Adult education

“ 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. ”

“ Adult Literacy Programme with a target of imparting literacy to 600,000 adults during the plan period, and (b) Work Oriented Adult Education Programme to impart relevant knowledge and skills to adults so as to enable them to contribute to local developmental activities’ and to be conducted by the vocational higher secondary schools in coordination with the various extension activities of His Majesty’s Government. ”

“ We have many forms of adult education: extension courses, continuation and night schools, correspondence schools, courses in settlements, Young Men’s Christian Associations etc. And yet all these take a very small per cent of our adult population. Where are people to get this necessary education? ”

“ To better equip our adult illiterates for greater opportunities, our education authorities have been implementing a program of adult education. About 18,242 adult illiterates have taken advantage of this program. ”

“ The more different kinds of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives. An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction and to object-teaching. ”

“ This is due to the fact that we so often think of adult social activities as the only ones that are worth while, forgetting that for the child the important thing is social activity now and in his society, that the only way to prepare for adult social effectiveness is to secure social efficiency on the part of the child.
These questions still remain: how can we, through education, produce the individual who, because of social sympathy, [5] knowledge, and activity, will tend to advance the welfare of all; and what kinds of education meet the demands of the aim which we have set up. ”

“ In the more advanced schools, shop and science work, community excursions, illustrative drawing and design, fertilize the life of the older children. The most complete self-consciousness is realized in a school of the Wirt type, where all the varied activities are arranged to contribute to the upkeep or enrichment of the school plant and the school community. For the older children the expanding community becomes an extension of the school, and they learn the operation of the adult world by going out to see the institutions of their community and asking questions about them. ”

“ Infancy, youth, adult life,—all stand on the same educative level in the sense that what is really learned at any and every stage of experience constitutes the value of that experience, and in the sense that it is the chief business of life at every point to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of its own perceptible meaning. ”

“ The idea has already been broached that men [Pg 183] and women in the modern community are no longer inclined to consider themselves as ever completely adult and finished; there is a growing disposition and a growing necessity to keep on learning throughout life. In the worlds of research, of literature and art and economic enterprise, that adult learning takes highly specialized forms which I will not discuss now; but in the general modern community the process of continuing education after the college stage is still evidently only at a primitive level of development. ”

“ She is also now more likely to belong to associations or clubs or classes for adult study in which educational problems are discussed than is he, and often more intimately acquainted with children's desires or needs in education. ”

“ Domestic education, which began after weaning, at three or four years, was intended to induce adulthood techniques and obligations as soon as possible in the child. A world in which manual labor was common to all, offered children the opportunity to participate in adult activities much earlier than, for example in our mechanized culture. Parents supervised the training of boys and mothers instructed girls. ”

“ The curriculum that this report recommends to us, and the methods that it outlines, are arrived by an analysis made from the adult point of view. Are we, then, to understand that child study is to be given no hearing? Are we shut up to formal analysis as the sole method in evolving a practical school plan? The newer education answers this question directly in the negative. It is putting the child in the place of honor and asking him to tell us what his nature demands and in what order it demands it. ”

“ Education as the agency of social control. There is enormous power in the habits of approval or disapproval to which we have, in our early days, been subjected by our parents, teachers, and companions. It is through education, in the broadest sense, that the young come to learn, and hence to practice, those actions which are socially approved, and by the same token to avoid those acts which are socially condemned. Through formal education the adult members of a society impress upon the plastic minds of the immature those habits of thought and action which are currently recognized as desirable. ”

“ CHAPTER IX THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS Change from childish to adult friends—Influence of favorite teachers—What children wish or plan to do or be—Property and the money sense—Social judgments—The only child—First social organizations—Student life—Associations for youth, controlled by adults.
In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging environment. Almost the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt obedience. ”

“ Liberal education at the adult level can, therefore, be superior to liberal education in school, where learning is identified with work.
Third, if schooling is equivalent to the proper use of leisure time in youth, then the proper use of leisure time in adult life should obviously include the continuation of schooling—without teachers, without compulsion, without assignments—the kind of learning that adults do outside school, the kind they do in conversations and discussions, in reading and study. ”

“ As long as learning or study has anything compulsory about it, you are still in the condition of childhood. The mark of truly adult learning is that it is done with no thought of labor or work at all, with no sense of the compulsory. ”

“ He is neither child nor adult, but passing thru the most dangerous and critical period of his entire life. The ends in view are no longer merely habits, ideals, and knowledge facts, but, added to these, and now more important for emphasis because presumably right principles have already been established, breadth and fixity of character, self-acquaintance, scholarship, and culture. Tell me that the atmosphere, psychical and spiritual, and the training, academic and professional, that will produce the ideal teacher of the child will also produce the ideal teacher of the adolescent? ”

“ When educators found that adult life overflowed these narrow limits, they introduced manual training, gymnastics, drawing and music; but the child became no more self-conscious, for these were merely additional “subjects.” The radical discovery of to-day is that the adult world is not primarily engaged in turning information into power. The adult rarely has a historical or a geographical or an arithmetical thought unconnected with experience. ”

“ He is not a purely latent being whom the adult has to approach with great caution and skill in order gradually to draw out some hidden germ of activity. The child is already intensely active, and the question of education is the question of taking hold of his activities, of giving them direction. ”

“ The question of completeness of education aside, children no less than adults need to experience the constraint imposed on every one by human society: they, too, must be kept within bounds. This function the state delegates to the family, to guardians, and to the schools. Now the purpose of government refers to present order; that of training to the future character of the adult. The underlying points of view are accordingly so different that a distinction must necessarily be made in a system of pedagogics between training and government. ”

“ But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own. ”

“ When the identity of the moral process with the processes of specific growth is realized, the more conscious and formal education of childhood will be seen to be the most economical and efficient means of social advance and reorganization, and it will also be evident that the test of all the institutions of adult life is their effect in furthering continued education. Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions have a meaning, a purpose. ”

“ For the well-born, normal-minded, healthy-bodied child, who has wise and careful guardians or parents to assist in his mental guidance, the public school forms a good basis on which to build an education. ”

“ Has the school met the legitimate demand for a suitable education of the adolescent? The answer is that the school has been slow in meeting this situation. The archaic form of school organization which attached the seventh and eighth grades to the elementary school has hindered greatly a proper recognition of the special needs of adolescence. The child of twelve or thirteen does not need a review of the elementary work so much as a preparation for the active life of adulthood. The adolescent needs to be given an insight into the organization of society. ”

“ Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work—these might save the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. ”

“ In chapter I the author states that the purpose of education, based not only on the needs of society but also on the needs of the adolescent, are, according to Dr Hall, ‘to train character, to suggest, to awaken, to graft interest, to give range and loftiness of sentiment of view, to broaden knowledge, and to bring everything into touch with life.’ During this age every effort possible should be made to ‘fill and develop mind, heart, soul, and body,’ especially with a view to vocational training. Such training demands vitalized and humanized materials of education and methods of instruction. ”

“ Now the practical educational question of our day is just this, Can he help it? or, Can his parents help it? or, Must the child sit down for life with whatever twist he has inherited? The fact is, many of us, professional teachers, have been taking aim rather beside the mark; we talk as if the development of certain faculties were the chief object of education; and we point to our results, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, physical, with a—“See there, what culture can effect!” But we forget that the child has inborn cravings after all we have given him. ”

“ This brings us, finally, to the highest and also immediately practical method of moral education, viz., training the will by and for intellectual work. Youth and childhood must not be subordinated as means to maturity. Learning is more useful than knowing. It is the way and not the goal, the work and not the product, the acquiring and not the acquisition, that educates will and character. ”

“ Child needs, rather than abstract standards, have thus become the basis of school activity. The old education developed its course of study by surveying the interests of adults, and picking from among them those, apparently the most simple, which were fit for children. The new education applies the laboratory method—studying children and their interests—reports, among its other findings, the quite evident fact that children enter into life as whole-heartedly as adults; that the field of their interest lies, not in the left-over problems of older people, but in their own problems and processes ”

“ The need of practical activity, which for long ages constituted the entire education of mankind, is at last recognized by the elementary school. It has been introduced in many places and already results have been attained which demonstrate that it is possible to introduce practical activity in such a way as to afford the child a sound development—physically, intellectually, and morally—and at the same time equip him for efficient social service. ”

“ And if parents of wealth would take pains to have teachers qualified for the purpose, who should teach all the young children in the community, much would be done for the happiness and elevation of the rising generation. This is an element of education which we are glad to know is, year by year, more extensively and carefully cultivated; and it is not only a means of culture, but also an amusement, which children relish in the highest degree ”