Scott Nearing

“ Already educators have recognized the potency of the saying: “The schools were made for the children, not the children for the schools.” Hence it follows that no school system is so sacred, no method of teaching so venerable, no textbook so infallible, no machinery of administration so permanent, that it must not give way before the educational needs of childhood.
Concerning the educational problem of to-day, yesterday cannot speak with authority. Each age has its problems—problems which may be solved by that age, or handed on unsolved to the future. The past is dead. ”

“ How profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of education,—the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved shoulders. ”

“ If children exist for education, then it is just that an objective educational standard should be created; it is fair that a hard and fast course of study be mapped out in conformity with that standard; it is right that educational machinery be constructed which automatically turns away from the schools any child who does not conform to the school system as it is. If children exist for education, they should either conform to its requirements, or else, if they will not or cannot conform, they should be mercilessly thrust aside. ”

“ The time has passed when reading, writing, and arithmetic made up the entirety of a satisfactory elementary education. Like the kindergarten, the elementary school must touch life; like the kindergarten, it must provide for child needs. Everywhere schools are turning from the old methods of teaching spelling, multiplication, and syntax to the new methods of teaching children,—yes, and teaching them those things which they need, irrespective of name. ”

“ The society which we in the twentieth century must erect upon the political and industrial triumphs of our forefathers, can never be successful unless it recognizes the fundamental character of the issues which nineteenth century industry and eighteenth century politics have brought into twentieth century life.
Is it too much to ask that the school stand foremost in this recognition of change, when it is in the school that the ideas of the new generation are moulded, tempered, and burnished? ”

“ Was not this a typical product of the system which knits thought and activity into such a harmonious, fascinating whole as the most fortunate adults find in later life? Out of such a school may we not well develop harmony and keen life? Never yet have men gathered grapes from thistles, but often and often have they plucked from fig trees the figs which they craved and sought. ”

“ Though the junior high school has so great a popularity, its work is eclipsed by the still more revolutionary program of those educators who advocate the complete abolition of any line between the elementary and the high school, and the establishment of a public school of twelve school years. This plan, coupled with promotion by subjects rather than by grades, replaces the machine method of promotion and the gap between elementary and high schools by an easy, natural progression adaptable to the needs of any student, from the end of the kindergarten to the beginning of the university. ”

“ Always education has been regarded as a process of molding life and character. The chief difference between the old and the new education is that the old education made a mold, and then forced the child to fit the mold, while the new education begins by determining the character of child needs, and then fits the mold to the needs. The old education was like the farmer who built a corn-sheller, and then attempted to find ears of corn which would fit into the sheller; the new education is like the farmer who first measured the corn and then built his sheller to fit the corn. ”

“ Thus does the social institution, wrought through centuries of turmoil and anguish, become useless in the newer civilization which is arising on every hand. The educational system in its inception was well founded, but the changes of time invalidate the original idea. Yesterday the school fulfilled the needs of men. To-day it fails to meet a situation which reshapes itself with each rising and each setting of the sun. ”

“ There, perhaps more consistently than anywhere else in the United States, the school authorities are providing for the whole child in their schools. Many schools have manual training and domestic science; many schools have school gardens and playgrounds; many schools have nature work in the parks and squares; but in no school that I have visited did I find a more conscious effort to unite mental and physical, hand and head, and vocation and recreation, in one complete system. ”

“ The South, if it is to fulfill the greatness of its promise, must remodel its educational system in the interests of a larger South, as the West has remodeled its educational system in the interest of a larger West. The notable State universities of the Middle and Far West, the Normal Schools, the prevalent system of education, have been felt, and are now being felt, in the progressive, efficient, Western population. Nothing less than a generally educated public could have made the West in the brief years that have elapsed since it was a wilderness. ”

“ After all it was possible to connect education with life.
Slowly the light of this truth dawned upon men’s minds. Gradually the way opened before them. One by one they trod the path, bridging the worst defiles, straightening the road, cutting out the thickets and filling in the morasses, until at last, behold the way, explored by hesitating, derided pioneers, no longer a trail, but a broad highway. Others have gone—their name is legion—and have succeeded. The three R’s are but the beginning of an adequate elementary curriculum. ”

“ It is one thing to invest, and quite a different matter to be assured a fair return on the investment. Nevertheless, the individual investor believes in his right to a fair return. From their public investments, the people, in fairness, can demand no more; in justice to themselves, they may accept no less. Are they receiving a fair return? The people of the United States have invested nearly a billion dollars in the public school system; each year they contribute nearly half a billion dollars more toward the same end. ”

“ These statements refer, not to the small percentage of children who go to high school, but to that great mass of children who leave the school at, or before, fourteen years of age. If you do not believe them, go among working children and find out what their intellectual qualifications really are.
One fact must be clearly borne in mind,—the school system is a social institution. In the schools are the people’s children. Public taxes provide the funds for public education. Perhaps no great institution is more generally a part of community interest and experience than the public school system. ”

“ The kindergartens are at the basis of the educational system of Cincinnati, and they are in charge of a woman who believes in herself and in her work. Perhaps the people of Cincinnati are not justified in believing that their kindergartens are the very best in the whole United States, but Miss Julia Bothwell, who directs them, says, modestly enough, that she has visited kindergartens in many cities, adopting their schemes and improving in response to their suggestions, until she is convinced that no other city in the land can show a better kindergarten system than that of Cincinnati. ”

“ Can there be a new basis for education? Does the foundation upon which education rests really change? Is the educational system of one age necessarily unfitted to provide for the educational needs of the next? ”

“ The modern city school with one teacher and forty pupils places before the teacher a constant temptation, which at times reaches the proportions of an overmastering necessity, to treat the group of children as if each child were like all the rest. A teacher who can individualize forty children, understand the peculiarities of each child, and teach in a way that will enable each of the children to benefit fully by her instruction, is [34] indeed a master, perhaps it would be fairer to say a super-master in pedagogy. A class of forty is almost inevitably taught as a group. ”

“ If we had applied ourselves to physiology, found out the time when the child needed the most energy for physical growth and the most relief from mental strain, and had then set out to plan a course of study which would wreck his health, we should have built a school system which gave him the comparatively easy work of the elementary grades until he was fourteen, and then, at the most critical period of his life, sent him into a new system of schools to study new, abstract subjects. ”

“ Doubtless these angels are the good angels of the community, for in six years the bitterness of neighborhood gossip and controversy has been replaced by a spirit of neighborly helpfulness. Boys and girls, doing Miss Belle’s “busy work,” fathers and mothers [206] learning from their children, have heaped upon Miss Belle’s deserving head the peerless praise of a community come to itself—regenerated in thought and act, turned from the wretchedness and desolation of the past to the light and civilization of the future, saved and blessed by the lives of a teacher and her children. ”

“ The high schools with a million students, and the universities, colleges, professional and normal schools with three hundred thousand more, constitute an increasingly important factor in education; at the same time, for every seven students in these higher schools, there are ninety-three children in the elementary grades. The proportion is so unexpected that it staggers us—more than nine-tenths of the children who attend school in the United States are in the elementary grades! ”

“ No single chapter can contain all of the progressive notes that are being sounded in American Elementary Education; yet it is possible, after some arbitrary picking and choosing, to describe a number of the most typical and most successful educational innovations. At the bottom of most up-to-date elementary school systems is the kindergarten. Not so often as it might be, but still frequently, the child begins school work there. The games, the songs, the children’s sports of these kindergarten years, make a joyous entry-way into the grades. ”

“ Standing on the threshold of his meager dwelling, this child of six looks forward to a life which must be based on the instruction provided in a public school system.
The country boy still has his ten-acre lot, where he may run and play. There are flowers and freckles in the spring; kite-flying, fishing, hunting, and trapping in summer and autumn. The general farm is a storehouse of useful information in rudimentary form. From day to day and from year to year the country boy may learn and enjoy. ”

“ The step is a short one from a vision of trained intelligence to a demand for effective education. Throughout the South, the will to progress is everywhere in evidence, and with unerring accuracy, one community after another is turning to this as the way.
There is no Southern city in which the agitation for increased educational activity is not being pushed with vigor and intensity. On all hands there appears the result of a conviction that the only means by which the effectiveness of the South can be maintained and increased, lie along the path of increased educational opportunities. ”

“ Education exists for the purpose of preparing and assisting children to live. To do that work effectively, it must devote only so much effort to school administration and to school machinery as will perform for boys and girls that very effective service.
No two children are alike, and no two children have exactly similar needs. There are, however, certain kinds of needs which all children have in common. It is obviously impossible to discuss in the abstract the needs of any individual child. It is just as obviously possible to analyze child needs, and to classify them in workable groups. ”

“ To what extent must the school be a center for social activity and social enthusiasm? How shall the school make the farm and the small country town better living places for the men and women of to-morrow?
The duty of the country school is simple and clear. It must fit country children for country life. First it must know what are the needs of the country; then, manned by teachers whose training has prepared them to appreciate country problems, it will become the power that a country school ought to be in directing the thoughts and lives of the community. ”

“ In the near future Miss Bothwell hopes to have the kindergarten work extend to the second grade, in order that the spirit, rhythm, harmony and joy of the kindergarten may thoroughly permeate the roots of the Cincinnati school system.
Even more significant—if anything could be more significant than the breakdown of the ironclad, first grade traditions—is the grip which the kindergartens of Cincinnati have secured on the people. The Cincinnati kindergartener is more than a teacher—she serves many masters. ”

“ To-day machines replace men in a thousand industries. To-morrow slavery is called into question, until in the dim-glowering nineteenth century, men will struggle and die by tens of thousands;—on the one side, those who believe that the man should be the slave; on the other, those who hold that the slavery of the machine is alone necessary and just. Thus is every social institution altered from age to age. ”

“ If it were a choice between sex instruction in the home or in the school, there would be no hesitation about delegating it to the home; but since most homes neglect the discussion of sex matters, leaving the children to gain their knowledge of sex from unreliable sources on the streets, the choice lies between the perversion of sex as it is taught on the streets, and the science of sex as it should be taught in the schools. ”