Organic education; a manual for teachers in primary and grammar grades

Preface

The main purpose of this book is very simple. It is to make a plain, straightforward report of a plan of work that has been in operation experimentally for some years in one of the regular ward school buildings of a large city. But in presenting the report it has been deemed necessary to give the underlying principles or philosophy of the plan. This pliilosophical interpretation constitutes Part I. Theory thus seems to come before practice, but such is not really the case. Part I presents not the starting-point of the work, — for that, as will be explained, was purely practical, — but the meaning of the work after it had been carried far enough for its meaning to become explicit. In Part II will be found a detailed statement of the methods actually pursued and of the materials actually employed. It is hoped that both parts of the work will be of interest and profit to teachers in other schools.

Grateful acknowledgment for assistance in the preparation of this book is made to the teachers in the Detroit Normal Training School, whose unflagging loyalty and enthusiasm have alone made it possible to carry on the work outlined in the following pages.

Detroit, Michigan, June, 1899.

Chapter I. Pa&e

CHAPTER n.

Fundamental Principles 12

CHAPTER HI.

The Organic Cm'riculum 18

CHAPTER IV.

The Sequence-method 31

' CHAPTER V.

Special Applications of the Sequence-method ... 43

CHAPTER VI.

The Formal Steps , . 52

V

VI

CONTENTS.

PAET II.

OUTLINES OF THE PRACTICAL WORK.

CHAPTER VII.

Introduction to the Outlines

CHAPTER VIII.

Hiawatha, the Indian Boy — Grade B 1

C. Material ....

Kablu, the Aryan Boy — Grade A 1

A. Analysis of Character .

C. Material ....

Darius, the Persian Boy — Grade A 1

C. Material Cleon, the Greek Boy — Grade B 2

A. Analysis of Character .

B. Ethical Aims Horatius, the Roman Boy — Grade A 2

A. Analysis of Character .

B. Ethical Ideals

C. Material Wulf, the Saxon Boy— Grade B 3

Analysis of Character .

Ethical Aims C. Ideal embodied in Literature

PAGE

CONTENTS. VU

PAGE

Gilbert, the French Boy — Grade B 3 . . . .201

Columbus — Grade A3 215

Raleigh 228

The Puritans — Grade B 4 238

C. General Statement of Material .... 234 The Development of the Nation 243

C. General Statement of Material .... 243 Grade B 5 250

A. General Statement of Aim and Material . . 250

C. General Statement of Material .... 261 Grade B 6 272

Vlll CONTENTS.

PAGE

C. Greneral Statement of Material .... 272

C. General Statement of Material .... 281 Grade B 7 286

Grade B 8 302

C. General Statement of Material .... 303 Grade A 8 308

C. Genera] Statement of Material .... 309

Appendix A 320

Appendix B 338

Appendix C 343

PAKT I.

THE THEORY OF ORGANIZATION.

Education is not a preparation for life : it is life." — John Dewey.

ORGANIC EDUCATION.

CHAPTER I.

THE GENESIS OF THE SYSTEM.

The plan outlined in this book consists in general of the use of certain typical periods of civilization as material for the work of the various grades. These periods have been chosen as satisfying the natural instincts and interests of children at certain stages in their development, and seem to be consecutive in the lives of most children, as well as in the history of civilization. The periods used are the following : —

The Nomadic Period, represented by the North American Indian. The Pastoral and Agricultural Periods, represented by the Early Aryan and the Persian.

The Greek Period.

The Roman Period.

The Germanic Period.

The Period of Feudalism and Chivalry, The Renaissance Period.

The Puritan Period.

The study of the Puritans in America is followed by a study of American national development, in lines of political, industrial, and social progress, and then by a similar, though less detailed, survey of the civilization of the other grand continental divisions of the world, and later of the world as a whole ; this last general view of the progress of civilization in all lines forming the basis for a study of sociology in the seventh and eighth grades, with especial reference to the family and the state, as social institutions.^

The foregoing rough sketch must inevitably have suggested to the well-informed reader the " culture-epoch " schools of Germany and America. With these, indeed, the plan outlined in this book has its closest affinities, differing from them, notwithstanding, in some very striking and fundamental particulars. So essential is a right understanding of these identities and differences, that it may be permitted to turn aside for a moment from the straight course to discuss the present status of the culture-epoch theory, and its relations to the ideas to be presented in the following pages.

It must, at the outset, be admitted that the conception of child-development as being a repetition in little of the history of civilization belongs to the class of poetic fancies rather than to that of scientific facts. It has been a theory of the idealists in literature, philosophy, and pedagogy. Goethe expressed it in the well-known passage from Wilhelm Meister : —

" To act upon the world outside of us, and to cooperate M'ith our fellow-men, is the end and aim of all education. Each shares in the accumulated results of the activity of the world. Each lives his own life, but at the same time lives the life of the race, sharing the experience of all vicariously."

1 More detailed statements of the work done under these general heads will be found in Part II.

THE GENESIS OF TEE SYSTEM. 5

Schiller assumed it as a working hypothesis when he said : —

" There are for the individual, as for the entire race, the three following successive stages of development — the physical, the aesthetic, and the moral."

Kant asked the question : —

"May it not be possible that the education of the individual should imitate the development of mankind in general, through their various generations?"

And the greatest of his successors, Hegel, answered the question in the affirmative : —

" The culture of the race must be absorbed by the individual ; i.e. the individu.al must traverse the stages of development traversed by the universal spirit. In eveiy child there is the potentiality of becoming one with the universal mind. To develop this potentiality is the province of education."

The same idea was more formally stated by Comte : —

" Individual education can be adequately estimated only according to its necessary conformity with the collective evolution of the race."

Among the writers on the theory of education, Pestalozzi appears to have been the earliest to enunciate

this view : —

" Every child has the right to the judicious development of his faculties. Education should concern itself not merely with what it is to impart, but should consider first the development of those faculties the child already possesses. This method is based on the principle that the individual shall be brought to knowledge by a road similar to that used by the race as a whole. Actual counting preceded the first arithmetic, and actual measurement of land the first Euclid."

But it was soon taken up by a more systematic reasoner. " The same idea," says Rein, in his Handbook of Pedagogy.,

" was pursued by Herbart, the real successor of Pestalozzi. In his letters and reports to von Steiger, in Berne, 1797-1800, we find the essays called, Ideas toward a Pedagogical Curricidum for Higher Studies, and the highly suggestive essay. On the ^Esthetic Representation of the World as the Chief Concern of Education. From these, we deduce the definite elements for his curriculum, which was to be a development of Pestalozzi's idea as applied to the Gymnasiixm. It is in short this, — the development of culture is to be presented in an ascending scale to the growing pupil, as an ascent from the ancient to the modern ; from the Greeks to the Romans, thence to the Middle Ages and modern times. He intends that this historical course shall be applied only to the historico-humanistic studies which develop the sympathy, not to the scientific studies which train the intellect.

" Among the pupils of Herbart the question of curriculum was farther worked out by Dissen, Thiersch, Kohlrausch, Brzoska, and above all by Ziller. Ziller followed Herbart in the following fundamental ideas : 1. For the child the growth of human culture is of the highest interest, in so far as it is presented and received in the light of moral judgment. That is, in the light of the evolution or ascent from the ancient to the modern. 2. Classic representations that are intelligible to the child should be made the basis for study. 3. Only great and connected materials or subjects arouse the sympathy with sufficient intensity to be used in the moulding of character. ' True moral energy is the result of great scenes and thoughts, presented not in fragments but as a unified whole.' (Herbart.) 4. The stages of the development of the youthful mind are to be carefully considered. The child must be given congenial and appropriate subjects from the history of culture."

Froebel must also be reckoned among those who make this assumption, as will be seen from the following passage : —

" I am always struck by the fact that in every part of organic nature, life and growth appear to be progressive development from lower to higher, that this development follows the same general law of development which the class as a whole had gone through. In dealing with a child, therefore, one must seek to develop the inborn original capacities by a regularly connected progress, taking for our guide the progress and development of the race as a whole. Education should lead man to develop his essence, his individuality, to be himself."

In recent years the biological analogy has gone far to strengthen this conception, adding to the names above cited those of Huxley and Spencer. The latter in his treatise on Education develops the doctrine of Comte as follows : —

" The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind as considered historically ; or in other words, the f/etiesis of knowledge in the individual must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of this doctrine — a doctrine which we may accept without committing ourselves to his theory of the genesis of knowledge, either in its causes or its order. In support of this doctrine two reasons may bo assigned, either of them sufficient to establish it. One is deducible from the laws of hereditary transmission as considered in its wider consequences. For if it be true that men exhibit likeness to ancestry both in aspect and character — if it be true that certain mental manifestations, as insanity, will occur in successive members of the same family at the same age — if, passing from individual cases in which the traits of many dead ancestors mixing with those of a few living ones greatly obscure the law we turn to national types, and remark how the contrasts between them are persistent from age to age — if we remember that these respective types came from a common stock, and that hence the pi-esent marked differences between them nmst have arisen from the action of modifying circumstances upon successive generatioiis who severally transmitted the accumulated effects to their descendants — if we find the differences to be now organic, so that the French child grows up to be a French man even when brought up among strangers, and if the general fact thus illustrated is true of the whole nature, intellect inclusive ; then it follows that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order.

So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent ; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little. It is alike provable that the historical sequence was, in its main lines, a necessary one ; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. Not to specify these causes in detail, it will suffice here to point out that as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them, has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route ; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other roiite ; and that as each child's mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can he accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilization will help to guide us."

Notwithstanding, however, the confidence with which the doctrine is presented, it is to be noted that in all this distinguished company of believers, not one has vouchsafed more than intuitive, or, at most, analogical reasons for the faith that was in him.

The essentially poetic character of the theory is not, however, by any means conclusive against its validity, but rather may be held to establish a presupposition in its favor, since every demonstrated scientific certainty has at some time passed through this mythical or poetic stage, on its way to the prosaic laiid of fact. As the "music of the spheres" was a conception necessarily antecedent to that of gravitation, and the " resurrection of the body " to tliat of the conservation of matter and energy, so it may be that the culture-epoch theory is the embryo of a scientific truth.

Its opponents, however, do well to insist that it is at this stage only an embryo, and a hypothetical one at that. Our German friends, Drs. Ziller and Rein, with their numerous and estimable constituency, have seemed to stmj at this point, assuming the theory as demonstrated, and thereupon building their systems.^ This position is undoubtedly open to severe criticism from the philosophical standpoint. It is a virtual begging of the whole question at issue.

But that the problem is capable of solution, and even that it will be resolved at some time not far distant, seems to be indicated by the prodigious interest in child-study which is now sweeping the world. This is the direction from which, if at all, comes our help. And it is as a contribution toward the solution of the problem on the practical side of child-study that the present work has been undertaken.

The point will bear further emphasis that the plan here presented is, so far, only a practical expedient for meeting certain observed conditions of child-life, its success or failure in meeting these conditions constituting the data for the theoretical conclusions drawn. Otherwise stated the genesis of the plan has been purely practical, the theory being an afterthought. The sys-

1 See Rein, Outlines of Pedagogics, pp. 120, 121.

tematic study of individual child-life upon which the system is based, was undertaken, not at all for any speculative purpose, but merely in order that the normal instincts and interests of each child might be properly fed by the material and methods used in the school. Various experiments were made to this end, and when the material which seemed best adapted to the mental development of each grade was supplied to it, this material was found, taken as a whole, to exemplify the underlying idea of the culture-epoch theory. That is, specifically the fundamental instincts of the majority of the first-grade children upon entering a particular school were found to be a restless curiosity, a naive sort of imaginativeness, and tendencies toward contrivance of a crude order; in short, such instincts as characterize the Nomadic Period in civilization. Stories about Hiawatha suggested themselves as answering the interest of these children, and were successfully used. In the second grade, the Greek myths were found to appeal most strongly to the pupils, as embodying their own instinctive attitude toward life ; and after a while in another grade stories of chivalry were demanded by the children in response to the dawnings of chivalric impulse only half recognized by themselves. From such suggestions on the part of the children the entire system has little by little arisen, without any idea at the outset of its being a " system " at all. Every expansion, retraction, or modification of the work has been made at the initiative of the children, and the coherence, if the system may claim any, is the coherence of the naturally developing organism, rather than that of the artificial structure. It was, indeed, in the earlier stages of the work, almost invariably true that the significance of an expansion or modification of the plan in detail would be evident to the teacher or principal only after it had been found necessary from the standpoint of the children, and thus adopted. For instance, the Indian and the Greek stories had expanded into a large view of the Indian and the Greek civilizations in response to the demands of the children for more and more details in connection with these stories, before it became quite apparent that this meant, in each case, a " culture-epoch " study. But even then the point was not assumed, but tested steadily, and is still being tested in the school, without any idea that the " culture-epoch " theory has been thereby established, and, it must be confessed, with far less desire to see it established than to devise more and more efficient means for widening and enriching the dawning interests of the child.

Chapter II. Fundamental Principles

When the plan had unfolded itself sufficiently to manifest its family likeness to the " culture-epoch " system, it also disclosed some very striking divergencies from that system as applied by Ziller and his followers in the German school.^ In the first place, the " culture epochs " used in the foreign schools confine themselves largely to German and biblical history, whereas any American system must of necessity accommodate itself to the breadth of our national inheritances, and to the non-sectarian principles of our schools. Con-

1 A specimen of a school programme devised for tlie German common scliools will be helpful in appreciating this important distinction. The following is by Ziller : —

First School Year : Folklore Stories, from Grimm.

Second School Year : Robinson Crusoe, by Defoe.

Third School Year: History of the Patriarchs; Heroic Age of Germany, and Thuringian Nibelungen Myths.

Fourth School Year : Heroic Times of the Hebrews ; Moses and the Judges ; History of the German Kings.

Fifth School Year: The Davidic Kingdom, and the History of Germany from Barbarossa to Rudolph von Hapsburg.

Sixth School Year : The life of Jesus, and the Prophets ; History of the Reformation, and Frederick the Great.

Seventh School Year : History of the Apostles ; Secular History of Antiquity.

Eighth School Year : Final Repetition or Review of the Catechism ; History of the War for Fx'eedom.

sequently the periods of development here used have been representative phases or stages in world-civilization, rather than epochs in the history of one or two chosen peoples ; and the ethical element has become, from an extraneous addition, the core and essential spirit of the whole.

Part II, containing the Outlines for the work actually to be done in the school, will serve to indicate somewhat in detail the periods of development chosen, and the considerations which have led to their use in the grades to which they are assigned. These considerations are in general, as has been emphasized throughout, the normal instincts and interests of the children of the grade in question. It is perhaps sufficiently evident from this fact how elastic is conceived to be the " correspondence " between the period of development in the child and the "culture epoch" chosen: and how subservient any idea of such a correspondence must be held to the actual facts of individual child-life as observed and interpreted by the teacher.

The second great divergence of the plan here proposed from the German system is found in the essential differences between the organization and the concentration methods of using the material provided. The German schools carry on simultaneously several distinct lines of work ; for instance, German and biblical history, nature study, drawing, language, arithmetic or number, establishing between them, in the teaching, some connection, either artificial or natural, for the sake of unity. The present method, on the other hand, starting from a certain period of race development, successively diffeientiates this period into all its various interrelated activities, industrial, artistic, scientific, mathematical, political, social, religious, and then, by comparison with other periods, unifies it again into what seems to be its fundamental idea or central principle, which as such has always an ethical bearing. And these unified activities constitute, with their respective details, the subject-matter for the grade. The various branches of study are not correlated or coordinated or concentrated by artificial means, but all have sprung immediately from the same trunk. The work of unification has been done before ever the teacher laid hand upon it. Her function is only to disclose the natural and organic unity preexisting in the material.

Every period studied may be said to branch into three great trunks, — nature, institutions, and art. "Nature" means both the physical conditions (recognized and used) of the period, and the current scientific conception ; "institutions," the industrial, social, political, and religious features of the age ; " art," the inventions, mechanical devices, architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and music. This constitutes the material, which is treated in three ways : (1) by comparing it in detail with the corresponding features of other civilizations, and in particular with those of our own age ; (2) by measuring and calculating various details by means of standards both of that time and of our own ; (3) by expressing in various forms the different ways in which the civilization of the period manifested itself, as well as some of the corresponding ways in which our own civilization is embodied.

These different aspects of the material and the ways in which it is to be handled are discussed at length in the introduction to the Outlines, Part II ; but perhaps enough has been said here to indicate the purpose of using the material at all. To some practical teachers it may not have seemed a sufficient answer to say, as was said in the last chapter, that the child is " interested " in the material. Why not interest the child in material that may be more directly useful to him ? Of course the crucial point here is the conception of " useful." What is useful to an individual, at any period in his development? There will hardly, at this stage in educational science, be any controversy over the answer : Whatever furthers his harmonious interaction with the social organism of which he is a member. And this harmonious interaction presupposes a knowledge of the social structure of the present such as may indeed be imperfectly gained by mere contact with the organism as it is to-day, but which is obtained far earlier, more economically, and more successfully by a careful adjustment of this contact to the child's capacities for interpreting it. This complex, multifarious, highly differentiated social organism is of necessity incomprehensible to the comparativel)'^ simple, homogeneous, half-awakened mind of the child. Some of its earlier, less complicated stages, however, he seems eager to grasp and assimilate — a new interest and a greater power of assimilation resulting from his mastery of the primitive phase.

By continual comparison of each feature of the simpler structure, with the correspondent features of our modern society, he comes little by little to comprehend the latter, and that in a much more thoroughgoing sense, than can the average man who has no idea of how the present order of things has come to be. This, then, is the whole object of the study of the past, — to know the present. It is a clear case of the longest way round as the shortest way home. The spontaneous interests of the child have simply given us a clew which we may follow with him into the heart of the labyrinth of modern society. Or, to change the figure, we have simply by this method built a bridge for him from his present interests to his future interests. Of what material the bridge chances to be made is really a minor question, so long as it be capable of carrying the child on his way, from interest to interest. This antithesis must not, however, induce us to forget that the two sets of interests are, after all, the same, one being only the broadening and deepening of the other. Keeping close to literal fact, it may be said that this method is the progressive organization of the child's interests. And this means nothing less than life itself. Education is the widest and deepest living possible at any given moment. Or it is the most highly developed interrelation of life — on the one hand the life of the individual, on the other that of the social organism. And the relations of organism to individual are, from the standpoint of the individual, his interests, physical, economic, social, artistic, religious. Hence it is plain why education, which is, in the universe-sense, life itself, may be, from the practical side, defined as the progressive organization of individual interests. If such definition be accepted, it becomes evident at once why it is impossible to determine what is useful for the child to learn, except as his interests shall first point toward it. Tliey are the unfailing indicators of the path to be pursued. We speak unthinkingly of " creating an interest " in a certain subject ; but none of us ever does it. None of us ever can do it. The most we can do is to expand or enrich an ah-eady existent interest. And the education of to-day cheerfully makes Hobson's choice in full recognition of the fact that the following of nature enriches both teacher and pupil an hundred fold more even than the denial of nature has heretofore impoverished them.^

1 See Appendix B.

Chapter III. The Organic Curriculum

The present status of popular thought upon matters educational is not altogether easy to define. In America for the most part we still retain our ancient conception of the public school system as somehow a thing in itself isolated, unique, understood in some vague way to " prepare for life," yet not, in any practical sense, responsible either to the individual child or to the social structure for its policy or its methods. Yet, in recent years, vigorous, though unorganized, revolt against this incoherent notion has raised the standard of individualism in education, declaring that here, as ail-elsewhere, the individual does not exist for the institution, but contrariwise.

And thus, of late, the old institutional conception of education may be said to contend with the newer theory of individualism. But out of the clash of these two conflicting notions, an ideal seems now to be rising, truer than either — the ideal of social individualism. Such an ideal has very recently come to expression in the aphorism of Professor John Dewey of the University of Chicago : " Education is not preparation for life : it is life ; " and in that of Colonel Francis W. Parker, of the Chicago Training School : " The common school is the central means for preserving and perpetuating the true democracy." ^

Such expressions as these recognize the fact that the individual is, indeed, the centre of every rational educational system, not however the individual as such, in the limited sense, but the whole individual in all his relations ; that is, the social individual. They involve the philosophical conception of the individual as a specialized or focussed functioning of society, and, conversely, of society as the whole functioning of the individual. The individual is society acting in a certain direction. He is a focussed activity of the entire social organism, just as the eye is the whole body directed toward the end of seeing. Society for its part is the complete activity of each individual.

Such, then, being the essential interrelations of society and its individual members, it is idle to balance the one against the other as ends of education. The real advantage of society involves ultimately the advantage of the individual member of society. And, conversely, the real betterment of the individual must inevitably tend toward the betterment of society. The two are no more separable in practice than are faith and works, thought and feeling, capital and labor, or any of

1 The thought has come to pervade the best of modern educational Uterature. See, for example, Commissioner Harris's report on the Correlation of Studies in the Report of the Committee of Fifteen : " The branches to be studied and the extent to which they are studied, will be determined mainly by the demands of one's civilization. These will prescribe what is most useful to make the individual acquainted with physical nature and with human nature so as to tit him as an individual to perform his duties in the several institutions — family, civil society, the State and the Church."