2) varying interconnection, or knowledge that has taken on many-sided associations varying with individuals, (3) impression, or forgotten *' knowledge " leaving its impress, including ideals, and appreciations, etc., (4) specific discipline ("knowledge") or habits of a specific character usable in particular situations, and (5) general discipline ("knowledge") or more general habits due to transfer, such as the ability of a person to drive almost any auto-

^ Bibliography in pamphlet form published by the Russell Sage Foundation, Division of Recreation.

mobile after learning to drive a few typical ones. This analysis makes each element of social efficiency manifest itself as impression, vocabulary, variation, habit and system, and transfer. ^'Transfer" will be discussed later under the heading of formal discipline.

A more common and easily understood classification, possibly, is the usual one into knowledge, habits, ideals, and appreciations, using the last term to cover several emotional factors. In these four ways we can change a child's mental growth in the direction of the five phases of the aim of education. For example, mere knowledge about health is not sufficient for making healthy citizens. Pupils must be trained also in definite habits, ideals, and appreciations (including interests, tastes, attitudes, etc.). We use both classifications in the accompanying charts, Doctor Yocum accepting the writer's list of five types of changes instead of seven.

Breaking down the old antithesis between knowledge and power, Doctor Yocum insists that nothing is educational which is not retained as knowledge in the mind of the learner, and that does not result in power — that is, in some form of control over the learner's future experience. The fundamental educational problem, therefore, becomes the determination of the stages or forms in which knowledge is retained, and the corresponding or resulting forms of control. He distinguishes between vocabulary and interconnection or variation control, because they correspond to distinct stages of retention — the bare retention which through a word holds an idea in mind with the least possible association with other ideas, and the growing many-sidedness of association, which, varying with individuals, makes possible a varying interconnection which he contrasts with definite and invariable habit and system. He fails to include appreciation and ideals as separate controls, on the ground that they are but two among many forms of impression. Forgotten knowledge, if it is educational, results in impression control through feelings, prejudices, appreciations, realizations, interests, opinions, attitudes of mind, tastes, ideals, and incentives; partial knowledge is exercised as vocabulary control through the number and kind of words barely retained; many-sided and varying knowledge makes possible control through the varying interconnection of ideas basal for originality and initiative; definite and certain knowledge functions as habit and system control; all general knowledge may under favorable conditions become still further educational through transfer control.

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III .2-11

Paralleling of school work with outside industry, general ideas and incentives to labor.

Esthetic tastes and social observances carried over from home to school and reverse. Carrying over of observation, analysis, etc., from one occupation to another.