,,education ,,and ,,living ,,by ,,randolph ,,bourne ,,author ,,of 8,,youth ,,and ,,life10 8,,the ,,gary ,,schools0 ,illustration ,,new ,,york ,,the ,,century ,,co4 #aiag ,copyright1 #aiag1 by ,,the ,,century ,,co4 ,copyright1 #aiae1 #aiaf1 #aiag1 by ,,the ,,republic ,,publishing ,,co4 ,published1 ,april1 #aiag ,,preface ,these papers1 reprinted with slight additions from the pages of the 8,new ,republic10 through the courtesy of the editors1 do not pretend to be anything more than glimpses and paraphrases of new tendencies in the ,american school and college4 ,the public school is the most interesting and the most hopeful of our ,american social enterprises during these days of sluggishness for us and dreary horror for the rest of the world4 ,it is becoming one of the few rational and one of the few democratic things we have1 and science and hope are laying a foundation upon which a really self-conscious society could build almost anything it chose4 ,the school fascinates me because there is almost no sociological1 administrative or psychological truth that cannot be drawn out of its manifold life4 ,it is the laboratory for human nature1 and the only one that is simple enough to study with any prospect of quick enlightenment4 ,experiment in education has come to stay1 and this means that we have it in our hands to approach ever more closely our ideal of education as living4 ,we can make the school ever more and more nearly that child-community life towards which our best endeavor points4 ,the point-of-view of these papers will be recognized as the product of an enthusiasm for the educational philosophy of ,john ,dewey4 ,but what is a good philosophy for except to paraphrase8 ,the discovery of truisms means merely that my enthusiasms are being communicated to an unappreciative reader4 ,certainly the most recent educational sensation indicates that there are still crowds of professional educators and parents to whom such ideas are not truisms4 ,to see education1 not as a preparation for life or as a process segregated from other activities1 but as identical with living1 takes more imagination than most teachers have yet acquired4 ,if the school is a place where children live intensively and expressively1 it will be a place where they will learn4 ,the ideal educational system would continue with the adult all through his or her active life1 sharpening skill1 interpreting experience1 providing intellectual tools with which to express and enjoy4 ,just as education and play should be scarcely separable for the little child1 so education and work should be scarcely separable for the adult4 ,by closing off the school and boxing up learning we have really smothered education4 ,we are only just beginning to revive4 ,we have first to make over the school into a real child-community1 filled with activities which stimulate the child and focus his interest towards some constructive work1 and then we have to teach the teacher how to expose the child to the various activities and guide his interest so that it will be purposeful4 ,the school can thus become a sifter where children unconsciously as they live along from day to day are choosing the ways in which they can best serve both themselves and their community as workers and citizens in the great scheme4 ,the papers on the ,gary schools are reprinted not because ,i wish to exploit the system or its superintendent1 but because of the usefulness of a concrete example to hang wandering theory to4 ,the schools of ,mr4 ,wirt's conception1 in spite of many inadequacies of realization1 still seem to me the happiest framework ,i have yet found in the ,american public school for the fulfillment of the new educational ideals4 ,no one can deny that in the actual schools much of the old unconsciousness and regimentation still stick their unwelcome head through1 but my somewhat nave impressions do reflect1 ,i am sure1 a spirit which is there1 and a possibility that is very near for the ,american community to catch4 ,to praise one thing1 however1 is not to damn everything else1 and it would be false to pretend that almost every city in our country has not latent within its system the embryo of the modern school4 ,some are simply more conscious than others4 ,some actually envisage education as living4 ,,contents ,,page ,i ,,education ,,and ,,living #c ,,ii ,,the ,,self-,,conscious ,,school #aa ,,iii ,,the ,,wasted ,,years #ah ,,iv ,,puzzle--,,education #bf ,v ,,learning ,,out ,,of ,,school #cb ,,vi ,,in ,a ,,schoolroom #da ,,vii ,,the ,,cult ,,of ,,the ,,best #di ,,viii ,,education ,,in ,,taste #eg ,,ix ,,universal ,,service ,,and ,,education #ff ,x ,,the ,,schools ,,from ,,the ,,outside #gg ,,xi ,,the ,,portland ,,school ,,survey #hd ,,xii ,,what ,,is ,,experimental ,,education8 #ia ,,xiii ,,the ,,organic ,,school #ajj ,,xiv ,,communities ,,for ,,children #ajd ,,xv ,,really ,,public ,,schools #aaf ,,xvi ,,apprentices ,,to ,,the ,,school #abg ,,xvii ,,the ,,natural ,,school #acf ,,xviii ,,the ,,democratic ,,school #adf ,,xix ,,the ,,trained ,,mind #aed ,,xx ,,class ,,and ,,school #afa ,,xxi ,a ,,policy ,,in ,,vocational ,,education #agc ,,xxii ,,an ,,issue ,,in ,,vocational ,,education #ahb ,,xxiii ,,organized ,,labor ,,on ,,education #ahi ,,xxiv ,,education ,,for ,,work #aig ,,xxv ,,continuation ,,schools #bjf ,,xxvi ,,who ,,owns ,,the ,,universities #bae ,,xxvii ,,the ,,undergraduate #bbb ,,xxviii ,,medievalism ,,in ,,the ,,colleges #bcj ,,education ,,and ,,living ,i ,,education ,,and ,,living ,what is the current broadening of the public school--the bringing in of gymnasiums and pools1 shops and gardens1 dramatics and organized play--but a new effort to realize the school as more a life and less an institution8 ,are we not getting a little restless over the resemblance of our schools to penitentiaries1 reformatories1 orphan asylums1 rather than to free and joyous communities8 ,a school system whose object was little more than to abolish illiteracy and prepare the more fortunate for college was bound to fall an easy prey to the mechanical organizer4 ,education in this country has been one-sidedly professionalized4 ,the machinery was developed before the moving ideals were worked out4 ,professional educators have worked too much for a logical system rather than for an experimental adjustment to the life needs of individual children4 ,we have achieved a democratic education in the sense that common schooling is practically within the reach of every one4 ,but a democratic education in the sense of giving equal opportunities to each child of finding in the school that life and training which he peculiarly needs1 has still to be generally worked for4 ,the problem of ,american education is now to transform an institution into a life4 ,let us not deny the value of that emphasis on administration4 ,the slow progress from the diffuse district school to the well organized state system represents the welding of a powerful instrument for a future democracy to use4 ,centralized and efficient administration is indispensable for insuring educational benefits to all4 ,but there is a danger that we shall create capable administrators faster than we create imaginative educators4 ,it is so easy to forget that this tightening of the machinery is only in order that the product may be finer and richer4 ,unless it does so result in more creative life it will be a detriment rather than a good4 ,for it is too easy to make the running of the machine1 the juggling with schedules and promotions and curricula and courses and credits1 the end4 ,to institutionalize a social function is always the line of least resistance4 ,we are becoming used to the impressive schoolhouses that tower over the unkempt and fragile houses of our ,american towns4 ,the school already overshadows the church4 ,if this means that the school is the most important place in the community1 then it is a hopeful sign4 ,but if its slightly forbidding bulk means simply that there is another institution to put people through a uniform process1 or indeed through any kind of process1 then we are no further along4 ,the educators of the last generation1 whether from false ideas of democracy or from administrative convenience or necessity1 imposed deadly uniformities of subject matter and method on the children in the schools4 ,they assumed that a uniform process would give uniform results4 ,but children are infinitely varied in temperament and capacity and interests4 ,so the uniform process gave the most wildly heterogeneous results4 ,and the present unrest arises from our amazed dissatisfaction that so admirable and long-continued a public-school education should have left the masses of children so little stimulated and trained4 ,the pseudo-science of education under which most of us were brought up assumed that children were empty vessels to be filled by knowledge4 ,teachers and parents still feel that to cut down an arithmetic hour to forty-five minutes is to deprive the child of a fourth of his education4 ,but children are not empty vessels1 nor are they automatic machines which can be wound up and set running on a track by the teacher4 ,they are pushing wills and desires and curiosities4 ,they are living1 growing things1 and they need nothing so much as a place where they can grow4 ,they live as wholes far more than older people do1 and they cannot be made to become minds and minds alone for four or five hours a day--that is1 without stultification4 ,the school forgets that we are only accidentally intellectual1 that our other impulses are far more imperious4 ,because a teacher can secure outward order1 it does not mean that she has harmonized the child's personality4 ,she has not the least clue to the riot or apathy or delusion that may be going on inside him4 ,she may easily become a drill-sergeant1 but she must not think that she has thereby become an educational scientist4 ,to become that she will have to think of the school as a place where children spend their time living not as artificially segregated minds but as human things4 ,she would have to judge their activities in terms of an interesting life4 ,and that involves good health1 play1 sport1 constructive work1 talk1 questioning1 exercise1 friendship1 personal expression1 as well as reading and learning4 ,a place where children really lived would be a place that gave opportunities for all these activities to just the extent that children were individually capable of expressing themselves4 ,children want to be busy together1 they want to try their hand at tools and materials1 they want to find out what older people do and watch them at it4 ,they have to flounder about and have all sorts of experiences before they touch their spring of interest and face their real direction4 ,all their education is really acquired in the same random way that the baby learns to control his movements and respond to his environment4 ,no matter how the school tries to organize their learning1 and feed it to them in graduated doses1 this way of trial and error is really the one by which they will learn4 ,you have no way of guaranteeing that they will learn what you think you are teaching them4 ,what you can do is to put them in a controlled environment where they will most frequently strike the electric contact of curiosity and response1 and get experiences that thrill with meaning for them4 ,life in its lowest terms is a matter of passing the time4 ,it would be well if educators would more often remember this4 ,if they did1 would they not examine more carefully the life which they provide for growing youth8 ,college and high school life is reasonably antiseptic1 it is not oppressive1 it is not particularly arbitrary or shabby4 ,but compared abstractly with what might be a good life1 given the interests and outlook and needed training of youth1 would it not seem a little sorry8 ,is it not a travesty1 except for the few1 on a really stimulating and creative way of spending time8 ,suppose educators seriously measured their schools by this standard of the good life4 ,suppose we really tried to carry out the principle that the secret of life is to pass time worthily4 ,most of this current educational interest is another stab at the age-long problem of making education synonymous with living4 ,we are rediscovering the fact that we learn only as we desire1 as we seek to understand or as we are busy4 ,we are trying to make the school a place where children cannot escape doing these things4 ,we see now that education has grown up in this country in a separate institutional compartment1 jealously apart from the rest of the community life4 ,it has developed its own technique1 its own professional spirit4 ,its outlines are cold and logical4 ,it is far the best ordered of our institutions4 ,its morale is the nearest thing we have to compulsory military service4 ,there is something remote and antiseptic about even our best schools4 ,they contrast strangely with the color and confusion of the rest of our ,american life4 ,the bare class-rooms1 the stiff seats1 the austere absence of beauty1 suggest a hospital where painful if necessary intellectual operations are going on4 ,additions of gymnasiums and shops and studios to such a school will do little to set the current of life flowing again4 ,the whole school must be loosened up1 the stiff forms made flexible1 children thought of as individuals and not as 8classes40 ,thus new activities must be woven into a genuine child-community life4 ,these things must be the contacts with experience that waken and focus children's interests4 ,they must be opportunities for spontaneous living4 ,the school constantly encroaches on the home4 ,it provides play and work opportunities that even well-to-do homes cannot provide4 ,it must take over too the free and comradely atmosphere of the homes and the streets where children play4 ,let teachers face the fact that they cannot teach masses of children anything with the assurance that they will really assimilate it4 ,what they can do is to fill the school with all kinds of typical experiences1 and see that children are exposed to them4 ,they can see that children have a chance to dabble in them1 touch tools and growing things1 read books1 draw1 swim1 play and sing4 ,let the teacher cleverly supervise and cordinate1 see that the children's interests are drawn out1 and that what they do contributes toward their growth4 ,in the last analysis1 each child will have to educate himself up to his capacity4 ,he can only educate himself by living4 ,the school will be the place where he lives most worthily4 ,our best ,american public schools are already in sight of such an ideal4 ,americans need more than anything to learn how to live4 ,this is the first business of education4 ,,ii ,,the ,,self-,,conscious ,,school ,in the educational excitement of to-day we scarcely realize how far the modern school is passing out of that era when the program for work and study was carefully constructed with a view to the child's 8preparation for life40 ,educators saw the world as divided into two radically different classes1 adults and school-children4 ,the adults were functioning in a definite sphere1 using a certain self-contained and common body of knowledge to do their work and make their way in the world4 ,the children1 on the other hand1 were waiting like the little unborn souls in 8,the ,blue ,bird10 to take their places in that active world4 ,if their parents were using knowledge as a current intellectual coin with which experience could be bought and social exchange effected1 the child who had any chance of succeeding as an adult would have to be put in possession of as much of this current coin as he could hold1 quite regardless of his own enthusiasm for it or his own consciousness of what it was all about4 ,the free public school1 therefore1 became the place where children took into themselves such automatically usable knowledge as would be important for them in the remote future of their active adulthood4 ,since book-knowledge had acquired honorific distinction as the badge of a leisure class--and did not every democratic parent wish his child to 8rise in the world08--and since it was of all knowledge the most easily negotiable in the form of simple processes and facts1 this type of knowledge became the stock of the school4 ,then at some time a not unintelligent attempt was supposedly made to compare this current stock of intellectual paper money with the specie circulating outside in the community at large1 to see whether the school reserve was accurate and sufficient4 ,this attention lapsed1 however1 and the curriculum became a closed system1 handed down to the uncritical and unconscious child with the authority of prestige and the sanctions of school discipline4 ,in this unconscious school1 knowledge was presented to us not as acquaintance with things but with 8subjects40 ,text-books were given us holding the golden lore1 and education became the slow nibbling away at their facts for six to twelve years4 ,we came to think of ourselves as cupboards in which were laboriously stored bundles of knowledge4 ,we knew dimly the shape of the articles and the distinction of the materials within4 ,but we never expected to see the contents until we were grown1 when we would joyfully open our packages and use them to the infinite glory of our worldly success and happiness4 ,but it was a slow child who did not begin to suspect1 long before his shelves were full1 that most of his adult friends had lost no time1 when their schooldays were over1 in locking their cupboards and leaving their bundles to the dust and worms4 ,the fine technique of the unconscious school as worked out by educators in normal schools and teachers' colleges in the last forty years can be read in any current school survey4 ,here the coincidence of work and study with the child's interests is accidental4 ,indeed1 many parents and teachers are still opposed to making too large a part of the curriculum appeal to the child's ephemeral interests4 ,discipline is still thought of not as willed skill1 which it is1 but as the ability to do painful things4 ,a world where children do joyfully and well what interests them1 instead of what is 8good0 for them 7because unpleasant71 still excites the envious mistrust of an older generation4 ,yet the transformation from the unconscious school to the self-conscious school is the very kernel of the present educational excitement4 ,the new schools which arouse enthusiasm are those in which the child is learning what has meaning to him as a child4 ,he no longer does things because it is the 8teacher's way40 ,that old perverted honor of the teacher never to admit that she is wrong lest the child's confidence be disturbed and he become conscious and critical of the methods and materials of his education1 is breaking down4 ,we are learning that in the unconscious school the prizes go to the docile and unquestioning1 not to those of initiative and skill4 ,the school that keeps children in ignorance of what they are doing trains them for an uncritical life in society4 ,the discovery is not new that all the skill necessary to live an effective life in ,america to-day is not contained in a few readers1 arithmetics1 abridged histories and geographies1 an elementary algebra and plane geometry1 a ,latin1 ,greek1 or ,german grammar1 with cullings from the works of ,csar1 ,virgil1 ,xenophon1 ,cicero and ,homer4 ,when educators found that adult life overflowed these narrow limits1 they introduced manual training1 gymnastics1 drawing and music2 but the child became no more self-conscious1 for these were merely additional 8subjects40 ,the radical discovery of to-day is that the adult world is not primarily engaged in turning information into power4 ,the adult rarely has a historical or a geographical or an arithmetical thought unconnected with experience4 ,what he does is to work very concretely at a myriad of occupations1 intellectual and mechanical1 concerned with making a living1 bringing up a family1 dealing with people1 casting a vote1 reading newspapers4 ,he has a great diversity of horizons1 and the most effective people are those who react most intelligently to their experience as a whole4 ,power and information increase together1 not one at a time4 ,the effective adult is a self-conscious personality4 ,the only school which can be a genuine preparation for life is a self-conscious school4 ,the child must learn to live in the same kind of world that his elders live in4 ,the school must be the community in which his child-life develops4 ,his play and work must be1 first of all1 interesting activity4 ,fortunately the modern movement to make the school self-conscious has begun at the bottom4 ,the four earlier years of the public school as taught by recently trained teachers are now generally filled1 even in conservative city systems1 with this new vivid consciousness4 ,dramatization1 the learning of reading and writing and arithmetic through play1 group-games and folk-dancing1 gardening1 constructive wood-working--all this is a sign of the growing self-consciousness of the school4 ,in the more advanced schools1 shop and science work1 community excursions1 illustrative drawing and design1 fertilize the life of the older children4 ,the most complete self-consciousness is realized in a school of the ,wirt type1 where all the varied activities are arranged to contribute to the upkeep or enrichment of the school plant and the school community4 ,for the older children the expanding community becomes an extension of the school1 and they learn the operation of the adult world by going out to see the institutions of their community and asking questions about them4 ,in the self-conscious school the child's own curiosity sets the cue1 and the school's work is to provide manifold opportunities for the satisfaction of that curiosity4 ,as this self-consciousness spreads up through the school system1 we should get a new type of intelligence4 ,children will get a sense of means used for ends1 and this sense is the most imperative discipline that we need4 ,a revolutionary reorganization of the curriculum will be effected4 ,already unapplied mathematics and unrelated classics are passing4 ,yet those years which should most closely approximate in function and appreciation and in intellectual attitude the adult world remain unregenerated4 ,little seems to have been done to alter the old high school1 still regarded principally as the gateway to the largely unconscious college4 ,as a community of adolescent life1 meeting sex-interests1 new idealisms and new assertions1 it is a failure4 ,but as the older pedagogy fades out1 and the younger children trained in the self-conscious school advance1 we may expect a new orientation for the older years4 ,meanwhile our most valuable criterion for any school1 public or private1 city or rural1 is1 8,how far towards self-consciousness1 as expressed in the individual child and in the school community as a whole1 has the school progressed80 ,,iii ,,the ,,wasted ,,years ,only one child out of fourteen in our school system ever reaches the high school2 whatever education ninety per cent4 of ,american children are to have they must acquire before they are fourteen years old4 ,so elementary a fact as this1 it would seem1 should be at the background of every discussion and criticism of the public schools4 ,yet the most cursory inspection of the average city public school shows that its significance has only recently and very dimly been realized4 ,indeed1 as the average city public school is at present organized1 there is every reason to believe that most of the children get practically all their education before their tenth year4 ,limited as this schooling is1 they do not by any means get the full advantage of what is supposed to be given them4 ,one can hardly come from a study of the everyday classroom work of the average city school without a conviction that there is disastrous intellectual leakage which has been strangely ignored by educators4 ,this leakage is not in the primary school and the high school4 ,for the teaching of 8the three ,r's0 ,american normal schools and training colleges in recent years have worked out many admirable techniques1 which seem to have been generally adopted4 ,the younger generation of teachers is doing efficiently its work of giving the child a mastery of these essentials of civilized intercourse4 ,the present primary school on its intellectual side is an efficient institution4 ,similarly the high school has had a large amount of attention and skill lavished upon it4 ,its administrative peculiar problems have been studied and met4 ,the best high schools have been made to approximate elementary colleges1 with well-rounded courses of languages and sciences1 of artistic1 manual and physical work4 ,for the highly selected group which reaches the high school it provides an excellent purely intellectual curriculum1 both for higher study and for social orientation4 ,between the primary school and the high school1 however1 there lies a desert waste of four years1 the significance and possibilities of which seem to have been scarcely considered4 ,they are the most urgent years of all1 for in them the educator must give compensation to the children who are forced to leave school for the opportunities they are to miss4 ,yet these middle years of what used to be called the 8grammar school0 are now left not only unmotivated1 but without any genuine educational function4 ,instead of being prophetic of the future they merely drag along the relics of the past4 ,some schools1 it is true1 have timidly brought down the beginning of high school studies into the lower grades1 but in general the 8grammar school0 merely continues the interests of the primary school on substantially the same lines4 ,fifteen years ago1 when ,i went to school1 there may have been some excuse for this system4 ,teachers may have been correct in their belief that it took the average child eight years to learn arithmetic1 reading1 writing1 spelling1 and a smattering of history and geography4 ,to-day such an assumption is ridiculous4 ,i have seen children in large classes in an ordinary city school system learn all the elements of 8the three ,r's0 in less than six months4 ,the clear writing and accurate reading of little children in the first grade who have only been going to school for a few months is astonishing4 ,it suggests that ,mme4 ,montessori could scarcely have known of the excellence of elementary methods in this country when she urged her ideas as revolutionary4 ,for these small children1 as for the ,montessori child1 the competitive number-work1 the writing from dictation1 the oral reading1 the spelling1 seemed not drudgery but interesting activity4 ,astonishing1 too1 was the uniform excellence of the results4 ,now it is little more than a truism to say that 8the three ,r's0 have not really been learned until they have become automatic1 that reading1 writing and arithmetic are not ends in themselves but merely the tools for work4 ,to give command of the tools is the peculiar task of the primary school1 and of the primary school only4 ,if children can be given an acquaintance with 8the three ,r's0 in six months1 it does not seem too much to expect them to acquire this automatic command in two or three years4 ,it is incredible that the child should have to study eight years for this4 ,yet our elementary schools continue to assume that every child is thus mentally backward4 ,in the higher grades we find the same subjects1 formal reading lessons1 formal penmanship lessons1 formal arithmetic and spelling4 ,but something has happened to these children4 ,they are distinctly less interested1 less interesting1 and even less capable than the smaller children4 ,it is depressing to realize that the elementary school has existed only to turn first-grade children into seventh-grade children1 and to realize that most of the latter are nearing the end of their schooldays and will pass out into the world with that intellectual listlessness and lack of command4 ,let me suggest what has happened to these children4 ,formal work1 the learning of any technique1 is apt to be pleasurable as long as we can feel ourselves gradually acquiring a command over our instrument4 ,but after we have acquired the technique and can rely upon our skill1 there is no gain in continuing formal exercises4 ,there is only gain in using our skill in real work1 the work for which we have studied4 ,if we have studied a language1 we do not keep mulling over rules of grammar and vocabularies1 but we try as soon as possible to read4 ,the means now gives way to the end4 ,we can understand one cause for that situation of which employers complain when children come to them from the public schools unprepared in the very elements of education4 ,in the bad memories1 flimsy information1 inability to write or spell or figure accurately1 is found the very common indictment of the public school4 ,the criticism is usually that the groundwork has been poor1 that the children have not been trained in the fundamentals4 ,if my thesis is correct1 the groundwork has not been poor4 ,of recent years1 it has1 on the contrary1 been unusually excellent and thorough4 ,the leakage has come in the middle years1 which have simply disintegrated the foundations4 ,the school has sharpened the mind1 and then1 by providing only a repetition of formal work instead of practical opportunity for use of the acquired technique1 has proceeded to dull it4 ,grammar has been studied1 literature in a curiously desiccated fashion1 political history1 esoteric branches of arithmetic4 ,subjects like these have filled the time that might have been given to copious individual reading1 to writing about what is read or experienced1 to practical number-work in simple statistics or accounting4 ,time which might have been given1 through use of pictures and newspapers1 to the cultivation of an imaginative historical and geographical background1 has gone into aimless memorizing1 or into a glib use of words and phrases4 ,this situation is all the more preposterous because both the high school and college are full of studies that could be begun by the intelligent child as soon as a technical proficiency in 8the three ,r's0 was once obtained4 ,what psychological law declares that before fourteen a human being is incapable of learning languages1 the sciences1 or even the sociological studies1 but that after fourteen he is capable of learning all these things8 ,as a matter of fact1 most of these 8higher0 studies could be much more easily assimilated by the quick and curious mind of the younger child than by the older4 ,and for the worker in any field1 acquaintance with elementary science and the organization of society is so emphatically important that we cannot afford to let the vast majority of our citizens remain all their lives ignorant of their very terms4 ,in the four years of the 8grammar school0 an intelligent interest could be awakened in these fields1 and the main outlines grasped4 ,this would not mean the addition of many new subjects to an already crowded curriculum4 ,it would merely mean the dropping of 8the three ,r's0 back into their rightful place in the primary school4 ,it would lighten rather than overburden the school4 ,we should then have a fair division of labor and function between the schools1 to the profit of both4 ,if there is one criticism of the public school system on its intellectual side that can justly be made general1 it is this of the wasted years4 ,the school has found itself in this paradoxical situation1 that the more excellent became its primary methods the poorer became the product at the end of the system4 ,this paradox is explained4 ,educators have simply failed to recognize that the sharper they made the elementary tools and the better the facilities of obtaining skill in their use1 the more varied and immediate should be the work upon which the tools are to be exercised4 ,they have failed to provide this work4 ,they have left a leakage in public education which has almost defeated its own ends4 ,,iv ,,puzzle-,,education ,how righteously indignant did our teachers use to be if we ever precociously objected to learning our mathematics and grammar in school on the ground that if we were going to be doctors or policemen we should never have any use when we grew up for that kind of knowledge6 ,were we not entirely too young to know at all what kind of knowledge we should need when we did grow up8 ,did not our teachers impress upon us that in some mysterious way all was grist that came to our intellectual mill8 ,did we wish to know merely what we could use in the daily grubbing of bread and butter8 ,was not the fine flower of education knowledge learned for its own sake8 ,we could thus be assured1 as we cubed our roots or diagrammed our sentences1 that all this work was 8training the mind10 so that we could almost feel our mental muscles growing in strength and elasticity4 ,we were too young to see it then1 but some day we should be heartily grateful to our painstaking teachers4 ,some day1 when we were successful men1 we should come to appreciate the superior wisdom of this educational system against which our rational little wills so smolderingly rebelled4 ,in those days1 would we not have given our young chances of promotion to see ranged up before the teacher a group of great grown men1 the successful ones of the earth1 to be put through the paces at which we kicked8 ,would it not have tickled us to see a class consisting of a state senator1 a former lieutenant-governor1 a manufacturer1 a city official1 a banker1 a physician1 a merchant1 a lawyer1 an editor1 an engineer and a clergyman1 trying to spell daguerreotype and paradigm1 reconnaissance and erysipelas1 guessing at the distance in degrees from ,portugal to the ,ural ,mountains1 locating the desert of ,atacama and the ,pamir ,plateau1 expressing #aej ,cent4 in terms of ,fahrenheit1 and finding the area of the base of a cylindrical #a gal4 can1 #aj ins4 high8 ,if it was true that we should all find this knowledge useful some day1 then it would be preminently these men who were finding it useful now4 ,let the news go forth to all the children of the land who are questioning the why and wherefore of what they are learning1 that this thing has actually been done4 ,the eleven men have been assembled in ,springfield1 ,ill41 and have had put to them these questions and others1 all taken from the prescribed work of the local public schools4 ,the class constituted one of those inquiries conducted with the deadly accuracy of a laboratory experiment by the ,russell ,sage ,foundation4 ,the results1 it need hardly be said1 were a complete demonstration of the intuition of our childish precocity4 ,not one of these eleven successful and intelligent gentlemen made so much as a passing mark in any subject4 ,in the spelling-match the best record was six words out of ten1 while one man1 probably the editor1 failed in every word4 ,only one of the pupils knew the capital of ,montenegro1 while neither he nor any of the others had the faintest reaction to ,atacama or the ,pamir ,plateau1 much less to the length of ,south ,america or the distance in degrees from ,portugal to the ,ural ,mountains4 ,only one of the eleven could do the thermometer problem--he must have been in ,paris once in ,january--and not one knew the specific gravity of alcohol when #b liters weigh #a4eh kgms4 ,as for the ten historical dates selected from ninety-one1 the only date that as many as ten men knew was the attack on ,sumter4 ,only one identified the date of the ,mexican ,war1 only one the surrender of ,cornwallis4 ,it must have seemed very curious to the eleven to be presented with these questions1 and then have the answers labeled 8knowledge40 ,how many of them drew the conclusion that our public schools were little more in the higher reaches than a glorified puzzle-party1 where recitation is often more like a guessing of riddles1 or trying to discover the answer from the teacher's tone1 or the putting together of a puzzle-picture8 ,look at the average school text-book1 with its neat and logical divisions1 and see if you can't hear the dry crackle of the author's wit as he has worked out his ingenious riddles1 pieced his cunning examples together1 hunted the dictionary for words to spell1 dissected his history1 carved up a continent4 ,the intellect feeds on syllogisms4 ,syllogisms are so much easier than appreciations4 ,and really it is far easier to reason than to interpret4 ,in the first you have merely to follow the beaten track1 in the other you must break new paths and put the thing in your own new language4 ,yet this whirling around of the mental engine with the belting off is represented to us as a process of 8training the mind40 ,you might as well say that an athlete could best train his legs by standing on his head and waving them4 ,it is this scheme of puzzle-education which this ,springfield inquiry--a characteristic flash1 we take it1 of ,american genius--has so tellingly shown up4 ,and this riddle-curriculum tends to get worse instead of better as the science of text-bookmaking waxes and the machinery of scientific pedagogy accumulates4 ,the avowed aim of teachers and training-colleges in recent years has been to discover pedagogical methods that would do the work regardless of the personality of the teacher4 ,the riotous absurdities of this scheme are being revealed by such inquiries as these in ,springfield4 ,they suggest that the policy of having our next generation's mental attitudes1 stock of information1 personal qualities1 and moral biases cultivated by unimaginative teachers whose intellectual capacity has been just sufficient to acquire a few routine methods of 8conducting0 a class and keeping order in a group of restless children1 may have become antiquated4 ,our genuine education--that is1 a familiarity with the world we live in--must wait until we get out of school4 ,that may partly explain why most children are so anxious to leave4 ,some people might find in this inquiry not so much an evidence of the inefficiency of our public schools as of how little intellectual baggage one needs to become successful and eminent in these ,united ,states4 ,but this is in reality only to make a heavier indictment4 ,it is still primarily the schools that have failed to make the intellectual baggage important to the minds of their pupils1 that have left uncultivated their tastes and horizons4 ,it is for this reason that our ,american intellectual background is so relatively thin4 ,v ,,learning ,,out ,,of ,,school ,a recent correspondent of the 8,new ,republic0 columns declares that the real puzzle in education is as to content4 ,she asks us to outline the facts we have found of value1 so that she may be sure1 as she confesses she is not now sure1 what children should know when they leave school4 ,i search the memory of my nine years in the public schools1 and wonder what ,i really learned there4 ,i must have learned to read and write and spell and work sums1 for ,i can do all those things now2 but ,i came out with no connected sense of my country's history or that of any other1 and if ,i had any geographical grasp1 it came only from a certain abnormal delight ,i took in poring over maps by myself4 ,algebra1 geometry and physics ,i recall to have passed before my attention4 ,i was a very dutiful child1 and it was my moral rather than my intellectual sense which enabled me to get 8marks0 in these subjects4 ,i cannot say that they were 8learned10 in the sense of being woven into experience in any way4 ,latin rather appealed to me1 chiefly because of its elegance of form1 which ,i remember to have been curiously reinforced by the sthetic format of the ,collar and ,daniell's text-book we used4 ,certain ,english classics appeared like dim ghosts on my horizon4 ,at no time could ,i have given an intelligent account of the plot or argument of any of the books we read in ,latin1 ,greek or ,german4 ,the ,french and ,italian which ,i picked up later ,i can read more easily than the ,german upon which ,i spent three school years4 ,imagined geographical wanderings1 the disentangling of some verses of ,vergil1 certain neat algebraic solutions1 are all of my 8learning0 that excited my interest or enthusiasm4 ,nine years seems an unconscionable time to spend learning these simple things4 ,i conclude that there is not much use teaching children things that they will not assimilate with their own curiosity1 and connect with what they consider worth while in their world4 ,in my own case this curiosity rarely worked in school4 ,i cannot defend its algebraic and ,vergilian workings except as springing from some embryo sthetic sense4 ,but the geographical enthusiasm is perfectly intelligible4 ,it is connected with that intellectual education which ,i was pursuing parallel to my school work1 and which merged with it only occasionally4 ,this unofficial education1 begun at a very early age1 came through the medium of the newspaper4 ,the 8,new ,york ,tribune10 lying freshly on our doorstep every morning1 was gathered in like intellectual manna by my small and grateful self4 ,it told me daily of a wide1 fascinating and important world1 and to it ,i reacted with never failing curiosity4 ,on the political events1 personalities1 foreign wars1 riots1 strikes1 plays1 books1 and music that streamed disorganizedly through its columns1 no school subject threw any light except geography1 which at least enabled me to place things on the map4 ,history1 which might have helped1 was taught1 not backwards1 in the order that one's curiosity naturally approaches it1 but forwards1 so that at no time did we get within hailing distance of the present4 ,my real education1 as ,i look back on it1 consisted in making some sort of order out of this journalistic chaos4 ,i got some help in the debates on current events which a radical superintendent introduced into our high school4 ,i remember pulverizing1 at the age of thirteen1 my opponents in debate1 with proofs that a ruthless dictatorship was the only form of government possible in the primitive state of ,santo ,domingo4 ,our household1 however1 was innocent of current discussion4 ,the public library had not been born4 ,i had to plot out this larger world by myself4 ,indeed1 the grown-up people whom ,i sought seemed on the whole less familiar than ,i with the bearings of my curiosity4 ,i cannot say that there was anything subtle or complicated or critical in my acceptance of the newspaper4 ,it was all ,i could do to get the world mapped out1 and become familiar with the names that ,i read4 ,i remember following the ,greco-,turkish ,war with a great deal of satisfaction1 though the issues involved and the real military operations never meant anything at all4 ,i got only the pleasant familiarity with this wider social world that one would get in meeting the same faces constantly in the street1 without knowing the names of the people or speaking to them4 ,whatever familiarity with the trend of events and the wider interests of men and women ,i had when ,i left school was obtained in this way4 ,the school had been practically valueless in giving me the background of the intellectual world in which ,i was henceforth to live4 ,my framework was bony enough and the content flimsy1 but the outlines of my interests were there1 and curiosity enough to keep me ceaselessly at filling in that content4 ,nothing has occurred since that time to show me1 through various vicissitudes1 that it was not the most useful ,i could have4 ,that its foundations had to be laid outside the school seems to me a sheer waste of educational energy on the school's part4 ,boldly then1 and in true egocentric fashion1 ,i say that the child when he leaves school ought to have the foundations of interest in the events and issues in which people generally are interested4 ,these practically all come within the attention of the metropolitan newspaper4 ,the child should be equipped to get some kind of intelligent reaction to what he reads there about political and sociological events and issues1 personalities1 art and literature4 ,no one could accuse a curriculum based on the newspaper of being aristocratic1 esoteric1 or ultra-cultural4 ,the newspaper is the one common intellectual food of all classes and types in the community4 ,many persons1 it is true1 may react only to certain specialized departments1 and yet even into the most rudimentary journals filter most of these larger issues and events4 ,to use this stock as clues and work out the historical1 geographical1 and cultural ramifications in the school curriculum would provide this broad familiarity with the world the child is to live in which ,i suggest4 ,i would not make the horrifying proposal that the newspaper be used as a school text-book4 ,i am too well aware of that cardinal tenet of current educational morality which banishes the newspaper entirely from the school4 ,there is something rather symbolic about that tenet1 by the way4 ,but to use a sort of generalized newspaper as the nucleus and basis of a curriculum would be a different matter4 ,it would be using the actual current life of society as the guiding thread of what the child is to know4 ,as far as the purely intellectual content of the school is concerned1 it would do what so many educators desire1 connect the school with life4 ,this ideal may be incredible1 but it is not necessarily impossible4 ,take the child at its lowest terms1 as a troublesome little person whom its parents send to school to get it out of the way of the crowded home until it is old enough to go to work4 ,then take the present curriculum1 a medley of equally emphasized cultural1 scientific and manual studies4 ,now the child certainly should have a command of the three ,r's before he is ten years old4 ,suppose then we transfer the mathematical and scientific studies to a place subsidiary to the vocational and manual work that is being so rapidly developed4 ,they would be taken up1 that is1 only as the theoretical basis for this practical work4 ,this would leave four or five years for the study of the history1 geography1 literature1 language1 and civics1 before the minimum age at which the child in the more advanced states is allowed to leave school4 ,there seems to be no inherent reason why a great deal could not be done in that time to prepare this imaginative background for the world we live in4 ,if 8cultivating the imagination0 means anything it means ensuring that what one experiences in daily life will call up interesting and significant images and ideas4 ,the public school sometimes attempts to cultivate a sort of literary and mythological imagination1 but as for ensuring that those references to places1 persons1 books1 political institutions1 ideas1 which occur in the papers and weekly journals1 shall call up to the mind prompt1 accurate1 and stimulating images and meanings1 it has been a dead failure4 ,an exploration of the current imagination of the average person would be a curious and profitable enterprise for a psychologist to undertake4 ,for the cultivation of this imagery1 we are all left1 as the child is left1 to the chance provision of the contemporary news-provider1 the illustrated paper and 8,sunday magazine40 ,here is where we get our notions of things as they look and act4 ,beyond all else the child should leave school with a wide and reliable imagination--not with facts or theories so much as pictures1 sympathies1 apprehensions1 what we call 8the feeling for the thing40 ,thus equipped1 his curiosity will provide him with all the facts and theories he needs4 ,the custom of teaching by subjects is as artificial and absurd as could be imagined4 ,we do not think in terms of history or geography or language4 ,if ,i read a foreign newspaper1 all these are merged into one imaginative impression4 ,we think in terms of situations1 which have settings in time and place1 and all sorts of fringes and implications4 ,unless the child is taught in this spirit1 the isolated subjects will have no meaning4 ,without the imaginative background that fuses and vitalizes his studies1 he will go out from school untaught and unknowing4 ,,vi ,,in ,a ,,schoolroom ,the other day ,i amused myself by slipping into a recitation at the suburban high school where ,i had once studied as a boy4 ,the teacher let me sit1 like one of the pupils1 at an empty desk in the back of the room1 and for an hour ,i had before my eyes the interesting drama of the ,american school as it unfolds itself day after day in how many thousands of classrooms throughout the land4 ,i had gone primarily to study the teacher1 but ,i soon found that the pupils1 after they had forgotten my presence1 demanded most of my attention4 ,their attitude towards the teacher1 a young man just out of college and amazingly conscientious and persevering1 was that good-humored tolerance which has to take the place of enthusiastic interest in many of our ,american schools4 ,they seemed to like the teacher and recognize fully his good intentions1 but their attitude was a delightful one of all making the best of a bad bargain1 and coperating loyally with him in slowly putting the hour out of its agony4 ,this good-natured acceptance of the inevitable1 this perfunctory going through by its devotees of the ritual of education1 was my first striking impression1 and the key to the reflections that ,i began to weave4 ,as ,i sank down to my seat ,i felt all that queer sense of depression1 still familiar after ten years1 that sensation1 in coming into the schoolroom1 of suddenly passing into a helpless1 impersonal world1 where expression could be achieved and curiosity asserted only in the most formal and difficult way4 ,and the class began immediately to divide itself for me1 as ,i looked around it1 into the artificially depressed like myself1 commonly called the 8good0 children1 and the artificially stimulated1 commonly known as the 8bad10 and the envy and despair of every 8good0 child4 ,for to these 8bad0 children1 who are1 of course1 simply those with more self-assertion and initiative than the rest1 all the careful network of discipline and order is simply a direct and irresistible challenge4 ,i remembered the fearful awe with which ,i used to watch the exhaustless ingenuity of the 8bad0 boys of my class to disrupt the peacefully dragging recitation2 and behold1 ,i found myself watching intently1 along with all the children in my immediate neighborhood1 the patient activity of a boy who spent his entire hour in so completely sharpening a lead-pencil that there was nothing left at the end but the lead4 ,now what normal boy would do so silly a thing or who would look at him in real life8 ,but here1 in this artificial atmosphere1 his action had a sort of symbolic quality2 it was assertion against a stupid authority1 a sort of blind resistance against the attempt of the schoolroom to impersonalize him4 ,the most trivial incident assumed importance2 the chiming of the town-clock1 the passing automobile1 a slip of the tongue1 a passing footstep in the hall1 would polarize the wandering attention of the entire class like an electric shock4 ,indeed1 a large part of the teacher's business seemed to be to demagnetize1 by some little ingenious touch1 his little flock into their original inert and static elements4 ,for the whole machinery of the classroom was dependent evidently upon this segregation4 ,here were these thirty children1 all more or less acquainted1 and so congenial and sympathetic that the slightest touch threw them all together into a solid mass of attention and feeling4 ,yet they were forced1 in accordance with some principle of order1 to sit at these stiff little desks1 equidistantly apart1 and prevented under penalty from communicating with each other4 ,all the lines between them were supposed to be broken4 ,each existed for the teacher alone4 ,in this incorrigibly social atmosphere1 with all the personal influences playing around1 they were supposed to be1 not a network or a group1 but a collection of things1 in relation only with the teacher4 ,these children were spending the sunniest hours of their whole lives1 five days a week1 in preparing themselves1 ,i assume by the acquisition of knowledge1 to take their places in a modern world of industry1 ideas and business4 ,what institution1 ,i asked myself1 in this grown-up world bore resemblance to this so carefully segregated classroom8 ,i smiled1 indeed1 when it occurred to me that the only possible thing ,i could think of was a ,state ,legislature4 ,was not the teacher a sort of ,speaker putting through the business of the session1 enforcing a sublimated parliamentary order1 forcing his members to address only the chair and avoid any but a formal recognition of their colleagues8 ,how amused1 ,i thought1 would ,socrates have been to come upon these thousands of little training-schools for incipient legislators6 ,he might have recognized what admirably experienced and docile ,congressmen such a discipline as this would make1 if there were the least chance of any of these pupils ever reaching the ,house1 but he might have wondered what earthly connection it had with the atmosphere and business of workshop and factory and office and store and home into which all these children would so obviously be going4 ,he might almost have convinced himself that the business of adult ,american life was actually run according to the rules of parliamentary order1 instead of on the plane of personal intercourse1 of quick interchange of ideas1 the understanding and the grasping of concrete social situations4 ,it is the merest platitude1 of course1 that those people succeed who can best manipulate personal intercourse1 who can best express themselves1 whose minds are most flexible and most responsive to others1 and that those people would deserve to succeed in any form of society4 ,but has there ever been devised a more ingenious enemy of personal intercourse than the modern classroom1 catching1 as it does1 the child in his most impressionable years8 ,the two great enemies of intercourse are bumptiousness and diffidence1 and the classroom is perhaps the most successful instrument yet devised for cultivating both of them4 ,as ,i sat and watched these interesting children struggling with these enemies1 ,i reflected that even with the best of people1 thinking cannot be done without talking4 ,for thinking is primarily a social faculty2 it requires the stimulus of other minds to excite curiosity1 to arouse some emotion4 ,even private thinking is only a conversation with one's self4 ,yet in the classroom the child is evidently expected to think without being able to talk4 ,in such a rigid and silent atmosphere1 how could any thinking be done1 where there is no stimulus1 no personal expression8 ,while these reflections were running through my head1 the hour dragged to its close4 ,as the bell rang for dismissal1 a sort of thrill of rejuvenation ran through the building4 ,the 8good0 children straightened up1 threw off their depression and took back their self-respect1 the 8bad0 sobered up1 threw off their swollen egotism1 and prepared to leave behind them their mischievousness in the room that had created it4 ,everything suddenly became human again4 ,the brakes were off1 and life1 with all its fascinations of intrigue and amusement1 was flowing once more4 ,the school streamed away in personal and intensely interested little groups4 ,the real world of business and stimulations and rebounds was thick again here4 ,if ,i had been a teacher and watched my children going away1 arms around each other1 all aglow with talk1 ,i should have been very wistful for the injection of a little of that animation into the dull and halting lessons of the classroom4 ,was ,i a horrible 8intellectual10 to feel sorry that all this animation and verve of life should be perpetually poured out upon the ephemeral1 while thinking is made as difficult as possible1 and the expressive and intellectual child made to seem a sort of monstrous pariah8 ,now ,i know all about the logic of the classroom1 the economies of time1 money1 and management that have to be met4 ,i recognize that in the cities the masses that come to the schools require some sort of rigid machinery for their governance4 ,hand-educated children have had to go the way of hand-made buttons4 ,children have had to be massed together into a schoolroom just as cotton looms have had to be massed together into a factory4 ,the difficulty is that1 unlike cotton looms1 massed children make a social group1 and that the mind and personality can only be developed by the freely inter-stimulating play of minds in a group4 ,is it not very curious that we spend so much time on the practice and methods of teaching1 and never criticize the very framework itself8 ,call this thing that goes on in the modern schoolroom schooling1 if you like4 ,only don't call it education4 ,,vii ,,the ,,cult ,,of ,,the ,,best ,a valuable inventory of our ,american ideals of taste and culture should result from the request of the ,american ,federation of ,arts that the ,carnegie ,foundation undertake an investigation of the teaching of art in this country4 ,we have devoted much attention to importing sthetic values and works of art from ,europe1 and to providing museums1 libraries and art courses for the public4 ,but we have scarcely asked ourselves what is to come of it all4 ,a survey of what is being done 8in the schools and colleges and universities as well as in the professional art schools of the country to promote the knowledge1 appreciation and production of art in ,america0 will be of little value1 however1 if it is to concern itself merely with discovering how many art schools and how many students there are2 how many courses on art are given in the colleges1 and the credits which each course counts towards the degree4 ,what we need to know is the direction of the studies4 ,we must not feel relieved in spirit if we find there is 8enough10 and correspondingly depressed if we find there is 8not enough0 being done for art in ,america4 ,we must clear up our ideas as to what a genuine art education would be for the layman1 and then ask whether the present emphases are the ones to produce it4 ,artistic appreciation in this country has been understood chiefly as the acquiring of a familiarity with 8good works of art10 and with the historical fields of the different arts1 rather than as the cultivating of spontaneous taste4 ,the millionaire with his magnificent collections has only been doing objectively what the anxious college student is doing who takes courses in the history and appreciation of art1 music or literature1 or the women's clubs that follow standard manuals of criticism and patronize bureaus of university travel4 ,everywhere the emphasis is on acquisition4 ,a great machinery for the extension of culture has grown up around us in the last generation1 devoted to the collection1 objectively or imaginatively1 of masterpieces4 ,the zealous friends of art in and out of the schools have been engaged in bringing before an ever-widening public a roster of the 8best40 ,art education has been almost entirely a learning about what is 8good40 8,culture0 has come to mean the jacking-up of one's appreciations a notch at a time until they have reached a certain standard level4 ,to be cultured has meant to like masterpieces4 ,art education has1 in other words1 become almost a branch of moral education4 ,we are scarcely out of that period when it was a moral obligation upon every child to learn to play the piano4 ,there is still a thoughtful striving after righteousness in our attendance at the opera4 ,and this moral obligation is supported by quasi-ecclesiastical sanctions4 ,each art1 as taught in our schools and colleges1 has its truly formidable canon of the 8best10 and its insistent discrimination between the sanctified and the apocryphal scriptures4 ,the teaching of ,english literature in the colleges is a pure example of this orthodoxy4 ,criticism and expression are neglected in favor of absorption and reverence of the classics4 ,the student enters college on a ritual of examination in them4 ,he remains only through his susceptibility to their influence4 ,examine what passes for cultural education in other fields1 and you will find that it is historical1 lexicographical1 encyclopdic1 and neither utilitarian nor sthetic4 ,it is prompted by the scholarly ideal rather than by an ideal of taste4 ,the prize goes to those who can acquire the most of these goods4 ,no one is challenged to spontaneous taste any more than the monk is asked to create his own dogmas4 ,to me this conception of culture is unpleasantly undemocratic4 ,i am not denying the superlative beauty of what has come to be officially labeled 8the best that has been thought and done in the world40 ,but ,i do object to its being made the universal norm4 ,for if you educate people in this way1 you only really educate those whose tastes run to the classics4 ,you leave the rest of the world floundering in a fog of cant1 largely unconscious perhaps1 trying sincerely to squeeze their appreciations through the needle's eye4 ,you get as a result hypocrites or 8lowbrows10 with culture reserved only for a few4 ,all the rest of us are left without guides1 without encouragement1 and tainted with original sin4 ,an education in art appreciation will be valueless if it does not devote itself to clarifying and integrating natural taste4 ,the emphasis must be always on what you do like1 not on what you ought to like4 ,we have never had a real test of whether bad taste is positive or merely a lack of consciousness4 ,we have never tried to discover strong spontaneous lines of diversified taste4 ,to the tyranny of the 8best0 which ,arnold's persuasive power imposed upon this most inquisitive1 eager and rich ,american generation1 can be laid1 ,i think1 our failure to develop the distinctive styles and indigenous art spirit which the soil should have brought forth abundantly4 ,for as long as you humbly follow the best1 you have no eyes for the vital4 ,if you are using your energy to cajole your appreciations1 you have none left for unforced sthetic emotion4 ,if your training has been to learn and appreciate the best that has been thought and done in the world1 it has not been to discriminate between the significant and the irrelevant that the experience of every day is flinging up in your face4 ,civilized life is really one sthetic challenge after another1 and no training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and settings4 ,the mere callousness with which we confront our ragbag city streets is evidence enough of the futility of the ,arnold ideal4 ,to have learned to appreciate a ,mantegna and a ,japanese print1 and ,dante and ,debussy1 and not to have learned nausea at ,main street1 means an art education which is not merely worthless but destructive4 ,i know that such complaints are met by the plea that the fight has been so hard in this country to get any art education at all that it is idle to talk of cultivating public taste until this battle is won4 ,mr4 ,edward ,dickinson still pleads in a recent book the cause of music to the stony educationists of the land4 ,let us get a foothold in the colleges with our music courses1 these defenders seem to say1 and your taste will evolve from them4 ,but the way to reach a goal is not to start off in the opposite direction1 and my thesis is that education in the appreciation of art has been moving exactly in this wrong direction4 ,widespread artistic taste would have had a better chance to develop in this country if we had not been so much concerned with knowing what we ought to know and liking what we ought to like4 ,the movement has caught those whose taste happened to coincide with the canons4 ,it has perverted a much larger host who have tried to pretend that their taste coincided4 ,and it has left untouched the joyous masses who might easily1 as in other countries1 have evolved a folk-culture if they had not been outlawed by this ideal4 ,the ideal still dominates1 although it becomes every day more evident that its effect has been disastrous4 ,a younger generation of architects has filled our cities with sepulchral neo-classicism and imitative dbris of all the ages4 ,we get its apotheosis in the fantasy of ,washington1 where ,french chateaux snuggle up close to colonial mansions1 and the great lines of the city are slashed by cheap and tawdry blocks4 ,all this has been done with the best will in the world1 by men curious and skilful1 well instructed in the 8best0 of all time4 ,it has been a conscientious following of an ideal of beauty4 ,we are just beginning to discover uneasily how false that ideal is4 ,art to most of us has come to mean painting instead of the decoration and design and social setting that would make significant our objective life4 ,our moral sense has made us mad for artistic 8rightness40 ,what we have got out of it is something much worse than imitation4 ,it is worship4 ,this effort to follow the best1 which even our revolutionists engage in1 has the effect of either closing the appreciation to new styles or leaving it open to passing winds of fashion4 ,that we are fashion-ridden is the direct result of an education which has made acquisition and not discrimination the motive4 ,the cult of the best is harmless only if it has been superimposed on the broadest basis of personal discrimination1 begun in earliest years4 ,let us admit that the appreciations of the ,brahmins marvelously coincide with what ,matthew ,arnold has stamped as right4 ,but perhaps for most of us there has not been the environment to produce that happy coincidence4 ,our education has forced us all to be self-made men in artistic appreciation4 ,our tastes suffer from hiatuses and crotchinesses and color-blindnesses because no effort has been made to integrate our sincere likes and dislikes and focus and sharpen our reactions4 ,until the present ideal is overthrown1 we have no chance of getting a sincere and general public taste4 ,we can have only the mechanics of art education4 ,i do not mean that ,america has been unique in this4 ,we have only been a little worse than other countries because we have been more conscientious4 ,,viii ,,education ,,in ,,taste ,there is a navely systematic way of teaching artistic appreciation to the students of many of our city schools4 ,to each class is allotted a famous painter4 ,the class is then taken en masse to the art museum1 and1 under the guidance of one of the official show-women1 confronted with the masterpieces of its proprietary genius4 ,the children hear the dates of the painter's life1 details of his career1 the significance of his pictures1 the particular beauties of his styles1 and any other loose fragments of knowledge that may appeal to their guide4 ,after they have been exposed long enough to the pictures to give confidence that appreciation has taken place in them1 they are allowed to exchange painters with another class1 and in rigid platoon proceed to appreciate their new idol in the same way4 ,presumably their appreciation finally flows over the entire museum1 and they take their places among the cultivated of the land4 ,the other day in a ,new ,jersey school ,i was shown some wall-paper designs that had just been made in a class of the youngest children4 ,a simple figure had been given them with which to cover a sheet of paper in any pattern they chose4 ,the thirty papers presented the most astonishing variety4 ,they ranged from mere blotches to orderly and regular patterns4 ,some children had merely reproduced the figure in parallel lines across the paper4 ,others had alternated their lines and made a more pleasing scheme4 ,here was a living demonstration of the variety of artistic skill1 but ,i was more interested in the appreciation4 ,the teacher told me that she had pinned all the designs on the wall1 and without any suggestion to the children had asked them to choose which they liked best4 ,there had been a large consensus of liking for the alternate lines1 the pattern which was obviously the most regular and the most pleasing4 ,in that museum system of class-painters who were to be duly 8appreciated0 ,i had a perfect example of the old unregenerate cult of the best4 ,but my ,new ,jersey school convinced me that these vestal virgins of the museums were guarding a decaying fane4 ,the young teacher in the classroom had the beginnings of what would be a genuine education in taste4 ,if that same critical and discriminating spirit could be carried forward with these littlest children all through their schooling1 most of them would get a robust sense of values that would be spontaneous1 that would never have to be cajoled1 and that could not be threatened4 ,might not this process of refining taste be woven into our elementary education8 ,already we have its embryo in these kindergartens and lower grades4 ,it is a question of emphasis1 of making the teachers see that the constant challenge to taste is one of the most important functions of the school4 ,types of school such as the ,play-,school make expression and selection the basis of their life4 ,the most valuable feature of the ,montessori school is the training of the senses1 the quickening of response to sounds and colors and forms4 ,suppose a child were brought up from his earliest years in everyday contact with forms and colors1 without its ever being hinted to him that some were 8good0 and others 8bad40 ,suppose the child were urged to choose and to express his likes and dislikes1 not giving his reasons but merely telling as he could what he saw or heard4 ,suppose this attempt were made through the course of his school life to clarify his appeals and repugnances1 not by rationalizing them but by synthesizing them4 ,would not something like taste evolve out of it all8 ,emphasis on what the pupil likes instead of what he ought to like would change the tone of school or college4 ,the average mediocre student under our present regime gets an almost uncanny desire to do things 8right40 ,since success in school depends on doing what the teacher thinks is right1 education becomes on the child's part a technique of accurate guessing4 ,anyone who has spent much time in high schools knows how eagerly children will pounce on any official judgment concerning a book or person or picture or idea4 ,the study of ,english classics in most schools becomes a festering bed of hypocrisy4 ,and it is often the intrinsically amenable who are the most conscientious and who therefore most hopelessly overlay their own reactions with other people's judgments4 ,the modern school recitation has degenerated into a skilful guessing on the part of the child of what the teacher 8wants0 him to say4 ,and this is a symbol of the general attitude1 in school and out1 towards cultural things4 ,a laudable attempt has been made in the colleges to teach the student to think1 but ,i wonder sometimes whether it has proceeded very far beyond encouraging him to find reasons for ideas and attitudes which he is persuaded he ought to have4 ,for most college students it is already too late4 ,expression and discrimination are the last things which the primary and secondary schools have been emphasizing4 ,the boy and girl come to college with no background of taste or selection1 and the old docility1 the old unconscious hypocrisy1 must dog them all through their course4 ,i would make a larger part of the process of thinking in school and college the discovery of what one likes and wants1 the control and direction of desire4 ,almost the whole object of education should be to know what one truly and wholeheartedly likes and wants4 ,yet the modern school is just the place where this critical1 discriminating attitude has a chance of being cultivated4 ,the secret of all the current tendencies towards the 8school of to-morrow0 is the increasing participation of the children in the work of their own school4 ,the ,wirt plan1 where the children help the mechanics decorate the rooms1 and dramatize their school-life in auditorium exercises1 perhaps carries this coperation farthest1 but in numberless schools that have shopwork1 gardens1 dramatizations1 etc41 the same evolution is apparent4 ,now every touch of dramatic1 artistic and literary expression made by the children in the school affords material for education in taste4 ,expression and criticism play into each other's hands4 ,any expression which passes without a reaction from some part of this little school public is expression wasted4 ,if the child does not learn in the school to observe and reflect upon and react to the expressive life that flows around him in the school1 he will never react intelligently to anything outside the school4 ,his childish criticism will of course be as elementary as the expression is elementary4 ,but the emphasis of teachers should be there4 ,taste must flow naturally and spontaneously out of the experiences of everyday life4 ,such an effort in the education of taste has a much better chance of success than has our traditional guidance4 ,to impose canons on a younger generation1 to make students appreciate the best in the arts1 we need hosts of teachers who are finely tuned to these appreciations themselves1 teachers whose tastes naturally coincide with what has been consecrated by time1 and who can communicate their admirations4 ,experience has proved that we shall never have those hosts of teachers4 ,we should never have enough ,matthew ,arnolds to go round4 ,what art education suffers from in this country is teachers who have only the mechanics of appreciation without the inner glow4 ,and it is futile to expect that we shall ever have enough with the classic inner glow4 ,in this new direction1 however1 the teacher need not be mentor1 but guide and provocative4 ,never being called upon to impart judgments or appreciations to the student1 what he requires most is not judgments and appreciations of his own but curiosity as to the student's reactions4 ,he need only be saying constantly to the student1 what do you like and how does it compare with something else that you like8 ,he need provide only the paraphernalia of art1 the materials and processes1 for the student to do his own work4 ,if the teacher is of sound original taste1 he can give the student criticism and aid him in his analysis and comparison4 ,if he is not1 he is at least prevented from making the student's taste hypocritical4 ,if this attitude became general in our sthetic education1 it would not be long before results became noticeable4 ,we should get a variety of tastes--some of them traditional1 some of them strange and new1 but most of them at least spontaneous1 indigenous4 ,at present we have no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of public taste is conventional1 fashion-induced1 imitative1 or sincerely felt4 ,much spontaneous taste might turn out to be traditional4 ,the majority of children trained in discrimination might prove to be incipient ,brahmins4 ,on the other hand we might get strange and vigorous expressions like the contemporary architecture and sculpture of ,germany4 ,i am assuming that taste and creation will fertilize each other4 ,for this fertilization we must have a liberation of taste from the sterile control of the 8best40 ,this does not mean that every person would become endowed with original taste1 but that we should have a chance to find original taste out4 ,we should have done all within human power to create public taste1 as our present ideal does everything to prevent it4 ,as a result we should have a chance of some kind of integrated culture4 ,in each art we might find several very strongly marked directions of style and taste which should appeal to different people4 ,it would then be the task of criticism not to choose between them but to discover their sincerity and significance4 ,style is a matter of right relations4 ,things have style when their parts make each other and the whole significant4 ,indigenous style is the only art that really means anything4 ,out of an education in taste will grow creative art as a flower from rich soil4 ,,ix ,,universal ,,service ,,and ,,education ,the current agitation for preparedness has set hosts of ,americans to thinking out for the first time what a real national strength and readiness would mean4 ,we suddenly realize that if we are to defeat that militaristic trend which we loathe we shall have to offer some kind of action more stirring and more creative4 ,the call now upon every citizen is to be not nebulously patriotic1 but clear and lucid as to ,america's aims1 so that our natural energy shall not be squandered and misused4 ,there looms up as a crucial need that 8moral equivalent for war0 with which ,william ,james first roused our imaginations4 ,it seems no longer so academic a proposal4 ,confronted with the crisis1 we see that he analyzed the situation with consummate accuracy4 ,all around us we see a very genuine craving for unity of sentiment1 for service1 for some new national lift and broadening which shall keep us out of the uneasy pettiness into which the ,american conscience has threatened to fall4 ,in our hearts we know that to crystallize this desire into a meaningless sentiment1 or into a piling-up of armaments or a proscribing of alien cultures1 would not satisfy us4 ,we want action1 but we do not want military action4 ,even the wildest patriots know that ,america would have to go through the most pernicious and revolutionary changes to accept the universal military service which they advocate4 ,we wish to advance from where we stand4 ,we begin to suspect that military service1 flag-reverence1 patriotic swagger1 are too much the weary old deep-dug channels into which national feeling always runs and is lost4 ,the flooding river fills again its archaic and forsaken paths4 ,our present confusion expresses the dilemma we find ourselves in1 when our instincts impel us into courses that our intelligence tells us we ought not to follow4 ,our ,american danger is not so much that we become militarists as that we grope along1 fretting and harrying each other into a unity which is delusive1 and expressing our 8,americanism0 in activities that are not creative4 ,the best will in ,america at the present time seems to crave some kind of national service but it veers off from military service4 ,until we satisfy that craving1 we shall run at half-power1 and suffer all the dissatisfaction and self-despising that comes from repressed energy4 ,the question which all are asking1 in the varied and disguised forms1 is3 ,how can we all together serve ,america by really enhancing her life8 ,to more and more of us the clue has come through ,james's conception of a productive army of youth1 warring against nature and not against men1 finding in drudgery and toil and danger the values that war and preparation for war have given4 ,ten years ago such an army seemed ,utopian4 ,we had neither the desire nor the technique4 ,it seemed a project not to be realized without a reorganization of our life so radical as to make the army itself unnecessary4 ,to-day1 however1 a host of new attitudes seem to give us the raw material out of which such a national service could be created4 ,we hear much of universal military service as 8education40 ,the ,plattsburgs are sugar-coated as 8civic-training camps10 8schools for citizenship40 ,universal service no longer stands on its old ground of mere preparation for war4 ,it is frankly trying to get itself recognized as an indispensable mode of education4 ,the next pertinent step is evidently to ask why1 if universal service is valuable because it is educational1 it should not be constructed on a strict educational foundation4 ,james's proposal sounded ,utopian because it would require an entirely new and colossal national organization to put it into action4 ,universal military service in this country would certainly mean such a task4 ,but if our national service is to be educational1 we already have the organization in existence4 ,the rapidly consolidating public school systems in the states provide the machinery for such an organization4 ,as the public schools become better places for children to spend their time in1 we are growing less tolerant of the forms of schooling outside of the public system4 ,the tendency is towards the inclusion of all children in the public school4 ,and the progressive states are requiring schooling up to the full age of sixteen years4 ,we are rapidly creating a public school system1 effectively administered by the states1 which gives us the one universally national compulsory service which we possess or are ever likely to consent to4 ,education is the only form of 8conscription0 to which ,americans have ever given consent4 ,compulsory military service would require decades of ,napoleonic political evangelism to introduce4 ,compulsory education is universally accepted4 ,for a national service which shall be educational you would have to convert nobody4 ,the field is sown4 ,no one denies the right of the state to conscript the child for education4 ,but coupled with this assent is the insistence that the education shall be the freest1 fullest and most stimulating that we know how to give4 ,the current educational interest arises largely from the indignant demand that a state which takes all the children must meet the needs of every child4 ,the very recent enthusiasm for 8vocational education0 means that we want a schooling that shall issue in capacity for fruitful occupation4 ,a national educational service could give training for work at the same time that it gave opportunity for service4 ,it is only a national service of this kind that would really be universal4 ,military service is a sham universality4 ,it omits the feminine half of the nation's youth4 ,and of the masculine half it uses only the physically best4 ,france is the only country where the actual levy on men for military service has approximated the number liable4 ,but worst of all1 military service irons out all differences of talent and ability4 ,it does not even tap the resources it enlists4 ,it makes out of an infinitely varied group a mere machine of uniform1 obeying units4 ,the personal qualities1 the individual powers of the youth it trains1 are of no relevance whatever4 ,men are valuable exactly to the degree that they crush out these differences4 ,a national service for education would not be a sham4 ,it would actually enlist the coperation of every youth and girl4 ,it would aim at stimulation1 not obedience4 ,it would call out capacity and not submerge it4 ,it would organize varied tasks adapted to the capacities and strengths of its young citizenry4 ,it would be universal1 but it would be compulsory only in the sense that it called every one to the service4 ,the tasks would not be enforced drudgery1 but work that enlisted the will and toned up the aspirations4 ,such a national service would be the logical outgrowth of our public school system4 ,suppose the state said3 ,all children shall remain in school till the age of sixteen years4 ,between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one they shall spend two years in national service4 ,this service shall be organized and administered by the state educational administrations1 but supervised and subsidized by the national government4 ,the service would be performed as national service1 but its work would be constructive and communal in its purposes and not military4 ,special military training could be given as a branch of this service to those who were best fitted for it4 ,but defense would be but an incident in our constructive life1 and not the sinew of our effort4 ,the tasks for such a national service would evidently be different from those contemplated by ,james4 ,he thought of turning his army of youth into the drudgery of the world1 where they might win in heroic toil and self-sacrifice the moral rewards which war had formerly given4 ,but if our service is to be universal1 it cannot be mere unskilled labor in mines and farms and forests4 ,a large proportion of our youth would be disqualified4 ,furthermore1 a service which made such frontal attack on industry would be bitterly resisted by those with whom its work competed4 ,we are not prepared for a service which clashes too suddenly and harshly with the industrial system4 ,what we need is a service which shall not so much do the old work of the world as create new demands and satisfy them4 ,this national service could do the things which need to be done1 but which are not now being done4 ,it could have for its aim the improvement of the quality of our living4 ,our appalling slovenliness1 the ignorance of great masses in city and country as to the elementary technique of daily life--this should be the enemy of the army of youth4 ,i have a picture of a host of eager young missionaries swarming over the land1 spreading the health knowledge1 the knowledge of domestic science1 of gardening1 of tastefulness1 that they have learned in school4 ,such a service would provide apprentices for communal services in town and country1 as many schools and colleges are already actually providing4 ,food inspection1 factory inspection1 organized relief1 the care of dependents1 playground service1 nursing in hospitals--all this would be a field for such an educational service4 ,on a larger scale1 tree-planting1 the care and repair of roads1 work on conservation projects1 the care of model farms1 would be tasks for this army4 ,as ,i was burning caterpillars' nests the other day in ,new ,jersey and saw the trees sinister with gray webs1 ,i thought of the destroying army of youth that should be invading the land clearing it of all insect pests4 ,we might even come to the forcible rebuilding of the slovenly fences and outhouses which strew our landscape1 and to an imposition of cleanness upon our ,american countryside4 ,with an army of youth we could perform all those services of neatness and mercy and intelligence which our communities now know how to perform and mean to perform1 but have not the weapons to wield4 ,the army could be organized in flying squadrons1 so that its youth could travel widely and see and serve all kinds of men and communities4 ,for its direction we would need that new type of teacher-engineer-community-worker that our best school systems are already producing4 ,scientific schools1 schools of philanthropy1 are turning out men and women who could step into their places as non-commissioned officers for such an army4 ,the service could be entirely flexible4 ,boys and girls could learn the rudiments of their trade or profession in actual service with the army4 ,book studies could be carried on1 and college learning could come to its own as the intellectual fertilizer of a wholesome and stimulating life4 ,athletics and sports would be an integral part of the two years' service4 ,there would be long periods of camping in the national parks or upon ocean beaches4 ,the ,boy ,scouts and ,camp-,fire ,girls already give the clue to such an enterprise4 ,if objection is made that this national educational service would fail to bring out the sterner qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice1 and would not be a genuine moral equivalent for war1 the answer is that the best kind of a moral equivalent is a moral sublimation4 ,we want to turn the energies of youth away from their squandering in mere defense or mere drudgery4 ,our need is to learn how to live rather than die2 to be teachers and creators1 not engines of destruction2 to be inventors and pioneers1 not mere defenders4 ,our cities and isolated farms alike are mute witnesses that ,americans have never learned how to live4 ,suppose we had a national service which was making a determined assault for the enhancement of living4 ,would its standards and discipline be less rigorous8 ,rather would the ingenuity and imagination have to be of the finest4 ,some such conception of national service is the only one which will give us that thrill of unity and vigor which we seek4 ,an educational service built on the public school system puts the opportunity in our hands4 ,the raw material in attitudes and desires is here4 ,every task that an army of youth might perform is already being done in some school or college or communal service4 ,all we need to do is to cordinate and make universal what is now haphazard and isolated4 ,an army of youth which focused school work would provide just that purpose that educators seek4 ,the advocates of 8preparedness0 are willing to spend billions on a universal military service which is neither universal nor educational nor productive4 ,cannot we begin to organize a true national service which will let all serve creatively towards the toning up of ,american life8 ,x ,,the ,,schools ,,from ,,the ,,outside ,to persons directing any complicated organization1 criticism from outsiders always seems either futile or irrelevant4 ,conscious of the difficulty that has been met in creating the existing machinery1 they resent the debonair and nonchalant proposals tossed in upon them by people who have only an amateurish or philosophical interest in their work4 ,there are very few able administrators in any work who do not honestly believe they are doing their best with the material that is given them4 ,to this resentment the educational world seems particularly prone4 ,the teacher finds it intolerable that the classroom should be judged from any vantage-point but the teacher's desk2 the superintendent is annoyed if you arraign his system in the light of the product turned out4 ,a public service which enlists so much conscientiousness as does our public school system is naturally sensitive to public criticism4 ,its very sensitiveness makes it difficult for it to distinguish between criticism of motives and criticism of policies and philosophies4 ,this resentment to amateur criticism is offset by an almost pathetic trust in expert overhauling4 ,letters from school principals to those in charge of recent investigations into city school systems imply that the expert has some kind of magical power not possessed by the ordinary teacher or administrator4 ,when we learn1 however1 that the defects discovered are usually of so elementary and obvious a character that few interested laymen could have ignored them1 we suspect that the magic is not so much a matter of the expert as it is of the outsider4 ,the thing is to get a new point-of-view1 a new interpretation1 which shall not be so obsessed with the inside workings of the machinery that the drift of policy and the value of the human product is ignored4 ,educators1 it is true1 8welcome fair criticism10 and they have a fond belief that they get it from one another in the educational press4 ,but in this mass of books and journals1 crowded with exposition and discussion of current educational conceptions and technical methods1 the whole setting1 language1 philosophy1 are professional4 ,the very bases and premises which the lay critic wishes to criticize are taken for granted4 ,educators decry 8destructive0 criticism1 but in a sense all criticism is destructive1 for it is essentially an examination4 ,it requires a stripping away of the wrappings of routine and jargon1 the turning of the idea about on all sides1 the placing of it in a light where it may be clearly observed4 ,there is another reason why amateur criticism is likely to be pertinent in education4 ,the whole business of teaching and learning is a matter of personal psychology1 and1 in spite of current cant1 there is no science so elusive and so unformulated as psychology4 ,if the scientists will no longer deal with the problems of the personal1 conscious life1 it is left for the amateur philosophers to examine the psychological backgrounds of the teaching world1 and attempt newer and more personal interpretations4 ,much of the public criticism of the school is no doubt unintelligent1 but what are we to say of that blanket defense we hear so often from the educator1 that the niggardliness of the public prevents his providing the best schools and the best teachers8 ,now a country that attempts almost universally to provide free secondary school education--something provided in no ,european country--is certainly not thus guilty4 ,the prestige of education in ,america is extraordinarily high4 ,it is quite too late in the day to pretend that anyone still regards public schools as a charity1 or that ridicule of teaching methods would only serve to discredit the schools and reduce the already small appropriations4 ,there is no more fear--though some of our educators would have us believe it--that free criticism of the school will leave us school-less than there is that denunciation of the ,new ,york police resulted in leaving that city without police protection4 ,the public schools in this country have the standing of all other public services4 ,it is not a question of more money1 but of more intelligent use of present resources4 ,the inexpert public cannot be expected to spend its money wisely4 ,it has an incorrigible itch for objective results4 ,it likes to see its money go into handsome buildings with expensive equipments4 ,large sums are spent in emulative waste4 ,if one town boasts a seventy-five thousand dollar high school1 its neighbor must have a hundred thousand dollar one4 ,it is obvious that money which goes into costly ventilating systems and the adoption of uncriticized fads1 does not go into teachers' salaries4 ,but it is the function of the educators to offset this public childishness with their own wisdom1 and see that the public money is profitably spent4 ,if they believe that we could have better teachers if we paid more for them1 they should see that the money goes to the teachers and not into fussy mechanical details4 ,the trend of educational activity has been to encourage this objective standard4 ,more of the intellectual energy of the educational world has gone into technique and organization than into psychology4 ,it has been more interested in seeing that the ,american child had enough cubic feet of air1 a hygienic desk1 and a fire-proof building1 than that he acquired an alert and curious outlook on the modern world1 and an expressive personality4 ,france1 with public school buildings1 even in ,paris1 that you would scarcely perhaps stable your horse in1 somehow1 by making expression the insistent motive of education1 turns out intellectual products strikingly superior to our own4 ,european experience tends1 too1 to challenge the common assumption of ,american educators that quality of teaching is proportional to salaries paid4 ,american salaries are certainly as high as those paid in ,european countries4 ,there is no violent contrast1 moreover1 between the intellectual and educational background of a primary teacher with seven hundred a year and a principal with twenty-five hundred4 ,they would both subscribe to the same philosophy of life2 they might easily have come from the same training-school4 ,the difference would be one of age or executive capacity1 or of 8experience10 which generally means nothing more than greater expertness with routine and a longer setting of the intellectual cement4 ,it is this background1 spirit1 philosophy1 behind the educational mind that the critical public is becoming more and more restless about4 ,it does not challenge details of mechanical and administrative organization4 ,these have been worked out with an ingenuity and a completeness all too thorough4 ,the public is demanding now a similar attention to the conscious and spiritual side of learning and teaching4 ,the ideal of the school as an embryonic community life1 of the child as a growing personality to whom the activity of the school must have intense reality1 of education as the training of expression1 creation--this has hardly begun to be generally felt4 ,the faults discovered by the ,springfield and ,portland school surveys arose largely from a careless and mechanical philosophy of life1 an educational philosophy that had not sufficiently emphasized these ideals4 ,the investigators were able1 for instance1 to tell on the moment whether a teacher had come from a certain training-school by her method and attitudes4 ,the responsibility cannot be dodged by the professional educators4 ,they are responsible for primitive and mechanical attitudes which make so much of the orthodox public school teaching a mere marking of time rather than an education4 ,millions of the public's money would not effect this change in the background of the teaching world4 ,that background could be changed without its costing the public a cent4 ,the difficulty1 huge1 it is true1 like any other attempt to change the obscure and uncriticized assumptions that lie at the bottom of any theory or practice1 is psychological1 not mechanical4 ,it involves only the substitution1 for certain undemocratic1 ultra-logical ideas1 of ideas more congenial to the time and social situation in which we live4 ,,xi ,,the ,,portland ,,school ,,survey ,if we are to have better schools in our cities we must know what kind of schools we have now4 ,in an attempt to tell us1 the school survey has in the last few years been developed with an admirable technique1 and the passion for being surveyed has spread to cities large and small4 ,no more illuminating document has come out of this effort than the recently published study of the school system of ,portland1 ,oregon4 ,it stirs enthusiasm because it shows the progress that has been made in clarifying the current problems and the ideals which must be realized if the public school is to prepare the child of to-day for intelligent participation in the society of which he will form a part4 ,compared with the investigations in ,new ,york ,city and ,springfield1 ,illinois1 this ,portland survey1 under the direction of ,professor ,cubberley of ,stanford ,university1 represents a new achievement in educational thinking4 ,those surveys contented themselves with a criticism of details1 or1 at best1 with a vague groping for constructive plan4 ,the ,portland survey represents a definite break with the tradition4 ,it is characterized by a clear idea not only of how the system fails to meet the modern demands1 but of how these demands can be met4 ,the investigators cannot1 of course1 explain how it is that one of the wealthiest and most comfortable of ,american cities1 a city at once entirely modern and homogeneously ,american1 should have the most mechanical and formalistic school system these educators had ever seen4 ,one gets the sense of how without leadership the school may become a little backwater in a community4 ,in ,portland1 a city of #bej1jjj people1 commercial and residential center for the great ,northwest1 these investigators found the 8maintenance unchanged of a rigidly prescribed mechanical system poorly adapted to the needs either of children or community40 8,universal practice10 they say1 8is enlisted in the maintenance of a rigid1 minutely and mechanically prescribed system of instruction1 organization1 administration1 supervision1 examination and inspection4 ,any change in this elaborate mechanism meets with resistance1 positive as well as negative4 ,so far as this system is adapted at any point to the actual needs of the individual children and youth that come under it1 so far as it is adapted to the needs of the communities for adequately trained recruits to serve the community1 the adaptation is accidental1 not the result of intelligence now operative at that point40 ,this is a criticism of an ,american institution1 and ,portland might be any large ,american city which has not had an educational awakening4 ,the survey is significant because it shows the machinery and motives of public school education in this country for the last generation not only in ,portland but in a city like ,new ,york1 whose militaristic1 mechanical system is now being thrown into convulsions by the sudden challenge of the new type of school embodied in the ,gary plan4 ,indeed this ,portland survey is a much better survey of ,new ,york school conditions than the elaborate ,hanus inquiry which was made a few years ago4 ,the viciousnesses which the investigators found in the ,portland system are those which are familiar to all who feel the defects of their own schooling1 or have set about to examine the reasons for the poor quality of the school output4 ,on the administrative side there are all the evils that come from retaining a scheme of amateur control in a system which has of necessity become professionalized4 ,a board which is directing a village school must keep all school matters under its supervision4 ,but when that village has become a vast city1 a school board which keeps the strings in its own hands is simply manufacturing wastefulness and inefficiency4 ,a lay board which employs highly paid and highly trained principals1 supervisors1 etc41 and then insists on directing all business--from the engaging of janitors and the personal selection of teachers to the suspension of by-laws whereby a schoolroom may be leased for an evening lecture or a teacher excused to attend the funeral of her grandmother--labels itself as archaic and unfit4 ,it is one of the cardinal principles of modern political and industrial organization that it is a waste of money to pay salaries large enough to buy judgment1 discretion and expert skill and then not permit them to be used4 ,this refusal to delegate responsibility1 the investigators found1 paralyzed initiative all through the school system4 ,nothing could be done without reference to an untrained body of laymen who1 however conscientious they might be1 must usually decide spasmodically and without any definite educational policy4 ,indeed their conscientiousness is often a positive vice4 ,shiftlessness on their part would have permitted initiative on the parts of principals and teachers4 ,under present conditions the distinction between good teachers and bad fades out4 ,the concern of every one becomes to keep the machinery going1 not to criticize the work and keep it adapted to the individual aptitudes of the children4 ,this administrative lifelessness has its counterpart in a pedagogical routine the focus of which is the 8course of study40 ,the curriculum is uniform for all children4 ,it is 8vivisected into fifty-four dead pieces10 laid down in pages in certain adopted textbooks4 8,the only thought devoted to the formulation of the course of study10 say the investigators1 8was the simple mathematical thought necessary to parcel out the pages of the books40 ,the teacher's duty is to haul the pupil through the course of study4 ,this is done by means of the formal recitation1 where 8pupils answer hollow word-questions with memorized hollow word-statements40 ,term examinations discover how many of these word-statements are left in the pupils' minds4 ,an elaborate system of inspection and supervision exists to check up and grade both teachers and principals and ensure that the hallowed 8course of study0 is fully being carried out4 ,many of the teachers are trained in the local schools and turned back into the system to perpetuate these methods4 ,a state tenure-of-office act keeps all teachers in their places4 ,the effect upon the children is logical4 ,the school becomes an automatic process of elimination4 ,those who can be hauled through the course of study are hauled4 ,those whose talents do not lie in the capacity to memorize printed pages pass out of the school or become hopelessly mired in the lower grades4 8,if the sixteen-year-old child has not yet transferred to his memory ,parts #cg to #ed1 inclusive1 of the dead and comminuted curriculum1 the chief constituents of which are abstract arithmetic and technical grammar1 then he must begin with ,part #cg and appropriate that and each of the succeeding #ag ,parts in order1 before he can even be associated with youth of approximately his own age1 and before he can engage in study suited to his age and condition--study and exercises that will be of immediate and practical value to him in the effort he must shortly make to serve society for the sake of his own livelihood40 ,and this system1 formulated and approved twenty years ago by high educational authorities1 the survey stigmatizes as valuable only in its 8cheapness and facility of administration1 and the relief that it affords educational officers and teachers from all responsibility of knowing and of meeting the individual needs of their pupils40 ,this type of public school1 so bald and grotesque in the sober pages of the ,portland survey that it seems more like the ritual of some primitive tribe than the deliberate educational activity of an enlightened ,american community1 is yet the type that still prevails in the majority of our cities4 ,this is the fact that we must face4 ,yet a community that asks to be surveyed is a community dissatisfied with itself4 ,other communities are likely to stir uneasily1 and ask themselves why1 if ,los ,angeles and ,indianapolis and ,gary can have modern and fruitful public school systems1 other cities should not4 ,we may even hope that it is the last of the old system and the promise of the school of to-morrow4 ,,xii ,,what ,,is ,,experimental ,,education8 ,at a time when more people are thinking intelligently about ,american education than ever before1 it is unfortunate that there should be any confusion between the widely diverse trails that experimentation is opening up to the modern school4 ,it is becoming increasingly evident that the 8experimental0 in education does not at all mean the same thing to educational administrators as it does to educational idealists4 8,experimental education0 has not yet been pitted in competition against the 8experimental school10 but it is not unlikely that the different techniques which they suggest may come to seem hostile to each other1 and so the real values of both be lost4 ,at present the two seem to be developing in a fairly complete disregard of each other4 ,it would be dangerous for ,american education to tangle itself in the dilemma of choosing between them4 ,on the other hand1 it would be even more disastrous to confuse them4 ,if we attempt to apply the quantitative standards of the new 8experimental education0 to the life of the 8experimental school10 or to infuse the qualitative ideals of the 8experimental school0 into the technique of 8experimental education10 we run the risk of spoiling that modern and socially-adjusted school towards which we are all feeling our way4 ,when the inventive school superintendent or professor of education speaks of 8experimental education10 he is thinking1 not of the 8model school10 but of the new standard tests in the fundamental subjects by which the work of large masses of public school children is being regularly measured and compared4 ,the city school survey has elaborated a technique of intellectual measurements which is giving us very rapidly a genuine quantitative science of education4 ,a report like ,professor ,judd's in the 8,cleveland ,survey0--8,measuring the ,work of the ,public ,schools0--is a storehouse of suggestiveness for all who like to see how mathematics can be fruitfully applied to living4 ,these statistical studies measure accurately the performance of children in the different grades and at different ages in the specific literate skills which everybody needs even to start fairly in the race of opportunity4 ,the standard tests have been worked out experimentally with great numbers of school-children so that average norms of accomplishment can be set for any class or any individual4 ,rates of speed and quality of handwriting1 and their relation to each other2 ability to spell common words2 rate and capacity of accurate figuring2 rate and quality of silent and oral reading2--these are the aptitudes that are rigidly measured by the tests4 ,the children are treated as segregated arithmetical minds1 reading minds1 spelling minds1 as units of intellectual behavior4 ,the tests are not 8examinations10 for they do not aim to show any absolute attainment of 8knowledge40 ,their value is in the comparison they afford of individual skill1 and of deviations from a norm of effectiveness4 ,in the mass of scores you have an intellectual relief map of your class1 your school1 your city system4 ,now nothing could apparently be more deadly and mechanical than this treating of living children as if they were narrowly isolated minds4 ,in this 8experimental education0 we are evidently in another world from the 8experimental school40 ,yet out of these tests emerge the most important implications for modern education4 ,out of this 8experimental education0 we at last get a scientific basis for the 8modern school40 ,for we have irrefutable proof of the enormous diversity of minds and aptitudes4 ,we have a demonstration of the utter foolishness of subjecting children to a uniform educational process4 ,we have accurate proof of the fallacy of the 8average0 in education4 ,these tests are added proof of the unscientific character of the typical public school on that very technical and administrative side which has been most carefully developed4 ,the graded school was a brilliant invention for its time1 but the bases of classification are shown by these new tests to be absurd4 ,children are now classified1 for purposes of education1 largely by age and average standing4 ,the tests show that neither category has the slightest relevance for effective learning4 ,we classify things for the purpose of doing something to them4 ,any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless4 ,but mere numerical age is no clue whatsoever to mental or even physiological age1 and minds with the same average may plot out very differently for every individual one of the various skills and interests that elementary training involves4 ,our educational grading has been as sentimental and sterile as the ancient philosophers' classification of matter into earth1 water1 fire1 air4 ,such a conception of the world was interesting1 but there was nothing you could do with it4 ,all the school has done with its classifying has been to get the children into groups where they could be dosed with an orderly sequence of lessons4 ,there has been no handle by which their heterogeneous minds and wills could be taken hold of and directed4 ,the rule of the classroom is necessarily military1 because such diverse people could only be unified in the most objective and external and coercive way4 ,no internal control would be possible4 ,so the teacher must devote a large part of her educational energy to the mere business of policing4 ,when she actually 8taught10 it was only the average child that she could really address--the fairly bright mediocrity4 ,the other pupils wasted their time almost in direct proportion to their deviation above or below that average4 ,children passed up through their educational life on the basis of an 8average mark10 which represented nothing whatever but a number4 ,the standard tests have shown repeatedly that ability is so unevenly distributed that the brightest fourth-year children overlap the poorest eighth-year children4 ,however children may average1 scarcely two children in the same class will ever be found to have the identical capacity in the different subjects4 ,the tests reveal not only that children differ1 but just how curiously and widely they do differ4 ,the traditional classification is enough to wreck any educational system1 even without the deadness of the curriculum4 ,with the progressive congestion of the public schools1 teaching has become more and more impossible4 ,the traditional system of grading has successfully resisted most improvement in teaching1 and vitiated the newer values that have been brought into the school4 ,if children1 clearly not defective1 cannot learn arithmetic1 read slowly and unintelligently1 spell chaotically and write a slovenly hand1 question the grading system4 ,never have there been such admirable techniques for teaching these fundamental things4 ,but the classification defies them4 ,the 8class0 gives the teacher no leverage for improving the children's skill4 ,an unscientific grading is as much a barrier to altering minds as it is to changing materials4 ,these truths seem elementary and obvious1 yet we had to wait for this 8experimental education0 to shake complacency in the 8graded school40 ,now if we accept these tests we have to conclude that it is useless to grade children for education unless those 8grades0 correspond accurately and specifically to the capacities of the children4 ,work must be done in each specific subject with--and only with--those who have approximately the same capacity4 ,the 8average0 is totally unknown in that 8real life0 which we are constantly forced to set up in antithesis to the school4 ,in no function of life is any one going to be judged by a composite ability to read1 write1 spell1 figure4 ,one succeeds not through any average skill or average information1 but through the ability to throw all one's skill and all one's intelligence where it is demanded4 ,a measurement of intelligence by averages will always produce just that ineffectiveness and vagueness for which the products of the public school are censured at present4 ,the fallacy of the educational 8average0 involves another fallacy1 equally obvious but equally prevalent4 ,this is the fallacy of the 8partially perfect40 ,the school ranks the seventy per cent4 child equal to the hundred per cent4 child4 ,children pass to more difficult work on an admitted basis of imperfect accomplishment4 ,but for any real effectiveness in the world it is not enough to be habitually only seventy per cent4 right4 ,whenever you need to be literate1 the world demands that you be actually literate4 ,if you have information1 you are either useless or dangerous unless your information is accurate4 ,it is better not to know arithmetic at all than persistently to make only seven hits out of ten4 ,for all practical purposes your child is as much a failure at seventy per cent4 as he is at zero per cent4 ,it will avail him little to be able to read and write and figure at a rate and an excellence only seventy per cent4 of the standard4 ,in any situation which requires these elementary skills he will be almost as much handicapped as if he were entirely illiterate4 ,it is time that the school faced the bitter truth that life demands an approximate perfection in whatever one tries to do4 ,education must shape all its technique towards this approximate perfection4 ,it is not necessary that all should do the same thing4 ,but it is necessary that what one pretends to do one should succeed gradually in doing4 ,the individual who is allowed to persist continuously on a level of imperfect accomplishment is not being educated4 ,for him education is a failure4 ,he should either drop his technique1 or ways should be found to improve him towards mastery4 ,what children are learning at any one time they should be learning with a sense of control4 ,the more difficult should not be confronted till the less difficult has been absorbed4 ,and this controlled progress will be possible only in a school where children work with their equals4 ,classification in education should be based only on specific proficiency4 ,the new 8experimental education0 is engaged in making dramatic in the schools these truths4 ,it is a force even more revolutionary than the idealism of the 8experimental school40 ,the situation suggested by the 8curve of distribution0 is one of the most momentous facts to be reckoned with by us of to-day4 ,it is making over our theories of democracy1 social reform and social progress4 ,to work out its manifold implications in the school is to touch the very nerve of our democratic future4 ,,xiii ,,the ,,organic ,,school ,the ,fairhope ,summer ,school1 which has just closed its season 7,sept41 #aiae71 at ,greenwich1 ,connecticut1 has given to ,northern people an opportunity to see at work ,mrs4 ,marietta ,johnson's widely known ideal of 8organic education40 ,just as the ,gary plan has shown how the city school may give a varied training to great masses of children with a freedom and flexibility never believed possible1 so ,mrs4 ,johnson has demonstrated how the small community1 or even household1 by using the natural environment and the natural needs as laboratory and workshop1 may adjust the child to life far more accurately than any formal school4 ,no school carries out more carefully ,professor ,dewey's dictum that the child can only be educated by concerning himself with what has meaning to him as a child1 and not what is to have meaning to him later as an adult4 ,in the organic school1 children grow up naturally and healthfully1 playing out-of-doors1 following their curiosities1 learning as their life makes demands upon them4 ,the teacher is there to answer their questions1 to sharpen their wits1 to name for them and analyze the flowers and soil and trees1 to show how to plant vegetables and build little coops or houses4 ,in their winter school at the single-tax colony of ,fairhope1 ,alabama1 on the shores of ,mobile ,bay1 the children can be out in the open air almost every day4 ,the land is a complete geological1 botanical1 and physical laboratory1 and the household a natural classroom where they learn to live4 ,the school grew1 in fact1 quite naturally out of the household1 and the necessity for some sort of school in a community where there was none4 ,mrs4 ,johnson1 with her teacher's genius1 simply sharpened and arranged her intercourse with the children around her1 and presently had a school which has become one of the most interesting in the country4 ,its very informality is its charm and success4 ,the hundred or more children are not classified in grades1 but in 8life-classes10 which correspond roughly to those three periods in child life--the first seven years of growth1 the years to adolescence1 and early adolescence4 ,the first class is really an outgrowth of the nursery4 ,in the cool rooms of the ,fairhope ,summer ,school one comes upon little farmhouses and villages and doll-houses of building-blocks1 which form the basis for getting acquainted with the village the children lived in4 ,the next group is characterized by a tough practicality1 a capacity for drill and persistence1 and this 8life-class0 was found in the wood-working shop and garden4 ,literary studies are taken up very late by the third class1 whose recitations are rather informal discussions in an outdoor cluster around the teacher4 ,only when a broad background of acquaintance with real things is obtained1 practical powers of observation acquired1 and an actual need felt for learning what books can tell1 are the conventional school studies begun4 ,in the organic school there is thus some chance left to the children for getting real meanings and not mere words and phrases which they may glibly repeat4 ,reading and writing are not taught by drill1 but are picked up by the child from the teacher or the other children1 in the ,rousseauan fashion1 whenever he finds that he is missing something very important and interesting in not having this skill4 ,learning in this kind of school becomes as natural as eating4 ,one learns when one is hungry to understand what is going on in the world4 ,such schools1 it will be said1 are all very well as an ideal1 but where can teachers be found to direct them8 ,certainly many of ,mrs4 ,johnson's children could teach others in the way they have learned themselves4 ,the way to get teachers for this free organic education in the 8schools of to-morrow0 is clearly to teach more children in the same way4 ,,xiv ,,communities ,,for ,,children ,mr4 ,wirt's schools at ,gary are genuine public schools1 in the sense that they provide for every kind of child in the community and draw into themselves the main aspects of the community life4 ,they are not artificial training-schools for vocations or for life2 they are a life itself4 8,the public school is still merely the old private school publicly supported10 he says4 ,the change of support has not really made it a different kind of a school4 ,it has not really grown up to urban demands4 ,school-boards usually act as if they were handling private property4 ,they gravely discuss 8wider use of the school plant0 as if this were some gracious extension of privilege4 ,the public does not yet feel that the schools are its own4 ,organization1 administration1 instruction1 are highly authoritative1 doctrinaire4 ,the ideal has been uniformity in methods and product4 ,the educational system has become as autocratic and military as the industrial4 ,as for content1 the curriculum is the old medieval one1 not transformed1 but patched up1 in the good old ,anglo-,saxon way1 as interests which had been the concern of the few were gradually demanded by the many4 ,art study1 nature study1 physical education1 science1 organized play1 manual training1 have been added to the public school work4 ,but these new interests and activities have become simply additional 8subjects10 taught in much the same spirit as the old4 ,the problem of the educator has been1 not how may the new activity vitalize and transform the others1 but how can it be introduced with the least disturbance to what is already there4 ,the present discussion of professional educators about vocational training shows the same mechanical effort to introduce an alien activity into the traditional curriculum in such manner that the latter may remain intact4 ,mr4 ,wirt's own school is not a tinkering-up of the present school system4 ,he is not an 8educational reformer0 making something over4 ,he has plowed up the educational ground4 ,he actually has a new kind of a school4 ,it is not a 8school of unspecialized vocational training10 or 8a school founded on play10 or an 8efficiency school10 or any of the other terms with which it has been designated4 ,it is hard to describe because it defies classification in the old terms4 ,nothing is more delightful about the ,gary schools than the absence of cant4 ,most of the current educational problems1 the books and ideas on pedagogy1 educational psychology1 supervision1 administration1 teaching-methods1 classroom management1 discipline1 etc41 which fill the attention of the current educational world are here as if they were not4 ,it is a school built up outside the influence of the professors of education1 the teachers' colleges1 and the normal school of the land4 ,it is true that there is probably not a single idea operative that is original with ,mr4 ,wirt4 ,probably there is not a single idea that is not being applied in some school in the country4 ,the novelty is the synthesis1 and the democratic spirit that motivates it4 ,here is provided for the first time a genuine public school1 a school which does reflect all the healthy interests of the community1 and where the child does become familiar with its life and with his own interests and vocational opportunities through practical doing of work4 ,the school becomes 8a clearing-house for community life40 ,to enter the ,emerson or ,frbel ,school in ,gary--the two superb new buildings constructed by ,mr4 ,wirt--is like coming into a well-ordered city where each citizen is going about his proper business4 ,there is none of that slightly depressing atmosphere of the mild if excellent prison for half-day involuntary labor which is too often the ordinary school4 ,classes do not seem to be neatly immured in rooms1 or to be moving about in lock-step4 ,you are dealing with interested individuals who1 singly or in spontaneous groups1 are utilizing all the facilities of a lavishly equipped and stimulating community4 ,the tone is of a glorified democratic club1 where members avail themselves of privileges which they know are theirs4 ,the schools are public in the same broad sense that the streets and parks are public4 ,the school is the children's institution4 ,they unaffectedly own it and use it as a mechanic uses his workshop or an artist his studio4 ,to go to the schools in the evening and see the children running and playing in the great broad halls--incomparable playrooms--running in now and then to speak to their parents who are studying in the evening school1 is to get a new emotional sense of what a school may be4 ,the children do not seem to be there because education is 8compulsory10 or because the parents send them there to get rid of them1 but because what can be done there is so interesting that they cannot stay away4 ,i am unable otherwise to account for their streaming back in such numbers to the voluntary ,saturday schools1 voluntary for the teachers1 too1 who are paid extra for their work4 ,saturday is a glorified pay-day1 where one may do anything one likes1 from making swords in the wood-shop to studying back work in the classroom4 ,i spent a fascinating hour watching the thronged wood-shop where little boys were fussing with the scraps left from the regular work of the week4 ,it occurred to me then how little real difference there was between the well-to-do home and the very poorest in the way of interesting activities for children4 ,how many homes of the comfortably enlightened classes were fit places to bring up a child8 ,how many even pretend to supply the books and the wood-work and tools and plants and music with which these wonderful buildings were running over8 ,without interesting activities for children1 city homes1 both rich and poor1 can provide only schools for loafing4 ,as between the street1 to which the less well-to-do child emerges for interest1 and the vaudeville1 the 8movie0 and the current fads to which the well-to-do child escapes1 ,i think the street is probably the less demoralizing4 ,this ,saturday workshop was a little study in spontaneous discipline4 ,although the children were unwatched1 they worked on their own little jobs as indefatigably as if they were under a drill-master4 ,if any little boy became weary and was moved to interfere with another little boy1 he was apt to be brushed off as though he were an irritating fly4 ,could it be that mischievousness1 supposed to be an integral part of child-nature1 was simply a product of repression or idleness8 ,could it be that school discipline was largely an attempt to solve problems which artificial rules were directly manufacturing8 ,visiting superintendents1 appalled at the freedom in the ,gary schools1 tip-toe about looking for signs of depredation4 ,they do not seem to report any4 ,i decided that these schools had actually acquired the 8public0 sense4 ,it seemed really true that children1 unless they were challenged to inventive wickedness by teachers' rules and precepts1 were no more likely to spoil their school than a lawyer is likely to deface the panels in the library of his club4 ,this children's community seemed to be enjoying its busy life in the same spirit that the wider public uses its streets and libraries and museums and railroad trains4 ,this supremely democratic public sense is the motive of ,mr4 ,wirt's genius4 ,all this richness of opportunity--the playgrounds1 gymnasia1 swimming-pools1 gardens1 science laboratories1 work-shops1 libraries1 conservatories--which this school provides so lavishly1 is possible to the public of a small and relatively poor city like ,gary1 exactly because the schools are managed like any other public service4 ,the modern educational ideal1 8to provide a desk and seat for every child10 is as absurd as would be one to provide a seat in the park for every inhabitant4 ,no public service is used by more than a fraction of the people at any one time4 ,mr4 ,wirt provides the coveted 8desk and seat0 for about one-quarter of the children4 ,while they are studying the traditional three ,r's1 etc41 the rest of the school is distributed in shop and playgrounds1 gymnasium and studio1 or at home4 ,by an ingenious redistribution of the groups throughout the course of an eight-hour day1 ,mr4 ,wirt is able not only to give every child the opportunity of the varied facilities every day1 but he is able to accommodate in one school building twice the ordinary number of children4 ,the insoluble 8part-time0 problems of city schools disappear4 ,the ,gary school has two complete schools1 each with its set of teachers1 functioning together in the same building all day long4 ,in the lower grades the child spends two hours daily in the classroom1 an hour in laboratory or shop1 half-an-hour in studio1 and half-an-hour in gymnasium1 an hour in auditorium1 and the rest of the day in study1 play or outside activity4 ,the older child has three hours for formal instruction1 and two hours for more intensive shop or studio work4 ,children are passing back and forth constantly between home and school1 each with his or her own scheme of work1 and all the school is being used all the time4 ,the amount of money thus saved in school buildings alone is so large that even a town like ,gary1 with relatively meager school revenues1 can afford not only the varied equipment1 but also luxuries like special school physicians and nurses1 and special teachers for special subjects4 ,mr4 ,wirt has been accused of 8business efficiency10 but this is scarcely the term for so artistically elegant a scheme of economy4 ,when you reflect that it is just because the traditional classrooms are provided for only a proportion of the children that all of them have the varied daily opportunities of many-sided work and play1 you are likely to call this 8economy10 in the old golden ,greek sense of the wise management of household resources1 so that every member may share alike in the activity and the wealth4 ,such economy is creative2 it enriches1 not impoverishes4 ,i have said that ,mr4 ,wirt thought in terms of the rural community1 but it is of the rural community and its creative economy1 expanded to fill and reorganize the life of the modern city4 ,the school trains the child by letting him do the things the city does4 ,his education is an acclimatization to the wider social life4 ,a truly public school would let nothing communal remain alien to itself4 ,in the chemistry class at the ,emerson ,school ,i actually found the children helping in the necessary chemical work for the city4 ,the class was simply an extension of the municipal laboratory4 ,gary1 of course1 has the good fortune or the good sense to have as chemistry teacher the municipal chemist4 ,the older children act as his assistants4 ,with him the class tests the city water1 the various milk supplies of the town4 ,under the inspector1 they visit dairies1 workshops1 bakeries and food-stores4 ,last year they published a milk bulletin containing general information and reports of their tests4 ,i could not see that it was essentially inferior in quality to one that an agricultural school might have issued4 ,when ,i came upon this class it was testing sugars and candies1 from the different shops of the town1 for purity and for use of coloring matter4 ,another class was experimenting with soft drinks1 studying questions of solution1 suspension and crystallization1 with ramifications1 ,i was told1 towards the physiological effect of certain products4 ,the children were practically deputy food inspectors1 and made reports on the official blanks4 ,the chemist assured me that he had not lost a case in prosecuting for violation of the pure food laws4 ,in ,east ,chicago1 where school-children were ostensibly not trained as a vigilance committee in scientific investigations1 the chemist could not get a single conviction4 ,the children also test the materials supplied to the school1 the coal1 cement1 etc41 to see whether they come up to specifications4 ,i saw a group trying to make soap for the use of the school4 ,the chemist assured me--college-trained ignoramus that ,i was amidst this youthful expertness--that there was scarcely a principle of the science1 theoretical or practical1 that he could not develop from this work1 all so directly motivated by the daily life around the children4 ,i wish ,i could convey the fine caliber of this young chemist as he stood in his laboratory with the children working around him1 his clear poise between the theoretical and the practical making him for me the ideal symbol of science working ceaselessly at the world around to make it cleaner and healthier and more livable4 ,that chemistry class in ,gary has a high and momentous significance to me4 ,it was distinctly not play1 as all other laboratory work in school or college that ,i have seen has been play4 ,i was surprised to find how completely the doing of real work banished the amateur atmosphere and at the same time made the work infinitely more interesting4 ,mr4 ,wirt says the child is a natural scientist1 indefatigably curious and resourceful1 quick and accurate4 ,the little children actually seem to achieve less breakage than the older4 ,what kind of a community we are going to have when any large proportion of the children grow up to observe and test the physical conditions under which they live--when they get the scientific-deputy-inspector habit1 so to say--and what would happen to some forms of political jugglery if a younger generation got used to thinking in terms of qualitative and quantitative tests1 ,i leave to the imagination4 ,but it seemed to me that that chemistry class was one of the most important activities in the ,united ,states to-day4 ,,xv ,,really ,,public ,,schools ,characteristic of the 8public sense0 of the ,gary schools is the class in history and geography1 which ,i found at work getting an imaginative background of the larger social world4 ,to the news-board in the hall they brought clippings that seemed important4 ,the history room was smothered in maps and charts1 most of them made by the children themselves4 ,there was a great red ,indiana ballot1 a chart of the ,state ,senate1 a diagram of ,state administration1 a table showing the evolution of ,american political parties1 war-maps and pictures4 ,the place was a workshop1 with broad tables for map drawings1 and a fine spread of magazines and papers4 8,laboratory0 work in history1 tried so timorously in some of our most daring colleges1 was in full swing in a ,gary high school class4 ,when ,i visited the room the class was concerning itself with reports on 8,the city as a healthful place to live in10 with special emphasis on parks1 because the town had been waging its campaign for the new water-front park4 ,little outlines on ,greek and ,roman cities1 medieval and modern cities1 had been worked up in the school library--bountifully equipped as a branch of the city public library4 ,i had walked into a true course on town-planning1 at once the most fascinating and significant of current social interests and the study that packs into itself more historical1 sociological and geographical stimulation than almost any ,i know4 ,a class that had gone through those reports would have the materials for exactly the social background that our current imaginations need2 and1 moreover1 all those materials would be firmly placed in the community setting4 ,there is a charming communal self-consciousness about ,gary1 and this sort of history is the thing that feeds it4 ,one class had been working on a comparison of ,athenian and ,spartan education with ,gary education4 ,this struck me as peculiarly delightful4 ,such social introspection we rather badly lack in ,america1 yet it is the only soil in which intellectual virtue can ever grow4 ,the ancient history class has for its purpose3 8to improve its members as ,american citizens by a study of the experiences of the ancient peoples40 ,this class1 after some classroom turbulence1 formed a voluntary society which is duly opened and conducted by the president1 while the instructor lingers in a leisurely fashion outside4 ,i know of no more admirable reason for historical study than this phrase1 the natural expression of the ,gary child who wrote the constitution for this class4 ,they do not seem to know whether they are studying 8,civics0 or not4 ,they are too busy soaking in from real events a familiarity with history as it is lived and the community as it works4 ,i throw in here an advertisement for the 8,literary ,digest0 and the 8,independent10 which the pupils regularly read4 ,they study history backward1 so that it explains what is happening to-day4 ,they repeatedly dramatize remote times4 ,they are talking of coperating with the ,state historical pageant4 ,it seemed to me that these children were actually learning their social world in the spontaneous natural way that the intelligent child learns it from newspapers and books and from the slow1 unconscious widening of horizon for which he must usually look quite outside the school4 ,if other community institutions have anything educational to offer outside the school1 or if parents and children think they have1 ,mr4 ,wirt's school lets the children go to these out of their auditorium or play hour4 ,the churches may have them for religious instruction--there is no ,bible-reading or prayer in the ,gary schools--and thus avoid the imagined necessity for a special kind of church day-school4 ,already a ,polish parochial school in ,gary has lost its reason for being and vanished4 ,y4 ,m4 ,c4 ,a4's1 neighborhood houses1 special music-teachers1 etc41 may also act as extensions of the school4 ,it will be interesting to see how successfully some of these institutions which purport to form the child's morals and care for his soul's destiny prove their supplementary value1 and how far they are not simply having joyfully extended to them a long rope by which they may hang themselves4 ,to ,mr4 ,wirt the school is not more a community than the community is a school4 ,he believes that parks and playgrounds should follow the schools1 and in ,gary he demands twenty acres for every school plant4 ,he does not rely upon public playgrounds1 to which1 as experience shows1 only a proportion of children can be enticed from the streets1 but his playground is a part of the school on equal terms with the other activities4 ,otherwise these very expensive grounds which cities are providing are apt to be futile4 ,mr4 ,wirt's policy is to make it as easy as possible for the community to use the schools4 ,he does not force people to the opportunities1 but he puts them where the people cannot easily evade them4 ,he does not drive children to the public library1 but he has a branch put in each school4 ,the ,gary schools are open night and day1 practically every day in the year4 ,the ,indiana law--protector from tyranny--forbids more than ten months of school a year1 but allows vacation schools4 ,sunday sees popular lectures4 ,the ,gary schools seem almost as public as the streets4 ,if the school is to be not only a community embryonic of current society but also a school-community of itself1 it must have some forum or theater where everything that is peculiarly interesting in any part of the school may be brought dramatically to the attention of the rest of the school4 ,this ,mr4 ,wirt provides in the auditorium hour1 so drearily used in the ordinary school for religious exercises1 8speaking pieces10 and moral homilies4 ,in ,gary every child goes to 8auditorium0 for an hour each day1 but he listens there to talks by the special teachers about their work1 lantern-lectures and dramatic dialogues written by the children themselves from their history or literature work4 ,there may be moving-pictures1 instrumental music1 gymnastic exhibitions4 ,the initiative and responsibility are left to the teachers4 ,there seems to be no limit to the interest and the possibility of what may go on in this free little secular theater except what the imagination of teachers and children can suggest4 ,there is always singing1 and of a most excellent tone4 8,auditorium0 is one of ,mr4 ,wirt's novel ideas4 ,it seems to make unreal the old categories of 8entertainment0 and 8edification10 just as the rest of the school seems to damage the conceptions of 8work0 and 8play40 ,there was a pleasant informality about things1 with the girls sewing at the back of the theater1 and the young audience breaking into whistling as they marched out to the music of the piano4 8,auditorium0 ought to be quite as important as ,mr4 ,wirt thinks it is4 ,what school-work might become1 lived always in the possible light of its intelligent presentation to the school audience in dramatic form1 we do not know1 because educators have never been dramatists4 ,the ,gary schools have special teachers for expression1 but the ,american spirit is in many ways so inexpressive that the idea can thus far be only a frank and delightful experiment4 ,i liked particularly in the 8auditoriums0 ,i visited the intermingling of children of all ages4 ,this is one of the many ways by which the ,gary school breaks down the snobbery of age which causes so much unhappiness in childhood1 and fixes the adult mind with so many delusions4 ,i came across a significant editorial in the ,emerson ,school paper which showed me how useful this intermingling was in smashing caste lines that were already forming4 ,the editor acknowledged that the expected objectionableness of the 8youngsters0 had not asserted itself4 ,one got a real sense of a new sympathy breaking upon these already sophisticating minds of high-school children4 ,i mention this because it is typical of ,mr4 ,wirt's genius to obliterate artificial lines and avoid mechanical groupings4 ,his ideal school is one like the ,emerson in ,gary1 a complete school1 from kindergarten to college1 in the same building1 with all the varied facilities used by all classes4 ,the grading is of the utmost flexibility4 ,the traditional twelve grades are followed1 but classes work in 8rapid10 8average10 or 8slow0 groups1 according as the various children give promise of completing the ,state-prescribed curriculum in ten1 twelve or fourteen years4 ,the child may pass from group to group or from grade to grade at any time on the examination of the supervisor of instruction4 ,the child himself has no sense of being 8graded0 or even 8marked40 ,report-cards are rather a concession to parents' weaknesses4 ,if the child needs additional help1 there is the parallel school1 so that he may have a double lesson the same day4 ,and the ,saturday school offers another opportunity4 ,all studying is supposed to be done in school hours4 ,the fearful bogey of 8home-work0 is laid4 ,in this free interchange of groups the child acquires a sense of individuality4 ,each has practically an individual schedule of work1 for the organization of which the executive principal1 who devotes all his time to such matters1 is responsible4 ,except in the youngest classes1 the children seem to move about individually to their different rooms and shops4 ,by this drastic carrying down of college methods through the grades ,mr4 ,wirt has exploded another hoary superstition that great masses of children in city schools can only be handled by uniform and machine methods1 in a lump4 ,frbel ,school in ,gary has twenty-five hundred children1 most of them very small alien immigrants4 ,yet the same flexible and free methods are used there1 apparently with success4 ,these children1 because of the immensely varied equipment1 and the possibility of small classes in the shops1 are getting something resembling individual instruction4 ,i picked up at random the card of an older girl at ,emerson4 ,it read3 8,printing1 ,history1 ,gymnasium1 ,french1 ,music1 ,botany1 ,auditorium1 ,english40 ,the very shock of that bold 8,printing0 gives you a realization of the modern school you are in4 ,and this is a girl besides4 ,now a program like this1 and all this free election and flexibility1 would seem wilful and anarchical were it not for the fact that in the ,gary school these schedules are the result of a natural and very careful process of selection1 made by the child4 ,what the child shall study1 outside of the regular classroom work1 is neither forced upon it nor aimlessly selected4 ,take the ,emerson ,school1 a beautiful building with laboratories and studios1 gymnasia and shops1 and put your child into its kindergarten or first grade4 ,he runs about the halls4 ,the shops and studies and laboratories are not segregated1 but distributed over the building so as to convey the impression that they are equally significant1 and to give every child an opportunity of becoming familiar with them4 ,all the rooms have big glass doors or windows4 ,the child's own unaided curiosity makes him look in and wonder about what the older children are doing there4 ,one could see children of all ages peering into the foundry or machine-shop or printery4 ,when the child has reached the third or fourth grade he has a certain idea of what activity interests him1 and he is allowed to go into shop or laboratory as observer or helper to the older child4 ,he watches and asks questions1 and the older boy learns by teaching him4 ,if the child finds that the work does not actually interest him he still has the chance to change4 ,when he takes up the work in the higher grades he has served his apprenticeship and is already familiar with the apparatus and the technique4 ,the teacher does not have to break in a new class each year4 ,it is almost a self-perpetuating and self-instructing class4 ,the child has been assimilated to the work as new members in any profession or trade in society are assimilated4 ,when the child is exposed from his earliest years to the various vocational activities1 is allowed to come into them just as his curiosity ripens1 you have as perfect a 8choice of a vocation0 as could be imagined4 ,only this sort of opportunity can really be called 8vocational training40 ,the usual vocation school work takes the child too late1 when his curiosity is likely to be dulled2 it puts him into the work without any previous familiarity4 ,it can scarcely be anything but drudgery4 ,if 8capacities are to be developed10 ,mr4 ,wirt's scheme gives the surest means of developing them4 ,it solves the grave problems of 8vocational0 and 8pre-vocational0 training1 which are so sorely vexing the professional educational world1 a large part of whose business in life seems to be to create and have problems4 ,,xvi ,,apprentices ,,to ,,the ,,school ,vocational training in the schools of ,gary means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing1 conserving1 beautifying or enhancing the facilities1 is done by the school itself4 ,these large1 lavishly equipped modern school-buildings require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair4 ,their shops are the industrial and manual shops for the school4 ,the children work in them with skilled union workmen1 who are employed not primarily as 8manual training0 teachers1 but as assistants to the building superintendent4 ,the mechanics teach by allowing the children to help them as apprentices4 ,they earn their salaries by repair and construction work1 while the children who desire it get an incomparable vocational training at practically no cost to the town4 ,where the ordinary trade-school must have large classes to make the enterprise pay1 the ,gary vocational work may be done with the smallest groups1 for the shops are paying for themselves anyway4 ,manual training takes on quite a new meaning as you move about1 watching the boys in the carpenter-shop making desks or tables1 or cabinets for the botany collections1 or book-racks for the library1 sending them on to the paint-shop when they have finished2 boys in the sheet-metal shop hammering zinc for the roof2 young electricians repairing bells2 a couple of plumbers tinkering with pipes2 little groups of serious and absorbedly interested boys in foundry and forge and pattern-making shop1 all coperating like the parts of a well-ordered factory4 ,there was obviously enough real work to keep busy for his hour a day every child who desired training in a trade4 ,where school and workshop are thus fused1 the need for 8continuation0 and 8coperative0 courses--where the boy alternates between shop or factory and school--disappears4 ,the child has the advantages of both4 ,the ordinary school1 and even the specialized vocational school1 is rarely doing more in its industrial1 manual1 or domestic science work than playing a rather dreary game with toys4 ,there could scarcely be a greater contrast between the real shops of the ,gary schools and those ordinary 8shops0 and kitchens with their dozens of little machines at which at a given time the entire class does its little stereotyped 8stunt40 ,in ,gary the domestic science room is a real kitchen in which the daily luncheon is prepared and served at cost to the teachers and pupils who desire it4 ,the cook is a real cook1 and the girls come in as observers1 helpers or workers1 just as the boys go into the shops4 ,the nearest approach to a luxury is the pottery shop1 but this is itself perhaps the best symbol of that fusion of the artistic and the practical that is the ,wirt genius4 ,what are you to say when you walk into the art studio and find a dozen girls and boys high on a scaffolding painting a frieze which they have themselves designed1 while others are at work on stained-glass designs to go in varnished paper on the panels of the door8 ,there is a genial1 joyous quality about all the work that gives every room a charm--the foundry with its deep shadows1 the smooth gray pottery shop with its turning wheels and bright glazed jugs1 the botany room with its mass of greenery4 ,even the history room at ,emerson ,school had the atmosphere which comes from concentrated interest and the slow accretion of significant material4 ,emerson itself is a spacious and dignified building with innumerable little touches of taste that one usually associates only with the high schools of exceptionally wealthy and cultivated suburban communities4 ,it is a delightful paradox that so beautiful a life should appear to be lived where every activity seems to be motivated by direct utilitarian application4 ,i said that you have to plow your mind up to understand this kind of a school4 ,certainly ,i have never seen a place which more nearly permitted to seem real that old ideal of the joy of work which we imagine must have existed back in guild days4 ,it may be left to the imagination what children trained in such a school are likely to have to say to the industrial society in which we live4 ,the practical work of the school is only limited by local school needs1 but the shoeless condition of some of the ,frbel children inspired the starting of a shoe shop where old shoes were made over4 ,both ,emerson and ,frbel have a printery from which come all the blanks1 reports1 programs1 etc41 used in the school1 as well as the bulletins and papers by which the various classes are tempted to preserve the good things they write4 ,the commercial pupils have charge of all the accounting and bookkeeping as well as the supplies4 ,the children who work in the shops are paid in checks1 which are calculated on the basis of prevailing union wages for the working-time4 ,this provides opportunities for a banking system1 which is also in charge of the commercial class4 ,in the ,jefferson ,school the boiler-room is an integral part of the machine-shop4 ,the botany class was responsible for the beautiful and elaborate conservatory at the entrance of the ,emerson ,school1 and for the window hothouse in the botany room1 where practical experiments are made4 ,the botanists also have charge of the shrubs and trees on the grounds1 and the vegetable gardens which they work communistically all through the summer4 ,their study of food and textile products ramified into the domestic science work1 just as the zoology study was fused with physiology4 ,this latter class had a playground zoo1 with foxes and coyotes1 raccoons and prairie-dogs1 about whose habits and adventures they were preparing a brochure1 which was already in press at the printery4 ,when ,i stepped into the zoology laboratory itself1 ,i found that ,i was in an even more animated zoo4 ,crows1 chickens and pigeons in cages at the back of the room were lusty with vociferous greeting4 ,the imperturbability of the children amidst this racket showed me how well aware they were that this was the way a zoology room ought to behave4 ,such a school1 where the child works almost unconsciously into a vocation which appeals to him as neither play nor drudgery1 is far more 8vocational0 than even the specialized school4 ,the child1 beginning so young in shop or laboratory1 and assimilating the work very gradually1 is able to lay deep foundations of interest and skill4 ,the ,gary school is distinctly unspecialized4 ,in a sense it gives a completely 8liberal education40 ,the child emerges a skilful amateur4 ,the industrial and scientific work no more 8train0 him to take a definite place in the industrial world than the cultural work trains him to be a college professor4 ,but he should leave school well equipped to cope with a dynamic1 rapidly changing industrial society which demands above all things versatility1 and which scraps methods and machines as ruthlessly as it does men4 ,only the man of rounded training and resourcefulness who can turn his hand quickly to a variety of occupations has much chance of success4 ,our public school1 in spite of its fancied 8liberal0 curriculum1 has really been turning out only very low-grade specialists4 ,it has made no effort to produce the type of mind most needed to-day--the versatile machinist1 the practical engineer1 the mind that adapts and masters mechanism4 ,this is probably the best intellectual type our society produces4 ,this exactness1 resourcefulness1 inventiveness1 pragmatic judgment of a mechanism by its product1 the sense of machinery as a means1 not an end1 are exactly the qualities that society demands in every profession or trade4 ,the ,gary school is the first ,i have seen that promises to cultivate this kind of intelligence4 ,it frankly accepts the machine not in the usual sense of the vocational schools1 as an exacting master that the child is to learn docilely to obey1 but as the basis of our modern life1 by whose means we must make whatever progress we may will4 ,the machine seems to be a thing to which society is irrevocably pledged4 ,it is time the school recognized it4 ,in ,gary it is with the child from his earliest years4 ,it is the motive of his scientific study4 ,the physics teacher at the ,emerson ,school told me that he thought the fascinating and irresponsible automobile had done more to educate the younger generation than most of the public schools4 ,tinkering with an automobile was a whole scientific training4 ,i dropped into his physics class1 and found a dozen twelve-year-old girls and their nine-year-old 8helpers0 studying the motor-cycle4 ,with that fine disregard for boundaries which characterizes ,gary education1 the hour began with a spelling lesson of the names of the parts and processes of the machine4 ,after the words were learned1 the mechanism was explained to them as they pored over it1 and their memory of vaporization1 evaporation1 etc41 called into play4 ,the motor-cycle was set going1 the girls described its action1 and the lesson was over1 as perfect a piece of teaching as ,i have ever heard4 ,the intense animation of that little group was all the more piquant for having as a background the astounded disapprobation of three grave school superintendents from the ,east4 ,to these physics classes the ventilating1 heating and electric systems in the schools are all text-books4 ,the climate is studied4 ,the shops provide many physics problems4 ,there was a class of boys having explained to them the physical principles of various types of machines4 ,the impetuous rush of those little boys as they were sent into the machine-shop to take apart a lawn-mower1 a bicycle1 and a cream-separator1 and the look of elation on their faces1 would alone make ,gary unforgettable to me4 ,it was evident that this was indeed a different kind of school4 ,,xvii ,,the ,,natural ,,school ,a surprisingly small amount of administrative machinery for so varied a system is required by the schools of ,gary4 ,mr4 ,wirt is the ,city ,superintendent of ,schools4 ,under him each of the five school buildings has an executive principal4 ,two supervisors of instruction look after the pedagogical work of the system4 ,the director of industrial work has charge of building repair1 and supervises the shops where the children work under the mechanic-teachers4 ,there is no attempt to segregate the vocational work4 ,manual1 physical1 artistic and academic activities are administered on an equal footing4 ,for the teacher the ,gary school should be almost as liberating as it is to the pupil4 ,in the details of courses much initiative is left to the teacher4 ,it is really an inductive school where courses are worked out by supervisors consulting together on the basis of classroom experience4 ,teachers are encouraged to experiment and develop their own ideas4 ,here is the first public school ,i have ever seen that resolutely sets itself against uniformity of method or product1 that recognizes differences of individuality4 ,the working-day of the teacher may be longer1 but she is relieved of the burdensome home-work4 ,the nervous strain is lessened also by the freer method of discipline4 ,there cannot be unruly children unless children are ruled1 and in the ,gary school there is apparently no artificial repression4 ,one found in the classroom as much talking as there would be in a concert audience1 with the same natural motives1 freed of 8rules of order10 for quiet4 ,the frequent change of room and activity in the ,gary school prevents1 too1 that nervous restiveness which must inevitably come to the child kept long at his desk4 ,the point is that only in a free and varied school like this can one talk of effective discipline4 ,when school activities are as attractive as they are here1 deprivation becomes punishment4 ,there is at hand an instrument for inculcating reason into refractoriness which is as powerful as the stoutest disciplinarian could wish4 ,the ordinary school tries to keep up a military system of control1 without any means1 now that corporal punishment is generally abolished1 of punishing infractions4 ,in a ,gary school 8being sent home0 for misbehavior usually means being sent to a place infinitely less interesting4 ,but there is little talk about 8mischievous and unruly boys40 ,those children who1 in spite of everything1 8are not adapted to our kind of school10 may go to the school farm in the country to work4 ,but this farm is not in any sense a 8reform0 school4 ,delicate children may also be sent there1 and other classes go for a holiday4 ,as to the personal manners prevailing in such a free school as this1 with its absence of moral homily1 and effort to 8train character0 through obedience and discipline1 ,i can only repeat the words of an ,italian boy who had recently come from orthodox schools elsewhere3 8,but they're so polite60 ,i was glad to see that there was no nonsense at ,gary about schemes of 8self-government10 which can be little more than a humiliating pretension in any school4 ,a kindly judge did once institute 8,boyville0 in a ,gary school1 with a parody of municipal functions1 but its unreality soon relegated it to limbo4 ,spontaneous organization there is1 but it grows out of real work4 ,the boys' ninth grade ,english class1 for instance1 has organized itself as the ,emerson ,improvement ,association1 and its work revolves around the speaking and writing necessary in conducting the affairs of the organization4 ,there seem to be no 8extra-curricular0 activities1 which create so many problems elsewhere4 ,athletic teams and sports are connected with the gymnasium work4 ,other societies spring up naturally out of the school interests4 ,problems of 8fraternities0 and the control of athletics which confront so many high schools are thus naturally avoided4 ,the ,gary school not only lightens this strain of discipline for the teacher and cultivates her initiative1 but serves as a kind of training-school for the teachers themselves4 ,the new-coming teacher learns by acting as helper or 8apprentice0 to the older teacher1 just as the children in shop or laboratory learn from one another4 ,the result is an uncommon and appealing equality between teachers and children1 without imposed authority on one side or subservience on the other4 ,beside ,mr4 ,wirt ,mme4 ,montessori seems almost a beginner1 so daringly has he carried the principles of self-instruction up through the higher grades4 ,even visiting teachers and superintendents who wish to learn the theory and practice of the ,gary school must learn in the same way4 ,mr4 ,wirt does not lecture to them4 ,he allows them also to come into the school for a few months as helpers to teacher or principal4 ,everybody who has anything to do with a ,gary school must evidently learn by doing the real work itself4 ,nothing shows more clearly the whole-knit fiber of ,mr4 ,wirt's philosophy than this new kind of 8normal0 school for visiting teachers4 ,i was pleased with the absence of self-display4 ,advertising has come from the outside4 ,the teachers seem innocent of the great number of things they are doing which a large part of the orthodox educational world believes to be impossible4 ,you are talked with frankly and genially1 but nothing is done to impress you4 ,you are left to interpret it all for yourself4 ,those who miss the spirit will find weaknesses4 ,professional educators hold up hands of horror at the 8looseness0 of the teaching4 ,they miss the dramatic effect of the 8well-conducted recitation0--the drawing-out of the pupil's memory1 or the appeals to glib guesses at what the teacher wants4 ,they judge by the old-fashioned standard of how the teacher is teaching rather than the new one of what the child is learning4 ,my complaint would be rather that there was still too much teaching that is conventional1 particularly in the lower grades4 ,and ,i have an animus against the deadly desks and seats which are still in use in too many of the classrooms4 ,but the significant thing is that this kind of a school is not static or completed1 but a constantly growing organism4 ,the only limit to which it may grow lies in the imagination and initiative of teachers and pupils4 ,and the school cannot be judged in cross-section4 ,even when it starts with so admirable an equipment1 its life has just begun4 ,for the mechanical and artistic1 manual work and intellectual study1 are all directed towards enriching the physical body and the spiritual life and atmosphere of the school4 ,this intensive cultivation of resources produces that 8embryonic community life0 which is ,professor ,dewey's ideal1 where in actual work the child senses the occupations and interests of the larger society into which he is to enter4 ,mr4 ,wirt's schools would be unworthy of discussion were they not capable of imitation generally in ,american towns and cities4 ,already a number of communities have copied the essential features1 and ,mr4 ,wirt is at present occupied in remodeling a few of the ,new ,york ,city schools1 successfully1 too1 in spite of the fact that ,new ,york1 on account of its rapid growth1 its great alien population1 and its political cross-currents1 presents perhaps the most formidable school problems in the country4 ,the only substantial difficulty in remodeling schools according to the ,gary scheme is the matter of playgrounds4 ,even this is surmountable1 for most cities have parks or usable vacant lots within reach of the school4 ,mr4 ,wirt's great triumph in ,gary is the old ,jefferson ,school which he found when he came to the town4 ,this was an orthodox ten-room building built by the city fathers to accommodate ,gary children for many generations4 ,by turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium1 transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and nature-study laboratories1 by building a jack-of-all-trades workshop around the engine-room in the cellar1 a domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner1 and by appropriating a nearby park space1 he transformed a perfectly ordinary school building1 whose prototype may be found in every town in the land1 into a full-fledged1 varied and smoothly-functioning ,wirt school4 ,through the 8rotation of crops0 system1 this school1 built for three hundred and sixty children1 actually accommodates over eight hundred1 and gives them every facility1 if less elaborately1 of the specially designed new schools4 ,perhaps ,i may here recapitulate4 ,the mere prosaic business economy of the ,wirt scheme is enough to recommend it4 ,no school board can afford to neglect a plan which not only saves money to the taxpayers1 but provides better facilities1 more varied equipment and better educational opportunities than even well-to-do communities can at present afford4 ,the ,wirt school solves the vexing 8part-time0 problem4 ,gary is the only city ,i know that has room 7,march1 #aiae7 in its present buildings for at least one-third more children than there now are to go to school4 ,in the second place1 the plan solves most of the problems of vocational and industrial training which now confront the public school4 ,it catches the child's curiosity and skill on the upstroke4 ,it makes no separation of manual from intellectual work1 and avoids that sinister caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement4 ,and from the point of view of economy again1 the scheme of devoting industrial work to actual care of the school-plant enables the school to provide a great variety of occupations almost without additional cost to the community4 ,in the third place1 the plan provides a large measure of individual instruction4 ,it is a school for every kind of a child4 ,the flexibility of schedules1 the coperation of outside agencies like the churches1 the varied activities1 give opportunity for the fullest development of differing interests and capacities4 ,in the fourth place1 the plan carries out throughout the school life the educational truth that learning can only come through doing4 ,the habits and attitudes of careful scientific observation1 or purposeful interesting activity which is neither work nor play1 the social1 democratic1 and coperative background which such a school cultivates1 are exactly the qualities we need for our younger generation in ,american society4 ,such a school carries out the best ideals of ,american democracy1 as ,i see them1 in an extremely effective way4 ,its philosophy is ,american1 its democratic organization is ,american4 ,it is one of the institutions that our ,american culture should be proudest of4 ,perhaps professional educators1 accustomed to other concepts and military methods and administrative illusions1 will not welcome this kind of school4 ,but teachers hampered by drill and routine will want it1 and so will parents and children4 ,,xviii ,,the ,,democratic ,,school ,a recent article in the 8,new ,york ,times0 7,oct4 #ag1 #aiae7 by ,dr4 ,thomas ,s4 ,baker1 ,headmaster of the ,tome ,school1 contains an able pedagogical criticism of the ,gary school which is typical of the general attitude towards the ,gary idea on the part of conservative schoolmen4 ,nothing could bring out more clearly the difference in educational values between this professional teaching opinion and the broad social vision of ,superintendent ,wirt4 ,dr4 ,baker admits the impressive social effectiveness of the plan4 ,it is 8the last development in socializing the schools40 ,mr4 ,wirt is 8not only an educator1 but also a social reformer1 a city worker40 ,but ,dr4 ,baker's argument is really the specialized pedagogical one against the social4 ,where ,mr4 ,wirt sees the school as a community center1 a children's world1 ,dr4 ,baker sees it as an educational factory4 8,the social value of the ,gary schools10 he says1 8is beyond question4 ,its pedagogic excellence has still to be determined40 ,from his point of view1 a school is not so much a place to train effective citizens as to make 8thorough scholars40 ,he questions whether 8these side issues in the scheme of child-training0--the gymnasia1 shops1 laboratories1 which the ,gary school contains--8are really essential in mental development40 ,he is afraid that the young citizens of ,gary learn more from their industrial shops and science laboratories than from their books4 ,dr4 ,baker's guarded argument is really a glorification of 8intellectual discipline0 as against an intelligent capacity to lead an organic life in a modern society which needs above all things resourceful adaptation and social appreciations4 ,it is a question of ideals1 and no more important issue was ever put to a people than this one of how we want our next generation trained4 ,the school is not only the one institution which assimilates all the people1 but it is the most easily modifiable4 ,it is not only the easiest lever of social progress but the most effective1 for it deals with relatively plastic human material4 ,to decide what kind of a school we want is almost to decide what kind of a society we want4 ,if we only want that kind of a school which would 8make hard-working and accurate scholars and produce thoughtful men10 we must resign ourselves to a progressive softening of the fiber and capacity of the mass of our people4 ,the average educator acts as if he thought of his child-world as a level plain of capacities4 ,there is the mass of unskilled1 unawakened minds2 here is the level of scholarship1 knowledge1 civic virtue1 appreciations4 ,education is to him the process of lifting up the mass from their primitive level to the higher one4 ,the public school is the elevator into which all are to be shoveled and transported to the upper story4 ,and the ,american public school in the last fifty years has been faithfully following this ideal4 ,the truth is1 of course1 that mental aptitude is not any such level desert1 but rather a series of inclined planes4 ,when we try to educate all the children of all the people1 we are not dealing with a homogeneous mass1 but with sliding scales of capacity4 ,a mental test of the school-children of a state would reveal an incline extending in orderly gradation from the genius down to the imbecile4 ,a physical test would give us a different slant1 a test for artistic or mechanical capacity another4 ,stand at the center of divine average and try to lever any of these slopes into a horizontal position and you find half of your society squatting heavily at the lower end4 ,you may ascribe it to race capacity1 personal heredity1 social environment1 malnutrition1 defective nervous organization or anything you please1 but the fact remains that the greater part of the human raw material will be permanently resistive to or only dully appreciative of any attempts to elevate them to a level4 ,this is true of any capacity you may choose4 ,the outstanding truth of society seems to be the heterogeneous distribution of capacities4 ,and the irony of it is that after artistic capacity true intellectual capacity is probably the rarest4 ,for the public school to try to make intellectualists of all its children is a sheer defiance of sociological reality4 ,some educators1 while they recognize this diversity1 yet insist on uniform standards1 uniform curricula1 uniform discipline1 on the ground that social order in a democracy is imperiled unless the highest degree of like-mindedness prevails4 ,such a democracy would be the stagnant democracy of ,china4 ,the result of these attempts at standardization have been the automatic centrifugal flinging off into space of the children whose interests were not intellectual1 who were no more capable of being made into 8accurate scholars0 than they were into artists and poets4 ,and from those who did not get quite flung off1 but clung on with their teeth1 we get most of our prevailing pseudo-culture4 ,to keep on trying to 8develop the mind0 and produce 8thorough scholarship0 in those whom we force to submit to educational processes1 means simply to go on creating a nerveless and semi-helpless mass of boys and girls who will never take their effective and interested place in the world because they have no mental tools which they can wield4 ,such a course is coming to be generally recognized as a kind of slow national suicide1 a slow suffocation of industrial and social progress4 ,the schools do change1 but the schoolmen yield grudgingly4 ,nothing could be more nave than the test which ,dr4 ,baker proposes for evaluating the ,gary plan4 ,submit1 he says1 the highest class in the ,gary schools to an examination by the ,college ,examining ,board4 ,if the students pass1 the ,gary system will be justified of its children4 ,was ever a more patent assertion of the professional bias8 ,let the children drop out of the lower grades untrained except in the rudiments1 but if the small minority in the highest class passes its ,vergil and algebra and ,english literature and ,german with marks as high as the graduates of the ,tome ,school1 then the ,gary system will cease to be considered a 8mere experiment40 ,if this is what the critics of the ,gary plan mean when they plead for an 8evaluation of this novel experiment10 we may well hope that it will escape the peril4 ,such a conception of educational values cannot become too speedily obsolete4 ,a public school is a mockery unless it educates the public4 ,it cannot make the rarefied and strained product at the top the test of its effectiveness4 ,and the public is not ideally educated unless its individuals--all of them--are intelligent1 informed1 skilled1 resourceful1 up to the limit of their respective capacities4 ,life itself can no longer be trusted to provide this education2 the school must substitute4 ,the ,gary school deliberately sets such an ideal4 ,democracy does not mean uniformity1 but it does mean equality of opportunity4 ,a democratic school would be one where every child had the chance to discover and develop aptitude4 ,the ,gary school1 with its harmonious activities of intellectual1 manual1 artistic and scientific work1 physical education and play1 gives just this chance4 ,democratic education does not mean the provision of separate schools for different kinds of children1 or even separate courses in the same school1 as the movement for industrial education is now threatening to bring4 ,this is to create at once invidious distinctions1 and fasten class education upon us4 ,to say that children are different does not mean that some are fitted to be scholars and others to be manual workers1 some to be artists and some to be scientists4 ,the differences are differences of focus and not of quality4 ,to most children will appear in the course of school life some dominant interest1 and it is upon the cultivation of that interest that the child's chance of being more than a nerveless mediocrity will depend4 ,it is upon that training that his chance of being absorbed out of the school into the social and industrial world will depend4 ,at the same time1 without a common background with his fellows he will be alien and adrift in the world4 ,interest and skill in one's work1 whether it be making automobiles or teaching ,greek1 an acquaintance with the contemporary world1 an alert intelligence which is always seeking to diminish the area of things human that are alien to one--a man or woman with this would be truly educated in any society4 ,but both focus and background are supremely necessary4 ,the present educational system does not really set itself to provide either4 ,only in a school organized on some such plan as the ,gary plan will such education be possible4 ,this does not mean that every child is to marvelously blossom into ideally alert and skilled intelligence4 ,but we can be sure that a school which gives opportunity for the development of the most varied aptitudes in the free play of a child-community life will have done all that it could4 ,no one pretends that the ,gary education is the intrinsically ideal education for all time4 ,but we can say that1 given the best social demands of ,america to-day1 this school will make for the most robust1 effective1 intelligent citizenship of which we are at present capable4 ,,xix ,,the ,,trained ,,mind ,how much longer are we to expect the headmasters of our private secondary schools to view with anything but alarm the current radical tendencies in education8 ,in the ,november 8,atlantic10 ,dr4 ,alfred ,e4 ,stearns of ,phillips-,andover is stirred to wrath against the fallacies of the modern school as expounded by ,mr4 ,flexner and others4 ,the paper contributes little new to the well-worn theory of mental discipline upon which upper-class education has so long been based4 ,but it is highly significant as a pattern of the 8trained0 mind as it works in the exposure of fallacies4 ,dr4 ,stearns is presumably an immensely successful product of the old idealistic and linguistic education1 gained by strenuous effort and vigorous thinking4 ,it is worth while to examine how such a mind argues1 what it considers as clinching evidence1 how it hopes to convince the alert intellectual of to-day4 ,the 8fallacies0 in modern education which ,dr4 ,stearns is exposing are the materialistic and utilitarian ideal1 the belief in the non-transferability of mental power from one field to another1 the cultivation of interest rather than discipline1 of play rather than drudgery1 the scientific rather than the cultural emphasis4 ,he wishes to persuade the reader that all these tendencies make for the perversion of the child's character1 the weakening of his mental grasp1 the materializing of his soul4 ,one waits eagerly for proofs of such very serious menaces4 ,the student of education to-day is rapidly acquiring a belief in objective evidence1 in statistical or at least analytic experiment1 in scientific formulation4 ,the kind of evidence that appeals to the alert student to-day is the kind that comes out of the psychological laboratory of ,clark ,university1 or ,columbia or ,chicago1 out of the great city school surveys1 like ,portland or ,cleveland or ,new ,york1 out of the experimental schools in different parts of the country4 ,these are the arenas where educational problems will1 he believes1 ultimately be solved4 ,and to him the so-called 8fallacies0 in modern education are not 8dogmas0 or 8assumptions0 at all1 but rather hopeful hypotheses which are now being tested in dozens of ,american schools4 ,is this the sort of evidence to which ,dr4 ,stearns' trained mind appeals when he wishes to discredit the 8new0 education8 ,not at all4 ,he does not even so much as show that he is acquainted with the existence of the great mass of literature which would throw light on the success or failure of the radical theories which he deplores4 ,educational journals1 school surveys1 reports of intelligence tests1 descriptions of play schools1--none of these seem to have come into contact with his training4 ,for the benefit of the philosophically-minded1 he does not even refer to the writings of ,dewey or ,hall1 or the other radical writers on education4 ,all this writing and doing which represents the new education at work1 he lumps into 8the pedagogical expert10 upon whom he lavishes his anxious scorn4 ,the only concrete data he offers is the record of the ,college ,examination ,board1 which ,dr4 ,flexner1 whom he is criticizing1 had cited in his 8,modern ,school40 ,dr4 ,flexner had argued against ,latin and mathematics in the secondary school on the ground that the majority of even the picked students failed in them4 ,dr4 ,stearns succeeds in showing that a majority of college candidates fail not only in ,latin and ,algebra but in all other subjects as well4 ,the normal mind1 untrained by the old dispensation1 would consider these statistics very damaging to ,dr4 ,stearns' cause4 ,the inexorable conclusion would be not that ,latin and algebra should be retained in the secondary school curriculum1 but that the entire curriculum should undergo a radical reorganization in teaching methods and educational philosophy4 ,dr4 ,stearns1 like most of the critics of the 8new0 education1 makes the fundamental error of confusing the narrow business man1 who sees no 8use0 for his son's taking ,latin or algebra in school1 with the 8new0 educator who would give these subjects a new orientation in the curriculum4 ,the 8practical0 business man is as much anathema to the 8modern school0 as he is to the cultural school4 ,the 8modern school0 would not refuse any subject to minds that fed upon it and fused it into vital experience4 ,but it would not force it on minds that could not digest it4 ,and ,dr4 ,stearns' own figures show how generally indigestible1 with all the drudgery and mental discipline in the world1 is the entire conventional secondary school curriculum4 ,the pseudo-modern high school where science and manual arts have been added1 only to be taught in the same unilluminated way1 is as objectionable to the 8new0 educator as it is to ,dr4 ,stearns4 ,since the latter's only use of objective evidence proves a boomerang1 what considerations does he think will be persuasive in his attack on the 8new0 education8 ,it is easy to see4 ,his reliance is entirely on authority1 upon personal belief4 ,several very successful business men of his acquaintance attribute their success to the training of the old education4 ,the majority of schoolmasters are not yet ready to abandon the doctrine of mental discipline4 ,the sons of ,mr4 ,hill go to college to get something which their father1 for all his success1 recognizes that he missed4 ,it is a serious question in the minds of many observers whether ,dr4 ,eliot's advocacy of 8observational0 training is sound4 ,always the reference to personal authority1 to prestige1 to anything but objective standards on which both sides may agree6 ,always the nave appeal to schoolmasters and successful business men1 the pillars of his world6 ,dr4 ,stearns deplores the materialistic trend of the age1 but he does not consider how powerfully his own innocent use of the verdict of successful business men as scientific evidence is likely to glorify material success in the minds of his students4 ,dr4 ,stearns' logic is as unconvincing as his evidence4 ,a doctrine is monstrous4 ,therefore1 he implies1 it is untrue4 ,intelligent children are usually bright in all their school subjects4 ,therefore1 if you force a child to learn through drudgery1 you automatically endow him with general intelligence4 ,the interest of boys in wireless telegraphy and automobiles1 he thinks1 is the best argument for keeping all these things out of a school where one must learn to work4 ,at the same time1 ,dr4 ,stearns objects to scientific schools because students so soon lose interest in their work4 ,but1 according to the gospel of drudgery1 why would not this make science the ideal 8mental discipline08 ,such a paper as this shows the technique of a thoroughly obsolete mind4 ,such 8mental discipline0 as this old education gave is evidently of little use in handling a world of facts1 of experiment1 of recorded tests4 ,criticism does not make such thinkers critical4 ,it only makes them belligerent4 ,they do not analyze1 they repel4 ,they are more interested in a moral justification for the structure of their craft and their practices than in the truth4 ,dr4 ,stearns' paper is the best evidence of how little relevant is the old linguistic and idealistic education to the intellectual demands of to-day4 ,the critical1 analytic1 impersonal1 experimental approach is wholly lacking in his paper4 ,his evidence is personal authority1 his logic is special pleading4 ,parents with sons in private schools might well view with grave concern the kind of 8trained mind0 which is likely to be developed under such masters of the old education4 ,they might ask how likely a boy1 taught to use his mind the way ,dr4 ,stearns uses his1 is to analyze and grasp the complex facts of the world into which he will come4 ,,xx ,,class ,,and ,,school ,the proposed experimental school which the ,general ,education ,board is to found in conjunction with ,teachers' ,college in ,new ,york has sent a shiver through the conservative schoolmen of ,america4 ,it is assumed that the policy of the new school will follow ,dr4 ,flexner's manifesto of the 8,modern ,school10 that adroit and uncompromising crystallization of the radical philosophy of our new ,american education4 ,dr4 ,flexner has proved himself to be an admirable agitator1 for he has succeeded1 with doctrines that public-school educators have been discussing for ten years and which experimental schools all through the country have been testing out1 in rousing the slumberous camp of private secondary schoolmasters to a sense of what is going on in the educational world4 ,the private secondary school is the last stronghold of educational conservatism4 ,enlightenment has to proceed upward through thick layers of prejudice and smugness4 ,dr4 ,flexner's voice seems to have broken in the walls and gotten a hearing for the new education even in the walls of the traditional ,new ,england academy4 ,it is for these people that the 8,modern ,school0 was written1 for only those will find its proposals 8revolutionary and dangerous0 who have never read a line of ,dewey or ,g4 ,stanley ,hall1 never read a copy of an educational journal1 never visited an experimental school1 or even the newer plants of the best public schools in ,american cities4 ,there is irony in the location of the new school at ,teachers' ,college4 ,for the latter has been one of the most persistently experimental educational centers in the country4 ,if its 8model0 schools have felt in the course of time the blighting touch of conventionality1 at least in the ,speyer course of industrial arts there has been developed a method of permanent value4 ,there is no more accurate application of ,dr4 ,flexner's demand that 8children should begin by getting acquainted with objects10 8follow the life-cycles of plants and animals10 8the observation and execution of industrial and commercial processes10 and so forth4 ,in this industrial arts course the children are concerned from the beginning with food-products and clothing and building and the way different peoples make their living4 ,out of this handling of homely things grow the geography and science and history and mathematics4 ,it seems only a question of time before there will be scarcely an elementary school untouched by this practical approach to knowledge through objects and projects and concrete facts4 ,dr4 ,flexner's tilting is not against our rapidly improving public elementary school so much as it is against the private secondary school1 with its sub-college1 classical1 formal curriculum1 and its obsolete educational theory of formal discipline and salvation through drudgery4 ,it is as an object-lesson for this branch of ,american education that the new school will have permanent value4 ,it will be the heaviest assault which has yet had to be met by that vested educational interest which we know as the private secondary school4 ,the private school has made it its function to prepare the sons and daughters of the well-to-do for college1 and so keep up the tradition of leisured and cultured wealth4 ,this is the ideal at the bottom of the hearts of the conservative schoolmen4 ,a knowledge which is useless1 like the formal classics and mathematics1 is only a sharpened tool of exclusiveness1 for only the younger generation of a ruling class can afford to give its time to it4 ,in a growing industrial society such an education becomes ever more and more a dividing line between classes4 ,that the public high school has been largely controlled by the same ideals does not mean at all that this kind of education has been democratized1 but merely that the unthinking and clambering middle classes have been hypnotized by vague aspirations of 8culture0 and 8intellectual training0 into imitation of the traditional ruling-class education4 ,some of the strongest opposition to vocational education in the public schools comes even from the ranks of the ambitious wage-earners who 8want their children to have the educational advantages they were denied40 ,they resent what they misinterpret as an attempt to keep their younger generation in a subordinate labor class4 ,what they do not see is that the traditional education which they admire is no real education for the modern world4 ,we find the industrious proletarian and the exclusive ,tory joining hands in opposing the new democratic education which is meant to have the effects of freeing both classes and making them fit together to administer a free society4 ,the ,tory wants to keep for his children his privileged status2 the wage-earner wants to obtain for his children this privileged status4 8,book0 education1 innocent of practicality and use1 is still an accepted mark of this geniality4 ,neither class has any real sense yet of a democratic attitude that finds both the 8utilitarian0 and the 8cultural0 irrelevant terms1 and demands only effective activity and imaginative understanding from every citizen up to the limit of his capacity4 ,the 8old0 education then is a class-education1 and therefore has no place in a society which is trying to become democratic4 ,how much class-feeling is behind the current allegiance to the education of discipline and drudgery is shown in a paper by ,miss ,edith ,hamilton of the ,bryn ,mawr ,school in the 8,new ,republic0 for ,february #aj1 #aiag4 ,she pleads for the 8old0 education in behalf of her girls4 ,but when she says 8school0 she has in the back of her mind an institution for the training of the well-to-do classes4 ,her argument against a change in education seems to be based on the idea that change would be prejudicial to the life which she accepts as worthiest for those fortunate classes with which she is best acquainted4 ,her argument is that life will make no stern demands upon the sheltered1 economically endowed leisure which most of her girls will enjoy4 ,without external standards their fiber must deteriorate unless they have learned the joy of work by the doing of things because they are hard4 ,without impersonal intellectual interests1 their personal energy1 she says1 will waste away in futility or in a meddlesome control of their own daughters4 ,the boy is harnessed into some kind of self-discipline by the exigencies of business life4 ,but for the girl1 the substitution in the 8modern school0 of domestic science for 8elegant accomplishments0 is only an illusory discipline4 ,not only are these arts of housekeeping too easy to provide discipline1 but they will never be demanded from the upper-class girl4 ,only the traditional curriculum1 therefore1 impersonal1 cultural1 laborious1 will give her the needed stimulus to play her leisured rle worthily4 ,at first sight nothing could be more ironic than this gospel of strenuous effort preached in the name of a sheltered class4 ,why should a girl be disciplined1 trained to do things 8because they are hard10 for a life which becomes 8easier and easier10 unless her teachers wish to provide her with some kind of moral and intellectual justification for her social rle8 ,the 8old0 education combines uselessness and effort1 and it is just this combination which would maintain leisure-class functions and yet leave the individuals morally justified4 ,the uselessness makes you exclusive and the effort satisfies your moral sense4 ,it is a little curious to find ,miss ,hamilton using the 8utilitarian0 argument against domestic science1 that is1 that it will never be used by her girls4 ,yet she wishes them to acquire 8impersonal intellectual interests10 which they can never use except in not very real 8cultural0 dabblings and social work4 ,miss ,hamilton's argument for tradition is the orthodox one that is now being repeated by all those who oppose the new ,rockefeller school4 8,the old education is superior to any training which makes interest not discipline1 efficiency not knowledge1 the standard40 ,now this point at issue between interest and discipline has been so thoroughly discussed by ,john ,dewey in his 8,interest as ,related to ,will0 and other writings1 that one is surprised at this late day to find responsible educators who are willing to give the impression that they are unacquainted with ,dewey's arguments4 ,even if disciples like ,dr4 ,flexner and myself in our enthusiasm unconsciously caricature him1 the philosophy is there in its classic form in ,dewey for all to read4 ,the curious notion of the 8old0 educator that interest makes work 8easy10 instead of intensifying the effort1 is only possible1 of course1 to minds soaked in a ,puritan tradition4 ,dewey shows that interest and discipline are not antagonistic to efficiency and knowledge1 but that knowledge is merely information effectively used and manipulated1 and discipline is willed and focused interest4 ,each has an element of the other4 ,it is meaningless to talk of interest vs4 discipline when all real interest has an organizing effect on one's activity1 and any real discipline is built up on a foundation of interest4 ,indeed in one of my articles to which ,miss ,hamilton takes exception1 ,i define discipline as 8willed skill10 which is as far from any conception of 8making things easy10 of 8smattering and superficiality10 as could well be imagined4 ,it is a superstition1 of course1 as ,miss ,hamilton says1 to suppose that all children burn with a hard gem-like flame of curiosity to know1 but it is equally a superstition to suppose that with all children strenuous drudgery flowers into the immense joy of work and creation1 or that effort taken consistently against the grain of interest can suddenly be transmuted into spontaneous activity4 ,a certain habit1 a mechanical routine spirit1 may be evolved by drudgery1 but not imaginative skill4 ,all true discipline comes from overcoming obstacles beyond which one is conscious of a goal in itself worth while4 ,it is only a feeble spirit which can be drugged by effort in and for itself4 ,in those admired cases where facility comes after conscientious but uninteresting effort1 let the old-fashioned educator ask herself whether the child gained the satisfaction of accomplishment because he went through the discipline1 or whether it was not only because he liked the satisfaction of accomplishment that he was willing to go through the drudgery4 ,if you admit the latter1 then you have admitted the case for the new education4 ,temperaments1 impulses1 interests--or1 if you like1 the lack of interests--will insist on dominating1 on determining the way each child takes his experience4 ,all education can ever do is to provide the experience1 and stimulate1 guide1 organize interests4 ,anything else may produce1 at its best1 a trained animal4 ,it will not be education1 and it will not produce men and women4 ,the task of the democratic school is to provide just this general experience and stimulation4 ,miss ,hamilton's paper shows that such a school would be a challenge to the kind of institution she has in mind when she speaks of education4 ,when leisure-class functions and leisure-class education clasp in a perfect circle1 a new sociological and industrial emphasis1 such as the 8,modern ,school0 suggests1 might make the leisure-class pupils uneasy1 restless1 questioning4 ,if you began emphasizing interest instead of drudgery1 you might find yourself calling into question the sincerity of those 8impersonal intellectual interests40 ,if you emphasized efficiency instead of knowledge1 you might make uncomfortably evident the unreality of much of what passes for culture in society to-day4 ,you would be making insecure the moral and intellectual justifications of caste4 ,but that is exactly the critical and undermining work which a democratic education is designed to stimulate4 ,these new educators are seeking a type of school which shall provide for children as human beings and not as members of any one social class4 ,they want a school which creates a common sympathy1 a common intimacy with the various activities and expressions of the modern well-rounded personality1 just so far as each individual is capable1 with his endowments and intelligence1 of acquiring such an intimacy4 ,the 8,modern ,school0 would turn the child's attention to the projects1 objects1 processes1 facts1 of the active world about him1 not because they are good in themselves1 but because they are the common stock of all classes4 ,the development of communal functions and services forces every family more or less into touch with the active world out of which the 8,modern ,school's0 curriculum grows4 ,it is in the study of these 8real things10 rather than in the logical systems of text-books1 the predigested ideals of literature or a leisured class1 the technical manipulation of dead languages and official science1 that common interest and the sense of common possession will arise4 ,the expectation is that interpretations and ideals which grow out of such a study will be more vital and sound because they will have come out of the child's own experience1 and not have been merely shoveled into his memory4 ,it is expected that the 8strenuous effort0 of the past1 which was so much an effort of memory and routine1 will become1 in a curriculum harnessed to occupational life1 an effort of interest and intelligent enthusiasm4 ,out of such a spirit and such a school should issue the self-sustained discipline by which all good work is done in the world4 ,,xxi ,a ,,policy ,,in ,,vocational ,,education ,now that the passage of the ,smith-,hughes bill is assured1 interest moves to the distribution of this federal subsidy for vocational continuation and part-time schools4 ,for the actual sums appropriated1 even the maximum which will be available in nine years1 are too small to be of constructive significance4 ,indeed there is something grotesque about the solemn and arduous study which went into the passage of this timid educational bill by a ,congress which could appropriate a full third of a billion for armaments4 ,the ,smith-,hughes bill has all the aspect of a pious wish rather than the beginning of a thorough national policy in education4 ,there was nothing revolutionary in this principle of federal aid4 ,the principle was established by the ,morrill act of #ahfb and recently confirmed by the ,smith-,lever bill for agricultural education4 ,the halting character of this new legislation must be explained partly by the novelty of vocational training in ,america and by the extremely confused condition of mind about it4 ,we scarcely know yet how to institute a vocational education that will make out of our youth effective workers and at the same time free and initiating citizens4 ,the hopeless lack of cordination between industry and our educational system blocks and bewilders our efforts4 ,in working towards a solution we meet two very real perils4 ,when we attempt a cordination we run the risk of turning the public school into a mere preparatory school for factory1 store and workshop1 producing helpless workers riveted by their very training to a rigid and arbitrary industrial life4 ,the better trained they are1 or at least the more intense their specialization1 the greater will be their subjection4 ,organized labor fears1 and not unjustly1 that a public vocational education might be the means of over-crowding the labor market and thereby 8furnishing strike-breakers to industry40 ,this is always the danger when we attempt to adjust our training too tightly to existing industrial conditions4 ,on the other hand1 if we try to evade this danger and make the young worker's training more general1 so that a number of fields of industrial opportunity will be open to him1 we may leave him more helpless than ever1 for he has no assurance of being fit for the very concrete demands of skill that paying industry will make upon him4 ,this is the dilemma4 ,if the organization of vocational training is left in charge of the representatives of the employers1 educators fear1 and fear rightly1 that the first result will ensue4 ,if it is left exclusively in the hands of educators1 the employers fear the other danger4 ,vocational education in this country has1 therefore1 run its uncertain course through experiments in continuation schools1 8pre-vocational0 courses in the regular schools1 trade courses1 8coperative0 courses1 until a certain skepticism has been aroused in the minds of professional educators and the interested public whether we can institute a workable system at all in our present public school4 ,skepticism has meant hesitation4 ,in spite of the propaganda and survey work of an influential society of educators1 employers and labor men--the ,national ,society for the ,promotion of ,industrial ,education--progress has been very slow4 ,only eight states have provided for the encouragement of vocational education and in only one is continuation schooling compulsory4 ,the whole movement has needed some very definite concentrated stimulus and some new1 clear focusing of the issues4 ,this is the real value of the new federal bill4 ,if it is negligible in its actual power for aid1 its indirect effects should be of great importance in the way of stimulus4 ,it will undoubtedly suggest to the majority of states the immediate establishment of a comprehensive system of continuation schools4 ,the grants will be just large enough to make it seem possible4 ,they are not nearly large enough to exempt the states from local appropriations4 ,according to the federal bill these must duplicate the federal grants4 ,the latter will therefore mean actual additional resources1 an increment to local and state appropriations4 ,if the states are wise1 and appropriate this increment to the payment and training of teachers1 then these small sums may be made to mean just the difference between the present hardly attained mediocrity of vocational teaching and a new and effective type of artisan-instructors4 ,the bill puts the distribution of the funds in the hands of such state boards as the legislatures shall designate4 ,the latter may designate the regular state board of education1 or a special board of industrial education working under the direction of the regular board1 or it may create a new and independent board to handle these funds4 ,no state is likely to trifle with this now thoroughly discredited 8dual0 system originally sponsored in ,illinois under the form of separate boards controlled wholly by employing interests4 ,the practical choice will lie between the purely 8educational0 control and the mixed educational1 industrial and labor control1 such as exists in ,wisconsin4 ,the objection to the former grows persistently on the ground that the new vocational methods and work tend infallibly in the hands of the professional educator to drift back to the academic4 ,educators have too often shown a willingness either to divorce the 8pre-vocational0 work entirely from the regular school1 or else to emasculate it of its realistic potency4 ,instead of seeing the new practical emphasis infusing and reinvigorating the regular primary and secondary school1 the enthusiast for the 8new0 education has too often had to watch merely the slow reduction of the vocational work to the old unimaginative level of 8manual training40 ,the question of control1 therefore1 which the new bill puts indirectly to the states is of the greatest moment1 both to the traditional type of school and to the new activities4 ,the board that distributes the funds will in the last analysis control the policy4 ,certainly the conservatism of the professional educator is far less to be feared than the narrowness and self-interest of employers' associations4 ,in following the provisions of the federal bill that the aided schools shall be below college grade1 for children over fourteen1 the state board will control the standards of the individual schools4 ,whichever form of control is adopted1 the trend towards state centralization of the school system is likely to be greatly strengthened4 ,in this development the states will be influenced largely by the experience of ,wisconsin and ,massachusetts1 where the continuation schools1 part-time schools1 apprentice classes1 which the bill encourages1 have been longest in operation4 ,the ,wisconsin experience will be found particularly instructive4 ,the state subsidizes its vocational schools by duplicating the funds raised by the community under an obligatory half-mill tax4 ,the local schools are under the control of a special board of industrial education appointed by the local board of education1 and consisting of the superintendent of schools with two labor representatives and two employers4 ,the distribution of the state funds is in the hands of the regular state educational administration4 ,there is an advisory industrial board of similar composition to the local boards4 ,at present the situation is much confused owing to the reluctance of this state board of industrial education to remain merely advisory4 ,a 8developer0 has been appointed as its secretary1 an expert in the field1 but without administrative power over the schools4 ,his attempts at acceleration have produced their inevitable and intense resentment among the regular school officials4 ,obviously such a system1 with two boards contending for mastery1 creates an impossible situation4 ,with the exception of this--and the actual effect of this very largely personal and political feud upon the local development seems to have been negligible--the ,wisconsin system seems to be based on sound principles4 ,the local industrial boards have worked with effectiveness and responsibility4 ,in ,milwaukee a remarkable system of continuation schools has been built up1 which provides for no less than eight thousand children between the ages of fourteen and seventeen1 children whom the public and parochial schools have sloughed off into 8blind-alley0 work1 and at whose education and guidance the city makes a last stab in the four-hour-a-week continuation school4 ,one definite principle these ,milwaukee schools seem to have established--that education must not be 8preparatory0 to work1 that there is no real place for the merely 8pre-vocational10 but that education should accompany work and do that just as long as there is anything to learn4 ,the ideal vocational education will be a liberal 8part-time0 education1 in which the school furnishes the background and the constant opening of new suggestions and possibilities1 and the shop or trade or office provides the arena for acting skilfully on what is learned4 ,the ,wisconsin system is particularly suggestive4 ,for the local boards constitute one of our first ,american attempts at representation by interest instead of political parties or arbitrary geographical divisions4 ,their success is largely ascribed in ,wisconsin to this fact1 that they do accurately represent just the three classes most concerned in this form of education--organized labor1 the employers1 and the professional schoolman4 ,the labor representatives are on the board to see that the policy does not swing over to narrow employing interests1 the employers are on the board to see that the school is kept in touch with the practical demands of industry4 ,the professional educator holds the balance of power between these two interests4 ,with this administrative development to build on1 with the improvement in teaching caliber that the new federal grants should bring1 with the state centralization of the school system to which the new bill will give impetus1 the future is good for a national system of education for work and with work1 a free and democratic vocational training4 ,,xxii ,,an ,,issue ,,in ,,vocational ,,education ,nothing is more significant of the new spirit in public education than our use of the term 8vocational training40 ,it strikes out at a blow the old antithesis between the cultural and the utilitarian4 ,for a genuine vocation implies neither a life devoted to thought1 nor a dull mechanical job to which personal and artistic and intellectual interests are mere trimmings--recreations which can be easily omitted by those who cannot afford to pay for them4 ,a vocation is rather a nucleus of any kind of interesting activity by which one earns one's living1 and around which whatever else comes to one's experience clusters to enhance its value and interest4 ,it is not fantastic to hope that the very demands of modern industrial technique will make of most trades just such nuclei4 ,when we justify trade-schools and industrial courses by the existence of law and medical and engineering schools1 we are implying that the skilled worker in modern industry can and should lead a life as genuinely 8professional0 as the lawyer and doctor and engineer4 ,new ,york ,city has at the present time 7,june1 #aiae7 a unique opportunity to meet these important issues4 ,in no other city has the question been so squarely presented4 ,new ,york has to choose between what is called the ,ettinger plan1 put into operation by a local superintendent to solve 8part-time0 and vocational training problems1 and the ,gary plan1 as worked out by ,william ,wirt and now on trial under his personal direction in several of the ,new ,york schools4 ,in that choice may be indicated the tendencies and purposes of industrial education in this country4 ,the ,ettinger plan emphasizes in the sharpest way the difference between 8cultural0 and 8industrial0 work4 ,the child chooses between them in his sixth or seventh year of school4 ,if economic pressure is going to force him into manual work1 he is allowed to try a number of different trades in the school industrial shops in order to discover what he is best fitted for4 ,this hasty experimentation has received the schoolman's label of 8prevocational40 ,having chosen his trade1 the young worker specializes in the shop1 under conditions as nearly as possible like the trade1 continuing in trade-school or technical high school1 or in the industry under a coperative scheme1 as in the ,german schools4 ,his academic studies1 as far as they are continued1 are of a severely practical character1 theory and science being used merely to explain the industrial processes which he is learning4 ,the ideal is a specialized school1 gradually breaking off from the traditional one and developing radically different methods and interests4 ,the object of the industrial course is to turn out a competent workman who has escaped the blind occupations of those who leave school at the minimum age4 ,the school under this plan may give the child an elementary industrial training1 with an intellectual orientation better than he could get under any system of apprenticeship1 but it can scarcely be said to give a vocational training4 ,the ,ettinger plan treats the child solely as a potential workman who is to be absorbed as a permanent subordinate in one specialized trade of a rigidly organized industrial system4 ,it makes of the school a mere downward extension of the staple trades and machine industries1 a sort of kindergarten where the employer gets his workmen trained1 free of cost to himself4 ,it quite ignores any other rles the young worker may be called upon to play in society--as citizen or as member of an economic class4 ,it makes an undemocratic class-division in the public school1 and by divorcing the academic from the industrial work gives to both the wrong setting4 ,the ,gary plan1 on the other hand1 prepares for a genuinely vocational life4 ,it views the world outside the school not as a collection of trades but as a community1 a network of occupations and interests1 of interweaving services1 intellectual1 administrative1 manual4 ,it sees the individual as a citizen who contributes his share to the community and pays for the things he enjoys4 ,the school itself is organized as a community1 self-supporting industrially and as varied in its work1 study and play as is the larger community4 ,the industrial work is made an indispensable part of the maintenance and enhancement of this school community life4 ,the ,gary child begins in his third or fourth school year as helper in a shop or laboratory that interests him4 ,if he is to work at a trade after he leaves school1 he gets a long and thorough training under real workmen in the school shops engaged in the repair and maintenance of the school-plant4 ,he is at no time called upon to choose between the 8academic0 and the 8industrial40 ,his work is a focusing of all the interests of the school1 and the attitudes developed in the school are bound to be carried into productive life and to give a new setting to the business of making a livelihood4 ,science1 apart from the light it throws upon the artisan's trade1 is bound to mean something to him1 for in the ,gary school it has answered his questions about the physical world around him4 ,history and geography and sociology and economics are likely to mean something because they have answered questions about the social institutions and the relations of men4 ,art and music will continue to interest him because they have been an integral part of the school life4 ,the ,gary plan would tend to produce not only a skilled workman but a critical citizen1 ready1 like the energetic professional man1 to affect the standards and endeavors of his profession and the community life4 ,the ,ettinger plan is as economically unsound as it is pedagogically unsound4 ,it requires special teachers1 and expensive shops which are unproductive4 ,without state or federal subsidies1 the cost of any extensive or even adequate industrial training in trade-school or elementary school will continue to be prohibitive4 ,the ,gary plan1 which connects the school shops directly with the repair and maintenance of the school-plant1 demands and can afford a much greater variety of shops than the ordinary school4 ,and since the workmen-teachers earn their salaries by their work1 the children get their industrial training practically without cost to the community4 ,by the ,gary plan the vocational training features are only practicable if all the other liberally varied 8cultural0 features are put into operation at the same time4 ,this effectually prevents that 8exploitation0 of the children which its opponents fear because the young workers get their training as 8apprentices0 in the school shops4 ,many who admit the superior social aims of the ,gary plan are inclined to feel that the practical results of the two plans will not be radically different4 ,but the ,gary plan and the ,ettinger plan are not merely two different ways of reaching the same end4 ,they not only involve different conceptions of the school and of industrial society1 but they are bound to turn out different kinds of people4 ,the ,ettinger plan is dangerous because it is typical of most schemes now being put forward by the advocates of industrial education4 ,these plans are concerned neither with genuine educational interests nor with genuine industrial interests1 but only with the interest of the employer4 ,no person who feels that the public schools should train critical citizens who will have something to say to the industrial system into which they go1 and not mere docile workers1 counting socially no more than their tools1 will fail to realize the vast importance that the ,gary plan should prevail over all these schemes4 ,,xxiii ,,organized ,,labor ,,on ,,education ,at a recent labor conference in ,new ,york ,city1 ,may1 #aiaf1 called to present a program for the local public schools1 ,mr4 ,gompers expressed himself as open-minded towards the ,gary plan which is about to be extended to thirty-five more ,new ,york schools4 ,this open-mindedness of ,mr4 ,gompers is in welcome and significant contrast to the attitude taken by some of the smaller leaders in the city1 who have apparently tried to line up organized labor with a personal political machine and with reactionary schoolmen in obstructing the reorganization of the elementary schools4 ,but organized labor has better business than opposing educational reform1 and ,mr4 ,gompers's remarks1 made with full responsibility and in direct opposition to the thinly-veiled partisan spirit of the conference1 suggest that the responsible leaders of labor are willing to take a more enlightened stand in this important movement4 ,organized labor has repeatedly gone on record in favor of a public school system which will train a labor citizenry so versatile and intelligent as to be able to protect itself from exploitation and the hazards of our social shiftlessness4 ,it has demanded that vocational teaching be kept intimately related to life1 so that children come out from the school neither helpless unskilled workers nor narrow machine-tenders1 but potential citizens acquainted with the backgrounds of their crafts1 with the significance of the labor movement and the institutions and movements of the world about them4 ,labor above all classes has a vital interest in an education for all children which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meanings of industrial processes and occupations4 ,the education that labor desires is one which will give1 particularly to those who engage in industrial callings1 the desire and ability to share in social control1 and to become masters of their industrial fate4 ,now organized labor must be rapidly coming to see that this demand will never be satisfied by the conventional type of city public school4 ,a traditional school founded on the bookish education of a leisure class can never be made into a pre-vocational school that will give power and dignity to labor1 without a fundamental transformation of the present spirit1 subject matter and teaching methods4 ,an elementary school which gives its children no more than narrow drill in the three ,r's plus a little remote and unreal text-book information in history and geography1 with what little half-hearted music and drawing and nature-study can be squeezed in1 will never provide the foundation that the trained worker will need4 ,no system of trade-training or vocational education superimposed upon such an elementary school will remedy the evils4 ,children who have been listlessly and ineffectively drilled in book-work will have acquired attitudes that are likely to be carried over into vocational work4 ,except for the few1 industrial training will seem sheer drudgery1 for it will have its roots in no interests and powers developed in earlier years4 ,pre-vocational education must mean something more than a mere sop to the motor-minded boys and girls who are restless with their books and are on the verge of leaving school for work4 ,such training1 if it is to mean anything1 must be woven in as an organic part of the school course4 ,the entire elementary school could be a general1 free1 spontaneous1 amateur pre-vocational school1 where in direct contact with machines and industrial processes as well as books1 with gardens and gymnasiums as well as laboratories and kitchens1 with tools and print and pottery shops and drawing and music studios1 children might have their imaginations stirred1 try out their busy hands on things1 and gradually sift out of the variety the interests that they can lay hold on with some promise of creative use4 ,the school might be a place where play passed insensibly into work1 and aimless experiment into purposeful construction4 ,most of the current criticism of the public schools arises from the rapidly growing conviction that only in such a school will the modern city child have a chance to be educated in any way which will meet the demands in industrial or commercial life that will be made upon him4 ,there is danger in current educational experiments that we become too easily satisfied with the mere addition of desirable courses1 without at the same time transforming the school so that the new work is organically assimilated4 ,labor cannot be content with the school reform which many cities are adopting in the introduction of vocational courses merely in the upper grades4 ,such a postponement means an invidious class-distinction in those grades between the children who are going on to academic work and those who are going on to industrial work4 ,it broadens the gulf between labor and leisure rather than diminishes it4 ,labor should be the first to protest against these 8pre-vocational courses10 8junior high school plans10 as they are variously called4 ,a school which consists merely of six years of bookish schooling with trade-learning and athletics tacked on at the top would merely intensify the evils under which labor now suffers4 ,it would produce mechanical drudges4 ,it would almost guarantee that industrially exploitable horde of young workers the creation of which organized labor so much fears4 ,in advocating such a system the lesser labor chiefs in ,new ,york have been very badly advised4 ,the program of 8immediate demands10 put forth under ,mr4 ,gompers's nose with a great flourish of the rights of labor1 is not only unprogressive but actually reactionary4 ,it is exactly the kind of specious program that the narrow-minded employer might demand who wished a docile but intelligent labor force trained at the public expense4 ,in whose interest does labor demand the 8immediate elimination from the course of study of any activity which takes away from the essentials and fundamentals of education in the elementary schools80 ,to eliminate organized play1 auditorium dramatics1 shopwork1 gardening1 dancing1 etc41 is surely the best way to drive children out of school1 or to train them into mere appendages to machines4 ,what labor needs is the most varied kind of work-study-and-play school1 where imagination and interest are awakened4 ,yet here we find a conference on organized labor and education demanding simply more of the old kind of traditional schools6 ,what good will it do to have more school buildings1 more teachers1 more pay for teachers1 even more night-schools and playgrounds1 if the schools merely pursue the old limited grind8 ,labor needs a school enriched in opportunity and vitalized with the modern spirit of 8learning by doing10 yet all it can think of to demand is 8a seat for every child06 ,and to ram home to the public a sense of its straitened vision1 this conference records its 8emphatic protest against any further extension of the ,gary plan40 ,now opposition to the ,gary plan may be a useful attitude for the lesser labor leaders who are playing for political stakes1 but we cannot believe that this is the attitude of the intelligent elements in the labor movement4 ,for what the ,gary plan does is exactly to make possible for the first time on a large public scale this greatly enriched elementary school which labor needs for the realization of its own expressed educational ideals4 ,the broad curriculum1 the flexibility which adapts the school to the needs of every child1 the interweaving work1 study and play1 transform the traditional school into a kind of child-community1 where children throughout the course are laying the rudiments of their vocations4 ,they have a chance from the early years1 by trial and error1 by experiment and realization1 to find out what they can do and what they cannot do4 ,to quote ,superintendent ,wirt1 the ,gary school is educating them just as the home1 shop and school teacher educated the children of earlier ,american days4 ,no formal pre-vocational course begun in the seventh or eighth year can do what this simple intimate contact with things and processes does4 ,in a sense1 industrial education may begin in the ,gary school as soon as the small child is interested in going into the school-shops or laboratories as helper or observer4 ,all the activities may be tested in the same way4 ,the school is thoroughly democratic because the opportunities1 bookish1 manual1 artistic1 are open on equal terms to all the children4 ,for labor to oppose the ,gary plan means that labor is suicidally opposing the very kind of school that holds out the most opportunity for an enriched education for its children4 ,mr4 ,gompers and the other responsible leaders of organized labor could do nothing more important than make an immediate and thorough study of the educational promise of the ,gary school4 ,if organized labor were to put itself enthusiastically behind the ,gary plan1 it would have at once an enlightened policy on elementary education which would effectively prevent any insidious exploitation of the movement4 ,it would be well if the responsible leaders would repudiate these lesser labor chiefs who manipulate education for political purposes4 ,the time has come for a bold and progressive stand4 ,,xxiv ,,education ,,for ,,work ,the urgency of vocational education in this country has been immensely reinforced during the past few years by the rapidly growing social solicitude for child welfare4 ,child-labor laws1 compulsory education1 minimum wage1 children's courts1 welfare bureaus1 devised primarily as mere protective agencies for the weaker and less self-defensible members of the community1 are now suddenly seen to involve a host of positive social responsibilities4 ,we are recognizing that the state has a duty not only to save the younger generation from exploitation1 premature labor and demoralizing environments1 but also to give it every possible opportunity to be trained for an effective vocation4 ,in particular1 the recent raising of the age limit for child labor in many of the states1 by keeping in school thousands of children who would otherwise have passed out to work1 has put a great strain upon the public school4 ,the challenge so far has done little else than make evident an alarming inadequacy of the present type of school to train children for the work which they will shortly be called upon to do4 ,the school systems of the large northern cities are having thrust upon them great numbers of children for whose education1 in this new sense of the word1 they are unprepared4 ,and the burden and urgency is one that will increase rather than diminish4 ,this is one of the lessons of a document like the recent admirable report of the ,minneapolis ,survey for ,vocational ,education1 made last year under the auspices of the ,national ,society for the ,promotion of ,industrial ,education4 ,it would be difficult to advise reading more important for educator1 employer and employee than this cross-section of the skilled-labor life of a great ,american city1 looked at with a view to vocational guidance4 ,in ,minneapolis all the conditions were at their best for such a social laboratory experiment4 ,the rapid growth of manufacturing and the unusually high proportion of skilled industries make the demand for the training of workers paramount4 ,the stringent state laws require attendance at the school until the age of sixteen or the completion of the entire elementary course4 ,the city has a school system of high traditional excellence4 ,clearly all the factors that would stimulate a campaign for vocational education are here in their most exacting form4 ,the analysis here given of the training which the manufacturing and mechanical industries require for their various skilled positions1 the training which public schools and special schools are purporting to give1 the increase in resources which school and shop will have to make to meet the social demands made upon them--all this will be found typical in greater or less degree throughout the country4 ,the most general impression one gets from the ,survey is of industrial unpreparedness4 ,the public school is seen not with its usual fault as an institution of general education which has ignored pre-vocational needs1 but as a pre-vocational school of narrow and exclusive type1 for the vocational training of the classes in the community whose actual need was least4 ,for above the earlier years of rudimentary schooling there has been superimposed a bookish school which is really a pre-vocational school for the professions or for domestic leisure4 ,the boys and girls whose futures were to be professional and domestic had the benefit of the public school4 ,the vast majority1 the motor-minded and those whose aptitudes were not intellectual1 very properly and automatically left this bookish school as soon as they had obtained their rudimentary general education4 ,when the state suddenly refuses to allow these children to leave the school until they have finished the elementary course1 the school system is faced with the necessity of broadening itself from a narrow pre-vocational school for the professions into a pre-vocational school for all the industries and arts of the modern community4 ,the smatterings of wood-working and domestic science which the city schools have introduced are shown not to have broadened the school in the least4 ,even the technical courses in the high schools have quite failed to meet the problem4 ,of the recent graduates from these courses in the ,minneapolis schools it is shown that one-half went directly to college1 only one-tenth passing into occupations for which the course could in any way be regarded as preparatory4 ,most of these students1 moreover1 went into drafting rooms4 ,it may be said therefore that to the training of the great artisan class of such a modern and progressive city the public schools have contributed practically nothing4 ,a typically ,american progressive school system with all its technical and manual accessories is shown functioning at its very highest limit as a pre-vocational school1 not for skilled labor1 but for the professions and what the ,survey suggestively calls the 8commissioned officers of industry40 ,the industries themselves1 however1 are found to be no more adequately engaged than the school in training their own workers4 ,apprenticeship has all but died out1 and among neither employers nor employees is there any enthusiasm for its return4 ,yet1 although all the trades require a constant supply of trained workers1 no substitute has yet been found for apprenticeship4 ,the movement for industrial education has at times seemed like an attempt of employers to get their skilled workers trained at public expense4 ,the effort to establish separate boards in the cities for industrial education threatened to limit such training to the narrow skill which each industry would demand and to supply employers with apprentices at no cost to the industry itself4 ,fortunately the ,minneapolis ,survey warns against this narrow and sinister conception of vocational education4 ,industrial interests cannot shirk the responsibility for the special training of their workers4 ,the rapid growth of 8corporation schools0 shows that at least the most prosperous and highly skilled shops and factories are accepting this responsibility4 ,all the employer has a right to demand is that the school give the young worker a general pre-vocational training which will introduce him to the special trade work4 ,the graduate of the elementary school should have been through a well rounded course which not only cultivated a general intelligence1 but discovered1 by submitting him to many different kinds of activity1 his particular flair or knack1 and thus enlisted his interest in further training for a particular vocation4 ,the elementary school should1 in other words1 be a general pre-vocational school1 where the boy or girl could get a bearing towards every type of vocation4 ,the ,survey strikingly confirms the far-sighted vision of ,william ,wirt and his unspecialized and varied ,gary school in which the children from their earliest years are testing out their powers in shop and foundry and laboratory and studio and classroom4 8,what is needed10 it says1 8is not a course in special woodworking--the extent of manual work in most elementary schools of the present time--but rather organized training in practical arts which will include a variety of experiences fundamental to the life of the community4 ,woodwork1 metal work1 printing and bookbinding1 clay modeling1 concrete and electrical work1 are some of the industries which give an opportunity for experience in certain fundamental processes which are most valuable to boys without respect to the occupation in which they may later engage40 ,in the last year of the elementary school1 or in the years of the junior high school1 more specialized technical courses could be introduced4 ,for the advanced work1 more and more responsibility should be thrown on the shop1 the school providing the background of theory1 the shop the practical application1 and the student alternating between shop and school as in the so-called coperative course4 ,for the workers already engaged1 part-time continuation classes are advised1 with 8dull-season classes10 and evening trade-extension courses4 ,for these the various special schools in the city1 commercial and technical1 could coperate4 ,in this correlation of shop and school a new form of apprenticeship would grow up4 ,the ,survey reports trade agreements already worked out in several trades which provide that after two years of high-school instruction in practical1 technical and academic subjects1 the worker will be placed in the occupation at wages equal to those of a third-year apprentice4 ,the agreements require the approval of the union1 and the employers agree to use the school as the first source of supply in engaging new workers4 ,on some such constructive lines as are suggested in this ,minneapolis ,survey will the problems of vocational education be worked out4 ,in its discussion of such topics as home gardening1 office work1 art education1 domestic service1 the ,survey suggests the breadth of the field to be covered4 ,an ideal system of vocational training would not only give every boy and girl in the school an opportunity to find an aptitude and cultivate some skill but it would make possible the training of 8non-commissioned officers0 in the industrial army4 ,the education of such leaders will really be the goal of organized vocational education4 ,as the industries1 trades and occupations become more technical and more scientifically managed1 the demand for administrative1 supervisory1 directive and planning officers taken from the ranks is constantly widening4 ,efficient management is becoming recognized as almost the most important factor in production1 and management will be the reward for intelligence and skill4 ,until we have an educational system which in coperation with shop and factory gives fullest opportunities for each child in the schools to work towards qualifying as such a 8non-commissioned officer0 in some occupation of the social army1 we shall not have our democratic school or our framework for the future democratization of industry4 ,nor shall we be able to attack those mountainous problems of unskilled labor which no system of vocational training can touch4 ,,xxv ,,continuation ,,schools ,the movement for vocational education has done nothing more valuable than to show us how far we are still from realizing the public school as a child-community1 first of all as a quickening life and only secondarily as an educational institution4 ,the rapidly extending 8continuation school0 is perhaps the most obvious symptom of this failure4 ,the term itself is unfortunate1 for it drags along with it the old separation of education from living4 ,it suggests something in the way of a surplus1 of extension schooling beyond an allotted time1 as if its pupils were getting an educational largess out of some great social bounty4 ,actually the 8continuation school0 represents educational deficit2 the necessity for it registers our failure to provide an earlier school-community life for children which would have kept them out of industry4 ,also it registers our failure to provide child-labor laws which would have protected them4 ,the continuation school is officially a 8school for employed minors fourteen to sixteen years of age10 and is intended to hold1 by the tenuous thread of four to six hours a week school attendance1 those boys and girls who have gotten their employment certificates at the earliest legal age and are floundering about in low-paid occupations1 mostly unskilled4 ,new ,york ,city alone has #eh1jjj such children1 fourteen and fifteen years of age1 two-thirds of whom have never completed the elementary school4 ,stores1 offices1 shops1 domestic service1 messenger service absorb these boys and girls1 untrained and unfocused1 and the truly formidable burden is placed upon them of making their skilful way in the world4 ,popular tradition tries to make us glow with the belief that this world is a ladder up which virtue and industry will automatically ascend4 ,but unfortunately the ladder of opportunity rarely reaches down so far4 ,the lowest rung is beyond their reach4 ,the gap between it and the ground is often too great even for initiative and character to bridge4 ,the 8employed minors fourteen to sixteen years of age0 become the nucleus for that partly employed1 sodden and anemic mass of drifters which drags down labor everywhere and clogs social progress4 ,the education which these children have had has in most cases barely fitted them to remain upright on the ground1 not to speak of reaching for the ladder4 ,the acquirement of literacy1 a more or less uncertain skill in figuring1 the exposure to some miscellaneous historical and geographical information--this has been the real substance of their five or six years' schooling4 ,to most of these children it is probable that the world of printed symbols will never mean very much4 ,a real school would have striven to awaken their concrete and constructive intelligence1 given play to all the non-intellectual impulses4 ,it is just the tedium and artificiality of the old school which has sentenced them now to stand at the bottom of the occupational scale4 ,without class-prestige1 economic advantages1 manners1 extraordinary initiative or intelligence1 most of these children are handicapped from the start4 ,literate1 they are perhaps fitted to compete on equal terms with each other for work4 ,but for the passing into better-paid1 more interesting1 more responsible and skilful activity1 their schooling1 though it came at the most plastic and active time of childhood1 has done nothing whatever4 ,we try1 therefore1 through the 8continuation school0 to make up bravely to these children what they have lost4 ,we try to lift them so that they can clutch at the lowest rung of the ladder4 ,we find it easier to make stabs at repairing the damage than to reorganize the elementary school so as to prevent it4 ,in ,wisconsin cities a boy or girl leaving school at fourteen to go to work is required to attend day continuation school four or five hours a week for three years4 ,in ,boston the children must attend for four hours a week for two years4 ,in ,pennsylvania cities they must attend eight hours a week for two years4 ,continuation schools for #bj1jjj children are in process of formation by the ,new ,york ,city ,board of ,education4 ,wisconsin's forty-five industrial and continuation schools are compulsory1 while in the other states which have permissive laws the schools may be made locally compulsory4 ,employers are required to dismiss their child employees on working days and within working hours1 the school time being reckoned as part of the time that minors are permitted by law to work4 ,such laws obviously follow the line of least resistance4 ,they add to the school system without revitalizing it4 ,at the same time1 a scheme like the ,massachusetts plan suggests that the continuation school may be developed into a real stimulus of incentive4 ,this plan provides for three kinds of classes4 ,for those 8employed minors0 who are already in semi-skilled work1 it provides some training and background for the trade or occupation chosen4 ,there are also trade preparatory classes for pupils who have definitely chosen the trade for which they wish training1 but have not yet found placement in the trade4 ,then there are 8pre-vocational0 classes for those who are ambitious to make some intelligent choice of an occupation4 ,these pupils are given varied shopwork1 visits to shops and factories1 and personal consultation with teachers and employers4 ,classes are small1 and intensive work can be done4 ,the other pupils1 employed in unskilled labor and without definite vocational leanings1 go into 8general improvement courses10 where half the time is spent in regular school subjects continuing the elementary school work2 a quarter of the time is devoted to 8the discovery and development of dominant interests and powers10 and the rest of the time to what is quaintly called 8civics1 hygiene1 recreation and culture40 ,in this latter activity one-quarter of the time of the 8pre-vocational0 and trade courses is similarly spent4 ,pupils may transfer from one class to another when they are ready4 ,if the purpose of the continuation school is to bridge that gap between the ground and the level where opportunity can at all begin to mean anything1 this ,massachusetts plan would seem to do it in an easily graduated and flexible way4 ,the untrained and unfocused worker has at least a chance to have his imagination stimulated and to learn the rudiments of some better work4 ,the sanguine advocates of the continuation school1 however1 are apt to assume that this chance is equivalent to an effective vocational training4 ,they forget that of the #aj1jjj or more children whom ,wisconsin provides with compulsory continuation schooling a majority must necessarily remain in the general improvement classes or else get only a rudimentary training4 ,and five hours a week for education against fifty for routine labor is not likely to make over the boys and girls who are pulled into the school for a brief respite from the department stores1 messenger and domestic service1 mills and factories1 millinery and dressmaking shops4 ,even in the stimulating ,massachusetts atmosphere one hour a week for 8civics1 hygiene1 recreation and culture0 seems hardly availing4 ,in the light of the kind of school-community life which every progressive state now knows enough to provide and could afford to provide1 the continuation school seems a pathetic if necessary palliative for our educational sins4 ,already loud complaints are heard against 8allowing the public school to pass on its failures for some one else to bury40 ,the first lesson of the continuation school is that it should not be needed4 ,even employers repeatedly declare that to industry children under sixteen are of no real value as workers4 ,the states are one after another jacking up their child-labor limit to sixteen years4 ,we are rapidly coming to the public conviction that the school should care for all children's activity up to that age4 ,what the continuation school does now for four hours a week1 we are insisting that the regular school shall do for thirty or even forty hours a week4 ,but this means that we shall have to have a reinvigorated school4 ,it must not be a prison where children are kept when they long for the freedom of outside work4 ,it must be a place where full opportunity for expression is provided for each child in a varied life of study and work and play4 ,it must be an organic life and not an institution4 ,no system of industrial and continuation schools piled on at the top will effect this4 ,the evening school has largely failed because it demanded an impossible concentration and perseverance from the over-fatigued and excitement-craving worker4 ,the continuation school1 dealing with restless and unintegrated children1 will be ineffective for the same reason4 ,the vocational movement goes blundering on in amazing disregard of the psychology of the worker4 ,even the docile ,german child1 it is said1 must be coerced into his admirable continuation school where he gets a thorough orientation in his relations to his work1 the community and his comrades4 ,what are admirable trades and studies going to mean to boys and girls who are doing the most rudimentary work1 their impulses undirected1 their minds filled with sex-fantasy1 personal mirages1 and all the cheap and feeble excitements of the city streets8 ,the groping and desiring spirit of youth is going indomitably to resist your most thoughtful schemes until you have a school which from the earliest years1 by its freedom1 its expressive life1 its broad communal and personal excitements1 its contact with real things1 provides a child-life which meets these inner needs4 ,our best ,american public schools already begin to show that such a child-community life is not at all impossible4 ,until we achieve it generally1 our continuation school will be one of the stop-gaps1 and a lusty warning of what we have failed to achieve4 ,,xxvi ,,who ,,owns ,,the ,,universities ,the marked and immediate reaction of the thinking public to the ,scott ,nearing case shows a growing conviction that all is not well within the conventional forms of university control4 ,it implies a sense that universities1 whether supported by the state or privately1 are becoming too vitally institutions of public service to be much longer directed on the plan of a private corporation4 ,university trustees are generally men of affairs1 and as men of affairs they naturally tend to hold the same attitude towards the university that they do to the other institutions--the churches and railroads and corporations--they may direct4 ,the university officers whom they appoint seem to have exactly the same duties of upholding the credit of the institution1 of securing funds to meet its pressing needs1 of organizing the administrative machinery1 which their corporation officers would have4 ,professors are engaged by contract as any highly-skilled superintendent would be engaged in a factory4 ,if a well-paid subordinate of a mining corporation could not get along with his colleagues and his men1 or if he consorted with the ,i4 ,w4 ,w4 or made revolutionary speeches in the streets1 his services would be dispensed with as readily as the ,pennsylvania trustees rid themselves of the unpleasantness of ,professor ,nearing4 ,trustees may respect a professor more than they do intrinsically a fourth vice-president4 ,they may tend to err1 as ,chancellor ,day has suggested1 on the side of 8merciful consideration40 ,but they cannot see that the amenities of the case materially alter the professor's status4 ,this would be the case of university trustees stated in its rawest terms4 ,that they tend so often to act as if they were a mere board of directors of a private corporation gives rise to endless suspicion that they consult their own interests and the interests of the donors of the vested wealth they represent as trustees of the university1 just as they would protect1 as faithful corporation directors1 the interests of the shareholders of the company4 ,it is just this attitude which the thinking public is no longer inclined to tolerate4 ,we are acquiring a new view of the place of the university in the community4 ,when the ,american college was no more than an advanced boys' academy1 there may have been some excuse for this form of control by self-perpetuating and irresponsible boards of trustees4 ,but many things have changed since ,harvard and ,yale1 ,princeton1 ,pennsylvania and ,columbia1 were founded4 ,now this determined autocracy may not have worked so badly when most of the trustees and practically all of the instructors were ministers of the ,gospel1 although even in those days faculties sometimes complained that their careful plans were overridden by men ignorant of collegiate business and little interested in educational policy4 ,the demand that trustees' functions should be limited to the management of funds1 leaving the faculties to regulate administration and control appointments is a hoary one4 ,but with the passing of control from the ghostly to the moneyed element1 the gulf between trustee and professor has become extreme4 ,professors have fallen into a more and more subordinate place1 and the president1 who used to be their representative1 has now become almost entirely the executive agent of the trustees1 far removed in power and purse and public distinction from the professor4 ,the university president in this country has become a convenient symbol for autocratic power1 but even when he has become a 8mayor of the palace0 and professors may not approach their governors except through him1 the real autocracy still lies in the external board behind him4 ,this absentee and amateur form of university control is being constantly ratified by our ,american notions of democracy1 and that folkway1 which runs so omnipresently through our institutional life1 of giving the plain ultimate citizen control1 in order that we may be protected from the tyranny of the bureaucrat4 ,the newer state universities are controlled in exactly the same spirit4 ,regents1 elected by legislatures1 have shown themselves quite as capable as the most private trustees of representing vested political interests4 ,nor has democracy been achieved by the cautious admission1 in recent years1 of alumni trustees1 as in the case of ,columbia1 or1 as in the case of ,harvard and ,yale1 by the substitution of alumni for the former state officials4 ,self-perpetuating boards will always propagate their own kind1 and even if alumni trustees were ever inclined to be anything but docile1 their minority representation would always be ineffective for democracy4 ,the issues of the modern university are not those of private property but of public welfare4 ,irresponsible control by a board of amateur notables is no longer adequate for the effective scientific and sociological laboratories for the community that the universities are becoming4 ,the protests in the most recent case imply a growing realization that a professor who has a dynamic and not a purely academic interest in social movements is an asset for the whole community4 ,the latest controversy between trustee and professors seems to have been very definitely an issue between interested policy and accurate1 technical fact4 ,it seems to have been clearly a case of old tradition against new science1 the prejudiced guesses of corporation officials against the data of a scientific student of economics4 ,any form of university control which gives the prejudiced guess the power over the scientific research is thus a direct blow at our own social knowledge and effectiveness4 ,the public simply cannot afford to run this risk of having the steady forging ahead of social and economic research curtailed and hampered4 ,we cannot afford to depend wholly on the tempering of trustees by the fear of the clamor of public opinion4 ,it is wholly undesirable that trustees should be detained only by 8merciful consideration0 from discharging professors whom they find uncongenial or who they feel are spreading unsound doctrine4 ,make university trustees directors of a private corporation and you give them the traditional right of terminating contracts with their employees without giving reasons or any form of trial4 ,but if the university is not to be a mere degree-manufactory1 or a pre-vocational school representing the narrow interests of a specialized economic class1 but is to be that public intellectual and scientific service that we all want it to be1 the governance must be different from that of a mining company1 and the status of the professor different from that of a railroad employee4 ,professors should have some security of office4 ,an interested public which feels this way will demand that the faculties be represented strongly in the determination of all university policy and in the selection and dismissal of the instructors4 ,it may even demand that the community itself be represented4 ,trustees who really envisage the modern university as a public service1 as a body of scientific and sociological experts1 will gladly share their power4 ,if they do not1 they will demonstrate how radically their own conception of a university differs from the general one1 and it will be the duty of professors to assert their rights by all those forms of collective organization whereby controlled classes from the beginning of time have made their desires effective4 ,,xxvii ,,the ,,undergraduate ,in these days of academic self-analysis1 the intellectual caliber of the ,american undergraduate finds few admirers or defenders4 ,professors speak resignedly of the poverty of his background and imagination4 ,even the undergraduate himself in college editorials confesses that the student soul vibrates reluctantly to the larger intellectual and social issues of the day4 ,the absorption in petty gossip1 sports1 class politics1 fraternity life1 suggests that too many undergraduates regard their college in the light of a glorified preparatory school where the activities of their boyhood may be worked out on a grandiose scale4 ,they do not act as if they thought of the college as a new intellectual society in which one acquired certain rather definite scientific and professional attitudes1 and learned new interpretations which threw experience and information into new terms and new lights4 ,the average undergraduate tends to meet studies like philosophy1 psychology1 economics1 general history1 with a frankly puzzled wonder4 ,a whole new world seems to dawn upon him1 in its setting and vocabulary alien to anything in his previous life4 ,every teacher knows this baffling resistance of the undergraduate mind4 ,it is not so much that the student resists facts and details4 ,he will absorb trusts and labor unions1 municipal government and direct primaries1 the poems of ,matthew ,arnold1 and ,james's theory of the emotions4 ,there is no unkindliness of his mind towards fairly concrete material4 ,what he is more or less impervious to is points-of-view1 interpretations4 ,he seems to lack philosophy4 ,the college has to let too many undergraduates pass out into professional and business life1 not only without the germ of a philosophy1 but without any desire for an interpretative clue through the maze4 ,in this respect the ,american undergraduate presents a distinct contrast to the ,european4 ,for the latter does seem to get a certain intellectual setting for his ideas which makes him intelligible1 and gives journalism and the ordinary expression of life a certain tang which we lack here4 ,few of our undergraduates get from the college any such intellectual impress4 ,the explanation is probably not that the student has no philosophy1 but that he comes to college with an unconscious philosophy so tenacious that the four years of the college in its present technique can do little to disintegrate it4 ,the cultural background of the well-to-do ,american home with its 8nice0 people1 its sentimental fiction and popular music1 its amiable religiosity and vague moral optimism1 is far more alien to the stern secular realism of modern university teaching than most people are willing to admit4 ,the college world would find itself less frustrated by the undergraduate's secret hostility if it would more frankly recognize what a challenge its own attitudes are to our homely ,american ways of thinking and feeling4 ,since the college has not felt this dramatic contrast1 or at least has not felt a holy mission to assail our ,american mushiness of thought through the undergraduate1 it has rather let the latter run away with the college4 ,it is a trite complaint that the undergraduate takes his extra-curricular activities more seriously than his studies4 ,but he does this because his homely latent philosophy is essentially a sporting philosophy1 the good old ,anglo-,saxon conviction that life is essentially a game whose significance lies in terms of winning or losing4 ,the passion of the ,american undergraduate for intercollegiate athletics is merely a symbol of a general interpretation for all the activities that come to his attention4 ,if he is interested in politics1 it is in election campaigns1 in the contests of parties and personalities4 ,his parades and cheerings are the encouragement of a racer for the goal4 ,after election1 his enthusiasm collapses4 ,his spiritual energy goes into class politics1 fraternity and club emulation1 athletics1 every activity which is translatable into terms of winning and losing4 ,in ,continental universities this energy would go rather into a turbulence for causes and ideas1 a militant radicalism or even a more militant conservatism that would send ,paris students out into the streets with a 8,cail-laux as-sas-sin60 or tie up an ,italian town for the sake of ,italia ,irredenta4 ,even the war1 though it has called out a fund of anti-militarist sentiment in the ,american colleges1 still tends to be spoken of in terms of an international sporting event4 8,who will win80 is the question here4 ,now this sporting philosophy by which the ,american undergraduate lives1 and which he seems to bring with him from his home1 may be a very good philosophy for an ,american4 ,it is of the same stuff with our good-humored contempt for introspection1 our dread of the 8morbid10 our dislike of conflicting issues and insoluble problems4 ,the sporting attitude is a grateful and easy one4 ,issues are decided cleanly4 ,no irritating fringes are left over4 ,the game is won or lost4 ,analysis and speculation seem superfluous4 ,the point is that such a philosophy is as different as possible from that which motivates the intellectual world of the modern college1 with its searchings1 its hypotheses and interpretations and revisions1 its flexibility and openness of mind4 ,in the scientific world of the instructor1 things are not won or lost4 ,his attitude is not a sporting one4 ,yet the college has allowed some of these sporting attitudes to be imposed upon it4 ,the undergraduates' gladiatorial contests proceed under faculty supervision and patronage4 ,alumni contribute their support to screwing up athletic competition to the highest semi-professional pitch4 ,they lend their hallowing patronage to fraternity life and other college institutions which tend to emphasize social distinction4 ,and the college administration1 in contrast to the ,european scheme1 has turned the college course into a sort of race with a prize at the goal4 ,the degree has become a sort of honorific badge for all classes of society1 and the colleges have been forced to give it this quasi-athletic setting and fix the elaborate rules of the game by which it may be won--rules which shall be easy enough to get all classes competing for it1 and hard enough to make it a sufficient prize to keep them all in the race4 ,an intricate system of points and courses and examinations sets the student working for marks and the completion of schedules rather than for a new orientation in important fields of human interest4 ,the undergraduate can scarcely be blamed for responding to a system which so strongly resembles his sports1 or for bending his energies to playing the game right1 rather than assimilating the intellectual background of his teachers4 ,so strongly has this sporting technique been acquired by the college that even when the undergraduate lacks the sporting instinct and does become interested in ideas1 he is apt to find that he has only drawn attention to his own precocity and won amused notice rather than respect4 ,in spite of the desire of instructors to get themselves over to their students1 in spite of a real effort to break down the 8class-consciousness0 of teacher and student1 the gulf between their attitudes is too fundamental to be easily bridged4 ,unless it is bridged1 however1 the undergraduate is left in a sort of ,peter ,pan condition1 looking back to his schoolboy life and carrying along his schoolboy interests with him1 instead of anticipating his graduate or professional study or his active life4 ,what should be an introduction to professional or business life in a world of urgent political and social issues1 and the acquiring of intellectual tools with which to meet their demands1 becomes a sort of sequestered retreat out of which to jump from boyhood into a badly-prepared middle age4 ,the college will not really get the undergraduate until it becomes more conscious of the contrast of its own philosophy with his sporting philosophy1 and tackles his boyish ,americanisms less mercifully1 or until it makes college life less like that of an undergraduate country club1 and more of an intellectual workshop where men and women in the fire of their youth1 with conflicts and idealisms1 questions and ambitions and desire for expression1 come to serve an apprenticeship under the masters of the time4 ,,xxviii ,,medievalism ,,in ,,the ,,colleges ,if the ,american college is to have a part in that new educational movement which is beginning to make the school not merely a preparation for life but life itself1 interested in what has meaning to the student at his particular age and situation1 it will have to recast some of its most cherished practices and ideals4 ,the large university to-day represents all stages in the adjustment of intellectual activity to social demands1 from the intensely practical schools of engineering1 correlating with the technical progress of industry1 back to the departments of literary scholarship--perhaps as pure an anachronism as we have in the intellectual world to-day4 ,the demands for technical knowledge have pulled the university along1 as it were1 by the nose1 and strung it through the ages1 so that a 8professor0 to-day may be an electrical expert fresh from ,westinghouse1 or an archaic delver into forgotten poetry4 ,the technical departments of the universities have kept bravely up with the work of 8learning by doing40 ,laboratory and shopwork1 practical coperation with industry1 contact with technical experts1 have made the newer departments what they should be--energetic workshops where theory and practice constantly fertilize each other1 and where the student comes out a competent technician in his craft4 ,but the place of the college in this scheme becomes more and more anomalous4 ,devoted to the traditional studies--the literatures1 mathematics1 philosophy1 history--it is still strangely reminiscent of old musty folkways of the schoolman and theologian4 ,every professor knows the desire of the average student to finish his college course and grapple with his professional studies4 ,every professor is aware of the sharp quickening of interest which comes on entrance to the professional schools4 ,though part of this feeling may be due to impatience to get out into the world1 much of it certainly arises from a realization that at last one has come into a sphere where thinking means action4 ,the college1 with its light and unexacting labor1 is cheerfully exchanged for the grind of the professional school1 because the latter touches a real world4 ,whereas the higher schools give the student active work to do1 almost all the methods of the college teaching conspire to force him into an attitude of passivity4 ,the lecture system is the most impressive example of this attitude1 and the lecture system seems actually to get a tightening grip upon the modern college4 ,as standard forms have become worked out1 it is customary now actually to measure the student's course by the number of hours he exposes himself to lectures4 ,for the college course to be organized on a basis of lectures suggests that nothing has happened since ,abelard spoke in ,paris to twelfth-century bookless men4 ,it is as if the magic word had still to be communicated by word of mouth1 like the poems of ,homer of old4 ,the emphasis is continually upon the oral presentation of material which the professor has often himself written in a text-book1 or which could be conveyed with much greater exactness and fullness from books4 ,these books the student knows only as 8collateral reading40 ,nothing is left undone to impress him with the idea that the books and reviews and atlases are mere subsidiaries to the thin but precious trickle of the professor's voice4 ,now there may be some excuse for the lecture in a ,continental university1 where the professor is a personality1 is not compelled to lecture1 and may make of his delivery a kind of intellectual ceremony4 ,but ,american professors are not only likely to be atrocious lecturers1 but to hate such compulsory talking as the sheerest drudgery4 ,too often their own palpable derision at the artificiality of it makes the lecture an effective barrier between the student's curiosity and its satisfaction4 ,this is not to deny that the lecture might be made into a broad interpretative survey1 which would give the student the clues he needs through the maze of books4 ,this is exactly what the best college courses tend to become4 ,but for this the college will need interpreters1 and not the humdrum recorders and collators that it has a weakness for4 ,the continuance of the lecture system is only symptomatic of the refusal of the college to see clearly the changing ideals of scholarship4 ,if the student has to think chiefly about exposing himself to the required numbers of lectures1 and then to examinations which test his powers of receptivity1 he will be forced into an attitude which we are discovering is the worst possible for any genuine learning4 ,this passivity may have been all very well when education was looked upon as an amassing of the 8symbols of learning10 or the acquiring of invidious social distinction4 ,the old college education was for a limited and homogeneous class4 ,it presupposed social and intellectual backgrounds which the great majority of college students to-day do not possess4 ,the idea of studying things 8for their own sake10 without utilitarian bearings1 is seductive1 but it implies a society where the ground had been prepared in childhood and youth through family and environmental influences4 ,when higher education was confined almost entirely to a professional intellectual class1 the youth was accustomed to see intellect in action around him4 ,he did not come to college ignorant even of the very terms and setting of the philosophy and history and sociology studied there4 ,now1 when all classes come to college1 the college must give that active1 positive background which in former generations was prepared for it outside4 ,it must create the intellectual stomach as well as present the food4 ,we are learning that this can only be done by putting ideas to work1 by treating the matter taught in the college as indispensable for any understanding or improvement of our modern world4 ,in the technical schools1 ideas and processes become immediately effective1 but nothing in the college is really 8used02 ideas are not put to work4 ,professors anxiously desire to 8teach students to think10 but they do not give them opportunities for that hard exercise which alone can produce trained thought4 ,the college organs of expression1 the debating clubs1 literary magazines1 newspapers1 speaking contests1 dramatic societies1 etc41 are usually amateurish1 spasmodic1 unreal4 ,the flimsy background of the undergraduate is not to be wondered at where undergraduate expression in any channel is left by the college authorities unorganized and childish4 ,and his low state must inevitably continue until ideas are not merely collected1 with some vague idea of gilding the interior of his soul1 but resolutely put to work4 ,one reason for the overmastering devotion to athletics in the modern college is exactly its activity4 ,in that field the student can do something4 ,here1 thank ,god1 he says1 is a place where one can act6 ,to make intellectual expression and not receptivity the keynote of the college does not mean to turn it into an intellectual engineering school or to make it severely utilitarian4 ,it should remain unspecialized1 the field for working out a background for the contemporary social world4 ,the paradox is that only by this practical exercise can any real cultural or scholarly power be attained4 ,as long as the student can speak of 8taking courses0 the receptive and slightly medicinal character of college learning will be emphasized4 ,moreover1 as the schools both above and below the college adjust themselves to the new conceptions of learning1 the archaic forms of college will cause it to lag in the race4 ,the reason for their persistence is1 of course1 that whereas the technical demands of industry and the keen emulation in the professions have sharpened the higher schools and forced a revision of ideals and methods1 the practical application of the cultural studies of the college has not seemed so urgent4 ,the turning of these cultural studies into power is to be the exact measure of our growing conviction that ideas and knowledge about social relations and human institutions are to count as urgently in our struggle with the future as any mathematical or mechanical formulas did in the development of our present4 ,transcriber's ,notes ,page #dh3 8cottom looms0 changed to 8cotton looms0 ,page #ib3 8,profesor ,judd's0 changed to 8,professor ,judd's0 ,page #ii3 8imperfect acomplishment0 changed to 8imperfect accomplishment0 ,page #afd3 8classics and mathemathics0 changed to 8classics and mathematics0 ,page #aij3 8particualarly to those0 changed to 8particularly to those0 ,page #bcj3 8,the large university to-day represent0 changed to 8,the large university to-day represents0