Class (education)

“ If the parents in the community, whose standards of life are the highest, and whose ideas are the most enlightened, would as a class co-operate in the advancement of common education, the charge that our public schools produce on the whole second-rate acquirements, and second-rate morals and manners, would soon be refuted, and the cause of popular education would cease to be handicapped, as it is at present, by the coolness of the well-to-do class. ”

“ The second class, which is designed to assist the poorer nobility, and less opulent among the merchants, citizens, and servants of government, in giving their sons a good general education, consists of sixty pupils, who are received from the age of eleven to fifteen years, and who pay to the Academy twelve florins a month ”

“ In the first place, an education completely divorced from the requirements of a vocation is a luxury appropriate only to a leisured class, or a class free from economic pressure: it is, in fact, a legacy from the independent families of the upper classes or the well-to-do middle classes who sent their children to the public schools and the old grammar schools, knowing that the question of bread and butter was not an urgent one. ”

“ The problem of how to produce as effective and as thorough education for leadership with a one-class school system as with a two- class; the opening-up of opportunity for youth of brains in any social class to rise and be trained for service; the selection and proper training of those of superior intelligence; the elimination of barriers to the advancement of children of large intellectual endowment ”

“ We are speaking of the common schools, and so of course are thinking of what school education in America does for the artisan and labouring class, and the lower stratum of the middle class; that is, children corresponding to those who are taught in our national schools, and those of a somewhat higher grade in society. ”

“ A traditional school founded on the bookish education of a leisure class can never [Pg 191] be made into a pre-vocational school that will give power and dignity to labor, without a fundamental transformation of the present spirit, subject matter and teaching methods. ”

“ Under this conception general education, instead of being the prerogative of the ruling or moneyed class, is urged as a common right, a social duty and an economic necessity. Learning is not limited to those who expect to enter the theological, medical, legal, or academic professions. ”

“ We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. ”

“ But no such coincidence can be assumed when once education has become a common possession. A large portion of our “upper” class—which is determined no longer by descent but to a considerable extent by wealth—is neither cultured nor even well-informed. ”

“ The latter class, as a rule, brings to their work no previous education, no theoretical schooling, no technical experience. They come mostly from inferior walks of life, with less intellectual power, and less moral force. ”

“ Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. ”

“ Millions are being given for the endowment of the higher learning—that is, for the creation of a learned class. What is that learned class going to do for the rest of the community? The members of it will make, no doubt, delightful society for one another ”

“ Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars' powers. ”

“ Yet, in general, the educational policy, matters touching the curriculum, and all the discipline of the student body, as almost a matter of divine right, whether or not by custom or by statute, belong to the men whose craft and experience is in lines of education. ”

“ In a public school, therefore, when all classes of the community are to be taught, the truths and exercises should be selected in such a manner, that they shall, if possible, be equally useful to all; leaving the navigator and the agriculturist, the surgeon and the lawyer, to supplement their general education, by the study of those special branches of learning which their several professions require. ”

“ It seemed to me that we teachers had unconsciously elaborated a system which should secure the discipline of the schools and the eagerness of the scholars,—by means of marks, prizes, and the like,—and yet eliminate that knowledge-hunger, itself the quite sufficient incentive to education. ”

“ But it was all the idle dream of a truant lad, who would fain now, as on former occasions, have avoided going to school—that best and noblest of all schools, save the Christian one, in which honest Labour is the teacher—in which the ability of being useful is imparted, and the spirit of independence communicated, and the habit of persevering effort acquired; and which is more moral than the schools in which only philosophy is taught, and greatly more happy than the schools which profess to teach only the art of enjoyment. Noble, upright, self-relying Toil! ”

“ For, depend upon it, after all we say about schools and institutions of learning, it is nevertheless true of education, as a statesman has said of the government, that the people look to the school for too much. ”

“ Have these institutions succeeded in raising the general level of character and improving the general conditions of life? Can we indulge any sure and certain hope that the work of education will be increasingly fruitful? ”

“ If such benign results have followed the establishment of schools of an inferior character, is it unreasonable to claim that education and the processes of education, however imperfect they may be, are calculated to increase the sum of human progress, virtue, and happiness? ”

“ I heartily grant to the privileged classes, that, enjoying in many respects the best educations, they have been conservators of polished manners, and of the other graces of intercourse. My quarrel with them is, that the inferior part of their education induces them to wish to keep these manners and graces to themselves, together with a superabundance, good for nobody, of all other advantages ”

“ This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education ”

“ In fact, the whole public educational system, if the ideals of humanity as expressed by the labor movement, are to receive adequate consideration in public education, will require reconstruction around the social studies. ”

“ This, then, was surely an ideal teaching of the masses, a teaching of the arts and crafts, a teaching of mutual aid, a teaching of true fraternity, a teaching of book-learning whenever that was considered necessary or advisable, a teaching of the rights of man and a wonderful development of laws as a consequence, and all of this accomplished not by the upper classes, stooping to lift the lower classes, but out of the conscious development of the lower classes themselves, so that there came a true evolution and not merely a superficial influence from without. ”

“ Now seeing this difference, how much education is there in school or college? In the classrooms there is none. All that is given in classes is instruction, which may be useful or detrimental inasmuch as it helps personality or not. ”

“ THE EQUALISING OF CLASSES BY EDUCATION The education which is the progressive adaptation of humanity to the conditions of social life has been, in a general way, so greatly developed by our modern civilisation, that it has, if not created the complete equalisation of the classes, at least brought the aristocracy, the middle classes, and the people together in a common effort towards individual action. ”

“ The result is that which we see about us everywhere—the division into "cultured" people and "workers," the separation of theory and practice. Hardly one per cent. of the entire school population ever attains to what we call higher education ”

“ They now write books for the working classes, give them lectures, and the like. There is now no class, as a class, more highly educated, broadly educated, and deeply educated, than those who were, in old times, best described as partridge-popping squireens. ”

“ On the way thither they accept and take along so much of higher motives, of knowledge and insight, as, on the one hand, instruction offers and training favors, and as, on the other hand, the individuality of each one, which the earliest impressions have further determined, is ready to assimilate. Those are rare exceptions who, through the development of an absorbing interest of some kind, in religion, or science, or art, have become less susceptible to the attractive force of their social class. ”

“ This division of labor constitutes the starting point for the diverse training of men, and modifies, in part, all systems of instruction that cover childhood and youth. This is, at first, an education common to all. The general invigoration of the intellect, and the preparation of the mind for the grand, the highest object of life on which I first dwelt, embrace all the earliest years of youth. There are elements of power common to all men, and instruments of knowledge effective for both the general pursuits of a liberal education, and the limited pursuits of physical toil. ”

“ In moral aim we always are, and generally too in our estimate of the present status. We all confess that the conditions of college education have changed, that the field of knowledge has enlarged, that a liberal training nowadays must fit men for more than the four professions of preaching, teaching, medicine, and law. We agree that the prescribed systems of the past are outgrown. ”

“ We must so reform the curriculum, methods of teaching, and examinations, that we do not mistake the B.A. degree as signifying either a completed liberal education or adequate preparation for earning a living or living a happy life. It should signify only decent preparation for the continuing task of adult education. ”

“ This moral and social instruction requires books expressly prepared, by competition, and with great care, and a schoolmaster in each parish to teach them to children, along with the art of writing, reading, counting, measuring, and the principles of mechanics. The study of the duty of citizenship ought to be the foundation of all the other studies.... There are methods and establishments for training geometricians, physicists, and painters, but there are none for training citizens. ”

“ In other words, to what extent does the conviction pervade the ranks of the fraternity of teachers, whether of public-schools, private schools, colleges, or universities, that the employment of the hands in the useful arts is more highly educative than the acquisition of the rules of reading, writing, and arithmetic? ”

“ In spite of these handicaps the movement toward the introduction of social studies into the general school is now sufficiently under way to be described as one of the most hopeful innovations in the curriculum. ”

“ The systematic tendency is essential to all education, properly so called.
§ 20. Division of labor has become requisite in the higher spheres of teaching. The growing multiplicity of branches of knowledge creates the necessity for the specialist as teacher. With this tendency to specialties it becomes more and more difficult to preserve what is so essential to the pupil—his rounded human culture and symmetry of development. The citizen of modern civilization sometimes appears to be an artificial product by the side of the versatility of the savage man. ”

“ We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up—words which express the difference of level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome of the process in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding activity—that is, a shaping into the standard form of social activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the general features of the way in which a social group brings up its immature members into its own social form. ”

“ Certain communist principles form the backbone of the curriculum. Work is perceived to be an integral part of education as are directed extracurricular activities, and a sizable percentage of formal education is allotted for practical and vocational training. ”

“ As the teacher cannot impart and teach what he does not possess and know, it is also plain that the teacher must have this superior spirit.
To accomplish the public education of the children of the people, we need the three classes of institutions just mentioned: free Common Schools, free High Schools and free Colleges. ”

“ At twenty-one or twenty-two the average youth would probably in your day have been little more advanced in education than at fourteen, having probably left school for the factory or farm at about that age or a couple of years later unless perhaps he happened to be one of the children of the rich minority. The corresponding child under our system would have continued his or her education without break, and at twenty-one have acquired what you used to call a college education. ”

“ In dealing with the vocation of the teacher, I shall292 necessarily be led to define the purpose of the social institution in which he labors and I shall for the sake of brevity use the word school to designate the social organs of education, which cover the period of childhood, adolescence and the beginning of manhood and womanhood. ”