Civic education: sociological foundations and courses

Front matter

Class L G I C X9JL Book .3 (o

Gojpght'N?-

COFfRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Preface

Hundreds, probably thousands, of the teachers and others interested in schools are now wrestling with the problems of civic education. They believe that our country needs more and better education for citizenship than it is now getting. It appears to them that our public and private schools, both higher and lower, have thus far made but partial and insufficient contributions toward the civic knowledge and idealism that our country, with its complex economic and political life, certainly needs. These schools do achieve much in general education; but of purposive civic education they give little, and that little is too often made futile by its formalism or wasted by its puerility.

America needs more and better education for citizenship — to that proposition all will give ready assent. Many commissions are studying ways and means of civic and other forms of social education. Special efforts are being made everywhere in teacher-training institutions to inspire and equip regular or special teachers for this difficult work. Philanthropy finances the "scouting education" of the Boy Scout movement in large part because of its promising contributions to good citizenship. The exactions of the war and the economic perturbations consequent on the war have forced us to see that our political institutions, serviceable as they have become, are not fully equal to the social loads they must carry.

Hence the current varied and intense aspirations for more extended and more scientific civic education in schools, especially those that claim our children from their twelfth to their eighteenth years. Statesmen and other students of social life are insistent in their demands. Progressive educators are generally awake to the need. It is only when we try to define specific objectives that we find ourselves iv PREFACE

in a jungle as yet largely unexplored. Naturally we make little progress in devising effective means and methods where our actual goals are so obscure. It does not take long to find that memorization of formal texts, and rigid recitation treatment of dry didactic materials, will rarely, in present-day school life, contribute to the functioning habits and knowledge, to say nothing of the appreciations and ideals, that blend in approved civic behavior.

This book is designed to aid teachers and other educators who are seriously trying to find and develop more purposive and effectual objectives and means of civic education. The discussions and conclusions here presented are based upon these convictions: (a) that the aims or objectives of any proposed type of education must first of all be derived from studies, essentially sociological in their nature, of the needs of contemporary societies, especially as evidenced in the adult members thereof; (b) that it is just as practicable and desirable to use a precise and specific terminology in educational discussion as in other fields of applied science; and (c) that what should properly be called civic education is only one part or type of education, — a part of increasing relative importance, indeed, — and that as respects specific aims and essential methods it will differ greatly from other types.

Teachers and other educators may conveniently and not inaccurately be divided into two classes — those endowed with some ability, possessors of some disposition to be curious, inquisitive, inventive, and progressive in their work; and those who find little time and have little desire to do other than prescribed and routine work.

The present book is designed for the former class only. The writer is convinced that much valuable and necessary work in education will always have to be done by teachers who can pretend to no originality; and much more by those

PREFACE v

who, even if endowed with some gifts of creativeness, are nevertheless too much preoccupied in meeting the routine requirements of their tasks to permit the development of these gifts.

The educator who can do little original work may be very serviceable in well-established fields of training, instruction, and growth-control; but he has as yet little place in direct civic education. The field is too new, the really serviceable means and methods too undefined, if not elusive. For youths from twelve to eighteen, at least, better no purposive civic education at all than the bungling and bruis-« ing efforts of men and women who can only employ the crude didactic tools of intellectual apprehension that have evolved in connection with the centuries of effort to enforce the learning of foreign languages, mathematics, and history.

Because of the character of the audience addressed, therefore, the writer has not hesitated to introduce numberless questions and problems that will doubtless require years for their answer and solution. Neither has he refrained from setting forth provisional interpretations and solutions where it has seemed that these might contribute to further understanding or provoke more concrete discussion.

Each of the first two parts of this book traverses in a measure the same ground. In Part I, the general aspects of the problems considered are presented. Part II is devoted to a more detailed study of certain of the problems found in Part I.

Civic education will for the present he largely a localized study in its best developments — that is, it will be in particular communities, schools, or under particular teachers that its most significant achievements may be expected. Certain portions of the subject must, indeed, like good nature study, always spring from local conditions, repudiating formal texts and cut-and-dried procedures. Certain vi PREFACE

other portions may be based on manuals and texts that ought to be capable of general use — of which, in the subjects of civics and economics, many forerunners have long been on the market. For the present, however, each school, or at any rate the schools of each progressive community, must, outside the more formalized subjects, initiate their own efforts and develop their own leaders. Toward such work it is hoped that the materials of this book may prove helpful.

The reader must remember that we have as yet no objective criteria or standards of educational values and certainly none in the field of civic education; hence here one man's opinion may be held to be as good as another's — and perhaps a "good sight better," as the recent immigrant remarked. The history teacher will almost certainly dissent from the evaluations of his subject found herein. He will still contend that history as a chronologically organized, compendious subject has been or can be so taught as to be functional of civic results.

But the time has passed when the partisans of any particular subject or group of related subjects can claim important shares of school time and energy without at least indicating their attitude toward claims of other subjects and the defenders of other educational values. In fact, a very heavy burden of proof should now be carried by the special pleaders for the prescription of any particular group of subjects in secondary education. Undoubtedly all the subjects commonly urged for inclusion in secondary schools are valuable — but not necessarily valuable for all classes of learners. The disposition on the part of all specialists is toward each having his own subject made compulsory for all learners. The wealth of knowledge now available for teaching purposes, our increased understanding of the variabilities in powers, interests, and probable future re-

PREFACE vii

sponsibilities of learners, coupled with clearer perceptions of the significance of educational values, justify us in upholding ideals of very flexible curricula for secondary schools. Certainly the time has not yet arrived when we should make universally prescriptive in secondary schools anything but the briefest presentations even under civics. But we should develop, according to the resources of our schools, a wealth of elective offerings — from service projects and ''scouting" to hard problems in contemporary politics, from inspirational readings to detailed studies of the historical roots of the economic and other social problems that must vex the minds and try the souls of the next generation of voters.

D. S.

Part One — Suggestions to Teachers PTEB PAGE

I. Suggestions to Teachers: Introductory Considerations 1

Social betterment 1

The re-creation of social groups 3

Education one process in social betterment . 5

Current demands for civic education .... 7

The example of vocational education .... 9

The aims of education li

The aims of social education 13

Federate groups develop needs of organized

II. Suggestions to Teachers: Civic Education in

Secondary Schools 17

The pending reorganization of secondary

education 17

Results as shown in an adult citizen 20

The socially efficient man 22

Educational objectives 25

Standard of social worth 26

The meaning of civic education 29

Some further problems of definition 31

Justification of civic education 35

The general need of civic education 36

Society's need of civic education in schools 38 Differentiations of the specific objectives of

Civic education and the teacher of social

science 42

The province of the social-science teacher . . 44 ix

CONTENTS

[APTER . PAGE

III. Suggestions to Teachers: Miscellaneous . . 46

To rural elementary school teachers 46

To teachers in small high schools 54

To teachers in seventh and eighth grades in

urban schools 57

To a superintendent of schools 63

Part Two — Sociological Foundations of Civic Education

IV. Introductory Considerations 73

V. The Sociological Meaning of Education . . 83

What is education? 83

Education in the broadest sense 85

School education 87

Qualitative distinctions in education .... 88

Classification of aims based on social objectives 89

Physical and vocational education 90

Cultural and social education 91

VI. The Meaning of Social Education 94

Preliminary analyses 94

Conditions of social education 97

Some problems in social psychology .... 99

Some educational presuppositions 101

Other varieties of social education 105

Social groupings: Some problems summarized 107

Social evaluations Ill

Crude social valuations 113

Relative standards 115

Weighting of civic qualities 117

VII. Society's Need of Civic Education 121

Social control 121

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTEB PAGE

Developmental civic education 122

Needs for civic education 125

Contemporary estimates of needs 126

The use of the case group study of needs . . . 128

Avoiding excessive abstractness 130

The direction of specialist service 132

VIII. The Objectives of Civic Education . . . .135

Methods of determination 135

Determination of " civic shortages" 136

Civic shortages in social classes 139

How teach principles? 141

Adaptations of objectives to groups of learners 142

Kinds of objectives of civic education .... 144

IX. Education for Democracy 146

Sociological conditions of democracy .... 147

Nature's limitations 148

What is oligarchy? 150

What is democracy? 151

Social repressions 153

Social democracy 155

Industrial democracy 157

Strivings for more democracy 158

Education as a means to democracy . . . .160

Democratic education 164

Part Three — Problems of Objectives, Courses, and Research in Civic Education

X. Means and Methods of Civic Education . .169

Preliminary analyses 170

Construction of courses 172

Effects of school environment 174 xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

Sources in social practices of adults 177

General principles of method 179

Specific objectives 182

Civic prognosis 184

Means and methods classified 187

School discipline as a means of civic education 191

History studies 198

Social sciences by didactic presentation . . 208

Project methods . . . -. 210

Developmental readings 218

"Problem" methods 222

XL Courses of Study for Civic Education . . . 236

First six grades 237

Second six grades 239

XII. Problems of Research 245

The "case group" method 245

Needs of civic education 248

Extra-school civic education 251

Values of school subjects 253

Related problems 262

XIII. Freedom of Teaching Social Sciences . . . 264

Problems of freedom in teaching the social

sciences 264

What is meant by "teaching"? 268

Realistic cases 270

Social-science teachers 273

Guiding principles 275

XIV. Sample Studies 279

I. (C.B.M.) Proposed courses in civic education for case group "owning

farmers" 279

CONTENTS xiii

PAGE

II. (A.L.McC.) Proposed courses for girls of

poor environment 284

III. (A.R.) Proposed course in citizenship

for a 9th grade 288

IV. (M.S.) Proposed program of education

for citizenship for children of Russian- Jewish immigrants (especially ages

12-14) 291

V. (C.C.P.) Proposed courses of study for

9th and 10th grades for a type group 301 VI. (R.A.C.) A plan for communicating the spirit of America to the foreign-born

VII. (M.E.D.) Program for a case group of

boys from high-grade environment . 313 VIII. (R.W.H.) Proposed program for selected

group 315

IX. (J.V.L.M.) Proposed program of civic education for apprentice schools in the manufacturing crafts and in railroad shops 320

X. (C.H.C.) Problems of program of special

civic education for a Chinese group . 322 XI. (P.F.V.) Certain problems of method . 325

Bibliographical Note 330

Index 331

CHAPTER ONE Suggestions to Teachers: Introductory Considerations

The purposes, aims, or objectives of all education find their final justification in the increased social well-being which results from right education. But only from sociology can we determine what are valid standards and conditions of social well-being. In a certain sense any one who proposes enlargements or reforms in education rests his case on foundations of sociological fact or assumption. Consciously or unconsciously he strives to express himself as a sociologist.

The sociologist studies human beings as they live and act in groups — societies. He seeks first to find the facts of group behavior, and then to control the structures and processes of group behavior toward better ends.

All kinds of social groups or societies can thus be studied. The family, the business partnership, and the schoolroom class are societies no less than a city, a nation, or a race. Social groups, like all other things human, may be good or bad (as affecting the individual or collective well-being of men, women, and other sentient beings) ; they may be incipient or mature, complete or incomplete, efficient or inefficient.

SOCIAL BETTERMENT

To sociologists (or social economists, as many prefer to call the men and women whose chief concern is with the betterment of societies or helping the people who compose them) even more than to other well-informed men, human societies seem nearly always capable of improvement. They think largely of better families, better nations, better economic arrangements — and even of better prisons, better schools,

l better streets. They see endless possibilities of extending human happiness through better stock, better government, better education, better economic production, better worship, better recreation. (Perhaps the word "well-being" is to be preferred, since the notion of "happiness'' seems too closely associated with that of "pleasure as an end in itself.")

Cooperation. The general realization on earth of lives that shall be richer in the things that we call good or pleasant (in the long run) and less subject to the things we call evil or unpleasant, depends above everything else, as sociologists see it, on increase in varieties, scope, and efficiency of cooperative action. Throughout all his history man has been, indeed, very cooperative. Some of the structures that he long ago evolved for that purpose were wonderfully effective — the family, the clan, the village community, the partnership, the militant nation, the worshiping congregation, the master-apprentice combination, and the buyer-seller combination for economic exchange. Some of the social processes created during the last ten thousand years are as yet too near to call forth the full admiration they deserve — processes of collective defense, of administering justice, of invention, of recording and diffusing knowledge, of exchanging products, of organizing productive effort under the corporation.

But the very increase of social knowledge upon which we now pride ourselves reveals endless possibilities still ahead. Our social groups are like the bodies that nature gives — despite their fundamental healthiness, they still abound in frailties, they are very liable to disorders, and they frequently prove unequal to the new needs that an evolving world imposes upon them. To the social economist:

... all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move.

THE RE-CREATION OF SOCIAL GROUPS

The most important social groups of human beings resemble organic species in this — the groups are relatively permanent, whilst their individual members come and go. New York, France, the Mohammedan Church, the Republican Party, and a university are social entities that have witnessed the infiltration and the silent departure of unnumbered members. Even that relatively transient group, the family, with its usual span of less than sixty years, witnesses periodically the accession of plastic children and their withdrawal twenty years later as shaped adults to form new unions.

The great drama of sociology is thus revealed — the perpetual processes by which every type of social group, from a boys' gang to an empire, must be perpetually renewing its membership, domesticating and training its recruits, educating its plastic novices. "The world" has gradually accumulated an immense stock of knowledge, customs, institutions — as well as machines, highways, cleared lands, and subjugated beasts. All this wealth — the social inheritance — passes on steadily from the older to the younger generations

— with the hope that the newcomers will be able to appreciate and wisely to use the ancestral fortunes and in due season to add to them.

Not only is all this true of those vast groupings which we call "our country," or a Christian denomination or civilization, or society-at-large; it is no less true also of particular social groupings. The Methodist Church, the city of Philadelphia, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the American Federation of Labor, the New York Central Railroad, the Adams family, the lovers of Mendelssohn's music, the Sierra Club, and unnumbered other social groups

— each of these has likewise its peculiar social or associational inheritance which attaches to the corporate entity and is shared in by each new recruit as he reaches the full stature of responsible membership.

But education is the essentially central fact in the drama of socialization — the processes partly of inducing each newcomer in society to enter upon his inheritance, and partly, under some conditions, of compelling him to do so, or at least of forcibly restraining him from interference with others who would do so. It is the drama of an education that is not of schools alone, indeed, but is carried on in every home, church, club, shop, army, play place, theater, newspaper office, police court, library, and convention in the world. Often these educative processes are unobtrusive and silent, sometimes they are sensational and shocking. E. A. Ross in his book on Social Control has surveyed the very web of processes by which both young and old are educated toward good group membership. Sumner in his Folkways, Tarde in his Imitation, as well as other sociologists, have shown the magnitude and complexity of the processes historically developed.

Literature and other art loves to dwell upon the individuals who have refused tamely to submit to socialization. Indeed, the young — except the very young — are often reluctant to settle into the harness of group cooperation, especially into that of the larger groups. At all times and everywhere we find those who wish to share in the feast but not to pay the price. They want the social goods of family, state, private property, culture, and personal freedom without making the personal concessions and even sacrifices necessary to "keep up" these agencies.

Civilization, indeed, presents two kinds of drama — and like the popular shows of today, the performances are continuous! On the one hand we have tens of thousands of societies, little and big, accessioning, disciplining, domesticating, and assimilating new members. On the other are millions of children, youths, men, and women, yielding to these socializing processes, but eager nevertheless to preserve their own individualities, those individual souls which ancestors from millions of years back projected for them. Science must here search always for the golden mean. Humanity or civilization can ruin itself just as certainly from too much, as from too little, organization, from being too cooperative as from being not cooperative enough.

EDUCATION ONE PROCESS IN SOCIAL BETTERMENT

Education, then, in its multifarious school and non-school aspects, devotes itself, now to making strong, resolute, and aggressive the individual; and anon to making him submissive, kindly, and cooperative. Now in one of its varieties it seeks to make of a few associates loyal, energetic, and regimented members of "small groups" — family, corporation, club, union, sect, or party; then, in other varieties, it seeks to produce the man devoted to the commonwealth, to humanity, to the service of God — the patriot, the humanitarian, the Christian.

Without number, therefore, are the purposes of education — its possible aims or objectives. Speculative writers often ask, "What is the aim of education?" The sociologist can only answer, "There is none — none, that is, distinct from the purposes or aims of life itself as expressed in human tendencies, or in civilization, or in what we may interpret as progress."

Education is a matter of many agencies, and not of schools alone as the obscure literature of the subject would sometimes lead us to believe. It centers most heavily on the plastic, the formative, years in the lives of human beings. Along countless channels it seeks first to make vital, functional, possessive, for each person those things from the general and particular social inheritance which he can "take on" or utilize. In highly developed special forms it may also seek to prepare choice spirits to add to the world's goods that the next generation may be the richer by new knowledge, new beauty, new aspirations.

Differentiation of education in purposes follows the same lines along which the " goods" of society are differentiated — the social values or worths found in various forms of security, health, wealth, righteousness, knowledge, beauty, religion, and sociability. The history of education, as well as any cross-section of contemporary practice, shows hundreds of avenues along which men have worked to make of oncoming generations competent defenders, workers, voters, thinkers, and players. By numberless means these have been fostered toward being healthy and strong of body, fearless in battle, diligent in industry, moral in family life, public-spirited in the community, loyal to the state, reverent toward God.

Neither the state nor any other social organization has yet achieved perfection in its educational processes. In a dynamic or progressive society it is safe to predict that final perfection is never to be achieved, since new and higher goals always reveal themselves far beyond present stages of practicable accomplishment. But it is clear that civilized societies are steadily shifting to those specialized types of educational agencies that we call "schools" a constantly increasing share of responsibility for difficult and complicated forms of education. Agencies other than schools have, in many cases, done well enough in the past; but they will not suffice for present and future needs.

That is the meaning of contemporary demands that many and varied schools shall be provided for vocational education, instead of a few for those aristocratic vocations, the professions, as heretofore. That explains why contemporary social economists, forced to see the wastes of happiness resulting from physical defect, seek through general or special schools the varieties of physical education that shall assure to the next generation better health and physique than have been the portions of the present generation.

CURRENT DEMANDS FOR CIVIC EDUCATION

And that, too, explains current demands for civic education in and through schools. America needs and wants more and better education for citizenship. The majority of adult Americans are, of course, not bad citizens, as judged by historic standards; but it is apparent to all careful observers of social life that the task of citizenship in a democracy as large and economically complex as ours imposes heavier responsibilities every year. The men who settled the colonies, and those who built up the states as frontiers were pushed westward, were in the main good citizens for their times and places, in spite of the fact that their schooling gave them little purposive civic education. So were the "Boys of '76," as well as those of 1812, of 1861, and again of 1898. And when the latest crisis came America found that she could confidently rely upon the higher civic behavior of her sons and daughters to play a fine part in the Great War.

American life — in the home, on the farm, in the shop, and even on the street — together with American education — as given by public and private schools, churches, the press, the stage, and numberless agencies of less direct influence — has given us a citizenship that on the whole is law-abiding, progressive, and possessed of social good will toward all the world.

Future social evolution. Why, then, do we find statesmen, educators, and other students of contemporary social life not only keenly interested, but even uneasy and urgent, in promoting more purposive and more far-reaching civic education? It might appear, superficially, that they were reflecting severely upon the ideals and achievements of our forebears. At bottom, however, that is not the case. It is true that for purposes of propaganda we all revert occasionally to historic instances of corrupt politics, of national greed, of the ineptitudes of adolescent democracy. But we are, after all, not blind to the devotion, honesty, cooperation, good will, and intelligence that have made America what it is. Most of our fathers as well as ourselves have been and are pretty good citizens as the qualities of citizenship must be judged by proper sociological standards.

It is not the past, but the future, that now concerns us. We are anxious not to lose the momentum of our three centuries of social evolution. We are certain that the future presents difficulties and responsibilities not faced by the past. We have grown to be a very numerous people; our free lands have been absorbed; our raw resources have been largely preempted, if not consumed. Our economic life has become complex beyond all previous example, and our economic interdependence correspondingly far-reaching and acute. Aspirations for "more democracy" — political, social, cultural, industrial, religious — - increase in all parts of society, and thus greatly complicate, if they do not arrest, the operation of other means making for social efficiency. In a hundred respects it is certain that the average American citizen of the future will face responsibilities calling for degrees of intelligence and kinds of cooperative effort which in the past have been demanded only of a few leaders.

The civic education upon which we have built this republic has been largely of an indirect order. Home and church and school inculcated the simpler pre-civic social virtues — that is, everyday morals. Public and private schools have insured a constant increase of literacy, which our forefathers were right in believing to be one of the primary foundation stones of good democratic citizenship. In spite of instances and occasional tendencies of a harmful character, the American press has contributed immeasurably to the upbuilding of intelligent civic consciousness and ideals. Scores of other agencies have been at work — even including commercial enterprises, international intercourse, scientific research, and finally war itself.

But of conscious and purposive civic education based upon a clear diagnosis of probable needs of adults, we have had heretofore little indeed, beyond the instruction in vernacular reading which early became the central objective in all public schools. American history and geography in very formal and somewhat meager measure we have also included in elementary school curricula primarily for the purposes of imparting civic vision and ideals. Studies in civil government and community civics have been developed experimentally in progressive schools, but so far neither specific aims nor methods in these subjects have been at all satisfactory.

The pressing educational problems of the present, then, as regards preparation for citizenship, are to be found not so much in the domains of indirect education, as in those of direct and purposive instruction and training toward clearly defined goals. An analogy from another coordinate field of education will illustrate this.

THE EXAMPLE OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

There began in our more progressive states some fifteen or twenty years ago a movement for publicly supported "vocational education." It was felt that many youths were deprived of opportunities to acquire vocational skills and knowledge; that industries, agriculture, and homemaking were suffering because of the incompetency of young workers; and that social well-being on the whole was impaired for these reasons. It took time for us to gain proper perspective in the campaign for vocational education. Finally the following conclusions have become clear: (a) All adults, now and in the past, have followed vocations, and, since instincts give man only slight immediate vocational powers, it. follows that all these adults have, by one means or another, received vocational education, using that term in a broad, but sociologically justifiable, sense. (6) The methods of vocational education in the past have been substantially of three kinds, namely: (1) school vocational education, which gives us about 5 per cent of all adult workers, chiefly physicians, army officers, stenographers, pharmacists, engineers, agricultural experts, elementary school teachers, and ministers; (2) apprenticeship vocational education, giving from 5 per cent to 6 per cent of all our workers, chiefly printers, locomotive engineers, barbers, plumbers, and some carpenters, machinists, electricians, tailors, and other skilled artisans; and (3) what may properly be designated "pick-up" vocational education, giving us approximately 90 per cent of our workers, among whom must be numbered nearly all farmers, homemakers, factory workers, clerks, and casual laborers. In essence, then, the current "movement for vocational education" is in reality a social effort to substitute for "pick-up" vocational education more effectual forms — that is, more direct, purposive, and pedagogical forms.

The leaders of this movement do not condemn as worthless the vocational education of the past; they perceive that it has brought us to the wonderful stage of economic development we have reached today: but they strongly hold that the old system is not sufficient for future needs, any more than was the private " hit-or-miss " literary education of former ages sufficient for modern cultural and social needs.

Civic education. Similarly must we interpret the current agitation for the extension and improvement of civic education. The wine of the new citizenship inevitably demanded by our complex social order can no longer be preserved in the old bottles. Domestic and community virtues, indispensable as they must continue to be for "social group" solidarity, may be expected to play relatively diminishing roles in that citizenship which must increasingly participate in a hundred responsibilities growing out of "federate" or "large group " social activities — political, economic, sanitary, cultural, religious, and even martial.